This Week in WordPress #268

[00:00:06] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this weekend. WordPress episode number 268 entitled. WordPress dot cog. It was recorded on Monday the 25th of September. 2023. My name's Nathan Wrigley. I'll be joined by three fabulous guests today. I'm joined by Taco Verdonschot by Rob Cairns and by Zubair Siddiq, it's a WordPress podcast. So guess what we talk about WordPress loads and loads of discussion today about the difference between wordpress.org and wordpress.com and possible conflicts possible overlaps possible confusion that dominates our conversation in all sorts of ways today. We talk about the fact that WP Tavern has got themselves a nice new forum. We talk about a couple of events, Wu session. The WP accessibility day open verse has won an award. I've started a new show called on filtered with the filter agency. 10 up has joined, fueled. There's a few new plugins. Black Friday is around the corner. Security news, all sorts of WordPress stuff, and it's all coming up next. On this week in WordPress.

This episode of the WP

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Hey, hello, hi there. This is, this week in WordPress, episode number 268. That's actually quite a lot. Quite proud of myself for getting to episode number 268. When I began, this was my goal, to get to 268. And I've done it this week, so as of next week, the show's done. No! We'll be back next week. I am joined by three fabulous guests, as you can see over there.

First time over there is Rob Cairns. How are you doing, Rob? I'm doing well,

[00:02:22] Rob Cairns: Nathan. Thanks for

[00:02:23] Nathan Wrigley: having me. Yeah, you're welcome. Rob is Rob Cairns, I should say, is the founder and CEO of Stunning Digital Marketing. He's an agency, which is an agency that specializes in WordPress security. He's the creator of the SDM Show podcast.

And in his spare time, he loves spending time in wine country. and touring around Canada. Thank you once more for joining us on the show today. Really appreciate it. There's like tons of news this week so we're not going to be short of stories. Over there. Do you know what would be my favorite thing in the world is if my hand just came in, it there's Taco!

Check him out, it's Taco Verdenscheit. How you doing Taco? I'm good. Thank you. It has been a while. Taco yes. Taco was a real regular on the show and then things at the company changed and collisions with schedules and all that, but I'm glad that you've made the time today for the finale to the This Week in Wildfresh show.

Taco, if you didn't know, how would you know who Taco works for just by looking at that picture? Taco is the head of relations at Yoast. Community supporter in the MakeWP community team, translator for Dotch, local WP meetup organizer, and a WordCamp addict. Naming him after food! Maybe... Ha! Maybe his parents best decision ever!

Because people tend to never forget his name. Taco has been with Yoast for over 10 years. Bravo. That's amazing. And deserves the award from yes. Most irregular co host of this week in WordPress. Yeah. Between his full time job and spending time with his family. Taco enjoys riding his bike on his trails bike, which he obviously doesn't do nearly enough as you can.

Controversy. As you can see from his double chin, you wrote that about yourself. Whatever time is left in the week is divided between sleep. And Netflix. I'm doing, I'm spotting the triple here, but it's hidden by a beard.

[00:04:22] Taco Verdonschot: So the fun thing is, I know that you typically don't look at the intros until you read them out loud.

So I can make you say anything.

[00:04:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you truly can. You truly can. Oh thank you for joining us. I've told this story before, but I'm going to say it again. The first time I ever met Marika. I did a podcast with her in Berlin, in WordCamp Europe. And she, you know this story probably, but I love it. She said to me, I was asking her about the difficult jobs in the organization.

How do you do this? How do you do that? And she just said, Oh no, we just get Taco to do all that. And I thought you were software. I thought you were a piece of

[00:04:59] Taco Verdonschot: software. I sometimes feel like that. Yeah.

[00:05:03] Nathan Wrigley: Is Taco a Dutch name? Or is that like quite irregular for people?

[00:05:07] Taco Verdonschot: It's not a common name.

Okay. I think there's about 1, 200 people that are named Taco. And the popularity slightly decreased after the Mexican dish was introduced in the country.

[00:05:25] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. I love it. And thank you so much for joining us today. Really appreciate it. And also there, down there, we have Zubair Siddiq. How are you doing, Zubair?

I'm

[00:05:35] Zubair Siddiq: doing good, Nathan, and thank you for having me again.

[00:05:38] Nathan Wrigley: You are so welcome. Zubair is the founder of the Oh My WordPress group. He's the organizer at Karachi's WordPress meetup, and he's the community manager.

For WP experts, really appreciate you all three of you being here. Thank you so much. Just a couple of bits of housekeeping before we begin. If you're joining us on Facebook typically Facebook, don't allow your username or your avatar or what have you to come across to the platform and so you have to do this little permission thing.

And the way that you're going to do that. It's probably embedded in the thread of the, of this post, but go to wave dot video forward slash lives forward slash Facebook and give wave dot video permission to know who you are via Facebook wave dot video forward slash lives forward slash Facebook's Facebook, sorry.

And yeah, that will allow us to see who you are. The other thing to mention is doesn't matter who you are, what you're doing. Put it down and go to this URL, wpbuilds. com forward slash live. Then go into the URL bar, highlight all of it, right click copy. Go to a social network, Facebook or Twitter, right click, paste, then write something effusive Ooh, I'm watching this show, it's great!

Taco's on, and Rob's on, and Zubair's on, and then click return. Get some people to join us, that would be really nice. We love that, and we love the comments that come in. And we've got a few coming in already. We've got Alan Fuller giving us a wave. Hi, Alan. How you doing? As is always the case, Peter Ingersoll updates us about the weather, where he lives.

It's become a tradition. Peter Ingersoll, good morning from Connecticut, where it's a rainy 13 degrees centigrade, 56 degrees Fahrenheit after a similarly Rainy weekend. I'm sorry to hear that Peter. It's actually nice and warm here today. I feel bad. Andrew Palmer's joining us. Good morning. Oh, good morning from the USA.

He's on his holiday. Very nice to have you with us. If you want to make a comment, please do that. Let's get stuck into the WordPressy stuff for this week. Bit of self promotion to begin with. Sorry about that. That's just the way it goes. There's our website, WPbills. com. If you want to stay up to date with what we do, just put your email address.

Thanks. In that little box there, click go, and we'll send you two emails a week. One to say when this episode is released and one to say when the podcast comes out, which is on a Thursday. You can see that we're sponsored by GoDaddy Pro. Thank you to them for helping keep the podcast open. That is so amazingly grateful.

I am very grateful. The other thing to say is I know we've only just finished summertime, and it feels like Black Friday was yesterday, but it's coming round again. And if we put together this page of all the deals that we can find and so I'm at that point in the year where I'm asking people, product owners, if you've got a plugin, theme, block, service, whatever in the WordPress space, then go to this page.

The easiest way to remember it is go to wpbuilds. com forward slash black, wpbuilds. com forward slash black, and then there's a button there which says add your deal. Click on that. You'll get to this form and some basic stuff, you've got to categorize it, give us your name, give us your email, give us your product name, coupon code, all of that, and we'll feature it on our viewed quite a bit.

page with Black Friday deals on it. Yeah, do that if you've got a Black Friday deal. The other thing I want to mention is last episode we did was 3 4 2 of the podcast, not this show. And we had a podcast with Thomas J. Reef. It's the third in our four part series breaking down the plug in madness security madness in the WordPress space.

We've had Calvin Elkin on, we've had Akshat Chowdhury, and now we've got Thomas J. Reif, he's from WeWatchYourWebsite. And yeah, fascinating insight into his thoughts on malware and firewalls in the WordPress space and how useful they are or not. I think that's it. I think I've done all the promotion I'm going to do.

So let's get onto this. Okay. First thing this week is, you've seen this page before, I'm sure, if you've been in the WordPress space for any length of time, you'll notice that there's a WordPress hosting page. On that page, typically are two or three companies. Up until recently, it said Bluehost, Dreamhost, and then it said SiteGround.

For reasons unknown. SiteGround was taken away from that page, probably, I'm going to guess it was about two months ago or something like that now. And then this week, maybe it was this week, maybe it was the last ten days or so, but up has popped WordPress. com. And obviously, again, if you're in the WordPress space, you know the difference, org is one thing, com is another thing.

This is a bit of a controversy. How has it made it up to there? Now, to be listed on the page, to be fair... They are very frank about it. They do say that inclusion on this page, the listing is completely arbitrary, meaning that they can list who they want, when they want for however long they want and say what they want.

But it includes criteria like contributions to dot org, customer base, ease of auto install, non GPL violations, all of that kind of stuff. But you can imagine the outcry. It does seem like the. com side. Is that an unfair advantage? So I'm going to throw that one out there and we can have a big bond fight about it and see if we can get to the see if we can get to the bottom of it.

Does this stuff irk you or are you totally sanguine about it? Does it not bother you? It's arbitrary. They can do what they like over to you guys. Just interrupt as you feel fit.

[00:11:13] Rob Cairns: I'm going to start because I got a pile of. issues here and it happened in the middle of the big community bun fight two weeks ago at right in the middle of it and one of my biggest complaints is forget The, this page, let's go to the recommended plugin page.

They're all automatic plugins. So here we go again, and this goes to why the com and the org sites need to be separated because WordPress. com should not be on that WordPress hosting page. It happened right in the middle of the community battle, where other hosts were called out, other things happened.

And it... It's just not kosher, in my

[00:11:54] Nathan Wrigley: opinion. Is that because it just feels to you a little bit icky? Because the caveat that they've obviously put at the bottom of the page, which is a kind of get out of jail free card if you play Monopoly, that's the ability to just say nothing applies. It's, up to us.

[00:12:11] Rob Cairns: It feels icky because... The dot org and the dot com is run by the same leadership and nonprofit companies, a leadership needs to be separated for profit companies. And then decisions like this wouldn't be questioned or in a controversy. So yeah, it does feel like it

[00:12:31] Nathan Wrigley: might be. That's fine.

[00:12:34] Taco Verdonschot: I actually think it will.

As long as it's not an exhaustive list of every possible WordPress host out there, there's always going to be someone who feels left out or not included or whatever. Given the size of WordPress. com as a host, and for that matter, also as a free host, it makes sense for it to be there. As much as my community heart agrees with you, Rob, that there's a little bit of...

Controversy between org and com and that there's unclarity on how the two are separated. To the outside world, but realistically they are a major WordPress host. So it, it makes sense for them to be there next to dream host and blue host.

[00:13:30] Nathan Wrigley: I do wonder at the point where the button was, the publish button was pushed on that post.

I have no doubt that whoever. Was either instructed or did publish that post. They must have known that this was going to be controversial. So I doubt very much it was not thought through. It must have been, okay, there's going to be, there's going to be people saying, whoa, hang on a minute.

There's going to be people who are fine with it. Other people who think this is a little bit strange, but no doubt it was a calculated risk for want of a better word. So yeah. Okay. Thank you. I'm so confident. Yeah. Zubair, anything you want to say on this?

[00:14:09] Zubair Siddiq: Yeah, I just want to add one thing Nathan that wordpress.

org and wordpress. com I think these two domains or these two commercial and free aspect need more clarity for the users. Okay, these are two separate things. And secondly WordPress. org is built by, volunteers and communities and all these things. And WordPress. com fetch there the brand power from the WordPress.

org. So the clear aspect should be given okay, that is the commercial aspect. The wordpress.com is the com for uses for the commercial aspect, and WordPress org is used for the free aspect. I agree with the taco that, okay, it's not a bad thing to to, put wordpress.com on wordpress.org page.

It's not a bad thing, but the clarity should be given while doing such kind of act and it's. It's just a little bit feeling like the, self promotion for the thing. It can hurt the people who are volunteers and all those things. So there should be a clarity about it.

[00:15:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think that because the three of us, myself included, four of us obsess about WordPress more than is healthy for us, probably.

It's so clear that definition, that the distinction is so self evident. That it's fine. But I do wonder if you were coming to WordPress and really your Google search began with just the word. WordPress. I do think that is a very difficult thing to pass. Like what is the difference there?

Oh, there's a dot com. There's a dot org. What's going on? And this controversy feeds into some other things which we'll get onto now. But anyway, it's there. Peter Ingersoll makes a point that unfortunately it's far from arbitrary. I'm quoting Peter. Unfortunately it's far from arbitrary as it's been only five or so hosting companies.

Featured on this page since 2005. I guess arbitrary in that sense means like the get out of jail free card, arbitrary, like we don't need to explain our rules, particularly arbitrary in the sense of. We're just going to do what we like. And we don't need to explain the rules, but these are some kind of guidelines about what's going on there, but thanks Peter.

Yeah. Only two or three. You say five or so hosting companies since 2005, right? Okay. So the plot thickens around this, I've got to say I was out of action last week because I was doing a summit, the page builder summit, we did it last week. And I really didn't look at. WordPress news at all. So during the course of this show, we may be stealing a bit from the week prior to that, but nevermind.

That's just how it goes sometimes. So first stop, I want to introduce this piece. It's over on the Jono Alderson website. It's Jono. Alderson. com. He is an independent technical seo consultant and obviously having taco here today. Probably lends a We'll probably have a really nice discussion about this one.

It's a similar thing only this is The difficulty in understanding the difference between wordpress. org and wordpress. com especially in search results and so To paraphrase the story, I'm just going to quote WordPress. com, which sells hosted solutions for WordPress, recently replicated the plugin directory from wordpress.

org. This had some interesting SEO implications as com may outrank org when people search for plugins. That may also happen for more general searches for the kinds of phrases that might return plugins, e. g. WordPress security or similar. It may also affect the indexing and ranking both in both sites in unpredictable ways as they compete with each other.

This, and then he goes on to why this is confusing to users. I will link to this in the show notes. You can read all about this yourself. So just from an SEO point of view taco, let's go to you first. Is this strange? The fact that they're replicating this the plugin directory in one place, is it, have you noticed, have you looked into this?

Are we seeing things from. com taking over where it previously would have only have been the. org repo?

[00:18:33] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. So as you probably know, John Alderson was the head of SEO at Yoast until recently. So he, he knows a thing or two about the WordPress community and the way that things work in WordPress.

I'm not an SEO specialist. So myself, I haven't been looking into the effects of. is already happening. We did talk about what might happen going forward. And a lot of that is already in in Jonah's message. The interesting thing is that from an SEO perspective it is getting harder for Google to understand which one is the content that people want to find.

And as I said before, WordPress. com is a huge host. It's not strange that they ended up on the hosting page but it also means that they have a lot of authority on that page. And given that WordPress. org doesn't have the best SEO strategy, let's put it mildly there is a real risk that WordPress.

com is going to outrank org. Which might have an effect on the discoverability of the open source project versus the hosted WordPress version. And one of the examples that we I actually discussed with Jono is there are so many subdomains for WordPress. org. When you think about the, all the make subdomains, we have WordPress TV, which is.

thing. It's not technically a subdomain. We have to mercantile there's a lot going on WordPress. org and that doesn't seem to have a coordinated, solid SEO strategy. So yeah, because that is a little bit of a mess or maybe more than a little bit of a mess. It opens the opportunity for. com to definitely outrank.

Dot org, creating this whole confusion about which is what.

[00:21:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And so just as we were saying a minute ago, if we ended up on dot com, I'd see the difference for a start. I just noticed the font would be different. And I'd be, Oh, I'm on. com. I've ended up here somehow. And I, go to the equivalent on.

org or probably do the search again and put. org in it. But if I'm a novice user and I just, I'm thinking about beginning my website building journey, that. That stumbling across the dot com, it may lead you to think, okay, WordPress is a paid thing. Now you've got to stump up a little bit of cash to get these plugins.

You need to be on the business plan. Got it. So that's maybe that's where the criticism would come in is, Oh, hang on a minute. Are we just capturing people who might have been wanting to do something different?

[00:21:47] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. And then an interesting question that I don't have an answer to is the people who have were searching for WordPress or building a website and they end up on wordpress.

com, would they have otherwise been able to do a self hosted WordPress install, or should we look at wordpress. com competing with, for example, the new Bluehost Wondersuite, Which is very much aimed at helping people launch their website, which is making big parts of installing a WordPress site a whole lot easier as is wordpress.

com. So I'm not sure if we're actually losing the people that the purists like us feel we're losing, because if they knew about the open source project, wouldn't they be searching for that

[00:22:45] Nathan Wrigley: specifically? That is really interesting because, so you mentioned Bluehouse Wondersuite, so this is a kind of like almost an AI driven onboarding process where you sign up and you go through some process, you answer some questions and at the end you've got yourself a site.

So that then maybe if you're on the dot com side, let's say you're an employee on the dot com side, you're looking at these innovations. from hosting companies and you're thinking, hang on a minute. And if we don't do anything about this in the next five years, we're going to become an irrelevance because all these hosting companies will have things which are far more seamless to, to get going with.

Okay. So I hadn't really thought about it from that point of view. Thank you, Taco.

[00:23:26] Taco Verdonschot: That's interesting. I don't want to put up a two baker commercial for Bluehost, but I haven't played with Wondersuite yet. It's interesting. Yeah,

Yeah, definitely. I would trust my mom to be able to build a website and that says a lot.

[00:23:44] Nathan Wrigley: I would trust your mom to build a website as well. Just so that yeah, I've never met your mom, but I'm sure she's lovely. Okay. So Rob or Zubair, do you want to chip in on this one?

[00:23:58] Rob Cairns: So it the issue I have is I agree with the SEO side tackle. You're bang on the money. It muddles the community a little bit by doing this.

And I think it was deliberate. That's number one. But number two is, we're all WordPress purists. We all live and breathe WordPress. The average business owner who owns XYZ Jewelry Store doesn't care. He wants a website. And I think one of our problems as WordPress developers, designers, security people, is we're all trying to sell WordPress as a solution instead of selling the end result.

So for the end user, it doesn't matter. And, you look at all the screaming that's gone on all the upset people, me included, but we live and breathe this stuff. These business owners are using it to do their job, and at the end of the day, they just don't care. And I think it's an attempt to be able to take on the Wix's, the Weebly's, and the Squarespace's of the world more than anything

[00:25:06] Nathan Wrigley: else, in my opinion.

Thank you very much. And Zubair, anything on this one?

[00:25:13] Zubair Siddiq: Nathan, first of all, that WordPress. com and WordPress. org clash kind of thing remind me that popular, Spider Man meme that you went I hope if you guys have seen that meme anyways, it's not the kind of context that first of all, that's my very personal opinion.

It could hurt the community. That's one thing that I know it could hurt the people who contributed for their plugins. It's a hurt for them. But before going to any conclusion, we need to listen the, story both sides and we have to look at the post side of the picture. As Samad has the statement that WordPress plugins are launched under the GPL license and anyone can could make them further more, marketplace, it will give them more exposure and it will get them more, users and.

Downloaders, but on the other hand, I think so before going such kind of act and action, the community should be taken under the confidence. They should tell them rather than the community know these things by some to it and by some screenshot that, okay, wordpress. com replicated the whole wordpress.

com. org plugin directory and one thing that I'm finding it problematic that there is no backlink towards the original plugin at wordpress. com. It could be given the, the disclaimer should be given. It is available free as well. The kind of thing we are in WordPress ecosystem, but think about a person who came from out of the WordPress ecosystem, search for a plugin, and he thinks that WordPress could be a suitable solution for him.

And he purchases a plugin from WordPress. com, but after a while he finds that he or she can find that plugin, free as well. Think about that. It could hurt them to the level that they leave the entire WordPress ecosystem because they will feel they are robbed. They will feel they are, they can take that kind of plugin for free, but they have paid for it.

It not give, it could not, it will not give a good perception to them about the WordPress ecosystem. The app should be clearly, should be well aware that they are doing these type of things. And the community should be taken in the confidence that, okay, if your consent is here, the plugin owner consent is here.

Such big kind of act should have the things that done under before creating awareness about it.

[00:27:55] Nathan Wrigley: Let's put some context into this. So first of all, if you're on the wordpress. com side of things, let's say that you're a user of wordpress. com in order. My understanding is in order to access.

Plugins the, these plugins the, all of these plugins that we're talking about, you have to be on the business plan. I don't know what the, I don't know what the fee for that is, but essentially you're being presented with a, here's a plugin where you found it off you found it off Google, say here's a plugin.

But in order to get through the process of using that plugin, you, if you stay on the. com side of things, you need to upgrade to the business plan. So it, I guess you could say it feels a bit like a. Dark pattern or now called deceptive design. Are you putting something in front of the user, which is teasing them into the upsell?

The other point that Jonno made, which I think is quite interesting is not only is the. com a bit of an SEO juggernaut, and it's doing really well when you compare it to the. org side of things, but he's saying there's some simple solutions to this. Why don't we just, for example no index.

Those those links, for example, just make it so that nobody's following anything from anywhere. The other point that may be of use here is that my understanding is you have to be logged in. You have to be logged in as a dot com user in order to see these. And if that's the case, maybe that adds a little bit of context as well.

Taco, no, I got that wrong. I'm currently not

[00:29:26] Taco Verdonschot: logged in and I'm... Seeing it in the search results after searching it specifically. So I don't think that is true. However, what wordpress. com did change since the feedback they've gotten is a big box that says this plugin is available for download to be used on your WordPress self hosted installation.

With a download button to org.

[00:29:52] Nathan Wrigley: So this was the next, this was the next article that I was going to raise. So that's perfect. Thank you for the beautiful segue there. Yeah, great. My understanding is that since that article came out and I probably not in direct response to that particular article the groundswell that articles like that probably created this box now exists.

And you can see here that it says free on the business plan. So that's the, that, that's the controversial bit that you can see there. And then down here, it says this plugin is available for download to be used on your WordPress self hosted installation. So this box looks like it's been added in subsequently, but my understanding, and again, I could be wrong.

I've may have passed it incorrectly is that this just leads to the. org repo. Not to the plugin page. And if I'm wrong about that, I do apologize.

[00:30:48] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah hovering the download button sends you to the zip file immediately. Nice. And the WordPress self hosted part, which is a link as well, links to an article on WordPress.

com that explains the difference between com and org.

[00:31:06] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so that's curious as well if you think about that, because... I would have expected that, that download link to be a link to a page, not a download of a zip file. I know it says download, so obviously that's totally legit. There it is.

But, I'm expecting like another button here or something which says visit the... Plugin page on the dot org repo or something like that. And I'm expecting this to, I dunno, basically I'm expecting to get to the repo page so that I can go and see the reviews and all the information about it rather than getting the download link.

Don't get me wrong. The download links jolly helpful. But I'm thinking that maybe there should be something there that. Gets to that page as well. Maybe that will change in the future, but it

[00:31:52] Rob Cairns: doesn't go far enough Nathan and the other thing I don't like the wording because it said this it should be this plug in is available for free and for download like let's Put the right wording in there.

They're not even though they say on the business plan It's free If you scroll down The link to the dot org page should say this plug in is available for download and is available for free or something along that line It's let's clarify it. Yeah, I don't like the wording

[00:32:23] Nathan Wrigley: to personally. No. Okay, so Okay, so this box got added That I think that's an improvement.

Whether or not it's improved it, where we'd, where, the four of us on this panel would like it to be is questionable , but at at least it's there, right? At least there's something. Maybe in the future it'll get better. But I should say that this screenshot came from Sarah Gooding's piece on the 20th of September.

Entitled wordpress.com plugin page ads download link. For using plugins on self hosted sites. So you can see this story seems to be running and various people have contacted Matt Mullenweg, and he appears to be responding on Twitter. Maybe we'll get to some more of that later. And he is saying that some of these ideas are good.

So let's see where that goes. And some of the plugin authors would like some stats about all of this as well. Anything else to add to that before I move on? No. Okay. Let me just quickly raise a couple of comments. First one from Peter. Thank you, Peter. Commenting rather a lot. Thank you. There is some interesting conversation about what the Make Marketing team can and can't do.

As a community that benefits from marketing WP, we need to pay attention to that more. Thank you. Internal linking. So they rank on WordPress self hosted.

I'm going to have to think about that for a moment. So what,

[00:33:55] Taco Verdonschot: what Alan is saying is that because the link text is WordPress self hosted, it will be seen by search engines as if you want to learn more about WordPress self hosted, then this is the URL to go to, which is linking to wordpress. com to the article that they have about.

Self hosted WordPress. So it is benefiting wordpress. com as well to have that internal

[00:34:23] Nathan Wrigley: link. Okay. So just to be clear, I'm going to put the screen back on again. We're back to that screenshot again. This, where does this link go? Taco? Can you clarify that for me? WordPress. com.

[00:34:33] Taco Verdonschot: Go slash website dash building slash WordPress.

There's quite a long link, but it's an article where the WordPress. com explains the difference between WordPress.

[00:34:48] Nathan Wrigley: org. Okay. Yeah, thank you, Alan. I hadn't actually noticed that to be honest. So that's really an important thing to say. So I for reasons unknown to me, I'd assume that went out to a dot org page, but Tacos corrected me on that.

So yeah, interesting. The plot thickens, as they say. Thank you, Alan, for that. Courtney is just saying she's, oh, good morning. She's just saying she's got her morning coffee in her hand and she's joining us. Thanks, Courtney. Appreciate it. We're as you might imagine, we're talking about wordpress.

org and com. I expect most of the WordPress community have been doing that for the last week or so. It may be that we're going to move on to something else. Yes, we are. This is exciting for me. I do a podcast. This one WP builds, but also I do one for the WP Tavern and the WP Tavern this week are in the news for themselves, which never happens.

So that's really great. And it's because WP Tavern have launched, wait for it. forums. Now it feels to me like I haven't been to a forum website in absolutely ages until I read this and suddenly thought, actually, do you know what? I probably have been more than I'd like to think about.

But yet very simple. WP Tavern have launched a forum. It's just begun. There's very few posts on there. In fact, this is what it looks like. It's using BB press and you can see at the moment there's Not a great deal of traction, but if you're in the WordPress space and you like to learn about the latest news and so on and so forth, you probably are hitting WP Tavern quite a bit.

And so now there's going to be some forum attached to it. Now, the interesting thing is this one here, which seems to have the most most interaction at the moment this discussions tab is going to be a place where The post that Sarah writes can be discussed. So in the comment section, I don't think it's live yet, but I think it's coming.

Maybe it's only if you're logged in. I'm not sure. You're going to be able to start a comment, sorry, a thread in the forum from the comment section, and also it will be highlighted there. Sometimes the comments on Tavern get closed, they're old or what have you, and they've been closed off.

And so now it will clearly demarcate. Okay. The conversation can carry on over here. I think it's very difficult to start a forum in this day and age because of, things like Facebook and the fact that everybody's surrendered everything to social media. But I, for one, will be making great use of this.

I'll definitely be hopping in and out. I feel it'll be a real useful resource to me. But yeah, WP Tavern, bravo. For doing this. It was a total surprise to me, which is I love surprises like that. It's not really news, but I don't know if any of you three want to say anything about it or the tavern in general So I don't

[00:37:41] Taco Verdonschot: know All right I'm curious what the goal is of having these forums what kind of discussions will eventually see other than comments on posts, because that's what we already had on the tavern at times we had quite lengthy discussions on the tavern articles, so I'm not sure what New audience they're trying to get in with the forums.

But definitely keeping an eye out to see what's happening there. For me, it means there's another stream of information that I have to monitor every week.

[00:38:30] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, yeah. Yeah, so Sarah doesn't really talk about the purpose more in the article. By the way, which is called WP Tavern Launches Forums.

She just talks about what it is and the technical aspects of the plugin that they've used, which as you might imagine is... Is BB press and a few people actually in the comments said that's a curious decision because BB press hasn't been the most updated of late, shall we say, but it's still fully functional service.

So yeah, I don't have an answer for you about that. I'm afraid. But I'm going to just because I have an allegiance to the tavern, not just because of what I do there, but because I've always found it to be a fabulous place to as a first point of call for the news on WordPress. I'll be hanging out there just cause to see how it matures and see what happens.

Yeah. Okay. Sorry, Rob.

[00:39:22] Rob Cairns: That's okay. That's okay, Taco. I think it's an attempt to try and reel stuff back in off social media a little bit too. I hate to say it. Like we all went through the spiel 15 years ago, where if you had a blog, you got 30 comments on your blog, and we all know those comments all happen on X, formerly known as Twitter or Facebook or wherever you want to put them.

And I think it's just the tavern trying to reel it back in. And for people like me, I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea because I'm fed up with that meta company. We, I think it's not a bad idea to try and reel some stuff. So I just think it's just an attempt to reel stuff back in off social.

[00:40:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, interesting. Zubair, anything to add?

[00:40:10] Zubair Siddiq: Taco and Rob has said very interestingly about the forums. I guess forums, open discussion are always in favor of the community. And, the more the forums, the more the discussion, the more the clarity and the more, the inclusivity and all that type things.

And I guess one of my input is that it's a good revival of BB press plugin as well, through the WP Tower. It'll give a huge boost again to the BB press. That was a great plugin. And from 4,000 K to it now loses to. Towards around 200 K, but it'll be a good revival after the WPA carbon spotlight and, it'll get again, a boost again.

Yeah,

[00:40:53] Nathan Wrigley: I I have this sort of slight regret about doing everything on social media for the longest period of time and, putting really important things that I. Wish now I had said elsewhere on my own property. I guess it will be an SEO piece as well. Let's say that in five years time, there's, I don't know, 6, 000 posts on there or something.

There will be some juice to be gained from that. But yeah, there was a fabulous There was a fabulous presentation at the Page Builder Summit last week by a chap called Alex Standiford. Go and check him out. He's a developer. He works at GoDaddy currently. And he is a real advocate of Mastodon.

But not just Mastodon for the sake of, Oh, Twitter, I don't like anymore. Let's just go to that social channel. His approach is that... He wants WordPress to be at the center of everything that he does socially. So he's rigged up a theme and he's coded various bits of that theme so that he posts on his website and then it goes out everywhere on all the socials, primarily Mastodon.

Then replies come back into his website, so he has this one spot. And it's basically the same regret that I've got, which is that I've put stuff on Facebook, I will never see that again. And some of it I probably would have liked to have been in my own database so that it was there. So anyway, go and search alexstanderford.

com. You can see his journey with all of that. So anyway, bravo. Well done, Sarah, for getting that pulled off. I will be I'll be using it. Thank you very much. Okay, let's try the next piece. Let me just raise it onto the screen. Community news carries on. WordPress community team invites organizers to apply for hosting next generation WordPress events.

So again, back on the tavern. So a little while ago, we had COVID and COVID in some situations, I think it's fair to say, really did put a spanner in the works for WordPress events. Obviously, they're getting back onto a footing. We had the first UK event since 2019, the other day not far from now.

from where I am, but it overlapped with the summit, so I wasn't able to go. Literally, it would have been probably the closest WordPress event to my house. And yeah, I was shackled to the computer doing the doing the summit. But yeah, so the, we've got this idea of, we, okay, we need to revive WordPress events.

We could go back to the old tried and trusted local WordPress events. But maybe this is a time to just... Throw everything up in the air, throw all the cards in the air and see where they land. Let's try some new experiments. And so that's what this is all about. We're calling them Next Generation, but when I spoke to Angela Jin about this, she wasn't entirely sure that name was going to stick, but it seems to have done.

Next Gen events are hopefully the future of WordPress events, and it won't be just the usual... Show up, there's a couple of tracks, there's probably some lunch in the middle, and that's how it goes. And then there'll be some sort of after party and a sponsors area and things like that. The idea here is to put on really different things.

And here's some ideas. The list spans the range of ideas such as college campus based groups, sponsor networking days, show and tell nights, Job fairs, events for agencies, Wordpress retreats, I like the sound of that one and many more. There's obviously caveats around what you can apply for, but if you've got an intuition, an idea, a quirky idea, That you've got that might be a wordpressy suitable event There's a form linked on this website where you can on the tavern website where you can go and fill it out But the the organizers will be asked to identify a category And do the following thing.

They've got to show wp expertise in some way shape or form They've got to show that the activity will be focused on training, recruiting, networking, contributing, conferencing, et cetera. It could be something to do with identity based women L G P T Q I and all of those kinds of things.

And obviously topics that are suitable, but it's no longer just limited to It's get a track going, get some speakers and put it on. There's much more to it. So I don't know, obviously taco in the introduction that you gave to us, you said you're an addict to this kind of thing. Yes. Does this does this freak you out a bit or is this a bit too weird or are you happy to see these changes?

A little bit of everything,

[00:45:34] Taco Verdonschot: All of the above because the traditional WordCamp is easy to understand in concept where we know what a conference looks like. We know what a meetups meetup looks like because we've, we, as the inner community have been doing those for ages at the same time, post COVID, I think we're seeing.

We're at the very least, we're seeing a lot less WordCamps coming back post, post COVID, but also meetup groups that used to be really big. Looking at my own group we always had a sort of strange schedule with four times a year, but we then have somewhere between 60 and a hundred people at our meetup.

And the last time post COVID that we tried our meetup, we were looking at 12 people. And. As if we lost a part of the crowd from WordPress, but also people no longer want to spend that time traveling to an event. So things have changed in the past almost four years since we had our most busy year for WordPress events.

Heck almost five years. I do think that there's a need to Switch things up and a different focus group, different target audience might be just that but I'm not sure. And I'm not sure I saw one of the suggestions is to have a half day walk around the city kind of event, which is amazing.

If you're local as a company sending people to an event. I'm not sure. I'm pretty sure I don't want to pay my staff to walk around the city half a day without with probably even less measurable results from that interaction. So yeah it makes it nicer for local, harder for.

The companies that typically would travel to a whole lot of events in their region

[00:48:11] Nathan Wrigley: So that's a really interesting point right because for me as an attendee The idea of everybody going on a walk around the city, that's cracking. I think that's brilliant, as an attendee. But if I was exactly what you said, if I was a company who paid, and in some cases you can pay fairly large amounts of money depending on the size of the booth you get and so on.

If I've paid that amount of money, the idea that let's say one sixth of the event, if it was a three day event. Let's say or a two day event, a quarter possibly, and a whole morning was taken out to walk around. I can see how you may very well be saying, do you know what? We'll miss that one out. So that's going to be an interesting one in terms of the sponsors and how those kind of fun things.

trickle down with the sponsors. And I know that Yoast has been an amazing company not only in terms of contributing to core and things like that, but turning up to more or less every event that is organized in the WordPress community. So hearing you say that is interesting because that gets my Spidey sense going a little bit, thinking okay.

We'll just have to see what the sponsorship piece looks like there. And obviously if it's a half day walk, do companies really want to attend that kind of thing? Fascinating. And

[00:49:26] Taco Verdonschot: so the interesting thing is that we have someone in the comments who works for a competing company GoDaddy, that's Marcus.

Confirming that very same

[00:49:38] Nathan Wrigley: problem. So Marcus says from a sponsorship side, it will be more difficult to get sponsors to pay for a half day city walk. Yeah, probably. Thank you, Marcus, by the way. That was one of the ideas mooted and it actually wasn't just mooted. I think that one is, either has taken place or it will be taking place, or certainly that one is a firm booking in the calendar, I don't know.

It says feature, it was the Bengaluru, a WordPress, WordCamp Bengaluru, one day event, I'm reading this off the tab and post, featuring the local culture and a walking tour of the city. So yeah, but again, just to reiterate the idea of the walking tour isn't de rigueur. It's not like from now on you've got to do a walking tour.

There was a whole range of other things there. College campus style things, sponsored networking days, show and tell nights, job fairs, events for agencies, WordPress retreats, and many more. I don't know what the many more are, but there is a link. To the concepts for next generation event organizers on the post.

So you can go and link to that. But that is interesting because the low ticket price for the events, which we're so used to in WordPress, 39 49 something dollars that does, I'm sure that won't even pay for your food, let alone all the other things. And that I think the chasm between the ticket price.

And the actual price is often met that there's a bridge there at least anyway, and the sponsors are part of that. So

[00:51:14] Taco Verdonschot: I think typically when you look at the traditional WordCamps the micro sponsor package those are the packages that cover the real cost per attendee.

Yeah, thank you.

[00:51:29] Nathan Wrigley: Anand says, These kinds of concepts can be experimented first at local meetups. Good point. The only problem in the UK, at least, is that those basically are not really there anymore. That's largely dwindled and dried up. Although my local one, WordPress Leeds, Is coming back in, in real in real life this month.

So that's a good thing. And then Atif says from an overnight, sorry, from an overweight developer walk is just what the doctor ordered. Ah, . You get the comment of the day award. I like that. Self-deprecating, brilliant. . Sorry. I'll just read Marcus's one and then over to you, Rob.

Competing hosting company, says Marcus Burnett, but still a big fan of all you lovely people. Yeah, nice. And

[00:52:23] Rob Cairns: there's another good comment from Doodoo Woo Podcast Hub, from our dear friend down at the bottom. Oh,

[00:52:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Just seen that one. Yeah, so this must be Bob. Hi, Bob. Hi, Bob. It seems that these events will be, of course, more localized and sponsorships are going to have to...

Relate more to the specific event, time to get creative. Yeah, I wonder if they are more localized, if it'll be more local companies, because I don't know.

[00:52:49] Taco Verdonschot: At that point, it makes sense to have a half day city walk when you're doing a pub crawl and all the pubs are your sponsors.

[00:52:57] Nathan Wrigley: WordPress pub crawl. Love it. I'm going to that one.

[00:53:02] Taco Verdonschot: We actually had it the day before WordCamp Europe in Sofia. It was a sponsored pub crawl.

[00:53:09] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, really? Yeah

[00:53:10] Taco Verdonschot: Sponsored back in 2014

[00:53:13] Nathan Wrigley: life doesn't get any better does it? That's that really interesting though so What it feels like I said at the beginning what we've got at the minute is a pack of cards and we've thrown it In the air and the cards have not yet landed but really interesting wrinkles there being You know, Yoast coming from the horse's mouth taco there.

Definite considerations about what that means for sponsorship. And obviously the longterm future of these events may the fulcrum of that may be sponsorship. So we'll have to see how that lands. Oh, just so that, I don't know if it was written in that piece, but my understanding is. The flagship events, for want of a better word, so the Asia, WordCamp Asia, WordCamp Europe, WordCamp U.

S. My understanding is there's no thought even of making those different. It will be the normal, traditional thing that you're used to. I think at the moment that's too big of a giant to move. Maybe there'll be things that are added on, but you'll be able to attend in the same way that you ever have WordPress, Marcus, WordPress, PopCrawl.

What? Could go wrong, democratizing, democratizing beer. Let's do those

[00:54:25] Taco Verdonschot: stories outside of the markets.

[00:54:27] Nathan Wrigley: I have a few. Find the pubs that use... Can you... Find pubs that use WordPress for their website and then go to those. There's bound to be loads of them. Let's put it that way. Okay, let's move on. Again, just to

[00:54:42] Taco Verdonschot: reiterate, because Yes, sponsorships will be more challenging.

But again, I do think that we need to figure out a new era of WordCamps because we do see that what we did in the past doesn't necessarily work

[00:55:00] Nathan Wrigley: anymore. So the worst possible thing would be atrophy, wouldn't it? If we literally did nothing. Those events would continue to decline, presumably, so creative thinking needs to be done.

But then I guess, Taco, let's imagine that there was one put on, maybe even by you, I don't know like an SEO themed one. That feels like a total shoo in. I know you've got your own YoastCon, so that might not quite work out so well. But do you know what I mean? Imagine the same in a different industry where an event comes along and it really is right up your street.

Let's say, oh, I don't know, speed optimization or something, and that was one of the events. Then you can imagine the likes of WP Rocket and a bunch of hosting companies showing up for that. Yeah, okay.

[00:55:41] Taco Verdonschot: All right. So getting creative is definitely the answer here. Yeah, on both sides, both the funding and the organizing.

[00:55:49] Nathan Wrigley: This has got to be the name of this episode. Democratizing Bad Decisions, . Thank you, Marcus. That's brilliant. Marcus would like a strong milk to go with the cookies. democratized. Oh, lovely. I love this show. It's great. Okay, let's move on. We are through, we are using as we so often do WP Tavern quite a lot and I make no apologies for that.

And here we have another one, but it is about something entirely different. We'll get to that. WordPress Accessibility Day 2023 announces diverse Speaker lineup, and this is just to say that event is going to be happening really soon. In a couple of days time. The lineup looks pretty amazing.

I've got the got the lineup here. The schedule is beginning at 2. 45 UTC. I'm not going to mention everybody's name, but what I'll do is I'll just quickly scroll through it and you can see if there's any of these things that that you think you'd like to watch. But obviously, accessibility.

Is as important as more or less anything online these days. People are talking about it like they've never talked about it before. So to have this event dedicated specifically to WordPress and accessibility is great. The thing that this article wants to triumph sorry, to trumpet though, is that the sponsors have come out in droves.

So that's good news. It's great to see that the sponsorship for these. Online events hasn't entirely dried up. I know how difficult that can be actually. So they've done a Tremendous job in getting the sponsorships there. That's brilliant. But also they've got a lot of signups 1, 248 people at the time had registered from across 30 different countries and they have a diverse lineup and they say that the speakers come from 10 countries This isn't you don't I don't see this too much and it's a nice thing to see.

67 percent female, 30 percent male and 3 percent non binary, 14 percent LGBTQ, 41 percent non white identifying, 2 first time speakers who've never spoken at any event and 11 of the 27 speakers identify with having a disability. And if having diversity in your speaker lineup means a lot to you, which I hope it does, then then this looks like an exemplary event.

Starting in a couple of days time, go for it. Anybody want to say anything on that? What I love to

[00:58:24] Taco Verdonschot: see is that it's not just the usual suspects from the WordPress community who typically speak a lot about accessibility, but they really found some experts from outside the WordPress community to comment, talk about accessibility.

So that is pretty

[00:58:43] Nathan Wrigley: awesome. Yeah. Honestly, just take it from me. If you've never run an online sort of summatee event, it's not easy. I don't mean it's hard. I just mean it's a lot of work. And so putting this kind of work in and doing it in this way. Oh, bravo. Really well done.

Just going through the speaker list again just because why not? It's brilliant. Rob or Zubair, anything you want to say to that before we move on? No, I'm good. Okay. Alrighty. Zubair, should we move on? Okay. Another event, then just a quick one. This is happening a little bit later. Obviously we've got Bob on the call.

He loves a bit of Woo, does Bob? And probably loving a bit of Woo sesh. October the 10th to the 12th. It's all about WordPress and particular Woo commerce, store builders, that kind of thing. And there's little for me to say other than that, if that's your thing. Then you can register now for this free event.

You go to wucesh. com And put your name in that little box there and they will keep you updated you can follow them at wucesh On the whatever that thing is called now. What is that thing called now? What the heck are we doing with that? Just call it twitter. Just call it twitter. Do you think that'll go

[00:59:59] Taco Verdonschot: on forever?

It's asking me anything, right? Yeah

[01:00:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, what even does that mean? Anyway, there you go Lovely event. Go get yourself subscribed. Okay, so I don't suppose anybody's got anything, so I'm going to move on. This is just to say bravo to the Openverse Project because it's won an award. It's won the 2023 Open Education Award.

And they're seeking community feedback for 2024. I don't really know much about this award, but I guess in the space that they're in, winning any kind of award is just a bit of a, a bit of a hat tip to them doing the right thing. things. They were one of 16 winners from more than 170 applicants, and they were commended because they should be apparently the recommended search for OER development due to its clear licensing and easy one click attribution amongst many other features.

That's all I've got to say about that. It happened. Bravo. Don't suppose anybody's got anything on that. We've got a We've got bigger fish to fry, haven't we? Oh, yeah. It's a big round of applause to them. Yeah. Thank you. That's great. Tenop. Giant Tenop. I don't know what their workforce is, but I think they plunge above their weight quite a lot.

They're one of these agencies that seems to be talked about an awful lot. They have combined... With a company that I've never heard of before because they're outside the WordPress space, a company called Fueled. And so this is an amalgamation. It's a merger. It's not a takeover. And I think it's basically to, to bolster their offering.

It looks like the Tenop team, if you like, are going to carry on doing their WordPress y, CMS y thing. But they've joined forces with Fueled, who are experts in building our enterprise level. Mobile applications and when you look at the laundry list of their clients, it really is quite the team So they have worked with the likes of Verizon the United Nations.

Check this one out Apple. What the heck? New York Times Wall Street Journal amongst many others so I mean If you're a customer of 10Ops, firstly, congratulations for being successful enough to work with 10Ops. But also I guess the message that they're trying to put across is that nothing is basically changing from the WordPress y 10Ops side of things.

Business as usual, but this does grow their team, the combined team to 400 plus people who can now not only build you a WordPress website, but it looks like their team can now build you a fabulous mobile application as well. So hat tip, I'm actually going to be having a chat with Jake Goldman, who's the CEO of Tenop in a few days time.

So I'll be able to report back what he said, but don't know if either any of you three are into the agency space and have comments on that.

[01:02:51] Rob Cairns: Just congratulations. It's a big deal

[01:02:55] Zubair Siddiq: I think nathan I want to add one thing. I guess it's a killer combination to have a mobile application and what? What best cms having under one group?

So a huge congratulation from my side at our agency, we have researched about it that the what? WordPress websites at that rate, the mobile applications are not building it up and you cannot lose the, the mobile users over. You cannot lose them as well So it's a good idea to have a for a business for anything that having a website and mobile application Simultaneously for your business.

So I must always stand up for having a partner agency that builds enterprise level mobile applications And at our agency, we have built a SaaS system for it that converts your WordPress website into a mobile application for iOS and Android users. I don't want to further promote it here, but I just want to say that it's a killer combination.

[01:03:59] Nathan Wrigley: It is, if you're in the market and you are, oh, I don't know, some giant blue chip company, let's say in the UK, like British Telecom or something like that. And you know that you're in the market for a CMSE type. Website infrastructure, but you also need something to combine and it's got to be done on every mobile platform on earth.

You got to think this is now a team which is going to be on your short list. They can do the full Monty as we say in the UK, it just seems pretty impressive. 400 people. That is quite the agency. How many have you got over at Yoast, Taco?

[01:04:36] Taco Verdonschot: Oh, a lot less. I think we're around, worldwide, around 130 right now.

Yeah,

[01:04:45] Nathan Wrigley: There are no exact numbers. Massive company. So yeah, 400 people. Pretty darn impressive. So congratulations to them. As I said, I'm doing an interview, so I will report back. When I have chatted with Jake. Anything else from anybody else? If not, we will go on to something else.

This is just a hat tip I was reached out to by a UK agency called Filter. And Paul Halfpenny from Filter, he said, would you like to do a little show with us? And so we've decided to do it. We're gonna release this show every month. It's called Unfiltered. And we're gonna take a topic. In this case, we did a topic and it was all based around accessibility, believe it or not, given everything that we've been talking about today.

So just really a little plug for that show. You can see it looks very similar to this show in terms of the way it's all laid out. But so yeah, we're talking with experts in different areas, and this is our second run, and we're talking about accessibility. The link will be in the show notes. If you want to subscribe to that channel on YouTube, it's brand new.

So there we go. I'm just going to say that this exists now. There is a new citation plugin which adds citations via a block in the WordPress editor. That's all I'm going to say. You can check it out on WP Tavern. A hat tip to somebody that I know reasonably well, Mania Kamal. He's also based in Pakistan, I think, Zubair.

And he has got this fabulous suite of products called Gutenberg Hub. If you're using Gutenberg and you want to do interesting, fun things with your Gutenberg based website, he has a suite of different plugins. And I noticed he never reaches out. I have to figure this out for myself. So it's not him.

Sort of pushing the agenda. I found it myself. He's gone for a different pricing model. He's now doing a sort of bundle deal. Like out everything all in one. So if you've got one site, you can get everything he does for 39. If you have multiple sites, up to 10 is 70 at the moment. And up to an unlimited.

Up to unlimited? Doesn't make sense. It's gonna be 99, 100 a year. Something along those lines. So just a hat tip to him. He's always trying to be creative and I think his work is absolutely brilliant. So there's that. This is the page. This page means nothing, but I couldn't log in. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna say, introduce this one very quickly and then throw it over to Rob.

This Is all about post status is slack. You wanted to raise that. I think, didn't you, Rob? What was going on this week, post status and slack?

[01:07:28] Rob Cairns: Post status paid a small fortune for shall we say professional slack or paid slack. And they've announced they're going back to the paid version, sorry, to the free version, which doesn't bother me at all.

Really I don't get it. Why spend 70 grand on the paid version of Slack? It,

[01:07:52] Nathan Wrigley: it makes no sense. Is that what their bill was coming to? Was it in the order of 70, 75,

[01:07:58] Rob Cairns: 000? Somewhere in there. And I just think that's absurd. I'm for a community. Let's just carry on the conversation. The free version for what they're doing works fine.

So

[01:08:08] Nathan Wrigley: what is, what's, okay. So obviously there's a difference between the free and the paid version. Is it largely that the posts evaporate after a certain, yes.

[01:08:16] Rob Cairns: That's one of the big things. Some of the ways huddles are used internally in the paid version, which I don't use either. So I'm okay. As I say, I'm okay with that.

[01:08:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah, that is such a giant amount of money to swallow, isn't it? 75, 000 for a sort of comms thing, which presumably is used internally, but also most of it is not internal. It will be for their community. What do their community think? Divorce, get rid of the subject of the 75, 000, which we understand is just a crazy amount of money for a piece of software.

But I wonder if that community, which is like the second home for the project in a way, isn't it? I wonder if there's a fear that some interesting archived history. Will disappear but also if if you go on holiday for a couple of weeks you come back You've missed everything. I think it's all been

[01:09:11] Rob Cairns: I haven't a couple of weeks.

It's

[01:09:12] Taco Verdonschot: 90 days. 90. Oh good

[01:09:15] Nathan Wrigley: Your holidays For some reason I had it in my head that it was 10 days maybe yeah, I don't know where that came from Yeah, that's and I

[01:09:23] Rob Cairns: haven't seen that much squawking about the downgrade like really being in that community I haven't seen a lot of complaining. Cory miller would be a good one to approach and find out, but I haven't talked to them, so I don't.

[01:09:35] Nathan Wrigley: From the horses mouth here, Michelle Frechette post status first paid year on Slack was discounted and sponsored. Oh, I see. Yeah. So it's, so they were paying, but they were on a discounted rate, which has now been withdrawn and it's suddenly, yeah. I think, I guess the trouble with a community so important as post status is just that.

That sudden disappearance of stuff, which you've been so used to for so long, but obviously if they can't, if they can't justify it, and let's be honest, 75, 000 is not a drop in the ocean, is it? Then yeah, we'll just have to see how that goes. But like Taco said, don't go on holiday for 90 days.

Put it on your phone. Nathan, carry it

[01:10:19] Rob Cairns: one more. Michelle just posted another comment saying she's a negative response. Thank you, Michelle, for clarifying.

[01:10:25] Taco Verdonschot: And I get that, Michelle, because the person to be negative about this would be looked at and said, okay then

[01:10:34] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. Yeah. You don't know what you've got till it's gone.

That's the thing, isn't it? It's just, they've been, people who've been in that post status community have been so used to that capacity to just, go through everything forever and ever. And now that's going to change. But my, my feeling, because it's a, because it's a thriving community and it's up to date every day, isn't it?

Stuff's happening all the time. It's more about what happened in the last few days than what happened three years ago. And so the archiving is probably less important. Yeah. And we're making

[01:11:08] Taco Verdonschot: at the same time both status released a new. Sort of sponsorship offerings that they have, which are really reasonably priced for hosting companies for plugin companies.

So if you go to post status. com slash join, I think it's from the top of my head. You can see what their new offer is. And that's actually if you're using post status a lot, then I think it's a no brainer to join because. A thousand bucks a year for most companies shouldn't be that much of a problem, especially all the large companies that we have in in the space.

[01:11:55] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so here you go. So let's plug the post that's offering then. So if you're a digital agency, we won't go into the UVPs, but that's going to be 1, says join now, 1, 000 a year. Products and plugins says the same thing. And then hosting providers is going to be a slightly different experience once you're in the community probably.

That's from 5, 000 a year and it lists out all the benefits. And just about everybody in the WordPress community, including Matt is always in there just making comments and so on and so forth. So yeah, go check it out. And got to say it nice, new looking website, really nice job. Won't say who, but it's a good job.

I like what they did. Looks really nice. Very clear and to the point. Yeah, good job. Thank you for that. What have we got? I think this is me launching the site. Oh no. Here we are. This isn't an article that I put in the rundown. This has come directly from Rob. Element dot how greatest WordPress hosting review.

Go on Rob, tell us what this is about.

[01:13:03] Rob Cairns: Oh, I came across this last week and I just thought it was interesting. It took some of the big... Hosting providers and broke them down. Taco, you'd be notice your rank fifth in such a list. So I have to mention that since you're on there, but it broke down some of the providers and what people are looking for in some tests.

Now, I do know that some hosts and I think correct me if I'm wrong, either Marcus or Courtney, GoDaddy didn't submit the testing for this review. So that was That was interesting,

[01:13:37] Nathan Wrigley: but they're listed as number six. I don't know

[01:13:40] Rob Cairns: In this set. Sorry guys So so there's some big hosts on there, but it gives some people an idea of what to look for I think that's important

[01:13:48] Nathan Wrigley: boy.

This is a long article. I definitely didn't have a chance. It's not interesting elemental Yeah. Interesting. Obviously they've got things like Stratik under their sleeve as well. So yeah, an exhaustive breakdown, a nice piece. Okay. So again, I'll link to that in the show notes and you can nerd out on all of the dates, data and graphs that particular piece shows us.

10 greatest WordPress hosts, fastest from 1000 plus GT metric tests published on the 12th of September. Okay, I think we've been putting it off long enough. Here we go. The piece of the day. So I don't know where to go with this. My role in the WordPress community I decided long ago was not to get involved in controversy.

So I'm going to introduce this one. I'm going to drop the bomb, then I'm going to walk away, and you guys can try to defuse it. This comes from Twitter, you can see Twitter on the page. This is SayReid who says, I filled my first WordPress code of conduct violation report today. After 11 years of being in the WordPress community, I wrote about it and published the report itself on the WP Cooler site.

And as luck would have it, we have that website listed as well. And in this piece Sae goes on to talk about she basically lays out what her Code of Conduct Violation report contains. And and essentially it's about an exchange that happened, I think mostly on Twitter, maybe some of it. Yes.

Ended up in post status or at least some remedial work tried to be done in post status to alleviate the problem I can't really remember but it was between Co founder of WordPress Matt Mullenweg and Say, but this all happened when I was on the summit. So That at least from my perspective made me Far less aware of what was going on.

Rob, you brought this to my attention. So I'm going to hand it to you to to defuse.

[01:16:01] Rob Cairns: So I'm not going to defuse. For those who don't know, and I'm going to do a little self promotion. I dropped an episode the Friday this all happened of my podcast called the WordPress Dumpster Fire. I'm not diffusing.

I think Matt over, as a see over, stepped out. And what I think it comes down to is he acted in behavior that we, that mental health experts would call being a bully, in my

[01:16:33] Nathan Wrigley: opinion. What was it about?

[01:16:35] Rob Cairns: It started off with the word the plugins being on the dot com being ranked higher than the dot org And then it just morphed in the community stuff and there was heavy discussion going on x twitter And matt jumped in and it got to the point where matt actually Blocked and unblocked people in the middle of

[01:16:56] Nathan Wrigley: the discussion So it was about the thing that we were talking about earlier the dot org

[01:17:01] Rob Cairns: That's what started, that's what started, and then it said, and then it got into leadership and why the dot com and the dot org leadership should be separate, which I've already touched on today, my opinion on that, and it just got worse, and I'm sorry, but any, and not only that, he threw several hosting companies under the bus who sponsor and contribute to WordPress all the time.

[01:17:29] Nathan Wrigley: I confess, I haven't seen any of these tweets apart from the one that I've seen just there. We have

[01:17:35] Rob Cairns: to be really careful here Nathan, because... If you threw, say you were the NFL, the National Football League, and you threw your sponsors of your games under a bus, they would drop you like a sack of potatoes tomorrow and be

[01:17:50] Nathan Wrigley: done.

Describe, describe what under a bus means in this scenario. We know what the phrase means, right? But what would can you remember, recall, or have on the screen?

[01:17:59] Rob Cairns: He criti, he basically criticized some hosting companies for conduct. And he criticized some hosting companies for even using WP in their name and for making money off the WordPress project.

[01:18:12] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And how has it landed? How has it been over the last few days of tempers? Obviously in this article we're to understand that say, thinks that this isn't finished. She wants there to be an official. investigation. So we know what the WordPress code of conduct is. It's the, the requirements that you have to honor.

Let's say a WordPress event. There are various things that you are expected to do. And I actually don't know what the sanction is for not obeying those, but say clearly thinks that the commentary that went backwards and forwards, some of those pieces were in violation of that. And so now we're in the period of.

It's been lodged, and we have to see who decides what. We're like in a little tribunal stage. Yeah, I

[01:19:03] Rob Cairns: think we do. And I don't think, we can pass these kind of blowups, sit around and manifest for a week, and then they go away. I think this one is calmed down, but I don't think it's going away this time. I think there was enough said.

It went from Twitter to post status Slack. I know the weekend after it happened, the minute I let go of the podcast, Matt and I had very heated conversation in post status. I'll make no bones about it. And then it just has gone on from there. To be honest with you,

[01:19:36] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, there's got a few bits of commentary coming in whilst I look at those taco or severe.

Have you got anything you want to add for this or are you staying away from this one? I've

[01:19:48] Taco Verdonschot: learned not to approach dumpster fires because you never know what's in the dumpster. Yeah. I tried to stay clear as much as needed. I hate to see that a long time values contributor like say And was treated in such a way that she felt this need to not only write the incident report, but also post it online.

I don't like that kind of behavior from anyone and yeah, other than that, I don't want to get involved too much. I just hope that we can, at some point all play nice again and... Respect each other, have respectful discussions when we

[01:20:46] Nathan Wrigley: disagree. The curious thing about the age that we live in is we're so connected and that's brilliant.

And we're so connected, and that's a nightmare. It's you can, it's fabulous. We can write something on, let's say, Twitter, which seems to be where this all happened, and it can spread far and wide, and it can do enormous good. And then you can say something, and it just... Maybe it's not the best version of yourself or what have you and stories like this emerge.

A bit like you, Taco, I don't see my job to, to pour fuel on the flames, but I think it's important that we raise it because it's definitely been a thing. I guess we'll see where this goes. But Zabir, do you have anything you want to contribute to this?

[01:21:32] Zubair Siddiq: Nathan, Taco, I have listened to Taco and Rob.

I must say WordPress looks good with a more open discussion, ideas and adaptation. It's a good thing for the WordPress. Controversy, drama, it's not a good trade for WordPress. It's not a good thing, not a good the kind of things are happening since the last few weeks. So I must say, both the parties should avoid it.

And let's talk and discuss and get the solutions.

[01:22:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Let's see. I got the feeling like you said, Rob, I imagine this story will blow over, but equally, it may well crop up in a few weeks time. Obviously, we'll see how this code of conduct violation request goes. And what I want

[01:22:23] Rob Cairns: to add is, if I can, Nathan, sorry to cut you off.

Our clients don't really care. I said this earlier in the show on something else. The people that are WordPress users, the installations, the companies, it's only us people that live and breathe this stuff, that really care a lot about what happens in our community. The people outside it, that we sell services to, they don't care.

They want a website that runs, they want to run their business, and they want to... Stay away from all this, yeah,

[01:22:53] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, that's true actually. Which kind of speaks to the, how cool the community is, if we, if this sort of stuff actually matters. You can imagine something like this, a storm wouldn't happen in a different community, people just wouldn't be that bothered. It just, it's just the way it is. Okay, so we definitely don't have we definitely don't have the answer to this. We'll see what happens in the days, weeks, and months to come, but certainly it'll be linked in the show notes. I have got nothing else to say, which is about perfect, because it's coming up to the exact time where we've got to end.

So I'm just going to round it off by saying thank you so much to Rob. for joining us today. Thank you so much to taco for joining us today. And Zubair. Thank you for joining us today. It is now Zubair and Rob and taco. All yeah, Rob stolen me thunder. Humiliating moment where you've got to raise your hands in the air and give us a wave.

And that's it. Thank you to everybody who made a comment really appreciated it. We will be back with a different panel of guests next week. I don't know, maybe some of the same guests I can't I honestly tell you. But pleasure having you, the three of you on today. Thank you so much indeed. I'm going to end it now and say have a good week and we'll see you later.

And guests, if this video doesn't stop in about 10 seconds time, just hang around. Sometimes it just gets in a loop and I'll be back with you in a second.