This Week in WordPress #258

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress, episode number 258 entitled What about Love Goblins? It was recorded on Monday the 29th of June. 2023. My name's Nathan Wrigley and I'll be joined in a few short moments by Michelle Fette, but also by Tim Nash and Katie Keith. It's a WordPress podcast. So you know what we're gonna talk about WordPress.

We kick off the discussion today talking about the Block Notes app. It's available on iOS and it runs natively in iOS. It's very exciting, and Tim gives us some indication as to why. We also talk about the CMS Market Share Report, which is produced semi-annually by Yost de Volk. Then we move on to the fact that there are going to be eight pilot next generation WordPress events.

This conversation dominates our discussion today. We talk about WordPress events and the scale and the size of them, and whether or not they're as good as they could be. We talk about the fact that Main WP has an extension for Pressable, and then we move on to talk about the command center tool and whether it should be renamed or not.

And towards the end, we also get into a conversation about Elon Musk having a fight with Mark Zuckerberg. 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/WPBuilds.

Hello? Hello there. Hello. Good morning, good evening, good afternoon, good other things as well. Hopefully you're having a nice week.

This is number two, he said, looking at his screen, having lost count of the number. This is 258. That's quite a lot, isn't it? 258 This week in WordPress, we're gonna natta drone on about the WordPress news. And I, as you can see on the screen, we've got some lovely WordPresses and yeah, hopefully at 90 minutes of chat and what have you, let's go to, just go around the panel and say hi.

First of all, Michelle, how you doing? I'm good. How are you? Yeah. You've you've said you've got a bit of a sore throat going on there at the moment. It

[00:02:43] Michelle Frechette: doesn't hurt. It's just that my vocal chords are mad that I talk so much, so there you

[00:02:47] Nathan Wrigley: go. Okay. I apologize for dragging you onto a show where the prime motive is to get you to talk,

[00:02:55] Michelle Frechette: sorry, two, two word camps in two weeks.

We'll do

[00:02:58] Nathan Wrigley: that to you. Yeah. Yeah. Luckily there's three of us who can talk pretty well, I'm sure. But Michelle Fette is the Director of Community Engagement at Stella WP for Liquid Web. In addition to her work at Stella wp, she's the podcast barista at WP Coffee Talk. She's the co-founder of Underrepresented in Tech.

She's the creator of WP Career Pages and a new project, wp speakers.com, which is actually very useful for people like me. She's the president of the board for Big Orange Chart, director of Community Relations and contributor at Post Status. She's an author, business coach and frequent organizer and speaker at Word Camp sorry, WordPress Events as we know, which was just found that out or not.

Speaker as the case may be in the near future, Michelle lives outside Rochester, New York, where she's an avid nature photographer. I saw your picture online this week of the Baby, dear. That was really special. That was at Word Camp Montclair. Really nice. Lovely. And you can find out more about her at Meet Michelle online.

Lovely to have you with us again. Thank you so much. Thank you. I was happy to be here. Yeah. Thank you. We've also joined by Tim Nash. Tim has not been on this show, I think for about three years or something like that. Welcome back.

[00:04:08] Tim Nash: Hello. I forgot how the internet worked for a little

[00:04:11] Nathan Wrigley: while.

Yes. Yeah. You did have a bit of a hiatus there. What was that sort of enforced or you just taking a bit of time out from the social side of things? Both. Yeah. Yeah. It's great. Global pandemics great. Yeah. That'll do it to you if there's a good reason. That is the one lovely to have you back.

Tim is a WordPress security consultant. I love this. Who terrifies people at conferences. It's true. Although you didn't terrify too many people, I don't think at the word Camp Eu, where he spoke recently, Tim got to speak on the grownup stage. He was on stage one with all the many. How intimidating was that?

Did you I know you've done loads of that kind of thing in the past, but you've obviously had a bit of a break, but that auditorium was pretty mighty. Yes

[00:04:58] Tim Nash: and not very full because I was giving a talk on code reviews. That's the way to do it. Oh, I feel that perhaps what they should have done was put me on a smaller track.

No, it was actually really good fun, and it was really great to be back on the stage. Oh, I've missed that.

[00:05:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, sadly I had commitments around the time that you were on stage, but I did, I dunno if you

[00:05:22] Tim Nash: on the a gnc, were you not?

[00:05:25] Nathan Wrigley: No. Because I did come in, I had about 10 minutes where I could wander 'em out and I came and stood at the back.

You were in Midflight, you were just about to wrap up and start the questions bit. But I had to disappear at that point. Anyway. It was a true pleasure to meet you again at the socials and also, watch you do in your thing. That was great. Thank you. And lastly, but my name is Lisa, Katie.

Keith, how are you doing, Katie? Good, thanks. Katie is the co-founder and c e o at Barn, two plugins. We're gonna feature an article of theirs in a moment. She's the co-host of the WP Product Talk podcast with Matt If memory serves right, Matt Cromwell. Yeah. She loves helping people to get the most out of WordPress, WooCommerce and their WP product businesses.

And as I said, we're gonna find out a little bit more about Katie's WordCamp Europe as well. A little bit later on. There's a few comments coming in. Thank you very much. If anybody is making a comment, really appreciate it. We've got Courtney, for example, saying Good morning. Sorry Tim, if these comments, and I should say, Katie, this new platform that I'm using, once the comments got long, they start to slowly and progressively get in the way of your faces and there's nothing I can do about it.

But I do apologize, Rob Cairns still issues with something, I dunno what the issues with on the website. Okay. Sorry. Refresh is all I would say it should go live. If somebody wants to check out WP Builds.com/live for me and see if it's working, that would be great. Good afternoon from Germany.

Says beer again. Nice to see you. Good afternoon. From Lisbon where it's a balmy 32 degrees. Tim and I can can boast something similar in the UK at the moment. It's probably about 28, 29 here at the minute. It's, it

[00:07:08] Tim Nash: is 32 degrees in this room at the moment. Yeah, up. I'm regretting being under some lights and not having the window

[00:07:17] Nathan Wrigley: open.

Katie is, at this moment regretting her move too. The, I know she's not. Yeah, the air

[00:07:22] Katie Keith: conditioning is glaring. I hope you can't

[00:07:24] Nathan Wrigley: hear it. Yeah. Makes, it says

[00:07:27] Katie Keith: there's a, is a problem. It says video unavailable, played back on other websites, has been disabled by the video owner. Do

[00:07:34] Nathan Wrigley: you know, it's weird that because it just hasn't, and I went into the settings during the course of the week.

All I would say is click on the little link in the YouTube video, the little icon at the top right, looks a bit like a bent over arrow, and it'll just take you there. And obviously lots of people have managed to get there because there's comments coming in. So use your initiative, click the button, go to YouTube.

It works just as well. Michelle is being called out by Courtney who says it's been a while. I guess you saw her like eight hours ago or something like that.

[00:08:01] Michelle Frechette: I saw her in Europe. I saw her in Montclair. Yeah, I'll see her in dc. You really need

[00:08:05] Nathan Wrigley: to. She's my bestie. You really need to get out more, Michelle.

It's it's just, I know. It's really sad. Yeah. Petes joining us. We'll talk about her in a moment, but she's saying good afternoon and Peter Ingersol is giving us his weather report as he does every week these days. Good morning. It's 9:00 AM 23 degrees centigrade and rising. I'm not gonna talk about that.

73, whatever that is. Weird metric of the weather. We'll have scattered thunderstorms today. Yeah. Where it's fine to me. That's right. We're in that scattered thunderstorm bit at the moment. The heat is rolled through. And now we're just getting Peter,

[00:08:40] Michelle Frechette: I had those thunderstorms about three hours ago that are headed Peter's

[00:08:43] Nathan Wrigley: way, so yeah, they're coming your way.

Yeah. Chat on the website works but is not available. I do apologize, honestly, Rob, if I could, if I owned Google, I'd fix it, but unfortunately I actually, if I owned Google, I probably wouldn't be doing this podcast to be fair. I'll probably be on a beach somewhere. But thanks for your comments. If you put something else in, I'm just gonna pass it by for the moment cuz we need to get onto the WordPress news.

Just so that Tim has got a hard stop and so if Tim just legs it we know what's going on. He intended to do it. It wasn't his technology breaking or indeed him being rude. We also have this really funny little quirk where when I share my screen, Tim freezes. So whatever position Tim's in just a moment, he's gonna, he's gonna stay that way, but his audio carries on working, so we should be fine, right?

Let's get to it. Here we, yeah. Stop it. He's totally

[00:09:35] Tim Nash: frozen.

[00:09:36] Katie Keith: That's hysteric. That's normal. How disappointing.

[00:09:38] Nathan Wrigley: Hoping next I will get him to do something. Gimme

[00:09:42] Tim Nash: enough notice. Yeah,

[00:09:43] Nathan Wrigley: sorry. Although it is weird that you're talking but not moving. That's All right. I'll give you notice next time.

This is our website, WP Builds.com. You've got the menus at the top. If you fancy subscribing, we'll send you a couple of emails each week. Just fill in this little box here, submit your email address and two episodes of the podcast. We put out this one and one on Thursday and that's pretty much all we're gonna send you emails about.

We are also having a show Peach's on the line. Me and Peacher, or mostly Peacher to be fair, are chatting tomorrow, roughly this time, 3:00 PM UK time. You never know. I might even get the technical Google Gremlins worked out by then. We're gonna do our Ur ux show. She's got a couple of websites lined up where she's going to go into them and and talk about them from a ui UX point of view.

We also get into deceptive design, aka dark patterns, and it's always interesting cuz Peach's got a lot to say about this. So if you have a website, if you go to WP Builds.com/ui. You can submit this form and you never know. You might get on the show next time around. And final bit of self-promotion apologies, is I've got the sixth and final part of the series with Mark West Guard from WS form.

We're gonna be talking about guess what AI forms. It's the subject that you can't ignore AI forms. And and we're gonna be doing that on Wednesday. So that's Wednesday, same url. It's always the same. WP Builds.com/live, and hopefully we will see you there. Okay, here we go. Now we're gonna, I think I might require Tim's help at this point, because the technical amazingness of this has eluded me, but at the state of the word I'm gonna call it, it wasn't the real state of the word, but Matt's address at WordCamp Europe.

One of the, one of the key takeaways, one of the things that you mentioned over and over again first of all, there was AI. But there was also this new thing called Playground, which came about at the latter end of last year. And playground is the capability to launch a WordPress site without a server.

So basically you can get it going up and running in your browser. Everything is done inside the browser. That's where my understanding stops. After that, it just becomes complete voodoo, but apparently it's really clever and the cleverness has been picked up by a variety of people. Adam Zelensky is behind The Block Playground, sorry, the WordPress playground, but it was picked up by, and I'm probably gonna.

Missed the name. Yeah. Ella Van Durp. And do apologies Ella, if I got your name wrong there, probably good. But they have created this thing called block notes, which you can launch a anywhere. And it's like a simple note taking app. But I feel it's like the opening salvo of WordPress as the operating system of the web.

You can see it on the screen if you're looking at it. There's some screenshots on an iOS device. This all is handled completely natively. It's very cool, but I don't really understand why. So let's hope Tim can a come back to yeah, there he is. He's back. Yeah, he's moving again. Tim, explain why this is called please.

[00:12:55] Tim Nash: Okay. So it's basically all running in something called web assembly, which is compiled down JavaScript. That's very, it's a very niche thing. So they're taking pH php, which is being emulated into this, into JavaScript to be used in web assembly to be placed into your browser. So there's lots of multiple layers of emulation and bits going on.

Why that's cool is because you can do things like a mobile phone in a mobile phone app, or you can run a spin up a test site in your browser without any of the normal technology stack and it's client side. So there's no server involved at all. It's just sitting in your routes. However, beyond technical demos and very niche cases, it's very niche what you actually do with it.

There's a few things where people have a few other things where people have been using it for there's a separate to the playground one, a separate thing that automatic brought out for developers to spin up dev environments very quickly via NPM and bits as well. And all of these come back to, yeah, but I can't do anything with this.

You're not gonna be running your WooCommerce store outta this. The instruction set for the php web assembly is reduced. It's got loads of incompatibilities in places, plugins do. Getting plugins to be compatible just with a normal lamp stack, your sort of Linux and patching MySQL and BHB is hard enough.

Getting it to use Exoticness. That is all of this is just a nightmare. Brilliant. For testing blocks out with. Brilliant for writing, making a little note taking app that could have been done in 20 lines of JavaScript in a different but it makes a point and it does bring a point that you can bring that power through and use that in a load of different places.

But beyond being a very cool tech demo, And it gets lots of JavaScript, people very excited. And one of the things I think with everything moving over to blocks and Gutenberg, the need to bringing external JavaScript people seems to have been a big theme and a big push. And so this is a way of exciting that new group of people in, right?

Rather than perhaps the traditional WordPress audience who's. Kingo. Cool.

[00:15:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah the, there's only a few things really over the last couple of years that I can think where Matt has said basically this is important. And one of them was JavaScript probably five years ago when they were just beginning that push towards Gutenberg.

And then now AI seems to be the trumpet that he's blowing learning the tools, not necessarily learning to program in AI or create the next chat, g p T, but just learning how to do the prompts and things like that. But also this, he really did talk about this, so I was assuming there would be applications coming down the pike and maybe that's it, Tim.

Maybe it's just that, here's some foundational stuff. Let's go and see what in the next six months, a year people can do with it. Don't get me wrong. It's very clever. Yeah. And clever's enough, isn't it? Sometimes someone

[00:16:14] Tim Nash: has spent a lot of time and is gonna, and if I'd done that and for, and got into that state, I'd be excited too.

Yeah. Around and telling everybody about it. Yeah. But yes it feels at the moment they haven't quite got a practical application beyond a cool tech demo. Yeah.

[00:16:29] Nathan Wrigley: Courtney's got a few things to say. I'll come to you Courtney in a minute, but first of all I'll just check with Katie and Michelle to see if they've got anything they wanna add to this.

I'm good. Shake of their head from

[00:16:39] Katie Keith: Michelle. I'm confused about it. Cause this article implies you can use it almost as a mobile app or something, but I don't think you can use it for user facing WordPress. Can you?

[00:16:53] Tim Nash: In itself. It's having, they're using the WordPress is WordPress instance on the mobile for you to interact with as if you are using a mobile app and it's storing the data locally on your mobile.

So no other visitor, there's no visitors to that site. That site is effectively stored on your phone and is a note taking app. So they're just using post features for making notes. In a very private instance. And can you share

[00:17:21] Katie Keith: that with anybody, like via special URL so that they can interact with it?

[00:17:26] Tim Nash: No, cuz then you'd be sharing it onto your phone and I don't think we want to, we have enough trouble in the world without random strangers. You have links onto your phone.

[00:17:35] Nathan Wrigley: So it's a very exciting piece of technology. Who knows? From a technical point of view, it's been obviously very clever and I get the feeling sometimes these clever discoveries do end up being useful down the road, but we don't have a particularly practical application of it yet.

Anyway, the article in question, I'm gonna I'm gonna phrase Tim here. Tim, go for it quick. Yeah. Rya there. Perfect. Totally worked. That's hysterical. I love it. He's got his arms right out. The piece is on WP Tav and Sarah Gooding wrote it. It's called Block Notes. App runs WordPress, natively on iOS.

We forgot to mention that. It's now in public Beatta. So all the links and everything that you need are there. Let's move on to the next piece. This is the biannual survey from Yost and I, by that Yost as in the person spelled j o s T, not Yost the the company, the s e o company, and this is his market share analysis.

Every six months or so, he does a little breakdown of the. The winners and the losers, if you like, the movers and the shakers in the CMS market. And this period, he's taken a little bit of time out because some of the some of the data points that he was using changed the way that they were delivering their data.

I, I think some of the data was amended in some way. So he couldn't do for comparing. But the bottom line is basically everything, more or less is steady away. If you were hoping that WordPress was still on the ascendancy, I think the answer to that is no. We seem to have reached a point of stagnation is the wrong word, because it did grow, I believe, no 0.2%.

It was some small proportion of growth considering the last five years where we've seen it going up in ones and twos and threes and four percentage points. Yeah, so WordPress is still by far the number one shop. If so, just to give you some idea, if you're looking at the screen, you'll be able to see the sort of pie chart if you like.

I dunno what that's called, the donuts chart. And WordPress is occupying a full 43 point something, so it's this big blue bit and it's absolutely massive. The other big section is non. That's basically something that can't be reported. We don't know what the CMS is. The other big section is other, so between other non and WordPress, we're looking at probably about 80% of the whole chart.

And the remaining 20% or so is divided up by the following. Let's just go through them. WordPress, 43.2%. Shopify staying steady on 3.8%. Wix is growing. Whoops, excuse me, I just dropped something on the floor. Wix is still growing, but it's much slower than it has been in the past 2.5%. Squarespace is added, no 0.1%, but Yoast is at pains to say that Squarespace significantly altered their pricing structure.

I think they put their fees up quite markedly. So to get any growth at all is really good. Mla. Steady away Drupal stead away press the shop going up a little bit, nor 0.3% growth. But given that there's such a tiny percentage, that nor 0.3% growth in the big donut chart is actually pretty significant.

And so they are, that's the takeaway really, that really, if you were thinking that the sky was falling in and WordPress was at some point, coming to an end, doesn't look like that's the way. But also it does look like we're not gonna be getting anywhere near 50%. Anytime soon. Let's see if we can bring see if we can bring Tim back.

I was hoping it'd stay. You were, Jo, you were like that. This is a great game. I wish you did this instinctively. So I'm gonna Yeah. Plan your next pose. Yeah I'm sanguine about this. Obviously I'm in the WordPress space. It's important to me that WordPress keeps growing stagnation or it growing a tiny bit is also equally fine.

I think that's perfectly okay. What we don't would like as a community, not to see is it stagnating or declining, which over the last 12 months or so, it doesn't seem to have done but over to you. I would say especially Katie, given that your entire your business model is based upon WordPress and the growth of that platform and a big audience.

So I'll hand it to Katie first. Is this important to you?

[00:21:55] Katie Keith: Very important. I think it's a shame to report on market share without total number of installs because we are talking about things like, is it growing, is it not? But what really matters is the number of sites in the world using WordPress. Market share, I would say is important, but is secondary to the total number of installs.

So I think it's a bit misleading, almost, or confusing to report on one without the other. You need to see the two together.

[00:22:25] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Thank you for that. Michelle. Anything on this?

[00:22:29] Michelle Frechette: Yeah, I think a lot of it goes back to how do we pivot or direct people into WordPress. As I've looked over the last 11 years of my involvement in WordPress, I see an a population that's growing in age and not necessarily ushering in the next generation.

And so that's been something that's been on my mind that I know other people's minds as well, is how do we continue to be relevant for other than us and kid kids camps is one way to do that. But let's also remember that kids camps are people who are already in WordPress bringing their own children to kids camps.

And one of the things we're gonna talk about a little later is the new mentorship program. We're also gonna talk about different ways that WordPress events are going to, are pivoting and we're adding to, I think all of that. Is gonna help keep it relevant. And then of course, I talk all the time about representation in WordPress and I think it's super important that people see themselves in the community and in the community leadership.

And so it's important that we continue to work for greater diversity on stages in leadership at Word Camp leadership, down to volunteers and everybody else because that's also something that's gonna help us grow WordPresses that people who are interested in seeing themselves in those peer, those areas of leadership also.

See people who are like them. And so I think that's one of the ways that we continue to grow.

[00:24:00] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know what, when I was at WordCamp Europe, I didn't go around with that set of goggles on, I wasn't really looking at the age demographic. But now that I think back, I don't have a memory of seeing boatloads of younger people.

And by, by honestly the word younger to me means something entirely different than it did a little while ago. But I would say anybody under the age of, let's say 25, okay, that's my classification of younger. I don't remember seeing lots and lots of people of that age. It was a much more mature, in inverted commerce.

I'm in such trouble a much more mature audience. So that is a bit of a concern, isn't it? I do wonder. If the people that are using it, creating for it, building plugins, themes, blocks, all of that kind of stuff are an older audience. And if as the timeline moves along, if they eventually, they retire or whatever else it may be, if that demographic is being filled up at the younger end, I don't know.

But yeah.

[00:24:55] Michelle Frechette: And that younger demographic has perhaps different values and different things that they wanna see going forward than what we and I speak as the oldest person in the room here, are embracing. And so we wanna make sure that we are not just thinking about what we want, but what the future generations are looking for.

Yeah. As far as involvement and what a c CMS looks

[00:25:16] Nathan Wrigley: like for them. Yeah, you're right. We're gonna get to a couple of those things, including word camps in a moment, but I'll just leave it open for Tim if he's got anything he wants to say about this. You've been around for years, you've seen it grow, haven't you?

And here we are.

[00:25:28] Tim Nash: I would say that want to slightly echo what Katie said, which was that the numbers. Percentages don't really mean very much. And then it would be much more useful to have figures. And those numbers don't really reflect active installs and actively managed and maintain sites.

They are just a selection of interesting numbers that have been put into pretty charts, so we shouldn't focus on them. It's not a good, it's not necessarily even important to know that there's growth or negative or stagnation because Okay. If things are stagnating or going backwards, does that really reflect anything other than maybe drive us to do something better?

Yeah. And if that's the case, then maybe we should have the, some negative growth to drive to better improvement. I don't think we should worry too much about the numbers at all. Yeah. And percentages of no use

[00:26:18] Nathan Wrigley: whatsoever. That's an interesting point. I should have probably been at Paynes at the top to say that the data is derived from Now let me see if I.

Yeah, thank you. And it's basically the top 10 million or there's a caveat to that as well. The top 10 million or top 1 million and I dunno how that is ranked, but yeah, so it's not based upon the number of installs. It is literally some arbitrary thing, but I guess he's gotta get his data somewhere.

And and yes, I love a good donut chart, away, we just need to know

[00:26:51] Katie Keith: how big is the donut in total as well.

[00:26:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Good good point. Okay, so we'll fire a message off to Yost and say, can we know what the donut is? How much do we need to eat? How fat are we going to get if we eat the donut, the entire donut?

Just say, Rob, I've now checked it on my end and the video is working. I'm in Brave, which is a chromium based browser. It's working for me, so I genuinely don't know what's gone wrong on your end, but the fact that it's happened to you twice in a row, and not to me may, it's something with the configuration or perhaps a Chrome extension that you've got.

You've got that pesky WP Builds block extension, haven't you? I know the one written by probably Tim or somebody like that. Quickly. I'll go back to the previous article we were talking. A little while ago and Courtney dropped something in. We were talking about the the playground and where's it gone, where's it gone?

Here we go. Courtney says, there is a new plugin in the repo related to WP Playground that came out over the weekend, and it seems to be called Interactive Code Block. And there's a further comment. It enables modifying code snippets within a post page and seeing it apply in real time into a WP Playground embedded instance.

And then she goes on to say, I'd love the, for WP Mobile app to be as easy to use as the note taking. Okay. So the friction of it was very low. Was it? Thank you very much indeed. Thanks Courtney for that. Okay. It's that time we're gonna get Tim to do something stupid and put the screen by Yeah.

Look. Yeah, that's good. This is great. I want this to be a feature of this platform. Love it. Brilliant. Okay, so the next piece that we're gonna talk about is this one. I've got a feeling this piece is gonna take up quite a lot of the conversation today. So buckle up. WordPress confirms eight pilot events to launch the next generation.

Camps in 2023. Forgive the self-promotion a bit again, but I did do a podcast episode with Angela Gin, who's an aian. And she, to say that she's in charge of WordCamps is over egging it, but she does have a, she does have some oversight into what gets created and how WordCamps may look. So if you wanna go over onto the WP Tavern website, go to the podcast tab and you can listen to Angela Gin talking about how WordPress events might change in the future.

And almost exactly a week after we recorded that episode, this piece came out. With now, we've now got eight pilot events, which are going to launch the next generation of Word camps in 2023. So these are all coming down the pike. They are. But so far from this article, they're very small events. It's not like we're trying to change WordCamp Europe because that's radical and big and would be like turning a giant oil tank around.

The ones that have been granted per well given permission to go ahead so far, are much small. So 63 ideas were generated, 59 organizers came forward and stepped up and said, I'll be willing to implement these ideas. And so an example is the first ever low cost word camp, which is gonna be happening, believe it or not, just in the next few days.

It's gonna be happening on July The. First 2023. It looks like they've got 90 attendees. It's gonna be hosted by organizers, but they're trying to keep the costs low. So that's interesting cuz every WordCamp that I've been to, there's been a lot of free swag, mugs, t-shirts, all of that given away.

And you do question the purpose of that. Is it really worth producing that? So no swag, no social, no dinner, no after party. One track presentation show up for the day and kind of, Decide where everybody's gonna go at the end and pay your own way. There's another one happening in Cilla in Spain that is a WordPress day that's gonna be happening just a day later, 2nd of July, 50 attendees.

And then there's another one in Tagal in Indonesia. Forgive me if I've pronounced Tagal wrong. That's called Scale Up. It's happening in October. 50 participants again one day. So the pattern that I'm seeing here, the ones that they're authorizing at the moment are little, under a hundred participants.

Easy to put on. Easy to easy, presumably for Word Camp Central to say, yes, go for it. Because there's probably not a lot of overhead or organization. I dunno if sponsors are involved or if it's just the global sponsors. Anyway, this seemingly is the beginning of the new direction, smaller. Stripped down, perhaps less social stuff, less, bands after parties, all of that kind of stuff.

And I know, Michelle, you've got thoughts on this, so I think I'll bring Tim back. Tim's still looking very, I

[00:31:44] Michelle Frechette: know, but it looks like he's so interested in what we have to say.

[00:31:47] Katie Keith: Still doing it.

[00:31:52] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's brilliant. Playing the game. Tim, thank you so much. Michelle, I'll let you rip on this one.

[00:31:58] Michelle Frechette: So I've been to two small word camps this year already. Word Camp Buffalo and Word Camp Montclair, which was just this past weekend. And neither of them had swag. I did donate stickers to Word Camp Buffalo, but like the camp itself didn't produce swag.

Word Camp Buffalo had about 90 people attend and we did have the after party. And then at Montair they had, they pulled out all the swag from the last four years, put it all out on the table and let people take t-shirts and things like that, which was great. Nice. And then there also was no after party.

And so it was interesting because I thought also there was only two, two sponsors who showed up and had TA a table there. And GoDaddy Pro was one of them, and the other was Jet Pack. Other than that, any of the sponsors who were sponsoring the camp weren't there. With a booth. And I thought it was very interesting and it allowed people to talk to those two sponsors who were very invested of course, but also just generally mill about.

And if you weren't in a session, you could sit, there was plenty of places to sit and talk to people and do that networking. I wouldn't have gone to the after party anyway cuz, I mean there was unofficial after parties, right? So people like, Hey, let's get together at Dave and Buster's, whatever. But I had no voice and I couldn't talk over a crowd anymore, so I just went for Indian food.

But that said, I think there is a benefit to these smaller groups. There's more of an opportunity to get to know the people who are coming. There's less pressure on the organizers to create more and more ordering swag is not an easy thing, especially if you do the t-shirt thing, and having to coordinate all of that. Considering. Yes. Everybody who puts on a Word camp is a volunteer and they probably have full-time jobs or more than one job when they're doing those kinds of things. And so making it a little bit simpler for the organizers, making it a little bit simpler for the attendees I don't think it's a bad thing.

Will I miss the way things always have been? Yes. Cuz I'm a creature of habit, but I also am able to learn and grow and participate in different ways.

[00:34:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Thank you for that. That was really interesting. I like the idea of attending an event with 50 odd people, cuz I think the chances of you colliding with more or less everybody.

Pretty high. I did feel like, I guess Katie, from a sponsor's point of view, Katie and BTU were an official sponsor at WordCamp eu. So they had a booth, we'll look at that in a minute. But the enterprise there is the more people that turn up and walk past your booth. The better, but there is something to be said for, at what point does it become too overwhelming and there's too many people in the room and you never really get to be.

Honestly, the amount of time I saw people like over there somewhere and I never managed to make that connection. And I feel in some way making it a little bit smaller might be quite nice. Birgit says the word camp in Leipzig might feel a little bigger Meetup day as and is organized by Robert Windage.

He's the guy. Yeah, he's the guy with the hat. I love the idea of having a low cost word camp. Yeah I'm into that. I know that a lot of people go with a half empty bag so that they can fill it up with swag. I'm exactly the opposite. I go with a full bag cuz I want to take all the things and I now don't pick anything up.

I basically leave as I arrived because I think that's important for me. But yeah. Anyway, let's hand it over to Katie. Probably got a slightly different opinion because of the, size is important if you're gonna be sponsoring.

[00:35:36] Katie Keith: Yeah, it's interesting. In the past we've had word camps, which have generally been quite big, at least with multiple sponsors and so on.

And we've had local WordPress meetups, which are more informal. It sounds to me like there's, the local meetups are almost starting to get a more formal Word camp thing badge organized centrally a bit more. So that's likely to take over maybe some of the smaller meetups. Personally it's not that relevant to me because I think it's for people that live in.

More populated areas. I live on a small island. I know of maybe one WordPress person on the island. I'm not gonna be going to any of these realistically to make it, I like the idea, but with like childcare responsibilities and things, I probably would only prioritize the big ones where you're gonna meet more people from all over the world and so on.

But I can see why it'd be really relevant if you did live near a city with quite a big WordPress presence.

[00:36:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Interesting that the swag thing just seems to be getting a. Peach is making a comment here. She says when I see all those mounds of swag, I instantly think landfill. Yeah, absolutely.

That's basically what I think. I'm not against it each to their own and all that kind of thing, but Courtney again, thank you, Courtney. It feels like a return to Word camps I attended before the foundation existed. It's back to how we began having camps in a minimal way. Courtney, I was never attending those kind of events, so I wonder if you feel like giving us yet another comment.

Thank you, by the way. What does that mean? Was it that you just, that like they were just made up and people invented them and somehow socialized around it and, there was no word Camp Central that you needed to go to. You might need to gimme Tim's nodding like he knows. Do you have an answer to that, Tim?

[00:37:34] Tim Nash: Word camps come from. A more of the original ones were much more closer to what a bar camp, which is an unconference, just, which the whole idea was it's just a place to turn up and gather. And then the talks became span out and we started to gain, for one of a horrible term, a more professional image of a conference.

And WordCamps have turned into conferences and volunteer, but they're conferences being put on entirely by volunteers who are not conference organizers, who, with the exception of the really big ones, aren't allowed to take on the costs associated with having a conference team organize it. So you have very stressed organizers who are doing their best.

And there have been loads of brilliant innovations through word camps, which I. We I worry about losing with the smaller ones. I when you, if you've ever watched live transaction, live captioning, for example, which I rely on as somebody, I can hear I, I'm not deaf, but I, and I'm not hard of hearing, but sometimes I find myself watching the live captions more than I'm listening to the speaker because I can take that in a pace that's reasonable for me.

When it's not being done by a person and it's being automated and I'm there going, what about love goblins? I'll be right. Surely at least it draws me back to the speaker. And that's the only thing going for it. But that's an example of where we've, where you see things cutting costs, where we see things going back when we start looking at things and saying okay, we can have one less room.

So we don't have a quiet room where we say, okay, we don't need this. We don't need these bits. We don't need these bits. And my biggest problem with Word Camp Europe, and it's an example of word camps generally, is word camps have become very they're they're only, there's only a certain level of accessibility.

And they, and by not just in a physical sense, but being accessible to people we took, they're saying getting rid of after parties. That the whole concept of an after party where there's lots of alcohol and loud music and dancing and all of this going on, you've completely excluded two thirds of the people who are going to that word camp.

There are people who are, couldn't even step into the building. If it was in a night, let's say a nightclub that they don't want to drink, then you've got the people who you know, like to be able to hear the person next to them

[00:40:22] Katie Keith: who don't. It's a networking event.

[00:40:24] Tim Nash: Yeah. It's like, why did you come to World Camp?

I wanted to meet my friends. Did you want to dance with your friends? Sure. Did you wanna talk to them? No. You don't want to talk to your friends. That's not a thing you do. So on, on the one hand, I like this idea of the small League Word camps, cuz it means that we might get back to being more inclusive and more friendly and the larger the word camp on the hold, there are exceptions.

I'm thinking London in particular, but there are exceptions. But on the hold, the larger the word camp. The more they try to make it into a proper conference, the less friendly it becomes, the less inclusive. I think it actually becomes, the less accessible I think it is to the local community. So having a small work camp is positive in that way, but be less on the organizers.

But we still got to make sure that we maintain that accessibility across the board. The other thing is that in places like the uk we haven't had Word camps for the last three, four years. No. You, we are not gonna be able to run really small word camps, or if we do, they'll just be crammed with people.

They won't turn out, if we run Word Camp Ely, hi Babs, who's on the, but no, it's also Fly is Wishfully wishing for Word Cafe ly, and she gets a hundred people come along. They're not gonna be a hundred people from Ely because every WordPress in the UK is suddenly going to try and descend on the poor little effectively a village.

Though it's claims to be a city of Ely. And we're gonna have this problem where we're just not gonna be able to get the local communities involved and get them into the word camps because everybody from the rest of the country wants to come in. So we in the UK really need a larger Word camp or a couple of larger word camps.

To allow us to have I don't know, release that pressure valve. So we've all got somewhere to go to, to meet on an annual or semi-annual basis. And then the smaller regional ones can take up the strain around that. Also as a sponsor, cuz I, I'm very lucky I've been in the position of being a speaker, a sponsor, an attendee, an organizer, a volunteer.

So I think I've gone done all. You've done a lot. Yeah. I haven't stood outside and heckled maybe that should be my last role going down with Word Camps. Haven't done that yet, but maybe that next time. But as a sponsor I can tell you from when I used to man Aand, the bigger the event, the less we got out of it.

Oh, interesting. Because you, the financial commitment becomes larger and larger. The, but you have only got a fixed number of people. They come to your stand, you have a fixed number of people. You can only have a fixed number of conversations if you have a large amount of people coming backwards and forwards.

They also, they're trying to spread out to many, to many of the sponsors. You end up in this thing where you're having very short conversations and then they're disappearing. Whereas at the smaller ones, you have people who can, you can sit and chat and you can actually talk to the customers. So it does depend on the product, obviously.

But on the whole, if you're a sponsor and you're looking to, or if you're looking to get into a sponsor on the whole WordCamp, sponsoring is a terrible business model. If you're going to sponsor a work camp, you're not doing it for money. You're not doing it expecting a return. If you are. It'd be very unlikely that it's gonna happen.

But it does mean that you can have the great conversations and those are the really important things because those conversations, you might not see that return on investment right now, but those conversations will last years because that person will go on to recommend you across the board and a bigger work camp you can, you still might have that conversation, but the chances of having it is smaller because you need to rush through as many people as you can and there's so much movement around.

So I actually think if you can invest in it as a sponsor, Investing in turning up at the smaller workouts is gonna give you the

[00:44:22] Nathan Wrigley: best return. Interesting. I, in a way, it feels like at the moment we're going full circle then that we're we're talking about smaller events, which feel like from some sort of Halian day back a few years ago.

And in that, so there's quite a few comments come through and I'll try to pause these as best I can. First thing to say is Peacher says that paying organizers would be a good idea at small events. Word camps have created and cemented a solid na sorry, nationwide community in Spain, and it's a shame to lose that.

So yeah, there's the paying of those people. Courtney again thank you, is saying she's grown more excited about the next Gen WordCamps having a topical. Focus as well. So small regions. So yeah, so we should say that not only are the geographical constraints and the size on the discussion, but also topic-based ones.

So it may be that in the future we have a WordCamp, which let's just pluck a topic out of thin seo, for example. Or WooCommerce, some, something like that. The topic might be specific. So Courtney's excited about small events like that. Who's this one? This is Cameron. Hello Cameron. He says he's all for smaller niche camps, but considering most communities are struggling, just getting back in person, I feel at this point in time, it risk being detrimental to those communities.

I think it helps. Peach says bypass the hot potato of paying speakers or, and organizers, bigger events apart from too much swag. They're really great and they help so many of us in so many ways. Do you know what, I think that the, yeah the takeaway from this is we've got to experiment, right?

We don't know what the right answer is, and it looks like a period of experimentation is gonna be important. Courtney, again, she seems to be happy with you, Tim. Tim has it. We planned informal after party locations as well. No speaker sponsored dinner either way. Do you know what you were saying, Tim, about the WordPress events that the after party?

I did feel, and please, if you are a part of the organizing team for WordCamp eu, please don't take this as a criticism because I realized there was a lot of people in that environment who were having a great time. I personally didn't. Find I could stay for very long. That's not true. I actually did stay at the venue, but I was on the outside.

And I was with Michelle. Katie was there, and it was, I couldn't actually hear anything. And for me, the event was more about talking than anything else. Yeah. Interesting. I wonder if, we wonder if we could have a choice, the quiet after party and the noisy after party and see which crowd goes where.

Tim's about to say, we're

[00:47:08] Katie Keith: talking about how to get the younger people involved. Yeah, true. Yeah. We do need to cater for that, but not just that, which is the problem this year.

[00:47:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Nobody's gonna show up for the Barack quintet. Are they, Tim?

[00:47:26] Tim Nash: What I would say, and I can't remember who said it but someone came up with the idea if they want that's fine. Silent raves are a thing. We hand them out. For the younger people, it could be a really interesting exploration when we give them Walkmans. Oh, and we watch what to do.

Yeah. It provides entertainment across the board. But No I've, I was I jokingly said that next workout Europe, I'm gonna arrange my own fringe event and it's gonna be in a board game club or in a board game. I love that. And I'm just gonna sit there and enjoy myself. My demo has actually done that, but I feel I've got a sneaky feeling that we'd pack somewhere out quite easily and have people on the outside, around the corner.

[00:48:07] Nathan Wrigley: I guess in these new environments you can organize all of that yourself. Beer get making. Sorry, Michelle, I feel I caught you off there. Did you wanna say something? You

[00:48:16] Michelle Frechette: did. It's okay. Yeah, I was just gonna say Word Camp Kent. The last one before the pandemic it was a two day camp and one day they provided lunch and the second day they had split up all up into small groups to go to local restaurants where you paid for your own lunch.

But you were able to have discussions with about 10 people at that local restaurant around that table. So you bought your own lunch, which is. Most of us are p fully fine with doing that. And then also it allowed you to actually have conversations seated where somebody was serving you. You didn't have to go through a long queue to get your lunch and find some place to balance it on your knees or whatever, happens in a lot of word camp.

So that's also an option, right? So that we don't even have to necessarily provide a lunch. If you have a way to and word Camp Toronto did that once as well, so that you were split up into these groups. You signed up for which group and which restaurant you wanted to go to. And then you went with that and there was one person who was in the charge of that group and made sure the conversation flowed and then everybody felt comfortable and invited.

And that's a really nice way to counteract some of the expense, but also the idea of these large groups and not knowing how to really network well. Yeah.

[00:49:28] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting, you know that thing that you're doing before you go to a big word camp. Like Word camp, you're where you're looking at all the social things and you're trying to figure out which, cuz they often happen, collide trying to figure out which ones to go to.

Honestly, this is me being a bit of an old curmudgeon. If something said no music. I'd be at that one immediately. That would be the top of my list. Or at least, very just normal background, quiet music that would jump right to the top of my list because for me it genuinely is about having conversation.

Conversation is the point. And be again, thanks for your commentary. She says, while organizing WordCamp Germany after the pandemic, it became difficult to carry on those kind of events because the cost of the, of housing them became ridiculously expensive. I know I won't talk about names or numbers, but I know that the WordCamp London crew found the exact same thing, like exorbitantly expensive to the point where it was just like, you look at the number, did they accidentally add a zero to that?

What the heck? That kind of thing. So yeah. And then Mike, thank you for joining us, Mike Johnson. I had some interesting discussions at Word Camp EU about the ultimate sizes of the event. It seems possible that it could be getting too big. Yes. So here's an interesting thing. It feels like these next gen word camp conversations seem to be bubbling that up, don't they?

It seems like there's some kind of undercurrent now of people thinking let's go small again. So maybe that's, if that's all that comes out of it, then maybe that'll be good. Tim, we're about to we're about to do that thing again. Go. He's put his thumb on his nose. That's brilliant.

I love it. You've got to watch this episode. If you're listening to the audio, go back and watch it cuz it's well worth it. So we're gonna go to Katie's piece, which is directly related to this. So Katie, as she said in the bio at the beginning is from Barn two plugins. They specialize in extending the functionality particularly of WooCommerce.

You, I believe it's true in saying, Katie, this was your first either major sponsorship or sponsorship of any kind. It was any kind. Yeah, any kind. Perfect. So you wrote an article about it. I read it, I could paraphrase it, but I rather you did it. What were your takeaways from that event? Did they overlap with what we've just said or did they, were you entirely optimistic?

Was it money well spent? Would you rather it was some of the things that we just talked about over to you? Yeah,

[00:51:56] Katie Keith: it was really interesting. It was crazy. It was. So busy. I've been reflecting on during this conversation about the sponsoring small versus large, because I feel I spoke to a huge number of people, but briefly.

So in a way it would've been nice to be at a smaller event to talk to people in more depth for longer. So you speak to fewer people, but you really build that relationship. There were videos of me talking to people at the booth that I don't even remember and I was sober. I just don't even, I, there was just so many people to talk to and I think it was probably good for awareness raising.

But the biggest benefit I would say was for my team because they my team is like 17 in total, but there were six of us at WordCamp Europe. And it was a really good bonding experience and I think it was good training for them to have to represent us at a booth and be talking in a kind of promotional way, really about our, what we do and our products and what the company is.

And I think it helps to crystallize things in their mind and give some context to their work cuz they're talking to real customers and the pain points that our products can solve and so on. So I think that in terms of the bonding and the context was really valuable. And if you think about the cost of.

The value of a good team member, then that pays for the sponsorship quite easily. We also ran a 50% off sale, and this followed from what we said earlier, we have had no sales on that coupon code, not even one. Oh wow. Wow. Yeah. Not one then we gave people like leaflets and everything and told them about it, and nobody has bought a plugin using that code.

That's fascinating. Okay. As Tim was saying about the roi, it is not about sales. Maybe it is long term. Maybe these people will be more likely to use our product in the future, but there's no evidence, there's no proof is there. So we could only judge r OI in terms of. Like the immediate partnerships we built with other product companies and team Impact.

Really.

[00:54:16] Nathan Wrigley: Wow. I am, that's, that is a, firstly, thank you for being so candid. You didn't need to share that information. So that's interesting. But it also does speak to, because I honestly, if you'd have said, how many sales did you think you'd have got from that 50% cou? I would've gone for a big number, not a zero number.

Yeah.

[00:54:32] Katie Keith: Mark WestStar did one last year and he said it more than paid for his booth. So I did the same and we've had no sales, so I don't

[00:54:40] Nathan Wrigley: know. Yeah, that's really interesting. Okay. So maybe the long and the short of that is that you also valuing the conversations and the fact that you are meeting potentially hundreds and hundreds of people, but for tiny amounts of time is maybe not as valuable as meeting half a dozen people for an extended period of time. I used to, when I was younger and a bit more naive and all of that, I used to attend local networking events and I went to a few of them and they were just, They were my idea of an absolute hell, but I persevered for a little while.

What I quickly learned was that as soon as I found the one person in the room that I could talk to, I spent the entire rest of the session talking to that person and I was watching all the other people flitting about. And what always happened was that I kept in touch with them that like that one hour that I spent with that one person inevitably led to something better than the person who was throwing out cards for 20 seconds here, there, and everywhere.

Yeah that's my experience anyway. For what it's worth, I.

[00:55:46] Michelle Frechette: I've said I've been a part of teams that have sponsored lots of WordCamps in the past. First with Give WP and now it's Stellar. And I've said over and again to anybody who will listen, that WordCamps are not necessarily something where you're gonna d draw direct roi.

It's all about branding and brand awareness and working within the community to make sure that people know who you are and what you do. And that over time, that becomes part of your whole brand strategy and that and eventually turns into those sales. But it's really difficult to draw that direct ROI from, we did a word camp and here's our sales.

That Mark was able to do. That is very unusual, I think, which I think is awesome for him. But I, my guess also is that his first word, camp. Was very different than subsequent word camps. Because you really do have to build your brand within the community and having that face there and talking to people is how you begin to do that.

Yeah. Boy, this is, I hope it's not lost, Katie.

[00:56:45] Nathan Wrigley: No, that's right. Fascinating. I apologize, we've spent a very large amount on that one topic, but it does feel like the powers that be, if you like, are trying to trickle down a different form of Word camp. Largely inspired by the, the drop off of numbers and then the pandemic and trying to bring them back up again.

And does seem like some interesting conversations are coming out of here, especially around, topic based ones and the smaller size of them. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. That was fascinating. Really enjoyed that. The next one is, I want to give it, oh, it's Tim. Sorry. I've got to ask you to adopt some sort of Yeah.

How many can you do? How many positive? How many? Yeah. Yeah. Yay. That's great. Look at his long hair.

[00:57:29] Michelle Frechette: So good. He was playing along so well.

[00:57:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I love it when people play along. I love all this stuff. This is a bit of a hat tip. Jess, Rick, who is a very frequent panelist on this show.

She's one of the co-hosts. She is from Pressable, and I got two notifications from the two companies involved this week. Pressable is obviously a WordPress hosting company. Main WP is a plugin that you can buy in order to manage. All of your WordPress websites, so updates and all of that kind of thing.

It really is not doing it justice just to call it updates, but it's a self-hosted maintenance plugin which handles a boatload of things, including client reporting and all that kind of thing. She reached out to tell me that this week pressable have joined forces with main wp and they now have an extension to main wp, which it allows you to do a whole slew of things.

So for example, if you've logged into your main WP website, you link your Pressable account, you can create a new site, sync the data you can edit them, disable sites, delete sites. I'm literally just reading off the screen here. You can enable or disable their C D n visit, the PHP my admin page, manage all of your backups on pressable, all that kind of stuff.

So basically a full on integration main WP, I think is used by lots and lots of people. I think last time I read it was, many hundreds of thousands. And so this seems like a really good move. So if you are a main WP user and you've given any thought to using pressable, There's perhaps another reason you might wish to do that.

So hat tip, I'll offer it to the rest of you, but I don't know if anybody wants to say anything there.

[00:59:10] Tim Nash: I think it's a

[00:59:10] Nathan Wrigley: great combination except Dennis Dornan who just popped in at the right moment there. Dennis is the founder of Main wp. So that was good timing, wasn't it? Hi Dennis. I can highly recommend Main wp.

It is basically the first thing, honestly, someti, this is gonna be a horrible, by the way, I'm gonna bring Tim back on. Is he still No, he's back. He's back. He was in the previous pos. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. This is a sad admission, but sometimes I have updated my WordPress websites before I've got outta bed.

That's a bit sad, isn't it? And I've used my wp to do just that. Click one button, wait a few seconds, and they all get updated in the background. And now you can do all that stuff with Pressable as well. So Bravo to Dennis and Bravo. Jess, but Jess's team as well, and obviously Dennis's team.

Michelle, Katie, Tim, anything on that? Or shall I move on?

[01:00:09] Michelle Frechette: WP Speakers is hosted on Pressable. They donated the hosting for that, so

[01:00:14] Nathan Wrigley: shout out to them for that. Nice. Yeah, there you go. Thank you. Appreciate that. I don't even know if this is worth mentioning, but I'm gonna mention, oh no.

Tim's got something on this. I couldn't quite sum it up why it was important, but in WordPress 6.3, the tool itself is dead. Cool. It's currently being called the command center. If you've got a Mac, we've got this thing on the Mac called Spotlight, where you invoke it with a keyboard shortcut and it basically gets at you anywhere you need to go on your Mac.

You start typing and it, it filters all of the different things that might match the kind of search you're about to put in. WordPress is gonna ship something similar called the command center very soon. You can see a picture of it on the on the screen if you're doing that. If not, it literally is like spotlight.

You've got a search bar and the more you type, the more suggestions come up. But it's thought that the term command center is a little bit technical, little bit on the techie side. I personally think it's pretty cool, but there's there's talk about renaming it and the winning contender at the moment seems to be Tim, what is it, Wayfinder or something, whether I got that right.

Yeah, Wayfinder. I don't know. I don't, what's wrong with command center? You said you had something to say on this, so I'm hoping you've got something to say on this. Pretty much,

[01:01:31] Tim Nash: It's a command pallet. It's always been a. That's what it is. It's a technical thing. I know that you know it, it's designed, it's for more power users to use short, who are used to using keyboard short commands.

They will know it as a command pallet. Everybody else will know it as a command pallet. It's a command pallet. Why be reinventing random terms for a command power? I

[01:01:56] Nathan Wrigley: do not know, but I don't even know what wayfinder is. It sounds like something out. A Game of Thrones. I

[01:02:01] Tim Nash: was thinking more Moana, which I think shows the difference in our TV levels.

What I did really want to highlight was this is very cool. Something that's available right now is a, something called Turbo Admin by my friend Ross, which is a plugin a plugin. You can use it as a plugin, but you can also use it as a browser extension, which means you don't need to install it on every WordPress site, and it allows this command pallet type.

Functionality across the entire site, not just inside the Gutenberg block editor. Yeah. I love some of the features that they're coming outta the new command center, which will hopefully rename as command palettes and not. Wayfinder. But I think that they've obviously started small and I'd love to see more of the functionality that is in turbo admin moving across.

But one of the thingss I really like about Turbo Admin is that I can use that on any site right now. And I don't need to pre-install anything cuz it's just in my browser. So I really, the reason for putting this on was basically to give a shout out to a friend.

[01:03:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. Yeah. Turbo admin is blatant nepotism.

Love it. The, honestly, I've been banging on about turbo admin forever. It is Great. Just go get it. It's, and the best bit is it literally lives inside the browser and I know that you're thinking well, alright, why is that so interesting? It's because you don't have to install it anywhere. You go to any WordPress website and it figures it out.

It knows that you're on a, in the WordPress admin and so you just install it into the browser once and you're off to the races. But it is a plugin as well. So if you wanna be, who knows, editing on your mobile phone. Y Ross has got your back. Why you would wanna do that? I don't know. Maybe the guys at Playground can tell us.

Anyway, so Wayfinder, it might be, and as Cameron says, it's not really a WordPress project unless there's so kinda some kinda fuss about the way

[01:03:57] Michelle Frechette: it's, he makes a good point.

[01:03:59] Tim Nash: Yeah. I'll find that hill and

[01:04:01] Nathan Wrigley: I'll walk up it. That's right. Yeah. Honestly, though, all the silliness around the name aside, really cool feature.

I can imagine six months from now when it has come out, I will be using my keyboard to achieve almost all the bits and pieces. As I said, I'm using Turbo Admin, so I'll probably just stick with that. For those that haven't, it's gonna be there. Okay. Anything on that? Or shall we move on?

[01:04:25] Katie Keith: Yeah, I think Wayfinder is trendy and not intuitive for the user.

I thought the article did a good po job of describing exactly what it is because it is not just a command center for developer types. It's also for searching and navigating and finding things. So I think command Centers still does the job, but I was wondering about something like Hub or something, because it's like your central place for getting stuff done.

But

[01:04:55] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, I think it should just be called something really boring. I don't know, Brian or Hery or something like that. Just invoke Brian and off we go. Tim's

[01:05:06] Tim Nash: I know some Brians, they're not boring. What? Talking about.

[01:05:13] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I'm in trouble with the whole Brian could and

[01:05:16] Tim Nash: then you've got the Hemion end.

I've

[01:05:18] Nathan Wrigley: really blown it. Yeah, I like it. One of the things that I use Ross's tool for, which I know it seems silly, but you know when you've got like a thousand, honestly, I've got a thousand posts and you wanna track down that one, like you, that is a faff. And if you can just start typing in, I know there's the WordPress search, but the ability to do it right away, it just.

Whatever screen you want. You don't have to go to the post section or whatever. That saves me lots of time. So anyway, there we go. I'm not gonna keep doing that joke at Tim's expense, but we are gonna go back to this. Oh, okay. Tim wants that joke at his expense there. We

[01:05:52] Tim Nash: gost be I know it's in the wrong place.

[01:05:53] Nathan Wrigley: Nevermind. Loving this. If you are a Gravita user you've probably known for ages that Gravita is a, is an automatic owned tool and allows you to globally publish an image of you basically onto a whole load of services. There are actually quite a lot of services using it. For example, I think Slack use it and a whole bunch of other things discus or discuss stack Overflow, GitHub, Trello, and a bunch of other things.

Use it. Tim's now gone let's he's said enough of this. Yes. Enough of them. I have had enough. I'm furious. No, he did say that he was gonna go at some point, so that might actually be the moment that he's had to leave. Let's just have a look. Yeah. Yeah, I think he's got to go. So we'll probably see Tim another time, but he did say that he was gonna go.

So farewell Tim, it's been nice having you. Now over on Gravita, you can start to use it as a bit more of a promotional tool. So rather than signing up to a site and just bringing your emoji along, if you like your gra your avatar along for the ride, you can now add in some payment options.

I don't know, somebody like me, for example I could use it just to say, okay, if you wanna donate to the podcast to keep the lights on, you can do that. It's pretty basic. You log in and you've got three options. You can use a PayPal me link, you can use a Patreon link, and there's another one.

This is basically what you get. There's my profile page and you just get these things at the bottom. But I did think it's curious because I use a I have used in the past a bunch of services where people can donate. And they are proprietary. Sometimes they involve a fee or a slice of your donation.

So let's say somebody donates me $10, maybe the platform will take 50 cents of that, or a dollar of that. But this seems like maybe that's what they're getting into. Just the idea to have this one universal place where you can put your identity, link it up and prove that you exist on other platforms anyway, they've added it in.

Whether or not anybody's gonna use it, I don't know, but it's a thing. Anything to add to that?

[01:08:11] Katie Keith: I can't say anybody would ever send me money via that, but I suppose if you have a completely different type of work or something, then it might be useful even informally with friends needing to send you money for paying you back for something, whatever.

But I do like the idea of a kind of a universal online business card type thing. Yeah. Particularly with something like QR codes which we could then print for and stick onto our WordCamp badges, for example. We currently do our own each time, and it would be quite nice if that maybe there was a central gravita place for all of that so you could refer people more easily.

[01:08:50] Nathan Wrigley: It's funny that there are places that do that. There's quite a slew of SAS apps and the whole enterprise is just to have a one page bio basically. And Gravita seems to be in a really good position to do that because you can, yeah. You can log in all over the place. You're probably gonna be using it repeatedly and it seems like, if you can add in links and, I don't know, it shows up on your Slack post and somebody can click through to that and donate.

[01:09:16] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. Is it a bit like a link tree

[01:09:19] Nathan Wrigley: with attention? I dunno what Link Tree is, but is that one of those platforms? Yeah,

[01:09:23] Michelle Frechette: so Link Tree is I don't remember, link tr.ee or something like that. Uhhuh where you can, on their platform list all of the different things you're involved in. So it's like a one-stop shop.

So that on Instagram, on TikTok, on those places, you have one place where people can Venmo you or see your Amazon wishlist or your blog, your sh your store, all of your e-commerce, those kinds of things. I used to have a link tree. It's probably still out there somewhere. I've replaced it with my own Meet michelle.online, which is what, where I put everything that I want people to find my links for.

But I don't have a, actually I do think I have a buy me a coffee on there, right? Which is one way people can give you a tip or something like that. I think Gravita is looking to become something similar. I think you're right, but more spec, like more niche for the WordPress

[01:10:11] Nathan Wrigley: community. Yeah, I think you're right.

And honestly I would use this, obviously the payment piece is probably not really gonna be that significant that you the platforms that just do that, they go out of their way to construct a UI in a ux, which Yeah. Guides you down that path and enables recurring donations and that kind of thing.

But anyway, it's, but I

[01:10:32] Michelle Frechette: have over the years, I've probably, over the last three years, I've probably gotten close to $150 through buy me a coffee. So this would be that instead? Yeah. And this would probably be more likely to, you could probably put this more easily on GitHub and things like that, right?

Where if people wanted to contribute to your project, they could do it that way.

[01:10:50] Nathan Wrigley: What's interesting for me is that this Gravita website has been basically dormant Sarah Gooding, we're stealing another piece from Sarah on WP Tavern. 22nd of June piece is called Gravita Adds new Payment Features.

She makes the point that really the whole Gravita thing has been on ice for about nine years, and so suddenly to add in. A feature is kinda, okay, what, what's going on there? So I would imagine there is some other piece linking up something somewhere that I, obviously, I have no insight.

It's a field on a form that's all it's doing at the moment, but you never know. Let's see. Watch this space. Anyway, if you fancy donating, it's gravita.com/nj Wrigley. There, I don't think anything will come of that, but there you go. Right next one. This wasn't raised by me. This piece came via Michelle, I believe it's episode 57, or the podcast entitled the podcast episode is entitled The Power of WordPress Mentorship.

This is on wordpress.org. What's this about? This is Jafa talking on her. It's called the WP Briefing. All this backwards, haven't I? But there we go. Episode 57, the Power of WordPress Mentorship. I confess, I haven't listened to this episode, but clearly you have.

[01:12:18] Michelle Frechette: It's it's just, a short, it's less than six minutes.

But it's specifically about the new mentorship program that they're implementing. I think it was in conversation before Work Camp Europe, but a lot of it's cemented at Work Camp Europe and the community team. And the idea is that we have mentorship around things like the the release squads, right?

So I'm on a, I've been on a release squad before you mirror you, you shadow the people who are in the prior. Release that you are going to do and then learn from that. And there's a little bit of mentorship that goes on there and probably more or less, depending on the team you're on and your own experiences, but the idea of mentoring people into the community as a whole and having I think of it like I equated to the old Big Brother, big sister program, right?

Where like somebody's new to it and then they get assigned to you or shepherd people in. And it's of when you're new to something, it's often one of those things where you feel like every question I ask is probably stupid because somebody's probably asked it a million times before. And if I just learned to Google, I could probably find it out myself. But the difference having a mentor is there's safety in that there's sa the ability to ask somebody where they say there are no stupid questions and you don't have to Google it and be, a person on your own island without having that connection to other people.

And you don't have to figure out how to network and get your foot in the door, so to speak. So the idea behind the mentorship program would be allowing people to really shepherd others into the community and into the ecosystem so that they have this feeling of belonging much earlier on. And a sense of commitment to the open source project because they belong, feel the belonging much earlier.

[01:14:11] Nathan Wrigley: It's nice. Yeah, this was a project, I guess it was probably launched about, I dunno, I'm gonna say about six months ago or something like that. But now we've got some meat on the bones. Do you know if this was happening at WordCamp Europe, Michelle, was this kind of thing already beginning or. So the

[01:14:28] Michelle Frechette: conversation about it was happening during contributor day.

To bring it forth to the point that they're lo actually launching an official program. I believe she said July 13th maybe. But don't quote me on that sometime in this next month. Okay. I'll say that for sure. Okay. And I see Gin has a note here that the contributor mentorship program is also helpful for contributors who feel lost or come back from a contributing sabbatical to kinda get themselves back in the groove of contributing to the open source project.

So there's a lot of opportunities for people. I think a lot of us have served as unofficial mentors for people and shepherded people in. Gosh, I go back to my church. Language when I think, when I say things like shepherding in, but but been able to mentor people and coach people unofficially or officially into in WordPress, but having the ability for people, thank you.

July 12th. I love that. Ett, you've got my back so many times that I appreciate you so much, but having an official mentorship program takes the questioning about how do I even get started? Because somebody there is there to lend you a hand and help you figure out how to get started or restarted in the program.

It's not, WordPress is big. It's a behemoth. And when you go to wordpress.org, even if you want to start contributing, you don't necessarily know how to begin and you don't necessarily feel like you can just barge in and go, Hey, I wanna be on the marketing team, or Hey, I wanna code.

Because you don't know what's already in process. It's like stepping into a river. It's already flowing. It isn't the beginning of something in WordPress. And so to join that river is to hop on a boat with somebody else. And so they can show you how to do it. That was

[01:16:12] Nathan Wrigley: the great metaphor. Did you just come up with that one?

If not, I did that. Is sublimely good? That just encapsulated it perfectly. You should write that down quickly.

[01:16:22] Michelle Frechette: I, shit, I'll have to re-listen to this later to remember what I said.

[01:16:25] Nathan Wrigley: That's great. Anything to add here, Katie? Or shall we move on? No.

[01:16:31] Katie Keith: This sounds like a really good initiative that will really help people.

[01:16:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yep. Yeah. Surely. Okay. The next piece. Oh, this is a sad piece. This this is. This is from Tim, actually. But we'll mention it. Anyway, I just think this is a really salutary story. This is Shannon, Matt who has a website called the Web Designer Academy dot com. As with everything that we've mentioned today, the links will be in the show notes.

It'll be published tomorrow as an audio podcast, so you'll be able to find all of these. But she has a title a piece. Titled My Stripe account was hacked and Stripe said I have to repay 70 oh $70,000. Okay, so I read this piece and the further I got down it, the more my heart just sank. Because at the beginning, Shannon, basically, the story goes a bit like this.

She woke up in the morning to notice that there was some email, which first of all she just assumed was spam or some phishing attempt. And then she realized, no, this is actually legit saying that there was a problem with her Stripe account. And then she logged in fairly sanguine that, okay whatever it is, we'll figure it out.

And then as the days go on, the emails become more and more calamitous in that, she assumed okay, I'll supply them with some evidence, we'll be able to prove that it was hacked. They'll refund me my money. But as the days went on, that turned out to be less and less the case. So at the minute, she's still fighting to a prove that all of this hacking happened, but also that she really isn't responsible.

Somebody seems to have gained access to her account. She does explain how that hack happened. But I can't exactly remember how it was but the, basically the long and the short of it is if the assumption is that Stripe has got your back, it would appear that there are some scenarios in which that may not be the case.

I, I, in the UK here we have the F S A, the Financial Services Authority. And essentially, so long as you don't lose gigantic amounts of money and you've obviously acted in a stupid way and signed documents that you shouldn't have done, you are. In many ways protected and you kind of work under the assumption that a company like Stripe would always have to have your back.

I heard, although I don't quite know, I heard that it may have been some of the configurations that Shannon had set up in the background. Either way, it's just a sort of salutary story that, don't always assume that just because it's going through a giant multinational like Stripe, that it's gonna be you not paying the bill.

They'll swallow the money. In this case, it looks like that fight is ongoing. So I just feel a bit sad for somebody in our community who's been caught up in this. And I dunno if either of you had a chance to read it, but Ugh, not really close. Yeah, I read

[01:19:25] Katie Keith: it nasty stuff and the way Stripe responded, just not listening to her and it must sounds very stressful.

Even just the experience, let alone happen to pay the

[01:19:35] Nathan Wrigley: money. Yeah. Just the idea that something can happen like that. And they haven't got your back. So again, part of the UK structure is basically, if it's not you doing it, You have that protection, there's just an assumption that, okay, we can see that you did not do this.

You are protected. That's basically the bottom line. Whereas in this situation it, Shannon's version of events is that she did not do this. It was per protected by hackers. But striper claiming that the way that it was done means that they can't get the money back, so it needs to be born by her.

So anyway, Shannon, good luck. I hope that it hope that you managed to straighten it out. Michelle, anything on that one?

[01:20:17] Michelle Frechette: No, I just, it's, Stripe is one of those behemoths. It's so helpful in so many ways to have it as a payment processor, but if you've ever had to fight a dispute, even if somebody, if you have hard evidence, oftentimes it doesn't go your way.

It's very hard, it's very difficult to win a dispute because they tend to side with the consumer, not with the products own product owner service owners. So it's. It's a mixed

[01:20:41] Nathan Wrigley: blessing, obviously. Yeah. I can't remember if she said that she had things like two fa switched on if memory serves. I think maybe she did, but the nature of the attack was that it didn't really matter.

That, I can't remember, but just be careful out there, basically, just watch what you're doing. Yeah. We've got about five minutes left, so we're gonna, we're gonna do one more. There was probably five or six more that we were gonna do, but we're, we'll do one more. And it's this joy I don't know.

What do we say? This is the exciting news that I don't even, I do not even know whether to believe this or not. I just, some part of me thinks it, this is an April fool's joke in July or June. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Are going to have an actual fight in an actual cage. And I don't know what to make of it, apart from just thinking what the heck has happened to us, that this is like perfectly normal.

That two, men from North America, Weller, Elon Musk, I believe is from South Africa. But these two guys, billionaires, both of them have just decided they're just gonna wrestle each other into submission. What, what's going on? Please help me understand.

[01:22:04] Michelle Frechette: I, all I can say is I would probably watch it just to see the two pasty, white, pudgy, middle-aged white dude tech bros going at it and to see who falls first and like the watch, the slap fight.

But other than that, I'm not sure.

[01:22:21] Nathan Wrigley: I just don't even get where you get to the point that this is a message you wanna put out. I've, I'm just gonna have a pawn shop with somebody. I don't know maybe the martial art that they've selected is much more refined and there's some sort of, there's some prior art in it where, you're not actually hurting each other, you're just wrestling each other into submission or something.

But I do just think it's curious that this is the way it's got, just,

[01:22:52] Katie Keith: yeah, it's not gonna happen. They're just

[01:22:54] Nathan Wrigley: talking. Oh, I'm so glad you said that.

[01:22:56] Katie Keith: Let's, yeah, it's just testosterone driven talk. I don't think it's a real thing.

[01:23:02] Nathan Wrigley: I wonder if I wonder if it's just to keep them in the headlines, but apparently Mark Zuckerberg is a bonafide martial arts.

He's a bit of a, he's a bit of a fan and he recently showed up to some kind of local event where he lives. Of people who were fairly expert and he won it. He's he's, I would imagine that Elon Musk would be toast. I think my money would be on would be on Mark Zuckerberg. But honestly, what a strange thing.

The world is going crazy. It says my long car. Hi. Thanks for that. Yeah, we are going crazy with the news, but I just thought this was so interesting. Where have we got to? And Peacher says scary stuff, but I presume she's talking about Shannon's horrible striped story and not this, although this is fairly scary.

That's it. We're we've got about three minutes to spare, but perfect. Time to end. Anything happening to you this week, Michelle? Probably talking as little as possible, I

[01:24:00] Michelle Frechette: would imagine. Pretty much, although today is a very busy day, who knows. But one of the things I'm working on is word Camp Rochester for this fall and finding a venue.

So I'm touring someplace on Thursday. I'm hoping that the price works well and that we will see some people here for Word Camp Rochester at the end of September.

[01:24:21] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Thank you very much indeed. Katie, what's happening on your diary this week?

[01:24:25] Katie Keith: Nothing particularly different. Might launch a few new features on plugins and things, but nothing huge.

And starting to work out who we are bringing to work, camp us, and that kind of thing as well.

[01:24:39] Nathan Wrigley: Let's hope that you have a really nice week and you managed to stay safe. That's all we got time for. It will come out as a podcast episode tomorrow morning at the absurd time of seven. In the morning.

Don't ask. I had no idea why I decided to do that. Oh yeah. No, I was thinking about that. Yes. We need to do the wave, the humiliating wave. Here we go. I've gotta put Tim in there somewhere, haven't I? I'm gonna have to slide Katie along in some sort of one of his poses, yeah. I get one him the back.

Yeah, that's perfect. The one from

[01:25:08] Michelle Frechette: behind. Absolutely.

[01:25:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for joining us. Really appreciate it. And so many people who made comments today, again, massively appreciated. We'll be back next week with some other guests, but until now, until then, even stay safe. Bye-bye for now. Cheers. Bye.