This Week in WordPress #273

[00:00:03] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode number 273, entitled Halloweeny Barky. It was recorded on Monday the 30th of October, 2023.

My name's Nathan Wrigley and I'll be joined by three fine guests today. The first stop is going to be a Wendie Huis in t Veld and also by Roger Rosweide, but also by Michelle Frechette. Maybe it was Michelle, maybe it wasn't Michelle. You'll have to see the episode to figure out, it's the Halloween episode, and so she gets dressed up.

It's a WordPress podcast. So what do we talk about? WordPress, would you believe it or not? Gutenberg 16.9 is coming around the corner. And there's some updates about that. Also WordPress 6.4, there's a field guide giving you some information about some updates, which are also coming.

We've got our silly awards. Elementor has had to cancel their DreamWeb event. The state of open source has a survey that you can fill out about any open source project. Bluehost have their creators award.

Ollie, the theme has given their onboarding wizard a separate plugin. So you can find out how that helps you to introduce your customers, or yourself to block-based themes.

An accessible accordion is that possible? We look at a possible option. Loads of black Friday deals and just deals in general coming around, so we cover several of those.

We talk about a little bit of security, the Lightspeed Cache plugin. And we also talk about how Cloudways have joined forces with Patchstack. And then it's on to texts, which is a $50 million acquisition by Automattic.

And finally, possibly the saddest thing you've ever seen in the world. Gallons and gallons of wine flowing down a hill in Portugal. 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, it's it's me. It's Nathan and WP Builds. It's episode number 273. I'm already chuckling of this week in WordPress. That means we've done 272 other episodes. You can find them on the WP Builds. com website. An absolute pleasure. Having you on the show. If you fancy joining us in the comments, please feel free to do that.

So a few bits of housekeeping before we introduce the guests properly, if that's all right. If you fancy making a contribution to this show, we'd really love that. Probably the best way to do that is to go to this URL WP Builds. com forward slash live. If you go there, then you need to be logged into some kind of Google account because it's YouTube comments.

However, a neat little feature of the platform that I've started to use recently, if you don't want to be logged into anything, if you go to that page, in the top right hand corner of the video, so you're looking inside the video embed, is a tiny little box and it says live chat. You can chat in there. And you don't need to be logged into any kind of platform, but anyway, if you do want to comment, we'd really appreciate that.

The other option is to go to our Facebook group. If you're in there, there's one little extra that you've got to do. And that's to go to WP Builds. com forward slash Facebook. That'll get you in there. And then you've got to go through a little bit of a bit of jiggery pokery. Because Facebook do not let us have your avatar and name unless you go wave.

video forward slash lives forward slash Facebook and surrender your entire life. To us and Facebook. Anyway, there we go. That's that's it. Michelle, I'm going to leave you to last because she's got a bit of a surprise in store and there's only so much I can cope with today. You'll notice that there are some silly bits around the edge because it's, yeah, it's coming up to Halloween.

I know that in the U. S. it's a big deal. In the U. K. it's not so much of a big deal, but we thought we'd make the effort anyway. But joining us there. Down there we got Wendy. How are you doing Wendy? She's on mute. I am

[00:04:46] Wendie Huis in t Veld: muted but good.

[00:04:49] Nathan Wrigley: How are you? You alright? Yeah, I'm all good. Let me introduce you properly.

Wendy is one of the lead organizers of WordCamp Europe 2024. We'll find out more about that in a little while. The team is already working on organizing the event and she is super excited and is happy to share where we are in the process, what we're focused on, what they're focused on, and also what the challenges are.

We will get to that. A little bit later, but thank you for joining us once again, Wendy. I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Fact, years and years ago both Wendy and I were in a program called WP Elevation and she was my accountability partner. Although what was that like? 10 years ago or something.

Yeah.

[00:05:28] Wendie Huis in t Veld: Something like that. We have, we go way back. Yeah, we

[00:05:31] Nathan Wrigley: do. That was, yeah, that was great. Wasn't it? And we're also joined by Roger. How are you doing, Roger? All good. Thank you for inviting me. You are so welcome, Roger. You join us, I think, is this the second or maybe third time? I can't remember. No, this is actually the first time.

[00:05:47] Roger Rosweide: Is it? We've spoken offline a couple of times, but never on

[00:05:50] Nathan Wrigley: the show. Yeah, there we go. Okay. Thank you. Roger is an agency turned WordPress product founder. The company that he works for, WildCloud, introduces the scalable infrastructure of SaaS to the WordPress community, enabling builders to compete with Shopify, Webflow, and Wix.

You're very modest there, Roger. You haven't actually named the company or told us much about it. Go on, quick. Elevator pitch. Tell us what it is. So

[00:06:17] Roger Rosweide: the company is called wildcloud. com and yeah, it's, we actually make it possible to build a single WordPress website. Once turn it into a product, sell that to your customers and basically improve all of your customers safely over time.

So we. Essentially make it possible to sell and maintain more websites with fewer people.

[00:06:41] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. I appreciate you joining us today for the first time. Apologies, but your face and everything about that whole background is really familiar. So just assumed that you'd been on the show. I make a lot of videos.

Okay. Last year at about this time last year, more or less to the day. Michelle didn't come on the screen, but she came on the show and then she clicked the turn the camera on button and I actually had a fit because she was dressed as me and it was really funny because I wasn't expecting it. The thing is, I don't know what she's doing this year.

So hold on. First of all, let me, I don't know if I can make you big. I think I can. Let's click that. Michelle. Shall I count you down? Three...

[00:07:28] Michelle Frechette: I can't hear all of a sudden right

[00:07:30] Nathan Wrigley: now, so hold on. Just do it whenever you like. Three, two, one. Go for it. Okay, here we go.

Wait, here's the mug. Is that actually on your face, or is that AI? It's

[00:07:49] Michelle Frechette: on my face.

[00:07:53] Nathan Wrigley: Let's just take that in for a minute. Some kind of dog with a hat, that says, this is fine on it. Got some kind of fire

ba What are you thinking? You've

[00:08:08] Michelle Frechette: got to explain it. You've never seen the meme with a dog sitting with a cup of coffee and the whole house is burning down around him and he says, this is fine.

[00:08:17] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. No, I haven't, but it's all the better for that. Honestly, you are priceless. Oh, that's brilliant.

This is the level that in the chat. I, oh I must look at the chat. I'll do that in a second. This is the level that I went to. I strung up about six skulls in the background, which is a half baked attempt at anything, frankly. Okay. Let's have a look in the live chat. There's quite a few. Yeah. Half baked

[00:08:42] Wendie Huis in t Veld: attempts.

We're in the Netherlands. I think Roger is also in the Netherlands. We don't, I don't think we do Halloween. Some of us do. Like for fun, but it's not really a thing.

[00:08:53] Nathan Wrigley: It's not really a thing in the UK either. But nevertheless, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna go for it because... We're gonna full Halloween today.

We're gonna go full Halloween. One of the things that I want to do, first of all, is this.

If anybody says anything funny, yeah, there's that. Or we might get this one. I like this one more.

Yeah, I like that. And if you do anything really brilliant, you'll get this.

And honestly, these are the depths to which I will sink. So that is the

[00:09:34] Wendie Huis in t Veld: life goal for today. Yeah, that's it. You gotta make us

[00:09:38] Nathan Wrigley: all laugh. Gotta make us all laugh. But yeah, anyway, so we'll have fun during this episode. Let's see if there's anybody joined us in the comments. There usually is, and usually some weather reports.

Rob Cairns joins us to say hi, thank you very much. I'm still looking at Michelle.

Good morning from Team WP Builds. Looking forward to a spooktacular show. Thank you. Mike, who is a bit of a regular these days, loving the spooky graphics. Thank you, Mike. It took me... Literally 12 seconds to put that together. I'm very proud of myself. Pecha says, wow, so many friends on the show today.

That's lovely. Mike Johnston says, I don't know how to pronounce that. Boatar from Lisbon. Apologies if I've butchered that. I think I probably have. Patrick, we're going to talk about you. He says, hi, Dave Gray joining us from the south of the UK. Testing the live chat. It works, Dave. I can confirm. Pecha says she's looking forward to Michelle's Halloween special.

There it is. You can see it now. I have no doubt there will be something. Can she shop the top last year as well? I think she can and I think she has. Hello from Sweden. Thank you very much for joining us. Manz, apologies Manz, I'm sure that little accent above the A probably means that it's not pronounced like that, but I apologize.

LeiaWP waiting for the reveal. Oh, I suspect that's already happened. And then loads of people laughing at the reveal. Peter Ingersoll who always joins us for the weather report. After a record setting high temperature on Saturday, the rains came in. It's currently 8 degrees centigrade. Nice. Same here, Peter.

He always joins us to give us the weather report. Aldermaston in the UK is fine today, and I think that's it. That's what we've got so

[00:11:21] Michelle Frechette: far. If you go to the private chat, I sent you a link that you can show the meme this goes with.

[00:11:26] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Alright, let me put that on the screen. Let's have a quick look at that.

If I can make do you know what? My Mac clipboard, I don't know if you get the same thing. My Mac clipboard is really temperamental at the moment. I updated. To the latest version of Mac OS a little while ago, and it really doesn't want to do anything to do with the clipboard, so I have to do everything With a keyboard, you know with the mouse.

Okay, here we go. Let's have a little look. Let's share it on the screen This is the thing this

Now I get it. Michelle, you're a wonder. Thank you so much. I'm sorry, I wasn't able to join in on the gag because I didn't actually know it. But yeah, I appreciate it. Now... I do. Okay, Michelle Frechette, we should introduce her. There she is, dressed as that meme. She's the Director of Community Engagement for Stellar WP at Liquid Web, and in addition to working at Stellar WP, Michelle is the podcast barista over at WP Coffee Talk.

She's the co founder of Omda Represented in Tech. Creator of WP Career Pages, President of the Board of Big Orange Heart, Director of Community Relations and Contributor at Post Status. She's an author, business coach, and a frequent organizer of WordCamp, sorry, WordPress events. She lives outside Rochester, New York, where she's an avid nature photographer.

She also likes memes, and you can find her at meetmichelle. online. Much as we love the silliness that comes with this, we are going to get to some actual WordPress stuff. I'm sure you'll be pleased to know. So here we go. Let's begin that journey. First of all, a little bit of self promotion. This is us, WP Builds.

com. You can see we are gratefully sponsored by GoDaddy Pro. Thank you to them for keeping the lights on over on this show and all the other shows that we do. I am very grateful to them indeed. The other thing to mention is this is a Silly Award that we are running. We don't make a dime out of it, it's all for the good of the WPCC, which is the WordPress Community Collective.

If you want to, I know it's that time of the year isn't it, there's loads of awards going on, so I thought let's do the antidote to those awards. You don't get to vote on anything, you essentially get to go here, each of these is a radio button that you can't switch off or can't switch on. So you have no choice you just go to the bottom and you cast your vote.

And in order to get your name on this illustrious list. You have to submit a receipt to me of 20 bucks minimum. for the WPCC, and in exchange for that, you will guarantee yourself a win on the most important award ceremony of the year, the WP Builds WordPress Awards, and we've got some stupidity going on.

The best WordPress blog, David McCann, funniest laybrack WordPresser is Chefro top taco tycoon of WordPress is Kyle Van Dusen, and the list goes on. Third coolest. Dave Smith in the WP Build WP community. There we go. And so if you want to do that, give them some money. WP Builds. com forward slash awards.

Do it, raise some money. It's for a good cause. We've got a couple of webinars going on at the moment. The first one is with Leo Lozovic. From Gato GraphQL. We're on the third episode, probably not this week. You're supposed to be on Wednesday, but it looks like he's out of action this week, but we'll carry that on.

That's at archives, demo archives. I'm also, I've started a new show with Sabrina Zidane all about speeding up your WordPress website. We did first episode, we did hero videos, second episode, lazy loaded images. Who knows what she's going to tell us this week, but that'll be on Thursday at. 3 p. m. U. K. time.

And finally, this is our Black Friday page. Sponsored by Gravity Forms and WSform. Look at that competition right at the top of the page right there. You can imagine those two fighting it out. But this is a searchable, filterable page of loads and loads of WordPress deals. You can go in and decide what it is that you want to look at.

And typically we get about 300... things on there by Black Friday. It's WP Builds. com forward slash black. Just head there, bookmark it, and we will have boatloads of deals by the turn of Black Friday. So yeah, enough promotion. Thank you. Let's go. Justin Tadlock on the Make WordPress Core blog this week had an article entitled what's new in Gutenberg 16.

9. And the answer is, there's a couple of nice new features. This one is my favorite and it sounds like it's Wendy's favorite as well. We'll go into a few of them a little bit later. But you have the capacity now, I'm going to turn that media, that annoying noise off because it's doing my head in. It whoo!

You can now rename almost all the blocks from the editor. There's a few exceptions. You can't rename core forward slash block. Template part, pattern or navigation. But basically now, if you want to go into the navigation and you want to give it a new name you can, it sounds like a trivial thing, but in my case where I'm creating paragraph after paragraph, it actually is going to be really nice to be able to rename these things.

So Wendy, when we were talking about the show before we press record, you thought this was nice. Why did you like this?

[00:16:40] Wendie Huis in t Veld: Yeah, for the same reason that you liked it. I work at Automatic. I do live chat support for WordPress. com and we often help users and they say I have this thing in my paragraph and it's really weird.

And then you open the page and they, like you have 70 paragraph blocks and then you have to find. the right one, which is, of course, doable, except in the list view which I use a lot, and having paragraphs or things have specific names makes it so much easier to use the list view also because I For me, the list view is so much easier in reorganizing different blocks.

But it is not if all your blocks have the same name. So that's why I

[00:17:25] Nathan Wrigley: Really like it. Yeah. Roger, when we, before we hit record you thought that you didn't say as much, but it sounded like you were surprised that both Wendy and I thought that was useful.

[00:17:36] Roger Rosweide: No, I was just jumping in and trying to figure out what it was about.

I think I fell into half the middle of a conversation, but exactly as you say, Wendy, this is. A common problem that I have with writing articles on our website. So I can't wait to use it really.

[00:17:52] Nathan Wrigley: I guess for me, it'll be most useful actually for parent items. So things like the group block where I want to say, for example, I don't know, this is the hero, this is the, I don't know, the testimonials section.

And it's at the top of the tree, so I can collapse everything underneath it. I know that. That's where I've got to find it at the moment. If I'm in a, if I'm in a block based page or post, I have to basically click on an item near to where I want to get to open up the inserter and then navigate with my eyes back to the parent.

In order to find it, whereas actually having it named would be great. Anybody listening to this this is so not going to happen, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Could we color code those as well? Can we have some kind of color taxonomy? So that all of my things can be like...

Purple or

[00:18:47] Michelle Frechette: something. I don't know if that dog has a name, so I'll just call it Michelle. Any

[00:18:51] Nathan Wrigley: thoughts on this one? Just this first little bit first. I think

[00:18:54] Michelle Frechette: it looks like a great idea. I like being able to find things because of something that makes sense in my own head versus somebody else's head.

[00:19:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah maybe that alone is all that is, all that's required.

Cause yeah, just having it as paragraph is no good. There's more though. Duplicate and rename patterns. That's gonna be really nice. That's one of the features that I make use of in the block editor all the time. Is saving away patterns and being able to duplicate them and rename them.

That's really nice. Do all that on the fly. You can delete pattern and rename pattern categories as well. I confess that's not a feature I've really made. A great deal of use of, but the idea that you can store, particular patterns away. I don't know, these are all heading patterns and these are all testimonial patterns or whatever it may be.

And then you can rename that is cool. And there's a bunch of other things as well. So for example, Gutenberg 16. 9 also introduces two new media categories. I don't know how these didn't make it thus far. But audio and video which kind of makes perfect sense, the idea that you can categorize those, that just seems really obvious.

There's a whole bunch of other really technical stuff further down. But we won't get into that, but that is WordPress 16. 9 as described by the somewhat awesome Justin Tadlock. If there's nothing else on that, we'll move on. Give us a. Give us a nod of the head. Yeah. Okay. Perfect. All right. In which case we will press forwards.

This is the the WordPress field guide. This, so this is for WordPress 6. 4. We can't be really far away. Just a matter of days now between, before WordPress six. What was that? Next week. Yeah. Really soon. Comes around. There's absolutely boatloads of work that's been done on it, you can see the statistics if you're looking at the page.

There's hundreds and hundreds of contributors, lots of bugs squashed and so on and so forth. But let's go into some of the things which are going to be coming your way. We have talked about quite a lot of this in the past, but this is quite exciting. WordPress 6. 4 introduces block. Hooks. This is on the make.

wordpress. org blog, I should say, which is a feature that provides an extensible mechanism to block themes. This is the first step in emulating WordPress's hooks. This is the concept that allows developers to extend classic themes using filters and actions. And I'm sure we've probably all made use of that, even if we haven't written the code for ourselves.

It also adds extenders so that you can register your own insert a media categories. We've just been talking about those admin notices are also getting it says here, two new functions, abstract HTML the maintenance burden. And here's the big bit encourage consistency. In admin notices, whether or not this will make it so that everybody adheres to those guidelines is yet to be seen, but hopefully the idea that would be some kind of admin notice consistency and new WordPress installs will now have this is.

Media uploaded in WordPress 6. 4. Now it does say here new WordPress installation. So I don't know if I need to imply that then is not for older installations. You will now not have an actual page created by default. Every time you upload a piece of media, I don't, for the life of me, know why this one hasn't gone away a long time ago, but now, you upload media, it will just be in the library, and you won't be able to find it elsewhere, presumably through the URL, and there is a boatload of performance improvements.

Again, the technical details are far too on interest. How we say they on a podcast like this, but there's loads. So anybody want to jump in on that? The things that I just mentioned

[00:22:42] Michelle Frechette: just a reminder that this has been from the all underrepresented gender squad and everybody in that team has been hard at work. I'm on the marketing team and had a little bit of Inputs here and there as far as what's going out publicly. I wrote one of the haiku, for example. It's exciting.

It's exciting whenever you get this close to publishing. There's always going to be a bug here or there that people are going to find and we're going to fix. And I don't know, it's just, it's exciting whenever these kinds of changes come around. And it's really exciting to have been part of the whole process.

[00:23:20] Nathan Wrigley: That's lovely. Ben Intel, the developer, one of them, the lead developer of Stackable. He's glad that we switched the noises off because he thought his tap was running. And then going back to something just a moment ago, Mark Westguard from WSForm. He says renaming blocks is huge.

Yeah, it's on the face of it doesn't seem like a big thing, but it really is a big thing. You've been able to do this in things like generate blocks for a little while now. So that option has become like muscle memory for me, but the idea that you can do it with core blocks is really great.

Anyway, sorry, Wendy, Roger, anything about 6. 4's field guide?

[00:23:57] Wendie Huis in t Veld: No, excited that it's coming also accessibility. I thought I saw there were quite a bunch of accessibility improvements, which is good thing because we can't have too many of those.

[00:24:13] Nathan Wrigley: No. So yeah, that's drilled down to the bottom there.

There is a boatload listed down here in terms of accessibility as well. So maybe the best thing is to go to that page and you'll see what's coming. Get yourself prepared. Cause it's quite a big release. Roger, should we move on?

[00:24:29] Roger Rosweide: Yeah, please do. As long as you're on the subject of sharing funny comments, I earlier read that LayerWP thinks that your witch sound sounds like his ex.

[00:24:41] Nathan Wrigley: Rather remarkable. Let's do some more of those just because it's funny. I have five to choose from. So you could, so this is sound number one. Tell me which your favorite is. So this is five witch sounds. Here's one. Okay. A little bit on the ground. Here's two. Okay,

here's four. Oh my. Yeah, it sounds painful. And here's five, my personal favourite. Layerswp, which one... No comment.

Is there anyone else in the audience? Yeah, thank you for the interesting

[00:25:29] Michelle Frechette: comment. I think that fourth one was from my first ex stepmother.

[00:25:33] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, here she comes.

[00:25:36] Michelle Frechette: Yeah, that sounds like her. It's

[00:25:37] Nathan Wrigley: hysterical, isn't it? They're out of the box. You've no idea, I spent about an hour this morning trying to find...

Sounds for Halloween. I thought it would be really easy in the open source, free to find. It's really not, there's hardly any.

[00:25:51] Wendie Huis in t Veld: What is what is the Halloween sound? Is it the weird laughter or is it the

[00:25:56] Nathan Wrigley: I went around and tried everything. So this, I Googled the word cackle, witch cackle. And that, that got me what I wanted, but there was, I'm so

[00:26:07] Wendie Huis in t Veld: glad my laugh is not in that list.

I'm going to mute myself every time

[00:26:14] Nathan Wrigley: I laugh. If anybody says something funny, I'm going to raise that. Third one says Ben. Okay.

I think Ben was saying it sounded most like somebody that he knows I'm not getting embroiled in there I feel the lawyers coming out. But here is Ben's ex

Okay, right no more of that Ben All right Here we go. Let's move on to the next story. Okay. So from frivolity to something entirely the opposite. So let's just calm it down a minute. If you were going to be attending the the Elementor event, it's called Dreamweb and it was event that we're going to be holding in a couple of days time in Berlin, Germany.

It was a live event. I'm imagining that if you didn't know, if I simply said that Elementor is a company. largely based out of Israel. I'm sure that paints enough of a picture for you to realize that there's probably enough going on elsewhere for the, for that event to take place. So they took the decision that event is going to be canceled indefinitely.

They've said that they will return when. Days of Karma, to paraphrase it, basically. But, when I was reading that article, obviously, I completely understood. If you were hoping to go, presumably, the communications have gone out from them and you've, you've cancelled your flights and your train journeys and whatever else it was.

But this was, this struck me, this, I almost thought this was a typo when I saw it. It says here, in 2022, Elementor hosted more than 400 meetup events. That's one point, what, like 1. 2 a day or something for the entirety of the year. And I really didn't know that Elementor was putting that much content out.

And I'm sure it was in the Elementor space, probably promoting their own business. Yeah, they have a

[00:28:14] Wendie Huis in t Veld: very active meetup community. They do elementary meetups. Yeah.

[00:28:20] Nathan Wrigley: That is just remarkable though, isn't it? More than one a day. I can't think of any. Mind you, I suppose they have the the reach with over 5 million.

Active installs when we were doing this show, like three or four years ago, we basically spoke about Elementor more or less constantly. I know that sort of died down a little bit as Gutenberg has gone up in popularity, but still pretty impressive. Bravo for running so many events, but also if you were thinking of going to that event and for some reason.

You didn't know about it. There you go. It has been cancelled for obvious reasons Asking you not to get into politics. Does anybody want to comment on that one?

[00:29:01] Roger Rosweide: It's a shame. I was looking forward to going to

[00:29:03] Nathan Wrigley: berlin . . Did you were gonna go in person, were you? Yeah, for sure. Oh, that is a shame.

Yeah. I guess hold the hold onto the ticket or something like that, because it does sound like they're intending to bring that back live. But I guess only time will tell how that actually pans out. Good luck. Anyway, elemental let's that you manage to revive that when times are, as you describe it, calmer.

Okay. If you if you like open source stuff and let's face it, who doesn't the state of open source, it's a survey. Honestly, if you're tuning into this podcast and you don't know that WordPress is open source, what the heck? But it's a piece of open source software, which means it's freely distributable.

You can copy it, make it your own. Fork it, all of that kind of stuff. But there's tons of open source stuff out there from operating systems to, I don't know like I've got a media player on my on my desktop here called VLC, which is open source, there's thousands and thousands of open source projects of which WordPress is one.

And there's a survey where nonprofits, really this survey is for people who have something open source y. But it's called the open source survey and it's out now. And if you have intuitions as to what you think open source should be doing in the future and what it's doing well and what it's not doing well you can click on the link into the show notes, which I'll do tomorrow, but it's the survey monkey.

com forward slash R forward slash open dash source dash initiative and run through that survey. I know that we only talk ever about WordPress, but obviously there's an awful lot of stuff. Going on in the background, probably a whole bunch of the stuff that we're running this software on is open source.

There's loads, so maybe go and fill that out again. I don't know if anybody wants to comment on that. If so, now's your chance.

[00:31:04] Michelle Frechette: I haven't had a chance to look at it yet, but I do hope that companies that are doing these kinds of surveys are really paying attention to what good survey. How to write a good survey.

For example, I love that we do this in WordPress every year, but the survey itself isn't necessarily, doesn't have all the right answers. So as somebody who works within another company, for example, sometimes I have to pick the closest thing, which isn't really what I do with WordPress kind of thing.

And how we use scale and things like that. So having a lot of background in survey design, I'm often. Disappointed in how surveys look. Hopefully this one is put together well.

[00:31:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I don't know if you guys use a lot of open source stuff, but I tend to go out of my way to find open source where I can.

I think in many situations I have to throw my hands up and say, actually, do you know what a proprietary paid for closed source version is better for what I need, but on the whole I do, I always exhaust the open source possibilities. First I, for many years I worked with Linux as my desktop operating system and then one too many tantrums, it was like, no today is the day that I start using Mac OS or something like that, which again is built on top of a boatload of open source stuff.

So Wendy, Roger, anything on that?

[00:32:34] Wendie Huis in t Veld: Yeah, sorry. No, please,

Wendy.

[00:32:39] Wendie Huis in t Veld: I used to work on Linux as well. And then again doing my best to find open source options, but it just exhausted me. So I'm now paying for I'm using a standard operating system and paying for most of the software. Also, I really like the idea of contributing to someone making stuff by paying with for my, for the things that I use.

Yeah, somehow my mind changed about using open source and especially the free part. I like the open source, but also I like paying the people that I use the stuff from, because contributing is not for everybody, and the people that do contribute... I'm a little bit distracted. My dad is here, and he is in my garden with a hedge trimmer, like this big, going around like this.

We can't hear it! Talking about

[00:33:40] Nathan Wrigley: Halloween! We can't hear it, but we can hear your dog.

My dad's here with a hedge trimmer. That's going to be the the title of this episode. Yeah. So Roger, you're a big user of open source stuff.

[00:33:55] Roger Rosweide: We use a Kubernetes, which is an orchestration tool to orchestrate cloud containers. So in that sense you could say our whole company is based on open source software either for orchestrating cloud containers, or we facilitate WordPress websites, obviously.

But in my personal life, I try to, but it's like you, at some point you've, you have to yield to whatever's helping you best. In a certain area and I use a Mac as well, so it's

[00:34:27] Nathan Wrigley: yeah I had to, I really had to convince myself to use a Mac, but it was, I think the straw that broke the camel's Mac, see what I did there was.

Trying to get things to print from my Ubuntu laptop and trying to find the, the right packages to install and then troubleshoot those. And I had a printer that was particularly wonky and man alive, I must have spent weeks trying to make things print. And I just thought this is getting ridiculous.

And so much as I love those projects, I think on the whole there for people who had more time around than I did, the advent of children in my life meant that Three days troubleshooting printers. That's a, that's not going to fly anymore. So yeah, I get it. When you're doing your Kubernetes containers, does that project deliver all the time?

Or do you have to constantly troubleshoot it in the same way that I did with my Ubuntu laptop and printers, or is it a rock solid, constantly updated project, which you never have to worry too much about. I'm

[00:35:37] Roger Rosweide: clearly not doing anything right

[00:35:38] Nathan Wrigley: now, so

[00:35:41] Roger Rosweide: it doesn't require constant attention. But also I'm not the one.

I've got much smarter, more brilliant co founders to handle that.

[00:35:50] Nathan Wrigley: Cause it is a lot, isn't it? Building your career on top of open source stuff, because you just don't really know when that's going to get updated and how frequently it will be. Yeah, I

[00:36:01] Roger Rosweide: suppose so. One of my co founders is on a beach in Thailand right now.

So clearly they've got a lot of confidence in the infrastructure.

[00:36:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. It's you've got to have the mobile phone though. Just in case something goes wrong, get off the beach. In Thailand, but we all do it. Don't we, if we're in, if we're watching the show, it's very likely that we've built at least some part of our business or life on top of WordPress, which is open source, but here we are talking about the great lengths that people go to, to improve it incrementally one bit at a time, it seems like you can, Bet your business on top of open source software.

And I want it to carry on and be available. So here we go. Look, the open source software, the state of it, the 2024 state of open source software survey. I have completed it, but it was a little while ago and I can't remember how long it took, but it's not very long. It won't take you long.

And it's basically check boxes and little fields to specify what you think. So go and fill that out and make sure that the entire. Open source community is getting some love. Peter is chiming in on Michelle's comment. He says that creating a good survey is both an art and a science and it's really hard.

It really is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then layer WP or Ben OS is the way, but sometimes you have to go paid for. It's a trade off, easy to use cost associated with. OS hosting, et cetera. Yeah. I just had a bee in my bonnet about using Ubuntu in this case, or a whole variety of different Linux distributions.

And really it got to the point where it was just not worth the time I was spending on it. And I still never seem to have too many problems with Mac OS. Once in a while I do, but. On the whole, it just works right. Moving on. Okay. We did my silly award at the beginning where you can nominate somebody for the WPCC contribution, but this is Bluehost one.

I think this is a little older than just recently, but I only caught sight of it this week, so I thought I'd mention it. They're on the hunt for 20 WordPress creators. Now I think that you can nominate yourself as well as other people, but basically they're looking to give away cash prizes. To 20 people in the WordPress space, you can submit your application here.

But what they're looking for, it says the Bluehost WordPress Creators Award is our way of recognizing and celebrating the best WordPress websites and their creators. Whether it's a website, blog, plugin, or theme. So it's pretty open. Could be almost anybody really, couldn't it? If it's WordPress, we want to see it.

[00:38:32] Wendie Huis in t Veld: And yeah, but podcasts are not in the list, so we can't nominate you.

[00:38:37] Nathan Wrigley: No, nobody listens to podcasts, Wendy. Oh no, I suspect I would get under the radar for that. I'm imagining that they would allow a podcast. Yeah, so could you all nominate me, please? I want to win this award because I want...

No, don't nominate me. The first place is 2, 000, second place is 1, 000, third place is 500. And then 14 other winners will receive 150 each. So I just thought, saw this as a nice opportunity to to get some recognition, if there's some project out there that you're particularly inspired by some developer, blog creator, writer, whatever it may be you can submit them to this.

And presumably the more people that submit the same name, the more time, they just jump up the tree and eventually somebody. We'll receive 2, 000. Yeah, go and nominate Nathan Wrigley somebody, whoever you like, Nathan Wrigley, the whole process.

What's what'd you mean? It's the whole process.

[00:39:41] Michelle Frechette: So it, we're anticipating there'll be many sites submitted. And then based on certain criteria, it'll be narrowed down. And then if you scroll down, there's a whole bunch of us on the jury and we'll actually be adjudicating the sites.

So it's not a popularity contest. It's not whoever gets nominated the most. We didn't have to zoom in, but

[00:40:04] Nathan Wrigley: I just wanted to draw attention to the fraudulent nature of this photograph. That's nothing. What you don't look at all like that. You've got this this bit above your lip is.

Significantly. Anyway,

[00:40:17] Michelle Frechette: a little different. You can't even see me smile in this costume. You look more like this, but I have been,

[00:40:23] Nathan Wrigley: but yeah, that's the same photo. I think that's the same photo. I've got it on your WP speakers card, which is lying on my desk here. Look, yeah, there you go. So you're one of the judges along with, it looks like about 20 other people.

Rob Cairns, who's in the comments. I

[00:40:36] Wendie Huis in t Veld: thought those were the people that were nominated. Yeah.

[00:40:39] Michelle Frechette: No, these are the.

[00:40:43] Wendie Huis in t Veld: But these are all cool people that should be nominated.

[00:40:45] Michelle Frechette: That's why we're on the jury. So that

[00:40:51] Nathan Wrigley: nice.

[00:40:53] Michelle Frechette: Put you in the jury and then you're out of the running. It's like all these years I've been organizing WordCamp US. So I can't submit myself as a speaker. But one of these years, I'm going to be like. No, I'm not going to organize. I'm just going to submit. This is the same idea, right?

You're a juror. You can't submit yourself.

[00:41:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. You get ruled out if you're on the jury. So you basically can't vote for any of those people, but there we go. Look, a whole host of very familiar names and faces there. These are the people that will make that decision. Go check it out. We'll be talking about James Giroux in just a moment, actually, but yeah, go check it out and you might make somebody very happy, suddenly waking up one morning and.

Realizing there's 2000 extra dollars in your bank account. It's great, isn't it?

[00:41:40] Wendie Huis in t Veld: Yes, I shared my halloween dad in the private chat

[00:41:44] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, what am I supposed to do? Want me to copy that and paste that in here? Look, you see i've got to do this horrible copy pasty thing like this Oh, you just took a photo of your dad.

[00:41:57] Wendie Huis in t Veld: And he's right here with his thing.

[00:42:01] Nathan Wrigley: I gotta say either right. And forgive me, either you have the most incredible noise suppression on your microphone or your dad's not actually doing a fat lot. Wendy. He's just out there going around. My house is very well isolated. Yeah, that's great.

Look, Wendy's dad on the show. You can show him, you can tell him. Tell him that later, I'm sure he'll be delighted. Yeah, so go and vote on the awards and see if you can get somebody to get a couple of grand in their pocket. That's a really nice. Yeah, that would be so nice. A really nice initiative. Okay, so I'll just let you know, it's called bluehostawards.

com They even got the domain. All right, here we go. Okay, this is the story that keeps on giving and it feels like it has finally come to what I think is a really nice outcome. Patrick Posner was in the comments a moment ago, I don't know if he still is. But this is the OLLI theme. I think, really, we've covered this probably on a weekly basis for the last month or so, which is highly unusual for a theme.

But OLLI, a block based theme, came out. I'll just give you a brief summary. Came out. And they had an onboarding wizard built into the theme. And some of the people on the theme review team objected and said, this is plugin territory. It gives you a bit of a commercial advantage, which other themes wouldn't necessarily have.

So they recommended it should be removed before inclusion in the repo. Some notable people. Came forward and said, actually, do you know what? We don't think the guidelines require that. And so that was the likes of Justin Tadlock and Josefa Hayden Champosi and even Matt Mullenweg chimed in and said, yeah, let it fly.

They didn't. In the end the two developers, Mike McAllister and Patrick have decided to ship their onboarding wizard. As a separate plugin, this then will hopefully at some point enable other theme developers to utilize that and build on top of it. But Sarah Gooding writing in the, this post on the WP town, it's called Oli dash plugin, so that's what it's called now available for Oli block theme.

She really seems to like it. She goes out of her way, I think, to essentially say she thinks it's a really nice idea. Get your set up with a block based theme. The time to get started is fairly long. And she says, this gets you. It gets you to the races much more quickly, especially for things like setting up the homepage and things like that.

So I will raise it onto the screen. You can see typically with the Ollie theme, it looks beautiful and it allows you to do things like choose your brand, create some pages, select a homepage, and then get your site launched. And yeah. Sarah seems to be a a real proponent of this. She seems to like it a lot.

So Bravo, Mr. Posner and Mr. McAllister. Well done again. Open up to the the panel, anything to add.

[00:44:53] Wendie Huis in t Veld: Yeah, I really like it too. I really like that they moved it to a plugin as well. Listening to the comments from the team review team. But one of the things that I run into in my work most is new users not knowing where to start.

And for them, this is like really helpful. WordPress. com has something similar, but to have it on the open source in a way that is available for everybody. I really like it. So well done.

[00:45:28] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. That was it. Yeah, great. There he is. He's still in the comments. He says, still here. And he, I don't know if he's saying thanks to me, possibly not.

I suspect he's saying thanks to Mike Johnson because Mike Johnston wrote just prior to that. I loaded the Oli theme and the dash plugin on a test site this week. It's a nice looking theme and the plugin is pretty slick. So my expectation is Patrick's probably answering to that. I don't know if you've I don't know if any of you three have actually tried to use a block based theme, but if you are, even if you're really into WordPress, it is not as straightforward as you would wish it to be.

There's a really a lot of pitfalls and a lot of little trip wires. And I suspect a lot of people who maybe Roger can talk about this. I don't know if this is the kind of client that they get. Maybe it's not, but I think a lot of churn happens at hosting companies. With things like this, you get there, you get set up, you start to create your website and you're quickly like, what the heck even is this?

Where are things? Where's the experience of getting me started? And yeah, so things like this make that process a whole ton easier. So Roger, maybe that's not your client at all. Actually, this

[00:46:38] Roger Rosweide: is one of the big pro this is one of the big problems that our company solves, and I'm very happy that. Patrick is actually launching some pretty cool stuff on our platform.

And Patrick, I know you're still in the comments. We didn't specifically discuss. The OLLI WildCloud SaaS but I know it's something that we discussed in the past. And I, this is one of the things that lends that provides more versatility to how people get started. So maybe to give a bit more context, what our customers typically do is they sell prebuilt managed websites.

So instead of getting on a hosting provider and then having to set up everything yourself, and even if you had such a delivery service, then you still have to manage it all yourself. and figure it out. That's something that we completely take away because the agency can basically manage all of the sites from a single source.

And the thing that Patrick is doing on the platform right now is nothing even remotely similar to what I've just said. He uses it to, to facilitate a website called web to zip, which is so very interesting. But the idea of having a prebuilt managed website typically means that you focus on a specific use case and solve a problem for a very particular niche.

And although you usually can offer multiple design templates for your customers. It usually doesn't really do much configuration. That's often part of an, of a setup service, but a tool such as the Oli WP plugin guides you through the process. So it not only gives you something

[00:48:14] Nathan Wrigley: that you've already bought prebuilt.

[00:48:18] Roger Rosweide: It even helps you familiarize with what you've actually purchased. So I love it. I think Patrick is doing very cool,

[00:48:24] Nathan Wrigley: cool. Yeah. It sounds like there could be a lot of synchronicity between what he's doing and what you offer because any client, even if you've paid in, as you've described you've.

Created a template of a site and then you sell that onto the clients. And so they know what they're getting. Let's imagine it's a, I don't know, a real estate site or something like that. And they got that website on the click of a button. Still some kind of onboarding is cool. And so I don't know exactly what the remit of that will be, but Patrick's here, he's still in the comments.

He says, we will also have the plugin in the plugin repository. And so obviously Roger, there's all of what comes with that statement, you but the queue, the recent queue, it will take a couple of months. Yeah. We're still in that phase, even though the theme review team have had loads of process updates and some new staff coming on board.

They, whoops, they, yeah, there's still a massive queue. So you never know Roger. Maybe you should take this offline with Patrick and I'm actually I've already made a note of it. Yeah, great. Okay, so Patrick, you can expect Roger in about I would say, in about 38 minutes or something to set you up when we end, Ben layer WP, it could be straightforward.

And what Ollie has done is a step in the right direction. I entirely agree and then Patrick's back You know, it's so nice when you feature something on this show and the person who's making it is in the Because it just, it's Oh, great. You just get it right from the horse's mouth. Imagine your WordPress journey starts with just the domain.

You don't even need a hosting company to get started. Add your domain, start the onboarding. You have a WP site in a couple of minutes. Brilliant. Okay. Michelle, is everything all right? You disappeared for a moment there. I don't know if that was it. Yeah,

[00:50:19] Michelle Frechette: I had an internet issue. I rebooted my computer.

Everything seems to be fine now. Yeah, we're back.

[00:50:24] Wendie Huis in t Veld: Good, good. The sign says she's fine. It's fine.

[00:50:29] Nathan Wrigley: This is fine, everything's fine. This is fine, yeah, it's all good. It's totally fine. No, that was me pressing the wrong button. I actually meant to press this button to make that comment go away, Press the button to make Michelle go away.

Sorry about that. Let's put the next piece up. That was on WP Tavern, by the way. This is somebody else who's often on the show. He's often a guest, but he's often also in the chat. I haven't seen him today. This is Marcus Burnett from GoDaddy. And he's come up with a really neat idea, I think. Cast your mind back, probably three weeks ago, we had the WordPress drama where...

Suddenly, out of nowhere, in the WordPress plugin repository, a button appeared. And that button allowed you to view the plugin that you were currently inspecting in Playground, which is a browser based version of WordPress. How that works, God only knows. But it does work. But for many theme developers, sorry, plugin developers, they had objections because they didn't ask for it to be done in that way.

And in some cases, the plugin simply wouldn't work because of things like, oh, I don't know, dependencies. Let's say you've got a WooCommerce extension. Plug Playground's not going to install WooCommerce for you. So that plugin won't. Work and it will look like your plugin is at fault. So Marcus has come up with what I consider to be the perfect answer to this problem.

The perfect antidote. He's basically saying, can we please bring it back? But with two caveats, the first one is you have to opt into it. And the way you would opt into that is by declaring this in your in the file that comes along with your plugin. And you would simply declare playground. To be true.

Let's zoom in on that. You can see it there. Playground colon true. If you don't want to do that because you don't really want to use playground because you've got a far more elaborate version elsewhere that really demos exactly what your plugin does. What about this instead? What about being able to create a URL, a demo URI with with the URL listed?

If you don't fill out either of those, there's no bottom. If you fill out playground is true, you get the playground button. And if you fill out the demo URI, it sends you off to your own version of the plugin, where you can install whatever it is that you want to install and make it work. This just seems like the perfect answer.

Maybe you're going to shoot me down, but what do you think?

[00:53:04] Michelle Frechette: I like it a whole lot better than having it automatically do that. So many plugins. Require so many settings to be able to get it to look like what you want it to look like that. And also, that sometimes the free plug in the repo builds on something that already needs to be installed, right?

So having those things auto play didn't make a lot of sense because somebody could be easily be dissuaded to use your plug in if it didn't look like what they expected because of all those, settings and things that prerequisites that need to be in place for it to do what it's supposed to do.

And so I think having an opt in makes a lot of sense or put or a demo site makes a lot of sense, both of them actually look really good as the options. I

[00:53:47] Nathan Wrigley: think so. It seems to satisfy everybody's needs, really. Wendy, Roger, anything? Totally agree. Yeah.

[00:53:55] Roger Rosweide: Nice. I thought it was astounding in the first place that this was.

Something that was available for all plugins, especially with the dependencies is just such bad UX.

[00:54:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it was a bit of a blunder, wasn't it? And I think the the person who was in charge of pushing that live on the repo Has subsequently said, yeah, I get it. On with hindsight, it probably wasn't the right thing to do, but I think probably on the things that they had tested, it seemed like the right, it seemed like a reasonable thing to do, but obviously as we know, with 60, 000 plus plugins in the repository, as there's going to be some of those that simply don't work.

So yeah. We have it sorted now, I think. Let's see if that gets implemented. So that was on the make dot track dot wordpress. org. That's a lot of dots. And it's ticket number seven, three Oh seven. So you can go and check that out and you can, give some commentary on that, like a lot of people have.

Okay. Moving on. This is okay. So first off, I have to say my accessibility chops are probably not what they should be. I think everybody. Would obviously like everything to be accessible all the time. But this is a post which tries to address one thing on the internet, which is a problem for accessibility.

And that is accordions. And I cannot say whether this is working or not, but I just saw it. So I thought I'd mention it. That's part of what I do. This is Taylor Arndt, and it's on it's on Mastodon. And Taylor is linking to a GitHub sorry, it's not GitHub, it's a Gumroad plug in sales site. But it does appear that you can get it for, let's see if that's acceptable, I don't know.

There's a fair price thing for it, but it's called WP Accessible FAQ. And what it will spit out is basically this. So it is an accordion and the claim from Taylor, at least anyway, and as I said, I can't honestly say that I've tested it. Is that, that what, what has been built is an accessibility.

Compliant accordion. So I just wanted to give that a bit of a mention. And I know that Michelle is big into this topic. We probably all are, but I just happen to know that Michelle is. So what are your thoughts on this?

[00:56:19] Michelle Frechette: I, if it works like it says it does, I think it's fantastic. I think accordions are one of the things that are hard to get right with accessibility.

And so if this if the screen reader reads this properly and inspires you to open and continue to read. And it works exactly like it should, then it's just, it seems like a no brainer.

[00:56:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Like I said, I don't know if it does actually fulfill all of the obligations, but Taylor certainly seems to think that it does.

So I will link to it in the show notes. Wendy, Roger, anything to add there?

[00:56:56] Wendie Huis in t Veld: No, nothing to add. I just have one thing. How much time do you spend searching all these things? Because you have a massive list of things.

[00:57:05] Nathan Wrigley: They come to me mostly. They come to you? I I bring them in from the ether. I have a cauldron.

You heard it earlier, actually. And at the beginning, on a Friday night, I just add in some WordPress spice and out they come. No, the truth is I have a giant RSS feed. It's truly overwhelming. I open it up on a Friday morning getting things ready for the... For you guys to read the show notes at Friday at some point.

And I probably go through anecdotally about three or 400 articles. Yeah, but I don't read them all. Like anything that starts with a number. I ignore. So 10 best things to, nah, that's, that all gets cut out. But then just things which

[00:57:54] Wendie Huis in t Veld: So all the posts, we wrote about 10 cool things about Nathan Wrigley and 10 reasons.

[00:57:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, but we all know that's a lie anyway, but but yeah, so all of that. But also what I do, I've got this process of during my browsing during the week, I've got all these browser extensions where I just click a button if something interests me. And it just drops into the queue for this show. So there's a bit of a process going on, but yeah I read, I do read a lot and whittle it down.

Because that

[00:58:24] Wendie Huis in t Veld: would mean we don't have to search the entire internet.

[00:58:27] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. Yeah. The problem is you've got to be aligned with what I think. That's the only problem there. There's an audience for that kind of thing, but yeah. So anyway, Taylor, thank you. Let's make the assumption that Taylor's done a cracking job there.

Taylor

[00:58:43] Michelle Frechette: is a blind creator, is a and so is where this was, you could see where it was in, in action on the previous slide. Thank you. Our previous tab [email protected] slash FAQ test. So I'm going to assume if two blind people are. Working together on this, that it's probably pretty

[00:59:03] Nathan Wrigley: accessible.

That's, do you know what? That's fascinating. I didn't even read the URL, but you are quite right. The the URL for this is blindcopywriter. com forward slash FAQ hyphen test. And that's Alicia Geary. That's really interesting. Okay, maybe. Now that this has now that this has arisen, we'll get somebody to have a look at it and we can assess whether it's good, bad, or ugly.

My intuition is, it's definitely worth a look. So maybe go and have a quick look. Whilst we're on the subject of plugins, I thought I'd mention a few things which have come along in terms of deals. Obviously it's Black Friday, we mentioned that with my Black Friday page, but here's a couple of things.

We mentioned them a few weeks ago. If you are, if you need to do bookings there's a new player in town. It's a WordPress plugin. So typically, Calendly and things like that are a SaaS platform. You can obviously do all of this in WordPress and Fluent Booking. So that's the company behind Fluent Forms and a variety of other projects called WP Manage Ninja.

They've just recently introduced their plugin and it is currently on a lifetime deal. So if that kind of thing piques your interest, you can get in with early pricing. I think it's fairly feature rich. There's a few bits and pieces. Which are not quite there yet, but if anything if there are other products or anything to go by, they have, they will have a fairly aggressive roadmap for that also Presto player, which is a way of skinning.

A video, like a video from YouTube or Vimeo you can add playlists and things like that. So the really nice experience, you can add things onto the top of the video and what happens when the video finishes rather than showing you a bunch of YouTube ads. That's also on a lifetime deal. Let's just have a quick look.

It's 299 for 25 sites. So again, if you making a lot of video content that might be for you. And then these things popped up on AppSumo for me this week, please. Don't take these as a recommendation because I've never used them. But bit integration purports to be something a bit like Zapier for WordPress, bit like WP Fusion, something like that.

So there's that bit integrations. You can find it on AppSumo. Then there's this one, which I thought was curious if like me, you create create lots of blog posts, but then never go back and do the internal linking so that the SEO improves. This apparently will do a lot of that work for you.

It'll consume your entire website and then figure out where backlinks could work. The words AI probably come to mind. Oh yeah. Look, AI powered internal link builder. You can't have a product these days without AI. Can you frankly, we have AI cat food. We don't, I made that up, but we probably could have. Squirly SEO is another one.

This is an SEO, this is an SEO plugin which will try to tell you what to do as opposed to the incumbents which all, you fill it out and then it gives you a, gives you an appraisal, red, green sorry, red, orange, green, and that kind of thing. The idea here is that it just scrapes your sight and tells you what you should do without you having to think.

So again, It's AI but yeah anything you want to add to those? Probably not. Okay. Let's go back to the tavern. I don't know enough about WordPress security, but I do know something that's worth mentioning when I see it. 4 million websites is a lot. And so this week I think it was WordFence that spotted this one.

The light speed cache plugin has an XSS cross site scripting vulnerability. I am not going to try and describe the ins and outs of it, but basically if you have light speed. Cache plugin installed. There is there has been a problem with it. Insufficient sanitization and output escaping on user supplied attributes.

Write that on a postcard and send it to your grandmother. Yeah, so basically, caveat emptor, if you've got this plugin, go and update it because that would be important. I don't suppose you three have got anything to add to that. You never know, one of you might be a full on security expert, a nerd out on that.

Or not. No more than that. Yes, at this point I should have a, like a tumbleweed sound, like a... Yeah. Okay, let us move on. Okay, this one really interesting because I know a lot of people use... Cloudways as their hosting provider of choice. It's now owned by DigitalOcean, I think. Oh yeah, look, the logo even says it.

DigitalOcean are running Cloudways. They've collaborated with PatchStack. And if you're in the WordPress space, you'll come across them. They're a WordPress security company, so they deal with the kind of thing that we've just been talking about. And yeah, they are thrilled to announce, I quote, the Cloudways Vulnerability Scanner.

To enhance your cloudways experience. It's powered. By patch stack, it feels on the face of it as if basically the collaboration is cloudways have put patch stacks tech inside of your cloudways control panel and it will give you the usual bits and pieces, telling you if you've got an update for plugins that are required, telling you if there are things which have been, recently flagged by their security team and so on and so forth.

But it's just really the monumental size of these two Yeah. Big players, PatchStack really growing at an incredible rate, as far as I can tell. And Cloudways seems like a kind of a bit of a match made in heaven. I'll bet Roger is going to want to say something about these. At least I hope he will.

[01:04:46] Roger Rosweide: Coincidentally, I just had a meeting with Oliver, the owner of PatchStack.

Silt, yeah. Just a few hours ago. And they've grown to 20 people in size. And he's actually showed me this integration last week. And it's not just a, an amazing add on for cloudways to have, it's also something that will propel the growth of patchtech to another level because it's basically just an inbound lead magnet, right?

Because you're clicking on it. It will guide you to, to a patchtech page, which will update you on whatever they've just communicated through your admin on your cloudways account. And it'll, convince you why you should also work with patch tech directly. So it's I think it's an amazing improvement for cloudways and it's a great tool for a patch tech to to

[01:05:38] Nathan Wrigley: grow even more.

It's a nice sweet spot for them, isn't it? Because I obviously, if you can, if you've really got no interest in that, if you can't opt out of those notifications, that would be a bit of an annoyance, if you've got something else figured out, but not. I can't see how anybody would be annoyed if some security company comes along and says, do you know what?

There's three things on your website which we absolutely know need attention. Click on this link and we'll tell you more about them. It's just a perfect win, isn't it? Cloudways win because they're adding something for nothing. Patchstack win because they get a whole load of, I'm suspecting it'll be a whole load of new traffic.

It's a flood wave, I'm sure. Yeah, and it's very

[01:06:24] Roger Rosweide: unintrusive as well. It's just a, it's just an icon in your account. So yeah it's, I've seen it. It's very it's just very helpful

[01:06:34] Nathan Wrigley: to have. Yeah. It doesn't look like that.

This is more an advice based collaboration. So PatchDeck are just telling you that there are things which are. And they make this point, you get 48 hours where they will say they will give you that little headstart before it's released into the public domain. So for things which are about to be released, it looks like patch stack will give you at least 48 hours to be ahead of that.

And obviously, barring the weekend and things like that shouldn't give you enough time to. Update your sites. So another nice collaboration, many difficult conversations

[01:07:15] Roger Rosweide: with

[01:07:15] Nathan Wrigley: customers with clients. Exactly. Good point.

[01:07:19] Michelle Frechette: Solid WP was previously iThemes and iThemes Security. Solid WP. Security Pro is also recently joined with PatchStack.

And so PatchStack is part of iThemes Security Pro, putting in that firewall layer when you're using what was previously iThemes Security, which is now SolidWP. So I think it's exciting that PatchStack is doing some amazing things and working with some amazing companies to make sure that our sites are well protected.

And patched before we even know there is a vulnerability.

[01:07:49] Nathan Wrigley: I think that's the sort of, that's really the kind of reason I was saying that patch decks seem to be growing at a really good rate. They seem to have, recently, so you're mentioning SolidWP, a. k. a. WOS i themed security. Now SolidWP. The partnership with them is, makes, That whole patch deck side of things really credible now you got cloudways that makes that whole side of things really credible But I guess the interesting thing here for patch deck is that it's the digital ocean space Or rather cloudways space.

I don't suppose the confines of WordPress are they say presumably they can you know? Reach a much bigger audience because you don't have to WordPress in order to be on their platform. I think I heard a dog, but I could be wrong. Is it your dog? It's Michelle. Oh,

sorry, Michelle. That goes two ways. That goes two ways.

[01:08:48] Michelle Frechette: I saw the mailman go by.

[01:08:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Went and bit his leg. Wendy, we have to have the dog on the screen. I'm sorry. It's not acceptable to have a barky dog that we don't get to see. Let me get it. I actually

[01:09:09] Wendie Huis in t Veld: have two. Oh.

I

[01:09:13] Michelle Frechette: think Jesse's put a sign on the front door, thinking we're

[01:09:19] Nathan Wrigley: a dog.

Michelle, whatever you're saying, that Barky dog is totally, no. It's, look there they go. We got to see them for a

[01:09:29] Michelle Frechette: brief moment. I saw

[01:09:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yorkie, I think. This episode is going to be now called Barky Dog. For the dogs. I think Barky Dog, or this is, oh look, one in each arm.

[01:09:41] Wendie Huis in t Veld: There's one and there's one. Two tiny little dogs.

And there's my ghost dad.

[01:09:49] Nathan Wrigley: They belong on the script. That's so lovely. Thank you. Hi. Hi dad. There's dad. The hedge car. Brilliant. This show never gets derailed, does it? Not ever. It never goes off the At all. Okay. Let's get back to the sort of WordPressy stuff. Okay. This is not really WordPress at all, but it's very adjacent to WordPress.

And I think for me, at least anyway, this is quite nice news. So this came on the Matt blog, ma. tt. So this is Matt Mullenweg's personal blog. And it is to announce that. Automatic have a purchased an app called texts. So five letters T E X T S dot com. Goodness only knows what that domain alone would have been worth, but they've bought the SAS app for, I think the total was, you can correct me if I'm wrong, was it 50 million us dollars?

I think something like that. The intention is to be able to consume all of your. Messaging services and have them in one interface. And I've got to say that this, I actually think this is a genuine problem. Which somebody needed to solve, and I didn't realize texts had done it. I'm a member of various local societies where I live.

One of them uses WhatsApp. Another one uses Facebook Messenger. I prefer to use Signal for everything. Then you've got Text Message. Then you've got Slack. And you've got LinkedIn. And you've got, Facebook Normal. There, it's back. The dog is back. Wendy, I'm going to mute you whilst the dog is there briefly.

Hold on. How do I mute you? I don't know how I mute you. If you mute you, that was already muted. That's great. Thank you. And it consumes all of those into one feed. So yeah, 50 million. I think this is great. I would love it if somebody solves that problem. So let me just go through onto the page and you can see what it is that they're claiming to do.

Do I don't know if you can see the logos at the bottom there, but we've got Telegram, WhatsApp, Apple, I guess that's iMessage, Discord, LinkedIn, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Slack, Instagram. There's probably more. Oh yeah, there we go. Which ones did I make? Oh Twitter. I wonder if Elon is going to allow this.

But Twitter apparently is in there as well. Plus all the other ones that they said. And the idea is that just consumes it all into one. Single feed. And I love that it's automatic. That's bought this because my impression, at least anyway, is that the products that they've bought in the past, they have not destroyed they've done a good job and I just have this intuition that they're to be trusted.

I don't know if you guys have any thoughts on this, but I think it's a real problem being solved. It's great. So

[01:12:47] Roger Rosweide: can you also, wait, hold on. So I was wondering if you're, so it now also includes the encryption. So you're basically getting signal level encryption, but you're probably texting people on WhatsApp.

Is

[01:13:03] Nathan Wrigley: that how it works? Because that would be... I really don't know because yeah, the encryption level on each of these, you would imagine there is a different thing going on. So I... Don't really know. I'll just read, they make this bold claim at the top. So presumably this website existed before automatic acquired it.

I don't know. At the masthead of the website, it does say it's part of automatic. So maybe they've updated this website, but it, it might've been around for ages. It says your message never touch texts, servers. So there's that they're encrypted and sent directly to the messaging platforms.

Texts makes money. So the company texts makes money through a monthly subscription, not through your data. So I would happily pay for this if it turned out that everything that they said previously was true. I'm not going to pay like 80 a month or anything like that, but I would happily pay to have all of that, just one app.

And then of course they've got AI. Because, you've got to have of course but then they, yeah, they combine it all into one inbox and I don't know if there's a Mac app and a desktop app for windows and all of that kind of stuff, but genuinely it just, it does frustrate me that the world is in different little ecosystems and we can't communicate with each other.

So as a perfect example, my child goes to a club and they only communicate through Facebook, what's it called? WhatsApp. I don't really want WhatsApp on my phone, but I have to have it if I want my son to be getting regular updates and things like that. So this hopefully would solve those problems.

Anyway, I've talked too much. Wendy. Yeah, I have

[01:14:43] Wendie Huis in t Veld: it.

[01:14:44] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, good. Yes. And what's it like? Why? Why do you have it, Wendy? Tell us why you got it first.

[01:14:52] Wendie Huis in t Veld: I work at Automattic, so I tested it.

[01:14:55] Nathan Wrigley: Did you did you know this was coming then? Is this something that's been in the pipeline for a while?

[01:15:01] Wendie Huis in t Veld: I did not until it was announced that we can download it and test it which is what I did.

And

[01:15:12] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, I it work at all. Everything is

[01:15:15] Wendie Huis in t Veld: is lie. I thought it. It works. It works. It does what it says it does. I thought I would love it, but, I now found out I like my things in little departments, so I uninstalled it. Also, it's not working on a phone. For me, a phone might be an interesting thing where it could work, but on my desktop everything is super organized.

Every little silo is in its own silo. And I thought it would be nice to have everything in one thing. And it didn't work for me at all. I really liked it. In different parts of the Wendy computer ecosystem.

[01:16:00] Nathan Wrigley: I'm hoping this is open source because I'm going to download it and fork it and then redistribute the platform as 19 different apps, one for each of the services that you can use.

So I'm going to have a WhatsApp add on a Slack, a Facebook messenger, and they'll all open in a completely separate window and you'll be right back where you started. Wendy,

[01:16:20] Wendie Huis in t Veld: yeah, the thing is maybe I didn't work it out correctly because I have different I have, I am very active.

I'm a very active muter. I have different settings for muting different things at different times and that was missing.

[01:16:41] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Okay. So it doesn't combat that problem of like notifications and overload of stuff that you don't want at different times of day. Okay, that's interesting. Maybe these features will come.

Oh, maybe I didn't,

[01:16:51] Wendie Huis in t Veld: I didn't look because with testing new things, I'm like, ooh, cool, new thing. If it doesn't work within two minutes, I'm like, yeah, no, tell me later how to do it.

[01:17:05] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, now the episode is going to be called cool new thing. Yeah, I get it though. Because I dislike. Or the mess that it creates in my life.

I hadn't really thought about your use case, but if you wanna switch off, let's say messenger, I don't know, five o'clock is the deadline and it comes back on at nine in the morning. 'cause MES Messenger is the thing that you use for work. Say, yeah, that, that kind of makes sense for me. It's just the frustration of.

I think, really, it's the frustration of giving everything to Facebook. In the UK this week the, there's this whole thing still in the press at the moment about things like Brexit and what was said by whom and when and whether there was collusion from different parts of the world. And it turns out that most of the communication about the whole Brexit thing amongst the people making the decisions was done on...

WhatsApp. And I just think that's so weird that we would be using a Facebook product to make decisions about key parts of British politics. But anyway.

[01:18:09] Roger Rosweide: Yeah. If that's any, I may not, maybe I shouldn't be saying this, but if that's anything like how it works in the Netherlands, it's because anything that you email to each other is automatically documented.

So all of the rumors, all of the chit chat, all of the work that's done before they are ready to formalize anything in like an official document. And that includes any email they'll discuss

[01:18:40] Nathan Wrigley: it on WhatsApp. Okay. So it's like a, it's a legit SMS, like a legit way of Of saying something that you know you that can't be on encrypted so you can do it's like a back channel.

And the problem like a back channel. Yeah, the problem that we have here is that the it would appear that almost everybody who did use WhatsApp has now deleted. Their trove of messages. And so when the when the authorities come to them and say, okay, tell us what was in the, what the contents of your messages was, they can simply say it's all gone.

It was deleted. I delete things. We have a similar problem. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So this won't solve any of that, but at least it'll, at least it'll put it into one place. And yeah, anyway, there we go. I just say,

[01:19:25] Wendie Huis in t Veld: I have one thing to add, because I'm not saying that it's not a good thing. But, I only use browser things for everything.

So I'm not using apps, so that might have tricked it that might have jinxed it as well a little bit because I'm so used to doing the thing that I'm doing, that.

[01:19:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So well let her give it a go. Yeah, give it a go. I won't say that Wendy's got invites, but Wendy's got invites. That's all.

I'm not saying I give it a try. Yeah. . So anyway, there we go. That's a new acquisition. Yeah, I got a couple of invites. She's got a couple of invites, so act quickly if you fancy that. Okay. Last couple of things. Oh, by the way, I tried to sign up and I got on the wait list. So it looks like that's the process at the moment.

We're very short of time. So I'm going to, okay. Very quickly, I'm going to mention this and then you can go and find it out for yourself. Halloween is not a big deal in the UK not really, not to the scale it is in the US, where it almost feels like Halloween is on par with Christmas in terms of the engagement and the public messaging and the sort of spirit in which everybody enters into it.

In the UK, it's basically small children and... People like me with nothing else to do with their lives apart from create orange backgrounds and cackling sounds on their live webinars. But it turns out that apparently the whole thing started in Ireland and was taken over from Ireland. To North America.

So if you have an Irish passport, you can you can claim ownership of the whole Halloween tradition. And so I'm going to link to that blog. Can I share an invite? Look, Wendy, you got it coming in already.

Yeah.

[01:21:19] Wendie Huis in t Veld: Send me a DM on Twitter and I will, I

[01:21:22] Nathan Wrigley: will send you. There you go. Thank you. Anyway. So if you've got an Irish passport, this is the deal. Now, this is my favorite story. Of all time

Michelle can I just say do that laugh again?

Oh god this is so great. Can you imagine? Being present at this place, nothing to do with WordPress. But Wendy supplied us with this story. So I feel Wendy should introduce it. It's great. Sorry, I apologize. It was Michelle. It wasn't. If you scroll

[01:22:07] Michelle Frechette: down, there's a video. I

[01:22:09] Nathan Wrigley: don't know if you can we, dare we?

So you can actually see it. Is there a video or is my ad blocker stopping it? Oh, it might be

[01:22:17] Michelle Frechette: stopping it. There

[01:22:17] Nathan Wrigley: was a video. Let me just turn off the ad blockers. Hold on. Let's just refresh. See if there's a video. Reject all. Go on. No, I've got more ad blockers.

[01:22:26] Michelle Frechette: It's in that tweet. That tweet right there.

That's not showing up. Right there. This one?

[01:22:31] Nathan Wrigley: If Elon Musk has got anything to do with that, I won't even be able to see that. Okay. Oh!

[01:22:37] Michelle Frechette: And it wasn't just a trickle, it's actually hundreds of thousands of gallons. Oh wow. Of port wine. Just flow, literally flowing through the streets of Florida.

I just went in search of weird stories and found this one. It was about a month ago, but. I had missed it at that point and I just want to know, I don't think Bob WP is like watching right now, but if he were, I just want to know if he went down there with his like, Tupperware containers and just started.

[01:23:08] Wendie Huis in t Veld: It

[01:23:11] Nathan Wrigley: is interesting. I was having a communication with Bob on the same day that this this thing happened on probably some messaging platform and the conversation did get progressively more. Difficult to understand. So apparently, I suspect He's just out there

[01:23:26] Michelle Frechette: bringing them samples.

[01:23:27] Nathan Wrigley: Look at that!

That's a full on deluge of booze! It is! That's hysterical! It is an absolute river. I honestly of wine. I honestly thought it was When we saw this video, It was gonna be like a little bit of a trickle. That is a full No. On It

[01:23:42] Roger Rosweide: sounds It looks like it's all the wine in Portugal.

[01:23:46] Michelle Frechette: It does. Mike Johnson said people all over Portugal were crying, which I can imagine because I can't even imagine how much money's worth of wine that was, but it says towards the top somewhere about how, like how big the storage containers were.

I just don't remember. There you go. 2. 2 million liters of wine.

[01:24:05] Nathan Wrigley: So for those of us in the, those of us in Europe using metric 2. 2 million.

2. 2 million liters of wine, which is 581, 000 gallons poured down this street and straight into the seriously, though, that street that we were looking at on that video is by the way, still go on. It was 58 seconds long. It's a full on torrent. This has to end up in a water course somewhere. Somewhere there are some very merry fish.

Just

[01:24:48] Wendie Huis in t Veld: having a

[01:24:48] Michelle Frechette: great time. Unfortunately, they're There are probably some very happy bees, because bees will drink things that are fermented and then have a little fun time flying away. I don't think the pitch would survive.

[01:25:03] Nathan Wrigley: Peach Neri says it's a full on tragedy. Isn't it funny? We all watched this and all of us exclaimed quite a lot of shock.

It's the idea of such... We know that if you put that in a bottle, it's gonna cost you quite a lot of money. But there it all is, just... Can you imagine

[01:25:18] Michelle Frechette: how much, how amazing it would smell, though? To be walking down the street and just smell that wine?

[01:25:23] Nathan Wrigley: My favorite story, like I say, of all time. The teacher continues...

The teacher continues to say, I come from a winemaking family, and this is truly shaking me to my core. Yeah. Yeah, oh boy. What we will find out, and it'll be hysterical, next week we'll find out it's deepfake. And it was just rainwater that somebody with an AI made red and sucked us all in with their story.

That is it. That's all we've got time for. However, not quite. Because at the end of this show, we always do this somewhat humiliating we do this sort of hand wavy thing. But, honestly, if I can make you more humiliated, I will do it. And today... Ha! So what we have to do is we have to line our bodies up so that it goes...

Oh, the dogs don't like it! Okay, here we go. Raise your hands. Make sure that the hand doesn't go in front of the pumpkin there. Oh, look, Roger's even holding his up. Oh, I love it. Totally perfect. The most humiliated you have been in your lives. I fully appreciate the fact that you

[01:26:35] Wendie Huis in t Veld: worked on this. If only, Nathan, if only this was the most humiliating thing.

I must

[01:26:40] Nathan Wrigley: try harder. I really must. That was episode number 273 of this week in WordPress. It goes without saying, I'd like to thank Wendy. I'd like to thank Roger. Hopefully they'll come back on the show. They'll really appreciate it if you did, but also, going to the next level, there's Michelle Frechette with her.

That is

[01:27:00] Wendie Huis in t Veld: the goal. That is,

[01:27:02] Nathan Wrigley: oh yeah, that's the level. That's the level we've all, that's the depths we've got to plumb ourselves to. Oh, look, she's back. Michelle, I have to ask, just before we end. It was really hot. All of that, right? You made, right? It looks like it's paper. You've cut out. It is.

[01:27:18] Michelle Frechette: It took an afternoon to cut out all the paper and glue it on.

My daughter saw it when she was over. She said, Did you do that yourself? I know it looks like a toddler did it, but I did it

[01:27:28] Nathan Wrigley: myself. I can only say thank you. You've brightened my life. Yeah, exactly. You've brightened everybody else's lives. Yeah, you set the standard. He has set the standard. I

[01:27:39] Michelle Frechette: don't know what I'm going to do next year, but I have to start thinking now if I'm going to top the last two years.

[01:27:44] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, we got the Christmas episode coming up. You've got, you got that. All right, we're going to end it now. Thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it. We will see you next week. Thanks for the comments. Take it easy.