This Week in WordPress #293

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week and WordPress episode number 293 entitled, AI music, it's a waste. But not a, waste. It was recorded on Monday the 15th of April 2024. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and I'll be joined this week by my co-host Michelle Frechette, but also by Marcus Burnette and Piccia Neri.

It's a WordPress podcast. So guess what? We spend the most time talking about WordPress. We talk about the fact that WordPress 6.5.1 was the release that never was what happened to that, and why did we have an upgrade to WordPress 6.5.2.

PHP 7.0 and 7.1 are being dropped. So you might need to make sure that your client websites are not using those.

The page builder summit is back. We are looking for sponsors, but also we're looking to get people on the wait list so that we can tell you what's going on, and when it's going on.

WCEU WordCamp Europe has announced it schedule. So we talk about that.

Also the, I guess you could describe it as a bit of an SEO mess. woo.com, woocommerce.com. We're back to woocommerce.com, but why and how is it affecting people?

Gravity forms have got an SMTP solution.

HEIC images. How can you use them? They're what your iPhone produces, but how can you put them on the web?

And then we get lost in a minefield of AI music. And it is the most compelling, most horrifying thing you've ever heard.

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. And by Weglot. Weglot the easiest way to translate your WordPress website. The Weglot translation plugin gives you a reliable and easy way to make your WordPress website multilingual in minutes. No coding required and no developer time needed. Find out more at weglot.com.

I have no words for what just happened. Alright? That's where my entire week went. I discovered this app, which we're gonna play around with later, and I literally sunk about 20 hours into making cheesy songs with a text prompt it. It literally ticks every box of what makes me happy. Anyway, apropos of nothing that was, it's WP Builds.

This week in WordPress show number 293, I'm joined by three fabulous people. Let's go to Michelle Fette first. Who as I, I'm now getting more accurate with is the co-host of the show. 'cause she's on so frequently. That's correct. And she helps me an awful lot. I've gotta say in the background, she helps me an awful lot with all sorts of things like booking on guests and just making sure that it ticks over.

So appreciate your, Your participation. My pleasure. And I know you're not feeling very well, particularly, so appreciate you making the effort to come on today. Thank you so much. happy to be here. Oh, and you've updated your bio. Woo hoo. I have so I'm not gonna read it out incorrectly. Hopefully. Here we go.

Michelle Che is the director of Community Engagement for Stellar WP at Liquid Web. They've got an event coming up. We'll find out more about that later. In addition to her work at Stellar, WP Michelle is the podcast [email protected]. Co-founder of Under represent underrepresented in tech.com, creator of wp speakers.com.

Also the creator of WP career pages.com executive Director. Let's get it [email protected]. Co-host of WP Motivate, which is a podcast and also co-host of the Audacity Marketing Podcast and the host of WP Constellations podcast. She's also an author. Frequent organizer at WP Events, and she lives outside Rochester, New York, where they frequently get eclipses, although they also get lots of cloud, apparently, which renders the whole experience Oh, I tried not to cry. I didn't cry, but yeah. Describe that dark. Let's get to that in a second. Yeah. she's an avid nature photographer, so that kind of makes up for it. And you can learn more about her at Meet Michelle online before we get to pizza. And Marcus, like, how disappointing was that on a scale of, oh my gosh, 10.

[00:04:56] Michelle Frechette: It was so ridiculous. I bought the glasses, the lens for the camera with the covers. Not, expensive, but still I'm out there and I'm like, maybe if I blow really hard, like the wind. It's like a once in a lifetime experiencing It actually passed over your apartment. It did. It did, except that it was so thick with clouds.

I posted pictures on Twitter, but it was so thick with clouds that literally, it just got dark and then it got light again. Like that? No, nothing to see. There was a, there was a story in the press here about this family from the uk. I don't know. They had loads of kids, like five kids or something.

[00:05:34] Nathan Wrigley: They flew them all out at great expense and it was cloudy and then flew 'em all back again. Yeah, there you go. They actually made t-shirts afterwards that said something about the eclipse in Rochester, New York. I didn't see the s word.

Oh, that is disappointing. But thank you for joining us. I really appreciate it. Let's move on. We've got peach joining us. How are you doing peach? I'm okay. Thank you very much. Yeah. Peach, you Have you got a new camera? No, I don't. But it looks like it. I could, brag and say that I do.

[00:06:10] Piccia Neri: Yeah. There's something like this worked out. The quality is I just worked out that in my, in the Mac has this feature. I can choose portrait. F stop. Okay. So that's why Oh, it looks really nice. 'cause you've got that kind of Yeah, it does. Yeah. Background. It always looks real. Yeah.

[00:06:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It does a good job of it. thank you for joining us Peach. She's got a much shorter bio. it says Peach Neri is a UX and accessible design lead consultant and speaker. she's got something that she wants to tell you about. We'll do that a little bit later. In the show where I'm living, it's going between like super bright like this to like glom as anything.

So it's gonna go between light and shade, but nevermind. but thank you for joining us. And finally, Marcus Burnett joins us and I must say thank you to Markus for stepping in because one of our guests had to pull out, due to other commitments and Marcus stepped into the breach. So I'm really appreciative of that.

How you doing? Good. Happy to join everyone here. Yeah, thank you. on camera instead of just in the chat. Yeah. Oh, yeah. regular chat. Yeah. Thank you. I really appreciate that. And there's a bunch of people who are commenting as well. We'll get to you. but Marcus is a community marketer at GoDaddy connecting the global brand with the WordPress community at online and in-person events.

Marcus is also the co, the creator of the WP world. We'll have a look at that as well today, which is a WordPress community resource. He's spoken at WordPress events and can be heard regularly as one of the co-hosts on the Do the Woo podcast. Occasionally he'll flex his design and development muscle on some freelance work or a new WordPress plugin.

He's one of the photo directory team reps and loves a good hike with his camera in tow. I'm getting into that. I'm getting into camera, taking camera out on the hikes, and it's. Blooming excellent. I'd love it. he lives in central Florida with his wife and two daughters who are starting to get too old for his liking.

The daughters, I take it, we wouldn't. Yes. Yes, the daughters. thank you so much for joining us. Thank you to anybody who's joining us in the comments. I think this will be the last week that we managed to push the, push this into the Facebook group because, Facebook are hobbling the API. So that'll be the last time that happens, but I might as well say it one more time 'cause you never know, it might actually count for something to somebody.

if you are joining us live or you want to tell somebody about it, the best place, honestly is just to go here, wp builds.com/live. If you're there, you can, use the YouTube comments, which are on the right hand side of the player if you're on a desktop underneath on mobile. Then in the video itself, buried in the top right hand corner is a summation of all the chat.

So if you, if you come in from a variety of different platforms, you can see what the other people are commenting. We've had a little problem with the chat from time to time. Some comments don't get through. And if that's the case, I apologize, but I'll try my best to look at them on all the different platforms.

If you are joining us from Facebook, I apologize, Michelle. you need to give us permission, to know who you are, and you do that by going to Wave Video slash Lives slash Facebook and click the little button. But yeah, there we go. One more time. WP builds.com/live. And let's see if we've got any chat.

Oh, we do. We've got Courtney Robertson joining us. She's taking Peter OL's fire and running with it, getting in with the, getting in with the weather report straight away. Hello. From 18 Degrees Pavilion. What does that mean? What's, the, that. Pavilion, is that a place? I'm guessing maybe from her pavilion?

[00:09:50] Michelle Frechette: She says probably eight. Oh, my pavilion missed that. Thank you. The birds in the trees around me have a lot to say. Nice. Elliot Sby, join us from just down the road here. It's probably going light and dark where you are. Elliot as well. just saying Hi. now I need a vid of, oh, no, no, That was the tune at the beginning. She wants me to sing it. Good morning, says Peter from Connecticut. It's 12 degrees centigrade, 54 Fahrenheit, sunny, partly. We're expecting warmer temperatures today up to 24. Ah, long for 24. Let's hope, it's fun to watch WP builds. Yes. Yes, I know that wasn't auto captioned by the way.

[00:10:34] Nathan Wrigley: I had to make it slightly ruder than it was, but I thought it was better that way. let's have a look. Bigge, who was on the show last week, she's in Germany. It's 11 degree centigrade. very nice picture. No idea who she is, but there she is. and there's Zube saying hello to us all and Amber Hines joining us with a hand wave.

Hi Amber. And there's a variety of other comments as well, if I've missed any, apologies. Cameron Jones says, good evening from Australia. Do Oh yeah, that's just popped in as well. There we go. Actually, they sync at different times from different platforms. So I do wonder if sometimes they go above what I'm currently looking at, if I only see YouTube comments. I don't see Facebook in there either. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I see a variety of them. And then we've got bigot the other big, ah, we've got the War at the Battle of the Bigots. That sounds great. That should be a thing. Somebody should set up battle. Nathan's definitely gonna do a song with that one.

Battle of, yeah. Battle of the Bigots. Oh, yeah. okay. Okay. Okay. Let's get on with the word Pressy stuffer this week. there's a fair amount to say. It probably won't be the longest show that we've ever had, unless of course we get. Into the plumbing, the depths of AI generated music at the end.

But here we go. This is our website, wp builds.com. If you're fancy, keeping in touch with all the bits and pieces that we do, just sling your email address into there and we'll send you two emails a week once when we produce this show. we put it out as a podcast tomorrow morning and also once when we produce the podcast on a Thursday.

We are very grateful to both GoDaddy Pro in particular 'cause they've been with us for absolutely ages. So thank you to GoDaddy Pro for whom Marcus works well. GoDaddy, and also to we Lot for helping keep the lights on over at WP Builds their support is highly appreciated. I honestly like, I don't know if you run podcasts, Michelle, for example, but like this whole sponsorship thing is such a big deal and.

I know it sounds a bit cheesy, me saying I really appreciate it, but honestly I really appreciate it. It does genuinely keep the lights on. It enables people Like me and Michelle to do stuff that we do. So there we go. All right, so that's what we got. Also, if you are interested in knowing what's coming up in, in the future for WP Build, if you head to our schedule page, it's at the very cryptic wp builds.com/schedule url.

That's hard to remember. the only thing that's out of bounds normal, is this, I've got an activity pub plugin, walkthrough with, Mattias Fle from, automatic. He's the guy that, originated the activity pub plugin and then got taken on by automatic. So put that in your diary. It's on the 24th of April.

Come and ask you questions about how it works and how you can connect your WordPress site to the Fed verse. Okie doke. Let's get on with it very quickly. WordPress 5.2 has been released, it's security release. so it's recommended that you update it. There's two, bug fixes in core and 12 bug fixes for the block editor.

but Eagle Eye people amongst you will have noticed that there was no point, no WordPress 6.5 0.1, which is weird. 'cause normally it goes, 6.5 0.1, 5.2, 5.3 up until 6.6 and then we start all over again. But 6.5 0.1, it just went missing. and where did it go? it turns out there was a bit of a bug.

There was, there was supposed to be a 6.5 0.1, but then there was a problem that was, discovered. but it turns out that the tags that the, sort of system, if you like, that use that is used to create the updates, that tag is immutable. So 6.5 0.1 was already being consumed, if so it couldn't be used again.

So little snafu there, apparently they're gonna figure out how to make that not happen again. But if you've, if you didn't find 6.5 0.1, you're in good hands. It wasn't supposed to be there. But, yeah. Anything to add to that? You three just probably not, I just wanted to mention, update your WordPress sites 'cause it was a security fix.

If there's nothing, I'll move on. Yeah, I think this is, Like a flag for those that hold off on the major releases, right? This is a lot of folks wait until there's at least one minor release that comes out before they start to update, especially folks with lots of a, with agencies with lots of sites and stuff, they wanna make sure 6.5 has gotten, bug tested and fixes happen.

[00:15:20] Marcus Burnette: So this is that. Now it's time to go update your sites. Yeah, absolutely. it dropped on, nearly a week ago. It just didn't quite coincide with this podcast episode, but definitely go and get your sites updated. Okay. If we've got nobody else comment on that. We'll move to this. if you're a, like an agency owner or a freelancer, you'll understand this, but it's all about PHP versions and the fact that your software, for WordPress at least largely historically, relied massively on PHP, much less so than it used to.

[00:15:52] Nathan Wrigley: But nevertheless, you've probably got a server somewhere and it's running a version of PHP. You may not know about it, but, go and. H around in your control panel and in there somewhere will be a setting hopefully to update it to a more modern version. WordPress has been historically really good at keeping, backwards compatibility with all sorts of things, and PHP is no different, but it's time to sunset.

PPHP 7.0 and 7.1, they are getting a bit long in the tooth, shall we say. that's gonna happen when WordPress 6.6 drops, which is gonna be July, 2024. So you have been warned, basically, why are you not on eight? I don't know. Hopefully you are by now, but, yeah, Essentially go and get your sites updated.

It does look like across the board, I'm just showing the things on the screen here. It looks like Word PHP 7.0 only has 1.5% of the, of the market share of PHP and 7.1 has Naugh 0.95. So roughly two point half percent of websites will be using something like this, so they're likely to, suffer problems.

So go and sort it out. But if you are, if you cannot update, it does say that sites that are running 7.0 7.1 will remain on the 6.5 branch of WordPress, which will continue to receive security updates as it does currently. So hopefully that won't cause your site to be insecure, although you never know, things might start to break anything on that U three.

[00:17:30] Michelle Frechette: I like the word unsecure better because insecure just makes it sound like it has all kinds of mental health issues. Is it, is unsecure a word that's interesting that, when I hear that, seems to, you know when you hear a word and you think. That's, nearly right, but not quite right.

[00:17:46] Nathan Wrigley: I get that when I hear unsecure, I just think, oh, ah, interesting. Look that one up. insecure. Anyway, it's not secure. Let's go with that. It's just my own little brain working in here on like Monday morning. yeah. da Okay, in that case we will move on. this is a bit of self-promotion. I do apologize, but why not?

I do this show fairly often. I get to drop a few things in. We have the page World of Summit 7.0 is coming back around. You can see on the page that it's gonna be dropping, in May, may the 20th to the 24th. We've got about 35 speakers lined up. It might go a bit north of that. It might trend towards about 36, 37, depending on how things pan out.

But, if you would like to be a part of that, head to page builder summit.com. And, and just click this little button and that will enable you to join our wait list. And that just means that we'll keep you in, keep you updated whenever we have, information about what's coming and the schedule and things like that.

If you are keen to, be part of the event from a sponsorship point of view. In other words, if you've got a company or something, there's a little link down here where you can find out more about sponsoring the event. We're keeping the sponsorship open for a few more weeks. So if that's your bag and you want to get yourself into that as a sponsor, then good.

Go for that. It's a great event. It's fun. And it's, really looking like the, agenda, is looking really good. So hopefully if you are into WordPress page building or just generally building sites with WordPress, come put that date in your diary and come along. It's all online, of course. okay.

I'm gonna say, does anybody have anything to say about that? But I doubt you do. Did you, do you have the lineup down below from there? No, I have the lineup in an air table. I thought I saw some of the folks somewhere. It's, a good lineup. We have, I'm really curious about the lineup. Yeah. Lineup.

How many talk a day, Nathan? 35 days in this. Yeah, it, so we've done it as five days and then sometimes we've done it as four days and we've made the days a bit longer so that the Friday is a bit more of a social thing. it's looking like it'll be eight, seven, or eight things every day, over five days possibly, depending on how we decide to break it out.

But there's absolutely loads of people. Yeah, there's a lot. Yeah. Say sorry, peach, say again. Massive. Yeah, it is. It's a, it is a lot of work. so how are you? sorry, I'm just really curious 'cause I did a one online conference and it nearly broke me. I did it by myself more or less, but I'm still recovering.

[00:20:27] Piccia Neri: I, the, the thing is. I'm broken. so it's you because Ancient is in, ancient SA wonderful. Cohost partner, whatever. She's in New Zealand now. Yeah. So she's not ideal. I'm really not, giving Anin her Jew, to be honest. And I'm just being a bit stupid and self-deprecating Anshan takes on the burden of organizing an awful lot of the event.

[00:20:57] Nathan Wrigley: So she, she does a lot of the organizing and the wrangling of the speakers. I do a lot more to do with the, like the editing of the video and organizing the sponsors and that kind of thing. So the speaker and the schedule for the speakers, we always decide it together. But Anshan has done a lot of the work connecting with all the, the different speakers.

But it's a really nice event. We have, we have a nice Facebook group, which we bring back to life each time, and there's a lot of comments in there. We do silly things like bingo and we do networking events and stuff like that. And it's just fun just meeting people. Last year I. There were several people who showed up to say that they took the week off.

They literally booked annual leave. There was about three or four of them. And wow, that's pretty amazing. so I was, pretty pleased about that. That's fun. Anyway, page builder summit.com. but the, schedule will be released fairly soon, but there's a load of old favorites in there and some new names as well, which is nice.

Yeah. Anybody else? Okay. All righty. All righty. All righty. In which case we'll move on to this. the admin bar is, oh, that's the menu. The admin bar is a Facebook group, but it's also a, website. You can go to the admin bar.com. And, I was in touch with Kyle Van Dusen this week on, I can't remember where, some kind of messaging platform.

And he mentioned that the survey, which they've done, I think for the last three years, polling people in the WordPress space, but agency space more generally about building websites. And they survey people just to see if there's any trends over time and something interesting which pops up. And so this year it looks like close to 1,150.

It's 1, 1 4, 4, surveys were completed and Kyle then makes sense of it. He does actually say. That if you go to the website, and it's, by the way, it's the admin bar.com/ 2024, the numbers and then dash survey, he does actually say that if you click on the link here, which you can see on the screen, you can get to the Airtable and then you can filter it yourself by your own criteria.

'cause Airtable is really good at, you can put in all sorts of filters and things, but I've highlighted a few things which I thought were of interest. And, let's see what, let's see if it promotes any discussion. So here we go. 15, sorry, 1200 roughly freelancers and, agency owners. The average amount of experience was 11 years.

Eh, a little whipper snappers. but, 72% of the people who were surveyed off, charged less than $5,000 on average for a website. Now, I don't know if that's, I don't, I honestly, it's been such a long time since I was doing all of this. Is that, a shocking statistic? Does that strike you as that's not enough?

How can you make a living out of that? I have no idea. Especially with like modern AI tools and things like that. what do we think is that, what do we reckon? I think the average is something that you've, what's the website look like? Is it a three page brochure site or is it an in depth, Yeah, that's, absolutely true. But then when you read the, data below 68% of businesses surveyed had a gross revenue of less than a hundred thousand dollars that goes with that. So it really depends on which country they were located in, which would be really interesting. But one thing that I wanna say, if I may, is that I just wanna say how, what an amazing job Kyle does, because he started.

[00:24:42] Piccia Neri: the, WordPress group, the, Facebook group a few years ago when I started another one. And I just the way he's grown it and made it something unbelievably useful is incredible. All the stuff that he does with a website, he did the accessibility, weekly accessibility with, Hinz is just amazing what he does.

And I find this survey, I was going through it today, thinking this is so interesting and the amount of time that it must have taken Kyle to also go through all the data. Do you know what I mean? And it's really such a good snapshot of the community at large. he really, I don't know who obviously who participated, but I just wanted to say that I think he does, I dunno how he has any time to actually run an agency that's what I wonder.

And yet he does that very successfully and. His websites are brilliant. the design is so sorry, just a little. No, that's fine. Yeah. Moment or, I think Michelle's point about, the, size of the website, if it was a very small brochure website, then maybe $5,000 seems like quite an attractive price point for you as an agency owner.

[00:25:57] Nathan Wrigley: 'cause it might not take all that long. But yeah, you're quite right. Looking at the one below, it looks like, most businesses, 68% of the people surveyed at least had an income less than a hundred thousand dollars. So let's say that roughly speaking, $5,000 is roughly what you're charging and you are earning a hundred thousand dollars a year or less.

Would it be fair to draw the conclusion that you're doing about 20 websites a year? So that's one every couple of weeks in order to stay. Solvent with a little bit of holiday sprinkled in around here and there, okay. That's interesting. Okay, the next one, less than 10% of the people surveyed made more than a hundred thousand dollars a year.

So I don't know how the question was phrased. Maybe it was like a hundred thousand, a hundred, less than a hundred thousand. But we've learned that 60, nearly 70% earned less, 10% earned more. I dunno what the cost of living is like where you are, but a hundred thousand dollars with a family and all of that, it's, it's it's not like you, the, typical person is like ragingly wealthy out of this business.

[00:27:12] Piccia Neri: Amber makes a really good point. Yeah. Sorry Michelle. Thank you. No, it's okay. I was gonna say the same thing. okay. I've just seen it, sorry, the, I've got things overlapping on my screen and it, I'm gonna move the comments a little bit quickly. One second, then I'll be able to see what's going on more.

[00:27:27] Nathan Wrigley: There we go. so Amber says, I think bigger agencies are not participating, are participating in the community and thus didn't take the survey. It was largely freelancers. Yeah, that's a really good point. I guess Kyle's group maybe attracts a certain demographic, who wanna share that kind of information.

Maybe the bigger agencies are a bit more closed off 'cause they've got all of that expertise in-house and things like that. But yeah, that's a really good point. Thank you for, mentioning that. she also says, and I can't put it on the screen. Oh yes it can. It's just come through. there are plenty of big companies, VIP agencies, et cetera, but those companies rarely engage in Facebook groups there.

even a few in post status is interesting. Okay. All right. okay. So back onto the screen. Less than 10% earn a hundred thousand or year, a year or more. 32%. So this is a new statistic. 32% of freelancers or agencies make the majority of their income from recurring revenue. So fully a third are making the majority, so 51% or more.

From recurring revenue. So I'm guessing that's things like care plans or selling some other service like hosting or what have you. Again, that's interesting. I guess if you can get into this is like the, golden egg laying, what is it? The golden goose laying the egg or something? if you can get yourself into this position, that's quite nice, isn't it?

'cause you've got a reliable, repeatable income, which is coming in every single month. Can you toggle that open? Can we see what that says? Yeah, there we go. Oh, there. Okay. I was hoping it would say what the, what those revenue sources were, but they aren't. Yeah, no, it doesn't give us the source, but it just gives us the revenue details.

And you can see, yeah, so Kyle is, amalgamated, to 32%, but that's interesting as well. Okay, let me put that down. Anybody wanna comment on that or shall I move on? I've got loads to say about this. Keep going. Yeah, keep going. the average hourly rate surveyed was $94 an hour, which is $2 lower than last year.

And again, I don't know in the US what a, an average wage would be or whether that represents good, a good income stream or a, fairly tight income stream. I'm not sure. But there it is nearly. So this is, the one statistic which I thought would be of interest to the discussion today, especially given that, Peter, who's actually literally just dropped off the call.

Hopefully she'll come back. but also Amber Hez in the comments there. Shit, that was hysterical feature that was so funny. I, was talking about you and you just disappeared. but this statistic, here we go nearly one 10th. So 10% of freelancers and agencies don't consider accessibility. At all is in italic.

So I guess Carl's trying to emphasize that when building a website, let's see what we get there. So the data is, don't consider accessibility that was 9.4% strive for breast practices. maybe that's an interesting statistic as well. 'cause I feel like it, that's 81%. Maybe that's more interesting. I don't know.

and try to adhere to the WCA guidelines. just 10%. Okay. It's interesting 'cause now that I see that 81.3% striving for best practice, that kind of makes me feel a bit more sanguine about that. So I'm gonna open that one up, especially maybe peach or amber in the comments if they want to comment.

[00:31:02] Michelle Frechette: That's a pretty nice bell curve. honestly, that's like statistically the best bell curve ever. Yeah, Exactly the same on both sides. It spikes really, and it spikes really high in the middle. yeah. I wonder what this means though, because this all comes around this word, best practices and I don't really know what that means apart from following the WCA guidelines really.

[00:31:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I think it's good to see that strive for best practices is up. I'm assuming that's what the arrows there mean. Yeah. Yeah. But I would've expected those to mostly come from, don't consider accessibility, moving up to strive for best practices, but it also looks like adhere to WCAG also dropped, so they moved down to strive for best practices.

[00:31:46] Marcus Burnette: I don't know what that means. Yeah. Are fewer people are actually adhering and have decided that striving for best practices is maybe the best they feel they can do. I, I suspect, I predict I'm gonna put my flag in the sand. I predict that this number will, this, don't consider accessibility will be dropping.

[00:32:08] Nathan Wrigley: Fairly precipitously in Europe, at least anyway, over the next 12 months because I followed up a, I followed a tweet from Amber actually last week in which she, and Michelle, you were on the call, in which she raised something that had come out of Ireland. I guess the eu, we could say more generally, but it happened to come from Ireland where you could spend up to 18 months in jail if you put a website out, which was not striving for accessible accessibility.

Now, we didn't get into the weeds of that, how big your company had to be, how poor it had to be, what have you. But it was just the fact that there was some kind of legislation, there was something given over to that. it makes me feel that this is gonna become a real hot topic in the way that, SEO has done over the last 15 years or something like that.

Amber, thank you. She's just put a little, one of the things Yeah. One of the things to remember I was gonna say is this is definitely skewed like Amber's saying, but also we don't know if this, isn't true Time series data. Did the exact same 1100 people respond this year than last year. what's the impetus for responding one year over the next?

[00:33:20] Michelle Frechette: It's not truly scientific, it's. Just a survey. Survey. Interesting as well, because Amber's saying that, she obviously did some work with Kyle Peach mentioned it a moment ago. the admin bar, that group, maybe there is more of a focus there on accessibility and so it sounds Amber's less sanguine about that data.

[00:33:40] Nathan Wrigley: Maybe, Amber you are thinking more that, it's a higher number. 20, 30% of people don't consider accessibility, maybe more, but in that particular group there's I don't know, there's an ethic there about doing that kind of thing or something like that. So she thinks it's skewed high.

She also says that she doesn't seem to see the same level of interest about accessibility in the other groups outside the admin bar. And Rob Cairns. Oh, hi Rob. Nice to have you with us. he says lawsuits will change people who are looking at accessibility. And then yeah, there's legislation that's gonna change this, okay.

There we go. I'm enjoying this survey. Should we keep going? I've got a few more. I think, down here there was a few bits and pieces that were all about particular page builders, and I had the, intuition that, so it was things like 50% of the people that responded, building websites with blocks use generate blocks.

And I know that Kyle is big into, generate blocks. So I, did wonder if that sort of skewed that. But also I know that Brix is the sort of hot. Thing at the moment, and a lot of people are talking about that page builder, so I'll just mention them. Brix was the only page builder, which increased the numbers amongst that lot, 32%, in total.

And like I said, 50% of the people who responded to say that they're building websites with blocks, were using generate blocks. But, again, I don't know if that's, if that's skewed, I've got to go down and collapse an accordion. Otherwise, my highlighting is all outta sync. There's a little plugin for Chrome, but it, obviously works out where it is on the page, not actually what the text is.

Okay. So I thought this was interesting as well, and this was always the case for me. referrals remain the most popular way of agencies to source leads with 70% of respondents listing it as the number one lead source. It was. A hundred percent of my work. it wasn't, but no matter how many Google ads or Facebook ads I tried to run, no matter how many clever campaigns I tried to launch on the internet, it was basically my mate John, who you built a website for, told me that you do websites.

it was that kind of thing. keeping, your, customers happy, definitely leads to this. Anybody want to comment on that one?

Okay. All right. And this is interesting because it speaks to what I was saying earlier. I started a blog and things like that. As everybody says launch a blog, drive traffic to your website. It never worked for me. And, it would appear that people have twigged onto that maybe as a thing, less than 20% of agencies are creating content on a weekly basis and just 28% of agency.

Oh, sorry. So there's that one. so maybe a lot of people have also figured out that writing a blog maybe doesn't get you. I dunno. I feel that unless your blog gets picked up by some other source and gets promoted elsewhere. It's shouting into the void a little bit. He said using WordPress for all these years, which began as a blogging platform.

and then 20% of agencies without a niche exceed revenue of a hundred thousand dollars while 41% with a niche exceed the six figure mark. So I think basically what Carl's saying there is if you've got a niche and it's a successful niche, you're making your life a little bit easier. whether it's, I don't know, you're going after lawyers or dentists or whatever it might be, that seems to be on the whole quite a successful, strategy.

So I think that was it. I think, oh, no, Here's one more. 54% of people say that they do not have plans to hire in 2024, so that's seems like quite a bleak statistic, but there you are. All right. So we're enough from the admin bar. Thank you, Kyle. Anybody want to drop anything just before we move on about that one?

I might close my blind because I look at me again. you're glowing. Yeah. Check it out. I'm like, I've gone into heaven or something. That's ridiculous. Yeah, it's very bright. Okay. All right. Let's move on. The one thing I would just say about surveys in general, whether it's the WordPress annual survey or the survey, is remember that people who are motivated to respond will have a certain incentive, right?

[00:38:01] Michelle Frechette: So whether I want my opinion to be heard, I don't care about my opinion, the size of my organization, whether I think it fits me or not. So there's a lot that goes into it. So don't ever take any survey data as gospel truth. yeah. Good point. Yeah. And it says at the top, doesn't it?

[00:38:17] Nathan Wrigley: 1,144 people. So Yeah. But interesting. like Peach says, fun that Carl's put that together and thank you to Carl. Absolutely. okay, so there's a few comments that dropped in. Who's responsible for the jail term? if a site is built by collaboration. Oh, interesting. Yeah. If you collaborate on a project, maybe you all go to jail.

I don't know. No idea. Amber, responded to that too, though. Oh, did she? Okay. Yeah. duh, Here we go. no wrong one. There you go. Likely the C-suite. And that means nothing to me. What's c-suite? The CEO. The CTO, like the, chief something or other that's called, the c-Suite Peach. I'm very sorry we've completely blocked out your face with our comments.

I do apologize about that. Actually, if I take that away, you'll be, there we go. You'll be back. There you go. It's all right. It's all right. No great loss. Okay. likely the C-suite, so the CEOs and Thank you. I've learned a term. It will only come to that if they are determined inaccessible and are mandated to remediate by a certain date and don't, so likely it'll be the decision maker, not the developer.

Woo. Okay. That's interesting. Or it could be a dev or agency owner if they commit fraud. By saying a website is accessible to the client, but it isn't. There we go. Elliot, hopefully you've got your answer to that. And Peter says, if you are new and have a smaller base, it's much easier to see a large percentage increase like growth.

Oh, okay. So growth. in the case of Bricks, it's a fairly new plugin. It doesn't have an incumbent, 6 million websites like Elementor does or whatever it is. doubling might be a case of, something easy to manage, whereas doubling elementals numbers would be ni on impossible, I would imagine at this point.

but ba and Elliot says the owner of the site isn't necessarily responsible for accessibility, but if they didn't build it though, surely, I don't know. I am no lawyer, Elliot. caveat emptor, Call up Amber. I bet she's got the right answer. There we go. they're not, personally responsible, but they're personally responsible for making sure it's accessible, which means they need to make sure that the dev is contracted to build a accessible site.

Yeah. Yeah. Can you imagine that going through the courts as well, though, especially on a sort of more local level where the, the judge, I'd imagine there'd be a fairly high bar of knowledge to be able to prove that something was or was not accessible. So it'd be interesting to see if those court cases do start to arise.

How the, lawyers can get over. no, hang on a minute. There's, there isn't something declared inside that piece of HT ML that would make that particular bit accessible. You can imagine the judge Oh, okay. So we'll see. Yeah. The whole thing is very interesting also with European legislation coming soon. I think it's, yeah. Scary. I think a little bit. Okay. Okay. good morning, says James. Hi James. Nice to have you with us. And it is very confusing. Elliot, you're quite right. We're all confused, but we're not lawyers, so I feel like we got off the hook. okay. Let's move over to talk about Word Camp Europe. It's happening. It's not that long away. Now what have we got? A couple months? I know. Months. Couple of months. And the contributor day, I dunno why I said con. Oh, 'cause it's on the screen. the schedule has been released. It's not just about the contributor day.

If you are gonna be in attendance. Then this is your portal call. It's, I'll put the link in your show notes for tomorrow. but here we are. We've got three tracks. We've got a main stage one called Sala Rosa and one called Sala Azure. What does s mean? Does that mean room or something? Does anybody Yeah.

okay, Lisa. So yeah, it means yeah, room, big room. Big room is the big room. Okay. and you can basically go here and, and, see what's going on. It looks like the, the keynote is being dropped right at the very beginning, day one, which is, let's just get this right, which is the 14th of June.

and it's gonna be Yost, DeVol, and Juliette, R fo Juliet, RF was on a tavern.

Episode, p and making sure that it was possible to have tooling in the WordPress space, which made it possible for devs to, get their code. I'm trying to summon up the right word and I can't get it. What, is it that she does? It's gone outta my head. It's not PHPU tells. Anyway, she is doing that and she has been doing it for years and years, gratis for no money.

And I think maybe the, she's reached the end of the road with that a little bit, so hopefully this talk will delve into that a little bit. But there's loads and loads of other stuff here. You can see three tracks begin and it goes back down to two and then three again, there's a load going on and, I wondered if any of you guys have had a chance to look through and found some stuff that you were interested in.

Is there enough variety in there for you? You happy with what you're seeing?

[00:43:33] Michelle Frechette: It seems a little more balanced than last year, but I haven't. Dived in very deeply, to be honest with you. when you say balance, do you mean, in terms of the sort of topics and, I was thinking more along the lines of the speakers. So there seems to be some more women and, people of color, so I just, but I haven't done any, it's just a, cursory glance, a quick glance.

[00:43:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. they've, they've definitely, run up against those kind of arguments in the past, haven't they, in terms of the, The distribution and the diversity and things like that. So I guess, yeah, it looks much better this year for sure. Okay. Interesting. I think. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. depending on what you're into, you can go and start putting things into your calendar.

I found it really interesting looking at this, looks really technical this year. Oh, good. Good. I've only, I haven't delved in, too much e either, but I just, I had a glance today before coming on, and I thought. Wow. A lot of, practical, technical stuff. I might be wrong. What, does everyone else feel?

[00:44:37] Piccia Neri: Let's have a look, Joey. Let's go through what we got. So we've got the, keynote about sustain sustainable. Open source is the future. I'm guessing that's not it says it's a community one. So we've got one community. Then we've got WordPress Pray Grant. That's technical development. Then next to it, interactivity.

[00:44:51] Nathan Wrigley: API. That's development. So we're skewing already, themes and development. Boy, you're not wrong picture. Okay. Then another development followed by a community event. All about learning pathways with Benjamin Evans. Then we're onto design, development. SEO. Accessibility. That's a long one. Look at, oh, no it's not.

The other ones are just more lightning talk, I think. then we've got development. SEO development. Oh, you're not wrong, Peter. Development. Development. No. Gutenberg speed build. I'm really looking forward to the European Accessibility Act, act explained also. 'cause I have to, if you were, if you click on them individually, you can obviously go into a little bit more information about each of these particular events.

But you're right. Just looking at that first state, I think it's definitely heavily skewed to the more technical. I wonder if that's based upon, feedback that they have For me, I have a very curious relationship with this page and every page like it, because what I do is I go around looking for interviews.

I can, have. And so I wanna come out of this with, let's say, I don't know, 7, 8, 9 interviews for the tavern, something like that. So I'm going around trying to find things, which I think, not having seen the presentation, which I think the audience of that podcast will enjoy listening to them speaking about.

And, then I contact them and hopefully they say yes. And we sit down and we do an interview. But I've got such a, weird skew on that. And, sometimes the development stuff is quite hard. Like it would be quite hard in an audio podcast to dig into, I don't know, let's say the interactivity, API, that might be quite a challenging thing to do without some sort of video element.

yeah, but you never know. So that's my take on it. Anybody else before we move on? Now big has shared in the chat that there were over 500 submissions, so that's a, whoa, that's a lot to, to sift through, to narrow it down to what's on the page here. Good grief. That is a lot, isn't it? So 500 and, I dunno what's there, but there's gotta be.

Like orders of magnitude less than that. What, like 30 or something over the days? I don't know, something like that. But wow, that's a lot. Good grief. That is a lot of work for them to do. thank you for telling us that. And duh, it looks like we got a few people going as well. Looks like Amber's gonna be going.

First word, camp Eu, she says. Looking forward to it. seven talks on SE O2 on Woo says Andrew Eagle Eye. Thank you Andrew. Appreciate it. Okay. Anyway, if you go in now, you know what you're gonna be looking at. And then of course there's the hallway track which runs on all of the after parties and things.

I dunno if the after parties have been, located yet. Community often they put these like other kind of events actually. Yeah, if you keep your eye on one of these menus, I can't remember which one. They will list out the, the sort of The non-official events, they start to get dropped in there and you can book your seats, book your tickets, and what have you.

Okay. so Woo is Dead Long Live WooCommerce, as it were. last week Curious story, woo, which I dunno how long it's been, the domain of choice, but let's say about four months ago, five months ago, something like that. Maybe it wasn't even as long ago as that. The, WooCommerce domain, all of the content there got pushed over to woo.com and there was a marketing push to make woo the thing.

so if you had a page from WooCommerce, it was gonna be over at Woo. And then some time during March, Google dropped what appears to be a fairly seismic update. Now again, not being, an SEO expert, not really even following the SEO news, I don't really understand what happened there. and whether it affected people more broadly, but it's affected WooCommerce, and we touched on it last week.

And they've decided to move everything back to, woocommerce.com. But curious article on the developer blog this week, which I thought was, I felt a little bit sad for people who are agency owners, especially WooCommerce agency owners or developers in that, they probably have spent quite a lot of time reorganizing their learning materials or what have you, to reflect this change over to Woo.

And now they've gotta do it all in reverse. They've gotta unw if you like. they've not gotta do the woo, they've gotta not do the woo. Do you, Bob Don? I'm gonna get email about that. I think this, do you remember the conversation that we had about rebrand Nathan? About yeah, The ux it's another one for that, for that slot. It's, interesting, isn't it? Yeah. obviously if they, and the article that was mentioned last week said that they'd hired, so they brought in outside talent, in the SEO world, and they basically decided that this was unfixable by maintaining the WooCommerce domain.

It was interesting, Cameron who was in the comments, I dunno if he still is. Last week he sent a screenshot on Twitter or something where he'd done a Google search and he'd noticed that about two thirds of the amount of results were available for Woo, as they were, for WooCommerce.

The, what he was meaning by that was, why don't they just wait, until Google fully indexes woo.com. But I guess, if you're faced with a bit of a sinking ship, then you've got to undo it. So anyway, after careful consideration, it's been undone. But this article really is just saying what's the impact on.

for your clients, you'll have a. you'll have a job of, on doing all of that as well. It's a bit, of a sad story, really. And again, the kind of the power of Google that it has over us and, and all that we do. Anybody want to comment apart from obviously Peter who's dropped in there just watching it Interestingly, especially from a marketing standpoint to see what actually, how it does affect everything and I don't know.

[00:51:30] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. Rebranding is not easy for sure. Yeah. Especially something as big as that. there's a lot of money tied up in Woo, that's for sure. And, getting it wrong is hard. Okay. So anyway, yeah. That is all happening. And then this came across my radar, from a lovely chap called Marcus Burnett, WP World.

[00:51:51] Nathan Wrigley: First of all, Marcus didn't put this in the rundown. I had it in the rundown before Marcus had even said that he was gonna be in the show. first of all, tell us about the WP world. You can find at the WP. World, which is a very cool domain, I have to say. what's the intention, not with this article that's on the screen, but what's the intention of the project more generally?

[00:52:14] Marcus Burnette: Sure. Yeah. Thanks for putting in here. I didn't know if it was in there before I, jumped in to, to sit in the seat or not. But, yeah, the, WP World is basically a WordPress resource. I'm just trying to create a WordPress resource that gives value to connecting WordPress folks with each other, connecting WordPress folks with events, helping organizers and meet up planners, figure out where they can best get, events started.

really just stems off of a lot of the stuff that I do at GoDaddy, in the community space and just finding a way to give back by creating this resource for the community to, I. Find out about events, find out about each other, where each other live so they can meet up to not home addresses, but cities so they can meet up at coffee shops and, encourage some in-person connections.

[00:53:12] Nathan Wrigley: Do you, act then, is your intention really to act like a bit of a conduit, like the, middleware, if you like, in the community? I don't know, let's say for example, I have the intention of putting on an event that my first port of call would be, okay, there's this website, the WP World, where there's just a bunch of WordPresses there and I can see the kind of things that they're interested in.

So I might be able to use it, a little bit like Michelle's WP speakers, I might be able to find speakers or alternatively, I'm getting into WordPress. I know there's a community, but I dunno where any of them are in my area. That kind of thing. So you are, you're, just being the, middle piece, just connecting the dots of the different arms of WordPress.

[00:53:53] Marcus Burnette: Yeah, that's, the hope to some degree. I. Try to use it as a way to elevate some of those other things. So like WP Speakers is integrated into the site. So if you're on WP Speakers and you're on the WP world, your WP Speaker information shows there, or some of it. And then you can click over to WP Speakers to find out more and to actually contact that person.

so part of it is being a conduit. Part of it is elevating the other pieces in the community that already exists. but what I really want is for somebody to say, I'd like to go to a, I'd like to go to a Word camp this year. Hop on to, where, would you go to find that out?

there are word. You go to Central, you had to dig around a little bit to figure out what's around you. or you could go to the WP world and put in where you are and see all of the camps that are hanging, that are in your area and figure out what's closest to you and see who's going to those camps.

People are able to mark that they're going to those camps before attendees, signups and stuff have happened at some of the camps. So really just figuring out how you can connect with other people. I love the, I love the, essentially you've got these menu items across the top and it's divided into presses, IE individuals.

[00:55:10] Nathan Wrigley: Then you've got events, businesses, sponsors, and then hosting, which is something altogether, which we have actually covered, in the past. And then there's a shop and then there's a possibility to add me. However, I'm just gonna do a random presser and let's just see. Who pops out in the random presser of the day.

okay, here we go. And it is Vais manos. You get yourself a WP Build sticker reach out, and, but that's really great, the idea that you can go and find a lot of people by location, by country, by the kind of things that they're into, and obviously events and all that. But this is your new thing. from directory to lightweight, C-R-M-C-R-M, meaning customer resource management, what's the intention here?

What are you doing? What are you building? Yeah, emphasis on the lightweight part. At the moment, I don't really envision building out a full CRM. There are pieces to A CRM that I just don't think are going to be in here, follow up notifications and, I. a whole bunch of personal details and stuff.

[00:56:20] Marcus Burnette: What I, really wanted this to be, so I'll clarify this too, 'cause I've had a few people ask if this is like ratings and reviews for pressors. It is a hundred percent not, these notes are completely, private to the person taking the notes. They're not shared with the person who you're taking the notes on.

they're not shared with the public or anything. They're, private to you. But basically, like I think about a podcast episode that I was a guest on with Adam Silver and we couldn't remember how we met each other. It's been several years. And it would be, would've been great is if I had, met Adam at some point and then I went in and I found his profile on the WP world and I opened up the sidebar and I typed in, met at Word Camp San Diego, 2022, hit save.

And then I can file that away and not have to keep that in my brain somewhere to try and come back to later. So then when I'm going to, meet with Adam at some other thing, I can. Open that up and see, okay, we met at this. This isn't, I have a couple of things, a couple of notes jotted down maybe that were important.

he got married a couple years ago or whatever, and I can look at that and say, oh, he got married a couple years ago. I should check in with him and see, your anniversary, happy anniversary, or whatever the case is. yeah, just a way to keep some extra notes. A lot of us meet a ton of people, especially at Word Camps and other events, and to try and keep all of the information that you learn about someone in your head at all times is hard and felt like this is a good way for you to jot some of that stuff down and be able to reference it later.

[00:57:59] Nathan Wrigley: It's really neat. Do you have a, do you have an intuition that this will be like li live data at any point? So in other words, do if I had this, I don't know, I could set my status to, at WordCamp Europe or something like that. I could, then, I don't know, use it whilst I'm at Word Camp Europe to make contact with people, like a messaging system or something like that.

Maybe I'm pushing it a bit far. Yeah, I, so far anyways, because I'm a team of one person, have stayed away from anything that requires real heavy moderation between folks. that can very quickly and easily be abused and become a problem for people. so I have not really created anything in the site that allows you to directly contact another person through the site.

[00:58:46] Marcus Burnette: all the, details about their LinkedIn and Twitter and stuff that they've opted to share are there and available for you to, reach out in Slack or reach out on Twitter. However you'd like to, contact them, but I don't wanna, I've stayed away from anything that requires me moderating lots of messages that go back and forth between people because I don't want it to be a problem.

[00:59:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. I can well understand. So a couple of nice things. firstly, the, comment that's come, no, not that one. Amber, sorry, Andrew. It wasn't that I didn't wanna sing your comment. It was just not the comment I intended, am behind saying that this is neat, which is true. It is neat. But also, bigot, whether it's bigot one or bigot two, I don't know.

Oh, it's bigot Polly Hack, she says, really great work for the community. Marcus. She's obviously saying that's great. Awesome. some of the, comments are not coming in, so apologies for that. I can't put them all on the screen, but I can try and read them out. Another, just another quick note that I amended to this after it, it's at the bottom of the article and there's an update there, but if you're not keen on having someone leave notes about you, that's totally fair.

[00:59:59] Marcus Burnette: if you log in and, go to your settings, you can turn off the notes feature for your profile and then folks will have to leave their notes about you somewhere else. But I wanted to make sure that if you didn't want people leaving notes about you, that you were able to turn that off. Look at this.

[01:00:17] Nathan Wrigley: I think the UK's winning the UK has 146 on. Its on, its, I know. Look, if you get the whole of United States and all, oh duh. If you, look under the pressors dropdown, there is a pressors by country. oh. oh, let's have a look there. Let's see, how we do. Oh, look, there you are.

The United States. out ahead. 368. I knew it would have to be Spain. There's basically, there's a work camp for every is huge weekend. Really? It's incredible. It's huge in Spain. Okay. I didn't realize until I started this project how big a community Spain has it. It's incredible. And bear in mind that it's, that there isn't a huge amount of English speakers, so I'm sure that you'd get even more people.

[01:01:04] Piccia Neri: One, once the project is, gets better known Spain is unbelievable. Huh? Really good. There you go. Yeah. That's fun. England comes in, a, in fourth place. like they do in just about all tournaments. In fact, I stop the podium. Yeah, that's right. This, do you know what? Do you know what I'm thinking?

[01:01:25] Nathan Wrigley: I'm thinking in a few years time when this has grown and grown. 'cause honestly, that's a pretty impressive target. You've got 1,378 people who've signed up. The, thus it's not bad, but there are more people in the community. Oh yeah. I'd like to see them sign up. Getting people to come and fill out a form is hard work, We know that. True. And, so that's pretty really impressive. I can see a survey coming on though, Marcus, like Kyle's survey, but slightly different. That would be, that would be fun. All right. The WP world that is a URL who knew that you could buy a world domain, but you can. Okay. Anybody else want to contribute to that before we move on?

Okay. Alright. I think I'm gonna leave that one 'cause time is gonna be a little bit short, so I'm gonna move on to this one instead, if that's all right. And I'm gonna hand it straight over, to Michelle. I'll just simply say that, there is an event, it's called Stellar, it's an event Spark conference.

What is it? It's just a one day conference, online conference for all things WordPress. and what we're hoping to do with it is show people who are newer to WordPress, some of the great things that it can do and that are possible and how the community pulls together and have some deeper talks too that would, appeal to people who've been using WordPress for quite a while.

so it's just, yeah, it's a call for speakers and a call for, it is a call for speakers. It's gonna be held on the 19th of July, from 10:00 AM to five p pm et and looking for a variety of, presenters. To choose from so that there will be something for everyone, no matter what level of expertise they have within WordPress.

Yes. Okey dokey. Let me just quickly sort something out over there. Sorry, I've got something which is just screen over there somewhat unexpectedly and diverting my attention. it'll be in the show notes tomorrow. Stellar wp.com/stellar spark. do you know what the, uptake's been like so far?

Have you had a few people interested? We just announced it on Friday, so I haven't even checked my email yet to see if anybody's applied. excuse me. No, but, we'll have a landing page soon for more information and so people can register for the event as well. that's forthcoming. But my first order of business was getting some really good content, Okay. Okay. Okay. Thank you very much. like I said, links in the show notes tomorrow. Okay. Moving on. New product time. This is coming out of Gravity Forms. I got a message, I think I had a chat with. I was chatting with Matt Madero, who is now working with the Gravity Forms team, and he mentioned to me that, they've got a new product which has just launched.

It's a plugin. It's called Gravity, SMTP. And, it is exactly what you'd expect it would be. It is a, a plugin which you can install in your WordPress website, in enabling you to send email out from that and not just use like the PHP function built into your WordPress website and using your hosting environments, server to send out emails, which is never a good idea.

and they've launched it as a V one. The, there's a, there's a. Bunch of commercial rivals and, free rivals that do similar things. But I guess one of the nice things it's got built out of the box. If these are your, if these are your email marketing platforms of choice, not marketing, email sending, let's say that, they've got Bvo or Revo, I don't quite know how to pronounce that.

Mail gone. Postmark, SendGrid. And then you can just use good old, SMTP, but it looks like more or less like a one click solution for those platforms. the only caveat is that you need to be, in order to get this, you need to have a Gravity Forms Elite license. I don't know what the paywall on that is, but if you haven't got that license, you won't be able to make or you won't be able to download it.

Let's put it that way. I'm imagining it's GPL, but you don't need Gravity forms to make it work. if you don't have Gravity Forms on your website, you can install this and get it to work. So there you go. If you're a Gravity Forms customer, that's, and especially if you've got that elite level, you now have it for free gratis.

That's quite nice. Okay. All good. And do any of you have an iPhone? Yeah. Do you ever try to get images off your iPhone and get the rest of the universe to see them? It's so annoying. What, the heck were Apple thinking? what's wrong? Why, what's wrong with a jpeg apple? so it turns out that, just about every Android phone just saves everything automatically as a jpeg, right?

And then you can suck it out of your phone and stick it anywhere, absolutely anywhere. And. But not an iPhone. Apple in 2017, for their own reasons, decided to use this image format called, HEIC, which stands for high Efficiency Image Format. Now they did it for all the right reasons, 'cause it's teeny tiny.

the compression is utterly remarkable, apparently, although. There's probably better algorithms now, but I ran up against this problem. I genuinely didn't know that the iPhone, could use this image format. And then I tried to share an image with myself from my son's phone. I have an Android phone.

I don't have, actually I have a, I dunno what to call my phone. It's like you have to shovel coal into the back of it. and, but I had an iPhone, sorry, an Android phone. And then my son tried to share photos, outside of a platform which would do the conversion on the fly. and I had nothing that, that could view it apart from I've come to my Mac oh, all's well, but I go to anything else like a Windows pc.

No, you're not looking at this. And I just genuinely didn't know that was a thing. firstly. Okay, apple. I get it. But naughty as well. and peachy, you're obviously a bit ticked off about it, but this week, the guys at Meta Slider, introduced me to a plugin which would get rid of this problem. they have got an article entitled How to use HEIC Images for WordPress.

It's basically a fix. you download it and on the fly it converts it to a jpeg. Nice. but it, and, this is quite important, so if you are like trying to put your HEIC images into a browser, more or less, forget it because only Safari has native support for it. So there you go. Salutary lesson.

Anybody using an iPhone? What the heck bin your iPhone? No, don't say that. Nathan, don't bin your iPhones. They're lovely. In many ways. They're fabulous, I'm sure. But, did you know that was a thing, like when you, took pictures, did you know that it was all done in this weirdy format that nobody else can see apart from other iPhone users Natively.

[01:08:42] Michelle Frechette: I've only encountered an issue with it once or twice when I shared an image with my computer and then tried to open it in Photoshop. But most of the time it saves as a openable thing to me. I share it as a JPEG or whatever, but every once in a while. Yeah. But if you uploaded it to like your WordPress website for example, how do you do that?

[01:09:01] Nathan Wrigley: 'cause you do loads of photography and also you're a big contributor to the photo directory. Do you have any problems con or are all of your photos coming off your, your decent camera, your standalone actual camera? They're, not all coming off my Canon camera a lot. Every time I travel overseas, it's just from my phone.

[01:09:21] Michelle Frechette: But I would never post anything anywhere without first editing it in, some sort of software. Got it. And so I open things in, in Lightroom, which is an Adobe product, to be able to really fine tune. I think a lot of photo photographers use Lightroom. And then if I need to take out more blemishes and things like that, I will often open it up also in po in, I always say post status because that's what PS means to me.

Photoshop,

where my head is. But, yeah, so I, honestly have only had one once or twice where I had to resend a photo to myself and then download it differently, but I. I don't usually run into issues. Mark West Guard, as is always the case, has the answer. Mark West Guard says, go to iPhone, settings, camera formats choose most compatible.

[01:10:17] Nathan Wrigley: And then I'm guessing it doesn't do that. It saves it as a JPEG or something like that. Sage words, west Guard. I wonder if I, wonder if I've already done that and that's why I don't. Yeah, may. Maybe that's why. And it doesn't cause you, but if I did, it was a long time ago. Yeah. But also, I wonder if I have no idea.

You would know more than me. I wonder if the photo directory might take care of that for you. I wonder if it does any of that kind of image manipulation on the fly. I would doubt it, but. Yeah, I don't, think so. You never know. I was gonna say in, in preparation for this, I did a couple last night to just one of my media libraries and they worked just fine.

[01:10:52] Marcus Burnette: And I was like, is this a problem people are having? But I must have done exactly what Mark is. I. Proposing here at some point years and years ago. Because when you upgrade, generally your settings follow you around. So I must have done this whenever it first came out. It could be because, oh, when I go to upload, I have no idea.

It's a JPEG in the media library. Okay. And then it turns into a web P for whatever other reason that I have going on. But it's already done, say, already done. The conversion for me, and it must be that it's. Saving it out based on the setting that Matt proposed. Oh, okay. Yeah. 'cause my son's phone was just basically outta the box, he's had it for a little while, but he is not one to tinker with the settings to improve or optimize the phone in any way. And I, couldn't see them on anything. We had a, none. Yeah, it was really hard to see it on anything. But, now I know that if you've got a WordPress site and you wanna have those high quality images with low file format size, then you can still do it according to, this article and that particular plugin.

[01:11:57] Nathan Wrigley: But it's another problem fixed by WordPress. I just checked and I do have mindset as most compatible, which is probably why I haven't run into issues. I wonder if that's part of the onboarding. I wonder if part of the onboarding is to, ah, Pete, there you go. I'll say that. I really, sorry. That's okay. Go ahead.

[01:12:17] Piccia Neri: No, I just want you to say thanks again to Mark. 'cause I do know. he says that, it'll stop HEIC airdrops even on photos taken prior to changing that setting. So what, you can no longer do airdrops at all. Airdrop, is that the technology where it allows you to stand in close proximity to somebody and Yeah, just quickly, it never works for me anyway.

Not even from my computer computers and my phone. So I won't miss it. It's fine. Yeah. It doesn't, oh, it actually wor it works fine with when you've turned that on. I use airdrop all the time between my phone, my computer, and other people. Okay. So that's not an issue. Okay, there we go. I'll say though that you do have to upload a JPEG into the, photo directory.

[01:12:57] Michelle Frechette: It will not convert photos for you. It must be a JPEG in order to be uploaded. Do you know, just on that not apropos of nothing, certainly not this HEIC. Do you know if there's, any thoughts into modern image formats like web P and a V? for the photo directory at any point, because my understanding is that you can save up to 40% file size if you go with, let's say A-V-A-V-I-F over jpeg.

[01:13:25] Nathan Wrigley: obviously JPEG's been like the bulwark for years and years but it's getting left behind. I still default to JPEG all the time. My camera does jpeg, my phone does jpeg But, it would be, I guess it would be nice to have smaller file sizes on the photo directory. So anyway, there we go.

[01:13:43] Michelle Frechette: I'm not aware of any Okay. Movement in that direction. I don't know if Marcus is. Yeah, not currently. I imagine that maybe there would be some tooling around that where, it remains a JPEG in the directory, but if you're using a plugin to pull or even core to pull. Photos from the word, from the directory that maybe when it's doing that and putting it on your page, it will convert it from a jpeg to a web P or a V or something.

[01:14:09] Marcus Burnette: I'd imagine that there's, there will be some tool that stands in the middle to do some optimization. I don't know that necessarily the directory itself will host multiple formats. Jerome is in the comments. He's saying, that his. His raws are 30. Okay. Wow. raw images of up to 40 megapixels.

[01:14:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. We are getting to the point where cameras just create ridiculous amounts of data. I think it's, Dan maybe was showing me his, he's got a Samsung Galaxy 7 trillion or whatever it is, and it's got like 800 cameras on the back and all of them do a different thing. But he, took a picture and I think it was like 40 to 50 megabytes on the top setting.

But then when you zoom in, like you can see the tiny insect on a leaf, which is like over the horizon. I. it's utterly, remarkable, which is what we all need. Yeah, That's, yeah, exactly. But, but the file size was truly huge and obviously clogging up the internet, like public facing websites, we mostly don't need anything of that magnitude, yeah. Anyway, thank you Jerome, for sharing that. Okie dokie. I just wanted to put this in people's, path. this was released this last week, it was actually 10 days ago, but I missed it last week. And it's an introduction to playground and running WordPress in the browser. I'm just gonna link to it.

you can find it on the developer.wordpress.org site link in the show notes tomorrow. But it explains the how-tos of running playground in your browser and how it all works, and how, you can get yourself like a 1 0 1 of how that actual voodoo works. And then very quickly, Andrew Palmer. What the heck.

Andrew sent me a link about 10 minutes before we went. He said, you've gotta have this in the show. So here it is. and I could have got this wrong, Andrew, so forgive me. But it would appear that the latest version of WordPress 6.5 has a different way of uploading plugins. So once you've uploaded a plugin, rather than the plugin's uploaded and the page refreshes, it does an Ajax call basically to say, we've uploaded the plugin.

And, now that apparently might break a load of onboarding experiences for plugins, which at the page refresh would send you somewhere else, here's how to use our plugin page. that might no longer be the case. And so this track ticket note, it's not, it's this, yes, it is. It's a track ticket.

came along this week saying, do we need to rethink this strategy? Andrew, I am sorry if I've completely butchered that. He says he adores me. I'll take it. if I've butchered that, I apologize, but that in the brief one minute that I had to try and pause that, was interesting.

But I can imagine if that's the case, a lot of plugin developers will be a little bit up in arms, but then again, I don't know whether I want them to be up in arms. I don't know. I dunno what I think about this. 'cause I don't always want to be chucked into an onboarding experience straight away.

Not sure what I think. Maybe I'll, maybe I'll let you, decide for yourselves. But anyway, I'll put that into the show notes. and Andrew says you have to refresh the page to get to the onboarding. Yes, exactly. So I think I got that about right. You have to actually refresh the page, which nobody's gonna do.

When they've uploaded a plugin and it says Plugin successfully uploaded, nobody's gonna go and actually hit refresh on the page. So that beautiful onboarding experience that gets you, your users through your plugin onboarding is gonna be no more hat tip to this man doom speaker that he is. It's, Tim Nash.

Tim Nash is on this show quite regularly, and and he released a video. You gotta watch it. It is great. It is like a narrative version of, WordPress. There's a podcast called, what's it called, dark Net Diaries. And, it's all about, stories that, things that have happened to people and I think, I think he's taking a little bit of a.

[01:18:19] Michelle Frechette: It just, I if you hit play, I expect to hear things like, hello, darkness Miles brown. Yeah, it's so good. So it's 12 minutes. Brilliant. Of, of story about, this, how WordPress websites can be hacked. Unfortunately, I can't share the audio 'cause the platform doesn't allow me to consume the audio.

[01:18:39] Nathan Wrigley: But just a bit of a hat tip. Thank you. thank you Tim, for producing content like this and go in above and beyond really. 'cause I know that he. Quite hard and making it appealing and narrative and interesting and engaging takes lots longer. So Bravo. Yeah. Yeah. the next one should be a musical though,

[01:19:02] Marcus Burnette: but like an unplugged version though. Yeah. To make a truly, gritty. Yeah. great, So it's called, actually, funnily enough, it's not actually showing the title. Oh, it's gone over there. memes Gone Bad, scary WordPress Security Story Time and I released it six days ago. So give it a watch. It's definitely well worth it and let's hope he does more in the future.

[01:19:25] Nathan Wrigley: That would be great, great. Okay. Let's do a little bit of promotion this time for picture Peach picture, what's going on, what are we looking at? What's going on? What's going on? So I hadn't done a masterclass or anything, or any courses actually for ages. And, it was about time. So I teamed up with Jonah Toley, who, any, anybody who's ever, done a design course or been interested in design probably knows Jonah Toley.

[01:19:59] Piccia Neri: I certainly lo learned a lot from him and we started working together last year. and really it all starts from typography, doesn't it? Because, they say that 95% of the web is typography. Probably is true and it's essential. 'cause to me it's not just typography in the sense of content in general is absolutely essential to the web.

So we're doing this, typography masterclass, which I don't think is just for designers, by the way. Not at all. It's for anybody who works with content on the web, and it's not just about. Picking a nice typeface. Not at all. We'll be looking at HTML structure and all the rest of it, and it will be opened as well, which I haven't actually put in, the sales, page yet by a, a, couple of users, one of, whom, a couple of people actually, one of whom is a Lazar.

a friend of mine who's also, who's blind from birth. And has been using a, screen reader since 2004. Gosh. And he demonstrate how he works as an accessibility tester now. Nice. And, he will demonstrate what it, what it's like for him to encounter a page that doesn't use correct. HTMO structure and so on.

so there would be him. But also the really interesting thing is that whatever may be completely accessible for, Lazar may be not accessible for other people with different who are disabled in different ways. So we'll have, people there as well, to, to demonstrate that briefly just to. Make people feel like they're in the shoes, in the same place as someone who uses the web in a different way.

Because, thank you Amber. I actually, Amber says, look, school pizza. Thank you very much. And I actually got Laa to test this, sales page. And if anybody notices anything that they don't think looks good in terms of accessibility, please do point it out to me because we're always, there's no such thing as a perfect website.

And I keep learning and I keep improving and I keep doing my best, really. And, it's gonna be, oh, there's a, did you tell, shall we tell them about this special? WP builds. Oh yeah. You had a little code for us, didn't you? Yeah, I've for, forgot about that. I do, I didn't indeed. Let me just find it out. If you, I'm just gonna say it on and I'll put it into the, show notes.

[01:22:51] Nathan Wrigley: I can turn it, the, if you go through the checkout process, pizza just sent me a coupon code. It's, WP builds one three, so WP builds 13. 'cause the discount is 13%. why not 13%. Okay, there you go. Oh, that's great. And that's valid until Thursday, the 18th of April. Yeah, so I'll put that into the show notes.

WP builds one three. It's not an affiliate thing, it's just a, it's just a nice gesture on Peach's part. thank you for doing that. I appreciate it. I always found those, I always find those things where you watch somebody using and struggling with a website. I found them profoundly interesting.

It's just, and in some cases just heartbreaking. absolutely. and when actually ev on another, I got, LAA to test another page that I'd built, that looked to me, just looked like the structure was absolutely, accessible, but I realized that even though I had done it accessibly, I still had built the page visually.

[01:23:59] Piccia Neri: So there were things that he couldn't make harrow tail of just because it didn't quite work. And it is just extraordinary how it opens up your perspective. On how things work for, others. It's so interesting. Sorry Nathan. I No, I'm very happy to let you have that. So the link will be in the show notes tomorrow and you can avail yourself until Thursday of a 13% discount with code WP builds one, three, which is really nice.

[01:24:28] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. thank you Apropo of nothing to do with WordPress at all, but Automatic acquired this thing this week, just. If you've got that, like I've got Slack open, I've got Discord open, I'm on Twitter, I've got Facebook open. If you want one platform to just do all the chat, just go and get this. It's so great.

It's called Beeper, which I like as a name. they just took them over. They spent $50 million last year buying something called texts, and as a result, texts, the team behind texts are joining the Beeper team, which is now an automatic property. I'm, like I said, in our house, we have Android phones and iPhones and it just works.

Everything works out the box immediately. And it's great including platforms which you might not expect, like signal, and things like that. So really check it out. It's just brilliant. It's one place to put all of your chat experiences, so you can have one app on your phone or one app on your desktop, which handles all of those chats.

And I've. It's profoundly changed my life. That's all I can say. Beeper dot com. It's totally great. And now the moment we've all been waiting for, right? Okay, so I am never, ever gonna be the same again, right? I discovered this website this week. I can't remember where I discovered it. It's called suno.com.

I don't care what you are doing, even if you're at your own wedding, stop it and go to suno.com and then click this little create button. You're gonna have to sign up with some kind of an account, and then you'll get like the capacity to create like 20 or 30 songs for free. And those credits come back every day.

So if you just, if you use up your credits, just come back the next day and just do it all again. Dunno how long it'll last. But I was such a skeptic, I thought, this'll be more AI bs that I don't want anything to do with, oh my God, it's so good. It's so good. You just type in 15 words or something like that and out comes a song like, it's so good.

And it's horrifying in equal measure, right? Because I see we're quite a musical family and I think there are people in my family who would like to have careers in this industry, in the music industry, they're up against this. And that makes it incredibly hard. It's a bit like, I don't know. I've got a manual plow.

I want to become a farmer. Will that work for me in the year 2024? No. 'cause we've got tractors and things, so I, think this is gonna be difficult, but man alive is this good now question is, do you guys have enough time to stick around for a few moments? So that we can play for you with these.

What do you think? I do? You do, Marcus. This is what I came here for. This is it. This is why we're here. so honestly, you type in 10 words and something comes out. okay, I'm gonna play one. So this is the one that was in the intro to this podcast. I typed in something like, tell me in a funk song about the podcast WP builds.

It was as simple as that, right? And 20 seconds later, this came out. Yo, check it out.

is it the best song you've ever heard? No, but it's completely credible as a piece of background music, right? You're just immediately credible. Is that, hopefully it's not too rude, but I asked it to create a song in an operatic style in which every word was the word crap. This is what we got.

Oh, it gets so much better. Here we go.

I don't know what to say. I asked it to create a song about the joy of watching paint dry, and I got this. Watching

and then I, I asked it to, I, I'm big friend with, Bob Don. So I asked it to create one where every word is the word Don du double NN,

and it goes on and on. And then I asked you guys if you had a chance to create one and, peach asked to create an accessible type one. Let's hear a quick excerpt of that.

Book accessible topography. That's the game we're gonna change. So you put his name in and it got, this is about your masterclass, the promo.

Joe's a legend.

Oh, I'm gonna stop it there. Not because I want to, but because, I did ask for a punk song and that's not quite my idea of punk, but, okay. But yeah, I'd listen to that. Yeah, exactly. This is the thing, right? Don't you think it's gonna get to the point where, rather than use Spotify to listen to songs that somebody else made up.

You are just gonna tell it. just play me loads of stuff. Just make me loads of stuff up that I've liked in the past. It's gonna make stuff up. Yeah, That we like. There you go. And then, I had Marcus send me one as well. I don't think I'm gonna be able to play yours, Michelle, 'cause I can't download it from the link that you sent me, but Michelle sent me one as well, but this is, oh, I send it to you in, I sent it to you in slack too.

Oh, I didn't see that. I do apologize. And that's okay. Here we go. Marcus is 7 billion people, developers, community. We stay connected. there're as cheesy as all hell aren't they? they're absolutely breathtakingly good. It, I cannot remember the last time I went to a website where I, literally couldn't believe what I, in this case was hearing.

mostly it's it's a bit hyped up and it's a bit on, the expectation. But I clicked. Generate and a song came out and it was completely, legitimately a song and in some cases, including some really weird embellishment that I thought, God, that's quite innovative. That's not what I expected.

Anyway, so I wanted your thoughts. What do you make of that? Enjoyed that this week. It was fun. Yeah. Yeah. You can see that. You can see that. Go on. I heard about this a little while ago and I've spent far too much time, both alone and with my daughters, just making up all sorts of songs. I, spent my entire Friday night when I should have been doing things much more interesting, making songs like just cackling.

To myself at how entertaining they were, and in some way, assuming it was me, it was like, oh, look how clever I am making all these songs. Whereas actually all I did was write a sentence and then press, what really nice for intro music, right? I, it takes forever to source free intro music.

[01:32:24] Michelle Frechette: So if you could just create the 10 seconds of, some kind of musical, whatever, they, what I'm wondering though, I'm always like the spoil sport, but what about, copyright though? Because obviously this is they've fed it all the content that real people created, right? And it's all ripped off.

[01:32:43] Piccia Neri: it's the same with the images. I, always come back with that, but, I just can't that's true. Not that I don't use it. I do. I, could. I do, I think we're all caught in that dilemma, aren't we? Nobody wants to feel that they're ripping off an artist, but you are. but then at the same time, there's that there's that just beautiful ease of it.

[01:33:03] Nathan Wrigley: Which is so beguiling, and I think you're right. I think maybe that the ship has sailed there. Maybe we needed legislation before the AI started to suck up everything that was freely available on the internet, but I think that ship has maybe sailed. Anyway, that website is called sno, SU nno.com, and do not come blaming me next week when your productivity has gone through the floor, but you've listened to about 8,000 songs all about your cat.

[01:33:36] Michelle Frechette: we have a whole playlist on Spotify now for all of the stellar WP songs or products that each have a song that was generated by one of our, met my Matt Childer actually. So there's a whole playlist I put out on, the Eclipse day to get you through the eclipse. Through a stellar WPA. I think what I'm gonna do, 'cause I, ever since I'd started my podcast, I've added cheesy music to the end.

[01:34:02] Nathan Wrigley: I'm just gonna now get a unique piece of cheesy music describing the podcast that's just happened. There you go. And stick it on the end. And and in that way I will make people hate me even more. okay. That's it. That's all I've gotta say. We've run over a little bit, so I do apologize to Michelle and to Marcus and to Peach for wasting 10 minutes of their time at the end there.

on it's a waste, but not a waste. Not a, it's to be here. It's a waste. Not a waste. That's the title. It's a waste, but not a waste. Not a waste. We need to write that down. and next week, John. Sure. A song in it. Nathan, go on. There's definitely a song in it. Yeah, it's a waste, not waste coming up. Yeah.

Alright, alright, Okay. We'll see what we can do. It'll take me all of 10 seconds to write that top hit. that's it though. I appreciate you, the three of you for joining me. We'll be back next week with some other guests, most of them generated by AI probably. but for now we've gotta do the, the humiliating hand wave of death that I'm now gonna start calling it.

There we go. Smile. Hello. And, thank you mostly to our audience. I really appreciate you coming in and saying hello. groundbreaking crap. Says Bud Kraus. Yes, this is the highest endorsement I think I've ever received. This is called, that's going on the website. the url is suno.com. there you go.

Groundbreaking crap, right? We're gonna hang the call up and we will see you this time next week. Take it easy everybody. Thanks so much. Bye-Bye bye.