This Week in WordPress #279

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this weekend. WordPress episode number 279 entitled, it's way shorter than usual. It was recorded on Monday the 11th of December, 2023. My name's Nathan Wrigley and I'm joined today by Michelle Frechette by Matt Cromwell and James Giroux. It is, as I said, a little bit shorter, the fact is we collided with state of the word, the address that Matt Mullenweg is giving in Madrid today.

And so we ended our recording early so that people weren't feeling as if they had two things to do at once. But still we cover lots of WordPress things. We cover the fact that WordPress 6.4.2 has been released and you need to update. It's probably unlikely that you'll have a security problem, but you never know.

There's a lovely post. All about the WordPress 6.4 retrospective. Look back. If you like all about all of the things that have happened in that release and what the community think about it. A charity WP gives a hand is encouraging you to give some of your salary, some of your earnings during. During the week from the 25th of December to the 31st of December. P H P C S really does need your help.

We talk about a post from Yoast de Valk, but also a podcast episode that I did on the WP Tavern. There's also a new update to the Gravatar profile editor generate blocks. Hacks is a lovely little plugin, which enables you to do just a little bit more with generate blocks, cadence, AI. There's a whole load of things coming, and you can see what that's all going to look like. And we say a sad farewell to David Walmsley on the WP builds podcast.

Kinder, maybe. Sorta. It's all coming up next on this week in WordPress.

This episode of the WP Builds podcast is brought to you today by Omnisend the top rated email and SMS marketing platform for WordPress. More than a hundred thousand merchants use Omnisend every day to grow their audience and sales ready to start building campaigns that really sell. Find out more ar www.omnissend.com.

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Hello there. Good morning, good afternoon, good day, wherever you are in the world. I'm gonna be speaking very quickly today because we've only got one hour because we're colliding with state of the word. Who knew, that was going to happen and collide on a Monday, but Matt Mullenweg is getting on stage in a little over 55 minutes, so we're gonna try and.

Do this one before that time arrives. And, apropos of that, Courtney Robertson has popped into the comments already saying We are the warmup band, which I'm okay with that. I'm happy to be the state of the word warmup. Act pretty, Okay with that. Thank you for joining us though. Courtney.

We're joined by Michelle. How are you doing, Michelle? I'm good. How are you? Yeah, good. Do you want me to do your full bio, Michelle, or should we just I do that. Let's skip it. Let's, do Skip the boat. There's Michelle. She does absolutely boatloads for the WordPress community and, you're gonna say nothing.

no. I wouldn't be so unkind, but also joined by Matt Cromwell. How are you doing, Matt? Doing well. Good to be here. Matt's in a brand new house. Matt is the co-founder of Give wp, he's the senior director of, customer experience at Stella, wp. There's a few more things in the bio as well, but I'm gonna keep that one short as well, if that's all right with you.

Thank you very much. And also just, in, time. There he is. James ou. How you doing, James? I'm good. Can you hear me? Yeah, we can hear you. Everything's working okay. We've had audio gremlins in the past. We were just saying, James, we're colliding with state of the word. So we're gonna keep this one on in Andra an hour.

So we'll get started straight away. But there's James. James is the founder of Team wp, which is the perfect for this episode. Short bio, just.

[00:04:30] Michelle Frechette: 1, 1, 1 issue is, I'm, finding on your website that it says people have to register for a webinar. Really? So

[00:04:36] Nathan Wrigley: if they really

[00:04:37] Michelle Frechette: Yeah, if they're trying to watch on. Okay.

[00:04:40] Nathan Wrigley: Whatcom Live, just wanted let you know that this, do this for me. Everybody go to, youtube.com/wp builds over there. You will be able to find our live stream. I apologize about that. I do not know why that would be. I haven't The faintest idea. No, just that you should know. But thank you. So you can't watch it on our website, but if you want to go to YouTube, you can do that.

sorry. I do apologize whilst one of you talks In a minute I'll go and update what I can there with a link or something like that. Just a very quick few things. This is our website, wp builds.com. We've got schedule page ups at wp builds.com/schedule. You can see that this week we're doing this week in WordPress.

Now we've got a Wonder Suite webinar tomorrow, followed by a UIUX show with Pete Jane on a we on Wednesday. And then we've got our weekly Speedy op show with Sabrina Zidan. I would just like to say the very, big thank you to those people who nominated themselves in our WP WordPress Silly Awards.

We raised $771 50 for the WPCC, so I'm very. Very grateful to all of you and I will attempt to reach out to you individually. Okay. Let's get stuck in. just a quick hat tip. I'm sure you've noticed this already, but WordPress 6.4 0.2 was a, security and maintenance release. There's not a lot to say apart from the fact that it included a vulnerability, which most likely won't affect you.

In the case of a multi-site network, there may be some situations where additional plugins could cause you to have problems. Needless to say, you can update to that and you should be fine. The next one is to say that Chloe Brigman, she released a WordPress 6.4 retrospective where they talked about all of the bits and pieces that had been happening.

in the last few months with WordPress 6.4 and there was lots of people suggesting, lots of suggestions about what would be kept in another release schedule and what needed to be added and what would be gotten rid of things to keep would be things like the WordPress community, wishlist. Blog posts to feature major changes.

Release team formation announcements during the previous release cycle so that people know long in advance a Slack channel for the release. Having a co-lead, which is in a different part of the world as the lead so that it can cover. The entire world in terms of time zones, what would need to be added?

What would be nice to be added would be additional mi minor releases between majors, an iteration between the theme. So 2024, iterating towards 2025, which is quite interesting. equal focus on old tickets and bug fixes with new features. that is gonna be a part of. One of the releases next year is just like getting all of the, bits and pieces in shape feature the pattern directory and the block editor and a whole bunch of other things.

And people were asked, what would you like to add? sorry, what would you like to remove? And controversially, one of the things was release, remove underrepresented release squads. But if you look in the one above, the bullet point above, which is what you would like to add, more underrepresented release.

So mixed, mixed messages there. But I guess, the, The community will have their voice. I think that's what you call balance. Yeah, that's right. That is balance. The yin and the yang. Yeah. So anyway, a few ideas there. I realize I'm rushing through it all, but I'm just gonna drop this one in your direction, you three, and quickly go and update my website with the link to the live.

So if you just want to take it from here, anything you want to mention in there, I'll go and update my website. And you nater about that for a moment. I

[00:08:19] Matt Cromwell: just love that they're doing these retrospectives and it does make it feel like, the community's voice is being heard, and taken a bit more seriously, in a good way.

I feel like that's been really encouraging the way that posts like this have been happening more frequently and the way that folks in the WP Slack have been more receptive. I especially like, I, think I mentioned this somewhere recently, the way, the. New playground feature on the plugin directory rolled out badly, unfortunately, the first time, and they listened and they, changed the way it was rolled out the second time and the new way they rolled it out is hundreds better than it was the first time.

And it was relatively quick too. All of these, actions, all these posts and the way that folks are, contributing to.org, and listening to community, it's actually been really encouraging. Recently. I've been really happy about all of that.

[00:09:19] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. I.

[00:09:21] Matt Cromwell: Thank you very much. Agree.

[00:09:22] Michelle Frechette: I, and it follows on the whole, community summit that we had right before Word Camp US this year, which was talking about a lot of these things and how are we more transparent?

How are we more inclusive? What are some ways that we can make sure that I. People feel like they know what's happening. And specifically also about recognition and just a retrospective like this may not call out retro, recognition for individuals, but it really does reflect on the whole process and all of the people involved.

And so it's been exciting to see some of those things that were brought up in the summit actually coming into play sooner than you might even expect.

[00:10:00] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much. Michelle James. I think,

[00:10:02] James Giroux: yeah, no, I'm a big fan of not just what gets delivered being Retroed, but how it's delivered, being retroed as well and how teams work together and how people work together.

And seeing some of that feedback being brought out in retrospective posts like this is really helpful, especially for new people coming in. If they are feeling overwhelmed or unsure of the process, and they might feel isolated in those feelings, right? Or like they're the only ones. Seeing it articulated in a post like this can be really freeing and allow for some conversations, in some of the groups and, slack channels that hopefully will make it easier for, people to get more involved in the future, right?

When feedback is taken seriously and actions are taken to actually reflect that. I really like this. Yeah,

[00:10:56] Nathan Wrigley: I just thought it was a really neat post. Honestly, it is worth having a read. I realize I haven't done it justice given the sort of constraints of time that we've got today. But it's really interesting looking back over what has happened over the last period, and also the fact that there's quite a few bits and pieces in there, which I genuinely would never have come up with.

So there's a lot of thought been poured into this. A lot of people have given it some time. And probably, I would imagine you'll find yourself nodding your head against a few of those bits and pieces. There. There's a little chart that we're showing on the screen at the moment, and this is when people were asked to, give their opinion, and they ended up putting it into a chart about how they felt.

About collab, collaborating and working on the release. So the project as a whole, one nice thing to notice is that at no point did anybody apparently say that they strongly disagreed, in terms of, strongly disagree in this case would've been a bad thing, whereas strongly agree is generally a good thing.

Nobody thought that it was bad, but, on collaborating was easy. Most people strongly agreed, but there was an awful lot of people, certainly more than half the people slightly disagreed or were neutral. the same would be true for collaborating on this project was enjoyable. I would say roughly half the respondents said it was they disagree with that or a neutral on that.

Starts to get slightly more positive when we talk about the release process was efficient. Lots of people seem to think that was good. Certainly more than half thought that they agreed or strongly agreed, and then it gets better here. The release process was well organized. Lots of people slightly agreed, nobody, even slightly disagreed.

And then this is the nicest one. The release was transparent and easy to follow. Yeah, lots of people, agreeing with that. So definitely work to be done there. But there's some. Some nice pieces, around there. Go and check it out.

[00:12:44] James Giroux: As someone who gets into the data on this kind of stuff, it will be interesting to see if they can have the same questions, posed on the next release retro and compare the two and see how the process is going over time and see if we can see, incremental improvement as well.

[00:13:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, Sorry Matt, were you gonna say something there? I apologize. Yeah.

[00:13:09] Matt Cromwell: outta curiosity, how many comments do we have on this blog?

[00:13:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it doesn't actually mention the number of comments. it just, quickly, Michelle and James, are you finding Matt to be very quiet? Yes, I am. Yeah. Matt, we probably have the same problem that we had a moment ago, so apologies about that.

I, my recommendation would be either refreshing the browser or try to get the camera, sorry, the, the mic check Any better? That's perfect. That's really great. Thank you. Could you say that question again? I think you said, do we know the numbers?

[00:13:35] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. I was curious how many comments there were on this.

Particular blog piece because what's always a good indicator is like when folks, when there is a really constructive piece like this, I'm hoping that gets a lot of community engagement instead of The other pieces that end up being controversial and we get all like a, flood of negative

[00:13:55] Nathan Wrigley: comments.

that's, yeah. So just a quick scan through. It looks like four people, have made comments. They've made multiple comments, so there's more than four comments, but Chloe was taken outta that. So that brings it to four. So you've got a, yeah, just four people commenting. And I confess I didn't read the comments, but it's well worth having a look at if you're interested in the process of.

Making WordPress and, following that through from, from release to release, then it's worth looking at that. Okay, it's called recap, WordPress 6.4. Surely retrospective. Okay, we've got 45 minutes and counting to launch in Madrid. So let's move to the next piece. This is just a, I guess this is a, philanthropic thing.

If you have a WordPress business or you run a WordPress organization, which has a profit, WP gives a hand, that's the hashtag I'm guessing. You can find them on Twitter and social platforms. WP gives a hand. Dot com is their website address, and the strap line is, let's make a difference together. WP gives a hand, will you?

It says, how great is the feeling when you not only get something back, but you're also part of those who give back. And the idea is that the event takes place between Christmas Day, so the 25th of December to the 31st of December. So it's that week between Christmas and New Year. And the intention is that every company that gets involved with this would donate a percentage of their sales.

I don't know exactly whether they're gonna, be strict about that, but you, any percentage, it doesn't mention five for the future. I. 5% or anything like that, to a charity. And you can see that down here are a list of companies that have decided to do this already. I dunno, just randomly picking a few.

Amelia, WP Alex, visual composer, WP Commerce, and they've listed out the charity that they're going to be giving to. So it's not a WordPress charity, it's not bound in that way. It's just a WordPress community effort. for example, WP Commerce are donating to unicef. Visual Composer are giving to One Tree Planted Indie Stack are giving to SOS Children's Village in Croatia.

Maybe that's something a little closer to home. so WP gives a hand.com. not strictly WordPress related, but it's the WordPress community doing a good thing. Dunno if any of you wanna Mention that.

[00:16:16] James Giroux: Yeah.

[00:16:17] Michelle Frechette: I love the ways that. The community finds to give back. I think it's great, especially when it's not necessarily dictated who you need to give back to.

Yeah. Just that you're being philanthropic in the, money that you make and helping the world and know coming from my background in give, I just love this kind of thing.

[00:16:34] Nathan Wrigley: Anyway. Yeah. Yeah. It's really nice. Really nice. For sure. Exactly.

[00:16:40] Matt Cromwell: the corporate term is corp corporate social responsibility.

And, I think that kind of thing is really, it really does make an impact, particularly on employees. employees like to know that their, employers are, generous with, with revenue that comes in, one way or another. even, times when, the particular. It's such a weird time and age that we live in.

Like even sometimes giving to charity can be controversial. You have a lot of diversity in an, in a company and people have different opinions, about different things. where traditionally, like in the US the Salvation Army was a very traditional charity to give to every year. Oh, Yeah. they don't have a great track record at the moment for being the most welcoming community anymore.

just doing standard, types of, let's just get the, salvation Army that actually might, alienate your employees a little bit. so being really thoughtful about these types of things are usually pretty, pretty useful and helpful,

[00:17:44] Nathan Wrigley: as well. Thank you Matt. That's an interesting comment.

Michelle, if you want to reach out on socials, I appear to have ticked a box which said password protect this, feed. not on YouTube, which is where most people watch it anyway, I believe so. we should be fine. But that page has been updated now, so if anybody did reach out to, you can tell 'em just to refresh now, should you.

Oh, okay. Okay. It was just me. Okay. Should you not know who you want to give to, I have a jolly good idea. What about. You give to this. if you cannot think of an organization which you would like to support, what about P-H-P-C-S, which stands for PHP Code Sniffer? Now, it may very well be that if you are not a developer, I am not.

I. Really a developer. So this is a thing that I've never used, but I've educated myself on what it is and how it's important. This is the kind of thing that underpins a lot of the WordPress project. So it underpins the WordPress project itself, the code base, but also, the plugins that bolt on.

to make WordPress more usable. And it is a whole suite of different things which enable developers to quickly and easily check whether their code is compliant, whether there are problems with the code. And if there are problems with the code, it allows them to spot that early on and then go back and, amend things and get things fixed.

In other words, it creates stability and security, which is, the bedrock of everything. Now, unfortunately, the project. Has been wrong. by a company called Squiz. That's not the unfortunate thing, and primarily by one developer called Greg Sherwood, but one of the, one of the members of the WordPress community, ju Juliet Reiners Olmer.

She's been the solo maintainer in the majority co maintainer of many popular PHP and WordPress libraries. Now, unfortunately, squares have decided to shut the door on this project, but not only that. They've decided to shut the door in a way, which means that Juliet can no longer get access to it. And so Yost from y Yost, Devo, the person, not the company.

Yost, has written this post on post status and, all I can say is. He's very concerned about this, and he's just to paraphrase it, he says, I can't stress enough how important these tools are. Again, if you like me and you've never heard of it, just be assured. It's a bit like, oh, I don't know.

Putting a hole in the Titanic, it's gonna sink in the end. That's the sort of thing that's going to be coming in the future. I did a podcast on the Tavern with Julia. It was probably three months ago now, where she outlined. what she does, how over the years she's been doing it entirely for free, the amount of work that she's put in, basically the wheels are coming off this project and help is needed.

I'm gonna hand this one over to Matt. I don't know if James, whether you are, you've used this in the past, but I'm gonna hand it over to Matt. Have you used this? Is this as important as everybody's talking about?

[00:21:00] Matt Cromwell: I haven't personally, but in our projects on Stellar, it's definitely used very heavily. it's one of those things where, it just helps you to do better code, automatically.

and it's really, it is, like yo says, it's really crucial to being able to write good PHP in general, which is the. language that WordPress is built on. and, the, one interesting aspect of, of these types of things too is in contrast to the previous one where we were talking about, corporate social responsibility.

This type of donation is a lot different for me in my mind. It really, I. It's not for one in the US or in the UK and other countries that do tax write-offs for generosity, for, donations and whatnot. This isn't, one of those types of things. but this is a way in which you, support the open source community.

I was actually personally struck just a, a couple weeks ago. I. Randomly recognized that I had been using Notepad plus for 15 years now. for free. And I've update, updated it every single time they had an update. And, I just was like, I, can't believe I've used this software longer than most of my kids are old.

and I reached out and saw that I could donate to the author and I just did. And I was like, because this guy's been building stuff for me for so long and I've. And he is never gotten paid from me. that's the same kind of thing. We pay for so many developer tools. we pay for a lot of expensive developer tools.

and, and yet we benefit greatly by these open source, libraries. and don't pay anything for them. it's, I. It's a catch 22 in the, in, in the open source, development space of benefiting greatly from free code, building free code. And yet at the same time, sometimes not necessarily, recognizing, that we, how much we benefit from it and how that the relationship is a bit inverse.

that we are benefiting from it a lot more than we are contributing back to these projects. so I, I'm with Yost a hundred percent on this one. it's a great call out. I was glad he brought it to everybody's attention.

[00:23:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So if you want the skinny on it, Yost gives a very, he gives a tse, not tse, a brief, that's the word I'm after.

He gives a brief, account of why it's important and what it does. You can find this, on post status. The piece was written on the 1st of December. It's called P-H-P-C-S and Major PHP Library needs support. If you wanna find out a bit more. Like I said, I did a, I, it was probably about 50 minutes, oh, 44 minutes.

A podcast with Juliet, where she really goes into the weeds of why it matters and how it's important. there's a transcript there if you want to read it instead. and she really does make the case for it. It's really important. It's one of those hidden things that, I don't know, it's a bit like suspension on your car.

you don't ever see it, but if it ain't there, you're never getting in that car. 'cause it'll be horrible. And the truth is that probably will be the same, for WordPress. You'll have more bugs to fix. Developers will require more time to make things, so it'll become less profitable to work in the industry.

However, a little bit of, bright light, Courtney's just, popped into the comments and said, Greg, who we mentioned, Greg has issued a bit of code that now tells. All P-H-P-C-S dependencies to use the new repo. quickly add to that, that Juliet over the weekend, I believe, tried to recreate all the repos.

and I think she did, a good job of doing that. And so probably that's what, Courtney's talking about. PPCS is a part of WP Core plugin, repo, theme repo, et cetera. It ensures PHP JavaScript and CSS code meets standards. okay. Michelle or James, anything on that? I have nothing to add. Okay.

James.

Sorry, I wasn't looking at the screen at that point. Okay. Sorry. It's, gone quiet, so Yeah, that's fine. that's fine. so I dunno if James, you were in on the call, but we're in a bit of a rush today because of this. There's something. Matt, somebody is doing something state of the something or other.

and, and yeah, we're, gonna try and get out of his way because, I'm gonna be ashamed if nobody turned up for state of the word 'cause they were all watching this quickly. Moving on. Okay. this is a nice piece. This is all about the future of WordPress in the year 2024. I love all of these.

Pieces where we pontificate on what's gonna happen. But there's a lot of good stuff in here and it makes me very happy about what's coming in 2024. You may write this off as a, oh, it's, it's crystal ball gazing, but it's really not. There's a lot of, there's a lot of stuff that I know is coming down the pike.

It's on the Talk Mag io website. It's called WordPress 2024 Roadmap Releases, common Features and more. three major releases. In the coming year, we've got March, July, and November. Not set in stone, but hopefully there'll be the dates that we're gonna stick to. But here's the bits and pieces, which I think are, of interest.

Firstly, version 6.6 at the moment, is gonna be held specifically for maintenance and general polish of software. So that's gonna be a non feature. Update where we just, push no new features. We just make things shiny that are a little bit dull and rusty, I see that a lot with SaaS projects.

They seem to take a hiatus from developing things and they take the month of June or something like that just to polish it up and make it look nice. And that's a whole third of the year. Give an over to that, so that's really nice. th things which have been proposed coming in the next year include the minimum PHVP versions in the plans.

Obviously, that's a big thing. Swap the focus is for 5.6, sorry, 6.5 and 6.6 round. I think what that is why don't we do the polishing now, right at the beginning of the year. Start that way and then spend the rest of the year doing features. That seems like to me quite a good idea. Everything always feels a bit slow in January anyway.

implement some ways for community members to vote on features. Ooh. Can you imagine? Whoa, I wonder how easy anything would be to get done. going from three to four major releases. I'm not a fan of that one. I've gotta say I'm quite happy with three, I think. Three is probably enough to manage and mo, I'm guessing this is an American publication.

move the November release to avoid clashing with US elections. Okay. Alright. fine. Yeah. if we need to, I guess it's a big thing. Presumably there's a lot of people involved. Let's just take those and then there's some more ones. PHB, I'm sure we can agree with that. What do you think about this?

Putting the, the feature hold release. To the beginning, not the end. I see. Matt, you were nodding a away.

[00:28:03] Matt Cromwell: it's fascinating. It's the first time I heard them mention that as an idea, but I really love it. I think it's an interesting evolution of the way in which Core has been released though in the past.

like for so long, core was so focused on. Backwards compatibility and stability of releases. And I do think that the introduction of Gutenberg has eroded that a tiny bit in terms of we are pushing some new things out at a very rapid pace in core. And it does sometimes has sometimes meant at the expense of a little bit of stability, the tiniest bit, that previously really wasn't there.

So I think having one whole dedication. Dedicated release on that Sounds really smart. I'm hoping that it also includes a lot of the momentum that the performance team has been working on. They've been doing amazing work and I hope that they consider performance as Polish. perhaps,

[00:28:57] Nathan Wrigley: potentially.

Yeah. And also there was a few features like the, the font library and things like that, which got punted into 2024 and having a, having one release where. There's no new features. Maybe things like that can happen. I know it's a new feature, but it's a new, a long promised feature, so maybe that sneaks onto the way, James, just on those bits.

So implementing 6.6 instead of 6.5, if But also, what about this one, this implementing for people in the community. To vote. I love the idea of that. 'cause we all a bit of democracy, don't we? But how, what, how would anything be done? I that's,

[00:29:33] James Giroux: I don't know if it's about anything being done.

I think it's about unmet expectations. Okay. Because. You think about, any product that, and all of us here have worked on products in the past. I think, as soon as you invite your users to vote on something, you take the power out of the product manager's hands, right? Or you set an unrealistic expectation that, Hey, just 'cause we voted on this, it's going to happen without taking into consideration.

Whatever is going on behind the scenes. Technical feasibility, like some kind of campaign by a very strong-willed, strong-minded, contingent of word pressors who are like, super focused on something that maybe isn't in the best interest of the, 80%. I'm not sure, that's necessarily the best direction unless it comes with the caveats of Hey.

Let us know the community's desire

[00:30:32] Matt Cromwell: or hope, right?

[00:30:34] James Giroux: For, what they think would be a, priority, feature. And the ball that then gets passed to the lead to be able to make that decision or, a group to make the decision on whether it's feasible or not for a release. but that would just be, I'd be nervous about something like that.

causing more friction and I. conflict than actually being the kind of support we think it's going to be.

[00:31:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:31:03] Matt Cromwell: interesting. It could be gamed, which could be problematic. Yeah. So the system itself has to be really done well. and it doesn't have to be that like. The, the one top feature maybe gets included of many features that get released or things like that.

So it doesn't have to dominate so heavily. It can just be, I do think that more community feedback is better than less. But, uh, it, it can be done badly for sure. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:31:34] Michelle Frechette: Michelle, anything? There's survey. Yeah, there's just different ways to talk to the community too. there's surveys, there's focus groups, there's things that you could put in place that could work, alongside of something like a, vote or, Having some kind of way to, to have a say just so that you're getting good information from different levels of users within the community without perhaps having it stacked so much for. The ecosystem as opposed to the general population that's using WordPress. So there's, I think there's some ways that you could do it.

It's gotta be very well thought out and very well executed though in order to avoid the gamification, poss possibilities

[00:32:13] Nathan Wrigley: of it. Yeah. And also, yeah, just, yeah, somebody, push pushing their agenda to the fore by managing to Corolla, a subset of the user base. Yeah. Interesting. But then we go on, there's a little bit more to this article than that.

And this is, finishing off phase two, which is been drawn a line under really, but obviously we've still got to, finish off the typography management. the idea of being able to store your fonts in something akin to the. The media library that got punted last year. we're also gonna be entering the phase of collaborative editing.

So think about Google Docs and here's some interesting stuff. And much of this I didn't really think about. So I was just thinking about the ability to edit things simultaneously with somebody else, which I think in the case of posts and. Would be great. I'm not quite sure what I'd think about that in terms of, I don't know, simultaneously editing templates for things or anything like that.

I'm not sure what the utility for that would be, but this is interesting and it treads on the feet of a variety of different plugins that I can think of publishing work. I. Throughout flows. being able to enforce, let's say editorial guidelines, the post cannot be published unless there's a featured image.

the post cannot be published unless it's been approved by a another subset of people. You get the idea, just a whole load of things. Think of the published press, plugin by Steve Burge. That gives you an idea. post revisions becoming more granular. So you'd be able to not just revert the whole post, but singular blocks that.

Is great. just imagine a paragraph, a pesky paragraph that somehow got balked and you could go back just on that paragraph That strikes me as really great. update to the media library. It does look ever so nineties. All of a sudden, now that I've seen some of the UI and in the era of prompt based search, some ation of search and command prompts, it says here to account for the proliferation of prompt based software.

I dunno if that means ai, that kind of feels that's what that means, but, sure does. can I just make a request on behalf of me? Can we leave ai, AI just out of core? Can we just leave it outta core? Can it be an add-on? Can you get it somewhere else, please? Elsewhere? and I'll go and get a tinfoil hat.

there you go. Yeah. And that's it. But I thought some of those were quite interesting around the publishing workflow. I dunno if you've got anything on those.

[00:34:42] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. So one of the things that I, as you look back over the whole list of things that you were just talking about is that when we.

Move things forward in WordPress. I think we need to re continue to remember how new people coming into WordPress and using it for the first time. You're right. What is their interaction with it? Because we've really been seeing this aging up of the WordPress user base, and I wanna make sure that we continue to bring people, into WordPress, not just from my generation, but from my daughter's generation of the generation behind her, Matt's younger kids, that kind of thing. And if it, if we over. if it's overwrought with so many things that it becomes difficult to just step into and use, then we're not doing a, we're doing a disservice to the possibility of continuing to grow the platform, or at least maintain, but we have, for WordPress because if, the newer people aren't gonna use it, it's gonna age out and it's not gonna be something that continues to be a part of the fabric of the internet.

[00:35:43] Nathan Wrigley: I do these publishing workflow changes. I could deal with a bit of that in my life actually already. I think some of that could be really good, but I'm not sure how it would work for me other than posts and pages possibly. I don't think I'd want it to encroach on anything else. But then again, I, Michelle, as you said, the words aged up.

I took a look at. The panel and thought, what the heck we're, yeah, we're definitely, we're not on the younger side. Are we're not on the 12-year-old group, are we? And you're right. It's a group that I very rarely think about. I basically just think about me and the people that I know. But you're right, we want this thing to keep going, don't we?

And the 12 and 15 year olds, imagine what we're competing against, those UIs in some of those, mobile platforms and things. That's just, oh. It's odd

[00:36:28] Michelle Frechette: to think of the younger demographic as being underrepresented in technology. Yeah. They but they are right now, and we need to remember them as we continue to, improve things.

Yeah. Not just for those of us who need the font to constantly be bigger. Thank you very much.

[00:36:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. I've got the, perfect antidote to that felt. It's called new glasses. It removes the font

[00:36:50] Matt Cromwell: problem. Yes. But

[00:36:51] Nathan Wrigley: times here, the font problem comes right back as soon as I. Take them off my face. It's absolutely, it's not a permanent fix.

Okay. Plenty to come in the year 2024, thankfully. Nice. That the project is, and certainly not stalling in any way. There's lots to, talk about the future. just to let you know that if you're a Gravita user, you'll notice I'm keeping these very brief. Your profile has been updated.

Now, I'm constantly amazed by how many things use gravita. So sign up for all sorts of SAS platforms, which have got no connection at all with WordPress. Notice my avatar's not right, and then I changed my email. It's oh, there it is. We're obviously using gravita. You've got a, you've got a new way of interacting and some enhanced privacy settings.

I think we're all using it for one thing. That little round image and pretty much nothing else. But there it is. It's got a new panel update, for those people who use generate blocks. This lovely little thing has come along. It's called GB Hacks, and it's an add-on, and it's free at the moment.

You can use it for five sites for free, and it just adds some much need. not much needed. You can do everything that is done without needing it, but it makes things, It makes things much more easy in generate blocks, so you can put patterns directly inside the block inserter, which is quite nice.

You can set the default headline block to be, the thing that which is always instantiated when you click return into a new block. So rather than going to a paragraph block. generate blocks. Text equivalent is called the headline block and it serves as an H one through H six plus paragraph, and you can make that the default, which is quite nice.

It also, allows you to, what was the other one? Oh yeah, if you've got a group block and you want to turn it into a generate block, container block, it'll do that for you as well and a bunch of other stuff, and it's free. So I thought I'd mention it. It'll be in the show notes tomorrow. however, I suspect that at least two of the users on this, sorry, two of the panelists on this show probably aren't that, familiar with generate blocks, but they are familiar.

This, cadence wp, they've been touting the AI features for quite a while and, been doing a good job of dripping out, little tasty nuggets of what's coming. And finally, we're here. We've got an intuition now of what's coming. you can find [email protected]. And, the, post is WordPress Solutions slash Cadence ai.

There's a video which will explain it to you in great detail. I'm just gonna quickly scroll down the page. An awful lot to see. It's a nicely put together sales page, but this little part of that page sums it up nicely. so you've got the quick start, which enables you to use ai, put in a prompt and it will quickly design, a website for you.

It will get you on stock by giving you guidance and customized recommendations based upon, specific information. Check this out across. Cadence. So I dunno if it's got some sort of compatibility, with other websites that you've built or something like that. you can find patterns using it.

You can get inspiration by, letting it says here, let AI spark your creativity with 20 starter context. You can do the, usual stuff that you can do with chat, GPT, generate text, improve grammar, tailor the text and update the tone. But, Michelle or Matt, I'm gonna throw this one in your direction.

Give us the, Give us the elevator pitch for Cadence ai. What's the, what's the

[00:40:23] Matt Cromwell: reason

[00:40:23] Michelle Frechette: we were, I'm gonna defer to Matt first 'cause I wanna hear how

[00:40:25] Matt Cromwell: he talks about it. Nice. one, one thing I'll say first is a, just a tiny bit of context. Like what I love about, Ben Ritner, the, guy behind, cadence is he's very, careful.

And intentional, and you'll have noticed all of 2023 there was this like gold rush for AI products. Yeah, there really was. Yeah. There definitely were some folks who were doing AI before 2023 and but then in 2023 it was like everybody needs ai and at the end of the day, a lot of them were just like, oh, I can type a sentence into a prompt and it will give me something that's nifty.

Nifty is. Not something that customers are gonna be clamoring down the doors for. and so many of these big products, they're like 20 bucks a month for something that was nifty. And I'm just eh, that's why you're starting to see the, AI usage dip now finally. 'cause the, luster is.

Past. but this whole time, Ben and the Cadence team and stellar leadership, did not jump straight into the deep end of ai. Instead, they were really careful and they're like, why do customers even want this? What will this actually do for them? like who actually caress at the end of the day?

and that's why you see what you see here is that we don't want to just be able to put a prompt in the block editor. We want to be able to generate. A whole landing page or a whole website for you based on what you say. and that includes images, that includes layouts, that includes text as well.

and the result that's coming out right now is really exciting. like one of the things that Stellar's talking about all the time is trying to make WordPress easy. and that speaks a little bit towards what Michelle was saying earlier of how Yes. we are aging up in the WordPress space and the, younger generation, honestly, one of their big right is that stuff is easier.

That's what they actually expect. They don't actually always expect like amazing, phenomenal UIs. They just expect it to work easily and intuitively and WordPress. Sometimes, unfortunately, really doesn't do that. so that's the goal and the aim here is that what we're building with Cadence AI is going to make building pages intuitive, and a lot more, straightforward, and that you actually get the results that you actually want, from these tools.

So I'm excited to see it. But do notice that it is pre-release at the moment? Yes. not, it's not 1.0. There it is.

[00:43:04] Nathan Wrigley: on the bottom. Yep. Michelle, thank you, mark.

[00:43:08] Michelle Frechette: I'm just super excited about it. Our, cadence audience is very excited about it. If you go and, we've several thousand people in the Cadence Facebook group, for example, and they're clamoring for it and we get direct messages every day.

is it released yet? Is it released yet? So it definitely is one of those things that people have been looking forward to. and, as Matt said, I think anything that makes it easier. If you could focus on your content and your design becomes easier and you can figure out how to personalize it easier, which is what you can do with cadence, I think that's where people like it can be as easy as you want it to be, or you could make it as complex as you wanna be too, right?

So some people love playing with the CSS and the codes and things like, and the colors and the hex codes and all those kinds of things. And you could do all of that with cadence. And so I think making it easier is really gonna make a difference. The next generation. We were the internet generation.

The next one is the app generation. And so whereas it used to be that apps needed to replicate what happened on the internet, now the internet is gonna have to start replicating how things look on an app. And I think that Cadence is doing a lot of that right now.

[00:44:10] Nathan Wrigley: it looks really amazing. Just the ability to type in and get, custom pages and just, the content is bespoke to the kind of query you put in.

So I'm guessing that the intention would be, for example, if I indicate strongly that I'm a gardening company, that I'm gonna get text, which is I. Adjacent to gardening plus images. Yeah, I was gonna say, and images that, you know, flowers and plants and all that kind of stuff. Caterpillar trucks, for example.

that kind of thing. And it just, I was saying in a couple of weeks ago, when those kind of things happen, especially if you are pitching a website to a client. And you just wanna show them more or less the wire frame, having content which is adjacent to the finished product really gets them on board a lot more.

They can see it. It's not em, and it's not some sort of 600 by 300 placeholder. it gives them an intuition as to what's going on and how it's all gonna look. As always, it's a starting point, isn't it? Nobody's s sort of suggesting, not yet anyway, that you click a button and your website is finished.

There's an awful lot more to do. But, Matt, do you know when the, when it comes out of, I'm gonna say beater, it's called pre-release. Do you know when we're anticipating full release? Comes out. When it comes out, man comes out

[00:45:23] Matt Cromwell: when it's ready. All right. Yeah. Okay. That's fair enough. I think we're, really aiming for quarter one, but, no promises.

Yeah.

[00:45:31] Michelle Frechette: It's not a cake. We don't have, we're not following a specific recipe for this. Yeah.

[00:45:35] Nathan Wrigley: Aw, that's good. I like the analogy. Any, anytime anybody uses the word cake in this podcast, we're all happy. I only wish I had some to share. James, anything on that? Or shall we move on? I know time is.

[00:45:48] James Giroux: No, I think, Matt and Michelle have both done a great job of outlining it.

I bringing it back to that underrepresented group, which is the younger generation. absolutely agree with Michelle on that. the thing that you were saying, Nathan, as well about, Con, working in context. I think one of the things that's really neat about this, especially things like content generating right in that spot where you're designing, when you're in that flow, either as a user or as a builder, being able to have that, that, content generated or those images populated, it's such a huge win.

Yeah, I've been doing, some, design work recently and, you've gotta take time out in order to find and source the right images for a particular block or something. And then you've gotta think about your content and you've gotta get that right and those blockers can get in the way.

Of, the flow of what you're doing. And if we can remove those through tools like Cadence, ai, I think that's a really, helpful thing for, users. and make the web more, more, accessible to more folks as well. as far as like people who maybe get scared of building a website, because they might have a design idea but they have no idea what to write.

[00:47:13] Matt Cromwell: I am. They have the content,

[00:47:15] Nathan Wrigley: dunno how to sign it. At the beginning of lockdown, I sat all three of my kids. 'cause we were in, we were isolated and no school was on. And I sat my three kids down and thought I'm gonna teach them how to use WordPress. Honestly, it lasted less than an hour. it was, hard.

And I thought, this is a fruitless struggle. This sort of stuff. Th this. Changes that paradigm. You sit down and within three minutes you've got something akin to a website which you could actually publish. Will it be a hundred percent exactly what you want? No. But will it be a lot further on than I gave them, which was, a black header with some white text and then a big, just some kind of, a rubbish website basically.

That they couldn't figure out what to do with this. Just gets them across that little hump and churn is the thing. If we can get rid of the churn. WordPress will become a lot stronger. I'm very conscious of the time. So we had a few bits and pieces. I'm just gonna very, quickly roll through them.

I just wanted to draw attention to a piece that Justin Tablo wrote. he's talking about styling the details. Block the details. Block is a sort of like a one accordion. You can open it and close it and it hides something that's hidden behind it. Usually text, we use it on the tavern to, to, to make the transcripts available.

that's a summary. Details block there and and he's written a post about how you can make it look pretty. And it is, it's nice, just simple little core block that you can now do this kind of thing with. So go and have a look at that. be on the alert, tell your clients. there is now somebody who has a special place in Hades who is sending out email pretending to be the WordPress team or the WordPress security team.

The intention is to get them to install, a plugin and who knows what that plugin is gonna do, but my expectation is it won't be good. and so just be mindful, your. Your clients are very much gonna be using WordPress, I'm sure it's quite likely. I imagine that this will be going out just spraying across the internet.

It's got a big target painted on its back these days. So if it says WordPress security team and it's coming into the inbox of somebody that doesn't know about WordPress, that feels like a click to me. Certainly possible. And. Just tell 'em, just like the bank, if, they, if somebody reaches out to you, don't click the links.

You go and find it for yourself. or best fit. Contact your developer. Contact you. Dear WordPress. so that's just awful. I wish things like that didn't happen. you can educate them in obviously seeing where the email came from, but maybe that's a step too far. But, these things are easy to do, aren't they?

I'm gonna, I'm gonna cry now. David Warley. David Warley. What a, lovely chat. He's been doing the podcast with me since literally episode one. He's done more than half of them. but he decided he's no longer gonna be using WordPress. He's decided he wants to build, websites which are based upon just HTML and CSS, and, so we're parting ways.

So much like Paul Lacey, he is now. A traitor. he's gonna go on my newly created traitors page. he's not, I love him a lot. it didn't take long though. We parted ways. At the end of recording the podcast, we parted ways and then about a week later, he, emailed me and said, do you want to do another podcast?

[00:50:43] Matt Cromwell: So,

I said, yeah,

[00:50:44] Nathan Wrigley: what's it about? He said, building websites, but without WordPress. so we're gonna launch a new podcast, and it's gonna be all about building, websites based upon the HT ML and CSS spec, not getting frameworks involved. We're gonna chuck that into the WP Bills feed. For a few weeks just so that you can get a flavor of it.

But it's Bye-Bye. But not really the heck, David. Yeah. Getting all the sympathy and then doing that, but I just wanted to memorialize at the moment. Yes. For me, it's a really big deal. It's seven, what is it? Yeah, we started in 2016. Quick bit of maths. That's 28 years we've been doing this.

And, and I'll miss him a lot, but he'll be back, so I won't miss him for very long. Bye David. Traitor.

[00:51:34] Michelle Frechette: at the end of this month, Allie and Niman steps away from the underrepresented in tech project. Aw. And I'm re, looking at the future of that and how to re pivot. I've been doing some work on the side around.

It's gonna go forward. It's gonna be great. but as a thank you to her for her time, I had a cameo done by one of her favorite, Actresses from Buffy the Vampire Slayer who write says, Hey, Michelle wants you to know you're dead to her.

[00:52:03] Nathan Wrigley: See, you're always raising a level. That was so good. Why didn't I think of that?

I like the way that you took it in a very negative direction. Now that's good. That's very

[00:52:13] Matt Cromwell: British

[00:52:15] Michelle Frechette: goes to.

[00:52:19] Nathan Wrigley: We've been having fun with it. That's great. Okay, I think maybe we've got time just for a couple of extra things before we have to knock it on the head. Normally we're 90 minutes, but today we're going on to 60 minutes. 'cause of this state of the word, is happening in about five minutes time. Ravo to Patch Stack, they have now become a member of the Open Source Security Foundation.

I confess, I don't know, a great deal about this, but the fact that they've written a blog post about it, I'm guessing they're celebrating this as a bit of a win. So bravo to them. I know that Spencer was in the comments. I'm sorry, Spencer. We did wanna deal with this in more detail. Matt, put it in and Matt, you've got two minutes if you wanna get into this one quickly.

Spencer talked to Sed, bulky.

[00:53:00] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, no, I thought it was great. a lot of folks who are paying attention to product, Often, resort to Twitter to complain about o automotive products. and that's the trend that I think that precipitates, interview like this, I think warranted or unwarranted.

and the o Automotive Sayad in particular has gotten a lot of public criticism from the WordPress community. And, I think that having the opportunity for him to go into detail and, Spencer really doing a pretty decent job of not letting them not answer questions, in this interview I thought was really good, really helpful, really useful.

overall I do think that sometimes the conversation. Wandered off a little off subject a bit and sometimes sed really didn't answer completely or or to the, nose. so I'd like to see more of sed in public, and more of him talking about what they do and why they do what they do. I. because it's really the WordPress users who are out there being vocal about, these things.

They're not wrong. They have good valid criticisms, but you don't see a whole lot of the typical, business owner complaining about opt-in monster stuff or others. And that's a lot of S'S point is that it's really other product owners who are being, very vocal. but

[00:54:29] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Thank you.

That's my take. Yeah, that's great. you can check this out on you, Tracy, I just wanna add Oh, please do.

[00:54:39] James Giroux: I, maybe not, a warning, but just a, caution to product folks in WordPress, about being careful not to venture too far into bullying. I've seen some of the commentary and there's this, like parody Twitter account and things like that, that are really.

I know they're

[00:55:05] Matt Cromwell: maybe joking.

[00:55:09] Nathan Wrigley: I think James froze. Yeah. Is that me? It looks that way. It looks like. Yeah. Unfortunately this platform is built with the, it's got this, maybe on these things. Matt, James, you, you, froze. You said they may be joking and then you froze. So I dunno if you can rewind a bit and carry on. No, I think James, are you James? Hello? Hello? Are you back? You're sorry James, you froze. Michelle, I know you've gotta go. I have to run. I'm

[00:55:39] Michelle Frechette: sorry. I've gotta go run

[00:55:40] Nathan Wrigley: off. It's alright. what about you Matt? Are you gonna run as well or I'm good you for a minute. We'll do a few more minutes then. James, do you wanna reiterate what you just said because you basically froze.

Thank you, Michelle. Appreciate it. Okay. Yep.

[00:55:55] James Giroux: Yeah, no, I was just saying I've been, watching, the Twitter commentary and, it's, one thing to, to criticize, an approach and it's another thing to take it into personal attacks or to. villainize someone or villainize an entire company and, all of that.

And there's a parody account. There's on Twitter, all these different things that I think venture a little bit too far maybe into bullying. And, I think that's not helpful for WordPress. It's not helpful for new product owners or new people trying to come in if they see this like collective.

Bashing of someone. And that's not to say you have to agree with the approach or agree with, things that go on, but we can do it in a constructive way. And I think that's much more WordPress, and much more what I would like to see than some of the things. And I think Spencer's approach of at least having that conversation and holding his feet to the fire, whether Syed answers all the questions or not.

I think it was very brave of s to even go on, a call like that, considering. The kinds of comments and things that have been said, especially in the last six. As an advert, six

[00:57:17] Matt Cromwell: months percent means whoa, by a specified amount

[00:57:20] Nathan Wrigley: or for every hundred. My, your ai, it's it's building you a website as we speak.

I, I will not happy.

[00:57:27] James Giroux: Yeah, that's right. The internet does not want me to be talking. That's apparently.

[00:57:31] Nathan Wrigley: I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna raise you. The WP Builds Facebook group image, which is just that Nice. Just stick with that. Do that. Yeah. And nothing goes wrong, right? be polite. Always. But let's go back to the article in question.

So this is WP Launch. I is the name of, Spencer's YouTube channel. You can obviously subscribe. This was published actually, oh yeah. 6th of December. And it's called Ed Bulky and Spencer Form, and discussed the future of WordPress and. I know that time is fast running out, so we'll just raise that as something that everybody can watch.

And thank you, Spencer for doing that for us and to finish us off rounding us off today, with one minute to go. Matt has. Brought this initial version for WordPress 6.5. What were

[00:58:23] Matt Cromwell: you? rich Taber shared out a, an article summarizing, roadmap stuff for 6.5, and he highlighted this one in particular.

and this is essentially a demo of what, dynamic, content could look like in Gutenberg blocks. and I was really impressed with this idea and this concept. 'cause this is something that basically every page builder that's not Gutenberg is doing in one form or another. Right? And Cadence in particular, all of their blocks, have a dynamic content, type functionality in them.

and, and it just feels like this actually, like basically trying to relate. metadata across different types of posts and things like that feels like something core should be doing in one form or another. and so I was really encouraged to see, this, development here. I do think it's gonna be relatively limited.

it's going to, Probably stay pretty focused on the types of content you do with normal, core blocks and things like that. but it's a very encouraging, move in the right direction. it obviously also the way it does, like image one, image two, image three, that's obviously something that somebody customized in one format.

Yeah. If you can extend this functionality for yourself, really imagine, using it for your clients in different ways. being able to say feature image one or feature image two, or like a business shot or portrait one, portrait two, things like that would be really cool, to be able to enable your clients to do those things rather than having to go dig through the media library every single time

[01:00:03] Nathan Wrigley: they need an image.

Yeah, I completely agree. it almost feels bizarre. That we don't have this in Gutenberg and every, implementation of Gutenberg, so whether that's Cadence or it's commercial rivals, they all have a different way of doing it. And if you flip from one to the other, you have to figure out a new way of doing it.

And so having some sort of standardized way, which normal WordPress users can use off the bat. Yeah, I will link to that in the show notes as well. But it's a, it's a GitHub. track and, I'll put the link in the show notes, which will come out tomorrow. I really appreciate it. I know that we are incredibly rushed today, because of state of the word, which has probably already started.

I do apologize for the fact that it's a little bit shorter than normal. I forgot Michelle kept me up to date with that, but we'll knock it on the head there. thank you. We'll be back next week. It'll be our final one of. Will it? Yeah, I think it'll be our final one of the year, unless we're gonna go on like Christmas day or something.

so, it only remains to do the, friendly little wave if you guys fancy given us a bit of a wave. That's great. Thank you very much. Thank you, James. Appreciate it. Thank you, Michelle. And thank you Matt. We will be back next week, so take it easy. See you then. Bye.