This Week in WordPress #267

[00:00:05] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode number 267 entitled. Don't mention Bob. It was recorded on Monday the 11th of September, 2023. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and I'll be joined in a few moments by three guests. I'll be joined by Cameron Jones by Rob Cairns and somewhat intermittently by Bud Kraus.

We're here to talk about WordPress and that's exactly what we do. A few things in the WP core space, Gutenberg 16.6 introduces block hooks and improvements to toolbars on nested blocks. Word per 6.4 features some new things. What are they? Three new blocks coming your way. Sounds very exciting. The page builders summit is coming next week. And boy, do I mention it over and over again, we also mentioned another event. WordPress accessibility day. Do you still use mustard on how can you integrate that with WordPress?

We get into that new podcast coming out of newsletter glue. It's called sticky, which is a lovely name. Camera and explains to us the Festinger Vault problem. It really is a slightly dubious way of dealing with the WordPress community. The field's API, Scott Kingsley Clark has a chat with me on the tongue podcast. And so we discussed that then Presto player has an update performance in translations have been improved. And there's a whole lot more. 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 percent off new purchases. Find out more at go. me forward slash WP Builds.

Hello! Hello. How you all doing? Nice to have you with us, no matter where you are. In the world. We've got people from the UK. That's me and him. He's not from the UK, but he's in the UK. And then we've got these American chaps down here. But it's episode number 267 of this week in WordPress.

We've got loads to talk about actually way more than normal. Normally there's about six or seven pieces that we drone on about, but this time we've probably got about. 10 or 12, lots and lots to talk about, but let's have a little bit of an introduction to everybody. First of all, let's start top right. My top, anyway, Cameron Jones, how are you doing, mate? I'm good. How are you? Yeah, good. Cameron's got a fabulous t shirt on. I don't know if he wants to show it, but look on, this is great. This is my code. Look at that. That's so good. This is my coding shirt says Cameron. Yeah. Nice to have you with us. Cameron's been in the UK for the last.

period of time. I guess over the summer, right? The whole summer.

[00:03:10] Cameron Jones: Yeah. So I got here in the middle of April. So I've been here about five

[00:03:14] Nathan Wrigley: months or so. And it's time to leave. And you were saying just before we hit record that you feel like this is normal now. Oh dear. You have to go back and readjust.

Yeah.

[00:03:26] Cameron Jones: Like it hasn't been a holiday. I've still been working full time while I've been over here, just experiencing life in a different country. And yeah. Summer all year round, but

[00:03:36] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, that's right. Yeah. You'll have three summers in a row. That's great. Cameron Jones is 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. He's best known for the Mongoose page plugin used by more than 30, 000 WordPress websites. He's a member of the, sorry. He's also the maintainer of the official WordPress plugin for the free donation platform, Kofi. He's contributed.

Patches to several major plugins, such as ACF and Jetpack. And as well as having spent nearly a decade building sites with WordPress and products for WordPress, Cameron has spent time as a meetup and WordCamp organizer contributed to WordPress core, but away from the laptop, you can often find him on the sports field at the dance class.

Or at the mosh pit of a happy metal concert. Did you get to do a bit of that? Like the music scene in the UK? Have you been managing to attend some of that stuff as well?

[00:04:34] Cameron Jones: Yeah, I've gone to three concerts while I've been here. I've got tickets to a concert in the States for two weeks time as well. So yeah.

And then I've got. A few more back home that I've already got tickets for. So they're keeping busy with the music.

[00:04:51] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. You can see by Cameron's little strap line on his on there, where he's got his name written, but he's also speaking at the page builder summit. There is no way that I'm not going to mention the page builder summit this episode.

In fact, I am going to drill the page builder summit for everything that it's worth. For example, this graphic might appear from time to time. Subtle and also I might just inject this video periodically.

So beware, doesn't matter when you're talking, you might get overwritten by the page builder summit stuff, but anyway, thank you. That's next week, Cameron speaking. So if you do fancy that page builders, pagebuildersummit. com go and get your tickets or your free ticket and get yourself on the schedule.

That's lovely. Thank you. Rob Kerns. Down there. How are you doing, Rob?

[00:05:44] Rob Cairns: You alright? Yeah, I'm doing great. And for the record, by the way, I am not an American.

[00:05:49] Nathan Wrigley: I know. I meant to say North America, but as soon as the word America exited my lips, I thought, Oh, that's not going to go down well.

[00:05:57] Rob Cairns: No. How are

you,

[00:05:59] Nathan Wrigley: Nathan?

Thanks for having me. Good, thanks. Rob is of course joining us from Canada. He's the founder, CEO, chief creator of Amazing Ideas at Stunning Digital Marketing. He's the creator of the SDM Show podcast, which has published 350 episodes. Rob is a WordPress security expert. He's also a community member who moderates the LinkedIn WordPress global community group, which is huge.

In his spare time, Rob loves spending time touring around Ontario. Other hobbies Rob enjoys are reading, music, and sports. He sounds like a perfect match for you, Cameron. He can often be found at a sporting event, supporting one of Toronto's many sports teams. Rob, one quick question, Ontario or Ontario?

Ontario. Tomatoes.

Potato, potato. I'm going to tell you a really boring story. My wife attended, she's a musician and she once attended an audition of somebody who sang that song, but obviously didn't know that there was a difference in the pronunciation. So literally sang. You say potatoes, and I say potatoes. And on it went.

Just. Anyway, we're also joined by Bod. Bod, have you been on this show before? I don't remember. Oh, now he's muted. Oh no.

BOD has had endless problems with the audio prior to getting on the show. What I'm going to do, BOD, right? What I'm going to do is we'll just leave you there. If you can figure out the audio, just keep talking whilst we carry on. If your audio doesn't come back, refresh it. Go through the whole process of joining the call again and I'm sure we'll get you back because we did have you we had You for a little moment there.

But yeah, i'll introduce bod properly Anyway, bod is a longtime wordpress instructor in the new york city area and beyond He's also very active in the wordpress community. His current work is providing wordpress content for wordpress businesses What does that mean, Bod? He's obviously asked me a question, which I'm supposed to supply to him.

So I'm going to ask him, what does that mean, Bod? And we get this horrible silence. It's a rhetorical question, perhaps. Okay, if you're joining us, fully appreciate it. If you want to make some comments, I'd really appreciate that. As the show goes on, if you fancy doing that, it enlivens the show, it makes it great.

But if you want to do that, just a couple of things. First of all this may be where you're watching at wpbuilds. com forward slash live. If it is, then you'll need to be logged into some Google service cause it's YouTube comments. Also, if you want to share the URL, that's the best place to share it.

Wpbuilds. com forward slash live. If you're in Facebook, you have to go through a little bit of an extra. Thing go to wave dot video forward slash lives forward slash Facebook. I suspect that link is embedded in the OP. And that will enable you to be de anonymized and we'll get to know who you are.

We've got a few people popping in to say hi. The first one, as always we're joined by Peter Ingersoll. Always a pleasure to have Peter. He gives us a weather report every Monday and today is no different. Good morning. After a weekend of thunderstorms in southern New England, the weather continues to be a bit unsettled.

At 9am it's 21 degrees centigrade, 70 degrees Fahrenheit, under cloudy skies it says. So thank you Peter. It's about that here. We're going through a nice warm spell in the UK. Cameron must be delighted. Honestly, Cameron, there's never been a year like this year. You've come in the best possible year. So bravo for that.

It's rained for the last

[00:09:47] Cameron Jones: two months. Oh, that bit, no, but you are like

[00:09:51] Nathan Wrigley: four hours away. Yeah, that's true. We've had quite a lot of rain, but we've also had a lot of heat. And normally we have quite a bit of rain and not much heat. So I think you've. On balance, I'd take it. Marcus Burnett, Cameron's shirt is great for the job, not so great for a hospital.

Oh hey folks, there's Courtney Robertson, mostly back working finally, but I have so much to catch up on. We all hope that you're well and on the way to feeling much better, Courtney. It goes without saying, I hope you're feeling well as well. It does seem that WordCamp US following on from that event, there really has been a deluge of people capping the dreaded Corona.

So hoping that everybody who went has managed to stay safe. Marcus is making some sports comment that I don't understand. I guess Raptors is a sport team. We'll figure. Raptors fan. Okay. Michelle's joining us. Good morning. I had my furnace on. Oh goodness. Had my furnace on last night and my AC on this morning.

Welcome to life in Western. New York, and I'll be checking out life in Western New York in just a couple of weeks, Michelle. Can't wait to see you there. And she replies, can't wait to see you either, Marcus. That's lovely. And Cameron. Oh! Look! It's, honestly, the show was made for this, wasn't it? It's some sort of meet up organization thing.

You can go and meet Rob. You can go and meet bod now you can go and meet. Various other people as well I've got bod coming in on a different stream. Let's see if we can let's put bod on twice. Look at That's weird. Oh, no Should we do it? Look Bod is on twice that's got to be the episode title surely.

Okay, we've droned on enough We need to get on with the wordpress and stuff. So let's do just that as I said, got quite a lot to cover. So we'll probably touch most things fairly lightly. Feel free to interrupt and Bud, let's hope your mic starts working. I have actually put the second version of you in now.

Let's see if it works. This is us, wpbuilds. com. We are sponsored at the moment by GoDaddy. Sincere thanks to them for helping us keep the lights on over here. Marvelous stuff. You can see also at the bottom, there is a, an opportunity for you to get your free ticket. To the Page Builder Summit. As I said, I'm gonna blast this message throughout the whole of this show, but go to page builder summit.com and click this little button here and you can get your free ticket.

It starts on it starts on Monday, the 18th of September. So it's basically a week from today. We've got. I know 38, I think it is presentation, something like that. Maybe it's a little bit more with the vault speakers thrown in, but yeah, come and join us for that page. Builders summit. com. First proper news article up this week is Gutenberg 16.

6. There's some nice stuff in here. I like this Gutenberg 16. 6 introduces block hooks, improvements to toolbars on nested blocks. Sarah Gooding writes on the 7th of September. So it's coming down the pike. Essentially, the block hooks bit is really just a renaming of something, so I'm not entirely sure there's too much in there, but the thing that's of most interest to me is the fact that if you interact with nested blocks, at the moment you've got this real faff of if you accidentally touch on a block and you're not keeping everything in the top bar, then the toolbar sort of just jumps all over the place and it's really hard to keep track of.

And honestly, there's better ways of doing that. And so now it will always leap to the position of the parent block. So in the future, let's just share this little video. If I zoom in, Oh, it's not that one. It's this one is that the right one? I can't remember. Anyway, the point is it stays in the same place, which is quite nice.

So fairly minor things. I don't know if anybody else got anything more out of that piece. I'll just hand it over to you guys.

And the answer is no, nobody's got anything to say about that. That's completely fine. So what I'm going to do in that case, I'm going to take this opportunity to do this.

Nobody wanted to say anything. So I might as well shove in a Page Builder Summit advert in case you didn't know that was happening next week, pagebuildersummit. com. It's going to get weary very quickly, more times than I'll anyway, that was over on the WP Tavern. The next piece is all about WordPress 6.

4. 6. 4 is coming fairly soon. It's got a underrepresented gender release squad. Talked about that in the past, but there is a nice new way to manage fonts. You'll be able to download your Google fonts and preview everything. As you can see on the screen in a handy little font library where it, if you've been to Google fonts, this UI is exactly the same.

You, there's a sentence including more or less every letter that's possible. And it shows you what that sentence might look like in a variety of different formats. But it's nice that library exists in there. Here's some nice new stuff. Three new blocks, some of which you may have imagined probably already should have existed.

What's coming is a new table of contents block, which will enable you to just put in the table of contents by let's hope just clicking a button, perhaps at the beginning, shove it at the top and what have you Presumably based upon headings and things like that, a new time to read block. So you can drop that in so that you can give users an idea of how long they're getting into something.

And I don't really know what this one even is, but a scrolling marquee block. No idea what that means, but that's something nice. We've got the new 2024 theme, which we talked about last week, which is really going to be quite exciting. And then we've also got the rollback feature is now going to hopefully at the moment, if you update a plugin or something like that, and something breaks, WordPress will automatically roll back.

And the intention is that's going to be extended to automatic updates. So if you automatically update plugins, that's going to going to work as well. So there, anything to add to that? I know you like the table of contents block there, didn't you, Cameron?

[00:16:23] Cameron Jones: Yeah, very happy to see the table of contents block.

I was looking up for it for something just the other day. I'm like, I thought this was already in there, it must just be in the. In the plugin or something. So good to see that's coming in. I wonder

[00:16:37] Nathan Wrigley: about the marquee block. Just quickly Bod, I think we've got you now. I think you do. Yeah, I can hear you.

That's great. We've got you back. Is there an echo? No, everything sounds fine. Yeah, we've got you in. Alright. There's a delay over

[00:16:52] Bud Kraus: here. I'll work on that.

[00:16:54] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, I'll tell you what, you keep testing. I'm gonna mute you for a moment. I think it's working. Yeah. I'm gonna mute you for a minute and we'll let Cameron talk.

We'll be back in a sec and check you out again. Back in a sec. Go Cameron. Sorry about that.

[00:17:05] Cameron Jones: Yeah, I do wonder about the marquee block. Like Marquee was a H M L element like 20 years ago and they got rid of it because it wasn't. Accessible, like it's the thing where things scroll across the screen. So are we adding that into WordPress when the W3C got rid of

[00:17:24] Nathan Wrigley: it?

To be honest with you, I've heard nothing about it until I saw that piece. And yes, but that, that brings back memories. I do remember that being a feature and then it's been gotten rid of by the W3C. Never pronounced that. Yeah, let's see what happens there. But the other two ones seem really useful.

Anything on that,

[00:17:45] Rob Cairns: Rob? Just that I saw this past week, there was a call for testing on the font block changes that they're looking for testers. So if you want to help out and help make WordPress better, get involved with that.

[00:18:00] Nathan Wrigley: I guess the whole font thing would be quite useful for clients in the websites that I always managed.

I always knew what the fonts available to me were and therefore what they would probably look like. But I guess if you're going to roll this out to clients, it might be quite might be quite useful for clients to be able to have access to that. It looks exactly like you'd expect over on Google fonts or something like that.

And

[00:18:23] Cameron Jones: WordPress currently doesn't handle uploading fonts well at all. There are some. Page builders and stuff like Divi, for example, let you upload fonts, but you can't actually upload properly without adding some filters to fix it. So hopefully that will sort that out as

[00:18:38] Nathan Wrigley: well. Yeah.

[00:18:40] Rob Cairns: That's a big issue with all the GDPR issues and things like that.

We need to get, we need to get to Cameron where we have self loaded fonts in, in our WordPress install. No question.

[00:18:52] Nathan Wrigley: Quite a few of the themes have taken that on, haven't they? There's a couple of themes that I've seen recently where there's a there's a toggle and it says basically upload all of your fonts and it does that work silently in the background.

You don't really even have to do anything. And it all just works. So yeah nice little set of features there. Let's move on. This is so nice. This is, we're actually showing, I should probably show it for a full Full accountability. This is from the repository email which is also sponsored and this is to say that Sarah Gooding, bravo Sarah Gooding has now been working at the WP Tavern for a whole entire decade.

Pretty remarkable really. I don't know how many pieces she's actually penned during that time, but I can tell you having had a look at the WP Tavern admin area, because I've made a podcast over there. There's quite a lot that, that she writes that she doesn't think makes it out. She's doing a lot more work than we ever see, but I think she's been doing an absolutely stellar job.

Until recently, of course, we had Justin Tadlock helping her out. And together, I thought they made an awesome combination Justin as yet. So I don't know what the process is and how, if they're interviewing people, but as yet, Justin hasn't been replaced. So Sarah has been doing all of that heavy lifting.

Oh, I imagine it's at well over a year now. So yeah, bravo. I think it's pretty impressive. The amount of content that she's been making over the last years. She's not, I don't think she's created a piece to say. Self congratulatory piece or anything like that. But anyway, from me, Sarah, well done for staying the course and keeping us all informed.

It is, generally speaking, your articles that make it week in, week out onto this show. It's the, it is the newspaper of record, I think I think it's fair to say. Anything on that, guys?

[00:20:54] Rob Cairns: No, just congratulations, congrats her writing is great and it's great for the community. So well done.

[00:21:02] Nathan Wrigley: I don't know how she keeps up actually, because sometimes she's written about a story only moments after it's broken, I say moments, but it's definitely a really short space of time.

So yeah, pretty amazing. Do you do you read her stuff, Cameron?

[00:21:17] Cameron Jones: I do. I don't keep track of everything that Tavon puts out these days, but. I know that she supplies 90 percent of the content for this show. So yeah

[00:21:26] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, she really does. It's the, it is the, I have in order to create this show, I have an RSS reader, the old good, old fashioned RSS reader, and it consumes everything that I've ever come across in the WordPress space.

So I see quite a lot. There's probably four or 500 things a week. And the WP tavern is as soon as my eye just catches that there's my default setting is to say, okay, let's, let me at least read that some of the other publications, not quite so much. So the fact that she's able to concentrate on that full time.

And do that as a job is pretty remarkable. So yeah, thank you to Sarah Gooding. Bud, I don't know if you can still hear us. Hopefully you've unmuted yourself. You can hear you. Yeah. You got anything to say about Sarah Gooding? I'm having a problem

[00:22:19] Bud Kraus: of a delay.

[00:22:21] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I don't know, Bud. I don't know what I want to do.

It's totally up to you. If you want to persevere and refresh and try again, you can. On the other hand, let me do

[00:22:31] Bud Kraus: that. Yeah. Cause I'm close. It doesn't work. Say

[00:22:37] Nathan Wrigley: goodbye. Okay. I'm gonna, I'm gonna let you do that. I will just mute you until such times as you're able to join us. Anyway, bravo, Sarah. Thank you so

[00:22:47] Cameron Jones: much.

Yeah. Nathan, can we go off on a little tangent and talk about your RSS reader? I've got one set up in a Slack channel. So it sends me a message every time something comes in. What do you use?

[00:22:59] Nathan Wrigley: So I was using for the longest time, going back a long time, I was using Google. What was it called?

Google Reader. Google Reader. And then Google did a Google on their products and just summarily got rid of it. And honestly, I think it was the best solution out there. So I don't really know what they were thinking. So then I moved over to Feedly. And that was what I used for years and years. Very happy with that.

I had no grumbles until I came across this one called sumi. news. So it's S, it's the URL is sumi. news, N E W S, and it's the most bare boned no frills RSS reader. So it doesn't bring in the images. You just get the text and you get the first little bit of the excerpt of the text, but also you can throw in things like Twitter handles as well.

So there's a few little extras there. And so for me, I don't really want to see the featured image in the RSS. I just want to see what the title is. So I go from there and then you can categorize things. So I put everything in a WordPress bin, if you like, and then I log in, click the WordPress tab. And then all it gives me is WordPress stuff.

And I, each day there's probably about a hundred things I have to scroll through. It's nice because it does it by day. So it says, yesterday and Tuesday and then Monday. And it goes backwards in time. By the time you get to Sunday, there's usually two. It's ah I've made it to Sunday.

Finally. It's nice and easy to read, but it's well worth checking out. Sue me. news. I believe that at some point they had a lifetime deal. That was one of the reasons that I got it. But I don't know what it looks like now. Have you browsed to that site, Cameron? Are they still offering affordable pricing?

[00:24:47] Cameron Jones: I haven't. I will have to have a look.

[00:24:53] Rob Cairns: And Nathan, you mentioned Sunday. Isn't there something special happening next Monday? I wonder what that is. Oh,

[00:24:58] Nathan Wrigley: Monday. Yeah. Yeah. I could honestly, Rob, I could go on about it, but I feel I don't know. I just don't want to keep going on about it.

I think I'd like to. Can anybody hear me? Yeah. We can hear you, Bob. You're back. Oh, you can. Can

[00:25:15] Bud Kraus: you hear us? Fine. Finally. Yay. Yep. Real good. Yeah. We got there. Okay. Yeah. All right. Take two. Start all over

[00:25:24] Nathan Wrigley: again. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. We'll just begin again. Yeah. I don't know anything about that really, but yeah.

So we're currently talking about which RSS readers we use. So what about you, Cameron, what are you using?

[00:25:40] Cameron Jones: Just a Slack channel, so you can set up an RSS

[00:25:44] Nathan Wrigley: integration. Yeah, how does that work?

[00:25:45] Cameron Jones: What do you mean? Every time someone publishes something to an RSS feed, Slack scans it periodically.

And then if there's a new thing, it pings me a message, says, new article. That's not, yeah. So it's, I've only got a few on there, like the Tavern's one of them, there's a couple others in the WordPress space that I look at, and yeah, so I just get Slack messages periodically, it's not like you, there's no sorting or filtering or anything, but.

Yeah, it's just oh, new news from so and let's see if that's interesting. I don't read everything, but I've got a little bit of an idea of what's going on, even if I just see the headline.

[00:26:24] Nathan Wrigley: One of my one of my rules of thumb is if an article begins with a number, I don't read it. Because it's like 10 of the best things that you can do or five things you should do tomorrow.

One week until the page builder summit. Let's try that. Yeah, but I'd write the word one. So if it begins with a number, I generally don't read it cause I'm constantly trying to figure out certain ways to get through it. Courtney said. We should share our RSS, it's hard to say, RSS OPML feeds. Yeah.

I do a bit of de duplication. Yeah. Mine's not as big as it once was Courtney. There were a few, I once was signed up to literally hundreds of things and some of them rarely publish anything. They've gone out of existence, but I'm happy to do that if you want to. I don't know what my. I don't know what kind of an export option it's got, but we can explore that.

That'd be fun. And then Marcus says,

[00:27:23] Bud Kraus: I actually pull, I'm sorry, go ahead. No, it's okay. I'm trying to make it for the

[00:27:29] Nathan Wrigley: last time. Okay. Yeah, that's okay. I let me finish what Marcus said and then I'll drop you. I'm still in feedly land. Yeah. Great platform. Close to this experience to Google reader.

I'm still happy to pay for it. Is that what you're using Rob? Yeah.

[00:27:42] Rob Cairns: I'm in feeling Marcus despite being a Raptor fan, I agree

[00:27:46] Nathan Wrigley: with this. And Bob, what about you then?

[00:27:51] Bud Kraus: All right. I just, before I answer that, I just want to correct the record. When you introduced me, I'm not American. I'm European. Oh, yeah.

All right. No, I live in the United States, but I'm European by nature. Anyway, I don't currently use one, but what I do use is I like to pull feeds from other And Nathan, you're one of the ones I pull and I think Rob, I think I do you too. So on my joy of WP site, there are, what I'm doing is aggregating.

What I think is the best WordPress news information, whatever I love. Doing that. I think it's a lot of fun. I use the RSS s Aggregator Pro plugin and it's really interesting and easy to use, so Oh, I see.

[00:28:37] Nathan Wrigley: So that I'm from, so rather than a, rather than it being a UI for you to use privately Yeah, it will consume it, yeah.

And then it will publish on your own. Got it. Yeah. Got it. Oh yeah,

[00:28:48] Bud Kraus: on my own site and if I wanna go read current information, I just go to my site and yeah. Current information.

[00:28:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Oh, that's nice. Okay. Nice plug for the, what was it? RSS aggregator. RSS

[00:28:59] Bud Kraus: aggregator

[00:28:59] Nathan Wrigley: pro. Nice. Okay. Maybe I should do that.

No, I think probably my weekly news thing is probably as much as I need to be doing. It keeps me busy. I typically do it on a Friday. It consumes most of my Friday morning, just deciding about what it is that we're going to talk about. So sometimes things are. Get quite stale if they come out like Friday afternoon.

I do them like a whole week later, but yeah, there we go. Feedly seems to be the the one of choice between the four of us and Marcus there. It's definitely good worth checking out, but Bravo, Sarah, getting back to that. Bravo, Sarah for managing to continue working in the WordPress space for 10 years, incredible.

Yeah, okay. There's an event coming up. It's called the WordPress Accessibility Day. You may have heard of another event which is also happening fairly soon. The Page Builder Summit is happening first and the WordPress Accessibility Day is happening a little bit later. This is 24 hours. Of global inspirational live streaming freeness and the registration is open.

So go to 2023. wpaccessibility. day, fabulous URL and you can sign up, get involved. And there's all sorts of information on the website about who's participating and how you can donate and sponsors and all of that. What are the dates though? That's the thing. There we go. The week after our summit finishes, 27th to the 28th of September.

Okay. Anybody want to chip in on that one? I doubt it. So should we just crack on? Yep. Okie doke. Ooh I am a big lover of Mastodon. And one, actually Mastodon comes along with a nice set of RSS feeds as default, a bit like WordPress does. And I just wanted to point this article out. I feel like Mastodon had loads of hype a little while ago.

My, my interest in it hasn't waned at all. I'm still using it just as much, but it feels like there was this doom and gloom apocalypse thought in the master on community that it was going to have this inexorable rise and Twitter was going to decline. I feel like in the last six months or so that has firmly stopped.

It feels like everybody is still. Carrying on with Twitter, just as normal, those whole accounts being closed, protesting about what was going on, politics and all that kind of stuff seems to have gone away, but I'm still loving it. We've got a, we've got a dedicated restaurant instance. It's at WP builds dot social.

If you find it, if you fancy signing up, feel free to do that. But this is an article over on talk. io and it's all about how you can use WordPress. And Mastodon together. It's got some really nice little tips and tricks. If you're just starting out ways that you can promote Mastodon over your other social channels, ways that you can verify yourself essentially it's a one on one in how to make your WordPress website behave in a way that promotes your Mastodon over your Twitter.

So I like that. That's my kind of thing. Anybody still chugging away with Twitter over there? I know that I am still using it in broadcast mode. I

[00:32:13] Rob Cairns: am actually, because I'm a big believer. You have to decide where your audience is and where your clients are. And I'll be really frank, Masternode's nice for developers, but my audience, my clients, my potential clients are all on Twitter and LinkedIn.

So that's where I spend my

[00:32:30] Nathan Wrigley: time. You're you're the LinkedIn group that you moderate is enormous. Isn't it? It's what is it? Like 9, 000 WordPress or something?

[00:32:39] Rob Cairns: Over 10, 000 now.

[00:32:40] Nathan Wrigley: Wow. Wow. That's pretty immense. Good job for

[00:32:45] Rob Cairns: curating. With Courtney Robertson, actually give Courtney, she's a

[00:32:49] Nathan Wrigley: big help.

So do you have to do a lot of moderation over there? Does it get a bit like inflamed at times or is it fairly polite and easy to manage? All

[00:32:57] Rob Cairns: the posts are moderated. So every time somebody tries to post to the group, we vet them before we, we post them to get rid of spam, get rid of Fiverr links, get rid of self promotion.

That's all not allowed. So every post is moderated before it goes up.

[00:33:13] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting. Yeah, that's nice. I've I've definitely carried on using social media, but I am without a doubt in broadcast mode now. In fact, I think I posted a tweet, ironically, saying that I really don't understand, and I've given up trying to understand how to reply on these platforms.

My heart's not really in it. So I've decided that I'm going to use it more or less as a one way streaming service for me. And it's just, if people want to stay in touch with the stuff that we do, then that's the way that I'm going to do it. And that seems, yeah, eminently sensible for me.

I'm still going to carry on using Mastodon a lot. I'll probably carry on using Twitter and all the other platforms, but it'd be a kind of one way street, I think. But the politics of Twitter don't seem to have dented its. I'm sure it'll be here for it's not Twitter anymore. I don't, what is it?

X, isn't it? X.

[00:34:10] Bud Kraus: X. But the problem with leaving Twitter is that after you've spent so much time building up some kind of following or visibility. You're going to lose all that. Yeah, I can't do that. It's yeah, I'm about to get to a milestone of followers. I don't want to do that. I don't want to leave.

[00:34:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So my my, my position is I'm not really going to leave, but I'm just going to stop using it as a messaging service, really. And that's all I ever did. So I may use it just as an inbox, but it's not going to be, I don't know. I just find myself less and less interested by social media as the days and weeks go on.

But Mastodon, I find just to be a bit of a change. So here it is, talkmag. io. Go check it out. Cameron, anything to add or should we move on? Not

[00:35:02] Cameron Jones: really to mastodon. I know I'm on the WP builds mastodon instance, but I don't use it. The WordPress community is the only reason I joined Twitter. So I didn't, I thought the whole.

the way it worked was a bit silly to start with. I thought it was just a celebrity thing, but yeah, it turns out that's where the WordPress community is. And there have been, a decent number of people who've left since the elongated muskrat has taken over. But he I think WordPress community is still active enough, so there's, there seems to be, a number of decent conversations that are still going on there and I'm still using it.

Not as much as I was. Previously, but I'm not using it as much as I was before COVID

[00:35:48] Nathan Wrigley: either. So I, I don't think anything's about to change. I think it will still be, I would like

[00:35:53] Cameron Jones: to see threads, take over that space, but that would take a long

[00:35:58] Nathan Wrigley: time. Yeah. Then there's throw into the mix, all the other incumbent platforms like blue sky and all of that.

And it gets a bit messy. Actually recently on my podcast, Rob, I don't know if this is of interest to you, but I've been asking people. Rather than replying on social media, I've been asking people specifically to go to the website, to go to our website and leave a comment there. And I just say something like, search for episode 342 and go there.

Because, I don't know, it's just one of those things. WordPress has got all that stuff built in. And so encouraging people to come and comment on the website. But of course... Taking people from an audio channel to a website is nigh on impossible. If I was doing something, I don't know on a webpage and then asking people to comment, that's slightly different.

But I think a lot of people consume podcasts in their, I don't know, in their car when they're out doing a jog or something, they've got the iPod on or whatever. iPod. Woo. Check me out from the nineties. Yeah, but and so the idea of, oh, I'll make a comment on that is. I think I'm probably

[00:37:07] Rob Cairns: But it's really interesting you mentioned that like 10 years ago or 12 years ago.

If you put a post on your blog or a podcast on your website, you'd get 20 or 30 comments without even hesitating. And now. All the commenting takes place on social and I've gone to the point where I've actually turned off all the commenting on my websites, on clients websites, because what I find ends up happening is you're moderating more spam and more garbage than really valid comments.

And I think all the valid Good comments, I hate to say it, are happening on social, so it's a balancing

[00:37:46] Nathan Wrigley: act, right? I agree with you. I think I'm just trying to be a bit of a Luddite and I'm fighting a losing battle, but I'm going to see how it works. I only started saying it about two weeks ago, so I'm interested if I keep...

If I keep saying it, I wonder if at some point there'll be some sort of change in momentum where people will do that, but Peter's saying he's presenting at the accessibility day. Oh,

[00:38:08] Cameron Jones: nice. Is he presenting a talk or is he presenting the weather?

[00:38:11] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, whoo hoo. Or both. That would be great if he did turn up with some of those little weather icons from the, you remember when they did the weather and they had magnetic.

Like little icons for clouds and things that actually stick them on. There was this hysterical session in the UK. So there was a map of the UK and it obviously was a big magnet and they had the clouds and whatever, and they'd throw them on and move them around. There was this one episode where for reasons completely unknown.

None of them stock. So the presenter spent the entire time just pushing things on and holding them on with his finger. Then when he wanted to talk about a different part of the country, he had to put another one on hold on. It was actually really funny. But yes, Peter, what are you doing? He says he's doing both.

Oh, nice. Nice. Nice. Courtney says I'm on everything because word presses are everywhere. Yeah, I've noticed that Courtney and I've noticed that you managed to keep, you managed to keep those plates spinning. And I think that's one of the problems that I find is that I don't really have the mental capacity to keep those plates spinning.

So bravo to you for managing that. That's pretty impressive. She says, thanks for the shout out to you, Rob. And she also says that she's going to focus. On WordCamp attendees, where WordCamp attendees tend to be. Yeah, I do like your idea, Robert, just picking one or two places and sticking to those where you know your audience is going to be.

Ah, here we go. It's a live demo. Peter's back. How to build accessible posts and pages. Live demo. Nice. Awesome,

[00:39:44] Rob Cairns: Peter.

[00:39:46] Nathan Wrigley: Okey doke. Well done.

[00:39:48] Bud Kraus: Can I make a quick little... A little statement to Rob's comment about commenting on blog posts and that is if you've noticed It used to be on WP tavern people like me and others would comment on posts now.

There's nothing So whenever they write a new Post to WP Tavern, there's no commenting to it, which is really interesting.

[00:40:12] Nathan Wrigley: I am going to, I'm going to pull up, I'm not going to put it on the screen, but I am going to pull up the WP Tavern admin area and I'm going to put the posts up. Hang on, let me log in with username and password.

You don't want to show that Nathan? I'm not going to show it, but I am going to disagree with Bod. Because I can see here,

[00:40:35] Bud Kraus: this is really a tough day. You're making this really tough. So it doesn't

[00:40:40] Nathan Wrigley: work now. You're good. Yeah. So there was two, two comments on the ACF piece. There were three comments on the Guttenberg 16.

comments on the GoDaddy piece before that. So I'm just doing them in chronological order. This is the number of comments. 2, 3, 12, 2, 1, 12, 8, 8, 10, 19, 1, 1, 2, 2, and then the page runs out. So there wasn't. Every post had comments. So I don't know what you're seeing there. I think it's the Used to be busier.

I think yeah. Oh Everything used to be busier though, didn't it? Just as yeah, just as rob described. I think i'm flogging a dead horse

[00:41:17] Rob Cairns: Yeah, the other thing we got to watch for commenting is it's really interesting people You can always tell the people that comment Based on the headline and they haven't read the post or listened to the podcast.

Cause it drives me nuts. News articles are like that, right? People read the headline and then they think they're an expert. So we're creating a whole pile of people on social who don't read actually, and it's like insane, and that's a problem too. So if people are gonna comment, they should at least give the author the courtesy of writing, reading the article, and then deducing

[00:41:51] Nathan Wrigley: their opinion, right?

Yeah, I think the interest in managing comments became so tedious during the time when the spam started to ramp up. Now, I don't know If WordPress out of the box does a better job. But I tend, I think I've got turnstile. Yes, I've got turnstile turned on the sort of automatic turnstile turned on the posts for WP tab.

And so it's doing some voodoo in the background to check whether you're real or not. But I think if you turned that off, it would just be a deluge of nonsense, wouldn't it? Hundreds of comments to sift through every single day. Most of them have absolutely no interest. And so it's very difficult to decide.

Yeah. Okay. All right. There we go. Let's raise the screen again. Here's a different piece. This is on WordPress. org. This is Javier Casares. He says, hola, WordPress features an extensive array of documentation, but it's an seamless this is a proposal. It was penned on the 6th of September for documentation to be more widely translated.

Now, as with many things on, in the WordPress project, this is something which is not finalized. It's it's being discussed. This strikes me as a truly important project largely because, and Javier makes the point that there's a significant proportion of the WordPress ecosystem, which is, and when I say that, WordPress installations.

More than half are not in English. I'm surprised that anything approaching half is in English, to be honest, but there you go more than half are not in English, but the documentation for how to use WordPress, extend WordPress, all of that is broadly speaking in English. And so the objective is to create a, I'm going to read our goal.

Quoting our goal is to translate and sustainably maintain all the documentation in the world's primary languages with full room for expansion in the initial phase, we will focus on translating documentation tailored for end users, advanced users, and developers. Subsequent stages will include additional resources such as.

Learn WordPress, team handbooks, and other related materials. And then the article goes on to explain how they're hoping to do this. They're going to have the team set out into three different hierarchies, translators, general translation editors, and repository maintainers. And yeah. The, this is quite important as well.

Glot Press, the WordPress built in translation system will not be used in this initiative to allow for greater flexibility. Instead, I can't remember how it's going to be done to be honest. I've actually forgotten now, but. Anyway, the point is this is now going to be taking place. I suspect that they are, oh, that's right.

It's going to be done inside of a GitHub repo. Yeah. I remember now. The challenge is big. There's an awful lot of work to do. They've obviously cherry picked what they're going to do first, but as a native English speaker and basically somebody that only speaks English, I often feel like my head is firmly buried in the sand on this issue, but it must be.

Blooming frustrating if you're from somewhere else in the world and you're banging your head through Google translate to try and understand how to use the software, which is freely available and well, democratizing publishing. So good project over to you on your thoughts. Should we start with, I don't know, Cameron got any thoughts on this?

[00:45:39] Cameron Jones: Yeah, I think it can only be a good thing. Not that it's not going to be. Hard, because it's not just a case of getting people who know that language. It's, you need people who are bilingual. Which is, an even smaller percentage of people than, that just speak your target language.

Yeah, it won't be the easiest thing in the world to achieve, I don't think, but... Yeah, I reckon it'll be a good thing overall. Yeah I got an email just the other day from Air France cause yeah, I'm taking a plane out of France in a couple of days and it's just I can't read this. Yeah. So yeah, Google Translate it was.

Yeah, so you can get by with it, but it'd be so much easier if it's just in your native language. So yeah, it can only be a good

[00:46:30] Nathan Wrigley: thing. Courtney says for the translation proposal, we've brainstormed things such as at a block level, notifying translators, better collaboration across learn, et cetera.

Thank you for that, Courtney. That's really helpful. Rob or Bod, anything to add on this translating WordPress?

[00:46:50] Rob Cairns: Sure I agree with Cameron. You need somebody bilingual to translate it. It would be nice if we could get it in all these languages. Like it would be, it would increase WordPress's reach. Google Translate is our friend right now.

And I find it, I'm my partner's Italian and I'm learning Italian. And I'm forever using Google translate to translate words when we're out and about, or if somebody doesn't do it for me. It's learning a new language is an interesting problem and and it's hard and to expect it just to happen is asking for a lot,

[00:47:33] Nathan Wrigley: really.

I can imagine that this, we're just glibly talking about this, but this truly is a massive undertaking, isn't it? And in order to try and streamline that process, they did make some, they've obviously had to make some concessions. A, they've decided to go through GitHub, which is probably from a developer's point of view, it makes perfect sense because where everybody's at and they all understand it, but also they're not going to distinguish, for example, Spanish from Spain.

Spanish from Mexico at this point is just gonna be Spanish. I don't quite know which Spanish. That means presumably Spanish. Spanish, if yeah. And the same for where you are, Rob. They're not gonna say the difference between French. Yeah. French from France and French from Canada.

It's just gonna be French. And here's the breakdown of the stats. It's interesting. So of the, all the WordPress installations out there. Here's the approximation English in massive domination 48% Germany or German, I should say 6%, Spanish 7%. I had expected that number to be significantly higher.

French 5%, Italian four, Japanese six, Portuguese five. And again, I don't know why I just thought that would be bigger and Russian three. And presumably then there's a whole bunch of other. Languages in the ones and halves and what have you, but yeah, it's

[00:49:01] Cameron Jones: very interesting that because I think the Japanese distribution of installations is closer to 20 percent right?

And obviously, Mandarin is the most spoken language globally from what I'm aware, and that's not even on there. Yeah, it's. Interesting to look at the, those

[00:49:20] Nathan Wrigley: numbers. I do wonder if the fact that all the documentation is in English and you attend WordPress events and things like that, and the presentations are usually carried out in English.

I do wonder if the default is even for people in these other parts of the world, it's just to flip it over to some kind of variation of English. Then at least you've got those. Standard terms, posts and pages. I actually have no idea what they look like in in different

[00:49:48] Rob Cairns: languages. Yeah. I wanted to throw out there, speaking of languages and the change in the community our mutual friend, Bob Dunn over at Do The Woo.

Bob's now doing some podcasts in other languages that aren't natively English. And I think that's really interesting Bob's perspective to recognize that the community is more than just all us English speakers. And I want to throw kudos out to Bob for doing that.

[00:50:14] Nathan Wrigley: You've disobeyed the one unwritten law of this podcast and it's never to mention Bob.

He's not here. I don't know. I don't know what you were thinking, Rob, honestly. I was thinking about the page builder summit. That's right. I was thinking about the page builder summit. Which by the way, which by the way is happening next week. No, I love Bob and that was a truly, actually we talked about that a week or a couple of weeks ago.

I thought that was actually fairly inspired for him to just surrender his, I know that he has many co hosts and things like that for him, but for him to surrender his podcast over to, to have it in an entirely different language. I think that's, I think that was really. Really quite something special. So

[00:50:57] Rob Cairns: yeah, he is the leader in this community for a

[00:51:00] Nathan Wrigley: reason.

Yeah. Yeah, indeed. We've got more chats coming in. Michelle says never mentioned, but oh, okay. Yeah. Oh, here we go. Yeah, I know this is going to be another thing, isn't it? We're going to never be allowed to be the title of the show. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to write that down quickly. I'm actually

[00:51:18] Rob Cairns: speaking at a certain summit.

I'm going to do that.

[00:51:22] Nathan Wrigley: No.

Honestly, I'm going to get slayed. I love you, Bob. You're you're my favorite. I'm just digging myself out of the hole. You need to get

[00:51:35] Cameron Jones: a Bob head, like he's got his head. Yes! That's...

[00:51:39] Rob Cairns: Like the West Coast.

[00:51:41] Nathan Wrigley: Oh. He sent me a picture of that head, which he never posted on social media, but there's a picture of it in a toilet.

It's funny flushed or preflushed. I don't know, but it was quite funny. Moving on. We still got loads to get through. Leslie Sim, who has the newsletter blue plugin. She has decided that she's going to begin her podcasting journey and. As of this moment, she's got three episodes out, including a season one trailer.

So two real episodes, if you like, I confess, sorry, Leslie, I have not had the opportunity to listen to it yet, but yeah, the podcast is, it's all about newsletters, believe it or not. So the strapline is here, the, here from the best newsletter operators in the business on how to monetize, grow and run.

Your newsletter where I use it actually to create the posts for this, but we're not trying to monetize that as such, but I know that there is a whole industry of turning your content into a newsletter and then trying to, monetize that I subscribe to a few. Actually, this is one in the UK called Jack's flight club.

You pay a fairly small amount and then Jack goes off and finds loads of cheap flights and publishes them in his newsletter. And and it's absolutely brilliant. So I know that there are definitely ways for people to make money out of this. And Leslie is in the is in the business of airing those voices.

She had one on the 28th, 29th of August, mastering deliverability with Alisa. Doolin, or Doolin, I don't know. And then going viral with Thought Leadership with Cedric Chin. So you can find that brilliant URL. The podcast is called Sticky and she has got the URL sticky. fm. Cameron, was it you? Did you say you'd listened to a couple of, or one of them or something?

Yeah,

[00:53:39] Cameron Jones: I've listened to both the episodes that have come out and yeah, I really enjoyed it. Nice. Yeah, good job. And it's good to hear from some Voices that I haven't heard of before. So yeah, but the two interviewees are not people I was familiar with before but yeah, it's been good. Like I've learned a few things about how email systems works.

Like I think it was the first one Alyssa works for or worked with Like email deliverer like email delivery platforms So it was really interesting to hear a bit of what happens on that side of things So yeah, I really enjoyed it would definitely recommend it

[00:54:18] Nathan Wrigley: Those platforms must be constantly banging their head against like deliverability problems because, they onboard some new user who then just spams their platform for a while.

Sorry, interrupted whoever that was.

[00:54:30] Rob Cairns: No, no worries. I just want to say congratulations to Leslie. It's as Nathan and I will attest to podcasting's a labor of love and a lot of work and well done for jumping

[00:54:41] Nathan Wrigley: in. Yeah, nice. Bod, anything? Do you know, Leslie? Oh. Oh, I think he's got muted again. Bod, you got muted again. Check the wires. Pull out the cable, switch, turn it off, turn it on again. Yeah. I don't know what to say. We'll move on, Bod. What I'm going to say is refresh your browser. Let's just begin that process again. We'll carry on in the meantime and and hopefully we can get you back in on that.

Okay. Occasionally we have some news stories which are just blooming annoying. This is blooming annoying. I wish I didn't have to do pieces like this, but I think it's probably important to raise awareness about it. So this is on a website called binarymoon. co. uk and it's all about something called Festinger Vault.

I actually feel like I could throw this over to you, Cameron. I don't know if you want to run with this or you want me to go through it, but if you want to run with it, because I know you've been involved in this.

[00:55:41] Cameron Jones: Yeah, sure, if you want me to Yeah, go, why not? This is my show now. Yeah what happened last week was, they to start off, Festinger Vault is a GPL club.

And you pay them a fee and you get access to thousands of premium WordPress themes and plugins that they have bought and then they try to monetize selling them for cheaper. I think this one's just a membership fee that you pay every year and you get access to all of them, something like that.

Yeah, so while it's legal, it's a scummy business practice to start with. And so they scraped a bunch of emails from somewhere and just created accounts for everyone. Yeah. And they did this with one of my emails six months ago, and I didn't say anything at the time because it's I'm just gonna keep quiet and keep an eye on it and see if, my stuff ends up on there.

Yeah, and then they did it again last week, and... Got another one of my emails and at the same time the email that was added six months ago Got a newsletter blast saying, please leave us a review, which was hilarious Yeah, and it seems like this recent thing was thousands, maybe more of email addresses Because yeah, there's been lots of reviews complaining lots of people on Twitter complaining Yeah, nice and fun.

Yeah, so it's a, they're not a, oh, what's the word? It's not a very ethical business to start with. And then when you're doing unethical things like scraping people's email addresses and automatically adding them to your site, it's Yeah, leaves an even bitter taste in your mouth yeah the irony of, adding someone like me who has premium products for sale to their site is just hilarious and goes to show just how braindead the people behind this company are.

Yeah, I, seeing as they've asked me for a review, I gave them one. Yeah, we've we've got the review. They claimed that it wasn't actually them that created the accounts. It was some competitor trying to tarnish whatever reputation that they have. I don't buy that for a second, because they have been called out in the past for spamming with Discord and on forums and lots of things, and those were definitely coming from their official accounts, so I have no reason to believe that this was some competitor.

Yeah, just scummy business doing scummy business things.

[00:58:27] Nathan Wrigley: I think you've explained that really well, and I presume that over on Trustpilot, where they've asked you to review them, yeah, you only have a choice of one star, you can't go lower than one star. No, unfortunately. That's the available

[00:58:40] Cameron Jones: option.

They tried to get that review taken down.

[00:58:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so it says, where do I even start? I never signed up for an account, I never signed up for a newsletter. If you're going to non consensually spam me asking for reviews on multiple email addresses a review you will get. I love it. Not only are they spamming, their entire business model is built on stealing from developers, asking me to review them when they proudly take advantage of people like me.

It's not only infuriating, but also a demonstration of just what a shambles the business is. Festing a vault, more like festing a stain on the WordPress community. So do you have any insight into where your email addresses ended up? Have they created, do you suspect they've created a WordPress user in their account, or is it just been scraped into a, like a third party email?

Deliver us. So it's a WordPress user

[00:59:29] Cameron Jones: account. Oh yeah. Cause the first email you get is with a username and password. And then you get the newsletter after that. Some people are suggesting it might have come from GitHub, that they've scraped through commit history. Or something like that. The the first one that got added was my agency account that I work for, and I don't use that account on GitHub.

That email is not public, so I'm not even sure where they got that from to start with. But they got it, yeah. They did. Yeah, maybe, it's possible to guess it. I'm sure if you knew who I worked for you could guess what my email is, but...

[01:00:11] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah. In the realms of plausible, but yeah.

Yeah,

[01:00:19] Cameron Jones: it's a weird one, isn't it, but

[01:00:21] Nathan Wrigley: it's gross. The whole GPL thing is difficult to parse anyway, I think we all understand how that works. It's totally... Within the bounds of the law, but it's definitely, as you said, it's a shady gray area, isn't it? It's hard to, they can share the

[01:00:38] Cameron Jones: code, right?

The thing is copyright is exclusive from GPL and trademarks are exclusive from GPL. So they can resell the code, but. If they were to buy one of my plugins and list it on their site with my logo, I will be sending their host an email saying DMCA please, they're using my branding to sell their products.

Yeah. Because

[01:01:01] Nathan Wrigley: that's illegal. And do you have any intuition as to what they were even trying to do? Okay, let's first of all make the assumption, which I think is fair enough, that this was deliberate. They've made the point, they replied to your email saying it wasn't them, it was somebody trying to besmirch their reputation, which I don't believe.

[01:01:19] Cameron Jones: When their official accounts have done similar things in the past, I find that very hard to believe. It's plausible, but

[01:01:26] Nathan Wrigley: I don't buy it. Yeah. I, but for the life of me, I can't figure out where the benefit to them comes from here. I just don't see how this is ever, in what scenario is this gonna work out well for them?

[01:01:41] Cameron Jones: Is given this automatic access to see what they have and that, they log in to see what it is and they go, Oh, this is cool. I'll pay you your 20 or whatever to get access to all this then. They've benefited out of it, right? Even if they've pissed off a hundred thousand other people

[01:01:57] Rob Cairns: got it and then that one person tells five other friends who four jump on So it's that whole mess like companies like this need to be shut down And I mean shut down quickly because they're doing people like cameron people like me a disservice and it's a problem and not only is this scummy and bad business practice.

It violates all the gdpr rules of That violates all the Canadian spam rules and violates and violates. So let's forget our community. These are where governments need to be stepping in and issuing fines to spammers and saying, we're done here. And we've had a couple of fines in Canada issued that have been over a million dollars.

So it's time they, this one certainly fits that bill, Cameron, as far as I'm concerned, they should be fine millions. And if that puts them bankrupt, great. I'm all in. You know what I mean? This is stupid.

[01:02:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so you can read this piece as I said at the top, it's binarymoons. co. uk binarymoons, singular, co.

uk, you can have a read there. The person writing this article, I confess, I haven't grabbed their name. They they illustrate everything that, that Cameron just mentioned, obviously Cameron was coincidentally socked up into the same mess this week and left his own comment. You can see the binary moon comment just there.

Also one star on Trustpilot. I think what he's trying to encourage people to do is actually to go to, if you are, if you have fallen foul of this, go to Trustpilot. Make an honest review, don't write something for the sake of it. And then also he's saying use go to Amazon SES, which appears at this point, at least anyway, to be their email provider.

I tried to

[01:03:45] Cameron Jones: report them on Amazon SES and their form was broken. So

[01:03:50] Nathan Wrigley: what the Amazon SES form was broken. Excellent. Oh great.

[01:03:55] Cameron Jones: I tried at least. I'm pretty sure there's an email you can forward their spam to as well. Yeah.

[01:04:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Assuming that form comes back at some point in the future, if you link, if you click on the link in the show notes, you'll be able to see where that is.

But yeah. Bob, are you back? Let's see. Can you hear me? You are back. Yeah, I got you. We got you. We got you. Don't touch anything.

[01:04:19] Bud Kraus: I didn't touch anything before and it died. I have no idea what today's just, that's so weird. So weird. Not my day.

[01:04:26] Nathan Wrigley: Anything on this? I don't know if you managed to capture what we were talking about there, this festing of alchemists.

It's not,

[01:04:31] Bud Kraus: it's, yeah, I did, but it's not really something I pay much attention, maybe I should pay attention

[01:04:36] Nathan Wrigley: to, but, yeah. Okay, that's okay, we'll move on. Alright, so the next piece then is this lovely project. This is WP Amazing. WP includes dot me is the URL you're going to be looking at.

And it's entitled a women in WordPress mentorship scheme, increasing the representation of women in WordPress boardrooms and leadership the people who have. Kickstarted this project are Siobhan McCowan and Francesca Marano. The idea is that exactly that is to promote the intention is to get to 50 percent of female representation across the WordPress ecosystem in.

Business, enterprise, agencies, and what have you. You can see the website on the screen, but if you're not looking at this and you're just listening to it, we've gone to the program link where they explain what it is that they're doing. And also there's a link explaining how you can become a mentee.

There's mentees and mentors. Obviously, if you want to become a mentee. Then you probably have, there's probably less expectation of what you've done in the past mentors. I imagine we'll have to have a proven track record of what have you. So anyway, nice new project WP includes dot me. You can go there now and register your support, get involved and what have you.

I think it was Rob whilst I was introducing, you said amazing, was it you?

[01:06:13] Rob Cairns: Yeah, it was me. I think it's an amazing project and trying to get more ladies involved in the WordPress in mentorship. I think that's really important. I think inclusiveness is important, so I think it's a great project. Well done.

[01:06:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Nice. I don't know how long it's been going. I feel because they're still looking for mentees and mentors, it's probably quite new, but anyway, you can go to that website and check it out, especially if you've got a way to contribute to it. But Cameron, anything, or should we move on?

[01:06:49] Cameron Jones: Yeah, just that it's a really good initiative, I think yeah, there's with all the talk about representation and gendered pay and all this sort of thing, like the biggest discrepancy is women in leadership positions.

There's, at least in the Western world, we've got laws about pay discrimination and all this sort of thing now, but the biggest thing is getting those women into those executive roles. So I think it's really good. I do, I wonder if they have bigger plans for it as well, cause the name WP includes is very broad.

Whereas their mission seems very specific at the moment. So I do wonder if they have even bigger goals that they're working on behind the scenes as well.

[01:07:38] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting. Just a thought. Yeah, nice. I'll tell you what else is a good initiative. Just just saying. What is that? I don't know. I don't know what that is, Bod.

I think it's some summit going on next week. There it is. I'm going to flash it on and off. Look at that. How exciting is that? It's a little traffic light. Pod, anything before we move on?

[01:08:02] Bud Kraus: More and more initiatives like WP includes in the WordPress space. Whether it's for supporting inclusion and support inclusion and technology.

That's one. There's more and more of these initiatives that deal with diversity and inclusion, accessibility. And I think it's all good. I think we all need that. So it's, it will only strengthen the WordPress project in the community, all these

[01:08:32] Nathan Wrigley: things. One final time, WP includes dot me.

Okay. Yeah. I, this is above my pay grade a little bit, but the next piece is inspired by an interview that I did with a really. Very nice chap called Scott Kingsley Clark. It was done for the WP Tavern and Scott was talking to me. It was, the interview probably took place about five weeks ago now.

I don't know that anything massive has changed, but it's it's Scott trying to get the community excited about API. And broadly speaking, the field API was something that Scott was involved in many years ago. And for a variety of reasons, which he explains that project really didn't take off.

The idea really is to make it so that there's a place in WordPress where all the developers can go. For example, if you want to, I don't know, create custom fields or custom post types, at the moment, your... You're either doing it yourself, in which case you're reinventing somebody else's wheel, or you might very well be probably are, using a third party solution, something like ACF, or Metabox, or Toolset, or something like that, and they've of course got their own way of doing it, and so Scott's position is, wouldn't it be nice if there was a WordPress y way of doing this, and then everybody can hook.

into the WordPressy way. So a bit of obvious benefit of that is it would be available to all. If you were using one of the products that I just mentioned and you found that you wanted to go elsewhere, hopefully that product would be able to marry in nicely and you could just port over. The reason it didn't take off in the past was for a lot of reasons.

Some of them personally ran out of steam and he ran out of energy to carry it on. But also he says that he did quite a lot of the work in isolation. He just got on with it and got his head down. And then when he finally. Showed everybody what he'd done. There was a kind of deluge of, that's not the way I would have done it.

So I think he lost a bit of, lost a bit of chutzpah about carrying it on. Anyway he's back. And he really does want this to happen again. And he's really keen. He's enthused again. You'll, if you don't know anything about Scott, he's one of the, one of the guys that is really behind the pods framework.

So he knows what he's doing. He is possibly the perfect person to take this on. So that was what that interview was about. And if you did listen to that and you, any of you three want to comment or you just have some thoughts about it, go for it. Yeah, I

[01:11:11] Bud Kraus: have an either a question or a comment or maybe both, which is this sort of a way to create a standardized way amongst, let's say form builders to use a standard set of code to create.

And I'm also want to reference, there's a movement of foot amongst learning management systems like what am I thinking of? LearnDash and others to create a, and in that space, that is the LMS space to create a standardized way of developing the stuff that they work on, which I find a little bit, it's, is that what this is about? I guess that's my question.

[01:11:57] Nathan Wrigley: Cameron, I've got a feeling that your intuitions on this will be better than mine, because you're far more technical than I am. But if you don't want to take that, I can answer Bod with what I think, but.

[01:12:07] Cameron Jones: Yeah, to an extent, yes. So WordPress has a lot of different settings stuff.

You've got like settings pages for your options and whatever. And you've got, post meta and that sort of thing. And they're all handled differently and they're all, like some of the things that they, the options pages in the WordPress admin out of the box are all hard coded. Yeah yeah, there's lots of inconsistencies and stuff that's just, it's technical debt from WordPress being around 20 years.

So yeah, that would, form builders and LMS systems, it would all be affected by it. And it would make their lives easier. The reason why we have products like ACF and pods and Metabox is because there is no fields API. And if you've noticed. From using those and using custom data for different types of content.

You've got your post meta, but then you've got users and taxonomies and it's all handled differently. So yeah, it just, the whole project is about standardizing it and, giving a proper API for it. That is standard and.

[01:13:27] Nathan Wrigley: That sort of thing. Aside from, no you carry on, Bob, sorry, go on.

Oh, just real

[01:13:31] Bud Kraus: quick. The, what I've learned about the the LMS side of things is that one of the goals is if you, if a user switches plugins, it'll be very easy to port, import, export the content without really, yeah, their courses, which is.

[01:13:52] Cameron Jones: It's what? I don't think it's along those lines. It's more about the way WordPress stores and interprets the data rather than the LMS systems themselves.

Yeah. I think Courtney knows what you're talking

[01:14:03] Nathan Wrigley: about. Yeah, it would be an, the fields API, I think that would be an not unexpected, but that would be a consequence that would be possible, but it's not the intention is to create a standardized way of. Storing all this stuff so that I don't know if you use a data or comments or whatever it might be, wherever you are in WordPress, you're using the exact same structure to, to create that data.

And it feels, it feels certainly from what Scott was saying this has been done elsewhere. Over and over again. And he talks a lot about the Drupal project, which I used to be a massive fan. I used to love using Drupal. And a lot of this has been handled over there for a very long time. They made that decision to do that hard work.

Presumably the commitment of WordPress to be backwards compatible. Compatible. Really to a very long time ago means that this work hasn't been done. There's no expectation for there's a, there was an expectation. Scott would like this work to be rolled into core, but he doesn't have any, he doesn't have any insight as to whether that would happen or not, but what he's trying to promote is.

If you've got any interest in this and you've got the chops, if you've built a way of handling custom fields and custom posts, like if you've got experience with that, come and join him. Let's figure out with him what it is that's needed, how to do it, who the people are going to be responsible doing it.

And I can't see that if it was done well, I can't see there being any downside. To this project at all and Courtney almost at the exact same time you asked that question, Bod says the LMS standards would be about porting data from one LMS to the other or APIs on student results. Yeah. So that, that I think is slightly different.

Yeah. Rob anything? No, I'm good. You're good. But anyway, go and have a listen. You'll just come away with a really nice impression of Scott as much as anything else. He's very calm, polite. He's obviously had a few setbacks in his endeavors and he's still coming back for more time. So bravo.

I think

[01:16:15] Cameron Jones: Gutenberg project just to be. Yeah.

[01:16:19] Nathan Wrigley: Go on. You said that to me in the pre preamble before we hit record. Should have had this in core 10 years ago. So that should have come first. It is the bedrock of something like a complex CMS really, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Interesting.

Okay. So go and check the podcast out and see what you think. Couple of things. One actually about pod about products in the WordPress space. I haven't used this, but there is a plugin called Presto player, which you can use to I think it's a, like a skin on top of videos. So whether that's hosted on YouTube or your own hosting, whatever it may be, it creates a sort of more engaging.

Skin for that, they've introduced a, an update this week, they've added playlists, so rather than a traditional player, which you might normally say, the usual rectangle with a play button and a slider to drag to where you want in the video and a few buttons, it adds a little window to the right hand side of that, which shows a playlist of episodes.

So for example that could be really useful. For something like, oh, I don't know, the page builder summit, as an example, we could what we could do there is we could put all of our presentation. I'm loving this. We could put all of our presentations into one playlist for the the page builder summit version six, which is what's coming up next week, 18th to the 22nd of September, 2023 pagebuildersummit.

com. And you'd be able to see them all in one podcast place. So you wouldn't have to be constantly clicking on links and going elsewhere. So I just think that's a nice. A nice thing. I've not seen that elsewhere. I'm sure it's probably been deployed somewhere else, but anything on that product, there was quite a lot of advertising in there.

Oh, okay. All right.

[01:18:10] Bud Kraus: I think it would work very well with the page builder summit. Just it

[01:18:13] Nathan Wrigley: would honestly, I think we, that would be genuinely, that would be an act actual perfect use case. If you've, let's say you've paid for the upgrades a variety of different things to. You have to, you have to go to different pages to see and if all the presentations were in one playlist.

Kind of nice. That's a good idea. Anyway, it's called Presto player and it's on version two, you can download now. Yeah. Very nice. Okay. Performant translations, right? You're getting in the weeds a little bit here again, maybe going a bit above my pay grade, but here we go. The core performance team recently conducted, this was a few weeks ago now, an analysis, and it showed that if you are doing translations on your word.

WordPress website, there is a, quite a slowdown in the way that WordPress implements it. So in order to combat that, this has happened really quickly. I feel the performance translations plugin has been created and what it does is it hijacks the way that your WordPress site. Does translations at the moment.

Let's say you want French, you need a an equivalent. mo file for your friends translations. This seems to, if I've got it, if I've understood it correctly, this gets rid of that and uses PHP instead, which can be cached and all sorts of other things, it's much faster for the server to pause it and it's basically ready to go.

What they're saying is it's beta, not beta. It's not ready, but ready. So they're saying we think it's good enough to be actually used on production websites, but maybe don't take that as read. Do some testing of your own down. I don't know, download something like they're suggesting here.

Query monitor. Carry out some tests of your own, see if it works. But this is one of those things which happened really much more quickly than I expected. I thought it was going to be like a news item, which got buried and never surfaced again, but here we are. So if you are translating, I cannot see the downside in trying this out.

If you've got translations, this. It purports to be able to install, set it and forget it. That's all you do. You just install the plugin, activate it, and you're good to go. And it says that if things don't turn out and in the way that you'd hope, love this it says it will remove all traces of itself upon uninstalling.

How many times have I wanted to see that sentence? Should you wish to stop testing the performance translation plugin, I'm quoting, uninstalling it will remove all. Of its traces bravo. So again anything for that we're very close to the end So i'm probably just gonna rush through some things quickly Okay, I wanted to mention that woocommerce blocks 11 has added a product collection block I don't think we're gonna have too much time for that unless one of you wanted to jump in on that one Nope.

Okay. I'll mention it in the show notes. You yeah. Oh, Britain. Lovely Britain. Britain decided that that encryption was something that you could have, you have your cake and eat it. You can fully encrypt things, but the British government says, can we have things encrypted? Like really well, but not quite well enough so that we can get into them.

And the tech companies for a long time said, no, that's not how it works. And so they said you can build how it works. And the tech company said, no, we can't build it. That's not how it works. And the tech company, and then the British government said, go on, please. Pretty please redesign of all of cryptography so that we can access it.

Go on. And eventually they've given in by the sounds of it. So signal, you can stay here. WhatsApp, you can stay here, all these other platforms. Apparently you can now stay here and and this I've understood is the reason that Cameron's leaving in protest against Against the I would have been

[01:22:19] Cameron Jones: leaving if they didn't need to.

[01:22:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah! That's what they threatened to do. Apple, with their iMessage product and Signal and a bunch of others said the simple solution is this, if you enforce us to do this, We just, we won't take it. We will just walk away from the UK and you can find your own encryption. And I'd say, yeah, interesting.

[01:22:40] Cameron Jones: Yeah. I've been following this even before I got over here. But I've got a bit more real time updates having been here and yeah, been really good to see them finally admit that they have stuffed up. I'm trying to push this through person on Twitter slash X slash whatever. Yeah. Heather Burns.

[01:23:04] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah. Very good. Heather Burns. At WebDevLore.

[01:23:07] Cameron Jones: Yeah. Is really good. Has been giving she's the main one. I get this information from she gives really good breakdowns on. Twitter about, how all this has been playing out. So yeah, give her a follow if you want to see how this has turned

[01:23:21] Nathan Wrigley: out.

You go and see her live. She no longer participates in the WordPress community for reasons we won't go into, but when she was doing WordCamps, she was a force of nature. She stood at that podium and it was like. You lot listen to me and you all did because Heather knew what was going on and it was very she was brilliant So she probably still is but she doesn't get involved.

Yeah I know she's

[01:23:44] Cameron Jones: been involved in some of the hearings and stuff that have been going on to dealing with this Yeah, good to see that the UK government has come to their senses about one thing at least Yeah

[01:23:55] Nathan Wrigley: I don't think they have much choice in the face of very clever. It's simply not possible

[01:24:02] Cameron Jones: And not let anyone else have access the

[01:24:04] Nathan Wrigley: premise was we need a backdoor.

So build us a backdoor, but only we must have it. And so the platform's contention was if we build a backdoor, there's now a backdoor. And at some point, somebody will discover the backdoor, in which case our whole product is meaningless. So

[01:24:23] Cameron Jones: we can't send it unencrypted to the government while it's being, and simultaneously be encrypted sending as the message.

And still say it's encrypted, because it's not.

[01:24:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think it was one of those moments where MPs finally met people who actually were able to say, Look, MPs, just calm down. You're just wrong. Stop talking now. And it was quite nice for that reason. It's like that Facebook

[01:24:50] Cameron Jones: court thing a couple years ago where all the guys are like, So how do you

[01:24:54] Nathan Wrigley: make money with Facebook?

Yeah, we do ads. We do ads if you not notice, we have loads of ads. Yeah. Brilliant. GoDaddy have retired. What was in the day that I started using the internet, really the platform media temple was a brand that was the cool kid on the block. It was brilliant in its day. It was bought by GoDaddy.

They've finally decided to shutter. That brand it essentially, that brand is non-existent anymore. My understanding is that all of the the sites that were on it got moved over, but the, I guess some of the branding was still lying around somewhere. But they've decided after 24 years to to jettison that.

So it is no more, we we bid a sad farewell to Media Temple. We haven't got time for this, but. Insider features Joost de Volk from Joost fame talking all about AI and this kind of like new problem that we face where more or less everything that you put out on the internet now is being scraped by AI.

So that it. Can replicate you and your way of doing it and all of the knowledge that you're putting out there. And he's saying, shouldn't we have a robots. txt for AI, which works, which has teeth. My understanding is there is a robots. txt equivalent, but who knows whether that's being observed, you can use it for chat GPT, open AI, but whether all the other.

LLMs are going to obey that on, how honest are these LLMs going to be and so on. So

[01:26:34] Cameron Jones: it's just for chat GPT that, and their associated stuff, as far as I'm aware, OpenAI seem to be behaving ethically from what I can see when it comes to AI, but you, I wouldn't trust everyone.

[01:26:47] Nathan Wrigley: No. And also, the ones that come around in the future that who knows, they made the point that all you have to do is rename the robot for chat GPT and all of a sudden your declaration to say, don't scrape us is gone.

But it is interesting, that the whole promise of the web was open. I'm going to put it out so that humans. Can enjoy it without any expectation that it would go beyond that. And now, of course, it's non humans who are ingesting it, regurgitating it. And what they're saying is particularly the likes of Google, Google is now, oh, and chat GPT, obviously, of course, these AIs are getting to the point where they're not consuming it so that they can point people to your website so that people will come and give you lovely traffic.

They're consuming it so that they can answer the quest, answer the question directly so that they never need to go to your website. And that is a bit of an upset for the way that the web works. Okay. You wanted to mention this, I think, Cameron, didn't you? WordCamp Whitley Bay is happening through some horrific I don't know what the word is, through some horrific bad planning.

It conflicts with another WordPress event, which is happening at the same time. This is WordCamp Whitley Bay happening in the UK, very near Newcastle. Yeah, lad, that was my Newcastle impression we'll never do that again, but it conflicts with the Page Builder Summit pick or choose, just saying, I guess I know what...

You're not going though, Cameron, are you? You're

[01:28:26] Cameron Jones: off. No. No, I've booked a lot of this trip over a year ago, so I wasn't aware it was on the horizon. Disappointed on a personal level that I can't get there and it is a fair way away, it's six hours away. Yeah, it's the it's not close, but it's so good to see events starting to come back again.

This is just, it's a single track, I believe, single day event. It's on a Monday, which is a bit weird compared to most WordCamps from what I can tell. Certainly ones I've been to have all been weekends, but it's a WordCamp in the UK. Honestly, I saw this. It's fantastic. Like it's been frustrating coming here to the UK and there has been no WordPress Brighton meetups and there have been no WordPress London meetups.

There was talk of a WordCamp London and that's fallen through. And and both of those were running. Before I got here and then stopped once I got here. .

[01:29:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I'm not, which has been frustrating. I'm not saying it's a connection, Cameron, that is not what I'm saying. Definitely not a coincidence at all.

There's a connection. Yeah.

[01:29:29] Cameron Jones: The north side of England seems to be doing a bit better. Yep. I've been going to the WordPress leads and WordPress Cambridge meetups online then. They're starting to try and get back in person by the end of this year. I believe both

[01:29:44] Nathan Wrigley: of those. Lead is coming back hopefully this month, actually, I think.

I know they've

[01:29:48] Cameron Jones: done a couple coffee meetups with Tim Nash, I believe. Whether his face is still frozen or not, I'm not sure.

[01:29:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. They did like a weekend coffee event, didn't they? I think it is starting to come back. I think there's more and more interest, but this is the only WordCamp scheduled for 2023 in the UK.

It's a very small one. Brand new. Who knew? That Whitley Bay was going to feature,

[01:30:08] Cameron Jones: but there it is. I actually know where Whitley Bay is. Cause I'm a fan of the show Vera, which is based around Newcastle. Okay. So Whitley Bay is a place that some of the episodes have taken place. I shall

[01:30:20] Nathan Wrigley: not do my Newcastle.

Nobody wants to hear that, but yeah, check it out. It's cool, Rob. We're really rushing now, but let's go for it. This is a good one. Kathy Zunt. This is sad. If you had a LastPass vault and it's and you stopped using LastPass, now you really do need to sit up and take notice because it looks like they are starting to be cracked open.

Rob, tell us more. It's

[01:30:45] Rob Cairns: just now they've been cracked open and there's more Bitcoin mining going on and then to add to it even more. They've confirmed that even if you were part of the breach last December, you've been breached. So anybody who's been using LastPass, if you haven't changed your passwords, you better change them like yesterday deal.

[01:31:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's circumstantial evidence, but the circumstantial evidence, it comes from Brian Krebs who is the man really along with Bruce Schneier. He's basically drawn, he's connected the dots and he's pretty convinced through a lot of Tangential evidence that somebody has cracked open last pass vaults depending on the strength of your password It may take a little longer for them to get in but it does seem like people have stored the seed For their bitcoin accounts and obviously if that was that's the kind of stuff you've been storing in there You need to deal with that quickly 35 million dollars worth of bitcoin has been stolen in events connected to LastPass.

So if you ever were using LastPass or you still are using LastPass, just change everything that matters. ASAP because the clock is definitely ticking.

[01:31:59] Rob Cairns: Yeah. And this company, let me add real quickly, Nathan, they need to come clean really quickly and admit all this stuff and they refuse to come clean.

So that's a big red flag

[01:32:09] Nathan Wrigley: for me. I moved everything over to bit warden. Happy using Argon two encryption over there. And my understanding is it's memory hard, so it's very difficult to imagine. Yeah. I

[01:32:24] Cameron Jones: moved over to Bit Warden when LastPass changed their pricing model 'cause it used to be free.

And then they're like, you can only use one device for free. I was going and it's I want it on my phone and on my laptop. So bit more than it was. And then this happened. A little while after that. So I'm hoping none of my stuff was in there. Yeah.

[01:32:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:32:45] Cameron Jones: I deleted everything from the last fast that I

[01:32:46] Nathan Wrigley: migrated over.

Nice bit of serendipity there. Yeah. Good job. And the last one was this, I believe I've covered everything else. You wanted to mention this. This is. This is what Cameron, what are we looking at here?

[01:33:00] Cameron Jones: This is a summary of what happened at the community summit, which was just before WordCamp US. Where a bunch of important people got together and had important conversations apparently.

I don't know, I wasn't there, so they mustn't have been that important.

[01:33:14] Nathan Wrigley: Ha!

[01:33:14] Cameron Jones: Not twice! And they certainly weren't talking about the most important thing of all, which was the page builder summit, but anyway. Do you know

[01:33:22] Nathan Wrigley: what Cameron, it's funny you should mention that because that is a thing.

That is happening. I'm going to make it just blink on and off like that for ages. That's great. Yeah.

[01:33:31] Cameron Jones: The interesting thing I wanted to mention was specifically about events. And they mentioned that, one of the main discussions that they were having was about how do they. Bring back events.

What format do they bring back events and this sort of thing, which I'm really glad to hear is happening at least like I have opinions about how WordPress events should or shouldn't be run. I think speakers should be paid at least something, whether it's a 50 or whether it's all expenses paid, doesn't matter.

They should be paid something, but that's just my opinion. It's not the way WordPress works, but my opinion. And yeah. I don't think the WordPress community will ever get back to the pre COVID levels, at least not in the next decade. That's again, just my opinion. The flagship events might have bigger attendances, but I think that'll be a symptom of it in the fact that there will be less local events.

So more people are going to the, will go to the flagship events. Again, these are just my opinions, but yeah. It's good to hear that at least conversations are being had about how WordPress events can get back on their feet, like in Australia, as I'm sure, Nathan from your interview recently with Joe is Joe.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The Australian community has really struggled because yeah, we don't have the population density of say Europe and the U S where, the majority of WordPress things seem to be centered around. Like you can't just, I can't just go up to London. If there was no Brighton meetups, I would have to get on a plane for several hours to get to the nearest community.

So it's, yeah, it's very difficult for. Us in Australia yeah, things are, the groups have struggled and I know we're not the only place like, yeah, south of England, there doesn't seem to be anything at all. So yeah, I'm just, I'm glad that conversations are happening at least.

[01:35:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that was a fabulous episode with Jo.

She spelled out to me the obvious problems that you face there in Australia, just around the. Yeah, the, just the size of the country and the fact that, if something's not happening in Sydney, the next best thing might be Perth or, the other way around. Yeah. And and it's a long way, long, long way.

And it does seem, yeah, I hope that these events come back. I know that there's a lot of talk about changing them and making them slightly different in the future. We'll see, but thank you for raising that. That's it. That's all I've got. And we've overrun. I'm sorry about that. I do apologize for confusing up your time in that way.

Are you sure that's it,

[01:36:13] Cameron Jones: Nathan? Oh I

[01:36:15] Nathan Wrigley: can now I don't know how many times I can do this joke. Rob's literally about to sore his own legs off with this. Stop it, Nathan. Yeah, there it is. I'll fade out with a video. But before then, we've got to do the hands. Claude, get him in the screen there.

[01:36:35] Bud Kraus: Yes, I know about the hands. You

[01:36:38] Nathan Wrigley: got the hands. Everybody's doing the hands. Okay. That's great. Thank you so much. That is all we got time for. Thank you. We might not be back next week because of the Page Builder Summit. I'm actually mentioning it in earnest there but Cameron, thank you so much for joining us.

Rob, thank you so much for joining us. Bod, I'm sorry about the technical gremlins, I hope it hasn't put you off, we will have you back gladly. I hope I'm not going to

[01:37:01] Bud Kraus: be voted off the island.

[01:37:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's right, yeah, raise both hands if you think. We will see you in a couple of weeks, probably. So I'm going to fade out with a little bit of a, what this is, but why not see you in a bit.