This Week in WordPress #284

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode number 284 entitled flamingos Walter slides and bright jumpers. It was recorded on Monday the 29th of January, 2024. My name's Nathan Wrigley and I'll be joined in a few moments by my fabulous guests. The guests today are Wendie. Wendie I'm terrible with her surname.

So I'm just going with Wendie. By Rob Cairns and also by the cohost Kathy Zant, it's a WordPress podcast. So of course, we're going to talk about WordPress, the topics under discussion this week, core editor improvements, especially in terms of revisions. There's a really interesting video by Anne McCarthy showing what that new UI will look like. We learn what the release squad it looks like for WordPress 6.5. And also the goals of WordPress generally in the year, 2024, Josepha Haden, chum, posi outlined.

Some of those, I did a podcast with Michelle Frechette all about diversity and we discuss that. There's also a pilot program to stop using meetup as the software for organizing WordPress meetups. And instead go over to a WordPress solution called a gatherer press. What is that about word com Asia.

They need some help in terms of contributor day help. WordPress has got two new plugins to speed things up, and it sounds like the panel not quite so sure about them. Also something we weren't quite so sure about is a new tool built into elements, or to be able to take sections from other people's websites and replicate them with a. And we also get into a whole lot more fun stuff 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 there. Hi everybody. It is Monday the 29th of January, 2024. It is this week in WordPress, episode number 280. 4, 284 I think is the right number. very nice, to have you with us, especially the three fine people who've decided to join me today. first off, oh, I got it right. I got it right.

First, is Kathy Zant. How are you, Kathy?

[00:02:52] Kathy Zant: I'm doing well. Good to see

[00:02:53] Nathan Wrigley: you. Yeah, really good to see you as well. Kathy's, Kathy's bio is a little bit different, so here we go. Let's, let's run through it the first time, used to say other things. Now it says this. Kathy is the Director of Content and Community at Motivations ai, the creator of Motivation Code.

Motivation Code is an assessment that explains who you are, what motivates us, and how to live a more fulfilling life tied to our individual motivation dimensions. She's passionate about WordPress your stories and believes that everyone's voice deserves to be heard. forgive me Rob, and forgive me, Wendie.

I'm just gonna go down this rabbit hole very quickly, if that's all right. Yeah. Oh, so motor, what, what is, just explain a little bit more about the company 'cause although that makes sense to me. Is this a new company? Is this a company that was founded recently? I guess it's jumping on the AI bandwagon, but it's all about mood and health and mental wellbeing and all that.

Is it.

[00:03:50] Kathy Zant: All of the science behind this has been around for quite some time, for decades. So there has been tons of research into what makes people do the things that they do. all of us came out of the Gallup organization and with the addition of ai, there's this, assessment is so cool. You basically tell.

AI stories about things that have fulfilled you in your life, and it comes back and tells you, here's why. this is what motivates you. This is your dimension, these are your dimensions. It's not just like one thing, like you take the Myers-Briggs and it's I like coffee, or I like tea.

And it's like an either, either or type of thing. Yeah. Yeah. But we are multidimensional people, right? Humans or spirits having a human experience. And there's a lot of different things that go into our motivations. And the cool thing for me personally was when I, learned about my top three dimensions.

My top three dimensions really just. Felt oh, this makes so much sense. I understood myself a lot better. So it's really a joy to be working with some just incredible people, with incredible technology and we're off to, to change the world and how people work. That's great.

[00:05:07] Nathan Wrigley: Imagine working for a company where you can say, we're off to change the world.

It's so cool. you'll be, in good, company, won't you? Because it, when I looked at the Motivations AI website, it looks like the WordPress community, quite a few members of the WordPress community have joined forces with you. I guess you are one of the more recent, people that's chopped on board, but there's a whole bunch, isn't there?

So you're in Safe families. We know. And

[00:05:32] Kathy Zant: familiar and just incredible people. Yeah, it's been a really long time since I felt imposter syndrome of what am I, do I really belong in this room? Yeah. oh my gosh, these people are so smart and so talented and everybody's an a player at what they do.

I'm just happy to be here.

[00:05:52] Nathan Wrigley: that's really fabulous. thank you for joining us again, and what a lovely story to start the show off with. let's go round, Let's go there. Let's go to, Wendie. How you doing, Wendie? I'm always nervous to do your surname because I always butcher it.

Just leave it, just leave it. Okay. you've just written Wendie on the screen, so I thought I'll just say Wendie, but it's Wendie. Look, there's Wendie, as one of the lead organizers of WordCamp Europe in 2024. We'll mention that in a bit. Wendie is on top of all the news related to WordCamp Europe 2024.

She has been an active part of the WordPress community since 2013. volunteering. Yeah,

[00:06:27] Wendie Huis in t Veld: I was writing it. It is the anniversary this year.

[00:06:30] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, no. Yeah, speaking and organizing word camps mainly in Europe was last year. She makes money working as a happiness engineer. wordpress.com. Yeah, I was wondering did what was going on there?

Was it my maths or, yeah, 10 years from last year, right? No, it was last

[00:06:46] Wendie Huis in t Veld: year. I, we are, we've moved on a year. Yeah, you're in year 11. It was last year. Yeah. I didn't celebrate, so I'm gonna celebrate

[00:06:52] Nathan Wrigley: this year. I honestly can't think of many bits of software that have lasted like 11 years. there's things like Microsoft Word and stuff, but WordPress 20, what the heck?

How did that am? But, very nice to have you with us. Thank you. We'll be talking a little bit about WordCamp Europe a little bit later, but last to finish off our panel. There he is. It's Rob, Rob cans. How are you doing, Rob?

[00:07:14] Rob Cairns: Doing well, Nathan.

[00:07:15] Nathan Wrigley: How are you? yep. Very nice. Rob's been on the show many times before.

If you watch this, so you'll know a little bit about him, but here we go. Rob is the founder and chief creator of Amazing Ideas at Stunning Digital Marketing. Rob is a WordPress security expert. He's a podcaster, a contributing author and co-manager of the WordPress Global Community Group on LinkedIn, which is huge, by the way.

It's truly enormous amount of people when he is not working, he enjoys reading, watching sports and touring around Ontario. What kind offic books do you like? I shouldn't say fiction. What kind of books do you like?

[00:07:51] Rob Cairns: it varies. So I read everything from business books to fiction, to science fiction. It all depends on the mood.

Oh yeah. And, the last I looked, I had nine books on my bedside tables.

[00:08:03] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I can't do that. I'm the Start it and finish it kind. Yeah. start, finish, then. Move on then. That's

[00:08:10] Rob Cairns: how I work. But you've got nine

[00:08:12] Nathan Wrigley: lined up, nine books to be read. Yeah. Do you still go with the paper book or are you happy with the ebook, the Kindle or something like that?

I do. I do both.

[00:08:21] Rob Cairns: Nathan, if I'm out in the go, the Kindle on the iPad, it's easier to take the app. If I'm at home, it's easier. I prefer to read a paper book 'cause that's less screen time. Yeah. Which is better for

[00:08:31] Nathan Wrigley: you before bed. So I am, I was having a conversation with my kids the other day and we were all talking about what our favorite device was.

bit of technology. And I think a few years ago I would've said phone, but I've got, I've fallen out with mobile phones and so you know that story. But, now it's my Kindle. Yeah. Hands down it's the Kindle. You just see it as this like little rectangular window to the, to knowledge.

Yeah. And and I, love it. I'm absolutely addicted. I've already read in this year, I've read 10 books in January. Good for you. That's awesome. Oh wow. I dunno what's happened. I just. I'm just addicted to it. As soon as my chores for the day are finish out, it comes and I squeeze in as much reading as I can.

Yeah, it's getting a bit obsessional. I need to calm down a little bit, but, yeah. Anyway, so we're not here to talk about that. We are here, however, to talk about WordPress and we'll get onto that in a moment. Firstly, if you would like to leave any comments, please do that. That would be so nice. This show is infinitely better when comments come flooding in.

It really is. It's lovely. And the best way to do that is to go here, WP Builds.com/live. If you go there, you've got two choices. You can either use the YouTube comments, so you need to be logged into a Google account or there's a little black, rectangle in the top right of the player. You can click on that, and that's just goes through the platform that we use.

So you don't need to be logged into anything. You just type your name and then you're off to the races. If you are watching on Facebook, you have to go here, wave Video slash lives slash Facebook, and that allows us to see who you are. Otherwise, you are entirely anonymous, which is fine. But sometimes it's nice to see who you are, for example, it's nice to see that Mike Cotton is here.

Hi there, Mike. Nice to have you with us. He says afternoon everybody. Afternoon to you too. Atif, is also joining us. He's saying Good afternoon. Hi there, Atif. Nice to have you with us. Courtney Robertson is joining us. Good morning. Yeah, thank you. Joining us all the way from the US and Peach. Who is. Often in Europe somewhere, I guess Spain maybe.

I dunno. Oh, she says, look, from Valencia halfway down the, oh, she's totally telling us exactly where she is. That's remarkable. from Valencia halfway down the southern coast of Spain, just after 3:00 PM It's overcast in Chile for our taste. 14 degrees is not what we're used to. picture, I can tell you it's minus one.

Where I am at the moment. I'll take the 14. Yeah, I'll take, 14 any day of the week. Peter Ingersol will no doubt pop up and give us his weather report if all things are normal. But let's get on with the word pressy stuff, firstly, little bit of promo stuff. Hope you don't mind. this is our website, WP Builds.com.

Get rid of that. if you fancy. Looking around what we do, please use these links. These are probably the most useful ones, the archive pages, that's where we store all the bits and pieces that we've done. So the podcast that we do on a Thursday, this show will end up on this menu here this week in WordPress.

If you wanna keep up with all that we're doing, put your address in here, your email address, and we will send you two emails a week, one for the show on. This one basically, and one for the show on Thursday that we release, which is a podcast. And I need to mention GoDaddy Pro, who've been sponsoring us for absolutely ages now.

thank you GoDaddy Pro for your continuing support. It really has helped keep the lights on. If you wanna know what we're up to head to this page, it's WP Builds.com/schedule and you can see all the bits and pieces that are going on this week. So we've got what we're doing now, that's this one here.

And then on Wednesday I'm speaking to Greg from a company called Omnis Send, which is a platform to enable you to interact with your, customers better. It's like an email marketing platform, but with bells and whistles. So we'll be doing that 2:00 PM on Wednesday. And then on Thursday we've got our regular Speed It Up show with Sabrina Zda.

I had to basically cancel everything last week, which is why it's all blank last week. 'cause I've, I felt like. Yeah, bad, not good, but there you go. WP Builds.com/schedule. And last quick hat tip. I did an episode this week with, Jen Harris. She is an accessibility expert, so if you go here and search for episode number 358, you can listen to her talking to me all about the importance of accessibility alrightyy.

There we go. That's all the word pressy stuff on. Let's, sorry, not the word Pressy stuff. The WP Build stuff. Let's talk about core editing improvements. Anne McCarthy, as she often does, writes an article on make.wordpress.org. An important bit of the UI of your WordPress install is the ability to go back and.

if you muck something up, go back to a previous revision. Honestly, I thought the revisions were pretty good as they were, but there's room for improvement it turns out, because that's what Anne is explaining. And the latest release of Gutenberg 17.4, you can get that from the, you can get that from the.org website.

there have been some significant improvements essentially, rather than limiting you to a, I think something like a hundred revisions. You can now, it's now paginated so that you can see absolutely every revision that's ever happened. if you're a, a one person band. You may not need it.

Likes, that's kind of me. I don't really use it, but if there's a big team, it might be good to go back through the hundreds and so you can do that now. also you can add some context to those revisions so you can write a little sort of note explaining what was going on. And also it'll give you some context by describing what was changed.

So that's nice. But also it will interact with the style book. So let's say that some big major change happened in the styling. You can go to the style book and when you click through revisions, it'll show you what those revisions did to the style of that page or post or whatever it may be. So there's quite a lot there.

it's one little thing, revisions, but I think it's an important thing. Robust revisions In the site editor, it's called. Do any of you three want to talk about that?

[00:14:27] Wendie Huis in t Veld: I just wanna say one thing about revisions because, you do need to check with your host if it is turned on for your, hosting company because there are hosting companies that turn this great little thing off. And so if you're trusting revisions, make sure you check if it is actually in your site.

yeah, I guess it can be. I had, I've had this experience and it's not fun when you think I can go back and it is not there.

[00:14:58] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Thank you. Make sure they're all switched on. it probably uses up quite a bit of unnecessary space. If if you've got posts dating back 20 years and they're still, you're still keeping the revisions, you never really look at them, it's maybe time to dump those.

But I guess the more recent things that you're actively working on, it's useful. Kathy, Rob, anything on that or should we press on?

[00:15:21] Rob Cairns: I just wanna add, you gotta be really careful with, things like revisions with the boat in your WordPress, database. we gotta be really careful that we maintain that database and the database doesn't get bigger and we make sure we clean it up.

Just food for thought. Every time we get into something like this, the database is gonna grow a

[00:15:41] Nathan Wrigley: little bit. Yeah, that's a good point. I, when I'm typically making these posts, I probably save it about 50 or 60 times. Yeah. 'cause I add the news stories one at a time and each time I drop it in, 'cause I'm a bit of a fearful thing, I like to click.

Save draft just because then I know it's got that one and I don't have to go back and repeat the work. And my workflow means that I delete links that I've, put in and all that kind of stuff. So it's really important that whole system is working. And I, like I say, I probably per post create about 60 or 70 revisions, which is a bit absurd.

Yeah, I really do need to, to clean those out. But yeah, Sage advice. Thank you for that. Kathy, anything before we move on?

[00:16:23] Kathy Zant: Yeah, I just, as collaboration comes into WP admin and more people are working together on things, I think things like making sure that revision, being able to like clearly delineate where revisions are happening is really important.

So I love that this is happening as collaboration is coming

[00:16:39] Nathan Wrigley: on board. That's a really good point. I hadn't really thought about it from that point of view, but in, like for example in the Google Docs interface, they do revisions really well. I think, you roll it back and you can see exactly what was done and they highlight it and all that.

That is gonna be really important, isn't it? Especially if there's four or five people editing it once and you've got no oversight into who saved what and when did they save it and you know which bits went where. Yeah. That's gonna become giant, isn't it? This is gonna be a really thorny problem. for the team, because you imagine if there's three people editing at once and somebody moves a paragraph up and then somebody moves it down again and there's this tennis going on of op down and people deleting things and adding things all over the place, it's gonna be really hard.

Maybe it'd have to be a per user rev review. I dunno. I dunno how that's gonna

[00:17:26] Kathy Zant: go. Yeah. it sounds like the team though is really thinking through like how impactful this might be. so I'm glad they're thinking about it so I don't have to Yeah,

[00:17:36] Nathan Wrigley: go and have a look at this little video that Anne put together.

It's only a minute and a half or so long, but it gives you a real insight into what we're talking about and it's good, like you say, somebody's actually thinking about it, so that's really useful. Okay. All right. Moving on. This is news, but there's not a lot to say. It really is just a, a hat tip to the people who have stepped up to be the WordPress 6.5 release squad.

you can see the names there, there are some very familiar names. So for example, the release lead is Matt and that's fairly to be expected. we just mentioned Anne, but there's quite a few people who've been on this show before. But you can see it's broken up into release lead coordinators, tech.

Sorry. Core tech leads, editor, tech leads, core triage leads, editor triage leads, design, marketing and communication documentation, performance test and default themes leads. Now, I don't know if that role is a role that existed in the past, 'cause I've never really inspected it too closely, but it'll say in the paragraph below, this release squad introduces the experimental default lead role.

So I'm guessing this is a new one. and that's because of the need to update past default themes due to changes introduced in releases. So if that is a new one, it looks like Carolina NY Mark is taking on the role of that. But, essentially, big thanks to all these people, whether they're, paid contributors or how that's all working.

Just thank you for taking the time and the effort to, To do that work for us. It's schedule beta one is February the 13th. So it's coming up. It feels like we just got this one shipped. And, yeah, and we're on the, we're on the rack of a new one. Anything for there before I move on? Okie doke. Alrighty, let's move on to this one.

I think this one's really interesting. It's Jafa, who's obviously the executive director of the WordPress project. And, whenever Jafa writes something down about the project in general, I think it's worth listening to. she talks about the goals for the next year. I expect many of you, if you watch this show regularly, a lot of this will be, will be common knowledge, but it's nice to have it all summed up.

She does make the point right at the top that, it's not a exhaustive set of lists. Lists because it's bound to change as things happen during the course of 2024. But here are the different bits of pieces which are going to receive the most attention this year. That's the intention anyway. phase three of the Guttenberg projects, as we were just talking about, that's gonna be interactivity, Document collaboration, that kind of thing. Think Google Docs, the idea of being able to multiple people logged in at the same time, changing the same thing. How that'll work. We've yet to see, then we move to community. The, another wrong of this ladder. community support to support the community through learning events and mentorship of the current, of current and future contributors.

We'll develop on these in a moment. And then address, this is ecosystem. It comes under address. The difficulty in moving platforms through data liberation that seems to have come out of nowhere in the last few months. And now it seems to be what everybody's talking about. And, we will see in a moment that, there's this, not fear, but WordPress's user base has, I think Gier used the word stagnated, I think.

that was, yeah. There we go. Look. Growth over the last, year over year, new installations, it's become stagnant. So I guess an easy win there would be, why not make it so that you can get LER websites instantly transferred into WordPress websites and Shopify and all the other things, all the other bits and pieces, as well as making it easy to port your own data to another WordPress website.

But the, the idea really here is to grow WordPress, to get that 43% up to 44 and beyond. And the, idea also in terms of events is to, not make typical WordPress events the flavor in the future. So word camps that you've been to, Gier describes it here as one size fits all. that was the strategy in the past.

The idea in the future is to have more advanced topics and more focused events, which can meet the community where it is. I don't know, as an example, it might be a. An SEO event or a security related event or something like that, whether that'll work, I'm not entirely sure, but they are the things, they're the big focuses for the next period of time.

And again, over to you three, if you've got anything you want to throw in there.

[00:22:13] Kathy Zant: I am super excited about data liberation because I see so much opportunity out there. think about all of the, various web tools that you use. what, and we have learning management systems, LearnDash, Lifter, LMS, all of these different LMS systems, but we also have, hosted solutions, SaaS solutions like Teachable and whatnot. Yeah. And tons of people who are finding success there, but. Then again, you're growing your business in a walled garden. Wouldn't it be great if we could find ways to help people who are using web-based SaaS tools to come over to WordPress to give them more freedom and flexibility?

And then I think about like other tools, like mural boards, the web-based tool where people can do all of that kind of fun stuff. Wouldn't it be cool if there were, was somebody created a plugin that allowed people to do that within WordPress, that gives them more opportunity to just get out of these walled gardens.

There's so many of them. And it's not just, LMS systems. It's not just Shopify versus WooCommerce. There's tons of web-based. Systems and tons of opportunity for creative plugin developers to go out there and say, wow, this tool is really great, and tons of people are using Figma. How do we bring the Figma experience into WordPress so that people are designing closer to what they're actually putting on the web?

That type of thing. So that web-based tools, no matter how far away from web publishing they might seem, you can bring them over to WordPress. And I think that kind of innovation and creativity is ripe and there's plenty of opportunity for creative plugin developers to create a new business based on that.

[00:23:54] Nathan Wrigley: We actually, we talked about this the other day, and I'll just give everybody, if you haven't heard about this project, it was the first I'd come across it anyway was during state of the word in December last year. obviously it's been on people's minds for a long time, but it hadn't really surfaced to me at least.

Anyway, the idea is to create a, I think, really a one click solution for a typical website. obviously if you've got like a jumbler website with a billion different bits of custom code, then you're probably out of luck. But a typical one click solution for importing a website, for example, straight from Squarespace, Tumblr, that's interesting.

or you could see the connection, maybe the automatic connections there, isn't it? HTML, if you've just got a static HTML site import that, an RSS feed Wix, Drupal blogger. And then this one, which captures my attention just 'cause I've been using WordPress for everything always forever. Anyway, this feels almost like a, built-in migration system.

So rather than having to rely on a third party, plugin to do that heavy lifting or, get in the command line or whatever, the idea would be that there'd be a way of doing that inside a WordPress to take, I dunno, your moving host stories, you just wanna try something different now. But then if you click on the view All guides here, they all are, a vda, which is a theme, to take it to core blocks.

So this is a big promotion on just core blocks, Contentful, I don't even know what that is, but it's a thing. divvy another one. So divvy to core blocks, Elementor to core blocks, cadence to core blocks. And then I, oh, WooCommerce product to, I dunno what that one is. It's gone off the page to WordPress, it just says, and then WP Bakery to core blocks as well.

I dunno how the community feel about that one. The idea of making a native solution to take from an already existing solution like DV or Cadence or what have you into something else. But, yeah, pretty cool. Pretty cool. Rob, Wendie,

[00:25:55] Rob Cairns: anything? it's interesting when you read Joseph's goals and I think what's gonna really impact those goals this coming year is ai.

I hate to go there. Like we, we can't have a conversation around web development or marketing without mentioning those two letters anymore. And I really, yeah, as Kathy Laugh sent me again because she knows where I'm going. And the problem we've got right now is AI is changing on such an astronomical front every day.

And I really think. a lot of the collaboration stuff we're doing in WordPress and things like that, AI's gonna impact it more than people think. And so I think those goals, I think the WordPress, team needs to be prepared to adjust those goals as we go. 'cause a lot of stuff might become non-relevant by the time AI's finished.

You look at stuff Microsoft's doing, you look at open ai, you look at what Google's doing, it's, to and people like friends of ours in the space, like Bertha and things like that. It's just. Mind

[00:27:03] Nathan Wrigley: boggling. Actually, Tim n has, just dropped in a comment. He says, you can rob. It's easy not to mention it.

it's so noisy. Thanks, Tim. It's everywhere. You open up the newspaper. There's AI absolutely everywhere. I just wanna mention this. how did, I not, I'm so sorry. Wendie. Jose is just loving the sweater if you're listening to this, which is how it's consumed by most people. Wendie's wearing a fabulous sweater with all sorts of red fruit on it.

And, and look, here's me in the most boring outfit imaginable. Black and gray. And there's Wendie Livening our lives off a little bit. yeah. Appreciate it. Wendie, tell us about your thoughts on these, WordPress events. 'cause I know that's a big part of your experience in the WordPress community.

What do you reckon?

[00:27:55] Wendie Huis in t Veld: Sorry, what? I'm still on the sweater thing.

[00:28:02] Nathan Wrigley: that's not going away. Should we, should we dissect the sweater for a few more minutes? You can tell us

[00:28:06] Wendie Huis in t Veld: exactly. I'm just so happy with my sweater. It's actually new. It's the second time I'm wearing it and I'm super happy with it.

[00:28:15] Nathan Wrigley: It's great. It's really great. I think we should all applaud the sweater.

Can we have lots of pleasant comments? please. From everybody about the sweater? I think it would make, Wendie's day. She's obviously delighted. Yeah, I'm already delighted

[00:28:28] Wendie Huis in t Veld: with my sweater, Yeah.

[00:28:29] Nathan Wrigley: But anybody's had anything. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I wish there was an intermission in the show. I would go and change and I, I don't know, put something else on.

a bit more sparkly. Go for it. WordPress events. What do you make of it? are you, are you worried about this new thing? Do you think this the one fits, one size fits all thing that we've got right now is working. Don't break. What isn't, what is it? Don't fix what isn't broken or something like that.

[00:28:54] Wendie Huis in t Veld: I think it's interesting. I am very, for, diversifying a bit because it is really hard to serve everybody in one event. and I also think that events like Word Camp, like the bigger word, camps, word Camp Europe, word Camp Asia, coming up soon, those are also, at least for me and for a lot of people I know a big part of that is hanging out with people.

it might be, but that could also be diversifying. smaller word camps and big word camps might have a different goal or a different, audience and serve a different purpose. So yeah, why not? I would love to do, for example, a beginner's word camp for just people who just started working with, oh,

[00:29:42] Nathan Wrigley: there you go, Wendy.

Wendies an idea. I hadn't heard. Everything seemed to be niching in on the, like the super niche, like the SEO or the, Whatever it might be. Yeah. But that's really interesting an idea. Just a, an event just for beginners. Yeah. I'm sorry, I'm back to the sweater. I'm not taking my head off that. love the sweater too.

Can't stop thinking of Pacman says, I see a show title coming. Yeah, I can now. Tom Thomas. Hi Thomas. we had Thomas on the podcast several weeks, months ago now. I dunno what a golf clap is. What's a golf clap? any intuition? Anybody on the panel? What's a golf clap anyway? Golf clap for the sweater.

I, guess that's a good thing. I, Peacher says. I had met the cherries and berries sweater last week already and loved it. There you go. The how, the heck does that happen? How can there be somebody in our comets in Spain, which is like three, 3000 miles or something

[00:30:39] Wendie Huis in t Veld: away from you? let me tell you about that because, pizza is my, accountability buddy.

She has been for years, okay? And we meet each other every Friday morning and we catch up and we, do, a bit of, how are you doing and what's going on in your life? And, yeah, that was the first time I wore a sweater. And this is

[00:31:02] Nathan Wrigley: the second time you dropped the sweater bomb into peaches zoom call.

It was the, the highlight of her wheat. yep. cherry gold. Sorry. Cherry. Good sweater. It's a cherry good sweater. What does that mean? I dunno what a golf clap is or what Cherry is Cherry good a brand. I don't know. I swear I wrote the comment, but I cannot find it. So Maya apparently wrote a comment about the sweater, but it's gone missing.

Patricia, hang tight. We're gonna talk about something Yes. Of yours. She's

[00:31:35] Wendie Huis in t Veld: very interesting.

[00:31:36] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, it's lovely. we're coming to it soon. Yeah. she, likes Wendie as well. She's a little, she's managed to squeeze in an icon of a strawberry. this is going totally off piece, isn't it? But I'm enjoying it, from an old Charlie Sheen movie with his brother Emilio Estevez.

Okay. That's what a golf clap is, I'm guessing. Okey doke. all right, let's see how those events transpire. I'm, I'm a bit nervous to be honest, because I think the WordPress community already is not the biggest thing in the world. And if you put these events and then you make them smaller, I just dunno what that's gonna do for actual physical, real world attendance.

Because getting people to come out for a WordPress event is. Quite hard, but get them come. Yeah. But the thing

[00:32:20] Wendie Huis in t Veld: is, we do have a lot of room for new people that are not currently visiting the events because they might be too afraid or they might not be interested in the topics, and that might come to more niche down events.

[00:32:35] Nathan Wrigley: You are right. You are right. let's wait and see. 20, 24. We'll wait and see what happens during It's an interesting experiment. Yeah, I think so. you've gotta, you've gotta change things as well, haven't you? Once in a while. So let's see how that goes. data liberation. You can find that, by the way, if you wanna look for it, you can go to wordpress.org/data-liberation and you'll be able to find it there.

okay. here we are. Here we are. I said it would be common and it was the next item on the list, yay. Patricia. Patricia, who's in the comments. That's nice. Nice. When you get to have somebody in the comments about something they've written, this is a proposal which Patricia has written.

Off the back of a plugin project. It's bigger than a plugin, really. and it is really revolving around the whole meetup thing. Now, if you're attendee of WordPress, events like WordPress meet ups, you'll have run into meetup, the platform meetup.com. And typically, if you want to run a WordPress event, you have to go through the Meetup platform.

Now, as an end user, that is to say, I show up to events. I've never run an event, so I've never had to administer the backend. But Tim, who's in the comments, Tim Nash was in the other week, and I know a variety of people who do organize it. The universal opinion seems to be that meetup is not great. can I cap encapsulate it like that, Wendie?

Is, it's not great enough, or does it need to go, do I need to be more strong with my language? I.

[00:34:08] Wendie Huis in t Veld: No, not great. It's fine. Okay. So it's, limited. It has, it does what it needs to do. It doesn't have, for example, you can't style your texts. You can't, there is only, you can only add one image. yeah, the basic functionality works pretty well actually.

You can create an event that people can sign up, which is what it's supposed

[00:34:31] Nathan Wrigley: to do, but it's not to everybody's liking and a lot of people seem to dislike it. wouldn't it be great if there was some sort of, I don't know, let's call it a content management system, which could, which could power an alternate?

Oh wait, there is, and it's called WordPress and there's a plugin which has been put together by, and I'm gonna read it off my piece of paper, Mike or Terry, and I suspect there's other people involved in the background, but I'm just gonna mention Mike's name. I did a podcast episode with him, which will be coming out on Wednesday.

All about this

[00:35:05] Wendie Huis in t Veld: project is very involved in

[00:35:06] Nathan Wrigley: this too. Oh, is she? Okay. So Peach as well. That's great. There's probably a list of names, isn't there? a little bit further down, but this is something called Gather Press, and it's basically a WordPress swap out for me top. Now the intention really over the next period of time is to test it out.

And if, I remember what Mike said correctly, the idea is to get people who are running events to do the event in parallel. So have it running on me top, but at the same time run it on gather press and see how it works and move this project forward and then have a decentralized, federated maybe at some point so all of the instances can join together.

And you might just have one login instead of need to log in into the, I dunno, Phoenix or Brighton or Bristol or London Meetup, website. And so the pilot program needs your help. It really looks like a mature project. So here's the benefits, here's the pros and the cons. The benefits are members and attendees.

Data lives on your website and database. Community organizers define privacy policies, selectively publish attendee lists, gather additional data from attendees, et cetera. it fosters democratized access to data as and functionality as WordPress is customizable. It's open source. And you could add a whole bunch of other things to that, couldn't You you could extend the platform yourself if you felt that there was some need for your particular event. You can style it as, as Wendie just said, and they are looking for your help. I will put a link to the show notes, but you can see the page there. Patricia's page proposal pilot program to test gather up on wordpress.org network as a meetup alternative.

So there we go, Patricia. I hope

[00:36:52] Wendie Huis in t Veld: Yeah, I'm definitely gonna sign up. For the meetup that I do in my city

[00:36:57] Nathan Wrigley: every month. So yeah. And run it in parallel.

[00:37:00] Wendie Huis in t Veld: yep. Yeah, just see how it works and see how it goes and contribute to moving away from Meetup and to a more open source, alternative. I think maybe think

[00:37:09] Nathan Wrigley: that would be great.

Yeah. I think throwing into the mix here would be the fact that Meetup was current, just very recently, I dunno, 10 days ago or something. It was announced that it had been acquired by a company called Bending Spoons, who are behind a bunch of SaaS projects. They also acquired Evernote recently and maybe there's some alarm bells there.

you dunno what's gonna happen, will it just sit and gather dust and if it's not profitable they'll junk it. I don't know. But there's that in the mix as well. So Kathy and Rob talk for too long. Sorry. Anything on that?

[00:37:46] Kathy Zant: I think Rob was mentioning before that ever since I. WeWork, I believe. Got, yeah, we, WeWork owned it. Yeah. Yeah. Ever since then, meetup has just been, we've just wondered about the long-term viability of it. and so because of that, I'm really happy to see that we're developing some of our own solutions for our community, and I think that could help other communities as well.

So it's very exciting

[00:38:13] Nathan Wrigley: to see. Yeah,

[00:38:15] Rob Cairns: Rob, I think it's, why aren't we, again, developing these solutions in WordPress? So it's the old, why do you use WooCommerce or not Shopify, why do you use Groundhog and not ConvertKit, that type of solution. And we have an open source and we're democratizing publishing.

So this is ideal just to bring back in-house and develop a solution right inside WordPress to do it.

[00:38:41] Nathan Wrigley: well done. I think, I think, I haven't really paraphrased what Mike said. he really came across as a very thoughtful. Person. And he, there, there has been a lot of thought for a long time, behind this, and I think they've got to the point now where they think they've got something ready to go.

but you can listen to his thoughts on why he would like this to become a thing inside a WordPress. It really does seem like a proper community, endeavor. I didn't, word, he told me the number of dollars that are spent every year on meat up, and I can't remember what it was, but I think it was 230.

I'm gonna, I'm very close when I say this, I think it's $234,000 go from the, the foundation. I don't actually where the money comes from, but in some way, WordPress, the community at large pay 102 hundred and $34,000 to meet up every year. And we have the CMS that could power this. To be done, for our own incentives.

yeah. Okay. There we go. Okay. Let's move on, shall we? Nothing else to add about that. Imagine

[00:39:53] Wendie Huis in t Veld: all the things we could do with that money for the greater good

[00:39:57] Nathan Wrigley: if we, yeah, I'm thinking a water slide in my back garden. That would be pretty good. No. any votes for the water slide in Nathan's.

Okay. No hands, just, no.

[00:40:09] Wendie Huis in t Veld: I've been joking around in getting a pool outside of the Word Camp Europe venue. Just the sun. Yeah, with a inflatable flamingo. And, oh,

[00:40:19] Nathan Wrigley: if you stand next to an inflatable flamingo with that sweater on, ohm there, I'm there. There's this show

[00:40:30] Rob Cairns: title right

[00:40:31] Nathan Wrigley: there. That's right. Oh, it goes off the rails so quickly.

That sounds fun. If anybody can think of a useful way to spend that money, please let me know. Answers on a postcard. I spoke to Michelle Fette. I normally speak to Michelle on Slack, and she's obviously on this show an awful lot as one of the co-hosts, as is Kathy. but she decided to do an episode with me this week all about, Advocating for diversity in the WordPress community is on the WP Tavern website, which will hopefully be coming back to life at some point in the near future. I realize it's ground to a halt from a journalistic point of view, but never fear. The podcast is still there. It's in the main menu.

Look right at the top. Just click on, podcast. And there I am, beaver in a way. And the, the most recent one is me and Michelle having a chat about diversity. Michelle's take on all of this, and she explains her position very thoughtfully, very carefully. And I think you'd be hard pushed to listen to that and not find it a reasonable set of, set of incentives.

and if you've got anything to add to that, I don't suppose you had a chance to listen to it, but if you've got anything you wanna say it now or we'll move on.

[00:41:47] Kathy Zant: Michelle's

[00:41:47] Nathan Wrigley: awesome. Yeah, that'll do it. I agree with, I

[00:41:51] Rob Cairns: second that. So I'm there.

[00:41:53] Nathan Wrigley: There was a really, she wrote about, do you remember when she went to Word Camp in, San Diego Word Camp US in San Diego. And one of the things that really spurred her on was when she, she basically couldn't access various different things in the auditorium.

Not in the auditorium, the hotel and the, yeah, the hotel. And she couldn't get a shower and all this sort of stuff. And I think it, it got the crusader spirit in her. and then she made a bunch of suggestions, which, some people, had one side of an opinion on and some people had another, but then more recently she attended Word Camp Asia and I think it was pretty bowled over by how impressive it had been.

and I think the same could have been said for Word Camp Athens as well. I think she had the same opinion there. Yeah. Okay.

[00:42:42] Kathy Zant: She and I talk pretty often about just disability in general. Just, my husband had a stroke a couple years ago, and so our, crusade is that everyone in the world is one crappy event away from having accessibility be the most important per thing in that person's life.

we owe it to it for, those of us that, went for a run this morning and are having like all of the physical abilities in the world, we owe it to those Yeah. Who don't, to watch out for them and to care for them. So I love that she's crusading on this. Kathy,

[00:43:24] Rob Cairns: it's not just the, I had a stroke or I had a heart attack.

It's even our aging population, like I see with my mom. My mom's 79 years old and there's things that she gets frustrated that she can't do that she could do 10 years ago. And these are just regular tasks and she's in good health, but the reality of it is accessibility's not just about disabilities, it's about everything and our changing bodies and our changing world.

And that's part of it too.

[00:43:58] Kathy Zant: so true. Yeah. my mom aging as well and has had a few incidents with falls and whatnot and In conversations with her, the thing that. she, it just happened overnight. It's like overnight. I lost this, overnight. My balance was gone overnight. It just feels like it happens all at once.

my daughter's been dragging me to the gym and so they make me do physical therapy or physical training. Oh no. Which is great and everything, but Oh my gosh. Even at my age, it's like I can see how balance, like I have to work for it right now and it's, scary how fast it can go. So I love the fact that you're bringing it up about aging populations 'cause Guess what? we're all going there. We're all aging. Yeah. We're all getting older and to set up systems that are supportive for all of us when we get there is really

[00:44:47] Rob Cairns: important. it is simple little things like opening a jar. You know what I mean? Or, my mom went and got a new exercise bike and spent 10 minutes on the bike and then was sore for four days the first time in years.

And then she's saying, I shouldn't be sore for 10 after 10 minutes. And we're like, yeah, you should be. Like, it's, and it's an acceptance factor too, and saying, Hey, I need help versus I'm frustrated. That's part of it as well. So yeah,

[00:45:17] Nathan Wrigley: I've decided I'm not gonna age in 2024. I'm just gonna say no to it.

And yeah, see what

[00:45:23] Wendie Huis in t Veld: I'm going that way as well. See what happens,

[00:45:25] Nathan Wrigley: Not happening this year. Got a feeling. Got a feeling that's not gonna land so well, Courtney, a lovely comment. she said instead of funding the swimming pools, which would be, fantastic from my point of view anyway, let's do something, to pay for the recently announced WC Canada.

That is true. I

[00:45:44] Rob Cairns: didn't know there was second, week of July in Ottawa, Ontario actually. Oh, Canada. Is this Canada? So Canada is

[00:45:51] Nathan Wrigley: brand

[00:45:51] Rob Cairns: new, right? Yeah, it just got announced and just got approved and it was announced on Friday or Thursday,

[00:45:58] Nathan Wrigley: something last week. I missed that one. I dunno how I missed that, but okay.

That's gonna go next week show in that case. So I'm

[00:46:04] Rob Cairns: in candid too, Nathan and I missed it. And thanks to Marcus in a text message. That's how I didn't miss

[00:46:11] Nathan Wrigley: it. So there you go. Ontario.

[00:46:14] Rob Cairns: Yep. In Ottawa, our nation's capital.

[00:46:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. okay. That's great. Okay. All right. In which, oh, all right. Reluctantly, I'll give up the pool and, thank you, Nathan.

[00:46:27] Wendie Huis in t Veld: Yeah, I'll bring my own inflatable flamingo. I'll be fine.

[00:46:32] Rob Cairns: Just bring the sweater too,

[00:46:33] Nathan Wrigley: Wendie. It was a soft thing to, to give up, but I can take one for the team. Oh, dear. Okay, moving on. Let's, so we were just talking about meet ups and the fact that it might be a nice idea to, to build meet ups on a different platform, but for now what we've got is still meet ups.

And so let's talk about one, which is coming up, which I'm encouraging people to get involved with. developer. Developer hours. This is coming up on February the 27th. 2024. So you've got a whole month, but you can sign up now. It's gonna be just in Tadlock and Ryan Welcher, talking about how to build modern layouts with WordPress blocks.

There's not a lot more to say about that other than there it is. you can find it on me. top.com. Alrighty. okay. Still on events. We've got a lot of event talk today. Word Camp Asia. Need, contributor day help. dear listener, if you don't, if you've never attended a Word camp or before, typically one of the days, either before or after the main two day event is this thing called contributor day.

And you show up and you often have to get a ticket. It's, free, right? But you, have to get one. 'cause places are limited and they need to know how much food to put out. Although that sometimes doesn't work and loads more people show up and have to halve the food and all that, which is fun. The, but the, yeah.

was that in Porto? I think yes. Instead of 300 people showing off. So excited that, so the food had to be eked out, which was. Quite a nice thing to, to do for each other. The, anyway, so WordCamp Asia, have obviously got their contributor day, but it does look like they're in need of a little bit of help, getting the table lead sorted out.

And what they need is somebody who can be the facilitator of the community table. So this is a real one. If if you're not into code but you like community, this could be for you. It says the table lead will be the facilitator of the community table. Community table often has various topics to discuss and work on.

for example, your role would include some of the following things. Onboarding new contributors who are interested in the community team facilitate a topic that could be or proposed, to be discussed during WordCamp Asia. Help us create a recap of what was discussed during this event and meet ups in WordCamp orientation and budget reviews.

You can see it on the screen, but yeah, it feels like maybe there's, I dunno, maybe somebody stepped down or really don't know, or maybe they just never managed to fill that gap, but, they want that gap. It's

[00:49:12] Wendie Huis in t Veld: always hard for, for most word camps, especially the bigger ones where they have loads of tables to find enough table leads available to actually take on the role.

It's

[00:49:25] Nathan Wrigley: do you have any intuition? Wendie as to how much or to Europe

[00:49:28] Wendie Huis in t Veld: we

[00:49:28] Nathan Wrigley: struggle as well. Oh, do you have any intuition as to how much time you like, is that a quite a lengthy, if you volunteered for that role, do you have any sort of rough idea of the amount you'd need to put in?

[00:49:41] Wendie Huis in t Veld: Yeah, it would be the entire contributor day because you will be, leading the conversation and wrapping up and getting on stage and sharing the results and onboarding new people and getting them in Meetup so they can organize their own local meetups. yeah, so it is, you will be quite busy during contributor day.

[00:50:06] Nathan Wrigley: What about the bits and the pieces prior? Do you have to show up to a lot of Zoom meetings and things like that? 'cause obviously you wouldn't be able to just show up on contributor day and lead the table. I guess there'd be a lot in the background. I don't think

[00:50:17] Wendie Huis in t Veld: so. I think, I don't really know what is, I think it also differs per team.

so that might be a good question for the comments on that post. yeah. Okay. Someone who is involved can answer, because I don't really know this,

[00:50:32] Nathan Wrigley: show, this show it, it's rare that we get somebody from that part of the world commenting on, that's not true. It does happen, but it's the, that the bit of the day where we're all awake has been and gone a bit.

but if there is anybody from that part of the world who has any intuitions in that, or indeed have just, done that kind of a role before and you wanna put in your 5 cents, please feel free. Okay. Rob, earlier was talking about ai. I'm gonna model up the order a little bit, our panelists, and tell me what you make of this team.

So my position on AI is, I've no idea. maybe it'll be the death of us all. Maybe it'll be the best thing that's ever happened. I'm not sure. But Elementor, you know them, right? The page builder, giant user base, truly. Enormous user base. They have, they've come up with a new thing and it's, it's called web-based containers with ai.

Now, forgive me, I'm not gonna do this justice, but I'm gonna try and explain it in the best way that I can. so the idea is that you build rows, if you like containers. So just think of a horizontal row with all of the bits, like a header or I don't know, a call to action or a contact form, or I dunno, a batos row or something like that.

And the idea is that you, put in, you go to the Elemental website that you've got, you add in a URL of something that you've seen online, that you like the look of. you then highlight the section that you wish to reference so that it's not doing the entire page. I want Elementor to. Give me something akin to this.

once you've done that, you write a little prompt as you always do with ai, giving it some more, knowledge about what it is that you want to come out. So on the screen they're saying Adapt, adapt this for a home decal website. And then you basically push a button, the AI overlords go into overtime, do some stuff.

nobody actually knows what they do, but they do things and then they spit out three designs for you to pick. And you say that one or that one. And maybe there's a way to do it all again if if it didn't come out. So that's the premise of it. So it's like a real shortcut to seeing something that you like an Elementor, presumably with the layouts and the different capabilities they've got for designing things, they build that in the background for you to mimic it.

Now. I don't know what I make of this from a technological point of view. I think it's brilliant. What a great idea. Like just whoever conceived that and then thought actually we can do it that is just technically brilliant. My concern is that, is it theft? No, that's too strong. I don't mean that.

Is it too easy? Are we, is it just making life too easy? Are we cutting out the design chops that you need? I, don't know. What, do you guys think? it's definitely brilliant, but I'm just not sure whether I. W what I think about it. I'm being a curmudgeon. I apologize. Right over to you.

Take it from me and

[00:53:47] Rob Cairns: tell me. Can I jump in there, Nathan? Yeah, please do. Throw my 2 cents out. So I do think it's brilliant. I think the whole tech around AI is brilliant. So what we gotta remember right off the top is AI tools or tools to help us do our business. And any tool can be used properly or misused.

So keep that in mind. So the way I sit is I can just see the copyright issues coming outta this. Like nothing like people grabbing websites, designers saying, oh, I'm just gonna grab this website 'cause it looks good. Here you go. Here's your a thousand dollars. And we know in the media industry right now, the New York Times is involved in a pile of AI lawsuits right now with, open AI and Microsoft.

And the reason these suits are going on is they're testing the waters to see where we all stand. And the problem is, I don't know, with a tool like this, like you've, frankly, if you say, grab my website and then sell that as your own, I consider that theft. So there is that problem too. So it's what do we do with using the tool properly to.

The whole copyright, theft, misuse part. that's where I sit. Yeah.

[00:55:08] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting. Okay. To

[00:55:11] Kathy Zant: me, it takes all the fun outta building websites.

[00:55:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

There is that. Yeah. Yeah, It's interesting, isn't it? I genuinely haven't a clue which way I need to sit on this. I'm it is almost like I am sitting on the fence.

I am, because I can't commit to whether I think it's good or bad. There's some bit of me which thinks no, that we shouldn't be doing this because we're just mimicking designs. But then don't we do that already? And in fact we just, we find a bit of a website that we like and we mimic it, but we have to build it ourselves.

And obviously, this whole debate 10 years ago was these page builders. What a stupid idea. No, let's do it the WordPress way. We'll use all these lovely template files and we'll get really good at PHP and we'll be fabulous at doing all of that. And. now we've got all these tools and we can't imagine letting go of them and the block editors enabling all of this and all these suites of blocks.

yeah. Kathy,

[00:56:08] Rob Cairns: can you see the security issues coming outta this? I'm looking at comments and we got both Tom Reef and in there as well, and you and I on the panel and I'm already thinking. If you move all this code, what security issues are gonna happen with all this code? I, it just boggles my mind, right?

[00:56:30] Kathy Zant: Yeah. they're just, what, are they doing? They're just basically view source and taking the raw H-T-M-L-S-C-S-S and, then building off of that. the thing, when I first built websites, the coolest thing was to come across something new and say, how did they do this? And looking at the source code.

Oh yeah. And then, can I do this myself? Yeah. and so there was like this creative, can I take this innovative new design and can I do this myself? Can I build this out myself to, to say, Hey, ai, can you go take this design and build it? It takes that fun, that creativity that, That spark of wanting to learn something new and gives it to a machine to do, and you lose out on the ability to, because when you take something that somebody else has done, I remember when I was first designing and there was this, guy who was, he did stuff with frames really creatively, and I wanted to see could I do this too?

And so I built out this really funky website using all these frames and everything, and. I couldn't, I didn't build what he built, I built based on the creativity that was spurred from investigating how he did it and taking it to the next level, and then adding my own creativity to it. Just taking something from someplace else and saying, do this, it's so completely boring.

It's stifles innovation. It stifles creativity. You have to add something back to it. And every conversation I have with chat, GPT ends up with, you almost had it there, but I'm adding my own to It it has to be, if you just let elementary AI just copy it, it doesn't do anything for you.

It doesn't spur your own growth as a creator, as a developer, as a designer. So I would say that if you're gonna do something like this, find out how you inject yourself back into the end project. Otherwise. Otherwise we're doomed otherwise. What's the fun of that? Just,

[00:58:31] Nathan Wrigley: I like that answer. Yeah, that's you've, encapsulated a lot of what I think there, that works for me and, but I, think the, bit which I find weird here, which I've done, maybe this has happened in other cases, but I, can't remember it.

The bit that I find here is you are being actively told to go out and find other websites so that you can mimic that bit of their website, which, it's fine, but that, oh, I don't know. I'm still confused. I'm still confused, but I agree. There's something about the learning, something about hollowing out the, way that you get into this career.

So when we all did it, I say we, I'm gonna assume that all of us are like, we're older than 25. Can we all agree to that? Yeah. Okay. we're older than four Me. Yeah. I, went low, but, the, but you had to, you, literally had to learn it, right? you, there were a few books that were out on web design, but the curiosity came from doing it all.

And there's a whole generation of people who've had that level of curiosity and then got picked themselves up, taught themselves or been through some sort of college program or something. And I do wonder if these tools are hollowing out that base layer of the industry where in 10 years time we're gonna turn around and say, where are all the people?

that we need with all the really difficult skills. they haven't come through because they got, they just got hijacked at the bottom level, if that makes sense. So it's almost you've taken the bottom row of the pyramid out and you're just waiting for it to collapse again, bit of a doom, mony sort of approach there, but that's.

That's the bit that confuses me.

[01:00:15] Rob Cairns: The biggest with problem with these starting. Go ahead Kathy. Sorry. Yeah, I was just gonna say,

[01:00:18] Kathy Zant: starting with the blank screen is terrible. It's terrible. You need something right to inspire you. Yeah. So you need to take from other people's creativity and then add yourself into, I'm not saying like the blank screen and then some lightning bolt comes out of the sky and you're automatically like an HTML genius and writing all of the CSS.

No, your inspiration's gonna come from somewhere. But don't make the mach if you give too much away to the machine, you lose out on the ability to learn, you lose out on your own inspiration because it's not until you're in there fighting with, fighting with CSS and gosh darn it, I'm putting important in there because I'm not gonna fight with this anymore.

Yeah, It's not until you do that kind of stuff. That going through the hard stuff is where inspiration and where creativity happens. If you make it too easy for yourself, you lose out.

[01:01:12] Wendie Huis in t Veld: But isn't that exactly the difference between, oh, sorry, Rob, you, you were first. Go ahead. It's okay. Go ahead.

Go ahead. Isn't that exactly the difference between the people that grinded to get to know how WordPress worked and how it, how you could tweak it and the people that bought a theme somewhere and just filled it? Yes.

[01:01:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. Yeah, that's a, an important point as well. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:01:35] Wendie Huis in t Veld: Okay. the people that are interested in, in, in working with this, who wanna copy exactly like it was, will do that anyway.

If they have the option, and they do now with Elementor and probably with other tools, the people that wanna learn and wanna tweak it and wanna adjust it just a little bit, they will grind it out and they will find the tools to, and the technique and the knowledge they will and they will surface as the next people, building the agencies and building the

[01:02:07] Nathan Wrigley: WordPress.

I think you are right. I think I'm being a bit of a snob. I think on some level I'm being a bit protective of the industry that I'm in, and I'm of an age where change is. Alarming, right? Yep. Because you are, it's hard, especially, when you get to over 25 like I am, you get a little bit set in your ways, don't you?

And new things come along and you just think, yep. so maybe I need to address that. Peter makes a good point in the comment though. She says that, okay, so just because you copied and pasted in effect a solution from somebody else's website that was tailored hopefully by a pro to work in their business, it probably won't work in your business.

good point. That's an interesting point. yeah. Sorry Rob, did you get your say? Yeah, no,

[01:02:57] Rob Cairns: that's okay. the biggest problem here is if we copy and paste and we don't understand how to do things, and we create this whole new generation of designers, and I saw this in my support career. How do you work yourself out of a problem?

If you're a somebody coming up and all you know is AI and how to copy and paste, you don't know how to troubleshoot. You don't know how to work out a WordPress site that's not working properly. And this is a problem. I saw this 15 years ago in support. Kids are being taught linear, and the minute you throw a curve ball in the middle, they look at you and say, excuse me, I'm stuck.

You think they were stuck 15 years ago? They're gonna be stuck now because they're not gonna have that foundation. They don't know how to install WordPress from scratch. Remember the five minute install that we all

[01:03:45] Nathan Wrigley: did? Oh yeah. That a five minutes.

[01:03:48] Rob Cairns: Yeah. But the point I'm making is if they don't have fundamentals, the tools are great, but you still gotta have a base.

[01:03:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. It was interesting about, about 10 years ago in the uk the, UK government decided that the children, through going through the schooling system, were basically being taught how to use products. In their computer science classes. So they were being taught how to manipulate data in spreadsheets, and they were taught how to, I don't know, use word documents and things.

That's not very grandiose, but you get the point. It was, here's a product that's already built, let's just get really good at that. And then some brightspark thought, no, this is crazy. We should be teaching 'em how to code. And so they ripped up that manual, and then they just went all like into Raspberry Pi and coding.

And I honestly, I don't know how that's worked out because presumably that generation had just starting to come through into the job market. But it was interesting that they thought that using tools wasn't enough. You needed a more foundational. Technical knowledge so that when something couldn't be achieved with the tools that you've got, you could build the tool and yeah.

And it feels a little bit like maybe this is, it's a different audience like Wendie says,

[01:05:08] Wendie Huis in t Veld: yeah. And I think that is al always the case. There are people who are interested enough to find out how to build the tools and there is the big bulk of people who don't really care.

They just wanna have it look like the way they want it to look. And they copy, they feel extremely satisfied with copy pasting, whatever is already around.

[01:05:28] Nathan Wrigley: I'm gonna throw in a curve ball. So this wasn't meant to be in the show, but it feel, feels like this conversation is just perfect. So since 2016, I've done this podcast with David Worsley.

Great. Great stuff we've done. I don't know. You AIed him. He was never real. That's what I've gotta tell you. He was never real, he was always a figment of my imagination. I can do his voice really well. No, I always

[01:05:53] Wendie Huis in t Veld: figured

[01:05:54] Nathan Wrigley: because Nathan at the,

[01:05:57] Wendie Huis in t Veld: who could imagine those two names together?

[01:06:00] Nathan Wrigley: so he's decided that he doesn't want to use a CMS anymore. And he came to me and he said, should we do another podcast? So this has got nothing to do with WP Builds, but I'll put it on the screen. 'cause it's interesting. We've decided to, we've launched a podcast called the No Script Web Show, and it's basically about teaching ourselves the things that we should have learned over the last 10 years that we haven't learned because we've allowed ourselves to become.

De-skilled. So we've recorded three episodes so far. Really all that we've done is we've laid the groundwork and what it boils down to is browsers, html, CSS, that's it. and that's gonna be the endeavor. And this website, which is very, Spartan. Each episode that we do, we're gonna add a bit to the website based upon what we've learned during the course of that episode, if So if we touch on something like, oh, I dunno, how do you implement it so that you can do like mode and dark mode, with a toggle using just CSS. Then we'll add that to the website and what have you. And it is completely flat. It's H-T-M-L-C-S-S. It's built without, a CMS at all. And we've managed to do, like I said, three episodes so far.

And we've mapped out the first 12 things like color options, web images, CSS, activity, typography, and you can find it at no script show. There's a plug. I'm sorry. You're totally unstoppable.

[01:07:38] Kathy Zant: I love it.

[01:07:40] Nathan Wrigley: I don't think it'll be fun. I really

[01:07:42] Wendie Huis in t Veld: like the angle of it. I am definitely gonna listen to it. But also, Nathan, how many podcasts are you gonna create?

[01:07:52] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, 85 I think is my target. no, this one's great because, half of the battle I'm doing a podcast is finding the right person. I. I think, yeah, if you're gonna do it as a co-host thing, and him and I just get along so well. it's just not a chore. It's just so straightforward and easy and he really is on a mission to learn this stuff.

So I'm the poor relation in this, in that he's learning. He's then teaching me on the show and then building the website. So I'm learning vicariously through the podcast, but it has been really interesting. Anyway. There you go. No script show. I can't tell you that the website is in any way. Perfect. It's very basic at the moment 'cause we've hardly done anything but man alive.

The stuff that is coming down the CSS spec, it's awesome. what the browser will be able to do with just CSS and HTML is gonna be pretty incredible. wow. Especially complicated layouts with grid and. All of that kind of stuff. So anyway, there you go. so what have we got? We got a few more comments.

James Kemp's joining us. He says, hi there James. I'm picturing Frankenstein's webpage. if they're using AI to design sections on a single page, will they be cohesive? And that's a good point. Yeah. will I consider how to get the information across in the most cohesive way. Yeah, that's a really good point.

You can imagine like a layer cake of just totally contrasting designs with different color palettes and fonts. And maybe they've thought of that and they've got like a limited color palette. I don't know. But that's a really good point. And Atif says, as much as I agree, where is the line? I grew up in an era where you bought a pc, you had to assemble it literally.

but this is not the scene today. Is it relevant or needed? I'm not sure. good point. yep. Okay. Keep the comments, comment, enjoying it, and let's move on. I've forgotten where we are now. Where did we get to? Okay, here we go. We'll go to these two. I dunno if these are new. but I found this on Search Engine Journal, which is not a website I typically go perusing around an awful lot.

But the article is entitled WordPress Release is Two Plugins for Speeding Up Webpages. And I thought, that's curious. I haven't heard anything about this. So I explored a little bit more and I'm just gonna scroll to the bit that matters. and here we are, the two new performance plugins, auto size for lazy loaded images and speculation rules.

Okay. the auto size for lady loaded images makes perfect sense to me. I think, great. We all understand what that is. This one though, what the heck? This is so intriguing and a little bit weird at the same time. And I didn't even know this existed. So there's a thing, I think it's called the speculation, API, oh, I can't find it now.

I'm gonna go with speculation. API. And it is a tooling, which I think is combined in some way with the browser. It must be. And it tries to figure out what you are gonna do next on the web. Please come into the comments and put me straight, all guests just correct me. So you load a webpage and then it makes judgments about where is the next most likely place for you to go.

And then it starts to preload those assets. So on the one hand, I think that's great. That's speeding up the internet for me. On the other hand, I'm thinking that's lousy for the environment 'cause I'm now loading a load of assets that I may never need. So anyway, here they are, on the search engine journal website.

I dunno what your thoughts on that are, but yeah, there you go.

[01:11:27] Wendie Huis in t Veld: Yeah. For me this is more scary than copying webpages content in ai. if somebody starts, imagining where I'm gonna go and already load that, yeah, no, not happy

[01:11:43] Nathan Wrigley: with that. It says the speculation rules plugin leverages the speculation rules, API in order to download the resources of webpages that a user is likely to request.

The speculation rules plugin essentially predicts that a page will be requested and will be, will begin pre rendering the webpage before a user clicks a link. I'll go keep going a little bit 'cause it'll add some depth to it. uses of the speculation. API to pre-render link URLs upon hover by default.

That's interesting. So you hover on something and the browser puts up a little window showing you what the website would look like. Dunno if I need that, but Okay. I can see it might be useful there. The. Excuse me, the speculation rules. API is a feature designed to improve the performance of web browsing by allowing webpages to provide hints to the browser about the potential links that a user might click to navigate to a different webpage.

The browser can then prefetch or pre-render resources based on the likelihood of a visitor clicking a link to navigate to a new webpage. And then there's all sorts of developer documentation from Mozilla and also the Chrome team. So we could get into the weeds, but I didn't. I just thought it was an interesting proposition, but personally, if that was an option, I will be switching it off.

'cause I just don't like the idea of something being loaded just for the environment as much as anything else. But also I don't know where that, like where's the prediction coming from? Is it based upon my previous, previous history on that website? Like for example, if I go to the bbc.co UK website, I always click news.

That's the first link I go to. So would it always just preload that knowing, oh, you've done this before, this is typically what Nathan does, so let's preload that and then I wanna know who's keeping that, who's keeping that data about what I typically do. so here's Ross probably to save the day, right?

Okay, here we go. Ross. Wintel in the uk. Developer in the uk There's still a subset of team culture that, oh, sorry, he was on the previous one. So we'll come back to you. Ross, apologies you're watching a few minutes behind. Let's go back to this. What do you think

[01:13:46] Kathy Zant: if, my website. Performance issues, are so bad or so slow that I need this to like, predict what my users are going to be doing.

I think maybe I'd wanna solve the fundamental performance issues first. Yeah. This seems, it just seems too much, it's like putting a bandaid on a wound that needs sutures, And hoping that it just heals on its own. It, if, there's a problem with the site's performance, solve those things first.

Make sure, there's some generic performance, recommendations that I think we can all make. I, it just, seems like too much. It seems

[01:14:29] Wendie Huis in t Veld: yeah, it sounds even worse. It sounds like just, there's a wound in the body somewhere and just randomly stitching up something because, that might just be where the wound is.

Yeah. We see blood, we start stitching an arm because, Yeah, that might be where the blood is coming from.

[01:14:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. I dunno. It's conflicting, isn't it? It says here that you need, for, at the moment you need, at least Chrome 121. Gosh, yeah. Is that where we're at, for this to work?

And it says that users that visit a site whilst using a different browser that do not support the speculation rules, API won't be affected in any way. It will be rendered as it normally would, and then it goes on. The plugging documentation says, by default, the plugin is configured to pre-render WordPress front end URLs when the browser hovers over a relevant link.

This can be customized by the speculation rules under the settings, settings, and then reading A filter can be used to exclude certain URL path from being eligible for prefetching and pre rendering. Alternatively, you can add the no pre-render CSS class to any link. Great. More things to add, that should not be pre-rendered.

Okay, Rob, I had an intuition. You were about to say something. Sorry if I interrupted. Oh, it's

[01:15:48] Rob Cairns: okay. And I am, so we're doing all the, I agree with Kathy, by the way, 100%. And, but we're also doing all these speculation rules and isn't that in essence going to increase the overhead on a website? So if you've got a badly performing website, oh, and now we're increasing the overhead, isn't it gonna perform worse?

I just, I gotta wonder, because the more we do with APIs, the worse the performance gets, the worse the GT metric scores get. And then where are we? That's my 2

[01:16:20] Nathan Wrigley: cents. Yeah. I, I don't really have any intuitions. I really should make more of an effort to understand the underlying technology of it.

It's okay. Maybe thank, maybe that's, yeah, maybe that's something that we can do, in the future, but yeah. Yeah. Okay. So anyway, there you go. It's, I dunno where it's gonna pop up. This and where you're gonna get that plugin from, whether it's gonna go into core or what don't know, but, okay. Let's go back to the subject that we had a minute ago.

Pete says the sweater, Pete's joining us. Ah, thank you, Pete. He's saying, time to change. The WP Builds podcast thumbnail. Yes. Because you know that traitorous David Worsley has left me. And, it needs to be, we needs to be expunged on the, website, on the homepage. I did, get rid of it.

It used to say with David Wamsley here, and then right at the bottom it used to say David, sorry, removed him from all of those places the

[01:17:15] Rob Cairns: same way you expunged Paul Ey

[01:17:17] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, don't even, traitor. I, but David said we should set up a traitors page on the, website and feature him and Paul Acey. we're still very good friends, all of us.

okay, let's go back to previous things. so we're back to the Elementor, AI wizard stuff. Even if you copy a good design, you'll have to adapt it to your own needs, and you need to understand UX content and content design in order to be able to do that. Not to mention. Accessibility. Okay. I guess the fear picture for me is that these AI tools begin to get good at those things as well in the future.

we could be facing a, thing where it can, make some of those intelligent decisions as well. And then there's still a subset. So this is going back to the computer teaching, I think in schools in the uk. Ross is from the UK by the way. there's still a subset of team culture that's into building tech and coding and the resources available now are amazing.

You should see what kids are doing with Minecraft. Scratch. And micro bit. yeah, so obviously Minecraft, we all know what that's capable of, but Scratch is like a program where you can add in little jigsaw pieces and make a set of code and it all goes in this sort of like linear fashion down the page you can do what, ifs and loops and all of that kind of stuff.

It's fun, it's really good. and then he says Raspberry Pi. Oh, of course. Yeah. Raspberry Pi and the game dev tools that are now available combined with YouTube and retro gaming culture. There's plenty of builders and hacking around. That's great. and if you want a co-host put out and ad auditions.

I'm, saying nothing. I'm, saying nothing, but it's in hand is all I'm saying. I'm, I've just said something. What the heck? I said I wasn't gonna say anything, then I said something. but I've got intuitions as to how 2024 is gonna look, minus the traitors. I milk that joke for everything it's worth.

Let's move on, shall we? And let's talk about this. Oh, this is a shame. I don't like things like this. opera in the day, fabulous browser. I had a Windows based phone. when it had that, like the little stylus and the teeny tiny keyboard. I loved that phone. It was great. And it had the best browser in the world on it.

And it was called Opera Mini, and it would pre-render because mobile phones were. Rubbish, looking at websites back then, it would pre-render it and send you an image of what the website looked like. It was really cool. It was really clever. but if this article is to be believed, and I say that 'cause I don't know the truth of it, if this article is to be believed, then you would probably want to stop using the opera browser because it, it would appear that at the moment, really, it has been bought out and sold several times, and it's now really owned by a venture capital firm.

A venture capital firm. Again, caveat mTOR, if the article is true. and now making money with what could only be described as really bad loan scheme apps, to keep the company afloat. So they are targeting, parts of the developing world and saddling people there with debt. And if any of that is true, if any of that turns out to be true, then I think the culture here is gone.

the day when they were a viable alternative, they got eaten up by Mozilla, they got eaten by Chrome, but rather than call it a day, they decided that they would keep the business going. But anyway, it's a horrible thought. I don't really ever wanna say those words, but maybe it's time to move on from.

From opera. I'll put the link to this in the show notes. It's from a website called Spacebar News. but it came to me, on good authority, but we'll have to see if that's true. But that's weird, isn't it? That's a yeah. sad piece of news if that's actually true. anybody want to comment on that?

just growl into the mic, like naughty, naughty opera. okay. Paul Hoff Penny's here to save the day about the speculation rules. API speculation, no, can't even say it. Speculation rules. Plugin is pretty cool. Okay. He loves it. similar to how we prefetch fonts and other items when rendering, the likelihood is that you will click on a link.

You hover over so it saves, so it's saving load time. Okay. Maybe there's a piece of the puzzle that we didn't understand. This is based upon some intent because of hover. Just hover. If you go for one second over a link or something, you are likely to be using it. All right. Okay. if

[01:22:06] Wendie Huis in t Veld: you're using your mouse like me,

[01:22:09] Nathan Wrigley: like,

that the whole time, yeah.

You're load everything. You're just loading everything. No, it'd be really, I bet you the math in there would be really interesting. I bet there's some metric of, like whether it's a 10th of a second or a 20th of a second or something. Some little granular bit of math, which, anyway, thank you Paul.

I appreciate the comment. That's great. Thank you for, letting us know that. Yeah.

[01:22:30] Wendie Huis in t Veld: Also, what would be interesting, I am now learning to use the mouse with my left hand because I had some pain in my right arm and my mouse, behavior is completely different.

[01:22:43] Nathan Wrigley: I'm gonna try that right now. I'm gonna try you.

I've never ever done it. Okay. Oh, that's really bad.

Wow. That's, that is hard. I'm like giving it, I'm going at a 10th of the speed I normally would and I'm terrified of clicking on something. I think we should all try that. that is weird. Anyway, sorry. Carry on. I apologize. Yeah,

[01:23:06] Wendie Huis in t Veld: that was it. it's just so if you have predictions then, and especially predictions on my normal behavior, this is what Wendie would do in case of your BBC visit, what Nathan would do.

Wendie has their, her preferences too. but now the thing is completely. Mixed up because I'm using my other hand. Yeah, you've, it makes no sense.

[01:23:30] Nathan Wrigley: You've just downloaded all the internet, because you got That is really interesting. I love doing, I love injecting things into my life, which make me aware of how rubbish I am as soon as my default structure is torn to pieces.

You ever done that thing where you cell a tape, like you sticky tape your thumb so that you can't use it? My kids came back from school one day and they did it at school. It's an experiment. Just take your thumb out of the picture, like just wrap some tape around it, 10 minutes and you will suddenly realize like how everything needs the thumb.

so there you go. I've given you, I've given you homework and I've made Wendie sneeze. That was such a, I'm allergic

[01:24:14] Wendie Huis in t Veld: for experiments like that.

[01:24:15] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. Just right. Not use the thumb the heck. Okay, let's move on. We're onto the last couple of things. We're running out time and these are you, these are submitted by Kathy and Wendie.

Let's go here first. This is, Wendie's one. I wanted to raise a little shout out for Word Camp Europe. Was there a specific reason?

[01:24:36] Wendie Huis in t Veld: No, there is always a reason to shout out for Word Camp Europe. tickets are, up, they are available. And if I'm not mistaken, we are getting the new design, in the coming, I don't know, days, week, maybe.

So that is, coming up, which is, super exciting. And there are two things I wanna point out. The call for volunteers is still open, so if you're interested in volunteering at work in Europe. don't forget to apply. And, the call for, next year's hosting City is also open. So if you are part of a community that is active in organizing WordPress events in Europe, and you are interested in hosting Word Camp Europe, go to the website, find the information.

We have, office hours every Tuesday where you can, talk with one of the people that is, on the team for selecting. And, you can get more information and you can also, apply if you're interested.

[01:25:39] Nathan Wrigley: I'm gonna nominate my back garden with flamingos and swimming pools. Everybody's gonna want.

Yeah. I don't

[01:25:45] Wendie Huis in t Veld: know how happy your family is gonna be with two to 3000 people in your back garden.

They're

[01:25:51] Nathan Wrigley: going on holiday while trying to just dispatch them to somewhere with a real swimming pool and, real water slides. okay. Thank you. So WordCamp Europe, it's, boy, these things creep up on you.

It feels like just last week that we were talking about where it was gonna be and now it's in Torino, 13th to the 15th of June, 2024. And Wendie said, if you scroll down a little bit, the still, a need for volunteers. And so keep your eye on the site and see how the design changes as well. And the other one, oh, sorry, Wendie.

Carry on.

[01:26:24] Wendie Huis in t Veld: Yeah, no, it's, I'm super excited. I've always already seen a preview of the new site and it's so nice. It's so nice,

[01:26:32] Nathan Wrigley: nice. And this one word, camp Phoenix. This is from Kathy. What have you got about this?

[01:26:40] Kathy Zant: Word, camp Phoenix is a very special event. I was an organizer there for a couple of years pre pandemic and when I lived in the Valley, it is a unique event in that speakers come from all over the place.

it's one of the core. Even though it's a local Word camp, it feels like one of the core word camps for the entirety of the United States. First of all, Phoenix, February, Hey, it is the best time to go. Don't go in July. the weather's perfect and the speaker lineup, if I may say so myself, I am speaking.

but there are an immense number of really intelligent and inspiring speakers that are going to be there. It, the topic areas typically are more cutting edge and more, not entirely technical, but like last year I spoke there and talked about pass keys and there's a number of talks that are much more forward thinking.

They're less beginner oriented, so I just wanted to highlight it for the entirety of the WordPress community. If you wanna go to a word camp that is top tier word, camp Phoenix is the place to be. And I hope to see you

[01:27:53] Nathan Wrigley: there. Yeah, it's happening soon. it says ninth to the 10th of Feb, so really soon, like in a couple of weeks or 10 days or something.

Looks like there's two, two tracks. One called the classroom track, I guess that's more workshoppy. and then there's the auditorium track, which I guess is a bit more, delivery of speeches by, presenters and so on. And there, you are. Look, the remote work survival guide Kathy Zanne. Yeah, she's gonna be there on the ninth of Feb at 10 30 morning.

You show my scars. Say again.

[01:28:25] Kathy Zant: I'm gonna say show all my scars of 20 years of remote work.

[01:28:29] Nathan Wrigley: Can

I just, totally hijack the conversation again? Of course. I can't understand passkey, I just don't get it. Like I'm, I, what the heck? No matter I don't know where they are, or, at least with my password manager, there it is.

And I've got everything in that little vault and, but the passkey thing, I seem to have. I dunno, browsers pop up and say, you've got a passkey. And I try it and it doesn't work. Is that the future? Is that where we're going? Kathy Passkey for all the things we're go,

[01:29:00] Kathy Zant: we're going passwordless, it's everybody.

Passwords obviously have a lot of issues with them. there's some services like, Stripe has passkey as a second factor. Instead of a two FA code, you have to dig out, you still have your password, but you have a passkey as a second factor. and the, I have a video on this, on my YouTube channel.

[01:29:20] Nathan Wrigley: I'll send it to you. Okay. That's where we're going. All your questions? Yeah. Okay. Okay. that's perfect. That kind of rounded out nicely. So we'll go to Kathy's website. I'll try. Let me just write that down. I will, I'll link it into the show notes. PAs. Okay. There we go. On my high tech piece of flattened tree with a pen.

That's it. That's, all we've got time for, I think. Just a couple of comments just before we end. The first one is from Courtney to say you can turn it off in the browser. That whole speculation API, you can turn it off in the browser. I hope it's turned off by default. I want to know that's not on by default.

And Courtney says she'll see you there. She's going Awesome. We will see Courtney, in Phoenix. That's all we've got time for. Thank you so much. Loads of nice comments. I appreciate that. That was very you to give all the, comments. That was really lovely. So thank you to Kathy's aunt thank you to Rob Cairns, and thank you to Wendie.

Wendie, justWendiendy. Wendie, that's what it's gonna be from now on the double. Wendie. I appreciate you coming on the show and giving up your time so freely. I really, do appreciate it. Thanks to all the commenters. It just remains for me to ask everybody to humiliate themselves by raising their hands and yay, they look at you all just loving it.

That's great. We will see you this time next week with another panel of guests. For now, thank you so much for joining us and yeah, like I say, we'll be back next week. Take it easy. Bye.