This Week in WordPress #291

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress, episode number 291. Entitled touching a different part of the elephant, and don't shout at guinea pigs. It was recorded on Monday the 25th of March, 2024. My name is Nathan Wrigley and I will be joined by my co-host Mark Westguard, but also by Tammy Lister, and also by Tim Nash.

It's a WordPress podcast, so what do we talk about? quite a lot this week it turns out. There is a possible delay to the release of WordPress 6.5, will it, or won't it ship on the date to designated. Do the Woo by Bob Dunn has found a new home at wordpress.com. We talk about Bob's endeavors over the years and just how much we like him.

I did a podcast episode on the Tavern with Miriam Schwab and this leads to an extended discussion about how our work lives work for us. What are some of the things which cause us trouble? What are some of the things which make our lives easier?

We talk about Cloudfest.

We get into a whole bunch of different events happening WordCamps in Brighton. WordCamps in London and various other parts of the globe.

We talk about whether or not a new WordPress media Corp should be announced. Who's it for how might it work?

And we also get into a bunch of new products and updates, as well as a whole load of deals in the WordPress space this week.

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

This episode of the WP Bills 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. Forward slash WP builds.

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So apparently the mics are not muted after all that. I dunno. It was very good that you were all extremely quiet because, I heard a cough. There was a little cough, but it doesn't matter. It's totally fine. Hello. Hello. We're on episode number 291 of this week in WordPress. I have a feeling this is gonna be chaos, because in the introduction it all got sideways quite quickly.

Not introduction. We've had a little 10 minute chat beforehand. but we'll, endeavor to get through a bunch of word pressy stuff. Hopefully, you are willing to share it. If you fancy getting your friends, colleagues, relations, enemies, dogs, cats, hamsters, or gerbils involved, head over to wp builds.com.

Forward slash I actually can't remember. Yes. Forward slash live. send people there. If you go there, then you need to be logged into a Google account in order to use the comments. Alternatively, there's a little box at the top right hand corner of the video. Top I dunno which way, one of those.

And, if you click that, you can give us a comment anonymously. So you don't need to be logged in. We're still going out on Facebook, but Facebook, in their wisdom, have decided to, destroy the API, which enables that to happen. So all of these kind of platforms, in April at some point, so fairly soon, you're not gonna be able to go into Facebook groups.

You can still do pages and things like that, but I would suggest that you just head over to our website. that's probably the quickest way to do it. And stop worrying about Facebook. Honestly, stop worrying about Facebook. Will you all stop anyway? Let's get on. Let's introduce first of all, down in the corner there.

He's on quite a lot. So he is become a co-host. He is Mark. Guardian of the West, Guard. How are you doing, mark? That's it. That's me. I'm good. How are you? Yeah, Good. really good. I'm over a jet lag at last. Thank i was saying before you joined us, I have been left with a, terrible legacy and Tammy's shaking ahead.

I've been left with a terrible legacy of my trip to Word Camp Asia. My body will not go back to European, like British time zones. I am a mess at nine in the evening. I am unable to carry on. You are nodding, like, this has happened to you. Yeah, I, I feel better. I was just exhausted after working out Asia.

[00:04:45] Mark Westguard: I was actually thinking about going to Cloud Fest and glad. But sad that I didn't. but yeah, I'm still waking up at 2:00 AM and it's what True. Why it's dark. Yeah. Yeah. It's really had a profound effect on me, but, nevertheless, let's just carry,

[00:05:05] Nathan Wrigley: let's just, carry, sorry. It's gonna be bad this week, isn't it? We're really not gonna get on with anything. It's, mark is the founder of WS form, fabulous form plugin for WordPress. Oh. It actually says on the bio a powerful WordPress form plugin. I'm terrible at marketing. I'm just injecting the word.

Fabulous as well. No, that's good. Pithy to the point. I love it. Okay. We're also joined by Tammy. Tammy Lister. There she is. How are you doing, Tammy? Hello. I'm good, thank you. How are you? I'm great. Tammy is, everybody's got such a short bio today. This is fabulous. Tammy is a product creator who is passionate.

I. About open source. That's all we got. But thank you. I appreciate you joining us today. and also by Mr. Tim Nash. There he is. Oh, nice. You even got the glance right. How are you doing, Tim? I'm okay. How are you? Yeah, really good. And Tim, I should add is a professional doom speaker what it says.

WordPress security consultant. I don't even know what doom speaking is, but it sounds bad. You've had me on this show enough times. Okay. That's, it's that. Okay. Okay, I got it. if you fancy making a comment like Peter Ingersol does every single week, I've gotta say thank you, Peter, for giving us, for joining us every week.

I know it's probably early where you are, but he drops into the comments and he always tells us about the weather, in Connecticut. And it's partly sunny, it's chilly. Two oh that is chilly. Two degrees centigrade, 36 degrees Fahrenheit in, in Connecticut. If you've got any weather comments you want to Dr.

Drop in, feel free to do that. we're not sure about hold the whole clock thing. I had a comment there from Courtney who said, happy Monday, Nathan. when does the UK change clocks? Sunday? And the answer to that is, I don't know, Sunday, spring. Okay, so there you go. we now know it's gonna be Sunday, and clocks move ahead one hour in the uk.

Oh, thanks. Peter knows more about this than I do. Oh, so, next week we're having a week off anyway, so it probably won't affect too much. Yeah, we'll be, we get Easter bunnies at spring US forward. That's not the case, but I, will be taking a week off. And, and final comment for now is Atif who says Good afternoon.

Like I said, if you, I got an extra hour in bit this morning. You did many four hours difference between us right now between. Okay, time. So I'm just gonna point out something obvious that is not the number 24, but it's

it's 12 degrees in rubbish in London. That's great. In London. Okay. So we're gonna talk about WordPress. We actually have way more things to talk about than we've got time for. So some of them will get in, some of them we won't. firstly, a little bit of self-promotion. This is our website, wp builds.com.

If you fancy, keeping in touch with what we do, put your email address in there and I will spam you so badly. No, I won't. I'll send you two emails a week. One to say when this is published, which is usually tomorrow on a Tuesday or on Thursday. So sign up for that. Otherwise, there's nothing else to say.

We've got, podcast episodes which come out each and every week. So you can check those out in our little archive section here. Let's, oh yeah. Mark, I thought you were raising your hand. No, I was just adjusting my microphone. Okay. Yeah. Yes, sir. Yes. I'm not at school. Yeah.

When we first did this show, back on episode like number one, none of us had a clue how to do anything like this, including me. and so we all did. We literally raised our hands and it was, yeah. Tammy, anything to add? I just wanted to raise my hand because I got left out. Okay. Let's get onto this.

this is really just to say that if you follow the WordPress project, you'll probably know that it, it gets released, and then there's a little buildup and excitement prior to the big release, and that is coming fairly soon. It's called WordPress 6.5. But prior to that we get these things called release candidates, which are mostly finished, hopefully, versions of the software.

And the idea is that if you would like to help, you could download that and see if anything doesn't work for you. And if it doesn't, then you report it back. So we're on release candidates three, which is typically the last one, which means that if everything is akay, we should be able to move over and get WordPress 6.5 release pretty quickly.

Now, I got a little bit of an intuition that this 6.5 may be punted. And the reason for that was because, Courtney, thank you Courtney, who's in the comments. she mentioned something to me that was going on in the make slack, the 6.5 release leads, and there seems to be some kind of problem ish. I don't really know 'cause I didn't get a chance to read it incredibly thoroughly.

but we have an issue with the way that the, new font library is storing the font files and, this is the post here. I will link to it in the show notes tomorrow morning, but it may be that the 6.5 release gets pushed. But Tammy was keen to point out that just because they say it might get punted.

Doesn't mean it, it's also you might have a release candidate. there isn't always just three. Sometimes there's four sometimes. Okay, there's two. Okay. so I think what will be done is an assess. So it, I've been involved in releases. So what will be done is an assessment of is this critical? Is this something that's gonna break everything or is this something that could be fixed after release and that will be the big decision?

[00:10:39] Tammie Lister: Or is this something that means that feature needs taken out? Which is actually the worst case, right? Because if you need to take the feature out, then you need to backport everything to unpick all your knitting. That's basically the best way that I can talk about it. so it's whether you go and it's, Courtney has just shared, it's currently been discussed in the core channel.

so that's the discussion is like what is the best and what is the worst case, of really, to go through that. So for the first time in the show's history, I can actually say this is like ongoing news making news. This is actually happening as we speak. but it's happening now in the core channel.

[00:11:21] Nathan Wrigley: If you wanna go there, there was a, piece that, Courtney, I dunno if you can, send us the URL or something, I dunno. But, published in the core channel 30 minutes ago. So who knows, maybe 6.5 will come out. But there does seem to be an issue and conflicting opinions about the way that it's stored, where it's stored and whether or not that's outside of the normal, the normal confines of where those files get stored.

And Courtney says, thanks to Tammy for the great explanation. Yeah, too, right? Thanks to Tammy for that. That's brilliant. does anybody wanna add anything to that? 'cause that was hot off the press a bit, wasn't it, Tim? no, I just wanted to say, please, Co test. Yep. 'cause this is how things like this, not this particular issue.

[00:12:02] Tim Nash: This particular issue is due to locations of where F should be. But generally, if things are about to be, punted, it's normally because someone comes along and says, we've just found X. Yeah. And the only way we find X is if people find X. So go test it. Yeah, go test your plugins, themes, your sites, your updates, all that jazz.

[00:12:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, good point. so we'll see whether it comes. I feel like it would be a great shame. not a great shame. Obviously the security of the platform and everybody's happiness I suppose is in some way tied up with it. But the font library was one of the real hot items that everybody has been talking about along with a bunch of APIs and things.

But if that got punted to the next version, that would be a shame 'cause there's been a lot of press coverage about that. And it does look like a really nice feature. We will see. I think I'll also add that the font library. Will get in. It's just when it's ready to get in and safely get in because it's been due to be in for a while.

[00:13:01] Tammie Lister: I personally would rather it got in safely and gently when it gets in. So if it doesn't get in this release, it'll get in the next release. yeah. I think we. You have to see releases not as like closed boxes, which means if you don't make it, you won't get in the next one. It's interesting 'cause from the outside, I've never been involved in a core release or anything like that, and it really does feel a bit like a closed box.

[00:13:24] Nathan Wrigley: I, it does feel like there's this moment in time where everything needs to ship and if it doesn't do exactly what it said hundred three weeks ago, then it's a failure. And it's not really, is it? It's just, no, not at all. It's just, it's gonna get better for the next one. And, I think, so when we use the terms punted or we, for next release, it's just, it's not baked ready, it's not fully brewed.

[00:13:45] Tammie Lister: We just need to put it back for a little bit, pay a bit more attention, do a little bit more work on it, and then we're gonna get there with what Tim said. We're gonna get there with testing as well. And that's the best way to see it, is we have a release date. and what is ready? That's the best way to see it.

[00:14:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. anyway, it go and test as, as the original piece was saying, 6.5 go test, maybe with particular emphasis on the font library. But in the show notes tomorrow will come. This piece, it's by Peter Wilson. It's called Font Library Updates, storage of Font Files. And you can see there's a whole ton of comments, much more than, is typically the case.

There's absolutely loads of people coming in, with fairly technical language describing what the problem is from their point of view. So again, it'll be in the show notes tomorrow. Oh, occasionally we get some fabulous news, and this is one of those days. my good friend, Robert Donn, always known as Bob, I don't even know if he's Robert, is, he, Robert?

Bob Don, who does do the Woo and has been in the podcast space for absolutely ages. He has some fabulous news. He's really put a lot of effort in the more recent past into making his podcast offering not just this one thing. He's now got, oh gosh, like many podcasts and he's got many, different voices in those podcasts helping him out.

And he's found a new home for his hosting, and it's [email protected]. I think it's fair to say that Bob is utterly delighted with this because it allows him to, have his platform, but without the technical headache of keeping up. The website, and I think he's got a full enough plate. he's spinning a lot of plates just with the content that he's creating.

And he is editing and he is managing and all of that. And I've gotta say, I'm totally jealous, frankly. you look at things like this press release where I'm just gonna play a little bit of it. what the heck? The video is just phenomenal, isn't it? woocommerce.com, just look at this, it's like full on professional stuff.

anyway, that's happened. He's now got hit this new home for his website. The content itself is exactly as it expect. nothing on that side of things has changed, but he's got a new home and he's chuffed a bits. It's, I think it's fair to say that whenever I'm at an event where Bob is at an event, we are basically stapled together.

we don't separate at all. It's, it's alarming actually. So I am really, happy for you, Bob. I dunno if you're gonna be in the comments or not, but Bravo does anybody wanna say nice things about Bob? I wanna say congratulations to Bob a hundred percent. he's, I remember him filming this in Madrid when we went to State of the Word, and he was very excited about it.

[00:16:32] Mark Westguard: he kept it under wraps for a, long time. he's been desperate to tell everyone about it and, Congratulations. And I know that he's been given a huge amount of support from the WordPress people. He's, they put together a lot of work behind the scenes to migrate the slide across to wordpress.com.

so he's been very excited about it. I remember when we were in work Onia, he suddenly got a message on his phone saying we're ready to start moving stuff. When he, had this huge list of work to do and he said, why are they doing this to me on the first day of work camp? Bob and I went next to each other in the sponsor Hall Asia, and he, I remember he told me before we left, he said, I've, made stickers for every one of my shows.

And I was thought, how many stickers is that? And he, his booth was just covered in all these different stickers from all the different shows that he did. how he keeps up with it, I have no idea, but he does a great job. he's one of those guys where you can spend, like you say Nathan, you can spend a day with him.

And behind the scenes there are podcasts being produced from lots of other people that he works with. And, Because.

Cohost doing it now. So he's quite clever how he's done it. Yeah, he's a, he's like a podcast czar sort of media mogul is media mogul. Yeah. Yeah. He wants to go. That's right. Yeah. And I think Courtney is, I think Courtney's drawn out the most important thing from this, which is that me and Bob need to have a hat silhouette competition.

[00:18:06] Nathan Wrigley: I think. I think we know who's gonna win. 'cause Bob's got, hair, and lots of hats and lots. Buys a new hat every time you go somewhere. But it's really nice. I'd like genuinely, I know we're making light of it, but I think genuinely, I'm really chuffed to bits for him, it's, it is hard work.

and I bet there's been times where Bob has thought about throwing in the towel, where it's just been harder than it might have been. And he's kept going and he's been doing this longer than anybody that I know. in the space. Real heritage and history. There it is alarming. When you walk around a Word camp with Bob, this is no word of a lie, right?

I swear this is true. So we're stapled together, right? You walk two meters, hi Bob, and then Bob talks to somebody. And then finally, you walk another Hi Bob, and then you walk another two meters high, everybody. Knows Bob. And, a testament to a fine chap, really nice individual. And there you go.

[00:19:08] Tammie Lister: And his care and consideration for those people that are on the podcast is n next to nothing. I think that really is worth saying, yeah, so I, it, is amazing and I'm so pleased. I gotta see at Cloud Fest kind of it, it launching as well. And then just seeing someone that's worked so hard. Get that.

It's just Chef kiss. It's so good. it's so deserved. we, get moments like this in our community that we just need to bottle and, so yeah, it's really, important. And as you've just noted, it's important to our community. Someone like that, keeps people going, that keeps people represented with voices.

The shared like breadth of podcasts that he has and the different voices that are on that is really, and are getting more and more different voices is really incredible as well. I, I dunno if anybody else I know maybe Mark's sad his bit. Tammy, do you have anything to say about that, Tim? Or do you wanna move on?

[00:20:12] Nathan Wrigley: No. Okay, that's fine. in which case, on a similar vein, so obviously Bob for many, years has been creating content around the WordPress space. you could, as we described, playfully describe him as a media, sort of WordPress media mogul. and in line with that kind of interestingly, Joseph Ser, Joseph Hayden Choi, who is the executive director of the WordPress project, she came up with this post, earlier in the week.

So it was March the 20th, and it's entitled, making a WordPress Media Core. And honestly, I can't tell you how this is gonna land. I just know that this is just an idea at the moment. I think really the whole. The whole direction of this is, as yet unknown. But she goes to paint the picture that if, WordPress was a corporate company, there would be a wing of the business which was funded to do marketing and to get the message out and to, just make sure that all of that stuff is happening.

WordPress, given the nature of the project and the, I know that there's, supporters who are paid, who have their contributions paid for in terms of time and what have you, but a lot of the work, the vast majority, I would imagine, goes on, on a voluntary basis. And so there really isn't that capability to have that wing of the business, if you like.

And, so Josefa thinks that maybe, there's been failures in the past. Now that isn't to, point a finger at anybody who's endeavored in this in the past, who's been involved in the marketing team. But the idea is what if. There was a way that we could have this as, it's called Media Core.

And that media core would include, dare I say it, I guess maybe people like me who make it their business to talk about WordPress and put stuff out in the WordPress space. So again, Bob would fit perfectly into this category. I can think of other things like the repository, which is a newsletter, and countless YouTube channels and what have you, that they would in some way have, a media channel where they could go and information would be disseminated to them.

Because what I typically have to do is open up an RSS reader and go to eight gazillion different websites a week to decide what is actually worthy. And it would be nice if there was like a fire hose for want of a better word of. Air quotes official stuff. So that's the idea. The, intention would be that the people who participated create content, which is 80% WordPress, have high quantity, quality journalism and writing.

Okay, I'm out. That's fine. follow WordPress community guidelines and honor embargoes and then this one at the end, et cetera. I dunno what that bit means, but there you go. and these people would then, in some way qualify to be in this little room of people. Anyway, I am fascinated by this just because of where I'm at and what I do, but I don't know if it's confusing.

I think, Tim, you were saying earlier, you're not quite sure what this all adds up to. Yeah, I, saw, I, get it when you, as you describe it as a fire hose, that sounds fantastic. but immediately it's a restricted fire hose. It's no, you, must have to access this magical fire hose, you must be, doing high quality journalism.

[00:23:22] Tim Nash: So no, Nathan, for example. Yeah. you have to follow, following the WordPress guidelines feels like the one thing that's on that list seems quite reasonable, but, all of a sudden we are restricting it. Surely if we want to broaden marketing, we want to broaden it to. People beyond the WordPress space.

[00:23:42] Nathan Wrigley: That is a very good point. And I think part of this, isn't this just inwards? So my thoughts are, okay, I'm gonna get on my high horse, right? My thoughts are that, that what would be a good place to start would be to get people who are creating WordPress content and just get them into a system. So let's call it a fire hose, whatever it is, just something which in a few weeks, they all know what's going on, regardless of the quality of that fire hose.

It's just, okay, we're all in a room. We all know each other's names. We all know what, when, people are producing stuff, get that working. I'm doing so many hand gestures, it's crazy. and then after that. Then start to figure out, okay, how do we bring in the publish publications who are outside the WordPress space, but how, who have a much bigger audience than the likes of me.

things like TechCrunch or those other people who, if they wrote about WordPress, would immediately get in front of a half a million, eyeballs, which would be amazing. 'cause it's those organizations I think that would really be impactful. but we haven't figured out, I don't think yet what that would be.

[00:24:49] Tim Nash: Does that help Tim? Did that sort of, but from my perspective, when I see WordPress news, the, you get high quality places like Tavern 'em, yourself, joking aside, but all the, all these sort of news sources. But then if we go and look for your articles this week. Half of them are from the se SEO journal.

[00:25:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. This, yeah. And similar, and they're normally trash written articles by people who not because they, the person writing them isn't trying the hardest, but they're outside. They're not getting, they're getting that information like Chinese whispered. And it's the same with security. the number of times I'm asked to comment on a, by a security publication for a WordPress article that's telling me that WordPress isn't secure.

[00:25:33] Tim Nash: And it's no, because plugin X, Y, Z from, which is like so far down here, but, so it would be great if those publications could have access to this. it just feels like it's not gonna go anywhere. And the other thing I was slightly concerned about is where does this fit within the already existing marketing team?

[00:25:54] Nathan Wrigley: Fantastic. Lovely. There obviously is. Been historically some hostility and problems and marketing seems to be a curse in WordPress. Anybody who takes the, says the word marketing in their team name seems to be damning themselves to some sort of weirdness that nobody seems to be successful. That I just don't understand why I think you're right.

in, I, completely agree by the way about your, inference there, that a lot of the journalism in the big organizations is not that great. and, maybe that is part of the, picture to address, it's to build up some relationship between people in that team and those external news organizations so that, there's that conduit of, okay, alright, you are about to publish this, but actually could could it be modified in such a way?

'cause that doesn't sound like what we're trying to say. I don't know. I'm just fascinated because it's completely adjacent with what I do. That's why I'm fascinated. I like the idea that it recognizes what you do and others do, which is, if we maybe changed the word and called it pr, I, I think it recognizes what a lot of people are trying to do and it helps with access to that information.

[00:27:09] Tammie Lister: I do think there is something to be said for sorting our own out before we go outwards, and making sure, so there are, there have been many instances where people have tried to, blog about WordPress. 'cause blogging about the thing that you're writing is, natural and news.

and they haven't been able to make 'cause success of it. So I think that's really. Something like this will help them make a success of it, will help them make success of their news. also there's an opportunity for mentoring. So we've just been seeing the process of Bob. We've been, there were many people who've been successful in this.

If someone wants to come and learn and be successful, coming and learning from this particular group would also be an opportunity just thinking from the future as well. There, there is that to think of. Whether it's a different, I don't know, but I'm just thinking of that, like where are the next publications to come from?

Where is the next kind of news sources as well? I think that's something to also think about. We've got the established ones, but also we're all like getting old and not able to deal with jet lag. So where's the next publications coming from? Yeah. And how do we get those on board? That's interesting.

[00:28:16] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so there's an article which I buried in the, I said we probably wouldn't end up talking about, but I'll just quickly, if I can quickly find it, I'll pop it on the screen. And this is a, an article, called, top Words WordPress Statistics You Should Know in 2024. it's, it ignored.

The, but I just want to just raise a few of the things, right? So it just raises, okay. We know this one, we've heard about this one loads of times. WordPress powers, 43% of the web, whatever that means. More than 500 new websites are being created on WordPress every day. 74.6 million websites use WordPress worldwide.

Every month, 2.9 million people search for the term WordPress on Google, WordPress Power. 65% of CMS websites I could go on. And let's just, assume that everything I've just said is in fact true. That, that, data is true. I have no idea. but the point is WordPress is massive. Totally massive.

And the fact that it is not habitually on organizations like, dare I say it, the B, C or TechCrunch is bizarre because it's imprint is totally enormous. and if it went away, so would a chunk of the internet. maybe this is where they're trying to get to just bridge that gap between what we know is the importance of WordPress and the, posity of mainstream coverage.

I don't know. I'm gonna raise a comment by Courtney. She said, Noel to has been calling out a significant need for market research and shortening the turnaround time from that research to call releases. she then goes on to say he spoke at WordCamp Asia and has been sharing his bits on X recently.

So that was Noel to N-O-E-L-T-O-C-K for those people who are listening to this. so maybe you could search for him on, x and hard numbers says Peter Ingersol and real researcher vital for making good decisions. We don't have that yet. Mark, did you want to add anything to this? Yeah, I just, I dunno where to go with this really.

[00:30:35] Mark Westguard: 'cause the first, line of this article is all around stagnated growth and, They want to tackle that problem. I, wonder whether this has anything to, and this maybe I'm talking completely outta line here, but are they feeling the effects of the Wix and, the other big players out there who have these ridiculously huge marketing budgets, and is that, affecting them and is this a plan to streamline their marketing and, give themselves a, bigger voice, which I'm all about.

but I, I am noticing nowadays, whenever I search for something, WordPress up comes a, Wix ad, which I'm sure is, is, impacting their ability to reach new customers. don't, Some of those companies like Wix and Squarespace and all that, don't they have like really gigantic budget, like I'm thinking like Super Bowl ads it's unbelievably huge, right?

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So I, dunno, whether that's, influenced this at talk, because I know she's talking about stagnated growth, but, can I ask a very, a question to the panel effectively? why does that matter? Honestly, why does market growth matter? Oh, growth just to growth in general. Why does that actually matter?

[00:31:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Do you know what, I've often given that thought, so to me, does it matter to me if we go to 44, 45, 50 55 60, does that matter? And the honest answer in my head is, I, don't think that matters. But what does matter to me, I think is the opposite. If it went to 40, 35, 30. So it going in the opposite direction because then for all sorts of reasons, we know Mark's got a plugin, like the, audience for that plugin becomes smaller.

the audience for this podcast is still two, what was it? Still huge? Oh, 200 million. Yeah, yeah, I don't think it, I don't think it matters to us so much, but I wonder how it impacts, the commercial side of wordpress.com. and where they're going with that. I also think it depends on where you are and what you are doing.

[00:32:48] Tammie Lister: So if you're pitching from an agency perspective, a number is great on a slide deck for a pitch, right? but also. If you are trying to build a product, you wanna know that number is dependable. a million spam sites, that aren't gonna install your plugin not so useful. a hundred sites that are guaranteed are gonna use your plugin and pay you very useful.

that's like different into the scale, but so the, data has, it needs to be appropriate for what you're creating. And I think that is the thing, like you honestly, like you get to a point where some of these numbers are just like big numbers that don't have any reality in anything, right?

because the bottom line is I'm not actually earning from my plugin or I'm not actually earning about it. It really is, to me it's about. Is there, are there people coming in this end? And are there people going too much this end? Is there balance in the ecosystem? Is there growth in products?

Are there new products happening or are we just like pivoting and just, or becoming just one product? And that also has its problems, right? are new products being created in the space that those are more kind of important measures of a healthy ecosystem than there's a billion spam websites, right?

can, canon by sites is not necessarily the great metric that we would go by. That's interesting. Yeah. I think, yeah. Boy, there's so much in this, but I totally share your thing, Tim, there about, does that number, which is the number which is always banded around, does that matter? My intuition.

[00:34:26] Nathan Wrigley: It says that it's on some level it does, but I can't get my hands on it. I don't quite know why it matters. It must matter because it gets banded around all. Yeah. Does. If you're pitch, if you're pitching, when I've pitch in agencies and I pitched, for some big projects, it does. So if you're trying to pitch to an enterprise level, they wanna know what percentages, some of these, they're like, that's the reality.

[00:34:47] Tammie Lister: Okay. it's more of a checkbox. I will, convey that, but it's more, is it trusted, is it dependable? How many, how much is the percentage of trust and dependability? That's, what you're talking about when you're pitching in an agency, you're normally going, yes. Here is our we're a WordPress agency's supported by all these people on the web.

[00:35:05] Tim Nash: We've got this percentage of the all and the next people coming on is, we're gonna build you a custom CMS, it's gonna cost you 28 times more and it's gonna be yours and you'll be, and it depends if you're pitching for an open project or a closed project, which I think is the difference, right? But if you're pitching for, from an open web perspective, then yes, the number will matter and will be part of your conversation because it will be against other open web solutions where the numbers would be different.

[00:35:30] Tammie Lister: So you'd be like, oh, this number, because this number then supports, and then this is the contributors, and then this is, so that would be part of your conversation. So again, it's whether you are pitching open or closed in an agency, which is a completely different. Conversation. I think it's an interesting pitch by Gisa because I've spent the last, I dunno, whatever it is, seven or eight years trying to build this thing, this WP builds thing.

[00:35:53] Nathan Wrigley: And and I've learned a lot of lessons on the, on that road, what not to do, what to do. And, I'm not suggesting it's entirely successful, but you get the point. and so maybe it's just that sort of, being able to just use that experience and tap into those things as a quick and effective way of getting a bit of a quick win.

I'm sure it wouldn't be the end of that journey, but I'm curious, we'll certainly see how that happens. Courtney has raised something she said she thinks too about the need for a younger skewing contingent in the WordPress community and the relaunch post covid of the community. Hang on, Courtney, do you mean that the WordPress community is skewing younger or that it's not skewing younger?

Because I feel it's not skewing younger. I feel it's. Without being rude to any of us. We are a No, this is good. We're getting a bit cobwebby. people who have been around the WordPress ecosystem for a relatively long time, and especially if you take that in terms of the web, but in terms of WordPress, yeah.

[00:37:00] Tim Nash: if we were starting to say who's been around for more, been doing stuff with WordPress for more than five years, and we kept our hands up, we could go way beyond five 10. Yeah. If the Yeah, exactly. so you's a whole generation and there's a whole generation who are coming through universities and things who are being told that, PHP and all this stuff and that these, this is an old stuffy stuff that you don't need to do and you need to do.

You need to get interested in this and, oh no, don't do WordPress. That's like old and it's broken and It's, it would help if there was like some young, fresh faces that weren't saying that WordPress is a, great thing to be platform to be using. yeah. So we are part the problem we're we're going.

[00:37:51] Nathan Wrigley: We, I think maybe on this episode we should all get our Zimmer frames out, let's be honest. And, we're definitely tending to skew towards the older demographic, aren't we? And I think Courtney has just clarified that's what she meant. She said not younger yet. So that's a point of concern. So Okay.

Shelve the media a bit. Maybe we need to concentrate more on getting the, and also focusing on what does media mean to those of us who aren't cobwebs. Yeah. Oh gosh, yes. what you are consuming. You mentioned RSSI would pretty much bet that I, if you ask, I gotta step away from that comment, many lower generations than you, then their answer would not be, I use RSS for my media consumption.

[00:38:37] Tammie Lister: I have heard of these thing called the tiktoks, all the kids the talkies are using. Yes. Find ticky talkies and all those kind of things. And probably what they're using. And we don't use it. We don't utilize, like I, so pretty much for me, TikTok is for farming and cute animals. I never encounter WordPress on TikTok.

Like it's not there. It's not in that space. And it should have fallen into my algorithm by now. Because that algorithm is smart as a button, right? But that button is just giving me sheep and cute bunnies. It's not giving she cute. Space away from the WordPress. Maybe there's somebody sitting on workbooks going, why is my WordPress stuff not working?

[00:39:17] Tim Nash: And I, all I can see is rabbits. Okay. But, honestly, on a serious point, and I genuinely didn't even think about that, Tammy is, my conception of media is woefully. Skewed towards it's cobwebs. Yeah. Yeah. Basically a hundred percent. Hundred percent. Like for, my, if you think about most one generation away from us, they don't have subscriptions to anything.

[00:39:41] Tammie Lister: Like all the old news. They're not watching tv. They're not like, if you look at all the data, their, consumption is very different. And we are not where that is. So part of this all should be understanding outside our like geriatric bubbles of media consumption. To be honest, it's a catch 22 though as well, right?

[00:40:01] Mark Westguard: Because yeah, we've gotta be hit to the kids to get the kids in when we wanna get something out, we go to where everyone is. and part of it's just listening, right? There's this thing that we can do called listening and there's this thing that we can do called market research, which is like understanding and we tend to be quite good at like contribution.

[00:40:22] Tammie Lister: So opening up to contributions from younger generations would be good, but across different cultures, not just like the US generations understanding what different cultures have. Is really important I think. That you are so right about that whole media chasm. Honestly, I, I was being slightly mocking when I said about the tiktoks, but the ticky talkies, yeah.

[00:40:45] Nathan Wrigley: I've never used that, but I'm constantly surprised that the attention that my children paid to, oh, I love it like that. and it, is, somewhere where I don't, you're right. I imagine there's not a wa not a lot of WordPress engagement. And I have, 'cause I have tried to search for it. Okay. It's not there.

[00:41:04] Tammie Lister: It's not there. and the algorithm hasn't even picked up. Okay. Unlike anything. it's not really there. it's lightly there, if anything. but it's not super capitalized. it's not really been used. but there is a lot of space. There's live space, there's a lot of space there to use it. It's just using it smartly because people will see through it in those spaces.

And that being able to see through the use of media is also something that. Our generation, generations down have been taught more Yeah. Than other generations. Michelle Fette joins us, to say that more and more Ws businesses are getting on. Yeah. The, tick to the ticky talkies, that's how I'm gonna call it.

[00:41:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. The tick, the ticky talkies. Yeah. Okay. So there we go. We've got a few other comments as well. Colin Dev Row, thanks for joining us. He said, joining the discussion late and old adage is, so this I presume is about the 43% number and, all of that. the old adage is, if you aren't growing, you are dying for any business, technology, et cetera.

So if the number shrinks, it could be indicative. A larger issue. Okay. Gosh, that's an interesting conversation. Anyway, the, article for that, is called, just raise it on the screen one more time. it was the 20th of March. I'll put the link in the show notes. Mar making a WordPress media court, there is a lot more to it.

and there's a quite a few comments and there is a slack, channel where you can join and be involved in that discussion. Okay, let's move on. Okay. It's gonna get a bit personal. Now. We don't often stray into personal things, but I, I did an episode of the Tavern Podcast with, Miriam Schwab. I dunno if Miriam, but Miriam, has been in the WordPress community for a really long time.

She founded an agency, was very successful with that. Moved that agency on, went on to found a company, I believe co-founder is the right word there, called Strati, which was fairly revolutionary in its approach, approach to hosting. She then sold that to Elementor and we had a chat about just her life and about the fact that she's got, honestly, wait for it, seven children and how you manage to be, a functioning.

Adult, just that. But then on top of being a functioning adult with seven children, how you managed to be successful. And it was genuinely interesting chatting to her. and I did just wanna really just ask the panel a, if they had any, of their own personal stuff to share and, and b, whether or not they, managed to listen to this episode and got any insights out of it.

She seems like she's heavily reliant these days upon, clever tools. So she's got a bunch of, SAS apps, which she uses, and she put me onto one actually, which is called Notion Calendar. And, I'm, like a week in and I'm totally addicted. I've literally. Moved my life over to Notion Calendar because of some of the things that it can do on the Mac, which is nice.

but there's a bunch of other tools as well. But also just, she was very honest and open and shared the fact that, she doesn't, always feel that she was, successful in everything that she did. Maybe the family took a bit of a hit because of the, need to do things for the business and so on and so forth.

I don't know what I'm all I'm gonna say is, panel. Tell me about your father. lie down on the couch and, we're gonna go with Mark first 'cause he coughed. Oh, hang on. I put my hand up. Okay.

[00:44:33] Mark Westguard: I really enjoyed listening to this. Oh, you did. Thank you. That's great. I don't usually listen to stuff that you make Ray, but Yeah. No. Quite right. Yeah. That's the right approach. No, it was, it was, really great to listen to. I don't know Miriam very well. I see her at all the work council. You always say hello.

She's always a delight to, speak to and say hello to. I had no idea she had seven children. I have two, and that's enough. And, as with any kind of, because she, she used to run her own business. And, that takes an awful lot of time, out of your day. It takes an awful lot of time out of your personal life, and I know how difficult that is and how much sacrifice she makes.

So with seven children, I can't imagine how she does it. She's very, humble, with everything that she does. And, yeah, it was fascinating to listen to. I, really enjoyed it. Can I ask you a question? And feel free to, not answer it. But what, is the hit on your life of your company?

[00:45:34] Nathan Wrigley: Just let, maybe all we do is the metric of hours. What would you say is the typical number of hours, like week, month? And again, just bat that one away if you don't wanna answer it, but I am curious. No, it's a lot. it has been ever since I was 19 years old, I've always run my own business.

[00:45:50] Mark Westguard: I think what works in our, in my marriage is that my wife was brought up in a, a business environment with her family. So she understands. For some, people it can be really difficult having a partner that's working so much. she's used to that and we've got a good bit of teamwork going on, which I think really helps.

so she can help out a lot with the kids. for me it's, not unusual that I'm doing 16 hours a day because I'm, working one day having some dinner and then going back to work again. but that's just what it has taken me to get my particular plugin and my previous businesses off the ground.

And you get the reward of having your own schedule and being to take time off when you.

But, it's the same with most entrepreneurs that I speak to. Yeah. they're all basically workaholics. and it's sad 'cause you have to be to, every hour you don't spend on the business, you are an hour back from getting the business to where it needs to be. Oh, yeah. but we do take time out together.

Like last night we all went out to dinner, and took some time together and put the phones down and spoke to each other, which is important. Yeah. and know. Yeah. Did you just say you put your phones down? We actually put our phones away. Yeah. Yeah. Bucket. Even the kids requirement of all restaurants with other people.

Without the rectangle. Yeah, we, yeah, we actually spoke to each other. That was quite hard. You weren't using the tiktoks? No. There was no tiktoks going around. There was no, yeah. Honestly, though, that's, oh, sorry, Tim, sorry. I was just gonna say, I feel really bad 'cause, my, my, daughter when she required, she sent, sends me messages for things like, I'm on the toilet, please, work my bottom levels.

[00:47:45] Tim Nash: And they're like, oh wait, that, this is very different sort of mentality to your world. I, think one of the things that comes out of that, and I dunno if you are guilty of this, mark. I certainly am because I work from home. I have this. Endless capacity to say that the next thing is, important enough to keep me here where I'm sitting right now.

[00:48:06] Nathan Wrigley: whereas I, do think there's something beautiful about working in an office or something where you can say, okay, it's five 30, I'm off and I'll be back at nine. but I've never really had that environment. And there, there are bits of me when in all honesty, when I get to the end of the day, I have to shamefully hold my head and do some groveling and apologizing because really I didn't need to be there for that bit.

I just made it important in my own head. and yeah, I think you've gotta just be mindful of that. Haven't you keep an eye on how often you're doing that and Yeah. Yeah, Are you I have to take time out with the family. And, that's usually dinner together after school and doing some homework and stuff, but once that finishes, I'm back at it.

[00:48:51] Mark Westguard: Yeah. if you send a support ticket, you'll get a response from me at midnight. It's, but yeah, it's, but I enjoy it. It's my work is my hobby. so I'm, not one of those to want to get out the door at five o'clock. I'm very lucky that Okay. I, enjoy what I do. Yeah. and, and I'm also a night owl.

I love working at night and getting stuff done while the family's asleep, yeah. I was that person as well until. work Camp Asia is just Yes. Seen that off. that was beautiful though. Thank you for sharing that. I appreciate that. I dunno if Tim or Tammy wanna contribute something to that.

[00:49:29] Nathan Wrigley: So my, I don't have children, but I can give a different perspective that I don't think it's just whether you have children or not. I think it depends on whether you or your partner also have medical or needs or caring. So for me, my partner's had long-term medical, needs. I don't always have the luxury of being able to maybe ignore until five o'clock.

[00:49:52] Tammie Lister: Those situations I might get up and it might be a bad day, and then I have to be dealing with that as well as I'm dealing with work. it is a little bit less, separating, when you are dealing with things like that. So I think we have sometimes the person that presents themselves on the podcast or the person that presents themselves at the Word camp, or, the person that presents themselves is not.

The person that's having the experience, that's the best way I can describe it. They may be, traveling because they're trying to do their best for the person that's at home who can't work or the, they may be in vastly different situations. So I think it's just. Trying to be as patient and as calm.

And don't assume just because someone hasn't got kids, that they've got endless amounts of time and that they, may be dealing, they may have, they may be caring for someone who's not their partner, even if they haven't got a partner. I think it's always fascinating for me to have these conversations that just as we always think of children, that there are vastly, particularly as we're talking about aging, there are vastly different, conversations, There's a thing when you marry someone in sickness and in health is one of the things that you say and you have to bear with that when you, are dealing with that. But my hat is so off to Miriam and what she deals with. I have been a long time admirer of her just being incredibly awesome.

and, I think that we need more people like that to just look at in the community because it helps. Everybody in the community be able to look at, but again, listen to their whole story because it'd be very easy to see her on stage or see her successes and be like, oh yeah, they never have a problem.

They never have a bad day. Yeah. They never are like dealing with I don't know, whatever they're dealing with, right? they never have a day where they just wanna grind a cushion. I've had days like that, or, where they just break down for no reason. and that's the thing, we maybe expect traveling.

We maybe expect things for the careers. Some people have to take jobs, some people have to do things and do different stuff. So I think it's really, important to just remember like the whole person, and check in on that whole person. and as we are like in this for a long term, remembering that like the partners and the children and the connected pieces, humans to those whole people change.

Gosh. I guess that's a different perspective. It's an interesting conversation, isn't it? I'm really enjoying this. Honestly, I think we could just do this for the rest of the show. one thing that I want to contribute to what Tammy just said is, I guess the, being working from home thing is a double-edged sword, isn't it?

[00:52:35] Nathan Wrigley: In this, in the way that I could not work from home, Right. So the situation for me is I literally. There, there have been times when I couldn't do that. Yeah. I, couldn't, I've pretty much only worked from home for a long time. One of the things I do have now though, is a separate office, which is amazing for me because I can actually take meetings away.

[00:52:53] Tammie Lister: That means that, my husband can sleep. that sounds like a really simple thing, but when someone's like taking a loud zoom meeting in the room next to you, it's really hard to sleep. Turns out. Yeah. so I have that separation and that separation is really good for me from a health perspective as well.

because it means like when I'm over here, I, my brain is in work mode. I can even put work clothes on. It's weird, but it's the thing. Oh, it's a thing. and, I can have a workspace and, that divide is really, powerful and useful for you when you're doing this. And then when I'm over there, I can be like paying attention.

and that's not to make him out to be a child. He's an adult. but people have different needs and different kind of conditions that they have. His story, But again, with me as well from my own health story, I think everybody has their own health stories and their own implications that they deal with as well.

So there's many layers to each person that's in front of the Yeah, no kidding. No kidding. My, my dad had this thing, he used to work from home and he had a separate office, but he would often wander back into the kitchen, make a coffee or just have a chat. And he had this thing where if he was wearing a particular pair of shoes Oh he was.

[00:54:05] Nathan Wrigley: He was in office mode. And he was to be like, basically don't interact with me on a, can we go out and kick the ball around in the garden kind of com. It was more like, okay, there's dad, but he's not really there. Yeah, he's invisible at this moment. And then he would change his shoes and he would be, my dad again for a bit.

Just interesting. It's just about communicating. 'cause I, don't have a kettle in here on purpose as well, so that I will actually go out, have to Yeah, yeah. I might, I probably never leave my shed. Yeah. but it's like that thing of just communicating what hours you're working and communicating when you can be interrupted because sometimes like interruptions are needed, but I always have my phone, available if I am needed for an interruption.

[00:54:46] Tammie Lister: And there have been times when I have had to end Zoom calls because of medical emergencies. And that's just the reality that I live in. this's reality, like many, people live in, this community. Yeah. Tim. Over to you. If you've got anything you want to add. I sort of wanna follow on from Tammy, but take the next perspective, which is that I suffer from medical conditions.

[00:55:08] Tim Nash: I, suffer from, a type of arthritis that most people won't even notice. it's called palindromic arthritis. And it, which literally means it comes and goes and I can appear to be perfectly fine one minute, and then the next day I won't be able to walk, and be in a lot of pain. And so I have appeared on this podcast more than once, doled up on painkillers.

Oh. And not, been able to, where I've hobbled into the office to sit down and then be cheerful for an hour and a half before going back to bed. and that can and does lead to. A strain on your mental health. And that need to be on stage and be in places. but yeah, I've been on it, been in events where I've been in large amount of pain, but having to pretend that I'm not, and that I'm just a cheerful, happy person, or I'm be put as much energy as I can into that persona of me.

and I, in the past I would be very much like Mark. I'd like to work all the hours I can, but I can't do that. I have a finite amount of spoons. My spoons have to be given as many as I, can to my daughter and my life and my routine is based around hers. So I'm, that means that I, honestly, I do not get the greatest amount of time to work.

So I work while she's at school and a little bit in the evenings, but I don't work till. Two in the morning because I can't, I have to go to sleep at around 9 30, 10 o'clock because my body won't let me. And you can read every productivity book in the world and have all this advice about how you're gonna get up at four o'clock in the morning, you're gonna have a quick meditation session, you go do some journaling, and then it's straight to the gym.

And, none of that, reality doesn't meet, it's just not true. it, for somebody, it must happen, but for the vast majority of people it doesn't 'cause we're all individuals. but it's okay 'cause, I get what I need to get done, when I can't. People are very understanding and I can still come on shows like this and be entertaining and fun for a little bit, and enjoy it.

And I enjoy the WordPress space, partly because it's a very welcoming place where we can have issues where. If I'm sat in the corner because I'm having a moment in the middle of a Word camp, my friends will come over and find me. It's just one of those things. yeah. Yeah. I, think, You should be very careful about assuming anything with any person.

Yeah. Because we don't all wander around with a list that says, here are my following problems. That would work better if we just had this. Some, for some people it might be quite short for others, but in fact, like Sims, when you have a little thing above your head have 20 of them popping up that, everybody is complicated.

So I was, about to say for some there might be more, but that's not fair because No, just 'cause you don't have a health issue or don't have X issue doesn't mean that your life's not complicated, that things aren't happening in it. So you don't know what's happening in somebody's life. You don't, whether it's physical, mental or, just what their life in general.

and yeah, so if nothing else, I think that, I haven't read the, I haven't listened to the podcast, but I. I've, met her. She's an amazing lady. I can imagine what, I, I don't think I, it's weird in, in many ways, I don't think I need to listen to the podcast to know what was said. yeah, And yeah. Yeah. really go listen to the podcast and I'm going to afterwards. Yeah. Yeah. thank you. really interesting conversation that, isn't it, because I, think one of the things which is coming out of this is like the public persona thing. That you, that's where I did the hands. Yeah. That kind of I always say when I'm on stage, I'm act like it's an act.

[00:59:25] Tammie Lister: And I don't mean that disingenuous at all. but it is a hundred percent, like there is a difference between the speaking me and then the real, like the reality of me. 'cause the reality of me is generally trying to work out how many spoons I've got, how many things I'm juggling, how many different things.

Because that's reality, right? But, it's, work, right? and I don't think that's a bad thing, that really isn't a bad thing. But we have to remember that when we're interacting with someone in a hallway hangout and when we're just like, just another two minutes, that two minutes might be that person.

Was on the way to the bathroom and they really needed to go, or that person really had just run outta spoons and they just really needed to go and find a cushion. and that two minutes just check in is are you okay to have this conversation now? That's what I'm trying to change it round to, 'cause I'm trying to like, remember when I was low on spoons and someone grabbed me in the hallway.

So I, honestly, I think we could keep this, we could have done the whole hour and a half on this. And it feels like a shame to draw a line under it in many ways, because this feels like probably the most important thing that we've talked about in ages. But, the episode with Miriam.

[01:00:41] Nathan Wrigley: It's really interesting because it does demonstrate pretty clearly that there's this public side and then there's the real life side. And the real life side is, messy. And the real life side is, interesting and it gets derailed and stuff goes wrong. but somehow you, get through it.

and I'm, obviously gonna be different, when I'm in, in the inadvertent comm real world than I am in the way that I present myself on this. I like to go and, shout at small animals and things like that. That's, that's my thing. It's really not Tammy. That's not actually what I do.

it was a joke even though it wasn't funny. but I appreciate all of your candor and your honesty. I have this vision of you shouting at Guinea pigs when you said that was all. We have Guinea pigs. We have Guinea pigs. I wouldn't care. no, there's no shouting at the Guinea pigs. But we do have Guinea pigs.

And I, I, Pick them up on a regular basis and give 'em a stroke. Anyway, here we go. A few comments about that. late to the show says, Elliot. Oh, no worries, Elliot. Don't worry about that at all. and big it says, oops, sorry. Wrong order. She says, I hear you Tim. thanks for showing up and sharing this.

Sending a, oh look. Oh, sending a handful of spoons. I have a weird story to tell right. And I'll just drop it in quickly. My, my daughter fancied having to go at, editing audio, so I've got loads of audio lying around that needs editing. So I gave it to her to edit and she was learning the software in which to edit it and all of that stuff.

after doing two or three of the episodes, she, got no impression about what WordPress Isle than that's something that I do. And she said they're all really nice, aren't they? All these people that you talk to, like there's this common thread, they're all nice. And she said, is it like that?

Like all the time? And I said, it probably isn't. But my experience is that it basically is. And so I do feel very, I do feel very privileged that there's, I want to meet the person who comes on who's not really who comes on going, What I need to do is show off my business acumen by being grumpy.

Yeah. That will get me more customers being grumpy on Nathan's show. But do, you know what I mean though? But even when you're like at a Word camp and things like that, there is, it's just a relentless cavalcade of nice people. if you've been to any other more business related conferences, I'm sure that you can make a comparison.

just a different approach and things like that. And so I feel very privileged. Okay. I think we should move the subject matter on because we got. We've got events to talk about. That kind of fits nicely with what we've just been mentioning. that episode was on the tavern. Go check it out, by the way.

so very quickly we'll just go through a few bits and pieces that are coming up in the real world happening soon. WordPress 6.5 Brighton launch party is happening. you can find this over on Meet Up, but if you do you think they know it's gonna be, sorry, has a potential to be delayed. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah. They're gonna, they're gonna order pizza tentatively, yeah. Just in case. That's right. but if you're in the Brighton area, then obviously this is something that you could attend in the real world. the date is escaping me. I can't seem to see it. I don't Oh, there, he is. It's Tuesday.

Yeah, Tuesday for Jam Heston's comment. So it's very, yeah. yeah, we'll see. I'll see if that gets delayed or not. I wish I was in Brighton for that. Oh, I do Miss Brighton. Yeah, I miss Brighton. Be right on. Yeah, totally be right on. Yeah. okay. And then the WordPress London meetup is happening, on the 28th, so that's also this week, which is really nice.

This one, is, it's at Klaviyo. That's where it's gonna be held hopefully for the rest of this year. I've not actually been to that location, 6:30 PM on the 28th. So if you're in the London area, you can search for W-P-L-D-N in your, in your search engine of choice or wpdn.uk. You can find it there.

next one is Word Camp Buffalo. This is a little bit further into the future, but as I haven't mentioned it, I thought I'd put it on your radar if you're in that part of the world in the us. it's happening on the 4th of March. buffalo.wordcamp.org is the way to find that. Sorry, I'm just racing through all of these and, As if life wasn't fun enough. We inject into your feed the new Wapos for Word Camp WaPo now with transport. Oh, yes. Wapos, which have got a ride. so here we are, Europe wordcamp.org. I'm one of the media partners, so I love stuff like this 'cause it gives me an opportunity to not only to put these on the screen, but also fulfill an obligation to Word Camp Europe, which is great.

it's in Torino, Italy this year. And what could there be more Italian than a WaPo sitting on a pizza? riding a Vespa, or also riding in a little chin Coto. So if you're, yeah. Isn't that great? I'm not con, I'm concerned about his, ability to drive the second one. Yeah, he's, I think he's driving with it feet, his little paws.

[01:05:40] Tim Nash: He's definitely a little bit on the, his little paws. Maybe it's bellies driving. That's a concern. He's definitely, filling up the car there, isn't he? he is definitely filling up the car, but they're cool. Happy. I'm not entirely sure he's gonna be able to ride that bike, either. His arms don't seem to, there's some perspective problems.

Bless if you have no idea what we're on about. There's this, thing, I, believe it started in Japan. This whole wahoo thing. Where it's like a mascot for the events. So they, there's this little character who I is like a cross between a, I'm gonna regret saying this, a bear and a dog.

[01:06:20] Nathan Wrigley: and no way it's Pikachu. Just, okay. Yeah. Alright. Where did he get bear and dog from? Because it looks like a better dog. I dunno. but there's this little character which appears, and he's, he, she, it, I don't know, is made up to, to look like the, place where they're going. And in this case, by riding all these, little Italian vehicles.

And, I'm gonna stop there before I dig myself into the hole any further, right? Courtney says, this feels like Mr. Bean driving. Really does. It does. I can't. I feel like you need some, transport. noises if you're gonna be a media partner for the, word count. Okay. Okay. beep. This, platform does offer the, as Mark West Guard knows, this platform does.

So do I feel like I've just opened a door into some five space? Yeah. No, I don't have any sort driving noises. That's for next time. But we can inject audio. Anyway, that's happening as well. and the last event to be mentioned is something that I don't know all that much about. I'm not a, search engine aficionado, but happening next month, 25th to the 26th of April in Brighton again, is Brighton, SEO, which I'm told is like the big thing, like if you're in the SEO space, it's like one of the, one of the big events, which is fun.

So you can find [email protected]. Unfortunately, if you search for it on a search engine, you just can't find it. It's. I'm gonna let that one hang for a minute and move on. Yeah. That might be why we need young people anyway. That's right. There's there. Yeah. Okay. Alright, moving on. this is a post that was, curated, made by, Yost.

Yost, the person, not the company. he was at Cloud first this week. And was interested to notice that a lot of the people that he was meeting at that event, I feel like that event has a big, it's skewed heavily towards hosting companies. I could be wrong about that. I've never been.

it was he for hosting companies, it's primarily for, it, it, historically was the, Hosting company event to go to. Okay. I, if you were in the hosting industry, this is where you went to have, CloudFlare take you on fancy boats and give you champagne. And generally it, it was a good old jolly for hosting companies and then some pesky WordPress people kept starting to interfere with it, right?

[01:08:46] Tammie Lister: And, take over it and bring in their demands for open source and things to happen. I'm obviously trivializing and being silly. Those, I really say that. yes. But Umuntu were there, there was a vast amount of open source there, there always historically were those, but it was, a much more, yeah.

[01:09:07] Tim Nash: Infrastructure as part. Yes, a hundred percent. but isn't it like, isn't it like, don't they have a WordPress takeover day or something now where there's a WordPress day? oh, so I went, there is, so I did the back to back, which I think a, few people in the community did, which was where Camp Asia and then cloudfest.

[01:09:26] Tammie Lister: and so there's the hackathon, which is a number of different is WordPress, but a number of different projects as well. Some WordPress projects were in there, and some, people who were in the comments actually had some projects there, which is, super awesome. And then you have the WordPress day, and then you have the normal conference.

And there was also some, web so called Pitch Camp, which was, WordPress pitching as well for products. So we had, and also throughout the whole of the, the main conference, there were WordPress talks as well. So there were a number of different things. So WordPress was sprinkled all throughout the whole event.

Gosh, it almost feels like it was, yeah. Yeah, there was a lot. And there was a rainbow in the cloud event, which, was, a really nice event as well. Huh. okay. I did, I genuinely, I got this intuition that it was pivoting towards WordPress, but I didn't realize it was quite as focused, getting more and more each year.

This is my first year, so I have nothing to compare it to, apart from this year. I didn't go to the hackathon, but next year I a hundred percent will be going to the hackathon. 'cause what I saw was amazing, incredible. And I just wanted to be proud of it. but, yeah, my, my impression is that it's just getting more each year from the conversations that I was having as well.

[01:10:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And I think that Mark West Guard with his 16 hour days isn't really pulling his weight, frankly. And, and he, wasn't able to make it. come on, mark. Next. We want 18 hours. I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it. Yeah. I was so exhausted after working. Yeah. No kidding. No kidding. There's no way, honestly, I would've been like a cardboard cutout of myself if I was there.

Yeah, I know how Bob, went as well, didn't he? Bob did no idea how he did it. I, dunno, I, feel like I got a virus or something. Work Camp Asia. Yeah. So I had, the free gift from Work Camp Asia. apparently every more, less everybody got that except me. it was it added a certain flare to my first couple of days.

anyway, Yost, in this article, it is talking about the fact that, that, okay, there's a load of hosting companies there. A lot of the hosting companies that he spoke to, and I'm guessing Yost probably knows all the people. I imagine he's very well connected. He was saying that a lot of the companies are now in the position where they are, they're really, focused on WordPress, to the point where maybe that's more or less all that they're doing is generally.

Hosting WordPress websites. And so Yost contention in this article, which by the way I'll put back on the screen, is called On Cloud Fest Hosts and WordPress. It's on post status 20th of March, 2024. He was saying, wouldn't it be interesting, an interesting experiment if a lot of the hosting companies who have built their own onboarding system or page builder or some way of, leveraging WordPress, which is unique to them and creates lock-in, what if they were able to step away from that and instead inject, I dunno, half of that time into the WordPress project, the Gutenberg project for one of a better word?

And if we all start to use that. So it's, this bit of blue sky thinking in order to push WordPress forward. And we were talking about marketing and all of that earlier and, 43% becoming 42 and so on. wouldn't that be a good idea? I don't know if anybody wants to talk that one through or not.

Time is getting short, but if anybody wants to, we will allow you the floor. And there's tumbleweed. I think it depends on where they're gonna contribute and what they're gonna do. so I, I think it's, curious. We definitely need onboarding in the core project because just Hey, there's a quick install.

[01:13:03] Tammie Lister: No, there isn't. but my kind of thinking goes back and forth on that, whether it needs to be visual, it just needs to be a really good extensibility so that you can just spin your own. I think from a hosting perspective and from a product perspective, you're always gonna white label and do something bad end.

So therefore, the extensibility in core, so where the. Conversations that everyone has together, which is maybe what's alluded to here, which I plus one is everyone agreeing on what needs to be in core is a really good point. I do feel like there's that power ball of everyone describing the same thing, but like touching a different part of the elephant and describe a different thing.

there's a little bit of that, like trying to redo it in different ways, but actually Not checking whether the user wants to have the same, the different experience. So I'm seeing lots of different onboarding that still doesn't hit the mark for users. so I, really would like just more checking of users and checking like, is it doing the job, to be done, not just to presume job to be done, from onboarding.

Onboarding was onboarding and AI that if we had a drinking game for the word AI at cloudfest, we would all be drunk. I don't drink. I would be by, product, be drunk. but again, it's workflows and onboarding. So that would be my discussion is we just need to decide what we need and then decide what needs to be like in core to extend it out to white label is really part of those discussions.

[01:14:36] Nathan Wrigley: just, I'll just raise a few quick comments. Sorry, I didn't mean to crosstalk you there. I thought you'd come to an end. Sorry. big it, says, yeah, really enjoyed the hackathon, I'm guessing. And Elliot says a hundred percent onboarding would be great if there was a standardized API I.

However, my head has been derailed by the comment. Sorry, say again to Elliot. There is, that's what we, have the, ability to do some standardized APIs. Most of the hosting companies are using a pretty standardized tools. Yes. More likely to be W-P-C-L-I tools behind the scenes, but they, these, tools already exist.

[01:15:15] Tim Nash: and are pretty standardized To start with, I just wanted to very, quickly say that hosting companies have to differentiate themselves. Ah, it's a ridiculous market. And if you are providing a managed experience, that experience doesn't just include WordPress. That includes the hosting experience all the way through.

So it's very easy for us to talk about onboarding, but we have to remember that onboarding is part of their managed process for their onboarding as well. So it goes all the way from start to finish if they're not doing it all in one go. I'd argue they're not a managed WordPress host. Tim comes to us with years and years of experience of working with, with WordPress hosting.

[01:15:54] Nathan Wrigley: So I think, although it wasn't in your bio at the beginning, I think that would be useful to drop in there. However, my entire head has been derailed by the content touching a different part of the elephant. I've never heard that before and my head went somewhere that it's. I don't know if I'm ever gonna recover from that, frankly.

Is that an actual phrase? Do people say that? So there's a palable that a lot of cultures have, which is of, people, trying to describe an elephant, without vision. Oh, okay. Okay. Alright. That's where I was going with that. I was not going with the summary where you took it. If you touching it, it sides you might think that you're touching a rug.

Yes. So if you're touching a leg, you describe it differently to touching a trunk. Got it. Touching. but you not just touching the elephant. No. Okay. There's no way you're doing When we finish this episode, I'm going to recycle my brain. And, and remove that sponge it. Shout at some Guinea pig. That's right.

Okay. back to the, work. Do have a title for this week's episode? I have. It's down. It's written down. Guinea pigs Touching an Elephant Written down. No, don't bring the Guinea pigs into it dear. No, I think that's plenty. The elephant comment. a few quick things. I know we are very quickly running outta time, so we've got a, few bits and pieces I just wanna share.

there is a, new tool which has come out, David. Bloom, was it David Bloom? I'm sure it was, over on Facebook. This came to my attention there. We haven't sadly got time to dwell on it particularly. I dunno if any of you had a chance to look at it, but it's, it's called Mobius, after the strip, I'm guessing.

And, it's called Mobius for WordPress. And it is, it's described as the heads ops CSS dashboard for WordPress developers. Obviously, if you are using CSS, this might be worth taking a look at. He's producing quite a lot of content in Facebook with videos describing, what it does. But here we go. I will just give you the quick, heads up.

It says, CSS insights often show themselves after in italics. You hit publish when you're looking at your site in a browser through the eyes of the user having to jump back and forth to an admin screen to make adjustments, slows you down, Mobius to the rescue. So that gives us some insight into what it does anyway, all the success in the world with that, I hope, David, that works out for you.

Anybody wanna comment on it before I move on? No, Okay. okay. This is an old bit of news, but it came across my radar whilst we were at Word Camp Asia, so it never dropped. But I really like this, developer and the tools that he creates. It's generate blocks, which is a suite of very minimal blocks, which enabled you to do all sorts of things inside the block editor in terms of layout and style.

And, back in February, so a little while ago, they introduced global styles, and I thought that was worth a mention. If you haven't looked at, if you haven't got a solution for blocks, outside of core blocks and you want to extend things a little bit, definitely worth a little look. It's from the guy who invented Generate press, the popular, WordPress theme.

speaking of popular, we'll go to this. this is a form plugin called WS Form created by a chap called Mark West Guard. I dunno if you've heard of him, but he's, he's there and then in the show he's right there. You've been talking to him for hours. and what's the deal You've got a bit of an offer on?

[01:19:20] Mark Westguard: Yeah, just from Work Camp Asia. we've extended it to be 30% off. So grab it while you can. we've just extended it 'cause everyone was so busy after Work Camp Asia, we've had a lot of people saying, is the office still there? So yeah, it's still going. Do you do this a lot? do you feel pressured into doing this outside of, I mean there's always the Black Friday, I don't know if you do Black Friday, actually yes.

[01:19:39] Nathan Wrigley: You do. Yes. Around Black Friday. do you feel a lot of pressure to do this kind of thing or. Not pressured. No. We just, we like to do it for the three, flagship events like Friday and that's it. Yeah. Got it. It's tied to those events. I see. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so you can avail yourself of 30% off. Use the coupon code wc.

30. how do you know how long that's gonna be around for? Probably for another week. Yeah. So yeah, 30% off, any of the additions and any of the head ons too. Yeah. Thank you. Appreciate that. Sure enough. moving on. This is the deal section. You might call it. there's another deal. This is a company called Omnis Send.

They have an email, an SMS marketing platform. It's a SAS platform, but they integrate with a WooCommerce plugin, sorry, a plugin which builds on top of WooCommerce so that you can get all of the data about your store out of it and send people emails. They've also got 30% off at the moment, which I thought was interesting.

So you can go to omni send.com. I dunno if there's an offer code, but there's a banner at the top that you can see there. You can make use of that, a plugin, which I've used and I really actually. Like the developer as well. We had a webinar series with him. He's a chap called Patrick Posner. You can see him here, me and him, just like I did with Mark, actually, we had a four or five part webinar series where he explained how the plugin works.

It enables you to flatten your WordPress website so you can basically switch it off, switch WordPress off, and it's just serves up HTML and CSS. he's offering the entire product on AppSumo, so you can get it for, if you've never been to AppSumo, you, pay once and then it's, like you've got your license for life.

The link will be in the show notes. And what's there one more? Oh yeah, here we go. The events calendar, also seems to be having a spring sale. You've got one more day for that. It runs out tomorrow, 26th of March, but they've got 25% off their calendar plugin. Anybody wanna talk about deals that they know about or shall we move on?

All righty. Okay, next thing do I wanna do this? I wanna do this. I wanna get Tim's opinion on it. here we are at the fabulous search engine journal thing. The, the repository of all brilliant articles in the WordPress. No, this is what we got. this is an alleged backdoor. Honestly, if any of this story checks out.

and it's true. So caveat mTOR, everything I'm about to say might not be true. No, If you scroll down like, a couple more inches. Okay. There's the update Just go up. Oh, done. Oh, it, somewhere between those two boys. Okay. Somewhere there. It's, there we go. Yeah. Okay. Oh yeah. So the new story is plugin developer did something then plugin developer, apologizes, let's move on.

No. Can you apologize your way out of this story? I don't know. So I'll paraphrase it. It would seem that a plugin, which is designed to, elevate the things that the bricks page builder can do, that the plugin developer was noticing that the, that their plugin was, had been nulled and was being used by a bunch of people who hadn't paid for a license.

And it would seem, if I'm getting this story that the plugin developer decided that maybe an interesting solution to that would be to experiment with the opportunity for those people who hadn't paid for a license to add the capacity so that they could delete their posts like, this is gonna go well.

is that what happened, Tim? Yeah. Yeah. and you know what? It went really well. Okay. Yeah. Everybody enjoyed that, right? Everybody in the community thought that was a good idea. Just set, the scene. You are a plugin developer. You've worked really hard on building your plugin, and then, you've got some pesky licensing conditions that mean you have to do things in certain ways and you have to use this GPL malarkey and all that.

[01:23:34] Tim Nash: So it's really, your life's against you generally, and you've, created this ad on for a popular page builder and somebody comes along and knows you. You're plugin and I've been there. It's horrible. It's a really weird feeling. You feel like you've been, you, it's, very personal, even though it shouldn't be, you get really wound up by this idea that someone, I've been shouting at Guinea pigs at this point.

I'm, it really, there'd be so much shouting at the Guinea pigs. Sorry, carry on. Yeah. but most people's response to this is to go, this is rubbish, or use other words. And move on or use the MCA take down notices, which they'll discover, don't really work and it's a lot of paperwork, but you'll, or do other stuff.

This guy, bless him for I'm going to fight back and you can understand, wouldn't you wanna fight back? So his solution was, I will just take, I'll write some code that checks, and if you don't have a license key, I'm just going to drop your table. Oh. Oh. It's not putting them to drop, it's dropping the table.

But it was just, I'm just gonna drop a table. I'm just gonna make it disappear outta the database. Gosh. And sure enough, he pushes code

license, key's not found on some people's sites. Post go, boom. Oh no. Few, tiny problems. License key might not be in because I don't know, it's a staging site. Oops, bye bye. License key might not be in because they didn't legitimately purchase it, but it's not their fault. A developer did that. And if you dust them nicely, you might, you could have put banner at the top saying, Hey, did you know that this might not be licensed?

That's how most people deal with this situation. Oh, but ignoring so bad things happened. He came out and went, Ooh, I didn't expect this to happen. I was just trying to fight piracy. Even if you accept that at face value, and this was just a terrible implementation, just think you've written some code that lets you do this.

Okay? The very first time someone goes to exploit that code on the sites that are legitimately licensed, because let's face it, the sort of person who's going to write this code. I'm going out on a limb. You're going to find other stuff in the code review. And so there's not an unreasonable chance that this could then cascade quite easily and you could end up in a scenario where the legitimate license holders have their tables deleted, at which point all bets are off.

But it, when I saw the article, it reminded me, I dunno if you remember tic, they were a theme company. Oh yeah. And they did things like randomly DDoS their competitors. Yeah. Make your site slowed down if you didn't do certain things for them. And it's got that same mentality. This is not, I, want to give the gentleman the benefit of the doubt and say he wasn't being malicious, just, and I'm gonna use this word loosely, stupid, but.

Malicious people exist and they would easily have taken this feature and done nasty, nefarious things with me. Yeah, and this is just a really good case of going whatever you are feeling emotionally about your code. Stop. If you are emotionally invested in your product and you are about to put it finger that literally has the DI have go to write code, and I'm gonna call it function, destroy stuff

that is your function name, before you commit that, go play with sunshine. I like that. Oh, that's the remedy. Hamster stop. Go outside anywhere, just don't do it. Go touch grass. Oh, it's, such a sad story really, isn't it? And you can, you can see the outrage, but obviously, the quirky thing here is that the apology, maybe the apology is profoundly sincere and it was very much meant, but I guess you've always got the fact that you wrote the code to do the thing.

[01:28:12] Nathan Wrigley: So it was an intentional thing at some point. You can't really, I. Back away from that. I'm gonna step back a little bit and give him, 'cause I really do, want emphasize, until you are in that position, you do not realize how violated you feel. Now I'm not, I've trying to justify that any way for him.

[01:28:34] Tim Nash: I'm just saying that's a scenario. And if you are young, rash, no. Gone, these are all words that are appropriate. But Yeah. If you are, you just, yeah. It's an experience thing. if you're old and commercially Yeah. Old because be both ends of the scale. Yeah. Possibly the possi, the well advantages.

If you are on the younger end, you might learn from the experience the older end, you are less likely to learn from it and you'll just be grumpy at how, the world. I just wanted to counter that. It's not just an age thing. Yes. Like it could be any one of any perspective. but hopefully it is a learning experience and they will never do that again.

[01:29:12] Nathan Wrigley: I, I would like to at this point, point out that my life is complete. Somebody came onto my podcast and used the word curmudgeonly. That's, that's honestly, I've been, I love that word and I'm so glad it wasn't me that said it. That was ideal. Curmudgeonly. That could be the, episode title all there, which My Guinea pigs.

No, away from the Crisis, Nathan, away From the Crisis. We did have a bunch of other things to talk about. We were gonna talk about Apple and we were gonna talk about this thing called the Arc browser and where we were gonna put a bunch of plugins that Mark had suggested that we look at. we'll, honestly, mark, can I just put 'em on the screen quickly?

Does that, can I just do a plus one? We can do another episode. Can I do a plus one to using the app browser? Because I've been using it recently and it's really nice. Okay, Google. Oh, Tim doesn't like me using it. No. No. Ar I can't commit. I just can't commit. There's just too many little weirdy things. Tim, what's wrong with the app browser?

[01:30:11] Tammie Lister: I, do not know. I haven't played with it. I would love to do it. Oh, okay. I will play with it. Don't doubt you. What's wrong? It's called here and it's now worth a ton of money. They are doing brilliant. It's brilliant. But I just can't commit. There's just too many little weird ui ux things. Oh, I use lots of different browsers, but I quite like it for specific tasks.

[01:30:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I'm with you. I'm with you. okay. So there was loads of different things that we were gonna put in. I did say at the top of the show that we were likely to. not be able to get through all the different things. So apologies about that. so Andrew Palmer has said it's not coming through for some reason.

Sometimes the platform doesn't show the comments, but he said, don't worry Tommy. I'm so old, I've forgotten how to learn. Oh, that's a great comment. ARC browser sort says Courtney, oh, ARC browser is so great for my A DHD brain. That's interesting. I'll be curious to know. Yeah, it really helps focus what you mean by that.

it's really good at focus spaces. Oh, honestly, the item that we show on the screen for like less than three seconds gets more comments. it's got about eight comments coming in already. the ARC browser, I love it. Fully switched, says Max just left Arc behind. It's amazing, but they've raised too much money, so I ran away, says Colin.

it's chromium based as Courtney. oh. So much like Chrome and those extensions work. yes. I've just gone down. Okay. Please stop supporting chromium based things. I knew, I sense there was something wrong from Tim's. I come to the light where we have Firefox and if you start using Firefox that I should stop using Chrome and then camera working properly.

I, I, it is not me. I didn't make the software. but that's it. That's all we've got time for because it's gone well over. I do apologize to the, the panelists. I apologize to the guests, and most of all, I apologize to any Guinea pigs who felt during the course of this episode. Or elephants. Or elephants, especially the elephants.

And I'm just making a public apology just so it's on the record. I don't shout at Guinea pigs. Not ever auto touch elephants.

That's now gonna be in the transcript. It'll be in the SEO juice for this episode forevermore. And the comments about the arc browser keep coming. and just a question mark from Magic Pharma, probably because of what we've just been saying, right? It's that time every week we ask the look at Mark. He's so fast.

that's it. We've done it. We've absolutely managed to do it. We'll be back. Actually, we won't be back next week because it is Easter and I am having a week off. So we won't be back, but we'll be back a week after. That hope you can join us. Then I'm gonna end it just by saying thank you very much to my co-host, Mark West Guard, to Tammy Lister and to Tim Nash.

We will see you again soon on another episode of this week in WordPress.