This Week in WordPress #288

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode number 288 entitled, I can create buckets of time. It was recorded on Monday the 26th of February, 2024. My name's Nathan Wrigley and I'll be joined today by my co-host Michelle Frechette, and also by guests, Marc Benzakein and Paul Halfpenny.

It's a WordPress podcast, we're going to talk about WordPress. First up we talk about the fact that in WordPress 6.5, we will have a new image option. We'll be able to upload AVIF images.

We also talk about some of the other things which are coming, for example, the block bindings API, the interactivity API, and the fact that you'll be able to manage your fonts all within WordPress.

We talk about events, WordCamp Europe, and WordCamp Asia, which is coming up next week.

We also get into a conversation about accessibility on the make and WordCamp websites. Amber Hinds has a few bits and pieces to say about that.

We also get into by coincidence. The fact that Marc has an update to MainWP, a big update to 6.5. There's a couple of nice new features coming there. And Paul is launching a new plugin called PersonalizeWP. So we have a look at that. And congratulations to Michelle Frechette for getting a new improved role at post status.

It's all coming up next on this week in WordPress.

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

hey, hello. Episode number 200 288. It says there, 288 of this week in WordPress. I know, I was, when I started the show, I was hoping I'd get to 289. So only one week left. What happens when you get to 289? I have no idea, but it's gonna be good. Two 90? It's gonna be two 90. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. We'll go for two 90. I've changed my mind. that's where we're at. We're on to 288 of this week in WordPress. We were supposed to be joined by Jess Frick, but sadly, Jess contacted me this morning to say that she, was not feeling all that well. And, as Lockwood have it, we've been able to swap one co-host for another.

Michelle, I got it in right the beginning. we've got, we're joined by Michelle Frechette who stepped in literally at the 11th hour. I messaged her about an hour ago and said, are you free? And she said, yes, of course. I'm, there she is, co-host Michelle Frechette. How you doing? I am good. Thank you. It's good to be here.

Yeah. Thank you. We're gonna share something really cool about, Michelle's flat in a moment. not in a moment, probably towards the end, but let's give Michelle her proper bio. it's fulsome, it says, Michelle Ette is the Director of Community Engagement for Stella WP at Liquid Web. In addition to her work at Stellar, WP Michelle is also the podcast barista at WP Coffee Talk.

Co-founder of underrepresented in tech.com, creator of WP Career page pages, the president for the board of big orange chart.org, director of community relations and [email protected]. Author, business coach, and frequent organizer and speaker at WordPress events. She lives outside Rochester, New York, where she's an avid nature photographer.

Ha. You'll see that, you can find out more about her, her website, meet Michelle online. yes, Michelle, once again, thank you for joining us as our regular co-host. Appreciate it. Pleasure to be here. Thank you. We're also joined, by two folk who've actually by pure coincidence, got things that are important and timely.

So at some point later on during the, during the podcast, we will be showing off bits and pieces that they've been working on. First of all, let's start with. there. Over there it is. Paul. Paul, half Penny. How you doing Paul? Thank you Michelle. That's very helpful.

[00:04:28] Paul Halfpenny: I'm very well, thank you.

I'm trying to get used to these things, which I usually have headphones that go in your ear. A little in ear job. yeah, Just But I wanted to join in with you three 'cause you are all, oh yeah, we'll put the headphones. Check

[00:04:41] Nathan Wrigley: out. Yeah, that's it. We're all doing the big headphones. I'll do the headphones,

[00:04:44] Paul Halfpenny: but it's a bit weird.

Like it's a bit,

[00:04:46] Nathan Wrigley: it's a bit echoy. Yes. I can totally sympathize with that. My ears are not functioning as normal. And just to give you some insight, this ear, hang on. Yeah. This one's hearing. This one's hearing like about 2% Functionally. I'm deaf except this high pitch version of you.

So whenever you speak, I get normal, Paul quietly in this one, and then I get like high pitched as if you're on helium. I'm the box. Yeah, exactly. Don't do that. That's freaking

[00:05:16] Marc Benzakein: out. That's, really

[00:05:18] Nathan Wrigley: loud. not loud. That's really high pitched. Anyway, there's Paul. Paul is the CTO of a WordPress agency, in the UK called Filter.

And he's also the founder of the tool that we mentioned earlier, personalized wp. We'll have a, we'll have a little bit of a prod around that, a little bit later, but thank you for joining us, Paul. Fully appreciate it. No worries at all. And also last, but by no means least down there is Mark Zakin. Ah, I'm never remembering how to do your surname.

Is it kind or keen or?

[00:05:49] Marc Benzakein: It's a Benzocaine, like the medication. Okay. which I say every time. So like Candy cane? Yeah. I am. I am a. Topical ointment, basically.

[00:06:05] Michelle Frechette: I think candy sounds a lot nicer, but you do. You

[00:06:08] Marc Benzakein: do. It does. It actually does. And I've never thought of that. And, yeah,

[00:06:12] Nathan Wrigley: far. Mark Candy.

Yeah, I like it now. so Mark Zaca is, has been involved in the WordPress community for well over 13 years. For 10 of those years, he was a member of the team, which, made up Server Press. He's now the marketing lead for Maine, wp, which has had a great big release coming up this week. I think Mark said it was tomorrow.

So we'll get a bit of a sneak peek of a couple of the features coming into that. He's an easy to use, privacy focused WordPress management. Sorry. It is, I apologize. A, an easy to use, privacy focused WordPress management Dash dashboard. As well as that, he's also involved in Psych District, a collaborative managed WordPress host with a focus on performance and security.

So I might also add that

[00:06:58] Marc Benzakein: I am also easy to use. Oh,

[00:07:02] Nathan Wrigley: I love it. Yeah. That's great. okay, so that's gonna be our panel for today. Just a few bits of housekeeping, if you wish to join us. that would be lovely. primarily this goes out as a podcast tomorrow at some point, but we do have a few people who drop in and share comments.

If you want to do that, the best place to go, is here. Why not copy and paste that URL into your browser of choice and then go and splurge it through a social media platform like Twitter or X or Facebook or whatever. It's wp build.com forward slash live. You'll find us there at the moment. If you want to comment, you need to be logged into Google.

you can use the box on the side and it's got YouTube comments. Alternatively, if you look in the, window playing the video itself, in the top, right in corner, it is a little black box. It says live chat. And you can, implement that, you can use that and you don't need to be logged into anything.

this is going away actually, I dunno, Michelle, if you've got any insight into this, but, the Facebook group functionality, Facebook are gonna strip out the API, to broadcast into a Facebook group as of, I think it's April the first. So we've either got figure a work around out or it'll just go away.

but if you are in the Facebook group right at the minute, we won't know who you are unless you click, a new tab and go to Wave video. Slash lives slash Facebook and then click the confirm button and it allows them to, allows Facebook to tell us who you are, which is nice. But yeah, go in away.

I'll put your name.

[00:08:35] Michelle Frechette: Oh, put your name in your, comment so we know.

[00:08:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, don't do that. Yeah. That's a good way of doing it, isn't it? You can, if you want to be anonymous, you can, or, anonymous from Facebook. You can do it that way. thank you to Courtney who showed up. She says, mark, how do you not have glasses yet?

What the heck, mark? Why haven't you got bad eyesight the rest of us?

[00:08:56] Marc Benzakein: the truth of the matter is I do have bad eyesight. Oh. And, about three years ago, my eyes went in the direction that, of, when I look at the computer with my glasses on, everything is blurry. So e everything is actually in very clear focus when I'm sitting at the computer.

And the only time I need to wear glasses now is when I drive. Oh,

[00:09:19] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. I got a new pair of glasses about three months ago under strict instructions that I should only ever wear them in front of the screen. But because I spend so much time in front of the screen, like so much time, I completely forget to take them off.

So when I walk away, I'm supposed to, do that. and I've got the old man. I love that. Yeah. Oh yeah, God. I thought to myself, there's no way I'm gonna be able to commit to that habit if I just put them down somewhere and wander off, which is what I do. I'll never remember where they are. So that whole thing of taking 'em on, putting 'em off, taking 'em off will become even harder.

But I never even, I never do that. I just never take them off. See, so now my eyes have come, become dependent upon,

[00:10:02] Michelle Frechette: if you're like me, you can't see no matter what. Yeah. So it'll, like not having your glasses on is never an option. Yeah. You, I do swap. Yeah. I have, bifocals for real life and then I have computer glasses

[00:10:14] Nathan Wrigley: for this.

What I really need is a pair of those old man glasses, which is like the half moon, like a line. And then, I

just

[00:10:20] Michelle Frechette: sort, that's what these are. Oh, really? They. I would need trifocals for computer as well. So I,

[00:10:27] Marc Benzakein: yeah. and what I do is with my glasses, I put 'em up on my head, which they say every time I go to the, the, optometrist, he says, that's the worst thing you can do for your glasses, because it tweaks 'em out.

And I'm always getting 'em adjusted. And they're like, get out that habit. And. I, don't, I just put 'em up on my head and then forget. Have there, get yourself

[00:10:47] Michelle Frechette: the librarian chain like Nathan has, so that

[00:10:50] Nathan Wrigley: internet Yeah. I'm all for, yeah. The librarian. Is that what they called the librarian chain? Yeah, I'll go with that.

[00:10:56] Marc Benzakein: Not enough. Anyway. You sounded good. I, happen to be dating a person who doesn't want me to do anything that makes me look like an old man. And I think that might include part

[00:11:05] Nathan Wrigley: of it. I'm so given up on not looking like an old man.

[00:11:09] Marc Benzakein: You know what? I feel like I've earned every wrinkle and every gray hair that I don't have.

That's it. Or whatever, I think I've earned it, but, be proud of

[00:11:18] Nathan Wrigley: your, growing years. Yeah. That's great. Exactly. Exactly. Okay, so we're not here to, talk about eyes. We're apparently here to talk about WordPress, so let's quickly crack on with that. We actually

[00:11:28] Marc Benzakein: have wpi glasses.com.

[00:11:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

Got a lot to cover, so we'll probably have to gloss over things. Fairly quickly today, or, if, or if we get stuck into one or two things, we'll have to miss a few bits and pieces out. But just a quick couple of things. This is our website, WP Builds.com. If you want to be kept up to date with what we produce, just put your email, into that little box and click subscribe and we'll let you know what's going on.

Like to draw attention to GoDaddy Pro, who have been a sponsor of ours for a long, time. And, they keep the lights on over here. great. Thanks to them for doing that. Okeydokey. So this is dead. Cool. I love this. WordPress 6.5 is just around the corner actually. We've got loads and loads of different articles which cover different aspects of this, but we'll cover this one off first.

if you don't know, there's, an image format called a VI actually can't remember what the acronym stands for, if indeed it is an acronym, but it's, it offers significantly smaller file sizes than, let's say, jpeg, for example. Now there's other rivals like WebP, which are I think probably in a bit of a, race for, performance, EE equanimity with things like a, but my understanding is that Avis at the minute is one of the, one of the leading ways to, to cut the amount of.

data that you're sending across the wire, it's obviously gonna increase the amount of images that you can store on a hard disk and all of that kind of stuff. but until now it hasn't been possible to use that in WordPress natively. But Adam Silverstein, who is on the performance team, he's a Googler.

he's here to tell us on the make WordPress core blog that is coming to WordPress in just a few weeks time, up to 50% smaller file sizes. and you will be able to upload them in the way that you upload absolutely. Anything else directly into your media library? There's a few bits and pieces around this.

so for example, your host. It needs to support this. you can check that by going to the WP admin area, and if you go to the tools section and then site Health, you might be able to find that in the dashboard actually. and click on the info tab and then media handling. So there's quite a little bit in there, but it's, 30 seconds of clicking about.

You'll be able to see if a VI is supported. This article, which I'll link to in the show notes, will, and it tell you how you can compress those with a little func, little thing that you can put in your functions PP file, and how to convert things from jpeg, say over to a v. and also, it's not natively supported, a across your entire.

Multi-site network. There are, things to be done there. Anyway, I thought that was cool. I confess, I've never, ever, created an a v image in my life, but I know that most editing software, Photoshop and what have you have been able to do this for the longest period of time. So there, I'm throwing that out at you.

What do you make of that 6.5 Nice new feature?

[00:14:32] Paul Halfpenny: I'm old school. I, get confused by images, like responsive images and art directed images and images that load in and different file types. I wish we'd just had JPEGs. They just

[00:14:41] Nathan Wrigley: got smaller. Why can't they just make JPEG better and call it jpeg again or something?

[00:14:47] Paul Halfpenny: JPEG more, jpeg less. Yeah. yeah. So I, it's great. the, biggest performance problems we see on websites are always the size of the images, where people uploading big images and they're not being optimized properly. Anything that we can do to reduce image sizes is a win for me.

[00:15:05] Nathan Wrigley: Totally.

Totally Yeah. mark. Michelle, anything that I

[00:15:09] Marc Benzakein: totally, I, totally agree. I was, I actually, only knew of a, I, as a dropdown option when I am saving from Photoshop. I didn't really know what it was, until I read this article, but I'm, I, so I'm, I guess I'm a little old school too, but I definitely feel like anything we can do to optimize, our image format so that they load faster and pages load faster, what's to complain about there?

I'm not sure, other than I feel bad for these people who have like hundreds of thousands of images on their site and, trying to compete, somehow or another with performance, and have to go back and redo their images or anything like that. But, but I think it's totally, I.

Totally beneficial to everyone, so why not?

[00:16:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I'm imagining at some point somebody will come along with a tool which will be able to bulk, convert all of the JPEGs. But a 50% saving is not really to be sniffed at. I have a bit of a bottleneck actually in my workflow in that I use a third party tool and it's really not typical, but I use a third party tool, which takes the audio from my podcast RSS feed, and it converts it into a video, so that it can be automatically posted to YouTube.

So, there's a strange auto blogging thing, and it's a third party SaaS service, and they don't allow, a VI that's just a blocker. It fails at that point. for me, at the moment, I'm stuck with JPEG because I, there's so much utility in that workflow that I'm gonna keep it. But if that wasn't part of my workflow, I think I'd be using Web PI.

And, and all the time. 'cause 50%, it's not to be sniffed at, is it? And really in the, era where we're more and more concerned about what we're doing to the environment, I don't really think if you can get away with it, you should be using something else. It's just, quicker load times, less storage and so on.

So anyway. Michelle will you as photographer?

[00:17:12] Michelle Frechette: Yeah, just as a photographer. As long as the image quality isn't right, affected, then that's, my biggest thing because,

[00:17:19] Nathan Wrigley: actually, funnily enough, inside this article, 'cause that's what I thought because I just bought a camera, Michelle and I have had various, conversations about cameras.

She actually was a great help. For me finding a camera. My camera is, it's brand new, but it doesn't It doesn't shoot in anything other than jpeg that, maybe it does. Oh, does it? I explored a bit further, to be honest, but Yeah. But the default is that, bring it to Asia. I'll show you how to do it.

Oh, great. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's great news. But the default is jpeg, but, in this article, just, where is it? It's about here-ish. It says a V form, da. Is this the right bit? Yeah. AIF images also support a wide range of, including HDR colors and produce sharper images than JPEGs, especially in areas with high detail.

So maybe there's something in the spec. That, rather than the jpeg doing its compression, maybe the a v is able to say, this bit looks complicated, let's really make the data in that little portion of the image. Lots and lots there, but this is a blue sky, it's mainly blue, forget about that.

I don't know, I dunno the technical details, but, it seems like I'm gonna have to throw my notes camera away. I just

[00:18:31] Michelle Frechette: No, I, don't think so, but I actually think I'm in, I'm interested in learning more, right? So obviously everybody's not gonna have brand new cameras just to, to support this.

So there's gotta be a way that it's working with whatever

[00:18:41] Marc Benzakein: images we have. So yeah, just shoot everything in raw and then you're good from there.

[00:18:46] Nathan Wrigley: That's he, yeah, he was a massive it. It

[00:18:49] Marc Benzakein: doesn't matter if every photo is 8,000 megabytes. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, that's

[00:18:53] Michelle Frechette: right. Yeah. you joke, but shooting in raw is the right way

[00:18:56] Marc Benzakein: to do it.

Then you can convert anything. So yeah. I agree. Yeah, just, get huge memory cards and, offload regularly and you're good. Yeah,

[00:19:04] Nathan Wrigley: that is, just a couple of things to say is that my, my capacity to see the comments coming in, is not keeping up with what's actually coming in. The platform seems to be consuming a proportion of the comments.

as an example, peach, Andary High there, you made a comment. I can see it on YouTube, but I can't see it in the platform, so I can't raise it on me. Oh, interesting. On the show. So I dunno why, just a subset of comments have come through. I've got three in the platform and there's about, I don't know, there's maybe 12 or something, in reality.

So apologies if some of them don't come through. I'm, sorry about that, but I'll, try to read them out. But Peach did say, your cat was photo bombing. You there, Michelle? I dunno if you saw your cat. Went and stood on the table and stared right at us all for a little while. Just she wanted her moment in the spotlight.

Andrew Palmer. Again, I can't put it on the screen, but I can see that you've commented. He says, is it compatible with Safari? I don't know, but I do know that there are, there are articles out there all, all over the place, which will enable us to, to tell whether that's true. I'm gonna, I thought

[00:20:15] Marc Benzakein: it said that it's compatible with all the major browsers.

Yeah, I would imagine. Maybe you're right. Safari. may, I think it was lo lower down, but I can't remember exactly where. Yeah.

[00:20:25] Nathan Wrigley: the truth is, Andrew, off the top of my head, I don't know. but I have a feeling that it's been around for such a long time. I'm gonna put my, finger in the air and say yes.

and then James Kemp again, sorry, I can't put it on the screen, but it's, he made a comment. It says, I may have missed this, but aren't there WP Tools and plugins, which auto convert av, to web, sorry, things like JPEGs to a Viff and Web P Yeah, there aren't there, there's lots of plugins. I think most of them are commercial.

there's short pixel and there's a whole bunch of other plugins. and also, who was it? Pascal Bler, who's also a Googler. He recently released a plugin on GitHub, where if you drag, let's say, I don't know, a jpeg into the block editor, if you just chuck it into a block, it'll convert it on the fly, and stick it into your media library or in the block itself.

So it looks and he's a, he's part of the performance team as well, with Adam, who wrote that article. So I, think a lot of that work is, coming, down the pike. James also says he shoots raw and jpeg. Fuji JPEGs are super nice and Courtney replies with Jet Pack Site Accelerator does convert to WebP.

I wish that it could be converted to core though. Yeah. Courtney Pascal Bula is hoping at some point, maybe 6.6 or something to have his code, ported into core, but we'll have to wait and see how that goes. Anyway, exciting stuff. lots and lots of nice things.

[00:22:01] Michelle Frechette: And Peter Ingersol did report on the weather, just so you

know.

[00:22:04] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, did he? Oh, Peter, I'm so sorry. He always roll up on the weather. Let, lemme try and find it. Da Oh yeah. There you go. Thanks, Peter. He says it's 2036 degrees Fahrenheit, two degrees centigrade. That's about what it is here. At the moment. Anyway, nice to see you all. Thank you. Keep the comments coming, but I may have to just read them out.

I apologize about that. and thankfully in our live like private chat that the four of us together can have, which we can't actually show on the screen. Paul has given us can use.com. what is that, Paul? Is that just like an online service which tells you what you can do with images and whatnot?

Yeah, basically

[00:22:46] Paul Halfpenny: it tells you what browser support there is. So you can just type in an item. So if you do, can I use Eve? It will show you all the browsers like Chrome Edge, safari, and what versions it supported

[00:22:57] Nathan Wrigley: in. Oh, that's neat. Look at that. Very cool. There we go. Can I use.com/query? Search equals and then a v.

Where are we? Where are we? So what was the question? It was about Snap Safari. Yeah. So

[00:23:12] Paul Halfpenny: 16.4. It looks like it's fully supported. Okay. Red is not supported. The orange one is partially supporters and

[00:23:19] Nathan Wrigley: there'll be some known issues. Okay. So the further down the column we go, the more up to date we get. Yeah. So basically if it's green at the bottom, it's supported, then we're good.

Oh, it looks I nobody's using opera anymore, especially after the recent news that they had about all the odd stuff that they were doing.

[00:23:36] Michelle Frechette: It's not surpr supported an internet explorer

[00:23:38] Nathan Wrigley: who would've thought the internet is not supported on Internet Explorer. and then there's a peculiar browser I've never heard of called QQ browser, and then the COOs browser.

I think that ships on Nokia phones. but basically you're good to go. it looks like with iv That's a good fine. Thank you, Paul. I appreciate it. Okay. So there you go. You can start using this fabulous new image format. Andrew Palmer said I had a site yesterday, which wouldn't display images on Spar Safari, and on, on iPad turned off Web P.

And boom, it worked perfectly well. I'm gonna have to look now on, I'm gonna have to type in Web P here and see what we get. Web P. See what we get. apparently, according to this, WebP has been, been possible since version 16, or, came in 15.6 or something, but who knows, Andrew.

Sorry about that. okay. That's that. So that was Adam Silverstein. So, related to that, this is Adam again. he's been really busy this week. He's been performing Busy guy. yeah, that's right. Yeah. He's ever so good at doing things quickly. 'cause he is on the performance team.

he's got an article called Introducing the WordPress Core Track Sustainability. Focus, and I'll just read, he says for this post, the emphasis is on sustainable or green coding, which focuses on minimizing the environmental impact of software development and execution. It encompasses practice like, optimizing algorithms and data structures to use fewer resources.

So I guess you could include what we've just talked about as part of that, although that's not an algorithm. reusing resources with caching. And, and really I'm just giving you the fact that this is a little project which is ongoing. Now, there's a few related articles. It's on the make dot WordPress dot core blog, and I will include it into the show notes.

It's just related to what we were just talking about. So there's a track ticket and there's a, there's a community that you can get involved in called sustainability. Like I said, all of the links in the show notes tomorrow, I. Okay. WordPress 6.5 is just around the corner. You can go to the official wordpress.org website and get a very, short version of what's coming.

Or if you fancy it, you can go to Ronnie Shawney, who has written an article on WP Tavern. Ronnie, as we'll find out in a moment, is one of the seven people who are, competing, I guess is the right word. they're over on the WP Tavern. There's, a few of them and they're all competing, but we'll find out about that in a moment.

But he's gonna tell us in more detail what's going on. the results of the 2023 survey have revealed that, I actually, I'll come to that later 'cause there's something about that. But we've just been talking about performance and accessibility. 6.5 contains 110 performance related updates, and you can see a little chart.

If you're watching this, you can see a table, which gives us some info. I don't really understand what this first one is. Can anybody give me an insight? How, can you measure typing? 'cause that's what's written there because I don't understand that. What does that mean?

[00:27:01] Paul Halfpenny: Is it the, the time between pressing the key and it rendering on the screen?

[00:27:05] Nathan Wrigley: Is that what, do you think that's what it is? Is, yeah. 'cause definitely if you've got a block intensive page Or you've got a block intensive page, which, has been open for three days and you come back to it and you type, definitely things are not quite as performant as they were. Okay.

So let's assume that what Paul said is true. in version 6.4, it took 60 milliseconds to register, the keystroke. Now it's down to 15 milliseconds. God knows with my one finger granddad typing, I'm totally okay.

[00:27:39] Marc Benzakein: You might not notice a difference,

[00:27:40] Nathan Wrigley: Nathan. No, I'm really not noticing any difference.

this surprises me, I just can't even imagine that the first number's true. But it says first block load in version 6.4. Am I reading that right? what possible thing can that say apart from 20 seconds? How. How, I've never ever loaded a page where anything's taken 20 seconds to load, so I don't quite understand what that is.

But now it's down to 8.4. So if it was 20 seconds, patterns, this I can understand. So if you pick a pattern, and you say, I wanna select that pattern, it takes a moment for it to come in and register all the different blocks and what have you. That's, they shaved off half a second, so it'd be 1.5, seconds.

And the site editor first block load. Again, I can understand this 'cause it's a bit of a slow process. It's gone down from seven seconds to 4.6 seconds. It's all going in the right direction. I guess there's not much more to say to that. but there are also 65 accessibility improvements, including fixes to contrast settings, cursor focus, sub-menu, positioning of elements and more.

The block bindings. API, is around the corner. Now, I confess not being a developer, I'm not really that sure why. This is cool. I'm trying to get excited about it, but I don't really know why to get excited about it. So I'm hoping that one of you three fine people can tell me why the block bindings API is a cool thing.

Do any of

[00:29:20] Marc Benzakein: It's not in my wheelhouse 'cause they say it's cool.

[00:29:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, because somebody says started. I

[00:29:25] Michelle Frechette: should, I shoulda grabbed that answer first.

[00:29:30] Nathan Wrigley: we have an article, about it, which does explain it a little bit, but let me explain by reading, off this page. It is Mario Santos, who described the goal of the new API.

he said this API aims to connect block attributes to values obtained from different sources that might vary depending on the context. And so here we go, for example, a value like post author that changes depending on the current post. This will expand the capabilities of existing blocks. For example, having a heading block with the content of the post author without needing a new post author block.

So it seems to me as if it's like an atomic way of atomizing. Different features, which at the moment you might need a block for. So if you wanna show what the block author's name is, you need the post author block. Whereas it feels like now you'll be able to put that inside of any other block. So you could put it, I don't know, inside a heading block or something like that.

you, some of you are nodding, so that makes me feel like I'm going in the right direction there. the API already powers the synced patterns and much anticipated ability to connect custom fields to block attributes. the list of supported blocks is pretty short. Paragraphs, headings, images, and buttons.

But anyway, there you go. Anybody want to comment on the block? Bindings API? It doesn't seem like we know much about it just yet, so I'll leave it open for a moment, then I'll move. No,

[00:30:58] Paul Halfpenny: I think what you said is right, Nathan. I think you did very well to, to encapsulate that in, such a way actually.

Yeah. Okay. It's about extending the standard blocks and being able to add. Additional attributes to them. But again, it's quite hard to describe if you like at this point. I think you need some examples.

[00:31:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Okay. I fully get it. But the, it almost feels like sort of something like custom fields, you can consume something from somewhere else and put it into something which is already existing, which traditionally you'd probably just have to type into.

So for example, a heading, I don't know, you might be able to type this post was written by and then add some sort of piece of functionality where the post author just comes right out there and it's inside of a heading, not a, block itself. James Lau, is joining us in the comments. Thank you, James.

I'm not able to raise all these on the screen. I'm sorry about that. And he says, Brian cords. has a video on the block bindings, API with an a CF example. Okay, great. Thank you for that. and Elliot Richmond is here to save the data. Says the block bindings. API is a replacement for custom field data in classic theme development for new full site editing block theme development only available for paragraph image headings and buttons elements.

Yeah, I, feel maybe I got that adjacent to correct in that case. So anyway, it's coming in version 6.5. It feels like a, propeller head nerdy developer thing, but probably if you fit that bill, you'll enjoy that. However, this is right up everybody's street also. The font library. Yay. so we're all, very well used to having the media library upload an image and it just sits in the media library and it's completely separate from everything else.

So you can dump it in a post, in a page, whatever. up until now you've had no capacity to do that with fonts. Fonts have been a bit of a challenge to work within in WordPress. If you're not a developer, not anymore. Now you've got the font library. You go into the font library, you upload or pick, for example, a Google font and there it is.

It's just in its own little library. And then you can invoke that, wherever you like. So if you're a typography nerd, peaches in the comments. I know she loves a bit of, typography. This is great. So anybody wanna comment on that? I think that's my favorite bit from a usability point of view. I love that.

I

[00:33:27] Marc Benzakein: can't wait to, I can't wait to bring back comic sands and papyrus now. honestly, that's, yeah, it's, that's where I'm looking.

[00:33:35] Michelle Frechette: Oh, and I thought we were friends. Mark

[00:33:40] Nathan Wrigley: Comic Sands is, I, know it's ugly and all, but it's very, utilitarian, isn't it? It's one of those fonts that we love to hate, but I, my understanding is that, a lot of primary schools in the uk, maybe it's the same in primary, is like your first, go at school. It's from the real young, like four or five OC till, I don't know, 11 or something like that.

they use that on pretty much everything when they type letters for the kids to read out or they're encouraging children to learn to read. They use comic sounds because it's so crystal clear and easy. Yeah. Sorry, Paul, say again? Fun. What? Fun. Fun, fun. Oh, fun. It's a fun font. Oh, okay. Honestly, I won't tell you what I thought you said.

My hearing is a bit dodgy. I definitely didn't hear the word fun. but yeah, but also it does things like, it has the a, the lowercase A looks like the A that you are taught to write, not that peculiar. A with the curve at the top and then the, and the E has got a dead straight line with a little bit of a curve.

Anyway, so I'm with you, mark. Let's make the world comic sounds. Bring it back.

[00:34:46] Marc Benzakein: It has the word comic in it. How bad can it be? It should be the default.

[00:34:51] Michelle Frechette: I love to hate on it, but it is easy to read and as Peacha points out it, it is an accessible

[00:34:55] Nathan Wrigley: font. oh, she's back. yeah, so she peach's very happy about it by the looks of it.

she says, this is really great news. Yes, exactly. Thank you. I guess that was in reply to me saying she's a bit of a fan papyrus. F Papyrus. That's a font, right? She says, P what does FTW mean? I see that everywhere for the

[00:35:17] Michelle Frechette: win. Is that

[00:35:18] Marc Benzakein: it? Is that what Yeah, you probably, thought it meant something else, but

[00:35:24] Nathan Wrigley: really did.

and that's, yeah. so papyrus, she loves comic sands, was conceived an accessible typeface, which indeed it is. Oh, that's great. Okay. So thank you Peach. Keep the comments coming. so that's coming. You'll have this completely separate UI to store all of your fonts and and it's pretty straightforward.

you've got a library, you can pick things and then hopefully. They'll surface all over the place within your WordPress website and the interactivity, API, which again, is a bit of a nerdy, nerdy thing, but this is coming down the pike as well. I think the interactivity API is a little bit easier for my me to understand.

It's the ability to do something on a page and then for something else to happen elsewhere, let's say on that page without you needing to have a page refresh. And the idea would be that the interactivity API would bring that functionality, so that it's the same for everybody. You don't have to build your own version of it.

WooCommerce would be a good example. You click add to cart, and your cart icon gets updated. With the number one next to it to indicate something's happening. Or in the case that you can see on the screen, you click the little heart icon next to the movie to say, I like this, and it stores it somewhere, okay. Nathan likes this particular film or what have you, puss in Boots. It's an absolute favorite of mine. and I would like that every single day of the week, but that's it. So there's an awful lot coming. Favorites. There are the ability for me to no longer type with one finger, the, the interactivity, API and the font library.

do you wanna say anything else about 6.5 U three before I press on?

Nope, I'm good. I'll take that as a no. Peacher says For the win. Yeah, of course it's for the win. I knew that. You knew that. I knew that. no. There's so many acronyms that my kids use that I, I'm like, I don't even know. Do you get that? Do you get that in life where you are sufficiently old now that kids use words, not just acronyms, but words in context and you think.

I don't even know what that means. I'm guessing that means it's really good, but I'm not entirely sure and I just nod. I Google it

[00:37:42] Marc Benzakein: every time. I'll Google it every time because there is no way. There is no way. My kids already call me old. There's no way I'm going to validate that, that I'm

[00:37:51] Nathan Wrigley: old with that.

Yeah. I remember doing it to my parents and thinking, no, this is so self-evident what this word means. And of course, yeah, they didn't know. Okay. That's WordPress 6.5. We've got, we've got a little bit more information. We were talking about how the block bindings API was a little bit of a mystery. and that's because I'm not clever, like just Tadlock is clever.

because here is a piece by Justin Tadlock explaining, it's an introductory piece. He's called it part One. And he's gonna be creating a, an ever more complicated series of blog posts about how you can use the in, sorry, I keep saying interactivity. API, the block bindings API, and in this case, he's put together an article.

it's, it's in the weeds. There's lots of code here and what have you. But I will link to that in the show notes and it will give you a bit of a 1 0 1 on the block bindings API and how all of that works. and then there's another one on the tavern. We won't get into it 'cause we've covered it, but on the seven 19th of February, James Jeru wrote all about the interactivity, API and how it's coming into WordPress.

And this kind of chart just sums it up perfectly. over here is how it is at the moment. Everything in gray is developer responsibility. In other words, the developer has to do the heavy lifting. And you can see that where we are at the moment, the developer has to do everything. And in the new version with the interactivity, API, most of it will be handled, either by WordPress or partly handled.

By WordPress. So the idea there is to have a standard that we can all, all hook into. and there's more there. I'll link all, of these bits and pieces, but there's absolutely loads this week all about the different things that you can do. And this is a nice little Twitter thread. This comes from Nick Diego, where he explains how he's using the interactivity API to build a custom mega menu.

And again. I'll link to all of this in the show notes. Okie dokie. anybody going to WordCamp Europe this year? Yeah, I'll be there.

[00:39:57] Marc Benzakein: You'll be there? Sure. I am unsure at this point, but, I would like to, I absolutely would love to.

[00:40:05] Nathan Wrigley: it's in Torino, it's on the 13th to the 15th of June, the way my life goes, that's like tomorrow.

and tickets are on sale, but it's after Asia. Yeah, Asia first. That really is tomorrow. That was yesterday almost. the, I'm gonna step back. The tickets are on sale. If you wanna buy a ticket, there's two options available. You've got a general ticket, which is, 50 euros. or you can go for a micro ponsor ticket if you feel like, digging a little bit deeper and helping the event out.

But, looks like at the moment in the, this round, there are 460 odd tickets left. My understanding is it's the biggest event, in the WordPress community. It typically tops out somewhere in the region of about 3000. So I don't think you're in any, any great rush, but it, often does sell out, Head to europe.wordcamp.org. if you want to be involved, you said you've already bought yours. Mark, are you gonna be going as a, as just a, person like me just, hanging out and attending sessions? Or do you intend to go with your team like you did last time? Are you asking me? No, I meant to say Paul.

I was gonna say,

[00:41:18] Marc Benzakein: did I say Mark Marcus?

[00:41:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. confused. I'm gonna blame this on me, not feeling very well. Anything that goes wrong today is my fault and it's entirely my own fault and I probably need to drink more water. So that one's directed at Paul. Oh

[00:41:34] Paul Halfpenny: yeah. yeah. No, we bought a bunch of tickets already and I've got flights books already, which is quite exciting.

good grief. Yeah. you don't, although like flight times last week Yeah. Flight times from London aren't great. But, yeah, we'll be taking, we'll be taking a team

[00:41:52] Nathan Wrigley: again. what's your point like when you do these kind of events and you take your, so obviously for me, I have a very, I like to attend the sessions.

Small team, small and more recently I've been going with doing interviews and stuff, but taking a team, my understanding is, again directed at Paul. It's not really an ROI thing. You're not really going to, categorically write down on a spreadsheet, we invested $20,000 and we've got $58,000 back out of it.

It's not that kind of thing. Maybe no,

[00:42:21] Paul Halfpenny: it is really hard to work out well the return investment. I think for us it was about, there was a couple things. First it soaking up the atmosphere 'cause we can be used. Massive. And it was really busy last year and it was great. And I wanted everybody just to feel that atmosphere and feel what it was like and go around and talk to people.

And it was great for team building and team bonding within the team as well. So we went to a few parties, we managed a bag of hotel with a, bar on top, and we went there every single night and spent a lot on expenses, making sure that we had a really good time. and yeah, it was just the opportunity to, give people insight, to give people that ability just, to take part really.

so for us it was about the fields, the feeling rather than, anything specific. It was like, go and talk to people. Go and listen. Go and make friends. Go and do what you want to do. Just make sure you enjoy yourself. Nice. I think everybody did.

[00:43:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:43:23] Marc Benzakein: And, if you don't mind, my interjecting back when, we were doing server press and we were sponsoring a lot of camps, and, went to Europe and all that, it was really about the, for, me, I wouldn't have any of the contacts today that I have if it wasn't for those events.

And it is, it's an intangible investment. There's no way that I could be where I am within the WordPress community if it wasn't for going to those events and sponsoring and being at those events and interacting and don't under, don't underestimate the value of the hallway track as they say. and the one thing that I did wanna point out back when you brought up ages, I wish someone would do an article, especially for these bigger camps like, like WordPress, Europe, word Camp Europe and, Word Camp Asia and, Word Camp US.

Someone needs to do an article not just on what to do in those areas, but for people that are new to these larger word camps, if this is their first word, camp. How to handle those word camps because they are not like your average 300 person word camp. So

[00:44:36] Michelle Frechette: like I could write that on post status this week.

Is that what you're saying?

[00:44:39] Marc Benzakein: You could, that's what I'm saying, Michelle, if someone, I'm not mentioning any names Michelle, but if someone could write an article about, look, this may be your first word, camp. Understand that it is not like any other word camp you're going to experience in your life and understand that you're gonna get overwhelmed with the fact that there are 2,500 people wandering around, basically looking for that person that they saw six months ago.

and, and you're not going to see everybody you wanna see, but here's how to handle it and here's what to expect. And, here, if you're investing in, sponsoring, here's what to expect as a sponsor. Here's what to expect as an attendee. like I, I used to do, I did a, presentation at smaller work camps called What To Do, at Word Camp if You're a Total Noob was I think that was the title of it.

And it was basically like a top 10 breakdown of how to handle a word camp. If you're like a complete stranger and you don't know anybody. I think that, I was shocked last year when I went to Athens, at how many people had never been to a Word camp before, and that was their first word camp. And I'm like, that's like taking on Gannon as the first thing in, in Zelda, right?

Like your first thing is you get the wooden sword and here you are, there's, you're a boss level, right? And, I know, I have no idea, idea what that means. Yeah. Okay. Okay. gaming, it's the gaming world. Let's just say, let's just say Gannon is the big boss in Zelda. Okay. Got it. Yeah. Okay. And everybody knows who Zelda is.

it's, like that, it's, like you're at boss level when you go to these camps. And so if there's some sort of breakdown of how to handle that, I think that would be a fantastic article, which I know that I will never write. But, Michelle, I think Michelle's on it. I think Michelle's on it.

Yeah. Yeah. I'll see if

[00:46:34] Michelle Frechette: I can fit it in this week.

[00:46:37] Nathan Wrigley: There's something adjacent to that actually. a couple of things about Word Camp Asia. So anyway, word Camp Europe. Tickets are now on sale, 50 euros. bit of a bargain really. There's no way that even pays for your food. probably so it's very much underwritten, but, similar.

this is a, guide, a locals guide to, Taipei. So if you are going to Word Camp Europe, this is an X WP article, and it just goes through a few bits and pieces, like the stuff to do when you're not. Being a word camper. things that you can do in Taipei, and then it just breaks out a few, places to go.

some probably if you're a, person living in Taiwan, these are all the places you take your friends and family, if they're visiting, like kind of food to eat, that kind of thing. places to go, hot Springs, for example. All sounds very nice. gondola ride that you can do to take in the city and so on.

anyway, so I just thought that was quite nice. So thank you to X number.

[00:47:36] Michelle Frechette: And they did include accessibility information on some of those. Did they the, gondola says there's accessibility information. Yeah. Not all of them have it, but yeah, I love that. Okay.

[00:47:45] Nathan Wrigley: So that's really nice. But also like this, I, don't know what to make of this, right?

I do, I genuinely don't know what to make of this. What. Tim Ferris, is gonna be speaking at WordCamp Asia. Now, I dunno if you know of Tim Ferris. I, don't really know a lot about him, but I know that on the internet, isn't he like, like super, super duper famous, like big, successful author has been involved in absolutely loads of, loads of famous companies, investing in all sorts.

So I think there were a few listed here. for example, he's been an investor and an, advisor to Uber, Facebook, Shopify Duo lingo, Alibaba. Then it says 50 others. he's got one of the, most listened to, podcasts, which has been downloaded. Now it says 900 million times. it's a few more.

The WP Builds. WP Builds. Just a few more, a little bit more. But what I don't, so he's an invited speaker. And I, is that a new thing? Is it new to be inviting speakers of some notoriety, like Tim, or is that a No? Is that a normal thing?

[00:49:03] Michelle Frechette: It is normal. It is not always successful. So you can invite people, they don't necessarily come, that kind of thing.

But, as somebody who's participated on the Team Forward Word camp us over the years, I will tell you that, there's always a list of people that we're, we are to suggest lists of people that perhaps would, we would like to have invited. And so sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I think the NASA speakers last year at Word Camp US for example, were invited speakers from nasa.

[00:49:34] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So for context, it's not new, so that's something, but also, adding more context into it. peach says, sorry, ti Andrew Palmer, I'll come to Peach in a minute. Andrew said, oh, let's see if these comments are actually coming through now. Maybe they are. no, sorry. Andrew York some, but not all.

Yeah, some, but not all. Andrew says, Tim, interviewed on his own podcast. He interviewed Matt, Mullenweg. and maybe during that conversation it sounds like Matt invited Tim to come along and say, maybe that's how. all of that worked out. And then Peacher says she's curious about, what, it'll do for the good of the community, and about the costs.

I, I don't know. I would imagine that Tim could afford his own costs, but also Yeah, whether that's coming out of the. The community pot? I don't know. Yeah, I'm, I don't have an answer to that. No. For me it's great, because you know anybody that's in the podcasting space who is successful, I'd love to listen to all that.

But I do wonder, what the majority of people think, whether or not it makes, it makes sense. anyway, there you go. I

[00:50:40] Paul Halfpenny: think, he's a very busy person, given that he only works four hours a week. Yeah. A book, an awful

[00:50:47] Nathan Wrigley: lot, four hour work week book in that four hours. It's only got, it's only got nine pages.

[00:50:55] Michelle Frechette: I haven't looked at the schedule yet. I just hope he is not speaking opposite me because I know that I will be speaking to an empty room if that's the

[00:51:01] Marc Benzakein: case.

[00:51:02] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. I do. You know what? That's a really interesting thought. Let's, find it. Let's find, Tim, let's, I just curious. Let's do Ferris. Let's search for Ferris.

Oh, he is? He is.

[00:51:16] Michelle Frechette: No, darn it. Oh, no, Michelle. no, you're looking at it wrong. Michelle. Tim Ferris. No, Michelle. You're looking

[00:51:23] Marc Benzakein: at it completely wrong. Look at, it's taken all the pressure off of you now. Yeah, there you go. You could look at it.

[00:51:30] Nathan Wrigley: Oh man. alright. Tim is in a direct competition with, Wes and Michelle and Perth.

all of those, the three other speakers happening at the same time. The light. Yes. Adam, Silverstein, gene, Adam, Silverstein, Kimberly, they're all in competition with Tim Ferriss. I, my personal opinion is, oh, I'm so sorry to break that news, to you. That's, it's, that couldn't have been, that couldn't have been easy to swallow.

The, it's fine from my point of view, having somebody like a following. Yeah. it it's interesting. it may be that you've never heard of him, but it just so happens that because I'm into podcasting, he genuinely has this gigantic following. and so I was genuinely curious. So I think this is great, but I did wonder a bit like Michelle, how it came to pass and what the sort of ongoing benefit to the community is.

But then if he has a, a podcast, maybe that podcast is something that he does inside of WordPress. I don't know. We'll have to wait and see. Do you not

[00:52:34] Paul Halfpenny: think it should be like some. Keynote or scheduling to make it before or after all the other stuff. Just if you're gonna do that, would be nice.

it feels, if it just feel a bit unfair.

[00:52:48] Michelle Frechette: No, I know that Nathan's not even gonna be in my session.

[00:52:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. No pressure, Nathan. no. Don't press well. No, it's okay. I can send the flat two dimensional head to the Tim Ferris, show. And, the

[00:53:03] Michelle Frechette: good news is they're all recorded and they, and anybody that misses mine to go watch Tim Ferris can, get it later and I'll be watching Tim's zombie play.

So

[00:53:11] Nathan Wrigley: there you go. Yeah. I don't know, because you know how like you're sitting around the dinner table and somebody talks about somebody famous as if you know who they are and the everybody around the table is like going, oh yeah. And you are thinking, I have no idea who they're talking about. I, think Tim Ferriss maybe fits under that umbrella.

I would be highly surprised if, even a majority of the audience at that event will have any interest in. Him, but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe. Maybe that will

[00:53:43] Michelle Frechette: See, I, think he will have a full room. I'm predicting that now. Nathan. Nathan. Nathan. But honestly,

[00:53:48] Marc Benzakein: it's really fine. We need to teach you to sit at the table with your phone and to use Google.

So when people are talking about these people, you can easily look them up. And

[00:53:59] Nathan Wrigley: you've not seen my phone. My phone

[00:54:02] Marc Benzakein: is' a dumb phone. you did mention that before. Yeah. Yeah. I've got a,

[00:54:05] Nathan Wrigley: I've got a dumb phone and it's serving me very well for exactly reasons like that. That reason I, and now just sit and say, tell me about him instead of, but that's really interesting.

Anyway, so Tim Ferris, super famous internet guy. Really? An amazing. Talent. I'm sure it'll be an interesting talk is now head to head with Michelle Frache. So go

[00:54:27] Paul Halfpenny: Michelle. Go Michelle. Go on. Michelle.

[00:54:29] Nathan Wrigley: I'm

[00:54:29] Michelle Frechette: just gonna say, if you're listening to this episode right now, choose wisely. Yeah. Because you'll continue to know me after Word, but

[00:54:39] Marc Benzakein: will you still be friends with comparison?

You'll continue to see Michelle is the thing.

[00:54:46] Michelle Frechette: No, honestly, there's. There's, enough audience to go around. Tim. It's alright.

[00:54:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Oh yeah. So Andrew Palmer makes a, an interesting point, and maybe this is part of the whole next Gen Word camp thing. I don't know, maybe 18 months ago, something like that.

This whole idea of, next Gen WordPress event so that it is not just a formula all the time. Maybe this is part of it. Inviting these, big name speakers and what have you. And Andrew Palmer says, this is great. it's about time a commercial speaker was seen at Word Camps and in terms of ticket sales.

You can imagine if somebody like that or somebody equally famous came along, maybe it would encourage people to, to buy tickets. So Peter says she wishes she was going to WordCamp Asia. Michelle, I could she'd come to your talk with Bells on. She says, Peter Ingersol says, for a number of reasons, it's, he's not for everyone, for sure.

Michelle is an excellent alternative.

[00:55:49] Michelle Frechette: hey, if you wanna be the alternative to somebody like Tim Ferris is okay to be the alternative

[00:55:52] Marc Benzakein: to, yeah. Anyway, so there we go. there's, in 2016, I invited, I was the organizer for Word Camp Milwaukee, I think it was 2016, and I invited Henry Winkler because we were doing a whole fifties kind of theme.

I actually invited Henry Winkler to come and speak and he couldn't come but his agent. Contacted Henry Winkler and Henry sent us a bunch of books that he had written that he signed to give away. So we, used them as giveaways. So it's, I've heard he's lovely. Yeah. It was very, cool of them to do that.

So I'm just, that's the shout to Henry.

[00:56:29] Nathan Wrigley: I'm sitting around my dinner table going, Henry Winkler

[00:56:33] Marc Benzakein: come. Oh,

[00:56:35] Nathan Wrigley: come, on, I wanna say the Fons. yes. Is that it? Did I get, did I actually

[00:56:40] Michelle Frechette: pull that out? The, it's so much more, but yes. that's

[00:56:43] Marc Benzakein: been his early start. Okay. Yeah. Cool news. And there's in Milwaukee, because, happy Days took place in Milwaukee.

Okay. Yeah. There's a thing called the Bronze Fs, which is a statue of the Fs right there by the river that everybody takes pictures with. And I just thought it would be really cool to get him. And, his, that's his agent said, his agent at first said, oh, he's out of the country. Sorry. We would love to, and then the agent contacted me back about two hours later and said, I talked to Henry and he feels really bad that he can't make it.

So he's sending you these books. And so I thought that was just really, phenomenal. I would've

[00:57:20] Nathan Wrigley: thought that over the years, Matt, in particular Matt Mullen, he must have met. An awful lot of people. Who have, air quotes, clout. and whether Matt was behind this engagement with Tim, I don't actually know.

It sounds from what Andrew was saying, that could well be the case, but that does that, could be a curious, that could be a curious, thing, Matt getting invited guests in just because of the unique position that he's got at the top table with lots of these businesses, and I, for one would be, I'd be really open to that, some just non word pressy thing, but just from some leading light in the, internet industry, I would be quite open to that.

But, if it was somebody who was. Like, like in the same way that Matt's address is blocked booked, isn't it? There's only one track while Matt's talking because you know that any other track will be, will be ized because of it. I do wonder if, this continues and what we see with Tim, I. Maybe those, big name invites could occupy a track all of their own so that they didn't cannibalize the audience from elsewhere.

Not that they will, Michelle, not saying that.

[00:58:36] Michelle Frechette: It's fine. It's all good. I, know how to

[00:58:38] Marc Benzakein: share.

[00:58:39] Nathan Wrigley: I think it's hysterical though, that you said let's just see and you are literally at the same time. It's okay. yeah, it's okay. I can, share. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Alright, so there we go. There is, word Camp, Europe and Word Camp Asia.

Few bits and pieces there. I just wanted to draw attention to this. if you, if like me, you were a massive consumer of the WP Tavern under the,

[00:59:04] Paul Halfpenny: you're not, sharing. Ah,

[00:59:06] Nathan Wrigley: coming. There we go. There we go. Thank you. If you were a, a massive consumer of the WP Tavern, like I was back in the day when Jeff did it, and also when Sarah Gooding and then just, and then it went back to just being Sarah.

I would read every word, absolutely every word, and so it's. it going away. for me was, tough actually. I, really found that I was ending up on articles that didn't, I don't know. I was just in trying to find news in places that didn't quite have that same caliber. it's back. The WP Tavern is in this process, which James Jeru, he's described it himself.

It's a bit like, metadata this James is describing. What is the Hunger Games, of WP Tavern? seven authors, have been invited to participate. I think there were quite a lot of people who applied. Seven people have been asked over a month long period. To write any article that they like. They've got all the permissions to, write articles, delete articles of their own making, and approve comments and all of that kind of stuff.

And they're in a bit of a battle. So seven is gonna be whittled down to two. My understanding is that in this month long window, they've each got a 14 day bit. So they can start when they like, but 14 days after they start, they can end and they've gotta go out there Anden, what do they do in the Hunger Games?

They kill off the opposition, don't they? So I don't know. What do you think of this? Is this kinda like a weird adversarial thing or is this okay? I don't, you tell me.

[01:00:48] Michelle Frechette: I love it. I think it's a great opportunity to see the writing, not only the writing styles, but what piques the interest of the different authors so that we.

we're not voting, I don't think, but, so that we get a idea and whoever's making the decision, which I assume is Matt and maybe others, can see how they engage with the community information. So what's going on in the community? How is it being presented? Is it being presented hard hitting?

Is it, being presented softly? Like how are we engaging, how is it engaging? How is that writer engaging with the material or the information that's coming about within the WordPress community and the

[01:01:24] Nathan Wrigley: ecosystem? It's interesting. I was just used to the article beginning. but obviously, these different authors have got different ways of introducing it.

So we can see on the screen at the moment, James has gone with A-T-L-D-R, like a little call out box at the beginning where he explains in one or two sentences what that article is about. And then, there's a, like a line break, Sarah, as far as I'm aware and Justin didn't use those kind of things.

And then he is, he is crossed out things in the article and each of them are using different, like font sizes for the headings and things like that. So for the moment it's all a little bit discombobulating, you wouldn't expect to go to a, the Times or the Guardian or what have you and see a bunch of different fonts and a bunch of different heading sizes and all that.

But for now, over on the tavern, that's what we've got. My understanding is that engagement is one of the metrics that are going to be potentially used. So if you do favor. one of the articles or one of the authors, I think you can give them a bit of a leg up by going and posting a comment, interacting with them.

I don't suppose for a moment that's the only metric. it's probably to do with the quality of the writing more than anything else. But, interaction I think is a bit of a thing. So you do favor somebody. and if we just go to the tavern, you can see at the moment we've got articles by Ronnie Shawney.

Apologies, Ronnie, if I got your name wrong, by James ue. Adam Silver, Ronnie again, James again. Adam again. that seems to be it for now. A few of them have obviously decided that they're gonna take their run at it now, but if that's four, then we've got three more to come, at some point in the next

[01:03:14] Marc Benzakein: and, I was just talk, I know that, Hopefully, I won't say too much, but I know that Topher Roja is also one of them, and he was talking to me about what he's gonna be doing, which is a, different approach as well. So it's gonna be, it's gonna be really interesting to see what happens. And I, in a way I hope they all win, but I know that's not possible.

[01:03:42] Nathan Wrigley: the, rules, from the outset have said they're gonna whittle it down to two, but maybe maybe if three of them, oh, I dunno. I'm just, it's pure speculation. Yeah. But in theory, it'll be two of them. Of course. If, if if you find yourself over on the tavern and you, want to listen.

To something. Oh, look, there's me. Oh, look there. Yeah, there's you and there's me, and there's me and there's me and there's, you're all over it. All over. but if you do fancy listening to the podcast, I've had a couple of weeks of being unwell, so I haven't posted for a couple of weeks, but hopefully I'll be back on the wagon, this week or next

[01:04:19] Michelle Frechette: week.

Nathan, on WP Coffee Talk, I encourage people to have a cup of coffee with me. How come you're not encouraging, mugs of beer when people are at the tavern

[01:04:28] Nathan Wrigley: with you, it's not gonna go well, is it? It's, a, podcast where you drink

[01:04:33] Michelle Frechette: alcohol. on occasion I've had bourbon and I've had a glass of wine with my.

Again,

[01:04:41] Nathan Wrigley: sorry for another day. Yeah. I could go for a flag of, I don't know, low, alcohol something or other. Anyway, so there you go. Go near beer. Yeah, that's the article that I wanted to highlight. So can I just encourage you, if you, if you care about, WordPress journalism and the WP Tavern as a source going forwards, then head over there over the.

from now, essentially, and go and read the articles and give feedback in the comments and all of that kind of stuff. And hopefully your voice will be heard. Paul, anything to add to that before we crack on?

[01:05:14] Paul Halfpenny: I just wish it wasn't gonna get whittled down to two. I wish there were more voices, I wish there was more articles, more news.

'cause it's, it feels like it, there's some quality there and, having diverse opinions and subjects that you might not think about from different people, I think that's really helpful. I can understand why the, there's a budget and there's a limit and things like that, but the, I.

Maybe I'd do it where you, paid full time for the subs, subeditors, and people could submit articles and then the subs took the direction. Actually

[01:05:48] Nathan Wrigley: go, actually that's a really interesting point because Matt, yeah, Matt, when he posted that he was gonna whittle it, onboard seven, take it down to two, he did say that there would be an open and EAs, I can't remember the words, open and easy to understand process if you wanted to submit.

Your own articles, but I don't know if that involves, like finance or anything like that, or whether that's just submitting something because you're a, good citizen. I was mostly

[01:06:18] Paul Halfpenny: excited by the fact there's loads of new stuff to read. Yeah, it, it's a, it is a site in my, list of things in my news tab in my browser.

[01:06:28] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Yeah, it's been a, it's been a regular source of what I do, over here, you can guarantee more or less, if it was on the tavern, I would probably include it. and because there's just so much going on the tavern at the moment, I guess maybe there's a bit of me, which is waiting for it to cool down a little bit back to the sort of three or four articles a week.

At the minute I feel it's more like eight or nine. 'cause they're all, trying to get notice. But anyway, good luck to all seven of you, the four that we know about and the three others coming up. So there you go. speaking of that, Here's another one, from the Tavern. This is Adam Silver, one of his articles.

And because everything went quiet over on the tavern, I didn't notice, to be honest, that there'd been a bunch of, WordPress acquisitions. So Adam Silver took it upon himself to just summarize the acquisitions that he'd known about, feels like three or four years ago. There was honestly a period of about six months, six to eight months, where we talked about nothing else than acquisitions.

There was just this train of one after another, and some big names went, Yost went and a CF went and all these other things went. Anyway. So to summarize, over the last period, last few months, opt-in Monster on the 15th of February has acquired something called the Beacon Lead Magnet Creator.

I honestly don't know what that is, whether it's a plugin or a SAS app, but, anyway, that has been acquired by Opt-in Monster on the 28th of January. Andrew Wilder at Nerd Press acquired the ever so Pithily titled Optimized Database after deleting revisions, plugin, I think I'm right to say plugin twice there.

So that's now under their purview. And a little bit before that, 6th of December, same person, Andrew Wilder, acquired a social media sharing plugin called Grow Social from Media Vine. And then October, 2023, so tail end of last year ish, Jamie Madden, sold his plugin, which was called Plugin License Server, and it was acquired by acquire.com.

So those four things went under my radar. It's calmed down a little bit. All this, acquisition stuff I feel, which I think is no bad thing. Anybody wanna say anything about that? I

[01:08:52] Marc Benzakein: think it's quieted down because they're, everyone's having to deal with the, chaos of all the acquisitions and getting it all organized under one umbrella.

But, that's just speculation. I'm actually not knee deep in any of that, but that would be my guess. Yeah.

[01:09:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yep. Yep, Anyway, thank you Adam for paraphrasing that. Okay, so now we're moving on to accessibility. This is just a hat tip to Amber Hines. it was published on 30th of January, but because I took last week off, it never got mentioned.

there was a, webinar, that was created. It's called Building a Low Code Accessible WooCommerce website, with am behind the URL is too long for me to say, but you could either Google that or wait until the show notes come out tomorrow, and you can find out what that was all about. But also, I want you to raise this one.

This is a Twitter. Thread, that Amber created. And I don't want this to become a, more of a, storm in a teacup than it might do. But Amber's post goes like this and I can't possibly go through them all 'cause she really did create a fairly lengthy article out of a bunch of tweets.

she said five months ago, Alex Stein, she uses his Twitter handle. I opened a track ticket suggesting that wordpress.org and WordCamp sites use. Amber's Equalized Digital Accessibility Checker plugin. and today we received, and I'm quoting today, we received what sounds like a decision from, and then a bunch of Twitter handles the people who made the decision.

And it sounds that has been declined, that's not going to be used. Amber then goes in a little bit further and says, hang on a minute. There's a whole bunch of things wrong with the WordPress properties, so that could be Word Camp, or Word or, WordPress org properties. And spent a little bit of time poking around on all the different websites.

And according to Amber found problems, more or less on everything that was looked at. And so then goes into, why can't we use this? Matt Mullen jumped into the comments and said, would it be possible to use some sort of scanning software, so maybe a third party SaaS tool or something like that.

Amber's response was, yes, but you can't use that on things which aren't published, and it might be quite nice to use it on an unpublished article and what have you. Anyway, so there's this. Ongoing discussion. I don't have any intuitions as to where this will end up or what the state of play is, but I just wanted to raise that.

I've not used Equalized Digital's accessibility checker plugin, so I don't really know, but I just wanted to raise it in case you wanted to drop into that Twitter feed and give, your 2 cents. 'cause we know Twitter is a good place for resolving, all, problems that exist. It's place

[01:11:48] Paul Halfpenny: on earth

[01:11:49] Nathan Wrigley: isn't,

[01:11:50] Marc Benzakein: it's, that's their mission, isn't it?

It's to resolve things

first

[01:11:55] Michelle Frechette: things. You need to click that follow button on Amber on the right hand side of your screen. 'cause she drops amazing knowledge. Yes, you do. And that, and Alex. yeah, for sure. But here's the thing about, the, accessibility plug checker plugin that X equalize digital has, it's phenomenal.

So I use it, I. It's very easy to understand what it's giving and how you should be addressing your website to make those changes for accessibility. But aside from that, everything Amber raises within WordPress about accessibility is always to make the experience of any user, whether they are a builder on the dashboard side of things, or a visitor on the, public side of your website better.

And we all can appreciate the outcomes of accessibility even if you don't have accessibility needs. So whenever she speaks, I listen.

[01:12:53] Nathan Wrigley: I'll just leave it at that. yeah, I'm sorry. I was just having a slog on my, pint of gin. we know it's water. Yeah. I'm making way more sense now than at the beginning.

So interestingly, if I just put it on the screen, beer. Tum who has been on the, the Tavern podcast with me. she says, after the decision was made not to use that plugin, she said, Phil, sorry to hear the conversation on Slack, left this impression on you. From my understanding of the structure of the.org network, there needs to be a tailored version of a checker plugin.

can we work towards a solution together? And she's just popped up in the comments to say, the problem with scanning is that it doesn't take into account pre-flight testing before publishing. Which I guess is an interesting point. and especially difficult for contributors who are publishing on WordPress ecosystem site.

So e essentially it sounds like there's more pieces to this jigsaw than meet the eye. but I know that accessibility is quite rightly a very, it's, a hot topic for want of a better word at the moment. it's talked about a lot and this obviously is something that could become an issue, over the next days and weeks.

So go into Twitter and, see if you can track down a, perfect answer for it. There is in Amber's post, a link to a track ticket, so maybe that's another place where you can go and explore. Paul, anything to say on that before we move on? It's

[01:14:23] Paul Halfpenny: really hard, isn't it? And it's a fine line.

You've got somebody that, that's developed something amazing that could be used, but then it, just potentially opens up unless you're a conflict of interest. But the, that plugin doing slightly different things. I dunno. I think it's probably quite hard to, for, and Matt's walking a bit of a fine line there, I think.

In trying to go I can understand where he is coming from. I, I, think the. What they're trying to do is offer up a solution to get the problem fixed, which is the most important thing, but sometimes maybe could just take a step back and work out a different solution.

[01:15:05] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Yeah.

That's an interesting angle, isn't it? So the fact that it's a proprietary plugin. Yeah. And it's got a commercial arm to it. I'm guessing, Amber, forgive me if I've said that incorrectly. You, maybe it's entirely philanthropic, but, maybe, that's the, problem, yeah. Is that the fear that using a commercial solution on all of these sites would favor one thing over another.

Anyway, you can, get your feet into that argument, over on Twitter. I'll link to it in the show notes tomorrow, or at least I'll try to. I, I do have problems linking to Twitter off my website for some reason. I don't quite know why, but anyway, it's there. You can go and search for Amber. So Amber Hines, Twitter handle is at.

Hey, Amber Heinz, HEY, and then Amber Heinz, H-I-N-D-S. So you can, probably track it down in that way. I'm just gonna highlight this one very quickly 'cause we haven't got time to dwell on it, but it's, this is a really interesting piece. it's all about the growing dissatisfaction. I don't really know if that's the right word.

Maybe it's a storm in a T Cop. But, search engine journal have picked up on the annual WordPress survey, and I've highlighted a few different bits and pieces, which indicate that not all is on an accelerated path, for the WordPress community. It does seem that there are some underlying, problems which may be storms in the future, but you can go and read that yourself.

There's sadly not enough time because there's not enough time because I wanna, allow two of our guests today to do a bit of showing off. totally coincidental. Paul and Mark are here, and I promise you, I assume that it's true there. There was no concoction there. They're just here on the day when something significant is happening in their lives.

And in the, in both cases, it's a plugin release or update. So let's start with main WP Mark. We don't normally do an advertising spot, and hopefully this isn't that, but Main WP is about to drop the 5.0 release. I guess that's a big thing. And we've got a couple of new things that are coming. Let's start out here just briefly, mark, what, is this new feature in main WPS called API Backups?

[01:17:19] Marc Benzakein: so this is something that's gonna actually be built into the core of main wp, and main WP is, It doesn't cost anything to get going, so it's very cool. I will try to avoid the sales pitch here as excited as I am about 5.0 coming out. so I apologize if I do sound a little bit markety, salesy.

I, really don't want to, but I, it's been amazing watching the team put this thing together and, this is huge. So the backups allow for you to use your hosting services. Backup capabilities through an API key. So you can manage all of your backups through main wp And right now, as you can see here on the page, you can see what, is what we're compatible with.

We just added cPanel and pluss, and, we'll be adding more in the future and we're working on that. but through the main WP dashboard, you can do all of your backup management right there, which, makes. Just one more thing that you don't have to do on an individual basis. You can just do it from there.

You can do your restores, you can do, whatever you want. And, we do have a, video, a walkthrough video that's gonna be released shortly on how to do all that. and, it's just super cool.

[01:18:50] Nathan Wrigley: So, the way that backups are handled with main WP at the moment is through third party plugins. oh, I dunno.

nothing's coming to mind. I dunno why I've gone blank. But, the, famous WordPress plugins, you'd have to manage it in that way, but now you can, let's say for example, you're on Cloud ways, which is one of the choices you can hook into your API key coming out of your Cloud Ways dashboard.

Plug it into your main WP, website, and then you can manage the backups that are created. Over there. So it's, you're not doing it from your plug. It's not a plugin that's handling it, it's their infrastructure. And, but you can see how many you've got. Correct. You can see everything

[01:19:34] Marc Benzakein: and manage everything.

Correct. Yeah. And one of the screens, is an overview of all your child sites and you can see, where they're being hosted, what the backups are, what type of backups are being done, and, you can manage it all from just that one site screen, which is, it's just super useful. And yeah.

And, and time, saving. the whole idea of course, with everything that we do is to try to make it a, time saver for you, so that you're working as efficiently for your customer, for your clients as possible, and, maximizing and leveraging your time, because we all know that's the one resource that you don't get more

[01:20:14] Nathan Wrigley: of.

So I never segue, I'm going to segue from time saving. Time tracking. Do you see what I did there? Oh my

[01:20:22] Marc Benzakein: goodness. You couldn't have done that better. Thank you. Thank you.

[01:20:26] Nathan Wrigley: Wow. So this is the other feature. two big, high, high level features and We all know what this is, time tracking.

But what, why has this gone into the, into a main WP dashboard is this so that you can track time against client projects and bind it to a particular site, and correct. I've done five hours work on that site this week. Correct. that client needs billing at this rate. Is that the kind of deal?

Correct.

[01:20:50] Marc Benzakein: It's, yeah, and, you can create buckets of time so that you can set up, say that you've got. 20 hours budgeted for, this particular project or something. you can set up the buckets so that you can keep track of all that. you start and stop a timer just like you would with a, third party thing.

And, this is all built right into, now this is actually a, an a pro extension here, but, it's something that you can do all within, your main WP. Dashboard and, once again, keeping track of all your child sites and, the projects and, knowing exactly how much time you're spending on each thing and, what rate you're billing at.

And you can set projects up, with various billing rates and, and, get that all going. it's really pretty cool. It's a pretty cool function.

[01:21:40] Nathan Wrigley: I, like it. What a neat, little thing to add in. Yeah. Thank you. And it's given me today's title. You can create buckets of time. There you go. Yeah.

I've, always wanted to create buckets of time. Buckets of time, yeah. Sounds like some sort of physics thing, doesn't it? Yeah. I didn't know you could carry it with you. Yeah. You carry it around and tip it out wherever you want. Just make

[01:22:00] Marc Benzakein: sure there's not a hole in

[01:22:01] Nathan Wrigley: your bucket. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah. Cool. it would be

[01:22:04] Michelle Frechette: more convenient if it was backpacks of time.

[01:22:06] Marc Benzakein: Great

[01:22:07] Nathan Wrigley: time. Yeah. Okay. that, honestly, two lovely new features. I'm glad that you were on, on, literally the day this will be rolling out into your main WP. website

[01:22:17] Marc Benzakein: and I am gonna throw out a little sales pitch here, which is that VI version 5.0 is.

Slated to come out tomorrow. We are all rushing around the clock, doing all the last minute testing and all this stuff that goes up. Just that, like a countdown, just like a launch of a rocket, Yeah. Just, making sure everything goes. But tomorrow is actually the launch date for version five. So you heard it here first two.

We are so excited about this. I can, can't even begin to tell you. nice. I'm trying to, I'm trying to contain my excitement. Yeah, that's

[01:22:44] Nathan Wrigley: right. I don't wanna put your excitement in the bucket of time. That's, yeah. I'll

[01:22:50] Marc Benzakein: put it in my

[01:22:50] Nathan Wrigley: bucket of excitement. Put it in your bucket of time. That'll contain it nicely.

And pop the lid on. okay. That's brilliant. Thank you so much for giving us that. if you haven't, go to man wp.com, or Google it. and let's move on to this one. So again, pure coincidence, I promise you, I dunno if it happened this week or last week, or maybe it's coming this week or something, I don't know.

But, personalize WP with a z. Yeah. personalized wp.com. is a project from Paul's team filter. Go on then Paul, give us the, give us the elevator pitch. What is personalized? wp

[01:23:28] Paul Halfpenny: It just allows you to personalize the content on your website. That's all. It allows you to show and hide content using the block editor.

You can work out what people are looking for and, what they've done on your site, and then you can show them content based on, that. And we soft launched it in January and then this week, last week we, delivered our latest update, which brought lead scoring in as one of our key features.

so it is available as a. Free plugin, on the org repository where you'll get all your personalization rules that you can, we've got a bunch of preset rules for you, like by device, by country, by time of day, by date, things like that. And then obviously, as we're in this business there, there's a pro version or a standard version, which, adds some features such as, creating visitor profiles of the people that are visiting your site, and seeing their activity of what they've been doing, and then being able to segment them into different audiences.

And give them a lead score depending on the kind of things they might do, whether that's like purchasing a product or completing a form or, just visiting a certain page. And then using all of those things, personalization rules, segments, lead scores, you can choose to show a high content for them or on pages of your website.

[01:24:54] Nathan Wrigley: So it's, is it an entirely block based enterprise or does it work with, I don't know, like elements within Elementor or what have you?

[01:25:03] Paul Halfpenny: It's entirely block editor based right now. Okay. But we'll be integrating with Elementor, certainly, shortly

[01:25:09] Nathan Wrigley: on the right roadmap. now I do use main wp I'll just say that off the bat, but I, can't really show you my main WP dashboard because it's full of websites that I manage and that's slightly private data.

So apologies for that, mark. Otherwise, maybe I could have shown some of the, although it's not out yet, but I was very kindly, given a, license for, Optimize, WP and I stuck it on a local website. And I'll just quickly give you the skinny, if you go to the dashboard here, you can see the different bits and pieces.

you've got the option to configure, personalization, visitor profile segments, lead scoring, and, general settings. I've got the pro version, so I'm not entirely sure what the difference is, but really where it, all, where the magic seems to happen is if this is a vanilla site.

So I've got my sample page here. If you go in and edit a page, just get rid of that bit there, and then you click on something. That's already in there, or obviously something of your own creation. You can see that the personalized options now appear in the right hand side. And I dunno if it's gonna show me the dropdown.

No, sadly it's not. but it's a, it's an if then kind of system, if, and so for example, it says the, default options are spends a minute on the page, is on a desktop. I'm just gonna give you a summary of them. Is a new visitor, is a returning visitor is coming to the site at this particular time of day is based in this country, is logged in.

then you go and say, okay, now hide it and show it. I might have a, block here, which is some sort of advert for Christmas or something, and it's gonna show the US version in dollars just before Christmas. And the UK version if I'm coming from the uk. So it's dead simple to use. I'm imagining that I haven't covered even a billionth of the functionality there, but there we go.

[01:27:05] Paul Halfpenny: Thank you very much. Yeah, no, it, the idea, we, believe in simplicity, so we try and make everything as simple as possible, and there's a bunch of. People that we know that are using it in ways that we didn't expect. before Christmas when we had the free version in the OR repository, somebody was asking about how to do an a event calendar using it, which was, it was just mind blowing.

It was like, oh, okay, you're gonna do that with it. Okay. That's really cool. Yeah. I can imagine on the date you're gonna

[01:27:34] Nathan Wrigley: show and hide, the, yeah. Not time for the seventh yet, so don't show it. And then you can, you can add to your scores. So e each person that comes along, can be given a score.

And obviously for things like e-commerce, that's, really helpful, Yeah. So I think this person is red hot then.

[01:27:50] Paul Halfpenny: Yeah. and, there's, a lot of things that you want to do when you try and drive conversion or you try and drive revenue, particularly in stores or agencies will be doing this with their clients, If somebody purchases a, if somebody goes to a product page, you're probably gonna give 'em a lead score of one. But actually, if they buy a product, you're gonna add a score of 10 to it. And then you go, actually I've got people that have got high lead scores. I'm gonna show them a discount offer because I know that they really like our brand and things like that.

So there's plenty of use cases. we're gonna try and document it. It's really early days for us. We're, on a, on our journey. but we'll be adding to our knowledge base as quickly as we can.

[01:28:29] Nathan Wrigley: Andrew Palmer says it looks perfect for restaurants with breakfast, lunch, or dinner options. Oh, absolutely.

Yeah, Yeah, It's like it's midday. Show them the dinner options, not the breakfast options. I'll scale that and put it on an early base. Andrew has a restaurant, so he, he knows. Okay. and then he, Lawrence also says, lots of potential for WooCommerce. Yeah. you can of course make your own rules.

I was just selecting from some predefined rules, but options. Yeah. You go and explore, go and look at the website.

[01:28:58] Marc Benzakein: does it have the option to, to set up the logic for if the browser can handle a VI or not? Ah,

[01:29:05] Paul Halfpenny: no, but maybe it's gonna go on the back. Look after today, right?

[01:29:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, So if it's the browser, which you get with your Noia phone.

Do this if it's every other browser. I know there was something called the GG browser or something wasn't there as well, if it's every other browser. Anyway, there you go. optimize wp.com. Go check it out. No personalized wp. Oh, did say wp

[01:29:27] Paul Halfpenny: what did, I say? It's your hearing. You've got already do it.

You said optimized

[01:29:30] Nathan Wrigley: about Oh, I'm, I do apologize. I'm gonna have to go and buy. Optimize wp. Yeah, personalize with a Z or a Z. Yeah. WP, why don't I just show it? Look, there you go. That's how it, that's what it looks like. if you see that you're in the right place, if it's perfect. it looks like that on that own page.

Brilliant. Always nice to, thanks Nathan. Feature a new product. You're welcome. Let's see if there's any time for anything else. Probably not. Time for that. I do want to get to Michelle's piece because she dropped something in as well. So let's spread the love. Where is your piece?

Here it is. This is. This is apropos of nothing to do with WordPress, but how nice, is this? what are we looking at? Michelle? You tweet, you tweeted, I

[01:30:16] Michelle Frechette: tweeted a bird. If you click the play button on that, click the play. Here we go. Yeah. So I have a bird feeder that sits in my house that the birds can access from the outside.

And of course, because I am a techie, I had to put a camera on it. And so I was able to actually video this cardinal. I've had other birds as well. but the, birds just recently found in the heavy snow. They found my bird feeder. And now sometimes when I'm sitting here working, I can actually look to the right and see birds eating in my bird feeder.

[01:30:45] Nathan Wrigley: So this is literally bolted into your house. So that bird window for a home was inside the boundary of your actual house. That's correct. That's so cool. Can I just say that's correct. We don't have birds like this in the uk. All of our birds are really uninteresting in comparison. That's That is brighter than any UK based bird that it's red.

That is a red birds. That's so cool. That is a

[01:31:08] Michelle Frechette: male cardinal

[01:31:10] Nathan Wrigley: bird. Yes. Are you looking very happy? I've gotta say. you're

[01:31:14] Paul Halfpenny: always red. It looks like an angry bird. Am I

[01:31:16] Marc Benzakein: wrong? Oh, they do. They

[01:31:18] Michelle Frechette: do look like an angry bird. Yeah, they do. I think that the cardinals are, and the blue jays are probably part of the angry bird repertoire.

[01:31:26] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just say though, was he not? Was that bird, I say he was that bird not terrified of you. does it not catch you and go, I'm outta here.

[01:31:36] Michelle Frechette: Sometimes they do if I'm moving too quickly. But I actually wasn't in the room when this one was here. I was in my living room. Oh yeah. And I got a notification on my camera that he was there.

So I opened up the app and videoed him. I

[01:31:49] Nathan Wrigley: think that's great. I want this in my life. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, that's lovely. Before,

[01:31:53] Michelle Frechette: before, before we let you go, can I let you open up the private chat so that you can see breaking news that I put in there for

[01:31:59] Nathan Wrigley: you? Oh, you can. Let me just try and copy that. Ugh.

Honestly, I'm so many problems. It literally just

[01:32:04] Michelle Frechette: got published.

[01:32:06] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, hold on. Copy that. Let me just open up a new tab. I'm trusting you. Here we go. Straight off the post status, press our evolving roles and go on. Michelle, tell me what this is about.

[01:32:18] Michelle Frechette: If you scroll a bit so you'll see my face.

[01:32:20] Nathan Wrigley: There you are.

There you are.

[01:32:22] Michelle Frechette: I am. As of this morning, the new executive director at Post Status. Whoa,

[01:32:27] Nathan Wrigley: what the heck? When did.

[01:32:30] Michelle Frechette: This morning? Yes.

[01:32:31] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, Michelle. Michelle. What does that mean? So this is, I don't, I know it's a, funky new job title, but what do you have to do that's different? That's so exciting. Not

[01:32:39] Michelle Frechette: a whole lot that's different.

I've been doing a lot of the work behind the scenes, and I've been working with Corey to do some, some handover. And so basically, I'm, the decider. I don't know. There's, it's, exciting. I get to work with my clinic. I get to work with, Josta Marika and of course continue working with Corey and, Olivia Ette as well.

So it's exciting. Good. we're doing good

[01:33:04] Nathan Wrigley: work over there. I think look's there straight away that in a comment that did come through onto the chat, she's saying, congrats, bge

[01:33:10] Michelle Frechette: and I are each other's biggest

[01:33:11] Marc Benzakein: fans,

[01:33:12] Nathan Wrigley: so thank you. Oh, and Lauren, same thing. He says, whoa, congratulations. Yeah, I'm blindsided by that.

Great. I

[01:33:19] Michelle Frechette: just wanna say I continue to work at Stellar wp. That is my day job. That is my bread and butter. I love the work I do with our plugins. This is the additional work I've been doing with post status and we'll continue to do, it's just, I have a new title there, so I wanted to share that.

[01:33:34] Nathan Wrigley: Nathan Ricky, congratulations.

The agency Congrat. Oh no. That says Nathan Ingram. Sorry, that's not me. this is great. So we've had two updates to Maine, wp we've had a new plugin, which is not called Optimize, it's called personalized. WP and Michelle's got a new job. What more, could we have That's brilliant. That's such a nice way to thank you for letting share that.

[01:33:56] Michelle Frechette: I know we're over

[01:33:57] Nathan Wrigley: time, but I wanted No, it's okay. I'm happy with that. There was a bunch more that I was going to share, with the audience today, but I think we'll round it off there 'cause we don't have time. it only remains for me to say firstly, thank you. Audience members, are sorry that the comments couldn't be shown.

No idea what was going on there. Sure. But, it's not my fault. I'm blaming gremlins. Yeah. Them that's it. Yeah, that's what was in my head. I'm blaming the gremlins. and I would just like to say thank you to my three panelists, my co-host. See if I can get it right. Michelle Ette and our guests over there somewhere.

Paul, half Penny and Mark. Yeah. Benza Cane.

[01:34:38] Marc Benzakein: There you go. Awesome. You got it. Candy

[01:34:40] Michelle Frechette: cane, benza cane.

[01:34:41] Marc Benzakein: That's you'll

[01:34:42] Nathan Wrigley: never forget. Never using another way of remembering it. now we have to do this slightly humiliating wave. Of course. So everybody, oh, look straight off. It's so easy these days. Woo. There we go.

Thank you very much. We'll be, I don't know, we should be back next week. It is a day before, I traveled to Word Camp Asia, but I can't really see any reason not to do this show, so hopefully, we'll be back in a week. Thanks for all your comments. Thanks for joining us. Go and share it elsewhere and we will see you next week.

Take it easy. Thank you. Safe travels everyone. Bye bye. Bye bye.