This Week in WordPress #266

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode number 266 entitled, Weirdly Bespoke CMS. It was recorded on Monday the 4th of September, 2023. My name's Nathan Wrigley and I'll be joined by three fine guests today. I'm joined by Bob Dunn by Katie Keith, and Birgit Pauli Haack.

It's a WordPress podcast. So guess what we talk about WordPress. First up, there's some Gutenberg and core news. We talk about Gutenberg changelog, which is a podcast and website by Birgit, what it does and how it operates.

We talk about the future of Gutenberg and WordPress. What with 6.4 coming up and some changes to Gutenberg 16.5.

Then we get into some community news. We talk about the fact that there is now and WordPress for enterprise guide. If you are in the freelance space or you're working for an agency, perhaps that might be of interest to you. Trying to convince people that WordPress, is not really a blogging platform anymore.

We talk quite extensively about people's experiences of WordCamp US this year, and also about the fact that Joost and Marieke have decided that they're going to join forces with Post Status, and they have injected some equity into that.

Then we talk about plugins, themes, blocks, and code. We introduce block variations, the HTML API, also theme.json gets tackled by Justin Tadlock.

And really quickly, the performance team have issued a plugin, which will help you make sure that your translated WordPress websites are up to speed.

And then we rounded off very quickly with a little bit of news about security, and how plugin authors sometimes just disappear, without a trace and make it very hard to keep in touch with them.

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 dot me forward slash WP Builds.

Hello once more. It's the 4th of September, 2023. It is this week in WordPress episode number 266. That's quite a lot. I'm joined today by three fabulous WordPressers. I'm going to start down there, right down there. Is Bob Dunn. How are you doing, Bob?

[00:03:02] Bob Dunn: Hey, I'm doing good. Good, good, good.

[00:03:04] Nathan Wrigley: Good. Bob spends his time building a network of podcast shows for WooCommerce and WordPress Builders over at DoTheWoo. He lately spent part of his time at WordCamp US where he followed the, oh, good grief, where he followed rather strange adventures. Of Nathan's head. We'll get to that later.

I don't know how this all happened, but yeah, thank you for joining us today, Bob. We'll get onto your podcast and what you do a little bit later, but we're also joined by Birgit Powley Hack, who's over there. I am getting so good at not getting the wrong hand. Yeah, doing it right every time. How you doing, Birgit?

[00:03:43] Birgit Pauli Haack: I'm very good. Very good. Yeah. I'm glad to see you all and be on the show

[00:03:47] Nathan Wrigley: again. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for joining us. Birgit used to come to us from across the pond over at the other side of the Atlantic, but no more. She's she's up sticks and she's now back in Germany. She is the publisher of the Gutenberg.

Times. We'll come onto that in a moment, which is a site with news around the WordPress block editor and beyond. She has the regular Gutenberg live Q and A as seen on YouTube and host the Gutenberg changelog podcast. Birgit has also been contributing to the WordPress open source project since 2014 and now contributes full time by being sponsored.

By Automatic. Yes. Nice to have you with us. Thank you so much. She was saying there's the lot of sunlight coming into her face. So if we see her wincing, you know why. And last but by no means least. Oh, I've done it again. It's Katie Keith. How are you doing, Katie? Yeah, good.

[00:04:42] Katie Keith: Thanks. Thanks for having me back.

Yeah, you're very welcome.

[00:04:45] Nathan Wrigley: Katie is the co founder and CEO of Barn 2 plugins. If you haven't heard of those by now go and Google it right away. She's the co host of the WP product talk podcast. She loves helping people to get the most out of WordPress WP product businesses. She had a fantastic time at WordCamp US.

We're going to talk extensively about that and it was even, Oh no, I didn't read your bio until just now. It was even worth catching COVID for, did you?

[00:05:14] Katie Keith: I did. Yes. I've been isolating until yesterday.

[00:05:17] Nathan Wrigley: And did you, because I read a tweet somewhere, it may even have been Bob, it may even have been in Slack, I can't remember.

COVID was a thing, right? It reared its head and lots of people, I don't mean lots and lots, I don't really know the numbers, but that was a thing, a feature of this event, right? Yes, it was, yeah.

[00:05:34] Bob Dunn: Swag.

[00:05:37] Nathan Wrigley: Somebody call

[00:05:38] Katie Keith: us swag. It doesn't even take up any space in your luggage. That's right.

[00:05:43] Nathan Wrigley: Can I, dare I ask, I know this is all rather personal, but did you manage to get home before the sort of symptoms?

So in other words, were you poorly... When you got home.

[00:05:53] Katie Keith: I traveled knowingly with kovid very masks up So last Monday, I had my flights back to London and then back to Mallorca and I was getting symptoms So I took a test the day of my flight and I had to collect my daughter from London and then take her back to Spain So I couldn't not I know you are allowed to fly with it, but I try to be responsible and stay in the corner away from people wear a mask, but I felt bad about it.

[00:06:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's an interesting, we're in face of that dilemma now, aren't we? We've gone beyond the time where it seems to be of any importance anywhere. I got a notification yesterday. today, actually on my mobile phone saying that the government COVID app is just being discontinued. So they're not even making an attempt in the UK anymore to track that data.

I don't really know how effective it was in all honesty. It was this like Bluetooth connection where a bit like air tags, it was using this mesh network of everybody's phones to try and figure out who'd got COVID. I don't know if it ever worked. Anyway, all of that's gone. I'm glad that you're back.

Up and running and I hope that you didn't suffer it too badly. We're on the podcast today to talk about WordPress, but if you fancy joining in or sending somebody in the direction of this show, please feel free to do that. Go to WPbuilds. com. forward slash live. If you go over there, you need to be logged into some kind of Google account because the comments are just copied and pasted over from YouTube and obviously YouTube and Google.

So that's the way that works. If you're looking at us on Facebook, if it's in our Facebook group or page, you might need to do an additional step. Wave. video, that's the platform that we use, forward slash live forward slash Facebook, unless you do that, we just see you as anonymous user. We don't know who you are, which is fine.

You might want to keep it that way, but if you don't want to go and click that button, alternatively, you could stay anonymous and then just write who you are in the comment that seems to work as well. Okie dokie. Let's have a look. There's a couple of people in the chat. Oh, Courtney Robertson.

We're going to talk and show Courtney later. Hi Courtney. She said, I avoided it during the event, but picked up COVID. Oh no, picked up COVID from kids going back to, with back to school bugs. I am sorry to hear that Courtney, that's rotten. Go on Birgit.

[00:08:16] Birgit Pauli Haack: Oh, I got actually back from vacation and had the day after had symptoms and tested and it was positive.

So I felt like I have FOMO for WordCamp US, but I had a sympathy COVID.

[00:08:31] Nathan Wrigley: I shouldn't laugh but I get what you mean. Thank you. Thank you for making that comment. Like I say, Courtney we'll feature your round up a little bit later of your experience at WordCamp US. Peter Ingersoll joins us every week and he gives us the weather report from usually Connecticut as it is this week.

Peter, can I say for the first time? Ever, it's hotter here than it is where you live. Here, in North Yorkshire, the United Kingdom, it's 26 degrees Fahrenheit here, and Connecticut is a poultry 22 degrees centigrade. 74 de Oh, it says it's heading up to 30 Oh! Okay, fair enough, you win.

[00:09:12] Birgit Pauli Haack: I don't think it's 26 Fahrenheit in your place.

[00:09:16] Nathan Wrigley: No, 26 degrees centigrade. It's so lovely and warm today. It's really nice. And we're being joined also by Tony. He's been joining us from sunny Aldermaston in the UK. Yeah, we've just had this relentlessly great weather here in the UK and it's been absolutely fabulous. You were saying Courtney, that your kids are going back to school.

One of my children can't go back to school. We got an email yesterday from his school to say that the fabric of the school building is so bad. that they're having to close it. No! How long? There's this story in the UK at the moment 150 schools, just like over the weekend have been identified with this product this like aerated concrete think of a chocolate bar that's got like all the holes in it's that, and it was designed to last for 30 to 40 years that was about 60 years ago and so they carried out this survey on loads of schools over the last year or so And then on over just before the weekend, they just suddenly decided a couple of days before school started that they're going to have to shut them.

And my child is one of them. So we're suddenly scurrying around thinking what we're going to do. What we're going to do anyway. So there we go. That's that's fun in my life. We're also joined by Nick. Nick Wilmot, he's coming from Daventry in the UK, 27. 5, oh Nick, I thought 26 was cool, but obviously not.

Thank you for joining us, Nick, I appreciate it, and Max says hi. Let's get stuck into the bits and pieces for this week, shall we? Let me share the bits and the pieces on the screen. This is us, it's wpbuilds. com, if you fancy subscribing to the bits and pieces that we do come over and fill out this form, we'll basically send you two emails a week.

It's one time for this show, when we finish this, I'll top and tail it, stick it out as a podcast episode and put the video up on YouTube. And you'll get an email about that, and then we do a podcast episode on a Thursday as well, that's just audio, and we'll email you about that. Outside of that, we might send you, honestly, one email a year out of cycle.

There'll be something like a Black Friday deal or something like that, but if you fancy it, stick your email in there and we'll keep you posted. However... This is maybe slightly more time pressing. This is the Page Builder Summit. It's coming back round between the 18th and the 22nd of September. So really soon, actually, in about a couple of weeks time.

In fact, in a couple of weeks time, we'll be kicking that off. If you want to get your free ticket. Just click this little button and you sign up in the normal way. We've now posted a list of all of the different people who are taking part. So there's Anshan LaRue is the co host along with that ugly chap on the left.

And here's the beautiful speakers. There's a whole list of them. You can see as we scroll down all of their different subjects. Ah, Cameron was on very recently. We've got a whole load of different people. I think we've got 33, 34 this year. Plus a few speakers from previous summits as well. So if you fancy that it may be on with hindsight, the page builder summit wasn't the best name we could have picked because there's tons of Gutenberg content in there.

There's tons of content around marketing and design and all that. But a page builder summit is what we decided to call it. So tickets are free. If you want to click on that button, you can access all of the different pieces, bits and pieces, and we'll send you all of the links as and when the summit starts.

So please feel free to do that. That'd be nice. Okay. We're going to promote the people on this podcast today. We're going to promote their podcasts. Oh, sorry. Whatever they're doing as well. In some cases, it's a podcast. In some cases, it might be a website. First one up though is the Gutenberg Times. As we mentioned in the intro, this is Birgit's property.

What prompted all this, Birgit? All those years ago when you were thinking, I want something to do in my copious amounts of spare time, which clearly you had lots of. Haha, laugh. What why did you, why settle on Gutenberg as a thing? Because it's, it seems like really niche.

[00:13:21] Birgit Pauli Haack: It's very niche, yeah, and I'm glad I did because WordPress has gotten so big, yeah, that you can't know it all, and then, yeah, putting a weekend edition of a roundup post together is really hard, but it was triggered in 2017 when I first saw the Gutenberg video at WordCamp Paris, no, WorldCamp Europe in Paris. And I followed up on that with what people are doing with with this new thing. And I found it quite exhilarating and inspiring. And I thought, okay, so there's a lot of... negativity around yeah let's just put together the positive things, what other people are doing and how they approaching it and how they yeah, exploring it.

And it was just a story file that I updated all the time. But then I heard from a few. Contributors and from the community. So do you have a newsletter with all the updates kind of thing? And I said no. And then. Storyfy was a product by Adobe and they announced end of life for the next, the following year.

I said, okay, yeah, that's what always happens when you don't have your own website and build it on some places else. Yeah. You. You are on rented rented time. And so I created the Gutenberg think about name. Yeah, it's kind of Gutenberg times. com and then migrated or everything over. And then a year later I started the Gutenberg change log podcast because every two weeks there's a new Gutenberg plugin release and we can only scratch the surface and the release notes as well as when.

When Sarah Gooding is posting about it, she also can only scratch the surface on the things. And I started off with Mark Urain, the designer design lead on the design team, and it was really fabulous. Yeah. Always interested me what's in the new Gutenberg plugin. And a lot of people. We use it to stay on top of all the changes that come with a Gutenberg plugin.

And we kept it going. It's now in 88th episode. The last episode with Ellen Bauer was really nice because she's she's the product or the head co founder of Elmer Studio, a theme development shop, and she has supported block themes from the beginning with all the ups and downs, what.

What works, what doesn't work. And she has done a great effort to give feedback to the team of how theme builders will probably use this or can't use it because something is missing. And she was very excited about the new way it's 6. 3 came out and 6. 4. She and I, we are on the release team for 6.

4 on the underrepresented lead. Release team. So we talked about that and we talked about all the good features that are coming in and quality of life changes and for the editor and for the site editor.

[00:16:30] Nathan Wrigley: So if you're into hearing the news basically about Gutenberg, then this is.

Probably alongside, I would say, Sarah on the tavern is the place to subscribe, really. So if you go to gutenbergtimes. com, not only are you going to get text based content, you're also going to get the the podcast coming out and keeps you highly informed. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. You do.

Create quite a lot of content and you get it all transcribed and everything, which is really nice as well. Yeah, thank you for doing that. The latest one as Birgit said, number 88 is all about Gutenberg, six point sorry, WordPress 6. 4 and Gutenberg 16. 4 and five. We'll touch on that in just a moment.

And then we'll come onto Bob's website as well. Okay, here we go. Let's move on to that. So this is on the. Make dot WordPress. No, it's not. This is WordPress. org apologies. This is the future of WordPress and what's new for Guttenberg. Couple of pieces here. Both of them covering broadly the same thing. This also touches upon something we'll touch upon in a minute, which is the fact that WordCamp US happened at the end of word at these big flagship WordPress events, so Asia and Europe and us the, how should we describe them?

The people at the. At the top of the pyramid, they get on stage and they have their moment to say what's happened and what will happen. In this case, onto the stage came Josefa and Matt Mullenweg, and they talked a bit about what's happened in WordPress recently and what will be happening. Josefa talked about the last 20 years and also touched on the importance of the community and events like WordCamps and what have you.

I don't know if she got into the subject of the changes that are happening in WordCamps, but that was where her focus lay. And then Matt took to the stage and. Talked about, the 20 year cycle that we're now in. And the first I was going to say tweets, but it was no such thing back then, the first communication with Mike Little, which got WordPress started.

And then dug into a few of the more interesting bits. We'll maybe have a look at 2024, the new. That's a being tailored for entrepreneurs, small businesses, photographers, artists, writers, and bloggers. It's also going to integrate for the first time, font management and image block options, which should be really nice.

He also got into what we've talked about a little bit in the past workflows and collaboration. And the fact that phase three of Gutenberg, hopefully we'll bring it more in line with something akin to Google docs. So collaborative editing, although I'm not. Still not very sure how that's going to work out.

And he also talked about, now this I think is well worth a mention in a minute, a new hundred year wordpress. com plan. So I really don't quite know that I would even know what's going to happen in four years. time to anything online, let alone a hundred years, but that's quite an interesting idea.

Well,

[00:19:25] Katie Keith: did you click through to that link? Because there's almost nothing on it. It's a

[00:19:29] Nathan Wrigley: very minimal page. So here it is. I had a little look and essentially you get the hundred year planet. It says it ensures that your stories, achievements, and memories are preserved for generations to come. At the princely sum, it seems like quite a lot, but when you break it down.

Somebody did, I saw it in a tweet. It's something like 39 a month or something like that. But it's 38, 000. Which it's basically a lifetime deal, isn't it? The sort of thing you find on AppSumo, but what not with the kind of price tag that you would get. But it's, the idea is that you're just investing in WordPress and you're saying, that's it.

This is the only thing I'm going to touch for a hundred years. I'd be curious to see how this works.

[00:20:13] Bob Dunn: I'm not the, I'm obviously not the demographic for this because .

[00:20:18] Birgit Pauli Haack: Not sure any of this I'm also more the Buddhist, nothing last. Last thing is it's permanent.

[00:20:30] Nathan Wrigley: But the fact that WordPress has got to 20 years is pretty remarkable, but you've got to multiply that by five. And he honestly, even the likes of Google, I would imagine there's a very significant chance. That Google won't be around in a hundred years time. It just takes one clever soul to come along and come up with a slightly different idea, which is slightly better.

[00:20:55] Bob Dunn: They could always, they could always freeze me and I could come back and renew, I don't know.

[00:21:02] Nathan Wrigley: I think we've had you on this show before where you've frozen yourself. Haven't we? Yeah, definitely. Yeah. So that's I don't, I just don't even know what to make of that 38, 000. I don't know. Any company of any description in any industry, which has offered a hundred year plan up front, and I'm just really curious as to what it's all about.

It's a significant investment. I suppose if you've got that money lying around, you can do it and then forget about it. Let's just open it up. Bob,

You

[00:21:37] Bob Dunn: wouldn't have to worry about renewing.

It's almost as simple if you had, business that was going to maybe go on for generations or something you didn't know, you could just do that. And if you had the money and say, Oh, now we're set for a hundred years, yeah. I'm sure there's somewhere there's somebody figuring out a reason to do it.

And I'm sure.

[00:22:04] Birgit Pauli Haack: I can see that a family business in Europe, yeah, that has been around already for 150 years can think beyond that anyway, because yeah, they have a legacy and if they can, yeah, sign on on some of the service, they don't have to really worry about it anymore. Same with publications, yeah, or a writer who has, yeah, done a lot of writing in his.

and wants to stay around for a while afterwards. I definitely it's not for me, but I think also the coming up with that gives you a lot of questions about even what's going to be on. Yeah. In 10 years, how would this plan be still valid? Being hosting, being software changes and all that even the internet.

Yeah. We don't know what it's going to be about. So I think it's, it opens a lot of thinking space. Yeah. It's not so much on the year to year thing. And it's not so much about the now it's more like How can we make it last? Even those things, sustainability is a really big factor in it. How is our hosting going to be sustained for a hundred years?

I think there goes a lot of thought into it. And when you make it so concrete, To say, okay, let's offer that to someone who actually really can yeah, buy into it and then talk through all the consequences of it. Yeah. Because there's legal issues. There's yeah. How do you do even contracts for a company that might not stay around and how do you do succession in a company?

So I'm yeah it's definitely a great exercise in,

[00:23:56] Nathan Wrigley: I have a friend who has a. a record deal. We don't call it that anymore, do I? I don't even know what you call it because nobody's buying records. But back when we were about 20, so almost 100 years ago, he was he signed a record deal with the label and he was very careful to read the contracts.

And he showed me this clause, right? In the deal was That the record company would be able to sell his, the product of his mind, his music on earth and its solar system. And you just think, wow, that's really far forward looking. Maybe it's not that weird. Maybe companies at this scale are really planning on this level.

And obviously if you think about it if you let, so let's say a big organization like the New York times, let's be honest, 30, 000, 40, 000 Nira dollars. is probably nothing, but you've bought them and sorry, you've locked them in for the entirety of everybody's life that is alive right now. They never have to think about it again, but you have got them, which is interesting, but also you're right being it.

I cannot imagine. What the internet will look like. It just, if we go back 20 years, just the thing that I'm looking at, I've got a widescreen monitor. Probably 20 years ago it would've been this big. , it might have been like really dodgy. L e d maybe it wasn't even a flat panel. It was a, a screen and I was probably working on like a Commodore 64 or something like that.

It's unimaginable really, that what it'll all look like in a hundred years. I'm curious. Yeah. Go back a hundred years.

[00:25:34] Bob Dunn: Think of,

[00:25:35] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Yeah. Go back a hundred years. What the heck? The Victorians were still throwing things around and, yeah. Oh, they

[00:25:41] Birgit Pauli Haack: were really complaining about the telegram. So why would I be interested what the other village is thinking about?

Yeah, why would I

[00:25:49] Nathan Wrigley: do that? Yeah you really are trusting on the internet and website paradigm working in a hundred years time. And I'm just not entirely sure that paradigm will be the case. It lasts already 30 years, yeah, no, I'm just thinking more maybe AR will take over or some sort of.

Yeah. Technology that you can talk to or something that, dare I say it, Elon Musk is working on things which are embedded in your brain. Who knows what that'll all look like. Yeah. Katie, any thoughts on that? I know you raised it and then we we didn't get you, give you a chance to talk about it.

[00:26:22] Katie Keith: Have you noticed that we're discussing this in more depth than we would a lifetime plan?

They could have released a lifetime version of wordpress. com, but there's something about the hundred years that's captured the imagination. Because no one's really defined very well what lifetime typically means in the industry, and it's fairly unusual for... for a hosted website service to offer it.

But is it really that different? It did they, I think, I feel almost there's like a political statement about WordPress in putting a hundred years on it. It's almost like showing their political confidence in the future existence and all of that.

[00:27:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. Anyway, there it is.

The hundred year plan. You can go and see it. It's at wordpress. com forward slash 100 dash year. But then if we go back to the article that I've actually slightly moved on, but it's basically about the same thing. We're now talking about that same keynote speech, but this is Sarah Gooding's take on it in the WP tab.

And she draws out all the same points. that we read on the WordPress site that we were just looking at a moment ago, but also gets into the, a really interesting development. There's a couple of things in here, Matt Mullenweg when he took to the stage, didn't only announce that, but he also talked about a new.

LMS, i. e. learning management system. So think things like Sensei and Lifter and a whole bunch of others. They're going to have a working group. And the idea of this working group is to figure out what the benefits and the drawbacks are of having multiple plugins, ostensibly doing the same thing.

And although they do it in their own kind of unique way wouldn't it be nice if they were talking to each other and working off, some sort of. Coherent WordPress y API maybe, or some sort of WordPress y code base where they could jump on top. So representatives from TutorLMS, LearnDash, Lifter, and Sensei met to discuss common data models so that users can, and I think this is the interesting sentence, users can easily switch between solutions.

At the moment, if you're using one of these platforms, aside from being very clever at MySQL and, chucking stuff from one database table over to another, there probably isn't a particularly easy way to do this. I imagine there's days, weeks, and... What have you enterprise in going from one solution to another, but wouldn't it be nice if we had some sort of interoperability so that really your feature set is the thing that locks you in, not the fact that your code is proprietary and it doesn't suit the compatibility of others.

He then took it further and he said, wouldn't it be nice if plugins that did all the things like SEO. Or site builders. And for that, I'm going to read page builders. So you know what I mean by that, that they also agree on common data models. And I just think this is really interesting. As an aside, I just did a podcast episode, which will be coming out.

On Wednesday on the Tavern with Scott Kingsley Clark and his endeavor, certainly very recently, and it goes back a long way, but he's reinvigorated himself to come up with the fields API so that developers can just use the same set of things to create, let's say, custom fields, custom post types, all of that kind of thing.

And this speaks to the idea that is this the way WordPress is going? WordPress core itself handles how to do all of these things. These plugins come along and they lock into those, but that means that you as an end user are not locked into one solution. And if that is indeed the case, that just feels like a really nice place to go.

So on that, I've spoken for quite a long time there. I'll just open it up. What do you feel about this LMS group and the idea of all of these common data structures that we can all hook into?

I

[00:30:29] Birgit Pauli Haack: think it's a very good thing. Especially because the industry of who's buying LMSs also has a standard. It's an outdated standard, but it can be invigorated yeah, refreshed a bit, especially when companies like the WordPress LMS industry comes together and to flesh out the new standards for that.

But I it's it's such an wave to take the risk out of the buy when you say, okay, you can move along if you need to, because we don't offer certain things. It's also good for the plugins and build on LMS. They don't have to do it for five or six LMSs if they. provide find some badges or something like that as a service to the LMS plugin, as an add on they just can do one standard for that.

And I think that really helps the platform or the ecosystem when there when there's collaboration between the product people, yeah that builds. And if they are together, their voice towards the core, what needs to come into core to make that all work better it's easier to update that as well.

[00:31:55] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you for that. I don't know what the numbers are for LMS websites in terms of how market share of WordPress itself they have, but I imagine it's fairly significant if this is going to be happening, I, in a somewhat slightly cynical Sentence just before we hit record I said something along the lines of, I wonder what the reasoning behind this is.

And I expressed the idea that I wonder if this is done. Let's just say for example, in the case of Sensei, if they were not the market leader, does it benefit them? So Sensei is a, an automatic property in the same space as all these other commercial rivals. If they weren't doing as well, say, Does this give them a way if you like to compete differently, but Bob, you happen to be coincidentally sitting near Chris Badgett from Lifter LMS, and thankfully you were able to give me completely different Intel.

[00:32:53] Bob Dunn: Yeah. And actually, I think he had some of his team members and I don't know if there were other LMS I was trying to, but it was, Chris was, I could tell from the back, you could almost feel the grin coming through the back of his head, he when it came up that. He sat up much straighter and was looking around, he was very happy about it.

You could tell. And the, some of the, I don't know whether it was his team members or if there were, like I said, other people involved with other LMS, but they were, raising their fists and excited. So to me, that shows that one thing is, these are a group of very smart people, so they know.

Kind of what they're getting into. And obviously they're very happy about it and excited about it because yeah, it was there was quite the applause and, there was yeah, there was a lot of excitement around it. So I think a lot of people, at least in that crowd. felt good about and it was good to see that the actual people that arm followed with it seemed quite happy.

[00:33:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And I, an example might be like if I bought a Ford car, but I could only take it to a Ford dealer to get it repaired when something went wrong, I'd feel a bit aggrieved about that. I want to just be able to rock up to any mechanic anywhere on the planet and say, here's my car. Can you have a go?

Oh yeah, sure. Like these are fairly standard parts we've got here. You've got your carburetor. I can get a replacement for that. Or I've just noticed the exhaust needs patching up. That's fairly straightforward. So from that point of view, it just makes perfect sense, doesn't it? Because Chris and his team should this.

Prove fruitful, they'll have less code to write, and they'll be able to concentrate on the stuff which matters, which is not writing of the code to interact with the database necessarily, but writing all of the cool features. All of the badging system and the way that their course workflows work and all of that stuff, they can concentrate on that and all of the air quotes, boring bits that they have to write to get things in and out of the database could be handled by WordPress core Katie.

[00:34:57] Katie Keith: Yeah, but the thing is, they've already done that boring work. They have their custom post type and all the fields attached to it. And so do LearnClapDash and so do Sensei. Who's going to take the hits and do the development work and move their data structure to somebody else's and things like that?

I'm not sure in practice. How it's going to be built, and I know what you mean about Sensei, then I don't know, there's definitely not number one or two market leaders, I don't know where they are after that. So I do wonder what the incentive is to so I'd be interested to see how it works out in practice.

But as a plug in company, I really like being its point about it being easier to integrate with. For example, we have a plug in that will list LMS courses and lessons and so on in a, like a searchable table view. And we have tutorials on our blog about individual LMSs and how to display their courses using our plugin.

So it would actually be really nice to just say how to display LMS courses in a searchable table, and it would work with everything instead of having to reinvent the wheel each time. But I'm not convinced what the incentive is for the LMS plugins to develop this.

[00:36:14] Nathan Wrigley: The piece, so this is slightly decoupled from what we're saying, but going back to the interview I'm doing, I did with Scott Kingsley Clark.

He was making the point that for the fields API, so custom post types, custom fields meta and all of that you wouldn't. If you stood where you are now on WordPress's 20th anniversary, you wouldn't want to be where we are now. You would want the system to have been designed so that there was a Field's a p I just Yeah.

In the first place. And it never worked out that way. So it's retrofitting WordPress with functionality, which means that those players. who are already incumbent. So the senseis, the lifters, the tutor LMSs, they will have additional work, but maybe somewhat frustratingly, all of the new players that come in, we'll be able to jump over that hurdle a little bit, and they'll just be able to get going straight away without having to.

To retrofit anything. So yeah, just interesting. Courtney, this is going back, I think, to the 100 years. Courtney mentions that Matt just called out lifetime plugin licenses as something he doesn't think is a smart move. So that's interesting because I almost view this 100 year thing as lifetime.

It almost feels like you could say the same thing. In the same breath Courtney goes on to say one example that would be helpful for having some of these APIs include who needs the data about learners. Suppose various organizations send their staff to learn WP and want to know staff. Sorry. Yes.

Staff completions. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. Other ways to use that data. Then somebody who's anonymous. If you wish to tell us who you are, feel free. If you don't, that's fine. But for now you're anonymous says it's never going to happen. They all work differently and it's impossible to have them be cross compatible.

Yes. I guess that's the case as we are at the moment, but the enterprise would be to unpick that and make it possible. Plus there's no in financial for financial incentive from automatic to build such a thing. It's OAuth and how they promised data from Facebook could be used in Google, et cetera.

Reality set in very quickly. No incentive for Chris to cooperate when they have no top down syndicate. Yeah. I think it's some of the things that we've been talking about there though. Oh, I think it's Spencer Foreman. He's lower down. Yeah. Hi Spencer. So it's Spencer Foreman. And the core blocks team is still breaking the query loop block.

It's silly to think about all of this. All this other stuff. I think that should have said stuff. Yeah, there we go. Okay. So thanks, Spencer. Put in the alternative point of view. Anyway, I just thought that was really interesting. And if that model, the fields API comes about the LMS, let's call it API comes about, and then the SEO API comes up, that all just seems like the right direction of travel and Spencer, I get your point that it may or may not happen, but it feels like a nice direction of travel anyway, let us move on.

So Gutenberg again, let me raise this onto the screen. Gutenberg 16. 5 adds new commands to the command palette. Birgit, being the Gutenberg expert, I don't know if you just want to take this and run with it, it's up to you. I can paraphrase it if you like, but you might want to.

[00:39:38] Birgit Pauli Haack: There's a a lot of things in there. Most of it is also set in the stage for the 6. 4 release. It will have some quality of life improvements on the site editor and blocks and all that. In Gutenberg 16. 5, there's a new commands for the command palette, which is has been a nice one. In. Implemented or introduced in 6.

3, but now everybody's coming up with what would be another good command to be in there? Riyad Benguela has published in the DevNotes for 6. 3 ways how plugin developers can also create commands for the command palette. And it's it's the quick way to get something done when you're not in the right screen.

So if you're in the site editor and you want to add a new page, you could do this in the site editor, but it's two levels up. You can just command do a control K and say, add page. And then it gets you to the right place. Or it can say switch off top toolbar. Or just for the moment because I need it at my block or yeah, all these kind of little things help you so much when you don't have to go six levels up and three levels down on the menu system and WordPress, and especially when you're a new user.

On WordPress and you don't know where things are and you have to find it out, you have to read documentation to find that little piece where you can change distraction free mode, for instance you can use the command palette and ask for that and it shows you a selection of different different ways to do that or different commands that you can go next in the situation where you are.

I think we have, none of us have really pushed the envelope on that quite yet. But it's also because for me, it's, yeah, I'm so deep in, into WordPress and all the menus that I actually know where it is. And you said something about muscle memory. I just go there and get back to what I need to do.

But if a new user comes, I think it's a very good tool to just get things done.

[00:42:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I I really was excited about the command palette. Genuinely thought it would be the greatest thing ever, and I've used it almost not at all. Because, like you said, my muscle memory is just, the arm goes out, I collect the mouse, go to the appropriate menu, and I'm okay.

I've done that, and it's probably taken me... Less time than it would have done to invoke the command palette and all of that kind of stuff. Maybe not. That's probably not true. But the point is I know what I'm doing. So it doesn't crop up. But on my Mac, I use Spotlight, which is basically the same thing, but for the Mac.

And I'm totally bewildered by where anything is on the Mac. I basically don't have a clue. So typing it in. Is the quickest solution. If I was writing for a Mac website or something, probably the opposite, I would know exactly where I was going, so I haven't really figured it out. But anyway, nice new stuff in there.

So I'll hand it over to Bob or

[00:42:55] Bob Dunn: Katie. Yeah I think that, I've demoted myself from a power user to just a user these days. And, my, my muscle memory is getting flabby. And so as a result, this, I haven't gotten into using this yet, but I want to use it because. Yeah, I'm constantly digging around because I'm not doing, except for some basic stuff that I do over and over.

Sometimes I'm looking for things and I'm poking around and frowning and stuff. And I think that, it's good for, it's good for new users, but it's also good for some of us that, no longer want to explore and spend a lot of time in there and just want to get things done. So I'm, I need to, take my.

My muscles now and teach them to use that and make it easier.

[00:43:49] Nathan Wrigley: Katie, anything you want to add? No,

[00:43:51] Katie Keith: I'm barely a

[00:43:52] Nathan Wrigley: user, so nothing.

Yeah, no, that's fine. The other thing which I think Birgit mentioned was that as more and more developers throw more and more things. into the command pallet. So basically imagine a year from now that I don't know, you've got a selection of 20 plugins on your website and each of them is throwing things into the command pallet as options.

That command pallet is going to get very full. And so how do we surface? Because the whole point of it is it's got no UI at all. It's got a search bar. That's it. And. How do you know what options are available for the plugin that you want? So that's going to be a real challenge. And if I just quickly show it on the screen, there it is.

The idea being, and you've probably seen this on all sorts of things. You see it in mobile apps and things, don't you? You begin interacting with the search bar, and then it begins to refine as to what it wants, what it is that it thinks you want. So in this case, we can see that the word open has been typed in.

So lots and lots of things that have possible. Open commands have appeared. But also what if you were in a particular part of the website, let's say that you were in the, I don't know, general settings area or something, would that invoke certain options or would it be, not quite so contextually aware?

Anyway, I think at some point I'm going to have to just make use of it. I. Like Bob, I've got the flabby muscle memory going on there. And I just could come time and time again to the same set of maybe 30 different things that I do on the website, but for new users. I see that this is a really good app.

Yeah. And it

seems this is how

[00:45:32] Bob Dunn: we're doing blocks. Yeah. It's when I look for a block, I go up into search, because I've got so many blocks in there that, I spend all my time scrolling through trying to find the right

[00:45:43] Nathan Wrigley: ones. Oh, that's interesting. Cause I use the forward slash command always.

I always start up basically a paragraph. So I hit return, get a paragraph block. Then I hit forward slash and then start type. So I'm primed for the command palette because I am using the keyboard. For that, I just haven't, I don't know. I just haven't got it

[00:46:02] Birgit Pauli Haack: as well. And we all gonna be not power users anymore when the new admin screens will come in.

I think that the moment that command palette hit was when the site editor was also introduced with a lot of additional menu items that not everybody learns. Yeah from the beginning and only when they need it that they all of a sudden know, okay, Oh, that's also in the site editor.

Yeah, we remember that there were pad reusable blocks were renamed as pattern. We can now do page adding a page editing in the site editor template parts and patterns have been moved from different places. So I think It's a good way to offset all the discombobulation that's going to happen with interface changes.

That I'm sure you have will throw quite a few of us into a slowdown on creating content and putting it out there.

[00:47:07] Nathan Wrigley: I can imagine a scenario where if you really are a power user of the command palette, you could fully switch off the admin UI. Entirely and make it all go away. And everything is just a keyboard shortcut away.

Remember when I started using Drupal, I just memorized all the query strings for everywhere that I want it to go. Forward slash, whatever it was, update or whatever. I never did that with WordPress cause the menus were so easy to use, for things like login, I use that, I type it in and what have you.

But yeah, the idea of getting rid of the admin UI. And using the command, that's interesting. I wonder if a whole new set of users in a hundred years time

[00:47:49] Birgit Pauli Haack: will. If I spin this a little bit further, I would say maybe a user can actually program WordPress to do a certain set of commands through the command palette and not have to do it themselves.

Yeah.

[00:48:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. And then we'll start talking to it and say, Hey, WordPress.

[00:48:13] Birgit Pauli Haack: Yeah. That's

[00:48:14] Nathan Wrigley: the AI coming in. Add a new page for me, please. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That again, quite interesting. So if you're into the command palette, it's got some new updates. That's basically the long and short of that. Let's move on.

This is quite nice. I think this has got more utility than I thought when I first read the article. So top agencies read that how you will, but some big agencies have joined forces to publish a free guide on WordPress for enterprise. Again, we're on the tavern. 29th of August, Sarah Gooding, as always.

So a collection of some of the bigger agencies, and I might as well list them off BigByte BigByte, I think led the charge here, and then they collaborated with Tenop, Ali, HumanMade, ImpSide, and XWP. They published a free resource, which is called WordPress for Enterprise Guide. Now this would never have applied to me because I was never really chasing the enterprise clients.

But really it's I think probably a vestige of the fact that many people at enterprise are still viewing WordPress, let's put it in air quotes as a blogging platform. I'm not sure strictly how true that is these days. I imagine even. Even people who don't know much about WordPress probably realize it can do a little bit more than that.

Anyway, there's some sort of friction at that level, getting their big clients to onboard to WordPress. There's some problem, somebody in the chain of command in the enterprise is going, hang on a minute. WordPress. Are you sure? But so what they've done is they put a guide together, profiling a bunch of high profile companies.

And honestly, this is the laundry list. Check this out. CNN, Vogue, Google, The Wall Street Journal, Spotify, Harvard University, The White House, Meta, aka Facebook, PlayStation, and many more. But that's pretty. Decent list to start with. And the idea is to expose all of the benefits. Here's some case studies.

Here's why these companies have benefited. Here's the things that they've gained, here's why not to be scared of it. But the other sort of quirky side of this is that I thought if I was still in the game of being a freelancer and I was still taking my local clients. I still think I could tear pages out of this and make it useful for me because if you can say to, Joe, the butcher who wants a quick, simple brochure website look, Google are using it.

I think there's a certain kudos to that. I think Joe the butcher will look favorably on that. So it's not just about the enterprise. I think the rest of us. Could make use of this. There's all sorts of information on the website, but I will just hand it over. What do you think? I think this is a nice little It's

[00:50:59] Bob Dunn: interesting because I've been, I, a lot of the agencies that come on do the boo are into enterprise.

I've heard this for the last couple of years talking about it. And I think that I'm talking with some right now about doing a channel just on enterprise. And so there's, the thing is that it's happened, it's happening. If people were to listen to my podcast, they'd find actually stories where they talked about these enterprise clients and I've had several of them come on and I think the biggest thing is just where the need is to.

Make everybody aware that it's possible and that there are actually companies doing enterprise work and they're doing successfully. And I think that's what it really boils down to, because for some reason it's been muffled and whoever and whatever is saying WordPress can't do it, blah, blah, blah, but they want to get more of a platform out there and get more people to realize that.

Hey, this can happen and there's some pretty incredible sites going on. And, some of these projects, some of these agencies talk about is just phenomenal. I've heard them explain, how long it took, how many people worked on it, even the prices that they've charged. And so it's being done.

It just needs to be publicized and people need to start accepting it that. It's possible.

[00:52:36] Birgit Pauli Haack: Yeah. I think a big part was also, it's not so much the blogging part with WordPress. I think it's the open source part that scares enterprise level IT people quite a bit the The accountability around open source.

And yeah, and I think this guide really helps with that, that all the things like security, like performance that all is at least talked about and and the agencies definitely smaller agencies can take this as well because it also unifies the language around all those problem spaces that an enterprise company has to.

To sign on onto a CMS so you don't have to make all the arguments over and over again. Yeah, you can really streamline your your project management to the need of that particular client and not have to start with, I say, always with Adam and Eve. Yeah, so you get them better, faster in there.

And I yeah, okay. I I was at WordCamp Europe. There was a pre WordCamp event about the enterprise level with the name agencies there. And it was really the part where there is no unified message and they cannot wait, or they don't think that it's actually the WordPress open source problem.

It's their own, it's a problem that enterprise. Agency would need to solve for themselves and that's what they have done. They come together and say, okay, this is how WordPress really helps in the enterprise world. We have a unified kind of uniform way to talk about it. And now let's get to the nitty gritty of really fast and Also, yeah, shorten the lead line the lead time it takes from contact to actually getting the sale or the closing.

[00:54:39] Bob Dunn: Yeah. And it was actually a part of the community summit. I think they had a piece there and they did have some other discussions around it quite a bit at WordCamp US.

[00:54:49] Birgit Pauli Haack: True. Yes. Yeah. And the notes are on, just to put it in there, make. wordpress. org forward slash summit. You get all the discussion notes with two caveats.

One is there's no attribution. So you don't know who said what. Which is pretty nice. And the other one is there were no decisions made because decisions are made in the team and not as one conference where not everybody can be there. Yeah. But read the notes over there quite enlightening on all kinds of aspects around WordPress.

Yeah. Just to put a little.

[00:55:22] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you, Katie. Anything to add to that before

[00:55:25] Katie Keith: we move on? I really like it because. As an ecosystem, we need to work together to grow WordPress overall and get more people using it for the future. And everybody wins from that. And this is one part of that. I think anything to focus on enterprise as we, as you implied, we'll have this trickle down effect so that smaller organizations will be using it more as well as the bigger ones.

So I think that's a really good direction.

[00:55:53] Nathan Wrigley: Little quote just to end this piece this comes from WordPress VIP Director of Product Marketing Michael Khalil, Khalili, I think. While smaller brands are able to switch CMS fairly easily, for large scale enterprise it's often a major undertaking. So we hope this guide makes the decision process much easier for those exploring open source options.

In other words, people have done it. WordPress can handle it, you can do it too. And you don't have to get involved in some weirdy bespoke CMS system that nobody else can help you update. That's the title of this episode, weirdly bespoke CMS system. Let's write that down. Okay. That's right. Okay, good. Got it.

That'll do. Okay. Let's do the next piece, shall we? This is. This is Bob's. This is Bob's piece on WordCamp US. We're going to feature a few pieces from various people, but we'll take this one first. I picked Bob's piece not only because he was on, but because he he takes photos of his food.

Which is great. I love this kind of piece. I just lap up this kind of piece, the piece where it's all very sterile and people just say what you should do at WordCamp and all that. I like the one that Bob does where, here's my, it's my Satsuki or whatever it else is that meeting.

But also, this is the point, right? There you are with your good friend. Mark, it's not Mark Westgard, I should say. It's not just about turning up and being on show for your company and all that, it's about making friendships and hanging out in the hallway. And and Bob just does a really nice.

Nice piece here, including some photos and all of the different things, all the people that he met, but also in here, I thought this was lovely. So let me just find the correct photo, which, yeah, here we are. So this is a Neil was on this show the other day, but sadly his audio and video would just so choppy that he had to drop out, but a Neil.

Had gone to the event and the intention was to have the booth available for his company, which is a multi, what is it? Multicolab. And but unfortunately the team weren't able to make it. I'm not quite sure what that was. So Anil gave Bob the booth for the rest of the event. And Bob, I know for a fact you were like thinking something like this in the future might've been a cool idea.

Didn't have any pretensions of doing it this time around. So what did you do? Just.

[00:58:30] Bob Dunn: I saw the booth and I was looking for a place to podcast and I knew he was having, had some issues and I saw there was nothing set up there. So I just went up to him and asked him what he was going to do with it. And he said essentially nothing because his team couldn't make it and he couldn't be tied behind the booth.

And I said, it'd be cool just to set up my microphone there and do some podcasts. And so he went and talked to the organizing team because I didn't want, to be arrested for squatting on empty booths at WordCamp US or something. So I thought I better, let's go through the motions.

And they were actually. Thrilled about it because then they wouldn't have an empty booth. Yeah. So I basically just sat up my microphone and I put a bunch of my own sponsor stickers on there that were also sponsors at WordCamp US and had a few podcasts there and it was, it's something that I played around with.

I think moving forward, I want to do this at least at the flagship ones. And it was nice because usually I'm wandering around like a pinball. And I'm just bouncing around. People came up, I was able to talk to people a little bit better, connect with people I wanted to connect with. And there was actually people that came up.

That listened to the podcast that I would have probably never had the opportunity to chat with or even meet by just wandering around. So it was really good. And then I actually Nell offered to give it to me for free and I'll, I'm going to have him come on and do a show with me. But I did. I did give him a sponsorship board because, he invested some serious money into that.

And I thought I, as much as, his graciousness, I appreciated that. I thought, it would be nice if he got something for that because that's a little bit of a hit, to the pocketbook. So we agreed upon that and yeah, it was really fun. It was interesting because since I wasn't really selling anything, it was a very approachable type of booth.

So people coming by and they'd go through the little buffet of stickers and grab a bunch of stickers and I was putting more and more different people's swag from other booths on there and stuff and Yeah, it was a lot of fun. So it's definitely something I want to you know Do again and this one, this picture you have here, this is actually three people on the night before we were at a dinner and I was talking about how I started doing these podcasts in native language.

So I take, two, three, four people from WordPress community, allow them to sit down and talk to their own community. And one of them were sitting there and he said could we do that? Here. And I said, come by the booth tomorrow. And it was really funny because I didn't even see them sneak up.

I was talking to somebody. I turned around, all three of them were sitting there, said, we're ready. And so I, yeah, so I turned on everything and just let him go at it. And there was a man behind there. He was one of the workers. At the conference, when the people sitting up in the eating area behind and I could tell he was just intrigued because he's at this conference and he sees this little group of people I, he might've been from, or understood Spanish and he was just fascinated.

He kept edging over closer and closer before he could listen to it. But, but yeah,

[01:02:01] Nathan Wrigley: it turned out great. I do the idea, and I don't know if this will ever take off, but I do like the idea of kind of non-commercial sponsorship booths. So the first time I ever saw it okay, this may be a mixture of commercial and non-commercial, but was in Word Camp Europe in Athens, where Amelia Capital had a booze, but it was like a.

It was like a space to do a little bit like a TV show in a sense, people showed up and they pitched to them. They've got this enterprise funding. We'll talk more about them in a bit. But so it wasn't, I'm selling you a product. It was just a space where people could find them and they had their allocated space.

And now you've done this Bob by a bit of serendipity. It wasn't intended, but I do like the idea of. dedicated tables for just other things. I don't really know what those other things might even be, but your podcasting one fits the bill beautifully. And I wonder if in some of the bigger events where there's lots and lots of hall space.

Something like that might be quite fun. And it

[01:03:07] Bob Dunn: was intriguing to me because I had no signage, obviously. So it was just this booth with something going on. So people would come up and stand there and step back and watch what's going on. And it

[01:03:19] Nathan Wrigley: was, yeah. So that could be an interesting approach, couldn't it?

A table, basically, where, you're not advertising a product, so you don't need all the signage, you don't need any of that, you don't necessarily even need a particular spot near a window, or, you choose your ideal spot near where the people are gathering for the food, and all that kind of thing.

You just... You just get a table and then you can put yourself there. When I do interviews for the tavern, they have media rooms, which I can book out. And that works really well, but it's not in the event. It's separate, in my case, it works well. Cause I want the noise to go away and all that.

But if you can gather a little crowd around you watching your podcast, that's great for you. It's great for the broader ecosystem. So there's my bid. I think that the big event should have these. Philanthropic tables available.

[01:04:08] Bob Dunn: Yeah it's really and I basically told a lot of people, I just walked around and said, there's a microphone over there if you want to sit down and just do a show, go ahead and do it now, I'll send it out through my feed and a couple of my hosts did that and yeah, so it was really a good time.

[01:04:26] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. I really love this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:04:31] Birgit Pauli Haack: Great job.

[01:04:34] Nathan Wrigley: Sorry.

[01:04:36] Birgit Pauli Haack: I have a question for Bob. How was the noise level actually? I didn't listen to any of your

[01:04:42] Bob Dunn: Yeah, I just put one out actually I'm putting two out tomorrow that had, that was there and I have certain mics so I know what to Set them out, as far as the background, then I Nathan will like this, I run it through descript and I can get that background noise really reduced down, but it stills, I get it to just a point where it still sounds.

I don't want it so silent. So there's, the technology and just thinking a little bit ahead of time because yeah, just out of the box, they do need some work. So I do have to spend some time, but it's it's it's

[01:05:25] Nathan Wrigley: well worth it. Yeah. Yeah. A big, if your podcast, if you do use Descript, but if you haven't made the leap to Descript, it is the, is one of the best investments.

I think it's really good.

[01:05:39] Birgit Pauli Haack: I tried it about two or three years ago and it was just

[01:05:42] Nathan Wrigley: abysmal. Yeah it's come on in leaps and bounds and they've really concentrated on video as well as on the audio and you can record. So what it does is it gives you the ability to record in basically any environment, knowing.

That you will at least get something usable. Honestly, you could be stood in a busy train station and it would work absolute miracles. Yeah, it's really good so yeah, really nice. Write up of word camp europe then of course Oh dear

not only does my head appear in that post Bob put together a dedicated post of all the places where my head and my favorite wait wait, where's it gone? Oh, you haven't you didn't include it. This is one where maybe it was a private one There's one where my head is literally basically in a toilet Yeah, that is

[01:06:43] Bob Dunn: a private one I thought that was maybe gone a little bit

[01:06:50] Nathan Wrigley: I love gimmicks like this. So that was really great. Thank you for doing that Bob. I appreciate it. It's all very funny, but this piece came across Katie's radar. This is WP sunshine. And I have to say, Katie, I haven't met Derek, but I interviewed Derek about, Oh, I didn't know four months ago, something like that.

And he came across as the most genuinely. Genuinely nice chap was quite happy to admit where he'd mock things up in his own business. He's moving from being a freelancer, so selling his time for money, to being a product developer. And he's made lots of mistakes on the way and he freely admits them.

And I get a sense, Katie, that his write up of WordCamp US... Resonated with you a bit on that level because it was very human.

[01:07:38] Katie Keith: Yeah, and also I spent quite a lot of time with him at WordCamp US, having only known him electronically before. And so it was nice to meet. So we talked in person about how, and he was tweeting beforehand as well about how he was nervous.

What have I signed up to? I don't know anybody. And having a bit of introvert regret beforehand. So it was really interesting to watch his journey, both in person and then subsequently in this post where it all comes together. And because I think all of us have been to quite a few WordCamps now, and the more you go, as the more people you know by now, if you just walk somewhere in a word camp for a minute, you'll find somebody, and it's nice to go back sometimes and think, what's it like for people that aren't in that situation? And Derek was, he knew people from online, but not in person. And it was nice to see what a welcoming community he

[01:08:33] Nathan Wrigley: found it.

Yeah, he just comes across as just like the human that you would like to be in the pub with talking about his frailty and his nervousness and all that. And I particularly like the passage where he talks about the fact that his wife, who he describes as an extrovert, Was very good at dragging him into situations where he might not have put himself, but also just that ability to sum up what you thought about it and what it meant to you and your business.

And he talks about all of the events that he went to. It was this paragraph here that I quite like where he talks about all of the things that he would've done differently if he got to hit the rewind button. Anyway, it's a lovely piece. It'll be linked in the show notes. WP Sunshine. It was published on August the 29th and it's just called WordCamp US 2023 Review.

If you've been to WordPress events before, you might find it interesting just to have somebody else's perspective, but if you haven't been to them before and you just think, I cannot do these things dare it. Shows the way you can, it's possible. And and I think he enjoyed it. And I did say to Courtney at the beginning that we'd raise a glass to her right up as well.

Courtney wrote one just a few days ago, 31st of August called WordCamp US 2023 recap, and it's just her. different take on all the different things, including, which is quite nice. Some of the some of the bits and pieces are actually shown on the stage. She's captured the the YouTube URLs and place those on there as well.

And some of her favorite talks and the highlights that she got out of the keynotes and things like that. So a different take. So have a look at that. And then finally on WordCamp US, this will be the last one. Michelle Frechette, who's often on this show, she writes from a different perspective, not always a joy when you attend a WordCamp event, not because the event wasn't good, but the sort of the aftermath of it, how in anything in life, you set yourself a task, you work really hard to achieve the task, and then you.

Do the task and you expect this epiphany and your emotional level will stay at that level. Of course it doesn't, it just drops off and you return to normal. And so this is her little piece about coping with the downside of returning to normal life after an event, not just a word camp, it could be anything, but yeah, it's certainly worth a read.

I know that Some people do go through that stuff quite a lot. And it's quite nice to know that somebody else is going through it with you. Okay. So we talked about Yoast and Marika. These are the co founders, husband and wife of Yoast the company. They have joined, and I think it's fair to say there's a new look to the post status website.

I, nothing about this looks familiar. Am I right? I'm right. Yeah. This is not the way post status website used to look. So it looks, yeah, they just did a recent redesign. Oh, nice. Anyway, so they've got this beautiful new layout, nice and simple, easy to read, and they have joined, they've decided to put their money where their mouth is.

PostStatus, if you don't know, I'm sure you do, PostStatus is a community online, I think it's fair to say it's probably Outside of make and all of that, it's probably the biggest of the WordPress communities. And in that community, you can find help, advice, chats about more or less everything.

They put tons of content out every single week and that's a slog, isn't it? There's a lot of work to be done and sometimes that can be a bit lonely. It was started by Brian Cosgard a little while ago, and he decided to move out of WordPress. Ooh, I'm going to say about three, maybe four years ago, something like that now.

And so Corey and Lindsay Miller took it off his hands and that job they've been holding onto since then with the help of many other people, including Courtney and Michelle. And they've decided though, that they're going to get some funding from Yoast and Marika as Equity partners. I don't really know what this means.

But I presume that if you put your money into such a thing, there's going to be an expectation of some sort of deliverable on the other side. I don't know what that means, but that's just to say that, if you've been in post status and you've been thinking about it, whether to renew and all those kinds of things, maybe this is the.

Sort of thing that you want. I certainly know from my perspective, I think Yoast and what that company have done and contributed to WordPress over the years gives me real real clarity in what their commitments were. And so Yoast and Yoast, the person and Marika being at the helm of that for many years, I'm sure that their incentives and their thoughts around WordPress as a project haven't really changed.

So I don't know if anybody's. Got anything they want to add to that, but quite a big shift if you're a post status member.

[01:13:16] Bob Dunn: I think that they, I heard a little, I talked to Corey at WordCamp US for quite a while on this. And I think a lot of it's in the back and they're still working things out, but the four of them have all taken leadership roles and I think they've all invested some of their.

Money's into it to basically grow it. I know they recently announced that there's a couple big announcements they're going to have over the next week or two. I think I have an inkling that one of them, I'm not going to say it though publicly, cause I don't want to screw up and say the wrong thing, but yeah, but I, it's, yeah, I think it's just.

There's some growth there, some things they want to do. And I think with, yeah, the tie in that Marika and Yost are doing with their other business. I think it all it makes a lot of sense. It's, when I look at it, it didn't surprise me and it made a lot of sense for the growth of it.

[01:14:13] Nathan Wrigley: So we know that their SEO plugin and business was their home, but really it sat inside the. I'm going to say the nest of WordPress. And going into the venture capital business, which way, which they did. I wonder if they missed that a bit. I wonder if there was like a bit of, I want to be, I want to be more hands on with WordPress and WordPress community and all that kind of stuff.

I don't know. But yeah, anyways, Birgit or Katie, anything on that?

[01:14:39] Birgit Pauli Haack: I find it's a genius move from Corey to, entertain getting those two on there. Yeah. Because when I first worked with WordPress Yoast was the first plugin that I installed and I was following how they conduct business and how they Live in the WordPress community, which is sometimes really hard, but then made a multi million dollar business out of it by having a perfect free plugin.

Yeah. And that was really interesting for me to see. With post status being a. A network of WordPress professionals getting the OG professionals in there is definitely a great move and for the whole community because with a look that Yoast had on on the ecosystem, also looking a little bit outside of WordPress.

I know Yoast also is available for Shopify. Yeah. There is a lot of input that they can give and advice to the, to any of the professionals and also having a little bit of a I know there's a whole lot of friends, set of friends around there. It's a very friendly and homecoming pretty much for them.

I would feel, yeah. And I'm glad they made the jump.

[01:16:01] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Katie,

[01:16:02] Katie Keith: anything? Yeah, it seems to be a good match. So they've invested in various product companies, and this investing in more of a kind of community within WordPress feels like a really good fit for them. So it'll be interesting to see how they help move it forward, because I think they don't just give their money, they give their time, don't they?

It's like the whole Dragon's Den Shark Tank thing, that they're giving their expertise in helping everything grow that they invest in. Interested to

[01:16:30] Nathan Wrigley: see. And also given that they've got an interest in the community and really they want to be in touch with community members for their venture capital It probably gives them a like intravenous into all of that.

They've got a real stake in that community as well Yeah okay. Congratulations. Corey lindsay and marika and just big it felt like you had something else to add Yeah,

[01:16:50] Birgit Pauli Haack: I forgot that The Yoast has actually had a lot of contributors contributing to core, back to core. And I think having that experience as well, knowing how WordPress actually works behind the scenes is really helpful to anybody in the community.

So if they share a lot of that, of their experience of contributing to core for the five, for the future, for the people that wanted to participate in five for the future, I think they have a lot of advice to give and a lot of stories

[01:17:20] Nathan Wrigley: to tell. Yeah, they always don't know Yoast is always the second company after Automatic when that stack comes out of core contributors, it's always like massive Automatic.

Most, mostly Sergei though. Fairly much. Yeah, that's right. Okay. So just a couple of developer y kind of things. We won't really dwell

on these. Nick Diego published a piece over on developer. wordpress. org, which is a Good place to bookmark if you're a developer introducing block variations. So he talks about all the different ways and it's technical. So I'll just show the URL and I'll put it in the show notes about the ways which you can fiddle with yours or your clients blocks.

So I don't know, you might just mimic the functionality of, I don't know, the cover block, but swap the text round. So that's on the other side and that kind of thing. And you can change the icons and he goes. Into the explanation of how basically you can have the same block, but it's just slightly different.

So you're not rebuilding everything from the start. You take something, tweak it. And now suddenly you've got a brand new block, which you or your clients can use. Another post was the very mighty Justin Tadlock. He created a piece called adding and using custom settings in theme. json. And again, we know by now, I imagine what theme dot JSON is doing and how it works with the new block themes and all of that kind of stuff. So he's taken on that journey again, another in depth piece by the end of it, you'll know exactly how to do all of that. And then finally, it's not a tutorial and definitely above my pay grade a little bit.

But this is Dennis Snell over on make. wordpress. org. He's got a piece of, which is a progress report. We were talking earlier about. APIs and all of that. This is the HTML API, what it does and where we're at with all of that. So again, I'll link to those in the show notes and this one, this will probably be our, one of our final WordPressy ones.

This is to say that Performance Translations plugin is now available on WordPress. org. If you are one of the 56% of sites that you, 56% of WordPress sites that have got into the translation game. It's quite likely that the, your translations have been slowing down your page load times for a variety of reasons, largely because of the way that the translations are stored and then brought to bear on your website.

So the performance team. I've created this plugin and it seems to have done a really good job. I think it's fair to say that if you're going to translate your site, it's not going to be ever quicker than if you didn't, but it doesn't have to be super duper slow. And so I'm showing on the screen a statistic on the left is the page load time of a site with no translations 25%.

Longer to load, something like that. That's if you went with the sort of traditional way of doing translations with MO files and things like that. And on the right is with the performance plugin installed. And essentially it's probably about, I don't know, 1 20th little bit extra on top. So that seems to be working.

So bravo. To the performance team, they were promising that this would happen not that long ago. And in the WordPress industry, when you read something like that, you often think, okay, we'll see where this goes in a couple of years. And sometimes it doesn't go anywhere, but this one's been turned around really quick.

So bravo to them. Anybody on that?

[01:21:03] Katie Keith: For me, it was just, it was interesting there looking at putting that in core because I remember the angry questions at previous WordCamps that Matt Mullenweg talked about. When will translations be in core? And I felt even though we're not at that stage, they are moving some stuff in that direction, which is interesting.

[01:21:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So the endeavor is for WordPress three, Google docs, if you like for WordPress and various other things, admin UI overhaul and all that. That's due to happen then for his translations. And so if nobody's going to touch WordPress, if your site's 25% slower, so getting this work done and a plugin, which you can test is beta at the moment, so don't go maybe sticking it on your Production website.

But if you want to be to test it and yeah, go do that in anticipation of that coming in, who knows how many years it will be before stage four. I want to know what we're going to do after stage four. I'll have nothing to talk about. I need a stage five quickly. Okay. Last one. I just want to point this out.

Sorry, Matt Medeiros. We just don't have time to get into that, but Matt did a review. Preview, not review, a preview of the upcoming 2024 theme. You know how this works. Every time a new version of WordPress ships we get a new default theme and other times as well. 2024 will be the next one. And he makes a video about how, what it looks like how it could be used.

We talked about it a little bit earlier, what the. So use cases for it are, but he also explodes all the Figma files that go with it as well, which I thought was a nice touch. So he's showing you what the mock up process looks like. And it's pretty exhaustive, actually. It's not like they just roll this out without a great deal of thought.

So yeah, anyway. Matt, thank you for doing that. PatchStack have highlighted a real big problem in WordPress. And that they call them zombie plugins. 1. 6 million websites affected by plugins, which will I probably never get updated. This is genuinely an actual problem because plugin author. It just doesn't respond to requests or doesn't update the plugin or the domain where the email is attached to for support requests and all that just isn't renewed, you're stuck.

And so PatchDeck have done the job, are trying to do the job of making this. Something which everybody knows a little bit more about. So yeah, absolutely tons of websites, 1. 6 million. And they talk about whether or not they should be whether they, or somebody else should set up a vulnerability disclosure program.

I'm sure quite what that means, but anyway, more for the community. To think about. Okay.

[01:23:57] Birgit Pauli Haack: Yeah, big problem. But it's also something that the plug in review team is working on with patch deck I think in the article that you mentioned there was already a little statistic on how many Plugins have already been patched or removed from the repository to take care of that.

But it's still a big problem for plugin developers because they are not, or for WordPress, because the plugin developers are not reachable. Yeah. They yeah, have disappeared from the face of the earth. And you can only hope there was one plugin in there that was, hadn't had an update for 13 years.

Yeah. That's really odd. But who is using that even? So as a user or as a a contractor or freelancer, yeah you have a responsibility to also help your clients to make the plugin choices a little bit more secure. But it's really, yeah, a good job getting through the plugin review team.

There is however, no, no way. For WordPress to to help the users, yeah, because there is no connection between WordPress. org and the sites that using the plugin. And that's a real miss piece because it would be really nice if we could just disable that plugin on a on a WordPress site.

And have a little note there, so we disabled that because it was not secure anymore, yeah.

[01:25:40] Nathan Wrigley: Bob, Katie, anything on that? Or should we, as we say in the UK, knock it on the

[01:25:45] Katie Keith: head? I see it as a dark side of open source, really, that, People think they're being so generous in open sourcing their code, but if you don't actually have a plan in place to maintain it in the future, that's not necessarily a good thing for the community.

So like people often say when they see my internal, like something we've done for our website, Oh, will you publish the code? And we're like no because we haven't got a wider plan of how we will maintain this in the future. And it has to fit into something bigger. So it's nice that people do this, but this is, We're now clearly seeing there's another side of

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

Yeah, as the word, as the years tick over and we get to that hundred year mark, when my hosting plan will run out, sadly. The yeah, this is going to happen probably more and more so patched out. We've got an article there and a few other pieces that have nothing to do with WordPress, but with run out of time.

It's it's exactly the amount of time that we're supposed to be recording. So we will, as I say, knock it on my head. I would just like to thank Bob. I'm going to do it again. I'm going to get it right every time. Watch this. It's Bob down there. It's, yes, Birgit over there. And it's Katie over there.

Thank you for joining us. And just before we end, we have to do the slightly, the double handed humiliating way. Look at us. We're so good. That's great. Thank you so much. We'll be back next week. We'll have some, a different panel of guests, but I've really appreciated chatting you today. To you today, as I said, the platform is pretty quirky.

If I click stop and I don't come back in 59, 58 and counting then please let us know. Thanks for anybody who raised a comment. Courtney, I did get your little comment there. I'm sorry. I didn't mention it, but yeah. Okay. Have a nice day and we will see you. Yeah. Thank you. Cheers. Bye.