This Week in WordPress #264

[00:00:03] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for This Week in WordPress, episode number 264, entitled, I have no interesting title for this episode. It was recorded on Monday, the 14th of August. My name's Nathan Wrigley and I'm joined by three guests this week. I am joined by Michelle Frechette, by Cameron Jones and Adam McLaughlin. We're here to talk about WordPress, so that's what we do.

We talk first about the enormity of the WordPress 6. 3 release. There really has been a lot in there and we come at it from every angle. We then talk about Gutenberg's 16. 4 release and some of the nice goodies in there. We also talk about 6. 3 in terms of the performance benefits that you're going to get on your WordPress website.

And the new, potentially new, kickoff to the Admin Mockup. The idea is to change the way the WordPress admin looks. And we've got some interesting thoughts about what the new mock ups are like. Some events to mention, Page Builder Summit, Bluehost have got a bunch of events as well, and the WP Career Pages Summit is also there.

And there's an AI one as well. And then we get into community news. We talk about supporting WordPress. org. We talk about people who have passed away in the WordPress space, WordCamp Asia, and a whole lot more. And then right at the end, a little bit of space is given over to some plugin news. So WSForm have got an InstaWP integration.

There is also the new service called ZipWP, which claims to make your site in just about 60 seconds. And also SpectraPro. 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. We are on episode number, I don't know, 264, I believe it is, of This Week in WordPress. I know. Where did the other 255 go to? They went on our website. Keep looking for them. They go on each time. We're going to repurpose this. We're archived. Yeah. Whoa, big archive. So yeah, we're going to talk about the WordPress news.

For the week that's passed. We were I was away last week, so I'm not going to try and cover two weeks news in one week. That would be silly. Instead, we're just going to cover the previous seven days. And as always, I'm joined by some lovely guests over there. First time, got it first time over there is Michelle Frechette.

How are you doing,

[00:03:05] Michelle Frechette: Michelle? I'm doing well, thank you.

[00:03:07] Nathan Wrigley: How are you? Yeah, good. Really good. I was very well rested and I've had a haircut, so everything's good. Michelle Fouchette is the Director of Community Engagement for Stellar WP at Liquid Web. In addition to that, she is also the Podcast Barista at WP Coffee Talk.

She's the Co Founder of Underrepresented in Tech. com, the creator of WP Career Pages, and also the President of the Board for Big Orange Heart, Director of Community Relations and Contributor. Post status. She's an author, business coach, and frequent organizer and speaker at WordPress events. She lives outside Rochester, New York, and she's a keen, avid photographer and you can find more about her at meetmichelle.

online, meetmichelle. online. Lovely to have you with us again, thank you so much. And over there down there, down in the corner we have we've got Adam McLaughlin. Have I said your name right, Adam McLaughlin? Yes, of course, it's perfect. Wins point and got the name, right? Adam runs build that agency.

com. He started building WordPress websites in 2011 and in 2019 started building monthly recurring revenue by selling websites as a service instead of doing the whole product thing. He now mentors web designers who want to get. Off the rollercoaster of revenue and build stable monthly recurring revenue instead.

Once again, buildthatagency. com is his website. You can see it underneath his name. Very nice to have you with us. Hopefully the first of many occasions. Just so that Adam, it's basically a bun fight. You can talk whenever you like. I talk too much. So I over talk him all the time. Yeah, no, stop the talk.

Don't interrupt Michelle. No, you can interrupt whenever you like. It's the only way

[00:04:57] Michelle Frechette: you get a word in at

[00:04:59] Nathan Wrigley: twice. I know. But feel free to do that because generally speaking, if there's nothing to say, I'll fill the void. That's just the way. Yeah, thank you. And finally.

Finally, not finally, but finally, down there we have Cameron Jones joining us all the way from Australia, Brighton, in the UK. He is from, obviously, from Australia, we've had him on the show before. We've got some technical gremlins with Cameron Jones today, but let's see if it's all working out now. How you doing, Cameron?

I'm good, thanks,

[00:05:29] Cameron Jones: Nathan. How are you? Yeah, totally

[00:05:30] Nathan Wrigley: working! What the heck did you do?

[00:05:34] Cameron Jones: Last time it was fine before the show and not on the show. This time it was not fine before the show, now it's

[00:05:41] Nathan Wrigley: fine on the show. Did you reboot your computer or something? I did.

[00:05:44] Cameron Jones: Oh! I have fiddled with a lot of things, So I'll just

[00:05:49] Nathan Wrigley: keep these fingers crossed.

I am so pleased. We were doing all sorts of counting exercises to see if we could get in sync. But anyway, I'm just checking Nathan was sober. Yeah, that's what it was. Cameron Jones is currently in the UK. He's a professional WordPress developer from the little beach town of Victor Harbor in Australia.

He's the founder of the premium plugin store Mongoose marketplace and best known for the Mongoose. Page plugin, which is used by 30, 000 plus WordPress websites. He's also the maintainer of the official WordPress plugin for the free donation platform, Kofi, which I actually use. It's a really nice platform that he's also contributed patches to several popular plugins like ACF and Jetpack.

And as well as having spent nearly a decade building sites with products for WordPress, Cameron spent time as a meetup organizer and WordCamp organizer, and he's also contributed to WordPress core. Bravo. Away from his laptop, you can find him on the sports field, at a dance class, or in the mosh pit at a heavy metal concert.

Okay, given that there's three options there, sport, dance, moshing, which comes first? Which would be the most pressing use of your time?

[00:07:03] Cameron Jones: Probably a concert, because they happen a lot less often. Yeah, okay. But most often would be sport. Yeah.

[00:07:10] Nathan Wrigley: That's just about every weekend. You're here to play sport, right?

That's the raison d'etre of you being in the UK. Is it like semi professional you do it, or? Oh,

[00:07:20] Cameron Jones: you're giving me too much credit, Nathan. No, I yeah, cause England and cricket England and Australian cricket season's run. During the summer, which is different times of the year. Yeah, I just thought, Oh, I'll come over here for six months and see what it's like over here.

And coincidentally, the ashes was on at the same time. Got to go and see Australia play a lot in England. So

[00:07:45] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, it's nice. I don't really follow cricket, but my understanding is the ashes was a draw, which is about as good as we can ever hope for. The ashes, by the way, to you two over there from the other side of the pond is this cricket trophy where they play for 25 days for this thing and it's honestly the trophy's about this. Honestly, it's about this big You could easily hold it in your hand and conceal the whole thing and it contains some ashes of a wicket, I think. Yeah, it's a bale. A bale? Okay, there you go. I know, don't even ask. It's a five day game which is often drawn.

There's no result because of rain.

[00:08:25] Cameron Jones: Fun fact though, the first international game of cricket was between the US and Canada.

[00:08:31] Nathan Wrigley: Really? The heck?

[00:08:36] Cameron Jones: Back when the U. S. was still a British colony. Oh, I see.

[00:08:40] Michelle Frechette: So

[00:08:41] Nathan Wrigley: quite a while ago. Yeah. A little while ago. That's right. Yeah. Let's talk about WordPressy things, shall we?

Before we do that, if you fancy drawing your friends, relations, colleagues, pets, enemies, anybody to the URL wpbuilds. com forward slash live. If you do that. then you're going to need to be logged into some kind of YouTube y, Google y account because it's YouTube comments. If you're in our Facebook group then there's a different thing to do if you want to de anonymize yourself and not have that typical avatar.

Wave. video forward slash lives forward slash Facebook is the way to go. We do love your comments. It's really nice when people do that. Rob Cairns is joining us. He says, hello, good morning all. I love this crew. Hi, Nathan, Michelle, Cameron, and Adam. Thank you. Elliot Sowersby just down the road from me is saying hi, Jackson.

Ciao from sunny Puglia. Puglia? I'm sorry if I've butchered the name of where you live. And Peter Ingersoll, as he always does, is joining us with a nice weather report. It is 22 degrees centigrade or 72 degrees Fahrenheit under partly cloudy skies here. in Connecticut. All right, Peter, I'm going to give you a fact about the UK and rain.

It has basically rained non stop for two months here. Cameron, just nod in agreement. Yes, I know. It's ridiculous. We went on holiday in the UK last week and not a drop. Yay. And then as soon as we got in the car to leave. Started chucking it down. It was just absolutely perfect. Anyway. Thank you to those people who have joined us.

If you fancy commenting, please do let's get to work. A couple of things to mention from my side of things. There's our website. If you fancy subscribing to what we do, just put your email in there and click subscribe and we'll send you a couple of emails each month. Thank you to GoDaddyPro for their continuing ongoing support of our podcast.

It keeps the whole thing going. Very grateful to them. A couple of things to mention. This is the most recent podcast that we did. It was called No Code is a Lie. And it got a few bits and pieces coming into me on Twitter. Lots of people saying, yeah that's basically true. If you fancy listening to that podcast and giving us a comment, feel free to do that.

Also, we've got a couple of events coming up. We have an event tomorrow with Pete Chenery. She's gonna take apart a couple of WordPress websites from a UI UX standpoint. If you fancy joining us, it'll be in this place, but it'll be tomorrow an hour from now. And if you fancy submitting your website, the URL com forward slash UI.

Drop us your website into there. And you never know. Peacha might well give your nonprofit charity website a bit of a going over from her unique perspective. It's very informative. Each. Time we do it, I learn something new. And also on Wednesday, same time, same place. This is going to be the fourth in our webinar series with Simply Statics, Patrick Posner.

He's been going to wrap up the series. We've been talking about how to build static websites, put forms on them and do search on them and all sorts. So we wrapping that up on Wednesday. So feel free to join us for that. Okay. Every once in a while, WordPress does something big. It did something big this week because now we have WordPress 6.

3 named after Lionel Ritchie. Not Lionel Ritchie, a different Lionel, but Lionel nevertheless. Absolutely tons in this release. I was lucky enough to do a walkthrough with Anne McCarthy and Rich Tabor a few weeks ago. I got a glimpse of what was coming, but major changes. So now you can basically do loads more inside the WordPress editor.

You can create your content, templates, patterns. The site editor does all of that. You can add pages from there. You can browse styles. It's all on this page, wordpress. org forward slash news forward slash 2023. And so on. This is the page that you probably got pushed to when you updated your site. You can preview block themes.

This is really nice. So instead of having to. instantiate a theme and activate it so that you could see what your website would look like you can now have a little try without actually putting it on your website sounds trivial but how many times have you not tried out a theme simply because you thought my site's going to look different for a period of time while i'm poking around do it on a test site instead not anymore now you can you can put things into place play with them and then if you're finally happy you can Click go or back away.

You can create synced patterns, which is the old name for reusable patterns. The command palette, my favorite is a bit like spotlight on the Mac. You can do absolutely loads of that. You can start things, you can go to pages. You've just got to learn the keyboard shortcuts really. And you can instantiate that with command K.

Or control K and it'll just pop up wherever you may be logged in on your WordPress website as a whole bunch of new design tools. I won't really go onto that too much. This is quite nice style changes can be tracked. So if you've got a team of people, you can actually see who's responsible for the calamity.

That has befallen your website during the night. That kind of thing. Footnotes block has been announced. You can hide or show content with the details block. We use that on the Tavern website to hide the transcript. It's basically like a little mini accordion. It's really handy. Loads of performance boosts, which we'll talk about in a minute.

Accessibility improvements and a bunch of other things. You can see, Adam, that I'm quite capable of talking for quite a long time. But that was a big one, right? If I had something to say, I would jump in. But yeah, that's great. Yeah, thank you. But that was a big one, right? That was a really big release that we got there, so go for

[00:14:43] Michelle Frechette: it.

Can we all agree that having the view page back on the editor screen is like the biggest sigh of relief ever? Oh my goodness. It's like night and day again. It's Oh my gosh, some of the features we lost that we loved are now back.

[00:15:00] Nathan Wrigley: Isn't that interesting how the absence of something can really be really annoying.

She was waiting for something. It's not always new stuff, which captures your attention. So I just listed a whole ton of stuff there. Let's do a bit of round robin, shall we? So Michelle, obviously the view page was a bit of a thing for you. Is there anything in that little lot that we just mentioned that sticks out?

Or maybe.

[00:15:22] Michelle Frechette: I have to admit I have not looked through all of them yet, but the little things that I've seen so far, I'm not mad at. So it's all good.

[00:15:31] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, you're not mad as in you're not angry. So that's yeah. Okay. That's great. All right. Let's move on to Adam. See if he's got anything that he likes in that particular.

[00:15:39] Adam McLaughlin: In my world, anything you can do once and automatically repeat is a great win. So some of those features where you can set a setting and it replicates it through the site. I'm. I'm happy to see that built right into the

[00:15:50] Nathan Wrigley: core. Nice. Yeah. There's a lot of that. Especially around the reusable blocks and things like that.

Yeah. Really nice. And Cameron.

[00:15:59] Cameron Jones: Yeah, the view page thing was quite nice. I haven't dug into it too much, but another thing I really liked was the ordering in the list tables for like posts and pages. It's a lot more obvious, like what is being ordered by what and which

[00:16:14] Nathan Wrigley: directions. So it's quite nice.

You're going to have to, you're going to have to tell me what you mean by that, because I didn't spot that at all. What is it?

[00:16:21] Cameron Jones: Like on, on your like list of posts and pages in the admin. By default, it'd be like, listed by date descending sort of thing. It's a lot more obvious now what's being ordered by what when you view the page.

Oh,

[00:16:34] Nathan Wrigley: okay. I changed the icons. Nice. I genuinely didn't see that, but I think I've only been into my site one time and I didn't even hit a list of any kind of disc... Okay, I'll look out for that. It's basically pretty seismic. They've done a lot of work and obviously... A lot of work going into the site editor and a slow but inexorable move towards having the site editor do more or less everything.

Seems like from my perspective, because I'm in it all day every day, I'm fine with that. I do wonder, maybe Adam's perspective would be interesting here. I don't know what clients are going to make of all of this because it's a bit of a big change. And if you've got a WordPress website and you're just...

You're the poor soul that has to fight with WordPress every so often. It may be that these kind of changes are a little bit of a jarring experience, I don't know.

[00:17:24] Adam McLaughlin: As much as we can, we put our clients on service packages. That's specific to me, obviously. And so typically if they need a change to their website, they're going to send us an email.

But we do have some clients who log in and do their own blog updates and those types of things. And some of them are still using the plug in that reverts to classic editor. And so just to give you some context, every time there's a major change like this, it is a bit of a deep breath for them.

And it does cause some customer service for me. Yeah, that's it's a bit of a balancing act, right? Because any new customers who come in or are going to be familiar with the new system, but. The changes for the existing clients. That's that's something that has to be

[00:18:04] Nathan Wrigley: tackled each time.

Yeah, I feel like we're on a roll with having chats to clients. I actually logged into somebody's WordPress website. A friend of mine that I was talking to whilst I was on holiday, he just happened to let slip that he was using WordPress. And Oh my Lord is all I can say. It was a real experience.

The way that the homepage was created was so weird. And I showed him Gutenberg. It was basically a bunch of ACF fields that made up the homepage. So he just had to pre populate. Here's the title, blah, blah, blah. And he had no design control and I showed him Gutenberg, which he didn't even know existed.

He was like Oh, that's much better. So in some ways. It's going in the right direction, but yeah. Anyway. Okay, so that's WordPress 6. 3. I would like to point you in the direction of an article which kind of makes it a little bit easier to consume. That is, of course, Sarah Gooding's piece on WP Tavern.

She released one. On the 8th of August, as you'd expect inside of WordPress 6. 3, Lionel introduces command palette, et cetera. She basically highlights the same things, but she did right at the bottom of the article, just right here near the comment section, she did highlight something that I didn't pick up anywhere else.

And that is that there's a new get involved tab on the about us page. I would never find myself looking at that page, not in a million years. Because I know what it's about these days, but I guess that's quite an interesting endeavor. It closes a 10 year ticket that suggested adding a contribute tab to the about page.

And the idea here is really to just get some community members joining up. And it emphasizes the fact that you don't need to be a coder. You can contribute in all sorts of different ways. Yeah, Sarah spotted that. Now, this one, though... is quite interesting. I actually really this and it never even occurred to me that this was something that was needed, required, desirable, but it looks like in Gutenberg 16.

4, so if you download the latest iteration of the Gutenberg plugin, you can there's a new experimental, so it's tagged as experimental, so you might need to Figure out a way to expose this auto inserting blocks. And the idea here is that in the future, hopefully there's going to be an option, whether that's done by code, or maybe that'll be some kind of UI that you can fiddle with, you'll be able to.

You'll be able to tell WordPress that a certain block should be inserted at a certain moment. So a nice one might be, I don't know, here's a collection of four blocks which we would like to put in every time a new post is created. And I just think that's really smart, really clever. It's obviously not really out in the wild at the moment.

It's got this experimental flag, as I said. But I just thought that was a really cool idea. They're also swapping out, probably, instead of spinny wheels for things, looks like in the future, we're going to get slidey progress bars. The there's two varieties, one where it goes from nought to a hundred and you can see the progress, I don't know, file upload or something like that.

And one where the bar just moves across and that's the. Just wait to basically bar and the command palette in Gutenberg 16. 4 has also got some additional things happening. We just talked about that. Show hide block breadcrumbs. You can enable or disable published checklist, which I think probably for most clients, once they're familiar with WordPress, maybe they don't need it anymore and you can preview in a new tab, so all in all.

Quite a lot of nice stuff in there, especially this inserting block feature. So again, over to you guys.

[00:21:47] Adam McLaughlin: Yeah, that's back to my world of something that I want done over and over or done by default. And to be able to set that up to happen by itself is a, it's a win for me.

[00:21:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Curiously, had you ever thought.

About that until it was like, were you like me? It was just, there it is. Oh, that's obvious. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm curious Cameron, Michelle, anything on that?

[00:22:12] Cameron Jones: Yeah, this is what I was hoping it would be able to do from the start when it was first announced. Like things like you, you're making a new blog post and you want to have a hero image, like that hero image should be at the top. Just things like that, like when it first came out, it was like, that's what I wanted to do.

It's okay, I want to have some sort of template where there's a hero image at the top. It's fixed at the top. I can't move it from the top. And then the rest of the thing is like freeform and stuff. And it sounds like we're moving closer to. What I'd envisioned five or six years ago.

[00:22:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. The way that I combated that is I guess it's a bit of a work around is that I created patterns for more or less every scenario that I could come up with. And then when I started a blank post, I would then immediately, click add, find the patterns tab and then dump in the relevant pattern.

That kind of works, but it would be far better if I could create a post and the stuff that I really needed every time was there. Because I think typically most people, they do want some sort of repetition there. If you're creating a post, like you said, if it's going to have a hero image, why not provide that at the beginning rather than having to go and search for it?

And again, makes the client experience a bit easier. Doesn't it? If all of that stuff is built in, you don't have to teach them about dragging in the hero block, or they might miss that or whatever it may be. And yeah. Okay. Interesting. And

not

[00:23:37] Cameron Jones: just, a simple example like that, you won't want to add space every four paragraphs.

Stuff like that. And, previously we've all had to do this with filtering the content most likely just to do it on the front end. But, now we'll be able to do it

[00:23:52] Nathan Wrigley: in the editor. Yeah, that's an interesting thought, isn't it? I hadn't really thought about that use case. Yeah. So I don't know what the limit would there will be.

I don't know if there's going to be, constraints on what kind of things you can put in and whether or not you can lock certain aspects. So in Cameron's case, you can't change the title of the hero because it just adopts the title of the post, but you can change the image. You can do some

[00:24:12] Cameron Jones: of that already.

Yeah, exactly. It's certainly getting a lot more flexible and powerful and that sort of thing from what it

[00:24:21] Nathan Wrigley: seems. Nice. Okay. So loads of nice new stuff coming around. I think we should mention this one as well. Let me just put this back up. One of the one of the things which is getting more and more attention in the WordPress world is performance.

The, we've got this I'm going to say new, but it's not really that new anymore. We have the performance team of which Felix Arntz is one of the contributors. He wrote a post shortly after WordPress sorry, slightly before actually. WordPress 6. 3 came around outlining all of the gains and the benefits that WordPress 6.

3 has got over 6. 2. Really, you probably will need to read this article a, because it's hard to explain, but B because there's some, he goes on to explain why he thinks the test that they set up is a fair representation, what it's doing and so on. And it's all about. Time to first bite and LCP last largest contentful painting, how one is taken away from the other and those kinds of things.

But the bottom line is if you're using a block based theme the headline statistic is that it's 20%, sorry, 27, a full 27% faster. And if then 6. 2. Which, by the way, had massive improvement leaps as well. And then if you're using a classic theme, 18% faster, so not quite as quick there, but still very quick.

And then he goes on to explain how this is all achieved, and honestly, it is, it's really on the edges, most of the things that they're doing. It's finessing things like the way that the emojis load. Who would have thought? That a lot of this is is, was responsible through clever implementation of JavaScript of the emojis loading, but there you go.

So it's an ongoing process, loads and loads of detail in here. As you can see, I'm scrolling through it. But needless to say, if you are using a block based theme, you should. In theory, I've updated to 6. 3 and just been like whoa, that's a bit snappier. I can't say I've particularly noticed the difference.

27% sounds like a lot, but I guess if it's already loading fairly quickly, maybe you won't notice it. But anyway, again, over to you if you've got anything for that.

Okay. In which case I shall move on. Next one then. Here we go. Admin design. I think it's fair to say that if you joined WordPress, like I did, I don't know, probably about nine years ago or eight years ago or something like that. The admin UI was actually pretty cool. It it looked really modern.

It looked really slick. It was certainly against its rivals. It's like Joomla and Drupal. I think it stood out as being heads and tails above them. It was lovely. It was clean and it's, oh, is it really? I haven't been back to those platforms. Yeah. Interesting. But if you log into more or less any modern SaaS platform, there's.

There's a lot that's changed. There's a lot of things which WordPress now looks tired for. So we are beginning the process kicking off as Sarah Gooding says, the admin design overhaul, and there's some initial mock ups on what this might. Look like it's going to be bundled in as part of Gutenberg's phase three, possibly, which is all about collaboration.

And so this felt like a good time to do it. If you're going to offer collaboration, why not offer a UI to do that? And if it's going to need some additional features But it's interesting. There's a little video here showing what it looks like. You probably can't see the video, but if you go to the page on the tavern you'll be able to play that video.

It's really short. It's about 25 seconds. No, sorry. It's only about five seconds. And it shows this idea that the menus will be locked to the left, much bigger than they are at the moment. But they will be this sort of swipable. You'll move, you'll click a menu link and the whole menu will move across.

You get this on things like iOS and Android. And then once you're in that menu, if you want to move back, you'd click the back arrow and the whole menu would sweep back again. And really the comments that I saw were largely negative. Most people were saying they thought this was a fairly tortuous way to do things.

Especially if you've got. Like three layers down, how do you get back to where you need to be? If you've got to go through various other layers, anyway, pointers, it's a first attempt. It's just an idea. So if you want to contribute onto this, there's some bits and pieces in this post, but yeah, lots and lots of comments here about people saying it seems to be not the best way to do it.

Goodness grief. I wouldn't like to be in charge of that project. Cause I know that. As I've said before, I have the design skills of a potato and WordPress would be significantly worse off if I was in charge. But what do you think? Did you get, did you three get a chance to see this? And if you did any thoughts, any good move on?

I'm cool

[00:29:21] Adam McLaughlin: with the. The functional improvements when they try to speed things up or make things more secure, but I'm in the camp of if it's not broke, don't fix it when it comes to the dashboard. As far as working with clients, these clients don't want and. Brand new interface, I hope there's an opportunity to revert.

And also myself, if I have a client who wants a 10 minute change, I just want to get in and make their 10 minute change and get out. I'm not wanting to get in and learn a new dashboard every, so many times or after so long, I do like that. It says, welcome back, Adam. I'm sorry. Everybody else has their name in the welcome back space, but for me.

It's going to be great every time I log in. So there, actually I do like the new interface.

[00:30:11] Nathan Wrigley: There's one bit of the new interface you really like. It's the welcome. Do you know what? I know this is going to sound very churlish, but the fact that my WordPress website mostly says howdy In the top right hand corner is, we don't use that word in the UK.

[00:30:26] Cameron Jones: Nobody says howdy. Change your language to

[00:30:29] Nathan Wrigley: English UK. I know, I really should, but I do think that's funny. The the thing here about this menu moving in and out, I do think that would if this was the way it was done, it would look lovely on like a phone or something, I'm sure. But I just think once you've got three or four levels down, I don't know how that would, let me just play that again and you'll get an impression of what happens.

So yeah, you can see it swipes over, you go back and obviously if you were four layers down, that could become. A little bit clunky. Any other thoughts on this, Michelle or Cameron before I move on?

[00:31:08] Cameron Jones: Are you muted? Michelle?

[00:31:11] Nathan Wrigley: Is Michelle muted? I don't know. Are you trying to speak Michelle? You can nod and if you are Oh she is. Okay. Let's have a look. Let's see why that is. Let me take that off the screen. I don't think you're muted in here at least. No. I can mute you and I can unmute you so you are unmuted.

My suggestion, Michelle would just be, go back into the. The audio settings and see if you can do it. And if that fails to work, do what Cameron did, refresh. Yeah. And we'll get you back in. And hopefully we'll get you back in and we'll talk about this some more. Whilst you do that, Michelle, I'll talk about I think Michelle is going to

[00:31:49] Adam McLaughlin: say that she also appreciates that it's going to default to welcome back Adam.

Yes. So we're all on the

[00:31:54] Nathan Wrigley: same page. Yeah. I'm pretty good at lip reading and I could see her saying the word like and Adam. Or maybe she just likes you, Adam. Maybe that's all it was. She just thinks you're a thoroughly good chap. Are you back? Can you hear me now? Yeah. Can you hear me now? Yeah.

[00:32:11] Michelle Frechette: What I was saying is that improvements to the dashboard should always be to make things simpler, not to make things more difficult.

And if I have to click more than I did before, that is not an improvement to me.

[00:32:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, an example comment would be somebody called Sally G, who gave the first comment. She said, I am very worried about this. I have enough problems with the new block editor. I don't need vast changes to the dashboard.

Actually, I would really welcome vast changes to the dashboard, but I think it needs to be done with the community in mind. But this isn't... Here's what we're going to do, what we saw, the videos that we saw and the, and what have you, this is WordPress working, right? This is the iterative process, stick something out, let everybody have a look.

If they like it, they can all say, Oh yes. And if they don't, they can write comments. And in the open, we can make the project better. So anyway

[00:33:04] Cameron Jones: they did preview something like this. I think it was at a WordCamp about a year ago where they had the exact same navigation menu for the admin. And everyone hated it then.

And a year later, everyone's hating it now. Are they really listening? Take notes. I do like that, it's got like the preview of the site, like the actual dashboard page itself that you first land on is useless in its current state pretty much. So I would welcome changes to that. But the navigation menu like that would work fine on a mobile phone.

If I was editing my site on a phone, that would be perfect. But like having to click through things to try and find Menu items. Especially if you've just installed a plugin and you've ever used it before, and you don't know where the settings pages, if I'm going to have to make 50 clicks to go through several layers of menus to try and find where the settings pages.

I'm going to not have as much hair as I do now.

[00:34:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I get it. I'm probably going to offend my neighbours too. Yeah I genuinely think this is a really difficult challenge. Just spanning the breadth of different opinions and the use cases and the devices that everybody's going to be on. I do think. It's yeah, it's going to be tricky anyway, that process is kicking off.

If you are interested, go and check out the WP talent article and you will be able to see exactly what is being proposed. So yeah. We've got a comment here from Rob. I don't know what, which thing we were talking about when that was the.

[00:34:41] Cameron Jones: Contribute tab on

[00:34:42] Nathan Wrigley: the about page. Oh, thank you Rob. I did not realize that.

Thank you Courtney as well. That's very kind of you so important says Peter Ingersoll to be part of the process rather than just responding after it. Yes That's a good point because you feel that if you didn't get your horse in the race Then you really you know, you don't stand any chance of winning So if you do have strong opinions about the way that this stuff is going to go put your Put your horse in the race.

I've got no other metaphor. That's get your horse and shove it in the race That's what you and then sometimes no changes are better than some change. I do feel though Rob, I do feel that as time goes on the wordpress ui does start to become More and more of an impediment to the user adoption because whilst i'm okay with it I think a modern user like my kids for example who have been Brought up on real slick interfaces these days.

I do think they look at WordPress and go, Oh, it's a bit, it's a bit clunky. Okie doke. Let's talk about a few events. If that's all right with you guys. First one is a page builder summit. It's an event. Shameless blog. Yeah. Shameless blog. Shameless. How dare I? So we're back. We're back. 18th to the 22nd.

No. Oh, look what I've written there. Look what I've done there. 20 seconds. Yeah. 18th to the 22nd. . It's great. 22. Yeah. I'm gonna, I'm gonna 22 replace, I'm gonna replace 20 seconds with 2022. And then just write the word Adam. 18th to the 22 of them.

We're coming back. We've got a whole list of great speakers. There's a boat to load as we always have. If you fancy being informed about when that event is happening. Yep. Just click this little button right here and you just fill out your name. Basically, we just put you on to our email list. Each time the event comes around, we scrub the email list and.

Begin again, because it just feels like that's the best way to run these kinds of events so that you're not getting marketed to, if you've got no interest in it this time around. But yeah 18th to the 22nd of September this year come and join us, it's five day event, loads of speakers, loads of fun, bingo.

We have bingo. You tell me another live song that has bingo. Come on. I love it. Who's speaking, Nathan? Oh Cameron yeah. Do you know anybody? I'm not sure. I haven't listed the the speakers yet, have I? No, we're keeping that under our proverbial hats. But I think comments from Cameron there, maybe be a bit of a giveaway.

[00:37:31] Michelle Frechette: Have you filled the speaker lineup

[00:37:34] Nathan Wrigley: already? We have more or less filled it. Occasionally somebody will send an email and it's, and it just seems so well timed and the topic just seems so perfect that we dropped somebody in at the last minute, but yeah, it's been closed for about a month, I would like to say that if you fancy sponsoring the event, that would be amazing you can just go to pagebuildersummit.

com forward slash sponsors, and we're keen to get some more people on into that role as well. Okay. There we go. Plug over. Bluehost, I don't know if this page is new or not, but it came into my feed. So I thought I'd mention it. They've got this new page where they appear to be beginning a whole load of new events.

So as you can see on here, they've got something to do with announcing WordCamp US on the 24th of August. They've got building your brand with WordPress on the 31st of August. How website caching works. They're tackling that on the 14th of September. And then they've got our email marketing best practices webinar.

On the 28th, so I'll put the link to that in the show notes, but I don't know if this is a new endeavor on their part or if this is just a new page, but anyway, there it is. So there's those. Also, what about this one, Michelle? What the heck

[00:38:53] Michelle Frechette: is this? I love that Cameron is actually the one that put this in before I had a chance to for this week's.

Nice. Yeah, but we're doing the word, the WordPress. Career Summit again this year, WC Career Summit. And it seems very timely, especially with all the layoffs that have happened in the last year. And we wanted to make sure we actually moved it back to October because it, we need to do it justice.

And this has been a very busy summer. So we are right now, the call for speakers is open and we do give a hundred dollars stipend to each speaker, which I know Cameron was like, wow, imagine paying your speakers. But we want to. We pull in people from outside WordPress two for this event. We have two tracks.

One is for job seekers and the other is for employers and hiring managers. And so they'll be, those two tracks. And we do have a keynote speaker. I'm waiting to announce who she is because I don't have all of her information yet to put it on the site. But she's somebody that I think everybody will recognize and wanna hear.

Yeah, so it's a free event, sign up to attend. And like I said, you can. Still apply through the end of this month to speak.

[00:40:05] Nathan Wrigley: 30 minutes recorded is what you're after, isn't it? So it's all pre recorded. Yes. I think that's quite a nice, we do that for the Page Builder Summit and whilst I do love a live event, I do think it's quite it's a slightly anxious or anxiety busting a bit, isn't it?

Because at least you can put your best foot forward and know that what you've. What you've created is the best version because I think when you do a live event like this it's quite easy to get derailed, isn't it? And you go off in all sorts of tangents. And the thing that you really wanted to say, you've suddenly find that you've got no minutes left in order to say it.

So I appreciate that. It makes,

[00:40:44] Michelle Frechette: yeah, it makes having all of those in your library, nice too, because they were all. Done specifically for that 30 30 minute timeframe. So if you were to scroll up to the top, you can still see all of last year's. If you say click past summits, you can still see all of the talks that were there last year.

It gives you an opportunity to still see all those.

[00:41:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Nice. Thank you for putting that on. So there we go. You can apply wpcareersummit. com. And then if you add apply to speak all hyphenated then yeah, you can get yourself into the roster.

[00:41:20] Michelle Frechette: This is a post status event. So if anybody's part of post status, you'll have seen this before

[00:41:24] Nathan Wrigley: as well.

Honestly, people coming on this podcast and promoting their own stuff, what the heck? I don't approve of promoting your own stuff at all. Back to the page builder summit. I'm going to just talk for a few more minutes about the excellent speed. No, I'm not. Okay. So yeah, go and check that out.

That's great. More events, WordCamp Asia. It was a great success. I wasn't able to go. I know that you were there. But you were. Oh yeah, the cardboard cutout. I saw you there everywhere! Yeah, that was actually quite funny. There was a cardboard cutout of my head, which managed to make it there, and it appeared in also quite some interesting places actually.

There's a few of us between. Whoa, hang on, that's not savoury. That's not suitable for the children. But I, I don't know if I'll be there in spirit, but yeah, WordCamp Asia 2024 is in Taipei, Taiwan. It's happening from the 7th of March to the 9th of March. And obviously massive event, probably I would imagine right up there.

Third, possibly biggest after Europe and WordCamp US. They are after different types of talks, 40 minute long talk, which is a bit like Michelle's, but it's 30 minute talk, 10 minute Q and A. Lightning talks of 10 minutes. With a little bit of Q& A at the end panel discussions. If you fancy not taking the rostrum all by yourself, then you could become part of a panel and workshops.

That's basically where you show people what to do when they turn up with their laptops and copy what you do, that kind of thing, 90 minutes up to half a day. Good grief. That's a long one, isn't it? You'd have to be well prepared for that. They have the Underrepresented Speaker Support Initiative alongside this call for speakers.

I'm quoting the goal of removing financial barriers for the speakers. Program calls on companies to invest in creating a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive tech community. Michelle, I know this is right up your street. Do you know anything about that initiative? About, does it have... Yeah.

[00:43:24] Michelle Frechette: Yeah, so I should say, tota reached out to me to ask if I wanted to be, part of that. And so I have said I will sponsor or at least help sponsor from WP speakers. And also there's also an element of Helping the people. So I can't think of words today, but mentoring. So I'm just struggling for my language today.

But so you know, if there's somebody who would like somebody to mentor them along the way with how their, from how their pitch looks to hearing them and doing some feedback, some zoom calls, things like that, to hear them and give them an opportunity to practice. So there'll be all, there's all levels of support within that.

And I think it's a wonderful initiative.

[00:44:10] Nathan Wrigley: Down here, it says they're also looking for sponsors, media partners, and volunteers. There's some other events which are looking for some sponsors as well. But just saying Honestly, it's turning into a... Fiesta of self promotion.

This is that I do apologize. So yes call for sponsors, get yourself on that speaker list. If you fancy it, Cameron, I know that you made the journey all the way from Australia to the UK. And so you were there for closer to Athens. If you were back in the U S sorry, in Australia, would this be something that you go to?

It'd obviously be a lot closer to home than coming all the way to Europe or the U S. Yeah.

[00:44:52] Cameron Jones: It would be the closest thing we have to a local word camp in Australia at this point. I know there is. Some initial work at getting one up in Australia for next year, but whether that happens or not, I don't know.

But yeah, that's the closest WordCamp I will have to a local WordCamp. But at this point, probably not. It's it cost me a couple grand. Just to get to Athens from the UK.

Yeah,

It's not cheap to get to WordCamp. It's like local WordCamp is in another country. So yeah, it makes it hard.

So yeah, at this stage, probably not. We'll have to see maybe sometime in the future when I, haven't just had, a six month overseas holiday,

[00:45:46] Nathan Wrigley: but yeah. I chatted with Joe mini earlier this week, as and it was a really interesting chat about the state. I'm going to do air quotes, the state of the WordPress community in Australia.

And it really does seem it's a tough thing in Australia to put on these events and encourage people to come. And she made great, she made, she talked a lot about a lot of the different reasons. And I was actually tweeting Cameron as we were talking, asking if he had any input. And you basically came up with exactly the same list of things that Jo did.

But geography is the big thing, right? For us. If I go down to London, it's, I don't know, three, four hours on the train. Doesn't matter where I live in the UK, that, that train journey can be over in a relatively short period of time. But for you, it's like literally the distance from, if you're in Perth or something and you want to get to Sydney, that's like Washington to LA or something.

But that could be the only one that's going on.

[00:46:46] Cameron Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Like I am, where I live back home in Australia is about from Brighton to London away from Adelaide, which is where the closest local meetup community is. And they've only just started up in the last two months now since COVID killed everything.

It's not like I can go, Oh, there's, like I've been attending a few still online ones in the UK. There's like Leeds and Birmingham and all these other ones. It's you could get away with traveling a little bit further to find another community here in the UK if you had to, if they were still in person.

The next closest will be Melbourne. That's I don't know, eight, nine, 10 hour drive. Yeah.

[00:47:34] Nathan Wrigley: It's just not feasible. Yeah, if you drive for eight, nine or 10 hours in the UK, you've either been going in a circle or you're in the sea.

[00:47:43] Cameron Jones: Probably in Germany.

[00:47:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It's teeny tiny. You can fit the UK, I think you can fit it four times into Texas.

And there's still a bit of space left over for a bank in the corner or something.

[00:47:58] Michelle Frechette: I'm driving to WordCamp US. Next week, because it's only six hours, it's only a six hour drive. So

[00:48:04] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, you see a six hour drive in this part of the world is that's just no, nobody. You never put the word only in front of that.

Yeah. When I

[00:48:15] Cameron Jones: when I moved to where I live now, I used to live on the East coast. So I now live in about the middle of Australia, East to West. That took me 24 hours of driving. Yeah. My dad used to do Brisbane to Perth. Runs, it would take a week

[00:48:32] Nathan Wrigley: return. I I did that drive along the Nullarbor from Perth to Adelaide.

And did I tell you this story already? I think I did it last week. I can't even remember. There's this bit where there's a, so it's a dead straight road. For a thousand, more, like two thousand kilometers. It's really long. And for hundreds and hundreds of kilometers before you get to it, there are these signs warning you about the bend.

Because you've been driving for so long that, this bit in the road is, you suddenly, you're gonna, anyway, 500 kilometers, watch out for the bend, 400 kilometers, watch out for the bend, and so on. And you get to the bend, and you do this with the steering wheel. That's it. It's two degrees, but it's the only bit of the road where it kinks.

So they have to warn you about it. It's hysterical. Okay, Peter Ingersoll wants us to be aware of horses. Thank you. I, horses. You kept saying hold your horses. I know it's perfect. It's absolutely perfect. Anyway, there you go. If you want to be a speaker for WordCamp Asia. Adam, do you attend events like this?

Is your bag, your community person?

[00:49:42] Adam McLaughlin: My wife and I have, okay, here's some backstory. My wife and I've been traveling full time since 2018. And so I was, yeah, with her. Yeah, we've been to 16 countries. And for me, I was thinking, Oh, I'm going to get to go to WordPress all the time. WordCamp all the time.

Cause I'll just go wherever WordCamp is. And it incredibly, it hasn't worked out. Actually we were fixing to go to WordCamp in Asia in March. And then. Something came up and plans changed and so now we're not going to get to do that either. So it's it's it doesn't make any sense, but that's how it's been.

[00:50:26] Nathan Wrigley: I I want to spend the whole of the rest of this show now talking about where you've been. But I think Adam, you and I should have a podcast episode or something. Talk about how the heck you get anything done if you're constantly on the road. That's pretty interesting. That's part of the discussion too.

Yeah, honestly, I'd just be, I'm going to the beach. There's work to be done. I'm going to that. Hey, that monthly

[00:50:48] Adam McLaughlin: recurring revenue. That's a, it's worth putting the effort into building

[00:50:51] Nathan Wrigley: that. There you go. That's what you're all about. Yeah. Okay. Thank you for that. Everybody, another event last of that, I think last of the event.

Announcements the guys over at human made I feel it was like two months ago or something like that. They did their first AI based event. It's all the hotness, isn't it? You go, we can't go by where there's not some pressing story about AI, but this is all about AI and WordPress. They have got their next event coming up.

It's the. 14th of September. It's called AI, the next chapter, and I will link to it in the show notes, but really the attendee registration is now open and it looks like speaker applications as well. I'll tell you what, we are not sure of events to attend online over the next few months and in person.

It's great. So there's that. I don't even know how to go about talking about this one. So if, if I say the wrong thing here or misstepped, I apologize. New page is on WordPress. org. It's called remembers. So it's WordPress. org forward slash remembers. I'm just going to quote off the top. I think it's quite a nice page.

WordPress dedicates this page to the memory of those we've lost. They've shaped our project and enriched our community as we remember their passion and commitment to WordPress and open source software. We celebrate their spirit. Forever in our hearts, their legacy endures through every line of code and every user they've impacted.

And then You can see, beginning with Kim Purcell in, who passed away in 2015, there is a list of people who have contributed to WordPress since I guess 2015 was the first one, so I just think it's a really. You know what? Nobody needed to do this. This didn't need to be a thing. Nobody was going to complain if this didn't happen, but somebody thought that this was a worthwhile endeavor to just memorialize, really, to celebrate and commemorate the people who really made what we're using as our workhorse every day, in and out.

A thing, I don't, this is the bit that's going to sound weird. I don't know what the criteria is for being on this page. And I hope that doesn't sound tasteless, but I do wonder, because there's probably about 10 or 12 people on there at the moment, I'm imagining there's probably hundreds more who could be on this page.

So again. Trying to tread on that tightrope without upsetting anybody, a beautiful idea. I really like it. And I do wonder where the where the line is for being on that page. Should you should you pass away? So again, treading on the tightrope. Does anybody want to mention this or talk about this in any way?

[00:53:43] Michelle Frechette: My guess is that they couldn't possibly. Start it with everybody under the sun who has passed and who's contributed. And so it gives the opportunity for some of us to be able to remember other people by suggesting them and submitting them to this page. And so I think it, it will then become a labor of love for the whole community to remember those who have contributed and are no longer with us.

[00:54:09] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you, Michelle, Elliot. Sorry, Elliot. I don't know why I said Elliot. Cameron Adam, anything to add to that?

Okay, let us move on. This is cool. We all love Bob. You know who I'm talking about Bob, the Bob and I by the way do a very interesting other podcast. I shan't mention it because it involves swearing But if you ever want to listen to that hit me up and I'll tell you what it's called, but it's hysterical Bob has decided to take his do the woo Podcast and community in a really cool direction.

And I'm thinking that this, if you're not based in the English speaking world, this could be something that is of great interest to you. So he's decided that he's going to launch podcast episodes, which are entirely in the language including the transcript and the text on the page of the person speaking.

So it's kicked off. With the Serbia community, I confess, I don't know a great deal about the community of WordPress in Serbia. But I could read the transcript if I wished to have that. I don't know if it's comes in English as well as a, the Serbian variety, but I just thought this was a really nice idea.

I do tons of content and it's all in English and I don't. I don't go to any effort to, to do that. And if anybody comes on my show, that's all done in English as well. And, and anyway, so basically, Bob, good on you. You're on your A game, really nice idea. So Michelle, sorry, I think I interrupted.

[00:55:50] Michelle Frechette: No, you did. I love it too. And I love that it's Milana and Milan who are starting it. They're at the top there. So Milana Saab and Milana Ivanovic,

[00:56:01] Nathan Wrigley: I don't know what the process is for. Reaching out to Bob, but I'm guessing if if you contact him on Twitter or some other place if you've got an enterprise, you'd like to talk on his podcast with other people in your own language then yeah, do that.

I just think this is really neat. It's very cool. Isn't it cool? Yeah. Good on you, Bob. Cameron, Adam, anything? Moving on. I think it's really cool. Yeah, isn't it? It's just such a nice idea. I wish I'd thought of it now.

[00:56:38] Cameron Jones: Yeah, I really like it. I do feel as a whole, like the mainstream WordPress community is very Western centric. So promoting more of these lesser known. Groups and nationalities and stuff is always a good thing.

[00:56:56] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting. We were talking about WordCamp Asia a minute ago and on the same page, although we didn't mention it the stipulation for speaking is that you speak in English, which obviously there's a chance that's the biggest language, so it makes a certain degree of sense. I think Mandarin is, actually. I was just about to caveat that. Yeah, it isn't. But outside of China, I believe it's probably the one that's most widely understood. So I can see that. But Bob, leading the way, you never know.

It may be that in the future, those kind of... Events will be done in native languages. In this case, whatever it is that they speak in Taiwan. I don't know if it's Mandarin or some other variant of Chinese. I'm not sure. Now I've offended everybody who lives in Taiwan.

[00:57:43] Cameron Jones: I guess I applied to, to speak at WordCamp Netherlands.

I didn't get. Selected, unfortunately, but like they had different tracks. They had an English tract and a Dutch tract. There were talks in different languages. Oh, nice. Yeah. Yeah, which was really nice. So obviously I don't speak a word of Dutch, but obviously there are people in the Netherlands who do.

[00:58:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, quite a few it turns out. Obviously, quite obviously. There's a good chance that the person passing you by in the street will speak Dutch. It's a... It's extraordinary. Okay. So anyway, Bob, bravo. Good for you. Brilliant. Hold on. Okay. Somebody, again, a minute ago, I I had to have something explained about what Courtney was doing and the fact that she'd got that message on the WordPress dashboard.

This is another one. I think Michelle, I'm going to hand this one to you if that's all right. Let me just raise it up onto the screen. This is a piece on. The make. wordpress. org website is called organization supportingwordpress. org. I'll just set it up if that's all right. In June, Matt shared the following.

There are a number of independent organizations that aren't air quotes official WordPress things, but still exist to support WP's mission of democratizing publishing like WPCC. And I've heard of things around accessibility, inclusion, enterprise, etc. And then the question was, what's a good place that we can link to for all of these and say that they're not official, but still a good place to get involved.

So Courtney's post is called organizationssupportingwordpress. org. Michelle, over to you.

[00:59:22] Michelle Frechette: Yeah, I think I, I haven't spoken to her directly about this, but I think it's the idea of, there are a lot of organizations around WordPress, there's WP Accessibility Day coming up. Which is not an official, wordpress.

org event. It's not a WordCamp, things like that, that are. Really designed to support everybody within the WordPress ecosystem, but they aren't official events or they aren't official websites or they aren't official organizations. And so I think this is an attempt to give credit to those people and those organizations who are doing great work to support WordPress and WordPress users, that aren't part of wordpress.

org and make. wordpress. org. For example, I have WPSpeakers. com as a labor of love of mine. And we added a box that you could tick that says you are an underrepresented person. And having been able to do that, Jill Binder has is a huge proponent of when people are looking for WordPress speakers specifically underrepresented folks, that they could go to WPSpeakers.

com and search for underrepresented folks who are interested in speaking at your events. And so she has done, hats off to her, she did all the groundwork to be able for that WPSpeaker, Wpspeakers. com to be officially posted within the Bakes WordPress Slack to say, if you're looking for speakers for your event, you can go to this project by Michelle.

And so I think that this would be something like along those lines. That's my understanding is that it's an, it's a way for us to point to these organizations that aren't official WordPress organizations, but are the doing really good work to help others. Like I have WP career pages, for example, people can go there and they can, if they're looking for work within WordPress.

So I think there's a lot of other organizations like that. And so they want to be able to highlight people that are doing good work, but aren't officially

[01:01:20] Nathan Wrigley: WordPress. So it looks like this page is like out they're looking for people to, to become a part of this to figure out what this all means.

So they're forming a collaborative working group and they've got a bi weekly intention. They're going to be using the meta channel by the looks of things. They haven't set a date and a time yet, but they're looking for a coordinator, various team members, creators of content, people to review things people to also look at the data as well.

[01:01:54] Michelle Frechette: Every, every organization or every site or however you want to term them would have to be vetted to make sure that they fit within, and then we'll have to be reviewed periodically to make sure that they are still active, still within the. Whatever parameters they set up to be considered would still be within those parameters.

And so there should be a team that works to keep this, keeps this running.

[01:02:19] Nathan Wrigley: I have a question around this. So forgive me, this is going to sound like self promotion again, but I'm curious as to whether something like this or Bob's podcast, maybe that's a better example would qualify. Because it's definitely, it's honing in right on the WordPress thing, but it's not it maybe doesn't come under the umbrella of some of the things that you've just mentioned.

So keep a close eye on this and see how it goes. Yeah. Cameron, Adam, anything?

Okay. In which case we shall move on. But thank you, Courtney. She's often with us in the comments. It doesn't look like she is today. So no, nevermind. This is just a lovely piece. I just wanted to mention this. I don't know if Patricia listens to this, but this was a piece written by Patricia Beattie on the 2nd of August.

And and it's that interesting question of. Why do you do anything for free? Why would you contribute in any way, shape or form to the WordPress project and not get paid for it? I think we are increasingly in a world where your time is often in exchange for money. I know Adam's got a different take on that probably.

Not so much time for money. But but the point is you get remunerated. You do something, you expect something back. We have a very different community. Here in the WordPress space. And and so she set out why she does things for free and I'll link to it in the show notes, but basically it's just a lovely article explaining why she does it, why she gives back, you can see it on the screen, improving her skills, networking, gets influence from this.

She gets recognition, personal satisfaction, all of these things. Play into the project. Cameron's Cameron's bio that we read out at the top indicates that, he's contributed to events. We know that Michelle does a load as well. Cameron's put things into core and things like that. So I guess the question is, why do you do it?

Why do any of us do this? I, my personal take is that I just, I, there's something about the whole open source thing that I really like. I cannot put my finger on it, but there's just something about it. I remember for the first time I came across any open source software and it was Linux and I installed Linux.

It was Ubuntu. I don't remember when it was, but it was Ubuntu. I installed it and I thought. What the heck? It's free and it works! How is this possible? And then that got me on the whole journey for open source software. As I say, I can't put my finger on it, but I just really there's something about the people that coalesce.

around projects like WordPress that I really so it's a bit of a selfish reason. I like it because of what it gives back to me as much as anything else. But I'm curious to open that up. Michelle, we know you do a lot. Let's start with you. What are your feelings?

[01:05:25] Michelle Frechette: For me it's, I could never...

Give back to all the people who have helped bring me to where I am today. I could never pay everybody back. I think of WordPress as a pay it forward community. . And so others have helped me and I try to pass that along by helping others. So it's one of those ideas where you don't just climb the ladder, you look behind you and you pull up others behind you at the same time.

And so for me it's about paying tribute to the people who have helped me by helping others.

[01:05:54] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Adam, anything to say on this? Why do you. Use WordPress,

[01:06:00] Adam McLaughlin: I use WordPress initially because it was free. When I was starting my business, that was the least capital intensive piece of software option to use that I knew would be consistently improved.

It wasn't, this was back in the day before SAS was really a thing in 2011. And I didn't want to buy like. Invest in a piece of software that in a year or two years, if I wanted to upgrade, I was going to have to reinvest. I owe the opportunity to get started to WordPress.

And so whenever I can give back, I want to share that opportunity with other people

[01:06:37] Nathan Wrigley: too. I was like I said, I was on holiday this week and I was talking to somebody, we got into the conversation about what I do. And I mentioned WordPress and they were entirely skeptical. About the fact that it could be any good because it was entirely free.

And they were saying, what do you mean it's free? No, like totally no. Yeah. You can totally have it for nothing. It can't be any good. It was like, okay, I'm just not even gonna, I'm not even gonna argue with you. It's just not even worth it. But yeah, I think that's as good a reason as any, isn't it?

That's probably why most of us got started. Curiosity around the fact that it was free. Cameron, what about you? Why do you do it? You get something, you get some nice warm and fuzzy feeling from doing it all. No, not really moving on next one.

[01:07:25] Cameron Jones: It's like my position on it has changed over the years. I used to like when I first got into the WordPress community, I very much wanted to become, the type of person that Was, a sponsored person who just worked on core all day.

That was the end goal at one point, but not so much anymore. Yeah, like becoming a parent changed a lot of things changes your whole outlook on life, surprisingly. But yeah, I there are some things that's just this needs fixing, I can fix it. I may as well fix it.

That's nice. Yeah yeah, like I, I don't contribute to things because, I feel like okay, I WordPress anything or anything like that, or because, I'm doing it to make myself feel. Like I'm doing something like, I do plenty of other things in my life that do that for me. But yeah

[01:08:36] Nathan Wrigley: I think that's a really, I think that's really lovely. The way that you just phrased it is like really great. I just fix it because it needed fixing. It's there's no agenda there. It's just, yeah, I spotted a problem. Go and fix it. Don't need don't need to mention it anywhere or talk too much about it.

Just do it and then move on. I think that's lovely. I bet there's a lot of people who feel exactly. Like you, maybe they're not even part of the wider community. Maybe they don't attend events, but they've just got this thing. And having something like WordPress, I feel is super important. And I know that word gets bandied around a lot, depending on what you're into in life, your level of importance may change, but having some free, easy to use publishing platform that anybody can stick their own stuff out on the web.

I think is super important and, man alive, do we have a lot of people to be thankful for. So

[01:09:26] Cameron Jones: anyway. I think publishing is something I think we would believe in pretty strongly if we're here. Yeah. Yeah I have concerns about some of the things that, WordPress has done over the years and how, bits get managed and whatnot.

I'm sure we all have. But the end goal is democratizing publishing, and that's a good thing. Regardless of what your political stance is, or any other opinions or beliefs democratizing publishing is a good thing.

[01:09:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I agree. That's a nice sentiment in stark contrast to that, there's a piece that came out on the the WP minute this week, which I thought was a good one to follow up the one that we've just had with and it was, it's Eric Karkovac talking about the fact that as much as we love WordPress, there's almost no chance that it's going to be around forever.

There's just highly unlikely it may be around for the next decade. A hundred years, who knows, but at some point it's going to be overtaken by something because that's what history teaches us. And and Eric's just runs through the whole thing. What would it take for another CMS to eclipse WordPress.

And he points to the fact that, other things that were equal, I say equal in terms of numbers, so 15 years ago to WordPress, things like Joomla and Drupal, they're a real small. Small number on the statistics chart. Now, in one or 2% and even the biggest rivals, things like Shopify and what have you, they're into the threes and 4%.

So WordPress really does dominate. He comes to the conclusion that there is nothing. Out there at the minute, which could take over. He thinks that it will be some new platform that nobody's yet heard of that's being cooked up in somebody's brain. Probably one of our children, just got this new idea.

I'm going to launch this, but I just thought that was a really interesting thought experiment. What would it take you? to move away from WordPress. I don't have any concrete stuff on that, but I just thought that was really good. So I'm going to mention that it was called what it would take for a CMS to catch up to WordPress.

I don't know that anybody's going to want to contribute to that, but if you do, talk now. If not, I'll just move on.

[01:11:44] Michelle Frechette: I'll be 55 in two months. I'm not looking to leave WordPress and learn something new ever. I will retire. With WordPress.

[01:11:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. I can't see myself moving either, to be honest.

I think even if something brilliant came along, I I probably wouldn't invest the time in it. I just think I've put too much into WordPress. I know it too intimately now. Same. Anyway, maybe Eric himself is concocting a rival CMS, and this is just the first volley in that process. Would it be called Adam CRO?

Oh, no, you're talking. Adam. The first human. Yeah, I like it. Let's move on to some plug in y stuff. Mark Westgaard, he's often on the show. He hilarious tweet this week. I don't know if you saw the tweet with him wearing all this gear. Hey, I won't. Bore you, but go and look at his Twitter feed.

There's a nice photo of him wearing some stuff. He's come up with this interesting idea. He's come up. So InstaWP is this service which you can use for free. And within the space of about five seconds, you can you can have yourself a brand new website to play with. In fact, if you use the URL new.

wp, which is. Super cool new dot WP. It will spin up a, an InstaWP site for you. How cool is that? Mark decided that it was worth his time investing so that he could make a WS form, create an InstaWP website. Now, if you've using WS form and you've got, I think you need the premium tier of InstaWP, But just a hat tip if that intrigues you, if there's something there, which you think, Oh, that could be interesting.

Maybe, I don't know, maybe my clients would like to be able to use a WordPress website, but I would like it to appear that it's done on my domain, where you can now do that with InstaWP. So I guess Adam's clients might be into this, you, yeah, you could spin something up for them, but it would be done via a form on your own website.

So it would appear like you've done some wizardry and magic all yourself. So

[01:13:56] Adam McLaughlin: yeah, I've definitely got something to look into this afternoon now.

[01:14:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, isn't it cool? So you just fill out a few fields. There's an API kind of connection that you need to make. You'll be done in five minutes, but I do like the idea of being able to, I don't know, tell your clients that come to this website, domain.

com forward slash new. And they can fill out the form and get themselves a website set up. And it's all done on the InstaWP service. So it's, you don't have to go to the pain of creating a website so that they can check it out. And it won't be, I don't think it's branded. Maybe there is an option in InstaWP's paid tier to do that.

I don't know. Maybe you can have your own custom domain, but yeah.

[01:14:38] Michelle Frechette: He's constantly innovating. He recently added the AI generated forms and. I used that on my daughter's website that I built and it spun up a form, all I needed to do was add one category on a drop down, it even anticipated the other categories I needed, it was amazing.

[01:14:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, he's probably doing Through the day, frankly, he's constantly innovating and he does all the sorts of things. Yeah, I think he does large amounts of coffee. I think you're probably right. Michelle, I don't know if it's the same for you, Cameron and Adam, but for me, Michelle's video has frozen, but your audio has not.

So I don't know, Michelle, if you want to do the quick refreshy thing again, that seems to work. That's strange, I'll do that. Yeah, it is weird, isn't it? Definitely some concoction of weirdness going on here. Anyway, bravo, Mark. Go and check that out. I will link to it in the show notes. The next one. Oh, good grief.

I don't even know what to say about this. I don't want to make anybody feel bad. But here we go. This is the reality. WP Tavern WordPress plugin review team addresses backlog of 900 plus plugins. Essentially, if you submit a plugin to the repository, it has to go through a review process because it has to, you can't just put.

You imagine the abuse that would happen if there was no review process, but it looks like it's getting very long. 61 days is now the amount of time it takes. And I guess if you're a plugin creator, you get all fired up, make this new thing, new service, want to get it out there into the wild and 62 months later, you're still waiting for the call to say, yep.

Now you've got to go and fix these things. So the team are slimming their process down or tidying their process up, whichever way you want to think about it, they're basically now going to expedite things a little bit. The idea is that we'll do for want of a better word, a kind of quick appraisal, and then if they find anything, they'll immediately send that back so that you've got something to be working on, but it is a bit of a problem, 920.

Nine plugins in the tweets from Marcus Burnett, he submitted a plugin and identified this problem. But yeah, it's all volunteer led. A few were taken on recently to help in this endeavor, but yeah, I don't know what we do about this. You're a plugin founder, aren't you Cameron? Did this stuff happen to you?

[01:17:03] Cameron Jones: No. So the process was very different. Back when I. Got all the plugins that I have on mypress. org approved. I might just go off on a little tangent and promote my friend Luke Carvis's podcast, Crossword. That's... He actually went into a bit of detail about this in the latest episode. He is one of the new people on the plugin review team.

Yeah Mika Epstein was pretty much the one person doing this for the last 10, 15 years. And she's decided to step away. So now... That's, a lot of all those processes and stuff, a lot of it is all in her head and that's perfectly fine because she's been the one doing it.

But now that they're having to get new people on board, that takes time. And so I think it's a team of about half a dozen that are stepping up and, Luke, my friend Luke is one of them. They need time to onboard and they need time to flesh out some of these processes that weren't necessarily documented because they.

didn't need to be because it was all just one person doing it. So there's a lot of that initial setup and handover that they've had to go through just to get it to the point where they can start processing the queue. And from what I've heard, it sounds like the review is a bit stricter than it was when I was doing it.

Like for instance, it sounds plugins now need to adhere to the WordPress coding standards, which they didn't when I've got a handful of plugins on the repo and none of them were coding standards compliant when I submitted them. By all the work I do now is, but back then, six, seven, eight years ago, they weren't.

So yeah, that adds a bit of back and forth because I'm sure, like when I first submitted plugins, I had no idea about the the coding standards, now they're going, oh, your plugin, this, you've got the spacing wrong. So we're not going to accept that because the spacing, you're using spaces instead of tabs and stuff like that.

There's going to be a lot more back and forth now. It's going to take a lot longer to process the queue. And obviously they've only just been able to start processing the EQ again. So it's something that's going to be fine in a year's time. We're going to look back and be like, Oh, what was this big deal about?

But yeah, it's just, it's

[01:19:37] Nathan Wrigley: going to take time. So yeah, 61 days at the moment. Thank you for that Cameron. They say, and I quote, in strategizing ways to cut through the formidable plugin backlog, the team has begun speeding up the process by performing a cursory initial review, followed by a more thorough one.

Once the plugin author has fixed the most obvious issue. So it looks like they've got this SOP of here's a bunch of common things, which we've seen again and again, let's check for those. And then at least if we find anything in there, we can hand it back to you. You can fix those whilst we get on with the main queue.

So yes, that's a. That's good news. Okay, shall we move on? We're running out of time, so I probably should move on very quickly. Next one, oh, I don't know. I don't know what we're going to make of this. Here it is anyway. This is called Zip, what is it called? ZipWP. This is a new service where It's using AI, I imagine.

Unless they have actual gremlins or, wizards standing there. It does say AI on the screen. Oh, you're kidding. Yeah. Doesn't every website say AI on the screen now to be honest? Don't they all say that? Create a stunning website in just. 60 seconds. No kidding. So you add in a bunch of details as you'd imagine, a bit like you do for any sort of chat GPT inspired thing.

But the differentiator here is that the whole website comes back in 60 seconds, including images, I think a contact form and a variety. of other different things. And there was a video done by Adam Preiser where I think it clocked out about, I don't know, 68 seconds or something. But gotta say, it's pretty interesting what it could do in such a short space of time.

Pretty compelling. And it does speak to the future. This is the first such service that I've seen. And if this is the first Iteration, I imagine hot on the heels of this are a bunch of rivals who are also going to launch this thing. Just, it just raises the debate, whether it makes our jobs as WordPress developers, website builders, whatever it may be less, what's the word?

Less likely to exist in a few years time. I'm going to hand that one to Adam. Cause this is right. In your street, I would have thought right up your right

[01:21:58] Adam McLaughlin: up my alley. And I've made multiple tweets about this. So people can not this product specifically, but AI generated websites or whatever. I think that as web designers, web developers, as agencies, we need to move to the point where we're not just building the website, but we're building the entire marketing strategy for the client.

So how are you getting people to the website? How, what are you opting in? That's going to provide value to that. How are you building your email list? How often are you sending out that email list? If we're basically just building a tool, we're going to get worked out of a job pretty quickly. But if we're building a strategy and we know how to build that strategy, we know how to get clients results.

Then that is where the money and the growth is going to be in the long run

[01:22:47] Nathan Wrigley: That's interesting. I watched this documentary on the bbc when I was a kid and it was this guy this business entrepreneur guy He was brilliant at all things business and he would go in he would be parachuted into a business and he would Identify the problems, fix the problems, and then he'd go back a year later and figure it all out.

There was this one fairly tragic episode where these employees had worked with him to streamline their job, the job that they did. And it happened to be like it was a warehouse and there was a lot of walking, so they would do their bit, and then they would pass it to somebody else and fill up a trolley and move the trolley over.

He basically got rid of... All of the bits and pieces where these people moved around the warehouse. So you've got everybody right next to where they needed to work. A year later, everybody who was doing the work hated the job because now they never got to get out of their chair and never got to communicate with another human being.

They were now just like an automaton. And that's the bit that concerns me really is that although on the front end, it looks like, Oh, this is all great. Yeah. Shiny, happy. Maybe we're just. Building things up to the point where we do ourselves out of a job. And I like your thoughts there, Adam, rather than just concentrate on that one thing, which clearly AI is going to be brilliant at, do the whole thing.

Do all the bits, make yourself indispensable.

[01:24:08] Adam McLaughlin: I just see a comment's come up about what Adam describes as a different job though, and I agree. We don't have switchboard operators anymore, and you can argue like we could, switchboard operators could have gone on protest and said we absolutely refuse these Dalyer extension systems because that's not the job I know how to do.

Or you could adopt and be the person that learns to sell and say, Hey, I used to do the switchboard and I know how important that is and now I'm going to sell the software that does the extensions on self on the phones. That's an example. Another one would be people who service typewriters.

I'm sure there's still a market very niche for that. The niche, whatever it's.

[01:24:54] Nathan Wrigley: Whatever it's going to be. We say niche. Oh, niche. Okay.

[01:24:57] Adam McLaughlin: Okay. So whatever the niche was, it's like you can say, I'm sorry, that's not what I'm trained in. And this is my job. But what happens when that goes away without your input?

What I would suggest is it's a great opportunity now to continue what you're doing and learn to expand. And be able to say, Hey, I'm essentially future-proofing myself.

[01:25:21] Nathan Wrigley: If the tool works as Adam Prize's video demonstrates, it is remarkable though. It is pretty amazing what a few lines of text will get you.

And I can't remember what the brand if you like, was, but he put this brand in and it. It, but it created images in the background. I don't know if they were created or they were just like stock images from somewhere. Anyway, the point is the website came with buttons. It came with links to other pages.

It came with, I think, a contact form and it had hero images and all that kind of stuff. So it was a pretty complete basic website. So yeah.

[01:25:59] Adam McLaughlin: Yeah, but what it's not going to consider is what is the motivation of the visitor? At least initially, right? So what are your call to action buttons? What are the things that a visitor to the website actually wants from the business, right?

And what is it that the business wants the visitor to do? Does the visitor, does the client want their visitors to call them, to send them an email, to fill out a form and request a quote, to download something and join their email newsletter? I would guess at least initially that AI thing is going to build a great looking website, but it's going to be up to you as the person using the tool to build the strategy around what does that website need to do to get results for the client.

And as long as you take that perspective, you still bring value to the fact that it could generate images and it could generate a menu and it can AI generate some content. However, if you're saying I build websites, this build websites, I'm out of work, probably.

[01:27:04] Nathan Wrigley: I wonder if I wonder if Andrew, by the way, who made the comment, he's the co founder of Bertha AI, which is a content and image and various other things, platform for WordPress.

And I always hear the the thing that Andrew makes the point, I think it's totally valid is it's the AI stuff is not, you don't copy paste that. You just, that's the beginning of that journey, isn't it? You create the AI and then you go and tweak it. I actually used a podcast tool where you feed it audio and then it summarizes and tries to make show notes for you.

That wasn't, that's not ready for use yet. It came, gave me a couple of ideas, but I basically ended up typing the whole thing. So it was good for the idea generation bit. He's made another comment. It's a great product, but man, talk about boilerplate sites. Okay. They're saying it's a first draft, so we'll see Cadence and many others launching similar soon.

Oh, okay. Yes. I've heard a little bit about Cadence AI, but I've not actually seen it. And then, Hey, Andrew. Hey, Rob. Hey okay. Let's quickly move on. Cause we are fast. In fact, I think we've overrun, but are you all right for two more minutes, everybody? Cameron, you're okay. Great. Thanks.

Okay. In which case I'll try to do it quickly and I will literally blister through these two main WP have now got a browser extension. So if you use that to update your WordPress websites, you can now do that without loading. The website, you can just click on a button in your in your browser extension bar where all the other bits and pieces go and you can see things in there.

So that's cool. Thank you, Dennis and team for doing that. Brainstorm force, I think are behind WP zip. I'm not sure, but they definitely are behind this. They've got new pro variant of their spectra tool. So they've now launched into the wild. They're they're sweet. of blocks. And so I will link to that.

You can find out all about that. This one, I really wanted to put some time into this, but we're not going to have, I am just simply going to say, go and have a look at this in light of all the kerfuffle around passwords and malware scanners and API keys being stored in plain text. The guys over at Sneeko have put together a post where they try to And how they think they have solved putting things like that in plain text.

Basically, they've created a vault where things like API keys can go. So they're no longer in plain text, but still entirely usable. Maybe I'll store that one up for next week because it's worth looking at. Okay, this is the proper last one then. And Cameron, you put this in the show notes and I'm going to hand it to you if that's all right.

It's called blocks in an iframed template editor. What's this one?

[01:29:48] Cameron Jones: So that is the WordPress editor. Now operating in an iframe,

so it's new in 6. 3, so it, you probably won't notice it on most sites, but yeah the issue was that, obviously if the layout that you're, building. Your blocks have styles and there is a risk that your block styles will clash with the styles of the admin interface itself. So they're putting it in an iframe so that, the block styles will only affect the blocks and admin styles will only affect the

[01:30:33] Nathan Wrigley: admin.

So this is a very much under the hood thing. I genuinely didn't know that had gone on. So from a, from the point of view of somebody using the website, nothing to see here you won't notice a thing, but there's just been this It's a necessary amendation in WordPress 6. 3.

[01:30:48] Cameron Jones: Yes, and I do the way they've done it progressively too.

They block, creation API is now on version 3, and it will only do it if you're only using version 3 blocks. If you've got a block that, a custom block you created 3 years ago, then you're not going to see it. Cause there's, they won't risk breaking anything for you because you're not using modern blocks.

But yeah, it's, should be a good thing in

[01:31:21] Nathan Wrigley: the long run. Andrew makes the point that Beaver Builder, Elementor, Divi, and probably some others all operate in an iframe for editing. Thank you, Andrew, for pointing that out. Yeah, like the

[01:31:30] Cameron Jones: customizer does too for people still using that. Yeah, and yeah, it should be a good thing

[01:31:37] Nathan Wrigley: overall, I think.

Thank you for highlighting that. The last one I'm going to just literally throw in as a bomb and then we'll end the episode. Not satisfied with having four forces in nature. We, I think four, we can all firmly agree is not enough because, the electromagnetic force, gravity, and the strong and weak force, that's not enough.

So the guys in Fermilab have potentially discovered a fifth force of nature it applies to muons. Don't even ask me. I think they're cartoon characters, muons, They're very small but you don't need to worry because this force of nature asks for like billions, lasts for billions of a second.

Anyway, good to know that on this day in history, on a WordPress podcast, you found out about the fifth force of nature. Because, it's important stuff. That's it! That's all that we've got for this week. I appreciate so much being joined by Michelle Frechette and Cameron and Adam. Yeah, you've got it Michelle.

It's coming. The Adam, you don't know about this. We do this incredibly humiliating thing at the end where we all raise our I then get a screenshot of everybody with their hands in the air. Cameron always is a bit reluctant. Yeah, look, he's done it. I caught him for half a second. That's fine.

We've done it. Thank you so much for joining us. If you were here giving us comments, thank you so much. If you weren't giving us comments, feel free to go over to the website. It'll be there tomorrow morning. I'm going to the intention here is to play a little outro video, whether or not that's actually going to work or not remains to be seen, but the three of you, if it all goes wrong and pear shaped and I don't come back, I do apologize, but we will see you on the show next week.

Take it easy.