This Week in WordPress #270

[00:00:05] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress. Episode number 270 entitled. You actually got a wife. It was recorded on Monday the 9th of October, 2023. My name's Nathan Wrigley. And this week I'm joined by Michelle for sheds by Tim Nash. And by Jack Kettering, we talk about WordPress. And this is what we say about WordPress. We talk about the fact that it's 6.4 version of WordPress, B to two is around, and you can test that out. We also talk about a new Lightbox speech, which is being added in the near future to images. Gutenberg 16.7 introduces some new font management capabilities as well. That looks really good. We also talk about the fact that the Ali theme has pulled their air quotes, contentious onboarding wizard, WordPress global sponsorships have become significantly more expensive. What do people make about that and how will it affect WordPress events in the future?

What camp Asia is coming about? WP founders watch out. You need to up your game. That's according to something that we covered this week, we also talk about another event cadence amplify, and what happens when you install 108 plugins on your WordPress website at the exact same time? The answer. Nothing particularly good. We talk about main WPS article, which exposes how it really is a good idea to make sure that you lock down your main WP dashboard. We also talk about the fact that this week. Some new button was added to the wordpress.org repo, which allowed you to view plugins. It came. And it went, what was all of that about? It certainly was a bit of a controversy. This week. And then we talk a little bit towards the end about AI. ATO seconds. And Wu sash. It's all coming up next. Of 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.

[00:02:32] Michelle Frechette: And you wore it for the longest intro in world list podcasting

[00:02:37] Nathan Wrigley: history. Isn't it? It's too long. And also that music is just so bad. When I first put it on there, I was actually, I thought it was quite nice. It was quite relaxing, quite nice, but now I'm fed up with it. If only you had the

[00:02:50] Tim Nash: power to change it.

If only

[00:02:52] Nathan Wrigley: I had the power to change it. I was hoping you'd do it for me. That's Tim Nash. Making incendiary comments. We're back. It's this week at WordPress. It's episode number 270. Thanks for joining us. If you are with us in the comments, that would be that would be great. We'd love to get some comments from you.

That's lovely. Best place to go is this page, WP Builds. com forward slash live. If you're over there, I'm actually trying something new out. Normally I embed the YouTube video, but the platform that we use has actually got a way to just embed their own video stream. It looks exactly the same as no visual difference, but I just thought let's try it without all the ads at the end.

And yeah, thanks. Tim, that's brilliant. Look at that. Like a pro! Can you do the other one from on top as well? Oh no, that's complicated. Way

[00:03:41] Tim Nash: too complicated. I could only use one hand at a time. That's right.

[00:03:45] Michelle Frechette: What we didn't see is he tried the other hand first, but because it was behind, we

[00:03:51] Nathan Wrigley: didn't see it happen.

That's always the way it goes. You can see it's going to be anarchy today. But yeah, WPbuilders. com forward slash live. If you're there, you're going to be need to log into Google because it's YouTube's comment system. The other option is if you're in our Facebook group or Facebook page, then you'd need to do a little bit extra because Facebook block us from getting your avatar and name in the link somewhere at the thread at the top is probably a link, but it's wave.

video forward slash lives forward slash Facebook. Click that. And we'll get to know who you are. But yeah, really would appreciate it if you want to go and send your friends, relations, dogs, cats, iguanas. And enemies go to that page, WPBuilds. Tim's not sure about that one. WPBuilds. com forward slash live.

Let's introduce today's guests over there. Yes. Yes. First time. It's Jack. Jack Kittering. How are you, Jack? I'm

[00:04:46] Jack Kittering: good. I'm good. This is my second time here. I feel like an amateur compared to all you. Don't do a lot

[00:04:51] Nathan Wrigley: of podcasts, so when I

[00:04:54] Tim Nash: say something completely random,

[00:04:56] Nathan Wrigley: you know why. There is not a lot to be said about that statement, other than that it's completely untrue.

I think you did a great job and you will do a great job today. Jack's joining us from the UK, which is last week we had somebody on from the UK, this week somebody on from the UK, and another one! So it's the UK taking over, that very rarely happens, usually it's North America. Jack is the product manager at LearnDash.

And the creator of too many side projects. Come on. You can't just drop that in and not tell it. Give us a, give us no, I can't. There's too many embargoed. He's

[00:05:31] Jack Kittering: literally just acquired another WordPress plugin last week. So you'd be making that official announcement in a couple of weeks. Once I finished

[00:05:38] Nathan Wrigley: tinkering with it.

OK. OK. That's lovely. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm sure lots of people have heard of LearnDash, and if you haven't, go and check it out. Go and Google LearnDash right away. Down there doing the signposting duty is Tim Nash. How are you doing, Tim?

[00:05:54] Tim Nash: I'm doing OK. I have a bit of a cold, so if I suddenly start sneezing, I'll unmute myself.

Yeah, that's

[00:05:59] Nathan Wrigley: great. Yeah, and we'll see you going like that lots. Tim is officially in hell, as you can see. There is no background at all. It's completely dark down there. What's it like down there? Pass the salt. Tim is... A WordPress security consultant. And apart from his consultancy work, Tim is also known for delivering engaging talks on various topics.

We'll see about that later. And occasionally making appearances in unique security themed improv comedy shows that are often overlooked. Is that true or is that hyperbole?

[00:06:32] Tim Nash: No I've. Started at least one. That's

[00:06:36] Nathan Wrigley: brilliant. You could find out more about Tim on his website, timnash. co. uk and even join his mild musings, random mutterings newsletter for a dose of him in your inbox every so often.

I subscribe to that and it's jolly good. So yeah, go and subscribe to Tim's newsletter. And you never know, bring a ray of sunshine. Darker, get rid of the dark background.

[00:06:59] Tim Nash: I think the black t shirt helps. Yes,

[00:07:01] Nathan Wrigley: you are literally a disembodied head. Ha. Oh dear. And, over there, yes, I'm doing well.

Three out of three, there she is. It's Michelle Frechette. How are you, Michelle? I'm good, thanks. How are you? Yeah, good. Obviously you can tell I'm in a bit of a stupid mood today. I don't know why, but I feel like this episode might come off the rails a little bit. Michelle Frechette is the Director of Community Engagement for Stellar WP at Liquid Web.

And in addition to work over at Stellar WP, Michelle is the podcast barista at WP Coffee Talk. She's the co founder of Underrepresented in Tech, creator of WP Career Pages and WPSpeakers. com. I got a card, look, WP Speakers. Yes, you do. Thank you. Where am I? I'm the president of the board of bigorangeheart.

org, director of community relations and contributor at Post Status, author, business coach and frequent organizer and speaker at WordPress events. Michelle lives outside Rochester. New York, where she takes lots of nice nature photos and posts them on social media. They're absolutely excellent. You can find out more about her at tim nash.

com. No, at make Michelle dots on line.

[00:08:11] Michelle Frechette: I'm not afraid to list them like Jack is. I'm just saying.

[00:08:15] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. Jack's, next time Jack's on, he's going to up his game. We've got to have a 10 line bio. Next time I'm

[00:08:21] Jack Kittering: on, I'm going to take up the hour and a

[00:08:25] Michelle Frechette: half. Just about you. I think that's the tavern he's going to go on that other podcast

[00:08:29] Nathan Wrigley: he's got. Tim Nash's bio until a few minutes ago, I think, just said, I need a new bio or something like that. He's updated it beautifully. Thank you so much. Peter Ingersoll is joining us in the comments. He always does.

And he always gives us a weather report from where he is, which is Connecticut. And, oh, let me just change the settings here. Oh, not that one. Let me just go here. How do I do that? I'll probably have to take that comment away first so that I don't hide Tim's and Michelle's face every time we do a comment.

Yeah, nice. Just lean over the top there. Hello from on this sunny morning, sunny, cool morning in Connecticut. It's eight degrees centigrade. 46 degrees Fahrenheit, heading up to 18 degrees centigrade, 64 degrees now at Fahrenheit, New England in the best of the fall, and WP, WBcom designs and obviously they tried to put in an emoji, but clearly the platform doesn't allow it.

So let's see if that now works. Let's have a go. Oh, that's better. Look now, Tim doesn't have to train his neck, right? We're here to talk about WordPress. So let's get that underway. Couple of bits of self promotion first, if you don't mind, this is our website, wpbuilds. com. If you want to keep up to date with all that we do, just put your email address in there and we'll send you two emails a week, typically that's like literally 99 percent of the weeks.

One to say that this episode has come out and one to say when the podcast has come out. We also like to mention that we're sponsored by GoDaddy Pro who've been sponsoring us for absolutely ages. And it really does help keep the lights on. So thank you to them. I'd also like to point out that we've got a new webinar series coming up starting next week on Wednesday.

It's with a lovely chap called Leo Lozovic. I. Pains to pronounce that correctly. I hope I did. Leonardo Lozovic and he's got a plugin called Gato or Gato. I'm not entirely sure graph QL and and it can do amazing things. And he's gonna in that five part webinar series, explain some of the things it can do 20 or so things that it can do.

And we're going to be doing it each week on a Wednesday, 3 PM UK time. If you fancy putting that in your calendar. Just scroll down and, click some links and get it into your calendar. But there we go. The other thing to mention is love it or hate it. Black Friday is coming around and you're probably starting to bookmark things.

If you're in the WordPress space, bookmark this wpbuilds. com forward slash black. Once more, wpbuilds. com forward slash black. It's our page where we allow you to search and filter all the Black Friday deals as they come in. You can see we've got some sponsors for that page, so thank you to Gravity Forms and WS Form for sponsoring that page.

But they're going to be listed down here and you can, search and filter and all that kind of stuff and hopefully save yourself a few little quid. On the journey towards black friday, right self promotion over let's get on with the wordpressy stuff Really? This is just a shout out if you're into beta testing wordpress then 6.

4 beta 2 has come out and is available for testing, you know the drill Don't stick it on a production site, put it somewhere safe and sound and secure. And hopefully by November the 11th, we'll have gone through all the beta rounds, but anyway, that's the latest one. So please make the project work better, go and get that tested.

But it's coming potentially in WordPress 6. 4 should that come in November. I don't know what you guys think of this in core, a light box for the WordPress block editor. So this is the idea here is basically if you upload an image inside of the block editor, you will have a setting to turn that image into a light box.

You all know how this works. You tick the box. And then when you click on an image, it pops up in a light box. I like the way it looks. But what do you reckon, is this something that you would ever want in WordPress core? It just seemed like a bit of a silly entry. There it is there.

It just says quite simply expand on click it's called. I guess they're eschewing the language of Lightbox because maybe that's a bit technical. But anyway, that's coming, good or bad, don't know. Over to you guys and probably not for long.

[00:12:42] Michelle Frechette: It seems to me that we are Putting more and more into core what some people have built WordPress plugins and their livelihoods around.

And so I wonder sometimes, is it good to have everything? Is it good to have the portfolios or the. The galleries, when there are so many gallery plugins that have, been feeding families for all of this time that have these features built into them, I don't know.

[00:13:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that I guess is the argument, isn't it?

The implementation looks quite nice. It's got this kind of sliding in effect. It doesn't, you don't get that kind of sudden That box on top of the black gray. Yeah. Box on top. I guess there's some sort of JavaScript at play there, which is again, more things that maybe we do or don't need, but the implementation looks nice.

I just don't know. , Jack, I dunno. Jack or Tim just feels

[00:13:35] Jack Kittering: Feels like plugin territory to me. Yeah, it does. Really plenty of. Slider plugins, gallery plugins out there on the market.

[00:13:44] Nathan Wrigley: I'm not saying I would personally decide to put in core. And if

[00:13:49] Michelle Frechette: you have to set the setting on every single image you upload, that's a probable probability for me anyway, to make mistakes where somebody is going to go, they all opened except the one I wanted to see Michelle.

Why is that one

[00:14:01] Nathan Wrigley: not opening? Yeah. I don't know if that's going to be on a grouped basis, whether you can toggle it on or off. Yeah. That's a good point. I hadn't really thought about that. This. Is what are we looking at here? We are looking at, we're looking at the image block here and it does look like it's on a per image basis.

So good point.

[00:14:19] Michelle Frechette: I'm sure that it's, you have a default setting and then you would have to undo that setting, but still. Yeah.

[00:14:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Tim, anything else?

[00:14:27] Tim Nash: Accessibility, it is the only benefit to it being in core is that core tends to come with slightly better accessibility because it's got a team that's focusing on it.

Whereas an individual plugin developer often, unless they have a particular interest in accessibility themselves, the only thing that they deal with is people complaining about it. And then they're retrofitting it in. So I guess that's an advantage, but honestly, this seems so niche.

[00:14:56] Nathan Wrigley: They.

The point is not lost on Amy. Thank you for joining us, Amy. Amy Letson. If this core lightbox is fully accessible, it would be nice to have to build on when not needing a whole hog plugin. But yeah, so that's a good point. I hadn't really thought about this. And then, the more gadgets you add, the more chance there is of a feature being missed.

Good point. Okie dokie. I think the jury's out on that. It looks nice. I have to say the implementation looks nice, but it does seem like more, more or less all of us think that it seems like a bit of an unnecessary. Thing to add into core. I got that from the meta slider website, by the way, it's called a new light box for WordPress block editor.

Let's see if anybody actually uses it. I guess the problem is once it's in, it's staying in. Gutenberg 16. 7 introduces font management. I suspect we'll all quite like this one, but I could be wrong. 29th. She was telling us that in Gutenberg 16. 7, hopefully, we will be able to have a new font manager. And I guess the easiest way to describe this would be, you know how the media library is separated from everything, so the media lives all by itself.

You can browse and fiddle and search and alter. All of that stuff in that own unique interface. This is the intention of the font management system. The library will stand alone and you'll be able to interact with it, install, remove and activate fonts from insider there. And my understanding is as well no, actually that was something else.

So anyway, the idea is it's separate, standalone. And given that fonts are now really, with GDPR and all of thing, if you're going to be loading fonts, it's a good idea to be able to manage them locally. This actually, to me, seems like quite a bona fide, good idea again, over to you.

[00:16:54] Tim Nash: I really like this.

Having spent a lot of time dealing with performance issues. Loading fonts is just a nightmare. How that said a lot of the remote loading of fonts is done with licensing setups. Most fonts are not free fonts in the terms of just like open source. I imagine there's going to be a little bit level of font piracy going on, I suspect, and then not that this is necessarily going to encourage that, but it's just going to happen as a nature of things.

But I like this. It's a shame it's not going to be in the next version of WordPress. I believe it's been punted.

[00:17:33] Nathan Wrigley: Punted, you said earlier. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:17:34] Tim Nash: That would have been a really Cool headline feature. Cause I'm not sure 6. 4 has any cool headline features anymore. Lightbox

[00:17:41] Nathan Wrigley: removed lightbox. Yeah, so the idea also would be, you'd be able to, with one click of a button, you'd be able to connect it to your Google account and thereby bring along, I don't know how many they've got now it's, I imagine it's well in closing in on a thousand or maybe in excess of a thousand.

So you'll be able to browse all of those and download them locally. Yeah, thank you, Tim. I appreciate that. Jack or Michelle, anything on this? I like it,

[00:18:09] Jack Kittering: but I do the same as Tim, with licensing, every time you build a new site, you need to go and find a nice fancy font that comes with a license.

And does someone non technical that's going to use WordPress understand that? Yeah, they're just going to be like, woo, a font. I

[00:18:25] Nathan Wrigley: can install it. Oh, yeah, there's a couple of other things coming in Gutenberg 16. 7. So let's just highlight those as well. Other notable improvements include group blocks can now have custom names.

I think that's nice. It's it is nice if you've got a big long page to be able to rename things so that you know exactly what they are. So that's nice new social link icon for the. Whatever that thing's called. X, Twitter, X, Twitter, Y, who knows? They'll only ever be Twitter to me. The other thing, have you noticed how in mainstream media, certainly in the UK, you cannot write X without following in brackets the service formerly known as Twitter.

I think that's never going to go away. I think

[00:19:09] Michelle Frechette: it's just... We still called Prince all those years, right? Yes,

[00:19:14] Nathan Wrigley: exactly. What are you going to call him? Just

[00:19:16] Tim Nash: in the years to come, it will be Twitter, formerly known as X, formerly known

[00:19:23] Nathan Wrigley: as Twitter. Anyway, you've got a new social link icon for that service, I guess that was to be expected. New ability to toggle nofollow settings for inline links, that's rich text only. Adding aspect ratio for image placeholders.

That's cool. And then there's a couple of things about the image block revised lightbox UI to remove behaviors, whatever that was an updated UI for the image lightbox redo. Again, not entirely sure what those are, but there it is. Gutenberg 16. 4 coming down the. The down the pike fairly soon, but font management is the headline feature.

Okay. Let's have a quick look. See if we've got any comments. Yes, we have. That's quite nice. Good morning from Philly says Amy. Nice to have you with us, Aaron. Just giving us a wave. That's nice. Gato is Spanish for cat. Oh. Okay, that's why Leo's site is full of images of cats because it's cat got it. I didn't realize Babs Saul is joining us from sunny Cambridgeshire in the UK.

That's really nice. And then going back to the piece that we had just a moment ago, Michelle's point about flipping the switch individually is well taken. Yeah. It would be nice to think that we could do the light box on all of them all at once. I call it. Twixta.

[00:20:44] Michelle Frechette: You would, Peter. You would come up with the perfect

[00:20:46] Nathan Wrigley: name for it.

Yeah, that is good. I can't see that, but It's absolutely ingrained in my head to call it Twitter because I can't think of what to call the thing that I'm doing. So if I do a tweet, I haven't got a replacement for that. So it's always going to be a tweet.

[00:21:02] Michelle Frechette: I saw something recent. I saw something recently that said Twitter had tweets, does X have excrements?

And that's all I can think of now.

[00:21:13] Tim Nash: Oh. That was my joke, Jack. Oh, was it? Did I just

[00:21:17] Michelle Frechette: take your joke?

[00:21:19] Nathan Wrigley: I'll edit it out, and you can say it now Tim. No. And everybody will think it's true.

[00:21:27] Tim Nash: I was going to say that we should if you call it excrement. Then you obviously can then work out what your tweet should be doing.

[00:21:35] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Oh dear. Okay. Let's move on and talk about WordPress events and particularly the sponsorship of events. I got to say that this sort of stuff gets bandied around on this show quite a bit. We talk about sponsorship and we talk about WordPress events, but to me, the curtain is.

Firmly shot on how all of this works. I really don't know how the whole sponsorship regimen works and who gets the money and where that money comes from and all of this, but let's raise this, but I know that Michelle and Tim, I don't know Jack, but I know that you guys have been involved in events in the past.

So let's go through this again. We're on the Tavern 2nd of October. Sarah Gooding, WordPress Global Sponsorship Program raises costs for 2024 to support expanding in person events. I guess everything is getting more expensive, and so why not sponsorship programs in WordPress? And I'm gonna read, WordPress Community Team has proposed a draft for the 2024 Global...

community sponsorship program with fees increased to cover the costs of the rapidly expanding number of in person events. The program supports the volunteer organized local events so that they can provide free or low cost access to attendees. It helps companies streamline their sponsorship contributions across multiple events with less administrative overhead.

Now we can see the numbers here. What it was is the top line that's 2023 and what it is now is the bottom line. So the gold was previously 130 and has gone up by 15 to 145. Silver has gone up by 20. So the silver has gone up more than the gold to 115 and the bronze has gone up 10. That's curious in itself.

It's gone up 15, 20. And 10, I would have thought the gold one would have gone up the most, but there you go. So this is in order to pay for the, these rapidly, what are being called, I'm sure they won't stick with this name, but next gen events, the idea of smaller, more, more specific, let's say with one theme or one topic or.

Just something different about them, these events. And it said at the top of the article that the number of events has gone up. And if you're looking at the screen, you can see this is the current state of affairs. A few stats demonstrating the strong resurgence of community events in the WordPress community since COVID.

36 local WordCamps held in 2023. To date, 25 50 ish. 170. 3 percent increase in WordCamp since last year, 60 WordCamps anticipated to be held in 2023, and there were 22 in 2022, seems about right. 200, sorry, 729 meetup groups across 107 countries. Over half a million meetup group members, nearly 3000 meetup events scheduled in 2023 to date with a 350 more scheduled through to the end of the year.

Anyway, it's a bitter pill. I suppose if you're a sponsor, you've suddenly got to find a bit more money and hopefully that will justify. Your existence in the program. As I said, I don't really know how this money gets allocated. Michelle or Tim or Jack, if you've got experience, where does all this money end up and who gets their hands on it?

And how does it work?

[00:24:51] Michelle Frechette: So some of the money sponsors, the sponsored meetups, right? So if it WordCamp or I'm sorry, WordPress Rochester is a sponsored meetup. So that's 20 a month, probably more now that I'm not paying out of my pocket to use the meetup platform. So part of it funds that for sure. But as far as WordCamps goes, it's depends on your budget.

When I met for WordCamp Rochester I was able to find a venue for 1, 500. I was able to find catering for whatever it turned out to be, I think totaled was 2, 000 for all the catering. And so we were able to pull off a WordCamp Rochester with food. We had the speaker dinner, we had. Coffee all day.

We had lunch and we had the after party and we ended up selling 80 tickets and had about 60 65 people actually come. That's a really inexpensive WordCamp. WordCamp Montclair had about 90 100 people. Their budget was over 7, 000. They did provide lunch, but there was no after party because that was not something that the budget would allow for.

And then WordCamp Atlanta is coming up this weekend and their venue was tens of thousands of dollars. So it just, it depends which city you're in. It depends where in the world you are as to what the costs of actually putting on that WordCamp are. It depends on how many attendees you have. There's so much that goes into that.

And so it isn't just a set amount. So If you look and that there are gold spot, those gold sponsors that are paying, that paid 130, 000 this year, they didn't give a thousand dollars to every word camp who had, their top levels. Fundraising at sponsorship at 1, 000 the top level fund fundraising spot or sponsorship spot at some of the bigger camps is a whole lot more than 1, 000.

So it might be 10, 000 or 15, 000. They're not getting all that money directly from that one. So for WordCamp Rochester, we were able to raise. In local or what they call local sponsorships. Some of it was not right local, but companies that wanted to invest in it. And so we got 1, 500 from the community sponsorship, which is what those gold levels ones you just had on on screen a minute ago.

But if you look at our fundraising, if you look at our sponsorship page, it looks like, because those are all listed under the thousand dollar gold level sponsor. It looks like we brought in 10, 000. If we had brought in 10, 000, I would have been giving everybody filet mignon for lunch here in Rochester because of the difference of how much it costs to put on a camp in Rochester versus Atlanta or God forbid, London, I understand is one of the most expensive places to try to hold a word camp.

And so it's it's interesting. I don't think that you get the right picture of how much money. When you look at those sponsorship pages was actually raised or given through the community funds. It's not a clear and transparent picture. So I'm wondering like, should we put global sponsors listed separately than the money that was given by local sponsors or how that should work?

Because it isn't necessarily clear to people. And as you saw in that too, it didn't include the flagship events. Your company can invest 145, 000, but then if you also want to sponsor WorkCamp Europe, you're coming up with another five, 000 on top of that to be a gold level sponsor, a platinum or whatever numbers they're throwing and Levels they're throwing at us.

So it isn't necessarily as transparent and which is why you're like the curtain has not been drawn back for me because I don't know that anybody gets the same picture when they do draw back the curtain, unless you've been part of organizing multiple events. I don't know that you've seen how that all works behind the

[00:28:41] Nathan Wrigley: scenes.

The one that there was in fact, the only WordCamp event, sorry, the WordPress, the only WordPress event that's taken place in the UK for a number of years was very recent. Tim was in a tent, you were in attendance, right? You went. Yeah, it was in your newsletter, which we plugged a little while ago.

We'll plug it again. Get Tim's newsletter. That was the first event in a long time, and it was thrown together relatively quickly, in terms of it, WordPress, London has got this massive lead time and, all of that. And it was one track, one event one day.

Nice and simple. I believe Tim that the event was the same as the place where you ate and they kept the costs down and in all of those kind of ways. You enjoy that? You've got mute. You're muted. You're either muted or you can, or your mic has gone off.

[00:29:29] Tim Nash: Hello. It was a lovely event. It was really well put together.

It was small. It was intimate. It was what WordCamps should be. When we talk about volunteer driven community events and then you look at WordCamp US or WordCamp Europe, they don't, that doesn't compute, their scales are completely wrong. Whereas this was like a nice intimate little event for local ish people.

Obviously, it was the only event we've had in the UK. It's probably the only event we're likely to have for a long time in the UK because of budget problems. So there were people traveling in, but on the whole it was just nice and it was, it didn't, it worked really well. It worked on a really low budget.

On the global sponsors it really is a double edged sword. Both for the events and for the sponsors. It's great that you have this little pot of money that's available for your word count. It's a little pot of money. Global sponsors do not give you vast quantities of sponsorship money. To your individual event.

They give you a tiny amount of money, far less than you need, far less than you could get if you went to those sponsors and said, Hey, Stellar WP, I'd like you to come and sponsor our event. You'd be, if you didn't have the global sponsorship, you'd be able to go to them and get more money for your individual event.

That does mean that certain events would miss out because they can't, don't have that reach or it wouldn't make any financial sense. But on the other side, Flipcoin, as a global sponsor, unless you're turning up to these events, the value of 140, 000, that's coming out of your marketing budget and you're going to sit in a meeting and say, Oh yeah, that was good value for money.

How are we tracking any of the value for it? No. Just pretend it's good value. So I don't see. You have to do that for a community perspective and 140, 000 is a lot of money to give on goodwill on the hope that something might come of it. But if you're going as, if you're sponsoring individual events, then you're sending your team there, then you're at least engaging.

You're still not going to get any sales. Don't get me wrong. WordCamp's a terrible basis to sell stuff. But. At least you're getting some engagement out of it. I don't think that, if I was sitting in any marketing team and someone said, let's go and sponsor a global level, I'd just go and hit my head against a wall repeatedly until someone accepted that it was a terrible idea.

Which is

[00:32:06] Nathan Wrigley: a real shame. Yeah. So you are all for the dismembering, of the global sponsorship program and each event just going out and looking for their own, I guess the flip side of that is at least if you're putting on a little event like the Whitley Bay one that we were talking about, in the UK at least you can dip into that pot.

And although the amount that you get may be small, at least. You don't have to do any endeavor to get any of that funding. You say you don't need to do any endeavor. But it's forms, I

[00:32:34] Tim Nash: guess. Generally, getting a WordCamp, just setting up a WordCamp and getting through that process is horrific and painful and not pleasant.

And you, we've lost so many organizers because they tried it and it. Just is not a pleasant experience. And that's all down to, again, a lot of volunteers working tirelessly around the world, different cultures, different expectations, different requirements, but being forced into a single model. That at least we've got these next generation camps that aren't really next generation camps and aren't they're just it's the same thing They're just giving it fancy terms But if we're going to shove people into one mold you shouldn't you might we might as well just not have volunteer events You might as well just split them down, pay, have the WordPress org foundation set up a events company that runs around the world.

We'd have less events, but they would be good quality ones, or you go, actually let meetups have autonomy. Let them do their stuff. Let meetups organically grow conferences in the way that they want. If they want to go down the WordCamp branding, let them do that, but don't go. But if they say, actually, we don't want to be a WordCamp.

We're going to run out. I don't know, admin day event or whatever, and give them that autonomy to do that themselves and go and We do

[00:34:06] Michelle Frechette: have that autonomy already though, and we can do that. So like I've Do you think? I've done events, oh yeah, I've done events, yeah I have, I've done hackathons and things like that right here in Rochester through the local meetup and had events like that for sure, that were full day events and had people show up and do those kinds of things.

Maybe not to the scale you're talking about, but to have 50 people in a room building websites for nonprofits, that's an event, right? And we were able to fund self fund that we charge people 10 a piece to come in. We got a couple of local sponsors paid for the pizza and made sure people showed up with, I spent their money.

For the most part. So we do have some autonomy to be able to do those kinds of events for sure.

[00:34:47] Nathan Wrigley: Anything to add, Jack, before we move on?

[00:34:50] Jack Kittering: I just think their numbers are really interesting on the posts. It's saying how successful it is and saying how much WordCamp's increased in, 2023.

When you look, it was COVID times, their numbers don't feel that truthful. You can always make numbers look as good as you want to make them look. It's very easy to

[00:35:08] Nathan Wrigley: do that with statistics and yeah, there weren't

[00:35:11] Jack Kittering: a lot in 2022, because no one was planning stuff in 2021.

[00:35:15] Michelle Frechette: To say I will tell you, numbers, attended numbers are down, except for the flagship events for every single WordCamp I've talked to.

[00:35:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think the UK may be a bit of a unique example. I don't know. No, I think Australia, I was talking to Jo Mini from Australia and she was saying that the WordPress community in terms of events is a, is in a bit of a state in Australia as well, but in the UK it, it looks like Whitley Bay, which just wasn't on the roadmap for anything in terms of WordPress a few years ago.

It is now the flagship UK event. It's the it's the one which is interesting. The nice comment has come through from Atif. He said, we should run WordCamp Europe in Scunthorpe, which is town in the UK. It's obviously tongue in cheek here and save millions. I suspect it would cost you a handful of pennies.

That's no offense. If you're from Scunthorpe, I'm not from Scunthorpe. So no offense taken, but maybe there are. People listening from . Skor what else have we got? A

[00:36:21] Tim Nash: fantastic place for a word camp. It

[00:36:23] Nathan Wrigley: would be, we've got the spa, which is this giant Victorian auditorium. It genuinely would be a really, don't even get me started, Tim.

[00:36:33] Tim Nash: Just so you know, Nathan is now organizing Word Camp. No, he's not. No.

[00:36:41] Nathan Wrigley: This is the title of this episode already. Nathan is not organizing WordCamp Scarborough. Although, honestly, the venue would be perfect. I've thought about that so many times, it's literally perfect. Amy says she loves the next gen idea. Still, revenues in my city are, I guess that means expensive and live captioning is necessary, but also expensive.

So right off the bat, it's really difficult to make an event as inexpensive. As one would hope. Marcus joining us from GoDaddy. Everything keeps getting more expensive. Important to not... To note. Oh yeah. Thank you. To note that those global sponsors do not include the flagship events, as Michelle mentioned.

So that's US, WordCamp Europe, and WordCamp Asia. Yeah, that's a really good point. And a deeper. Search for donated space would maybe be a start for my area. Okay,

[00:37:34] Michelle Frechette: thank you. It's hard because even the spaces that we're donating spaces now because of COVID protocols and having extra cleaning and all of those kinds of things can at least have to pay for their staff that are there.

So free space is almost hard, is almost impossible to come by. But I used one of our local schools, so not a college, which costs more. I used one of the city schools, the school of the arts here in Rochester. And that gave me the opportunity to just pay their staff, which was basically 1, 500

[00:38:03] Nathan Wrigley: for the day.

So you managed to really get the budget. You wrangled the budget right down by some creative thinking. What was the event? venue like in Whitley Bay, because they had on the logo, Tim, they had something which looked like a Victorian spa kind of thing, like we have in Scarborough.

Was it something akin to that? Was it quite It is.

[00:38:23] Tim Nash: I can't remember what the exact name, but it's called the Spanish City. It used to be a fairground. It looks a Victorian esque fairground, which would, with rides and things. And it sounded amazing. I wanted to go to that. Unfortunately, they seem to have knocked down all the attractions and turned it into a conference venue, which Was disappointing, but it had a beautiful domed ceiling in the main, we weren't in the main area, but you could slide through a door and there was this beautiful domed area and there was fancy restaurants.

It was really nice. If you ever want to go to Whitley Bay it really was a good selling thing for going up to Whitley Bay for a few days.

[00:39:03] Nathan Wrigley: I'm not doing the Scarborough event. I'm not doing it. It doesn't, I'm just. Not doing it, Tim, so I can see this is the beginning of something. Okay. So anyway, there we go. Those global sponsorship programs have increased in cost. It is quite a lot of money. 145, 000 for the gold. And as Marcus says, doesn't include the flagship events, which are very expensive I know for those sponsors. All right, let's move on. Let's go to this space.

Speaking of WordCamps. Occasionally we do the segue, right? This one is one of those moments. WordCamp Asia this is just to say that the tickets are on sale. It honestly feels like yesterday that I was looking at pictures coming in from Bangkok at the event, and yet here we are. It's not that far away.

Half a year away, tickets are on sale. It's happening in Taipei, Taiwan. It's March the 7th to the 9th. And I presume, as always, it's going to be tranches of tickets. They'll sell a thousand or whatever, and then go on to the next thousand or 500 or 200 or whatever it may be. But yeah, there we go.

It's available. It's for sale. Go and get your tickets. It is at Asia. WordCamp. org. Anybody here going, I don't know if LearnDash send you along, do they? Michelle, are you going to be going?

[00:40:24] Michelle Frechette: If I go, I'll probably self fund. I have applied to speak. It falls on International Women's Day, which is right up my alley, so we'll see.

Would you

[00:40:32] Nathan Wrigley: rather be at home for that or there for that?

[00:40:36] Michelle Frechette: I am an international woman, so it doesn't matter where

[00:40:39] Nathan Wrigley: I am. I get it. Okay. Fair enough. Anyway, if you're interested in attending... I imagine that like last year, this is going to be a really important event for that part of the world. It really did from sitting on a couch, browsing Twitter posts and things really did look like something quite special.

Looked like the organizer pulled something pretty amazing off. They did have three years to plan it. So yeah, that's true.

[00:41:05] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. But that aside, they did an amazing job. It was incredibly accessible. I think I was the only person, using wheelchair device, but everything about it was accessible and just, it was really

[00:41:18] Nathan Wrigley: amazing.

Neat. So go and get your tickets if you fancy going. So we're moving on. This is justinferriman. com. He's got an article entitled wake up WP founders. I'm just curious really, as to what your thoughts are on this. I know that we've got Michelle and we've got Jack. Both from the commercial plug inside Stella WP and all of the various different pieces, LearnDash and so on.

I'm curious to think what you think about Justin's piece here. He wrote a long post on Twitter, which by the way, he thought was actually quite a good way of doing it. He says he got lots of engagement over there, but his premise is basically this. I'll encapsulate it just by quoting. Let's face it.

Selling WP products today is a hell of a lot harder. Than it was just three to five years ago. I have no idea if that intuition is true or not, but it certainly feels like I'm getting bombarded more by products. It says it's got harder ever since COVID. You, but it's, so it's basically really hard to get yourself noticed.

Every, every man and his dog seems to be coming up with a plugin and a solution using WordPress. And essentially this article is basically saying the WordPress ecosystem is a cutthroat space and you really have to treat it. Like a full on business. There's no point in going into WordPress as a developer, you built a plugin, you've got a solution.

It's all right. He's basically saying, all right, is really not going to cut it anymore because no, a, you won't get any discoverability. People are going to expect 24 seven support. They're going to expect a website, which isn't some sort of cookie cutter template is gotta have, a real amount of thought put into it.

In other words, WordPress is no longer the build it and they will come place that it used to be. Like I say, I don't really have any intuitions in this. Because I don't have a plugin, but let's hand it to a, let's send it to Jack first. I don't know if you in any way, get yourself involved in marketing for any of your products, but as it become more difficult, do you think?

I think it's definitely become more difficult on the whole, but

[00:43:22] Jack Kittering: I think you've got two sides, but you've got the professional companies like, your star WP, your new folds to have bigger budgets, they can. They can push more out, they've got more staff. And really what Justin's saying about the, the single developer

[00:43:37] Nathan Wrigley: on their own,

[00:43:38] Jack Kittering: pushing out a plugin, making some money.

I think you can still do that, but I think a lot of single developers get confused and think, Oh, my plugin's on WordPress to get loads of installs, I don't have to tell anyone. You still have to push it somewhere. It's not a magical place where someone is going to get notified that, Oh, someone built a solution I've wanted for three years, and it's now available, let's go and install it.

Like you still have to do that baseline of marketing, but I don't think it's a market space where you can't do that anymore. And then just what you've got in the COVID boom of all the plug in companies getting acquired, everyone building a plug in, selling a plug in, everyone just started building cookie cutter plug ins that everyone else already does.

They didn't bring nothing new to the table. They were replicates and poor imitations of other plug ins already on the market. If you want to sell something, make something unique, like you have to have a selling point. A selling point isn't, I spent my spare time doing this and now it's on WordPress.

org.

No one cares but it's definitely a more crowded space. I think WordPress has more competition in general from all the different no code tools, from the web flows, the square spaces, like WordPress is still a pain in the ass to get set up if you're new. Everyone says, oh, it's really quick and easy.

It's not quick and

[00:45:00] Nathan Wrigley: easy.

[00:45:03] Jack Kittering: I've watched enough people struggle getting a WordPress site set up to know it's not quick and easy.

[00:45:08] Nathan Wrigley: That's going to become the new title of this podcast. WordPress is still a pain in the arse to get

[00:45:15] Tim Nash: set up. We've shortened that to just WordPress is a pain in the arse and leave it at that.

[00:45:20] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that's a say's Tim Nash. I'll add that bit to the end. Yeah thank you for that. I have to say, given the role that I now have. Which I don't quite know how it happened, but now I just basically create content in the WordPress space. It makes me a bit of a target for email outreach for people who have got a plugin and, or a theme, or whatever it may be.

And I get dozens a week, and that is no exaggeration. Literally dozens from people who have got a thing that they've built. And it's never, I'm thinking of building, what do you think? It's always I've built it, here's the website. I don't really know how to say this kindly. So I'm just going to say it, it is quite disheartening how poorly executed the marketing side of it is.

And it makes me feel a bit sad. For people who have put all of this effort in to what is clearly a difficult enterprise. They've built something They've taken the time It on the face of it if it's as they've described It does a great thing that a proportion of the population are going to need but it just doesn't look Executed well from the outside, the website is There's spelling mistakes.

There's just really That's just because

[00:46:40] Michelle Frechette: they're using the UK

[00:46:41] Nathan Wrigley: spelling of the American word. That's what it is. No, genuinely there's, lots of spelling mistakes and it's, I don't know, and there's some bit of me, which thinks good on you. You've just, you've done your best and that's what you're able to do.

And marketing's not your thing. You're a coder. That's brilliant. But there's another part of me, which feels like, Oh, blimey, this is. Bound to fail and I wish I could help all of these people, but I can't but I think The long and the short of why i'm saying that is I think justin might have a point here in that build it and they will come is probably gone.

I think build it make it look amazing market the heck out of it Then they'll come I think we forget how

[00:47:26] Jack Kittering: international the WordPress space is though, because a lot of these developers don't speak English

[00:47:32] Nathan Wrigley: natively.

[00:47:33] Jack Kittering: Exactly. They put up a marketing website, and you read it, and you're like, 9 times out of 10 it doesn't sound that great.

You look at the product, you look at the code, that's all fine. But, unless you're a geek, you're not going to look at the product and the code. You're going to be put off by the site before you get to the product or the

[00:47:50] Nathan Wrigley: code.

[00:47:51] Jack Kittering: Yeah. The countries they come from quite often, they don't have big budgets.

They can't even go and hire someone to fix the copy. You can't go and hire someone for 1, 200 to fix the copy of the thing that you're spending you spend your spare time on and you're trying to make money. They don't want to spend a month's salary fixing up a page.

[00:48:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think so.

I think you're right. I just it makes me just feel a little bit sad because I think if I'd have been Reading those emails four or five years ago, I probably would have said, yeah, that's fine. Just go with it and iterate. But nowadays I think if you have a good idea, probably it will get copied fairly quickly.

But also not too many people are going to dwell on it because I think everybody's intuitions on the internet are so much more well, we don't judge a book by a cover. Except that we all do. And when you see a website which looks a bit janky, and even my relatives who have no relationship with technology, even they can spot a website which looks poorly executed things, because it's just part of the landscape now.

Got a website, I know how it should look in the year 2023. Yeah, I think Justin's onto something here. Sorry, I've promenaded this.

[00:49:09] Michelle Frechette: I think my first LearnDash course, I've been trying to figure out what to create on LearnDash will be how to market your WordPress product, because I think some people could, yeah, they could run with it if they just had some steps to follow, right?

Who do you reach out to? How do you write a press release? Who do you send a press release about this to? Cause your local newspaper doesn't care, but there are news outlets for. WordPress, et cetera, those kinds of things, how to be a good podcast guest, how to pitch your idea to a podcast, all of those things that I'm on the other side of, I'd be able to help tell people how to do with the caveat that they don't inundate my inbox to try to get on all of my podcasts.

[00:49:52] Nathan Wrigley: That's brilliant. Too many intuitions on this.

[00:49:57] Tim Nash: No, I'm still pondering spellings as if you're somebody who's come is where English isn't your first language. How do you make spelling mistakes? Because when typing in and getting things translated, is there a translation system somewhere that deliberately puts spelling mistakes in

[00:50:17] Nathan Wrigley: or something?

No I get the intuition that they're you, that the ones certainly that I read look more phonetic. Then they look accurate. So I can't think of an example right now, a word which really ought to be spelt this way, but is in fact spelled this way. So that would've been a great example of run this so a 1 0 1 there would be run that email through a translation engine.

But this is the disconnect. That person is not thinking on that level. They are just thinking, I'm going to spray this out to all the people that I've got on this email list, which I've found. And that'll do it. Yeah. And

[00:50:50] Michelle Frechette: that'll do it. Max has a really, Max put a good idea in the chat, which is that with chat GPT, there should be no more excuses for poor copy.

[00:50:58] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So yes. I don't know. I've seen a lot of poor copies. Yeah. At least with

[00:51:04] Michelle Frechette: spellings, it should at least. Fix the spellings,

[00:51:08] Nathan Wrigley: my plugin will make you look more attractive or some sort of, hallucination like that. Thank you, Max. That's yeah, that's a really good point, but that's exactly the sort of thing that I mean, it's that little layer of professionalism, which I think wasn't required.

And in some sense, I would like it not to be required. Still, there's a part of me, which is like rooting for the underdog always. But I, yeah, we've just got to that point where everything is very professional and everything coming down the pike. I did see somebody, it might even have been Justin.

No, I don't think it was. Somebody's launching a service called Rightly or something like that, where they're going to write your copy. It's a paid service and essentially they're gonna write copy for WordPress plugin and theme developers. So you'd come to them So it's a little bit like what you were saying Michelle saw that on Twitter, but I can't connect the dots with who it was Anyway, sorry, Tim.

You've made a comment about spelling mistakes and then got hijacked. Was there anything else?

[00:52:10] Tim Nash: If there was it's now gone

[00:52:11] Nathan Wrigley: completely Sorry Okay. All right. So Justin I think from my point of view, I think you've got a point All right, let's move on. I did a podcast this week with a lovely person.

Pierre Miaro is how you pronounce that, although it looks like Pierre Mario. Orekeone, and he was talking about how WordPress. Is translated I won't go into it, but if you're interested in how WordPress core and the plugin repository and all of that gets translated and who is behind that important work, go and listen to the episode.

It's, it is really amazing the amount of stuff which goes on in the background to make WordPress an international thing. And Pierre Mario or Pierre Miaro explains how all of that works. So go and check that out. It really is lovely. This is either over to Michelle, Michelle let's plump up for you, Michelle.

There's an event, it's called Cadence Amplify Mastering the Art of Effective Website Creation. It's happening a week on Friday, so October the 20th, 2023. Do you know anything about this, Michelle, other than the fact that there's a page here? Do you, have you been involved? There's

[00:53:25] Michelle Frechette: two tracks?

This is the second one of this year. The first one was a resounding success two tracks online all day, learning different ways to be successful with your website.

[00:53:38] Nathan Wrigley: Do you need, do you know, do you need to be using cadence? Is it bound up in that or is it more general than that?

[00:53:46] Michelle Frechette: Last time I did a session on how to.

How to launch a podcast. So it was not dependent on Cadence. It's put on by Cadence. And of course, they'd love for you to use Cadence. But it isn't necessarily about, every session is not about Cadence. So you don't have to be all in on Cadence, but you will certainly learn a few things about it if you do.

So you can also pick and choose which ones you want to listen to and

[00:54:07] Nathan Wrigley: be involved with. All online with a sort of keynote by the founder of Cadence, Ben Rittner, 4pm EDT. 1 p. m. So I guess, I don't know if there's a signup process. I can't see one on here. Did you did a master in the don't know. It just says that there are two, I'll watch live and participate, catch the replays, celebrate our speakers.

So the. I'll drop the link to that into the show notes, but it's there. Put it in your diary 20th of October, which is next week on Friday. Okay. This is lovely. This is so great. This is a Sylvan Hagen or Hagen. I don't know. Sylvan took it upon himself to install. All at the same time. So it's not like one, do one plugin and then go and see what happens.

This is install all 108 and then see what, I don't mean literally at the same time, but don't interact with the website in any way until all 108 are installed and activated and see what happens. I've never seen this before. The periodic table of WordPress plugins. I guess that equates to 108.

There they all are. Fabulous. And he made a short video, the long and the short of it is a dog's dinner. Your WordPress site, if you install those 108 plugins, and I genuinely didn't pay enough attention to see which plugins were doing it, but it's that whole notification thing and hijacking with the onboarding that happens automatically.

His website was. Utterly unusable. There were pages and pag I mean lit you know, one page, but scroll scroll, scroll, of notifications, things to do, onboarding wizards which hijack the entire UI so that you had to dismiss them one after another, and essentially the conclusion of this is well, obviously, don't do it, don't install those 108 plugins at the same time, that's lunacy, but his takeaway is can we please?

regulate the notification system and sylvan i have good news There is a project afoot to hopefully wrangle the notification system Although what the progress of that is i'm not entirely sure I don't know if any of you saw the video and just laughed at it in the same way that I did but Over to you if you've got any thoughts, it just made me laugh

[00:56:30] Tim Nash: We have had so many goes at trying to regulate the notification system.

We have notification systems for notification systems at this point, the new project It was like, we're going to do this, and there was about 20 people went, what about all these ones that we've been attempting before? Whatever you do, we're going to end up in the same position because somebody is going to create this really cool theme and it's going to have an onboarding wizard and that's going to be different from everything else.

And we reject, Oh, no, wait, that's another story coming up.

[00:57:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that is another story coming up, but maybe that theme review team will be able to get their tendrils into that and say, look, if your theme is wanting to use Any kind of notification not until you've gone through the notification system and then of course the paid version who knows what that'll do Yeah,

[00:57:20] Tim Nash: I mean I can't see it ever working I think we have created this beast if we'd built if Back in the day, you know when we were talking wordpress one when we were first talking about plugging Hooks and filters and even back then there was suggestions that maybe we shouldn't just let people just randomly take over the UI We might have stand a chance But the beauty of WordPress is that you can do almost anything with it.

The problem with WordPress is you can do Almost anything with it and notifications are the same This is they are just a byproduct of being able to do almost anything with it and Yo, stesio will come out on black friday with a giant banner and upset everybody regardless of how you build your notification system

[00:58:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's got top billing on the the plug in look there.

They are right in the top corner They are the hydrogen of the WordPress ecosystem. Is it hydrogen? Top left. I can't remember showing my age. Hydrogen is one, isn't it? Hydrogen. Anyway, blah, blah. My recommendation is go and find Ross Wintle's plugin or Chrome extension or, browser extension.

It's called, we mentioned it before. It's called Turbo Admin. If you're suffering from notification fatigue, just put that in your browser They be gone. It's brilliant. Thank you Ross for creating that. Jack, Michelle, anything on this? It's a bit of a silly piece, but I thought it was fun.

[00:58:53] Michelle Frechette: I just think that the color contrast on that site needs to be fixed a little bit.

Okay.

[00:58:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. All right. That was an unexpected consequence. Yeah. Green on green. All right,

[00:59:04] Michelle Frechette: it gets a good rating three out of five is what

[00:59:07] Nathan Wrigley: have you been doing that have you been checking it out in the background with

[00:59:10] Michelle Frechette: I just did right now killing my eyes.

[00:59:13] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you. This is quite an interesting piece.

And really, There's not really a story here, but there's just be careful. It's an angle that I hadn't really thought of before. This is from main WP. It's the pieces, my WP, by the way, is a WordPress plugin. You install it on typically a dedicated website of its own, and then you can install a child plugin and update your WordPress installs from one central dashboard.

Now obviously that creates a bit of a backdoor if you can hack. The main WP install, then you've got a direct line into all of these child sites, if you like. And so that, that was a new vector that I hadn't really thought of. But Thomas J reef from we watch your website wrote a piece about this recently saying that this is.

A bit of a deal. He mentioned three solutions. He mentioned managed WP umbrella and main WP. And he talked about how crucial it was that you basically locked these down. Main WP go to lengths to say that in this case the attack vector required you to log into a legitimate. Main WP account.

So in a sense, it was almost like an employee was doing this, but obviously those credentials could leak or get out on the web somewhere. And and so this is a bit of a thing. You've got to monitor this. You've got to make sure that you're keeping logs so that if somebody, when you, nobody should be logging into that website is logging into that website and yeah, the reason I mentioned this, because I really hadn't given this angle any thought at all, but having Tim on the show, I bet he has.

So let's hand it over to Tim.

[01:00:59] Tim Nash: Don't let, this all boils down to really simple security advice that we give over and over again. And everybody knows, not everybody implements, which is, every site you log into, you should have a unique password for it. If you don't have, if you're not doing that at the moment.

Password manager. Go, use one or passphrases. It's up to you, but they should be unique. They should be long. You can make whatever jokes you like at that point. Where possible have multi factor authentication. If you're running your own WordPress website there's a plugin called 2TWO factor.

That is a WordPress core feature plugin. The idea is that eventually that will turn up in WordPress core. We've been waiting. What feels like a decade for it to turn up unfortunately, this giant block editor thing has got most of the attention and projects like that have been given a back burner, but that's a really good plug in for handling multifactor authentication on third party services.

If they have 2FA support, use it. Some third party services even offer you a discount if you want to use it. Because they do not want you to be hijacked. That's neat. I've never seen that. And there, if you're doing anything that involves, you logging in. It's your responsibility to maintain it.

So use a unique password, use a unique email address. If you can, I'm not suggesting come up with completely random ones, but in things like Gmail, you have that plus icon that you can then add anything at the end. So you can have Tim plus this website at my site. com. If you use those emails that allows you to track and so you can start saying, Hey, my, this email is being used by this spam that's coming in.

Okay, that's a hint that there might be a problem with that site So you can that's allows you to do a little bit of remote monitoring yourself. But the big one is unique passwords everywhere. Just do it

[01:03:09] Nathan Wrigley: Can I throw this one at you tim and see what you make of it because I come I came across this service Not that long ago and i've started using it literally a couple of weeks ago And i'm not sure what I think about it and it's doc Goes re so basically you click a button, there's, they've got a browser extension in every password field.

It sorry, email field. It puts a little dot go icon, a little bit like you would say the, the bit warden or last pass or whatever it would be, and you click it and it will generate for you a unique email address at that moment. And then pre fill that field. Now. When that email, you then go to your doc.

go account and you say, okay, every email that is generated from my account, forward it to this one, right? So it's all going to your regular email address, but the emails, they will strip out all the trackers from the emails if you wish to have that. But also when you log into doc. go, you can just terminate that email.

So you can say. Okay. X, Y, Z, 9 at doc. com. Just stop that one working from this moment on, and then you can bring it back to life again. So you can switch it off, make it dormant, bring it back on. And I thought that was quite a, you quite a neat idea, except of course, there's that single point of failure if doc.

Go away, but I like the premise of it, even if I'm relying I've created a, I've created a single point of failure for myself.

[01:04:37] Tim Nash: Yeah, and Apple offers something very similar with that. Oh do they? Okay. There are ProtonMail does something similar. FastMail does something similar with uniquely generating.

And some of those will link in actually link into something like Bitwarden. So if you, Bitwarden is a password manager, if you're not familiar with it. And one of its features, it will integrate with a lot of email services to generate. Unique emails on the fly. The advantage of having your mail provider do that versus the third party is Mail systems are fragile.

Email is not a reliable source of communication. Email is If you ever look behind the curtain, and if you ever thought that email was you send an email and it arrives at a different server and that's it. You would be horrified at how many jumps, hoops and loops go through, how much stripping of email, how much checking of email.

How all these blacklists that are checked against all of this stuff is just happening behind the scenes. And you are adding one giant thing in the middle. When their reputation of their service goes down, you're not going to get your email. When people screw up stuff on there, you're not going to get your email.

When they inevitably go bust, when they get, and when they and if you worry about your privacy, you're going to have the scenarios where if they're stripping stuff out of the email, that means they're reading the email. Yeah.

[01:06:01] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. You've, you've scared me as you do so often. Luckily, I'd only got a week into it.

Okay, I'm gonna discontinue use of that. I think you've made some good points. I'm gonna go back to my... Ad in Gmail.

[01:06:17] Tim Nash: Check if your password manager supports ad in Gmail. You can get something quite similar set up. And there are lots of services that will do this for you. If you're an Apple user, Apple will do it for you, for example.

But a lot of the mail services providers now do it.

[01:06:36] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you. Back to the main WP story. Basically, I guess if you've got a main WP or equivalent install, just keep an eye on it. Obviously, if there's people logging in that you sacked six months ago, it's probably not going to go well for you.

So maybe maybe recycle those users periodically that kind of thing. But anyway, there we go. Main WP doing its job to highlight this as an issue. Righty ho, let's move on. Okay. We are. At the story of the week. So I don't know what to say about this story. Except that a few days ago, I believe my first, I can't remember when I saw it, but I woke up one morning and somebody said, Oh, look, if you go to the WordPress plugin repo, there's a nice new button.

I can't even remember what that button said. But you could try out. The plugins. So you could try out any plugin you like by clicking the button and it launched it launched playground, which is a browser, but it's phenomenal that it even works, but the browser based version of WordPress, which spins up in like less time than it takes for me to say the word install and you're up and running now on the face of it.

What a great idea. This genuinely seems like a cool thing. You click a button and you get the opportunity to look at a plugin in the repo in a completely disposable WordPress website that you can have for, I don't know, a handful of minutes just to see what's going on in there. Didn't quite go down like that though amongst the community.

And I don't really have an intuition as to whether this is going to come back. My understanding is as of right now. This functionality is gone away. Now, whether or not you like the idea of it, whether or not the implementation worked for every plugin is not the point. The point here was more about how the heck did this get launched on the wordpress.

org repo? How did this happen? Given that nobody saw it coming. So it seems like quite a lot of plugin developers and so on were just totally taken by surprise and they genuinely thought that people were talking about it as a, as an idea, and then they went to their plugin page on the repository, discovered it was actually real.

And in some cases, I think probably realized their plugin maybe didn't work. There was something not right. Just something that was misaligned. Wasn't going to work with playground. Now it's gone. The only assumption I can draw is that it was, I don't know, a mistake. Somebody. Pulled the trigger by accident, and launched it live, and then realized the re I don't know.

But what are you What are your intuitions around this? This seems like a story the like of which I've never covered before, anyway, this that you're looking at is The only bit online that I can find. that has anything to do with this being a thing. It's a, it's on making. wordpress. org. It's ticket number 7251.

And the idea of adding a preview in Playground to the bot, to the plugin directory. This seems to be the single container for the entire conversation. And that just doesn't quite feel like the way that WordPress normally works, where everything's out in the open, you have a consensus and it's decided upon and...

So I don't know quite what this happened, but I'm interested in what your intuitions were. Like I say, what a great idea. But it just seems to have been just, it seems to have been a bit of an own goal in terms of the optics of how it was done, really. Over to you. Kick that football around a bit.

[01:10:18] Tim Nash: I feel really sorry for I've forgotten his the gent's name who actually pushed this live. Because we ran out of negative feedback that must have hit him like a wall. And it's very hard to not take that sort of thing

[01:10:33] Nathan Wrigley: personally. Yes. Well done, Tim, for pointing that out. I think that's the

[01:10:37] Tim Nash: right call.

It was, it, for all the big negative things we're now going to say for the next ten minutes about it, just needs to be emphasised that behind any pain, doesn't matter where it is, there's always a human somewhere. And, unfortunately for him, It would appear he literally owned the ticket and everything to do with it.

So it's gonna feel If he I would not be shocked if there was suddenly just like i'm just never going to push a change again And that leads on to the fact that the meta team So the team that are behind wordpress. org and all the infrastructure and the site is tiny. And Is opaque in its nature they tend they've either been around in the project so long people like otto who are just Are part of the not just part of the furniture.

They were frozen into the furniture Or are from automatic or subsidiaries of Various max companies and organizations to the point that it's so opaque that and they're so small These decisions are not necessarily taken Quickly they're taken in private and yeah, there was a track ticket. Was there a make post?

Did any, did they consult any other team? Doesn't appear to be. Did they consult the security team? Did they? Before putting on, some interesting features directly into their site. All of these things. normally have large processes and they have open and public debates and conversations. But because their team is so tiny, because 99 percent of people don't care normally about what they do, because they do tiny things behind the scenes that nobody notices.

And they did what they thought was a tiny change that no one would notice, possibly in response to WordPress. com scraping. And they were like, hey, we've got something that's this cool feature we can implement. And it was such a good idea. Yes, but I like many developers who have got plugins on wordpress.

org My first reaction was to go and press the button for mine and I went it would help if you said how amazing the that the new tech instant wordpress technology is and it's like I've only worked that the

[01:13:00] Nathan Wrigley: sense of, numbingly complicated. Yeah, and

[01:13:04] Tim Nash: very fast. Yeah, very fast. Also very buggy.

Don't you think,

[01:13:11] Michelle Frechette: don't you think it's interesting that the plugins and themes are treated so differently, right? So with themes, you can preview a theme. It doesn't necessarily look like it's actually going to look right. We all know that, right? I fell into that mistake early in my freelance days.

I'm like, Oh, that's beautiful. What is this that I just installed? It does not look like that. But we did that for plugins. We do have onboarding for plugins, but heaven forbid we put an onboarding in for a theme. So there's just two little different worlds working at. Right now and how you add things to your WordPress

[01:13:47] Tim Nash: website.

The other thing is that the theme team are reviewing themes that have phenomenal rates and getting them published. And the plugin team who have recently expanded because, up until then, it's effectively just Mika doing all the reviews has. Got something like 90 days worth of backlog of plugins to go through.

Imagine if they now have to add onto that list. Oh, does it work in this very esoteric environment to make sure that it can at least launch.

[01:14:15] Michelle Frechette: So it was the plugins team that killed this. I got

[01:14:18] Tim Nash: it. Okay. The plugin developers killed this when they all cried out in pain across the entire of the WordPress ecosphere.

There was just one shout of stop. The really frustrating thing is. It's a

[01:14:32] Nathan Wrigley: great idea. Yeah, it's so good an idea

[01:14:37] Tim Nash: The problem is when you start going, okay, it's great idea. My plugin requires a dependency on woocommerce So I need to be able to install woocommerce as well as my plugin cool My plugin only works if you're logging users in and out of wordpress Because it's something to do with the login screen.

Can I have users that log in and out? Okay, yep. So that's another use case. My plugin requires the use of the standard PHP extensions that just don't work in your esoteric weird platform. So it's currently erroring. Yes. Okay. Mine needs a lot of variables.

One of the really good things that someone suggested was, Hey, why don't we just have a URL to a demo site?

[01:15:22] Nathan Wrigley: To be allowed to

[01:15:24] Tim Nash: just put the URL in. That's old school,

[01:15:27] Nathan Wrigley: Tim. Links!

[01:15:29] Tim Nash: The heck? How dare they come up with a reliable way that you could do it yourself and have it set up. The other one was that somebody said can we make this opt in?

And the response was immediately no, that would break the user experience. It's you don't think the current experience is totally broken? Because if I push a button and it comes up with critical error and red screens and does all sorts of other stuff but somehow taking the button that wasn't there two minutes ago and removing it was going to break the user experience.

[01:16:02] Nathan Wrigley: It just seems such a shame because it is such a neat idea and maybe maybe this is, maybe all of the things that Tim listed there and probably could have listed for minutes more to come. If they could be checked off and this could have, my plugin has a dependency of this and my plugin requires this.

Maybe there's a, maybe there's a path forward to that. Max makes

[01:16:25] Tim Nash: a good point. The dependency issue would be fantastic if ironically, if this caused us to fix dependency. That would be amazing.

[01:16:34] Nathan Wrigley: It got that conversation kickstarted. Yeah. Max makes the point that you can obviously, Tim made the point, use a link.

Max makes the point that you can use something like InstaWP and you can append plugins in the repo to the URL. I think my understanding is you can just add the name of a plugin as a query parameter at the end and it'll install that for you. Maybe that would be another way of going about it. I tried it, says Amy, with a plugin I'd never used.

It's interesting, but A, not a real world. Not a real plugin use scenario. It was slow. So a user might wonder whether that's the plugins fault. Good point. Three. And it simply won't work in many cases. Yeah. Okay. Jack, anything on this? I just

[01:17:16] Jack Kittering: remember I woke up and looked at the stellar WP Slack that morning and was like, oh

[01:17:20] Nathan Wrigley: shit.

Jack, go back to bed.

[01:17:25] Jack Kittering: Yeah, I'd been in London. I was like one of the first people online and I was like, Yeah nothing works. I think two of our plugins, fatal error, some of the other plugins just didn't work. And when you're demoing a plugin, like we used instaWP at Stellar and we have very good demo sites that are purposely curated to work specifically for real world use cases.

And when you're demoing a plugin, you can't just chuck someone in the WordPress admin that's maybe not even use WordPress and be like. Yeah. Have fun figuring out how this works. If the plugin developer hasn't built an onboarding demo flow that launches when they do that thing, no one's going

[01:18:07] Nathan Wrigley: to use your plugin.

Max makes another good point. It's a corollary to what we were saying a moment ago. I didn't realize this. There is a Chrome extension for InstaWP which adds the same button into the org repo. Obviously it's not actually adding the button yet by installing that plugin. You are not updating the WordPress.

org repo. Let's be clear. You are adding it. When you press it on your little browsing experience, it will go to instant WP and preload that. So maybe that's going to be a better experience because you get a bonafide. WordPress website for a period of time. I think it's like an hour or 20 minutes or something like that.

A small period of time where you get an actual WordPress site. Anyway, so PR kerfuffle, the words teacup and storm come to mind. Maybe it'll be a bit like that in the future, but still a bit strange. If like Jack, you wake up to realize that what would have been a great advertising channel has then just collapsed around you because it's erroring and everybody now thinks Jack's.

Jack's plugins, they don't work. None of them work.

[01:19:20] Jack Kittering: The only good part for me being actually like at LearnDash, even though I work with the other brands, is LearnDash is premium only. So I personally think that LearnDash is broken on the hook. That's the problem for the

[01:19:31] Nathan Wrigley: other brands as well. Yeah, so maybe this is a lesson.

Like we said, it's a great idea. Let's hope that it comes in the future and let's just hope that that nobody feels too bad about this. It came, it was quickly taken away, so let's move on. All right. Okie doke. I just want to point out a new service. It's by Patrick Posner. And it's called Zip2Web, he's been on the podcast before, and he's got this new service where you can, for I think 200 pages on a website, you can make a static website, you basically fill in the bits and pieces, the domain, your email address and so on, and it'll zip your site up, I can see this has got great benefits for somebody who has a brochure site with a few pages on it that never really changes.

And then you could use a, I don't know, something like simply static to take that going forward. So that's new. Another thing is that stackable, which is akin to cadence blocks, same sort of idea, they've got a new WooCommerce integration with various other bits and pieces, including enhanced color gradients and opacity settings.

So hat tip to them and the guys over at Fluence. Forms, I forget the name of their company, but they've got Fluent Forms, Fluent CRM, lots of different products, WP, Ninja Tables, and all sorts. They're launching a new plugin soon called Fluent Booking. So if you're in that kind of appointment seeking. I think they've got a history of doing things well.

So there it is. It's called fluentbooking. com and you can go and check that out. And also Hacktoberfest. I know really nothing about this, but it came on my radar. And I thought that Tim would maybe appreciate me mentioning it. I don't know. But this year marks the 10th anniversary of Hacktoberfest.

And we're calling on for your support, whether it's your first time participating or your 10th, it's almost time to hack out for pristine pull merge requests as we continue our month support for open source. So I think you can go for all sorts of different, projects. It's not just limited to the usual suspects.

I'm not entirely sure. Do you have much, do you go for this sort of stuff, Tim?

[01:21:41] Tim Nash: Over the many years, I have been involved in many hackathons of which Hacktoberfest is a sort of hackathon, but it's online and it covers a wide range of open source projects. I think. That they have a specific they've got a specific list of ones that because they've got like little mini goals and targets you can Go for yeah, but yeah now if you're a developer and even if you're not a developer There's some options there for non developers as well It's a great sort of opportunity to see the wider open source community because sometimes we live in a world where wordpress is the only bubble we see we do.

I really think it's worth coming along. And if not only for the amazing retro website, that's color contrast. Yes. Scrolling

[01:22:25] Nathan Wrigley: things. Brilliant. It's called Hacktoberfest and it's exactly as you might spell it. H A C K. O B E R fest dot com. What did you say Tim? I didn't get it. I said I

[01:22:35] Tim Nash: can't read it. As you're scrolling down, I'm like, my eyes have, Oh yeah,

[01:22:39] Nathan Wrigley: sorry.

I've settled now. There it is. Anyway, that's that. I feel like we missed the piece about Ollie. Where did that go? I don't know what happened there. Oh, here we go. I don't know. I must've missed the tab. So we'll quickly cover off this one. Cause I think this is an important one. So a couple of weeks ago, the Oli theme and Oli is run by Mike McAllister and Patrick, who we just mentioned a moment ago with his zip plugin sorry, zip service.

They've decided after a little bit of thought that they were, they're going to pull the thing that was contentious about their theme. So they had a a block based theme, but they had an onboarding wizard and various people on the theme review team said, this is plug in territory, get rid of the onboarding wizard because it gives you potentially commercial advantage.

You could put all sorts of things in there to upsell or what have you. Anyway, the long and the short of it is that it turns out that the theme team review rules are jello, like jelly. They're fairly flexible because Matt Mullenweg stepped in to say, so long as it's innovative, then it's okay.

Just safer, I think more or less stepped in and said the same thing. If it's innovative, go for it. In other words, they appeared publicly to give. Ollie, an endorsement. In other words, yeah, just get it on the repo. We'll be fine. But Mike McAllister was having none of it. And he's pulled it anyway.

So that's the news around that. So it's like a bit of a bit of tennis. Between the theme review team, upper management and and the theme review the author of the theme nobody quite knows what seemingly knows quite where to go with this, but as it stands at the moment that has gone.

So I'm

[01:24:29] Tim Nash: worried about the tennis games you're playing where you have three teams

[01:24:32] Nathan Wrigley: involved. Oh yes. Yeah, very peculiar tennis. We have, but that's such an unusual story, isn't it? Something is. The theme team themselves can't quite decide on it because Justin Tadlick was on one side.

And I can't remember Oh, I've forgotten. I can't remember, but somebody else on the theme team was on the other. So then it, obviously Matt stepped in and Giuseppe stepped in and gave their thought. And then Mike just thought this isn't worth it. We'll put it into a plugin anyway. Just odd optics, isn't it?

It's just a little bit strange. Anything on that before we move on? We are fast running out of time. No. Okay. Alrighty I just want to mention this, because this is utterly phenomenal. Just, I don't even know what to say. Nobel Prize has been awarded in physics, and it's been awarded to a trio who are capturing...

Rapid, sorry, creating rapid flashes of light to capture the shortest of moments, right? And these little things that they're creating in their laboratories, I can imagine they've got these Beautiful white jackets with so many by rows all lined up perfectly. They must be incredibly clever people because they're creating packets of light, little quanta of light and I got down, this article was quite interesting, fascinating, until I read this bit, this is the scale of what they're doing. It's all to do with electrons. The movement of electrons inside atoms, I'm quoting, and molecules are so rapid that they are measured in attoseconds, an almost incomprehensibly short amount of time. So it turns out that if you want to watch protons and neutrons easy, they move like like slugs compared to the electron.

The electron is just super fast. So you need some super fast equipment to measure it. Atoseconds is your best friend. An atosecond is to one second as one second Is to the age of the universe. Pars that.

[01:26:45] Tim Nash: What the heck?

[01:26:46] Nathan Wrigley: How many seconds are there in the universe? Isn't that bizarre? Anyway, I say, bravo.

People who can work in Atto seconds totally deserve a Nobel Prize. I give you my seal of approval.

[01:27:00] Michelle Frechette: Is time going more quickly or is it like... My god, this day is taking forever. Do you know how many attoseconds it's been already?

[01:27:07] Tim Nash: Like

[01:27:08] Nathan Wrigley: a hundred trillion have just gone in the time it took me to say a hundred trillion or something.

That is bonkers. Anyway, those clever physicists, right? All

[01:27:17] Tim Nash: those times where we've been talking about like the millennium bug and 32, once upon a time we had 16 bit computers and then we had 24 bit then 32. Now we're on sort of 64 bit computers. If you think about that one second in attoseconds, we can't count.

In that, in our current computing system, it wouldn't be able to process it, the number's too big. Those electrons,

[01:27:42] Nathan Wrigley: they're just, it's like a whole different ballgame. That's the kind of tennis I like to play. ATTO tennis. Oh dear! I'm gonna curl up and go into a ball. That's dreadful. She, ATTO.

AtoWP. That's brilliant. Okie doke. What have we got? Half a load. It was just, it

[01:28:05] Tim Nash: really loaded quickly. That's all. Yes.

[01:28:08] Nathan Wrigley: That's going to be the new core web vital. How many Ato seconds does it get to load? Imagine how long the page would be. So that's pretty impressive. Also, just to mention, here it comes.

The deepfakes are starting to have an impact. Honestly, I don't really know anything about MrBeast, but MrBeast and a variety of other people have been they have been deepfaked. They've been caught on YouTube and TikTok and various other places, and the things that they are purported to have said They did not say it was a deepfake video.

And all of this, whilst this is incredibly funny, and it's, ah, it's Mr. Beast. He's a, he's a colorful character online. I do worry once we start to see politicians and people of influence getting caught up in all of this, that does start to worry me. So Michelle, I have crowbarred AI into this conversation.

I do apologize. And This question was posed by Michelle. What the heck's this doing in here? How often do you think about the Roman Empire?

[01:29:04] Michelle Frechette: What? It's a TikTok trend where women turn to the men in their lives and say, how often do you think about the Roman Empire? Because somebody posited that men think about it so much more often than women do.

And. The answers have been things like not that often, maybe two or three times a day. And I'm like, maybe two or three times a year I think about the Roman Empire. So I was posing three other men in the room here today, so I thought I would pose it here.

[01:29:30] Nathan Wrigley: I, that's the bookshelf. That's a modest collection of the books that I have.

I went to that just before we started it. That's the Roman history books off that shelf. I've got five, five Roman history books. Does that make me sad?

[01:29:51] Michelle Frechette: I guess it makes you typical according to TikTok. Yes,

[01:29:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think it's fair to say that I am in no way extraordinary, put it that way. And you managed

[01:30:00] Michelle Frechette: to get a wife, so there you go.

[01:30:06] Nathan Wrigley: That now has become the, the title of the podcast and you managed to get away. That's lovely. I think about the Roman Empire far more than is healthy for me. I, whenever like a drama comes on or like a documentary, it's about, that period of history fascinates me. Anything ancient history basically. I could

[01:30:23] Michelle Frechette: be watching the Ten Commandments and Still not think about the Roman Empire.

[01:30:30] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So that was that. Thank you for putting that in. I am a typical male. It turns out who obsesses about the Roman Empire. What is this? I don't even know who put this one in, but go on. So

[01:30:43] Tim Nash: basically it's a, it's an interesting blog post talking about patron, which is a online platform for creators to basically you can sign up to be someone's patron.

On patreon and then you give them some money and they give you customized content right specifically to their patrons as a platform it's it was very innovative at its time It has become a seedy, horrible, privacy scariness place. And very recently they had a massive change in their privacy policy, which basically suddenly meant that a bunch of creators and users of the platform discovered that a lot of personal information that they thought was private was flipped to public just like that because they changed the privacy policy.

So needless to say, quite a few people would really like to see an actual alternative, but it's really difficult to build an alternative that is privacy friendly and that supports organizations because one of the problems with Patreon is that it is it's changed with the times and it's changed with where the money is and consequently people who started on Patreon who are no longer persona non grata on there, for example if they want to use a pseudonym.

Rather than their real name that's no longer a thing that can happen. So this is basically a blog post highlighting some of the things that other companies could do to become a Patreon, a new Patreon. The problem is by the end of it, you're there going, yeah, I can understand why this doesn't happen.

The one thing it doesn't cover, which is why it's in, I put it in. It was, it didn't cover WordPress. Interesting. One thing to do that you didn't really go into at all was you can self host this. And I thought that might be an interesting thing. It might trigger some things in people's minds about, oh, should I self host this bit of trend towards things like Substack, is that the right word?

Yeah. And I was just thinking, yeah. I, as someone who's several times looked at doing mem, originally when I got in first involved in WordPress was building membership sites and membership plugins. And I'm just thinking, I wonder why people aren't doing that as much. And I guess actually we've got the perfect person on with Jack with LearnDash because there are so many third party e learning solutions and yet they're I don't know.

It just seemed like a good conversation bit, but we actually have one minute to have that. Yeah,

[01:33:08] Nathan Wrigley: I'm really sorry. That's my fault, but I can, I totally agree. I think the premise behind Patreon is blooming excellent. Like the premise, the idea of it, the idea that you can get a band of people who love your stuff and are prepared to put their hand in their pocket for it is just brilliant.

And I'm imagining that in the past it's worked very well and made careers. Out of people's content creation or whatever it is that you've, put over as a service on Patreon, but that's a shame. Why do all good things? Why can we not have good things? Tim? I called. I think you should

[01:33:42] Michelle Frechette: just add, do add, give WP to your website.

You can create your own Patreon experience with Oh, customers who do

[01:33:50] Nathan Wrigley: that all the time. Okay. Okay. . Interesting. Does it allow you give WP to create like tiers? So Pat on, one of the things I think that you can do is like offer, I don't know, like a different podcast experience, stripped of ads or something like that.

Yeah, absolutely. . Okay. Thank you. That's a great alternative well worth remembering. Okay, a couple of things First two things about WooSesh coming up very soon, October the 10th. So starting if my, let me just do the math. It's the 9th today. It's tomorrow. It starts tomorrow and guess who's speaking?

The chap called Tim Nash. What are you doing? Not to be a WooHacker,

[01:34:33] Tim Nash: yeah I just wanted to say that I, these are pre records, so I've recorded it. So I know normally when I do presentations, I come out saying, Oh, that didn't go well. And I'm still going to say, oof, it didn't go well. I really enjoyed doing this.

Good. That's awesome. I'd like people to watch it, because I think it's going to be fun. Nice. I'm leaving it at that. I'm not saying anything else. But, totally worth going on. It's registered free. I think you get recordings for seven days for free. After which, you have to be a Adobe Sessions member. Okay.

I think people should come and watch it.

[01:35:11] Nathan Wrigley: WooSesh. com and Tim's session is called There are other talks as well. How not to woo a hacker. Yeah, and there are some other talks as well. But Tim favours his own there for obvious reasons. And, very last little piece, just very quickly, this is also WooSesh related, but Michelle wants to plug Something.

What are you plugging, Michelle? Just scroll down a tiny little bit. Oh, I'm sorry. Down a

[01:35:36] Tim Nash: bit more.

[01:35:38] Michelle Frechette: No, right there's good.

[01:35:40] Tim Nash: No, we want to get rid of Bob. Keep going there. Oh, there you go. I'm leaving. There we go.

[01:35:47] Michelle Frechette: I did not know, I did not know that I had been nominated as Advocate of the Year until Jack Kemp, I'm sorry, James Kemp had put on there on Twitter that he had been nominated as Developer of the Year, so of course I clicked through to vote for him, he's also one of our co workers.

And as I scrolled down, I saw my name and burst into tears because I was so touched. So if you are so moved, I would love to

[01:36:13] Nathan Wrigley: have your vote. So this is a ballot. You get to vote. You get to cast your vote for the Seshies. And it looks like there's an advocate of the year, which Michelle is up for along with Do The Woo, Bob and Kathy Darling.

We've also got, whoops, excuse me. Oh, and there are honorable mentions as well. Katie Keith and Edith Allison. We won't mention all the other. Names, but there's a developer of the year category and extension of the year category, agency of the year store of the year. I hope this doesn't go on for too long.

Innovation of the year and that's it.

[01:36:45] Tim Nash: They miss security consultant of the year out. Yeah.

[01:36:48] Nathan Wrigley: And WordPress podcast host of the WP Builds podcast. You know that one as well. That's very specific. Yeah, I gather all the votes for that. One, my. wife, hopefully. That's it. That's all we've got time for.

Thank you so much for Jack for joining us today and for Tim and for Michelle. Hopefully you didn't get too frightened or freaked out. I was in a bit of a hilarious mood today. Hopefully it was actually usable content. We will see you all very soon. Before you go though, the somewhat humiliating Jack, I don't know if you remember this bit.

He's not doing it. Look, he's not doing it. He's the first one. He's done it. Yes. Thank you for joining us. Anybody that made a comment really appreciate it. This podcast will come out live tomorrow. The guests are press end broadcast then for sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't, it always ends, but sometimes it doesn't bounce you into the show, but hopefully hopefully it will.

So we will see you very soon. Thanks for joining us. Take it easy. Bye.