This Week in WordPress #260

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[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode number 260. Entitled how many times can we say patterns? It was recorded on Monday the 10th of July, 2023. My name's Nathan Wrigley and I'll be joined by 4, 5, 6 back down to five, up to six, back down to three. Loads of different people today, I'm joined by Michelle Frechette, Jatie Keith, Birgit Pauli-Haack, Sam Alderson and Mark Westguard.

We're here to talk about the WordPress new. So that's exactly what we do. And the list is as follows WordCamp Dhaka has been canceled. We find out why, and also we find out what we don't want to find out about. WordPress 6.3 has dropped support for PHP five.

Mark does join us temporarily for a little bit of a chat about his fantastic new AI in Ws form. You can now create forms with a prompt. The WordPress 6.3 live demo is coming up. I'm going to be joining an McCarthy enrich table, showing you all about what it can do. Gutenberg's 16.1 is introducing pattern creation.

The WordPress plugin review team has added six new people. Louise Towler talks all about the environment and sustainable WordPress websites. What can we learn from that? If you'd like to sponsor the page builder summit, we'd be very keen to hear from you. beta is the status of north commerce. And we also talk a little bit about some security news and various Erata towards the end. It's all coming up next on this week in WordPress.

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[00:01:47] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there. Hello there. Welcome to this episode number 260 of this week in WordPress. I realize WordPress has been going on significantly longer than 260 weeks, but that's as long as I've been going with this show, at least. Anyway, so we're joined today. As you can see, look at it. It's like a full on smorgasbord of people.

We normally go with three or four, but today we've got five and then maybe six. Let's just press the button and see what.

Just keep doing that. As the show goes on, we're gonna be joined by somebody else a little bit later because they've got a really interesting thing happening in WordPress this week. But as you can see, I'm joined by some fabulous WordPress people to my, what is it? It's that way to my left. All right. I can't work it out in my head.

We're joined by Michelle Fette. How are you doing, Michelle? I'm good. How are you? Yeah, really good. Honestly, I'm in a really good mood today. I dunno. I dunno what it is, but feeling like genuinely really good. Michelle is the Director of Community Engagement for Stella WP at Liquid Web. She's doing a new thing, which we'll find out a bit about a bit later.

In addition to her work over at Stella wp, she's the podcast barista at WP Coffee Talk. And another one, coffee co-founder, underrepresented in tech, creator at WP Speakers, creator of the WP career pages.com website, president of the board, big orange chart. Look at the bowing director of community relations and [email protected].

Author, business coach, and frequent organizer and speaker at Word Press Events. She lives outside Rochester, New York, where she takes photographs of nature. And she's got another website. Meet michelle.online and you can yeah, you can probably tell by the introduction that Michelle does rather a lot and very kind of her to join us.

I like to be busy. Yeah, I can tell that. Is there a, do you serious question, right? Do you ever get the impression that you do too much? I don't mean like from our point of view. Do you ever sit down and think I could do with a bit of a. Bit of a break.

[00:04:22] Michelle Frechette: I plan breaks and I do them strategically so that I am not always doing everything.

I take a whole week. I take three weeks of vacation a year where I'm not working

[00:04:31] Nathan Wrigley: at all. So planning breaks is something that I'm not very good at. But anyway, let's carry on. Thank you for joining, Michelle. We're also joined further on the other side of Michelle by Beit Pauly Hack. How are you doing, Beit?

[00:04:43] Birgit Pauli-Haack: I'm doing well. I'm doing well. I'm on the show. I've been taking a break from the show, not because of you,

[00:04:52] Nathan Wrigley: I suspect maybe by the end of this episode you will wish to.

[00:04:56] Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, but I congratulate you to the 206 edition because Oh, nice. And I also had a 260. 260 weekend edition. So it was just published last

[00:05:08] Nathan Wrigley: week. Sounded. That's coincidental, isn't it? That's pretty amazing. Totally line. That's

[00:05:13] Birgit Pauli-Haack: great.

But then I saw it

[00:05:15] Nathan Wrigley: pretty big is the the publisher at the Gutenberg Times. You may have seen that. If you haven't just Googled Gutenberg Times. It's a real solid resource for all things WordPress, specifically around Gutenberg. It's a site with news around the WordPress block editor and beyond. She hosts regular Gutenberg Live q and as on YouTube and hosts the podcast Gutenberg Change Log.

She has been contributing to the WordPress opensource project since 2014 and contributes now full-time with a sponsorship from Automatic. Great. Yes. Thanks for joining us. You're welcome. We're also joined by Sam Alderson. How are you doing, Sam? First time on the show. So far so good. No gremlins with the audio.

Let's see how it goes. Are you all right? I'm great. Thank you. Very nice. I detect a UK accent, but I don't know where you live.

[00:06:03] Sam Alderson: Yorkshire.

[00:06:04] Nathan Wrigley: Where? York. Oh. I live in Scarborough, well near Scarborough. So we're like, Down the road, 45 minutes down the, oh, that's great. There's nobody that I know from Word. That's not true.

There's Elliot Sby, who's probably in the comments. He's he's from Yorkshire. He lives in Brisbane. And now the three of you have to meet for coffee. I know. That's right. And Elliot. Oh, that's exciting. Sam Alderson is the social media and brand manager at Yoast seo. They've been at Yost for two years in and active in the WordPress community for just over a year that they intend on changing that.

Oh, yeah. I guess Plus one. Plus one. Plus one. They have a passion for social media accessibility, d e i and what to educate people on this all, at most conferences, you'll find them chatting about what sets their heart on fire and their pets. So two questions from that First one. How many pets and what are they?

[00:06:55] Sam Alderson: Just one. His name is Patch and he is in Nightmare. But hopefully trying to convince my other half to get another dog that potentially Patch can then bully into submission.

[00:07:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yay. Patch. And then the other one, you're gonna have to forgive me. I dunno if I said that and I can't for the life of me summon that acronym, d e

[00:07:16] Sam Alderson: i, diversity, equality,

[00:07:18] Nathan Wrigley: inclusiveness.

Okay, that's settled that in my head. I didn't realize that was the acronym for that. Anyway, Sam, so much thanks for joining us today. Really appreciate it. And also, Katie. Keith, how are you doing, Katie? Hi. Good thanks. Very nice to have you with us. Katie. Seems to be seems to be coming back more and more regularly, so I'm very thankful for all of that.

That's really amazing. I really appreciate it. She also has the shortest bio of everybody. It simply goes Co-founder and SEO at Barn two plugins and the co-host of the WP Coffee Talk podcast as, nope. Thank you for

[00:07:55] Katie Keith: joining us. The coffee talk, the

[00:07:56] Nathan Wrigley: product talk. Oh what did I just

[00:07:58] Katie Keith: say? You said I was SEO and coffee talk rather than CEO and product

[00:08:04] Nathan Wrigley: talk.

I said a minute ago that was really happy. That was really happy. I'm glad my bio's not longer. Now I've realized that I'm not on my A game. I'm gonna have to go. I'm, I resigned. See, let me do that again. Katie, Keith is the co-founder and c e o at Barn, two plugins. I'm the co-host of the WP Product Talk podcast.

It's there in black and white, but I was saying just before we hit record, my eyesight is sh shocking. And we're also joined by Mark West Guard, but not for very long. He's gonna he's just gonna keep going. Sorry, mark. I don't mean to to be annoyed, but it's just, it's so irresistible.

I do apologize if you want to join us in the comments. Feel free to do that. That's really great. I love it when people make the effort to comment. There's just a few little caveats around that. The first thing is if you are in our Facebook group, then you need to do an additional thing.

You need to go to chat restream.io/fb. Otherwise, we simply don't know who you are. You just come across as somebody anonymous, which is fine if you wanna do it that way. Also, if you're fancy, being a bit social and sharing this online with your friends, colleagues, enemies, pets, whatever you like, then wp builds.com/live is the URL to send them to.

And let's see if we have any comments. Oh, good grief. Okay. Yeah, we've got for you. So apologies, we'll just go through this very quickly. Hi there, Courtney. She says it's humid in Central Philadelphia. Remember, WordCamp US will be much like this. Haha, 30 to 35 degrees centigrade with 90 degrees humidity.

Nigel's saying that he's here. Nathan apparently is trying to press the record button, says Bob Tacho. Hi Tacho, nice to see you, even if it's not seeing you. I've got your icon. Anyway. Very nice to have you back on the show. Full house he says. Peter always drops in the the weather comment, Connecticut 22 degrees centigrade with some rain, just 40 miles to our west of flash flooding warnings.

Woo. Yeah, we had quite a lot of flash flooding. I was in it yesterday actually, and it wasn't very pleasant. Hello ladies, says Courtney, I know that I know each of these amazing women. And Hi Mark too. We should probably just give Mark the opportunity to say hi. Hi, mark. Just gone again. I dunno what's, honestly, mark, you must try a little bit harder.

Then there's lots of people basically saying hey, this Sam, this is Elliot. Elliot lives in Bri coast. Again, down road. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. Just down the road from where you and I are. Do you ever sleep? Nathan meant to ask. I presume that's in conjunction with the comment.

Anyway, there you go. Please keep dropping in the comments. It's a lot of fun. But let's natter on about WordPress. There's a little bit of self promotion at the beginning. I'm. Really sorry about that. I don't like to do it, but I'm going to do it. The first one is basically our website. You can see that we're sponsored by GoDaddy Pro.

Thanks to them for helping us keep the lights on. We've got a couple of events coming up. The first one is with a chap called Mark West Guard. I'm not entirely sure who he is, but I've got this vague memory that that I know him a little bit may. Maybe you've seen him recently there. It's very early.

He's gonna go. He just keeps popping off. I'm doing a show with Mark on Wednesday and it's the final in our webinar series, six webinar episodes all about. Ws four marks product, which all joking aside is actually really good. So go and check it out. We're gonna be talking about AI and actually that's the reason I keep dropping him in cuz we've got a little bit of a bombshell to drop.

You. You may have seen some social media hype about it, but there's that coming up. This Wednesday. You can see it on the top of our website. 3:00 PM UK time, this coming Wednesday. And then also, just a heads up, I've got a show with Pete coming up. You are UX show that's in a few weeks, 25th of July.

And if you wanna send us your nonprofit or your pets project or your. Charity, I suppose is the right word, project and get to have a look at it. Hit that link and you will get there. The other thing to mention is that we are doing another version of the Page Builder Summit that's coming up and we are looking for some sponsors.

So if any of you people listening to this are working for a WordPress kind of company, although it says the Page Builder Summit, you might be thinking like Oxygen, Elementor Beaver Builder. It's actually got a ton of content about the block editor. It's just that we named it that before the block editor was.

A thing. And so now everybody's, is there anything about Guttenberg? Yes, there's loads about Guttenberg. Yeah, so if you wanna sponsor that, go to this page, w sorry, it's page builder summit.com/sponsors and scroll down. There's loads of information about what we offer, what you'll get in return, and, generally how good the event has been in the past.

It has been a really nice event. And I think that's it. That's all the self-promotion. Yeah, that'll do. I could go on. Okay. Hot topic of the year so far, I think is this one. WP Tavern, Sarah Gooding wrote a piece called WordCamp Dakar 2023 canceled due to concerns of corporate influence on community making decisions.

So this is the sad news, I have no other way of saying it, that a WordPress event, which was into the late stages of planning, has been pulled by WordCamp Central. There's not much more to say, it's all in the title. It would appear that some corporate entities have been flexing their corporate muscle and according to this piece anyway, trying to.

Interfere in how that event has been put together and things got a little bit out of hand, so out of hand. In fact, that Word Camp Central has decided to pull the event. Now, helpfully actually, and I do mean helpfully, there are no names attached to this. So we don't know who those companies are from my point of view.

I actually think I want to remain ignorant about that because I know that some people will be collateral damage because there'll be bound to be people who work for a company who was part of this, who don't necessarily subscribe to that will, can maybe get swept up in all of it and all of that.

So anyway, this is big news, Sam, just so that we basically crosstalk the person that gets in first gets to talk and we're all very polite and we'll we'll figure out who's gonna go next. But no, you just have to interrupt. Yeah. You don't to interrupt. Exactly. Sad news is over to you. What is there to say about this?

[00:14:38] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it's really hard. Go ahead. Yeah, sorry Michelle, but no, go ahead. When you look at the post at the made community blog, it seems that there were actually a mentor as well as a deputy involved for the work camp. So it go through all the levels of work camp organization where this unduly behavior happened.

So I can see that there is a lot of there, there was a lot of help to try to rectify this, but it just didn't happen. So cancellation is probably the only thing that makes it keep the program. Levelheaded and Integra and integrate what, and keep

[00:15:29] Nathan Wrigley: integrity, I think maybe is the word. Yeah, yeah.

[00:15:31] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Thank you. Yeah, sorry I'm now living in Germany and my English goes to pr.

[00:15:37] Nathan Wrigley: That's kinda, no, it's okay. I can't read the words SEO or product. I wouldn't feel so bad, but there are glasses for that. Yeah. Yeah. Seemingly for

[00:15:49] Birgit Pauli-Haack: my impairment, there's no,

[00:15:51] Nathan Wrigley: Anyway, thank you for that opinion. That's really great.

Yeah. So any of the other three want to give their opinion

[00:15:56] Michelle Frechette: here? I wrote about this at post status over the weekend and. One of the things that I think we, we like to think that everything is always perfect in our community and that every, everybody are good actors and everybody acts in good faith.

But we are a community of literally millions of people. And that doesn't mean that there aren't some people who don't have that, that, altruistic intense when it comes to things like this. We talked about last year or earlier this year, what Micah went through, or Mika went through with with managing the the plugins team.

And we know what happened there. We've seen what happened. We've seen companies get banned from sponsoring and attending Word camps as sponsors because of things that they've done in the past. And it's, this is just another example of the community correcting itself. And so I think that, hopefully in the future we'll see that they'll be able to come back with a camp that's better balanced with some more oversight.

I know that new camps, it's always hard and. People not understanding what's what they can and cannot do. I like to think that people are just ignorant and not willfully being a bad actor but who knows for sure here, and the fact that the community can step in and say, okay, so now's the not the right time for this.

Years ago I attended a Word camp where all of the sudden Josepha and Andrea Middleton showed up to the word camp because there were so many things happening behind the scenes, and the person who was organized in that word camp is no longer part of WordPress because of things that happened there.

And just, you just never know, right? So you never know what people have in the back of their mind as acceptable or whether they're actually trying to exert undue force. We don't know for sure what happened here. All we know is that because of those kinds of situations they had to say, okay, not this year.

And it's heartbreaking. Yeah. Especially for the people who have been organizing and the people who do have the right intentions. And Yeah, I don't know what else to say is beyond that, but yeah. But we have, there have been examples in the past. We learn and we grow and we do better going forward.

[00:18:10] Nathan Wrigley: Can I ask Katie, and I don't know Sam, too much about your what you're doing specifically over, so this question may be apropo for you as well, but I know for Katie that you were a sponsor at WordCamp Europe, and I just wonder what your experience of that was in terms of guidelines and boundaries and expectations.

In other words, did you feel clear on what you could and couldn't do? So the, let's imagine the horrible scenario that this had been bound to. You'd have been, you'd have been going to Word Camp Europe and you'd been crossing a load of lines. Would you have known what the lines were that you shouldn't have crossed, given the documentation that you received and the information from the event?

[00:18:57] Katie Keith: Yeah, it was clear they were very professional. They provided a very long document as well as terms and conditions that I had to sign and things like that. I suppose part of it came from my prior knowledge of attending Word camps that I had seen what the sponsor booth do, so I assumed that was how I should behave, but it's really hard to learn from this as a community if we don't know the detail.

I know we shouldn't know names, and I don't want to know names, but I don't know even what sort of corruption or whatever undue influence went on. So if. I don't know how companies other than just using their natural common sense could avoid

[00:19:37] Nathan Wrigley: it. That's a good point, isn't it? I hadn't really thought about that.

When I read this piece, I was happy not to see the names of individuals and it, and like I said, I was happy not to see the names of companies because I didn't want people to be, to be the collateral damage. But you are right, and I hadn't thought about that. It would, I can't see a problem with saying, okay, this was the type of thing that was done.

This action was a, unless, of course there's a direct. Correlation between the action and the person or the company involved. Maybe if there's a path directly between the two things that's inextricable. Perhaps that's why they've kept it quite, I don't know. But yeah, you're right. It would be good to know what boundary they crossed so that we can, in the future make sure that doesn't happen again.

In fact, in the comments Elliot, sorry, not Elliot, it was Cameron, I apologize. Cameron, who was on the show just last week or the week before makes that point. He does want to know who was involved and he does want to know what was going on because he said, how can we learn from this as a community unless we know the specifics of it.

So it was obviously a different opinion there. Sam, over to you. I dunno if that question does apply to your work at Yost, you may just have an opinion outside of Yost anyway. Of course. No, I was just thinking

[00:20:49] Sam Alderson: about what Casey said. I'm hoping that whatever went wrong for this gets fed back up into the instructions that sponsors.

Actually get given, cuz you do get quite a lengthy document given to you of this is what you can do, this is what you can't do. Because I've attended what, maybe four or five word camps in the past 18 months or so. So I'm still very used to like all the guidelines and what you can and can't do. So I go to tackle and say, can't we potentially do this?

And he goes, no, you can't do that. I'm like, okay. So I hope that all the, anything that I'm like you Nathan. I'm like, I'm glad that they've not named names, but I hope that's been fed back up to the guidelines and okay, this is what you can't do so that the next person knows that they can't do that basically.

And we stop it where it. Where it starts. Basically,

[00:21:37] Nathan Wrigley: Courtney, who always knows everything really, it would seem about WordPress. She's truly incredible. What Courtney doesn't know about WordPress doesn't seem to be worth knowing. She says, Angela left a comment near the end with a few more details about what happened.

Yeah, I confess I got to Cameron's comment and then didn't have time to read on okay. Let me let me just quickly scroll down. Was that the end of that piece? I can't see the word Angela at all

[00:22:00] Katie Keith: in the

[00:22:00] Nathan Wrigley: article. Yeah, it says Angela left a comment near the end, but I can't see it's,

[00:22:05] Birgit Pauli-Haack: So there were five kind of things that she shared.

One is insulting and personal that acts.

[00:22:13] Nathan Wrigley: Public. Oh, brilliant. You've got this, you've got this information. That's great. Thanks, Peggy. Good. Okay

[00:22:18] Birgit Pauli-Haack: insulting and personal attacks was one. The second one was public and private harassment, and then who influencing and enticing harassment and then retaliation in response to report behavior and then discrimination.

So I agree. Yeah, the details need to come out, but only reading those five lists. I don't five items on the list. I don't need to know more. No, I don't.

[00:22:46] Katie Keith: That does come under

[00:22:49] Michelle Frechette: standard.

[00:22:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah I, that's fascinating actually, because that the list that you've just given is actually worse than I had imagined it would be.

I, it

[00:22:58] Birgit Pauli-Haack: has to be I don't know if you, so I have been organizing WordCamps. Yeah. WordCamp US 17, 18, and 19. And the amount of work that goes into vetting each organizer, each sponsor, each volunteer, it's speaker. Every speaker Yeah. That go through a certain thing. So if they cancel a word camp, there is, yeah.

Actually go to that. They had to, had many conversations before and many opportunities to to improve on the behavior, to stomp it and move on. Yeah. Because that's our community. There's always a second chance, but if somebody misses second, third, and fourth chances, then it definitely needs to go and we need to cancel that because it, yeah, as you said it yeah it dangerous integrity of the program itself, but it also I don't think there's anything more to say about this.

It was really bad and it was bad on multiple level and tried to improve it, but couldn't and had to cancel. Yeah. It's

[00:24:10] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Yeah, I'm gonna raise a piece, one thing in our private chat. Michelle dropped a piece, which is actually really helpful in one of the paragraphs, gives me a bit more insight into what's going on.

So I'll just raise that onto the screen. So this is on the the Make WordPress community. It was Sam Sosh on the 3rd of July, and it's about, and Angela's

[00:24:31] Michelle Frechette: comments

[00:24:32] Nathan Wrigley: are at the bottom of this article, right? So it's spied Angela's comment, which I presume is what it's July 5th. Yeah. So this probably is the paragraph which caught my attention.

Unless there is an immediate danger to any community. Remember give up today, Nathan, to any community, remember. Yeah, that's good. To any community member, reporters are given choices in proceeding or not. And will often share our communications with reporters so that they have visibility in our approach.

So maybe that's the, maybe that's the killer piece is that there was just. Some kind of threats perceived or otherwise. That's really sad. That's, that's, I said at the start of the show that I was feeling really great. Now I'm feeling a bit, less than great, but I guess some things are gonna go that way.

I would be interested to know, from what I've just heard, I'd be interested to know if there was some level of sponsorship in that. In other words, I wonder if somebody thought that they, because they bought a sponsorship package, if they believe that allowed them to climb the rungs of a certain ladder, and it gave them influence in certain things that would be interesting to see.

Or if it was just a company with, I don't know, lots of history, clout, many employees bought lots of attendance tickets, who knows? But yeah really interesting. So sad news. That one I'm afraid to say. Yeah. Absolutely. Agreed. And obviously my thoughts go out to all the people who have just purchased a ticket to that event, want to go, and now have had the rug pulled from under them.

I am sorry for those people who've had that awful thing we do better. Let's see if the next time it comes around, if If things can be different. Okay, on a slide, on a somewhat different note if you are a developer with WordPress, this is going to be known news to you, but we have a fair few people listening to the show who are, how to describe it.

They're not technical, they don't regard themselves as technical, so this might be of interest. WordPress 6.3, which is coming around fairly soon, more of that later is dropping support for PHP five. Now, again, you may not know your WordPress website is running on a piece of software called php, and each period of time, few months, it gets an upgrade.

And some of those upgrades are so significant that they give them a new number. So number eight is where we are now. And PHB five is really long in the tooth. It's very old and really it's time to drop it. There's a whole bunch of reasons to drop it. The most notable of which is probably security on your website, but also the performance that you're getting on that website.

It's time to change. Basically, there's a lovely little graph showing where we are at. The big slice of this pie over 50% is PHP 7.4. That seems to be where most people are residing. But if you can get yourself up into the eights, if your plugins, themes, blocks, and all of that support it, that would be a good idea.

Lots of reasons for that, as I said. But it's going away. By the time WordPress 6.3 drops, if you are using PHP five point anything, you are in trouble. So make sure that's not the case. I'm sure that Mark West Guard will have something to say about that. Mark, anything on that? No, apparently not. He's, I can see him on the screen here.

He's absolutely wetting himself. He thinks this is really funny. I gotta keep doing it. It's good job. I know him. So hand it over to you. There's not a lot more to say about that. Shake your head if you've got nothing to say and I'll just quickly move on. No. Alright. Okay. Let's move it on in that case.

Okay. It is time to fi Let's finally get him on the screen. The reason I've been toying with Mark is simply because Mark approached me earlier in the week actually during the weekend, I think it was, to announce that he's got a new thing. Mark is now on the, I apologize, mark, that was.

Yeah.

[00:28:39] Mark Westguard: Talking about discrimination. Yeah.

[00:28:44] Nathan Wrigley: Abuse and all of that. So we've just dropped Mark into the call. He's gonna be here for a few minutes just to basically show us what he's got. I really was big ID by this, so I thought it was worth doing. Essentially what Mark's got is an AI solution to, to build out your forms.

So you're used to things like chat, g p t, you ask it a question and it supplies you with some text. And, we're be, we're at the forefront of all that. We're now at the point where Mark has managed to, goodness knows how many sleepless nights he had. He's managed to make it such that you can type in a prompt in a little modal that pops up in Ws form, basically telling the plugin what form you would like to have built for you and off it goes.

You showed me a couple of examples. You typed in some, reasonably complicated things. Do you wanna just give us a little bit of insight? What's your thinking here? How long's it taken? Where's it gonna sit in your product offering this out for free? Are you gonna pay for it? What's going on, mark?

Yeah,

it's a

[00:29:45] Mark Westguard: free add-on right now and it's, we've been playing around with open AI for a number of things. We already had an integration with most of the open AI endpoints. And what I mean by that is, asking it a question and getting a response back or describing an image and having that image put into the form into a file upload field.

And I've seen a lot of A lot of ai IMP implementations where you can type a description in and it will give you some code back some code back where you can actually do code snippets. And I thought maybe we could take it a step further and actually use that code snippet to, to build something.

And that's basically, What we've done. I can give you a quick demo if you want.

[00:30:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that'd be great. I've just been showing a video of on the screen whilst you've been talking. So what you can see on the screen is the modal, you, you type tap the bottom, you type in. You could see, you can't just say, make me a contact form.

You need to be maybe you can, maybe that exact scenario is probably all right. But you have to be fairly specific. You have to lay things out. And I think really we are now learning in the same way that we learn SEO and how to make a search engine give you back what you wanted. I think a lot of us are learning how to use AI prompts.

They call it prompt engineering, I think. So that you lay out very clearly so that it doesn't have any trip wires or impediments to fall over. So we can see that on the screen. You type that in and you're off to the races. Yeah. Go on, give us a quick demo. You are gonna have to share your screen.

And I'll take mine down and should be able to see it. Yours up. Okay. Let me raise that up onto the screen. There you go. I'll take mine away. Can everybody see that? Can you all see what Mark's doing there? Yeah. I realize that our little icons are getting in the way there, mark, so I might just make us go smaller.

Oh, that's fine. I'll

[00:31:35] Mark Westguard: look at that. That's fine. Yeah, that's good. That's go for that. Yeah, so basically what you do is you go to the AI generated form template and this is where you have a prompt and you can type in what you want. Now you can do a very simple prompt, just like you said, so just for fun, we could do something like a form for designing a dinosaur and then create

[00:31:56] Nathan Wrigley: what we all need.

That's great. And it'll don't drop yet. Yeah. And it'll

[00:32:04] Mark Westguard: do it. Yeah, and it will even fill out things like select dropdowns as well. It'll fill out all the stuff behind the scenes. Now if you wanna do something a bit more complicated, you can give it a few more prompts. Things like a contact us form.

Obviously we've got a template for that already. You can do that. But just give you a quick example. I won't type it in. I'll just copy and paste it.

[00:32:28] Nathan Wrigley: Let's create a form. I see what it says for those people listening. Create a form for a sponsoring the page. But, oh, get in, create a form for sponsoring the Page Builder Summit.

And now my eyes are failing me. There are four sponsor levels with the names listed out. Add a payment method button, add some instructions. First name, last name, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Request the logo, right? Go on, create it. Nice. Let's

[00:32:48] Mark Westguard: do what it does. Hopefully open AI won't let me down today.

[00:32:51] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so we're on the, we're on the cogs going round. There's nothing we can do about that. We need it to, oh, okay. That's right. And it says Open AI era. It's so guaranteed to go wrong the minute. Oh yeah. It's guaranteed to go wrong. Whilst we're on, let's try it again. Let's see what happens. If it doesn't work, then.

Boar. Oh, it has worked. There you go. Okay. There you go. Yeah. So the form has, so your first name, last name? Yeah, go on. Sorry. Yeah, so you've

[00:33:14] Mark Westguard: got first name, last name. We've asked it for the company, the website address. We asked it for a logo upload. So we've got a file upload field. We gave it the sponsor level.

So you'll see in the radio there, it's actually created the sponsor level options a payment method and it actually shows you at the bottom of the form as well how many tokens we used. So it roughly costs about. 0.004 of a dollar to produce a form. It's a minuscule amount of money.

But yeah, so there you go. That's basically what we put together. And you'll, if we actually, lemme just preview that form and see if it's done. We'll be asked it to yeah, so there you go. You've got your logo, you've got your sponsor levels and et cetera, et cetera. One of the other things that you can do with it as well, I'll just give you one more quick example.

[00:34:05] Nathan Wrigley: I'm loving

[00:34:06] Mark Westguard: this. Great to add new, you gotta open ai. So this time I'm gonna ask you to add some help tech to each field to help with accessibility. So if we hit create on that, it'll go, hopefully it'll go a little bit further. And we'll actually put help techs in each of the fields you see there because we've asked that it's actually filled out all of the help techs on the field.

So when you look at that form now, we've actually got help techs on every field. Yeah, and there's a lot more we can do with this. We're hoping to add conditional logic to it and things like that. So the very quickly, the way it works is we use prompt engineering behind the scenes.

And prompt engineering is where you can build a prompt give that to open ai, and we inject the request that you give into that prompt engineer into that prompt. And then we're able to, as much as possible, get open AI to give us the data that we need to then interpret, to build the form. So yeah

[00:35:05] Nathan Wrigley: that's where we are with it.

I love the fact that you've come on the show. I've actually put you in the show now. If I put a comment up, oh, there, he's gotta get, I've gotta totally obliterated by the comment. It's never, not funny. Mark. Always in the wrong place. Mark, honestly, I am so impressed. I have a feeling that you might be the first to market in the WordPress space with this, if that is in fact the case.

Bravo, congratulations. I'm sure it did keep you going late at night. Just one quick reminder, if you're watching this, mark will be joining me and we're gonna do a full hour, possibly some more. But I won't be bouncing him in and out. Although you never know. It might be, you might do kinda nice and him, but Mark, thanks for showing us that.

So that's Ws form. Go and Google it and you can find out about that. And he's always available on chat time of the day or night, it seems. He contacted me at four in the morning or something to tell me about it. Very exciting. Thanks for dropping in Mark. Really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having me.

Take care. See you later. Bye. What did you make of that? That's amazing. Pretty Isn't that great? I think that's really cool. So yeah, well done Mark. Thank you so much. So yeah, as I said join me with Mark on Wednesday and we'll be going through that piece again. We were talking earlier about WordPress 6.3.

I dunno if any of you guys I imagine big, it probably has a lot to say about this, but WordPress 6.3 is coming down the pike very soon. There's gonna be a live product demo. It's happening on the let me get this right cuz I don't want to get this wrong cuz it matters to me that I get this right cuz I'm actually co-hosting it.

It is on July the 20th. 2020 and it's at 4:00 PM utc. I believe it's five o'clock in the uk but it's 2023, right? I'm just, yes. Yeah. Do not show up in 2024 or indeed. 2022. You missed it. And McCarthy and Rich Tabor are gonna be going through the various bits and pieces. What's changed basically since WordPress.

6.2 became WordPress 6.3. It's gonna last about an hour. It's very informal. It's a bit like this conversation here. We've got the guests on the screen. They're gonna be showing a slideshow. So I will link to this in the show notes and you can sign up, but bigot 6.3. What's exciting you about it?

[00:37:32] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, what's exciting me about it?

I really like that the site editor gets it's much more comprehensive. It gets its own menu on the left hand side, and you can access, really, you can access the pages that you have on your site. You can edit the pages and if you get into a template area, you can edit the template.

So it's really comp. You don't have to go in and out of site editor to edit the content on pages. You still need to do it for the post, but it's all there. And you can then also start styling. There is a change that I want everybody to know, and that is that reusable blocks are now patterns and they are synced.

Yeah. So in opposed to the other patterns that are unsynced and because they are pretty much the same system they only have one difference is that with when you change them in one place, the sync patterns update. Every instance where you use them throughout the site in the unsynced you just change it in that one post that you're using it and then you can reuse the shell someplace else without having the changes to propagate over the whole site.

So that is a great start into also Combining them starts actually to also have partial sync patterns later on. Like patterns where you only wanna change the style, but that style should be like the color or the round corners, the radis of the corner. You want propagate over all the patterns where you use them, but the content could be different.

So that's a partial syn, or you just change out the button, but the rest should be the same. But they haven't find so that's the start of having a a lot more control over patterns. And what this also brings is that you can create patterns on your site without having to do PHP or getting from the directory.

You can really say, okay, this is, I really I want this to want to reuse this. For later on column yeah, three column, both header, picture and kind of design. And then just make it a pattern and it shows up in your pattern library on and side editor. So those things are really finishing up what the site editor wants to do.

It's not yet complete, of course. But it's really showing the potential of the site editor also for the next step. That kind of is how does the WP admin gonna change sooner or later? Yeah. So that, those things. Yeah.

[00:40:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Thank you for that. I must admit, when the whole, they're gonna, the, so reusable blocks are gonna be, are be gonna become patterns.

The re naming of the, I was, I'm still a bit confused. So is a, if a pattern's just a pattern. So this sentence is gonna be so weird, but here it comes. If a pattern is just a pattern, is it called a pattern? And if a pattern is a sinkable pattern, can you Pattern, pattern, is it called a pattern that syncs what's

[00:40:55] Birgit Pauli-Haack: so it's a unsynced and synced.

That's the difference now. Okay. Yeah. But they're

[00:41:00] Nathan Wrigley: all patterns. So that's a, so that you preface the word pattern with it. So it's unsynced pattern. Synced pattern, yeah. Got it. Okay. I'm gonna have to get my head around that. I'm gonna get that wrong.

[00:41:11] Birgit Pauli-Haack: And it's also gonna be in the interface like that?

Yeah. You will have a little mo. So a synced pattern or is it an unsynced pattern? You can always make a sync pat. You cannot go back to a sync pattern to make it a pat, an unsynced pattern. You can copy it and then make it an unsynced pattern, but they couldn't figure out, okay, how to unlock the other.

Instances of that pattern. So you, you can't change that. But that's a little small thing you just, you can do. Yeah. Create, duplicate, and then. Yeah. No further with

[00:41:44] Nathan Wrigley: that. Yeah. E every week I write down the name of the podcast show as we are recording it. This one's gonna be called How many times Can We Say The Word Pattern in one show?

I think we've probably done it rather, or how many times can I make Mark West Guard disappear? That might be a little let me just raise on the screen an article, which I was probably gonna do later, but just highlights a lot of the stuff that be, was talking about. This is around the Style book, actually, which is a really big part of what's coming.

This is so nice. You may have noticed that in the most recent version of. WordPress. The really, if you are creating a theme, you're not really using so much CSS anymore. You're using theme json. You're doing a lot of the styling in there. And this article, it's actually called the Style Book, A one-Stop Shop for Styling Block Themes.

It showcases that it's, I will link to it in the show notes. It's on the wordpress.org developer blog, and it goes through how you can actually make that happen. It's really cool, nice, simple examples to show you what's going on. But then it also tells you about the hierarchy the sort of cascade, if you like, that we have in css.

The one which is most finely tuned to the part of the page that you want to get to that wins, in this case theme, J S O N wins over css. But more than that, specifically the editors the styles which are bound to that exact. Example of a block that will be the winner in most cases. When you go into the interface and you type in 20 into the editor for padding, that's the one that's gonna win.

Then it goes down to theme json. Then it's reverting to your sort old styles, and then they talk about yeah, the style book that was mentioned and I've just realized this out, this look, it's an icon, look. It's an icon. Icon. I'm gonna say it again. It's an icon. It wasn't funny the first time. It's less funny the seventh.

But nonetheless, and if you're only listening,

[00:43:41] Michelle Frechette: you have no idea

[00:43:42] Nathan Wrigley: why it's funny at all. Yeah, I said it eight times already. And yeah, so it explains how

[00:43:48] Michelle Frechette: it's an e y econ if you're only listening, it's

[00:43:51] Nathan Wrigley: an e

[00:43:52] Birgit Pauli-Haack: y e C Om, it's an eye icon.

[00:43:55] Nathan Wrigley: No, that's way too complicated. How many times can we say the word I is also what this episode is called.

But yeah, this style book enables you to see on your, on this one page pretty much everything that might appear on your site. So all the blocks that are gonna appear on your site appear on this style book. You can just change the settings and see what it would look like on every example.

Obviously it's an isolated example. It's not how it's gonna look in the context of all the other bits and pieces on the page. But nevertheless, that's, it's just really nice. I really do this a lot. So I realized me and big have hogged that conversation. The real thing was about WordPress 6.3.

Katie, Sam, Michelle, anything to add to that?

[00:44:38] Birgit Pauli-Haack: I'm good.

[00:44:39] Sam Alderson: I'm actually really looking forward to the 6.3 cuz I, my own personal block needs a massive overhaul and I do not do any coding whatsoever. So I'm really looking forward to be able to just go play and drag and drop and do the things and the style book is just like next level of have your branding in your website is just, makes life so much easier.

[00:45:02] Nathan Wrigley: Can I ask a question? Honest answer and bear it, cover your ears. You don't know what's coming. Sam, honestly, how easy is the block editor to work for somebody who is, and she's gone. Honestly, how easy is it to, for somebody that, that doesn't really do that sort of coding piece? Are you finding it is it basically getting easier and easier over each iteration or are you still getting easier smashing your head against the desk going, no.

Why doesn't it work? Like it's

[00:45:29] Sam Alderson: getting easier in places. I will not lie. I will smash my head against things when I'm like trying to click on something and it's not highlighting. I'll be like okay, just calm down. Yeah, it so perfect needs to be done, but it is so much easier than it used to be now.

Yeah. Yeah. And I just think 6.3 is just gonna make it even easier as well. I don't think it's gonna be much, much more difficult for people to just pick up WordPress now and be able to just manipulate it in the way that they want to.

[00:45:57] Nathan Wrigley: I think the style book's a really interesting idea for somebody that doesn't do the code as well, because just that sort of visual thing.

I, the first time I opened it, I totally got the premise of it. Cause I was looking at thinking, ah, that's everything I wanna see right there in one interface. It turns out, visual stuff, I'm not a good designer at all. I keep saying I've got the design potential of a potato, but but being able to see all of the bits and pieces there and make little modifications that I want, knowing that they will then be reflected wherever they be on, on the website.

That's been really helpful. Okay. That's great to know, Sam. So being you can you turns out you didn't need to cover your ears or all fine.

[00:46:38] Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, but I really would wanna know, yeah, if there's anything that kind of really raises the bar or kind of is not really. But I really like also on the style book that all your custom blocks.

Show up there too. So if you have blocks from WooCommerce or from Jet Pack or from from some of the block like stackable or co blocks, they show up in the style book as well. And when you change the style variations Yeah. Like where the color and the font changes the whole site, you could actually see how your blocks behave.

Even the custom sometimes you need to connect with the plugin developer and say, look I changed the style variation, but your block doesn't behave well enough. Yeah. What can we do? So that's certainly something, it's not the surprise anymore. You really see everything. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And one feature I really like that kind of got me excited as a developer is the command palette that is coming to To work for 6.3.

And that is,

[00:47:44] Nathan Wrigley: we've got the name at last. Yay. Yes,

[00:47:46] Birgit Pauli-Haack: we got the name and it's gonna stay around now.

[00:47:50] Nathan Wrigley: I think it should have been called Brian or Hermione. That was what I was nominated. I always call

[00:47:55] Birgit Pauli-Haack: him Fred, but Yeah,

[00:47:59] Nathan Wrigley: so the Command Pal is a bit like Spotlight on the Mac. If you've got a Mac, you can invoke this one short. It's this little window which pops up and it's a search bar and you start typing and it cascades beneath it. All of the different things that you can do. Yeah.

[00:48:11] Birgit Pauli-Haack: And you can say open template or open pattern or edit page or delete page if you

[00:48:17] Nathan Wrigley: want to.

Yeah. I wonder if you type in kick Mark West Guard off the call. I wonder if it would do that. You can, I'm gonna milk this for everything it's worth. You know what?

[00:48:26] Birgit Pauli-Haack: You can create your. Your own commands for it. There's an API for that.

[00:48:32] Nathan Wrigley: Honestly, I'm gonna get in such trouble. So

[00:48:35] Michelle Frechette: yes, the answer's

[00:48:35] Nathan Wrigley: yes.

Yeah. Yeah. Yay. The answer's. Yes. That's another good name for this podcast episode. The answer's yes. Katie obviously working for a company which developed all sorts of. WordPress products, particularly around WooCommerce. Is there any, are there any gotchas that you've had or any excitement that you've got?

About 6.3? I dunno how closely you particularly follow that.

[00:48:57] Katie Keith: Yeah, not that closely. We've been quite slow and where we have in tried to integrate with blocks and things like that, we've come across road lot, quite a lot of problems. So we are mostly still short code based even though we don't want to be.

For example, we have plugins that affect the visibility of areas of WooCommerce and with the WooCommerce blocks we weren't able to make it work with some of them. We also have a WooCommerce filter plugin and we couldn't reliably get our filters to work with the blocks because some of the hooks in it were actually marked as experimental and things.

And so we are one just watching it stabilize more and more over time so that we can integrate more closely and more reliably with it. But at the moment we're in the uncomfortable situation where we. Get as far as we can with these things, but some of our documentation does say This doesn't work because we are waiting for the Gutenberg, to continue on its path.

I'm kinda curious about that. It's not nice having to do that.

[00:50:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. How do you view that as a developer? Do you view that as it's just time well spent for the future, or is there a bit of you, which it feels like that was just dead time cuz it never gave us the result that we wanted.

[00:50:15] Katie Keith: It's important because at least even if it was impossible at the time, right?

We've been able to document it so that when customers ask How do I use the filters with the product category block or whatever, then we have done that testing and we can document it and we, sometimes we've made compromises, like you can use it with a non Ajax version or something like that. But yeah, I look forward to the fully mature version as it, which continues all the time.

So obviously this next release is another step towards that. And then we can, cuz we want to embrace it fully, it's just, A little bit early

[00:50:53] Nathan Wrigley: still. Yeah. That's a really interesting insight. Thank you, Ken.

[00:50:57] Birgit Pauli-Haack: I'm, I really congratulate you that you're not jumping on the experimental kind of things.

There are some plug-in developers who do that, and every two versions of Gutenberg, they need to reamp some of the code base. And I definitely think that's it's a great learning experience, but it's probably business wise, not that. Particular smart of a move. But it's also experimenting with the things, what we probably need from the extenders community, especially those that are, you provide filters for developers to filter your plugins, but also work with WooCommerce.

So it's three layers off of Gutenberg. Pretty much off of the, so that will be really good to have a list of the experimental APIs that you see that. Hold you back the most. Yeah. So that can be prioritized to get it to a stable version and then release it and then have you move forward.

I think that would really help. And if I had no problem to get into a conversation with you one-on-one or so and through that or so Yeah. Yeah.

[00:52:08] Nathan Wrigley: This product did one thing. It was connect Katie with beer and Advance the advanced. Yeah. I'm sorry we didn't mention. No, that's great. I think that's not needed Word Camp Europe.

Yeah. But Mark West Guard, he was on a minute ago, I think he says they've been holding off rebuilding customization or in bracket styling tools. So it's exciting to see these recent developments. Yeah. Okay. So the style book in particular, I guess is the thing there. So yeah, all of that was centered around the fact that 6.3, the conversation around that is going to get aired on this call.

So I'll put the links in the show notes and you can join us and and I'll be much more polite basically, without gonna be kicking anybody off. Okay. So next thing. This is another serious thing. I think this probably sat really probably could have done with going near the top of the show.

But here we go. Sarah Gooding writing in the WP Tavern WordPress plugin Review team adds six new sponsored volunteers, opens applications I dunno if Mika Ept Epstein, who had been doing the well God's work basically of making sure that things went into the plugin directory that were ready to go into the plugin directory.

Mika has stepped down that. That the conversation around her stepping down was a bit bittersweet because she obviously put in 10 years of time. But there was, getting back to the thing that we were talking about Dakar earlier, there were certain conversations that came to light after that, that meant that really fielding a lot of a lot of bile and anger by people in that role.

So Mika stepped down. We now have six new. Sponsored volunteers. They are the following people. It's David, apologies if I butcher anybody's name. I'm sorry. David Perez. Evan Herman, Francisco Torres, Luke Carbu, Marta to, or Torre, I don't know. And Pao, Mahan or Mahan again, I don't know. They're gonna be stepping up and doing it looks like from further down something in the region of about five hours a week.

So if they are in fact replacing Mika one to six, if that's the ratio, obviously that's a great thing. I dunno what Mika's commitment was, but almost 40 hours. Yeah. Was it the full week? Yeah. Okay. So that probably won't no, that'll more or less cover it then, won't it? Not quite. But those six sponsored volunteers will more or less make up that chasm that Mika has left, however, If you wish to if you wish to become somebody that's involved in this enterprise it appears not only do you have to have the following credentials, but you have to have fairly thick skin.

You need to have a ability to communicate clearly. You need to be kind and constructive. You have to have a solid track record as a developer. And then there's various other things. It's all listed on this page. The commitment is going to be five. Hours a week, but this is asking for volunteers. So I, I dunno if there's any opportunity for sponsorship there.

But so there's two pieces there. A, the abuse that Ika suffered and how that's bang out of order and let's hope that these people don't receive any of that. But b, the story about six new people who are taking on some work, and I am maybe conflating that they're doing five hours. It doesn't in fact say that I was just assuming that was in fact the case.

So it says at least five hours as well. Yeah. Was that not in to do, that was not to do with the application process for new people. Maybe that was my misunderstanding. Epstein, sorry, is encouraging volunteers to apply if they have at least five hours a week, whereas these people, these six, I feel like they've already gone through the application process, so I'm not really clear on that.

Yeah, you could be. So I.

[00:56:07] Michelle Frechette: I've been speaking with Marta through Twitter, and she's one of the, she's giving five hours a week and she's looking for a company to sponsor those five hours. So I know that a lot of the people who are giving of their time that way are looking to find companies that will sponsor the five hours so that they're not losing their own ability to provide for themselves by giving up that kind of time.

[00:56:30] Nathan Wrigley: Hey Michelle, do you know if there's a, like an official channel for doing that or is it that, that each of those six people have gotta go out and find that themselves? I. Pretty

[00:56:39] Katie Keith: much

[00:56:39] Michelle Frechette: have to go out and find it themselves. Although there are, I think Aruba has something through GitHub that you can sponsor people.

You can also sponsor people directly through Git. And then also of course you can talk to the people directly and sponsor them that way as well. So I don't know that there's one official way to do that maybe has a better idea.

[00:56:59] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. No, there's no official way to do that. No.

[00:57:03] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Thank you. Sam, anything to add to that before we press on?

No, I think it's

[00:57:09] Sam Alderson: interesting that we've, it's got to this point and we've not been able to highlight that sooner and hopefully help her get the help that she needed. It's a shame that. We do have that little dark corner of the community that people feel like they have to suffer

[00:57:26] Birgit Pauli-Haack: on their own. Yeah. I don't think that the maker is stepping down because of that.

Yeah. That has been going on for years and years. The harassment that the that I think the 10 year part is more like the Okay. Yeah. It's time to do something else Yeah. Kind of way. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, and she has talked about that harassment and how how she can, how other people that experienced the same thing can protect themselves online.

Yeah. I remember there was this talk by Mika at Workcamp New York in eight in 19. Yeah. Where she told finally the whole story about that one plugin. Person that kind of pursued her on and off the web. Yeah. But yeah it definitely that behavior is still common and that people don't think they are, find it out about it.

Yeah. That's kind of something that I don't, I, yeah, it's beyond my grasp, but that's certainly my lack of imagination.

[00:58:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. So firstly, Sam, I think you've coined a meme there, the dark corner of the community. I like that. That's really interesting and sums up the tiny percentage of people who really spoil it.

But also big it what you were saying there if there is an expectation that these six people plus others are going to receive that kind of an email at some point, that's fairly demanding of them, isn't it? Because I know. For me, I probably shouldn't say these words, but here we go. If I was to receive an email which was threatening or horrible, I would, I really wouldn't take that very well, I don't think.

And if that was part of a volunteer role that I had, I'd like to know that somebody'd got my back there and I don't even know what that means. Like somebody that I could talk to, some service that I could go to receive some support. Because the sad truth is if that does happen, I would imagine that you really, you've on your own and you've just got the deal.

No, you're not on your

[00:59:37] Birgit Pauli-Haack: own. There is oh, good. Yeah the plug-in review team has for a few years back decided that they are not personally signing each email. They just do a kind of plug-in review team and then they all read the same inbox. So if there's something coming back, yeah, you don't have to take it personally.

It's just that obnoxious person letting out the frustration, but it's not a personal attack or something like that because it goes through the full box there. But that was one of the learning experience or learned lessons from the previous, what happened. So that's one thing.

And of course there are certain behavior code of conduct. Code of conduct, yeah. Yeah, you're right. That, that happened on the WordCamp is also part of the plugin review kind of thing. So code of conduct violations are definitely Reported as well as sanctioned. Be careful.

[01:00:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Did anybody have anything to add to that before I move on? No. Okay, great. So anyway, good luck to those six people. And that page will be linked to in the show notes, if you wish to apply with yeah, with the knowledge that it'll be roughly about five hours a week, something along those lines. So the important topic of our time, or at least I think it is anyway, is the environment.

And I did a podcast episode this week with Louise Tower, forget the fact that it was. I'm really not trying to do the promotion piece there. Please go and listen to it. It's actually really good. Louise was at WordCamp Europe. She was a, doing a presentation but also she was pitching to Amelia Capital.

Amelia Capital is the is the brainchild of Yost and Marika formally the CEOs, both of them of Yost Sam's company, and they have decided to invest in something that Louise is doing. She's deciding to do something in the WordPress plugin space. To give you an idea about what kind of an impact your WordPress website websites, if you've got many of them, I suspect the imperative to do this is more important so that you get some kind of indication of the carbon foot footprint that you are creating.

And it takes lots of metrics. That whole thing hasn't been quite decided upon. The venture capital that they got from Yotta. Marika is to, flesh out what that product offering is and bring it to market. But the broader point of the podcast wasn't that plugin. The majority of the podcast was just talking about the fact that we are just addicted to electricity and the byproducts of electricity.

There isn't a day goes literally. There isn't a day of my life that goes by where I don't consume a fairly large proportion of electricity. I'm constantly on the internet. I've got mobile phones, I've got computers, which I fail to switch off when I know that they're not gonna be used for the next several hours.

I've got teles, I've got devices which are switched on all over the place, listening to potential things that I'm going to say, which I never do. Say you get the point. The thing that I think is the disconnect that I think here is that you just don't connect the internet with the environment.

I made the point in the podcast that if you ask me to go and stand at the back of my car for an hour, And breathe in heavily. No way am I doing that because I know the consequence. I can see the stuff coming out the back and I know that my lungs will be toast. I am gonna stand next to this computer for weeks on end without giving it a second thought.

But somewhere the pollution is happening. And her whole thing was about that. Ways that you can mitigate this. Don't send over large images if you don't need large images. In fact, don't even send images if you don't need images locally. Load fonts. Find a host which has got the credentials of maybe offsetting the carbon or they've just got some infrastructure which helps for this.

Stop sending videos that no, don't need to be sent. Get off TikTok that, forgive that. If you wanna be on TikTok, whatever, that's your bag. But you get the point. So this is the broad conversation, probably for the next 10 minutes or so. The environment, WordPress internet use, I. I dunno if you feel as bad as I do, but I suspect that I will get over the bad feeling that I have remarkably quickly when this conversation has ended, even though I probably shouldn't.

[01:04:23] Sam Alderson: And that's the thing, isn't it? Is that you can't connect this to your actual physical self. It's like trying to figure out how much your daily usage actually impacts. The impacts the environment is hard to connect one to two. I, I know for me, it's like things like we've had solar panels installed on the roof.

We've done stuff that we've tried to mitigate that impact. But yeah, just you forget about it because it's not a physical interaction with it, like you say with the cards. Like you see that you, the output that it

[01:05:02] Katie Keith: has.

[01:05:04] Nathan Wrigley: I like the idea and I get the impression from what Louise said, that this is some of the endeavor of the tool is to, so Yost Sam's company, we all know if you've ever installed Yost, you've got this sort of traffic light system inside the plugin.

And it's really obvious, if you've got a red traffic light you've really got work to do orange, you're on the way in green, yay, everything's great. So something e equivalent to that, say in your dashboard that your clients could see where it aggregates. This page has got 7,000 images on it.

They're all massive. What the hell are you doing? Red light as opposed to this is great, it's just text. You're locally loading the fonts. We've got some information via an api, perhaps about the hosting that you're using. You get a green light. And I just think that would be a good idea. I basically need bludgeoning.

Into being told how to be a better citizen on the internet in terms of my consumption, cuz honestly, I, I just, I, it's an endless resource as far as I can see it. I just don't make the connection despite thinking about it. It is remarkable how quickly I forget about it. Anyway. Sorry, Michelle Begi.

Katie, go for it.

[01:06:19] Katie Keith: I think interesting bit in the back of my mind. I think the first time I came across it was at a Word camp years ago with the talk from Whole Grain Digital who were a very eco minded UK WebPress design agency. And they really make it the main part of their business that every website they design thinks about the environment and that kind of, and various things since have made me aware that every single image I upload to the admin or something like that, every YouTube video does actually have a permanent really environmental cost because it's permanently being hosted on somewhere which uses electricity.

So while I don't take massive actions, it's just there in the back of my mind, can I be bothered to optimize this image? It's only a knowledge base article. It's not gonna affect our sales. Yes, it should be smaller because of that. So that transcends any business reason to do it sometimes, which is a good motivator.

Yeah, I think the business

[01:07:18] Sam Alderson: region is also quite an interesting one as well, because If you reduce the size of the images, your pages load faster, you get faster, better performance, you get better load times. It was better experience for the user. It's like that as a business case in itself is something that you can latch onto.

When it comes to building websites itself,

[01:07:39] Nathan Wrigley: I quite interestingly, so Louise obviously made that point, the SEO piece, squeezing down all of the assets so that it basically loads faster, Google likes it more, and so on and so forth is a total win. But also what about the idea that you become an agency who has the chops, the credentials, and you can market yourself as the environmental agency if you like.

I don't really know what that means, but. Honestly, if I had two competing quotes and I knew that one of the teams that I was gonna be working with had this in the back of their mind, they were gonna try to make it environmentally friendly. That kind of tips the balance a little bit for me. And I suggested this to Louise and she said she didn't know if it existed or not, but how about this?

How about a browser extension, which measures your daily usage? Because it really would know what's being throughput through the browser every day and then basically tells you off. You get to the end of the day and it's like Nathan naughty, basically. Yeah. You get a Red Cross, you got a D minus for your internet usage today, as opposed to, good boy Nathan, you get an a plus today.

You didn't hardly look at anything. And to that point, Bob, Don joins us. Hi, Bob. Yeah, the fact that I've been watching, yes. You see the disconnect between what's in my head and what I'm actually doing. The fact that I've been watching this video on a live broadcast for an over an hour makes me wonder.

Yes, Bob, you are quite right. Ah, I don't, but

[01:09:06] Michelle Frechette: Do you remember when the internet was going to save the trees? So it's it's like a disconnect, right? Because even originally it was like, email is keeping paper out of your waste basket and out of the landfills, right?

And all of that was like, this is so much more eco-friendly. And then, two, three years ago people started saying, it's not really right. And so it's like there's this huge disconnect in my brain that, but this is still better than chopping down trees, right? You

[01:09:35] Nathan Wrigley: it's not, but you're right that there is that, and I had totally a shift in that argument.

Yeah.

It's

[01:09:43] Katie Keith: a sh it's a

[01:09:43] Michelle Frechette: shift between what natural resources we are. Over expending.

[01:09:49] Nathan Wrigley: I do like the idea of a browser extension, which tells me off, it would appear that would be

[01:09:54] Birgit Pauli-Haack: how many trees you saved by writing emails. Yeah. Yeah. And then how many yeah, carbon filters Yeah.

Things you Yeah. Flown out to the world. Yeah. And then it's zero or something, and it's actually not,

[01:10:09] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. I'll tell you what, whether you like it or not this subject is not going away. At least that's my opinion of it. It's gonna get louder and louder and louder whether we like it or not.

Yeah. Thank you Louise for raising that. Really important issue. I really appreciate that. And I said at the beginning of the show, very happy. And then I started to mess things up and I was less happy. Something that's always makes me happy is when Justin Tadlock comes in and makes a comment.

That always makes me happy. The plugin and theme review team members. So we're going back to Mika see the worst parts of the community. I think the plugin review team has probably had the word. The worst of it. I see. I still can't manage to read the words. Okay, that was great. Really interesting discussion.

I'm just gonna move through a few of these articles very quickly cuz I know that time is fast running out. Just a quick heads up, if you if you've never heard of this, I've mentioned it a couple of times, but I haven't done it for a little while. North Commerce is a WooCommerce revival.

They're heading into what they're calling their real beta. They've had a few people testing it, but they're launching this, lifetime deal or something. And I'm gonna link to it in the show notes. Basically, if you want to hop on and be one of their early adopters, then you get a whole laundry list of benefits.

Like I said, it's a hoped for at least from their point of view anyway, a hoped for WooCommerce revival. And they're at the point where they believe it's almost ready to ship, but they're offering people the chance to get in on the ground. It's not free. You can see it's $475, but that I think, gets you unlimited usage over three domains for the lifetime of North Commerce.

Yeah, maybe go check that out. Security news. We don't normally delve too deeply into this, but occasionally something pops up and I think it's worth it. Ultimate member 2.6 0.7 has patched a privilege escalation, vulnerability, because I don't have the intellect really to understand all of the ins and outs of this.

I would just say, go and make sure that your website has been updated. There were a few different pieces coming from different news outlets, which made me think this was probably worth mentioning, but I've, I'm gonna link in the show notes to the the piece on the Tavern by Sarah, so you can go and check that out.

My understanding is they did several patches, none of which fixed it. So that I guess in itself is a. Here's a point of concern. We're gonna not go to that one just yet. I'll come back to that one. That's Kathy Z's piece. I want your thoughts on this. We should bring Mark West Guard in at this point. What do you make of this, right?

So given that we've just had a conversation about the environment and whether or not we need unnecessary resources on our page, right? But also given the fact that some people like to be playful on the internet, they enjoy the fun side of things. Watch this, and forgive me if you are listening to this.

I'm just gonna refresh this page. What do you make of this? Right Click refresh. There's a blank page. A guy wanders in with a button, like there's a cartoon character. Who's got a button under his arm and he wanders in and he hangs it in the page, and then the button is there. And then there's a bunch of other characters hanging around underneath the button, pointing at it.

So they're calling this, I can't remember what they're calling it, interactive experiences or something. The idea being they've come up with this technology where they put these little avatars on the screen encouraging you to fill out the form. Now, this is a very, I guess this is a very jocular, cartoonish way of doing it, but I could see kids, for example, being.

Intrigued by this. If the school, for example, wanted them to fill out a form, maybe this would have an impact, but replace this character with something, I don't know, a bit more or a bit more, I don't know, some kind of arrow which goes down and tells you what you need to fill out, what have you.

Is this just stupidity? Is this just environmental madness? Do we need all of it, or are you persuaded by this? This is from a company called Vis Me, and although it's apropos of nothing, I thought it was quite interesting to stick on the screen. What do you reckon?

[01:14:22] Katie Keith: Yeah, I kinda love it because it's, it looks professional and it makes their brand memorable and I totally get the performance implications, the environmental.

But I think it does work cuz it's a kind of modern designed website, but they've just added that personality to it. And I think the button's really cool to draw attention to the call to action. But I do see the other side as well.

[01:14:46] Nathan Wrigley: Wasn't it though, wasn't it like I've never seen that, I've never seen anything where a button was invoked by a cartoon character or anything even equivalent to that.

You've seen but I, to be honest with you, I didn't te test it on different screen widths, but I'm guessing that the button will still be carried on and will work whether or not, you're on a mobile or what have you. But I just thought it was kinda. A bit quirk in maybe some of the fun that we need on the internet anyway.

Sorry, Sam or Michelle or bigot over to you.

[01:15:17] Birgit Pauli-Haack: I like it for an onboarding experience. I think if I see it two or three times when I come back to the website, it gets a little old and it probably blows my internet resources as well like my data plan or something like that. But I get that's for the first interaction.

I think it's a really good idea to liven it up a bit. Yeah. And we've seen some of that interactivity where people walk on a website and introduce themselves and talk about a product like like a real person. And I think it, I always enjoyed it when I was going to a website for the first time.

But. If it starts talking to me without me clicking on the button, that is when I go away. But other than that, that, that's a really fun way to do things. Yeah.

[01:16:09] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting. Bob says he's getting distracted by it. Wants to know what the lady's doing with the laptop. Sorry. Sorry, Michelle. Off again.

[01:16:21] Michelle Frechette: Yeah, it reminds me of the old flash, right? So we used to have a lot of things that would start with flash, that kind of thing. And also, I'm wondering if it's more or less, probably less resources that embedded sound or embedded video. So if you you go to so many websites and there's a YouTube video embedded that autoplay and things like that.

So I think it's probably a trade off on some things. It's cute, it's clever. I don't know if it would, and if I would look at that and say, gosh, I have to explore this more. Or if I'd be like, oh, this is ridiculous. I'm going someplace else.

So

[01:16:51] Nathan Wrigley: we're looking at screen now with us. I think it'll to summon that to others.

Yeah, there's a lady on the screen and she's hanging around on a join the wait list button looking a little bit like, come on, fed up and then just keeps reaching down and pointing to the button and drawing your te It is fun, isn't it? We all watch Disney movies. We suspend our belief.

We know that none of that's written and it is a bit like that. It's kind of Disney-esque, isn't it? Anyway, sorry Sam.

[01:17:16] Sam Alderson: It's very bit emoji sort of style esque to it. So I can see where the attraction to like maybe having it, like you say on like a kid's site to get them, to encourage them to do the things.

It depends on how someone would execute it really. I think it's fun, but I think I'm very much on the fence on, on it.

[01:17:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think so. I think it really would have to be like a soft toy company deploying it more or less anything else. I can't really see the utility of it, by the way, just But

[01:17:48] Katie Keith: it does fit with what they do.

Yes. Cause they're a conversion company and that lady is really drawing attention to that call to action. Yeah. And that shows that they understand the psychology of conversions. If you imagine shopping around on multiple conversion company sites, that's the one you're gonna remember. And I think that directly symbol symbolizes and illustrates their skills in conversion rate optimization.

[01:18:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Do you know what, I think I've got caught up with the cartoon character and the that's what they're offering. But of course, that cartoon character could be literally anything. You could really tune it to whoever your audience may be, and that avatar could be a person or just a symbol or just something.

Yeah. It's interesting. I've got a feeling I've, if I was to bring this website to Peach's attention from a ui ux standpoint, I think the answer would be a definitive. Thumbs down, but yeah. Yeah. And also from an accessibility point of view, may maybe it just doesn't even get in the way, maybe if you can get to the bottom quickly and often it does actually say join the wait list.

It doesn't really matter so much. But yeah. A good point. Katie, thanks for that. By the way, did anybody hearing Sam a minute ago, was she was her audio phasing in and out or was that just me? Yes, Sam, you might just wanna refresh your browser. We'll just hop you straight back into the call.

We've only got a few more minutes, but you were, it was like half of you we could hear and the other we missed half a second, then we heard half a second kind of thing. Just refresh it. It's often the cure for all problems. So anyway, that's on the Vis Me website, vis Me, make makes sort, basically spreadsheets and things like that sort of presentation layer for the internet.

It's a really good company actually. Max says he really likes it. He wants to rebuild something like that. He says he loves it. So yeah. Here you go. And then do Mark says, sorry. Bob. Bob says, don't give Mark any ideas. Mark from WS form. We'll find him popping up on our screens. No, I did show it to him and I didn't get a particularly a positive reply, let's put it that way.

Okay. Let's kinda round this out. We're getting close to the end. Firstly, we mentioned at the very top of the show that there was an additional WordPress podcast that was common into existence. It's Michelle WP Constellations. Nice name by the way. Thank you. This is episode one. Yes.

Who are you doing it with? Michelle. And what's the intention?

[01:20:22] Michelle Frechette: So my co-host is Jeff Chandler, who people probably know from the community. And the intention is to talk about what's going on in WordPress, but in a, we have a lot of podcasts that do that. I realize that. But we're gonna dig into specific plugins, specific, projects and things like that.

The first episode is out as of last week, where we talk about the new form builder. And give WP the second episode, which is coming out next week. I was in Europe when that, or maybe not Europe. I was somewhere else on vacation when that was recorded. And Jeff interviewed Shane Pearlman and Marcus Burnett about ai.

So it's not an internal podcast, it's for everybody. But we will of course talk about some of the stellar products and what we're doing as well. But it's exciting. So actually we've scheduled Mark to come on and do some more with what he is doing with his forms. And if people are interested in coming and talking to us, they're more than welcome to DM Me Anywhere and we'll discuss if it's a good fit for the

[01:21:26] Nathan Wrigley: podcast.

I have a lovely graphic to raise at this point. And

[01:21:34] Michelle Frechette: Perfect love. Stars

[01:21:38] Nathan Wrigley: Tooth is the part, this message is approved by Mark, west Star. Oh, that's brilliant though. WP Constellations. You can find it though. It may not be if you Google for it. I don't know if it's got to Google yet, but stella wp.com/podcast because it's been done on behalf of Stella wp.

So joined by Jeff Chandler. Is that a, is that the regular, is two the two of you regularly? Yes. Nice. Yes. Was Jack in sorry. Oh, I cannot say the words today. It's not working. Is it? Is, was Jeff in Europe with you? No, he was there. Oh, I see. Okay. It was, the fact you said he interviewed

is

[01:22:16] Michelle Frechette: Sam still in the green room?

Did you forget to bring Sam

[01:22:19] Nathan Wrigley: back? Oh, no. No, she's not there. Okay. Just checking. No, I can't see. Yeah if you can message her and ask her if she's having gremlins, then yeah, that'd be great. But no, she's not. I keep looking periodically, but she's not there. Okay. So there's that. And also Katie brought this to my attention.

This is over on the Barn two website. I don't know, Katie, forgive me if it's new or not, but we've got something on the screen called barn two Plugins, and it's the WooCommerce Shipping Calculator. What's this? Is it new? If not, what does it do? Tell us

[01:22:48] Katie Keith: more. Yeah. Last Thursday. Nice. Yeah. Sometimes we release plugins that just do one task, which is missing in mainly with commerce.

And with this one, we notice that. How many times have you bought something on any online shop and you put it in the cart just to find out what shipping is gonna cost and then if that's too expensive, you abandoned your cart and go somewhere else. And that's how every

[01:23:11] Nathan Wrigley: single time Katie is the answer.

And

[01:23:13] Katie Keith: that's how we Commerce is built because the shipping calculator only appears on the cart and or checkout. So this simple plugin we've built it lets you put the shipping calculator on the product page, whether it's like above the add to cart button or as a separate tab next to the product description and the reviews or that kind of thing so that people have clear shipping information to help them make that decision whether to buy a product instead of afterwards, which.

To me seemed upside down the way it naturally

[01:23:43] Nathan Wrigley: is. Honestly, I'm not exaggerating. I did this Mary dance yesterday. I was buying something I bet from a company, I won't bore you, but basically there were four things that I wanted and I went through every permutation of putting those four things in to see what the shipping would be.

And it turned out that if I bought things in two separate consignments, I could get the shipping at more or less half the price, which is curious. So I get this pain. I totally understand. That's really clever. Bravo. Nice. That totally suits me. This is great. Thank you very much. So this is barn two.com.

And the plugin that you're looking for is called WooCommerce Shipping Calculator. It goes without saying, it works with, WooCommerce. So there there's a comment about that. Will WooCommerce transition to more atomic blocks instead of having monolithic templates? Oh, that question. I don't, yeah, I don't suppose either.

Any of us can answer that quite at this moment. Where are we at? Beer, GI, I think brought us something as well, didn't you? Beer gi? Yeah. Was yours, was it this, was this the yes.

[01:24:53] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Perfect. That's it's Gutenberg live q and a about design systems and theme json and It's really hard sometimes when you have multiple sites or a big multi-site to get the design system every time.

And so the WebPress v i p team built a plugin that. Combines the Figma design system and the theme json so you can spin up new websites that adheres to the design system that you already built and also syncs back. We do a little demo there and then we discuss how that's gonna work and how it's working for the WebPress v i p team that work with quite a few agencies and also have Joni Halabi is going.

So it's gonna be David Bowman and Alec Gatas and Joni Halabi is from the George University Senior Developer there. And yeah, so we're gonna discuss all the different ways how dis designing system and theme J can be together. Wait, and,

[01:26:04] Nathan Wrigley: Did I hear you right? You use Figma, you build your site in Figma?

And it, it exports a theme, json file or syncs a theme json file with your WordPress site. So you can do that bidirectionally. You can bidirectionally,

[01:26:19] Birgit Pauli-Haack: I'm not quite sure, but that's a very good question for that live q and a. And it's gonna happen on July 21st, next

[01:26:25] Nathan Wrigley: week. That is so cool. I love the, because with the best will in the world, there are design tools which are superior at just doing the design.

That's what they're for. And if you so many people seem to be talking about Figma, using Figma, loving Figma. And the idea that you could, even if you just did it one way as a one-off dump after you finished and got the design perfected. Oh, that's great. So this is I'm gonna be linking in the show notes too.

It's a Zoom call. And you will get the landing page to subscribe to the Zoom call 21st of July 6:00 PM. Is that London time? It says London. That's London time. Okay. So it's 17 UK time. Yeah. 1700 utc. Yeah. Okay, thank you. Oh, that's brilliant. That's really cool. Yeah. And very last thing, which I'm gonna spend about 12 seconds on we have a new social network, if you didn't know, it's called Instagram Threads.

And if you don't have, if you've still got enough time left in your life to wrote messages online and do all of that, you've got a new thing to share. It's managed to get something along the lines of 80 million subscribers in the space of just a couple of days. I know Mastodon, which I bang on about quite a lot, is more, I think around the 11 million mark.

And it's been going for years and years, which just gives you some idea of the. The power of Facebook. My understanding at the moment is it's just text-based. I imagine they co-opted a lot of people in with a, I dunno, a one click solution. I tried it, I got about four seconds in and I un installed it.

I don't have the time or capacity for any more Facebook things. But anyway, I thought I'd mention that if you're into if you're into Facebook and all, are you gonna be subscribing? I know that, if you're into marketing maybe not,

[01:28:09] Birgit Pauli-Haack: maybe, but there's a caveat when you delete. It. I saw on Twitter, if you delete it, you also delete your Instagram account.

The Instagram is the way in, in two threads. And so that's one of, I don't know why they did that, but Yeah. No,

[01:28:27] Michelle Frechette: maybe, which is also why my username still is my married name because it's connected to everything. Yeah. Yeah. Even though I'm divorced, I'm still, Michelle aims on there, but the barrier to entry was much lower than trying to figure out how to work around in Mastodon.

Mastodon, yeah. Because Mastodon, you have to find servers, you have to figure out. And even when you're logged in, sometimes it's hard to find other people because of how the structure works. This is super simple. Yeah. Which is always something, you'll get more people signed up if it's easy.

[01:28:58] Nathan Wrigley: I saw a comment from, I can't remember who it was, it might have been Ross Wintel. Forgive me Ross. If it was you and it wasn't you that made the comment rather so of said, logged in. Now the load of unsolicited. Comments from people that didn't know and then immediately logged out. That's the thing I like about Mastodon.

Essentially, if you don't follow somebody, you'll f if you don't follow anybody, your feed is utterly blank with, and you cannot change that. There is no algorithm pushing stuff into your feed. It's just a chronological list of people that you follow. And and obviously, that's not Facebook's model.

It will actually, in the future, it will combine. With Mastodon. I'm not sure exactly how that's gonna work Facebook or a company out to make a profit. So they've gotta keep you, gain your attention in some way, shape or form. Yeah. So Max says, yeah, didn't get any, you users, they just got them over from Instagram and Sam.

Oh, I'm sorry. Sam. Sam says, can't connect to this room again. I'm glad that you got most of the way through, Sam. Apologies for that. She says her internet usage is over for the day. That's all we got. I think in, on this particular show, it's time for the, oh, Michelle, straight in there. It's time for the somewhat humiliating wave as look at us.

We're all so compliant. It's great. Check us out. Thank you. We'll be back next week. Thank you to our fourth. Thank you. Five, six, even Michelle Forhe here, Paul, Katie, Keith, Sam and Alderon, fucking older son, Alderson. And and also Mark. I don't know what his surname is. The guy from WS form him.

Thanks for him dropping in from time to time. We'll be back next week with another show. Until then, take care. Stay safe. Thank you. Bye.