This Week in WordPress #281

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode number 281 entitled I bought a hat. It was recorded on Monday the 8th of January, 2024, my name's Nathan Wrigley. And as always, I'm joined by some fabulous WordPress guests this week. I'm joined by Michelle Frechette. I'm joined by Marc Benzakein whose name, I apparently can't ever say correctly. And also by Gen Herres.

We talk about WordPress, but what specifically do we talk about? we talk about all of the nice things that have included in WordPress core in the recent past. There's a website, a post by Anne McCarthy, where we talk about all of those bits and pieces.

We answer some questions, which Matt Mullenweg answered, about overflow questions from his state of the word address in December.

We also talk about why WordPress is still the choice for 2024. If you're building a WordPress website, why can you still have confidence?

Are there any events that you're going to be attending in the year 2024? The panel talk about what they like to go to and what they're intending to go to.

There's a new plugin from the makers of stackable called WP interactions. What's that all about? Why is Elementor being classed as a CMS? You can find out about that.

And we also talk about a new show that I'm going to be doing with David Waumsley called the no script show.

There's loads more as well. And it's all coming up next on this week. In WordPress.

This episode of the WP Builds podcast is brought to you by GoDaddy Pro, the home of manage WordPress hosting that includes free domain, SSL, and 24 7 support. Bundle that with The Hub by GoDaddy Pro to unlock more free benefits to manage multiple sites in one place, invoice clients and get 30% of new purchases. Find out more at go.me/wpbuilds.

Hello. Hi there. hello, Happy new Christmas year thing. Hope that you, had a happy holiday, if that's the thing that you do in your part of the world. Very nice to have you with us. This is episode number 281 of this week in WordPress. We're gonna talk about the word pressing news. that happened probably not just from this week because we've had a bit of a break.

I believe we've had two weeks off. So there's three weeks of news to cover. Although, to be honest with you, it goes quiet. looking at my RSS feed reader, there's large days of emptiness, which is very unusual. Normally each day is filled with stuff, but I'm joined this week by three fine people.

You can see them there. There and over. Yeah, over there in different places around the screen. First of all, I'd like to welcome, I'm gonna get it right, the co-host, one of the co-hosts for the show. And that's Michelle Ette. Happy New Year. Michelle.

[00:03:01] Michelle Frechette: Happy New

[00:03:01] Gen Herres: Year to

[00:03:01] Nathan Wrigley: you. It's really nice to have you back.

Michelle has been on the show, oh, dozens and dozens of times, and, no doubt that will be the case during the year 2024. If you don't know Michelle, what have you been up to? Frankly, she is the director of Community Engagement for Stella WP at LiquidWeb. In addition to her work there, she is also the podcast [email protected].

co-founded underrepresented in tech.com, created WP Career pages. She's the president of the board for big orange art.org, director of community relations and [email protected]. You do a lot of work over there. I've noticed, author, business coach, and frequent organizer. And speaker at WordPress events.

She lives outside Rochester, New York, and she's an avid nature photographer. And I'm gonna have to bend her ear more. 'cause for Christmas I got myself a nice camera and and I want to learn how to use it. 'cause all I'm doing is I'm pressing bring it to Asia. Yeah, I'm putting it on the auto setting and then clicking the aperture button.

And that's it. There's nothing wrong with, there's nothing wrong with auto. you can find out more at Meet Michelle online. Michelle, any New Year's resolutions this year? You don't have to tell us if you don't want.

[00:04:15] Michelle Frechette: I don't make resolutions, but I do have goals. Okay. See, resolutions you can feel let down, but goals, if you don't quite make them, you've actually worked towards them and attained them.

It's not a, it's not a failure if you don't quite make it. I like it, but

[00:04:28] Nathan Wrigley: I have goals. I like it. Yeah. Yeah. You got some. Okay. I do. And also first time on this show, we've got Mark. Oh, mark. I'm gonna mess it up. Mark. Zaca. Zaca. Keen.

[00:04:39] Marc Benzakein: Benzocaine. Zaca. Yeah. You got, it. Third try

[00:04:43] Nathan Wrigley: or, okay. Thank you.

That's good. Mark's joining us, it's like one in the morning or something. 'cause he is in California, so really grateful for the getting up early thing that you are doing. Mark has been involved with the WordPress community for over 13 years, for 10 of those years. He's a member of the team that made up server press.

Oh, that's cool. He is now the marketing lead for Maine, wp, which I'm sure many of you have heard of, which is an easy to use, privacy focused word, WordPress management dashboard, as well as site district, which is a collaborative managed WordPress host. What do you do over at Maine WP Mark? What is your responsibilities there?

[00:05:23] Marc Benzakein: it's mostly all marketing. Just getting the word out there, who we are, making sure that, people have the right idea of who we are, what we are, and, making people aware that, I, one of the things that I really like about Maine, WP and, I've known Dennis for, I don't know, 12 years or 11 years or something like that, is that they've always been super privacy focused, but also it's, we're not a SaaS model.

I think that SaaS fatigue is going to be, the buzz phrase of 2024. And, and, people are looking for, you self-manage your, WordPress, a lot of people self-manage WordPress, so why not self-manage your WordPress management as well? And yeah. I really like getting the word out there.

I think the people that, that. Maine WP are awesome. They always have been. And so I'm really excited to be working with them.

[00:06:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I've noticed, I have to say, I'm a, I've been a Maine WP user for, oh, I reckon about six years, maybe seven years, something like that. And, log in every morning, even on the weekends actually, just in case.

And, it's a brilliant tool. And I have noticed that the marketing, endeavors have gone up a lot recently, haven't they? What with Denis making videos and all of the contributions that you've, been making

[00:06:39] Marc Benzakein: no doubt as well. Yeah, I'd love to take credit for those, but that's just the team. Just like kicking some serious butt, yeah, doing a good job.

Partnerships and getting updates up out

[00:06:48] Nathan Wrigley: there. Yeah, Left right. And center partnerships and all that kind of stuff, Yeah. Okay. thanks for joining us. I really appreciate it. Hopefully it's the first many times me and the third, but this is easier 'cause Jen is just as easy. I can understand.

There's no left or right going on there. Jen Harris, how are you doing? Good. it's very nice to have you, Jen's been on the show before. Jen is an accessibility advocate and WordPress developer with over a dec a decade of experience. We'll talk a little bit about accessibility in this episode at her company.

Easy at, do I say it as Easy? Ally? Ally. Ally, Ali Guide. Yeah. She specializes in helping their accessibility journey with done for you guides, tutorials, and tools. She's also spoken at several, events on accessibility, including WordCamp US in 2023 A and Fara. Jen specializes helping solve and prevent WordPress problems.

She works with a wide range of website clients from multimillion dollar companies to solopreneurs maintaining their WordPress sites with care plans and making their WordPress journey less stressful. She also organizes the Baltimore WordPress meetup and is an active participant in many online groups.

Same question to you, Jen, any New Year's resolutions?

[00:08:00] Gen Herres: one of the groups that I'm in Focus, wp, what they do is the word of the year. Oh, nice. So basically you pick a word or a concept that you're going to work on for the year. So it's not specifically a goal, it's more of a process. Okay. So you're just going to work on, some aspect of your personal life or your business that you just want to make some small improvements to and just keep going on through the year.

So

[00:08:29] Nathan Wrigley: my, go on. What's

[00:08:29] Gen Herres: yours? Mine is consistency.

[00:08:32] Nathan Wrigley: Oh. Mine would be sleeping

[00:08:35] Gen Herres: because it's very easy to get pulled in many different directions and to not necessarily consistently focus on, one specific topic. So

[00:08:43] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, I get it. I totally get it's, yeah, that's, I'm a jack of all trades, master of non kind of guy, and, I'm, I very, rarely, I'm consistent.

This is, this podcast is about the only consistent thing that I've done in years and, I'm quite glad, at least one thing in my life on my gravestone, it'll probably say he wasn't very consistent, was he, but he got better at sleeping. Hopefully it'll say something along those lines. what about that?

three really different but very, experienced WordPresses on the show today. If you are joining us on the socials and you're doing that live, appreciate it. If you want to help the show get some more engagement, we'd really appreciate your efforts. There, he said, scrambling to try and find the right caption.

There it is. Go and share this. It's at wp build.com/live. If you go there and you logged into a Google account, you'll be able to use the YouTube comments on the side. But if you're not logged into a YouTube account and you wanna remain anonymous, there's a little box at the top right inside the video and you can actually access an anonymized chat, inside the video if you happen to be joining us on Facebook.

And why wouldn't you go to Wave video slash lives slash Facebook and that will de anonymize you and it will tell us who you are, where you're from. Otherwise you just come as cross as that random avatar that gray head with Ian name. By its side. Okay? Yes. Mystery person. The mystery person. But we've been joined already by Courtney Robertson.

She's saying, happy 2024. You too, Courtney. I hope you have a happy 2024 and hopefully I'll see you at some point during the next year. Elliot, from just down the road from where I live, happy New Year. He says, dah, Then we've got some weird thing, which always comes from Twitch. All the weird comments come from Twitch.

Twitch, saw you, saw your life out. Don't allow the weird comments 'cause I'm never gonna put 'em on the screen. Peter, Ingersol join us every week and tells us how cold it is in Connecticut. And it's minus two degrees centigrade apparently in Connecticut on the mostly sunny skies. Schools across the state have dis oh, delayed opening after a snowy weekend.

That was always my favorite bit of school. When you got to, you had a snow day, we call it, and you didn't actually have to go. And usually it was because there was about this much snow in the uk, but this much snow in the UK is enough. To just wipe us out. There's nobody can do anything if there's this much snow because we're rubbish.

We have no infrastructure. Can we, get snow? Yeah. Michelle will be set

[00:11:16] Gen Herres: up for it right up there. You can get your snow handled. I have four, we

[00:11:20] Michelle Frechette: got four inches of snow over the weekend,

[00:11:22] Gen Herres: so yeah, that's just, decoration in

[00:11:25] Nathan Wrigley: Rochester. Yeah. That's like a decades worth of snow in the UK these days.

When I was a kid though, we did actually get quite a lot of snow and I have noticed. I think we're at that exact tipping point of if you're into global warming, I think we might be in the part where it gets, there's a real noticeable change. So you used to get loads of snow and now we get hardly any, really hardly any.

It's really rare now. Cammie says, good morning, Paul Bedford says he's happy he is not at your part of the world. Peter, it's around Th Oh, stop it. 30 degrees centigrade here in Pretoria. I will swap with you in a heartbeat. Paul, South Africa with thunderstorms expected later. we get those, so I'm all right with that.

Marcus Burnett joins us to say, happy 2024. Everybody missing the show, and I'm glad to see these beautiful faces this morning. You are very kind. Oh, I've still got my hat on. I've only just noticed I've got my hat on.

[00:12:17] Michelle Frechette: I,

thought

[00:12:17] Marc Benzakein: it was a

[00:12:18] Nathan Wrigley: choice. I'll leave it on that. No, I was

[00:12:20] Marc Benzakein: gonna comment on

[00:12:21] Nathan Wrigley: how much, I liked your hat.

I've only just looked and there I'm gonna keep it on hat. That's good. I, have a collection

[00:12:26] Marc Benzakein: of about 30 hats, but once I shaved my head, they, I'll come down, down to my eyes. Oh, Michelle wins. Look. Oh, there you go, Michelle. That's awesome.

[00:12:35] Nathan Wrigley: Who has that lying around? Who has that? That's brilliant. She's like liberty.

[00:12:41] Michelle Frechette: I have so many tiaras on my desk. That's funny.

[00:12:44] Nathan Wrigley: That's great. kitchen sink Wp Kitchen sink. WordPress. He says it's Adam. 'cause I never make the connection. Thank you for joining us. He says Mark is up early. Yeah, he's on the west coast. He is. So

[00:12:55] Michelle Frechette: is Cammi. Cammy's over in Oregon. So she is too

[00:12:58] Nathan Wrigley: much. Us Q people are too good.

Yeah. Anyway, thank you for joining us. We've done the preamble bit. Please share it, get the people in the comments. That'd be really nice. Okie dokie. Let's just get the screen shared. A little bit. Few bits of promotional stuff. I apologize. We've gotta pay the bills. the first thing is, this is our website.

Apparently we have a menu which won't go away. Just Oh no, there you go. There we go. this is what we do. We do a podcast each and every week. We do this show each and every week. And if you wanna stay updated with that, you can click and put your email in there. We also have a, a little calendar here, which tells you what we're doing.

I. And you can see in the upcoming week, we've got a GTO GraphQL webinar episode. It's gonna be the fifth and final episode in the series, all about what the GTO GraphQL plugin from Leo Lovich can do. And oh my Lord, I am not exaggerating. If you're like slightly on the techie side, but you're slightly not on the techie side, and you wanna be able to do really complicated things, his plugin will enable you to do it.

It is truly marvelous. There's a bit of a learning curve, but. Check it out. Fifth episode coming up. And then we've got an episode of the Speed It Up Show with Sabrina Zda. That's all happening at the same URL as all of the live stuff. Wp builds.com/live. you can always find that schedule on the schedule page.

It's slash schedule. By the way, it's this exact same thing, but, yeah, there. And also I have some really interesting news about, I don't know, about 28 years ago or something. I started the WP Builds podcast with David Worsley, and he's been doing it with me ever since. Every other week, David and I have been on the mic talking about WordPress, and he decided that he's probably not gonna be using WordPress much anymore.

So he decided I'm not gonna be on WP Builds anymore. and that was fine. We said our goodbyes and everything. Then a week later, he phoned me up and said, can we do a different podcast? I was like, yes. Get back. 'cause I really enjoy being in his company. So we've started a new podcast called No the no Script Show.

You can find it at No Script All as one word show. It's all about web development, but it's take the WordPress bit out and it's all about HTML and CSS and getting back to the basics. but I've decided to inject that into the WP Builds feed for the next three or four weeks. So the last episode that we released.

Is like a hijack of the podcast, and it's me and David talking about what this new podcast in, what it's about, HT M-L-C-S-S basically, and the need to not use as much JavaScript and, yeah, it'll be hopefully quite an interesting, show. He's really into that and I, he's taken me along a ride, so it'll be quite fun to, to watch that happen.

Okay,

[00:15:38] Michelle Frechette: so he was only

[00:15:39] Gen Herres: dead to you for a week, is that right?

[00:15:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, honestly, it literally, we said, we recorded the farewell episode. I had a, shed a tear. I got a tiny violin out and played terribly. and then literally four days later, he called me up. He said, can we do another one? Love it. Yeah, it's lovely.

I love it. It's really nice. So that's gonna be entirely new. Something in totally different, but in about four or five, six weeks, I'll just separate them out so that they don't, they're not pollinating each other anymore. Okay. Let's get into the word pressy stuff from the last few weeks. In that case, I just want to put this one in your path dear listener.

this was written on December the 28th by Anne McCartney. You've probably heard of Anne. She's been on the show a few times and we've done a few bits and pieces together and she's just trying to sum up a good place to begin if you are not really that into Gutenberg or perhaps haven't really explored it as much.

Her job is obviously, part of that is to promote. The usage of Gutenberg and she's just put this nice article together explaining some of the top line features, which will really speed up your journey that you may not have used before. the command palette is a bit like spotlight on the Mac, where you can invoke the, invoke this thing from almost anywhere in your WordPress website, and then tell it what you want to do.

So I want to create a new post. You could type add and then P for post, and it'll give you that, but it's gonna have lots of contextual stuff in 2024. So it'll know where you are in your website and it'll offer suggestions pertinent to what you, are currently doing. Maybe it'll even learn a little bit about what you do typically and give you that advice.

So that's good. The Style book, if you haven't invoked this before, this is a fabulous way of checking what your site will look like. You can look at how changes that you make to CSS will reflect across all the blocks on your website. So you can just see everything all in one interface. So that's really useful.

You might want to just see what it does to one block, but it will show you it for all the blocks so you can get consistency. It's a perfect thing for designers. there's a bunch of styling shortcuts coming as well, or rather, they are here, they're available, and if you've used them before, but if you just want to take the style of one block, you can do that with a simple copy and paste, like you do on a Mac or a Windows machine, and you can just open up a block, copy it, styles, paste it into a new block, and obviously you can decide whether you want that to be done on every instance of the block.

That's a real time saver, distraction free mode. I've explained how in 2024, I want to be distraction free. And, this is great. You can make all of the UI go away. Just focus on the writing and you can focus on just the thing that you're interested in. If you haven't used patterns before, that's a great way of making things more quick and saving them away.

You can save like global patterns. They're called sync patterns. There's a whole bunch of stuff. List view, you can invoke that little list view on the left hand side. Anyway, there it all is in this one little article, and I thought it was worth mentioning. I hope, I, really hope that the members of our panel are using Gutenberg.

Maybe you're not, but if you are, that will demonstrate all the different things that you could use. Any thoughts on that dear team? Oh,

[00:18:54] Gen Herres: several. the first one's the command palette. I find it's helpful occasionally, but in general it's actually terrible for your memory. oh, go on. Tell me more.

Remember things in, Big events and then they remembered the, little actions that, that they took in between. So part of why Covid I is both a day and a century to us is because for most of us, there weren't any big things that happened during that whole time gap. But for the command palette, if I did it in two keystrokes, I don't remember necessarily what I did.

So if I do several of these events an hour later, I have absolutely no idea what I did. But if I actually navigate to the menu and I click through, I remember going on that journey. I remember taking that path and an hour later I remember what the heck I did to change the color of that

[00:19:55] Nathan Wrigley: icon. That's an interesting point.

I hadn't really thought about that. I only saw it from the perspective of it's quicker a therefore ergo it's better. But yeah, that's a good point. If you, so sometimes quick is

[00:20:07] Gen Herres: good, but sometimes if you're making, especially early when you're setting up a website and you're turning a whole lot of things on and off, you completely forget what you do if you don't actually have a process and go through the whole process and remember, oh yeah, this is that part of the process.

This is the next part of the process and I remember what the heck I did.

[00:20:27] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So it's a bit like when you do a Google search or something then, six weeks from now, you found that perfect thing somewhere on Google, but you can't quite remember how you did it. That's interesting.

Exactly.

[00:20:38] Gen Herres: yeah. And then on, on the style book, I like the concept, but I've also met clients and they go in and they individually style everything they can possibly find. So when you try to make, a. Global change, you end up it not actually affecting a whole lot of things because the client went in there and individually styled a whole bunch of stuff.

And the other grievance I have about style book, which is really part of what's shipping with WordPress is the styles that they include. Like one of the styles they in like several of the styles are really poor for accessibility. one of them is literally make my entire website link blue text, right?

So that the whole website looks like this link and it gives you like a DD, and you're like, I don't know what I'm doing. Everything's a link. I dunno what to click. Which, when I think the WordPress 20th anniversary website first was launched, those of us in the accessibility group, spammed them like crazy with feedback because they actually launched the whole website in link blue.

it's still available on, archive.org. The entire WordPress 20th anniversary website completely in link blue. it's just a what not to do, So I really think that they shouldn't be shipping as defaults, things that are just really, poor usability, and

[00:22:12] Nathan Wrigley: accessibility.

Yeah. It would, it, would this be a sort of a client training thing? Do you feel like you've got more things to tell your client now with some of these innovations? don't touch that thing Until you've learned Yes. The other thing. Okay, I get it. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, it's hard for me to, because I don't really work with clients directly anymore, so I don't really have that interplay.

The, And I know, broadly speaking, what I'm doing, I, I don't really come across that and I don't fall into that trap, but I, now that you've said it, that does make sense. There's more things that the client needs to not touch. A little red warnings beware, there'd be monsters kind of thing. Yeah. Okay.

Alright. Anything else on that, Jen?

[00:22:56] Gen Herres: nope. Okay. Up to bark. And Michelle.

[00:22:59] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Over to you two, if you've got anything. If not, we will move on.

[00:23:03] Michelle Frechette: I've always been a huge fan of, keyboard shortcuts, so when I learn the keyboard shortcuts, I am a happy girl to pull up the right blocks and things like that. So for me, I can see things like this having their place for sure, as far as like customers and things like that.

That's where I use a lot of controls over what they have actual access to, to not make a lot of change. Those changes style-wise and things like that, depending on what your, your contract is with that customer for sure. But if it reminds me a little bit of like the remote controls that have tape over all of the buttons that you don't want grandma to touch.

[00:23:39] Gen Herres: Yeah. Except the power

[00:23:41] Michelle Frechette: and the volume and the channel kind of thing. I think that should be the picture of all of those, like controls for use for user, levels and WordPress. and this is the grandma one with tape over everything.

[00:23:53] Nathan Wrigley: I have a, I have a plex box, Plex server, so it's a media server and and I have taped over the, power, so that you can't actually turn off the power.

I've literally covered it in tape so that the children cannot unplug it. Exactly. Do you actually are, you, is that your thing then? Keyboard shortcuts because I, never. I say never. I can do command C in command VI know those ones right. But in almost nothing else do I take the time to learn keyboard show.

[00:24:26] Michelle Frechette: I've been using a Mac for over 10 years now and I still, the, muscle memory still tries to do some of the keyboards from, PC

[00:24:36] Gen Herres: back

[00:24:36] Nathan Wrigley: in the day. Oh, interesting. They are hardwired. Yeah. Yeah. I never really bother with that kind of stuff, and I don't really, you can invoke the command palette.

I, I think it's k command K or something like that. It's actually written in the article. I should probably just find it. Hold on. Yeah. Command K. But I would never invoke it that way. I would probably, I, dunno. I just don't really use keyboard shortcuts. Anyway, mark, sorry. I

[00:25:02] Marc Benzakein: try to stay outside of doing any development as much as possible, probably because I think people have issued a moratorium on me doing that.

I tend, to cause more problems than anything. however, I'm with Michelle, I'm a huge fan of keyboard shortcuts and, and to Jen's point about, remembering the journey, I can barely remember what I had for breakfast on a day-to-day basis. And for me, remembering a, workflow of how I got somewhere, I'm gonna forget it 10 minutes later.

Anyway, it's, I think different people just process things differently and I can certainly see your point, but, for me it's about how do I get to my end result as quickly as possible. And, so I do tend to learn keyboard shortcuts. it, Michelle, it's interesting that you bring up.

Using keyboard shortcuts from PC I, with ServerPress, because we were multi-platform and it was an application, I went from PC to Mac so regularly that my fingers developed muscle memory as to which keyboard I was on, and it just automatically remembered which keyboard shortcuts to go on. And it reminds me of the old days of going from a stick shift car to an automatic car where you just, like you, you knew what seat you were in, you felt it, and you just automatically did not throw people through the window.

'cause you're trying to push the clutch in the automatic car. So

[00:26:32] Nathan Wrigley: that's such an interesting little tale you just told. 'cause I've never, ever, driven a manu an automatic car really. And then just after Christmas, really well in the uk. Nobody has an automatic, everybody has a manual. Everybody has stick shift.

Yeah, but I just, I found this car. I know, I knew I needed a new car and I found this really great deal on an automatic, so I got it. Man alive. Have I had to unlearn? My left leg is just constantly twitching and my hand is constantly going to the gear stick. I nearly caused a pile up the other day by pushing the brake on like full on, on a, motor, whatever you call it.

A freeway. Yeah. Wasn't funny. I was actually pretty terrified 'cause my foot was doing things involuntarily. That's weird how that happens, isn't it?

[00:27:20] Marc Benzakein: it's even stranger going to the UK and driving a, manual transmission on the wrong side of the car. It was, funny because the wrong side, Nathan just showed his left hand when he's doing the motion of the stick shift.

I was in Ireland, I was in Ireland and rented a car and oh my goodness. It took me like two days to remember. it's one thing to drive on the left side of the road, but to actually remember the Yeah. The shifting and all of that. Yeah. It was, a

[00:27:49] Nathan Wrigley: learning curve. There's a perfect way of framing that conversation and that is you drive on the right side of the road.

And we drive on the left. so nobody's wrong. It's not right or right. You drive on the right. We drive on the wrong. it's weird.

[00:28:02] Marc Benzakein: That's what, that's, what people in

[00:28:03] Gen Herres: the UK say. And it breaks your brain

[00:28:04] Nathan Wrigley: to Yeah. Yeah. And whenever I go to France and drive my, because I, again, I always get a manual.

My hand is constantly smashing into the door to try and find the, stick. I believe it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So we got totally off piece. we went from the command pallet to, automatic versus manual cars. but yeah, so Camie says she's been driving manual since 1986. Camie, all I can say is I don't think I'll be getting another automatic.

I, I've put too many lives in danger, in the space of a week. I'll get used to it. I think I'll get used to it. What I need is some kind of caliper to lock my leg down and just. Okay. Sorry. totally off pieced. Let's get back to the word pressy stuff, shall we? Okay. I thought this was interesting.

So this was the, the state of the word happened, last year, right at the end, I believe it was on the 11th of December. It was in Madrid. A few of the people that have been on this were actually, in the show. And, Matt addressed enough questions that he could do in the time that he had available, but he also wrote, on make wordpress.org.

He, allowed people to, keep adding their questions and he answered what he thought. I was wanting to use this not as a trampoline to say what Matt said, but I found some questions that I thought were interesting. I'm just keen to, get your thoughts really dear panel. See what you think.

So one of the questions he was asked was this, and I know this, goes right into Michelle, especially your wheelhouse, and the question was, in the past year or years, some people have left or reduced their contribution. what are the plans to protect long-term contributors and make them feel safe?

Now, I don't know quite what the wording safe means there, but Michelle, have you had any thoughts on that? Do you know anybody that's gone through this or leaving because they didn't feel welcomed or what

[00:30:02] Michelle Frechette: have you? I would actually guess that this has more to do with, Micah. Mika, sorry, Mika, I always say her name wrong first before I get it right.

Yeah. and her, what she went through with the plugins team and the harassment that she dealt with, I would guess that the safe co, the, talking about safety probably had something to do with that, but I couldn't speak a hundred percent on what that person's question spoke to. yeah, it's interesting, but I think it has a lot to do with that.

I think that there's, when it comes, you and I have talked a lot about underrepresentation and things like that, and there's definitely an aspect of security and feeling safe in those environments when you are an underrepresented person. so there's probably a, I could say that there's a level, of that as well, but I can't really ascribe what that person was talking about specifically.

But I think when it comes to those two things, making sure that the people who are contributing are not in the direct line of fire, of people who are not happy with the way things are in the pro, in the procedures that are in place. I, moderate photos. There are people who are not happy that their photo doesn't make it into the photo directory, but if it's a bad photo, I'm not gonna put it in.

If it's a nude photo, I'm not gonna put it in. if it's a, if it's a picture of war, we're not gonna put it in. 'cause we have, procedures and place and protocols for those kinds of things. and so there are people who are like, but, it was a artistic photo. yeah, perhaps it was, but it's, the subject matter still goes against our, our, code.

And so there are people who are not happy about those things and they take it out personally if they can, on the people who are in the position of power to approve and not approve those things. So I think that's. One aspect of it, but then of course there's always the aspect too, of underrepresentation and making people, not only feel welcome, but actually welcoming them.

There's a big difference, between making somebody feel welcome and actually welcoming people to a space. And so I think that there is a level of that as well. At least that's what I would read into that. Yeah, just making sure that people are welcomed.

[00:32:05] Nathan Wrigley: That's interesting. I really hadn't thought about the Mika angle, but that was the perfect framing of that.

I think, and I guess if people are gonna volunteer to do things which Mika was doing in spades for years and years and years, the last thing you want is to be like verbally attacked. and I think on, some occasions it got pretty scary. And I know there are other members of the community that have really felt very, actually threatened, by some of the things that come their way.

maybe that question was about policing that how do we protect those people or anonymize their, like you, Michelle, let's say in the case of those images, does it have to emanate from you, for example? Can it just No, as a matter of fact, it doesn't

[00:32:47] Michelle Frechette: now. Yeah. Ah, nice. It doesn't at all. if, you were to be able to log in and see the backend of the site, you could see who approved and didn't approve them because that's how WordPress works.

Yeah. But that's not public information. And I think that's by design.

[00:33:01] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Thank you. mark, Jen, anything on that? Or do you want me to move to the next

[00:33:05] Gen Herres: question? yeah. The, a number of people who contribute on the accessibility team have definitely expressed that there is a bullying that's been happening where there are a large number of users who are like, but only a couple people need accessibility.

We need to push features forward. Features are more important. So instead of trying to clean up code and make it accessible on the very first go around, they're saying, you can just patch it later. that's like trying to add plumbing to your house after you already finished the kitchen.

That's, not gonna go well, right? if the kitchen faucet doesn't turn on for people, the kitchen faucet doesn't turn on. that's a fundamentally broken thing that you're delivering. The, and there's quite frankly, a large number of vocal people out there who have been blatantly bullying the smaller number of people who are saying, yes, this needs to work for everyone.

We shouldn't just be throwing features forward. We should really think about the architecture and how we're coding everything and make sure that things like security and accessibility are put in there at the very beginning. So we're not trying to rewire everything and manage mounds and mounds of deprecated code.

I was talking with, I think Steve Jones had been making a contribution to the table block, and he's oh, this is a quick fix. And then he found the mound of deprecated code from previous versions where it had just not been, people hadn't thought about how it needed to work for everyone. And so there's just this whole mound of old code that, that you have to also maintain and bring forward with the changes.

[00:34:59] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you, for that Jen, some sort of serendipity going on today in that, the person who I think may be asked that question just dipped into the comments. I don't actually know if that's the case because Matt himself, as you can see on the screen, Matt himself put the question in his own.

Comment as a, he did it as a block quote or something like that. But, from the comments, it looks like, Jose, apologies, Jose, if I've got your name wrong. It looks like that was in fact your question to Matt. if that was the case, and you're still with us, I'd love to know what you meant by this feeling safe bit, because it, I feel like you maybe joined the conversation after Michelle said her piece.

She was saying maybe it was surrounding, bullying, or she drew attention to Mika, in the plugin review team, and then Jen obviously developed that a little bit in terms of accessibility and the people who were feeling like they had been bullied. So if you feel like making a comment about that, Jose, we'd love to hear it, but I'll pass the torch to Mark.

Have you got anything to say about that one?

[00:36:01] Marc Benzakein: yeah, actually I think one of the things that we also have to consider, and, this is gonna go into I think another question that was asked on the same, on the same page, it goes into. We have to keep in mind that it's not just the people who are getting bullied.

It is the people who have been lurking and looking at WordPress and saying, I'm thinking about, contributing. Maybe I wanna contribute here. Maybe, I'm motivated to, to volunteer some of my time. And then they see this and they see this, and a lot of this bullying, by the way, is very public.

It's not, behind the scenes or behind closed doors as everything should be. I'm not saying it should be behind closed doors. by the way, it's, six o'clock in the morning here anyway.

[00:36:54] Nathan Wrigley: You're doing well. keep the coffee going.

[00:36:58] Marc Benzakein: but we have to keep in mind that.

for every one person who's being vocal about it, there could be a hundred people who have thought about getting into WordPress or contributing to WordPress that are like, why would I want to even get into this drama? Why would I want to even take part in this? When, people, when they preach one thing about being welcoming and open and all this thing, all this stuff, and then someone comes in with a, with, a way to improve it or a way to, to appeal to a smaller demographic or anything, and they get lambasted for it, and why would I wanna do that?

So it, it's much further reaching than just what we see, unfortunately, in my opinion. And I've had a lot of offline, as I'm sure everyone has offline conversations with people who just do not feel, safe, in general because they. They already have enough to deal with making a living, providing for their kids, all these things.

And then to go in and have that rather than it just being this, open conversation where it's fine to have different ideas, but I. But let's have like real conversations about it where we progress as opposed to, blowing someone off just because we don't like their idea.

And, I can go on about this.

[00:38:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, no, I think that was really nicely put. But, I, guess again, dear listener, if you're listening to this and you're blowing this off, it's just words or something. It, doesn't really feel like just words when you're on the receiving end of it.

And it isn't just, and it's not just people disagreeing in some cases about, I don't know, the effectiveness of an implementation in software. I think sometimes literally strays into threatening behavior where you have the intuition that somebody's gonna be knocking on your door and, anything approaching that is, is horrible.

But the latter. The, little steps that lead to that are also horrible. And I guess the other thing to throw in is that we have some people who contribute such significant amounts, that if they disappear, we really do destabilize a large part of the, whole pyramid of things that we've got.

So in the case of Mika, so much, and her stepping away, is, a big thing. And one person, that one person has a, really big impact on the community.

[00:39:27] Marc Benzakein: look how long it's taking to get a plugin Yeah. Approved these days in the repository. And I, back in the day I had conversations with Mika.

It's been a while, but, she was always stressing about, getting these plugins approved and, going through that and, losing her, It is huge.

[00:39:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:39:50] Gen Herres: Yeah. And that, that also brings up a point in the general WordPress ecosystem that this is the largest content management system in the world powering, millions and millions of websites.

And yet the big bottleneck is volunteers. Yeah. Yeah. What. Why with the, literally billions of dollars that are going into the whole WordPress ecosystem, why don't we have people who are actually employees who are doing this?

[00:40:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Another can of worms. That one, isn't it? We could probably open that and, go

[00:40:27] Gen Herres: on about that.

'cause then, you have an actual, reliable base of people. I'm not trying to make this no longer open source. I love open source, but. Also we need stability. Given the giant market share that WordPress has, the whole lack of stability is part of why companies don't choose

[00:40:47] Nathan Wrigley: WordPress.

I'm gonna, I'm just gonna flip it over to, Jose. sorry Jose again, if I've got your name wrong. He's been very good at replying. I appreciate that. he says thanks. Yeah, it's definitely him. the case that were mentioned, were ones that were being considered when the question was posed. but besides more that, obviously you know about that have not been made public yet, he said, I saw in many cases.

This, that those people that suffered from bullying, bullying had to face it alone. Okay. So that adds context to it as well. It's not just that it's happening, but it's, there's nowhere to turn. I definitely feel that this is a fail as a community. Can I just mention at this point, big orange heart? If you, if you, it's not the solution always, but it's a place to turn.

and every contributor is needed, mainly those that have been with us for a long time. I think I've just raised that one. Yep. yeah, thank you for your responses. Okay. So we've got context on that question and obviously there's a few things that you know about which we don't. so maybe there's some, more news in the year 2024.

Courtney chimes in as well. The plugin team has seen an increase in submissions while simultaneously implementing a process for sustainability for the team. Over half the plugin review team are sponsored at this time, I believe. So that's, I guess that's a slight bit of good news. And Patricia, BT would add that the non-sponsored contributors might be fed up and just stop if they were bullied.

I think I'd change the word might to will. I wouldn't be sticking around too long if I felt that, I was getting bullied. I maybe. I guess the nature of it might be in, in question, but, okay. So that was a big question. let's add some more. Thank you for your contributions there.

That's great. I, was gonna raise loads of these, but I think given the time that we've got, we'll just raise a few and I'll just pick a couple that I thought were of interest. So excuse my editorial deciding, WordPress community is getting older and older. Do you have any ideas on how to attract the younger generation?

I don't feel old, but I am. but it's true. I don't see that every time I turn up to a WordPress event. I don't get me wrong, it's not like I'm only seeing people of, a certain age and older. there's definitely a mix, but it doesn't, it does feel like it's skewing more as the years go on, towards it's aging up.

We call that aging up. That's, I'm glad you had that phrase. I was struggling. so it's aging up. So those that are in stay in often despite what we just said. but we're not getting that, that funnel into the bottom. we're not getting the young people in. What do we do? What do we do? I'm guessing that maybe it's not as attractive to work on a content management system as it once was with SaaS and things like that.

Maybe if you're a, a website designer, there are other options that you can go for, whereas WordPress has had this inexorable rise and for, ages it was just the default. I don't really know what the answer is, except maybe things like events and in-person stuff is, a good, it's a good

[00:43:57] Gen Herres: thing.

Yeah. I was at the, New Jersey Montclair Meetup, in 2023 and the keynote speaker was talking about how one of the ways that he got started with coding was a bootcamp. And at the bootcamp they were saying to these people who are all brand new, brand new to development, brand new to trying to code, and they're telling them that PHP is a dead language.

Which, PHP has been steadily increasing market share and is a very solid, mature language that I think will be

[00:44:29] Nathan Wrigley: going around for many. Oh no. P-H-P-H-P has been dead for 15 years. Jen, you've not heard after life.

[00:44:36] Gen Herres: Truly epic afterlife. Yeah. It's always dying. But, one of the things is that, the.

The code camps are, saying that PHP is a dead language and WordPress is on its way out. and when, quite frankly, the things that people are going to get their foot in the door when those places are saying, this isn't something you should look at, they're gonna trust what their mentors and their teachers at these camps are pushing them towards.

So I would say that, getting into high schools, getting into high school programs and getting kids into WordPress when they're in high school, getting into college programs, getting into the boot camps where people are getting their foot in the door. that's, that first foot in the door experience should be something that we want to give them as a positive view of things like PHP and WordPress.

Because if they see that as negative. that's the memory that, that's gonna stick with them. That's their first impression.

[00:45:41] Nathan Wrigley: I think a good route maybe as well in that discussion would be the data ownership thing, which seems like a bit of an old homogeny thing to talk about. And it's one that we talk about a lot.

But I'm constantly thinking that kids have just given up their entire digital lives to these giant mega corporations. And there's no, there's not even an aspiration that, that's weird. There's just, yeah, Facebook can have it all. What do I care? Yeah, I can see the ads. I don't care. And just making that argument that just at some point you might want to have that under your control.

just think about that a little bit. So maybe, some of that plays into it a bit. think about the future, why would you ever get a pension? those kind of things. Think about the future, dear child. Okay, mark. Michelle, any solution.

[00:46:29] Marc Benzakein: I think that one of the things we have to keep in mind is we are naturally going to age up when you have two years of a pandemic and no in-person events.

So the thing that I think one of the great contributors to the growth of WordPress was Word camps. There's no doubt about it. So when you have two years of no word camps and No, in-person events and, meetups are all virtual. And so instead of them being localized meetups, all of a sudden people from, Peoria, Illinois are showing up to the Seattle.

and I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, I'm just saying I get it. Yeah, I'm just saying that, the whole idea and the beauty of Word camps was they started out as like these kind of localized events and the meetups were localized events. And so all of a sudden we've gotten this old.

This older generation. And so when Word camps came back last year, it was all the old people just like family reunions kind of thing. and I think, and it was something that I actually brought up to several people in Phoenix was we as the older generation, and like you, Nathan, I don't feel old, but I know that I am, as the older generation, we need to take it upon ourselves to bring the younger people in and we need to mentor them, and we need to make some time for that. And we talk about how can we contribute into WordPress. I think that's one of the greatest ways some of us older generation people can do that, is to meet people at these work camps, especially younger ones, and bring them up and, show them the ropes and get meetups going and all of that.

and create, once again, this groundswell from a, grassroots kind of, point of view as opposed to from the top down or anything like that. I think that could be helpful. And WordPress is not as sexy as it used to be. Let's face it. that's, it's not the new kid on the block.

it, really isn't. What's that? That's

[00:48:38] Nathan Wrigley: a feature of life, isn't it? Yeah. Oh, thank you. it was interesting as well. Michelle, anything you wanna add to that?

[00:48:48] Michelle Frechette: I think it's easy as somebody who's worked their way up through it, it's, I keep saying it's still a young community, even though technically it's not because tech, technology moves so quickly, but 20 years is not an incredibly long amount of time for the people who, were grassroots in it, not to feel like they still have ownership of what, what happens within it.

And one of the things that has to happen is people of my age, I might be the oldest one here, or close to it, mark, I think you and I are right around the same age. Pretty close. I think you, but yeah. I have to be able to not only want to see a younger people in it, but. Almost step aside in a lot of respects.

Oh

[00:49:30] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Okay.

[00:49:32] Michelle Frechette: Interesting. in order not leave. I'm not suggesting, like Jose says, that people who have been in it a long time need to continue. So we have some of that consistency, but also have to be willing to bring people in alongside them and then be willing to hand the reins off to people who are younger because they need to be able to be in decision making places as well.

Yeah. So that's one of the, it's really difficult when you stay with a project so long and you field such ownership over it, whether it's community, whether it's code, whether any of those things to then say, I'm going to just be a user now and let somebody else lead. It's

[00:50:05] Gen Herres: not

[00:50:06] Nathan Wrigley: easy. Isn't, that's a really good point.

I'd never even thought of that. And it feels like in, in business management it's always better to. Have older people, right? Because you just want those experience levels. But with, something like this, it's not quite that is it? Because technology, especially public facing technology, that people are gonna use.

You need the, you need those cool new ideas and the things coming through and yeah, you're right. Once you've got your. Claws in something, it's hard to let go, isn't it? It's hard to, it's hard to let the 18-year-old talk to you about what you should be doing because, alright.

[00:50:37] Gen Herres: Yeah. I used to turn to my daughter to

[00:50:39] Michelle Frechette: see what was, hip.

Yeah. And we don't even use the word hip, right? Yeah, she is, she's in her thirties now, so she is not even the demographic, like my own children are not the demographic. Yeah. I have one child. Okay. and her husband, so, I actually can't even turn it within my own family unless I'm looking at nieces and nephews who are much younger to find out what is important to them.

it used to be important to us to say you own your own data, that is super important and it still is important. but now, like people who are my daughter's age and younger are often looking at what is the ethos behind, what are the ethics behind, where's the morality in and how is, this technology being used?

For the greater good. And how, and what does that mean as, opposed to ownership of your own data? How do I feel part of the community and how am I using this, within the greater global community to affect good? because we have so many things happening in the world that are challenging and scary,

[00:51:42] Nathan Wrigley: I think that's really hard to let go, isn't it?

But maybe that's what we need. Maybe that if we wanna encourage a younger, if that's an actual thing and we're worried about it, maybe we need to be able to let those voices be heard and get the 17 year olds in and allow them to shout about their ideas and all of that kind of thing. Yeah. That's really interesting.

James. Au thank you for joining us, James. He says he loved what Michelle, said about handing off to others. for many of us, we work hard to get to where we are, so it isn't easy letting go. Yeah, really. good point. Yeah. It's like when, like me, when you've got like teenage kids, it's like I'm so used to telling them what they should do.

It's hard to let them tell me what they should do, say, oh. Can we just rewind 10 years and just go back to how it was? It's not easy. Elliot's bittersweet for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Elliot says when he was at university eight years ago, he remembers some people would say PHP and WordPress will be dead in a few years.

Yeah. And there's more modern options. I tried to convince them otherwise. It's interesting as well, I just think the interface has changed as well. 'cause when I began with computers, it was a computer, you plugged it into the wall and there was a box and a screen and a keyboard and a mouse.

And my kids like, they're not touching any of that stuff. It's all something which goes in a bag or in a pocket. And the interface for creating it is as good on the handheld thing as it is. Everywhere else. And so there's a, yeah, there's a lot to think about there. I just wanna do one more quick one, and I dunno if we care about this or not, but I'm, interested in your thoughts.

and it says the W three, according to W three texts, and we'll come onto something of theirs in a minute. WordPress usage has been going down since June. even saying it doesn't sound like it's that big of a deal, does it really? It's six months we've had it up and up and up and then we've had six months of down.

What do you think about these numbers? Any ideas on what we can rev do to reverse the trend? And I am gonna include Matt's comments here because I thought it was important. data liberation. So this new initiative to, enable dozens of platforms to import data to begin a WordPress website from content that you already have somewhere else.

There's gonna be a lot of work done on that e-commerce. He says the plugins in e-commerce need to be significantly implo improved in terms of user experience and integrations. I can't comment into that 'cause I don't use e-commerce in WordPress or outside of it. And we need to make sure all the cogs in the engine of the WP community are spinning at full wheel, and he mentions a lot of the things that we've just talked about.

Okay. So that's in, in short, the question is, should we care that it's gone from astronomically high, 43% to this little dip where we're still in the forties, but it's the low forties? Should we care? Is that, something of concern?

[00:54:23] Gen Herres: on the e-commerce one, since I deal with a number of e-commerce sites, for example, the, for someone who has not used e-commerce before, going in and setting up a new Shopify site is super guided, super easy.

Quite frankly, in one hour they have a live website with a couple of products and they are selling. That's compelling. That, that's the setup for me as someone who's been using WooCommerce for years and years. I can have an e-commerce set site set up in an hour. But trying to train a user on it.

Okay. Trying to get a user who, does not have that experience. It, is a se it feels like trying to, climb a, vertical rope versus Shopify feels like a nice gentle ramp,

[00:55:16] Nathan Wrigley: right? Yeah. So

[00:55:18] Gen Herres: the, whole WooCommerce versus Shopify, it's just so different. And honestly, for people who just want a really simple shop and they don't wanna customize things, they don't wanna do, add-ons, they don't need all of that.

I tell them, go to Shopify. It's, you're done. it's, done for you. It's gonna be cheaper, faster, and easier.

[00:55:39] Nathan Wrigley: that's a big thing then, isn't it? Yeah. if you

[00:55:40] Gen Herres: need the add-ons, you need the integrations. You need to customize, you need to do all that. yeah, now we're talking about, about a WooCommerce project, and I have some sites that I've brought from Shopify to Woo because they needed more.

Shopify wasn't giving them enough. They couldn't customize, they couldn't control things, they couldn't do filters the way they wanted, so they needed more. But the people who are shelling, five products with three colors and they're done, no, they're, they are honestly and truly much better off in the Shopify space.

And I was looking at, a year end report and it had shown that there's a lot of exchange that happens back and forth between Woo and Shopify and quite a few Woo shops that become Shopify and quite a few Shopify that become woo. And I think it's because of what people's real needs versus what they actually wanna maintain.

[00:56:38] Nathan Wrigley: I was just looking, I clicked on the link from the data liberation section, of the post that we just looked at, and I was wondering if Shopify appeared in there. And actually, curiously, it doesn't, it's not on the list of, maybe I'm missing something, but, looks like, WooCommerce products to WordPress, that's all those Squarespace, Wix, all of those are being taken care of, Drupal blogger and what have you, but it doesn't seem to be Shopify in there.

So that's interesting. Given that Matt cited e-commerce as one of those things, I wonder if we'll see more of a, push to bring the, the Shopify people along. Michelle or Mark?

[00:57:12] Marc Benzakein: I think there's a lot, oh, go ahead. I was just say I'm a hundred percent with what Jen said.

[00:57:18] Nathan Wrigley: That's, yeah. Nice.

Okay, great. Yeah.

[00:57:21] Gen Herres: I think there's

[00:57:21] Michelle Frechette: more data that needs to be out than to just say, we have X percentage of the internet. So what does that mean? What are those websites we're looking at? Are we talking about majority e-commerce? What is, we have 43% of the total, but what is, or whatever it is now.

But is it when people are just throwing up brochure sites, are they going to sell it to an easier, there's so much more data that we need to be able to say whether it's significant or not. because we don't know what the total is. We don't know what the purposes are. We don't know if it's a simple blog versus, Vogue.

there's just, there's too much to be able to say that one number defines what WordPress is to the global internet.

[00:58:05] Nathan Wrigley: It's interesting though, that he's picked out as number one is the data liberation. So the idea of pulling in people from other platforms so that he must have some intuition. I'm guessing that people.

Would like to do that, but they don't have the capacity to do that. They wanna move over from one place to another, but they can't, Okay. So there was an awful lot in there I will link to, as always, with everything that we show on the screen. I'll link to it in the show notes. but that was an interesting article.

There was loads more questions that I highlighted, but really we're gonna run out time if we don't move on. So we'll quickly move on and we'll talk about this. I dunno how to describe this. I think this is what you might call a foot in mouth moment. I don't know. so we're back to the W three Techs website and I don't really know if I need to call this a survey or if it's more, I dunno where this data comes from, but I see this piece at the beginning of each year getting a lot of attention on a lot of big websites.

they point to this because there's authority here. and this year, the CMS. The content management system of the year 2023 is, and you know it, you know what? It's, elemental. It's not what you thought. how, what, okay. First of all, look at this. So you can see on the screen in every year except one, WordPress won it.

Then in 2022, Wix won it. So after like literally a decade and more, 12, 11 years of WordPress wing it, Wix won it. And then 2023 that the decision was that Elementor, was the winner. Now, obviously, you and I, we all know that Elementor is built on top of WordPress. It's not a content management system.

It, uses a content management system. But the thing that I thought was interesting here is how disconnected is our community from the rest of the technology world. That people think that Elementor is the CMS. Like we, we have clearly somewhere, Elementor has got a runaway train of media and marketing and just, they're just brilliant at that stuff.

And they've managed to get it to the point where they've persuaded these guys who are doing this stuff all the time. the, it's the Elementor is the thing doing it. And of course it's not. So I, dunno if there was anything in that for you, but I just thought that was curious. They did walk it back, I think in a tweet or something a little bit later, but I find it curious that they walked it back in a tweet, but not on the website.

Maybe they don't have a very good content management system to update their,

[01:00:37] Michelle Frechette: number two is WooCommerce. Who is

[01:00:39] Gen Herres: WooCommerce,

[01:00:40] Nathan Wrigley: right? Yeah. Look there. I forgot about that. Oh, even better.

[01:00:45] Gen Herres: The question is always who are you surveying and what questions are you giving them? Yeah, that's true. That's true.

did, Elementor, who has a gigantic email list, did they blast out to their entire email list, 15 emails to vote for us?

[01:01:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, maybe. Okay, I get it. I see what you're saying. So yeah, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. They, see online somewhere that this survey is being done, they wanna win it.

But I'm not putting, I am not putting the boot in on Elementor. It is a fabulous product. It is done amazing things for the popularity of WordPress, but, Elementor, if you did that, if you were a part of that, don't just

[01:01:29] Gen Herres: shame on

[01:01:30] Michelle Frechette: you. Yeah, I love if you read the paragraph above too, it says that it becomes hard for WordPress to consistently be in when it's

[01:01:37] Gen Herres: reached well over 60% market share.

Again. Where, what

[01:01:41] Michelle Frechette: market really? 60%.

[01:01:44] Nathan Wrigley: don't dunno. Yeah. Okay. I don't know. So it's a nothing burger really, isn't it? But it's fun to see. Yeah. Yeah. It's fun to see. and they, like I said, they walked it back. I'm sure they walked it back somewhere online, like their official Twitter channel or something like that.

But obviously. didn't, update it on the website. Okay. So that's that. in, response to that, web dev studio wrote a piece which began like this. It says recently a WordPress page builder was mistakenly named as the best content management system in 2023, even though it's not a CMS. And so what they decided to do, which I thought was nice, a nice way of doing it, was that they just went through all of the different stats and things, which basically tell us what we already know.

It's still dependable, reliable, extensible, all of those things. And yeah, keep telling your clients that they can use WordPress and Elementor. You don't have to choose one or the other. You can have both if you like. okay. So there we go. I'll link to that in the show notes as well. I'm gonna be attending a few events this year.

I'm hopefully gonna be, I am, unless something goes horribly wrong. I'm gonna be in Taipei, in Taiwan in, whenever that is. March, I think. March the seventh or something. Oh, I'm so bad. in March, later this year. but WP Engine had put together an article about virtual conferences, things that they've spied, real world events and what have you.

Look at that WP Career Summit, Michelle, made the grade. And I did wonder if you, three of you had any aspirations, maybe in terms of turning up to, to promote your products or services or just other quirky things. I'd like to attend some podcast events 'cause that's something I'm into.

Whether I will or not, I don't know. But, I'm gonna be attending hopefully the three flagship events for WordPress this year. yeah, it's just over to you. Tell us about events that you hope to go to during this year. I hope

[01:03:43] Gen Herres: to catch a few on replay because I like to, skip the first, 10 minutes of the talk because it's, the intro and all that.

And then, watch the rest of it at 1.5 speed and then

[01:03:56] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, you do that. Okay. I can't do it. I'm terrible. Can't do it. I'm terrible. No, I just can't, there's something about the way that the words slur and everything I, yeah. Anyway, sorry. Interruption.

[01:04:07] Gen Herres: Carry on. Yeah, I, I generally do that for conferences, so I'll be looking forward to, ax Con, which is Dqs Accessibility Conference, and then, which is a big conference

[01:04:22] Nathan Wrigley: I'll all online.

Is that a, I'm just gonna write it down for the show notes. Is that A-X-X-E-E con just all as one word? Yes. Okay. I'll put that in

the

[01:04:29] Gen Herres: show notes. eq, D-E-Q-U-E. Yeah.

[01:04:31] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you.

[01:04:33] Gen Herres: Okay. And, then also, the word press accessibility day, which is in September, I believe.

[01:04:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yep. Okay. Thank you. I'll put that one in as well.

We've mentioned that in the past, especially when it was coming. anything from you, mark on that you're hoping to attend anything? I guess you've gotta wear your main WP hat at some point for these things.

[01:04:52] Marc Benzakein: I,

do. And I know that we are sponsoring, word Camp Nepal, which is coming up, in a week or so, but we are not actually physically gonna be there, but we wanna support, a lot of these word camps.

I'm, that's nice. I've, always been far more of a word, campy person. I like the hallway track a lot. I like meeting people. I like talking to people. I like getting feedback. I, have not completely planned out my year as far as where I'm going to be, when it comes to that. there was the one, and I forgot which one it was, which looked interesting to me only because it's in Wisconsin, which is where my kids are.

Oh, yeah. So I have a little bit of a double kind of, that's a solid reason to motive there. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But, but I am, really, we have our 10 year anniversary is, this coming up, shortly at the beginning of this year. Good for May, wp And so we have a lot of really big things planned and so all of our focus is, and attention is on that right now.

You

[01:06:08] Nathan Wrigley: skews the company focus for a year or so. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Michelle, I know you are, gonna be in Thailand. I'll be in, sorry, Taiwan. I'm sorry. Yes.

[01:06:19] Michelle Frechette: Anything else? I'm speaking at WordCamp Asia, so I'm excited about that. I will be at WordCamp, Europe.

All things going well. My company is sponsoring there as well. and I'm putting together my application, so hopefully I'll be able to speak there if I get selected. Nice. applications are open for another seven days, I believe if anybody's interested in putting their speaker app in for Europe.

[01:06:43] Nathan Wrigley: speaking of that, that extended, it's a little bit different.

I'm skewing it slightly, but, if you are gonna be attending Word Camp Asia, if I believe this is only for the people who have decided to purchase a ticket and succeeded in doing that. There is, probably dropping in your email inbox quite soon. there's the possibility for you to get on the contributor day.

It's part of the ticket. You can show up, but there is limited availability. I think 450 was the number that I thought, so there's gonna be a lot more people at the main event, but if you want to contribute, in contributor day, which is the first day before the actual, event starts, then you need to go to the, thing that you'll get in the email.

I, don't know if I should disclose the URL particularly and look at that picture then. That's a nice picture. Work out Asia last year and they've, they're asking in the form for you to nominate the area. Where you'd be most interested. you don't have to pick, but they're, obviously after spreading that load out and making sure there's enough people sitting at the different tables.

Okay.

[01:07:46] Michelle Frechette: It was a good contributor day last year with plenty of wifi,

[01:07:48] Nathan Wrigley: so that was a good one. Oh, nice. Yeah, that's always fun when the wifi stops working. Yay. and then this, which I just a big hat tip from me to, Katie. Keith Katie's been on the show several times and. Katie has done this same piece, I think three or two or three times in the past.

it's for her company. she has barn two plugins, with her husband. They're both the founders. I believe his name is Andrew Andy. And, and, in January or right at the end of December, Katie releases what can only be described as a real, how to describe it. I don't really know. she just doesn't, she's not editing herself, if She, gives you all the data. There's only one thing she doesn't give you, and that's profit. But she gives you the amount of, how many employees they've got, how much revenue they've had, where that money has been spent, things she did well, things the team did well, things the team did badly.

And it, I just love reading it. Partly because it's so candid. There's something about that kind of vulnerability about it, which I really like the, fact that, you're being human and saying we didn't get everything right. I, love that. but also there's just tons of learning in here. I don't have such a company, so I can't really have that bit of learning.

But if I were to have a company, there's an awful lot in here, as you can see, all the numbers laid out, including the total rev revenue from the plugins, the amount of money that they gained from YouTube ads, how much they spent on affiliates, what they bought. what about, the plugins? Where did the time that they spent in the company go each year?

how they had an SEO scare, which knocked them down the Google rankings in the month of October, and they had to fix that on the fly quickly before Black Friday and how they did it, and the fact that it knocked, I think it was 14% off that month's revenue, which is just fascinating that you can put a number on that.

If your ss EO is killed for one year, what does that do to your. profit and loss statement for that month, and there's just absolutely loads. And so I would just like to commend, Katie for doing it. I thought it was absolutely brilliant. I, again, I'll link to it in the show notes. I dunno if any of you want to contribute to that, if there was anything you thought was, meaningful in there.

But I, I just loved it. I just loved reading that piece. shake of the head. Nod of the head. Anybody got anything to add to that? If not, I'll just move on.

[01:10:14] Marc Benzakein: I, that was a good point. I like, I think that, Katie is awesome. one of my favorite things about her is, her, love of numbers and data.

Yeah, that's, I, love that about her. I like how she. She gets into that. I remember, the first time I saw a year in review, report was back in the day Pippen Williamson did one with Yes. was also I think to me like also just unbelievably transparent how he would do it. And

[01:10:47] Nathan Wrigley: I remember reading that for the first time and just looking at the numbers with my jaw on the floor thinking, wow, in WordPress you can actually turn over that.

[01:10:55] Marc Benzakein: What? Yeah, And so it's, really cool to see that, that Katie's doing it a as well and seeing where they're at, and congratulations to them, of course, with their ongoing success. I think that's pretty

[01:11:08] Nathan Wrigley: awesome. May, maybe that's the bit that I like so much about it. there's this, team family team put together this suite of plugins, tried things, worked, things didn't work.

They've got things they wanna work on in 2024. And it's just, nice to see that in our community, the one that we cherish so much that can happen. and it's just lovely. It's just a no holes barred, thing. And like I said, I'll put it into the show notes, but you can find it on barn two, the number two.com, and it's called 2022 year in review and transparency report.

So maybe go and check that out. Okay. We're gonna have to go a, fairly breakneck speed from now on. Stackable have introduced a new. Plugin. We've had Ben, on the podcast before talking about it, and they've got this new plugin called WP Interactions. I'm not entirely sure, what I'm looking at, except that I think there's triggers and then I think there's actions based upon those triggers.

And you can see that they're concentrating very much on, and I think general probably have something to say about this. They're concentrating on things like the visuals, as you can see on the screen, if you can't see on the screen, 'cause you're listening to the audio, things are scrolling.

you are scrolling and things are accelerating past you and things are slowing down and moving at different rates, that kind of thing. Parallax effects, hover effects. and so on. I, when I saw the details of the plugin, I had this intuition that it would be more about inserting dynamic data and I dunno, triggers like it's a week before Christmas, show this thing, but I didn't really get that feeling from the article.

But Jen, I. Go for it. I know there's gonna be things here.

[01:12:46] Gen Herres: One, I think it's a little confusing because in WordPress core there is a proposal for the interactivity, API. Yep. Which is all focused. It's specifically outlines that it is focused on front end of block and doing things on the front end, which is of course stirring up quite a buzz in the accessibility community as we're concerned with how is this actually going to cause interactions and will those interactions cause a huge number of accessibility issues.

so I'm a little confused with Stackable trying to name their thing the exact same thing as, or, very similar to Oh, okay. Interactivity.

[01:13:29] Michelle Frechette: A API.

[01:13:30] Gen Herres: Yeah. anyway, in terms of what they're doing, I. more and more of the, market share is going towards mobile devices. So in general, I'm not a huge fan of doing a lot for hover effects.

Hover effects are nice, but for many websites they just don't exist for half of the people using the website 'cause they're on a touchscreen device. and then in terms of parallax and the moving, scrolling content, that causes all sorts of issues for people who have vestibular problems and it can cause them to literally vomit after looking at your website.

So the, my first concern is that it obeys something like, prefers reduced motion, but while that's a feature available in every browser and operating system, most people don't actually know that it exists. Yeah. I am, always concerned about how they're going to. Handle all of that. And quite frankly, especially the older population, they don't like a lot of stuff moving.

They really don't. It's a, they like it simple and

[01:14:54] Nathan Wrigley: clean. It's a really difficult, tight, direct to tread, isn't it? Because on this show, one of the things that I do not wish to do is to slag a product off or anything like that, but you raise really good points, and some people want animation on their website, but.

Is that a good thing? that's really the sort of the nature of the debate. does it serve all the people or are there different ways of doing things? yeah, interestingly, and I, don't know, maybe this is the sort of thing that you see lying around on all the websites in all the places, Jen, but they say accessibility at the forefront.

we know how important,

[01:15:30] Gen Herres: but they don't actually address

[01:15:31] Nathan Wrigley: accessibility in this. Yeah. Yep. dear Stackable team, may, maybe get in touch with, Jen, and, you can have a conversation and see. Anyway, there it is. They've got a new product. Mark and Michelle, do you mind, given the amount of time we've got left, do you mind if I just move right along, keep moving.

Okay, we'll keep moving. Keep going. Okay. Thank you. First of all, I'm gonna bring up a couple of things, which some of the people on this panel raised after the show had started, so I haven't a clue what I'm about to show. So let's hope it's clean. this is the first one, and I can't remember which one of you raised it.

So this is, we watch your website. I had, Thomas on the podcast talking about, WordPress Hacks, security, and all of that kind of stuff. Recently, which one of you was raising this one and do you, me, just me just go for again, me, scroll

[01:16:18] Gen Herres: down to about 40% of the way down this, site, about 40%.

[01:16:24] Nathan Wrigley: we see a big graphic that's probably about There. There, you go.

[01:16:27] Gen Herres: Perfect. So basically the short summary is this is, they monitor millions and millions of websites and over that monitoring span and many of the websites come to them because they were hacked to then get on the monitoring. but when they looked at who actually is hacking websites and how are websites being hacked, 60% is stolen session cookies.

Good. Great. Which is not talked about by nearly anyone in the WordPress, security community. Yes. Vulnerabilities are coming in at 30%. Yes. Compromised login credentials are coming in there because, someone gets hacked and. then that data gets sold on the dark web and then people have reused their username and password on a whole bunch of websites and Right.

[01:17:23] Nathan Wrigley: the normal stuff that we've heard about. Correct.

[01:17:25] Gen Herres: You can't get in the stolen session. Cookies is a huge one. How do you even see away? How

[01:17:31] Nathan Wrigley: do you do it?

[01:17:33] Gen Herres: Oh, easy. So what you do is you get, malware installed on someone's machine and there are, okay, so you're like a man in the middle are malwares that are so simple that just opening a PDF in an email that, that you were sent installs malware on your computer.

so for example, one of them is that. there's been a Facebook class action lawsuit. Read this PDF for more information about how you can get your money. And they even give a, like a legit info about the actual cases that are happening. But there's a malware on that PDF. So once you've opened it on your machine, you've installed that malware, you now can have all of your session data stolen and uploaded.

So

[01:18:20] Nathan Wrigley: just to be clear that this is basically, you are, immediately. unless it had been logged out, you are logged into whatever thing that person was and you are totally legitimately them. correct. You are. So if, you've got Amazon open, no, Two

[01:18:36] Gen Herres: a, no password needed,

[01:18:38] Nathan Wrigley: nothing. You're literally carrying out.

Reminds me of that fire sheet thing back in the 10 and especially

[01:18:44] Gen Herres: people are checking the, the keep me logged in button. Yeah. That keeps your session going for a couple weeks.

[01:18:53] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. So this is my plea to the internet in the year 2024. Can we just stop. Can we just stop this silliness, please.

All of these people who get paid to do these silly things, can you all just stop?

[01:19:09] Marc Benzakein: It's not good. Is it in 2025? I want you to tell us how that worked out for you.

[01:19:14] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. It'll be worse. It'll be so much worse. Yeah. And oh, dear.

[01:19:19] Gen Herres: The, the, short answer is, log out. Log out. Log out, right? When, you are done, using things log out.

And also, if possible get, actual PHP based things on your website that log you out of your WordPress admin. Yeah. So that you, do log out, you do stay logged out. In fact, get, rid of the, allow me to stay logged in buttons. You can just hide that from your. WordPress login screens.

[01:19:50] Nathan Wrigley: I feel, maybe things like passwordless logins.

I, I've completely forgotten the thing. IES SS or something like, it's gonna be, it's gonna be the thing. It feels like it's gonna be a It still steals your session. Yeah, exactly. It's but it's gonna be a thing Won't 2024, but it's not gonna help. And all the, but I think we've become, there's so many things that we use online now.

Like when the internet was invented, you were probably going to one, maybe two things at all. Past keys

[01:20:18] Gen Herres: also lock you, it, the, current pass keys is, very, early in development. And quite frankly, most of the security people are saying, don't, use it yet. It's, too young. But the current pass keys lock you into the passkey system.

Yeah. That you're using. Yeah. So if you get Google Pass keys, you're now locked into Google. If you get Apple Pass keys, you're locked into Apple. Yeah. You're actually locked into that passkey service and you have to go through a giant reset process if you wanted to switch from like Apple to

[01:20:52] Nathan Wrigley: Android.

Michelle, just reverse quickly. Would you mind muting your mic? I think whoever's in your, I think it's probably in your office. we can hear quite a lot of the, I've got an intuition that you might be on the wrong mic. I don't know. I'm not entirely sure if it flipped at some point during the, but thank you Michelle.

That's great. Okay, there's the cherry tale for 2024. a brand new thing that you never knew about, that you've got to worry about. But the lucky thing is all you gotta do is click that logout button or just clear out your cookies every week or something. I dunno.

[01:21:26] Gen Herres: No, that doesn't help because you're on server session.

Oh, the session exists on the server. Not on your browser. Got it. So for example, there are some WordPress plugins out there that are JavaScript based, that attempt to log you out. Don't use any of them. Anything that's JavaScript based only happening in your browser. It doesn't log you out on the server where your actual session is stored.

[01:21:51] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. My plea remains the same. Can you just stop it now, please? All of you're up to. No good. We don't like it. We just want the internet to be nice and friendly. but that is a horrible thing. That is. I'm, sad. I'm sad now that I was an hour ago, but yeah, it's the thing. So be aware of it.

And also this one, no, that's not how it looks, Nathan. It probably looks more like that. There we go. who was this one? That was

[01:22:19] Michelle Frechette: for me. Yeah. last year I saw, I know Adrian, he's part of the Buffalo, WordPress community and he speaks and does a lot with accessibility, as Jen probably is aware. And, last year he was speaking out against audio.

I, as overlays as we know, are not something that's actually accessible. It's giving the AP a appearance of accessibility and make somebody who's doesn't need accessibility

[01:22:46] Gen Herres: feel good about what they

[01:22:47] Nathan Wrigley: did. Sorry, can I just interject? Is audio. IEYE. Is that the name of a product, which is an over overlay? It is.

Okay.

[01:22:56] Michelle Frechette: Thank you. And so once Adrian had spoken out against overlays audio, I actually sued him to shut him up. And now that suit has been, settled. What's the word? Settled. Thank you. It has been settled and Adrian is not in trouble it seems. but audio I is gonna be paying $10,000 to.

Association for the Blind. One of those Yeah. Organizations. I can't recall. Second one group.

[01:23:24] Nathan Wrigley: So is do we, do you think, Michelle, it sounds from what you've just paraphrased there, that you think this is a good outcome, right? This has ended the way Oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

[01:23:34] Michelle Frechette: it could have been, probably, could have been a lot better, but, Adrian is not being held responsible for speaking out against, poor technology for accessibility.

[01:23:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But still, you've had your name gone through the mod for a bit and you've gone through the legal process worried about, oh, it's been rough for him, I'm sure. Yeah, You can't measure that.

[01:23:55] Gen Herres: Spend a lot of zone, money and get donations to help cover

[01:23:59] Nathan Wrigley: his legal costs. And you can imagine that, that's, I'm gonna say this and it's gonna sound wrong.

That's maybe audio. I think that's $10,000 well spent because they've managed to put the frighteners on a lot of other people who,

[01:24:14] Gen Herres: it's part of a whole trend of slap lawsuits, S-L-A-P-P lawsuits that are geared towards basically trying to make people who speak out against overlay technologies and similar stuff to shut up.

There's, several lawsuits in other countries against other organizations and people that have been raised by these various, different overlay companies because they quite frankly, have a huge amount of venture capital money and they're willing to throw money at shutting people up if they can.

[01:24:53] Nathan Wrigley: we've ended on cheery notes today, aren't we? No, this is cheery, There, there's, a rollercoaster, but hopefully Adrian has just got himself off it. but this sounds like a positive outcome, even though in the process of going through it, no doubt Adrian has gone through the ringer.

yeah, thanks for bringing that to my attention. Michelle, that's great. I'm just gonna mention a couple of things that are not anything to do with WordPress, but I think they're interesting. Anyway, Microsoft is going to, this is the, juggernaut that is ai, that I actually think is gonna be the story of 2024.

there's gonna be a key, a hardware key on your actual physical windows based keyboard, which is the copilot key. so you can imagine that. if you're buying a computer anytime from, I don't know, July or something this year, and it's a, Windows machine. It's gonna have a key to invoke copilot.

And I was, saying before we started the call, you imagine the effort that you put into getting your website to the top of Google and how much effort and time you put into that. Imagine that you had a key that was on everybody's Microsoft Windows-based keyboard that would invoke your product over all the others.

for, whoa, that's a fairly ballsy statement about what they intend to do with copilot. I think, there's gonna be a lot of people using that, and we will have what I like to call the tyranny of the default. I'm not much of a fan of AI in any way, in any case, but, this just is a pretty, pretty interesting move by Microsoft.

So there's that. also I'm not even gonna do that. It's such a waste of time, but it was quite funny. Shall I do it quickly? Okay. I found this. You can fire a cannon into a room and it's hysterical. It was a Christmas thing and I just thought it was brilliant. You'll have five seconds of me firing stuff.

great way to nearly finish. Last one. no. Second to last one, penultimate one. $20 billion was what Adobe were proposing to pay to acquire Figma. And they're no longer doing it. It seems that they have been pressured by regulators. I think if Adobe had have got Figma, they would've really dominated the, design software field for the next decade or so.

I dunno what that means for Figma, whether or not they're gonna go and try and find some other way of selling themselves off. But $20 billion, oh, that's a lot of money for a piece of software, which is used by graphic designers. That's pretty amazing. Anyway, so if you're a Figma user and you don't like Adobe and their recurring fees, hold your breath.

Let's see what happens. And finally. incognito mode, is not quite as incognito as maybe you thought maybe you knew this already, but Google have just paid out $5 billion. it was a class action lawsuit basically saying your incognito mode doesn't really do much in terms of incognito does it. And that little icon that you've got of the guy in the hat looking like a, detective, it turns out really all it's was all it was doing.

And to be fair to Google, they never actually claimed otherwise. But I think the intuition was that it was doing more is it doesn't really. Do much in except clear your browser history so that the people who next use the computer can't see what you did. But all the telemetry from Chrome, they were Google were getting all of that data.

And that data could be used and probably, or possibly was in some way. They clearly think that they had something to answer for. 'cause who shells out $5 billion and unless there's a case to be answered, I dunno if this changes anything. I dunno if Incognito in the future will be more incognito, I think all the browsers are doing the same thing.

So it's not like Google are uniquely guilty, but, yeah, $5 billion. Ouch. So there we go. It started all happy and then it all went a bit sad towards the end, didn't it? I'm sorry about that. but that's the way we roll sometimes. Thank you. Go back to the cannon. yeah, that's right. Oh, okay. We'll put.

No, we won't. I was gonna say on, you can see, look, it's more or less pitch black here in the UK now, three o'clock in the afternoon and it's nearly dark. It's ridiculous. I'm gonna write a letter. I dunno who I'm gonna write it to, but as heads must roll, it's far too early in the evening. Thank you so much to my co-host, Yasi.

I remembered Michelle Fette. Thank you very much. Thank you to Mark who's gonna say his own surname because I'm gonna get it wrong.

[01:29:24] Marc Benzakein: Zaca, and

[01:29:25] Nathan Wrigley: thank you for having me. Thank you so much, and thanks to Jen Harris for joining us today. Now, mark, you may not know, but I have to. Do this, we do this slightly humiliating thing.

Oh, Jen, look at it. Go. we all raise our hands simultaneously and I take a screenshot of it. So would you mind? Oh, he is a good sport. Look at that straight away kids wave. That's perfect. Thank you so much. We'll be back next week. We'll be chatting with some different guests and panelists and all of that kinda stuff.

Thank you for making comments. If you did, really appreciate it. And we will see you, this time next week for another episode of this week in WordPress. Take it easy. Bye.