This Week in WordPress #263

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode number 263 and titled AA, a a hosting.com. It was recorded on Monday the 31st of July, 2023. My name's Nathan Wrigley and I'll be joined today by REM Costa Reese. By Derek shower. And by Paul half penny, we're talking about WordPress as we usually do. First stop Gutenberg 16.3 has added some new ways of interacting with patterns.

What do we make of those and how are the people using them with their clients? There have been improvements in terms of performance to the cash API, and also a breakdown of how translations get handled and the performance impact of that. WordPress contributors have been demanding transparency. About the hosting page. We talked about it last week, but we go a little bit deeper this week. There's a new handbook for word camp organizers and how it is that you might organize the speaker lineup to make it as diverse and inclusive as possible. Classic press has decided that they're going to have to fork woo.

Commerce. What do we think of classic press learn how to use the WordPress playground. What's it for? How does it work? How could you use it? And also Ty Paul graphy, we talk a little bit about a podcast I did this week and how type biography is a lot more than you might think. 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.

Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Now they all know why I'm saying that. So hello. Thank you for joining us wherever you are in the world. I really appreciate it. We're on episode number two. My eyesight, honestly, that's probably like font size 12 on my screen and I'm really struggling to see it. Episode number 263, I think that says of this week in WordPress.

Very nice to have you with us. You can see on the screen, I am joined by three fine people. The first one, let's go. Let's go over there. It's Paul. It's Paul Halfpenny. How are you doing, Paul? Hello. Very well. Thank you. Paul is the CEO of Filter, which is an agency based in the UK. He will be joining us along.

Actually let me do my proper intros. I think that's probably the right thing to do. Paul Halfpenny is, as I've just said, the C T O app filter, which is a remote first WordPress digital agency. Okay. I've added that little bit. And also by down there, MKU Dre, how are you? Mku? Rimkus gets the award. I don't know if Rimkus is on mute, but I can't hear him.

Can you guys hear Remkus there? No, I can't hear Rekmus at all. But we could hear Remkus 30 seconds ago. Remkus, do the refresh thing and let's drag you back in. See if we can get you back in. I'll come back to you in a minute, Remkus. I'm also joined by Derek Ashauer. He's over in the corner down there.

How are you doing, Derek? You all right? Can you hear me?

[00:03:41] Derek Ashauer: Yeah, doing

[00:03:42] Nathan Wrigley: great. Thanks so much. Yeah, great. Derek is a client site maker at a it's ashwebstudio. com. I hope I've parsed that correctly. Have I got that right? Ashwebstudio. com. And he's a plugin developer and he makes things over at sunshine photocart and he makes other things at WPSunshine. com, which I've got to say is a URL.

Nice to have you with us. Thank you for joining us. Thanks so much and much. Finally, Remkus. Let's see if we can get, have we got his audio? Have we got Remkus? His audio?

[00:04:22] Remkus de Vries: I har, do you have me?

[00:04:24] Nathan Wrigley: I can hear you. Yeah. Yeah. Got you. Yeah.

[00:04:27] Remkus de Vries: How you doing? You all right? I'm well. I'm well, thank you. How are you? Good.

[00:04:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah good. Yeah, thank you. A few technical gremlins today, never mind. I wrote half of this introduction to Remkus, and Remkus wrote the other half. See which bit you think I wrote. Remkus is a tall man from the place of the Vikings. He lifts heavy things and throws them over high things. Often he also know a thing or two about WordPress performance.

Check out his new project called Watchfully [email protected]. . I wonder which bits, IRA, go on Reka spill the beans. What's watchfully.com?

[00:05:02] Remkus de Vries: You just have to check it out.

[00:05:06] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. You don't wanna do any like little promo there, you just wanna Oh,

[00:05:09] Remkus de Vries: sure, sure. But it's it's it's a service I'm building together with buddy.

And it's essentially like the title says, it's something that watches over your website and focuses on health, on performance and core vitals and all of that, and gives you nice reports and lets you know where you are.

[00:05:35] Nathan Wrigley: Very nice. And brand new. Yeah. Yeah. It is. Yep.

Watchfully. com. I will keep a watch out on that URL in the future. The jokes are not going to get better. Bail out now if you've got any common sense. Thank you very much, Paul. I appreciate it. That's really nice of you. If you're watching this and you would like to comment, that's great. We would really love that.

There's just a few little caveats. If you are over our main page where most people seem to watch it these days because we've been doing it long enough and I keep saying this URL over and over again, everybody seems to go here. WPBuilds. com forward slash live. If you do go there, you've got to have some kind of Google account or at least the YouTube account, because the comments require you to be logged in.

They're the comments that we've embedded. However, if you are in our Facebook group. Then there's a little hoop you have to jump over in order to make it work. And that's to go to this URL wave. video forward slash lives forward slash Facebook, and that enables you to be de anonymized. It's been a while since we've had any comments in from there.

Everybody seems to go to the YouTube channel link. That works well. And we've got some live comments coming in. Thank you. Please do share the link. WPbuilds. com forward slash live. Drag your friends, relations, cats, dogs, enemies in. And let's see what they have to say. Courtney's joining us as is tradition.

A lot of people. Derek, for reasons unknown, now give us some kind of briefing on what the weather's like where they live when the show starts. Courtney's saying it's it's, there is humidity the humidity is finally down in Gettysburg, USA. That's great. Rob Cairns is joining us. How are you doing, Rob?

Nice to have you with us. Elliot Sowersby, just down the coast from me in Gettysburg. Good old North Yorkshire is joining us. Peter Ingersoll actually started this whole thing about the weather off. So here we go. Good morning. He gives us the full Monty. Good morning from Connecticut after a hot and humid week and stormy weekend.

We're having beautiful weather. It's currently 19 degrees centigrade on the sunny skies with low humidity. Excellent detail, and then he said it again for some reason, so I've put it up twice. Cameron Jones is coming to us from a very wet Brighton. Max says hi, thank you for joining us Max. There's a new face here.

Itamar, I hope I've pronounced that right. Itamar, very nice for you to join us. Really enjoying having new members and Darren Rich as well is saying good morning. Keep those comments coming. If you want to drop something in, if you've got a question, if one of us says something stupid. Put a comment in especially if it's about me, cause I reckon a lot of the topics today, I am in way over my head.

So we'll just see how we go. So let's put the screen on. First of all, a little bit of self promotion. This is our website, WPBuilds. com, if you fancy keeping up with what we do, just fill in that little box there, put your email address in, click subscribe, and we'll send you two emails a week when we produce new content.

That's typically this show. Which comes out tomorrow, takes me all of, a few hours to edit it after we Click stop on recording and we'll also send you it on thursday when we do the podcast episode You'll notice lurking at the bottom. There's this horrible banner When websites put like a ridiculous banner that takes up like a fifth of the page.

I It's disgusting. And yet there it is on my own website. And it's promoting the PageBuilder Summit, which I run with Anshan Laroom. PageBuilder Summit is coming around. It's coming back again later this year. We're doing it towards the end of September and we're actually looking for some sponsors at the moment.

So if you know of any company. Or dog or enemy or cat or anything who has some money to blow on a WordPress event. We'd really appreciate that. You can get in touch on this page. It's pagebuildersummit. com forward slash sponsors. And the very final thing, I'm just promoting something that I'm doing at the minute.

It's a webinar series with a lovely chap called Patrick. Patrick has a plugin called Simply Static, which enables you to flatten your WordPress website to speed it up, if you like, amongst a whole bunch of other reasons, but he's explaining how that whole plugin works. First week, we did just a brief explanation, the 101 of collapsing your HTML.

Then last week we did how to embed forms on your website. And this week we're going to be covering how to do search. We'll be doing that on Wednesday. At 3 p. m. U. K. time. Same URL as you are now. In fact, if you basically don't leave this page for the next 48 hours, just stay right here. Loads of coffee.

You'll get it without even click one one. I'd say that's worth it, but you may look you're all nodding Maybe not come back in 48

hours and join us, right? Okay. Let's get on to the word pressy bits and pieces for this week Just to let you know Derek Cross talking is totally fine. Interrupting is totally fine. Typically what happens is that I just introduce the topic, and then there is deadly silence. Tumbleweed comes across my screen.

And then eventually somebody plucks up the courage to say something. And then we go, and then we're off, and everything's fine, but fear not. I like how you're always so positive. Yeah, that's right. I don't know what's happened to me

[00:11:14] Remkus de Vries: this week. You mean this year? This decade?

[00:11:17] Nathan Wrigley: This decade. Okay. Sarah Gooding Gutenberg 16.

3 adds new tools for patterns. This is just to say that, yeah, there has been a new release of Gutenberg, which includes several new tools to make pattern management a whole lot easier. Realistically, there's not a lot to say here. It is just some UI changes. It's added a sticky header bar on the patterns page.

What they're trying to do really is just consistently get the UI a little bit more consistent, a little bit. More fine tuned so that you can hand it over to your clients and hopefully the the experience won't be so much of a miasma, each time you go back, hopefully it will settle down over the days, weeks and months to come.

I don't know if any of you push. Gutenberg based websites to your clients. If you do, I guess stuff like this can be a little bit infuriating because we have a change, but hopefully it's a change for the better. So I'm going to throw it at you, Paul. In fact, you get the tumbleweed moment. Yeah, no, you're welcome.

The other side, you've already broken the ice. You've said thanks.

You do, is it easy? Does this stuff infuriate you or do you just think, actually, this is great?

[00:12:32] Paul Halfpenny: No, I think it's great in the longterm, isn't it? We need improvements. And I think anything that wrinkles out inconsistencies in the UI is I get big stumps up from me. I guess the. The thing that becomes a little frustrating is, as an agency we might develop some videos or some content or some help content to help our clients to use WordPress.

And then you have to go back and redo them all every single time because the UI has changed. But I think that, give it 12 months. Maybe we'll be in a place where we're not changing everything all the time. And I think patterns deserve some love. Patterns are great, we, when we're building clients website, it's all about which blocks we're using, which custom blocks we're using, which patterns we're building, which templates we're building.

And actually it's a big part of the build processor for us. So I like to see it get some attention.

[00:13:24] Nathan Wrigley: I love patterns. Honestly that's basically the only way that I now create new content is to drop into a post and then pick something that I previously did. It's very rare that I start off with a blank page and start writing.

[00:13:38] Paul Halfpenny: Yeah, and it's, when you're building client websites and you're handing over to them It's so much easier to build a pattern and then go and put this pattern on the page. So for instance, we might Create a careers website for instance, and we'll build a pattern that might be A bunch of blocks on that page, which is make sure you've got the job description here and make sure you've got, your salary here.

And you've got your responsibilities here and building that all up in the pattern means they can just create pages much more easily by dragging that pattern onto the page.

[00:14:10] Nathan Wrigley: We use it a lot. Yeah, great. Nice. So over to Derek or Remcus, if you've got any thoughts on that.

[00:14:18] Derek Ashauer: Yeah, the better, the more that they're doing, the better it gets.

Then it's a win for everyone. And maybe in five years from now, I'll start using it for clients as well.

Yeah, so I'm on that train position established.

[00:14:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's us versus him now, right? Okay,

[00:14:40] Derek Ashauer: that's exactly I know. I know a lot of people are getting into and enjoy it. And it's always everyone's background and where they come from. I'm a developer person who hates doing client support.

I hate it. So I am of the ACF model where I just want clients to type in letter by letter what they want and my template does everything for it. I'd rather handle that for the client than them break a hundred things and do something wrong. Put in yellow highlighter text, cause I've seen it far too many times.

And that's great. But I've also started to, because of Kutenberg and all those other things start using some of those things more. More in page builders, just because I don't feel ready to give it all to clients yet. But but see the advantages of things like that. Because again, I.

It just gives them more power to do things, but but in the end I still find clients destroy things faster than they help themselves. That that's my experience and my level of client that I deal with

[00:15:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's true. If you

[00:15:52] Remkus de Vries: have clients breaking stuff, hey, here's me, coming to fix stuff, and this is the build.

[00:15:59] Nathan Wrigley: I think I'm going to put a course together on YouTube, it's going to be called How to Break My Website and Annoy My Developer. Ten part series, every episode's just going to be the same. You'll see.

[00:16:12] Paul Halfpenny: I think there's some benefit in using patterns though in that way in that actually you can lock stuff down so they can't break stuff, you get into the point with using theme.

json that you can lock down attributes and things like that. So you only give them access to the things you want them to and if you drag, if you get them to use a pattern. To do something actually you've got more control in some ways like I get where you're coming from

[00:16:34] Nathan Wrigley: totally So you would you're creating patterns and then in theme.

json, you're locking bits down so the client can see it And then maybe they can alter this bit of text as derek's described, but perhaps not Perhaps they can only alter the I don't know the p not the h1 or something like that it's

[00:16:54] Paul Halfpenny: more around the theming and the styling of those individual attributes are part of the pattern.

You're only going to use these colors. We're not going to let you use an h1 where it should be a some paragraph text. Yeah, it's, you need to dive a bit deeper into understanding theme. json to get to that point. So you're building sites from a different way up and you have to start that level and build up that way.

Yeah, and much, it can work. Yeah, but it's a lot. Yeah, absolutely that point

[00:17:23] Derek Ashauer: I think it would be a great tool for that 40 50, 000, client But when I'm doing sites for that, landscaper or things like that it for me in my experience It doesn't make any sense to spend the extra several hours to develop and put a CSS into theme Jason just have it in a CSS file and just bust it out, get it done and move on with my life. Because the amount of times they're going to change and do something is not that, is not worthwhile to put the extra effort to get it into the modern

[00:17:52] Nathan Wrigley: theming system. It is interesting. I do wonder if the two of you, Paul, you're.

Audience, if you like your client base, I suspect might be different because I think you, you work with enterprise level clients, don't you? Yeah. Maybe there's time to do that kind of thing. And also teams that can't afford to mess things up.

Yeah,

[00:18:13] Paul Halfpenny: but I think there's some middle ground, right? So the, could be a benefit of having like super app and controls that allow you to do that theming that takes rather than having to do it at the end or Jason you can do it in the editor and you can go and set up those presets and choose what's available and what's not maybe somebody that already offers that as a plugin.

Maybe I don't know

[00:18:36] Derek Ashauer: that it's changing so fast. It's wonderful that it's changing. Finally, it feels it's been around for so long and it's starting to finally feel like it's actually moving in a, it's progressing rapidly, which is great. But that's also a challenge for small person, individual companies like myself, who are just a one man team who was like, how to.

I have hundreds of websites, some clients, how do I, reinvent my entire process overnight to start doing this stuff? It's going to take a long time to reinvent that. And then all of a sudden, then you have, is this a, 2019 client, 2020 client, 21, and it just it's a challenge for smaller companies like myself to adapt to the newer stuff.

And honestly, it's one reason why I'm not. I'm not unhappy to be slowly facing out my client work and why it says WP sunshine on there and not actual studio as my primary tagline there, because I wanted to move to focusing on plugins. And but but Yeah.

[00:19:38] Paul Halfpenny: And the pace of change. Yeah. The pace of change in the block editor, if you're building sites three years ago, you're building sites very differently now.

So if you built a site in 2020, and that's your 2020 client, like you say, your 2021 client. You develop it slightly differently as you put 2022 and then you go back and you find like the UI is broken and

[00:19:58] Remkus de Vries: things like that. I'd say there's already a difference between, because I built quite a few sites on the full site editor already, I think about 20, 20 plus, there's quite a few that I built at the end of last year, which I'm looking to.

Update yeah here and there not huge stuff But there is definitely stuff that's changed too much for my liking and yet I'm still happy that I switched when I switched right. It's just it just becomes better and better The only thing that was really a pain in the ass was menus, which is being solved in 6.

3 It's still not good. It's still not nice to work with but at least it's accessible now And this you can actually get to it and explain it to a client. But other than that yeah, I'm happy that I switched very happy. So this move in, in making the experience smoother I'm a big fan.

And if that means my documentation, it's out of date which it is,

[00:20:56] Nathan Wrigley: it's fine. Derek, if you are moving, which I know you are into making plugins, can I recommend, I don't know why nobody, why has nobody done like. A navigation block that's like really good. Cause I agree with Remkus. The navigation piece is, until now, has been difficult, shall we say, inside the block editor.

I think they're making a lot of improvements, but it does strike me as great third party developer terrain. If somebody could come up with that and all of the different whiz bang things that you can do with it in the customizer with your chosen theme at the moment, that would be great. There is absolutely some opportunity there.

Yeah. Over to you. We'll come back. You run along now and we'll see you in a couple of weeks. We'll

[00:21:44] Remkus de Vries: see you in December.

[00:21:47] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. So my video series that I've just been scribbling the notes down on it, it's called how to annoy. Your developers and episode one is how to request unneeded color changes.

And that's that's going to be my first episode of how to write an incendiary email I'm on a roll this morning. Okay. Let's move on. That was cool. That was interesting. Nice little conversation there. The next couple of pieces I was mentioning in the beginning somewhat stupidly that the, there's a few bits and pieces that are outside of my pay grade.

I'm hoping that one of you. We'll step in, but a few of these are around caching and they're also around translations and the effect that they have on performance. So let me just raise those onto the screen. First one is here. Oh, has it, has my sound gone again? Sorry. It's my sound. Oh, so mine's still working.

Is it? Ish. It does my sound. Does my sound terrible?

[00:22:52] Paul Halfpenny: No, sorry. It was no worse than my headphones.

[00:22:57] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. Let's put the screen back up. Oh, it was your headphones. You didn't, it was my headphones. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. We the reason we were saying that though, is just before we started my audio.

So it was phasing in and out. So it was quite possible that my audio would just go the way of the dodo. So here we are. This is the first one by Johnny Harris improvements to the cache API in WordPress 6. 3. Now, honestly, on an audio podcast. It, this is going to be literally impossible to explain accepting that if performance and caching are something that you are interested in, there is a very detailed article here, which might be of interest to you and then moving on to another piece, which was by Pascal Birchler.

This was all about the performance analysis and in particular. The way that translation files can slow down your WordPress website. I've got to say in my time, say again. Not can,

[00:23:56] Remkus de Vries: they absolutely

[00:23:57] Nathan Wrigley: will. Yeah. So this was quite surprising. I was just going to go on to say that during my time building WordPress websites, I mainly operated in the UK and very often it was people fairly local to me.

And so translations really was not much of a thing. So this is why I'm saying I'm really ignorant of this. I never really had to do it. My only real experience of doing anything like this was. Installing a plugin and just playing with it to see how that would work for the purposes of recording a podcast.

But yeah, as Remcus says there's been some work done recently to try and gain some metrics on how much it slows down your website, the way that WordPress handles internationalization and translations and the bottom line is basically as Remcus just said, it does, it slows it down a lot. This piece is trying to figure out what can we do about that?

And again, it's incredibly technical. This truly is a hugely long piece. They're proposing four or five, it might be five. I think there were A through E solutions, all involving different ways of either ignoring things or rewriting the way that things are done or adapting the way that, that things are done.

I guess this really is all about the fact that A. You've got to be mindful of this. If you're translating your WordPress website, there is, there, there will be problems, but also the fact that it is being looked at and hopefully in the future, this would be some things. And I know Remkes in the past has enjoyed talking all about performance.

So yeah, two pieces there, the caching piece and the translation piece. I don't know if you want to get into that Remkes.

[00:25:37] Remkus de Vries: I'd like to say something about the translation because, if you consider that from the moment you install a translation of a site, so you select a different language and then WordPress automatically imports those, all of those files in some way have to be loaded to present whatever page you're looking at, whether that's dashboard or front end.

have to load the translation. So the loading of that is an extra versus not having to load it. So by default, it is slower. Now, depending on how bad you create your translation, so for instance, if you have one translation file for a plugin, that's quite extensive. In the, both the dashboard and the front end, and you have it load on the front end, the entire translation file, including the text strings on the dashboard side of things, that if you start thinking in that sort of direction, then it can quickly become quite, quite a bit of overhead.

And this is known for a very long time. The larger plugins and the larger solutions already handle this the way it should be handled. But yeah, it's still slow. It's still slower. And depending on, if you if you have a site that attracts four or five million page views a month, that's quite a bit of difference in terms of what performance you're leaving behind versus, small site that maybe gets a couple of thousands visits a month.

So there is obviously the larger site gets, the more of an issue this is in terms of raw performance. So what what Pascal and the the team have done is they looked at six solutions. Where their conclusion is that the revamping of the translations parser, so the actual parsing of the translation is probably where the biggest improvement is going to be found, combined with the new PHP translation file format.

So that's the Yeah it's essentially a combination. So they have tested all the variables, different ways of doing things and just looking at what does it mean in terms of performance gain? But I'm really excited that this is something that's finally being tackled.

[00:27:49] Nathan Wrigley: Is this in preparation?

Are they laying the groundworks here Remkus? Do you think for phase four? Yeah, a little bit. In which case they're just getting ahead of the game, because obviously if they try to do everything in phase four, And they haven't laid the groundworks in terms of figuring out .

[00:28:05] Remkus de Vries: I think so. Yeah. So this is a known issue for very long time for anyone doing this.

But the, and doing this meaning having deliver translated sites in a performance environment where you're aware of what what's going on, but the it makes a lot of sense to have an optimized version of your core app, which is then WebPress before you start. For those who don't know Gutenberg phase four is meant to bring translations and everything that comes with that in a much yeah, native to WordPress environment.

Currently you can only do it with there's a wider range of plugins that will make your site a multi lingual one. And you just want to have that in a smoother way because every single version out there currently is broken or comes with quite a bit of technical setup and things of that nature.

This is probably, I see this as the first step behind the scenes, working up towards having a great environment where there's actually start making sense from all directions.

[00:29:22] Nathan Wrigley: Let's maybe ask Paul being an agency, larger agency in the UK, do you have to deal with this kind of stuff or are you mainly working with UK based clients with one language requirement?

No,

[00:29:33] Paul Halfpenny: frequently more with multilingual and we've tried, various multilingual plugins. To be honest we're waiting to see what Gutenberg brings with Phase 4 with with Bated Breath, really. Because we don't seem to have found anything that's brilliant. So I'm really interested in seeing where it's going.

And performance, it's always important, being generic. But it's really important, but it's probably above my... Paygrade this one. I don't understand it enough. They'd listed out six options. It took me probably 20 minutes to understand what all the options were.

[00:30:08] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's pretty good though.

I got through the title in 20 minutes.

[00:30:18] Paul Halfpenny: I was surprised I kept on going to another option. I was like, Oh, no, there's another option. Yeah, I

[00:30:25] Nathan Wrigley: honestly thought it would be like a couple, but then when, yeah, do you know what's really interesting in that let's just put that page up, right? Because it is, it's really indicative of the amount of work that sometimes gets put into this.

So here's the page is Pascal's work. Bearing in mind, this is just a troubleshooting exercise. They're just trying to figure out if there's a problem. Yes, we've identified that. What can we do to fix the problem? And you look at this and you think, Pascal, mate, you have really committed quite a lot of effort.

There's links everywhere. There are, there's pros and cons. He's presenting all sorts of different options. And then he lays out the design considerations, the benefits, the caveats, and the risks, the effort, and the timeline that would be required. And he breaks that out in each. Of the different options right through to F and then he summarizes the whole thing.

And i've just scrolled through it all And there's more tables and everything loads and then quite a lot of commentary But I guess what i'm taking from that is a it was difficult for me to understand But I persevered with it and I got to where I got to But b was just the level of detail that was put into it and the fact that somebody somewhere is addressing this issue It's amazing.

It's

[00:31:37] Remkus de Vries: an absolutely awesome post.

Do

[00:31:40] Nathan Wrigley: you know? Yeah, do you know Pascal Remkes? Yeah. Yeah. Very well. Yeah. Anyway, I just thought that was amazing. Occasionally on the make WordPress site, you do come against these articles where you just think, boy, that is almost like a mini dissertation that somebody's done there.

So yeah. Yeah. Well done, Pascal. Thank you. Derek, anything to add to that? Or are you more like me who usually built English websites? Oh,

[00:32:07] Derek Ashauer: I'm the classic dumb American who only deals with English stuff. Yeah. But I'll say my plugins, my. Half of my customers for my sunshine photo card are international.

It is good to see that kind of stuff is getting handled. It's more of a core WordPress thing, not specific to my plugin in general, but it's good that we'll see the better that things help international customers, international for me the better it is for. More likely people will use WordPress.

And then the more people that are using WordPress, the better for me as a plugin developer. So anything that helps more people get into WordPress, the better.

[00:32:41] Nathan Wrigley: Do you offer a translation inside the admin then for the user interface for the settings and so on?

[00:32:48] Derek Ashauer: No, I just do, community translations and it's just part of the, regular translation

[00:32:53] Nathan Wrigley: files.

Okay. Interesting. Okay. Anyway, thank you. Sorry, I just

[00:32:58] Paul Halfpenny: had one thing on this and it was just, I actually came to this via... The post the Altice did recently where they've written, I think Remkes or no better than I would. They've written their own parser, but they've written it in Rust which is a really speedy performance language.

But then, that's discussed in Pascal's post as one of the options, but it's then not relevant. And I just, I thought there's something slightly interesting where different solutions.

[00:33:46] Remkus de Vries: So if it makes sense to do something in Rust I think the last great example of when it makes sense to use Rust instead of just using whatever PHP offers or WordPress for that matter, was a huge search and replace on an 18 year old 12 posts a day since 18 years old.

That's 60 gig of database. Probably a little bit higher even. That was a huge search and replace. So Rust made that fast. Okay, great. Use it.

[00:34:29] Nathan Wrigley: Meaningless color changes, but we now have episode two courtesy of Rob Cairns. Thank you, Rob. Episode two is going to be entitled how not to pay your bills. If anybody's got any suggestions for episode three, I'd be most grateful. Honestly, on my like okay, that's brilliant. Let's move it on slightly.

And we didn't talk about this. Oh. Yeah, I

[00:34:53] Remkus de Vries: just want to quickly mention the the cache

API,

It's just a short one, but what it essentially means that as a developer you have way more control over what is being cached and what is not being cached. How it's being cached for how long it's being cached.

The option that there is more to cache is also there now. It's a very. Welcome change in just getting the whole a cache API more complete and more flexible. Essentially, that's the, probably the TLDR.

[00:35:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. You've summarized that beautifully. Can I just point out that from now on, if I put yellow lines on articles, can we just all assume I've read it?

'cause that's, that, that'll be great. .

I

[00:35:46] Paul Halfpenny: do believe that some people have what's known as xenophobia, which is a fear of yellow. Really? Yes. Like

[00:35:56] Remkus de Vries: any yellow

[00:35:57] Paul Halfpenny: anywhere. It just, any, just a fear of yellow crack. How?

[00:36:03] Nathan Wrigley: Bananas and I don't know.

[00:36:05] Derek Ashauer: What about this? I just want to tell my cats with the color scheme.

[00:36:11] Nathan Wrigley: There are many days. There's a load

[00:36:12] Paul Halfpenny: of people crying in the corner. Unfortunately, they're watching the screen, but they're crying.

[00:36:17] Nathan Wrigley: I love stuff like this. So fear of the color yellow. Okay. That's really interesting. I bet there's fear of almost every color. Yeah, I know you're wearing. Yeah, I don't really like white.

I'm just afraid of white. I'm struggling to look at Paul, in all honesty. There's so much white. There's a lot of white. Santaphobia, that's so interesting. Okay okay, let's move on. We've segwayed enough. So the next one, we did actually cover this last week, but I know that Remkus has a background in hosting, and...

Performance. And so I wanted to retouch on this article because we just really did it ever so briefly. So you'll see the date is a little bit stale. It's the 21st of July. It's Sarah Gooding. And this is a pretty hot topic. I think at the moment, I don't know whether it's going to die down in the days and weeks to come, but this was the dropping of site ground from the the WordPress recommended.

Hosting page. I think it's called recommended hosting. In fact, if you go to wordpress. org, I think there's a, that you really within a minute, within two clicks, I think you can be at this page, it's really easy to, in fact, I seem to remember doing a doing a search on Google and if you just type in what it'd be great if one of you three could confirm if you just type in WordPress hosting and then click return.

I think the first result that you get to is the page in question. And you can imagine just how many people type that in every single day. The story is we don't really know how sites get onto this page. But at the moment, there are a couple of sites. I believe it's Bluehost and... What is the other one?

Dreamcast, isn't it? Is it dream host? That sounds right. Yeah. Dream host and blue house. If I got that wrong, you can check for yourself. And anyway, the point is there were three site ground got removed. We're not entirely sure what the process for that is, but it got removed. And so now the question is, okay, if such an important page that can drive.

life changing or business changing amounts of traffic. If there isn't a, if there isn't a a system, a community system for getting what companies put onto that page and we don't really know what's going on. The idea is wouldn't it be nice? Should we have some sort of guideline for deciding who goes onto there?

One of the recommendations that came in further down in the post that was that we... We use. So it says in here the post status hosting channel name sheet co-founder, whose name is Matt Russell. I don't know Matt, but he was mentioned here, suggests that Mullenweg, who's in charge, Matt Mullenweg is in charge of who gets onto that page.

Use the WP hosting Benchmarks performance data, which kind of brings me to this website and I can almost sense re's Temperature rising whether or not this could be a decent metric. It doesn't have to be this metric, but the point is, wouldn't it be nice if given that WordPress is a community endeavor, if that very important page were not to be behind some sort of secretive system that we don't really have any insight into maybe something like this.

Which is an endeavor to rate wordpress host upon all sorts of criteria yeah, so I didn't know if you guys had any thoughts on that a is this a little bit murky and b Does this represent a decent way of doing it? So remkes i'm gonna i'm just before you know explode I'll I'll let you come in first.

[00:40:11] Remkus de Vries: So much to unpack here. So first off the, any changes that has happened to the WordPress recommended hosting page has over the years. And I've been aware of that particular page since the first day it's been there. I don't know exactly how long that is, but that's in the 16, 17, 18 years range, but whenever there was a change on that page, it has caused some kind of ruckus because the process of who gets on that page and for how long and what are the things that are interchanged in having a party B on that page is absolutely shrouded in a lot of mist. This has always been at the preview of Mr.

Mullenweg attempts to get some insights into that have been never met. It is our guess as to what actually happens. My educated guess would be a party comes into a sponsor settlement agreement of any kind, and pays the foundation an ungodly amount of money. And it gets to be on that page, because if you are on that page, the amount of traffic that you get and the conversion leading from that is worth more than millions.

I don't think we're ever going to get the, I'm going to say this as politically correct as I feel comfortable with, I don't think we're ever going to get the full answer from the WordPress Foundation, which is represented by Matt Mullenweg. I don't think we're ever going to get there. So that's where I start.

Then the second part is we have a way of measuring good hosting. Yes, we have. There are multiple ways you can actually test hosting whether it's performant, whether it's flexible, whether it has options, all of those things could, are, are metrics in and from of themselves. So you can measure those.

And what what essentially is being said here is, by by Javier who is the hosting team rep there are systems that we can use. So why don't we use it? And I think a large problem that arises with using metrics like this, first off, I think we should use them. Make no mistake.

I think we have to be. Aware of what your hosting actually does and not what the caching of a hosting does, for instance, that's a big difference. But the moment you start using those metrics, some hosts, which are very well known hosts, like big names, like the biggest names are most definitely not the best hosting.

There really are not. That is a big discrepancy between what is being presented on that page and what is actually factual. So when the, when project Batrog is about, let's show data and let's have the data be the driving metric, you end up with a situation. where there's going to be a big change if that was the primary data being used.

In a nutshell, this is a can a can of worms, a hornet's nest or whatever you want to call it, but it's never going to be solved unless the foundation behind it decides to be fully open and transparent about it.

[00:43:49] Nathan Wrigley: I would just raise my. Little Google search. So there we go. I'm in an incognito window.

I did this last week and it didn't really go anywhere, but I just put in WordPress hosting. So you can see I'm not signed in. So I'm not getting any kind of personalized results or anything. And there it is. So page number one, or sorry, result number one gets us to that page. And there we have these two hosts.

And we decided last week that this. Text here about being listed on the page, which illustrates some things that you shouldn't do. For example, you need to have an easy to install WordPress system. You need to be taking care of upgrades. You need to be avoiding GPL violations, but then it also says that the listing on this page is completely arbitrary.

Yeah, I guess it must be one of those things that hopefully would be resolved. And if Remkus says this project bedrock, which was actually linked to in the article, the idea of having some sort of project here, the WordPress hosting team has been working on this thing called project bedrock that aims to create a directory in which any hosting company that meets a certain predefined set of requirements.

Can appear as a recommended hosting or a compatible hosting with WordPress CMS.

[00:45:11] Remkus de Vries: That's still only the base layer, right? So what you actually want to know is so Kevin Ohashi is who's from WP hosting benchmark, he does a yearly like proper scientifically approached benchmark. Is that

[00:45:29] Nathan Wrigley: the page we're looking at now?

[00:45:33] Remkus de Vries: Possibly.

[00:45:36] Nathan Wrigley: WPHostingbenchmarks. com. Yeah.

[00:45:39] Remkus de Vries: What this does is it actually measures. It measures database throughput. It measures raw PHP performance. It measures a whole bunch of stuff. Uptime. I think you want to know about uptime. All these things that are related to performance or good health or whatever you want to call it.

The only logical way is to do what Kevin's doing here. So you just want to have the best hosting presented for whomever is installing WordPress, but there's so much money going on in this particular field of WordPress that I think it's very difficult Get politics and money flows and marketing and all of that aligned in the exact same way as what the data is reflecting,

[00:46:29] Nathan Wrigley: Sorry, just sorry Derek just i'll just quickly raise these quick couple of comments and then we'll go back so courtney robertson said jesse's i'm presuming she means jess frick from pressable jesse's update is pinned to the top of the make WordPress hosting team site.

I confess I haven't got that open on my page. So I can't really show that apologies. If you've got, if you want to copy and paste what she says in there, I'd be more than welcome to look it up. And she also says I've shared Courtney says I should say I've shared a proposed way to score hosts based upon criteria Matt mentioned, including contribution to teams.

It's in Jesse's post. Okay. That's interesting. Cause that's another. Interesting metric, isn't it? That isn't necessarily data that you can get out of a query on the internet. The amount of, or that you Yeah. Stuff that you can put back would be interesting. And then Peter Ingersol checking the internet archive way back machine reveals how very little WP hosting page has changed since the very beginning.

So I'm guessing you are talking about the one that we were showing that is linked from Google, that first page where it's got Blue host and. Had did have SiteGround and now has DreamHost only. It's been like that for many years. Okay. Yes. Yeah. Sorry, Derek. I do apologize. Carry on.

[00:47:49] Derek Ashauer: There's a lot of, cause you talked about, the data and how fast servers loads. And that's absolutely something that's important. One thing to consider about that page is I think in 10, 12, 15 years, however long I've been doing WordPress, I've hit that page twice. Actually looking for it for anything as a WordPress professional, we don't use that page.

The people using that page are going to be people who are just starting into WordPress, maybe considering to make a website on their own using WordPress. And one important metric that they care about is customer service. And that's, and the ratings on that, what you're going to be more important to those people than.

How fast, the, microsecond that this server loads faster than this other one, they're not even going to understand any of that stuff. And and so customer service is something that's hard to just put into data for the people that will actually be using that page. And how do we rank a web host?

Based on customer service and how they can help new people to, who are just getting started with WordPress. People who are good at helping them through the, Oh, when you install this plugin and you do this instead of saying, Oh, that's the plugin. You need to go contact them, but they actually help you with WordPress to get people on board to help improve the WordPress reputation, because there's going to be a lot of people who are going to hit and run into technical issues.

And the first thing they're going to, the only point of contact they have is their web host. So they go there and then the web host says, Oh, we don't deal with this. And then they're going to be lost in this hole. So it can be a big factor in how people perceive WordPress is who they recommend on this thing.

And I, and their overall experience with what is WordPress. Cause we get, doing plugin support. There's a lot of people who assume something like Elementor is WordPress. They think that their theme, the theme that they bought off Code Canyon is WordPress itself.

So there's going to be a lot of confusion that they're going to think Bluehost is WordPress. So this is a really important thing, but how we rate it is not just technical data, it is their experience. Their host is the first real company that someone may use and interact with in their experience in the WordPress space.

That's

[00:50:13] Nathan Wrigley: also

[00:50:13] Remkus de Vries: a lot harder to, yeah, I was going to say that's a lot harder to actually measure because. Oh yeah,

[00:50:19] Derek Ashauer: absolutely. I'm not giving a solution. I'm just saying that it's something to consider.

[00:50:23] Remkus de Vries: And that's a very valid point that you mentioned it is something that should be considered, but it's also something very difficult to do because I think we've all known the clients or.

The type of client that complains more beyond reason. And if we're to use some sort of validation system, that's ultimately the best way to look at it. The amount of support requests versus how many are five stars, four stars, that should be a metric, but it's also quite easy to manipulate.

It's, it becomes very difficult. I don't think we're ever going to see a solution where everybody is happy with all the things added to the metrics of why we recommend this host over that host. So what Courtney added is a good contribution as well. So actual contribution to the project of WordPress is worth something as well.

So it's difficult.

[00:51:21] Derek Ashauer: Yeah, I think the challenge and contributions to WordPress is a little bit You have to consider, you know some thoughts. I'm trying to think how where to start this but There's a lot of companies that you know, when you get a company contributing to WordPress, they have a very business Reason for contributing and may not be what's best for the community.

So when you make that an incentive, a business, a business is doing I'm doing this for my business, not what's best for WordPress. I think maybe another one that I just thought of off the top of the head is how much do they contribute in the support forms? Again, going back to being how helpful are they with people getting started with WordPress since that is their first touch point with a company that can.

Roundabout way represents what it means to be involved in WordPress. That could be another way. I'm just came up with just now.

[00:52:14] Nathan Wrigley: I think they're all really good ideas. The difficulty is in the detail, isn't it? I've come up with a solution though. I've just registered whilst we've been talking.

I've registered the domain name a a, hosting. com. I recommend it's listed alphabetically.

[00:52:36] Remkus de Vries: I will register a site that starts with a hyphen then. Oh,

[00:52:43] Nathan Wrigley: That was a waste of 10. I shouldn't have said anything. I do think that piece is really interesting though about the community and I'm sorry, Paul, I interrupted.

That's

[00:52:55] Paul Halfpenny: all right. Sorry. I was interrupting you. I don't know whether there should be any recommended hosting. Oh. I know just don't do it like just do a page that talks about what hosting is and tell people how to go and find it and the kind of things that they want to look for in a host and let them go and find it and then you ignore this subject completely

[00:53:17] Nathan Wrigley: doesn't you know that's really interesting if you laid out on that page a bunch of really objectively useful things that are required in terms of Performance and all of that and you left the community piece to one side just left it to one side And then you could find a page on each vendor's website each host website that kind of answered those questions That might be quite useful.

Yeah any

[00:53:43] Paul Halfpenny: other way you're just going to find a way to gain the system It's like sponsored ads on google and it's like the recommendation Even if they were just really honest and went do you know what they paid a million quid to be here like you'd understand it's a sponsorship, to have an opaque recommendation system that you'll never satisfy just ain't going to

[00:54:05] Nathan Wrigley: work.

There's an interesting piece from Peter who says there are some hosting companies that have contributed so much to the WordPress community that they must be considered even if their numbers aren't at the top. So yeah. That's probably true. I think what we're all deciding at some, in some way, shape or form that is contributing in some way to the project would be a good metric should that page.

Stay live, but again, the devil is in the detail. That would be extremely hard to quantify.

I

[00:54:36] Derek Ashauer: absolutely understand what you're saying paul and I had the same thought but i'm also like I i'm okay with I want them to make some money because I want them to Pay more people to be part of the plugin review team.

I want them to, I want, certain things to be there and if something like that funds it, okay, , but does it fund it? If I knew that it was funding it? Yeah. Obviously we dunno do it transparency and we come back to the very first beginning question that we had about the transparency of the whole page.

But yeah, so I'm not against monetizing it, but I also agree that's also another very viable solution. It's just. Let the community deal with it somewhere else whether I'm like web host, what was it? Web hosting talk. com was a forum that, it's about all that kind of stuff. And third party site that you could, refer people to something like that, and let them do their own research.

But then that can also be overwhelming for new people as well.

[00:55:36] Paul Halfpenny: Yeah. I think the problem for me is that second link. And when Nathan did that search in Google and you look at WP beginners. Intro article, and it says Bluehost is officially recommended by WordPress. I think that's challenging. That's what and I think if we don't know why it says there, one of the official WordPress recommended hosting provider.

[00:56:04] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I see the choice of the words. It's officially recommended. Okay. That infers

[00:56:13] Paul Halfpenny: a level of authority. The. That convinces people when they just read it. Yeah, it's not the first result second result, right?

But it's implicit in there that you should go with them because they are officially recommended

[00:56:27] Nathan Wrigley: So what i've now done is i've gone out and i've bought hyphen hosting dot com

[00:56:40] Remkus de Vries: I'll just get an emoji domain then.

[00:56:44] Derek Ashauer: Oh, why I oughta?

[00:56:47] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. He's always got the answer, hasn't he? There's always a, there's always a better way. We tried. Is

[00:56:54] Paul Halfpenny: there a hosting subdomain? A top level domain? TLD? Is there a hosting? I

[00:57:00] Nathan Wrigley: know the site, isn't there? I don't know if there's hosting. Site and page you can get, right? Okay. But I don't think there's, can you imagine how quickly all of the good ones would go for and how quick, how much money would change hands for, I don't know, WordPress dot hosting.

Yeah. Yeah. That'd be interesting. Okay. Thank you. That was a, again, a really interesting conversation. Here's one that, it's a community based story. We'll just tap into this quickly because it's a difficult one. Jill Binder on the 13th of July wrote a piece on make. wordpress. org. By the way.

Anything that we mention in the show today, I will put into the show notes that go with this show. Like I said at the beginning, if you subscribe, you'll get the show notes. There'll just be a bunch of links, really, of a bunch of interesting stuff from this week. And this is a bit of a primer for Jill's thoughts on how it is that when you create a speaker list or you have a process for selecting speakers for a WordPress event, I guess Word Camp is what's in the title.

So we'll go with that word camp how you might do that. And she lays out a bunch of different. Criteria, what are the problems that we might face? And the enterprise, excuse me, as far as she sees it is to get an interesting mix of topics. That's a bit of a given topics and speakers that will draw attention in order to generate ticket sales.

Yes, I guess that's true. Percentage of local speakers. We were talking about local sites a minute ago, local speakers a ratio of male, female, non binary or the gender demographics of the reason that your that your event is taking place in balance of fresh new voices versus, versus seasoned speakers.

And I'd like to speak to that bit in a minute, because I think that one's really interesting. And then reflective of your WordCamp's audience in other words, Especially in the new way that WordCamps are going to be done. There seems to be a focus on more one topic potentially for one event, lots of smaller events devoted to one particular thing.

Are you talking to developers, designers, implementers? Are you going to have a particular language focus and so on and so forth? So there's all of that. Suggestions of how you might do that, including an appraisal of whether a blind process is a good thing to do. Jill, I think, comes down on the fact that a blind process is a good thing to do if done with other things.

And so then she puts forward some possible ways of making that speaker process happen. So there's that article. Again, I'll link to it. But I thought that was interesting, that piece there. About Not necessarily always choosing the same. Faces. And I guess it's true in WordPress, much like it's true anywhere else.

There are some people who have, what's the right word for it? They have notoriety. They have fame. And I do wonder if in the speaker process, obviously Jill's considering it cause she's written it as one of her top. Seven or nine items, whatever it was, if if that then pushes out people who perhaps first timers, if they don't have the clout, I've definitely been to WordPress events where there's been people and I've thought, Oh, such and such is speaking.

That's very exciting. I've heard about them. I've seen their YouTube videos and so on. So anyway. There's that piece. I don't know if anybody wants to touch this one or that particular topic. Should we thinking about, new faces as opposed to getting the, I think she said something along the lines of, the same people over and over again because of their notoriety and so on.

So I'll offer that one up if anybody wants to speak to it. Can be a difficult one, this Carnet. So it might not be one that I

[01:00:56] Remkus de Vries: think it's a good mix actually. You both want the people that are known and known to give good presentations or discuss difficult topics and know how to explain the thing that needs to be explained.

But you also want the new ones. You also want to open up as much as possible for anybody entering your community. Yeah, I think it's, as a lot of difficult things have tend to have one and the same answer and that it depends on what your goal is. It depends on how deep you want the topic to go.

It depends on the crowd that you're surfacing. It depends on the actual. People submitting a talk. There's also that. I know that for WordCamp Netherlands though I have been part of WordCamp Europe for a very long time from the very first one to the previous one, I've only been in the selection process for probably the first three or four.

But WordCamp Netherlands, I've always been part of it somehow. And it's always balancing between what we have available, what we would like to see, topics we would like to promote. And that is for this year's edition, which is in September. We still have tickets, by the way, should really come. It's no different.

I think we found a good mix. But I'm sure there's people looking at the mix and go Yeah, that's not how I think the mix should be. That's always going to be the case, especially now. If you look at the post Jill published, it's a long list of varieties you have to take into account.

And given that we're all doing this on the side, doing our best working with what we've got, inviting as much as we can. Like we've actively reached out to folks we wanted to see this year, and we've. We were happy to say that the ones we wanted to have, we were able to convince them. But it's a challenge.

It's difficult. It's just I think you said that right when you said, if anybody wants to touch this topic, it's difficult.

[01:03:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it is. It really is difficult. And obviously

[01:03:15] Remkus de Vries: it's never going to be perfect. You're always going to see somebody complaining about some part of the process or the output, which ultimately then go makes you go like, why the hell am I even doing this?

I'm trying to help. I'm trying to do my best. Am I biased? Of course I'm biased, but that's why we have a team is the team biased. Of course the team is biased, but that's because we, where does it end? Where does it stop? It's very difficult.

[01:03:42] Nathan Wrigley: The, and the, I guess lots of criteria suggested and if you've got an event where let's say, I don't know, you've got 20 slots available it makes it hard, doesn't it?

To, to. to produce something which is perfect in every respect over that small number of slots. I guess the bigger your event becomes, the more opportunity you have. I

[01:04:05] Remkus de Vries: will say this for WordCamp US, WordCamp Europe, WordCamp Asia having some part of the process being blind, I think is a good thing.

But some other parts should not be blind.

[01:04:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I think Jill in this article, she meant, she talks about. She points to the drawbacks of doing blind and I and I think one of them was your capacity or your your familiarity, let's say that your familiarity with the English language, say if you're, if that's your first language and you are.

Really comfortable with writing speeches and you've done presentations before, you're probably going to come up with a nice catchy title, which catches people's attention. So that's one thing, but also but also that then needs to be taken into account in a different way. So if you did it blind and those things came out as, Oh, that's really good.

And then you did another non blind something equivalent, but maybe for a different criteria. And then you match the results with the blind one and the not blind one. And you see where the matches are, then maybe that's the way forward. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:05:14] Remkus de Vries: Yeah, it depends.

[01:05:17] Nathan Wrigley: Paul, Derek.

[01:05:18] Paul Halfpenny: Yeah I think the hardest thing that I found, I've applied to talk WordCamp EU and WordCamp US, and I got selected for WordCamp EU for Porto, which was nice, haven't done for WordCamp US this year.

I think the thing that's missing sometimes is what they're looking for and that theme. I think not necessarily you basically throwing yourself into the void and not knowing, whether it's on topic or not. And I think that's just a little bit hard. I think if they went actually.

This year, there's a broad dominant theme of X, but we're doing other stuff as well. But, this is where we want to do it. And I know that's been talked about for different word camps. I think that might help generate people to talk about those things rather than randomly throwing things into the void.

Don't I've never run an event like that. I don't, it must be incredibly hard to sift through all those things and try and work out what will work, what won't work, who's a good speaker, who's not a good speaker, does it matter if they're not a good speaker, is it an interesting subject is going to find it interesting, I wouldn't know where to start.

I genuinely wouldn't, I'd probably throw it all up in the air and just pick the first 20 up and just go with that. Cause that seems as reasonable approach as anything

[01:06:40] Nathan Wrigley: else. I think. Stick it in a database and do a random.

But

[01:06:50] Paul Halfpenny: it's really I don't expect, I can write quite well. Actually, I think, so I'm probably quite persuasive in what I'm doing. And I've got loads of white privilege and stuff like that. And I don't want to be that person that takes somebody else's spot really. But I think it's really hard.

Yeah. I'd love to speak more, I'd also don't want to feel guilty about taking somebody else's place.

[01:07:16] Nathan Wrigley: I'm going to be doing an episode with Jill and Birgit Olsen about this in the near future, so that'll air soon, and obviously we'll get a chance to hear what their criteria are, and they'll probably flesh out what it is that Sarah's mentioned in this article.

Derek, I don't know if you had anything on that.

[01:07:33] Derek Ashauer: No, I'm more of a, I've never been anywhere close to it. I've only attended, a WordCamp Denver five or six years ago, one time. So WordCamp US will be my first one that I go to this year. I don't even know what is beneficial to me as just a. Attendee to even have a comment of how to find a good speaker, to be honest.

I think, my experience with WordCamp when I was so long ago was yeah, just as yeah, choosing speakers. Yeah. I don't have anything to speculate. I was going to go into what makes a good WordCamp in general, not specifically WordCamp speakers.

[01:08:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I reckon Cameron's nailed it there though.

Look, I reckon people have appeared on the WP Builds new show preferential treatment. Nice.

[01:08:21] Paul Halfpenny: I don't know why you don't do a live podcast at WordCamp, like on stage. That at other events, right? They do live podcasts. Podcasters.

[01:08:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I've never really thought about that. There's also, you're not really, yeah, I don't know. I haven't an answer to that. I don't know that anybody would want to want to see that, but typically the the rooms that you get, they're a little bit tucked away. And so it's not really in the main auditorium podcast

[01:08:54] Remkus de Vries: on stage would definitely work,

[01:08:57] Nathan Wrigley: but I didn't think that was allowed because it was, have you

[01:09:01] Remkus de Vries: submitted a presentation like that?

It's just a format. No.

No,

[01:09:07] Nathan Wrigley: I honestly thought that that it would be self promotional, if

[01:09:15] Remkus de Vries: of course it is. Every single person speaking at a WordCamp in one way or another is self promotional. I don't care how much you're giving, you're also there self promoting, in one way or another.

Whether that's intentional or not, but you are. So might as well factor that in.

[01:09:32] Nathan Wrigley: You never know. Maybe maybe. It won't be at WordCamp US, though. I did actually get a ticket to WordCamp US, but I realized that it collided really quite a lot with school holidays here in the UK. So I shall not be going, Derek.

Sadly, we won't be meeting up in person. Are you going, Remkes?

[01:09:50] Remkus de Vries: Still having the same issue as you. I still have the ticket. I might end up making it, but I also very likely I'm not going to. Yeah.

[01:09:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I just pulled the plug about a week ago and thought, no, there was a perfect collision of calendar openness on that exact week.

It was like, it would be bad for the family if I went. So I decided not to do it, but I wholeheartedly agree with Cameron. Sorry, say

[01:10:16] Remkus de Vries: again. If I can find a great last minute, like literally, if I can make it on time in versus back from my vacation and find a great, then I might do a hop over a bit.

Nice,

[01:10:27] Nathan Wrigley: You never know. And Paul, you said you are going. Yeah, I am going, yeah.

[01:10:31] Paul Halfpenny: Yeah,

[01:10:32] Nathan Wrigley: I am. So Courtney addressing the topic that we had just a moment ago, she said, Matt mentioned in the make WP hosting channel, some criteria such as contributing my proposal scoring reflects how to quantify the hard stuff.

Courtney, we must get you on so that you can explain what your thoughts are on this. That would be. Most excellent. Thank you for that. Okay, let me move us on some what I don't know how long I want to dwell on this because I'm not sure really what to say about it. And it's this story a little while ago when WordPress 4.

9 came along in anticipation of the move to 5. 0 when Gutenberg happened and all of that. There was a fork of the WordPress project to something called classic press. And it, there was quite a lot of media attention around it at the time. We covered it quite a lot because who knew how that would go.

It might've been that, they took 50% of the WordPress audience with them. It hasn't turned out that way. Certainly my experience I just don't know anybody who has who has gone with classic press and using it as their daily driver. Everybody that I know is keen on exploring all the latest and greatest that WordPress can do.

And if they're not using it directly, they're still at least curious about it. But ClassicPress carries on regardless. And they've decided that in order to be up to date, they're going to have to fork WooCommerce so that they can make it work with ClassicPress. But obviously, as more and more time goes between WordPress 4.

9 and now, the more difficult it is going to be. And, I don't know, I hate to say this, it's going to feel a bit... Ridiculous, but there's something I feel a little bit sad about this in a way, because I do feel it must be hard to put the time into a project like this, that it would require knowing that the audience is potentially not there in the way that you once.

I don't know if I'm quite summing up my thoughts on it, but I hope you understand what I'm meaning. Anyway, that's a thing. That's the story. If you're using ClassicPress, you'll probably be delighted. But I don't know anybody that is using it. So I'll just hand it over, see if anybody's got anything.

[01:12:56] Remkus de Vries: I tweeted about this.

I said, I get forking software to enhance and propel it into the future, but I'm lost when it comes to forking because of opposite reasons. What did you mean?

[01:13:06] Nathan Wrigley: What do I mean with what? No, the opposite reasons. What was that? Opposite

[01:13:09] Remkus de Vries: reasons is you don't like where it's going. So you want to stick with what is then the status quo.

So you're sticking with something that's going to inherently be old. And the, when they said that my first thought at the time was, okay, so if you're doing this you're ramping yourself up to having to fork every single thing that's important inside of WordPress. In terms of plugins as well.

And this is exactly where we are. So I think it's foolish. I think it's a waste of time and energy. I'd rather work on something that is a future forward thinking and not staying. Remember the sentiment when the very first version came out and everybody was like, Oh, I hate the block editor. It's worse.

It's sucks.

[01:13:56] Nathan Wrigley: That was why it was interesting, because you didn't know if that groundswell was going to go that way. So

[01:14:03] Remkus de Vries: everybody hate not everybody, but a lot of folks hated on it. And I know page builders still depend on the classic editor being there. So I still, and I get it from that perspective.

I just don't understand the I desire to stick with something that's just not, wasn't great to begin with. Wasn't

[01:14:24] Derek Ashauer: the part that I don't get is I, just a couple of weeks ago, edited a client site that's 10 years old. Running WordPress 6. 2. 2. It's doing just fine. I don't, what I don't need to switch to classic press a site that I built 10 years ago, the same theme that I haven't touched in 10 years is still running on WordPress 6.

2 there. I don't see a need for it. And it doesn't make sense to me. If you really want to stick to that old way of doing it, as you heard me, I established, I still like that kind of more, a little more classic way to do it, but I still run the most modern version of WordPress. Yeah.

Because there's no need. You can still. Do that type of site with modern WordPress. So it, and the block editor, the more I've used it, I actually appreciate it. And it's nice. And it is it doesn't make sense to me

[01:15:18] Remkus de Vries: either. I see it as a perfect example of what the core philosophy of WordPress is, right?

If you want to have something that is not part of the current WordPress trajectory. Build a plugin and make it so that it does what it actually needs to do for you. And I think ClassicPress for me is exactly what that is. It should have been a plugin. Have them take over the future of of the Classic Editor.

[01:15:45] Derek Ashauer: Wasn't there that plugin that switched it back to using the Classic Editor? That was really popular for a while. What more did they want out of that? I'm not sure what more they were hoping to get out of it.

[01:15:57] Nathan Wrigley: We used to have this society, this sort of tech society where I live. And it was basically just a bunch of people showing up on a Thursday night once a month to just have a natter.

It was really lovely, but it just, after running it for years and years, it lost popularity and it was, it felt a little bit like that. You'd go each week hoping. More and more people would show up and actually the reality was it was the other way less and less people showed up and yet There was a core bunch of people who'd begun it all and were very committed to it and they kept going until eventually You know everybody in that scenario had to just call it a day And so that's the sort of feeling I have around this I'd you know, I don't wish them threads Yeah I don't wish anybody on well, but I worry that you'll be able to keep that going And obviously at some point there is some kind of responsibility.

I presume to forewarn people if you're not going to keep developing it because Those people who are using it will need to be mindful of moving it over or going to a different platform or whatever it may be So

[01:17:05] Remkus de Vries: not too long ago. They had trouble finding Yeah, it wasn't a lot Either contributors or funds just move on.

[01:17:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think it was funds and it wasn't a lot of funds. If memory serves, it was not a lot. Yeah. I thought you were talking

[01:17:24] Paul Halfpenny: about Twitter just then, Nathan.

[01:17:26] Nathan Wrigley: It's not Twitter. There is no such thing as Twitter anymore. What there is a letter of the alphabet. Oh, ten. Ten. It means ten. Ten. So everywhere that I, let's just segue on that because why not?

Everywhere I've gone this week that's talked about that story, they always end it with, Did you know that Apple and Mark Zuckerberg have basically... Copyrighted the letter x up the wazoo. I don't know why Microsoft has done that but I can understand why apple did it, because Mac osx and all that so Yeah, but

[01:18:04] Paul Halfpenny: probably for all for slightly different things.

I think the devil's in the detail with people spreading that kind of news It's microsoft patents. It's something completely different or trademarks if something's very different Just slightly on the classic press thing though. I think there's other CMSs out there that work in the way that you, they want WordPress to work.

So something like craft CMS or Satamic, Laravel, like Satamic's a great CMS, right? Flat file CMS. You've got Gatsby. You've got all sorts of things that you could use. I don't really see the point in continuing to try and retain. It's like trying to. Keep your girlfriend when she wants to split up with you and go somewhere else.

Isn't it ? It's please do, please stay with me. I'll do

[01:18:54] Nathan Wrigley: anything. By the way, you said that word twice and both times I heard the word Satanic. C m s, .

[01:19:03] Paul Halfpenny: probably just said it. Wow. What even is that? Stata.

[01:19:08] Nathan Wrigley: Stata, yeah. Yeah. It was just my PAing of the word. It was too close to the word satanic.

That's, we look for we look for episode titles within the stop that we've all said . This is confirmation bias.

[01:19:22] Remkus de Vries: This is confirmation bias.

[01:19:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

I'm saying thing that's a pen. That's a pento. All I'm saying. Okay, let's move on. Let's get back. Into the WordPress ecosystem. Okay. This one, we've got a very short amount of time, so we'll just race through a couple of these. This is to say that if you've never tried this, I do not even understand, this is total voodoo.

I'm convinced there's a little man in my browser, moving cogs around and things, because how does this even happen? You can now you have been for a while. You've been able to go to the WordPress playground and play on the swings. No, you've been able to make WordPress come to life within your browser.

You don't need to hook it up to any hosting. All of it is handled with an SQL lite browser. It all happens inside your browser, as I've said. And I'm just going to click this button and maybe we can count to 10. So this is playground. wordpress. net. Here we go. Click the button and it's beginning life.

It's. Bringing itself to life inside my browser. And there it is. We have a WordPress, an actual WordPress website. Look, we got a dashboard, we got pages, we got media. We don't, we don't have any posts, but you get the point. And so this is now a thing, and I'm hearing more and more about this.

Lots of people saying this is such a fabulous way to. To experiment, if you just want to try out a plugin, you could just whip this up playground. wordpress. net, install the plugin, run it, give it a go, bin it. All you need to do is click refresh in the browser and you're back to an absolute fresh install.

So it's pretty transformational, but obviously it may be a little bit confusing for people. If I spend time on it, will it just disappear? What if I want to back it up? What if I'm satisfied with something that I did and I want to keep a copy of it somewhere? How can I transfer that into another different environment and so on?

And so this is just to say that a video, a 10 minute video has been made, which will explain. How all of that happens. Especially for novices, people who aren't familiar with whipping up an install, don't have hosting, I don't know. You just want to try something right now, then this is totally possible.

Again the magic, the devil in the detail. I don't really understand, but I'm sure it's terribly clever. So yeah, there we go. I don't know if anybody wants to contribute to that.

[01:22:00] Remkus de Vries: Has a bright future ahead of.

[01:22:02] Derek Ashauer: Yeah. Yeah. We've seen, a couple. Private companies coming up that do something very similar to create those.

And I found it very helpful and effective for doing just testing my plugin and roughing support. Just be like, does it actually do this on this client or this customer site that does this? Let me test with, quickly isolate this one plugin, upload it real quick and test it in a.

Environment where their one plugin is enabled. It's a lot quicker to do that than disable the 50 other plugins that they have and stuff like that. It's a great way to do that type thing. So it's a very useful tool to test and play with things.

[01:22:40] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, so I see what you're doing. So Paul has dropped a sorry, Paul, for some reason, if I try and copy that link and shove it over into the browser that we're all looking at, the link gets corrupted in some way.

I haven't really worked that out. But Paul's just sent me a link through. With a query string on the end, which is query plugin equals WP DXP, which is your plugin for personalization. And I'm guessing what you're saying is if you just use that query string on the end, it'll suck in the repository plugin as it's creating that install.

Is that right? Yeah, I

[01:23:18] Paul Halfpenny: think so. One of our peers sent it to me the other day and was like, Oh, here you go. And it just it, it runs WordPress and it installs the plugin. It's ready to use just as a single, it very much in the same way as InstaWP does. When you use like an InstaWP template. Which is, similar process.

[01:23:36] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, I've managed to get the, I've managed to get the link to come across now. So here we are. We haven't done it. So there's the little query string on the end. So it's your plugin. Hopefully we got the string right. Let's see what happens. So it did the download and now it's downloading WPDXP.

Clearly you're adding a tiny little bit more time to the whole thing. Let's go and have a look at the dashboard. Let's have a look at plugins. Sure enough. Look, there it is. So this is a great way to share, I don't know, a plugin with somebody if you want to just get them to test it out. I'm wondering if you can add additional query strings to just plugins.

I wonder if you can do the same with themes and variety of other things.

[01:24:17] Paul Halfpenny: Multiple plugins as well. There's an API. I'm sure we can come take a look at that. But the plugin is working. Nice. Anyway, yeah,

[01:24:28] Nathan Wrigley: demo,

[01:24:28] Paul Halfpenny: all sorts of things, try stuff out, support.

[01:24:33] Nathan Wrigley: So anyway, it's there, it's live, if you want to play with it, it's good to go. A couple of quick things. Firstly, I did a podcast episode with Julia Laco all about typography. Honestly, like I'm not just saying this. If you don't really think about typography a lot, please listen, she does.

It was actually eye opening. I learned loads of new words. Ligatures and armatures and all. I think it was armature. I've actually forgotten what that word is. But little things about how certain, the way that the letter is formed can make it really almost unreadable to people. I knew about line height and letter spacing, but she gets right into the detail of the actual curvature of the font and the little gap.

If you've got a lowercase e, That little tiny gap between the horizontal line and the curve at the bottom of the E. There's a name for that gap. And if that gap's too small, people see it as an O. And yeah, I'm really going off on one, but it was really interesting. Episode 85 of the WP Tavern podcast. I don't know if anybody's got anything to say.

We've got two minutes left, so I'll just race on if that's all right. Yep. Remkus looks like he's poised. He's muted. Is he muted for you? Yeah. Refresh Remcus, it's this platform. Something quirky is going on. We'll have you back in just a moment. Oh, he's back. Who knows? I didn't touch

[01:26:03] Remkus de Vries: anything. I was going to say, I love typography.

And I love the little details that make up the understanding of what we're actually looking at.

[01:26:12] Nathan Wrigley: Honestly, there was so much in there that I genuinely, not only didn't understand, but I just never even heard of. So it was really refreshing. So it's about 40 minutes or so. It's well worth a listen. It might open your eyes in some regards.

If you like icons, I suppose this is slightly related. I came across this week. It was a tweet somewhere or something. It's called icon body dot app. All of the icon libraries are searchable. You pick your icon library down the side here. We're all familiar with. Dash icons and things like that.

You can find all the dash icons. There they are. And there's 180, 000. Should you be thoroughly bored this week, you could probably look at them all one at a time. And you'd have a great time. So there's that dash icon dot app. JetBrains have released a new code quality platform called.

Are pronounceable. Quodana. I don't know how to say that word. Q O dana. Quodana. You can check that out. And we were going to do a piece all about this chap who was one of the founders of AI and how terrified he is of it. But in all honesty, I think we've run out of time. So we maybe push that to next week.

That's it. I haven't got anything to add Are we done? Thank you guys. Yeah, thank you very much. No, derek. I'm, sorry before you go this He thinks he's getting out of here

First of all, i'm just gonna turn my little light off a little bit We do this really humiliating hand wave right every week so that I can put it onto the screen thing and what i've noticed right is if you get your hands really What did he do? What did he do? If you put your hands really close like that.

Come on Paul. Can I persuade him? Yes. Look, we've got everybody. He's given us all. He's given us the Vulcan gesture, whatever that one is. Thank you. There's plenty there. We will be back next week. Thank you so much to those people who made the effort to come into the chat. Cameron, Max, Peter, Rob, Courtney, Darren, and a bunch of others really appreciate it.

Oh, actually we won't be back next week because I'm going to be on holiday. That's. That's nice for me, isn't it? . . Look you. But that's it. Yeah, I know me. But that's it for this week. We will be back next week you guys. There'll be a little ten second thing that'll hit the video now. Just stick around.

We'll have a quick chat when we're done. Thanks for watching. Take it easy. Bye.