This Week in WordPress #272

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode number 272 entitled, what shape is a lozenge? It was recorded on Monday the 23rd of October, 2023. My name's Nathan Wrigley. And today I'm joined by three fabulous guests. I'm joined by Jess Frick, by Jeff Chandler, and by Anil Gupta.

It's a WordPress podcast, so what do we talk about? WordPress, we talk about some of the updates to Gutenberg 16.8. What's coming up and what is of interest? There's also a release candidate for WordPress 6.4. We discussed briefly what's in there.

We also talk about some of the things that we're doing at WP Builds, like our awards, like our new shows about Gato GraphQL and speeding up your website. You can find out more about that in the show notes.

The State of the Word address, which has always been held in north America, when Matt Mullenweg says what's happened and what will happen in the near future of WordPress is going to be happening in Spain in December this year.

The plugin team are trying to make it as easy as possible for people to submit their plugins and getting them approved on the WordPress repo. How is that going and what has been done to speed up that process? Because it has been quite a lengthy one until now.

There's a new showcase website showing off some of the best endeavors in the WordPress space, building websites, and you can have a look at that. And what shape is it that those images are encapsulated by.

Animated gifts as the icons for plugins in the repo. Is that a bad idea or not?

The fediverse is connecting to wordpress.com. There's loads of black Friday deals. We talk about a bunch of plugins that we like. And it's all coming up next on this week in WordPress.

This episode of the WP Builds podcast is brought to you by GoDaddy Pro, the home of managed WordPress hosting that includes free domain, SSL, and 24 7 support. Bundle that with The Hub by GoDaddy Pro to unlock more free benefits to manage multiple sites in one place, invoice clients, and get 30 percent off new purchases. Find out more at go. me forward slash WP Builds.

Hello. Good afternoon, good evening, good morning, wherever you are in the world. Thank you for joining us. It's episode number 273 of This Week in WordPress. We're going to drone on until there's nothing more to say about WordPressy things. I'm Nathan Wrigley and I'm joined today.

Let's go around the houses. I'm joined over here. by Jess Frick from Pressable. How are you doing, Jess?

[00:02:53] Jess Frick: Could not be better, Nathan. How are you?

[00:02:56] Nathan Wrigley: Jess has had a makeover in the background there. There's quite a lot of nice new detail. Bravo. I'm going for Zen. Do you feel Zen? I'm it's more Zen than what I've got.

But yeah, it looks... Great. Jess is the director of operations at Pressable, one of the 2023 reps for the Make WordPress hosting team. She's an iced tea connoisseur and a proud member of the post status and WP Minute Communities. An absolute pleasure having you on. Really appreciate it. Over there we have Ann Gupta.

How you doing Anil? I'm doing

[00:03:30] Anil Gupta: excellent. How are you?

[00:03:31] Nathan Wrigley: Nathan. Yeah, great. And I'll try to join us a few weeks ago, but I think we had technical gremlins. I can't remember exactly what happened, but looking very sharp today. And it'll is the CEO and co founder at multi dots, multi co lab and dot store.

It's a very short bio that is there anything you want to add?

[00:03:52] Anil Gupta: I think that covers us all. Yeah. So these are the three different brands and agent one is agency and two are the product and

[00:04:00] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Finally, we're joined by Jeff Chandler. He's joining us for the first time. How are you doing Jeff?

[00:04:08] Jeff Chandler: I'm doing great.

I can't believe this better be good that you got me out of bed this early for this. However, I will say I was so excited about being on the show. And I'm running that little to no sleep. I couldn't ask you last night. Cause all I could think about was my opinion.

[00:04:25] Nathan Wrigley: Let's try not to waste it.

Jeff is a marketing generalist at Stella WP with a focus on learn dash, the events calendar and solid WP. It's so much more than that though. Jeff, let's be honest. You've been in the WordPress space for a really long time. It's slightly embarrassing, but I'm going to do it anyway. The, one of the reasons that I got into doing what I'm doing, which is making content in the WordPress space is because of the stuff you did.

And I don't want that to sound groveling or anything, but honestly, huge debt on my part for all of the amazing stuff that you started over at the tavern. I don't know if you talk about that too much these days or not, but bravo, that was a boatload of work that you did for many years, and it got me and a whole bunch of other people interested in WordPress, I think.

[00:05:10] Jeff Chandler: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for the compliments. And it's been a wild and crazy ride. And I was picked up as stellar WP a few months ago, and I've been having a great time working on the product side. So it's been a good time. And by the way, just to circle all the way back you're never going to go full Zangess unless you get one of those pink Himalayan salt lamps in the background.

Oh

[00:05:33] Jess Frick: gosh. I have a pink Himalayan salt grinder. Would that count? It's close

[00:05:39] Nathan Wrigley: enough. You can sprinkle. What do we do on this show? We talk about WordPress, generally speaking, we limit ourselves to the stuff that's happened in the last week, but sometimes we stray a little bit further, so there's a few bits and pieces that I missed over the last few weeks, which will be dropped in there this week. If you fancy joining in the commentary, that's lovely.

Please do. Probably the best way to do that is to go to this page is to go to wpbuilds. com forward slash live over there. You've got to be logged into Google cause it's YouTube comments. Alternatively, if you're in our Facebook group, you can do that same thing. The only other little caveat there is that you've got to give the, you are the platform that we use.

You've got to give them a URL. It's wave. video forward slash lives forward slash Facebook. And that allows us to see your face and see who you are. You can comment anonymously if you like, probably. That's fine. We got a couple of comments come in already, although I can't seem to see them yet. There we go.

Firstly, hello, Courtney. Nice to have you with us. Good morning. She says, I woke up to temps just, Oh okay. If you haven't been on the show before, for some reason, and I don't quite know how it happened, but it's basically Peter Ingersoll. We always talk about the weather in a fine British tradition.

Right at the beginning, she woke up to temps just above freezing and had to scrape frost off the car window. Here he is the B the eponym of it all. Good morning. Like Courtney, it was close to freezing 6 AM here in Connecticut, six degrees centigrade on the sunny skies. Courtney's back, Jess, you.

Are you an enthusiast of our favorite WP friend named Taco?

[00:07:18] Jess Frick: I gotta be honest with you. I will get down with tacos that you eat. And I also love taco from Yoast. What's the deal? Why? Why do tacos from Yoast? Or I will eat a taco. Like it's whatever. I just love tacos.

[00:07:33] Nathan Wrigley: I tell this story quite a lot. I met Marika, who was the CEO of Yoast, and she told me that any tasks that they couldn't manage themselves, they got Taco to do it.

And I'd never met TACO or even heard of him and I assumed he was a piece of software. So I started quizzing her about how TACO actually worked and where did they purchase it and She kept me going for a while. It was quite funny. Marcus Burnett joins us. He says, Hello, neighbor Jess. Good to see you and all the gents this morning.

Atif says hello at WP builds and everybody else gray and rainy in London. Yeah, it's the normal, right? Wouldn't have it any other way. And finally cotton web afternoon, all looking forward to another informative episode. Okay. Thank you so much. Let's crack in to the bits and pieces that we've got on offer today.

Forgive me. I'm going to do at least two minutes of self promotional stuff. Because that's the way it goes. So this is our website. We're sponsored by GoDaddy. Thanks to them sincere. Thanks for keeping the lights on over here. If you fancy subscribing to the stuff we do, put your email address in there and click that blue button and we'll send you two emails a week about the content that we produce.

Nothing more. We have a couple of new bits of content that we're producing. We do these demo things where we go live every week with somebody this time around with. Talking to a chap called Leo Lozovich, Leonardo Lozovich from Gato GraphQL. He's got this fabulous plugin and we're going to delve into it over the next five weeks.

You can find all of that. If you go to the archives section here, click demos, archive, you'll be able to find it. We started off last week and he explained how the plugin works and we're doing another one live this Wednesday. Another show that I've just started. There you go. One episode in is a speed it up thing.

There's a Sabrina Zidane, who's a performance expert in the WordPress space. She's going to take user submitted sites and we're going to try and figure out if they're going slow. And if so, why, and what can you do to make them a little bit quicker. First episode was all about header videos and why they're good or why they're bad.

So that was nice. So join us for that. That's going to be this Thursday. You can submit your site. If you go to. Here, contact and speed it up. You can actually submit your site and Sabrina will take a look at it. Live on the show. We've got a few submitted already. We've got our black Friday deals page sponsored by gravity forms and WS form where we're sticking all of the black Friday deals that come around to see is quite a few up there already.

You can search and filter and, drill down into what it is that you want. That's a WP builds. com forward slash black. Okay. I'm nearly coming up for air. Here we go. Last one. And this is my favorite one. This is the silly awards that we do each year. This is my favorite too. This is great.

Thank you. And I. I suspect that you're here. In fact, this I think might be Jeff. This is an award system where basically if you want to vote for the best at something you go to this, but you can't actually change any of the options. You'll notice you can't switch these on or switch them off.

You just. I'm manually forced to vote for them. And if you go to the bottom, you can submit your vote, but you're basically voting for everybody. It sounds a bit silly. Why are we doing it? We're trying to raise money for the WPCC, the WP Community Collective, and it's dead simple. If you want to appear on this illustrious list of names, and of course you do, because...

Why not? What you need to do is go click on a link here. There's a link to the WPCC go and donate at least 20. Take a screenshot of the receipt and then fill out this form. As you can see so far, we've got a target. I just made up a number. 2, 000 was the number I made up. We've managed to raise 627. And 75 cents.

And we have things like best WordPress form builder. You never realized you need WS form. That was best WordPress hosting powered by Knights of the realm century. I like it. Funniest laid back WordPress. I think that's you. . That

[00:11:26] Jeff Chandler: is absolutely

[00:11:26] Nathan Wrigley: me. That's you chef Row. And you get the idea.

Top taco. Top taco.

[00:11:32] Jeff Chandler: Ta. Whoa. It's not Jeff Row. It's Chef Row. Chef row. Yeah. Say it right. Thanks. Thanks. I got a shout out to Tom Finley for coming up with that. Say it right. Beautiful word play.

[00:11:42] Nathan Wrigley: It has a c h at the beginning. Look, Jess, top Taco tycoon of WordPress, Kyle Van Dusen claimed that one. He

[00:11:51] Jess Frick: can be a tycoon.

I would prefer to be more of an advocate and enthusiast, yeah, that's okay. But I gotta tell you, Nathan, I was playing around with this and I haven't been able to decide what awards I want to win or award. But I did discover that new confetti plugin on here. Yeah. Oh, really? It's so fun. I can't believe I didn't know that existed.

Okay.

[00:12:15] Nathan Wrigley: Let's have a look at that. Let's see what this is. Wpsunshine. com forward slash plugins. Oh, I see. That's yeah. Yeah. I had forgotten about this. Yeah. It makes confetti. It's a bit like Mac OS Sonoma when you put your thumbs up. So anyway. Anyway, your 20

[00:12:30] Jess Frick: bucks was well spent. I've never heard of your plugin before, but

[00:12:33] Nathan Wrigley: I love it.

Very good. Yeah, it's very worthwhile. So it's WP builds. com forward slash awards. Just go and give 20 bucks. That's all we ask. And you can get your name on that list. And it's the antidote to all the other award systems going on at the moment. Yeah, thanks for joining us. And thanks for sticking yourself on that form if you've done that already.

Okay. Let's get stuck into the actual WordPress stuff. If you've not been on the show before, so Anne has been on, but didn't quite manage with the technology. And Jeff's not been on before. It's okay to talk over each other. I'll, I generally talk and then the, we fill the vacuum with whatever it is that you've got to say about it.

But I generally introduce each piece one at a time. So this is to say that this is the WP tavern Sarah Gooding writes all about. Gutenberg 16. 8 making the cover block smarter and there's some other various bits and pieces. So this is the experimental stuff that's coming out in Gutenberg in the near future.

I don't know if this is worth anything to you, but essentially what they've done with the cover block is if you upload an image. I'm going to say it's AI because of course that's what everything is these days. The AI, the incredibly sophisticated AI technology will figure out what the mean color of that image is.

So in this case, you can see it's basically red and it's figured out that, okay. It's red and then it puts like a layer over the top. So it gives it that sort of opacity. Why you would need that. I'm not sure, but it's there it is. Font library work on that continues. It's been pushed till WordPress 6.

5, but there's a few updates in there as well. And also. Again, this is work, which I think needs to be done in spades. There's still, as Sarah says, a chasm between the post and site editors, WordPress six, sorry, Gutenberg 16. 8 introduces new options for going in between page templates and pages and all of that.

It's still, I think, really hard to figure out which interface is which, even though they've done some good work. But yeah, that's basically what's happened there. So there's a few bits coming down the pike. If you've got anything you want to say.

[00:14:41] Jess Frick: I'm, I know this is so nerdy, but I'm really excited about the table and list views updates that are coming. I've had to use plugins for stuff like that on websites before. But there it is right there. That cool guy. It's going to give you an easier way to find what you're looking for and just improve the organization.

I'm excited

about

[00:15:06] Nathan Wrigley: that. I missed this. What is this? So is this just a different

[00:15:08] Jess Frick: way of looking at Oh, watch. They're going to get there. Here you go. And now you can sort by, status, you could filter the list down. Okay. Isn't that

[00:15:18] Nathan Wrigley: pretty? Yeah. It actually does look more like a SaaS app than it, than WordPress at the moment.

I know.

[00:15:23] Jess Frick: I know. And as somebody who's had to use plugins before to achieve this level of granularity in the list view I'm excited. Okay. I think it's smart.

[00:15:32] Nathan Wrigley: It's a thing. Okay. Thank you. I think

[00:15:34] Jess Frick: it's smart. And I don't know, I know that you've discussed it on other episodes, but I'm a little bummed about the Google font exclusion, but you can't get it all.

You can't do

[00:15:42] Nathan Wrigley: it all. No, it won't be that long. It won't be that long. So the updates to the font library are that it's going to be like this strip, it's going to be like the media library and be able to deal with your fonts in one place outside of any other interface and you'll be able to cope with them over there.

Anil, Jeff, anything on this before we move on?

[00:16:02] Jeff Chandler: When Sarah mentions the chasm between the editors, when you're, I don't know if you deal with clients or client sites and whatnot, but what do you call the various editors and WordPress these days? Some people still call it Gutenberg.

And it's, that's inaccurate. Gutenberg is a plugin. It's the experimental version of the editor that's being worked on as a plugin. So you can't call what's in WordPress now Gutenberg. So what do you call it? Do you call it just the editor? Do you call it the post editor? Is it the site editor? Page editor?

Post editor? I'm getting confused here as to, what we've learned in the past two or three years here is naming things in WordPress is hard. And so I'm just wondering, how do you explain or point to people, what it is they're editing, in the various parts of WordPress.

[00:16:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I have no clients these days to, to worry about. So I'm going to have to pass that over to somebody else. But yeah, that is really confusing. It used to be dead simple. There was one word, everybody shared the same word. Now it's a bit of a, yeah, we had

[00:17:07] Jeff Chandler: code editor and visual editor and that's all you had to worry about.

Now we've got editor, this and editor that. With the goal, hopefully they have one editor to rule them all. And I can't wait for that. I can't wait for that. Unified

[00:17:19] Nathan Wrigley: editor blocks, reusable blocks, synced blocks and on it goes. Yeah. I know. Go on. I can see you're desperate. They also call it a block editor.

[00:17:27] Anil Gupta: Yep. I think that's sometime I had. But yeah, in, on the point of naming things, it's like also hard from the from the content writing perspective, because we write a blog and every time I, my content team is like, should we mention say a blog editor? So what we have started is. Block editor into bracket Gutenberg, so just because there are still some people refer that as a Gutenberg, but it's like confusing.

I agree with Jeff. From this list, my favorite feature is the page list that Jeff mentioned. I think I like that one for sure. All other sort of new features like banner and hero image, I think those are all good to have because People who now publish the content using WordPress they are poised by the other editors like, Wix and Squarespace, which has all these things like already there.

So I can see. Yeah, especially someone who is more visual content creator. I think something like this will be very

[00:18:39] Nathan Wrigley: helpful. I think it's all going in the right direction. It all just seems to be taking its time, which is, a good thing, but also the naming of things and the renaming of things.

And then the renaming of things, it does get a little bit tricky to keep up with, so I think Jeff's right. I wouldn't know what to say. I'd probably take a screenshot and go that, click that button there and put a big blue arrow pointing to the button that they've got to click and then send them another screenshot six weeks from now.

No. Now it's here. It's just up there now, that kind of thing, yeah. It sounds

[00:19:12] Jeff Chandler: like you would have a wonderful time documenting the UI of WordPress.

[00:19:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, this is important work as well, isn't it? And keeping up with the documentation must be really tricky at the moment. Anil, just to say, when you joined the call, I think you were on a different microphone.

Sometimes this platform, without user consent, just goes and picks a different microphone. So just go into the little cog wheel at the bottom settings and just see if it's somehow picked the wrong one up. If you can't make it change, you can always refresh and we'll just let you back in because I think you're on a different microphone.

It sounds fine, but it just wasn't as good. Anyway, there you go. 16. 8 is the next version of Gutenberg. As Jeff said, it's a plugin. You can download it now and go and play to your heart's content. We're staying on the tavern. This is just, there's probably not a lot to say here, so I'll just say it and we'll probably move on unless.

That's one of the three of you have got something desperate. WordPress 6. 4, the release candidate one has come around. What this means is if you're new to WordPress, we're approaching that point where a new version of WordPress is coming around the corner and final versions are being put out that need to be tested.

Things like, strings have been frozen. And what that means is it's got nothing to, actual string. It's to do with the text. And one of the important things of moving a version of WordPress from one to another is that it's got to be translated. And so there's got to be a moment in time where no more language can be altered.

That's now fixed. So that's the period that we've reached so that the translators can get busy and update it into all the different locales and different languages. But basically it's calming down the pike very soon. A few highlights, Sarah writes, are the lightbox functionality. You're going to get light boxes for images out of the box, which is quite nice.

The redesign command palette, think spotlight on a Mac. I don't know if there's a thing like that on windows, you're going to have block hooks so that you can insert blocks into parts of your page or template design, wherever you want to put them expanded design tools and a new default thing called TT for 2024, which is.

Really great actually. And that's it. So unless one of you has got something you want to chip in there I'll just move on to the next one So i'm

[00:21:26] Jeff Chandler: i'm just gonna say my favorite feature here and it's been a long time coming And I can't believe we've had to wait this long to get it. But the default lightbox functionality because the default in wordpress is that when you click on an image It either goes to a thumbnail or goes to the actual meat.

You can set it to link to the actual media image, but then you just see a giant picture on your screen and there's no way to navigate back or it takes you to a different page and you don't really want to link people to the attachment page because most of the time it doesn't make any sense. So almost for every new WordPress install I've done ever since 2007, 2008, I always look for a lightbox plugin to install.

And now thank goodness, all these years later, I'll be able to scratch that. Must use plugin off my list. And I haven't used it yet. I haven't tested WordPress 6. 4 yet, but I'm very happy to see that's going to become default functionality. And I hope a lot of theme authors can tap into it via hooks or filters, maybe expand upon it.

And it's just one less plugin I have to rely on.

[00:22:33] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. And it is, I thought it was quite a nice implementation as well. I thought whatever JavaScript they've used to zoom in, it looks nice. And then you click away and it zooms out. I don't know. It just looks really nice, but you're right.

How have we not managed to have something like that baked into core for such a long time? It's coming. It's coming very soon. Jess, Anil, anything on that?

That's a no.

[00:22:58] Jess Frick: Okay. I was going to let him say something, but all I was going to say is make sure that you test test and submit your feedback. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. November 7th is going to be here really quickly.

[00:23:08] Nathan Wrigley: Man alive. That really is quite.

[00:23:10] Jeff Chandler: Probably one of the easiest ways to test if you don't want to set up a staging site on your own is WP Playground.

It'd be a great way to play around with.

[00:23:21] Nathan Wrigley: I can't remember if we've got something about playground coming up later, but we had the fewer, we certainly covered it over the last few weeks, all the. Bits and pieces coming into the repo with the playground bottom. But yeah, that is a good way of testing it.

Okay. All right. So this is intriguing. So this is a bit of community news, if you like. State of the word is where the co founder of WordPress, a gentleman called Matt Mullenweg, you may have heard of him. He he does an annual address in which he lays out what's happened and what might happen in WordPress in the future.

Prior to the pandemic, I think. It was bolted onto other WordPress events, but since the pandemic, it's been it's standalone event. I could be wrong about that. And it's been an invite only event, but it's always taking place in North America somewhere. And now it's not for the first time ever, it's being shipped over to Spain in this case.

I don't know if that's a trend, which is going to continue, but it's going to be held in Madrid on December the 11th. And it's going to be invite and tickets. So there is an opportunity for you to get your ticket to that. If you want to attend, it's going to be live streamed. You won't miss out on anything, but it is one of those moments in WordPress is like a bit, if you're really nerdy about WordPress, like I suspect the.

Four of us are it's one of those things. It's like a must see event. I don't know if you guys have the same opinion of it, but I certainly do. I tend to stick around and watch it live, but it's happening in Madrid. And Sarah is speculating here that maybe it's a bit of a hat tip or recognition to the fact that over 51.

4%, so wait, just slightly over half. Of WordPress users actually run a non English version of the software, which is easy to forget. And so moving that around might be a good idea, but also she speculates maybe WordPress has saturated the English speaking market and there's room for growth in locales, like Spanish speaking, Arabic, Chinese language areas.

And so if Matt as the sort of the mouthpiece, the sort of figurehead for WordPress, if he makes his voice heard. In these different areas, starting in Spain, maybe that'll grow adoption. So anyway, there you go. The question is,

[00:25:39] Jess Frick: will he use said voice to speak in Spanish?

[00:25:42] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, he's probably

[00:25:44] Jess Frick: Or will he go to Madrid and then speak in

[00:25:46] Nathan Wrigley: English?

I suspect he'll go to Madrid and speak in English, but I could be wrong about that. I suspect you're right. Yeah. Maybe there'll be some AI.

Did any of you see going totally off topic, did any of you see it was a podcast, but it was a video podcast. There's a guy called, I've actually forgotten his name, but he's a fairly growing podcaster. He did an interview with who's the Facebook guy, the big guy in Facebook.

What's his name again? Zuckerberg. Yeah, Zuckerberg. He did a live, a augmented reality, so glasses on, what's the product that they've got, that thing, the meta goggles thing. And you know how a year ago we were all just like poking fun at how 8 bit and ridiculous those characters looked? Oh my god.

It literally looked like the two people were standing opposite each other. So there was Mark Zuckerberg. It looked exactly like Mark Zuckerberg. And the person who was being interviewed, it looked exactly like him. The, sorry, the interviewer. And so just makes me feel that like in the future, stuff like this, you could easily have an augmented reality version of Matt Mullenweg speaking in your native language in real time.

Anyway, that's apropos of nothing. But it was just fascinating the way the technology has moved on. Oh, I think

[00:27:13] Jeff Chandler: it's I think it's a good thing that the state of the word is being moved on, showing that it does not have to be in North America. It doesn't, there's nothing tying it to North America.

It just happens to be there. So him actually doing this in Madrid, Spain, I think it's a good

[00:27:26] Nathan Wrigley: move. Thank you.

[00:27:29] Anil Gupta: I don't think I want,

[00:27:30] Nathan Wrigley: can you guys hear me? Okay. Yeah, I think we're back. I think you got the good mic again. Nice.

[00:27:34] Anil Gupta: Great. Yeah. So I was going to say I, I attended the one in New York state of the word 2021, December which was great, but I'm still curious that earlier, all the state of the words were happening around the big word camps, like WordCamp US or sometimes WordCamp, one time it happened around World Camp Europe too, but why there is a separation now, state of the word, from the big world camps?

[00:28:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I don't know. I'm presuming it was the pandemic, but I could be wrong about that. But I'm guessing it was the pandemic. You could split it off. It's a funny time of year as well.

December, isn't it? It's that it's especially December the 11th. It's for me at least anyway, I'm totally in like Christmas buying presents for kids routine. I have to drag myself back to watch it. I'm happy to do that, but it's a curious time to put it on.

[00:28:30] Jeff Chandler: What we've learned in WordPress over the years, actually over the past decade is that.

Dates and months and holidays and back to school and Christmas and Thanksgiving. None of that matters. Here's the date we're going to release or do something on it. And if you don't like it, that's tough. That's on you.

[00:28:46] Nathan Wrigley: December the 11th, put the date in your diary. It's happening in Madrid. Jess, anything to say.

[00:28:54] Jess Frick: No, I just, it occurred to me that at WordCamps, it was whoever was in the room would be in attendance and could ask any question they want. Whereas at these state of the words, it's a more curated

[00:29:06] Nathan Wrigley: audience. Yeah, I think it's an invite and so you can apply for a ticket and apply, right? So you can, I imagine that will be consumed by some early, people who've got deep pockets and things like that.

But the invite bit, yeah, it'd be interesting to see who ends up in the room there and what kind of questions get

[00:29:24] Jeff Chandler: asked. But I'm actually a fan of having questions curated because I'm a little sick and tired of the Q and a section of people going off and they start off with a question. And then 30 minutes later, you find out everything there is to know about their life history.

Yeah. So it's crazy. The Q and a section of these events is always the craziest part.

[00:29:45] Nathan Wrigley: There was a, there was something about that. Wasn't there a few months ago and it was right off the back of WordCamp Europe, because I think, I don't know if you watched that, but there was the, the ending of the whole event, it was Matt and Joseph and Matthias were on the stage.

And I think a few people did fully take the opportunity. To just, there was quite a little bit of advertising going on there. They'd introduced themselves and their company and the plugin and what it did, and then stumble into a question based around that. But also there were a few people who just told stories.

And at one point, I can't remember who it was, somebody just heckled, Get on with it! Something like that. Where's the question? And so there was talk about whether those questions should actually be submitted. And in this case, Having a very small room probably means that at least, the sort of caliber of the question that's coming.

I guess it's nice to to see Matt having to answer questions that he's not expecting and Giuseppe and Matthias, but also, I guess it's not so great to sit there and listen to somebody rambling on about their own company, not like that. I did that for three minutes at the beginning of this episode.

Or anything. But it's your show. Yeah, that's right. Exactly.

[00:31:03] Jess Frick: Two things, Nathan. Number one, Cottonweb asked, what does RC stand for? Round the Corners, which is hilarious. But it's actually Release Candidate.

[00:31:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it stands for Release Candidate. I should have said that. Yeah, Round the Corner is good enough.

Round the Corner is fantastic, actually. Yeah, that's much better. Yeah, that's great. And then

[00:31:23] Jess Frick: Michelle made a great point about state of the word. Where are we? Where are we? Where are we? It doesn't give preference to any particular flagship event.

[00:31:35] Nathan Wrigley: That makes sense. So that's in answer to Anil's question.

If it's separated out, then you're not favoring... One particular location. I suppose you are favoring Spain in this case, but you're not a favor in a particular event. Yeah. Thanks. Cotton web. Honestly, there's so much jargon in the WordPress space. I just take it for granted that everybody knows everything that I say, but yes, RC release candidate.

It's that it's so it's when it's gone from alpha to beta and then finally this release candidate, there's usually three. Three? Is that three? The correct three. And that means that it's basically, it's we're really in the final stage. Everything is more or less as they're expecting to ship it. So it's if there are faults, we're hoping at this point that they are teeny tiny and minor.

So that's what that means. Yeah. Thank you. So much for pointing that out. Courtney says she's looking forward to the block hooks, but back to the previous story. Did it yeah, it did follow the pandemic says Michelle. Thank you for that. And the last release of the year really does work to avoid most holidays across Asia through America's.

That's the biggest overlap holidays among the globe. Okay. I, Courtney says really love an opening act for state of the word from team reps across teams. Okay. Thank you. Keep the comments coming. Is that the end of that one? Have we said everything there is to say about that? I think we have. Okay. This is important.

This is a big one if you are a plugin developer. This is one of those stale bits of news, but I think it's worth doing it properly. This is on the make. wordpress. org blog. I get the feeling that if you're a plugin developer, this would be the most infuriating thing in the world. So you develop a plugin, you polish it, you make it really great.

You've got everything that you want in there and you want to bring it to the world of WordPress. And one of the things that you want to do is offer a free version. So you bring it to the WordPress repo only to discover that you've basically got a 90 day wait. A 90 day wait, because there are currently, or there were when this article produced right at the beginning of September sorry, in the middle of September, there were about 1, 250 plugins in the queue.

That's a lot. So it takes about 88 days to get through those. And so Alvaro Gomez has written this piece just to update us about what the progress is and how they're trying to fix this bottleneck and trying to please developers so that it's more weeks, not months. And he likens it to bailing water or fixing a leak on a ship.

And the quickest way to the quickest way to stop a ship sinking is obviously just get the water out, bail the water out. Your ship is still sinking the whole time you're bailing the water out. They haven't really fixed anything. So the best thing to do is to fix the leak. And so with that in mind, that's what the team have tried to do.

They've tried to. Tackle the root causes of the problem, which hasn't meant that the 88 day queue has gone down, but they've put all of the docs in a row so that hopefully in the near future, it will start to come down. So they've onboarded a whole load of new members. The most recent of which are listed here.

It's Gustavo Bordini Gagan. Deep Singh and Rob Rawnsley, Robert Rawnsley. They've joined a team. They've closed the submissions for that team. So they've had more than 40. So even if you wanted to be a part of that's, there's a hiatus on that just at the moment, but no doubt it'll come back.

They're also working on a plugin called the plugin check plugin. Easy for you to say the plugin check plugin, which allows you to, if you're a. If you're a plugin developer, check your own plugin, thereby circumventing a lot of the stuff, which the team would have to check and then come back and disappoint you with, because apparently most of the problems are the same.

And then they're encouraging people with email to self review their own plugins, the point being there's three steps in that process, hopefully. That will bring the time down and make that a much less frustrating experience. I know that when we've talked about this problem in the past, we've always had comments with people who just say how annoying it is, especially if you're new to WordPress, you didn't know this existed and finished the plug in November, thinking Christmas is coming, January is coming.

And yeah, over to you. If you've got anything to add about this, I see this all as good news. They're

[00:36:00] Jess Frick: doing the Lord's work over there.

[00:36:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, no kidding. Yeah, it's it's a lot of work. Anybody

[00:36:06] Jeff Chandler: else? For anyone that's been paying attention to the plugin repo this shouldn't be a surprise to anybody because Mika Epstein she goes she was one of the plugin reps.

She did, she reviewed the plugin directory, all the plugins for a very long time. Her and Otto. And I think even it's another gentleman, Scott Riley. I think he was also part of the meta team as well. And all the hell that she went through and all the things, all the very, very nasty, disturbing things that she's had to go through from very upset developers because their code wasn't approved or their plugin couldn't get onto the repo just a huge shout out to her and all her volunteers and her contributions to the WordPress.

over the years. But w to have, she wasn't going and it just so happens th I wasn't, I didn't have a behind the scenes look, but it felt like, Oh my God, we got it. We got to write down our processes. We got to do this. We got to do it. We got to onboard all these people. And right now we're just in the midst of, we're seeing all of that take place.

And the backlog is just a natural thing that's going to happen until everybody gets on board. We're talking about years and years of experience that Mika had that people joining the review team aren't going to get overnight. So it's going to take a little while. And the good news is that if you already have a plugin approved in the directory, you don't have to go through that process.

But if you're in the commercial space of wanting to launch a freemium product or a plugin, you're going to have to do keep it in mind that it could be two to three months before your plugin goes live, before you can actually start doing all of your various marketing techniques around their product.

[00:37:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's a lot. It is a lot. And you're right. I think Mika was like a single point of failure for a really long time. And then she stepped down, went through a lot, stepped down, and now we're filling in, backfilling the enormous hole. That Mika left. Yeah. Thank you for that, Jeff. That's great. I think if

[00:38:12] Jess Frick: Mattson were here, he would also make the joke.

Hey, bro. I heard you like plugins So we made a plugin to check your plugins.

[00:38:18] Nathan Wrigley: I yeah, it's the ingeniously titled plugin check plugin. It's

[00:38:23] Jeff Chandler: Yeah. All right. Let's not anybody call it PCP.

[00:38:29] Nathan Wrigley: It's going to happen. Oh my God. That's so funny. Yeah. Does that mean something? PCP? Sorry. Should I even ask?

Is that going to get me in trouble?

[00:38:38] Jeff Chandler: Call your local authorities, they'll explain. Okay,

[00:38:42] Jess Frick: yeah, it was like the drug that you take and then you get naked and jump off a train and

[00:38:48] Nathan Wrigley: okay This is suddenly taking a turn I'm gonna write this one down PCP

[00:38:55] Jess Frick: drug you live in the UK. Isn't everything legal there like

[00:38:59] Nathan Wrigley: not everything I Could certainly think of a few things which might not be like maybe that's the thing in the UK, it's not Kind of

[00:39:10] Jess Frick: We've been pushed to the wayside for Jess.

[00:39:13] Nathan Wrigley: You've definitely got the so far you've got the title. Every week we, we named this episode by something that happened or something that was said. I think so far, Jess, you're in the lead for leave it to the Florida girl. Get naked. Is. Basically what this episode Get naked and jump off a train. Yeah, get naked and jump off a train.

Let me write that down. Whilst I'm writing that down, Anil, anything to say about that? Not that! The bit before that!

[00:39:39] Jeff Chandler: Ah, this isn't going to be demonetized at all!

[00:39:43] Anil Gupta: I learned about the PCP acronym just a few months ago, actually, yeah, I moved to US five years ago. I'm still learning a lot of new words here. But yeah, one of my buddy, he introduced me that word. I think I was saying some sort of something I was trying to Like, acronym. And then he's you be careful, using this word around here,

[00:40:10] Nathan Wrigley: the transcript for this probably already has 20 examples of the word of the acronym PCP.

So we're somewhat screwed. Sorry. Carry on. I know. Yeah. So I

[00:40:20] Anil Gupta: was going to say the whole. Plugin directory and the plugin reviews that we can see there's a backlog and it's also relying on the volunteers and people who actually contribute in the WordPress. I'm just wondering there might be an opportunity for.

Some maybe an agency or plugin developer offer a service to review the plugin before it goes to the WordPress org, and help them finding out how they can improve so that, the overall. I was thinking also about the monetization of like people who are reviewing the plugin.

If there is any way we can find a way to monetize so more people actually spend time and energy and volunteer for it. But if not, then there might also be an opportunity for, yeah someone to offer this

[00:41:18] Nathan Wrigley: as a professional service. So what you're saying is PPC, professional plugin check just to muddy the waters PP anyway, there we go.

PPC is another option. Yeah. Really interesting, but I should probably state that this is also, this whole plugin, check plugin is also going to be merged in the future with another ongoing effort by the performance team who are currently working on their own example of how to do things from a performance point of view.

So hopefully at some. point, those two things will get merged and we'll bring that time down. I don't know what a realistic expectation of time would be, but it feels like anything under a month would be a bit of a North star to aim for certainly feel like if it was anything under a month, that wouldn't feel weird, but two, three months like we've got at the moment does feel.

A little bit too much. Okay. Thank you. I want it now. I want it free and I want it now. There's another episode title right there. Sounds like something Jim Morrison would have said. Okay.

[00:42:25] Jeff Chandler: Bob says in the chat, Bob Dunn from do the woo podcast. Nathan asked me about that stuff someday. Okay, Bob has been around the block a few times,

[00:42:36] Jess Frick: definitely

[00:42:36] Jeff Chandler: legal in Portugal.

Yeah. I want to know what concert he was at when he was introduced

[00:42:41] Nathan Wrigley: to that stuff. I will so long as you supply me with photographic evidence, Bob, if I can get the photographs, then we'll have that chat. Thanks, Bob. That's great. We'll talk offline. Okay, moving on. Nick Diego has a Posts coming out this week, all about the WordPress showcase.

I've got to say, this is something that kind of went under my radar. And probably that's the reason it's going through a revitalization process. He wrote a piece on the 11th of October called revitalizing the WordPress showcase. It's a pretty cool site actually. The WordPress showcase is a part of visually refreshing the whole of wordpress.

org and making it look a little bit more up to date to show off some of the, some of the leading examples of what's out there that the industry in WordPress has created using WordPress. This is what it looks like now. I don't know what it looked like particularly before, but you can see there's little lozenges here of a whole bunch of different sites.

And not one of them looks anything like the other one. So what I'm getting here is a whole, just a smorgasbord. God, I managed to say that word during this episode. A smorgasbord. I'm

[00:43:58] Jess Frick: still dealing with you calling these

[00:44:01] Nathan Wrigley: lozenges. Yeah, okay. What would you say? Is it a rectangle? I don't know, but a lozenge is...

No, a lozenge is like that, isn't it? Yeah, it's not a lozenge. That's for a sore throat. There's another episode title. It's not a lozenge. Why am I the point is within these shapes, whatever those shapes are called, encapsulated within these shapes are a whole different bunch of WordPress websites.

They're obviously done by, real professional teams of people. But the endeavor of Showcase is to find these sites and showcase them. Hence the name. showcase. It's ingenious how these things fit together. And demonstrate what versatile a platform WordPress is. So it's been revitalized. And Nick Diego goes into all of the work that's been done to make this happen.

All I can say is if you're an agency or a freelancer, it's worth a look just to give you some ideas because I've got the. Design skills of a potato. And so if I go to a website like this really does help me stuff like this lifts me from potato. Maybe asparagus is what I'm aiming for, but that's about as good as I ever got, but it's just really nice.

So Bravo is categorized. You can search, you can filter there's tags on it all, and it looks really. Really nice and really credible way of showing what wordpress. org is capable of. I don't know if any of you had a poke around and enjoyed that experience. Feel free to comment on it if you wish.

Quick shout.

[00:45:35] Jess Frick: If you are in the make WordPress slack, join the website redesign channel because Nick is doing a tremendous job of leading the wordpress. org. Overhaul and redesign. And this is just one of many examples of the incredible work he and others are doing to make it better.

[00:45:56] Nathan Wrigley: Hat tip to Nick and the team there.

So yeah, website dash redesigned Slack channel on make sorry, over on the WordPress Slack. Anil, Jeff, anything to add?

[00:46:09] Jeff Chandler: I'm no, I think the new way of displaying these Honeyfield cough drops. Or is it looks great. The showcase has needed an overhaul for a long time now. No, a lot of people, a lot of people over the years, they question what big websites trust WordPress enough to use it, and we have the showcase where we can just point people to and they can browse around.

And there's a lot of sites on here that make you go, Ooh, and I, there's a lot of good things on here. That really is. Yeah. And the spirit. Of the WordPress showcase and some of the great things that you see on there Jb marzlin who has an awesome youtube channel. He's been doing some of these videos he recently did a video where he showed how techcrunch.

com spent 1 million dollars building their website And he recreated it within the wordpress black editor full site editor in 30 minutes So it would be cool to see him or somebody else go to the WordPress showcase and try and recreate some of those big brand sites within a black editor and just see if it's a, if it's even possible and be how difficult it is.

[00:47:17] Nathan Wrigley: I, I would watch that video so long as he could. Categorically name this shape. If he can absolutely whatever he can name that shape. I'll watch that video. Yeah, that was amazing. What he did there. Wasn't it? He really genuinely pulled off something close to a miracle. He should do this site.

He should redesign the WordPress showcase as a showcase on his YouTube. It's very meta. It's wheels within wheels. Anything I would just say

[00:47:49] Anil Gupta: one thing that, yeah, I love the whole. Showcase especially in our agency business, we have been when we work with someone who, whose website is not still in a WordPress and like a Sitecore or Adobe Experience Manager or something like that, they tend to ask Hey, what are some big examples or good examples of WordPress?

So our team has been sharing showcase. And usually like when we share it on our website or someone else's website, it still doesn't add as much as. And the weight that if it's already on the WordPress org. So yeah, I love the idea.

[00:48:29] Nathan Wrigley: Peter makes the comment that he doesn't know questioning how the sites are selected for the showcase.

Yeah. Good point. I don't know what the selection criteria is there. I think there's about a hundred on at the moment. I don't, I have no quibble with any of the ones that are on there because all of them do look amazing, but it does make you wonder. If there's any that are still in the queue, I think the article mentions that there might be more that are still ready to go in.

And he, Peter makes the point that Nick did not select which sites are on there. Okay. And Courtney, thank you, Courtney. She also says dog forward slash enterprise. for the scale of sites using WordPress. Okay. So there's lots of great stuff in there. It looks really nice. If only we could identify that shape that's for another episode.

[00:49:16] Jeff Chandler: Michelle's not even here. And she says that I think design skills of a potato should be the episode title.

[00:49:23] Nathan Wrigley: That's thanks. Thanks, Michelle. That's probably

[00:49:25] Jeff Chandler: the least offensive title we've come

[00:49:27] Nathan Wrigley: up with. Yeah. Yeah. We We, I think we can plumb further new depths. If we carry on for the next 40 minutes, there's probably further to go.

Anyway, there you go. The WordPress showcase wordpress. org forward slash showcase. And check it out there. There are some really lovely sites, which were not designed by a potato. This is on Mastodon. Mastodon is a bit like what Twitter once was. He said, hoping that nobody would react. Mastodon is like a federated, a de federated service, a bit like Twitter.

And Aruba has obviously set herself up with an account and I just thought this was quite interesting what you thought of it. Because she made a point and it really resonates with me. It may not resonate with you. She says, I really don't like the animated GIF plugin icons in the WordPress plugin repo.

They're so distracting on the plugin update page. And as I've read that. I just did a big yes like that. That's what I did. I did a big yes. That's another episode title. I did a big yes. And I totally agree. Whenever I go into the WordPress repository, I get annoyed by the increasingly large amount of animated GIFs, which have the icons like.

I'm sure there's a subtle way of doing it, but it does seem like we've got into the era of let's just cram as much movement in as we possibly can just to drag the eye onto it because everybody's a sucker for that, right? You look at it because it's moving. That's the merit that it's got. It's moving. So you look at it.

If I was the universal dictator of this planet, which I am not I would say that should be outlawed. But I'm not. So what are you, think?

[00:51:22] Jeff Chandler: I know there's a while back when this was added or it was being discussed, there was a lot, there was heated debates on both sides. But me personally, I don't like it. I don't like seeing a plugin icon, a rocket like taking off like, Hey, where are you going? It's I'm, and again, I wonder how accessible these are.

I I got to imagine they're less accessible than just a standard. Image that has an alt tag, which describes their plugin icons all about. So I don't know, I don't like them.

[00:51:55] Nathan Wrigley: I think that if it was just like a rocket and there was like smoke so this is my criteria, right? If it was a rocket and there was a little bit of smoke simmering underneath and it was.

Showing that it might take off maybe that's okay. But when you get the full take off out of the icon and the icons completely changed, but I reckon there's a bit of an ecosystem now where you're just trying to do as much as you can squeeze into an animated icon as possible. So the icon change, it flips around.

There's another new logo, words scroll across it. And you just think that's not really, it's not a level playing field. The big

[00:52:29] Jeff Chandler: problem is. That now that it's your, that animated gifts are possible or animated, you don't plug in icons. It's one more thing that plugin developers can set themselves apart.

It's a differentiator. And even though we don't like it, as a plugin developer, you want your stuff to be seen. You want people to check it out. And unfortunately that most of them were probably going to go with an animated icon because.

[00:52:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I'll bet it does. I would imagine there is a real correlation between the craziness of the icon and the amount of eyeballs that you get.

Yeah. Anyway, Jess or Anil, what do you think? Is this me being a bit fussy or do you agree?

[00:53:12] Jess Frick: Okay, Anil?

[00:53:17] Anil Gupta: Honestly I looked at, I didn't look before, but now I'm going to see that commerce also has an animated icon plugin. And honestly, I don't know. We know whether which way is right or wrong. Because it does add, like grabs your attention, but also my wondering that if.

All the plugin will start doing it, then it will just be like an animated show on the page.

[00:53:47] Nathan Wrigley: I'm just trying to find one at the minute. So as is always the case, when you do something live, if you'd have asked me before I hit record to find one of these icons, I would have found you a hundred in a heartbeat.

Now

[00:53:58] Jeff Chandler: that I would help you there, but I I'm not going to.

[00:54:03] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. Okay. You can keep that one under your hat. So I'm now scrolling through the plugin directory and I can't find a single one. But it has annoyed me in the past. I don't know. I just feel like this should be a level playing field and those little tricks that people deploy to capture your attention.

I don't know. It just doesn't seem equanimous to me. Sorry, Jess. I probably interrupted.

[00:54:25] Jess Frick: No, not at all. I thought Sean's note on that thread was interesting that this has actually been a discussion going on for three plus

[00:54:35] Nathan Wrigley: years. Oh, okay. So if you

[00:54:40] Jess Frick: look back in an older post about this in Meta where Mika, once again, was recommending that they stop this.

For accessibility reasons and for, a variety of others, and there was a whole long thread and it didn't go anywhere.

[00:55:00] Nathan Wrigley: So what we're saying here is that this episode truly should be called episode number 272. Only three years out of date. That's.

[00:55:11] Jess Frick: No, that's not what I'm

[00:55:14] Nathan Wrigley: saying.

It's just, no, you're not.

[00:55:16] Jess Frick: It's just another one of those Oh, same as it ever was.

[00:55:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. I was just interested because I'd never seen that debate before. And I remember that it remember that it annoyed me. So anyway, it would appear that the consensus is maybe we shouldn't allow them, but anyway, there we go.

Three, three years and counting. Three years and counting. As if we ever segue, but here comes a segue. This is to say that wordpress. com, I know that most people watching this probably a consumers of wordpress. org, but nevertheless, wordpress. com has officially announced their support for the Fediverse.

So the Fediverse could be broadly encapsulated as things like. mastodon. There's a whole bunch of other things, but it's anything which binds itself to the activity pub protocol amongst other things. So you're not locked into one vendor. You can move from one service to another, and you can log in with one set of credentials and post on other different services and things like that.

WordPress. com have officially added the activity pub plugin to the. Capabilities of wordpress. com users. And that means that over the last few weeks, thousands and thousands of WordPress websites, which otherwise were just nothing to do with that whole social network have now become first class citizens.

So it means, and although it's a little bit tricky to get it set up potentially, because the plugin is in development still, it means that in the future, you'll be able to do things like post on your wordpress. com site. And of course you can do this on the. org. If you've got the activity pub plugin post on your WordPress website.

It will go over to your social media account, let's say mastodon. And then if people comment there, those comments could come back onto your WordPress website. And it just allows you to have a social network, but WordPress is right in the middle. And I think over the last decade, that's a shame that we've just shattered our own Online place, a WordPress website, for example, and we've decided that, it's easier and quicker to post everything on Facebook and it's easier and quicker to post everything on Twitter.

And then stuff happens, things like Elon taking over Twitter, whatever your thoughts are on that. Some people like it, some people don't, but it does mean that maybe that whole. Sit period of time that you spent, boosting your Twitter account. Maybe that's come to naught for you. And wouldn't it have been always good to have that on your own property?

So I just think this is really cool. I think the more I read about this, the more that the whole mastodon Fediverse thing seems like the right way for me. to go. I'm not saying that you have to follow suit, but it just seems like a real, a really good choice for me at least anyway. So there you go.

WordPress. com users can benefit from that. Anything about that? I

[00:58:12] Jess Frick: know on Twitter, Matt had said a long time ago that he was interested in bringing it to Tumblr. And I'm excited that it's happened on WordPress. com. I'm interested to see if he still does bring it to Tumblr.

[00:58:26] Nathan Wrigley: There's a, there's another service called blue sky.

And I don't know if any of you have messed with that. I've

[00:58:31] Jess Frick: tried so hard

[00:58:32] Nathan Wrigley: to get into it. Oh, okay. Yeah. I have an account and I've made almost no effort, but the theory is that will also federate at some point in the future that my understanding is that is the promise. But they're waiting until they find out all the kinks in that one website, blue sky dot social.

Once they've ironed out all the kinks, then they'll roll it rather than trying to fix a moving, movable feast, but anyway, I don't know. Jeff, anything

[00:59:02] Jeff Chandler: on that? I think I think this is great news for the Fediverse have to have the backing of WordPress. com. That means it's legit. That means it'll probably catch on.

It means people who have no idea what the Fediverse is, maybe we'll get into it or. Get into that realm. It's I'm one of the big increases in signups for Macedon or the Fediverse was what's been going on with Twitter or X is formerly known as Twitter. And, it's only a matter of time before Elon takes it, trashes you.

And what we need is for Twitter to just. Go down. And I gotta tell you, I've invested so many years into Twitter, I finally reached 10,000 followers. Whoop do, big deal. There's so much content I've given to Twitter that I just don't know if I have the energy to invest into any other social networks, like at this point, right?

Like at this point, if Facebook disappeared, I'd be happy. If Twitter goes by the wayside, I'll be sad, but, I'll do mastodon. That's the one I'm on. I'm not going to do threads. I'm not going to do blue sky but I think once Twitter goes by the wayside that will be finally The kick in the butt I need to actually get into activity pub and start using my blog again and start Connecting with others and creating my own social hub instead of relying on a network to do that for me because now Everything is in place

[01:00:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think that's my motivation as well is just to have this central point, but I haven't set it up properly yet because the plugin, the activity plugin hasn't quite got what I need from it just yet, but automatic.

I don't know if it's fair to say that they acquired the plugin, but they acquired. The developer, they basically sponsored the developer of that plugin. I think his name is Mattias or something. I can't pronounce his surname. Sorry for butchering that. And he's now paid up to, to work on that plugin.

That's what his gig is now. So that is promising annal anything? I would

[01:01:12] Anil Gupta: just say I'm still not into the other social media platform, but I have seen the LinkedIn has. A huge potential and just in general, a lot of people who have been publishing on Twitter and other social media they are publishing more, creating more content and personal brand and all that on LinkedIn.

And so I would say in terms of that, like moving from X or Twitter to LinkedIn, that has been trending a lot and a lot of executives and all them, they were all. Writing, publishing and promoting their brands and personal brands.

[01:01:55] Nathan Wrigley: On LinkedIn. I have services recently told me that

[01:01:58] Jess Frick: there's, I'm sorry.

Someone recently told me that there's ss e o benefits to doing more on LinkedIn. I don't know how true that

[01:02:08] Anil Gupta: is. Maybe you do. I don't know. But yeah, it I wouldn't

[01:02:13] Nathan Wrigley: be surprised. Yeah. I I think it's fair to say that if Bob endorses something, we should all pay attention.

[01:02:21] Jeff Chandler: I wouldn't go that far.

[01:02:25] Nathan Wrigley: I refer the Honorable Gentleman to the comments I made some moments ago. There he is. He's loving LinkedIn over there. He's making use of the WP Builds Mastodon, whatever that is called, instance. You can sign up for that for free if you like. It's wpbuilds. social. That's a URL. WP builds dot social free for anybody that wants to sign up unless you're a robot in that case.

Don't bother but he's making use of it Yeah, I don't know about linkedin. I've never i've always struggled with linkedin There's always people there who are far more professional and make me feel bad. I don't really go there

[01:03:02] Jeff Chandler: I don't I had I have an account on linkedin just for job purposes marketing and stuff But I will say that man linkedin is insanely popular and it gets forgotten when you talk about Facebook and Twitter and whatnot.

But LinkedIn's a big deal. Can't forget

[01:03:19] Nathan Wrigley: about LinkedIn. The one thing that I like about the mastodon thing, the whole activity pub thing is there's no algorithm. So you will get a feed in chronological order of the people that you follow. So it feels a bit like the promise of Facebook at the beginning, it's just here's the stuff that your friends and mates do people that you've decided to follow and it's in order and we're not going to game it with sponsorship and we're not going to game it with ads and I really like that and it, very quick, I saw, I followed a ton of people at the beginning and fairly quickly became obvious, Oh, actually, You write stuff that I'm not that bothered about.

So unfollow that. And then suddenly the feed gets a little bit different and I really like it. But it's very low fi. There's not a lot in terms of, I don't think it would be a great place to position your business because you only appear once and you can't promote it and people clicking a button saying I boost your light, your post doesn't really do anything because there's no algorithm watching for that.

[01:04:18] Jess Frick: I love that.

That's your bar, Nathan, you write stuff that I'm not bothered about.

[01:04:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's another title. Okay. I'm just writing that I can't write very quickly. So it takes me ages. I'm not bothered

[01:04:35] Jeff Chandler: about Nathan. A little birdie has told me that cotton web is still waiting for you to accept their connection request.

What's that? Oh, no. What do you have against cotton web? Oh,

[01:04:48] Nathan Wrigley: that's bad. Nothing. I'll look at that afterwards. That, that's really poor of me. I'm sorry. If you signed up for age ages ago, then yeah, that's naughty of me. How can you ignore

[01:04:59] Jeff Chandler: that little red icon? It's just begging for your attention.

[01:05:02] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. I feel awful. Cotton web, unless you wrote something silly. Cause I do ask a question, which is WordPress related. And I think you've got to answer that question. So if you wrote something silly, I might've said no. But I apologize about that. I feel awful. Baba Bob's back. I feel it's not about social, it's about professional networking.

We're talking about LinkedIn, I'm guessing. Okay. Yeah, good point. And Rob can says, yeah, LinkedIn is a big deal. Yep. Okay. Anyway, it's there wordpress. com. If you're interested in playing on the Fediverse, you now can get to that completely for free. And this is the sort of stats in terms of the growth that we've seen by using that plugin.

So this was I don't know, it looks like this is the growth month over month. Oh, imagine that . Yeah, it's going up. wordpress.com is a big deal. Yeah. Yeah. At two and a half thousand. It still seems quite small, really, but I guess that's really to do with the popularity of Mastodon itself. Okay. I think I'll miss that out.

I'm just gonna, it's a bit of self-promotion. Sorry. I did a podcast this week with Puja Ri all about diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in WordPress is a really nice, listen, it's about 40 minutes long and she. She really does do a great job of expounding why this is an important topic, but time is short, so we'll just move quickly on.

I wanted to highlight a couple of things that I saw in the WordPress space this week. A few of them are deals, but I thought this was quite nice. This is called MediaSync. It's a plugin. It's on the repo, so it's free. You can download all the files that are in your upload directory. You know what I mean?

When you've had loads of uploads, but they're not ending up in your media library, it will find all of those and chuck them. Into your media library so that you can actually access them. You click a button. It tells you these are the ones that you could import your ticks and boxes, and it does that. It's a little thing, but it's a little cool thing.

So there's that. The other thing that I wanted to mention is there's a plugin called fluent booking, which has come out. It's on a, I think it's on a lifetime deal at the moment. Anyway, if you need a booking solution in the WordPress space. There's this, it's a new incumbent by WP Manage Ninja. They've got a load of other very popular plugins, like a form plugin and things like that.

And the last little thing to mention is there's a it's like a skin for things like WordPress and Vimeo videos. If you want to make them look like they're coming from your own domain. It does a whole load more but they've also got a lifetime deal. It's called Presto player. I haven't used it, but it looks pretty good.

They seem to have deals on at the moment, including a lifetime deal. It looks like I can get 25 websites for 300 bucks down from 499. Don't suppose any of you want to talk about that, but if you do now's the moment, maybe that media file one would be quite interesting. Ooh, not that one. That one.

Anything. I was

[01:08:03] Jeff Chandler: just thinking about a shout out to a plugin. And also shout out to OG developer, Viper bond mills or Viper double seven bond. Alex mills, I believe that was his name. He did create a deployment card, regenerate thumbnails. And I've seen an issue that some people have come across lately where when you upload.

A, an image, depending on your theme, it will generate tons of thumbnails of all these different aspects and sizes. And depending on the quality of your images, if you're not optimizing them, you could quickly run out of disk space. So what regenerate thumbnails can do is actually, it can actually tell you which images are just sitting there, not attached to any posts.

So you're not using them and you can go through and actually delete them. And that's how you can regain server space. Always back up your site and database and everything else before, you do something like that. But I thought that was pretty neat.

[01:09:01] Nathan Wrigley: So this, so that's not its core feature, but it's like one of the little things that it also does.

So if you've got a media library, let's say there's a thousand images and you're pretty sure that a whole bunch of them are not actually being used anywhere to free up space, regenerate thumbnail with whatever option that's called it'll find them and you can say, okay, get rid. Of those right. That's neat.

That's very cool. Yeah, I like that. That's a neat piece of functionality Jess anil anything on those three things or shall we move on? I would

[01:09:32] Anil Gupta: just add on a media sync plugin I think the future wordpress like Gutenberg phase three there is also a planned revamping of the media library. So they're gonna launch a new media library and going to load a bunch of interesting features in there.

I'm not sure if you have checked out, but yeah, they have a lot of tagging and filtering and lots of different great things. So that might also be something that Interesting.

[01:10:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I feel like the the media library really is in a massive need of a bit of an upgrade.

[01:10:13] Jeff Chandler: There's a lot of noise outside.

Oh, it's because you said they're going to be revamping the media library. There's a lot of people out there.

[01:10:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and also who knows when that'll come, but there is lots of talk about what it'll look like and some, there's some screen like animated gifs and things out there of what it might look like, but it definitely needs to be done.

I'm going to mention this one apropos of nothing. This one just came into my head as you were talking and I'll. This is one called happy files. I don't know if you've come, any of you have come across this, what a great name for a plugin, if nothing else, it just adds folders into your WordPress media library.

So hopefully this kind of thing will be taken care of by WordPress core in the future. But you can see in this image here, you create folders within folders, and you just drag your images into the folders. And if you've got a big WordPress website.

It's a neat way of organizing everything rather than having to go and search for that image, which you know, you uploaded three years ago, but you didn't correctly name, it's still got some random junk title and you can't find it. This will help with that cause. Have you used that, Nathan? Yeah, I have used it.

I totally recommend it. It's actually by the developer. There's a page builder called Bricks, which is very popular. It's been growing in popularity. It's the exact same developer. And what I really like about it is the fact that Bricks went through the Stratosphere, but he didn't drop support for this.

He still continues to maintain it. Even though this probably has the tiniest footprint compared to what bricks has been receiving lately. He still takes time out and he does a sort of like dedicated three day stint on happy files to make it updated. So yes, it's, if you want my endorsement, I'd say it's great.

I don't know what the footprint is particularly, but I've only ever used it on sites where it was absolutely necessary and it was. It was great. It worked.

[01:12:13] Jess Frick: Potentially stupid question. I know I'm going to take us off track for a second. Does this organize them into folders that you would see in SFTP or is it just more metadata

[01:12:24] Nathan Wrigley: that's kept with the WordPress?

I think it's metadata. Because if you uninstall it, then you can just quickly uninstall it. And it just, it's back to normal. So I think it's just method. So it's, I guess it's just some sort of, tag that's attached to each one or something like that, but it does it really, it's really, no, it does it really quickly.

It doesn't alter the way the media library looks. You can see there, it still looks basically the same. It's just got this little sidebar, which is adding a little bit of screen real estate. It's worth looking at. It sounds to me, Jess, like you need this plugin. Oh God.

[01:13:01] Jess Frick: I volunteer for a site that needs this

[01:13:04] Nathan Wrigley: plugin.

Okay. Okay. Worth checking out. Happy Files. Hey Nathan, can you

[01:13:09] Jeff Chandler: check out in the private chat that link I just

[01:13:11] Nathan Wrigley: shared? I can. One second. That one right at the bottom.

[01:13:14] Jeff Chandler: Yes. Speaking of media, I came across this. The other day on Mastodon and this gentleman it's for iOS, so it's either on your iPhone or through Mac iOS, and it uses a shortcut app or the shortcut ability.

And once you download the app or the shortcut and you set it up, it uses your REST API. And it'll take photos right from your phone, convert them to JPEG and upload them straight to your WordPress media library. It's super quick and super fast. I've been using it lately and it's it's a really cool, neat little shortcut tool.

It completely bypasses the need to use the WordPress

[01:13:56] Nathan Wrigley: app. Because I'm a moron. And I was unable to use the basic feature of that a show title yet. There's another one because I'm unable to do copying and pasting, I spent the whole time that you were just talking, trying to copy and paste that link.

It was just my, I couldn't overwrite what was previously in it, which was my bit defect, bit warden password. Now I've got it though, and I'm going to ask you to explain it all again. I'm really sorry. All

[01:14:26] Jeff Chandler: So uses you would go there. You would click on that link. If you're using iOS on your either iPhone or your Mac OS, and you would set it up, you would download it, set it up.

You need a you need to go into your wordpress. org backend, create an application password for the shortcut. And once you do that. Then you would have to put in that password for the username. Then you would have to put in the rest API endpoint, which for the most people, it's going to be the default.

And he includes that in the directions. What it does is you can go right. You can use the shortcut. And go into your media library on your phone and upload photos straight to your WordPress media library without having to go through the WordPress app itself, makes it very

[01:15:16] Nathan Wrigley: quick. Yeah, that's really neat.

So especially, and it

[01:15:19] Jeff Chandler: also something I've learned is pretty important is that it converts your image. Most photos on iPhones by the far H E I C format which is a proprietary format that, that Apple has, this will convert them to JPEG, which is important because I've recently discovered that not all based on your server setups.

Not all websites support HEIC image formats. It'll just show you a blank square when it should show you an actual image. And I've actually seen that image magic, I think is a piece of software that's installed on the server. And if you're using an older version of image magic, you can't use many of the HEIC to JPEG converting plugins that are out there as well.

This takes care of all of that for you. It bypasses the app and you can just quickly take a photo and whip it right into your WordPress media library.

[01:16:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, nice. I will add this into the show notes. It's by Chuck Grimmett. If you want to Google it, if you're listening to this on audio, the piece is called Apple shortcut to upload photos to me, WordPress media library.

And I will add that. That's really cool. What a neat idea. And yeah, you're right. Apple format is just unusable by. Almost anything that's not apple. Yeah, try editing that in online software. It's really tricky. But yeah, okay. Thank you So there's two recommendations there happy files and the one that jeff just mentioned as well.

Thank you so much Let us move right out of wordpress. minutes It's to nail consciousness because it's the sort of thing you do on a Monday morning at 9 a. m. Stanford scientist after, so this is nothing to do with WordPress. What do you make of this? Stanford scientists. So this chap here, he looks like a scientist, doesn't he?

Imagine. I don't know anybody more scientific than that. He

[01:17:17] Jeff Chandler: looks like he wishes he could have done what Timothy Leary did, but now he's here doing this, staring

[01:17:22] Nathan Wrigley: into space. Yeah, but you've got to, that's the perfect staring into look like you're thinking about something really deep and hard, and you've got a knitted jumper, a big beard and long hair.

Is that really the Enterprise flying in space? Yeah, I'm thinking about something awfully difficult. He has decided... And backed up by evidence and the fact that he is we mock but he genuinely is a fully bona fide scientist from stanford he's postulating that we have no free will and apparently if you are into the if you're into the field of research that he's into That's been something that people have realized for a really long time.

However I'm a little bit annoyed because I think that I should have free will, it feels like everything that I'm saying is a concoction of my own head, but when I actually think about it, I started this sentence And I had no idea where it was going to end up. And the same is true for every sentence that you begin and every thought that you have.

And his point is that, genuinely, you're just playing a game. You've no idea where things are going to end up. And I challenge you, whatever you're about to say, Jess or Anil or Jeff, you do not know where you're going to end up in the sentence you're about to begin. And that's the sort of basis of his argument.

You don't have free will. And then it gets into all sorts of tricky things like what do you do then about somebody who runs somebody over in a car? Are they to blame? And the answer according to him is potentially not, but you can imagine the devastating consequences of that. We'd never get the media library updated if if he was in charge.

So I don't know if you've got any thoughts on that. I would

[01:19:06] Jeff Chandler: definitely blame Elon.

[01:19:08] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. Yeah. Any thoughts on that? I genuinely thought that was a fascinating thing, but maybe not.

[01:19:14] Jeff Chandler: Does this have anything to do with we're actually just things living in a simulated or a simulation there's somebody playing sims right now controlling all of us.

It's

[01:19:25] Nathan Wrigley: not really that it's more that the contents of your next thought Are totally and utterly undiscoverable by you genuinely have no idea And it's the sort of thing like if you try to meditate or you sit there and you try To be calm and not think about anything and only concentrate on your breath.

You quickly notice that your head is just constantly doing things without your authorization. You're just having thoughts and random things cross your mind and seemingly none of it you are in charge of. And then if you take that theory and blow it up, you then really don't have any control. Over anything and and I just thought that was curious

[01:20:09] Jeff Chandler: if all of this stuff is actually going on in my head I'm gonna have to consult with Jess.

Just give me something that can help Yeah, I'm

[01:20:18] Jess Frick: thinking of the philosopher Billy Corgan who said despite all my rage I'm still It's still just a rat in a cage.

[01:20:28] Nathan Wrigley: That's a good title as well. The full, and I'm going to go with the philosopher, Billy Corgan, not the not what he actually said. Oh, that's brilliant.

[01:20:37] Jeff Chandler: Yeah. Yeah. Off the album,

GISH. I'm going to have to listen to free will by rush after this show.

[01:20:43] Nathan Wrigley: Smashing pumpkins. It's the time of year as well. We're only eight days away from Halloween and she's dropped a smashing pumpkin reference. Anyway, I thought that was really interesting. Maybe you didn't.

Let's move on to some other sad news. Again, this is me being absolutely way off the mark. I picked this up this week. And it is to say that Molly Holtzschlag, and I'm not sure how you pronounce that. She passed recently. I actually thought that it had happened just this past week. I was informed by Jess to look at the date of this article and only to discover it was the 6th of September.

It doesn't make it any less sad, but if you like me began your internet journey fairly near the start of it. Then she was one of the people that made the internet important. She was one of the big players early on pushing the boundaries, making sure that we were all thinking the right thoughts and that things were being done in a way which the early founders of the internet were so good at the internet got hijacked at some point in the last decade, I think, but she was amazing.

And so just a little hat tip to her. I don't know. Jess, the fact that you knew that she'd passed probably tells me that you were also following along this story. Sad, right?

[01:21:58] Jess Frick: It's very sad. It's very sad. But nobody gets out of this alive,

[01:22:03] Nathan Wrigley: oh, there's just too many! They just keep coming!

I've got a whole family! Now

[01:22:09] Jess Frick: you've got me in my Gen X emo mode, and I'm like... I honestly, when I die, I hope these are the pictures that they share of me, because... She's a badass.

[01:22:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, she really did do a lot. She did do a lot to shape the internet. She was actually her icon. was on the Twitter homepage for the first six years of Twitter or something.

There was a small selection of accounts which were linked. Do you remember there was the whale? There was the Twitter icon and then there was like a little lozenge of about six or seven accounts. It just demonstrating what the feed looked like. A little what? A shape.

Oh dear. Dig in the hole deeper and deeper. And she was on that for years and years until finally they updated the homepage and she said something like eight years. Pretty good run. Something like that. But yeah, amazing. The fairy godmother. Of the web she's been described. Nathan,

[01:23:07] Jess Frick: you got to call out Mike's

[01:23:08] Nathan Wrigley: comment.

Oh, have I? What's he done? Wait, hang on. I can't see the comments. Mike, which one? Mike cotton. Oh, cotton web. He's got a name. There are people dying who have never died before. Maybe another time too

[01:23:23] Jess Frick: soon,

[01:23:23] Nathan Wrigley: Mike. Oh, thank you. And Max says he can recommend the philosopher Daniel Dennett. Oh yeah.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Thank you for that. And very last pay. Oh, did either of you want to comment on Molly before we move on?

[01:23:44] Jeff Chandler: I never. I didn't really know who Molly is or Molly was, but her being known as the fairy godmother of the web reminds me of a WordCamp at a long time ago.

If anybody here, if you're OG, you know who Laurel Van Fossen is. She was a huge WordPress advocate back in the day, huge with WordPress. com. And she went to a WordCamp event and might've been Portland, Oregon if I remember correctly. Where people dressed up and she dressed up. She had a wand like a fairy and she was called the fairy blog mother.

Oh, nice. Yeah, that was really cool. Way back in the day. And I miss Laura. I haven't, I know she got into teaching and I don't know what she's up to these days, but I miss you around. I'm thinking about you a lot all the time.

[01:24:34] Nathan Wrigley: What a nice thing to say. That's lovely. Yeah. So Molly Pulse Schlag. Really not sure if I've pronounced that correctly was very important to the foundation of the internet and her impact is indistinguishable.

What's the word it's you can't really put your finger on it, but it was important indelible. We'll go with that or lozenge. It was very lozenge is how I describe it. Yeah. Okay. And let's drop this one as the very last one. This is to say that, Oh, come on, Google. Would you please try harder?

Google have been hosting adverts, which are mal izing on their ad network, which obviously app appears in search. Dunno if you've ever come across it. But there's this free like password manager. It's stores, not just passwords, but anything that you wanna put in. It's called KeyPass. And over the last week or two, they've been A malicious actor has managed to persuade Google by using this strange concoction of characters, which when you actually print them out into a browser, types out the word key pass, but if you look very carefully, and I'm going to enlarge it as big as it will go, if you look very carefully at the K there.

The K character ends up with this little dot underneath it, but that's the only difference between the correct URL, keypast. info, and this one. This one would take you to a website, which will give you all sorts of malware for your computer. And it just makes you think, come on, Google, you're getting paid to literally put this stuff out there.

Surely somebody who is authorizing these ads is clicking on a link and it must match some database somewhere. So there's that. I bet you they're

[01:26:28] Jess Frick: really big about that capital P too. It's

[01:26:31] Nathan Wrigley: biggin What did you say? I didn't hear what you

[01:26:35] Jess Frick: said. I said, I bet you they're really big on that capital P too.

Capital,

[01:26:40] Nathan Wrigley: What? Oh, here

[01:26:42] Jess Frick: you didn't, it might be something else.

[01:26:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I don't really know. Anyway, the point is, naughty Google, shoving these ads in people's faces and making people get malware. Not good. That's it. That's all we've got time for. It's 29

[01:26:57] Jeff Chandler: lassage.

[01:27:00] Nathan Wrigley: Is that what it, a lozenge? Is that a lozenge?

A lozenge! That is what that is. It's henceforward called a lozenge. That's gotta be the title of this episode, despite all the naughty, rude ones. I think we'll just go with, it's a lozenge. This

[01:27:14] Jeff Chandler: can you helped me empty this can way before the end of the show with the

[01:27:19] Nathan Wrigley: last shaking can. That was yeah, there was too much there.

Okay. Just before we end, firstly, thank you so much for all the people who made the time and effort to. Comment. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much to Jess. Thank you so much to Jeff and thank you to Anil for joining us today. Really appreciate it. Hopefully you'll all come back at some point and join us again.

Now, Jeff and Anil, sorry, this you've got, okay. You didn't sign up for this, but we do this quite humiliating hand wave at the end so that I can create a So I can create a thumbnail image. Basically all of us do that. Oh, look, Jeff's straight in there. No messy, just totally able to go. Yeah. Look, I even doing that.

Thank you. We got it. We nailed it. I'll be publishing this at the absurd time of 7. AM tomorrow morning. Don't ask me why just do, but we'll be back next week with some other fine guests. But thank you, Jess. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you. I know we will

[01:28:16] Jeff Chandler: be. Came on the show, there's no donuts, there's no bagels.

[01:28:20] Nathan Wrigley: No, all there is a pad of paper and a humiliating hand wave at the end. See you next week. Take it easy guys. Take care. Bye. Bye, bye, bye.