This Week in WordPress #280

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley - Oct 2023: It's time for this week in WordPress episode number 280, entitled opportunity for failure. It was recorded on Monday the 18th of December, 2023. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and this week I am joined by three fabulous guests. I'm joined by Michelle Frechette by Tammie Lister and Slobodan Manic. We're going to talk about WordPress, but what specifically?

we get into the roadmap for WordPress 6.5. There's a lot to unpack and that dominates our conversation. We move on to what was mentioned in the State of the Word that is Matt Mullenweg's address, where he talks about the things that have happened in the last year, as well as some of the things that's going to happen in the future.

There's a page where you can now find all of the WordPress events all over the globe on a simple map.

WordCamp Europe, they need speakers and sponsors and media partners. And so we get into that conversation as well.

The WordPress project is not going to be moving over from Slack to Matrix after all, and we discuss why that might be.

Tammie gets into the conversation about the admin UI overhaul. What does that mean? And what does she imagine it's going to have in the future?

Also some new guidelines for what themes can do in the onboarding process. It feels like it's tightening up on the bits and pieces that they can show to you.

We also mentioned some of the things that we're doing over at WP Builds, and then we get into some erata, some not WordPressy stuff to do with Facebook, Threads, Meta, Mastodon, ActivityPub as well a little puzzle about color.

It's all coming up next on This Week in WordPress. And. Cheers. I hope you have a nice holiday.

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 at www.omnisend.com.

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Hello? Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hello there. Good morning. Good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are in the world. It is episode number 280 of this week in WordPress. Guess what we are gonna do? We're gonna talk about WordPress, on all the bits and pieces from the last week. It does what it says on the tin. I'm joined join this week by three, a fabulous guest, two of them new to the show.

Let's start though with a returning guest, Michelle Frechette, who comes on quite a lot, I have to say. Thank you, Michelle. I really appreciate it. How are you doing? I'm great. Thank you. How are you? Yeah, good. Thank you, Michelle. If you've not seen this show before, is the Director of Community Engagement for Stella WP at LiquidWeb.

In addition to her work at Stellar WP Michelle is the podcast barista at WP Coffee Talk. Co-founder of Underrepresented in Tech, creator of WP Career Pages, also the creator of WP speakers.com. You should check that out. It's really good. director of community [email protected], and a frequent organizer and speaker at Word Camp Events, sorry, WordPress events.

She lives outside Rochester, New York and takes lots of pictures of nature. the other website, which she's got is called Meet Michelle. Online. So thank you for joining us once more, Michelle. Absolutely appreciate it. And we're also joined by, Slobodan Manic. Is that right? Have I said your name right? You almost did.

Yes. But that is good enough. Almost. It's slab and man, but I'm not going to force you to say that. Oh, that's very kind of you. I appreciate you coming on the show for the first time, the sort of run up to Christmas. That's great. Thank you Slobodan is a growth strategist at Maxima. he also hosts the Know Hacks Show podcast, which I presume you can go and find with your search engine of choice.

Thank you. And I thank Michelle for putting my bio to Shame. Yeah, mic. Michelle's, bio is always, a, I write bios professionally. So one day I'm gonna do Michelle's bio in one breath, but it'll probably be my last. I tried to get you to do that once. You're like, no, I'm just gonna read.

Yeah. I realized it was Folly. also joining us for the first time on this show is Tammie Lister. Hello Tammie. Hello. It is very nice to have you. Tammie's also gone for the minimalist, bio as well. Yeah. She is the developer at Inside. Did I get that right? Yeah, you're good. Yes. and is also a core contributor to WordPress.

So if nothing else in, we're in deep debt. for that I'm wearing a Christmas hat. It may not last that long. I'm also suffering browser crashes. I dunno why that is, but my Mac decided over the last seven or eight days that it was gonna crash periodically. it was gonna crash the browser.

Periodically. So let's pray if I disappear. Michelle, it's on you. Okay. We'll just keep talking. You just keep talking. Happy Christmas. Yeah, you just keep talking and I will come right back. I've never had a problem filling dinner. Yeah, exactly. if you fancy little bit of housekeeping, if you fancy joining us in the chat, we would a love that.

It really does make the show genuinely much more interesting. it's just lovely when people make the effort to do that. Appreciate it. And if you would like to do that, probably the best place to send people, get onto your Twitter or Facebook or whatever, send them here, wp build.com/live. If you go there, you can comment you using the YouTube comment.

So you need to be logged into a Google account that's on the right, but also if you look inside the actual video player, top That looks like top left 'cause everything's backwards. It's top is a little box. It says live chat and you can see every comment from any platform over there, not just the one that you are logged into.

So there's that WP builds.com/live. If you're join us from Facebook. you have to do this. Go to Wave Video slash lives slash Facebook. Otherwise, you are entirely anonymized. We just get this picture of an icon of a face and we dunno who you are and your name doesn't come across. That's fine. You can do that if you like, but, why not tell us who you are.

so thank you Cameron Jones joining us all the way from Australia, I'm guessing. good evening. Good morning. Depending on your definition. Yeah. Thank you, Cameron. am I cold by any chance? Says ca. Yes. I live in the uk. It's basically cold all the time. I live in the north of it, north of England, so it's pretty much Dr.

Dismal and dark, no doubt. somebody's gonna join us from Connecticut in a moment and tell us what the weather is like there. You'll see, Tammie, you'll see slobber. Dun Peter will no doubt drop in. He usually does. we've still got snow in Toronto, says Rob Cairns. Very nice. I'd like a bit of snow.

We had some snow over the last week, but it's all gone, sadly. And now we've got Slush, it's a WordPress podcast. So should we talk about WordPress? How does that sound? Sure. Okay. All right. If we mo actually quickly, I should turn away the last one with the little slide about the, which color is darker.

Okay, here we go. So first of all, a bit of self-promotion. This is our website. Look at it. Wp builds.com. It says, Nathan Wrigley and David Walmsley present the WP Builds podcast. That's not true. He left me this week after seven years. he's gone. He is done a runner, dirty rat. Yeah. He's no longer gonna be using WordPress.

he's gonna be using the W three C spec, CSS and HTML. And with that in mind, he's decided no more WP Builds podcast. However, wait until January the fourth, he snuck his way back in. but you can find out more about that. So he did a reverse. Paul Lacey? Is that what I just heard? He's to, he became a.

Traitor. And then he untraded himself. That's right. That's exactly what he did. but he's not gone, but he's gone, if But anyway, it was lovely for seven years to do the podcast with him. And, yeah, I'm sure that, we'll keep in touch in one way, shape, or form. Anyway, that's WP Builds.

if you wanna know what we're doing, we've done quite a bit over the last few weeks. Head over to wp builds.com/schedule and we've got this calendar. so for example, this week we've got a webinar with, Leo Lovich, all about Gato Graph ql, his fab, like properly clever graph QL plugin. you can join us on, Wednesday at one o'clock in the afternoon, and that'll be the fourth out of five.

But look. Look at this. This never happens. I've got two weeks off 'cause it's Christmas. I'm wearing a hat and I'm having a holiday. so we're gonna, after this week has gone, that's it. We're gonna put the tools down and just be back to normal for a couple of weeks. I'm sure you're all gonna cope. we did a podcast episode with, Anne and Jacob from, grade Suite.

It was all about how they're building accessibility in their suite of WordPress blocks and other things. You could check that out, right? I'm nearly done with the, promotional bit. And we talked about cumulative layout shift with Sabrina Zan in our eighth episode of Speed It Up. That was really cool.

We took on the techcrunch.com website, which is the most cumulatively layout shifty website ever. Go to go on a mobile to techcrunch.com and try to click something in the first second. I challenge you, you will fail 'cause it will move. and we also did, another webinar with the guys at Bluehost about their Wonder Suite series and they've got this AI called Wonder Help and it's intended to get your clients on board and get their question answered quickly.

Anyway, that's the self-promotional stuff. Here we go. Ann McCarthy. Has written a giant article, in the last, not quite week, seven days or so, 10 days, all about the roadmap to WordPress 6.5. Who holy moly. there's a lot. genuinely this, I am sure she tried to cut it down and I love Han Deeply.

but there's just so much to put in. So I'll try and cover it off as quickly as I can. just the headline pieces. Then we'll hand it over to our panelists to tell us what they like. She gives us some screenshots and a little video about maybe what the font library will be like. And actually I like it.

It looks really great, really easy to use. Gives you an impression of what the font is gonna be in your website. Think media library. But just for fonts, you've got the idea. So hopefully that will drop in 6.5. This is my favorite, the ability to sync specific blocks and attributes of patterns. So I'm just gonna quote, building upon sync patterns.

Partial sync library allows users to ensure a sync layout and style across patterns while allowing each instance of that pattern to have customized content. So I don't know, imagine you are a real estate website or something and you want there to be a standard card for a house that's being sold. You can now do that.

You can drop it in people, your customers or clients, whatever, could change the text. But ev all the imagery and the border radius and everything about it would stay the same. And obviously if you changed it once. All the similar cards would change. So I just think that's really cool. section specific theme, JSON and colorways, I won't go into that.

more support for classic themes with, blocks, which is nice. And that is what, oh, this is also another favorite, a real rethink of the revisions options in WordPress. So if you're watching this on video, you can see there's a little idea here about, what the current state is. It's like a Kanban view in a way.

So you can see a little bit more about what has happened over the last period of time. And thank goodness, this is another one of my favorites, the navigation block, the overlay, you're gonna have options to style that. So think about a website that you built with a block-based theme at the moment.

the, the ways that you can alter The, the menu which slides in or the overlay if you like, have been limited and that's going to be altered so that you can change that. API's interactivity. API, custom fields API block binding API more compatibility with, PHP and yeah. Well done Anne. Well done team for the roadmap.

I'm out of breath. It's over to you. Take a break. Anybody interrupt as you see fit?

There's a lot there. Yeah. I think it's important to remember that. this is everything that could get done, but it's not to say everything that will get done. That's right. And this release also is always going to be a little bit bigger because everyone has the holidays and everyone has, there's always a longer time period as well.

I love that it starts that seed of the foundational experience. nice experience. I like that terminology as well, rather than a redesign or redo or anything. I like the foundational experience as a framing. I think that's really nice. And also that it takes things like revisions. It takes things like the navigation, mobile overview, which exist already and iterates them and makes them more extendable and more useful.

So I've seen people have to like. Work around the existing, situation and this offers them the potential not to have to do that because it takes something that's solid and then allows you to customize it easier. So yeah, I just love that foundational experience. It, yeah. Nice. That was a nice way of putting it.

I, whenever I think about like OSS updates, I don't know, Mac, OSS or Android or whatever it may be, iOS, it feels like it's really hard to innovate in that space anymore. It's really difficult for those companies to actually come up with something which you go, Ooh, that's exciting. We don't seem to have that problem.

in WordPress, it seems like there's a laundry list there for 2025 and there's a lot that's gonna change. Maybe that means that there was a lot that needed improving, but I'd just get excited 'cause there's absolutely tons that could happen in the next year. Slab it and did you wanna add anything?

yes. I think what you said about syncing patterns and blocks that experience is. I'm not gonna say crucial, but very important in the future. Also custom fields, API and, what is block binding API that hopefully makes its way? I see that as having potential of having an impact. The same way custom fields had 10, 12, how many ever years ago it was.

'cause now you're not just copying patterns and blocks and making 'em the same everywhere. There's dynamic content inside them that you can control and that you can, I think, edit from the blocks as well. You can add, you will be able to edit the custom field from the block directly. I think that opens a whole new layer of possibilities.

I wouldn't say it's evolutionary. It's a remix of what has been done 10 years ago, but it's a beautiful remix in a more modern way, I would say. Yeah, there's certainly a lot to look forward to. And thank you, Anne, as always for keeping on top of it all and, writing all of that up for us. That's great.

Okay. We'll turn to the thing which happened, which is probably your most interesting, the community this week, the one single event, and that was the state of the word address from Matt Mullenweg. It took place in, I want to say Madrid, but I, yeah. Was it? Okay, great. Yes, I did watch it, but I've just.

Forgotten. and yeah, Matt Mullen, we, got on stage along with a variety of other people, including Mattias Ventura, and, Jafa also was on the stage, but this is a little writeup in the GoDaddy, on the GoDaddy, website. And I've just highlighted a few things which I thought were worthy of attention.

If you don't, if you've never seen it before, state of the word is like a summation of what has happened. So a lot of it is staring back over the last year and then there's a pur, a portion of it, which is staring forwards into the future to try and to just to try and. Tell in easy to understand language what may happen.

And here's some things in terms of the community, this is all very encouraging. 70 word camps took place in 33 countries. I can't remember the exact numbers, but the numbers from previous years, I, if memory serves, I think they were lower. So I think we're going slightly up again, significantly, big drop for the obvious reasons of the pandemic.

and then slowly but surely, it seems to be becoming more normal to attend those events again, three and a half, sorry, 3000, 300 gatherings. so that could include all sorts of different events, including school days, kids camps and youth camps. Those are really. Great. I tried to sit my kids down and teach them WordPress.

It didn't go well. But, clearly, teachers around the world, are up to the task. Two and a half thousand organizers made this possible. There was also mention of the annual meetup survey, and if you want to get your, opinion heard about the state of WordPress events in the future. 'cause there is a big endeavor.

I think we're still calling them next gen events. There is a big endeavor to, to change the way that those events take place. Maybe make them mono subject or. Something along those lines so you can get your, get your thoughts, shared there. 1,339 new contributors to WordPress this year, which is just a, again, a huge total.

There's lots of other things. I'm just gonna slide through them. I hope that's all right. There's some, a new showcase page, which was highlighted, and the new enterprise page, which was also highlighted. By the way, if you want to get the skinny on the showcase page, tune into the WP Tavern podcast that I did with Nick Diego, where he shares what's, going on there and why it's going on.

Anyway, you can see it on the screen. It's very nice. open verse is more than just a search engine. It said it's a broad part of the WordPress Eco, WordPress family. there was some updates on that. I can't actually remember what they were. Playground got a bit of a mention. So Playground is the tool where you can install WordPress into your browser.

It takes about a. Point eight of a second for it to happen. It's a utterly remarkable technology. If you asked me to explain it, I would have to cower in a corner 'cause I haven't the faintest idea how it works, it's magic is what I would say. but there's gonna be a lot of implementation of that over the next year.

And also, making hopefully plugins and themes available in playground on the wordpress.org website as well. there was a lot of talk about the 2024 theme, but we've done that lots in the future, so I'm gonna leave it there. Except this one thing. data liberation. obviously WordPress would love to continue to grow.

I think there's this aspirational target to get to 85% of the web. okay. that seems like quite a large target, but there you go. but the idea is why not make it easier for people who are using other solutions. So that might be Squarespace or Wix or whatever it may be, to be able to bring their data in.

Click a button. Wait a moment. And for all of your. Current website to become a WordPress website. So there's gonna be a lot of work, done on data liberation as well. I'm done. Again, I'm out of breath. Do you guys want to add anything to that? I do. I wanna say, if you go scroll back down to Word Kev Asia.

They've started to announce speakers and one of our guests today Has already been announced. Who Tammie will be speaking at Work Camp Asia. What's your, did you go last year, Tammie? No, I didn't go last year. My first work Camp Asia as well. Have you spoken to people who did go? yeah. It seems like really achieved.

In fact, I was due to go to the first one that didn't happen. So I'm very excited to finally go to work Camp Asia. So I didn't go, I tuned in and watched it, but it seems to be the word camp from last year. the flagship word camp that got everybody's Jaws loose. Everybody was talking about it in really, it was amazing.

Quite, but why was it amazing? what was different? I think part of it was that it was the first big word camp back. I mean that we'd had, I shouldn't say that we'd had, Europe last year as well. Yeah. But it was the first time, so it was the first time we were meeting in Asia as Word Camp Asia.

'cause previously had been canceled. It was, the venue was perfect, the size of the crowd was perfect. The layout of the venue was perfect. You had to walk through the, vendor area to get to anything else. So people were constantly saying hello and seeing one another. and every. Every bit of attention was paid to accessibility, which was phenomenal from my standpoint.

Of course. And just the vibe, the whole, I hate to use the word vibe. I feel like I, raised in the seventies, which I was, but vibe away. the whole, the vibe was just amazing. Yeah. Just, it was just so every thing you could think of was thought of and accommodated for. I remember talking to people who were organizing it prior to organizing and obviously, they were really engaged in that whole thing, but they kept saying, we're gonna try and do things differently.

And I kept thinking, what could you do differently that's gonna be, that's gonna move the needle to make people rave about it. But whatever they did seems to have been infectious. There was something in the water there, I think. Can I share a perspective of Yeah. My colleagues who went there from Ed, the, first impression they had is, it's.

A lot more business oriented. it's a lot more adult than some of the work camps that we usually go to, Europe, us And that was like the biggest thing because work camps, yes, they are about business, but they're a social event slash business event. And they have been for, what, 10 years, 15 years.

This was like a, I'm not going to say a proper event because that makes work camps not a proper event, but it was a, like a more business oriented event. interesting. And you enjoyed it for that reason? it wasn't me, it was a few of my colleagues who went there. Yep. Okay. So I was there and I wouldn't have said that.

I would not have said it was more business, but I think you get. What you're looking for as well, right? Probably Probably yes. Perhaps. Perhaps if they were looking to make those connections. But I've made lots of connections there. I made connections for Stellar wp I made all kinds of opportunities.

my talk went really well, was well attended, which doesn't always happen at a lot of Word camps. People are like, oh, I'll catch it on the online and I'm gonna go talk to my friends. So those kinds of things were very exciting, to have happen as Well, Tammie, you've, you've got not that long to, when is it?

it's not that far away. It's in March. March, yeah. It's really soon. Little bit of time. Little good. Yeah. Enough time to get it written. It happens over International Women's Day as well, so it's gonna be exciting to see women on the stage. Okay. So that was bring sorry. Can I bring us back to this day where there's one bit we skipped over, which was the data bit.

There's one, and everyone's excited about the exporters and the importers. I'm really excited about the figma to blocks. Oh, tell us more on, yeah. So excited. So one of the like. Problems because humans is between having this design in Figma or Figma is a tool that a lot of people use to create a design.

left it all or not. and then handing it over and saying, now make it into WordPress. that's, that often leads to not great conversations or some exciting workflows and different, solutions that maybe in an agency or in a freelance or scale it however you want, that you have to work around having a unified method for this or at least a option for this.

even if it's just a simple exporting that just exports into a theme, Jason or just exports, into more managing of this. And part of this is also like theme tools and ha, having a better way of doing that is gonna be. Fundamental in having better conversations. Often the first conversation is, this is what we own.

This is what we own, and it's not a great kind of, handover. We talk about design handovers. That's not a great start to a project. so you'll be able to have these better conversations, be able to talk in blocks easier. we can think there'd be a magic button that you press that might be a little way off.

oh, it'd be nice though. It may not be, because honestly there's already things like Jason, because of the way that Figma has variables and the way that things are set up and Figma, it's things in that way anyway, so really it's not that far to be able to think about it in the form of components and in the.

Form of being able to export. You can already export to Jason quite easily. so it's super exciting for me. Figma, I'm guessing, I said it a few times. I have the design skills of a potato. potatoes are pretty good at design. because you can cut them when you're a child and make like prints, in that case, a particularly bad potato.

really useless potato. That's what it's like when I design things. But you were saying before the call started that this is the tool. Now this is like the hot thing. it's one of the standards just because, I mean it's still owned by Adobe because it's, yeah. They got 20 billion or something.

Yeah, they bought it. everyone was like with Figma thinking that they went. Adobe and then Adobe purchase them. but really it is just easier for collaboration across teams. it is, it is a tool designed for product design rather than a tool designed to manipulate photographs, which is what Photoshop is.

so it's designed to do the job that it's doing. yeah, it's the tool that most people find easier to do that way. It's an interesting one though, isn't it? Because it's not really getting a website which already exists, if It's, bringing in a design, so that's slightly different.

I'm just gonna raise onto the page, the, data liberation guides. So I'm guessing that these are the things that they're gonna be targeting and presumably they're to do with market share and things like that. So let's just put those on the screen. sorry. It's very small typo. And then the tools is the Figma one, which she takes.

Yeah. Okay. So we've got a VDA to core blocks. We'll get onto that in a minute. Let's do the WordPress once first. blogger to WordPress, Contentful, I dunno. Anything about that. To, to WordPress. Drupal. To WordPress. I'll stop saying to WordPress. HTML. R-S-R-S-S. That's interesting. Squarespace, Tumblr, Wix, WooCommerce product.

WordPress to WordPress. So that's just migration, and then we've got these other ones, which is, I'm interested what you think about this particularly, Michelle, when we get to one of these, the cadence ones. So these are already existing WordPress solutions and it's trying to get you into core blocks.

The land of blocks, not the land of page builders. So Avada, let's go down divvy, Elementor Cadence, but look at the right hand side. Look at the list of what it, WP Bakery. Look at what it says it does. So WP Bakery is taking it two core blocks. Divvy is taking it two core blocks, Elementor just improving the comparison chart.

So just gonna say it's already using, it's already using blocks. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. So that is an exciting development. But yeah, the idea that you can obviously, tell your clients what have you, don't worry if you're on Drupal, we got you covered. let's see how that goes. But that is a big development and thanks for your input there.

Tammie, anything? I almost wanna start, I almost wanna start a Wix blog just to watch and see how it migrates. not actually publish it or anything, but just play with it. I have a week off between Christmas and New Year, Maybe maybe I'll do that. Okay. Alright. I'm just going to see if there's anybody coming to the comments.

There's, oh, here we are. Just to restore normality. Michelle, you know how important it's to, to get the weather forecast from Connecticut. he's here. Goodness for that. I was worrying, crazy weather. Minus 17 centigrade for the love of Mullenweg. What the heck? with heavy rain, gusty winds, lots of power outages and trees down.

Many schools throughout the state are closed today. Peter Ingersol, you are going above and beyond even joining us. Thank you so much. And Courtney, there's Courtney. we were looking at your article a moment ago, Courtney. I hope that you noticed that. she also says out of the flagship events, word Camp Asia really was the best, event location, including speaker sponsored dinners and after party.

It was fantastic. So there's a nice, nice update on that. wsu, the Asia had wa stop fees. I dunno what a stuffy is. It's a stuffed animal. Oh, it's a toy. Okay. which you don't find at other events. So for that reason alone, come on, w WordCamp EU flight at Tai. Just for that lift your stuffy game. That's all I'm saying.

also the encouragement to wear cultural attire for the after department was amazing. That is amazing. I wish I'd been there now. Taiwan, you were, you're faced outta well, it was in 2D plastic format, apparently. I won't tell everybody what that was about. Anyway, there's the guides. hopefully in the near future you'll be able to implement those.

So I think we've, I think we've done the. State of the word. Let's move on. I just wanna raise this as a thing. it may not be a particularly long piece, but here we go. There is a new WordPress events page, we've just been talking about events, and you can find it over at the very easy to remember url, events.wordpress.org.

and it's really just, a map with faceted search so that you can drill down into where you are in the world and what have you. for example, I'm in the UK and you can see that, sadly, WordPress is not, it's not what it once was. in the UK it's looking that used to be dots everywhere.

there's now only four. Oh, bless us. but in other parts of the world, WordPress is still going strong. So if you're in a part of the world and you fancy, Checking out what's going on? we had the word camp last year. This year we finally had our first word camp. And I think different con it shows different countries are doing at different pace.

I think that's important to remember. Yeah. That was the one, right? WordPress Northeast. Was that the one you were meaning? it was, no, it, the one in was one in, in Whitley Bay, wasn't it? Absolutely. Did you go? Yeah, it was super awesome. What was it like? It was really nice just to have a work camp. it was like the smaller work camps again in.

I think that's probably the answer to, our work camps. 'cause England had the problem, the UK had the problem with them getting a bit big, for our communities. And I think, we do have a smaller community. so it's really important and our problem is, London and other cities are just too expensive to have these events.

yeah. 'cause the cost of livings and things. So it's just better for us to have the small remote ones and it exposes culture to those areas and, yeah. More of those, please. I think also what you're seeing in the map corresponds to what's upcoming in the list below. What's happened in the past, okay.

Okay. So that's what's gonna happen in the near future. but what's really nice about the list too, if you scroll down, Nathan, you'll see that it tells you whether it's online. So if you're looking to attend from a remote location, you can find, an event that would work for you. For example, my, my meetups are still online.

I haven't scheduled next year yet, but, and we have people attend. I actually have more people attend from Australia than I do from my local really community. That's so cool. That's people from Australia and only two of us, and people from all over the United States and Canada have a tendency to come to mine because it's still online and they can meet people and have great conversations.

So there's opportunities, especially if you're in a remote area that doesn't have a meetup, this shows you better than trying to search on meetup.com where you're just guessing. Where, like a location, because it's not as pinpointed as this. So this is a wonderful way to see what's coming up.

Not only word camps, but also, the, meetups and things that you might want to attend. Who's responsible for adding, events here? Yeah, see, we can find, I can think of two that are not there. That, so what it does is it's, I believe it's pulling off of meetup.com. Okay. Anything that's an official event.

So if you have a, if you have a chapter of, WordPress, a meetup that's official, it's a sponsored by wordpress.com or wordpress.org, it would show up here. If it's not, it may not. Got it. I'm in Porto, by the way, the Lovely Work Camp Europe venue. There's a meetup and there's a Workcamp in four months, and I don't see them.

That's why I'm asking. Yeah. I don't know how far forward it goes either, so there's Oh, okay. Okay. There's a lot I don't know about it, but, I don't know if we've had this conversation. Do you live anywhere near Bob? he's this way. Two kilometers away, I would say. Oh, yes. Yeah. Oh, yes. Yeah. It wouldn't be healthy for me to live anywhere near Bob.

I feel it would be why? there'd be too much going out and, consumption of things. Yeah. Okay. It would be, do you remember that video of all the wine coming down the road in Porto when that batt that would be you and he at the bottom of the yeah. With your containers. Nothing good would come of living close to Bob, from my perspective.

okay. That's, anyway, it's there events.wordpress.org if you want to see. So it would appear things that are coming up. it's a good place. I guess especially if you have moved country or something like that, or you're just new to the community, there it all is in a nice, easy to use and easy to search map.

Okay. Let's move on. Speaking of word camp. And Europe. This is, there's two things. there's a call for sponsors for WordCamp Europe. It's [email protected]. Just let's search for the, the newest post, but, it's the usual drill. If you have a company and you'd like to be part of that event.

It's happening in Torino this year. I have actually forgotten the dates, but I think it's May, is it May, June. June, thank you, happening in June this year, and all sorts of different sponsor options as normal. I think like the whole next gen thing isn't touching the flagship events, so you'll probably get what you've had in the past, so there's nothing, no surprises there.

But also there is a recall for speakers. so this has been extended if you like. So if you fancy being a part of that experience from a speaker's point of view, then this is what they're looking for. They're after 45 minute long talks. They're after people to do 10 minute lightning talks. Also, people to take workshops on that's more interactive, where you do things with the participants in the room, not just speak toward them.

And also, people to be members of panels as well. So again, links to all of those will be in the show notes tomorrow. Any of you want to add anything to that? I'll just say one thing. 2013, Tammie was when I saw you on stage talking Tale of the theme. Tale of a theme. Story of a theme, whatever it was. And that was a great presentation.

I remember that. Yep. Nice. And I would that my first big workout. Oh wow. Thank you. I would encourage anyone to speak. You might think when people are standing up on stage at their experience or their fight. I get nervous every time I speak, and I think most people do when they speak. and just, you never know where your life will go from speaking.

so if you slightly feel like you would want to do it, because you can also get some support in mentoring and learning. you never know that you could do it from a 10 minute one, so you never know where it'll lead you. Yeah. Yeah. So just taking that first talk is really exciting to Nice kind of, who knows?

Yeah. And the nice thing I think from the point of view of those events is that the crowd, if you're gonna cut your teeth on speaking in public, the crowd is, not like the normal crowd, is it? If you've not attended those events before? No. I've spoken at WordPress and non WordPress events and I would choose WordPress events every single time.

'cause it's like speaking. Amongst friends versus speak amongst space. Scary things. And they're still friends, but they're also scare me. I feel a clap is coming your way. Whatever happens, so yeah. Maybe just so that we put the record straight, Peter is not about to die in minus 17 degrees Fahrenheit.

I wondered about that because 62 was not even minus 17. Yeah. I was waiting for his little nose. Like you need like a knitted nose thing, assuming, I dunno, Fahrenheit, but I realized that minus sounds like Calvin. It's Yeah, absolutely. It's like being on the moon or something. not, it's just 17.

so it's quite warm December, so he's turned that around. da Atif is joining us and saying, they only showed about one minute about the admin dashboard. We'll come onto to that actually. We've got a few things to say about the admin dashboard. It'd be very interesting to see more about what's planned.

Yeah. There's a few pieces, that we'll come to later. and oh. Ohio, I think you pronounced that. Hi there. nice to see you. I heard about how much everyone loved the stuff WaPo. I've put some thought into how we do that for Word Camp Eu. Okay. So they've already lifted their stuffy game. They're thinking, great to find more sustainable stuffies, and then raises this as an idea.

What about recycling idea? That's amazing. Shirts bring your old shirt that you're not gonna wear that old bags made of t-shirts. 'cause you can make t-shirt bags. There's oh yeah. Thousands of YouTube videos. Like tshirt build a bear. Yeah. Okay. we've got the solution more stuffies made of T-shirts.

This is the answer. I think the first stuffy was Word camp US 2016. Okay. If I'm not mistaken. Yeah. It's probably going gray by now. The second one. Yeah. Do you remember the word Camp Eu Paris? One that had a baguette. Oh, there were can, but it's in Paris. It had a little bar as well. It was Oh, wonderful.

What Torino is famous for, does anybody know what Torino is famous for? I can't summon it off the top of my head, but yeah, that, whatever that is, the wahoo needs that thing. okay. So yeah, please. if as Sammy says, you've got any intuition racing track you'd like to speak, isn't it? A racing track isn't, yes.

It's gonna be hard to get a racing track, It could be. It could be in a little car steering wheel. Yeah. As well. It's over to you. Word, camp EU organizing team. Let us know, uh, anyway, call for speakers is out. Call for sponsors is out. Let's make that event truly memorable. yeah. Brilliant. Okay.

So if you are into putting images on your website, you may have cro come across open verse as a bit of a thing. I always get. In my head, I always get confused between open verse and the photo directory, if you like. And I really should do a better job of not crossing the wires in my head.

but open verse, Michelle, correct me if I'm wrong, open verse was taken on by the WordPress Foundation, or was it automatic? I'm not sure. Like a year ago or a little while ago. And the content isn't held on an automatic or a WordPress property. It's just like a, it's like a silo of all the places where you can find free and open technology.

Can I, is that right? That sounds right, but I don't know the exact history of it, so That's okay. So long as I'm adjacent to, but the WordPress photo directory participates in the open verse, not the other way around, so Yes. Yeah. but obviously if you've got a project like that and that project is surfacing images, then there's problems in terms of what the.

Content will be, that's being served up. So you can imagine, oh, I don't know, content that's inappropriate for young children, that kind of thing. So there's been a little bit of an effort recently, and you can find it on the make.wordpress.org, slash open verse blog. they're trying to filter out that content so that it's suitable for everybody.

The intention, just by reading it, is that the default, if you just visit it for the first time, all the guardrails will be switched on so that you don't see the content. But curiously, this is interesting, and I don't know if this is the default, but this is, if you're looking at the screen, this is what you may see.

and we're looking at the, imagine you're inserting an image into a WordPress post, and you've got the sort of sidebar on the left invoked, and you're looking at some images. it's showing you things that. Exist, but have been like the opacitys been turned like right up so that it's blanked out.

there's an image there, but you've got to turn the moderation off in order to see it. I guess Google and their images, they just don't show it. The intention is you'll never see that image exists. This appears to be a slightly different approach to it. it's, it's, what's the word I'm after there?

What is that effect? It's gone all fuzzy. It's, obfuscating it. There you go. It's ob. They've obfuscated it. Thank you. they've obfuscated it, but, think of the children, essentially. So this just seems like a really sensible thing. Anybody in a WordPress website, I'm sure that the majority of us don't wanna see that stuff, by default.

So let's turn it off. Yeah. But for those that want to know, it's of existence. Of its existence. It's there. Anything to us, interestingly. Yeah. With the WordPress photo directory, it's all, we're all, there's a team of moderators that moderate photos into it, and there's certain countries that won't even allow you to be shown images without your express consent of knowing what the images prior to actually seeing the image.

whether it shows something war related or pornographic, et cetera, things like that. And so there are only certain countries that can even moderate those photos in the photo directory. So those are held for some of us who, our country doesn't care what we see the United States, and others that, we, I can approve it to be approved or I can just approve the photo itself.

and most of them are actually things like horses and, trees and things like that, that somehow AI says there might be something strange around about this. But, um, I've only come across one or two photos where we've, I. Or it truly was sensitive and, we did not approve it into the directory. I feel like we've got to quickly put on our superhero capes and, get Elliot Sby who is in the comments.

get him to a Word camp. he says, oh yes, feel nervous at the thought of going to a word, word Camp event. Nevermind speaking at one Elliot. Fear not it, what can we say? It's so friendly. Can I reflect? I was so nervous. My first word, camp event, and I took so many years before I attended a World Camp event.

I was a contributor for so many years. 'cause I was like, Nope. Comfortable not going anywhere. Yeah. happy communicating behind my keyboard, in a beautiful way. And I was super welcome the moment I did. and then I spoke at a local event and then, yeah. Find a buddy. Yes. You're gonna feel nervous, because you might just be a nervous human.

I am. I feel nervous. Walking to the end of my road. but. It can be good nerves and it can be, know that there are multiple people feeling that way. we have a community of a lot of amazingly nervous, happy people, so Yeah. Yeah. Fear not Elliot. Elliot lives just down the road from me. I've never actually met him, but he lives about 15 miles away.

Can go to Meetup together. Yeah. I should bundle him into the back of the car when he is least expecting. No, that's not how this person feeling. Nervous. We're gonna bundle into the back of the car, Elliot. That's not what's gonna happen. I'll politely ask you if you want to be bundled. no. just be for tea.

Will you First we'll have a, we'll have a small coffee. but the Elliot, seriously, I dunno if they're gonna do the Whitley Bay one again, but they, You could drive to my house and we could go from there. It's, shortly in the car you could have a small, your first work workout could be just the two of you watch a work workout video.

Yeah. That can be Oh yeah. Just a little private session. That sounds good. So Fia, not Elliot. I'm sympathized with, Tammie because I have a little bit of that imposter syndrome as well, and I just went and I did the lurking thing. I just lurked around a little bit and fell into some, we need a new word for lurking because Oh, okay.

It is a fine thing to do. Okay. And it sounds like a bad thing to do. Okay. Yeah, it's not, I was there, I didn't speak very much, but it all, and I met Paul Lacey, who I've been friends with ever since, and so happy days. he's, definitely not a traitor in any way. I'm not gonna say that Michelle knows what I'm talking about.

I'll get a text on signal a bit later about that. but come along Elliot. That'd be nice. We should go to one of those. Cameron says that, the Brisbane one, they did Plushies. I don't know what that is either. I'm guessing that's, that it's the same man. It's, just different words for the same thing.

Okay. They did a WaPo Plushie at Brisbane many years ago. Can't imagine the cost involved in doing it for a flagship event. Yeah, that's true. Make 'em out t-shirts. Great idea. And then Courtney says, there are quiet rooms and spaces. to help if you need some. I love the quiet rooms. Yeah.

That's so good. Yeah. Or you can also wander around with headphones and I've done it and no one's ever told me to take my headphones off at a WordCamp. Yeah. So I've done that quite happily. oh, Elliot, I, you've given me the good emoji crying with laughter emoji. We're, on. Did we? Is that Lacey?

Is that you Paul? he says we met at Word Camp Manchester. Did we? No, that's not true. You are wrong. I'm probably not wrong. You've got a better memory than me. oh. I feel bad now if that is Paul. I'm very sorry. I apologize for everything I ever did. Let's move on. Let's talk about some other bits and pieces.

Okay, so this doesn't mean a lot to me because I'm not part of the team that, create the code for WordPress or anything like that. But there's this project going on in the background called Matrix. and Matrix, as I understand it, is a tool that, that was, it was hoped, would be moved to fairly soon, that, the entire WordPress establishment, if you like, would start using Matrix as the tool of choice, in order to, to communicate with one another.

but it is been decided that is gonna be paused. that would actually be a very big decision to make, I'm guessing, but it, I, it doesn't sound like it's coming from the point of view of technical problems or anything like that. It's more about the usability in terms of accessibility. of the platform and also concern about the licensing of that tool.

Tammie, it sounded like you had an intuition or something that you knew a little bit about this, but, I think it's licensing and accessibility, so it's the same thing. I think, it's good to stop using something if it's not gonna work. I think it's a big thing to move. but if it's not gonna work for the whole community, then that's also super good.

It was involving having to get new, different clients, 'cause you had to get the browser or you had to move. I literally a couple of days before I had finally just got the client to, to make my move over and then change. 'cause it was, the call was going there. I think deciding once and for where call goes and just staying with one thing is best.

So I like the fact that it, we have, it's been done and decided, to stay there. yeah, so that, that's my thing. I dunno if other people got feeling, but if it's not gonna work for everybody, we shouldn't go over there. that's my favorite. Agreed. Yeah, that's a good point. I really struggle with Slack, that, I dunno what it is.

There's something about that UI. That really doesn't, they keep on changing it. That's 'cause they keep on moving. Yeah. Moving your cheese. Yeah. Yes. It's, I dunno. And also the speed at which the WordPress Slack moves. So you come and, I don't know, 12 hours as in, have you started grouping your channels?

So group and mute is my best recommendation. No, but I'm gonna write that down. What was that called? Group and mute. We just start grouping your channels because you can group them into sections, but you can also mute channels. I strongly advise that you do that. do not have to be everywhere at once, 'cause your brain will explode.

but start grouping them into things that you pay attention to. Okay. So I didn't know that I could do that. So I can declare a group of any name that I choose. I can, and then I can put, I think it's called. Sections. Okay. I use emojis 'cause it just makes me happier. and I have a little, here no evil, for all my music channels.

It's me. I love that little productivity hacks. Okay, I'm gonna try that and let's see if my, my, it's how to survive slack, honestly to oh yeah. I find how to survive slack is just to shut it down. That seems to be the very easiest way. okay. So that's the decision. It's been made and it sounds from this article as if the decision has been made until at least 2020, the end of 2024.

I can't remember the exact sentence, but it said, for the next year, we are not gonna be doing anything with that. Okay. Anything on that SL down or shall we move on? Not really. This was news to me that it was even a thing. Yeah. When I watched stated word. yeah. yeah, I'm happy, silencing my Slack conversations.

Tammie said, that's a great strategy if you want to stay sane. Yeah, but sectioning, I didn't know about that. Thank you. I think to me it's more sorry to reopen this whole thing. I think to me it's, and I don't know what the answer is. There isn't an answer I don't think, but it's just when I come back to something that I was looking at three or four days ago, just the length of.

Stop that I have to go through and there is no way of avoiding that. But I wish they were, you know what the answer is, that we shouldn't use Slack as documentation. We should actually use the mate log more. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. that makes sense as well. Okay. there's a quest for 2024 or move over to Matrix almost.

Yeah. Yeah. I think we've made that just start sending owls to each other would Yeah, that's right. The world would be so much nicer, but slightly more messy. I feel, for me it's one more communication channel to have to pay attention to. Because Slack isn't going away for all of the other things.

Yeah. And so now if I have to also open matrix on top of Slack, on top of Facebook, on top of X, on top of LinkedIn, and all the places that in my job I have to be a part of, Then to add one more that I now have to remember to check on a regular basis, it just. Build that's why I took so long with doing it because it was just like, ugh, if I, we have to, was what I was going through.

Yeah. but we don't have to for a year. So there you go. A little bit of a reprieve. Did you see a few? It was, maybe as much as a few months ago now that Automatic have acquired a company called Texts. and Text is a platform, maybe it's on, it's on the Mac. That's as much as I know.

It's maybe Windows and everything else as well. But it enables you to put all of the platforms into one place. So it does like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp. Signal. yeah, but it does have a fee is the only problem. So I was using it during the little free trial, and then as soon as it became, that I had to pay for it, I realized, I personally, I was happy having all the different bits and pieces open.

In fact, in some way it felt better having the different bits and pieces open. 'cause then I couldn't just close slack, make that go away for a bit. Whereas with text, I didn't work out how to do that. I think it's curious where is your friction versus payment, right? Yeah. all of us have it.

Yeah. I will pay for some things, which others wouldn't. that one for me was like, I'm not annoyed enough to pay for it. Yes. I was like, yeah. That's right. For me, it was an interesting experience trying it, and I did for a period of time. I liked the fact that they were all in one place and the notifications were all bound in this one app.

But then I did realize that I couldn't I couldn't be, granular in the things that I could shut off, so it didn't work for me. sorry about that. okay. Oh, it was Belinda. It was Belinda that I met at Word Camp Manchester. hi Belinda. oh, nice to hear from you again.

That's lovely. Atif says he's tried texts, sadly, didn't like it so promptly uninstalled. That was my experience also, you don't get long if you're selling software, do you? If you're a ven, if you're a vendor of software, you literally get like three minutes. Is it any good? No, it's gone. Yeah, that's tough.

But thank you for sharing that. Thank you. Let's move on. Tammie wants to, wants to cover this I think quite a bit. I was thinking I might bypass it, but we are gonna get to the admin redesign. This is actually a piece, from Tom McFarland, uh, but it could have been from a thousand different places.

He's given some thoughts on the admin redesign. he says, for example, that he's excited about what's planned. He feels like it's gonna be a much bigger, but much easier to say that when we've been working with the current UI for so long. He's looking forward to seeing how hooks are going to be updated.

He's looking forward to, other things that have not been updated in quite a while. for example, the setting screen. what he's really hoping for is that unlike, for example, Gutenberg, for some people, the documentation wasn't enough. And so he is hoping that all comes along for the ride. and he's also interested to see how plugins will interact.

So that was his thoughts on it, but, I'm gonna hand it over to Tammie and see what her thoughts are. For me, it's about the design system that has been slowly, that's the foundational, kind of comment that was said. the foundational experience is about the that, and there's been a lot of work done, particularly in the Gutenberg repo on like, how do we take the component work?

How do we roll that out? And that's was starting back in Gutenberg, how do we take that and then apply that throughout the whole of the application. There are areas of WordPress that have remained untouched for quite a long time, and that means they have. Quite a debt, quite a lot of maintenance debt as a result of it.

Quite a lot of, issues with code, issues with not using easily updated variables that causes problems from products that causes problems from extending them. That causes just, there's so many from an agency, from a product perspective. So all of this is if you are looking for a project to be involved in open source or whatever you wanna design system, nowadays we have one, it's very hidden, it's not super public.

and this is about being really public, about having one and really, open about having one. That doesn't mean it's just for designers though. Often design system people go, oh, because of the design word. It's basically a system of. Reliable pieces that you can then extend. And that's what this is to me.

I think just framing as admin, isn't necessarily because it's something you would then be able to extend into your own products and that kind of, or experiences, which super excites me. Just you can depend on everything to extend it is not gonna be done in version, the next version of WordPress. The next version of WordPress.

but I would encourage anyone who extends or in any way, be it product or agency, to get involved and give feedback to those people who are making it because they are gonna need to know where you need to hook, where you need to extend it. Because if they don't hear about it, they're not gonna know to include it or keep it.

So that's also part of the conversation. yeah, it's, I'm super excited. I've wondered it for such a long time, and it's, yeah, remember I was saying about 20 minutes ago that I tried to teach my kids WordPress, and it wasn't that long ago. it wouldn't really matter whether it was at any point in the last decade, I don't think, really.

it was the, one of the first thing which went wrong was what it look like on the inside. and this is ridiculous 'cause my children don't, they're not steeped in, like I said, I've got the skills of a potato. it's not like I've coached them in good UI and UX or anything like that. But they just had this initial kind of Ooh, it's really old.

What the heck. 'cause they're, they've been bought up in the era of the iPhone and everything's super slick and beautiful and glides well, and there's probably, a lot of the bigger companies, at least anyway, they make decisions, almost overnight. they can do whatever they want whenever they want and update whenever they want.

And so it's a really, but that's part of it. Like the refresh is part of it. So yes, it will look fresh. We're gonna have a new look of paint and it's gonna be, or spic and span are gonna be amazing, but then you can add your own. So if you are an agency, you could then have your own paint. You could then have your own look.

If you are, you can then add. It's really hard to do that today. It's real extension. You think how easy it is to change theme Jason's? Yeah, it could be easy to do that, to redo your version of WordPress to reconfigure so you could have a version of WordPress specifically for your client that you are going to the dashboard and it's exactly for your client, everything.

That's the future that you can live in when you have a reliable system. So it's moving that kind of thinking ahead. So that's what excites me as well as we get all the new fancy and then we can keep up to date with the new fancy 'cause the reason it does look dated is it's really hard to update. Yeah.

So why would you want updated, Tammie? You said it's not going to happen in the future version, in the next version or the version after that. What's the timeline looking like here? I don't think anyone can reliably, predict unreliable timeline. I we're not giving any dates. Okay. One thing I have learned is never That's fair.

I think it's gonna be iterative. I think it's probably gonna be faster than anyone thinks. Because a lot of it already there. We already have button components. We already have some really strong tickets in the Gutenberg repo of experimentation. a lot of the underpinning work on, just getting rid of the fluff and the extra things, but then that has to be rolled out.

I love the fact it's looking at some of the views. some of the complicated table views, not tables, but like data table views. Yeah. because I think those are silently important in the way that we view things. I think having those opening to different things allows people to start creating different experiences and thinking about how their plugin would do as well.

I would probably say at least most of this year is gonna see a lot of different changes, but then it's also testing it, right? Yeah. Because, yes, a few people commenting over here, but then getting people to have feedback because it's gotta be credit design agnostic whilst also having one design opinion.

So the design that releases has to be very new, fresh and opinionated, but it also has to be able to be unhooked really quickly as well, so that you can customize it your own way. Sounds like a very simple process to me. It's so simple. it's gonna be done tomorrow, but the super smart people doing it, so we're all good.

They are beautiful and amazing. I talked to a few people about this, about the new admin w admin dashboard or whatever, and beyond some screenshots, nobody has any idea of what it's going to look like. Is there any way to see anything more? There's, yeah, there's several amazing tickets in the Gutenberg repo.

Okay. flagged about right. Lots of this. Saxon has done some posts. WordPress design, curiously enough, would be a good place for people to go make WordPress design, has some good, commentary there. and I really would say start following that. Yes. It's design, the way people are doing that.

I think there's gonna be a lot more cross-posting going on. but really just start, there, there was a lot of auditing and looking there. See, there you go. There's actually a whole phase there. I think also, yes, think of the opinionated design, but also think of the non-op opinionated design.

But that actually interests me way more of yeah, great. This is minimals. I love it. But I also love the idea of every agency having their own version of this. Every product been able to extend this. That, to me solves a lot of problems that have happened for clients in the past. So that's interesting.

That's really interesting. In terms of the each agency going in their own way, I, my, my intuition would've been in the opposite direction to have something which was standard. with colors and website. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Got it. Got it. Yeah. And also, like we, we always speak of like headless WordPress.

you wouldn't necessarily need to have that, If you could choose a completely branded onboarding experience using existing WordPress components natively. I'll probably link in the show notes to a piece. it's not particularly new. It was, July this year from Mattias, which is simply called Admin Design.

It's on make WordPress and there's also more stuff on the WordPress design block as well. yeah. there's loads. Just thought this was quite a good one. 'cause it shows at least a few, there's a few little screenshots of Yeah. That's the consistent design tools and design tools were all of last year was how can we have consistent design interface tools and how can we just start, really understanding like what is, a lot of them are like Figma, but what is like padding?

What is like a range tool? What is this? And now we have those, we can start like we have the components to then Yeah. And that was half a problem, right? We had a hundred color pickers. Every plugin was in different color picker. Yeah. okay. So yeah, there we go. The admin redesign. I'll link to those, additional posts that we just raised on the screen and you can have a look at those for yourself.

But yeah, an exciting development. But as Tammie says, it's not gonna drop on January the first, let's put it that way. one four, not this year. Yeah. Not the, not in 2024. You never know, but it'll be a slow and iterative approach. That's why we love WordPress, and that's also one of the reasons why it can be frustrating at times because we all have to have a bit of buy-in and everybody gets a voice, so that's nice, ultimately.

Okie doke. Anything else on that before we move on? Hold on. No. Okay. Alrighty, so let's go onto to this one very quickly. This is again, [email protected]. This is a post by Koman, oh, I dunno how to say that. I'm sorry. but it's called New Requirements for Setting Pages and Onboarding in Themes.

There's obviously a meeting which took place a little over a week ago where some thoughts were shared about what is and what is not allowed when a WordPress theme is installed. I have this intuition that this might have been caused by the, oh, what was the theme? It's Mike McAllister's theme. oh, is Ali Ali, the Ollie theme, because it was a bit of a brew ha about that because they, they had this onboarding wizard, which some people thought was okay, other people thought was not okay. Eventually they pulled it and put that wizard into a separate plugin. And that seems to have satisfied people in as much as, anybody can use that plugin now to have their own, onboarding wizard.

But here are the things which have been taken out of it. themes must use the admin underscore notices hook to provide any custom messages to the user. So these are just thoughts about what should happen. the admin notices must either be a one time, we all heard it one time or permanently dismissible.

So it, you get one shot at it. Or it's permanently dismissible. I dunno if the two things are the same or not. But anyway, this notice can be used to link to a settings page or start an onboarding process. Popups are not allowed upon theme activation, and then we move on to the admin page. Theme themes may optionally add custom sub pages under appearances.

In the WordPress admin, they should only contain core WordPress UI elements, so nobody's going off in their own direction, making it difficult to understand what you're looking at. and match the WordPress admin design, themes must use the settings and options API when storing custom settings in the database.

They're only allowed a single database option, which would need to be an array for storing all sorts of other things as well. What is not allowed, the following features are not allowed as part of the admin menu or onboarding process. Demo imports. So you can't bring in a demo. Website, external calls.

Yeah. And tracking and affiliate links. I'm finding myself in agreement with pretty much all of this. I don't see anything, I'm not a theme developer. Maybe there's some of this, which is gonna be a little bit irritating if I am a theme developer. I don't know. But all of this seems sensible and tackling some of the problems that we had, in the community over the last few weeks.

And there is an, there is something down here about, as an example, the Ollie Dash plugin, which I just mentioned. it would not be allowed because of some functionality they've got built in. So in order to pass these new tests, if you like, they would need to update something. Our goal is to put these requirements into place from the first of next month.

so very, soon. It's a bit technical, that one, but what do we think? Any thoughts on that? Open to you lot. I think sometimes you log into your dashboard and you can't see your actual content because there are so many notifications from plugins and themes and everything else on the page.

And I'm not even just talking about the main page of the dashboard. You go to your plugins and all of the information above, don't forget to update and you've just done this and you just, it's like pushes everything so far down that it actually, maybe it's microseconds, but it starts to feel like it adds up to actually being able to access the things you're looking for.

there was a old Saturday Night Live like funny thing about how so many things appear on the screen when the news anchors in there, that there's suddenly this tiny little box in the corner. And that's how the dashboard is starting to feel. Like, where's the thing I'm actually trying to see?

I think it's a good thing that we are paying attention to what's important to put on there and giving access to the things that are still important. But don't need to be in your face as soon as you like, log into your dashboard. I guess this is just it's just an, it's an evolution over time.

Nobody, when the theme repository opened up, nobody knew what ingenious things. I love that word ingenious. Let's go with that. Ingenious things. Yeah. Yeah. theme and plugin developers would come up with, given, what was available to them. And I think just over time people have become dissuaded that certain things are good.

just too much of this and too much of that. too much color, too much, too much whatever any company wants. And so tightening it up a little bit, certainly from my point of view as an end user, I'm entirely happy with that, but. Are you sure? Ingenious is the word. ingenious can go both ways.

Yeah. You could be ingenious, master criminal. Yeah. I work for a plugin and theme company and I find a lot of that annoying. So I think it just needs to be what is super important, what you need to know right away, and then what can you access quickly? 'cause you want to. Yeah. I think it also is the point of themes do go really well with plugins and should go really well with plugins.

So encouraging that you can have a theme that has a plugin, it's pretty cool. Yeah. so that to me, is a way that, I would like to see themes just be themes. I've felt that way for quite a while. and, so yeah, I'm fully supportive of it and I think as we're going more forward, it does see the easier for that to happen.

And then it frees us for styling plugins and full experience plugins a little bit more. So that to me is super exciting. I wanna see the onboarding plugins, I wanna see more of those. But I think because we've been forcing it to be in themes a little bit, we haven't seen so many of those. So I think it's a, both a perspective, it can feel more limiting, but it also can be more freeing if you think about it in the plugin perspective as well, that it could be for all.

Themes to be able to have that. yeah. Thank you very much. Bertan, anything you wanna add? current dashboard experience in WordPress, I'm not what you talked about, Tammie, the new admin design. But what we have right now, I think if you get a hundred people and ask them what that experience is, you've got a hundred different answers.

And th this is not on the agenda. And I'm not gonna go on a rant, I promise, but let's please not do that again. Let's please not have that happen again. And it's not just about the notices at the top, it's about the hijacking of everything inside WordPress. it's the nature of open source. I am going on rant.

Sorry. That's okay. Feel free to join me. Join me. Feel free to join me. But, what drew me to WordPress, and this was 2007, was decisions, not options. How do we deviate so far from that? That was the most beautiful thing about WordPress in my opinion. Now you log in and you have different publishing experience, different editing experience, different way to add.

There's a thousand color pickers, and this started years ago with the teams that had unlimited color options. Like what's an unlimit? It's a color picker. It's not, that had 800 Google fonts, who needs 800 Google fonts. I'm ending the ran soon. But I hope the new admin experience and the new admin design is going to be not the same thing for everyone, but the same kind of experience for everyone.

Because right now it's not great and that's not WordPress's fault, but, the experience of using WordPress is what people see when they log into a WordPress website and that who designs that ux? How many different people design what the user is getting to see in the dashboard. That is a huge problem in my opinion and hope.

I really hope that's not going to be a problem moving forward. I recently set up, even with just basic WordPress, this is the last point of my ran. I set up a basic WordPress website with nothing, with no, maybe WooCommerce in the dashboard, in the, what's it called? Admin bar. At the top. There's edit site.

There's edit page, there's customized and there's settings. What am I supposed to do? And I've been using WordPress for 15 years, so I knew what they were. What is a new user supposed to think? I really hope. I really hope we get a better experience when it comes to that. I always want things like that when I think of gaming.

So the first experience for me should be like, when you start, tomb Radar or Zelda or any of the awesome games where they have amazing like onboarding experiences where it's not just like a click through, that's not an onboarding experience, that's like a slideshow. is where you learn by doing to start off with.

And that is also, onboarding is slightly different from the admin redesign. I think that will come 'cause it is part of the experience. Whether that comes through plugins or whether that comes through the native experience, I. Not gonna observe. but it's by have the native experience getting out of the way enough and having established strong good practices to allow good practices, if that makes sense.

if you set up an opportunity for failure, people are gonna do that, right? Like it's the, if you just, and it is because there's an opportunity to put something somewhere. Someone's probably gonna do that, put something somewhere because you haven't said, Hey, that's not maybe the best thing to do from user perspective.

And that's not. Patronizing. It's just trying to raise the tide of the user experience for everybody, and I think that's better. Yeah. Every week I try to find a nugget for the title. And Tammie, you just said it, this one's gonna be called Opportunity for Failure. I love that. Provide an opportunity for failure.

People will take that. Yeah, that's so true. Atif raise is a nice point. He, I think he just wants things to be. a certain way, as much as I get how much, how to clarify that. It's more what is the job to be done that you're doing. If you are trying to do different things with WordPress, you shouldn't see everything.

It's, there's a Swiss Army knife, like the ultimate, there's like the joke in every ux talk, the ultimate Swiss army knife, and it's every single tool that you could possibly have from a Swiss Army knife. And that's what WordPress has become. Yeah. And we shouldn't do that. Yeah. Yeah.

That's what was being shared there. And that's the problem with having WordPress look the same for everybody is when you load it up, it's this giant tool that you can't use for everything. So that's a Thank you. Good analogy. Yeah. Atif, I'll just add this comment and then back to you, Sloan. Atif says, as much as I get, have, and that would been rant.

Don't go back to me please. Okay. Yeah, he's, he's, he's, I have more, he's embargoed himself, as much as I get how much customizing WordPress, as much as I get, how customizing to different WordPress, different scenarios. I think there's a sense of comfort and familiarity seeing the same dashboard when working on many different WordPress sites.

Okay. Thank you for that. is that one, Don? Are we, can we move on? We'll do some non WordPress stuff. We've only got about 12 minutes left, so we'll just move on some silly other things and, as is so typical of me, I want to. wanna raise things like the Fed us and things like that. So here we go.

the first one op is if you are using, messenger, which I actually do use, there's a few people that I communicate only in Messenger with. So this is a Facebook thing. you've probably used it, it's a chat thing, but until now it wasn't end-to-end encrypted. I have no intuition as to how it was, how that data was stored.

Maybe it was just held in there on their servers, but they're now gonna be implementing end-to-end encryption, so that's a bit of a tick. they're gonna use a bespoke version of the signal protocol, which to my understanding anyway, is like the gold standard in doing, secure messaging. but they're going to be storing it on their servers, so there's a permanent backup.

So there is that little point of failure. I don't know why I obsess about this so much, but stuff like this I think really matters. I don't really want Facebook becoming. The only method of communication. But I'm in, I'm involved with a lot, quite a few clubs. I attend three clubs a week where I live. two of them do everything in WhatsApp.

You cannot be a part of these communities unless you are prepared to have a Facebook account and prepared to have a mobile phone with all of that facebooky stuff on it. And I just, I don't want that to be the future. I don't want us to be beholden to a co any company. It doesn't matter what it would be.

It would be automatic. It would be the same. I think we need these sort of open protocols, and so this feels like it's a step in the right direction. So it's something that's encrypted. I'm happy with that, but, there's that, sorry, that was a rant. That was my rant Sloan. That was nothing compared to mine.

Oh, no, you were much better. how do we get up to a reality where Zuckerberg is the most beloved tech entrepreneur, where he's, what It's happened? he is like Elon Musk is now. The worst thing that happened to tech, according to most people, nobody likes Bezos, Dorsey's out, and now Zuckerberg is like the good, reasonable, sensible guy.

I think all he had to do was keep his mouth shut for a year. exactly. That's what I mean. If he says nothing. All the others just put their phone in it over and over again. That's all it takes. That is exactly what it's, Yeah, yeah. Yep. Yeah. I don't think good by default is the measure we're going here though.

Yeah. but can I just ask that everybody gets signal? just all download signal. Please and start using that. Yeah. The problem is someone's on signal, then someone's on WhatsApp, then someone's on something else and then you end up with like I an I know it's rubbish. Aon. Yeah. and then we need the text app so that we can put another, yeah.

So we can layer a cake like 58, come on one messaging platform. Owls. We need owls. The solution. It's the solution. Definitely. Anyway, so it was at least a nod in the right direction from Meta, a k, a Facebook, there's a little bit more news from the Facebook side of things. And this I really do so Facebook have a rival to Twitter.

It's been around, I don't know, maybe six months or something like that. It's called Threads. I don't use it. I think right at the beginning I maybe set up an account, but I dunno that I've logged in ever since then. They had this promise that they would use, the activity pub protocol, which is the protocol sitting behind things like Mastodon and pixeled.

It's open source, um, automatic, recently have onboarded. oh my goodness. What's his name? Mattia. Is it Mattias? ffa? ffa A I've forgotten his name. I'm so sorry. he's an automatically now and he's full-time on the Activity pub Protocol to turn your WordPress site into a, a first class citizen on the Fed deverse.

So now. Facebook threads is rolling out support. That means if you've got a Mastodon account, you can communicate with people over on threads and they can communicate with you. And there isn't any buy-in now. It's being rolled out slowly, but that's promising. Now my hope is that people using things like Mastodon will revel in the fact that they've got no ads and no algorithm, and they will bask in that warm glory of no algorithm trying to game your attention.

I'm guessing that on the thread side, even though they're using Activity Pub, they'll be punctuating it with ads and it will be, I dunno what their implementation is, but I'm pleased that they did this open source. Stuff. This is the way to do it. Tammie, this is your owl activity pop. If we all start to use activity pop, then we're all good.

Is this for direct messages? It can be. It's so it, so Mastodon, which is an implementation of activity pop, it's a, it's an absolute swap out for Twitter. Okay. if people are on there, it is. Yeah. but this is between threads and masteron to send direct messages be so SMS. but then again, you need your community there.

And I think this is the problem is where is your community? and if your community isn't on there, your community's on, Like you are forced to use the application that your community is. And I think. What I like is the option for you to choose to use your application and then the com your community comes to you, which is what this slightly hints to.

yes. And that from someone that, and I, my Betty Press, and that kind of was like, bring your stuff too you. that makes me excited, because I have communities in way too many different places and I don't tend to them because unfortunately I am just get tired. so yes, I am. Very skeptical still.

'cause I think a lot of, people go back to X, you have to say x that's what I feel. You have to say it X Twitter. Okay. You have to say it like with a grumpy voice though. 'cause it seems to make everyone grumpy using it. It really does. Like Twitter was like the cute little bird X is like making everyone grumpy.

it really is. It really is as well. It does. It's more revelations today. Grumping. but still that seems where people are and it's like it or not. same as there people on TikTok. it's finding that way to have. Your community served, how you won? I still, in my heart, believe is the way forward, so yeah.

Yeah, I, I imagine that there was like Twitter and then there was a rival to Twitter. Basically what you're seeing here is that those two things have now decided on a common protocol to talk to each other. So even though you need a Facebook account to get, an Instagram account, I believe it is, to get onto Threads, it's an Instagram account.

Now you can talk to all the other people who are on Masteron. So I've got a Mastodon server, which you are free and welcome to use. I'll happily on onboard you. It's called WP Builds Social, and then you're on the Fed Deverse with that account. And now you can talk to people in Threads as well. And everybody else on Mastodon.

There's a few wrinkles, but it's pretty good. And that is my happy place now is to log into Mastodon and just look at the. Algorithmic feed of stuff that you actually want to read. 'cause you're interested in the people, not some advert. somebody did a survey last week that I read and they said that they were scrolling through Facebook and they counted 74% of it was in some way commercial sponsored.

Oh. Facebook has just gotten awful. What, 70 anyway. Yeah. Okay. That's my little rant. but very quickly in line with all of that, the, the folks over at the W three C oh praise the W three C for all their greatness. they've also decided we've had enough of Twitter. We're off. And they've decided where are they going?

They're going to Mastodon. Very sensible. They are too. So you can find them and I'll link to that in the show notes. And lastly, I think one of our panelists said what could possibly go wrong when I showed this? This is a, this is like a place to store your brain. It's open source. It's Evernote, but in the moment it's like a black mirror.

It reminds me more of obsidian. It's more of obsidian than every note though. It's just like obsidian. But there is something about it, which I like a little bit more. I've started to do. You own your own data, like your vaults, like obsidian. Okay. You can back it up with log sec if you wish to back it up.

You can use their server. I think it's $5 a month. I haven't been doing that, but, 'cause that's less worrying. If you're only on vaults like obsidian, then that's less oh my goodness. Twitching for hat. Yeah, exactly. So it's a bit like that. It's just a really nice implementation free open source with the option to back up to their cloud.

But I couldn't even find, it took me ages to find that. So they're not pushing that. Monetization of it down your throat. it's worth a look if you've, if you want a place to dump all of your content, you can have those spider diagrams where all of the different things connect and it looks really impressive until you go, I don't understand any of that, but it looks great.

Probably in 1982 I thought something about something, and now it's connected with lines, but I Why, but it's a nice project. Have a look at it. And the very final thing before we move towards our little, Christmas wishes is this, I love these things. so this is visual only. If you're or doing the audio podcast, I'm sorry about this.

We are presented with a chess board. It looks like a mini chessboard, and there are some squares that are dark and there are some squares that are light and one of them is labeled A and it's dark, and another one is labeled B and it's light. But it's not, it's just, I cannot get my head around it. So A and B are exactly the same color?

No, they're not. I don't care if it's true. They're not cylinder dress. it's that cylinder that's throwing that, that shadow that, oh, all off. I get it. I totally get that. It's that, but it's it. It's just one of those things that my brain ref E, even given, I even went and put a color picker on it. And it is exactly the same.

they're all 7, 8, 7, 8, 7, 8. They are the same. But it's not the same. And I don't want my brain to trick me like that. I just think stuff like that is, I wanna go to a magic show with you. I think that would be fascinating. Oh, I, I would be like, look at that. Yeah. No, I'd be no fault.

Let's do it. I heard the same word. Camp work. Magic shows. There you go. Silly thing to end the show. That's it. That's all we've got time for it. Before we finish properly though, I dunno if you guys wanna share anything that you're doing over Christmas or anything like that. You're taking a bit of a holiday.

I'm gonna take a break. by the way, Tammie, you said the word Zelda in your last little bit. that's a word I'm not allowed to say in my house. Because if I say the word Zelda, I get an hour long diatribe from one of my children about everything to do with Zelda, and I can get three minutes into that conversation and then it's I don't have a clue what you're talking about.

Beautiful. It is, yeah. Even the music's beautiful, isn't it? It's just calming. Sure. Escapism. But the second game, very frustrating bosses. Oh, okay. Yeah. I'm not, it's a, it's verboten in my house. okay. So I'm taking a couple of weeks off. This will be the last show that we do until January the something, I'm gonna say the eighth, but that's a guess.

Might not even be a Monday. but around then, somewhere around, yes, it's the eighth. Oh, is it? We got the schedule up. I'm totally aced it. I was just looking to see who's co-hosting with you. We don't have anybody, so that is it really The eighth? I could, I'll be working on that. Yes, Uhhuh, I'm feeling so pleased with myself.

but that's, I'm gonna spend time with my family. Chill out, take a bit of time out, switch the, switch all the devices off. Might leave this beauty switched on though. Oh, this is what is that? It's my phone. I've ditched the, I've ditched the Really, I've ditched the clever phone. I've gone back to the, it's got numbers.

No way. Yes way. And it's way better. It's hours in it's hours and around it comes. It's so much better. I've read four books with, yep. I have to jump off. I have another meeting in one minute. Michelle, we'll see you soon. No, it's great. It's absolutely fabulous. I'm absolute, I can imagine.

But that's what I'm gonna do with my holiday. So what about you, Sloan? Anything to mention? flying back to Serbia for a few weeks, I'm from Serbia, living in Portugal. actually I didn't mention this, but I'm on the organizing team for work in Porto. next. This is the first time I'm doing this, so I have no idea what I'm doing.

I'm in charge of international sponsors. If you have any send in my way. just flying back to Serbia, relaxing with the family. There, not much else. I need a break. This has been a very eventful year. Yeah, I think I, I share your concern. I need a break. I'm gonna take some time out and rest. Tammie, what about you?

I'm gonna be probably, I like tinkering over Christmas holidays, but also I am gonna be doing some knitting. My offline thing is I like doing like knitting, because I dunno if that's the hand signal for knitting. I just now, it's the, what I'm going to use, just because I'm not using a screen then.

but also just like creating some stuff. It's nice to do. yeah, just taking some time away and just, recharging a little bit by doing that and creating some offline stuff would be nice. Yeah, it's amazing how many people in my life have, have. Made the same connection. they want less electricity in their lives, basically.

and so Christmas is a time where everybody's got the time off. So more, more down. I try and do knitting every day. Yeah. Knitting or crochet. Just because even if you do like quarter, an hour to 20 minutes, it's like a little meditation, but it forces me to not use a screen. yeah. I totally sympathize.

I get it. That's the endeavor behind this little beauty, which by the way, is made by Caterpillar. Oh, but I get mittens at the end of mine. Do you have No, I get, oh no, I don't even care. Oh, rubbish. I'm gonna start knitting. yeah. Okay. That's it. That's all we've got time for this week. I'm sorry.

It's Laban. Sorry Tammie. We always do this thing at the end where we raise our hands so that I can why do you, why are you apologizing? Oh, I don't know. I always apologize. It's the, I needs to apologize. You're not sure what say you, you either talk about the weather or you apologize. okay. There we go.

Give a smile. Give us wave. Thank you. Got it. Captured. we will be back, as I said next year. I really appreciate the participation this week of Michelle. Of Slumber Dan, of Tammie. You will certainly get an invite to come back. Hopefully you'll take me up on that. Really appreciate it. Quick knitting comment.

Knitting is analog form. It's good of programming. Oh, yep. Alright, interesting. You are following a program when you are following knitting. If you look at a pro, a knitting pattern, it's basically programming language. Yeah. That's interesting. Rob cans says, happy Christmas to everyone. Courtney also wants to know if it can place snake.

No, there's no snake. It does not do snake. Okay. Then just get one that plays snake. Merry Christmas everybody. We will be back in the new year. Have a lovely time. We'll see you soon. Take it easy. Bye Bye. Bye.