This Week in WordPress #261

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: it's time for this week in WordPress episode number 261 entitled mucho intro. It was recorded on Monday the 17th of July, 2023. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and I'll be joined in a few moments by my three guests. I'm joined today by Michelle Frechette, by Christine Clouder and by Tiffany bridge, it's a WordPress podcast. So what do we do? We talk about WordPress. We talk about the upcoming page builder summit, and the fact that we're looking for some sponsorship deals.

We also talk about some upcoming shows that I've got with Patrick Posner from simply static. And also peach and airy about UI and UX. And the show that we do, then we get onto the WordPress news. We talk about the unveiled plans for phase three real-time collaboration and updates to the media library, as well as the admin interface. That's a lot planned for WordPress on the backend.

We then get into an episode that I talked about with Carrie dills. It was an episode on the WP Tavern website, all about internationalized and your WordPress code, not website. There's going to be an upcoming 6.3 live demo with rich table and am McCarthy managed by yours truly. That's coming up later this week as well. And then we talk about the inaugural set of mentors and mentees. Who've been selected for the experimental mentorship program.

And there's a whole lot more about security as well, and whether or not your location data should be private. 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% off new purchases.

Find out more at go. me forward slash WP Builds.

Okay, I'm learning, lifelong learner, turns out this video platform allows you to pick two videos if you want to at the introduction, there's a little checkbox and normally you tick one and obviously I had that one previously ticked and then I ticked the other one. Anyway, sorry for the Sorry if I'm subjecting you to two videos there, apologies.

It's This Week in WordPress. We're on episode three billion and four, something like that. I'm joined as you can see by three fabulous guests today. I hope you're all doing fine wherever you are in the world. Let's find out who they are and What their relationship is to WordPress. I've got the, I've got the usual bio for Michelle.

Hi, Michelle. How are you doing? Hello.

[00:03:02] Michelle Frechette: I'm good. I did add my latest endeavor to that bio though. So

[00:03:06] Nathan Wrigley: I don't know if I haven't refreshed the page. I will quickly do it now. And let's see.

[00:03:12] Michelle Frechette: WP Speakers, I just added WP

[00:03:14] Nathan Wrigley: Speakers. Oh, okay. If I forget it, you just chuck it right in at the end. I already did, look at that.

There she is. Is the Director of Community Engagement for Stellar WP at Liquid Web. In addition to her work at Stellar WP, Michelle is the WP Coffee Talk, co founder of Underrepresented in Tech, creator of WP Speakers. and WPCareerPages. com. She's the president of the board for Big Orange Heart, director of community relations and contributor at Post Status, author, business coach and frequent organizer and speaker at WordPress events.

She lives outside Rochester, New York, where she's an avid nature photographer. You can find out more if you go to meet. Michelle online. Every time I read that, Michelle, I read the words lives outside Rochester, New York. What does that mean? Does it mean there's Rochester and you're just like 10 feet away or something?

[00:04:09] Michelle Frechette: I'm in a suburb. A suburb of Rochester. But nobody's ever heard of Hilton New York. And if you google Hilton New York, you will find every Hilton hotel in New York City before you find my town.

[00:04:19] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, so the town where you live is actually called Hilton, but that just collides with the biggest hotel chain in the world.

Absolutely. Oh no. So anyway.

[00:04:29] Michelle Frechette: So outside of

[00:04:30] Nathan Wrigley: Rochester, New York, it makes more sense. That'll do. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. We could amend that. She lives in a small suburb of Rochester, New York called it. Nah, let's not bother. We're also joint. Ah, I got it wrong. Always got it wrong. Get it wrong.

There's Tiffany. Tiffany Bridge. How you doing, Tiffany? I'm well, how are you? Yeah, great, thanks. Apart from all the calamities that this platform is causing for me, but who cares? Let's press on regardless. Very nice, succinct bio from Tiffany. Although let's see if we can drag some more out of her. It just says this, Tiffany Bridge is the product manager at Nexus.

Anything you want to add? Is that the lot?

[00:05:11] Tiffany Bridge: I'm the product manager at Nexus, which is a lot crammed into four words, right? And I'm also the co organizer of the WordPress DC meetup that we are trying to resuscitate. But the truth is I just am not as impressive as Michelle.

[00:05:30] Michelle Frechette: So that's not true.

[00:05:33] Tiffany Bridge: I'll tell that.

[00:05:34] Michelle Frechette: She is the do not panic, the don't panic person, and I'm all the... Sky is falling. So

[00:05:41] Nathan Wrigley: that's cool. Actually, I am, I can't in some situations, I am the sky has fallen in person, but in situations where there's I don't know, like a medical emergency or something where it truly matters.

I get, I'm super calm, but anything else I don't know, we've run out of printer paper. Ah! Ah!

[00:06:01] Michelle Frechette: Specifically when it comes to websites, Tiffany's don't panic. And I'm like, oh my God, the white screen of death, whatever

[00:06:08] Nathan Wrigley: will I do? Oh, that's great. You need somebody calm and Tiffany is the calm person.

Oh, that's lovely. So there you go. We can add to it. She's also very calm. That's lovely. And let me see if I can get, oh, I'm doing it wrong again. Over there, suffering somewhat from video jittery gremlins, but we're going to carry on regardless, who cares. Is Christine Clowder. How are you doing, Christine?

[00:06:31] Christine Clauder: I'm doing well, thank you. I genuinely, I apologize. I have no idea what's happening to my video, but every other frame is

[00:06:39] Nathan Wrigley: fine when we do these things. And I read up quite a lot on, blogging and vlogging and all that kind of thing. The one thing that you can't have not work is the audio.

The videos it'd be nice if it worked, but the audio is the thing and your audio is coming through. Fine, but the video is a little bit glitchy, but there's you know, it's perfectly serviceable

[00:07:01] Michelle Frechette: Her video is better than tim nash a few weeks

[00:07:03] Nathan Wrigley: ago, though. Yes. That was hysterical Every time we put tim nash on the screen, it was frozen So whatever he was doing when we brought him on the screen, he just stayed like that and so we played games yeah.

Perfect. Christine. Christine,

[00:07:23] Michelle Frechette: she wins the award for best microphone though. Can we agree with that?

[00:07:27] Tiffany Bridge: Oh,

[00:07:27] Nathan Wrigley: look at that. It lights up. Oh, I feel a little good now. But to round

[00:07:32] Tiffany Bridge: out

[00:07:33] Christine Clauder: this lovely group, I'm actually the arbiter of chaos.

[00:07:38] Tiffany Bridge: Yeah, I'm walking in chaos. We say that about you.

[00:07:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Just to give you some context, Christine is the field marketing manager for Nexus.

And for those of conspiracy theorists out there, who will no doubt say the show's been taken out. The booking system is open to anybody that I send it to. It's complete coincidence that we managed to get these three fine people on the show today, all on the same show. But anyway. Thank you for joining us.

I really appreciate it. We'll talk a little bit about WordPress in just a moment. Let's see if anybody's dropping into the live chat, just so that you can have some context around that. If you are looking to share this on social media or something like that's probably the best URL to send people to WP Builds.

com forward slash live, if you do that. Then people are going to be able to use YouTube comments. So they'll need a Google account. If they're not on a Google account and you're watching in something like, I don't know, Facebook, for example, you're going to need to give this platform permission to allow us to see who you are.

And in order to do that, just pop open a tab, type in wave. video forward slash lives forward slash. Facebook, in this case, and hopefully that'll allow us to see who you are. But yeah, please go share it. That'd be really nice. Cameron is joining us. Hi, Cameron, from an extremely windy Brighton. Yes, I know the meaning of windy.

Yesterday, my son was playing in a festival. He's drumming. And we parked the car in the car park and about, I don't know, 20 metres away was a giant trampoline. Came back, guess where the trampoline was? Yeah. On the car? On the car. Oh my goodness. Couldn't have been better. Yeah, lovely. Anyway, I know the meaning of the word windy thanks for joining us, Cameron, always appreciated.

Good morning, says Maya. She's coming from melting Belgrade. Yeah, this is making the news here, Maya. I don't know what it's like in the rest of the world, but in Southern Europe at the minute, the temperatures have gone absolutely berserkers. In the UK, we've still got the somewhat ridiculous, I don't know, single figures degrees centigrade.

But in the rest of Europe, it's really hot. And so let's find out from the weather report that Peter Ingersoll brings us every week. Good morning from now sunny Connecticut. The northeast U. S. has significant rains and flooding over the weekend. It will be quite hot. Oh, that's really hot. Good luck, Peter.

Stay inside. Stay out of the stay out of there. And we're also being joined by Courtney Robertson from Smoky Gettysburg. Smoky as in Canada smoke? Is that what we're talking

[00:10:27] Michelle Frechette: about there? Yeah, we're getting that here

[00:10:29] Nathan Wrigley: too. Oh yeah. Next comment makes that point. Canadian wildfire, hazy drafting this way.

Okay. And also I think we've got somebody new. I don't know that we've, have we come across Tony Gerling?

[00:10:41] Michelle Frechette: I don't know, Tony.

[00:10:42] Nathan Wrigley: Hi Tony. Hi Tony. It's very nice to have you with us. From Sonny Aldermaston in the UK. That's lovely. Tony, if you fancy sharing it, like I said, wpbuilds. com forward slash. Live is the place to go for that.

Okay. So we're going to talk about WordPressy things. Do excuse the somewhat self promotional beginning to this show, because I've got a few things going on and why not? So let's put that on the screen. The first thing to mention is this is our website, wpbuilds. com. If you would like to subscribe to what we do, then there's a little email link.

You can see it just there. If you fill out the Fill out the email form. We'll send you a couple of emails each week when we produce new content. Thanks to GoDaddyPro for helping support us and keep the podcast on the air. That's been really good over the last year. Really appreciate everything that they've done to help us help this show and the other ones that I do.

Keep going. Bravo. And you can see down here that You know, I'm clearly after some more sponsorship because the page builder summit version six is coming down the pike pretty soon. It's going to be in September. So we're a couple of months away and we're looking for some sponsors to help us put that event on.

If you fancy that, if you think your company, even if you're just curious about it, then you could go to this page. It's wpbuilds. com. Forward slash sponsors. There's a little chat widget there that'll get you straight through to me. And and I can talk through all of the options and what have you. So yeah, go and check that out.

Most appreciative to anybody who wishes to do that. That'd be great. Okay. There's another somewhat self promotional bit a little bit later, but for now, let's get onto the WordPressy stuff. So lots and lots from WP Tavern this week, Sarah Gooding, obviously is the writer over there and she is sharing this first story.

WordPress unveils plans for real time collaboration with major improvements to revisions and the media library. If you're following along on the screen, you can see that I've highlighted different bits. This is the story that essentially we've been going through the four phases of Gutenberg.

Phase two. Has been rounded off. That was all about let's not go into all that. Let's focus on the future. Phase three can be summed up as really real time collaboration, but there's quite a few other bits and pieces that have been bolted into that as well. Workflows, revisions and amendments to the media library.

And maybe that'll be something we'll talk about later. The idea really is that we'll get something in Gutenberg. Or WordPress, I should say, which will be akin to Google Docs. You log in, your pals log in, your colleagues log in, and you can all look at the same document at the same time. If you've been using WordPress with colleagues for any length of time, you'll know the frustration of seeing that a piece of content is currently being edited.

You're basically locked out. It's a contrivance. It's, it stops things getting screwed up, but but it's not exactly usable in this day and age. I think these days, everybody's working on these kinds of collaborative docs. And Matthias Ventura has puts together a tiny little video of what the concept of this may look like.

It's really, it really is the bare bones of an idea. But if you're looking at the screen, you can see an interface where. Essentially, two people are clearly editing this page. They've got little icons, which seem to actually have the ability to roll around the page. So rather than just being in Google Docs, where you can see where they're, which word they're in, and if they've highlighted things, this looks a bit more like some sort of graphic design tool where you can literally see where their cursor is resting at that moment.

So that's interesting. So you could see if somebody was thinking that it looked like Nero. Yeah, I use another app called Whimsical, which has this same kind of behavior. And yeah, so that's going to be a big thing. One of the things that they're at pains to point out is they really want to make this work on any kind of hosting.

Obviously hosting is not all equal. If you're paying 20, 000 a month for some hosting, you're going to expect that to be full of grunt. But if you're on more affordable, let's say 3 a month hosting or 5 a month hosting, how is this going to manage with that? But it's hoped to go a little bit further.

You can see bits that I've highlighted here. It's gonna hopefully do things like include a publishing checklist, be able to share draft links with permission controls. So before you publish a post, this is cool, right? Think of the things that you could do with this draft a post and then share it, but share different bits with different people so that I don't know.

Tiffany can access this bit. Michelle can access this bit, a version control system as well. Again, if you're looking at the screen, you can see all of that. Let's talk about that bit first, this collaborative editing. Then we'll come to some of the other things that the media library and so on.

Honestly, are you going to use this or is WordPress more of a. Publishing tool where you go in, amend things on a website. Is this worth it? Is this

[00:15:56] Christine Clauder: worth the endeavor? I like it. I think that me personally, I'm just a minor freelancer and going in to be able to show my customer or whoever's, wanting me to build a site, I can go in and have himself managed because I generally just build it and then leave it up to them to handle after that.

So I can show them, Hey, this is where you would change that. So doing that kind of live training would

[00:16:23] Tiffany Bridge: be helpful. I was just thinking. As a person who has done client work, even if the only thing that people get out of this is that you never have to ask a client, Can you please get out of the document so I can go in and see what you're talking about?

That by itself is reason for this to exist. But I think all the other stuff is going to be fun too. Like, how often do we send, Google Docs around the office and ask people to collaborate and comment and like our like our marketing team uses Notion to collaborate on documents and wouldn't it be cool if they could collaborate directly in

[00:17:03] Nathan Wrigley: WordPress?

Yeah, I think so. Do you think, Tiffany, though, that would, there would be any... Could you see your team, so let's imagine that Notion is the tool forever and ever and you're never going to move away from that, it's just brilliant, and I know it is really brilliant. Could you see yourself transitioning into a WordPress website to do like team stuff?

In other words, you're using it almost like Notion, it's got nothing to do with what's ever going to go out on the public facing internet, it's just draft documents and things like that. Or does that seem a stretch too far?

[00:17:35] Tiffany Bridge: Because a lot of businesses already have Google Docs and, or Notion, I don't necessarily know that they're gonna migrate away from that just for non published collaboration.

But let me tell you that I am absolutely certain, just having worked a couple of years at Automatic, that they will be using us for that. Because they, that is a, they I am sure that they will be doing this simply because there's just a lot of dog fooding that happens there, and the whole company already runs on P2.

I don't see any reason why they wouldn't find interesting ways to adapt this kind of situation for that.

[00:18:16] Michelle Frechette: Can I jump in too is I have, I do some freelancing on the side as well, and then I usually teach my clients how to manage some of things, the things for themselves. blog posting and things like that, or they want to swap out an image on whatever page.

And I share over zoom and I show them and then I get out of it and then they have to log in so that I can watch them do it. And if we were instead working real time together on the same post, I could watch them do it. They could watch me do it. We'd have to do this back and forth, log in, log out of the pages in order for them to be able to learn.

So I think it could be a really good educational tool for one on one training on WordPress

[00:18:56] Nathan Wrigley: as well. Interesting. So I've never really certainly not for a long time worked as part of a bigger team. It's usually just been me as a freelancer. So I can't fit myself into the jigsaw of where teams might use this.

But for example, for this podcast, we have a custom app. Custom Laravel app, which allows us to share show notes. Now it's got lots and lots of drawbacks in the, essentially the bits and pieces that go into the show notes, which Michelle and Tiffany and Christine can see, I will then have to copy and paste into the WordPress post, which will be created for this podcast.

So really I'm doubled, I'm doubling the amount of work I've got to do. If I could put those into a. Shared post and invite Tiffany and invite Michelle and Christine. And they could look at that and then I could just, when the show's over, just delete bits that weren't relevant or bits that we didn't talk about or add some links in.

And then that becomes my blog post. That seems like really useful. But again, I guess if you're working in a big team of, I don't know, let's say you're working for TechCrunch or something like that. I understand TechCrunch use WordPress, but they've got dozens and dozens of staff writers. And they must be constantly leaving things in a draft state or somebody goes on holiday and that piece needs to be finished.

That then seems like it would be perfect. We've got five people that need to knock heads together to get this piece out. Let's just all log in, join in on the doc, delete what we don't want, add what we want. And then finally somebody gets the permission to to publish it. And that seems like part of this as well.

There seems to be a big piece around permissions to do things. So like I said, Christine could get in and do this, but Michelle could get in and delete what she did, but not the other way round. And then maybe Christine has the ability to finally click publish, but Michelle doesn't, those kinds of things all seem.

Yeah, really interesting. I can't the reason I was saying all that is because I framed it as a Google Doc at the beginning, but I guess they serve totally different purposes really. Okay, let's talk about ways. Yeah. Did you want to say something else? Tiffany? Sorry. I was all I had to say. I was

[00:21:06] Tiffany Bridge: just

[00:21:07] Nathan Wrigley: agreeing with you, Nathan.

Yeah. Oh, there's finally somebody you can do more of that. Yeah, do more of that. That's great. No. So let's just carry on with that little piece. So We got halfway through it and now we're talking about the media library. I, do you know what, there are bits of the media library that I can totally live with, but it really does seem like it's a little bit out of date.

When it came out, I think it was revolutionary and pretty amazing, but not so much anymore. It's a little bit old and there's a lot of things that kind of don't really... Work as well as bespoke custom apps that you've seen elsewhere online. So it says the main goals. So we're quoting Matthias Ventura here.

The main goals are to expand the media management capabilities, unify the block edit and single media interfaces, and improve on the major media flows adding things like categorization and tagging. That's cool. Better handling of attached media and design improvements to view the library.

The other media library projects may include a revamp of the image editing interface, which remains somewhat unintuitive. At this moment, it really is bizarre how you do things like crop images in WordPress, you highlight that thing and then rather than hit return, you have to go back over and click the crop button, which feels like you already should have done that because now all you're doing is crop it, I don't know, anyway, you get the point.

So there's quite a lot of nice stuff in there, possibly, open to you guys. I

[00:22:41] Tiffany Bridge: mean, I have to reteach to myself to use the image editor every time. It doesn't matter. Yeah. It's I have to reload it every time.

[00:22:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. It's not ideal. I just

[00:22:52] Christine Clauder: started I have just started editing the images before I even upload them to the WordPress site.

Just go ahead and knock that out of the way and upload it as is.

[00:23:02] Michelle Frechette: And if it doesn't work, I delete it? Edit it and re

[00:23:05] Tiffany Bridge: upload it. That's exactly how it happens. I like editing in place for when I'm trying to get a certain like focal point on a featured image because there's still a lot of focal points on featured images.

That's nice. So I do like it for that. Can I just crop a little bit off the top? But like I have to re teach myself to use the crop tool every time. They haven't yet shown us anything on what kinds of changes they're looking to make, but I'm just delighted to see the media library getting some focused attention because it's incredibly important, and, we're all accustomed to just being able to upload images from our phones to one social app or another, and I feel like there's, we're in this cultural moment where maybe people could move back to blogs, but then blogs need to catch up.

With the ease of use. And so I'm delayed to see WordPress moving in that

[00:24:01] Michelle Frechette: direction. There's a feature that I would love to see that nobody's ever talked about, which is that it would prompt you to give a better name, file name to the image when you upload it. Because when you have, for example, a form that people are uploading their own headshots to for Career Summit and things like that, and their file name is 7597213, Does not say that's Tiffany's headshot, right?

So if I could just quickly and easily, because on a site like post status, for example, there are probably 30 versions of the Yoast. And I don't mean different versions, the same exact image of the Yoast logo because every time somebody needs it, they upload it with a different name. And so if I go searching for I'm never going to upload a logo to post status without checking because there's probably already 30 to 50 of them somewhere because it's been around so long.

And some of them are probably out of date, but if we could, if we were prompted to rename it, tiffany Bridge headshot. Like then I wouldn't have to go searching for trying to find it. Cuz it's, I'm sure Tiffany uses good no nomenclature, but others do not. .

[00:25:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah I definitely Tiffany Bridge, AKA 7 5 3 8 1 2.

Yeah. Yeah.

[00:25:18] Tiffany Bridge: Like when I was just actually thinking about that when you were using me as an example. I was like, gosh, I probably just uploaded. An image with God knows what filename to WP Speakers. Yeah,

[00:25:29] Christine Clauder: mine are usually like, whatever I mash on my keyboard, that's the filename.

[00:25:34] Michelle Frechette: And mine is always my name and then the size.

So it'll be Michelle Frechette 500x500. So that if somebody needs to know what is that image of Michelle... They have all of the information

[00:25:45] Tiffany Bridge: they need right there. And I should think about that because I used to be a recruiter and I was constantly after people. Please don't just send me a file called resume.

I get a hundred of them a day. So please name the file with your, so like now what, if I'm applying for a job, I always name the file my name. I don't know why I don't think about that with

[00:26:07] Nathan Wrigley: is that interesting? I do like the idea. I'm sure that there's a solution. Let's just see if somebody in the comments knows, but the deduplication thing, Michelle, seems like that would be really sensible.

If there could be some sort of hash done of the image so that it could, I don't know, it could be its dimensions and then it could be a hash of the image. So we know it's a replica. Of it. And then it just says, no, don't even bother. You've already got this one 15 times over here because if there are 15 images of the last year ago, you can't possibly delete one of those.

Because you've no idea where it's being used. So that would be another nice feature, where is this image?

[00:26:51] Michelle Frechette: Plugins, right? So we have a jobs board. The plugins, when you create a job, it asks you to upload your logo. So it's, you're going to do it, right? You're not going to say it's already there somewhere.

Because it's not going to connect with the other end. So there are so many use cases where this would be something. I don't know. That would be helpful.

[00:27:11] Tiffany Bridge: I'm sorry, guys. I hate we already have a logo. is? Exactly. Yeah.

[00:27:18] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, there she is. Honestly, don't worry about it. So long as we can hear you, that genuinely is the main thing.

Obviously, it would be lovely if we could hear you and see you, but the hearing bit Is the crucial bit and we can hear every word crystal clear. So it's Monday morning, so blame that she's gonna preach in real life, blame them Monday morning. It is arbiter of chaos, you guys. Yeah. Yeah. There's another thing to mention, which I know Michelle will quite like, and that is the, there's hopefully gonna be tighter integration with open verse, which will obviously make the media library A load more useful.

So OpenVerse is the, I can't remember what the number is, but it's a staggeringly large number of freely licensed. I think they're all CC zero would be my guess. Yeah. Images and the intention, it's now, I guess the custodian of that project is now automatic. And to be able to access those, I'm making up a number, 50 million images and videos and audio and whatever else there may be on there.

Within the editor, wherever the editor may be and drag them in some kind of intuitive, nice looking way. Yeah, that would be nice. Whilst you were talking, somebody mentioned mobile phones. And over the weekend, I mentioned my son being in this concert I was taking lots of pictures. And, it's nice to edit them.

So I don't use Instagram. But I use something adjacent to Instagram. You see the picture and then it says, do you want to add a vignette and you click, yeah, and all of a sudden it looks great. And then do you want to, I don't know, make it look a bit retro. So it looks like an old Polaroid or something and you click yeah.

And you just fart around and you undo and you redo and you keep adding things in. Now I know this is probably a bit overkill for the WordPress project, but it does seem like some of that stuff. Some of that fun stuff might be quite useful in there as well because honestly, the kids, they're all raised.

This is what you get with images. If it's just upload an image, stick it on a website, be nice to be able to handle some of those other things as well. If there's anything

[00:29:30] Tiffany Bridge: to add to that. So much of that image processing is driven on device by the processor. So putting that into WordPress does seem to be, would be challenge for would be challenging for Budget hosting because you're going to get people wanting to consume more resources and then there aren't necessarily enough resources for everybody to be like vignetting their photos on upload Yeah, good point.

I'm wondering how much of that would get done but I also feel like there's a really great opportunity For people to for plugins that are like backed by a SAS to do that so like external server processing power, like you upload it to WordPress, it gets whisked off to the servers, you like do your little thing and then it comes back.

Edited or it's right there in a cdn kind of situation a jetpack site accelerator Yes, so I think

[00:30:28] Nathan Wrigley: there's opportunity for that. I guess you're right thinking about The sustainability of websites all of the things that I just mentioned are basically superfluous, aren't they?

but if that was truly something that you required in your workflow the ability to Toggle that thing on or off might be quite useful. Courtney, thanks for joining in the comments. Courtney, that's great. She talked talking about the affordable hosting. She says, I'm very curious how the performance will go with most economical.

She calls it hosting plans. My days are o of overcrowded. Shared hosting wouldn't handle it well. I had a conversation with Steve Burge. Who's from published press and he, for the longest period of time has been really interested in phase three, because, collaborative editing is right inside the wheelhouse of what his product is WordPress plug in does getting things published in teams and all of that.

And he's looked into it quite long and hard. And at the time that we did the recording, probably about four months ago, he was really puzzled as to how they were going to get it to work in anything other than. Really pretty decent hosting environments. So he came up with all sorts of novel ideas, which he was just spinning off the top of his head, more or less, I think.

That is to say, he wasn't, he hadn't got any insight from anybody on, the development team. And his ideas were, what about if you just edit a block at a time? So if I edited a block, Michelle couldn't edit it. She would, in effect, be locked out. So I could do a paragraph, and as soon as I... Jumped out that paragraph, everybody else could edit that one, but nobody whilst I'm doing it.

So that would be one thing, wouldn't be doing the whole page at a time. And also the ability to offload that, like Tiffany just said with images, the ability to offload that as a service. Again, let's just use the example of Jetpack. If you could have a concurrent editing add on for a WordPress site, maybe that's something that will happen.

We'll see. We'll just have to see what the team. Can manage around that anyway thank you for that comment and then she's given us another one photo sharing Has anyone checked out what jetpack social is doing? No, I haven't is the answer push images out to networks from your own site What do you mean there what you can get sock in images from your social networks or?

Any of you three have any insight into that? I'm not sure what that your

[00:32:53] Tiffany Bridge: images would go out would be published out. Would

[00:32:59] Christine Clauder: it be an automatic, is that an automatic process? You just post something and it automatically gets pushed out to

[00:33:04] Michelle Frechette: Twitter? My guess is that would depend on your settings.

Yeah. I

[00:33:10] Tiffany Bridge: mean,

Jetpack has done like automatic publish, like publishing a post to social for a long time. I haven't dug into that. I haven't dug into that feature too much lately because I'm trying to reduce my dependence on social networks. But they're also unavoidable, right?

I I should

[00:33:33] Nathan Wrigley: be checking that out. Yeah. It's interesting because all the fun social networks, there's a lot that are based around image sharing and meme sharing and all that kind of thing. And so if you could just upload something to your WordPress website, it goes on your website, but it also gets pushed out directly.

So it's not a social post as such. It might, I don't know, but yeah. Okay. Courtney, if you've got any insight into what you meant there, that would be great. And she's got one final comment there now, just to make the mobile app experience for WordPress is easiest photo network apps. Yeah. I think we've got the work cut out for us in in stage three of the Gutenberg project, let's move on to the next piece, which is actually broadly the same not quite, but it touches on many of the same things.

So again, Sarah Gooding doing God's work WordPress plans, ambitious. Admin UI revamp with design system, galvanizing broad support from the developer community. Half this article is basically saying that a lot of the people who have seen this, who are developers think that there's a lot of cool stuff in here.

But yeah, I've said this a few times ever since I joined WordPress in 20, something like 2014, something like that. The admin UI has been basically the same. I think there's been some very minor modifications, but broadly speaking, it's the same. Maybe it's time for a change. And so what you can see on the screen here, if you're looking at it is some proposed options.

It looks. Much more minimal than we've got at the moment. It's this idea of this, I think from my reading of it, it's this idea of this menu here on the left, which you can collapse and then, but everything's done in here. So if you want to move away from the design options, you click back here and then you get to the previous menu.

And if you click on something, this panel is taken over by that. So it's. It's left so rather than at the minute, everything just flies out and there's more fly outs possibly. This is just this idea of this one universal menu and everything appears in this interface over here.

I'll just read directly from here. WordPress admin is on deck for a long awaited makeover after Gutenberg lead architect Matthias Ventura published plans for a revamped admin design. You can click on the link in the show notes and it will take you to that. As WordPress turns 20, the overall aim of this work is to improve upon this experience at a foundational design level, giving plugins and users more control over the navigation whilst ensuring WordPress, the WordPress experience Is recognizable, intuitive, accessible.

And interestingly, the word delightful has been used. I could go on. There's absolutely loads of detail in here, but I won't really, but you can see here, we're in the sort of the section to do with this particular plugin, and you could click this arrow, go back to where we were before. Maybe this is to do with a, I'm not really sure in all honesty, but the idea of this unified UI where you can achieve more or less everything.

Is the intention I am i've tried to get my kids to use wordpress and they just think it's an outdated Sort of dinosaur when they look at the ui because I use it every day I don't really think of it that way, but maybe this will help over to you guys

[00:36:55] Tiffany Bridge: I can't tell you how excited I am about this. I have a lot of affection for the wp admin of my youth But that's the point, isn't it, right?

It's the WP admin of my youth and I am squarely middle aged now. And, and people's expectations of what a website editor should look like and feel are being set by tools like Squarespace and Wix And things like that. And then they log into WordPress and they get an interface that is like straight out of 2004.

And, I love it because it makes me feel nostalgic, but like nostalgia is not necessarily what you're going for in a technological product interface, so I'm really excited about this. It's long overdue. The assumptions that WP admin make or bait are based on a much earlier phase and WordPress's development.

So if it does nothing else, but like corral all the different menus that all the different menu items that plugins like shove into that left hand WP admin menu, like that would be enough. But but yeah, having it like having a WP admin that's designed for the way people were use a word, want to use WordPress today.

Can't tell you how excited I'm

[00:38:08] Nathan Wrigley: about it. Yeah. It's great, isn't it? There was some more stuff down the page. I'll just read these because it adds a little bit more texture to the canvas. One recurrent, so I'm quoting one recurring theme in the feedback was the need to find a way to curb pollution of top level menus.

So if you've had plugins and themes installed, you'll know you've basically got one menu item for that thing. So I don't know an SEO plugin, there's the SEO admin menu item, and then everything else is buried under there. So that. Hopefully will be quite nice, but here's a big thing, which we've talked about a few times, the idea of a standard notification system so that plugin developers cannot hijack the UI.

And we've all had that experience, I'm sure, of either logging into a client site, or maybe just logging into a site that you haven't touched for a while, only to discover that, like the things that you're expecting to see, like the post names and things are like seven miles down there somewhere, because there's pop up admin notification after big advert, after what have you, so tucking those away somewhere seems like quite a nice idea.

But also... Another challenge again, I'm quoting another challenge that concerns developers, ensuring the new design adequately accommodates WordPress pages. This is music to my ears. WordPress sites, sorry, with large numbers of posts, pages, categories, menus, comments, because really all that you've got at the moment, if I'm going to try and find some piece of content in a site with, let's say 3000 posts at the moment is quite an arduous procedure.

Sure enough, I can search. Really, I have to load up, what is it, 20 or so at a time, click next, wait for it all to load, click next. And if I've got images, the same kind of thing. So having some kind of modern way of getting through all of that, when there's a load of content, don't know what that means.

Is it grids, list views? Is it Ajax loading? Don't know. But anyway, so there's more to this than meets the eye. I'm sorry I interrupted. Michelle or Christine,

[00:40:13] Christine Clauder: I one of the things that I find myself doing and I've done this for years is actually simplifying the UI for my clients and, removing things that I know that, and I know this is a controversial topic regarding hiding plugins.

But when you're creating the site for a client and the client does not have that WordPress experience I think it's an acceptable use case scenario where I'm actually hiding the plugins that I know they're not going to have need access to. It gives them less opportunity to muck up. The site, but when they log in, they see a nice simplified UI.

They don't need to see, in my opinion, they don't need to see the media library. They don't, unless they're actually creating their own content, which is generally not the case in my in my, in with my clients, other clients, yes, but not mine. But yeah, I actually simplify the UI. So not having to utilize a separate plugin to accomplish that is not, would be nice in my case.

[00:41:19] Nathan Wrigley: So being able to toggle off because all that you can do really at the moment is to down either know the code or you download another plugin so that you can show and hide things. Okay, I have to

[00:41:29] Christine Clauder: download several plugins to simplify the UI. And then of course, like you were talking about having the list.

of blog posts and or pages and making them, searchable or having them presented in a nicer manner so that the client can easily find the page that they want to edit, searching or even having the description, different columns because the WordPress admin doesn't do the

[00:41:51] Nathan Wrigley: columns. That's good, isn't it?

There's lots of thought there. The idea that you could, in the native UI, you could add in all the columns. Yeah, show me the featured image, don't show me the excerpt, but do show me that random custom field that I've got as well. I'd like to see that. And that could all be searchable and filterable.

Yeah, neat. There's a load in there. That's really interesting.

[00:42:12] Tiffany Bridge: And, and when you hide the stuff in the sidebar like that it doesn't this is something that we did when we were working on StoreBuilder, our StoreBuilder products. This is not a pitch for StoreBuilder. It's just an example.

We did that. We simplified the admin. But then what we found is that WooCommerce would change. And then suddenly our the menu structure we had devised wouldn't work anymore. And suddenly something was missing that you really needed to get to. And even... Like very understandably wanting to hide all of that stuff.

Then you you just you create other problems because plugins will be developed with the assumption that the menus work a certain way and and it's that WordPress is so customizable that you cannot possibly anticipate. Every use case that a user of your product is going to want to have access to so there's it's opinionated, but not opinionated enough.

Yeah, I think it's, I'm looking forward to more simplicity there.

[00:43:19] Michelle Frechette: I also like the idea of all the Plugins and plugin settings being directed under one heading. I have uploaded plugins before where I upload the plugin and then I have to spend 10 minutes hunting and searching for where the settings for that plugin in, are they under settings as it is under tools, because it doesn't actually have its own menu item in the left hand side, but it's the plugin I need and want to use.

So where are the tools for it? So sometimes that becomes very frustrating as well.

[00:43:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I do. Honestly, this is, you've taken the conversation in a really different direction than I had in my own head imagined it, but the idea of being able to customize the WordPress URL, nothing bizarre or strange, but just the idea of being able to, rather than just change it from a grid to a list view with pages and posts, if you could add all those custom.

Fields in or just other fields, a bit like you do with the dashboard at the moment. You can say, show me the WordPress news bit, but don't show me this. Something along those lines that you can have those. And I know you can do that to some extent at the moment in WordPress, but the ability to put almost anything you want in there and then the ability to search and filter with those.

Yeah. That's. That's interesting. Let's see where this goes. I'm buoyed now. That's, that sounds quite exciting. Okay. Let's

[00:44:37] Tiffany Bridge: not that one then. Last time WordPress 2. 1, right? Yep. Yep. That's how long it's been. We're up to WordPress 6. 3 coming out in a couple of weeks. Like it's time.

[00:44:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I agree.

I think the way it looks at the moment is a bit of an off putting experience for some people. So if you were to log into, I don't know, if you come from Squarespace or something, I do think you would find it a little bit. Discombobulating. A little bit 1990s, you might say. Okay. All right. Let's let's do something else.

You've all heard of Carrie Dills, haven't you? I'm sure. Carrie Dills has been in the WordPress community for many years. I was lucky enough to sit down with her and have a conversation on the Tavern podcast. And I just thought I'd mention it. If you're a... Plugin or theme developer making blocks or whatever it might be.

And you would like to get your code in front of a wider audience. And what I mean by that is internationalizing your code. So I was always aware that you could, if you like, internationalize the front end of your WordPress website. There are various plugins and solutions which allow you to click a button and all of a sudden, all of the bits and pieces, they're now showing in Italian.

Whereas before they showed in English, that's for the front end. That's not what this is about. Carrie is talking about all sorts of things built inside of WordPress core, get text in particular, and how you can make the UI interface, the admin interface available in those different languages. So rather than relying on people installing your plugin and having to go to English, Why not make it available in a bunch of other languages as well?

I think we always seem to have in, but I don't know what it is, but WordPress, all the events, not all the events, but a lot of the events are done in English. We tend to do a lot of the stuff in English, but Carrie's point is if your plugin isn't really going into the English market, I don't know. I said, imagine you're.

Plugin is only used by Hungarian people. What's the point in having it in English? You should probably have it in Hungarian. And so she explains a little bit about how you might do that, why you might do it and how you can find out more of the different projects and places that you can go. If you want to find out about this I, this is a really difficult subject for me to cover because I basically only speak English.

So the sort of default setting in WordPress basically works for me a hundred percent of the time. But there's a lot of technical detail inside plugins sometimes. And I think it would be enormously frustrating if you had no English. Your English wasn't great. It would be quite nice if developers made the effort to to get that stuff translated.

So this is not about doing the translations. You're going to have to offload that to some other person, some language expert, somebody that can do it. This is about the mechanisms for allowing those translations to WordPress interface. So I don't know if any of you have got anything to add about that. I just thought I'd mention it cause it was such a nice episode and she's lovely.

[00:47:53] Tiffany Bridge: She is lovely.

[00:47:55] Michelle Frechette: I love it. I like the idea. I think it's so important. It's, a lot of the WordPress we focus on North America and, the part of Europe that speaks English, right? And most of Europe, I think, a lot, I shouldn't say most, a lot of people speak English, or they learn English to be part of this, about a part of WordPress, but there are such A huge amount of users that are not speaking English and do not read English and need to be able to see things that are not in English.

So I love the efforts to better internationalize the, all of the experiences within WordPress.

[00:48:29] Nathan Wrigley: And as, as luck would have it. As a lot would have it, Cameron's popped into the chat to say he's doing a talk on internationalization. That is a hard word to say. Internationalization. On that internationalization at the word camp.

No, of course not. The WordPress meetup. Which it's leads, but it's not leads. It's online leads, if but Cameron, make sure it's recorded Cameron. Yeah. If you can also post if you've got the link for for getting invites, then that'd be great. I get the mailings from WordCamp or the WordPress leads meetup, but I can't get it right this moment, but yeah, we're happy to share that on the screen if you want.

So sorry, Christine, sorry, Tiffany. We. We haven't heard you all's thoughts on this, if you've got any.

[00:49:23] Christine Clauder: I'm a hundred percent an English speaker, so this, yeah, I don't have a lot of input. I agree with Michelle in that, of course, it's important, but this is, I unfortunately have no dog in the fight here.

[00:49:40] Tiffany Bridge: And she

[00:49:40] Michelle Frechette: has a lot of dogs.

[00:49:42] Tiffany Bridge: I do have a lot of

[00:49:43] Nathan Wrigley: dogs. None of them are fighting.

[00:49:48] Tiffany Bridge: Just none of them. She's a very responsible dog. Oh

[00:49:50] Nathan Wrigley: good.

[00:49:51] Tiffany Bridge: I think it's I'm excited about it though. I think it's a great conversation to be having. Internationalization, like the, getting things properly translated is so challenging. But there are, there are services, like there are WordPress plugins now that as we've talked about they'll internationalize the front of your site.

I would love to see that kind of functionality, like, where they'll bring you machine translations until you can update and afford. Like professional translations. And I would love to see, I would love to see a service like that for plugin developers. Because a lot of plugin developers are solopreneurs and, so like the idea of having to like then purchase, manage.

And update translations can be really like, that can be laborious for folks. But that doesn't make it less important, but I wouldn't want that to be like a barrier to entry. So like having having some like service available to plug in developers they could subscribe to that would make their plug ins.

Cause even a machine translation is better than no translation at all. Like you can get by. With that, if you have to I think it would be really useful. And also just on a completely different note, something that I've been trying to do lately is I've been trying to learn Italian. And so I'm gradually like changing the interfaces of the various tools I interact with.

To Italian like right now. I read Facebook in Italian.

[00:51:24] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, you're good

[00:51:26] Tiffany Bridge: so So I can imagine myself like trying to use WordPress in Italian in some future state So I would love to see a service that helps plug in authors like bring in Translation to their plugins while they're ramping up their businesses.

[00:51:45] Nathan Wrigley: I guess the nice thing about this is that the people who are developing these things, presumably being developers will be able to engage with the content of this podcast, because it is. Focus more on developers. It is a little bit more on the technical side. She talks about this whole get text thing, which allows you to do this and how you do it.

Obviously it's hard on an audio podcast, but she points you in the right direction. But yeah. And not only are you making WordPress slightly more accessible, let's. Be honest, you're probably going to be making your business somewhat more profitable. Because if you can directly say that, I don't know, I am a Hungarian translated plugin.

Why not? You're going to attract all those people and bear in mind that although we think that English is the center of the universe, sometimes there's quite a lot of people speaking non English languages. So hello, Pecha, by the way. And. Nice to have you with us.

[00:52:46] Michelle Frechette: I've just shared that leads with you on Slack because I don't know how to do it in here without leaving the room.

[00:52:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. In which case you can include it in the show notes. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. I will try to do that. In fact, yeah, there's very little point in me putting it on the screen because it's a giant number at the end, but I will add it Cameron what'd you say? Is it this week coming up Wednesday?

The 25th. 25th. So it'd be a. Thank you. Weekend or something like that next week. Okay. Good luck with that, Cameron. Thank you for mentioning that. Okay. Let's move on. So a lot of this stuff that we've been talking about is the future of WordPress. Here's another thing about the future of WordPress.

This, I mentioned this last week, but I'm gonna keep banging on about it. Live demo. Rich Tabor and Anne McCarthy are going to be describing all of the different pieces of significance that have changed between WordPress 6. 2 and 6. 3. I think sometimes there's not so much, sometimes there's quite a lot.

I would classify this as. Quite a lot because there really has been quite a lot. And so if you fancy joining us, I'm going to moderate it. Basically I'm doing what I'm doing here. I'm just going to, field the questions and things like that. Please go to you'll find it on wordpress. org and the piece is entitled 6.

3 live product demo. And it's a live zoom call. You get to ask them your questions, raise your concerns. I think the intention is to go for something like an hour, maybe 30, 35 minutes of a demo followed by enough time to get everybody's questions answered. So yeah, come join us. That would be absolutely.

Lovely. All right. A community piece, I guess community, but also to do with the core project as well. A little while ago there was a mentorship program which was launched. The idea of the mentorship program really was to help people who didn't feel they necessarily could. We're able to, don't know what the right words are there help out the project.

And the idea was that you would find a mentor would be found for you, and they would shepherd you through the process of whatever area it is that you wanted to contribute on. I don't know, let's say it was documentation. There, you would be married together, if you like, with somebody who'd done that all before.

And they would guide you with any questions or answers. So sometimes you say these things and then you never hear about these projects again. I'm pleased to say that this one is not the case. It looks like 11, was it 11? No, 13 people have been onboarded, 50 people applied. Across eight teams, including core training, community documentation, photos, test polyglots and support.

And of those 50 applications, 13 have been given the green light. They've been matched up with a mentor. And the intention really is that they will go through a kind of weekly. I think it was weekly. Yeah, our mentors offer one to one support to each contributor in our cohort. These mentors check in with mentees each week to offer them support and guidance on the program and to answer any questions that they might have.

13 selected. Of course, if you didn't make the cut, or you didn't even know about it, you can still apply. There'll be further rounds in the future. But really, if you've got, if there's an impediment to you joining the community and that impediment is that you just don't feel you've got the know how and you want to learn from somebody who does, then this is for you.

I don't know if anybody, I thought Michelle might have something she wanted to say about this.

[00:56:34] Michelle Frechette: I love the idea of mentorship at all into WordPress. I think it's, I hope it's something that will prove successful and that can grow. It feels like 13 is such a small number compared to the total number of people.

But you have to start somewhere and a pilot program shouldn't have 700 people in it. So it makes sense to start small. I just hope it's so successful that it's something that will spin off into multiple areas and allow more people to feel confident in contributing to WordPress because we need everybody.

And as I've said in the past, I think the, I don't even, I think we see that the WordPress user group is aging up and we're not bringing in enough younger people. And I think that this is one way that we can help usher in the next generation. Yeah.

[00:57:19] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Yeah, just, sorry, please, you carry on. Oh, I was

[00:57:24] Tiffany Bridge: just going to say that I, what I'm hoping comes out of this in addition to.

A lot of success and an expansion of the proof of the program. What I was thinking as I was reading this is that, one on one mentorship does not scale. And so what I'm hoping that comes out of this is a lot better resources for joining in as a new contributor. I'm participating in the 6.

4 release squad, and I have never joined a release squad before I've been working with WordPress for 19 years. I have never. Intentionally joined in to participate in a release for and, we had our kickoff call this week, which was great, and it was wonderful to see all these great folks on the call.

But as it wrapped up, a friend of mine who is all, who was also on it and is not in this room. Messaged me in Slack and was like, do you have any idea what you're supposed to do next? Because I don't. And we had a whole call and and I was like I'm contributing on the docs team.

So I think what I'm going to do is get the docs meeting on my calendar and I'm going to look for this post on the make blog. But there's nobody that says, okay, if this is the team that you're on. Put this meeting on your calendar, watch for this post, and we anticipate that it will be published on this date, and here's where you'll find it.

There's nothing like that just explains this is how this team organizes itself. Or if it is, it's buried in a way that people don't know to look for it. WordPress is so big, and the con and the contributor pool feels very big and very busy. And you're like am I supposed to be in track?

Am I supposed to be in GitHub? Am I supposed to be in Slack? Am I supposed to be in all of those places? And I feel like there's a real lack of like just taking people by the hand, figuratively, even just new to contributing to this team, start here and do and here are five steps to contributing to the team.

Generally, here are five steps to joining the release. I feel like we're really just lacking that very plain Oh God, there's so many people in Slack and there's so much going on and everybody's volunteers and I don't want to bother anybody. So I'm hoping that this like mentorship program, that information will come out of it and be turned into that kind of,

[00:59:44] Michelle Frechette: of help. You're not stepping into a stream, you're stepping into a raging river that's headed towards the waterfalls. At least that's how it feels a lot of the time. And so I agree, having people that can say, Oh, you're new here, let me show you, this is the next meeting.

This is how we're organized and how we're moving forward. That would be... It's incredibly helpful.

[01:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: This conversation today is so interesting because it's just, honestly, you make me think about things in different ways. And that was a great example because I didn't even think about the not one to one piece.

And I know for a fact that there is no way to gather the data that I'm about to ask for. But it would be interesting to know how many people thought about contributing and got, let's say, just looked at the Slack channel, freaked out, Backed away, or did what you there you go, so we got one, two, okay, so two out of the four here, or got a little bit further in, and then realized that there was no specific guidance, the likes of which you just mentioned, Tiffany, be here at this time, look for this, here's what's going to happen, just some little bullet point to this, I wonder how much that has resulted in people not managing to get there.

This, just from the outside, this just felt like a great initiative. And I think It is! A great initiative. I fully understand what you're saying about about it not being scalable. And I hadn't given that a moment's thought. And the idea of having something a bit more broad... It's really interesting. Yeah.

Thank you for that. That was great. I dunno if you've got anything, do you want to add, Christine, you raised your hand there,

[01:01:23] Christine Clauder: so Yeah, I was I think we can all, I think knowing Tiffany and Michelle know me, that I'm just I know nothing about anything. I'm just, I just float through life. Please.

So girl,

[01:01:38] Tiffany Bridge: Christina's my booth buddy at Word Camps, so don't

[01:01:42] Nathan Wrigley: let her fool you. She knows a lot.

[01:01:47] Tiffany Bridge: Maybe not always about the things you might think.

[01:01:51] Christine Clauder: This is very true. It's just a potpourri of knowledge in my head that is useless to most people. Ask me anything about dogs, I got you covered. But ask me about WordPress and I'm just going to sit there and stare at you blankly basically. But yeah, so no, it is overwhelming, when you jump into the Slack.

And of course, I'm a member of all the Slack channels and just there's a lot happening. It is very overwhelming. And then of course, for those of us that may be neurodiverse or have a little anxiety, and just second imposter syndrome, whatever it is it's a lot, it's

[01:02:28] Nathan Wrigley: overwhelming. I genuinely struggle with the, like Michelle described, a raging torrent.

I know you, whatever language you put in there, it is like that. You come back, you just go to bed and then wake up the next morning and come back and try and find out. What happened? And usually a lot happened because there's people contributing to that a day, all throughout the day and all throughout the night.

And so the way my brain works is Slack doesn't often work that well for me just having to go back and figure out what happened and all of that, but that's in

[01:03:04] Tiffany Bridge: Slack. It doesn't work for a lot of people. Yeah. Like some people, there's. Slack is a very particular way of working that doesn't work for all neurotypes and and also, there's the folks who contribute to WordPress because they are sponsored to contribute.

And so for 40 hours a week, that's their job. And when it's your job, like you'll get in there and you'll figure out how it works. But for those of us who are trying to carve out a couple of weeks. A couple of hours a week to contribute. Like maybe we want to do a five for the future pledge or something like that, and to try to carve out those couple of hours a week.

Like I have limited amount of time I can spend volunteering for WordPress. I want to volunteer for WordPress, but I cannot spend all of that time figuring out the next thing that'll happen because eventually I have to get back to my actual job and my family. Yeah. And my hobbies. Yeah. So I'm hoping that this really I'm hoping that one of the outcomes of this excellent program is to is to just have a little bit more thought into how to onboard new contributors who like literally may only have two to three hours a week to give to the project.

[01:04:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Really interesting. Fascinating conversation. I'm so glad we're having this. Peter is saying something similar. So thank you, Peter, for commenting. I've always said that Slack and GitHub are barriers to entry may be necessary, but potential contributors are filtered out by the requirements of touch tools.

That is interesting, isn't it? Yeah. The idea that there could, who knows how many. Thousands may have stepped in and helped, but didn't really feel that they could do that. And Peter said I've tried a few times to contribute to at least two teams, three, in fact, and I just can't work out how to do that via Slack.

Impossible. I. Sympathize because I get that feeling. If it's a one on one chat, like Michelle and I chat quite a lot on Slack. It's just ideal. It serves that purpose really well. But when there's 50 people all throwing their stuff in, I get lost in the deluge there. Okay. Brilliant. Thank you so much.

Peter also wrote something that just occurred to me that I didn't mention at the top of the show. Again, sorry, everybody on the panel. I am going to do a little bit of self promotion because why not? Frankly Peter says that we should promote the show that we're doing. We're doing a UI UX show. And yeah, that's what I'm going to do.

If you have, any interest in UI or UX, maybe you've got a webpage that's half built or a project, which is half finished. Petra and I do this once a month ish UI UX show where we raise two websites onto the screen and Petra takes a first look at them and gives them a going over with her expert knowledge about those things.

So she looks at accessibility. We look at things like deceptive design. And the, we've changed the format a little bit in that Petra's hoping to get non profit. Or as we would call 'em, non or charities, as we would call them websites, but also pet projects. If it's a big commercial project that you are getting paid for, then perhaps this isn't the show for you going forwards.

We're gonna be doing those. Yeah, we're gonna be doing those non-profit type things. If you would like to join us, then you can go, this is right on the homepage of the WP Builds websites. Just there's the start a little bit further down. You can see just here. Is that section and there's calendar links for when we're doing the show.

The next one is on the 25th of July. So not that far away. And if you want to send us your site, there's a link just there and Peter, we'll have a look at it and maybe add it to the roster. And also we're doing a show with simply statics founder Patrick Posner. He's got a four part webinar series starting on Wednesday, and we're going to be talking about static websites.

GitHub, how you can get forms on static websites, all the stuff. Static website is where you flatten it basically. And it just becomes like HTML, CSS, and maybe a bit of JavaScript. And you shut WordPress down. You build it in WordPress, turn WordPress off completely. So it's not there anymore. And then you just switch it on again when you need it and then flatten everything and switch it off.

It's interesting, really novel approach. So Pecha, I hope that's okay. Come and join us. We'd love that. We really would. That'd be lovely. Okay, so next one. I don't know if any of you want to raise your hand and say that you're a security expert. I certainly am not. So I don't want to go too far into the weeds here.

But this is a piece on the WP Tavern website. It's called Malcare, Remote Plugins Patch. Vulnerabilities allowing site takeover through stolen API credentials. This is to say that Sneeko, I think that's how you pronounce it, which is run by now what? Is his name. I have gotten, there we go. Sorry, Calvin.

Calvin Olkin. He's published a site saying how it's possible to take over your WordPress websites via the Malcare blog vault and WP remote plugins. Now the conversation gets a little bit nuanced and it goes a bit above my pay grade in that I think you need to have been. There needed to have been a previous vulnerability for you to be able to read the database tables because the API key, I think, that connects BlogVault and your website is held in plain text.

Now, I'm pretty sure that the guys behind Malcare, BlogVault, WP Remote, that's one company, by the way, it's got one umbrella company run by Akshat Chowdhury. They've... Mitigating this. It sounds sounds like it's their number one priority at the moment, but just to say that if this is something that you're using, if this is a service that you're using, you might want to read this article.

You may also want to update the plugin to ensure that this is not happening to you. So in the interests of fairness. Because there's two sides to this argument. I'm going to have podcast interviews with both sides. I'm doing Calvin tomorrow and I'm doing Aksha a little bit later, so they can both explain their positions on this.

But anyway, go and read that piece. And I don't know if any of you three want to comment. I don't really understand all this stuff. There's a mass shaking of heads. Yeah. Okay. Good. Okay. Anyway, keep your ears

[01:09:39] Tiffany Bridge: peeled for the podcast. There was a similar thing happening with... The all in one security plugin this week.

They were also found to be storing plain text admin credentials in the site database. And I don't know y'all, I feel like plain text secrets, the word in the database is,

[01:09:59] Nathan Wrigley: it's

[01:09:59] Tiffany Bridge: disappointing. And that it's, and that it's, happening across multiple security plugins is distressing. I don't want to.

I don't like to get out there and slag on people who do this because this is not work that I can do but I, it's disappointing. I'm, and particularly as a person who has to decide based on how many times this plugin is installed on my fleet whether to call a security incident and force an update it's not it's not great.

It's not a great feeling to be like forcing updates to the security plugins on best of our websites because the security plugins themselves are the vectors of

[01:10:45] Nathan Wrigley: vulnerability. Yeah. So again, it's beyond my pay grade this in all honesty, but it's a curious story. But I know that there were I know that there were two sides to this.

Akshat has his opinions on it, BlogVault, that he's representing BlogVault, and the people over at Sneeko, they had their opinions on it. So in order to get me up to speed, I'm, like I said, I'm doing podcast episodes with both of them, and I guess you could listen to them in tandem. Maybe I should put them out as one show.

You never know. But we'll see Cameron's making a comment and he is a developer, so he understands this thing more than I do. The thing with vulnerabilities like this is the only way this can be exploited is for a very specific vulnerability and other plugins. So the risk is not as bad as it might seem.

Yeah, that was my understanding from the article. Thank you, Cameron. It felt like you needed to have a vulnerability being exploited already. In order to be able to use this vulnerability to get these API keys. The problem, is if that did happen, then the API keys basically give you the right to do things like create new admin users and things like that, which we all know is not that great.

Anyway.

[01:11:56] Tiffany Bridge: It's a good thing there are no hacked WordPress

[01:11:57] Nathan Wrigley: websites out there. Oh, there you go. Yay. The just, it's an unfolding story. Let's see where this goes in the next few days. But thank you for your comments there, Cameron. That's really helpful. Alrighty. Let me find the next piece if I can. This one comes from Michelle.

She dropped us into the show notes a little bit before the show started. So I'm not too sure. That I've got much to add, so I'll just basically hand it over to you, Michelle.

[01:12:26] Michelle Frechette: Sure. So accessibility expert, Adrian Rosselli is actually being sued by AudioEye, which is a accessibility overlay company for stating his opinions about the fact that overlays are very inaccessible and actually cause more problems for accessibility.

And so he's being. Slapped with what's called a slap lawsuit, which is a strategic lawsuit against public participation. It's, that's something, they don't call it that when they sue you, but that's basically what it is it's a tactic to try to get him to shut up, basically.

[01:13:04] Nathan Wrigley: So is this a case of if you've got deep pockets?

You can just invoke this kind of a law, right? Yes,

[01:13:13] Michelle Frechette: exactly. Exactly. And I saw this come up from just it showed up in my Twitter account. Somebody probably retweeted it, and from the original post from his lawyer, which All of these are, they're all linked within this article that I wrote.

And there's been quite a lot of discussion on the post status Slack about this, and about lawsuits, and about legalities, and all of these other things. And accessibility is so important. I'd, I... Personally, make a lot of text bigger on my screens because I am now 54 years old, almost 55 years old.

I wear bifocals, I wear computer glasses, like all of these things, but I don't need to use a screen reader. I don't need the accessibility overlays, not overlays, but a lot of the accessibility features, but other people do. And so if you're going to advocate for accessibility, you need to advocate for accessibility to all.

And I think. That I've heard so many horrible things from accessibility experts about overlays and how overlays are just really terrible for accessibility. But so many freelancers, so many people building sites for themselves think that it's a wonderful thing because they don't know any better. And so Adrian is trying to raise awareness.

about the fact that true accessibility is putting in the time and the effort to actually make your site accessible, not looking for a band aid that actually just covers it up, right? And for a public figure like him, who's literally traveled all over the world giving talks about accessibility, To be sued like this.

I think that audio, I didn't realize coming after somebody in the WordPress community means you come after everybody in the WordPress community that is paying attention. And it's getting a lot of attention. I decided to write it up for post status and yeah, it's just terrible. It's just

[01:15:05] Nathan Wrigley: terrible.

When I ask a quick question is it because of the, what was the company that's come after him called? Is it because he's mentioned their specific product, in other words, in, in his accessibility talks, he said, look, here's the thing and right. Okay. So they want him to be quiet because he's literally mentioning things, which Let's say, for example, Google could find and so they don't like that and they just want him to go away and be quiet.

Okay, ah. Yep. Same information from my end Michelle. That is to say all the accessibility people that I've spoken to and that, there's quite a few now. That is. That is a message that you could write in large letters over everything that they've said. It's just the overlays are not the answer.

They're not even a vague attempt at an answer. They look like an answer because you can see them. And the kind of the whole problem here is exactly that. You're not facing the same interface if you can't. See it. So

[01:16:16] Michelle Frechette: I think it's not get rid of black mold. It just makes it look prettier, right? It's not the actual solution.

[01:16:22] Nathan Wrigley: And you also point out the fact that, this is hard work to get this right. It's difficult work. And they, it doesn't have to be difficult, but it's harder than the promise which they have, which is click a button.

You're done. So yeah, you don't want your

[01:16:38] Michelle Frechette: heart surgeon to put a bandaid. Over your open heart surgery wound. Do you want them to do it correctly? No, thanks. And so we want people who are, we want people to treat their sites like that open heart surgery. Look for the things that need to be fixed, so that you're not slapping a band aid on something and pretending that it's working properly.

You need to put the alt text in. You need to look at your the order of things that are showing up on your site. You need to use your h tags properly. You need to... I can't even think of everything right now. The contrast, the size of your text, like all of these things

[01:17:10] Nathan Wrigley: matter. So come and join us where Pecha probably will, now that we've talked about this, will wish to talk about it.

I think she's being sarcastic here just by the icon. She says overlays really are oh no, sorry, I thought she'd written are not so bad. Okay, good, I'm glad. Overlays really are so bad. A talk at WordCamp US sorry, WordCamp EU actually suggested using them. AudioEye says, Maya. Uses auto an automated solution to check websites.

And I still haven't found a single one that actually is accurate. Is it a slap lawsuit or an STFU? That STFU, he's got to be making that up, right?

[01:17:51] Michelle Frechette: No, that says shut the fudge up.

[01:17:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. That's what I meant. It is not illegal to hurt anyone. No

[01:17:58] Tiffany Bridge: but it is a Strategic lawsuit against public participation is, yes.

Okay. It is, yes. That's

[01:18:04] Nathan Wrigley: such a good acronym. A SLAP. It really feels like a Yeah. Like that. It sure does. Yep.

[01:18:09] Tiffany Bridge: And then Peter saying so in states that try to outlaw them, they're called anti SLAPP laws because in states that have antis slapp laws you can argue in court that you are being sued for this reason that they're basically just suing to shut me up.

For my protected speech and the the court can find that yes, the company is doing that. And now they have to pay your legal fees, but not every state has those protections written in. Okay. So

[01:18:37] Nathan Wrigley: they go at you via a state where they have no protections. I'm guessing. Yes. I'm wondering whether, so Pecha again, I'm wondering whether agent's case may actually help bring the issue to the fore, hoping he wins, of course.

Pecha. I will publish tomorrow in the show notes, but of course it's there already. If you go to poststats. com and look for the very recent article by Michelle, she posted it two or three days ago on the 14th of July. You could share that, with your social network. Mia going further than any of us so far saying they should be banned, which sounds about the right way of doing it.

And I feel, hope this could become a bit of a Streisand effect. Got a feeling that's got something to do with Barbara Streisand, but I don't know what it means. But I'm sure it's got something to do with like things going viral. If you protest

[01:19:29] Tiffany Bridge: about something loud enough, suddenly people who didn't know about it now know about it.

Oh,

[01:19:33] Nathan Wrigley: okay. Is that what she

[01:19:34] Tiffany Bridge: did?

[01:19:35] Christine Clauder: If I, yeah, if I recall correctly, and someone in the comments can correct me if I'm wrong, but if I recall correctly, she wanted to prevent her house. It's being published on Google Maps or something like that. And she made such a huge deal about it that it became what's known as the Streisand effect that it made the news.

And then people were like, okay, now I'm curious to know where to look at her house. Whereas they may not have known about it or cared in the

[01:20:00] Nathan Wrigley: past. Got it. So yes wouldn't it be good if this lawsuit resulted in just that outcome? It's we wish we hadn't done that. Peter Ingersoll, this is nice.

Lots of good, isn't it funny how some comments just trigger the, some things that we talk about, get the comments rolling, don't they? I'm so annoyed about how any search for WP and accessibility will result in ads and affiliate driven WP influence promoting. Overlays. Yeah, that is a shame. I hadn't even thought about that.

If you

[01:20:32] Michelle Frechette: search for WCAG, which is Web Content Accessibility Guides the first thing that shows up is an ad for Accessibee, which is an overlay company. So you have to scroll past the sponsored advertisements to actually get to what you're looking for. It's crazy.

[01:20:48] Nathan Wrigley: Nothing wrong with the internet. It's all fine, isn't it?

Thanks, Michelle, for the article. Oh, that's nice feature. That's lovely. And Maya says, I just checked and AudioEye has been suing little people left, right and center for the last couple of years. You never know. Maybe, Michelle, you've seen it.

Let's move on quickly. We've got a couple of minutes really left is all we've got. So it's not really related, but I guess some what related. This is over on your side of the pond. And I don't know how. Massachusetts differ from the other states, but I just thought this was curious, not WordPress at all, but a proposed matches Massachusetts law would ban the sale of your cell phone location data.

I don't really know what kind of information is being sucked out of my phone. I try, I have an Android phone, which I realized is probably more of a sieve than if you've got an iPhone, but, I try to, where possible, limit the, what my apps know about me, but there are ones that, if I want to use them, they know.

Like my Google Maps, for example, if I'm using it to navigate guess what? They know exactly where I am. And my understanding is that unless you keep a watchful eye on these apps, often they will ask for permissions like your location data, even though the app has... Nothing to do with your location. It's a picture sharing app or something.

And then it will consume that data, send it to their servers, and then that can be sold to data brokers who then sell it on, they're the middle man if you like, sell it on for cash. So it's data for cash. And this just seems absurd, frankly. I can't see a single scenario, apart from the scenario that you want to get rich off my data.

I can't see another scenario where this is acceptable. And Massachusetts are proposing a law to ban this. I don't know what you think. I think this should have been banned from the outset with phones, to be honest. I don't think these phones should ever have had the permissions to do that kind of stuff and sell our data as if it's some sort of commodity that we all agreed was allowed.

But yeah, over to you. I think

[01:23:02] Christine Clauder: that technology, it moves so fast. The internet moves so fast, the, at that, the laws just can't keep up. And then you have the bad actors coming in and taking advantage of, what they can get away with that. It takes a while for all these laws to get caught up.

And these companies that are doing these things are like, Oh, I can do this now. And they get away with it. So

[01:23:29] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Yeah. Okay. Just, Christine what do you, what's your thoughts on that? If you were to discover that there was an app on your phone, which you installed and it had no reason really to get your location data and you discovered that they were flogging it and making money out of it, that, that just makes me a bit cross actually.

[01:23:49] Tiffany Bridge: It's an, yeah,

[01:23:50] Christine Clauder: it's invasive. Yeah. And, but what's really actually sad is thinking about it. Now I expect it. I expect my privacy to be invaded when I use Facebook. I a hundred percent know that they're selling my data to whatever. So that I'm Amazon, I'm searching for a. I searched for an office desk, I bought an office desk, and two years later, Amazon and its affiliates think I still need an office desk.

Here's an office desk? I know you bought one, but how about another one for all the other rooms that you have in your house, right? And so it continually serves these ads, but it's invasive, but it's expected nowadays, and it's actually sad that we've come to this.

[01:24:35] Michelle Frechette: It's a bit of a human heat map, isn't it, though?

If you think about how we look at our websites for activity, we look at those heat maps. It's it's a human heat map. It's like a, the 30, 000 views saying where are the humans and how can we target ads towards those people and how can we target sales of ads towards those companies by showing how many people are physically in their space.

It really feels like Big Brother is watching from way higher up than we think. If you

[01:25:03] Christine Clauder: actually Google I just went to New Orleans and I was looking at local malls, and it literally tells you the busy hours. Right now, there are X amount of people right here. Same thing with the traffic, right?

How do you think that it gets the traffic Backlogs or whatever traffic jams. I'm a remote worker. I have completely forgotten what these words are. Traffic jams. Yes. That's what it's called, but that's how they know is by invading your phone location data.

[01:25:35] Nathan Wrigley: I think, sorry.

[01:25:38] Tiffany Bridge: Oh, I was just going to say that data is so it provides these very useful features.

But then, I was at a, a team meetup a couple of months ago. And one of my colleagues was like, I'm just, I'm getting all of these ads for this, like one particular product. And I was like, Oh, I know that product. I get ads for that all the time. And you and I have just spent a week in the same conference room.

So now Facebook thinks that you must also be interested because our phones have been close together. Oh, that's And that's literally how it works. So like when, people are always like, Oh, Facebook must be listening in on me. No, Facebook's not listening in on your microphone. Facebook knows who you've been near.

Because we all have phones with Facebook on them. And and that's what we're getting at. Cause they the rationale is always, Oh, we, we anonymize this data, we package it up and it's this huge amount of data. You can't just pick you out of it. But here's the thing we have documented cases of law enforcement.

Purchasing cell phone location data, because here's the thing, if you drill down into that data and you know my address, which if you're in law enforcement, you know my address if you know where my home is and you start seeing the same two phones going in and out of that address, eventually you're going to figure out one of them's her and one of them's her husband's.

And it's not that hard to figure out where I'm going, and, as the subhead says on this article Massachusetts is proposing this specifically to pro to protect people who seek abortions. Because that's a big controversy right now in the United States, is we've got all of these states trying to pass abortion bans and trying to make it, Illegal to travel to another state to get one and so massachusetts is saying well, you just cannot buy any cell phone data About massachusetts because you're just not going to get to know who's coming here for that purpose It's if you know where the abortion clinic is in a particular location and you see all these phones coming into it Suddenly you trace those back to their home locations.

Like it's chilling. It is absolutely chilling. And so I think this is really important and I want to see more of it.

[01:27:42] Nathan Wrigley: My, my guess is that when the folk at Apple, cause I'm presuming they did it first, put the geolocation technology into the iPhone, it came onto the Android platform later, I bet everybody just thought, Oh, this is great.

Look, we can now like. Do apps which know where you are. So that'll be really helpful. And then of course, fast forward 10 years, people have just come up with all these ingenious ways of really getting horrible stuff from that data. You're right, Tiffany. In the article, it makes the point that it's fairly easy to de anonymize that data, depending on how much of that cohort of data you've got.

If you've got the whole lot. You can probably do some stuff. Anyway, I just thought that was a nice piece. Let's hope that Massachusetts managed to push that through. I think that's a good idea. Maybe you do too. And then we're going to do the last piece very quickly. I'm sorry Michelle, we're... No, it's fine.

Oh, good. We're going to put this one up. Yeah. This is, you're going to have to explain this to me because we had about 10 seconds to discuss this before the show started. What's going on here?

[01:28:45] Michelle Frechette: Yeah, basically on Tumblr, somebody is asking that ads not have flashing qualities to them, which are triggers is so strobe and flashing is as a trigger for somebody with epilepsy, for example, or other seizure disorders.

And so somebody is suggesting that we not have those on Tumblr and other places, because as you're scrolling through something, you don't want to be triggered into a seizure. And apparently as you can see that if you scroll down there Matt says that we already have blocks for ads that are too flashy, but the reality is a third party of networks it can get by, right?

They can break the rules you can report it, but if you really want to make sure that you are not serve those kinds of ads, you can upgrade to an ad list. Version of whatever social you're on specifically Tumblr.

[01:29:40] Tiffany Bridge: And so

[01:29:42] Michelle Frechette: that's a little tone deaf to use probably another problematic phrase, but that's not being sensitive to.

Accessibility. And so to say you have to pay for curb cuts if you're in a wheelchair, to say that in order to, access things you should be paying for a separate entrance for somebody who's in a wheelchair. That's exactly what that is equivalent to and so somebody who we shouldn't have to pay for accessibility.

Somebody who has any kinds of disabilities, especially People who could end up hospitalized because of the issues that are served to them on the web. We shouldn't have to pay for The opportunity to serve to use the web without having to have a seizure trigger, for example. And so I think that was interesting.

And Alex Stein was the one who posted that on Twitter. And that's where I saw that was the link to their Alex has quite a a long post, a thread on there about why this is problematic. I listen to Alex a lot. Alex is a blind man who is my accessibility expert and who I ask questions of when I truly need to know.

And he's always gracious and kind in sharing his wisdom and knowledge with me. And when he speaks, I listen because he is the person who is such a great advocate for not only himself, but for others with disabilities as well. He even reached out to me after I wrote the article last year, after my WordCamp US experience and said, if I ever have problems, come to him because he knows how to navigate these things.

So thank you, Alex. Thank you, Alex, for bringing this up and for sharing and everybody take heed. We need to, if you are an advertiser. Be kind to the people you are serving your ads to and do not use Flash and do not use Strobe and things like that. If you're creating, if you're creating content at all on Twitter or on TikTok, please be kind to the people who are.

Using the services and make sure that you are not triggering something that is potentially a health issue.

[01:31:53] Nathan Wrigley: I'm going to add that into the show notes so that people can read it, but it was over on Tumblr that, yeah, the URL is literally indescribable. But I will add that into our show notes. I realized that we've run over the time.

So apologies to our guests for keeping them longer than they thought. Thank you to everybody who made. a comment. I really appreciate that. There was quite a few nice little comments dropping in. That's really lovely. Really appreciate it. Of course, goes without saying, thank you to our three guests, Michelle Frechette, Tiffany Bridge, and Christine Clauder.

Absolutely brilliant having you all on. That was a fascinating conversation. I genuinely enjoyed that. There was a lot of meat on the bones there, wasn't there? Now, here comes the somewhat humiliating bit of every one of these conversations. This is what we do at the end of the show. We all put our hands up and I take a screenshot and then it just is humiliating basically, but that's what you get.

So that's great. I think we've got everybody. Thank you so much. We will be back. Ooh, we will be back next week. I'm going to end it now. And yeah, thanks for your comments and we will see you really soon. Take it easy. Bye. Bye. Bye.