This Week in WordPress #275

It's time for this week in WordPress, episode number 275 entitled waffle, bluster, pointless, in summary... don't bother. It was recorded on Monday the 13th of November. 2023. My name's Nathan Wrigley and I will be joined today by three fabulous guests. I'm joined by Michelle Frechette by James Giroux and by Atif Riaz, although I can never quite pronounce his name correctly.

We are a WordPress podcast. So guess what we spend most of the time talking about WordPress 6.4 rolled out very recently, but no sooner had it rolled out than a patch came. And we talk about how that happened and why it was fairly significant for hosting companies. We talk about a podcast that I did with Marieke van de Rakt and all about how she believes the WordPress community is becoming really divided. What's causing that division. And how can we resolve it?

There's going to be some really serious performance improvements in translations in WordPress, 6.5. What's that all about? And how does it work? There's a few acquisitions brainstorm force have a recently bought a booking system called late points, and they've also updated the name of Project Huddle, which was a plugin they bought a little while ago to Sure feedback.

We talk about some silliness with WS Form, and how Jetpack are launching the Jetpack creator to monetize your content. There's a load of black Friday deals and a bug bounty program. From Wordfence. And so finish it off as always. Some scary stuff about AI. It's all coming up next on this week. In WordPress.

[00:01:53] Nathan Wrigley: This episode of the WPBuilds podcast is brought to you today by Omnisend, the top rated email and SMS marketing platform for WordPress. More than 100,000 merchants use Omnisend every day to grow their audience and sales. Ready to start building campaigns that really sell? Find out more at www.omnisend.com.

And by GoDaddy Pro, the home of managed WordPress hosting that includes free domain, SSL, and 24x7 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. You can find out more at go. me forward slash WP Builds.

Hello. I'm not sure everybody's mic was muted there. That was interesting, because I could hear somebody coughing. I think it might have been our teeth, but, never mind. It's okay. It doesn't matter. They're supposed to mute and I don't think they're muted. Who cares? Nobody watches that video anyway.

It's just to allow you guys to, have a nice break and a cup of tea before the show starts. This is This Week in WordPress. We're on episode number 275 to anything ending in a 75 feels like a. bit of a milestone. I don't know, three quarters of 100 or something like that. So we're doing this every week.

We're at WP builds dot com forward slash live. I'm going to get the housekeeping bits out the way quickly first before I introduce all of the panel. But you can see who they are. But just before we get into that, a few bits and pieces around the way that this show works and what have you. if you fancy dragging your friends, colleagues, relations Anybody in to this, probably the best place to send them is that URL wpbuilds.

com forward slash live. If you go over there, you're going to have two options for commenting. The first one is to be logged into a Google account because there's YouTube comments. That seems to be the most popular way that people do things. Alternatively, if you don't want to be logged into anything, this is nice.

the, the platform that we use has got an embedded chat. Inside the video, which is pretty unique. I've not come across that. It's at the top right of the video on that page. It just says live chat and you can click on it. You add your name and then your comments all fly through to us. They won't get cross pollinated with the other bits and pieces, but if you want to remain anonymous, that's an option.

WP builds. com forward slash live. if you are joining us on Facebook. Facebook, in a remarkable vault fuss of everything else they do, have decided to be anonymous with your data and protect you, which is interesting. in order to give us your, like your avatar and your name, you need to do the following, go to wave.

video forward slash lives forward slash Facebook and click whatever. Blue button is there to say something like, yes, I authorize that to happen. If you do that, we'll be able to hear from your commentary. And yes, I think that's probably all the bits of housekeeping. So let's do some proper introductions joined by three guests.

As you can see, first of all, there. I really want to go right there, one day, one day, the technology will enable that. yeah, one day that'll happen. it's Michelle, Frechette, how are you doing? I'm good, how are you? yeah, good, indeed, very good. Michelle's been on the show so many times, I think she's probably the most, The most, what's the word?

I don't

[00:05:33] Michelle Frechette: know. Paul Lacey probably still has maybe eight.

[00:05:35] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's true. Yeah. We don't speak of, we don't speak of him. I actually got a message. Yeah, no, Yeah. The traitor. That's right. I got a message from him this week. We had a chat and he's, still listening. So that's really nice. He's such a delightful person.

Oh, he really is. You'll just say, Paul, hello. Yeah. Hi, Paul. so Michelle, in addition to her work at Stella WP, Michelle is the podcast barista at WP Coffee Talk. She's the founder of underrepresentedintech. com, creator of WP career pages, president of the board for bigorangeheart. org, community, sorry, director of community relations and contributor at poststatus.

com, author, business coach, and frequent organizer and speaker. at WordPress events. She lives outside Rochester, New York, where she's an avid photographer of nature. I nearly said naturist, but I feel that's got a different meaning. I wear all my clothes. You can find that website and meet Michelle online and never got, we didn't mention that.

There's my little business card I got from you. WP Speakers. That should get added. It is

[00:06:42] Michelle Frechette: in my newer bio. I think we have an old bio on this, but that's okay.

[00:06:46] Nathan Wrigley: All right. thank you for joining us once more, Michelle. Appreciate it. We have also joining us today, James Giroux. How are you doing, James? Pray.

It works. James. we always joined the call about 15 minutes early and just bat around whether things are working or not. And that kind of thing, James, his audio was just not working at all. So it's a miracle. he is here. So pray for the gods of the internet that it keeps working. James is the founder at TeamWP, the team and culture platform for WordPress teams.

James has been around in the WordPress ecosystem for many years, and you may recognize him from his roles at PageLines. Boy, that. Brings a wow. Wow. Okay. Envato gravity forms and stellar WP where he's been contributing to and leading teams in marketing page lines, right? That's 20 years ago. Am I right?

Have I just misremembered? Oh,

[00:07:41] James Giroux: that's, Almost that long ago. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:07:44] Nathan Wrigley: Wow. You really have been around. That's amazing. Thank you for joining us. I really appreciate it. And we've got Arteef. How are you doing Arteef? Have I said that right? You have

[00:07:54] Atif Riaz: almost, but it's good. It's better than most I would say.

[00:08:00] Nathan Wrigley: Artif.

[00:08:00] Atif Riaz: Artif. Let me show you. Thank you so much.

[00:08:03] Michelle Frechette: I read, the directions. So did I. I was reading

[00:08:11] Nathan Wrigley: the frenetic, description. I still got it wrong. Artif is the operations executive and the lead web architect for the ScanClinic, a health and technology company based in London.

He's also part of the infamous Crack development team. I could just end it there and it really would go in a different direction. the correct development team behind the code snippets plug in. Atif lives in London, with his wife and two beautiful daughters. He's been working in technology within healthcare for over a decade.

In his free time, he's a traveler, regularly makes his favorite journey between his kitchen and the sofa. That is troubling. lastly, he would like to preface any public speaking by apologizing in advance for any controversial comments and specifically to Nathan for the multiple shameless blogs of the code snippets he will make throughout the stream.

That's so subliminal. Anybody listening to this after the fact, he's just, pushed his mobile phone website on it. That's brilliant. Why don't other people do

[00:09:15] Michelle Frechette: that?

[00:09:16] Nathan Wrigley: I'll tell you what, Michelle, I could just casually raise

that's brilliant. Thank you so much. all. Three of you really appreciate it. We've got a few people joining us in the comments and it's always nice to say hello to them. So we've got Rob Cairns joining us from Toronto. Oh, I'm guessing, from the center of the universe called Toronto. So in the universe called Toronto.

It is the center, yeah, thank you for joining us. I don't mean to be nasty. That was awful. Mike Cotton. Good afternoon from a stormy Isle of Man. Yep. Basically, we've got the same here, Mike. It's not very nice. Peter Ingersollo is here to brighten our day with the weather forecast. Good morning from Connecticut.

It's currently minus, he's not here to brighten our day. It's minus one degree centigrade, 30 degrees Fahrenheit under a sunny sky. I hope you guys are currently replacing. Oh, I hope the guys. Currently replacing my roof, have a way to stay warm today. Michelle and I were discussing like when you spend money on things that you really don't want to spend money on before the show, I'm currently replacing windows, Michelle just replaced, I think you called it a furnace.

We call it a boiler. and, it looks like Peter's replacing the roof. It's just so much money on something that you'll never, ever notice. Oh, sorry, Peter. I'm taking

[00:10:41] Michelle Frechette: to eating dinner with my furnace because I spent so much money on it. I feel like it owes me a date.

[00:10:49] Nathan Wrigley: That's great. Oh, lovely. Thank you for joining us though, Peter.

Really appreciate it. Tony Gerling, good afternoon from a partly sunny, but. Constantly windy Aldermaston in the UK. Hello, says Maya. Hello, says Amber. Good morning. Elliot down the road from me says hello all. And Ben all the way from the Philippines. Good evening from the Philippines. 10 PM.

It's, look at that. 27 degrees centigrade. That's about 80 degrees Fahrenheit. I can do that one. still a high from the recent WordCamp Manila last Saturday. Oh, nice. That's lovely. Yeah, that is awesome. Okay. Thank you for making the comments, please. As I said at the top of the show, if you fancy dragging people in, go on, do it.

Spend three minutes on your social media platform. Send them to that WP builds. com forward slash live. It always makes the show a lot more entertaining and Courtney Robertson pops in just as I say the word entertain, which is ideal. Thank you, Courtney. Perfect. Let's get on with it. Shall we? A bit of self promotion.

Hope you don't mind. WP Builds, that's our website. We've got a brand new sponsor this week, apart from GoDaddy Pro, who have been sponsoring us for a long time. I appreciate them very much. We also like to raise our hat to OmniSend, who've decided to join supporting the WP Builds podcast. You'll be hearing all about them in the content that we produce over the days and weeks to come.

So thank you to them. Also, if you click this little subtle Black Friday button, you'll get yourself to this page. This page is being supported this year by Gravity Forms by checkout WC and by WS form. And over there at the moment, you're going to find about 220 WordPressy deals. If you click this little yellow button, you can search and filter things.

I don't know. You might want to do stuff that's SaaS only. you can do that, or you could say things which are, I don't know, just plugins or what have you, but there's 220, it'll grow as the days and weeks. It's a WP builds. com forward slash black. So bookmark that and you'll save yourself a ton of cash.

there are some affiliate links in there, but not many in all honesty, I've given up on that game. also to say that I've been doing a show every week on a Thursday with the fabulous Sabrina Zidane is called speed it up. And it's all about, guess what? Speeding up your WordPress website. She knows a thing or two about it.

And over the last four episodes, she's, we've taken one specific thing and Sabrina's talked about how you discover it, how you do it, what you can do, how how you measure it and all those kinds of things. And then she's also taking user submitted sites, um, in order to, so that she could poke around within those.

And if you go to WP builds. com forward slash speed. You'll end up at this page, which is the form. It's a WS form as word would have it. And, it enables you to submit your site to that show. So there we go. Apologies for the self promotion. does anybody else have something they want to promote quickly?

We might as well. I've just spent about two minutes promoting myself. Michelle, James, Atif, anything?

[00:14:07] Michelle Frechette: Brand new episodes of WP Coffee Talk coming out all the time. So pay attention to that. I actually read us. This from OmniSend will be, his episode will release this week, so you'll be able to meet him.

[00:14:18] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. So WP Coffee Talk, James, anything from you?

[00:14:24] James Giroux: nothing new, but we're always open to companies wanting to hang out with us and talk about team and culture. come on

[00:14:32] Nathan Wrigley: down. Is that teamwp, is it co? That's the, yeah, that's the, that is the only thing I've remembered in about eight weeks. I'm pretty pleased with myself with that.

That's pretty good. I know. I'm quite happy with that. And, Arteef, we know, but do it again. We,

[00:14:51] Atif Riaz: we have our 50 per Black Friday deal. It's actually on your website as well. So yeah, do check out Nathan's. I should have said, why don't

[00:14:59] Nathan Wrigley: you search code snippets? Let's do it. Let's just do it quickly. See if it actually works, right?

Okay. Let's put the site back on. So if I type in here, I actually have a

[00:15:06] Atif Riaz: question, quick one for you. Yeah. You've got all these deals coming through. Is there. Any apart from code snippets, I'm sure any that are like, wow, that's a really good deal that you think

[00:15:16] Nathan Wrigley: to be honest Look, there you go code snippets folks pro.

I searched for snippets in there, and it came up. So yeah, it actually works Not only thing i've remembered this month, that's the only thing i've built which actually works no to be perfectly honest with you, people add their deals by clicking on this button and it takes you to a form And those deals come through to me.

So, long as they're legit. So I give them all a once over and I check that, that it's a legit company and that it's got an actual offer and the dates match up and things like that, I don't really get into which one's better than the other, but, here, this might be quite handy. I guess if you're, let me just go here.

If you go back into the search and filter thing and I just reset it all, This might be quite a useful thing. if you go up and you're looking for, this is, this will show you anything between 60 and a hundred percent off, a hundred percent off. That is a real good deal. So that might be some sort of metric.

these are companies that have obviously decided to offer an absolute ton off. So that might be a good way of looking at it. Anyway, thanks. I got to promote myself even more.

[00:16:25] Michelle Frechette: I'm going to submit a hundred percent off deal. Oh, yeah. Nice. Okay. So I put it on post status already, so I'll submit it to you.

[00:16:34] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Thank you. Oh, thank you, Michelle. That's great. And 121, sorry, 221 deals will be the case. Okay. So this is the world's shortest release of WordPress. It's 6. 4. It lasted eight or nine minutes. I reckon something like that. I'm joking. It wasn't as quick as that, but it wasn't very long. It really, I think it was within 24 hours.

Yeah, it was certainly less. Than a day. We talked about all the fabulous things that WordPress four brings about, but we haven't had this chat with Atif or with, Oh, ATS. ah, Atif. Sorry. I'm gonna butcher your name all day long and I really apologize. I can't seem to get that into That's, you're not the first Yeah, the, oh yeah.

I apologize. but I did wonder if Michelle. or James or Atif, if you just did want to mention something that you thought was cool about the release, I've talked about it to death, but if you've got something to say, it, or we'll move on and talk about the problem that forced the, I really

[00:17:31] Michelle Frechette: liked the haiku at the bottom.

[00:17:33] James Giroux: Oh.

[00:17:34] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. I wrote

[00:17:39] Michelle Frechette: it. Did you? Where's It's on the official release page.

[00:17:43] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, it's not on this page. It's not. Actually, this is the official, it's the download release page. So I don't know if that's

[00:17:50] Michelle Frechette: good. It's the blog post one,

[00:17:52] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I'm sorry. Okay, so the haiku's cool. What else? Anything else that you like about this release?

And again, open to James and Atif.

[00:18:03] Michelle Frechette: Over 600 people participated in this, this release team, And I think that's just amazing that the 600 people can come together to do that. It was an underrepresented gender release squad. I was on the marketing team for that and just, it's just magic to watch it work.

Even when there's blips, like a, ancient curl issues and things like that. And I did say ancient because let's face it, that really was an issue. But, But yeah, it's just the whole, it takes a village and all the little platitudes and things that we talk about when we talk about a community coming together to create things, it really is a magical thing to watch.

And so just so freaking proud of our community every time we release something that helps, 43 percent of the internet and people like us be able to have a living and to do that through something like WordPress. So I'm just, I'm always in awe.

[00:18:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's a nice way to put it. Thank you.

Anything from the other two? before we move on. Go ahead and top that guys. Yeah.

[00:19:05] Atif Riaz: I echo Michelle's words. She took the words right

[00:19:07] Nathan Wrigley: out of my mouth. Yeah. I suspect I was, yeah, I was probably going to say more or less. Especially

[00:19:16] James Giroux: the

[00:19:17] Michelle Frechette: part about being on the marketing team. I don't remember seeing your name there.

[00:19:26] Nathan Wrigley: 600 people. yeah, to make that webpage, I guess more than the webpage, the project as a whole, just draw your attention to this because this is not apropos of anything, but, we said hello to a brand new theme. It's called the 2024 theme. And it really is. in that you can really just click a few buttons in order to really change the look and feel of it in a way like no other theme, certainly a block based thing that I've seen, but I do wonder, and I'm going to ask you candidly and you can either blow V8 and ignore the question or you can answer it honestly.

has anybody switched over to full site? sorry, block-based themes yet as your go-to, or in my case, I'll be perfectly honest. My, the bit that is holding me back is just things like the navigation block. I just can't seem to make the switch. It, I know it's brilliant and I know that being able to manipulate the whole header and the whole footer.

Being able to create those, those posts, those template pages really quickly is amazing. And I gave it such a long go this weekend, but in the end, I still thought, do you know what, I still think the theme that I'm using, my old fashioned customizer theme still works for me. So I haven't yet made the move, but I do wonder James or Atif or Michelle, if you have,

[00:20:50] Michelle Frechette: I use cadence almost exclusively now.

So I'm in blocks all

[00:20:53] Nathan Wrigley: the time. Yeah, and, but do you use the old, I say old in air quotes, do you use the, non block based classic Cadence theme, with the customizer and all that?

[00:21:06] Michelle Frechette: sometimes, and sometimes I just use the Cadence

[00:21:08] Nathan Wrigley: blocks. okay, interesting. Alright, and what about you, James?

I'm, I'm

[00:21:14] James Giroux: with Michelle. I'm primarily Cadence with, Toadip into Oli. So it's basically all block

[00:21:21] Nathan Wrigley: feeds. Yeah. Ollie, I had a go at that this weekend and of the bunch, that was my preferred one, I think that was really rather nice and, seems to be having a lot of, yeah, a lot of installs at the moment and a lot of talk about it.

yeah. I'm with you. It's just, it is just that piece. It is just the fact that you can't make, you can't really modify the, I don't know, the, the, ability to have that mobile menu. It's not quite, I don't know, putting buttons in it. It's all a bit more complicated than, all the ways that I've had to do it.

Teef, what about you? I

[00:21:54] Atif Riaz: think I'm the rebel of the group. I don't actually use it. I use Bricks mostly, and a danger word, Elementor. I still use Elementor, but Bricks is like the theme. I can't, yeah, nearly everybody. And

[00:22:06] Nathan Wrigley: that's a theme, right? Everybody imagines it's a page builder plug in, but it's not.

It's a theme, which of course... I think

[00:22:12] Atif Riaz: that's one of the amazing things about it. It's a theme and you can do so much with it. just the ability of, the cool thing about it, not to try and plug it in anyway, but dynamic data, it just handles it with a breeze. using sites with lots of dynamic data.

It's

[00:22:26] Nathan Wrigley: so nice. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. there is this brand new theme, 2024. It is pretty amazing. And if you're, if you are, I think this is an interesting time to flip over to block based themes. Cause I think most of the stuff that's holding me back will not, those dominoes won't take long to fall. So I predict that in the very near future it will become my way of doing things.

But there's also, then the new showcase and there's a bunch of other things, but we done this to death. Let's talk about the, Let's talk about the kerfuffle that happened because not too long out the gate, WordPress 6. 4 rolled out and then we're looking at a page on the WP Tavern, it's called 1 fixes a critical, you'd never like to see that word, a curl requests bug.

confess this is a little bit above my pay grade, but essentially if you were like me, this didn't cause you any problem. I was entirely fine. I had no hint of anything in 6. 4 going wrong whatsoever. However, some web hosts, have Older versions of curl. And I'm not really sure how far back you've got to go, how in air quotes out of date that version needs to be, but there was a problem with the version of curl.

and so that meant that a quick patch needed to be released because things couldn't be, updated. Now you could. Probably, if you've listened to that sentence carefully, you can probably understand the problem. if the thing which is broken stopped things getting updated, how do you update the thing that's broken?

Because the update won't work. Looks like it's on the hosts to update their version of curl for all of their users. Then, those users will be able to update their version of WordPress. Maybe that's something the hosts will take care of automatically for them, I don't know. Anyway, it was a, bit of a crisis.

It came out of the blue. 24 hours after this fabulous release, we've got a, real big problem. Hopefully by now, that has been fixed. But a bit of a PR. A bit of a PR snafu and no doubt if you're in the Squarespace and Wix camp, this is excellent fodder for their, PR outlets, WordPress, Oh, how difficult is it to use them all that.

So over to you, if you want to talk about this and if, you're working for a company that dealt with it or clients that dealt with it. Yep.

[00:24:58] Atif Riaz: Yeah. if I can maybe just. Okay, go. I think, actually there's real two sides to the coin. I think one is definitely amazing response to actually get an update out that quickly and patch it up.

the thing actually is, from a hosting provider point of view, you can see them on both sides. They are the devil and the saint in, in, in some ways in that, it's not just Not to go too technical in it, but not just curl. It is curl, that's the issue. But the core underlying issue is that the operating system that these servers run on is called CentOS.

And CentOS is actually also discontinued. It's end of life. It's no longer continued. That runs. An older version of curl. So it's not something that they can update. There's a limit to, they can't update curl anymore. They have to in the actual server, that's running the websites, put in a new operating system.

And if you have a host, that's got hundreds of thousands of sites, that's quite a task and you need to manage that properly, but I'm not trying to take their side. They should do that. it's not something I'm saying, they're totally blameless because it's not news to these hosts that, Oh yeah.

Operating system is end of life. They do get notified and there should be some planning that they should do but it's a good question, I think it raises in general of how far back should you Make things compatible is like when WordPress, they were still, supporting PHP 5. 4, it's, I think that was not too long ago when they, changed that.

So it does raise a good question. I think, how far back should you go?

[00:26:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I saw some, I saw some commentary. There was obviously a bit of back and forth on Twitter, people, on from hosting companies. Feeling that they had to defend their decision to have a versions of curl, which were, out of date.

And they were saying that in some sense, if that piece of software was working, why update it? And of course the argument is always, security and things like this. it was working, it was functional. What was the point in updating it? The, I don't quite know how it's snuck in, but I'll just raise it on the screen.

Cause this was Tiffany bridge from nexus. She said that they've got tens of thousands of sites which were affected by this bug. So obviously that's a ton of work that company has got to fix. And she said that this is how the whole thing went down. And I'm just trusting that this is true. Sarah Gooding's written that. Yeah, no, I read the full request as well. Yeah. Okay, perfect. Okay, so she says someone reported a bog having to do with an interaction between, their intrusion protection system as WordPress. Then that person submitted their own patch to WordPress. The project lead for that area asked the submit to write some tests, which they didn't do.

Then this got merged, this got merged anyway, despite the lack of tests. and and then, the last point, meanwhile, the hosts are all going to have to revert the changes and what we've just discussed. So it seems like it's snuck in under the wire. But all of that being said, the final paragraph of this is the interesting bit WordPress core contributors will have to get to the bottom of how this bug was allowed to get through via a post more tomorrow or the discussion.

So really it's not really all that relevant how it got in. It was, I guess the thing now is to figure out how on earth it was allowed to be. Not so much how it got in but how it didn't get spotted and wordpress 6. 4 got pushed with this problem tens of thousands possibly hundreds of thousands of sites having a problem is a Bit of a calamity.

Anyway, apologies. Courtney

[00:28:31] Michelle Frechette: and Jonathan in the comments have given some more insight as well.

[00:28:34] Nathan Wrigley: Great. Thank you so much. Let's quickly put those up. We've got a few full site editing comments. We'll come to those in a minute. So here we go. Courtney, says curl, the curl bug meant that any call to an external sites were broken on those older versions.

Dot, core. org repo plugins, themes, and all of that. Any license key premium. SAS were all impacted for their section of users. Jonathan DeRozia says 98. 5 percent of sites running the 6. 4 major version and now on 6. 4. 1. Okay. That's an interesting, statistic, isn't it? So if we read that the other way round, 1.

5 percent of sites haven't updated to 6. 4. 1. And I'm guessing a subset of those. Will be with a problem as opposed to they, they can't update. So let's guesstimate that it's, less than 1%, but still 1 percent of 43 percent of the internet is still, uh, a lot, James, it looks like you're willing to say something.

Oh,

[00:29:41] James Giroux: always willing to whether the,

[00:29:45] Nathan Wrigley: we hear you. My, my,

[00:29:47] James Giroux: my one thought on this is I wonder how much of the impact is felt by, enterprise customers, an enterprise host hosting versus your average day to day hosting because they tend to have, longer development cycles between, websites that they're building, they have, bigger teams involved.

So the cycle of getting things done is just takes longer. And hosting that caters to that also has to consider that sometimes these enterprise customers are using other software that's just as antiquated and requires a specific version of curl potentially right that they have to use and those considerations have to be taken into account, which is why some of these hosts are doing it.

So I do wonder if the impact While maybe not felt downstream is felt more upstream at those enterprise where we actually need WordPress to succeed even more, in order to, get some of the traction

[00:30:50] Nathan Wrigley: we want in the rest of the world. I wonder also if, so I'm going to use the word nexus just cause it's on the screen, not because I'm picking on that company, but Tiffany said that it was, what did she say?

It was tens of thousands, I think was the word. So I wonder if hosting companies, for example, nexus in the future. We'll, operate a different, schedule for things like even minor releases or major releases, because if you'd have, if you'd have held off for let's say 72 hours, this, you maybe could have seen this happening with other people.

obviously the best thing to do is to be able to confidently roll over the moment that all of these things happen. But I do wonder if it will change the posture of some companies who've been caught up in this, because I'm guessing in some cases, this is going to cost. Hundreds of thousands, millions, I don't know, in lost time or possibly, clients getting fed up and wandering off or just dragging people in over the weekend that didn't need to be in over the weekend, that kind of thing.

So we'll see, but, I wonder if it will change their way of doing things in the future. Okay. Thank you for that. Carrying on Courtney's back to Tiffany's point about enterprise infrastructure. There are ways to keep sent to us other Linux, even PHP seven on life support. after they are no longer officially.

Maintained. It's a good point. Thank you. back to the subject of a moment ago. when we were talking about full site editing, Amber Hines is saying, it was partner Steve's first contribution. Oh, nice. he fixed an animated bug gif to respect prefers reduced motion accessibility fix. Nice.

Accessibility is Amber Heinz's middle name. it's not really, but it could be. Amber Accessibility Heinz. I like that. It's got a nice ring to it. Mike Cotton says the navigation block is really counterintuitive. I can never get it to work. Yeah, it's just. Not as fully featured as other things I've seen.

Okey dokey, let's move on. This is another interesting subject. this is Maria van der Akt and me having a chat. Maria, sorry, Maria, Marika van der Akt. formerly the CEO of Yoast. And now, in charge of all sorts of things. Emilia Capital with her husband Yoast, the person, not the company. She is, in fact, not married to a company.

That would be weird. but she has taken to post status, recently, and she's started to pen a bunch of articles. And one of them caught my attention. I thought it was really interesting. So I got her on the, got her on the podcast and we talked about her concern that in the WordPress space, there is this like bifurcation that the WordPress community is splitting into two channels and her concern is that these channels are getting so far apart.

That it's impossible to even shout pass the salt Because the other side won't that's maybe a really british reference The idea of two people at the end of a giant table who are supposed to be having dinner together But they're so far away from each other. They can't even hear each other speak They're in the same room, but they're not Part of the same conversation.

And so these two channels that are going in different directions, on the one hand, you've got community orientated people who show up to events, who create plugins, who do WordPressy things like contribute to core, just because they think it's a great philanthropic thing to do. And on the other hand, people who are into the community because there is money to be made.

nobody thinks that those two pieces of the puzzle aren't important. We have to have both, right? We just have to. The problem is, are we getting to the point where these people can't even communicate with each other? And so I had a chat and she put forward her thoughts on that. And I wonder, do you feel this a little bit?

Do you... get the intuition that the community is going off in two different directions. I'm going to kick that one off with Michelle, because you're all the places everywhere, all at once. That sounds like a film. what do you think? Is she, concerned needlessly, or do you think there is something in this that we need to address?

I

[00:35:06] Michelle Frechette: think that this... Is a product of a community growing and an ecosystem continuing to grow so that there's, definite, there's more definition between types of people contributing and working within the ecosystem. I also think it's a product or a byproduct of not having had in person events for almost 3 years.

So that we weren't coming together, we had lots of online events, but it's not the same as like just seeing somebody is sitting down at lunch or finding somebody in the hallway track or talking directly to a customer because you're at a vendor table. And so I think that we've had a little and now when we come back from those, and we've had these big events, it's almost all Insiders that are grabbing up those tickets, especially at the, bigger events, right? WordCamp Rochester, that was not the case. And it's, we're struggling at the local event level to get people to even buy tickets. where I used to sell out 140 tickets at Rochester, we had 70 tickets that we sold this year.

And then we had people who couldn't make it because they got COVID. So we had 65 people at an event that used to be almost 150 people. And so I think that there's a lot of that happening. And whether it's people don't want to come together in person, or they've just found other things to fill their time, and they continue to use WordPress.

I'm not sure exactly. even in my own community, and I have people asking me to can we get our meetup back in person and other people won't even come, to the online meetup. So I'm like, that's a lot of work for me who has to get a scooter out of a car and bring somebody along with me if nobody's going to show up.

So it's, there's a lot, there's a lot to consider. And I'm not sure what everybody's. internal, dialogue about these kinds of events and how they're using WordPress and all of that. yeah, I think she's definitely on to something, but I don't know what the solution is, I guess is where I'm coming at.

Because when you start to see things split up like that, how do you bring them back together?

[00:37:06] Nathan Wrigley: I remember back in the day, and I really wasn't part of this conversation in WordPress, but I was in the Drupal community more and in the Drupal community, everything genuinely was completely philanthropic.

There really wasn't an ecosystem to buy anything. Honestly, I think the word anything is, appropriate. You couldn't, there was nothing. And so it had that sort of feel to it. And then I came over to WordPress and already that conversation had occurred and people had moved on because you could already buy things.

But having read about the history of how all that happened, it appears that the first tentative steps into paying for plugins, paying for themes, there was a lot of pushback people thought. No, that's not the ethic that we want to be pursuing. Eventually we got over that hump. And now I just, I think Marika's point is we've moved so far away from that initial conversation that now we've got people in the community who are.

Just in it for the money, only for the money. And I think that's where she feels the problem lies. if you suck the system for all that it's worth financially, and so get that, let's imagine you're a company, you've got this fabulous product. You get really wealthy, but you put nothing back. That's not great because the bedrock upon which your whole company is built is not being nurtured by you.

You're making your millions, but you need to be getting involved in, I don't know. Let's say five for the future or something else sponsoring people to be part of the release cycle or Sending people to events being a good custodian. I don't know. James, this is right in your wheelhouse. What do you think?

[00:38:47] James Giroux: I think that There's a healthy

[00:38:53] Nathan Wrigley: tension. Careful tightrope treading required.

[00:38:56] James Giroux: no, I think that there will always be a healthy tension between, community values and commercial values, and that's okay. Having that tension is good. because when you have tension holding up a rope, it actually makes the whole thing taught.

And so you can actually do something with it. One of the interesting things I've noticed. so Michelle and I are two people who are lucky enough to have been to all three flagship, work camps this year, we went to Asia, Europe and U S and one of the interesting things that I think both of us can attest to is that disconnect between the.

sort of money making side of wordpress and the community side and, what Marika is saying, I think is right. And I wonder if there's an opportunity for those of us who have seen the value, of the community side doing very specific outreach to executives, In some of these companies, who are purely money making or C works like a revenue source, to get them together, to talk and to connect and to create value for them.

when we were in, in Europe, the head of new fold digital came out, not a word presser. Very obviously not a word presser, right? and from that community perspective, and yet she came out and she hung out at the Yost party and she had a great time and it was really neat to see that.

And I wonder if, like Carrie from, Liquid Web did the same thing. And I wonder if, finding opportunities and ways for us to help these humans. Who are, just as new and nervous and awkward in these community settings as we would be and find a way to speak to the value that they need to get out of justifying their time and also find ways to integrate them into community.

I'm talking with Josefa about the conversation that she had to go through to get Google involved. in sponsoring WordCamps and all of the hoops that she had to go through. It's the same thing. We're not really that good at making WordPress welcome to people from outside of it, at that top level of revenue and in that executive space.

And I think maybe that's an opportunity for us.

[00:41:30] Nathan Wrigley: It's interesting. One of the, one of the consequences of what I do is that I get called up quite a lot by people who want to, who've got a product and they're looking to. a quick win, they want to get in and start selling it and making, making waves.

And one of the questions that they often ask is, yeah, what can we do? And that's always my answer is get involved in the community, figure out that bit, because yeah, sure. You could put a billion dollars into Google ads or Facebook ads or whatever, and you could short circuit it that way. But I always think go with the intuition to figure out what the community is.

And then when you figured out what the community is. Do that, do loads of that and, suddenly it'll just start to click. It might take a bit of time. It might be a lost leader, but get involved with the events, make it known that you're doing the events. One of the, one of the things that Marika and I talked about in our podcast was whether we should have some credential system, this is, going to go down so badly, but let's talk about it anyway, some official accreditation and I.

I have no idea who does that. That's not the point. It was just what is the idea like? where if you submit 5 percent of your, let's say profit, you can display that you did that in the year 2023. We can certify that we gave 5 percent of our profit if we did 5 percent of our. Workforce is time. We can certify that we did that.

If we sponsored the WPC, we can CC, we can certify that we did that. so just some little quid pro quo. You do something and you get something back. Cause I think that bit might be missing. you could be putting in loads and loads of hours and not really know how you can say, Oh, we did this without sounding like you're showing off, so there's that as well.

Atif, anything. Yeah, no, I

[00:43:25] Atif Riaz: think I can really echo what Michelle and James are saying. I think there definitely is. I came from also a Drupal kind of background and it was a bit of a shock. I wouldn't say shock. It was a bit surprised, okay, it's like a lot of things you have to buy. And now even, just.

in the intro, we spoke about how it's just thinking back to when I first came to WordPress and now there's some things which you would buy for like a few dollars. And now it's six, 700. Yeah. Wow. That's a, huge jump. And I'm sure in a few years time, you'd have to mortgage your house just to buy a plugin or something, it's going to, it's only going to go up.

So I think that there does need to be companies that are. Doing really well of WordPress. It should also be giving back to the community. I don't know if we have to put in a British tax system where we're taxing the most, but we should have some way that companies are, I think that are doing well should give back so that the core foundation is, only improved.

[00:44:25] Nathan Wrigley: Courtney's raised the point. Sorry. I'll just quickly say this and then we'll get back to James. would it be 5 percent or 5 percent of WordPress revenue? Yeah, I don't know. Courtney is the honest answer. We just thought, would it be an interesting thing? you could just prove something and then have a little badge.

I don't even know. I'll. Maybe it'll be me. Maybe I'll set up the badge system. I'll give you a little sticker when I see you at WordCamp. But yeah, just something. 5 percent of what? I don't know. Maybe less, but something along those lines. And what about contributing upstream? Yeah, PHP, JavaScript, all sorts of things that you could contribute to.

Yeah, would that count? I don't know, Courtney. Let's let's hold, the, put a pin in that one and see. But I just thought that would be a nice, like way of being able to accredit yourself and show off a little bit without being too boastful. James, sorry, interrupted.

[00:45:18] James Giroux: speaking as somebody who has a certification product, I can tell you that it's, it is interesting, right?

Like you, you need some buy in from some early adopters to really get it off the ground and then you need, to be really strict on it. And that's going to make you enemies as well as supporters. the more you, get into that. but I think, Amber also mentioned, meetups being something that's really important as well.

And I, agree with that. if I put my business hat on. And I'm looking at it from the perspective of these, revenue only people I'm looking, where's my customer acquisition coming from? Where, are the new folks coming into WordPress? How, can I, identify those and supporting those local meetups and encouraging those communities to grow and actually bringing some of the expertise maybe we have in house around.

events or around customer acquisition or creating big networks and community engagement to actually support these local teams and mentor them through growth. I think there's a lot of opportunity there for us as well. the community team, at WordPress does a great job and automatic has a team that does that as well.

us all participating in that in some way would be helpful. I,

[00:46:48] Nathan Wrigley: I really don't know what the answer is to this because it seems to be true. Can I say something controversial? Yeah, please do. Go on. I'll, come back to

[00:46:54] Atif Riaz: you. I guess a plugin company or theme developer, they could argue they are contributing because with all respect, if you just take a blank WordPress installation, I don't feel it's at that stage where you can make a finished site.

Without any other plugins or themes. Yeah, so they could say, the fact that WordPress has gone to where it is and the level it is, because we're contributing to make it better. We're extending it. And so you can't make a finished product with what it is, but you can if we add these things on. it's success is also maybe down to our success and what we've contributed in this way.

[00:47:30] Nathan Wrigley: This is why it's so difficult to disentangle all of it, isn't it? Because everybody wants the whole thing to grow, but it just, as you said, I don't think anything you said was controversial, actually, I think it makes perfect sense, with a rising tide carries all boats, if you like, if you, if there's an ecosystem of incredibly cool plugins and themes and, hosting options and all of that kind of stuff, it just makes you wanna.

Use WordPress. And I guess I'm not even really talking about just core or anything like that. It's just figuring out some way where, you get accreditation cause you set up a meetup and you did it because you did, I don't know. You contributed some of your finances because honestly, I think if we sat down, we could probably come up with a hundred things, which are worthy of notice.

I do this. I don't know if that would be worth noticing, that kind of thing. If you put YouTube videos together, which are helpful in people using full site editing, it does that count. And perhaps it does. But, yeah, I just think Marieke is onto something with talking about it and just saying, look.

There's a problem. Let's try and get this, these two little camps to come back. I'm doing hand gestures. I think my hand gestures probably have said more in the last 10 seconds than I did in all of the words that I spoke. Anyway, Marika is writing a weekly blog. Easy, quick to consume over on poststatus.

com. So if you go and follow her there, and if you listen to that podcast, I should have said it's, it's on the, oops, sorry, wrong piece. It's on the WP Tavern website. It's number 98 of the jukebox podcast. And you can have a little listen. Are you guys ready to move on? Do you think we've gone through that one?

Yeah. Nod to the head. Okay. Alrighty. Okay, this is a sort of technical thing, but if you're into speeding up your WordPress website and you have a multilingual website, there's some good news on the horizon. Targeted for WordPress 6. 4, over on the tavern, Sarah Gooding tells us about how the new performance translation system, for want of a better word, is mooted to be launched in WordPress 6.

5. We won't get into the technicalities, but it handles translations in a different way and a performance way. And it really does really make a difference to the speed at which your website loads. So this is just to say it's coming. you can see here. There's some performance measurements based upon how things currently operate.

If you're using the English US locale, and, the load time on a, the same site that we're going to show in three different cases would be 1. 5, 159 milliseconds. As soon as you throw in a German translation, it goes up to 217 milliseconds at the moment. But if you do exactly the same translations, but you use this new performance technology, performance translations, not only does the memory usage drop to just over core, if you like the default, but the, time goes up by almost nothing.

So if you have a translated website at the moment, it is probable that your site is being slowed down and you cannot do anything about it. It's just, that's the hit you're going to take, but in March, if this all ships in a timely fashion. your translations are going to make almost no difference to the speed at which your website launches, which, is a good thing.

I don't think there's much else to add to that, but if you want to add, I'll just open it up to you three.

[00:51:15] James Giroux: I got nothing.

[00:51:16] Atif Riaz: Translation is a beast. I think I didn't realize how much of a beast it is until I started working on code snippets and then making, implementing translation is a beast, so anything that can help is,

[00:51:27] Nathan Wrigley: is awesome. Yeah, I did read an article, but it was probably about two or three months ago where it went into technicalities of how it works.

And at the moment we're using a set of MO files and it like completely hijacks that system, gets rid of it altogether and replaces it with this new system. My understanding is that from the back end, if you're doing the translation work. you won't really notice any difference, but on the front end, it obviously makes a huge difference and it will put for WordPress at the forefront of those kinds of websites.

So no more will you have to worry about deciding whether or not you want a multilingual website, because it will be as fast can be. Okay. We've got a bit of a kind of plugin news. There's a few bits and pieces around plugins this week. The first one I hadn't heard of this, to be honest, there's a plug, I guess it's a plugin called late points.

it's a booking solution and it's an acquisition piece and use this. It's because you're probably looking, it's been, acquired by the makers of Astra brainstorm force. they've bought this plugin. They, it's interesting actually, where they lay out why they've done it. And if you don't follow brainstorm force, they've really got their tendrils into.

So many different pieces of the pie. They've got probably one of the biggest themes of all time with Astra. but they've also got a load of other stuff. Like they've got shortcut, which is an e commerce solution. they've got, actually, if I just scroll down, we'll be able to make the, make the.

The sort of tighter integration here. Yeah, here we go. so they've got sure start, they've got short triggers, they've got a whole bunch of other stuff. But what they said is they, didn't really have a way to monetize the meetings, if you like, because they've figured out how to monetize. Actual physical products.

You can sell a digital product with their products. You can sell a real world product and have it delivered with their products and all of that kind of stuff. But they didn't have a way of monetizing the, human bit, selling your time. And so now they've done that. Apparently the plugin has got 21, 000 installs at the moment, and they're going to try and bind it closely with the suite of products that they've already got.

I confess I have not heard of it before or played with it. So I can't vouch for it. But, another acquisition, but it does seem this one, it nicely integrates with the. Stuff that they've got already anything on that you three

[00:54:00] Michelle Frechette: it's interesting when I worked in higher education. I worked in with massage therapists and finding a solution that was also HIPAA compliant Was huge.

And so I don't know how all of these different You know how all these I see if their example there was getting your hair cut your beard trim with that kind of thing, but when people have to input for medical purposes, I wonder how compliant they are. And I know the doctor's offices do have a lot of times where you can schedule online.

So it's just curious. Yeah.

[00:54:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. They've got the usual arrangement of integrations. Like they've got a bunch of payment, the usual things like stripe and, but actually a couple of other ones that I. Not really come across before. there was a razor pay was thrown into that as well. And I've lost the little graphic now, but they, PayPal stripe, raise the pay and a few others.

I can't actually see it now, but it's gone off my radar, but anyway, on Google calendar, PayPal, stripe, Molly pay stack, another one that I can't read brain tree. Flutter wave. Never heard of that one. Yeah. A

[00:55:07] Michelle Frechette: lot of them are for different countries.

[00:55:09] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah. Anyway, there it is. If you're into a booking solution, personally, I always go with Sass for that because, I dunno, I just, I don't want my website being in charge of that piece of my life for some reason, just in case my website goes down and I've got nobody to blame if it goes down, I always have that done by Sass.

James, Atif, anything, or should we move on? Oh, James, you have now gone, your audio has gone. Do the quick refresh, do the, refresh thing. It's going to be quicker than everything else. I imagine, unless you can find the setting and update it, we'll happily listen to your response when you come back. they've done, they're throwing out a lifetime deal, by the way, in order to Bolster this. I think it really is for the next like 15 hours or something. you can see the price. I won't mention the prices, but I'll just put show them on the screen. that you can get that plugin for now for a limited time on a lifetime deal. So there it is. Okay. Speaking of monetizing. Jetpack have got a new thing.

This is something I have not heard of before. It's called Jetpack Creator. it's a new offering launched this week. it includes, I'll describe as Sarah Gooden does. She says Jetpack 12. 8 was released this week, introducing Jetpack Creator, which is a new product under the growth category that sits alongside the recently launched newsletter product.

Jetpack creator is aimed at users who want to monetize their content and subscribers. So it's all about the stuff you put on the page on your website. You want to monetize that. So things like eBooks, courses, paid newsletters, paywalling access, advertising, and other content options. The, bundle. If you buy it, it looks like at the moment it's available for 9.

95. I don't quite know why, it says 50 percent off. I don't know what that means in terms of whether it's for the next six weeks or for the first subscription. I don't know, but it comes with 40 different blocks. Again, I can't say what they are, but 40, it's a lot of blocks. That's a boatload of blocks, that allow you to do all of that.

Paywall content, add subscriber forms, accept donations, start a newsletter, receive payments. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. you can do this for free. It says the free newsletter product caps at a hundred. That's only the newsletter bit. So I don't know about all the other bits, but, anyway, there it is.

They're going to try and link it in to the other things that Jetpack does. And they're going to try and get you into some kind of, system whereby they, they suggest your content within the wordpress. com network. and you can therefore be suggested hopefully on other people's websites. I'm not sure how much people actually make use of that kind of stuff these days anyway.

But anyway, there you go. If you are hoping to create content and make money out of it. 10 a month at the moment seems to be a credible way of doing it. Again, I'm sure if you're in the WordPress ecosystem, you've probably been able to cobble together something like this, but, if you're into jetpack, maybe this is a quick, easy way to do all of that.

So throwing it open again to, I, I dunno, let's maybe begin with Michelle. Cause I saw this bit, look, accept donations is obviously in your wheelhouse with give and things like that.

[00:58:36] Michelle Frechette: I think it's very interesting. It's interesting. I, start to worry sometimes what automatic tries to be everything to everybody because it feels like it starts to drive people out of the ecosystem.

and so it's interesting that way, but I also don't know, like maybe it's reaching an audience that isn't. Reachable at other places, I don't really know. it's interesting for sure.

[00:59:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's not, Jetpack isn't really a thing, which word like people like you and me who are really, into WordPress, it doesn't seem to get a lot of love or attention, does it?

It feels like people like us, we always go and find the other solution, which is tailor made for that thing.

[00:59:18] Michelle Frechette: people like you and me have been in the ecosystem a while. Remember when Jetpack would just slow down your. your site ridiculously, right? And now they've made it so that it isn't this huge bloat for your site anymore.

So I can see how newer people into the ecosystem don't have that kind of hanging over their head. Remember when Jetpack used to slow my site down to a crawl and things like that. And

[00:59:41] Nathan Wrigley: also if you are an inexperienced WordPress user, and you just install that one plugin, the list of things that it now does is.

App is remarkable. it's like you can scroll for quite some time, all of the different things that it can do. and it's a bit like, I don't know, when you go to, oh, I don't know, you sign up for some sort of online service and then you realize, okay, I need it to do that, and that, and you just enable these things and the bill starts to ramp up slowly, much of it is just in, you get it for your initial fee, but obviously this bit, the creator bit is going to cost you additional.

$10. James orif, anything on this testing?

[01:00:21] James Giroux: Can you hear me? Yeah, we got you . I was just gonna say this seems like a [email protected]. Ooh. And,

[01:00:29] Nathan Wrigley: interesting sub stack, that kind of thing as well. yeah.

[01:00:32] James Giroux: So it's, looking at those folks who are having to make the choice between Medium or wordpress.com.

And, WordPress. com gives them a bit more flexibility on design and plugins and different things like that. But the monetization is fully integrated and seamless, over at Medium. So if you are a content creator and you're looking for a place to land, I've got this creator pack, lets me do the sub stack thing.

It lets me pay, get paid for my content, collect donations, do all these different things. That's an easy win. I'll just choose wordpress. com because I know it's the blogging thing.

[01:01:10] Nathan Wrigley: I am constantly amazed when I go online and I listen to other podcasts, which are nothing to do with the WordPress space, how, successful people can be.

With their own writing and their own content, it never ceases to amaze me. How many tens of thousands in some cases, hundreds of thousands of subscribers people can have. And so in my little world, this creator thing just seems Oh, really? Who's gonna, who's going to pay for that. obviously if you are somebody like Neil Gaiman or something like that, you're a famous author and you want to write a blog and get money that it's just a bit of a no brainer, isn't it?

Those sub stacky. Medium and now Jetpack Creator things. And presumably, it's, not a great deal of work on the front end. you click a few buttons, throw a few blocks in, decide who's going to get it and who's not. And you're, you're off to the races. Jetpack's getting all of this stuff thrown in.

Nice. Thank you. Atif, anything on that before we move on?

[01:02:10] Atif Riaz: Yeah, I think, I think I just have a bad impression of jetpack, which is maybe why, Haven't given a chance, when I came into WordPress, I first came through GoDaddy and then GoDaddy would always install Jetpack. And it was one of the first things I'd uninstalled.

I just got this bad vibe of Jetpack. So maybe I should give it a chance, in general, just paywalls. I'm not the biggest fan of them. I think, people that have. Creators that have had the biggest success that I think are people that Have do on open platforms like youtube and things like this There's you know, just straight away blocking or paywalling all your content.

I'm very on the fence about it.

[01:02:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, interesting Yeah, I just I do know for some people it's really successful. Yeah. but yeah

[01:02:56] Michelle Frechette: You probably deleted hello dolly every time too, didn't you?

[01:03:01] Nathan Wrigley: That's the first thing to go That is the first thing I remember

[01:03:06] Atif Riaz: the first site I came under the first site, there was like this, hello, Dolly.

And then there was a kiss, Matt. And I was like, what are these things? Wait, What am I going through?

[01:03:17] Nathan Wrigley: And there they are every single time. anyway, if you are creating content and obviously, this audience is probably not it, if you have pretensions of creating content, that might be a legitimate, and obviously.

Things like Substack that is massively popular. I really see that everywhere. And you see that typical medium site feels to me like medium has been upended by Substack and now Substack is the cool place to go. And obviously if WordPress can get a slice of that little market, then, and that's great. If you are on the free, I think there's a free version, but they take 10 percent of your.

Revenue. And then if you go onto the paid version, I can't remember. This is the pay Wally bit. I'm not entirely sure. I think they, it's just strike fees and things like that. Anyway, you can go and look at the article. I'll link to it in the show notes tomorrow, right? From the sublime to the ridiculous Mr.

West guard, what the heck? I don't know if he's in the comment. I was chatting to him yesterday. he's just, he's decided, I think this is actually quite cool. Mark has joined forces with the plugin developer at WP sunshine. I don't know if they've joined forces as such, but Mark has decided that wouldn't it be nice if you could have some sort of.

Euphoric moment when you successfully submit a form, because at the moment when you submit a form, what happens at the very best, it says, thank you for submitting your form, which is highly uninteresting. especially you've submitted your tax return correctly during the

course of It might be quite nice to get some kind of clap at the end of it. So that's what this does. When you successfully submit a form, it invokes the. confetti plugin, which again, we'll link to in the show notes and here is your options, right? So imagine I'm hovering over the submit button and the submit is successful.

You can have this basic cannon. Here it comes. Just a little puff of, little puff of confetti, or you can have realistic cannon. I don't know what, I don't know what's realistic more about, oh, it spreads further. Okay. This is my favorite repeating cannon.

That's the one I would use every time. Truly celebratory. Yeah. Oh, so the fireworks fill the whole screen, rather than it coming from one little place. School pride, coming in... Now that I look at it, I think that's my favorite. And falling, you just get like a... it's like snowflakes falling down.

Honestly, it is a bit silly, isn't it? But also at the same time, it's cool. You can imagine this going in different directions where I don't know, you get some sort of fanfare. I'm not suggesting we want the internet to be full of this kind of stuff. In the case of my kids. Filling out a form, like it's dead confusing to them because, my kids are now a bit older, but the idea of reading some confirmation message to say you've successfully submitted this form, maybe not.

But the idea that you get some sort of firework display, I think it's, I think it's fun. I think it's all a bit of fun and it brightens up the internet a little bit. And we have in the UK. Of course, you Americans know all about it. We've just had, Guy Fawkes Day, 5th of November, where we put mannequins of people on top of fires and set fire to them.

What the heck? ha! Every year, children... Seems healthy. Yeah. Every year, children go around with, prams with this thing that they've made to resemble a human being. And they go around collecting money for how good their model of a human being looks like. And then... When you've collected the money on the 5th of November, you chuck it on a bonfire and burn it to death.

there's nothing weird. The money or the effigy? The effigy, yeah. It was this, it was this guy called, it was literally this guy called Guy Fawkes. Guy Fawkes, yeah. you know the anonymous, that little thing? That's all based around, him. Anyway, so that's what we do in the UK. We burn effigies of people.

Two

[01:07:31] Michelle Frechette: weeks ago you were making fun of our Halloween tradition.

[01:07:34] James Giroux: I know.

[01:07:36] Nathan Wrigley: Just saying, Yeah, you're right. It's ridiculous, but it's not as ridiculous as the cheese rolling festival which takes place every year where many limbs are broken in the pursuit of cheese.

[01:07:51] Michelle Frechette: I saw a documentary about that recently.

Did

[01:07:55] Nathan Wrigley: you? It's so funny. Anyway, confetti. It's a thing. I know it's frivolous, but I do appreciate the endeavor of brightening up the internet a little

[01:08:05] Michelle Frechette: bit. And somebody out there right now is saying, and how much of our, how many trees is it taking to put confetti? you and I both know there are people who are looking at that going.

[01:08:22] Nathan Wrigley: I just like the idea of making things frivolous and doing stuff. I, it too.

[01:08:27] Atif Riaz: I can't be on board with this. I have to say I'm a purist I'll, I, like it when I form and I can't see any confirmation message. I have no idea what's happened. Has it been submitted or not? This is a traditionalist. I'm a traditionalist.

I wanna know.

[01:08:47] Michelle Frechette: I'm in the process of submitting nine products to every Black Friday site that there is. And there's one site, I don't remember which it was, and I wouldn't point them out anyway. There's one site that you hit. the submit button at the bottom and literally nothing happens. Like all of your form is still there, but you get an email confirmation.

That's thank you for submitting. You're like, I guess it went through.

[01:09:11] Nathan Wrigley: Mark, I have a suggestion, right? How about this, mate? so if Mark, if you're listening to this, how about instead of the, you could do this with the confetti as well, but how about you do this when a form is submitted?

Incorrectly,

okay, that would be quite good, or just like something like that. And then what about when a form is submitted? Oh, no, this might be another fail. Here you go. If you submit the form, it's wrong. I

can't turn the booing off. But if you submit a form successfully, not only do you get the confetti, but also this

and we have single handedly.

[01:10:04] Michelle Frechette: You know how you fill out a form and it's you miss the box of something that was required and you get to the bottom and you're like, what did I miss? Yeah. That's when you need that boo. you don't know how to fill out a form, Michelle. Michelle,

[01:10:17] Nathan Wrigley: you missed a spot.

Yeah, boo. anyway, we've destroyed the internet, but nice idea, Mark. I appreciate it. That's all good fun. Thank you. Love it. Okay, moving on.

[01:10:28] Michelle Frechette: Mark just popped in with, don't tempt me, Nathan.

[01:10:30] James Giroux: Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!

[01:10:36] Nathan Wrigley: Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!

Oh!

Oh! Devilishly bright stroke. No, don't. I'm a big

[01:10:52] Atif Riaz: fan of Jen Tudy. I would love it if it performed as a girl, with just her popping up. Ridiculous! Ridiculous!

[01:10:58] James Giroux: Ha ha

[01:11:00] Nathan Wrigley: ha! Where has this gone? Marcus Burnett says, Was that cheering or people screaming as they run out of a building? ha It could be both!

But anyway, so there you go. Mark has made the world a little bit lighter and I thought that was worthy of mention. Thank you. Mark brightened up our lives. so another plugin, this is again, a piece of brainstorm force news. I just want to put it on everybody's radar. So this is a little bit like Atarim, but before Atarim came about, there was a plugin by a chap called Andre Gagnon.

He's a Canadian and a thoroughly. Lovely person as it turns out and he produced project huddle and it is imagine, you're trying to Get a client to go through the process of completing a website with you much like atarim does project huddle Does the same thing. It was bought by brainstorm force.

And now we were talking in a minute ago about how everything's sure. Something sure. They're sure that then they're now calling it sure feedback. So that's really all the news here. They've got this product. I don't think they're doing anything, drastically with it. It's just, it's getting a bit of a name change.

So if you've got that, expect that to come. Okey dokey. Can't be much to say about that, Mark. I need you back for this one. I did a podcast episode with David Wormsley this week and we asked ourselves this question and I'm interested in the panelists because with the best will in the world, you three, we're not getting any younger.

Okay. I'm going to guess that not one of us is under eight years old. I went deliberately low. and I do wonder, right? So the question is, 20 years too long in tech? I am getting to the point where I think my brain cannot keep up with the new stuff. I'm in a position now where I don't really need to keep up because I've pivoted and I do all this content stuff now, but if I was to be still.

Pushing the boundaries of making websites and all of that kind of stuff. I do wonder if the rate of change, the pace at which things are moving is so fast now that somebody of my late years, look at the gray hair of my late years, it's going to really struggle. And so that got me thinking, what about the, kids that are moving in now, the 18 year olds who are beginning on the journey in the industry that we love so much.

20 years from now, can you imagine how breathtakingly difficult it's going to be to keep up? So the question is just open. After 20 years in tech, do you feel that you can still keep up and stay relevant, or is that getting harder and harder? So anybody that wants to answer that, feel

[01:13:48] James Giroux: free.

[01:13:53] Michelle Frechette: Okay, I'll dive in. I'm the oldest one in the group.

[01:13:57] Nathan Wrigley: She said, are you?

[01:13:59] Michelle Frechette: I just turned 55, so I think I am. Okay,

[01:14:02] Nathan Wrigley: you win. No,

[01:14:06] Atif Riaz: no, I said, wow, because I never would have guessed.

[01:14:09] Nathan Wrigley: I'm getting with the other. Wow.

[01:14:11] Atif Riaz: I wish you could give me some tips on how to look that good when I'm

[01:14:14] Michelle Frechette: 55. I cover the gray and I like to say fat doesn't wrinkle.

So there you go.

[01:14:23] Nathan Wrigley: Can you keep up? Michelle, I keep

[01:14:25] Michelle Frechette: up with what I need to keep up with. Yeah. And here's the thing about WordPress is you can build a site in WordPress without knowing any of. Coding at all. And that's what's been beautiful about WordPress all along. So like I've never been a coder. Do I know CSS? Yes.

Because I've had to learn it over the years because I've had clients that wouldn't ever wouldn't make the logo bigger kind of stuff. but. I don't know CSS enough to not have to still continue to go to W3 schools and look it up sometimes, right? And as long as there are resources available, and as long as, and I think also the older we get and the more successful we become, we're able to hire people to do some of those things that we need to fill in the blanks sometimes.

And so I don't think you can age out unless you allow yourself to age

[01:15:12] Nathan Wrigley: out. That's interesting. Yeah, that's a

[01:15:15] Atif Riaz: good point. That's a good point. maybe if I can just say a couple of things, I'm not at 20, I would say I'm about 15, 16 years in tech, I'm nearly almost there. WordPress isn't the only thing that I work on.

I am a coder and developer, so I know other languages and work on other things. One thing I've really seen is just the number of kind of frameworks that really are just wrappers for the core language. The number of them have just shot up and, maybe an old. Grumpy man, I could say, it, the only thing that kind of makes me a bit annoyed is just people learn these frameworks and they don't really learn the language and then, and it's important because it's a foundational thing, and I just feel like this is only going to go more and more than there'll be a time where you'll say things like PHP and JavaScript and they're like, what's that?

Yeah, It's just I know this framework. I know react, I know this or that, and these are the hot things. Oh, but actually, do you know, like how to be. You had to write in PHP and it's no, I don't need to. And I think there's a bit of a shame or a bit of sadness in that, I think.

[01:16:22] Nathan Wrigley: I have this intuition that things might be going full circle with the, not quite full circle, but with the, advent of all of these fantastic things that are coming in the CSS spec.

So many of the cool things that CSS is going to be able to do that we've relied upon JavaScript and all these clever things in the past, I do wonder if it's going to actually become easier to achieve some of the clever things that we've been able to do. anyway, thank you for your input. James, what do you reckon?

You've definitely been in it for 20 years. Yeah, you gave away as much.

[01:16:54] James Giroux: Yeah, my fault. No, I remember, machine language when I was in college, and having to go all the way back to that and, and figure that out. And the foundation that it gave for just the concepts of coding and the concepts of things.

and I think about. Even now, how far things have gone in CSS, Michelle, you talk about CSS. I wouldn't know if I was looking at a page builder right now, the difference between padding and margin. If I didn't have a background knowing basic CSS, and it's because of that foundational learning that I'm able to actually navigate the UI that everybody just assumes is what you're supposed to know.

So these young folks that are coming in and skipping over some of those foundational steps and getting into, other things maybe are a bit hobbled or handicapped. or hopefully they're learning some of that and accelerating that, I don't want to lean too far this way because I did write this down as a topic for later, but how will AI, impact some of this stuff too, because, that's gonna, that's gonna remove some of those barriers as well when we start being websites with human language.

So

[01:18:17] Nathan Wrigley: I agree. I agree with everything that you've just said, Rob, did assembler. Okay. Old school. Wow. Yeah. and Mike says he started with GeoCities in the 1990s. I've always been a dragger and a dropper. That's a, I love that phrase. I want that on my gravestone, I think. I've been a dragger and a dropper.

that's lovely. Thank you, Mike. Yeah, I don't know. I just, it was just, there's so many clever things and Atif, what you were saying about frameworks and all of that kind of stuff, honestly, there must be like a dozen that you could just mention right out of the box. And we do seem to hop onto the latest bandwagon, WordPress has got itself tightly bound in with react.

How long will that keep going? I. Don't know, but it's all very cool and very new and very impenetrable for somebody like me. So it puts in obstacles to something I'm already using. So anyway, if you want to hear me and the curmudgeonly conversation that me and David have, you can go to the website, WP builds.

com, and search for episode number 349. And, you can have that experience of listening to us old codgers. Actually, I'm going to, I'm going to drop something in there. Cause it's quite funny on the next episode of the WP Builds podcast with me and David. this is to James's point, we do the entire episode reading out what AI told us to say.

[01:19:51] James Giroux: What the?

[01:19:53] Nathan Wrigley: Wow. Not, we do paraphrase a bit, in between bits we say, we told it, we wanted this, and then we just, and it's so bad! It's

[01:20:02] James Giroux: so

[01:20:03] Nathan Wrigley: bad! It's 45 minutes of your life you'll never get back. I suggest don't listen to it, but it's funny, it was genuinely brilliant. Recording it and the crud that it gave us.

Okay. Very, quickly. Cause we're running out of time. if you're into security, you might be interested to know that, WordFence have launched a bug bounty program. There are bug bounty programs like this out in the wild already. They have dis they've made themselves distinctive, or at least the claim is.

That they're making themselves distinctive because of the fact that if you submit something, you get paid for that thing. My understanding is that with some of the other bug bounty programs, the structure of the way that you get paid might be different. In other words, there's a pool and everybody takes out of the pool.

Whereas in this, if you submit a. thing of a certain type, then they will pay you a certain amount. So here's an example, 1, 600 for an unauthenticated arbitrary file upload, and there's a bunch of other things, 1, 060. That's a. Peculiar amount, isn't it? for an unauthenticated file, deletion in a plugin, and there's some other things.

$800 for SQL injection in a plugin or a theme, $320 for something else, $80 for something else. You get the point. The more difficult it is to pull that thing off, the more you get paid. And, and so the hope would be, from WordPress. Word fences point of view that it will make the project stronger because people will go out obviously trying to get themselves some cash And and make the project stronger make plugins stronger make themes stronger.

So it's it's available word fences log bounty

[01:21:43] Atif Riaz: How much do you get if you can manage to inject confetti?

[01:21:49] Nathan Wrigley: now only Mark Westcott can tell you, I think, you have to pay, if you do that, and if you add in sound effects, you have to pay even more on that point, actually, Mark did say that Derek from, WP sunshine, he's going to have to do the work of adding in the, The sound effects.

Oh, yeah, my offload the bird and I see what you're doing there Okay All right, let's move on. We got a couple of other non wordpressy things I really don't know where to go with this story because I didn't follow it up carefully enough after the fact But, followers of Automatic will know that it acquired, I think it was Automatic, acquired Tumblr in 2019 for what at the time seemed like a very reasonable amount of money given the user base.

And the hope would be that Automatic with its chops and its background experience and its, massive laundry, sorry, not laundry, massive roster of people that are available to do the coding, they would turn it around. The truth is that probably hasn't been the case. They say that they've done something like, what did it say?

What was the number? 600 years of, or something like that. 600 years of coding has been put into the product, and it seems that it really hasn't paid any dividends. I think, honestly, I think it's so hard to go up against the likes of Facebook and, hope to win. But that's obviously what they did. So this article was whether or not they were going to give up, whether they were going to just throw in the towel, but then a later piece came out because this piece came from a leaked memo.

You don't often get leaked memos in WordPress news here. It sounds like the proper news. a leaked memo, obviously by some, somebody within the company who said, who took a certain portion of the text and put it out into the wild. then Matt felt that he had to comment. So this is Matt Mullenweg, the, The chief of, of automatic. And he then came back with, some more clarification saying, they only leaked bits of that. And if you, actually read between the lines and here, I will explain what I was thinking when I broke that down. then we can be more sanguine. It's more about. we're going to divert attention into other things, but the idea is to keep Tumblr going.

But the interesting thing here really is the, a, the fact that somebody, automatically leaks the document, but also presumably that's a bit of a. that's not great because Matt obviously felt in writing a memo like that, that it was going to be fine to give it to all the employees that needed to read it in the hope that it wouldn't be leaked, that expectation.

Can you imagine now, if you don't know who the person is, every time Matt or somebody like that releases a memo, there's got to be that whole, Oh, good grief, is this going to get leaked? So there's a trust thing going on here as well. I confess I don't use Tumblr. Never have. It's unlikely that I ever will.

So it's all a bit of a fun storm in a teacup, really. I don't know if you've got any intuitions on this, but, yeah, there you go. That's that piece.

[01:24:59] Michelle Frechette: I have a Tumblr account, just like I have a Threads account and I have a bunch of other accounts that I don't ever use because there's so many social places that you can post and I never got good at Tumblr and so I haven't invested my own time into, um, pursuing it or using it at all. I think there's Tumblr is a micro blogging platform, so is Twitter, so is, Instagram, so is Facebook.

if you think about it, every time you post something in those places, it's just a micro. of whatever you're thinking at that time. And I've just never leaned into it. so I don't really have a whole lot of experience with it to even have a comment really.

[01:25:40] Nathan Wrigley: just the idea of, they got it, I think it was 50 million or something, which at the time, given that the, the valuation of companies like that, you really could be billions, couldn't you, if you did the right thing, but it.

It says six centuries, 600 years of people's hours. they haven't managed to turn it around. So we'll have to see where it goes. If you scroll for long enough though, you get this and you cannot dismiss it. There is no way that I can see to make that go away apart from signing up. Look, even if you're refreshed, look, that blighter just comes right back.

So yeah, anyway, anything from you guys, if not, time is more or less out. So we'll just quickly do a couple of things. James, you mentioned you had an AI thing you wanted to mention. Do you want to just fulfill that?

[01:26:32] James Giroux: Yeah. last week while you were, doing WP. Builds live WP news live, over in San Francisco Open AI was announcing some big updates to what they're doing with GPT chat GPT and I know you're a little on the fence when it comes to AI and that's perfectly fine But I am super AI And I love it and I just thought

[01:26:59] Nathan Wrigley: this Did he just say he is super AI?

Did I just hear that right?

[01:27:06] James Giroux: the thing that really touched me was they had a video with an older gentleman on it who called ChatGPT Chatty and I called ChatGPT Chatty so I felt heard and like I wasn't alone and it was just this really, human uniting experience for the both of us.

[01:27:26] Nathan Wrigley: What's the next great iteration? What's it going to do?

[01:27:29] James Giroux: The next great iteration is that you are now able to create your own version of chat. GPT. You can name it. Yeah. You can use human language. And you can upload your own content. So it becomes your chat GPT. One of the big challenges for anybody who's been using it is if you are like me and you, maybe you're not necessarily a developer is you've got your prompts you're that are like.

Hundreds of pages long or multiple pages long and you have to enter it in and like multiple things to give all the context, like here's the name of the company. Here's, the product information I want you to have. And you have to do that for every single chat, every single thing you open up. And now.

You can create a chatbot, you can give it a name, you can give it an image, and it can search the web and do all the things that chat GPT does. But, you can also make it your own. I've been playing around with it, it came out last week, so I've got a little, A little, HR bot that I've called Rio and I've given Rio, this, like cutesy Japanese personality.

So it's got like this anime like thing going on. And, you can ask it questions like, Hey, can you create a job description for a WordPress engineer role? And it goes, here you go. Like that kind of thing. Here's my little egg yo for you. But like just random things like that.

But I think what's even more interesting about it is that not only are you going to be able to create your own internal chatbots that you use privately, they've got them for, you can share the link. So I could give all of you the link to Rio that I've created and you can go and use it, but you can also eventually sell it.

And they will be launching a marketplace for what they call GPTs. basically these, chatbots that people can create, they can fill with their own context, their own, IP or, whatever information they've got and make that available to the masses. And I just thought the early days of WordPress, when you had the plugin, repo coming out for free, and then the selling of these things and Envato and ThemeForest and all that kind of stuff, there's an interesting parallel here for us to look at and go, we've been here before.

And I wonder what this is going to do for AI in the future as people get their hands on it and are able to craft things and sell things and what the commercialization of AI means really for, um, technology in the future.

[01:30:14] Nathan Wrigley: it's interesting you should say that, James, because I, did actually know that piece of news and I created my own chatbot and I made it consume all of the WP Builds content that we've ever created.

And then I asked it for a very quick summary of what WP Builds is and what it stands for. This is what I got back. Waffle, bluster, pointless, in summary, don't bother. no,

[01:30:45] Atif Riaz: Really, it's

[01:30:46] James Giroux: intelligent

[01:30:46] Nathan Wrigley: and it knows all the things. You see how smart it is? I honestly, I get it. I do get it. I think it's remarkably cool, all of that kind of stuff.

My intuitions are just there. just my, synapses are going crazy because there's just so many wonderful things about that, but in the same exact sentence, there are so many diabolically bad pitfalls about that as well. and I, I. for some reason I focus on the pitfalls and not the positives, but I get it.

It's really interesting, actually, in the space that I'm in. So content creating, there's a lot of tools coming out where it will learn from the content that you give it. So you give it a podcast audio, and then you ask it questions about that. And it only knows about the episode. So it's completely bound within that conversation.

So obviously it knows grammar and it knows, but it figures out, it's not bringing in information from. The internet circa, 1998 or anything like that. It's just, that, and it is beguiling. I get it. but I am going to wear my tinfoil hat, uh, more and more, but thank you. Thank you for sharing that.

That's amazing. We've run out of time. I think unless Jay James has said that a T for Michelle, do you want to come back on that quickly? I just

[01:32:11] Atif Riaz: had one thing. I just had one thing. and I'm an ai, I, do see the real benefits of it, but I can be an AI skeptic. I do look at the pitfalls. I, read or watched something, I can't remember exactly which one it was, but there could be a time where you could train an AI to know everything about your life and become your friend, and then that could be this friend would know you better than anyone else, and then there could be a time where you end up just not communicating with anyone because you've got this AI chat.

Who knows how to respond to you. And I think there's some real danger in this and the future. future generation is just becoming sucked into not living in the real world, living in this digital

[01:32:54] Nathan Wrigley: world. Honestly, this conversation, it's like wind Wrigley off and off he goes. now that I've said we're going to wind it up.

So this is, one of the interesting things. And I heard this on a podcast. Now I've never heard this elucidated before, right? If you go back to, you know how everybody says, we'll invent new jobs. There's always going to be new jobs. the AI will come along and it'll do those subset of things, allowing us to do this.

new subset of things that we've never figured out. But this person articulated this argument in the past, everything that we've invented has meant that we've got somewhere to go to that we at that point didn't fulfill. And largely, certainly in the last three, 400 years, it was brawn. It was, you'd invent a.

thing so that it could do, it could lift 500 times more than you, or it could move more quickly. So robots for cars, the industrial revolution, trains, they can move people. The point is the humans then could move into the space of intellect because there's, so now the, machines do the heavy stuff.

We don't have to do the heavy stuff. So we move into the intellectual space and we create blue collar work and white collar work and all of that kind of stuff. But if we. Surrender the intellectual space. We have nowhere else to go. Once something is clever enough, there's no other space to occupy.

And I just thought that was an interesting... An interesting articulation of the argument. I think one last

[01:34:21] Atif Riaz: thing just about this. The real concern for me, I think, is just, even these companies that are producing these models, even I think you can say this is a fair point to say about even OpenAI, they don't know how some of their models work.

And they're the ones that are making these things. And, you know what? They just know, even broadly, but knowing the actual flow of, if I give it this prompt, how is it calculated? They don't even know. It's that complicated. I think that's quite scary.

[01:34:47] Nathan Wrigley: And on that bombshell. We're, we're gonna, we're gonna have to end this episode.

There were a few pieces that I've missed, but sadly, that's gonna be the way it is. they'll all be in the show notes tomorrow though. Anything that we didn't cover will still be in the show notes tomorrow. I would like to really thank, and it overran, so I'm sorry about that, Michelle. Frechette, thank you so much for joining us.

James Giroux, thank you for joining us as well. And for the 700th time, I'm going to mispronounce the name. Atif, Riaz, thank you. Oh, all right. At the end. Yay. One time. got it right. Thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it. Now the ever so humiliating hand wave.

Oh, that's great, I appreciate it, we'll see you next week, thanks for all the comments if you put that in there, thank you so much and we will be back this time next week, alright take it easy guys, see you later, bye bye.