This Week in WordPress #285

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode number 285.

Entitled. $10 will buy you the world. It was recorded on Monday the 5th of February, 2024. My name's Nathan Wrigley and I'll be joined this week by my cohost, Michelle Frechette. But also by Colin Devroe and Marc Benzakein, it is a WordPress podcast. So yeah, we're going to talk about WordPress.

We talk about the 6.4 0.3 security release, and there's lots to say about that. Then we get into what's coming in 6.5 and when it's coming, gather press is an initiative to replace meetup.com for WordPress events. We hear what the panel think about meetup and whether or not it should be replaced word com Asia, what are some of the bits and pieces that you need to. To know if your attending, including some of the things that you might need to know so that you don't offend people during your trip. We also get into the outreach program and what's happening there. And after a tweet that I put out, what one word would you use to sum up the word, press community. The developer docs come under some inspection because there's some brand new bits that have been launched over there. The playground now supports multi-site my new podcast.

No script.show is inspected. And we also talk about some of the bits and pieces that some of our guests have brought along as well. And it's all coming up 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, hello. Good afternoon, good morning, good evening, whatever other goods there are. It is episode number 285 of this week in WordPress, and I'm joined as you can see by a whole panel of fabulous people. we'll start off with my co-host, down, where is it? Roughly? There in the corner. Down corner.

How you doing, Michelle? I am good. How are you? Yeah, really, good. Michelle has a wonderful bio, and it goes like this. Michelle Frechette is the director of Community Engagement for Stella WP at LiquidWeb. In addition to her word work at Stella, WP Michelle is the podcast barista at WP Coffee Talk.

Co-founder of Underrepresented in Tech's, creator of WP Speakers, creator of WP Career pages contributor post status co-host of the WP Motivate podcast co-host. I'm breathing now co-host of the Audacity Marketing podcast, host of WP Constellations podcast. You do more podcasts than I do, author I know.

Yeah. Author and frequent organizer and speaker at WordPress events will have a lot to say about them later. She lives in Rochester or outside, I should say, of Rochester, New York, where she is an avid nature photographer. And the final URL if you wanna learn more about Michelle, is meet Michelle. Online.

Thank you so much for coming back yet again as our co-host today. Good to be here. Yeah. Thank you. Also, first time appearance. By now, forgive me, I'm gonna try to get this right because I know that your name is not pronounced in the way that I probably would've said it. First off, Carlin Devereux.

Perfect. Yes, head in, just 'cause you wrote it out phonetically for me. But, there's Carlin Devereux, he's been work as part of the WordPress community since it was formed from B two Cafe log. So right at the start. Good grief. That's pretty amazing. I'm very old.

[00:04:01] Colin Devroe: Thank you for bringing that up.

[00:04:05] Nathan Wrigley: I'm sorry. it's built multiple startups and products on WordPress. Carlin is currently the senior product manager at Nerd Press, N-E-R-D-P-R-E-S-S. Go google it. Working on Hubb, a social sharing plugin for WordPress. Hubba makes it easy for website visitors to share blog posts to their favorite social network, including X or Twitter.

Facebook, Pinterest, and just last week threads Woo and more. Hobo Pro adds many additional networking features, gives publishers powerful Pinterest customizations and sharing stats to give them insight into what is being shared from their website. You can find out more hob.com. More hobo.com.

I said the word more twice. you can also find Karl on his personal website, C dvu, and also on Mastodon. it's lovely to have you. I appreciate you coming today. Thank you very much for having us. Yeah, You're welcome. and finally, mark, Second time, I believe for Mark coming on the show.

That's right. How are you doing, mark?

[00:05:07] Marc Benzakein: Yeah, I'm doing great. Thank you. Yeah, it's lovely to have you back. Thanks. Thanks for having me a second time. Yeah,

[00:05:12] Nathan Wrigley: you are very, welcome. mark has been involved with the World Press Community for over 13 years. For 10 of those years, he was a member of the team that made up ServerPress.

He's now the marketing lead for Maine, wp, which is an easy to use, privacy focused WordPress management dashboard, as well as site district, a collaborative managed WordPress host. So there we go. There's all the introductions. You now know our panel for today, we're gonna talk a lot about WordPress, as we always do before.

Then a few bits of little housekeeping. in order to make use of this live, you're joining us live. We obviously repurposed this and send it out as a podcast and things like that. But if you're joining us live, feel free to comment. We love that it makes this show a. Large number better. Let's say a million times better.

Something like that. the easiest place to go is this page WP Builds.com/live. Stop what you're doing now. Put that coffee down and go to that page and then share it. copy and paste the URL into all the social platforms. Page isn't working right now,

[00:06:14] Michelle Frechette: Nathan. It's got

[00:06:15] Nathan Wrigley: it all. Oh, you are kidding.

Okay. Don't go to, it's got an

[00:06:17] Michelle Frechette: old tomorrow in there. Go to YouTube. Really?

[00:06:19] Marc Benzakein: Pick your coffee back up and it's got

[00:06:22] Nathan Wrigley: back up. It's got Sabrina on it. I've gotta, I've gotta check that WP Build. There's WP Builds.com working. that's fun, isn't it? But the live

[00:06:32] Michelle Frechette: page, it's a flash live. It's, got an old, it's got an old URL on there.

[00:06:36] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. I'll tell you what, when one of you it's looking to a past episode. Yeah, thank you. When one of you starts talking, I'll go and amend that 'cause something's got balked somewhere and it's, I know what it'll be and it's an easy fix. But it's Monday. Yeah. I need to go and fix it. Anyway, go there.

join in the comments. That would be really nice. Alternatively, head over to YouTube and you can join us there. If you're on Facebook, or Twitter, Facebook in particular, go to Wave video slash lives slash Facebook. Okay, I will fix that page in just a moment so that it's working and appreciate anybody who has pointed that out.

First of all, let's say some hellos. Hello Emmanuel. Very nice to have you with us. Really enjoying Monday morning as is Courtney. Happy Monday. Mike is, hello everyone. Afternoon everyone. Hope that you're all okay. Igor joining us with a little hand wave. Marcus Burnett said Good morning presses. Indeed.

Indeed. And Peter Ingersol, as he always does from Connecticut, gives us the weather. It's become a tradition. It's a thing. it's, oh, what? It's minus one degree Centigrade. No. Oh my. Do they map? That seems wrong.

[00:07:45] Colin Devroe: No, that isn't, that is definitely incorrect. I'm not too far from Peter and it's, not,

[00:07:51] Nathan Wrigley: I think it might be, would that be 30? I reckon he's MR three. Yeah, we,

[00:07:56] Michelle Frechette: usually get similar to y'all and it's 33 here in Rochester,

[00:08:00] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. Anyway, it's a sensible number of degrees centigrade and the crazy indecipherable number of degrees Fahrenheit. Yeah, it's bonkers. and very nice to see you, Peter.

Thank you. I might get to see Mark in per person later this week. Oh, mark, tell us more. Do you even know why you might?

[00:08:21] Marc Benzakein: unfortunately, unless Courtney, unless you're gonna come visit me, I think what she's probably talking about is word Camp Phoenix. And unfortunately I have to skip it this week or this year because I have, some, family, things going on.

so my dad is turning. 84 years old this year, and, for the first time in a while he's gonna have all four of his kids in one place. oh, nice. That, kind of took Yeah, I'm really excited and man, if I get to be him when I grow up, I'll be like, happy. Yeah. Oh, he's, 84 and they just got back from Pismo Beach and they're on their way to Italy this summer, and it's they, just don't stop.

[00:09:05] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Yeah. I'll tell you what, you should definitely, when this gets published. Cut out that snippet of what you just said and send it to your dad and make him cry. Tears of joy.

[00:09:16] Marc Benzakein: I don't know. He hears me say that all the time. Okay. Yeah. That's just Mark being Mark again, Yeah. I don't do that in every aspect of my life, but the one thing that I, will say is I've always been very good about making sure my dad knows how much he means to me.

So that's nice. Yeah. That is nice. I need to do that with more people.

[00:09:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I, should say, just to clear up the whole YouTube thing, the video thing, a quick way to get to the video would just be to go to, youtube.com/wp builts. That's another alternative and I'll, get it fixed. I'll just do it while somebody's having their first little chat.

Okay, here we go. this is our website, WP Builds.com. If you like what we do and you wanna subscribe, put your email address in there. You can find out all the different bits and pieces that we're doing. If you head over here, which is WP Builds.com/schedule. You can see that this week here we are. We're here.

We don't have any webinars organized this week, but we do have our speedy op show. on Thursday with Sabrina Zidan. In fact, you could basically copy and paste that into every Thursday, 'cause that's the plan that we've got. We do have a, webinar coming up on the 28th called from Themes to Blocks with Tammy Lister.

if you don't know much about Tammy, she was one of the, one of the architects of the early stages of Gutenberg. So that'll be interesting and let's get into some WordPress stuff. Okay. First stop. WordPress 6.4 0.3. If you haven't got your sites on auto update, firstly, why not? That's very naughty.

and if you have, this'll probably have, you've probably got a deluge of email just the other day saying your site has been updated. And then another one, which said exactly the same thing, but it has, and it was a security, five bug fixes in Core 16 bugs fixes for the block editor. I actually didn't have a lot to say about this just to make sure that your sites were updated, but it turns out that Carlin has in fact got some things to add to this.

So can I just drop you right into it Carlin, and say Sure. Yeah. What was going on there? Yeah.

[00:11:15] Colin Devroe: there was a fix that, or a security update to WordPress in this build that could cause some havoc with those uploading, uploading, zip files to their WordPress admin. Zip files that were created using, Macintosh.

if you take a folder on the Mac and you just right click and hit compress, it creates a zip file for you. That process creates a zip file that is no longer accepted by WordPress after this build. And so a lot of plugin developers, that's how they compress their builds for their plugins, especially those that are distributing 'em outside of the plugin directory.

'cause the plugin directory does that on its own. You don't have to supply a zip file, it does it on its own, or you can update your plugins through your WordPress dashboard and all that was working just fine. But, the underlying issue is any website that is, or any WordPress installation that's running on a server that does not have lib zip updated to a certain version number would then cause you to get an error message back when you tried to upload one of these zips.

And so there's a nice track, ticket that describes not only the issues, but some of the workarounds that they have already, come up with. So if you run into this issue, if you're listening to this now and you had this issue, you tried to update a plugin, you got an error message after this update, or you're trying to install a new plugin that you downloaded, or a theme, sorry, not, just plugins that you downloaded from a website and you're getting this error, it's pretty easy to fix.

if you go to the track ticket, there's several ways to do it. and also Mac users that use Safari, because Safari automatically un, compresses zip files. When you download 'em, by default, it creates a folder on your computer. So then people would then right click on it, compress it again, 'cause they need to creating their own bad zip file essentially.

So it, it's a fairly broad issue. It already has a patch in the works. it's already in testing. I think there's a poll request for it already. but unfortunately those of us, like myself, that develop premium plugins and distribute them through zip files, we're, very much impacted by this, but, fortunately there's already a fix in the works.

Did any of you guys hit that issue?

[00:13:55] Nathan Wrigley: No. I, confess I didn't, but I did see some of the, I forgot, about that aspect of it, but it, the, press that I saw, it was all bound to zipping on Mac Os. Was it a, particular issue with Mac Os or was it simply that you had to be your Mac OS version?

Possibly didn't have the correct. what was it? Lib.

[00:14:17] Colin Devroe: Lib. Zip? No. So lib zip it, it is Mac related in the sense that a Mac can create a bad zip file, but people were creating bad zip files on Windows on Ubuntu. So if you read the track, you'll see there's a lot of people coming up with a lot of, different operating system distributions that could create the bad zip files also.

So it wasn't necessarily a Mac issue. I think it was mainly looked at as a Mac issue early on when it was detected because when people were downloading the zip files through Safari and then they had to create their own zips, they're the ones that were the first people to maybe see this issue that happened.

Got it. So it got linked to being a Mac problem, but it is most definitely. More so an issue with the lib zip version on the server. so if you were up to date on that, then you never saw this issue, even if you had a bad, zip file. So the workaround for this, if you're interested, is, hopefully the plugin author or the theme author already created a new zip file that you can download from their website.

That's what we did at hubub, is we created new zip files that were not, would not give anybody an issue. so you can just download those again and hopefully you won't have the issue. But if you're on a Mac and you get a zip file and you're using Safari and it creates a directory for you, you need to rezip that There's a command line, tool that you can use to zip the file and it will work just great.

I, you're probably not too happy to have to use the command line, but in that track there's a, track ticket. There's a nice thing you can copy and paste and create a zip file for yourself, so if you do run into that issue, but hopefully this will be patched soon. I don't know if the, if they'll wait until six point.

Four point, I don't dunno if they'll do a 6.4 0.4, that's what all of the plugin authors are hoping that they do because it created a lot of support, issues as you might imagine. or if they'll wait till the end of March until another release is done. Oh,

[00:16:26] Nathan Wrigley: wow. Okay. interesting that one got through actually.

was there any sort of blowback that you saw in the community around that? The fact that it didn't get picked up or? No,

[00:16:38] Colin Devroe: I I didn't, there was, a lot of going back and forth in the track ticket about whether or not this was a big issue or not. Yeah. the scope of an issue is very difficult to determine early on.

And so I don't blame anybody for thinking that it was a small issue. Obviously, because it's my day job to create plugins, it obviously feels like a big deal to me, whereas to someone else, maybe it wouldn't. but really it comes down to the end user experience. If somebody's using WordPress. That is, does not understand all of the underlying issues.

we all know that we all are standing on the shoulders of many, different packages and operating system versions and WordPress versions and all. Obviously the, stack that you host your website on, there's a lot of things that could go wrong in there. But ultimately it looks like WordPress is broken to an end user that doesn't understand the underlying technology.

or that the plugin author gave you a bad file, which is unfortunate. You wouldn't want to give your customer a, something that is broken. I didn't see any blowback as to why this didn't get caught in testing. Obviously someone like myself should have maybe caught something like that in, if I had a beta of 6.4 0.3, then I should have caught those things.

I personally, with my test environments, don't have that issue because my lib zipp is up to date. it, is, it's it's unfortunate that it got through, but I don't think anybody blamed anybody for that.

[00:18:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's interesting that point that you made about being a plugin author. 'cause that would be the first line of, that would be the way you'd go for support really.

I guess if you just updated a plugin, especially if you did it manually and all of a sudden this happened. The assumption, I think my assumption actually to be fair, would be, it must be the The patch, the plugin that I've just updated, so I'd be off to their support, but Okay. Oh, that's really interesting and a very deep dive into that.

Thank you so much. Let's, let's hope that one doesn't happen again. Mark or Michelle, do you have anything you wanna add to that little thing? Way back when

[00:18:49] Michelle Frechette: I first started working at Give, I had a customer who was complaining that she could not upload and open any of the, files for, for the add-ons for Give.

And she was in, I think, in South Africa. And so we set up a time to get on a Zoom together. And I said, walk me through what you're doing. And her, settings for cro, for apple, for her iOS was to automatically open any zipped files. And that was the first time I'd seen that. 'cause I was like, how is it not working?

And I watched and I was like, oh, we need to fix how you're downloading your files. And so it sounds very similar to that. And I had never, I didn't even know that was an issue before that. So yeah, it definitely makes life a little bit harder if you're unzipping your files before you're trying to do anything with them.

[00:19:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Good point. mark, anything or should we press on?

[00:19:41] Marc Benzakein: No, I, think we're very fortunate to have Colin on to be able to No kidding. Get into that so deeply because I, haven't. I haven't done anything with WordPress in the last week and or, so, and this is really good to know about.

'cause I would've been banging my head against the wall probably over it,

[00:20:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. very nice to bring that to light. I appreciate that, Karl. That's absolutely amazing. By the way, if you head over to wp builder.com/live is now working. it's a weird it, but not what I expected.

Actually, it was something else I had to troubleshoot quickly. So I had one ear on Carlin and one ear on, that. I, think we, one

[00:20:20] Colin Devroe: ear is on me is more than,

[00:20:23] Nathan Wrigley: that's, that's, that was enough on this occasion to get us through. Okay. Anyway, there we go. 6.4 0.3 with a very nice in depth analysis of what went wrong in one particular case.

I dunno if there's anything really to say too much about this, but this is just to say that there's a piece appeared on make WordPress org, by Dave Smith on the 19th of January, so it's not particularly new, important milestones for 6.5. And it really just outlines the fact that beta one, as we say in the uk, is coming around on the 13th of February, so really soon connected to that.

Here's, another article. This was just the other day. This is Mary Baum, and this is the release schedule for, 6.5. And I won't labor the point, but if you go to the URL, I'll put it in the show notes. It's called Release 6.5, sorry, 6.5, release, party, schedule, and host. You'll be able to see that, yeah, 13th of February, B to one, B to two, a week after that, and then so on and so on.

a week until finally, the dry run for 6.5 will be March the 25th. With a hopeful, possible general release on March the 26th. If nothing goes wrong on

[00:21:38] Colin Devroe: March, that's the date that I hope we don't have to wait for, the patch that I just talked about. I hope I, I hope we don't wait until then.

Yeah.

[00:21:47] Nathan Wrigley: But, yeah, fingers crossed. but yeah, there you go. So that's, they're the dates to put into your diary, if you're a. If you're an avid follower of the project and working on core and all of that, all of these things matter. But maybe if you're just an end user, probably the only, only the one at the end is of significance to you.

But there we go. I've raised it anyway. Okay, so this is, absolutely fascinating, and we mentioned this on a previous episode, but I, wanted to highlight it again. A, because we've got a different panel, and B, because I've actually produced the piece of content that it was related to. Michelle, the co-host of the, this week in WordPress show, I'm just gonna keep saying it, Michelle.

she, put me in touch with somebody called Mike or Terry. And, we had a really interesting chat about a plugin that he and a growing team of community members are getting involved in. And it's called some, it's called Gather Press. Now, if you have attended a WordPress meetup or any event that probably wasn't a Word camp, then you've probably come across something called meetup.com.

It's a SaaS platform. And for historical reasons, which I don't really know, it has become the defacto way of organizing and communicating with people about your events. for example, word, the WordPress London Meet up, which is restarting, thank you, Dan, maybe, and Paul Smart. the, event system that you're gonna go through is me top.com.

However, Mike had this intuition that wouldn't it be nice given that we've got a CMS wouldn't it be nice to take this functionality into a plugin? And so in 2019 and then through the years of the pandemic, Mike, started working on this and, has now got to the point where he thinks it's. Pretty much capable of doing the job that Meetup would do.

And so he's put it out there. He is. Put it out there for public consumption. There's a GitHub repo, actually everything's linked to in the show notes. This is on the, WP Tavern website. I put the podcast there. And, you can find the Gather press, slack group. You can find the Twitter channel.

You can find all of the different pieces. The plugin website, the GitHub repository. They're all in the show notes, but he's really keen to take this forward and to go into a stage where it's been battle tested out in the world with real events and seeing what feature set is needed. But I just thought this kind of interesting, It was recently acquired meetup.com by a company which governs a bunch of SaaS products. And so maybe there's a bit of sweet timing here in that, questions often get asked, don't they? When there's an acquisition, how will that keep going? And also, according to Mike's calculations, the WordPress community, spend close to a quarter of a million dollars a year, on accounts for Meetup.

I think it was $234,000 a year if his math was correct. And he thought maybe that could be, used in some other vein. So whether you've got a grudge against meetup.com or not, I'm gonna open it up to the panel. Just go for it. What do you think? Good idea. Got legs? No way. Who knows?

[00:24:57] Michelle Frechette: My biggest concern with it when I, so Mike reached out to me a long time ago to see if I'd be willing to look at it and give some feedback and some ideas.

And my biggest concern with it was how many people are discovering their local WordPress meetups? Specifically through meetup.com. So I ran a very unscientific poll on my meetup group and asked them, how did you discover this group? And of the people who answered less than 20, so again, not scientific, but still gives you se anecdotal information.

I think only one out of 20 had discovered the group through meetup.com. Everybody else had discovered it either through the Facebook group or they had, been invited from another per through another person. And that was the primary way is somebody told me about it. Several people had seen it on there.

dashboard. So you will see local events show up on your WordPress dashboard, and several people had found it that way. So as long as we're able to continue to put like the local meetups on the dashboard, regardless of whether they're part of meetup.com or not, and I suspect that events.wordpress.org can somehow feed into there, right?

For your locum. I'm not sure how that works. I'm not a developer, but I think that this should be a really good alternative and can save groups a lot of money. So every official WordPress meetup that's on meetup.com is paid for by meetup.com. There are a lot of unofficial ones, in that they are not officially sanctioned and paid for by meetup.org.

Not that they are not talking about WordPress. yeah, when I say official, that's what I mean. Yeah, there are a lot more that aren't, that are being paid for by people like you and me who have started their meetup and wanna have control over the entire thing as opposed to co-opt it with, with wordpress.org.

So this would be a way for you to still have a lot of, autonomy over your group, but save wordpress.org a lot of money and be able to put it right on your own Websites like wp rochester.com for example, is our local, website for our meetup. And that's, right now everything's going on meetup.com and then I'm sharing at other places.

But if it was right on the website, that would be a lot easier

[00:27:14] Nathan Wrigley: to do. Mike, in the podcast, he, was mentioning that he carried out some other anecdotal, survey. I actually, I dunno if he said that, but he said that in his experience he was able to show that the dashboard widget has become the thing.

For the meetup, which he attends and organizes. It really was coming from the dashboard widget. And yeah, when I go to my meetup account, I only visit it. To r SVP to something I've seen somewhere else, which is typically the dashboard widget or on social media. go to meetup.com, click the black Rs, I don't know what the wording is, I want to go to this event button and then I log out And I'm gone. and so it's not really doing any of that. Maybe I've switched off notifications. Maybe I should be getting email. But the dashboard widget would be the way to do it. And I think Mike's intuition around this project is that if it got some legs and it got some buy-in from the community, it could become an official project at a, I don't know, meet up.wordpress.org domain name, a multi-site network setup so that you've got a something akin to a single sign on.

You use your wordpress.org credentials and, it does all of that. And, he's already built the functionality. you've gotta link it up to some SMTP, Company or what have you. But you can reply to people that have received an invite but haven't replied, or people who have agreed to attend, and it automatically creates an attendance page.

And, it just does all that heavy lifting, really, that meetup.com would do. So the, idea at the moment, and Patricia, who might be in the comments, I don't know, she put a proposal together saying, let's run this in tandem. Like, why not just run it with a meetup and gather press at the same time and just see what the missing feature set is.

So anyway, sorry. mark or, Carlin over to you.

[00:29:10] Marc Benzakein: I, personally love the idea. I'm, I, just am. I can't tell you how much in love with this idea I am, and maybe it's because I am toying with the idea of starting a local meetup here. I have always gone to meetup.com to look for WordPress meetups.

and, Other things, but mostly WordPress meetups, that's where I go. And, I've always had a, kind of this love hate relationship with meetup.com, since 10 years ago or whenever it was that I found my first WordPress meetup. but the key, as you mentioned, Nathan is going to be a community wide adoption, of this project.

And I hope that it goes somewhere because, first of all, it's community driven. It's open source, it's all the things that WordPress is and, why not include this in there as well? Since meetups are a big part of what grows our community in the first

[00:30:13] Colin Devroe: place.

[00:30:14] Nathan Wrigley: to some extent, I can't quite work out why it doesn't, why a project like this didn't gather, didn't occur a decade or more ago.

'cause it almost feels like going to a SaaS platform is peculiar. Given, the capabilities of all of the people involved in the community, it feels nobody's inventing the wheel here. There's calendars and email and, a page that's put together with some kind of archive or I don't know.

it's odd. I, find it, I

[00:30:45] Colin Devroe: think there's

[00:30:46] Marc Benzakein: a lot of, a lot of brain damage it gets in, gets into building something like this. And maybe nobody, everybody was like, this is so easy to just go on Meetup and, yeah. And honestly, back when it was, the, foundation. Meetup was adopted by the foundation years and years ago.

And so it just became the defacto standard of how we did things. and if you look at, one of the other subjects you're gonna be bringing up shortly is this idea of different types of events. there is the, this is the way things were traditionally done, and now all of a sudden I think it's post pandemic and we're looking at things and going, we have to come up with other ways to do things now.

And that's probably part of the thinking is, okay, let's look at everything we've been doing and let's see if we can make some things better. I, don't know, that's my speculation,

[00:31:38] Nathan Wrigley: but I the idea that if, I was running a meetup, let's say in my part of the world, I kinda like the idea that if I had this, capability within a, plugin, I could then make my page look.

How I want it, just create a pattern consuming the data that gather press, brings to bear and then make it look like where I live, apart from, not this white, black and red generic thing, which honestly, it's so uninteresting.

[00:32:07] Colin Devroe: Absolutely.

[00:32:08] Nathan Wrigley: Doesn't sell anything. Does it? it's not giving anything about the venue or the kind of, I don't know.

I just think that,

[00:32:15] Marc Benzakein: I gotta tell you, I, do have notifications turned on, Meetup and every time I get a meetup notification, I just roll my eyes, ah, nine times outta 10. Yeah. Because it's this is going to be something else I'm not interested in going to. Okay. So yeah, I, I, like I said, I have a love-hate relationship for it.

I prefer to do the work and go for looking what I want to. I don't need to have all these notifications and suggestions and like you said, the website is not

[00:32:43] Nathan Wrigley: compelling. I. Courtney joins us saying, I think a decade ago, folks looking to connect, used, meet up more. Okay. Okay. That's an interesting point.

also, the WP Project uses a few paid services that specialize in what they do. Ah, okay. So there's connections to, for example, things like Slack and GitHub. Okay. So there's, wheels within wheels, there's cogs in the background that I'm really not that familiar with. yeah, the other,

[00:33:08] Michelle Frechette: the other thing to keep in mind is that there is a level of control that has to [email protected] level in order to make sure these are all mapped together and that they're, that they are part of the ownership of the different groups so they know what's happening and know what's going on.

So I'm a made up organizer. I. Take the time to go put things down on meetup.com and then I share it and I do everything. And I, and whether you like the notifications or not, mark, a lot of our members remember to put, to come to, and we meet at the same time every month. First Monday of every month, six 30.

But that's what reminds people to actually join the meetup or to come,

[00:33:43] Marc Benzakein: which is why I have them turned on in the first place is more the Exactly. Than you'd been. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So it's I have to take all the other stuff in order to get to the stuff I

want,

[00:33:53] Michelle Frechette: but as a community team member, 'cause I am on the community team as well, and I was part of the re I can't remember what we called it, but the Reenerg, EER, reenerg, I can't think of words.

Re-energizing of, meetups post pandemic is that we were able to, I'm a super user for WordPress on meetups. So I can go in and look at all of the different meetups and I can. message people through there, how is your meetup going? Are you ready to get things up and rolling again? So we had that for about a year.

Getting, reaching out to the different meetup groups to make sure that if they wanted to get started again, if they didn't, how could we find other people in the organization? And so there was a lot of work that happened and because it was all central in one place on meetup.org.com, that was easy for us to do, easier for us to do than if we had to start trying to find all of those different meetups other places.

So I think there's just a level of trying to make sure that it replicates a lot of those same, Features so that from the top down we're still able to see everything that happens, still able to interact with organizers and if organizers fall off or, stop work, being part of their meetups, that we can still reach out to other group members.

So there's a lot that needs to go on to make sure that we still as WordPress are supporting and helping the different groups, all over the world to stay healthy.

[00:35:17] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's a really interesting context as well, because that put, puts a completely different spin on it. To me, I had this idea that it would all just be great to go to a WordPress plugin because it'd just be great to have it inside a WordPress, but you are saying that it really had utility.

Especially in that period where it needed, the community needed a bit of a kickstart. because of the nature of the, I guess the pyramid structure of the, of the permissions that you get and what have you. And if you're a super user, you, had more power. Yeah. That is interesting.

Okay. I guess though, having said all that, could be built inside a multi-site network.

[00:35:51] Michelle Frechette: It could be, absolutely. Yeah. It's just a matter of making sure that all of those Yeah. Boxes are checked Yeah. Before we would migrate to something like that, so that we don't lose any of what we have now.

[00:36:02] Nathan Wrigley: Carlin, anything on this?

[00:36:05] Colin Devroe: I have a soft spot for Meetup, ah, controversy. No, Not at all. I, think obviously with anything like this, there's, pros and cons to everything, right? So I have a soft spot because like me, meetup is an OG of the internet, and so it has been around forever and, the way that I found my first WordPress meetup.

Was very likely because I was already on Meetup for other things like blogging, or learning to code when I was younger or whatever it may be. 'cause there's other interests. So the thing that I think we'd lose from moving all of the WordPress events into its own thing, I think there's a lot to gain, far more to gain than, this one thing, but is people that use WordPress are not just the people that build WordPress or the people that like to talk about the community of WordPress, or people that, make money on WordPress.

There are people that knit that use WordPress every day. There are people that fly fish in, amazing rivers throughout the world that use WordPress every day, and none of them are engaged in the communities that the four of us are. and so if they're on Meetup and they're in a fly fishing group.

They knew need help with their website. If they happened to see, like Michelle had brought out, if they happened to see that in the Rochester area for her, now there's a meetup that has to do with the software that she's using to run her website. then you end up going to that and then now you're ed, you, get some help, which was huge.

The WordPress meetups back, very early on, and probably still today, I do attend a fair number of them is that someone could go in there and say, how do I update my blog colors? Yeah. how do IXY, Z, right? Nowadays WordPress is incredibly complicated compared to what it was when I started with it.

so yeah, I think that there's some of that. just the, overlapping of these different communities that we would lose by it all being so WordPress centric. It'd be great. Interesting. Yeah. it'd be great because now you have the ability to bring some of those features onto WP Build's website now, and now it communicates maybe even with the wordpress.org site.

And if there's an event, both of them could be up to date with each other and all of those things would be fantastic. And obviously when you have control of the source, then if a, if Meetup has a feature or does not have a feature that someone has been wanting for a long time, it could easily get done.

But there is that little bit of an overlap, the Venn diagram of why someone uses WordPress as opposed to the fact that they use WordPress. and the reason why they use WordPress is probably just to, sell their jewelry or whatever it may be, whatever their interest is. So that's, something I think we would lose.

And I might shed one tier for Meetup when that happens. But, maybe there's a way to use the meetup, API too, if, bending spoons is, fine with it. Maybe there's a way that these meetups could still be reflected in the meetup ecosystem, so that still happens. if I'm in Phoenix, Arizona and I look up events that are in my area.

It would still be really cool if there was something that showed, Hey, there's gonna be like 15 people at a coffee shop talking about WordPress on Monday. Wouldn't it be, maybe I'll pop in there because I heard of WordPress or whatever.

[00:39:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That's really interesting. You put a really different side to it and I think, both you and Michelle have painted a, really credible picture for why, it's not a question of.

Throwing the baby out. Do you use that phrase, throw the baby out with the bathroom too? I try, not to. Yeah. I was just, as soon as I said it, thought, probably aren't familiar with it. Yeah, okay. you don't just throw, good after bad or something like that.

and there's a lot of, maybe there is a lot more utility in it than I thought. that's fascinating. But the idea of, yeah, I, the idea of it being federated some way around a central multi-site network. And let's say that on WP Build, I installed that plugin and I could then in some way connect to that and advertise my WordPress related events.

Obviously they'd have to be a gatekeeper saying, yeah, Nathan's allowed, but this other thing over there, which has nothing to do with WordPress and all the inevitable spam, I just like the idea of that. But you make a really good point. if we're trying to find new people. Then maybe, something based upon WordPress is is locking them out because unless they've already found their way in, they're gonna struggle with something that isn't like me talk.

Yeah. Maybe there is something about the API. Okay. thank you for that. that was interesting. I

[00:41:08] Marc Benzakein: enjoyed that. That was very compelling. Colin. I'm rethinking all of it

[00:41:11] Nathan Wrigley: now. Yeah, I think I'm gonna go back, have a lie down after this. Patrick Posner's joining us. Hi Patrick. He says, is it impersonate Nathan Day?

I'll get a cap on. we know Michelle has a, history of trying to. Look like me

[00:41:29] Michelle Frechette: and I do it well. Yeah,

[00:41:31] Nathan Wrigley: she does, it? Actually very well. there was an episode Mark and, Carlin, we, Michelle literally showed up, like looking.

[00:41:39] Michelle Frechette: She dressed up. It was Halloween though. Let's, it was Halloween.

[00:41:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

It wasn't a weird stalking thing. It's not every

[00:41:46] Marc Benzakein: day for you then, is what you're saying?

[00:41:48] Nathan Wrigley: No. No. Okay. Let's stay on the theme of WordPress events, but let's mention a particular, event in. let me just find the button. Where's it gone? There we go. WordCamp Asia 2024 is coming around the corner.

I just thought this was a really nice article. It's [email protected] and it's entitled WordCamp Asia 2024. A Comprehensive Guide to Attendees And it's got the usual stuff, where is it? When is it, what, are the, what are the, the top level items and what have you? it shows us the official, the soup dumpling WaPo.

his, he's so cute. Yeah, there's something, about eating too many. Dumplings about the, business, a round WaPo. and then the speaker lineup, which hasn't been announced so far. I dunno if the tickets are still available, but on this post it says they are, but I'm not sure if there's any left still.

But the bit that I thought was interesting, if anybody watching this or listening to this is going was this little bit tucked in at the end. And I'm always fascinated, there was a period of my life where I traveled a lot and, etiquette. You really, if you're a traveler, you wanna approach people's country and be the deferential visitor and not put your foot in it.

So I thought this was just a lovely thing for them to put in. I don't know, where this information comes from. There's a lot more in this article about, the kind of things that you can do in your free time, what have you. But let's just go back to this bit. Here's some travel etiquette, when you visit Taiwan so that you don't become frowned upon.

so first off, the official language is Mandarin Chinese. I suspect that in the fi five weeks or four weeks that I've got left, that's not happening. I'm, unlikely to master Mandarin Chinese, so we'll just gloss over that. but here's the thing, right? So you're not supposed to use the word four, like the number four or death in public.

Now I can understand death, but four is an interesting one. And apparently it's because the word four is, has some sort of superstition attached to it. So avoid altering that in public places. don't get involved in politics. I'm not gonna put my foot in that one. so we'll just quickly move along.

when making use of public transport, don't eat, drink, or smoke, I dunno if it means drink as in literally consume liquid or alcohol. But I guess if it's eating and drinking, don't do that. So again, that's different to where, to my part of the world, if you are having food, and it includes chopsticks, do not put your chopsticks vertically.

It's frowned upon something to do with incense sticks. The norm is to place them on the bowl, across the top so that they're nice and horizontal. When meeting locals for the first time, handshaking is not the recommended thing to do. It's a slight nod, slight bow. you can do handshaking. It doesn't seem like it's, verboten, but it's not the, it's not the way to do it.

And finally, okay, I love it. Don't give gifts of clocks, handkerchiefs, watches, candles, or, I would say this goes everywhere. Knives, and white flowers. Because of su superstitions attached to those. So apropos of nothing except the WordPress community is heading there. There's some interesting stuff.

Does anybody wanna chip in there? Just so

[00:45:22] Michelle Frechette: as a person who wrote a book called A Good Firm Handshake, and then the, Pandemic happened, I wanted to change the title of the book anyway, so I'll just say also having came come back from Word Camp Europe last year with, Covid, I think avoiding handshaking is just the right thing to do in today's society.

Anyway, so I, actually I like this light bow and the head bow, and I've been doing that. Ever since I got back from Bangkok last year. Yeah. I just think it makes sense. And if you're stabbing your chopsticks in your food, that is just, that's, that would be po You wouldn't do that with your fork, don't do it with your

[00:45:56] Nathan Wrigley: chopsticks.

Oh, no. The way I read it was like, when you're not doing anything ho holding them vertically. But also like

[00:46:03] Michelle Frechette: sometimes, oh, I stick, you stick them in the rice or stick them in. I've seen people at Yeah, stick them in the rice or stick them in the food to just, but don't do that either.

You wouldn't like, just do that with your fork. So don't do that with your chop.

[00:46:18] Nathan Wrigley: This is a very interesting, sounded like you wanted to speak

[00:46:20] Colin Devroe: this. yeah, this is a very interesting list. and at first I, we, talked earlier about this list just briefly, and I, thought of, Which I don't think I'm gonna make this comparison anymore, but I did, it made me think of Richard Stillman's Rider, which if you've never read it, you could do a Google search and have a laugh about what Richard Stallman, would like to see at events that he shows up to.

it's comical, if anything. But this is a culture that we're talking about here, which obviously is very beautiful, and it's very nice to be able to fit in when you go to visit different places. so I wonder if we could talk about, what would we create as our list of etiquette for the UK or for the United States?

If someone were to be visiting our, respected areas and coming to an event from somewhere else, what would we say that people should

do?

[00:47:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think, the feature that I can think of in the UK is embrace self-deprecating humor. you have to take the, mickey out yourself. I was gonna use a different word there, but I'll probably get banned on YouTube.

you, have to take the mickey out yourself. That would be one thing. bring an umbrella would certainly be another, piece of advice. And also be very, willing to, to, just, accept the tidal wave of moaning, which is gonna come your way, because I think the British are fairly well known for, for moaning.

So get a good load of moaning lined up so that you've got things to complain about.

[00:48:01] Michelle Frechette: One thing that I would throw out there, if, and I would never have thought of this until I have traveled internationally now, is not to comment negatively on people's appearances here in the States. For sure.

having traveled, I've been, I've been, people have commented on my weight and on my skin, and I was just like, and I didn't mean it. in a mean way, but it still is like to hear somebody say something negative about you. To your face. It's just like you get a little taken aback. oh, I see. I, yeah. okay, if somebody says to, somebody said to me, why is your face so broken out? And I was just like, rude. But I, didn't say they were

[00:48:43] Colin Devroe: rude to their face. I dunno if that, I don't if that should be a US only thing, Michelle. I think that should go everywhere in the world.

That's

[00:48:49] Marc Benzakein: just human sensitivity. Yeah.

[00:48:52] Michelle Frechette: But, in other cultures, commenting on people's appearance is just a way to say hello, or perhaps, so there are other cultures in which, it's, actually asking after one's health as opposed to I see. Saying, I've noticed this flaw about you.

But that's how we take it here. So

[00:49:09] Colin Devroe: we can you make a list of all the places that happened to you and let me know. So I don't

[00:49:14] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. One of the, one of the, the things that I noticed when I went to the us so this is not some, this is more what we don't do. That you do, you are really happy to talk about money.

And in the UK that's that's basically off the table. That conversation. Like you never, ever talk about how much you earn. Never. even if it's obvious that you earn a ton of money 'cause you're driving around in a Rolls Royce, you still don't do it. You wouldn't mention the numbers.

But in my period of time in the US I remember hearing people like, just, shooting the breeze about what they heard and they was, what are they doing? It's so different.

[00:49:55] Marc Benzakein: I, I actually grew up the same way that you do not talk about how much money you make, you do not talk about anything that has to do with money.

what you do for a living is not what defines you and, I, to this day, I get very uncomfortable having grown up in the United States when people talk about how much money they make or when they're showing off whatever they may have or, talking about these things, it makes me uncomfortable.

yeah. I, yeah, I, understand what you're saying about that for sure. And let, I think one of the things just came up in the chat, by the way, and I was gonna bring this up, going back to the number four, I actually wikipediaed this, and it's, and, then, Mr. Panzer Dragon, or Dragon Goon, I'm sorry, brought it up.

Is, that the number four, according to Wikipedia, and this confirms it, is that the number four sounds like the word death when you say it. Oh. And so that's why you don't say it. Out loud. And I'm sure that if it were me an American trying to speak, Mandarin Chinese, I'd probably butcher it so bad that it would sound exactly like death.

yeah, I can see why now. Yeah. I,

[00:51:16] Michelle Frechette: I,

wanna comment on what you said about not talking about money, and I grew up the same way. I'm I'm 55 and that was definitely the way I grew up. However, I will tell you that since I've been doing DEIB work, especially here in the United States.

Normalizing. Talking about salary helps create Yeah, a more even playing field. So if I say how much I make and somebody else says how much they make, and we are working at the same company at the same level, and that man is making a whole lot more than me or. As a white person and a black person, those kinds of things.

Yeah. Then you go, then you start to say, ha, that's not so fair. That's not right. And so it's actually made it a more even playing field as far as salary negotiations. So I'm all

[00:51:59] Nathan Wrigley: for it. So we have an anonymous person. yes. Not anonymous necessarily, but we can't see who you are. And I'm not logged into Facebook, so apologies for that.

who says a lack of sharing your salary is something pushed by employers so they can get away with not paying everyone equally? Yeah, it's interesting. I dunno who

[00:52:14] Michelle Frechette: that is, but that sounds like something pizza would tell us.

[00:52:16] Nathan Wrigley: So it might be, okay, pizza is that you lurking anonymously. but it's not Thank you.

Whoever it is. Yeah. The interesting thing is it is just, it's an unwritten bit of social etre in the uk and nobody, I, don't ever remember the moment when somebody who was older, like a parent, said to me, don't talk about money. It's just, it never happened. And then you'd be in rooms where the, maybe the conversation was going in that direction, then you could see everybody pulling back and you just learn.

You just learn, but you are right. But I found it really refreshing when I went to America at the beginning. I was like, somebody just mentioned, and then I and then it just oh, we all did. Where were you? Yeah. I, spent a year camp. I bought a car and drove across, oh, okay. I was just gonna

[00:53:00] Colin Devroe: say, because in my experience traveling through the United States, everywhere is so different from one another.

You spend about eight seconds in a coffee shop in San Francisco and you'll be sitting next to someone that just raised $20 million. And they're letting you know that's what they just did. Yeah. and then you, go somewhere else and it might be a lot more conservative and they don't really bring those sorts of things up.

But, yeah, it's nice to, that we have so many different cultures, but I fear the list that I would create. I think it's very easy right now to make fun of the United States from outside. 'cause you could make a, list that would, not be very kind. but. that's the world that we live in.

But hopefully by sharing these lists, I'm very appreciative to the event owners Yeah. Or the event organizers to share a list like that, because I think Maybe that should be done a little bit more. obviously we, it, wasn't that long ago that events didn't have, code of codes of conduct. and I think that event organizers that are thinking of putting something together as small as a meetup as we were talking before, or as large as a word camp, should give that portion of their organization for the event as much thought as anything else.

how diverse is the set of speakers that we're going to have? Yeah. How, are we going to allow the attendees to be a diverse set of attendees, whether that be I. The economics of the ticket price or the accessibility of the event or what have you. And then also rules or the codes of conduct being able to say, we will not accept these sorts of things at our event, otherwise you're going to be asked to leave right away.

Which we've seen unfortunately, so many events have had things at them that, have led to terrible outcomes. And I think the more that we get the information publicly available and live by those things then, and something as simple as just knowing what words not to say when you visit a foreign country, I think we should do more

[00:55:11] Nathan Wrigley: of that.

Yeah. And just to be clear, I don't think this article was, created by the, the team behind the event. So it's a, okay. It's a WP content, is the website. but I, like you, Carlin, I was just, I, was just thankful that somebody had made the effort to, to put that little section in because, with the best rule in the world.

That probably wouldn't have been on the top of my list of research. It would more have been research about, this kind of thing, where to go when there's time off or where to meet friends and all of that kind of thing. But throwing that in there, was, very, helpful. And I don't think anybody who's gonna be attending that event wants to go in, not.

Knowing that kind of information. So that's, really good. And it led to a really interesting, conversation. So first of all, the, the person who wrote the Facebook comment was not peach. It was, or at least my friend Matt. I presume it wasn't 'cause it was the, it was the comment immediately after It was Matt, carrying this bizarre conversation on, in London, in the uk.

It's not the norm to say hello to strangers now. That's so weird, isn't it? Where it's so weird. I started to say hello or good morning and actually got many strange looks. Someone even thought I wanted to rob them. Oh, we're

[00:56:22] Colin Devroe: so sad.

[00:56:23] Marc Benzakein: I found, the same thing to be true in Greece, though people are not, when we were in, I don't know Michelle if you experienced this, but I would say hi to people and they'd look at me funny, but they were the nicest people in the world.

[00:56:35] Colin Devroe: Yeah. But it wasn't just their go-to, to It's not a thing

[00:56:38] Nathan Wrigley: that you do. yeah,

[00:56:39] Marc Benzakein: yeah,

To say hi to a complete stranger. Yeah. and then I had people asking me for directions 'cause they thought I looked Greek and I don't speak a word. So that, was also a little bit, off-putting,

[00:56:49] Colin Devroe: but

[00:56:50] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Yeah.

Paul Hoffen joining us. Hi Paul. a member, a family member once got upset because my mom talked about splitting the lunch bill whilst at the table. she thought that it was rude to discuss money. Yeah. Tip, tip it. Oh, now there's the one, there's the crucial difference between us on this side of the pond and you guys over there.

It's expected. The first time I set foot in North America was in Canada and the, I got more or less got off the plane and went to a bar and I did what I do in the uk. I. Paid the money, and then I walked away from the bar and the barman just, he just slammed his fist. He was like, you come here. And I was like, okay.

Sorry. What did I do? Yeah, what did, and he said, you got a tip. And I was like, okay. Sorry. in some part of my brain, I knew that was a thing, but I didn't realize it was Dori. it's because we do not, it's starting include, we do not pay them. Okay. It's starting to be included. Yeah. Here it's just not really a thing.

You just, you, it's, it's just not really a thing. So eight is a lucky number and seven in, but not in Taiwan. Okay. unsolicited type. Okay. I don't quite understand that. Unsolicited high equals e. Really equals, high percent that such people are asking for money in Europe. Okay. So somebody says hi.

You're thinking they're gonna, they're trying to panhandle. Yeah. Oh, pan. Okay. That's the thing. That's interesting. That's interesting. Panhandle. Is that a phrase? I've never heard that. Yeah. Oh, yes. Okay. Okay.

[00:58:23] Michelle Frechette: It's put your handout for money. Huh?

[00:58:25] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, Nelo says, okay, so I'm the only person who shows morning at Word text.

[00:58:32] Michelle Frechette: I do too. Nelo.

[00:58:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Wow. So that was really interesting. But anyway, the long and the short of it is, thank you. That was such an interesting thing to have written down and it certainly got absolutely talking, didn't it? That was great. Okay, so let's just stay on that event just for a brief moment. here's a list of the speakers.

If you go to WordCamp, sorry, asia.wordcamp.org 2024. and then slash speakers, you'll be able to see the speaker lineup. I don't think we've actually got the, the topics listed there yet, but here they are. The great and the good. I think the

[00:59:02] Michelle Frechette: schedule

[00:59:03] Nathan Wrigley: is out now. Is it okay? I can't, I didn't find that initially.

As long as you, there you go. No, look at this. We've got, Matt Mwe on this page. Fascinating.

[00:59:11] Michelle Frechette: Is that the only person you see there? Is that the only

[00:59:13] Marc Benzakein: person

[00:59:16] Nathan Wrigley: No, I was trying to be annoying. look, where Matt ended up, next to Michelle. Let's say it that way. Around Matt.

[00:59:23] Colin Devroe: He is the person.

Person. How fortunate for

[00:59:24] Nathan Wrigley: Matt, exactly.

[00:59:26] Michelle Frechette: Matt was. Thank you, Colin. The person that called me the busiest woman in

[00:59:29] Nathan Wrigley: WordPress. So yeah. that's brilliant. So there they all are. I was gonna say, I

[00:59:32] Colin Devroe: did, I did see your bio Michelle, before we got on this episode, and I thought, man, I am not working hard enough.

Clearly, because you, have a lot more links in your bio than I do, so I need to really get on it. It's

[00:59:45] Nathan Wrigley: based

[00:59:45] Michelle Frechette: upon the number. I take that yellow thing really seriously.

[00:59:50] Nathan Wrigley: Ah, okay. So there's more comments coming in. Yeah. Tipping. Tipping is, so weird here in the States. that was from, Mr.

Mr. Panza, Dragoon, Marcus. I'd be more than happy to pay people what they deserve and do always with tipping nonsense. years ago I tried to tip somebody in Germany. It caused quite a kerfuffle, so the exact opposite. do you want a tip? No. 'cause the answer is often no. It's what? No, that's weird.

but anyway, there we go. So there's the speaker lineup, and here is something else. Just briefly gloss over this, because as we are fast running outta time. last year, the, call went out for. let's think about WordPress events. Again, we're doing a lot about events today, aren't we?

Nevermind. and the idea of these next gen events, and that was the label that was gonna be applied to them in the interim. an idea of coming up with a, different format, not necessarily for the flagship WordPress events, the Europe and the US and the, Asia ones, but more the other ones, the city-based ones like London and so on.

How can we tweak, what they are? How can we change them around a little bit? So maybe there was some intuition that after the pandemic, the, number of attendees was falling. Maybe there was a decline in interest in sponsorships. I'm not really a hundred percent sure on what was the, cause of that, but there was a, this idea of next gen events and playing with them since then.

There's a list here, which you can see on the page if you're listening to it. Apologies. But I'm gonna put my finger in the air and say there's about 12, 12 word press events took place, pitching some difference. maybe it was related to SEO or it was related to, I dunno, children or something like that.

and the idea really at the moment is to clarify what this means going forwards. And so they've put together what an ideal WordPress event represents, which really is four bullet points. And it's, very generic. It's not, it's not giving you specifics about what you must do, but also maybe this is slightly more helpful.

there's gonna be some tooling. Around what WordPress events organizers have got at their disposal. Not really any word on that yet, but the idea that, if you are using, sorry, creating these events, you'll have some tools and resources that you are available. and then there's also some messages here about how that works for global sponsors and what have you.

I'm briefly rushing over that. I have a lot more to say, but because of the time, I'm just saying that, so if, any of you have got something to say there, please do But the, the post was written by Julia, Golum. Golum, I'm not sure, sorry, Julia. and it's called Reflecting on Next Gen Events Pilots project, and looking ahead.

So I'll just pause for a minute, see if anybody wants to interrupt. If not, I'll move on.

[01:02:45] Michelle Frechette: I'm just excited to see some of the different things that will come out of that, including the, I think the last thing we added for today, which we'll talk about later.

[01:02:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So it was things like, this, so there was one in, I can't pronounce that, Gina, and it was focused on optimization work and WordPress.

Then there was a dedicated day, for WordPress event organizers, and there was a one called all about scaling up, which was in Indonesia, focusing on enhancing participants WordPress skills for the enterprise world. So you see, they all just take a sort of, a sort of specific subject and run with it, and we'll have to see career camp at Cota.

Yeah, it's interesting, right? Jakarta website pitching competition where participants were encouraged to submit and showcase their websites. Yes, it feels a bit like throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks, which maybe is exactly the right approach at the moment. try things out. See what the community comeback with is.

that was enjoyable. That didn't work. That did work. The sponsors didn't care for that, but they really love this. Let's see. Okay, shall we move on? I just wanted to point out this 'cause I know Michelle likes it. if you wanna see where WordPress events are, you can go to events.wordpress.org and there's a fabulous map and I'm just gonna refresh the page.

Why does it always start in North America? Why every map, every map always starts

[01:04:09] Michelle Frechette: the number of

[01:04:09] Nathan Wrigley: events. I don't know. Yeah. I'm guessing, I can't even zoom out now, but anyway, there you go. They're all listed there. You should

[01:04:16] Colin Devroe: commit a change, Nathan, that would, adjust the map to wherever you're browsing from.

Oh.

[01:04:23] Nathan Wrigley: To Yorkshire in the uk. Just send it right in.

[01:04:27] Colin Devroe: Just be specific. Yeah,

[01:04:30] Nathan Wrigley: you have to zoom out depending on where you're, anyway, that's a lovely, project, events.wordpress.org. just a quick hat tip again, I want you to say more about this. If the panel do want to say more about this, then again, please interrupt before we move on.

this is to say big at poorly. Hack has given a lot of thought to what happens now that the full site editing outreach program has come to an end. Where does, it carry on? Because obviously, site editing as it's now called, that endeavor is not dead. It's just moved to a different phase and maybe outreach is no longer the point after phase two of the Gutenberg project came to an end.

So did this really in theory and the intuition is to move all of the communications over to a dedicated Slack channel with the hashtag outreach and everything goes there. But the piece that she wrote is proposal. What's next for the out? Reach program. and I'll just leave it hanging there.

Anything else on that? No. Okay. So again, apropos of nothing, I wrote this post on Twitter the other day. Forgive me. It's not supposed to be self-promotional. In fact, I'll just take it off the screen. It doesn't matter. the, but the post was, I got cornered by somebody on a Zoom call the other day and they said, how would you sum up WordPress in one word?

And I thought, that's curious. I like that. And I, it, I ended up with the word kind. That's what it ended up being for me, And so I then posted it on Twitter and, and I'll give you a selection of the replies that came through. See if any of these work for you. Multidimensional. Ooh, helpful, accessible, friendly, creative, open, welcoming.

I like this one. Feisty. Woo. inclusive, helpful. Leftist, supportive, diversity. Accessible. Amateur. Dunno if that's a dig or not, but I'm, gonna read it anyway. Innovative, diverse, helpful. Resilient. Democrats don't even know what that means. I know that's a part in the US but I'm, gonna, I presume there's a pitfall that I could fall into there.

Sure. It goes one along with left leftist. Oh, okay. And then the last one is two-faced. Okay. So I'm gonna throw it out there. You've had enough time to think

[01:06:50] Colin Devroe: I, these sound like comments. That would only happen on X.

[01:06:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. I rarely post on Twitter something that requires a reply, but I just thought that was interesting.

So go on round. Let's go round the horn. let's start with Michelle. What would your, what would be your one word? Growing? Ooh. okay. Yeah. Okay. I think they're still evolving. Yeah. Oh, in that sense? Yeah. Okay. Got it. Carlin, what

[01:07:17] Colin Devroe: about you? I liked the open one. It's interesting, the, responses seemed like they were mainly focused on the community Yeah.

As opposed to just the piece of software, right? so that's interesting. yeah, nobody wrote

[01:07:32] Nathan Wrigley: code.

[01:07:34] Colin Devroe: it's interesting. So as a developer, I, when, you first asked that question, my immediate thing was how do I describe WordPress in one word? The software, not necessarily the community. so Open was, obviously that's the re reason why it was founded.

And so yeah, open would be my Okay. Response.

[01:07:54] Nathan Wrigley: I like it. I like it. And finally, mark,

[01:07:57] Marc Benzakein: I was gonna go for the obvious umbrella term, which is just community. that really is, first of all, sure the software drew me into the WordPress, but what had me stick with WordPress was community. Yeah.

So it's all of those things that everybody said, including two-faced. it's all of those things because that's what community is to a degree, is it's, but that also means all inclusive. ho

[01:08:28] Nathan Wrigley: honestly, if you'd have asked the 18-year-old me, so the 18-year-old me lived in a universe where the internet didn't exist.

I think maybe some, lunatic somewhere had a dial up modem, which you actually put your phone on, but nobody had the internet. If you'd have said to me, okay, when you are how old I am, insert number, big number, less than me, you'll be, yeah, exactly. you'll be looking at a screen and you'll be chatting to people on a screen and they will be your air quotes, but not air quotes, friends.

I would've gone, no, that's weird. No way is that gonna happen. That's, I don't, I don't wanna do any of that. That's all wrong and weird. Fast forward to 2024. I'm loving it. I love all that stuff. I love the fact that I can get online with you three and you are all over the place and we can have a conversation about etiquette in different parts of the world and all that.

It is amazing. And very occasionally I sit at this desk and I bet you've had the same thing. You just get that epiphany of like, how the heck did I get so lucky that I picked this community? And it's got this bunch of people in it and all right, there's a little bit of falling out from time to time, but way less than there should be.

There should be way more falling out and there isn't. So I feel very lucky. That happened, I'm going to shed

[01:09:53] Colin Devroe: it here. I think that it's because,

[01:09:56] Marc Benzakein: I think it's because fundamentally, we all share the same ideal, and so we get a little bit passionate about it. And that's why you have the fallout from time to time.

But it's because everybody loves not just what it's evolved into or what, has evolved, but they love where it can go. And so we become very, passionate about what we want it to become. And, sometimes it ends in, in, in conflict, but most of the time, people are open to listening to.

What it's all about and where we want it to go. and I love that about, this community. I've always been a big believer that community is where it's, at. And finding that in an entrepreneurial setting is very difficult. And so when a lot of us have discovered the WordPress community, it, just was like, yeah, this is what I've been wanting my whole life.

And I think when you all talk about your age, I think I'm the oldest one here. I'm telling you it's really something special. And so we fight tooth and nail to protect what's so special

[01:11:05] Colin Devroe: about it.

[01:11:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I'm so glad I'm not the oldest person.

[01:11:12] Colin Devroe: It's always, I actually, don't

[01:11:14] Marc Benzakein: mind that I'm the oldest

[01:11:15] Colin Devroe: person,

[01:11:16] Nathan Wrigley: no, I was only pulling your leg. Okay. I know that. So fabulous. Thank you for that. I thought that was, I didn't know whether I was gonna drop that one or not. But, Marcus Burnett has come back quite rightly. To say that the WP world, you can find that by Googling it. WP World, shows the whole world. So Marcus is about where it's not just to do with events, it's to do with all sorts of different things in the Yeah.

The whole community. Whole community and, and it shows the whole world. Okay, great. That's, an improvement. Thank you. And it's a cool website too, but Marcus, I'll, it's, I'll bong you $10 and could you just make it, start in Yorkshire and zoom out? That'd be good. All right. Okay, let's move on.

So I didn't, that sounds like a good

[01:11:58] Marc Benzakein: way to make money, by the way, Marcus, as you just like, who's gonna sponsor me this week on WP World? And that's where it's gonna zoom in first. That's right. It's gonna stop. Yeah. Biding more. Yeah. There

[01:12:09] Nathan Wrigley: you go. Zoom out from the

[01:12:10] Colin Devroe: headquarters of such, you get that idea

[01:12:12] Marc Benzakein: for free market.

Great.

[01:12:15] Nathan Wrigley: so I didn't know if this existed or not, but, it, I, think it's new, really, forgive me if this has been around for ages, but I think this is new. the website is developer.woo.com, so we're no longer using the term WooCommerce for this kind of thing. and here it is, it's a website dedicated to the documentation all around the, WooCommerce project.

So really what else is there to say? other than that, it's there and you can go and, browse it at your leisure menu on the left, giving away that there's really an awful lot put into the one website. again, forgive me if it was there before, but it only came across my radar recently. anything or shall I move on?

All righty.

[01:12:59] Colin Devroe: I'll move on. It has the word developer

[01:13:01] Marc Benzakein: in it, so you lost me

[01:13:02] Colin Devroe: right there? Yeah.

[01:13:04] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. Yes. Since snore. couple of pieces [email protected]. and I like to feature these when they come up. It's just. Because I, I think this is such a nice project, loads of nice documentation coming.

It's a couple of tutorials. The first one by Nick Diego, which is a, really nice quick 10 minute, 15 minute read, showing you how you can disable specific blocks within WordPress. Obviously I won't go into it because it's a bunch of code, but that's nice. There's probably a whole bunch of things that your clients or you, yourself really don't need to be using on your website.

So yeah, why not disable them? Give that a go. And then Justin Tadlock, has written a piece calling called Adding Starter Patterns to your WordPress Themes. And it does exactly what you'd imagine. the idea that you can create a bunch of patterns that your, the users of your theme, can just try out right at the start, when they're looking at a blank page and they want a bit more inspiration than that.

two things there. Anything on that? Or shall we move on?

[01:14:07] Colin Devroe: I just like that there's effort going into the full site editor and blocks. I, I am a fan. I know a lot of people are not, or people are, being reluctant to moving towards the full site editor, which I understand 'cause there's a lot of, history there with classic themes and things.

But, I just recently had to, I'm rebuilding my personal website, which I've had for 30 years, which is really Wow. Something. Okay. That is

[01:14:38] Nathan Wrigley: a good,

[01:14:39] Colin Devroe: project. Wow. Yeah, so I've just spent the last couple of months rebuilding it in WordPress and trying to use the full site editor and trying not to write code as a developer that is very difficult 'cause my, in, my first, the first thing I reach for in my toolbox is to write some code.

so to just see where is this project and if I was someone coming into this for the very first time, how would I navigate this and how would I be able to build a website? I have an idea in my mind. How do I then make that a reality? And it does still have a, quite a long ways to go, but it is very, well made so far.

And it's really, as someone who cares about the output of the site, and yes, building it is one thing, but what is it, what is the result of it? As someone that very, is very picky, for what ends up resulting on the website. It is coming a very long way. there's still quite a bit of, I think we could do a whole episode on that, probably Nathan someday.

But yeah. it, there's quite a bit that, you still need to reach for your toolbox, to be able to do. And so some of these things that were covered in those two, posts that you had brought out are starting to close that gap. there's, still quite a other, few other things, but I don't think you, know this Nathan, but I started a project called Barley, in 2012.

That was

[01:16:09] Nathan Wrigley: a I know that. What,

[01:16:10] Colin Devroe: what was that? So it was a full site editor. it was not built on WordPress or originally, though we did bring it to WordPress eventually, but it allowed you to edit the entire, build a website using a wy wig editor. You never had to see an admin. So though Gutenberg and the full site editor is still, you go into an admin and then you choose to update the page that you'd wanna update.

And, some of the things are preview viewable in the admin, some of them are not. Where you still have to go look at the website when you wanna see what the result is. The whole idea of barley 12 years ago was to never see an admin, never see a text box, always manipulate the page directly on, and there's a lot of tools out there, now that, that do that far better than we ever accomplished back then.

But, where you, never really have to see an admin, but I, that's my ideal for an end user. Is that they can think of what their website should be and they can make that happen somehow. I do, Matt covered some of this ai, like some of his dreams for AI in the state of the word this year about how you should be able to just create a write a prompt that would say, I would love to have a website that has a blog on it, a portfolio for my images and whatever, and then it would go and then build, the website for you.

That, that is definitely a utopian view, and I think that's 100% would be really cool to, to see happen. But, for, someone to be able to drag and drop different things and build the website as they want and all of that, the full site editor definitely does enable that. but it still has a long way to go for someone just to sign into WordPress and build a website.

[01:18:02] Nathan Wrigley: couple of things. Firstly, I appreciate that and just highlighting the fact that the developer resources are coming along nicely. there's, not just Justin and Nick, there's other things happening. But if you go to, so here's the plug. Go to developer.wordpress.org and you'll see that it's divided up into a variety of different sections.

so we've just been looking at the, sort of developer blog here, but there's all sorts, block editor, themes, plugins, playground, which we'll come to in a minute. common APIs. So there's just loads and it's growing. And I think, I think a lot of people have been asked to, to man this ship, and put content on there.

And that's exactly what they're doing. And I have to ask, Carlin, was it get barley.com? Yes, it was. I remember it. You had there was like a yellow color. Was it yellow? Yeah. Yeah. I, played with that. Oh, I'm in awe.

[01:18:55] Colin Devroe: This is great. Yeah, it was. I, it, predated medium. So Medium has that nice writing interface that a lot of people appreciate nowadays.

and, obviously Gutenberg now, with the forward slash interface where you can just add whatever you want by typing in forward slash and all that, it predates all of those things. we were very early, but, but it is a vision. It's a vision that a lot of people share for the web, which is that you shouldn't, it's the no code movement.

Now that was something that didn't exist then. but just to be able to allow someone to just build something by. Not ever needing to write code, which I think, yeah. Yeah, I think people learning to code is super important and is definitely a worthy thing for anyone in any industry at all. To learn how to code is still, I think, I would, highly recommend it.

It's a, i, always call it a superpower, my ability to code you. You mentioned earlier about, pinching yourself that you're involved in the WordPress community and stuff, and I, pinch myself that I chose to be able to program because it's really a superpower no matter what you do in life, whether you work at a restaurant or you're an artist or whatever, having some ability to code is, can be, a superpower.

And, I. I do still think that learning and writing code is important, but being able to make a piece of software approachable to everybody, not just people that can write code, is also a very worthy cause that I'm I'm still very glad that automatic and, tons of people around the world are spending their time trying to advance that.

Even with people that are, they, don't say very kind things sometimes about the full site editor out there. Yeah. and I think, there is still a. It's still a worthy

[01:20:57] Nathan Wrigley: effort. Yeah. So you described your coating as a superpower. I would describe my coating as a bit of a damp squib.

My coating's not really gonna get me anywhere, in all honesty. but I'm glad that, I'm glad that it serves you well. That's great.

[01:21:13] Marc Benzakein: So I think it's important to at least understand how the sauce is made, right? Yeah. Yeah. So even if you're not a good coder, which I am not. As an example, I can look at code and tell what it's gonna do, and I think that helps In a way to inspire creativity and come up with ideas.

[01:21:30] Nathan Wrigley: And WordPress does that in spades, isn't it? if you're just using the no code solution, there's gonna be a point where you're gonna think, oh, I wonder if you can do that. And if you are using a proprietary platform, the ones where you pay them $19 a month, you're out a lot mostly.

but with WordPress, you can just get the toolkit it out and begin. And you don't have to go complicate. You can start with a snippet or something like that and take it from there. That's, I,

[01:21:54] Michelle Frechette: fork. Hello Dolly. Just as a way to take my fist and take some of the mist off the window and look into what coding looks like, right?

Yeah, Perfect. So for the same reason. Yeah.

[01:22:02] Nathan Wrigley: Perfect example. By the way, I've hijacked the, the WP World website and it only costs me.

[01:22:11] Marc Benzakein: Marcus,

[01:22:11] Michelle Frechette: you sold out too

[01:22:13] Nathan Wrigley: low. I'll send you my latitude and longitude and you can start up my house.

[01:22:18] Colin Devroe: if it's anything like million dollar homepage, do you guys remember Million Dollar Homepage? Oh, yeah. Yeah. so Marcus, every day increase the amount per day. A dollar or something. And we'll, see at the end of the year how much you're making.

Don't listen to him. Marcus, stay. I think you should stay adults. Stay

[01:22:35] Marc Benzakein: at 10. You should do pay clicks and see what people will bid on it. And then you get a, budget, a spend budget every day of what people are willing to

[01:22:44] Nathan Wrigley: spend. His brain is worrying. Now. He's, you've truly made Marcus's Day, I reckon.

so we're getting back to the community bit. Mr. Panza Dragoon, it took over a decade before joining the community. Yeah, I wasn't, it wasn't a decade, but it was certainly a number of years. I just used it as software for years and years and then somehow stumbled into a WordPress event and thought I'll go to that.

And then thinking, I'm gonna sit in a corner, it'll be weird, I won't like it. And then went. And I didn't sit in a corner and it wasn't weird and I did like it. And here we are many years later. FSE has come a long way, says Elliot, since its release, but I still need to approach block theming as a developer code allows more flexibility for sure.

the developer blog facelift he carries on is really nice. And there you go. WP Tavern Barley article references the front end editor project being developed for Core. Oh

[01:23:37] Colin Devroe: yeah. That might have had tho those two might, those two things might have been related.

[01:23:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and then you go, FSE is much better than where it was before, but still people are finding it hard to use, myself included.

But it's getting there. Themes like Ollie. could help users transition into FSE. Yeah, that was, an interesting thing when they introduced their onboarding wizard. Anyway, there you go. developer.wordpress.org. You can see it there. Go have a poke around. You never know. You might discover some little aspect of the project that you want to play with.

This is cool if you're into developing things. Up until recently, if you went to playground.wordpress.net, is that right? Yeah, you would get a, an install of the word of the WordPress software, but you, what you might notice is that it, you didn't actually do anything or go anywhere or install anything.

That's because by what I can only describe as voodoo, it's all being, it's all happening inside the browser. honestly, it's beyond my comprehension, how that is even possible. But it was limited to experimenting. So it's the perfect way to experiment with something. You wanna play with a, I don't know, a block or a plugin.

This is a good way to do it. And as soon as you close your browser tab, it is gone. but it used to be single sites only. Now if you append the URL with, forward slash query, multi-site equals yes. Probably can't see that on the screen, but there it is. then it will install you a multi-site network.

And the same caveat supply once you close the browser. I dunno, actually, I've got this intuition that they're gonna. Make it so that even if you close the browser, you can get back to it at some point. But anyway, there it is. You can now, do some more voodoo. All right. Anything about that? Probably not.

Okay. We were talking about learning to code my friend David Wamsley and I, so in, in a vain attempt to keep up with a number of podcasts that Michelle does, I started another podcast with, a very good friend of mine who did this podcast for years and years. It's called, he's called David Worsley.

And we started a, show called the No Script Web Show. And the idea of this, is that this website is as bare as we can get it. And as we cover something each week, we add it to the website. And we're on week three and we're just beginning to talk about, we're just beginning to talk about intrinsic design in episode four, which is coming out soon.

it's at no script do show. The idea is we're not dealing with CMSs, we're just going HTML. CSSW three C web standards and keeping it. Simple kiss, that kind of mentality. And so if you wanna follow along with what we're doing and watch this website go from terrible to slightly less terrible, no script show, you can follow along what we're doing there.

And I obviously, I've got to still come up with 19 other podcasts before I'm, getting past the finish line. Hey, head, Michelle.

[01:26:35] Michelle Frechette: Bob's got us all beat though, right? Oh yeah.

[01:26:38] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah. Yeah. Bob. Done. I take comfort though that's all under one brand. Yours are all under the different brands and Yeah.

okay. Okay. I think,

[01:26:47] Marc Benzakein: Bob's taken more of a producer role than anything at this point though, so he's Yeah, he's,

[01:26:52] Nathan Wrigley: he's got the right idea. He's, being smart. He's smart. Yeah. Yeah. He's. interesting ideas, but I think they'll keep the WP World homepage a bit more inclusive than that. Oh, I thought I was gonna, do well

[01:27:06] Colin Devroe: out.

Oh, you and your standards, Marcus.

[01:27:10] Nathan Wrigley: Nevermind. Anyway, there you go. That's that show. I just want to raise this tool. If you're into podcasting, check this out. It's called podcast.ai. It's one tool. It just shows the power of the browser. It's now this one tool which enables you to do more or less all the things that you need to do to launch a successful podcast, including recording, editing, adding effects.

Just loads. It's really clever. I confess. I haven't used it. I'm just working off their marketing jingo. But if they deliver on what they promise, it's definitely worth a look. let's go over to some sub content submitted by our fine guests. Who was this one who put in our own your

[01:27:47] Colin Devroe: web? I did. Ah, yeah, when I saw that you have a pick of the week, I thought, man, I could send him a hundred links.

yeah, I'm sure everyone else could too. But, this is, a newsletter by, Matthias Ott and, it's called Own Your Web. It's, still very early days. I think it's only eight or

[01:28:07] Nathan Wrigley: 10. Yeah, I think he's on 10, I think. Yeah.

[01:28:11] Colin Devroe: and eight or 10, additions. Yeah. Yeah. That, that have been published.

but he focuses on building a website, building a personal website a lot. And also he highlights, a personal site of the week and I. I cannot be a bigger proponent for having a personal website. it has led to every opportunity in my career. I have everything that ha that I've ever done is because I have a blog.

and and many others have said similar things. It's obviously if you are a tinkerer with WordPress or if you're a developer of any kind, if you wanna try coding, you can obvi obviously do it on your own website. 'cause you can break it and you can fix it and it's okay. and so I like that he is starting to feature, personal websites because I just think they're, making a comeback for sure.

if anybody's following along with the fedi verse and activity pub and the at protocol and threads and all these things that are happening, all these sites are beginning to connect again. It used to be we were all connected through RSS feeds. RSS feeds are definitely still a thing, and I use them every single day personally.

I know many others do. And it's a, it's an underpinning of the web for sure. Every app that you open, whether it's the Apple News app, or Flipboard, or the Google News app, they're all powered by RSS. So if RSS didn't exist, all those things wouldn't exist either. however, the federation part of it where personal websites can connect now, someone can make a comment on Mastodon.

It shows up on your blog post. Someone can write a blog, a comment on your blog post. It can show up on, any of the, Activity, pub powered, platforms that are out there, whether that's a photo sharing thing, there's a replacement for, yeah, pixel fed. There's a replacement called bookworm.

for, good, reads. There's all these different things that are starting to connect the connective tissue of the open web. when, we said before that we were like defending the principles of WordPress by defending the principles of WordPress, you're actually defending the open principles of the open web of trying to allow there to be no owner of any particular thing.

And for everything to continue to connect with each other and not be siloed in their own things. And we're seeing that make a humongous resurgence over the last 18 months. even Facebook is joining the Fedi verse, which is like ridiculous to no, we never would've. Thought that could happen. and so now just, this is a simple newsletter.

I just picked one out of the latest things. But, the fact that they're highlighting personal homepages, I think if you have a site that's laying dormant right now, or you haven't updated in a while, consider publishing your content on your site first. Then sharing it everywhere else.

Yeah. I think you'll see a lot of

[01:31:15] Nathan Wrigley: benefit from that. If you, if you download the activity pod plugin for WordPress, which you know, officially under the auspices of automatic, you'll, it's a really interesting experience. It is not what you're expecting. Your, website becomes a first citizen of the Fed.

So in effect, your website posts when you post and now you can cross pollinate comments from different social platforms just on that. I've stopped mentioning it recently, but if you fancy joining our master on install, WP Builds.com. No, not.com. WP Builds.social. You can sign up over there. It's free. I'm saddling the burden.

Oh, that's nice. Yeah, it's, I think we've been had it for I don't know, two years or something now. And, it's good. It's nice. It's just a free way to interact and, and, but I've been following, Mattias OT for a little while as well, and I love the stuff that I read. We featured a few on this show actually a couple of times, so that's really nice.

Thank you. And finally, Michelle has raised the WordPress photo festival, 2024 submissions. What's this one, Michelle?

[01:32:21] Michelle Frechette: This is a WordPress event that is happening right now. started on sat, Friday, Saturday, whatever day the third was. The FRI Saturday, runs through the 10th and anyone anywhere is allowed to register.

It's free to register. And then when you submit photos up, you can submit your photos through, wordpress.org/photos and tag them with, hashtag WP Corolla. photos, I think is what it is. And when they come in to be moderated, we will add that tag to it. There are actually prizes. I am one of the adjudicators for this event.

So we will be awarding prizes for, for the most photos submitted for, I can't remember best photo, things like that. Marcus and I and Topher is feeling better. Topher has been under the weather. we will be, announcing those at the closing remarks on the 10th, but right now there are over 200 photos awaiting moderation.

I always like to remind people that there are only 29 of us moderating photos, and we also all have full-time jobs. So if you have submitted photos, please, patience is, appreciated. But it's is, it's an exciting, next gen event for WordPress. It is all online, so anywhere anybody, anywhere in the world can participate and, I can't remember how, oh, you can see 351 approved already at the time that you pulled this up.

It might be even higher now. But I did just double check. Yeah. 3 71, 20 20 more. Nice. Yeah, so there are people who are in there happily editing or moderating right now. We're not accepting all photos. They are moderated the same as they would be for anything else. if you are submitting, less than stellar photos, they probably won't be included.

So make sure that you're looking at the quality of your photos as well as abiding by all the rules, no faces, no license plates, things like that. And, we will get to all of them by the 10th. And it's just an exciting kind of thing to be a part of and to see something that people can all participate in.

And you get a badge. Yeah, you get a badge If you've never, if you have never submitted a photo and you get a photo approved into the WordPress photo directory, you get a badge on your, wordpress.org profile, as a photo contributor. So

[01:34:40] Nathan Wrigley: nice. Photos dot wp kerala.org. K-E-R-A-L-A, do org. And now that my, Marcus Burnett has turned down my.

Fabulous offer.

Hang on, Yorkshire. Can I win the competition? Yeah, no. Okay. Fair enough. Yeah. Go to photos dot wp carol.org and submit your photos there. I'm gonna click refresh 'cause I wanna see if it's gone up from 17th. Oh, I can't see now. I dunno what I did. That's it, that's all we got for you this week. We will be back next week.

with another, oh, another one has just been added. We're on 3 7 2 There you go. that's fabulous. So we'll be back next week. It only remains for me to say super duper big. Thank you. That was a fabulous discussion this week. I think we've enjoyed that. I loved it. First of all, thank you for anybody who made a comment that really helps the show move along.

It's brilliant. Secondly, thank you to my cohost, Michelle Frache. She joins us very, frequently. Appreciate that very much, but also, to, Carlin Dere and also to Mark Zaca. Have I pronounced that? Mark? You got it right. Very good. I appreciate that as well. We will be back next week, but just before we go, Colline.

I'm sorry, but here comes the slightly humiliating thing. I have this piece of look, he's just so into it. Mark, join us. Yay. That's it. We're done. I can capture that and we can stick that on the socials and say thank you very much indeed. So we'll be back next week. Thank you so much. We will see you soon on this week.

Thanks, Nathan. Thank you.