This Week in WordPress #274

It's time for This Week in WordPress episode number 274, entitled smooth, buttery feel. It was recorded on Monday the 6th of November, 2023. My name's Nathan Wrigley and I'm joined by three guests this week. I'm joined by Taco Verdonschot shot by Andrew Palmer and Zubair Siddiq.

It's a WordPress podcast, so guess what? We talk a lot about WordPress. We talk about the coming updates to WordPress 6.4, and there's a lot of nice stuff to be considered there. Gutenberg 16.9 also has some nice updates as well, particularly around the ability to change the name of blocks in the inserter.

Woo commerce, no more. Woo is the new name. You can find it at woo.com. Why has this been done? What do we make of that decision? We had spent absolutely ages talking about translating the WordPress project. So not your website per se, but all of the documentation and materials, which enable you to learn WordPress. And we spend so much time on that, that we run out of time, but in the show notes there will be lots and lots of. Other things to talk about.

It's all coming up next, on This Week in WordPress.

[00:01:24] Nathan Wrigley: This episode of the WP Builds podcast is brought to you by GoDaddy Pro, the home of managed WordPress hosting that includes free domain, SSL, and 24 7 support. Bundle that with The Hub by GoDaddy Pro to unlock more free benefits to manage multiple sites in one place, invoice clients, and get 30 percent off new purchases. Find out more at go. me forward slash WP Builds.

Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Big hands. Check it out. hi everybody. Thanks for joining us. We're on episode number 274, gosh, of this week in WordPress. by the way, panelists, guests, we're always on the lookout for the thing which is most useful as a title. So if somebody says something particularly interesting or cringeworthy or funny, that's going to be the title.

So get your pads out and start writing them down if you hear them. But I'm joined today for the 274th episode. You can see. Right over there is Zubair

[00:02:36] Zubair Siddiq: Hi Nathan, I'm doing good and it's my third time to be in the show and it is already feeling like a home to me.

[00:02:43] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, nice thing to say.

[00:02:47] Zubair Siddiq: And I'm looking forward for the whole episode, especially looking forward to listen to Andrew.

Cool Dude and Taku, definitely,

[00:02:55] Nathan Wrigley: Ha! I, I have three people in my house, all of whom are my children, who would strongly disagree with the moniker of Cool Dude. Anyway, let me introduce you correctly. Zubair Siddique is the founder. Of oh my gosh the WordPress group. He's the organizer at karachi WordPress meetup He's a community manager also at the wp experts agency, and it is very nice to have you back For the fourth episode and because you've said such nice things I'm having him back every week from now on.

let's see. We'll see if Andrew and Taco can live up to that. Joining us. No, it's fine. Join us down there. we've got Taco Verdenshot from Yoast. How you doing, Taco? It's been

[00:03:39] Taco Verdonschot: a while. Yes. Yeah, it's good to

[00:03:42] Nathan Wrigley: be back. Yeah, very nice to have you with us. You, probably have seen Taco around.

Taco, of course, as you can see, is, one of the people from Yoast. In fact, he's the head of relations at Yoast, which means he gets to talk to people like me. Plugin developers, theme developers, everybody in the WordPress space is on Taco's list, which is great. he's into managing the support team over at Yoast and the community team as well.

He's also a polyglot because he translates WordPress into Dutch. We will get into that and how jaw droppingly fascinating that subject is. A bit later is the co organizer of the WordPress press meetup. Wait for me to butcher it. Nine Megan. Close enough. Good. He's the father of two husband to one husband.

yeah, that's right. Yeah. taco really likes the podcasting thing, but it's too insecure about his skills to start one on his own. So he tries to join, the show regularly, but that's really kind. Yeah. I know what you mean. It is a weird thing. but thank you so much for joining us again. And also at the last minute, very, grateful because, we were due to have Tim Nash, but Tim sadly is on well.

So firstly, get well soon, Tim. I hope you're feeling better soon, but Andrew Palmer stepped into the breach. There's Andrew. you've probably seen Andrew. He's been on the show multiple times before. How are you doing, Andrew?

[00:05:05] Andrew Palmer: Alright, big shoes to fill and, this is the best, podcast out there,

[00:05:10] Nathan Wrigley: don't you?

Thank you. That's that's Zabe and Andrew coming back on a regular basis. Zabe, I've

[00:05:17] Andrew Palmer: met, we zabe we met at Word Camp, I think, didn't we? Yeah. Red

[00:05:21] Zubair Siddiq: Camp. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:05:22] Andrew Palmer: It is a, I've been lucky enough to break bread with. And have a big steak somewhere in germany

[00:05:31] Nathan Wrigley: It's a small world the WordPress world it's lovely tiny

[00:05:34] Andrew Palmer: world and nathan, of course,

[00:05:35] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, everybody tries Yeah, let me give you your let me give you your official introduction he is the andrew I should say is the ceo and co founder of Bertha AI, which is all the hots AI?

That's a subject which I honestly thought would go away in interest, but it just every week, it's still interesting. He's an investor in multiple businesses, including Atarim, which I'm sure you've heard of atarim. io and wppluginsplus. com. And you can also see on the screen, if you're looking, you can find him at somebody's hero.

Okay. Okie doke. Thank you for joining us. Just a couple of bits of housekeeping. There's a couple of things. Firstly, depending on where you are, there's different ways that you can comment, this is probably the easiest thing to do is if you fancy, commenting, go to WP Builds. com forward slash live, and then you've got two choices.

Now. Because of the new platform that we're using. The first choice is to be logged into Google. And if you're logged into Google, it's got YouTube comments on either side. But also, if you notice, in the top right of the video is a little live chat button actually inside the video player. And if you click on that, you don't need to be logged into anything.

You just type in your name and we're off to the races so you can give us comments in there. That's nice if you don't like social media platforms and things like that. and also that player is coming, through on the website as well. So it's all being hosted by the, by the wave. video platform.

If you are on Facebook, you've got to go through an additional step because we won't know who you are. And that is you've got to go to this wave. video forward slash lives forward slash Facebook. You can click on a link over there. Then wave. video can tell us who you are and things like that. I would appreciate it if you want to share this with your friends again the url wpbuilds.

com Forward slash live that'd be really nice and give us some comments. We always love Your commentary. We've got a few in so far. So let's say hello to Mike Cotton afternoon all looking forward to another humor filled Episode Mike. I thought you were in the UK I don't know why I thought that probably because it says good afternoon, but the spelling of humor indicates maybe you're not But hello Mike very nice to have you Elliot just down the road from me says hi all half penny he's saying hi as well.

Good afternoon, WP. We're doing a podcast episode with Paul, which is called, Unfiltered. No doubt I'll be sharing that on social media in the days and weeks to come. Peter Ingersoll, as always, reliable as ever. You can set your clock by it. Good morning from Connecticut in the northeast U. S. where it's currently 5 degrees centigrade and something in Fahrenheit, nobody cares, on the partly cloudy sky.

I've just offended 400 plus million people. and good morning, Nathan Andrews Zabir from Mark Vestgaard, the Guardian of the Moon. Who is he? Who is he? That's right. And we're also joined by Dave Gray. Good afternoon from an undisclosed secure location somewhere between the M3 and M4 corridor. You've narrowed it down for us, Dave.

We've got a fair idea. Oh, he says man flu, Mike Cotton. His ability to spell. He's on the Isle of Man. We'll forgive you, Mike. It's perfectly okay. And thanks, Mike, for submitting your site for Sabrina's show. I appreciate that. Okay. That's what to do. Let me take off that little caption. If I can find it.

There we go. And let's share the screen and get on with the show. This is our website. We're sponsored as you can see by GoDaddy Pro. Thank you to them for keeping the lights on. I really appreciate that. If you want to be updated on what we do, put your email address in there and click subscribe. That's all you got to do.

It's dead simple. As I was just saying, we're doing a few new shows. One of them is with Sabrina Zidane. We're planning to do it each and every week, and we're taking user submitted sites, if there are any, and if they're not, then Sabrina is just going to find some aspect of web performance that she can suggest.

You can improve so far. We've done home page videos, lady, lazy loading images and how to find bottlenecks. It's been genuinely a real eye opener. It's about 45 minutes long and you get real nuggets of inspirational, good quality stuff from Sabrina. So we're doing that every. It's at the same URL as you're watching this now.

WP Builds. com forward slash live. I'm also doing some with, Leo from Gato graph QL. You can find these in the demos archive link, just their archives demos archive. That's the way to find that. We've also got our black Friday page. It's growing. It's got about 130 deals on it at the moment, and it keeps going up.

During the time I've been talking, I've had three more submitted. they just, keep coming in. Birth is on here somewhere. but yeah, if you want to sponsor this page, you can see Mark Westgard has, Gravity Forms have and Checkout WC have, but it's searchable, filterable. You just go in and say, I want something to do with maintenance and you're off to the races.

You can filter by the amount of discount and all of that kind of stuff. It's your place for Black Friday. WP Builds. com forward slash black, dead simple to remember that. What was it? I've forgotten. and finally, if you want to raise some money for a very reputable charity, this or a nonprofit, this is raising money, the WP community collective, it's a bit silly, really.

You submit yourself or somebody else to be the best at something in this year's award ceremony. And you'll notice this form. These are radio boxes, but each. Section only has one radio box. So you can't actually vote for anything. You just, all you can do is click the submit button at the bottom. so it's a bit silly, but all you need to do is if donate 20 to the WPCC, there's a link here on how to do that.

Then go to your screenshot app of choice. Send me the screenshot via this form and we'll stick you on that. We've raised 751 and 50, 50 cents at the moment. And that. Believe it or not, he's actually going to do a lot of good. I put this anecdotal target of 2, 000 up there. I just made the number up. If we can get to that, wouldn't that be lovely?

There are so many worthwhile causes. So here's an example of it. We were talking to Mark a moment ago, the best plug, the best form builder you never realized you needed. You can vote for WS form. In fact, you don't have a choice. If you vote on this, you are going to vote for that. best WordPress hosting powered by nights of the realm century.

Best WordPress blog, David McCann. Best WordPress news provider was Nathan Wrigley, but I didn't send that in. So I then, I then put in another one somewhere all about the fact that somebody else had put that one in, but I can't remember where that is. Anyway, it's all a bit of fun. I'm,

[00:12:28] Taco Verdonschot: intrigued by, the award that Kyle's winning

[00:12:32] Nathan Wrigley: though.

Kyle is the top tech. Look at that. The top taco tycoon of WordPress, Kyle Van Dusen. Yeah, you've got it. you've got to submit a taco, you can, so long as you don't use that exact wording, I will take whatever nomination you've got. So let's see if we can get that maybe to a thousand dollars, that'd be really good.

And you've got 23 days to think about it. Okay, great. Let's get stuck into the actual WordPress news. So the three panelists just interrupt whenever you like is totally fine. but here we go. WordPress 6. 4 is really close. Now we've been droning on about all the features. Sometimes, things get dropped at the last minute as they have been in the recent past.

But, Yoast put together a post just outlining some of the cool bits. we've got this fabulous new theme, 2024. I think it's fair to say that this is the best theme, the best default theme that we've had in. Years and years It really does look great. It's been essentially there's four people who it's, so it's pitched out and I've listed them here on tremors and small business owners, photographers and artists, and websites, uh, writers and bloggers.

So that's three, not four. but honestly, with the capabilities and all of the different things that are in there. You really could make this your home, no matter what it is that you're doing on the internet. We'll talk about the adoption of block themes in a moment and how it's not really going all that well.

Okay, so there's that. You'll have a lot of fun exploring that if you choose to. But also there's loads of enhancements to some blocks that you've probably been using in the past. So for example, the block editor, it says here, continues to evolve with improvements that promise a more intuitive building experience.

Background images for group blocks. That's really handy because group blocks tend to be the parent item of, all the other things that you might want to put in it. So putting a background image on that is really cool. You can also add categories to block patterns. So I dunno, you might have a.

Some sort of sales pitch section that you just want to repeat over and over again. You might have an Easter theme set of patterns or a Christmas or whatever it may be. You can now categorize those. We've mentioned in the past that there's a new light box feature come in so that if you want your images to be small, but then somebody clicks and they all go big and it looks like a really nice implementation.

It's not like too weird and snazzy. It just Gently pushes out, gently pushes back in. And it reminds me a lot of something you'd find on a phone. to be honest, it's got a smooth, buttery feel to it. You can rename group blocks, which is really handy as well. because if you're anything like me, when you've got a post, it just says paragraph, heading, paragraph, heading, paragraph, and the ability to rename those kinds of things will be really useful in the future.

but that's about it really. I'm gonna, I'm gonna toss this out to you three. Anything in there which you like the look of?

[00:15:41] Andrew Palmer: A lot. I've been, playing with, blocks, actually. Last week I built a, website with blocks. I cheated slightly because I used Cadence, but,

[00:15:51] Nathan Wrigley: That's not cheating. You're still using blocks.

[00:15:54] Andrew Palmer: Yeah, still using blocks, but also, but I use native blocks as well. Yep. But I also, I did a tutorial the other day for a little AI plugin that I've got and, did it in Gutenberg.

And I noticed that go from, to go from lists to a new block is actually quite difficult. and I didn't figure it out.

[00:16:14] Nathan Wrigley: Do you mean when you're in creating a

[00:16:17] Andrew Palmer: list? So you've got a list and you want to put an image in the middle of that list. It was a bit of a head scratcher, so I didn't bother. I couldn't, I just couldn't stop it being a list

[00:16:27] Nathan Wrigley: in the middle of a list.

Do you know what? I'm going to throw that one out to the comments, because in every list I've made, I'm simply...

[00:16:32] Andrew Palmer: no, what I did is I

[00:16:33] Nathan Wrigley: split the lists. So you made two lists and shoved an image in the middle. And then put

[00:16:37] Andrew Palmer: a block in the middle of it. That's the

[00:16:38] Nathan Wrigley: only way that I could do it. Yeah, I think I would have done it that way as well, to be honest.

Yeah, a

[00:16:42] Andrew Palmer: bit annoying. I just wanted to press return a couple of times and have a new block. Okay. That's it. it's just the intuitiveness, being Divi and Bertha's built on Elementor. So I've had to learn Elementor as well, which again, I find difficult, but because I'm Divi, I've been Divi since it's Divi one, and, so it's just not as intuitive as say a page builder like Beaver Builder or Elementor or anything like that. yeah, but I still enjoyed it. And the site is super fast. it's Oh,

[00:17:15] Nathan Wrigley: now there's one of the reasons to do it. Yeah,

[00:17:18] Andrew Palmer: out of the box. all frankly, all my divi sites are fast, but the, straight out of the box, I didn't have to do anything.

It's really fast. And it's got a massive header image as well. So Courtney

[00:17:29] Nathan Wrigley: Robertson is to the rescue for you, Andrew. Look at this. She's right in there. Andrew, we see a super list block. I'm guessing that's a plug in that you can find, for nesting things in blocks beyond the core version.

Cool. So there you go. Brilliant. Thank you, Courtney. That sounds great. that's great,

[00:17:47] Andrew Palmer: but also, why isn't it in core? okay. I'm just saying. Yep. Thanks. She's always rescuing

[00:17:51] Nathan Wrigley: me, Courtney. Yeah, she's there for us all. we'll talk about her a bit later. So thank you for that. Taco or Zubir? I think Taco, you were going to go next because it sounded like you were.

Yeah,

[00:18:02] Taco Verdonschot: obviously I've seen that post before,

[00:18:07] Nathan Wrigley: it happened to be on

[00:18:08] Taco Verdonschot: Yoast. com. but yeah, no, I think definitely the, the new theme is a wonderful display of what's possible with, the current state of blocks. so I'm probably going to move some sites over to have a bit of a better play with, with it.

That's looking fabulous.

[00:18:33] Nathan Wrigley: Much later in the show, we're going to talk about the state of default themes and all of that kind of stuff and whether or not block themes have taken off. In short, the answer is not yet. But things like this theme, I reckon, is really quite a compelling mixture because there's just so much that you can do with it.

great, thank you for that as well. Zubair, anything?

[00:18:55] Zubair Siddiq: Yeah, it's the last major release for the year 2023 and I'm really excited. The new theme looks really fine, minimalist with a minimalist approach and with a very feature rich theme and lightbox and new development tools and all that. yeah, we all are excited for the WordPress 6.

4.

[00:19:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, no kidding. Yeah, so there's a lot of tweaking there. My favorite in all of that, though, is the being able to rename blocks. I know that's a bit ridiculous, but honestly, when I open the inserter on a typical WP Builds post which is just basically text and headings it's, the inserter is of no use to me unless I click in to the paragraph that I want and then I can find it.

But being able to rename it and saying, I don't know, header and everything obviously that's nested inside that is the header and here's the, I don't know, the, form, collection of things, that would be really useful. So all of those kind of things, coming down the pike. So that's brilliant. So Yoast.

com. Forward slash WordPress dash six dash four. You can have a look at that yourself. Now here's another thing which is coming in WordPress 6. 4. And honestly, I have no idea why this wasn't done a long time ago. I genuinely don't know. I'm not trying to be annoying. I don't know why this hasn't happened sooner.

if you are new to WordPress, it may surprise you that every time you upload something like an image, let's just call it an attachment, but image is typically what people put in their media library, that then creates, if you like, a page. It creates a home for that, and it's a page so that all the metadata and everything can be bound to it.

Now, that typically will never be seen by anybody. Except, maybe, Google catches sight of it. I don't know, maybe you've got an XML sitemap, sorry, or a sitemap, just a HTML sitemap or what have you, and it might get listed there, or somehow Google may find it, and really it doesn't serve any purpose in your SEO.

It may, in fact, spoil it to some extent. So in WordPress 6. 4, any new, and I'll repeat that, any new install of WordPress, not your current version, this will not happen. So if you upload an image, you will not get an attachment page for it. If somebody was to figure out what that was, then it would just redirect them to the actual asset itself.

like you find in the metadata, you can actually forward slash, dot JPEG, whatever it is. now this just seems perfectly reasonable to me. There's a couple of people who pushed back with reasons why they thought that maybe this should have been talked about a little bit more.

But to my mind, This seems like common sense, and I'm going to, Ooh, I want to see the pushback. Ooh. it's not a lot. It really is very little. it says here, WordPress plugin developer, Cy... Cybra... Cybra. Okay, thank you for rescuing me there. Yeah, he's Dutch. Sorry? He's Dutch. Oh, great. Okay, so that's... in which case, can you just say that whole name?

Yeah, Cybra Weijer. Okay, I would never have got that. Thank you. WordPress plugin developer, I refer to what Taco just said, made cases for giving users an option for toggling this on and off. The problem with filtering options is that when other plugins provide the option to toggle, the option filter will go against expectations.

So typically... And I'm sure Yoast has an option for this. You can toggle them off. You can toggle the option to have that off. Maybe Taco can correct me on that. But if now that's going to be in the SEO plugin, but you can't make use of it, is it a bit of a conflict? Is it weird? What's going on? So I actually am going to throw that right at Teco.

How do you handle this? What's the plan for the future with you guys?

[00:22:34] Taco Verdonschot: for anyone who already has their WordPress site, you will still need your SEO plugin, to properly manage this. If you've installed Yoast SEO and you haven't messed up your settings, it's, already turned off by default. Oh, nice.

Because there is, no good reason for SEO and, unless maybe super specific use cases. but for, most people, there is no good reason to have these pages. They are super thin content. They don't add any value. they just create more links on the web that need to be crawled. They consume power.

They distract from your main pages. there's no good reason for most sites to have these pages. if you've been using Yoast SEO, they have been off for a very long time. And, in fact, a couple of years ago, there was a little bug in Yoast SEO that, Undid our fix, which led to a whole storm.

I see. Please smile about it. so we've been fixing this for as long as I can remember. except for a couple of months. You,

[00:23:51] Nathan Wrigley: you, said something then, which I thought was really curious. You said it's got thin SEO. Is that a technical term? Thin content. Thin content, sorry. Thin content. Is that the technical term for stuff which basically just doesn't serve the purposes of your site's SEO?

It's thin as opposed to... it's most...

[00:24:06] Andrew Palmer: Yeah. The most interesting thing Taco said was it consumes power. Ooh. That's the most interesting thing because you've got a website and it also takes up... It's another click to buy, isn't it? We're always trying to get people to get to the content that we want them to read and have a call to action or whatever, on it.

it's a user distraction as far as I'm concerned. I always used to, before I started using Yoast, plugin cause I did used to use another one, sorry, tag. and I used to use, redirect attachment pages. It's a plugin in the, dot org repository, but every single SEO plugin, including Yoast, which I now use is, has a facility to redirect attachments to the.

Content that it's attached to, if you like,

[00:24:59] Nathan Wrigley: which is the, what you need, which is the right

[00:25:02] Andrew Palmer: thing to do. And I don't agree that it's, I can't even think of a, like Taco said, a super, there's just no,

[00:25:12] Nathan Wrigley: could this be a use case? Could it be, let's say that you're a photography, if you're selling photography and you want that metadata that's in there.

I don't know, dimensions or something. I don't know if any of that might be useful, maybe. if

[00:25:27] Taco Verdonschot: you're selling photographs, then you probably need an e commerce solution.

[00:25:31] Nathan Wrigley: That's true, and you need to hide the original anyway, because you're giving it away. Yeah, that's a good point.

[00:25:36] Taco Verdonschot: But if you're a photographer and you have a gallery site, and you have decent descriptions with all...

what I was referring to, the thin content, means that you have a page. That doesn't have any unique value. It doesn't add anything useful to the web. And typically the attachment pages are the photo or the image. And maybe the description if you entered it, but mostly people don't. and that's it. And there's not a whole lot of value there.

Yeah. But if you turn that page into something where you have a description of where you took that picture or you have a longer form content that goes with the picture, then maybe But there's other solutions to do that in a better way

[00:26:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think the long and the short of it is that this for the vast majority of us This is how it should be but i'm glad it's gone.

Yeah. Yeah. yes if you if you have a new WordPress website You have nothing to fear if you have an old WordPress website, which is existing before 6. 4 Then then keep going with your seo plugin and it will keep you It will keep this stuff away from Google and what have you. Zibia, anything on that or shall we move?

[00:27:04] Zubair Siddiq: Oh, I think Docco has said everything and you added value to things. Yeah All right.

[00:27:09] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. just a couple of comments coming in around some previous stuff that were mentioned. Courtney again She's involved with the WPCC. We were talking about sponsoring it for that silly awards page she's just saying thank you for the contributions that have come in so far every Contribution matters.

Mark Westcott is agreeing with that and says, yeah, 20. Oh, by the way, you can donate more. You don't have to stop at 20. There's a few people who've done more than that. And I appreciate them doing that as well. and Mike is agreeing with you. Andrew is saying he would have done a list, then an image, then a list, and so would I.

Now we know there's a, there's another option as well. Okay, this is beyond me, to be honest, because I have not really contributed in the same way that this article is talking about. this is over on makeWordPress. org. If you have contributed, maybe, I certainly know Taco is involved a lot. Being the community person at Yoast.

WordPress 6. 4 remains on schedule for release tomorrow. afterwards work needs to be done to release one or more maintenance or minor releases. So this is the normal process of keeping the software. you can't just go from 6. 4 to 6. to be, pulled out into the open. And key roles need to be, filled so that cycle can continue throughout the 6.

4 release phase. release managers. are required, and they do things like this. Triageing bugs in coordination with committers and component maintainers. Drafting announcements for the release, so the PR side of things. Preparing for and running release day activities, that's been a, again it's PR related, but very important to keep people updated.

And updating the documentation on minor releases so that it gets better each time. This is basically a call for those people, I will link to this in the show notes and then you can click on the links which you can see embedded all over this page and hopefully if that's your bag, you can start contributing to the WordPress project in that way for the bits and pieces between 6.

4 and a possible 6. 5. Taco, anything on that, knowing that you know this stuff? Yeah,

[00:29:26] Taco Verdonschot: basically as... as the post already describes, they're looking for people who can manage certain tasks. and I think a minor release is one of the better ways to get into this. I know Courtney, who's, active in, the comments, has been, part of a release team before.

but yeah, it's, just, like you said, another way to contribute to WordPress and getting into it, during a minor release. takes off a little bit of the pressure from a major release. So I would recommend anyone who has any of the skills you just listed, to apply and, be part of, of those teams.

[00:30:12] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Thank you. Sabir, Andrew, anything on that? Shall we move on?

[00:30:18] Zubair Siddiq: Yeah, those who are interested and those who are capable, they must contribute and it's a great chance for them to begin their contribution. Yeah. Great chance.

[00:30:30] Andrew Palmer: Oh, yeah, I'm, incapable. So that's fine. Yeah, you carry

[00:30:34] Nathan Wrigley: on. Oh, okay.

You're incapable,

[00:30:36] Andrew Palmer: is that what you just said? Oh, I couldn't, be a contributor to WordPress. I'd just be, I'd just be, I wouldn't work. I'd just do WordPress. I'd just be a contributor. Let's see. write stuff and all that. And then once you get into it, I know, I do know a few WordPress contributors and they just wish they could just contribute to WordPress because they love it so much.

And that's, the problem is when you get into the, when you go behind the ropes, an old golf term there from me, you just want to stay behind the ropes because it's, nice and comfy and you're feeling as though you're solving a problem. So if I got involved in that, I wouldn't actually earn any money.

So

[00:31:15] Nathan Wrigley: I see. Okay. Okay. I get it. You need to be able to manage your time. so again, it's triaging bugs, drafting announcements, other assorted PR stuff and updating documentation. if you're into any of those, even if you're just curious, why not just see, what comes of it. the post will be linked to in the show notes, which will come out tomorrow.

Alrighty, now we mentioned this one already, in passing, but I'll, point to the article because there's a little bit more to be said. This is Gutenberg 16. 9. So this is not WordPress 6. 4. This is the sort of the, bleeding edge, if you like, of Gutenberg. And there's a couple of interesting things coming down the road.

The first one, as we mentioned earlier, there's going to be this option to rename almost all of the blocks. And in fact, the only things that you won't be able to rename, if I've read this correctly, are these things. the core block. core forward slash template part, core forward slash pattern, and core forward slash navigation.

I'm sure that if you use your imagination, you could imagine why they shouldn't be renamed. They probably, I imagine your site will break rather rapidly if they were allowed to be renamed. Anyway. Pretty much everything else can be renamed, so that'll be really exciting in the future. So almost any block of any description, you'll be able to give it a different name.

There's a little video here, like showing how that works. Essentially, it's a bit like you would do on Photoshop or something. You, right click or you click the little three, three icons and then you just click rename. Little modal pops off and you give it whatever you want to call it and you're off to the races.

That's how that works. But here's a surprise. And what the heck? what? There's gonna be forms. There's an experimental form and input block allowing the creation of basic forms. Now, Mark Westgard, you are in the comments. I want your actual response to this. I didn't think that WordPress would ever get into the form creation space.

Because I just thought that was Plugin territory. Now, it says basic building of forms. Now, I do wonder what that means. Is it just like name, email, comment? Is that the length and the depth that they're going to go to? But you're going to be able to play with this by going to, first of all, you'll have to download the Gutenberg plugin, then you go to Gutenberg, experiments, and you'll need to enable the, form and input blocks experimental setting.

Now, we've got Mark Westgaard from WSForm in the comments. Maybe he'll drop something in there, but also in the text here, we have Carl Hancock, who is one of the co founders of GravityForms, and he asks this, I think, fairly reasonable question. Why has there been no proactive outreach to reach to the many developers of long standing WordPress form solutions currently used by millions and millions of WordPress sites?

That, in, summarizes it. But he then goes on to say, It's a bit more philanthropic than that. He goes on to say, look, we've got a wealth of experience. We really know how to do forms. Maybe we could have helped this enterprise. Maybe there's pitfalls that you're going to, fall into that we won't.

So very, early stages of development. I just thought that was curious. and I'm wondering what you guys think. So over to you, interrupt as necessary. I think

[00:34:41] Taco Verdonschot: Courtney's comment, that she just posted is super

[00:34:45] Nathan Wrigley: relevant. Should I just read it out? Courtney, as always on the case, I believe the forms area isn't functional.

Thank you. just adding the field input areas for styling. I think the user would still need to get a form plugin. This would really help. Theme styling forms. Okay, so there's no news here moving on, but the article definitely reads in a different way. So either I've misunderstood what the article was saying, or the article has misunderstood what this is about.

Or Carl has misunderstood. I don't really know. It probably falls on my shoulders and I've misunderstood it. But Courtney, thank you.

[00:35:28] Andrew Palmer: I'm going to go out there and build one and see, whether that is the case, because I believe Courtney, but, I just don't see the point in having the form fields in there and then installing another.

Form plugin of which there are many and we have a favorite. We know WS form is our favorite and I still, I love gravity forms as well, but it's not something that hasn't, Elementor have a form, Divi have a form, Beaver Builder have a form, all the major site origin has a form building thing.

Then we've got contact form seven, which is if you're a developer, you can make contact form seven, do anything you like. It's an amazing. Free plug in and it's never ever been commercialized, but I think Carl's point of why was there No discussion with people that have got forms that is the same kind of reasoning behind why we.

com Announced we've expressed but maybe we can get into that later Because there's plenty of people out there that do woo plugins and we express may Maff that up for them for a little bit,

[00:36:31] Nathan Wrigley: yeah so that's interesting because I totally did read it as you would be able to make use of these forms.

They weren't just, um, forms that you could use in order to generate styles and things. If that were the case, as Courtney seems to be saying it is, then this, being able to put a form on the website without a form plugin so that you can then give it some stylings That's an interesting use case, but yeah.

Okay. Taco or Zubia, anything on this?

[00:37:02] Zubair Siddiq: No, I do not have anything specific for this. if Taco can add anything.

[00:37:08] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. what I find interesting is that WordPress doesn't have any forms because it is one of the basic things that we add to every website. Even if we look at WordCamp websites before the WordCamp's announced, the one thing that's on the page is Sign up for more information by entering your email address here, um, which is a form.

it's interesting that WordPress never had this, um, at this point, introducing something very basic, even if it were functional, might be nice for some people, but... Anyone with slightly bigger demands would still need, a decent forms plug in.

[00:38:03] Nathan Wrigley: That's a really good point. So you're right, aren't you?

there is no website, there's almost no website where a form, even just that email field, just one field at some point wouldn't, be useful. And so straying into that territory does, now that you've said that, it does seem like something that's been missing from WordPress, but given that it hasn't been there, it does seem odd to be throwing it in there.

So I guess that's just a consequence of the history of the project that we've had. But yeah, framing it like that does seem to make. Perfect sense. Let's see, Mark Westgard has chipped in a few things, so just for context, Mark has a form plugin of his own, as Andrew said, WSForm. He said, adding forms to core is a strange move.

I think there is definitely more, I think there are definitely more important things that should be focused on. It's like WordPress adding SEO functionality. to core. There are plenty recently did, by the

[00:38:58] Taco Verdonschot: way. recently, but about a year ago, we added XML sitemaps to WordPress core. Yeah. Yeah. It's been a feature for SEO plugins since forever.

Yeah.

[00:39:09] Nathan Wrigley: it goes on to say there are plenty of good plugins out there for SEO. Yoast is what he says. yeah, the likes of WS form, gravity form, fluent forms, etc. Incredibly complicated. It seems like a strange bitch. Journey to start on. Yeah. Okay. So maybe that's the fear, right? Is that if you build something basic, does that then mean that something complicated is coming down the pike?

My intuition would be that wouldn't be the case, but who knows?

[00:39:40] Andrew Palmer: Actually in Divi, they did, a basic form, which people complain just generally didn't work, but it's, sometimes you need an SMTP, SMTP, right? Because hosts don't some hosts and some web servers don't allow you to send mail without.

doing it through SendGrid or whoever or whatever. But, so it is a dangerous area for them to get involved with because one of the main complaints with Divi was that the form didn't work. It didn't have enough in it. We couldn't you couldn't do date picking. You couldn't do all sorts of stuff. And when you look at WSForm and FluentForms and GravityForms, they're incredibly complex, not just.

For somebody who knows how to build a form like me and Taco and Zubir and all you as well, Nathan. But imagine trying to make a logic form or a funnel form. out of, oh great, WordPress has got a form, I'll build that form, now okay, I need it to go on to the next page, and I need it to save those entries, and all those kind of stuff, and I need it to choose my calendar time, and I need a date picker in it, and actually while I'm on here, Mark Westgard, please put a date picker in that puts the UK format in as well.

And all form people don't, it's not all about America. It's, we've got the right, we do it the right way. That's the thing about form pickers. But the thing is, that they are complex. And if they are going to go down this road, it's a very dangerous road. I'd prefer them to have a look at the database, how it, how WordPress queries, the database make that much faster or much more efficient.

Make database entries deletable from within WordPress without destroying the website. There are so many different things to be done. A form seems agrarious. However, you would say that, Nathan. Yeah, egregious. Thank you the. It just seems pointless to me. Leave it to the guys that know what they're doing.

[00:41:40] Nathan Wrigley: That's an interesting point though about the SMTP settings. Because obviously on a typical WordPress host that you, run, yourself. So we're not talking about WordPress. com. Your forms are out of the box. They are not going to work. And so if you do put something in core... You are introducing a point of failure there.

However, contrary to what we've been talking about so far, Paul, Paul Halfpenny joins me in the conversation, and he says, if WordPress wants to compete with services such as Wix and Squarespace, which of course I think more and more it does, then a basic form builder would be necessary, a necessary feature.

Mike says it may start with forms and it could end up being a slippery slope and a deep one. Rabbit hole. I think maybe that's what Andrew was thinking. You have to put Mark's reply in there. Oh, okay. Mark's, replying to the date picker. WS form does support UK date pickers. No, It adheres to your date side formatting settings.

Fix your settings, Palmer.

Great. Not needed in this case. Perfect. Knowing

[00:42:46] Taco Verdonschot: Mark, he might just have edited in the last 30 seconds.

[00:42:50] Nathan Wrigley: Exactly.

[00:42:51] Andrew Palmer: You never know with that

[00:42:52] Nathan Wrigley: snake. I woke up this morning to find a Slack message from the weekend for something that Mark had added to WSForm that I requested. This happens more than is necessary.

Suggest some pointless little feature. so for example, for the WP, for the, the Black Friday page, I wanted square images, only square images would be acceptable because if they're not square, every, some people's product looks better than others. And so Mark built a ratio setting into the image upload field.

So you could say one to one is the only acceptor and it totally works. Now I only get square images every year. It's been a nightmare until now. Thank you for your hard work. Michelle's giggling at that. That's great. Okay, We've got forms that's coming in some way, shape or form. Courtney, thank you for correcting us on that.

There's also a couple of quick things, new media categories for audio and video, so you can organize your media, slightly better, hopefully in the next little while we'll have an updated media library. So that'll be nice. You can sort. Pages by date in the editor's management screen, the command palette, which is like spotlight on a Mac, has block specific commands and contextual suggestions, which I think is really cool.

if you're somewhere on the site, it doesn't make sense to pop up suggestions for something which you really probably have got no intention. And there's an added feature, sorry, image field, as an experiment to

[00:44:25] Andrew Palmer: the page list as well. that, That's really important. Tell me more. because when you're in the list, so I'm talking about page lists, so you've got all the lists of what's in your page and you've got SEO bits and you've got other bits in there as well, to have to go to the page and, I'm presuming, and see whether you've got a featured image, because some people just forget.

And also when we're editing when we're going into because somebody's hero dot go to uk do build websites And we also edit other people's websites for us to be able to Drill down and see which pages haven't got featured images in that's fantastic

[00:45:05] Nathan Wrigley: That is a very good point. so it'll appear on the list by the way This is a plug for a free plugin.

So it's not a plug for a free, but that's hard to say. this is cool. I don't know what the, what it does in terms of bloat, but this is a really nice plugin and it handles what you just said. So it adds a featured image, but this is, it's called admin and site enhancements. I wasn't meaning to suggest this, but when you said that, I thought I'd stick it up on the screen.

So it adds a ton of different options to the admin. Of WordPress, and you basically toggle things on and off. And you can see it's absolutely boatloads. they've, they're all pretty minor. none of them are particularly massive. But one of the things it does is it adds in SMTP. Free. You can do your SMTP there.

It, it doesn't keep a log or anything technical like that. But it allows your email to egress. You can do things like disable XML, RPC and all of that. But here somewhere, one of these things is add a featured image into the list view of WordPress. And so yeah, this is cool.

Admin insight enhancements. It's very nice.

[00:46:07] Andrew Palmer: Yeah, awesome

[00:46:09] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. it was not me. Thank you to bobo the contributor of that. that's the

[00:46:16] Taco Verdonschot: Plug into that one nathan. and that's by it's called admin columns Oh,

[00:46:24] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, that's great, isn't it? Yeah,

[00:46:26] Taco Verdonschot: they've been sponsors of several word cams, so they deserve a shout out.

[00:46:31] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. You're absolutely right. I've got the pro version here just because that's what Google gave me straight off the bat, but they do have a free version. Yes, they do an awful lot more than adding the free image. You can more or less anything. I remember a few years ago, I built a real estate website and obviously the client wanted to see almost all the details about the houses and so you could, if it was metadata, you could add it into the list view and it was just, this was the way to do it.

This plugin was. Was really great. So admin columns. This is admin columns pro, but i'm there is a free version on the repo which handles a substitute

[00:47:08] Andrew Palmer: They're amazing these plugins because I normally ask for my dev to because we with bertha and everything we would we needed to add a listing for stuff in the woocommerce page list display for particular reasons.

And, it took me about two minutes, because it's just a little function.

[00:47:27] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, it's a snippet. Yeah, it's almost nothing. yeah. And to make it searchable.

[00:47:31] Andrew Palmer: We've got these, plugins out there. Woo hoo. Yeah,

[00:47:34] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. It's, it doesn't take long. you can do that with, yeah, a quick snippet.

It'll get you there, get you to the races. Alrighty, so this is probably the biggest news of this week. it's not really news, because it's not, nothing's really happening, except it's a PR thing, but it's a big thing, And that is to say that during the course of this week, WooCommerce is no more.

It still is, but it isn't. it's a bit of both. WooCommerce... is basically now becoming Woo. if you were to go to WooCommerce, you're now going to, I think, you're going to be redirected. Let's hope they did that already. But, I clicked on this and you can see in the URL bar, I'm on Woo. com.

I've been mentioning Woo... As the name for WooCommerce forever, just because it's quicker and every single person in the, WooCommerce, sorry, in the WordPress space knows out of the box, what that means, whether or not there's a job of PR reaching out to the wider world who now are like, what the heck, what's Woo?

That sounds weird. It's a bit too jocular. It's a bit too frivolous. Don't know. I like it. The plugin itself, I believe, so here we go. Woo is how we're going to refer to the brand and the company. The website and the name of the thing. WooCommerce is still the open source e commerce platform for WordPress.

Woo's core product. So I don't know if that suddenly made things that would have been easy a little bit more difficult. I don't know. But anyway, seismic change. If you're into e commerce, you're going to be on the phone a bit over the next few weeks. Suddenly explaining to all your clients. Yeah, it's the same thing.

Because my understanding is... You won't have to do anything. Let's wait and see if that happens. But the intention is if really you don't need to do anything. It's just a PR thing. The name is changing, but hopefully nothing else should change. If you're a developer, this won't be news to you because you've probably been told already, but it's a big thing.

And I wonder how much they paid for woo. com. That strikes me as quite a hot, interesting,

[00:49:45] Andrew Palmer: but the, you know why they've done this, Nathan, don't you, so that they can have woo commerce. Woo booking, woo subscriptions, it's always been, it's always been the same. So rather than WooCommerce subscriptions, so it's just basically Woo colon anything else.

So it allows them. Woo. The next thing we're going to see. Yeah. Here you go. It's going to be Woo hosting.

[00:50:09] Nathan Wrigley: So yeah. So think a perfect example here is WooCommerce payments recently got renamed to WooPayments. There you go. I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. to me that works, because I'm in the WordPress space, but WooCommerce, if I was a total newbie to, to, the web, and I'm a 16 year old building my first website, WooCommerce tells me what it is a bit more.

I know it doesn't, but Woo, if I wasn't really familiar with that brand, maybe not, so I guess that's the job, is to make Woo an obvious, landing spot, and if you go there, you're gonna know that it's all about e commerce. just very quickly before I hand it over to you guys properly. there's another article here on the Tavern about the exact same thing.

And where was it? There was something about WooExpress as well. It's right there where it says where it's yellow. Yeah, just here where I've highlighted it. Yeah, WooExpress, another recently launched product that already bears the shorter name. yeah, so WooExpress is like a managed version, Pay your money and you've got a WooCommerce website managed. Managed hosting. Managed hosting. So may you think that'll become Woo hosting to you as opposed to Woo

[00:51:19] Andrew Palmer: Express? there's gonna, there's, I think there's, woo Express is the first step because they're obviously using WordPress.com as the hosting.

Yep, yep. But then, because brands split out, you've gotta think about WP Engine and Flywheel, so Flywheel's gonna be brought into WP Engine, but I think you can still buy Flywheel. Then you've got, the company that bought Yost. New fold

[00:51:41] Nathan Wrigley: digital. I think we've got somebody on our panel who can Categorically tell us the answer to that 30 40 50

[00:51:46] Andrew Palmer: 60 80 separate hosts and up 150 whatever it may be, but it's just So so you'll have because woo hosting says it all right?

So that's going to compete with wp engine kinsta Rocket all the big names that you can think of guru all say they specialize in managed WordPress eCommerce hosting, right? That's their sales point. So I think Automatic have got to be careful in really trying to dive into the GoDaddy Pro arena, the WP Engine arena and all that kind of stuff and degrading the offerings that the third party people offer.

it starts with WooExpress because we've got Bantu plugins, we've got Yith, we've got many other WooCommerce solutions out there. And once you start going down the road of WooExpress, nobody's got a choice anymore. So you've got to be careful of when you take the choice away of what choices people have.

So from an, for an open source product like WooCommerce, because it is open source to all of a sudden become gate kept is a little bit of a spit in the eye to the people that have helped WooCommerce grow.

[00:53:13] Nathan Wrigley: This is always the difficult tight rope to tread, isn't it? Is exactly

[00:53:16] Andrew Palmer: that. It's a tough one because obviously Automatic have to make money.

I think they paid, what, 100 million for WooCommerce a few years ago. So they've got to, I doubt, I'm not even sure they've got that back yet. it's tough. It's a tough, it's that tight rope that Automatic have got to walk. but if it degrades the... Sales of people like barn to another other growing, um, wood commerce plug in developers then You're almost shooting yourself in the foot.

[00:53:47] Nathan Wrigley: Anything on that Yost perspective? Sorry, Tcho. I just called you Yost. that's fine. It's because I looked down and the word that I saw was Yost . There's worse things to call me. Yeah.

[00:54:00] Taco Verdonschot: That's good. Yeah. So when you, when you said, I'm curious for how much they, acquired that domain, I was like, I'm wondering for how long that domain has been registered.

Have you had a look? Have you just checked? Yes, of course I did. Years I'll bet. So on the 22nd of January 1996 Wow, it's probably old. Woundup. com was registered. So that's an ancient domain.

[00:54:31] Nathan Wrigley: I wonder if, I mean I have no conception we could obviously look at the Wayback Machine but I have no idea if that was used for a personal blog or a serious business or what have you.

But Somebody we're going to get to a story about. In fact, let's pivot to that quickly now, because it is really interesting that this is totally unrelated, but related, this week. So let's imagine that you bought woo. com. what is that like millions of years ago, ages I can't do. Yes.

ages and ages ago, you probably had a really amazing payday, very recently, probably a retirable. Yeah, so the

[00:55:07] Taco Verdonschot: last update on the domain was 21 December 21. So if they didn't have the domain before that, because it might be another update. But then, yeah.

[00:55:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it would have been like nine dollars or something like that.

And, yeah. Woo!

[00:55:27] Andrew Palmer: You'd have to gain some extra play on that's for sure.

[00:55:29] Nathan Wrigley: yes. It depends where you live, yeah. here's another thing, apropos of nothing. Not related, but we'll throw it in there because it's quite interesting. This week, Google. Google. It's Google, but it's not Google.

Google Registry, so you can't actually register these through Google, because they've sold that arm of their business to Squarespace, but obviously at some point before they sold it to Squarespace, they obviously acquired the rights to sell the ing. domain ending, and they've released it out there.

There's a bunch of third party providers, I can't tell you where they are, but they're listed somewhere. There's a, few of them. At the bottom of this post,

[00:56:11] Taco Verdonschot: Nathan. at the bottom. No, not that far to the bottom. there's an overview with some brands.

[00:56:19] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, can't see, Don't, never mind. But it's actually, funnily enough, it's not the usual suspects. GoDaddy's in there. So I guess that is a usual suspect, but then there's a bunch of other hosting domain registry companies that I personally haven't heard of and I'm guessing they're American, but anyway, so you can buy things like designing, actually you can't because that's gone, making, editing, adapting, dum dumpling?

What the heck? drawing, you get the idea, right? if you want a really good one You're gonna have to separate yourself with about a hundred and thirty thousand dollars a year, if you want wedding, ha! But you know what? if you get that domain and you are in that line of work, that probably is worth every penny, because it suddenly makes you have that domain.

But I tried a few out. I tried podcasting, because, and yeah, I would basically have to remortgage my house. if you wait a little while, if nobody grabs it, I think the price is going to go down. We're in this sort of sunrise period and as the days go on, then yeah, you, you'll be able to get it.

But I don't know if you've got any good ideas for domains that you would like to buy with these kind of things. Inking, dumpling, yeah, getting. The interesting

[00:57:42] Taco Verdonschot: one, obviously, is that we should all sponsor you to get podcasting.

[00:57:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, nice, thanks, yeah. It is

[00:57:49] Taco Verdonschot: 3, 600 something. Oh, is that what

[00:57:51] Nathan Wrigley: it's gone down to?

Yes. Okay, so a few days ago, so it is this period where it declines in, so for the first couple of days, I think, it was, all of it was really expensive, and then it went down a little bit and down, like the ones which are really, short and real English words. They're still more expensive, but if you just type in some random junk, I think it's like 14 a year or something.

So what is it? 3, 000 to get podcasting?

[00:58:17] Taco Verdonschot: yeah, in euros. So it's around 4, 000. Okay.

[00:58:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I'm still not going to do it.

[00:58:25] Taco Verdonschot: So the interesting thing is the, one that I expected would be, registered right off the bat. It's obviously search engine Bing. Yeah, and it isn't! It's not! It's still available!

[00:58:38] Nathan Wrigley: I know! That's exactly what I did.

[00:58:40] Taco Verdonschot: That was like one second. And just 120, 000 euro,

[00:58:44] Nathan Wrigley: How did you? Let's just play with this for a bit. Where did you? GoDaddy. com. Say again? GoDaddy. com. Ah, okay, So you can do it over there. So if I go to GoDaddy. com. And then I can just

[00:59:00] Andrew Palmer: type that in. webhost. ing, webhosting Yes.

Is 682 a year. if I was a webhost, I'd pick that up. Immediately. Because it's annual, let's not forget. It's not just... No, it's not a one time.

[00:59:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I wonder if i've got some Ad blocker script because I had this same problem before so i'm on brave. Let's just see if turning a few things off. Yeah, there you go So 608 so this is in pounds so you can get web hosting for 682 pounds.

let's try tacos one out I bet he's gonna bought it whilst i've been talking about this. No, i'm joking podcasting 3, 150. What about Bing then? What does it cost us to get Bing? Yeah, 105, but that's cheaper. That was definitely a lot more money that was in the 130s. So that's gone. How have Microsoft not picked that up?

That's absolutely surprising. Yeah. Let's try one more. Let's try. Oh, I don't know. Wedding or something like that. Wedding. these ones typically I found you see that's not look at that If you're in some kind of wedding type biz that does seem like a pretty good deal

[01:00:11] Andrew Palmer: There's no guarantee if you're getting them either nathan if you look it's priority pre registration Yeah Oh,

[01:00:18] Nathan Wrigley: I see.

You go into a queue, do you? There

[01:00:22] Andrew Palmer: might be that

[01:00:23] Taco Verdonschot: Microsoft is going to keep bidding on

[01:00:24] Nathan Wrigley: Bing. Yeah, you can imagine.

[01:00:26] Andrew Palmer: bidding. Bidding.

[01:00:28] Nathan Wrigley: Bidding. Let's do it. Bidding, what's that going to be worth? High limit. Oh, 360. You got to imagine eBay is going to go for that one. 375. we're all suckers.

[01:00:45] Taco Verdonschot: But then the interesting thing is because you can have this domain and it sounds fancy, except that you have to explain to everyone that your domain is, bid. ing and not bidding.

[01:00:59] Nathan Wrigley: com. Yeah. I read a really interesting

[01:01:02] Andrew Palmer: article. That, I don't, subscribe to that tech, go when you and I, you can poke me in the eye when you see me next, but I really don't think we've got.

co we've got. co that we've had to live with it for years. I only haven't been able to have code. You've got. nl. what does that mean?

[01:01:19] Taco Verdonschot: but that's the interesting thing for, a Dutch web shop. I will guess that it's. nl for an English brand. I will guess it's. com and usually that's correct.

But. I will understand that, for example, amsterdam, which exists, is a legit domain. My mom will think that she's missing part and she will type. amsterdam. nl because there has to be nl, right? I, think that maybe. Generations who are more used to the web will understand that this is a thing, but it will take some time for it to be useful.

[01:02:02] Nathan Wrigley: My guess is that if you are after these regular words, having said what you just said about the fact that this is some sort of bidding process, my guess is that you're probably going to be outbid. like Ronning, you can imagine the likes of Nike and Adidas and all of that kind of going after something like that.

Apparently, that's a new thing. So if you I tried

[01:02:26] Andrew Palmer: SEOing is 16 pounds,

[01:02:30] Nathan Wrigley: 30 a year. No, don't do it. Cause yoast. com is actually better, isn't it? but yeah, so it does drop down. I think the cheapest you can get them, if I put into some sort of random string like that's the hot one. Look at that. K Y D B. There you go. That's as cheap as you're going to get it.

It's 16 pounds. 30 a year for really junky ones, but anyway, so somebody did really well out of woo. com. That's all we know, but we don't know who they are, but they're now probably living in Mauritius. address is to be decided. Okay, moving on. We were talking about translations earlier, and about how documentation and things need to be done.

I, okay, can I just say, if you don't know anything about translating WordPress, which I didn't, and so this is not front end, this is not... Translate your website with a plugin like WPML or TranslatePress or something. This is about getting the project translated so that anybody who wants to build a WordPress site can rock up, can find out, how to do it in their language.

So it's the learn materials, it's the, all of the WordPress. org materials. I was totally staggered by the, Utterly breathtaking amount of work, which goes into this. And the spaghetti, I use that word in the podcast, the spaghetti of how that process is handled at the moment. Now, thankfully, the likes of Estella Rueda and Courtney Robertson in the comments and Javier Cazares, they are on a mission, to tidy up this process and improve it.

And, honestly, I was really staggered. I'm so lucky that I speak English for a start, and I, everything's in English, so if I want to build a website, I know it's all there. democratizing publishing is the endeavor. But if you speak, let's say, I don't speak Khmer, or something like that, and you don't speak any English, that project is going to be a little bit, a lot more difficult.

And hopefully, in the near future, with the initiatives that Stella is suggesting, hopefully this will all be tidied up. And it was just such an interesting conversation about what's being done, and so I'm going to give this one straight to Taco, who translates into Dutch, and maybe you can tell us how jolly, tricky it is.

[01:04:55] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. So who should be translating into Dutch because it, it's a very, very time consuming, thing and I don't spend enough time on it, unfortunately. but yes, every sentence, every word in WordPress, has to be translated. where a machine translation oftentimes misses context. So it is all manual work for all of the languages that WordPress supports, for all of the plugins, all of the themes.

it, we're talking about hundreds and thousands of words that need to be translated for every

[01:05:39] Nathan Wrigley: release. But also if you've got like in Spanish, apparently there are 14 variations of the Spanish language, which I didn't know. There's a Catalan, there's regular Spanish, there's variants in South America. I could have got that number wrong, but I'm pretty sure 14 was in my head.

they're going to try and slimline that process down. and they're going to, I think it was eight, they're going to pick eight languages, which are going to be the focus for the near future, because they've worked out from the download statistics and where those, where WordPress is being downloaded, that they can capture, I think, 98 percent of downloads.

represented by these eight languages and that's treating, for example, Spanish as one language. They're not going to go for the 14. They're just going to say, okay, for now we'll do Spanish as this one Spanish, but that seems like a good way to start. And then from there, once this new workflow and the new processes and the new tools, which are being built by Javier and others, once those have been embedded and the workflow is all sorted out and everybody knows what they're doing.

the idea would then be to, migrate that to all of the everything. So that a hundred percent is covered. I'm eating cashew nuts and I've just got one in my throat. So over to you while I clear me. Don't die,

[01:06:56] Taco Verdonschot: please. Yeah. I, get where they're coming from the downside of the current state of translations is that if I have a, Dutch translation, so I'm using Dutch on my website.

If there is no Dutch translation for a specific word, sentence, string, it will fall back to English. the thing with all the Spanish languages and all the Portuguese variations that we have, because obviously in Portugal they speak Portuguese, but they do so in quite a few countries, across the world.

And same goes for Spanish, something colonialism. if you use. I think it's Brazilian Portuguese, and there's no translation. It will fall back to English. Oh, falling back to Spanish, which might, or a Portuguese, sorry. which, might be the better solution for, Brazilian users. Then again, there's a reason why they're separate because they are, even though in nuance.

different languages. The fact that we have U. S. English, U. K. English, Australian English, South African English. I don't know how many versions of English there are, but it is because the language is slightly different. you noticed the humor earlier in this episode, missing a U. Yeah. that was American spelling.

So if you were using WordPress, in the US setting, then it wouldn't be there. But switching to the UK translation of WordPress, there should be. So even, where you said, I'm happy I speak just English. There's no such thing.

[01:08:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're right.

[01:08:57] Andrew Palmer: You're right. Oh, I've lost count of the amount of times Americans have corrected my spelling.

My English spelling.

[01:09:04] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I see. yeah,

[01:09:05] Andrew Palmer: yeah. Hundreds of times and really got quite nasty about it as well. You are spelling that wrong and it's interesting.

[01:09:11] Nathan Wrigley: Focused. Yeah. When I write a blogpost, the word

[01:09:14] Andrew Palmer: focused, it's got two S's and you

[01:09:16] Nathan Wrigley: include a Zed like categorization or like we do an s do Exactly.

[01:09:21] Andrew Palmer: Hospitalization. That doesn't exist in our English language hospitalization. It's not a word. Anesthesiologist that doesn't exist in England. Oh, yeah.

[01:09:31] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, we could go down a rabbit hole here we could

[01:09:33] Andrew Palmer: go up, but again, but in dutch then you've got dutch and afrikaans. You've got different derivatives of it.

You've got Many African countries speak French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch. amazing amount of languages in Africa. Amazing, amount of languages. So you've got, then you've got the South Americas. You've got the, like you say, the Catalan speakers in Spain and, Portugal, North Portugal speaks a different to South.

Portugal, north Spain speaks different to, you go to Hara, try to speak the Spanish that you've learned on the, coat on the South coast. They'll look at you and go, what are you trying to say? like the South of France, north France. It's different. It's different intonation. S accent, complicated

[01:10:17] Nathan Wrigley: mesh.

this was the thing that came out. He goes, England.

[01:10:20] Andrew Palmer: Yep. Manchester, Birmingham. all this kind of stuff. It's just different words. Give up. Yeah. How did anyone understand gang yam? You know what gang yam means? Tako. I have no idea. It's an English word, Ganyan, or a couple of English words, Ganyan.

And it's Geordie in North, Newcastle. But I'm going home. I'm Ganyan now.

[01:10:42] Nathan Wrigley: Crazy. That is crazy. I don't live that far from Newcastle and I've never heard it. So that's fascinating. Yeah. I'm not mixing with the right Geordies. Zubair, where are you?

[01:10:55] Zubair Siddiq: I'm into a little bit polyglot things. I have already, unlocked my, translation badge.

And I am, doing already doing the translation of the WordPress things into Urdu language. in Pakistan, we speak Urdu and our neighbor country is India, they speak Hindi. We verbally understand each other language, but our scripts are different. So this is the issue. Around 1. 5 billion people understand each other verbally and our scripts are different.

So we are putting the different efforts. Yeah.

[01:11:25] Nathan Wrigley: Did you say B? Billion. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:11:29] Zubair Siddiq: Yeah. Around. Yeah. Two countries. If you collect them, they are almost 1. 5 billion. Yeah. India is around 1. 2 and three and we are. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:11:41] Nathan Wrigley: okay. So you're involved in this enterprise and how, is it for, okay, you're steeped in WordPress.

So you know where to go, I'm guessing, you know what to look for, but let's say that you gave WordPress, build a WordPress site with no knowledge to a friend of yours who didn't use WordPress and they didn't speak, let's say English. Let's just go with that one. How tricky would it be to. to manage being an Urdu speaker?

[01:12:08] Zubair Siddiq: okay. It will be a little bit difficult, but in Pakistan and in India, we learn English language from the very starting of our, yeah. Yeah. So we know it very well. In fact, our new generation don't know our regional script and things, but we know English language. very well. So this is the one thing. this is the advantage that we have in subcontinent, but, I can feel for the people who, you know, at countryside and don't know about the English language.

Yeah, and there are so many variations around, we have around 250 or 400 types of different languages in India and Pakistan. So it's a huge thing. It's a huge thing. And also the issue is that you left to right and right to left script as well. So one of the context or one of the jargon, if I haven't, didn't get the translated in that language, so it comes back in English and it creates a disturbance with the script.

So these are things are the matter. I also found the interface of the translation is a little bit difficult for the beginner. It should be made a much easier and what have already been done should be clearly known to the people who are joining the translation. So they don't put effort on the things that have already been done.

[01:13:26] Nathan Wrigley: And that was the purpose of that podcast was to let people know where things are at right now. And Courtney makes the point, I did try to make this point, but I don't think I've made the point clear enough. This is not just WordPress. org. it is all of it really. it's docs, it's training, it's, or training slash learn.

there's a whole lot more. and if really there are tons of, I'll just show there's a bunch of links in the show notes for that podcast episode provided by Courtney and Javier and Estella, which will give you a real, quick deep dive into this project and how you can become involved, but also just to let you know, because honestly, if like me, this is an area that you just didn't delve into, it is a huge, Like, massive piece of work that just is invisible to me because I've never really touched it.

So good grief. Thank you, Courtney. And all the people who are involved in this in any way, shape or form, it's God's work. It really is. if,

[01:14:30] Taco Verdonschot: if you have five minutes spare, while listening to the podcast, go to translate. WordPress. org and just have a look how much translated.

[01:14:42] Nathan Wrigley: So the enterprise is to get new, new, workflows, new tooling, and they're just trying to figure it out at the moment.

And yeah, go and listen to that podcast episode or just read the transcription, which is, in English. Oh, okay. All right. Yeah, at least there is one. I suppose there's something to be said. Okay. Very quickly. I was chatting to Rem Kusturice earlier this year, and I'm just going to quickly plug a project that he's involved with.

He's involved with somebody else, but I don't know, who that person is, but he is launching with that person, a project called Scanfully. And it's described as performance and health monitoring for WordPress. And the UVP is one, dashboard for WordPress sites, performance and health. I think you can probably understand what that is.

but if I quickly go to the features, you'll get an idea. It's a dashboard. There's uptime monitoring, performance monitoring, site health, event timeline, and lighthouse scanning built in. if you go to scanfully. com, you can see that it's signing up for early access. I don't think this exists yet, in the wild, but you can sign up and get some early access.

So if that kind of thing is up your street and you want to help Remkes out, then scanfully. com. Okay. The other

[01:16:02] Taco Verdonschot: person, by the way, is Barry Coy, who's the owner of Never5

[01:16:07] Nathan Wrigley: plugins. Can I just say that when I was transcribing This the other day, right? That ended up coming out as Barry Coy. Who sounds like somebody from, Manchester.

Barry Coy. B A R Y space C O Y. But I don't think that's how you spell it, is it? Can I, can you just tell me how to spell that so I can go and change the transcript? Genuinely?

[01:16:31] Taco Verdonschot: B A R Y. It's his first name.

[01:16:34] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's right. I got

[01:16:35] Taco Verdonschot: that. Yes. And Koy is K O I J.

[01:16:42] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Yeah. It was C O Y. And I actually, in the transcript, I put a question mark.

On

[01:16:47] Andrew Palmer: that, I wanted to, have a word about what, Remkes is doing, the scan for these things. Yeah. This should be in the core of every managed WordPress host out there, because I don't understand why it isn't, I don't understand what managed WordPress is, if this kind of stuff isn't in, and there's, we've got Dave Gray, who's in the, who's in the chat, he's got a very similar thing called Heads Up WP, and he, he sends me scans of Bertha.

ai every week. So often just say you got a broken link. It was down for two minutes. It's you've got some more from the links here. This page doesn't work and all this kind of stuff. And that's, what it is. competition in, in WordPress is what makes it work. But you got heads up WP as well, which is very similar.

Dave's SAS for it as well, so it's, and it's. It's and Dave's very, new to the plug in business kind of thing and is a great programmer. But the thing is that the I, when I had, a sandwich and a cake with Dave the other day in, in a nice little cafe, very close to us, I said, why isn't this in WordPress core or why isn't this in hosts core?

this, your, customer, cause you know that I do mentoring and coaching and stuff like that. So I just went out and said, just sell it to the hosts, just get, them to. Distribute it or, your main client is the host on this kind of thing. And I'm sure that could must be Remus, end game is to say, come on, hosts up your game a bit.

Yeah, maybe. And let yeah, and let people know when your, when their website is down, or they've got a broken link, or a broken page or, even, drill down to accessibility issues on your website. Say you've built a new page and your whole website is accessible. You've worked really hard on that.

And then all of a sudden you've built a new page or you've had an author go onto that page, a guest author, and they've put a yellow button somewhere or something that's in, that's not accessible to, to warn you that you've got a, got an accessibility issue on your, on a new page. Why not do that?

[01:19:03] Nathan Wrigley: great point. I think the question on everybody's mind though is what sandwich did you.

[01:19:09] Andrew Palmer: He actually liked a cake and I think I had a sausage and bacon sandwich because I just couldn't resist because I don't have bread in my house.

[01:19:18] Nathan Wrigley: Is this a religious thing? I went, oh bread, I'll have some bread.

Anyway, scumfully. Dot com that is Thank you so much, yeah

[01:19:32] Zubair Siddiq: I'm, sorry. I'm just disturbing. I guess andrew is also into a restaurant type of things I guess andrew runs some restaurants and i'm right

[01:19:40] Andrew Palmer: say that again severe i'd missed it. Yeah.

[01:19:42] Zubair Siddiq: Yeah, you also run some restaurant things Restaurant.

Restaurant things. Restaurant

[01:19:47] Andrew Palmer: things. Oh yeah. I'm doing one at the minute. Nightmare.

[01:19:53] Nathan Wrigley: this is actually skylight. Converting

[01:19:53] Andrew Palmer: this coffee shop into a steakhouse, restaurant. Yeah.

[01:19:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Honestly. Okay. Let's get back to WordPress quick. Cause we are fast. Oh my goodness. We're running out of time.

okay. WP data dashboard tracks, WordPress ecosystem. I'm just going to mention this and show you, this is, an important thing because it got ripped out of, the, the theme repository a little bit, all the metrics and all of that. Let's not get into that, but. This is a project by, forgive me, Munich based Hendrik Luhassen.

Ah, I try so hard, but I fail every time. You are so English, it's just ridiculous. I know. and it's exploring the landscape of WordPress themes. Essentially, he was keeping track of everything in the theme world on a, on an Excel spreadsheet or a spreadsheet. and he's now moved it over to what you, Might consider to be a SAS.

So if you're a theme developer or you're in the marketplace for a theme and you want to see what's popular, what's rising, what's falling, what uses blocks, then you can do all of that here. You can go here, use these tags to okay, I want something that might fit education or something that's got a responsive layout.

Right to left language support is using full site editing. You get the idea, but possibly the most interesting thing, would be this column down here. If you go to the list view now, I find this really interesting. This usage is a metric that he has come up with. And I, so I can't tell you what the formula is, but he's mixing up the number of active installs with whether or not those active installs are still.

So the higher this number, the more sort of sticky, if you like, that theme is. all right. a theme could have 600, 000 downloads, but it's used by only one website. Nobody stuck around. It never had any longevity. The higher this number, the more sticky it is and the more in use it is. So I really wanted to dig into this, but we're not going to have time to do that.

But it's there. It's called WP Dashboard. and it's w data dashboard. Don't know if anybody wanted to get into that. We are so out of time. I'm so sorry. No. All good. Okay, great. Okay. In which case we will quickly move on. Om, do you know what, do you know what I'm gonna bump these to next week? There's no point in rushing them.

Let's just, unless, was there something that I missed that you three guests had read that you wanted deliberately to go through? Or are we all good if I just say, let's knock it on the head there? 'cause we're just gonna not do anything, any justice. It's probably better if we just push things to next week with

[01:22:40] Andrew Palmer: different.

Put that omg, img. there's a, I've got certain views on that. So maybe I mean on next week.

[01:22:47] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that's interesting. I'll just quickly say that the two Corys, Corey Miller and Corey Maas, have released this project. They did it in the, open, in the, post status community, and they've released it.

All of the links, plus the ones we never got to, will be in the show notes. There was going to be all sorts of stuff about plugins that have been acquired, about plugins that are possibly going to go away. We were going to talk about the word fence CLI. We were going to talk about all sorts of things. Oh, you've been publicly accessibility shame.

There was a lot to say, but we're not gonna have time for it. Cause we are fast approaching and I've got a hard stop in three minutes. So yes, I'm afraid that's it. So that being said, I'm going to say a big thank you. Firstly. To the three people on the screen. So thank you to Xavier. I really appreciate you joining us to taco for joining us as well.

And to Andrew Palmer for stepping in at the last minute and, telling us about his sandwich come back next week, have another sandwich and you can, he's nodding. He's nodding. It's all good. So the slightly humiliating

[01:23:58] Andrew Palmer: smooth battery feel. What's that? The name of the podcast, you idiot.

Oh,

[01:24:05] Nathan Wrigley: I see. Yeah. Okay. Smooth. Did I say that? Yes, you did. You did. Smooth, buttery feel. It's going down on the list. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Smooth, buttery feel. Thank you. Perfect. Got it. Written down. thanks to those people who've made a comment. This show is nothing without you. really appreciate it. If you want to add any comments after the fact, go to WPBuilds.

com. Search for This Week in WordPress 274 and stick your comments in there. I'm asking people to do that from now on because we've got a darn fine commenting system built into our CMS and always ends up on Twitter. right on that bombshell. Let's do the slightly humiliating wave. Oh look, everybody first time.

There we go. Thank you so much. We'll be back next week, but for now, I hope you have a nice week guests. I'll be back in about 10 seconds. We'll, we'll see you in a sec.

[01:25:04] Andrew Palmer: See ya.