This Week in WordPress #295

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode number 295. Entitled panic at home. Joy in the studio. It was recorded on Monday the 29th of April, 2024. My name's Nathan Wrigley and I will be joined by three fabulous guests. I'm joined by TAC overdone shot by Cameron Jones and by Marcus Burnett. It's a WordPress podcast.

So we talk about WordPress. We talk about all of the improvements that have been experienced in the performance of WordPress 6.5, not just the speed of your website, but how sustainable it is as well. We also talk about the idea of making sure that if plugins break, when updating, they will individually be rolled back to keep your website safe.

If you've got auto updates, switched on the page, builders summit is back. It's happening from the 20th to the 24th of May, 2024. You can go and get your free ticket. Accessibility day, the WordPress accessibility day is looking for speakers. WordCamp Asia has released all of their videos and WordPress Whitley bay is also looking for speakers as well. We have a very, long conversation, all about a new product from wordpress.com called studio.

It's an environment which enables you to develop websites locally and then push them with a single button over to wordpress.com. It's really very interesting. Indeed. There's a whole load of other things that we talk about as well. And it's all coming up next. On this week in WordPress.

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

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That's wrong. I don't think we're on episode number 295. I think it's 296. I could be wrong. Let's go with what it says on the screen. It's this week in WordPress, episode number two, nine x. You decide what episode we're on, but we're on some large number of episodes. That was fun.

I started the, countdown. on the, video just then, and then suddenly a minor family crisis occurred. And, I've spent the, I've spent exactly one minute and 18 seconds out of the 120 seconds trying to fight a fire. Oh, perfect timing, I'd say, yeah, I'd managed to just hit the return key on the appropriate response, just at the exact right moment.

Lovely to have you with us. As you can see, we're joined by three fabulous guests, as always. we'll start over here. We'll start with Taco. How are you doing, Taco? I'm good. I'm good. Thank you. It's really nice to have Taco back. Taco. Taco used to be on like, really rather a lot, and and I know that commitments over at Yos meant that, schedules and meetings moved around and so it's an absolute pleasure when you, finally managed to come back.

If you don't know of. Here is what he has to say. Taco is the head of relations at Yost, GTE for Dutch community supporter on the WP Community team, co-organizer of the WordPress meet up in, I'm gonna try it. Name Megan for well done. former Word camp organizer and it says Stop it Taco. You wrote that into your bio.

Stop it. Taco. Okay. You're just trying to make your bio as long as Michelle's. Anyway, he's the father of two and a husband of one and he sometimes struggles to balance his work and family life online. You can find him at Taco Verdo, T-A-C-O-V-E-R-D-O on most platforms. an absolute pleasure to have you with us.

nice, nice. Thanks for having me. Yeah, you are lovely. Very, welcome. And over there is Cameron Jones all the way from Australia where it's stupid o'clock. What time, Cameron? It is 10:35 PM that gets, goes above and beyond. I, owe you a biscuit or some equivalent small prize for coming on. Next time I see you, I'll buy you a round of beers.

Thank you very much for joining us today. I think

[00:04:55] Cameron Jones: you might've bought me a drink at Word Camp era of last year, so I, I

[00:04:58] Nathan Wrigley: feel I completely exonerated that responsibility in that case. I owe you nothing. Come on this show every week at this hour, but it's a pleasure having you on. I'm gonna read.

Cameron's bio and then I'll do Marcus's and then I'll come back to Cameron 'cause he's got some exciting news Actually. Cameron Jones hails from Victoria Harbor Australia where he runs, and this is it Shorty Designs a web development agency. He is also the maintainer of the official WordPress plugin for the Freedom Nation donation platform.

Kofi, you can find him at Cameron Jones Webb on most platforms. So yeah, thank you so much for joining us and we'll be right back. But before then, we have to mention Marcus, how are you, Marcus? I am good. I am up at the time of the day 9:00 AM I. And I've gotta say, Marcus, you're sporting a highly nice camera there.

Something about the lighting and everything. It just, it's it's radiant is what, I tweaked my setup a little bit last week. Yeah. Yeah. It's nice. I've given it a go. Whatever you did. It's definitely working. Cameron Burnett is a WordPress community enthusiast, web designer and developer, amateur photographer and podcast host.

Marcus is the, did I just say Cameron? Yes. I'm so sorry. That's okay. I feel bad now. Okay. I'm gonna start it again. It's a good name. Marcus. You know when you do something and then your brain like catches up about three seconds later? That's what happened there. I thought, hang on. Something was wrong there.

Marcus Burnett is a WordPress community enthusiast, web designer and developer, amateur photographer and podcast host. He's also the creator of the WP World WP AR Universe, WP Photo Stats, and a few other WordPress plugins. Here is a WordPress. Photo directory moderator with the fourth highest number of contributed photos.

His bigness biggest weakness is that he cares too much and his middle name is Cameron. It isn't actually really, I'll

[00:06:57] Marcus Burnette: change it while the show is gone. Yeah. While the show is going on,

[00:07:00] Nathan Wrigley: thank you for joining us. If you are coming in on the, the live feed and all that kind of stuff, really appreciate your participation.

The more comment that people have, the more fun the show tends to be. I don't know why that is. It just seems to go that way. It's very nice to have a few of you joining us.

[00:07:18] Taco Verdonshot: Say that with a comment that just came in

[00:07:19] Nathan Wrigley: though. Yeah. However, some comments are better than others. good morning. Team says Mark, west Guard.

That was a, a dig at Mark West Guard, a hill coat because he's very good at sarcasm. Maya is waving a hand or it comes through as hand pink waving. Unfortunately, the, the little emoji doesn't come across. Hello from sunny Belgrade. Very, nice to have you with us big. It's joining us. Good afternoon from Germany.

Rob Cairns, who I was on a call with on Friday. That was nice, Rob. Good morning. Nice to see you all. mark is back 200 and oh. It is 295. Thank you. Great. Yeah, last week was 294. That's about the ability of my maths. Add one. so good evening. Everyone says, says Marcus Burnett and. See, just comedy all the way, told you so comedy all the way, and web friendly web guy.

It's almost like he's not done a podcast before. He really is like that. and here he is. Here he is. The much anticipated comment from Peter Ingersol. He drops in every week to give us the weather report from Connecticut. Good morning from a mostly sunny Connecticut where it's a nice 20 degrees centigrade, 68 degrees Fahrenheit.

It may get up to 27 degrees centigrade or 80 today. I love that. I dunno why that's so great, but it really is. Thank you Peter. something about pizzas from Rob Cairns and so much fun, Nathan as well. thank you. okay, we're gonna be talking about WordPress. There's quite a few bits and pieces, some fairly exciting things drop this week and fair bit of news and, other bits and pieces.

So we will crack on with that. The, first thing though, as always, is a little bit self-promotion. I hope you don't mind. the first one is this is our website. If you like what we do, and you would like to be kept in touch with all the bits and pieces that we do. Just pop your name in there, as you don't put your email in there.

That'll work way better. put your email in there and then click this subscribe button, and then we'll send you a couple of emails each week just to say what we've produced. It's, there's really no spam and some highly exciting news. We've had GoDaddy's Pro as a sponsor for a really, long time, and I am enormously grateful for their contribution.

So thank you GoDaddy Pro. It's been many years that they've been helping us keep this podcast on the air, but I'm happy to announce that we've been joined by Bluehost, as well. And Taco iss doing some kind of fun dancing thing over there, yeah. Yeah. thank you to Bluehost for joining us.

They'll be there, they'll be here for a while to come, but I appreciate their support, so thank you both to. Pro and Blue host. The other thing that I want to mention is that I did a webinar this week with, a chap called Mattias Fle, who is an magician. but he's behind the Activi Activity Pub Protocol, which connects things like Mastodon to your WordPress website, and we went through the state of play with that plugin at the moment.

And honestly, it's really exciting and really cool. You can have your WordPress website as a, as like an entity on Mastodon. So if you create a post, it'll create a post on Mastodon. If people reply on Mastodon, it all comes in as comments on your WordPress post. And You literally, your website is a person if you like, on, on Mastodon.

And it's just very cool and he's got a lot of new and fresh ideas for that as well. go and check that out. If you go to our archives and go to the demos archive, then you can watch that it was about an hour, something like that. But it was genuinely highly engaging and really interesting what they're up to.

Okay, Back to Cameron then, Cameron, before we crack on with us, what's your exciting news?

[00:11:15] Cameron Jones: my exciting news is that, I have a nice little new byline there. I have recently acquired. A web design agency called Shorty Designs. They've been around since I was in high school, which is terrifying.

they were, like a sponsor of the very first word camp I went to, and, as the, universe aligned. I'm now running it,

[00:11:46] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Possible. can I ask, a, is there a, obviously you're really excited about it. I are you, do you also, in, in all seriousness, do you also have a lot of work to do here or is it more just like drop in and run with what's going?

Or is there a boatload of things for you to do now?

[00:12:05] Cameron Jones: There is a boatload of things to do. I'm working a lot of hours at the moment.

[00:12:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And how did it come about then? How did you, collaborate with this and decide to take it over?

[00:12:19] Cameron Jones: it's a, long story. but I. More or less it was going to shut down.

And then it was offered that oh, if you want, you could take it over. And I'd already been working with them as it was, so worked out pretty well. That's the very short, version of it. But yeah.

[00:12:41] Nathan Wrigley: Ah, it's exciting. Congratulations though. a nice new chapter in your life.

And, obviously, from myself and I'm sure from the other two guests on the show, congratulations. And, we wish you well. I hope that it, it doesn't completely take over your life. I know that you're an avid sportsman, make time for that. But don't injure yourself. That's all I'm gonna say.

he's laughing 'cause anyway, are you implying something there, Nathan? Yeah. Yeah. I'm, but we'll leave that between us. Okay. Let's crack on with the bits and pieces. so, this piece came around on the make dot WordPress, dot org, core. Blog the other day, and it was Joe McGill a couple of days ago, saying all about the WordPress 6.5 performance improvements.

Now, I dunno if you've been following along, but the performance team have been going for, I don't know, a couple of years now, something, a bit more than that perhaps. And each time that WordPress rolls around, we seem to have a lot of features coming in. And the team are basically saying, despite all of that, despite the fact that there's loads more features coming in, we seem to be keeping up the last little iteration.

There were, areas where things went backwards a little bit 'cause of new features added in, but on the whole, it was broadly in line. So they've speeded it up over the last several years and they've managed to keep it going. And here's the, key things. key performance for translated sites will come to one of those a little bit later.

This version of WordPress includes a new localization system that loads translation, files more quickly, won't go into the technical details. and it's expected to bring a 23.5% improvement in loading times and a 41.4% reduction in memory consumption for translations. Now, gotta say, I don't get involved with translations for more or less anything, but I'm imagining that if you do, it's a bit of a headache and there's a lot of, waiting around and consuming your CPU cycles and all that.

So hopefully that's good. The editing experience has got faster.

[00:14:48] Taco Verdonshot: Nathan, to, reply to that, I think that a, if you look at how many non-US English installs of WordPress there are, and then imagine that this is quicker for all of those sites. It means that we're saving forests instead of trees.

This, the, optimization here is enormous because I think it's over half the WordPress sites that are in, non-US English, which means that all of them are loading translations and some of them are even loading multiples. So it definitely will be, Visible on the power consumption of the web, if you're monitoring

[00:15:38] Nathan Wrigley: that.

It, do you know, this is really interesting, Teko? 'cause you've ju honestly, about an hour ago I was editing a podcast with a chap from Spain called, now I barola, I dunno if you know him, but he, he created a podcast series called Sustain wp, and he's got it in, he's got it as part of his, persona now.

And one of the things that he wants to make of his life is to talk about the environmental impact of not just WordPress, but the web in general. And I was saying what fascinates me about that posture and about the fact that you Taco have related performance to the environment. These pieces don't. It's never written in that way.

It's never written. As the performance has improved, there's less CO2 going into the air and less trees getting chopped down. It's always in terms of speed. And until, now I had said it, as ignorant as it may sound, I hadn't made the connection in my own mind. I hadn't connected performance with, with CO2 reductions.

And he came out with this breathtaking statistic and it was the, a chap whose name I've forgotten who has a plugin which connects, MailChimp to WordPress. It's got over 2 million installs. He chopped 20 kilobytes out of his plugin, 20 k. And he's been able to work out that he saved tons of CO2 A actual Yeah.

Car weight amounts of CO2. From chopping 20 kilobytes out, and 20 kilobytes is just nothing, Yeah. If you imagine every time you put an image on your website, what you're doing, and so Tako, thank you for making that point, and I think it's something which gets ignored all the time and yet really, important.

Yeah.

[00:17:35] Taco Verdonshot: I, really think that every website owner should visit website carbon.com at least once every so many months to see how they're doing compared to similar sites and see what it means that they have their website up and running.

[00:17:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Just

[00:17:53] Taco Verdonshot: the fact that they have a website that gets some traction and see what that does to the environment.

[00:18:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So I guess what we, are now saying is not only are these performance improvements that we're seeing on the screen good because they make your site quicker and that experience is less frustrating. But also that they're chopping and chopping down the amount of, carbon that's going into the atmosphere.

And it might be interesting if these pieces made that point and I don't know that they ever do. but that's interesting. Okay. To carry on with this and then we'll get Cameron and, Marcus to chip in. the editing experience, in 6.5 is apparently five times faster, for typing. I don't quite know what that means.

It's not, like I suddenly became significantly better at typing, but it says typing processing, so I'm not really sure what that is. two times faster for the editor to load, and I've definitely noticed that. And a 60% reduction, in the loading time for, click on a button to drop in a pattern and a pattern appears and is ready to go.

And also, support for IV images. I dunno if you follow this, but IV is a new-ish. Format, and I think it's probably destined with WebP just to become the way we do images for the next, several years up to 50% smaller file size than a jpeg with no, noticeable change in quality. there are a few other bits and pieces in there as well, but they're the top line items.

Cameron, Marcus, either of you, if you've got anything you want to add, just go for it.

[00:19:30] Cameron Jones: Okay. yeah, I guess it, I, don't like use the full site editing experience, which is where a lot of the recent improvements have come to WordPress in recent versions. So I, it's, good to see the other parts of, WordPress, are still being worked on and still being improved. And, there's, still.

Things in it that are coming and being worked on that are, relevant to people like me and, not just people like me. the people who still use Divvy and WP Bakery and all that. I, it's good to see that it's not just the one area that's being worked on.

[00:20:08] Nathan Wrigley: I, I obviously, as I speak to quite a lot of, WordPresses That is basically now my job is to talk to other boxes.

Shocking. I know. Never would've guessed that. Yeah. And this thing, this whole performance team thing comes up more often than, it ought to, if Just like any other team, everybody seems to love the performance team. Everybody seems to love the fact that this is now a thing and that they're making WordPress there's a conversation that you can have with the enterprise at that scale.

when they come back to you with the WordPress is slow. Hang on a minute. Wait, No, Maybe it was, but it's definitely getting better. Marcus, anything or shall we crack on?

[00:20:49] Marcus Burnette: Yeah, I think I would echo what Cameron was saying. I don't, I also don't use the full side editing experience for most things.

And so when I look at what's new, performance wise or feature wise or anything else, 90% of it currently is new blocks, new full side editing features. And so I file it away in my head as something that I know that. I need to have back there, but I'm not probably gonna use it anytime soon.

but it's nice to see that improvements are made in the admin interface. 'cause that still touches, everybody that's using WordPress. The, a v image stuff is as well. to figure out how that shakes out with web WebP seems to have gotten the early lead on, on market share. So see what, what comes of IV and adding that to sites and stuff.

But yeah, like Cameron said, like I'll, look at the performance stuff and see what's going on, but a lot of it is full side editing experience, so I file that away for later.

[00:21:56] Nathan Wrigley: Okie dokie. All right then. Okay, let's draw a line onto that one, but Bravo, the performance team. Thank you very much indeed.

let's move on to this one. Thi honestly, this would've been so not of interest to me as a story until this morning. and then it suddenly did become of interest to me. This, not no interest, but here we go. Quite an exciting development. So a proposal to roll back auto updated plugins. Again, it's on make wordpress.org.

And I'll just paraphrase, Andy, is his name Frag or Ragan? I don't know how to say his name. I believe it's Frag. Okay. We'll go with Frag. Andy Frag, who wrote this on the, 19th of April. And he's essentially proposing a mechanism whereby if your website is auto updating. Plugins. it will be able to detect in the future that a, certain plugin has failed, or during the process, something about that update has conflicted in a way that has ground your site to a halt, given you a white screen of death or something like that.

And the idea, which is explained in this is how that might happen. And it goes in the technicalities of what happens behind the scenes in WordPress when you click like an update and how all of that takes place. but a really simple. Idea would be that, okay, we spot that there's a problem. We roll it back to the version that was on the site before we did the update, and then we send you some sort of notification to say, okay, this has happened.

And then you can go and obviously take a look for yourself. He says, the biggest risk for a site owner when updating plugins is encountering a PHP fatal error that crashes the website while core updates. Protected by automatic rollbacks since 3.7, no such protection was added for plugins.

Ideally, WordPress should be able to recover in the same way that core does. and then he says To further protect websites and increase confidence in automatic plugin updates within WordPress, the rollback Autumn Auto update feature plugin aims to detect PHP fatal errors during automatic plugin updates and subsequently rolls back to the previously installed versions.

When I said that this was of no interest to me, what I meant by that was it has been literally years, honestly, three years since a plugin update, did anything unexpected on any site. And then this morning I got a white screen of death. From a plugin that got updated. I won't go into it, but it happened. I had a backup, so I just rolled the backup, which was fine, but now, but if that had been on an automatic thing rather than me clicking buttons, I would've been in jeopardy.

my site would've gone down and, it's Monday morning, I've got things to do. So I would've probably put that to the back burner until a bit later. But I just think this is a really neat idea. over to you team, what do you reckon?

[00:24:56] Marcus Burnette: This feels like it falls in the bucket of why haven't we done this already?

Yeah, exactly. Why are we waiting till now? This feels like the sort of use case that you would've gone through when you added auto updates to WordPress. what happens if something goes awry? I personally have a, mental list of which plugins I feel safe turning auto updates on for, and which ones I prefer to manually update and make sure nothing breaks.

This would cut that list in half the list of plugins that I'm not sure about,

[00:25:30] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, so you at the

[00:25:30] Marcus Burnette: very least.

[00:25:31] Nathan Wrigley: So you go into your sites and there's a few that you just pick out because for reasons in your own mind. Sure. You trust that one, you trust that one. So you, turn auto update on for them and, a bunch of them, you just don't because you're not Yeah.

The,

[00:25:44] Marcus Burnette: more complex ones that kind of take over your whole site. I tend to wanna manually do those things like maybe a WooCommerce or something, especially something as critical as that, where it goes down, you lose money. I wanna, I want to have a little bit more hands-on approach to, something like that.

But honestly I would feel safe turning that on for WooCommerce if I knew that I. Auto update rollback was gonna catch something. If it, were to go down, that it would just roll back to the previous version for me. So really that list of plugins that I don't feel safe doing automatically, I would feel safe doing if I had, if I knew that it would just roll back, if something

[00:26:26] Nathan Wrigley: were to go wrong.

Yeah. and I'm guessing that in a, in many cases, the plugin causing the, white screen of death, I say many cases, I have no data to back that up, but will be, because of a, cocktail of other plugins on your website, there'll be some conflict between several things. And so the plugin itself might be fine in 99% of the cases, but in this one particular, version on your website where there's all these things going on, it fails.

and so to have everybody rolling across the whole globe. in this way, everything's on auto update and we'll just take care of the ones that go wrong. That's good for just the security of the web in general, especially around security updates and patching and things like that. So that closes that loop for you, Marcus.

If that worked, you'd feel confident just auto updating everything and, just assume that technology would save you bacon. Okay. Interesting. Cameron Taco. Yeah, yeah, I,

[00:27:25] Taco Verdonshot: go ahead, Cameron. Yeah. Okay.

[00:27:27] Cameron Jones: I, I don't trust auto updates at all, and it frustrates me that the position of the WordPress project seems to be you should have, auto updates on because, you'll get security immediately.

And, that's true, but like also when the automatic updates take your site down, then you know, you could kill businesses with it. if, your site's broken, then it doesn't matter whether it's secure or not, it's. Useless. so yeah, it's, yeah, one of those things that like, yeah, it's good to see and, yeah, I like Marcus.

I, could almost feel comfortable turning auto updates on to an extent. yeah. I dunno if I would yet or not, but, yeah. That's interesting. it's one of those things that would be a prerequisite for me to be comfortable turning it on. Oh,

[00:28:27] Nathan Wrigley: okay. Okay. So you'd consider it if that was, implemented, but until that was implemented, it's not even an option.

[00:28:35] Cameron Jones: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. that's interesting. I get alerts for like critical security updates. Like a lot of the vulnerabilities that there are around tend to be not particularly. easy to like, exploit or, there's lots, it's administrator plus vulnerabilities or, phishing links.

It's it's risky, the cha the actual probability of it being exploited is relatively low. so the actual, number of critical ones like is very low. and, and when that does happen, I get emails from Wordfence or whatever telling me that they are, and I can go and, fix the ones that have it.

yeah, the, benefits of having audit updates on for those edge case that, of the, actual serious vulnerabilities as opposed to, an auto update that I haven't been able to vet, just taking down a site is, it's the, cons have always outweighed the, pros Interesting.

for me, yeah. Yeah.

[00:29:44] Nathan Wrigley: Maybe it's gonna, and

[00:29:44] Cameron Jones: like features like this, like they're kinda like backups, You don't, know you need it until you really, need it. yeah. Like you found out today that, like sometimes plugin updates take down sites. Like it happens. Yeah. And you're scrambling when, you don't have a feature like this.

and it happens. So yeah. It's, good to see, I'm also a little surprised that it hasn't got into core before now. yeah. But I have seen that they've been making incremental steps to get here. In, previous versions, they introduced, if you activated a plugin that errored, then it wouldn't activate.

And they, when you use the file editor inside of WordPress, if you wrote some error code, it wouldn't save and that sort of thing. So I've it's been, coming. and you can see the steps they've taken to go to get there. but yeah, it's good that it's finally coming along.

[00:30:43] Nathan Wrigley: One of the things that I think is quite nice about this is that if you are, like, let's say that you just had automatic updates switched on at the minute and what happened to me.

This morning happened, I wouldn't know which plugin had done it. I just know that a plugin had done it and then I, it would be me going in and okay, disable all of them. Then put them all back on one at a time or something akin to that. Whereas this, the intention from this, and, I forget, I, think this was in the article, was that it will know, so it'll obviously, it'll update 'em one at a time, figure out that was the one, and then it will notify you.

I think email to the site admin is what I seem to remember from the article, and it would tell you which one should do that. So not only is your site should in, it should recovery mode, that tells you which one it's, yeah. Yeah. So not only is your site rescued, but you know where to go looking. As a first point of call.

So again, all really nice tco, anything on that?

[00:31:35] Taco Verdonshot: So the interesting thing is I'm on the complete opposite side of the spectrum from Cameron. none of the sites that I manage, and that's because I don't manage those.com, are relevant whatsoever. If they're down for a week, they're down for a week. Oh, okay.

Someone's probably gonna notice in a week or two. it's local sports clubs. it's not really relevant. So the risk of auto updates is so incredibly low that I rather have those auto updates fill on me once a year than have to log into a website and manually do those updates because no one really visits the sites.

Anyway, we're talking like a few hundred visits a month. I'm a big fan of auto updating and every once in a while breaks and then I'll fix it, which is less work than going in and updating all the things manually. And also because I'm not a developer, there's no way for me to know, I don't review a, an available update.

I can look at the code and go yep, looks like code. But there's no value in me looking at it before installing it. So either it breaks and I have to manually roll it back or it breaks and I have to manually roll it back. But then a week later, it doesn't matter. I don't lose anything from not having these websites.

I. Online for a week.

[00:33:15] Nathan Wrigley: So your relationship with WordPress and the kind of sites that you're building. if you're, if you're only, if you've got one website and that's all you're taking care of and it's your own and you're in there every day, maybe auto updates are fine, but obviously Cameron's now got a different hat with a agency and all of that, and I, yeah, I guess that's a really different position to be in.

You don't want the 50 clients who've all got that plugin that went rogue, overnight, all phoning you at the, especially if it's

[00:33:43] Cameron Jones: one that's on every site. Exactly. Exactly. That's know still something like that is used universally.

[00:33:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, exactly. Okay. So that's really interesting.

So the, where you are, what you're doing, matters in that sense. you are joined Cameron by Rob Kens, he says he doesn't like auto updates for this reason. I, dunno if he doesn't like me or something. He is. Got Nathan at the end of that sentence. What's going on? Rob, he was responding to your I know.

I'm pulling his leg. Cameron auto updates are not worth the risk in my opinion. Okay. I would definitely be switching it on. I think if it proves to be a decent, a good technology that's reliable and there's lots of metrics. I think at the minute they're testing it on, I think it was like six and a half thousand sites or something is what they're planning to roll it out on.

I can't remember. Anyway, the article was called Merge Proposal, rollback Auto Update. So you can go and check that out. Now, to be fair,

[00:34:40] Taco Verdonshot: Nathan, this is coming from Andy and he does have a track record of, being very strict about quality. So if he says it's good to go. Yeah, I'll blindly thrust that. I thought you were

[00:34:55] Marcus Burnette: gonna say, and he's a genius.

I'm, on board with anything he rolls out to.

[00:35:00] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay, good. That's nice. I, I thought you were gonna say he is got a track record of breaking plugins or something that Not at all. No, it's quite the opposite. Exactly the opposite. Okay. watch this space, make wordpress.org. go and check it out over there.

Maybe even give your ideas in the comments. Now it may have, I don't know if you've got this subliminal message from somewhere that there's a summit coming up soon. It's called the Page Builder Subm Summit. I, something, I dunno, it's in the air or something. there it is. There it is. There it is.

it's coming up really soon. And so I'm just doing a quick bit of promotion for that. If you are into kind of page builders and building your websites with tools perhaps rather than code as your first approach. it's back, it's on the 20th to the 24th of May. And if you want to be a part of it, you can show up for free.

It's free for 48 hours after a presentation drops. We make it available for 48 hours. And if you wanna find out about who's speaking and when they're speaking in the schedule and all that kind of thing, click that little button, stick your name and email in. And, we'll keep you updated, but stick it in your diary 20th to the 24th of May this year.

And if you're interested in sponsoring that event, we've got a few of the sponsor packages and you can click on that little link down there, find out more, and we'll let you know. But quite exciting. It's the biggest one that we've done in terms of speaker numbers. We've got over 40, I think we've got like in the top thirties in the past, but this time we've, managed to get over the top of 40.

So it'll be a nice event packed, packed week. So there you go. Anybody got anything to say about that? Just say No, by the way, and then I can move on and not feel quite Icky. Okay. This is a nice event. I can talk about other people's events confidently 'cause it feels less weird. this is the WordPress Accessibility Day 2024.

It's, still a long way off. It's the ninth of the 10th of October, live streaming for free and. Oh, I'm pretty sure that this isn't the page I wanted to show. I'm pretty sure. Was it the call for speakers? I can't really remember. Yep. Thank you. whoever just said, yeah, the call for speakers has come out.

So if, accessibility is a thing that you are knowledgeable about or would like to speak about something, at that event, then head over here. It's 2024 WP Accessibility Day and click on the call for speakers link. it says it's open to anybody who wants to share information about how WordPress and accessibility in intersect never spoken before.

That's fine. Don't hesitate to submit your first talk today. And then there's a list of all of the different bits and pieces that they are looking for. It's all there on that website. I will crack on unless you guys have got something you want to drop in there.

[00:38:00] Taco Verdonshot: let's just make sure that we spread the words and that we got.

As many people as we can apply to speak and then attend the event in October.

[00:38:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[00:38:08] Taco Verdonshot: nice Indeed. It's super important to the future of the web, I'd say.

[00:38:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of fun stuff coming down the, from the W three C in terms of accessibility, all of this, kind of stuff we talked last week about, instead of you deciding whether to toggle light or dark mode, how about the browser just locks that in for you and you instruct the browser.

Okay. This site always show me in dark and show me in light. Anyway, there's just loads going on in the accessibility space. and here's another event. This time in a, country far away from here where Cameron is now. Cameron, this is a serious question. I hope it doesn't come out the wrong way, but from, conversations that I've had with people, it seems like the, word press community, live event community, showing up in the same building at the same time collapsed, like properly collapsed because of Covid.

We had a similar experience in the uk, but we now have things afoot, bringing it back to life. But I've not seen anything in Australia yet. Is this the first inkling of the community coming back?

[00:39:16] Cameron Jones: This is the first word, camp since 2019.

[00:39:19] Nathan Wrigley: Wow. Okay. In the country. Yep. Yep. And, it is gonna be happening from the second to the 3rd of November.

Yeah. As soon as I say that, I think, gosh, it'll be cold, but that's not how it's working, over there. but here it is. It's gonna be happening in Sydney, dah, But I don't know. It looks like the call for speakers has a link. I dunno if they're actually looking for those things.

Let's have a little quick look. Okay. Call for speakers. They're looking for

[00:39:48] Cameron Jones: sponsors and speakers.

[00:39:49] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Call for speakers, call for sponsors right now. you get your foot right in the door at the beginning. You've gotta imagine if, especially if you're a sponsor, you've gotta imagine that the interest in this event is gonna be as high as any in for a long time in Australia.

All the WordPress community, desperate to, to get in the building at the same time. And, yeah, be a scrum at the door. Fascinating. You gonna go, Cameron? Maybe we'll have to say, maybe we'll see. okay. There you go. Okay. there it is though. WordCamp Sydney 20 to 24. Happening from the second to the third.

The URL is sydney.wordcamp.org. You can go and check it out. I would love to be there. speaking of word camps, I thought I'd mention this over at Word Camp Asia. I remember when WordPress TV took like forever to get videos out and I dunno if this is because it's YouTube or not, I dunno, dunno what's going on.

but quite surprised in, a short amount of time. all the videos for Word Cam Asia, which was not that long ago. they're all here, on. YouTube. Now, haven't

[00:41:04] Taco Verdonshot: they also been posted to WordPress tv? I would've

[00:41:06] Nathan Wrigley: thought so. I just found them here on this one link, and I, when I see them on WordPress tv, I don't get that same, I can't see them in such an easy to manage Scrolly way.

And, I just thought I'd mention this. So anyway, the point being, they're out and they're available to watch. So if there was something that you missed when you were there or you had an inclination that you wanted to go but didn't quite manage to make it, but you wanna see some of those events, they're spread at every kind of subject.

There's loads of them. let's just have a look. I think it's 40 46. So that's pretty big. That's almost as big as the page builder summit. I, don't even know. Yeah,

[00:41:50] Taco Verdonshot: so I, I know that I don't wanna put you in a bad position. but I'm super proud of the team working on WordPress TV because they're doing amazing work with a very small team.

so I sent a little link in our private chat Nice. To tell that you are wrong about not having that nice overview for Oh, perfect.

[00:42:15] Nathan Wrigley: Great. Now my only problem is this platform has got JavaScript dis, like all sorts of things, disabled. Can I just read it out so that everybody, and then I'll put it in the show notes.

But I'm delighted to be wrong about that. That's great. let me just find it. So if you go to WordPress tv slash event, I'm reading the right one, aren't I? Forward slash WordCamp dash asia dash. Then the numbers 2024. they're all there. and in, an easy, I wonder why they're putting them on YouTube then.

I wonder if there's just some sort of great SEO benefit or if people stumble across things more on Yeah. Audience. Yeah. Much

[00:42:55] Cameron Jones: more accessible.

[00:42:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I, I find that I've got a few Google accounts, but I, if I'm on the account, which is tuned in with my WordPress habits, so I only look at WordPress stuff.

It is phenomenally good at finding things that I really want to watch. It's scary. Good. 'cause if you, if it's if it's my regular account, it's just showing me all sorts of random stuff. But if I'm on my WordPress, the account, it really, it's just one after another. I could sit there all day.

It's a bit sad really. But anyway, they're there and I will make sure to put the, the non YouTube links into the. Show notes, presumably Taco. The content is absolutely identical, right? Yeah. What we're seeing on YouTube is the exact same video. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So in terms of content, there's no, not necessarily any benefit in going one o with the other, but, okay.

Thank you for helping me out with that. Anything anybody wants to add, shall we crack on? Okay, now, James. What can I say? love your content, but we're all having a bit of, we're all having a bit of a problem with, the website today. I hope, he's watching. so I'm stuck in French. I looked at this piece, which I'm going to be able to tell you about 'cause I've got it open in another tab.

and there it is. I can't, my French is so bad. I can't even tell you what the tr title translates to. But if you go to James Shiru, so James, J-I-R-O-U x.ca. this article, and I don't know if it's translated through Google Translate, I dunno if this is the authentic title name. when the praise, when the phrase Suppose a positive Intention is lost in translation.

but I can only show you the, that's not true. I was gonna say, I can only show you the French version. No, I can't. I can show you the Spanish version. Do you wanna see that for a bit? There you go. Look at the work. Go,

[00:44:57] Marcus Burnette: Japanese. I wanna see it in

[00:44:58] Nathan Wrigley: Japanese. Oh yeah. Okay, look, we can do the Japanese.

Here we go. Nice. Oh yeah, there we go. Yeah. I'll keep it like that I think. No, but if I, select the in Oh, please work now. No, unfortunately the English and, we're all having the same problem, James, so I hope that you managed to, to get whatever, little gremlin in the system is there.

But the article that you wrote was absolutely fabulous, so I will, actually, let's take that off the screen 'cause it's not gonna help us in that way, but I've got the article translated into English over here and, a few bits and pieces that went on this week. The first one, which this, article by James is a way in, there was a tweet which came from, and I apologize about the butchering of your name, Ari Opolis.

Yep. Was that a half decent approximation? That was

[00:45:49] Taco Verdonshot: a half decent approximation. Oh, great.

[00:45:51] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah. More than half I'd say. Yeah. I'm gonna, I'm gonna get a cape and write,

[00:45:58] Taco Verdonshot: I can pronounce one Greek name. Yeah, that's right.

[00:46:02] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, I can do that. they, so Ari has been a, contributor, a titan by all accounts, like a real, force in the WordPress space for years and years.

And this tweet came up and it said, I give up. I can no longer contribute to Guttenberg. I can't understand our code anymore at this stage. It's alien to me, and it keeps getting more and more complex. Instead of similar, I'm wasting too much time trying to understand what we do. And this kind of opened a bit of a tidal wave and it went in every direction really.

A lot of people, really sympathetic and reaching out and just saying, just explain where it's going wrong. variations of that theme. tell me what you're thinking and we'll try to figure it out. And then some other people then obviously jumped on the bandwagon and took this as an opportunity to just open the can of worms, which is let's, let's jump on, Gutenberg and it, get our frustrations about that out.

But firstly as to the issue of somebody, and I'm gonna use air quotes, but I maybe shouldn't, important to the WordPress project. feeling that they're at the point of giving up that seems. That seems a bit sad. I don't really have any other word to describe it, but I don't know, maybe I'll just throw this one at Marcus or Tcho or Cameron, see if they've got anything to say.

Do you have any intuitions around this?

[00:47:35] Taco Verdonshot: So Ari is a former colleague at Jost and he is a very, skilled developer. so seeing that tweet coming from him, I'm very happy that it rela, it raised all those alarm bells. It did. because I do think that if he's unable to keep up, then a lot of people who would be willing to contribute, are probably unable to keep up and will then probably also step out, but quietly, Which might be problematic for WordPress and Gutenberg in the long run.

[00:48:20] Nathan Wrigley: So you, knew Ari, and you've obviously got more than an intuition. You've got an understanding of what he's capable of. is your feeling that he was on the, how to describe, and again, I dunno how I'm gonna summon the words up for this, but was he on the more expert level of the project in terms of his capability to understand something like Gutenberg, if, if you were gonna put a hundred people in a room and say, okay, get to grips with code Ari's, your Ari's, like a really credible you, your top

[00:48:51] Taco Verdonshot: five.

Okay.

[00:48:53] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And so what you are saying there is if somebody as credible and as capable as Ari has had enough, then really that's, alarm bells. Because imagine all the people who are. I don't know who come along, would like to give it a bash and then just are confronted by a tidal wave of something that they really, truly can't understand and then just quit, like you said, quietly.

Okay. Yeah. and that was the concern that quite a few people, had and that was part of James's, post here. Now the day that James wrote this, I actually don't know if it's got a date on it. Oh yeah, it has. It's 24th of April, so this is five days now. And apparently at that point, I don't know many tweets to get this many, views.

86,000 times. It had been viewed five days ago, and I don't know my way around Twitter well enough to know what it would be now, but I'm gonna assume it's north of that.

[00:49:48] Taco Verdonshot: Yep.

[00:49:49] Nathan Wrigley: Currently 87.8. Okay. So it's, not trending in quite the way that it was, but nevertheless, that's a lot of people, eyeballs on this.

And, okay. I'll throw it out into Cameron and Marcus. Maybe just develop taco's idea of, yeah. What do you think, is it a sad state of affairs? Does it, is it a wake up call? Is it just the frustration of one individual and we can all move on?

[00:50:17] Cameron Jones: yeah, I have never really felt like the developer experience for the Gutenberg project has been very good. even right back at the start, like I tried, like I was, involved in some initial alpha testing of Gutenberg before it was even announced, and anyone knew what it was. So I was very excited for it initially.

This is like back in. Maybe 2016, maybe 2015. This, it was a long time ago. and then it was announced and I was very excited and, tried to make blocks and as soon as you managed to get something to work, the next update would just break everything. And so after two or three weeks of that, I just completely gave up and I barely make a native block now.

yeah, the developer experience has never really been great, especially for, like traditional PHP WordPress developers. and even react developers, I worked with a, like react specialist developer on a project once, and he said, this is the most bastardized version of React I've ever seen.

so it's, and the, there's been issues with the documentation like. It's, certainly improved. The documentation team have done a lot of work putting together tutorials and stuff, but you also don't have those auto-generated, like Codex articles that all the PHP functions have, like that those, like articles on WordPress org for all the PHP functions are generated automatically from the code.

We don't have anything like that for any of the JavaScript. and yeah, like I've been saying for years that, the technical implementation of Gutenberg has been flawed and mostly it's just been me screaming out into the void on a blog or Twitter or whatever and, I don't necessarily expect, Matt Mullen to, turn around and, say, ask me to tell him what all the problems are so that he can fix them.

I'm just, one person. And I also see, even back from the start that there were people who were a lot smarter and a lot more influential than me saying the same things, and those things weren't getting addressed. maybe with, someone like Ari saying this sort of thing, then, more attention will be paid to certain bits of it, like, tech technology's never gonna be perfect. There's never a finished website. There's never, code's never finished. and like we, we've seen what it's like trying to get. accessibility concerns addressed. Like it improves, but, it'll, I don't think anyone would ever expect at this point to have a fully access accessible block editor.

It's just not going to happen. 'cause like we've seen how hard the accessibility advocates have pushed and, I'm not sure it's improved a great deal. and I'm just speaking from my experience, using tabs and arrows just to navigate around and finding it going all over the place, let alone using a screen reader.

Yeah. hopefully, someone with Ari's standing and reputation in the community might, Bring forth some change, but, yeah. Yeah. I think it's, hopefully optimistic. It, is very telling that, if someone like him is, saying this sort of thing, 'cause a lot of the, concerns that people have raised have been, it's either, you should have learnt JavaScript deeply or contribute more.

hopefully, Ari saying something like this will, bring about a change of perspective in a way.

[00:54:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. It's maybe something that has lit the, what's the phrase lit? The blue touch paper or something like that sets off a firework anyway. Certainly a lot of people seem to be chiming in and certainly from what the intuition that I had.

I don't know, Ari. but from what Tako has said, definitely a really credible person to listen to when they speak about these kind of things. Okay. So that's a sad bit of news. Marcus, anything you wanted to add before we move on?

[00:55:00] Marcus Burnette: yeah, I'm, not a developer, at least not to the level of, contributing to core and that kind of thing.

I think what's interesting to me is I spent a few days last week at a non WordPress conference, which is rare for me. Most of the things that I go to are WordPress related. But, I wanted to kinda go see one of the other communities and see what they have going on. I think once you step away from WordPress, you very quickly end up in react next Js, Astroland and all of those.

And so what I find interesting is as WordPress has adopted some of those things like react, that it's not this tiny little one-off project that we. I guess I've taken in whatever direction we felt like made sense for WordPress. It's a huge community, which also has, we have the WordPress way, there's also the React way in the next JS way.

Like it would seem to me that if we're building these things the way that the JavaScript frameworks have laid out, that anyone who's into using one of those, I presume Ari is very familiar, very comfortable with the way that those JavaScript frameworks work. should be able to step in and, jump right in and, continue contributing and developing.

And if that's not the case, then, I guess the question for me is why, we decided to go in a different direction than the rest of the folks that are developing those technologies. and hopefully Ari speaking up will. Have some kind of an impact on let's, take a step back and see what we're doing and get that back on track so that we can invite the greatest number of contributors possible.

[00:56:55] Nathan Wrigley: Kind of interesting as well that it's not a, I'm just, I've got other things on my mind. I've, my work's moved on. I've got a different take it. It definitely is a, oh gosh, comment, isn't it? It's like a, it starts with I give up. it is definitely a call for help in a way. Not, help, but, like alerting people that this is going on.

So lots and lots of people chimed in. let's see how that story develops. Maybe more documentation is the answer. Maybe. Yeah, like you said, going and seeing what projects elsewhere are doing. I certainly know for my part, I reckon if I speak to a hundred people, there's definitely a, there's definitely two rival camps when it comes to Gutenberg and that whole thing.

There's the, I'm on board, I love it camp, and I'm implementing it. I don't tend to speak to the, like the people who are developing the code and then there's the people who just simply won't touch it with a barge pole. They, they find it a really alien experience. I think. Cameron, you were saying earlier about full site editing, just staying away from all of that, whether you use the block editor, I don't know, but definitely divisive can be.

I think you're muted, Cameron.

[00:58:09] Cameron Jones: Yeah, I, I use the block editor for content, but not full side editing. Okay.

[00:58:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yep, Okay. anyway, that piece by James.

[00:58:20] Taco Verdonshot: Yeah. The positive thing that James highlights in his piece though, is that a lot of the core contributors to Gutenberg chimed in and were really helpful and, really trying to understand, what was going on and what, are the blockers that, Ari is experiencing.

So I'm quite hopeful that Good will come from this.

[00:58:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think you're right. And in fact, that was gonna be the next bit. Unfortunately, this translate, the, English translation has the Twitter. images where you can see the corresponding text from the, from the people who chimed in. So there was the likes of Courtney.

Robertson was asking, a question about, what were Ari had been up to. and so were a bunch of other people, but on the, version that I've got on the screen, be it Japanese or what have you, for some reason those little tweets never quite made it over, but maybe I'll just endeavor to read a couple of them around.

Riyad, Benguela, I want to learn more about this. So he is replying directly to Ari. can you expand? I want to try to understand and see what we can do to improve the situation. Damon Cook, sorry to hear this. You've done some amazing work and pushed a lot forward. I'd be curious to hear more about your observations.

Feel free to hit me up and various others. Courtney, like I said, contributing as well. And actually the piece by James is not about this story. The piece by James is about how we communicate and be supportive and be positive and. All of those kind of things. But, I thought it was a nice way to dig into this particular subject.

So anyway, Ari, best of luck. My understanding is that Ari's not saying I'm outta WordPress, it's just I'm gonna find other things in WordPress to be involved with. maybe something that, that he's happier with going forward. But there we go. Alright, let me find the next little piece. And it is, oh, this is nice community thing.

Oh, there we go. this is applications for the Kim Parel Memorial Scholarship. If you have the inclination that you'd like to go to WordCamp us and for reasons that are known to you, you are unable to go. Maybe that's because you don't have the finances available, or whatever it may be. This. scholarship exists and you can apply for it from now.

it, provides if you are the recipient, it provides travel assistance for the recipient to attend, including, hotel stay, travel to and from the event from your home for the entire duration of the event. They'll put you up, they'll give you a ticket, and so on and so forth. it is in commemoration of Kim, Parel, who was a contributor, WordPress open source, and this scholarship is in honor of her legacy.

The eligibility criteria are as follows. you have to be an act, an active contributor to WordPress project. So I guess you, From now probably doesn't count. You probably had to have been involved previously. a woman, you can't have attended a word camp us in the past. And it says here, eligibility req criteria requires financial assistance.

So I guess there needs to be some way to demonstrate that as well. So anyway, spread the word. That's the thing. you can go and, apply for that. Also, sticking with Word Camp, events like Word Camp, us and Sydney and so on. The, only word camp that's taken, oh, I could be wrong about this. I've put my foot in this all the time.

that's happened in the uk Whitley Bay, which is not that far from me. it was took place last year. It was a one day event. Everything inside a one room, one track, one everything. And it's happening again. And they're looking for speakers. The deadline is pretty soon. oh. Has it gone? Oh, looks like it's passed.

Oh, I miss that. This piece, I put this in my bookmark thing and I thought I've got the week right, but I've got the week wrong. Anyway, at propo you couldn't have

[01:02:26] Taco Verdonshot: applied to speak.

[01:02:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's happening though. The reason I, if you did,

[01:02:30] Marcus Burnette: you'll find out this week.

[01:02:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. but w Whitley Bay is an event, it's Northeast England.

put it in your diaries. Go and Google Word Camp Whitley Bay. Oh, I'm sorry about that. Whitley Bay, I, messed that up. This is,

[01:02:44] Taco Verdonshot: I think most, I'm actually a little bit involved with Whitley Bay because I Oh. Basically signed on as their mentor, for the work camp. which is amazing because the team is quite experienced, so I don't expect a whole lot of work from me, but

[01:03:03] Nathan Wrigley: that's the best.

Yeah, you wait and see. but apparently the event was really great last year. Tim Nash, who's often on this, he was an attendee and he said it felt to him like, like an old school Word camp event. not one of these bigger, like Word Camp Europe and all of those where there's multiple tracks and lots of everything.

He said it was great because everything was in one room and the food was in the same room, so all the speakers had to finish their sessions and then they moved the tables around and all that kinda stuff. sounds like a nice event anyway, but it's happening again this year. Patricia just joining us, she to watch the replay.

I love your show. Thank you very much. Got email today. our call for speakers is currently open but close on the 5th of May. Do you know what Jackson? That, I think that's maybe why I included it as well. Because I have an intuition that I got an email which said that the date was later. So maybe go and check that out.

If you are interested in speaking and you're listening to this, don't trust what I just said about it ending already. It, I think there's a possibility that it is actually carrying on until the 5th of May, but this form definitely hasn't been updated to show that Cameron's with the theme,

[01:04:13] Cameron Jones: later.

[01:04:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[01:04:15] Cameron Jones: According to that Twitter, it closes on the 5th of May.

[01:04:18] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So they've obviously extended it, but never quite got to this, form, okay. Good to know. oh, great. I feel like I averted a, a calamity there. That was good. All right, so I think this is probably the most interesting story from my perspective this week.

I'm just gonna show you the post status thing and then we'll move on to various other things. This is Michelle who's in the comments, saying that wordpress.com. Have launched a product called Studio. And if you've ever used, like a local develop development environment, something like Local, which I think is that owned by WP Engine now, who runs local?

Yeah. We are all nodding. Okay. WP Engine's local. Remember it was Flywheel for a while and then in fact even before it came, that's real Flywheel branded. WP Engine bought Flywheel. Yeah. And then before that though, before Flywheel bought it, it was some other. Individual developer, and I can't remember what it was called, but I bought a license for it and it was brilliant and it still maintains, it is still brilliant, but basically imagine that product but with a few little twists and turns thrown in.

So Michelle had a go and, she says that she's not a developer, but she was able to get it working, in short order. I had the same experience. I downloaded it honestly. You just click some buttons and you're up and running with local workforce websites. and here we are. This is the piece. There's a video of how it all works and what have you.

One of the things that I think is really interesting is that the normal development environments, you launch it and you've got a button to go to, like the WP admin or the front end, and you can change the PHP version and the, I don't know, you could pick n Engine X or Apache or something like that.

This though. We'll bolt into your wordpress.com account and with the click of a button, your local website will go over to.com and I think it's free, right? I think that's free, but I think you get five at the minute. You get five of those sites and they have a clock ticking. So you've got, I think, seven days.

So a week in order to play with them. And then who knows what happens? Presumably they get recycled back into the trash can, or maybe there's an option to, I don't know, extend their life over on.com. So there's that piece of the puzzle. Free hosting, for a period of time, thrown in on the.com infrastructure, but also in the ui.

Now let me see if I can surface it a little bit. Here we go. There's a picture here. Sorry dear listener. but I'm gonna show something on the screen. you can click buttons in the UI and be taken directly to bits of your brand new WordPress website, which have obviously been the, cause of many a, many a discussion in this podcast.

for example, you can click a button and go straight to the site editing. Editing experience. So it's, not like you have to log in and then figure out where all that is. You can go and start to fill around with your styles. You can be taken into where all the patterns are stored. You can go to the navigation, the templates, the pages, and then you can do the, the usual things like, find it in Your Finder or Windows Explorer.

I think there's a Windows, windows beta version or something like that on the, or you can open it in your vs. code editor or in the terminal or what have you. So I think this is, I think this is a really interesting play in that it's making real front and center decisions about what matters in a modern WordPress site.

let's get your style sorted. Let's get your patterns set up. Let's get the navigation underway, and you just click buttons in this local environment, so you're not even in the UI of WordPress. And I, just thought that honestly, if you'd have, if you'd have told me this product was coming around, I wouldn't have imagined it.

I, would not have imagined these buttons would've been there. So I'm actually terribly excited about this and I know Cameron isn't using it like probably any of this, stuff here with the full sight editing. But I do think it's a really interesting experience. Now, I'm sure a lot of people say, but it's dot com.

Yeah, but it's still on your local machine and you can put it wherever you like when you're finished. And they're giving you a website for free for seven days, five of them. And I guess maybe you can recycle those five. I don't know. I'm, delighted that this product exists. I think it's really cool.

Enough of me. Go on, tell me I'm wrong.

[01:08:57] Taco Verdonshot: So I haven't played with it myself yet. I asked some colleagues earlier when preparing for the show and they were like, yeah, it works. but compared to local, I'm not sure if it's the game changer that will get everyone who's currently using, local to switch over.

So

[01:09:23] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, I think, that's a really important thing. Local has got so much traction that pulling all of your sites out of local into this, I dunno how easy that process will be. Presumably you could just, locate it in the finder. I dunno how you get the database all hooked up and I dunno. I dunno.

But

[01:09:41] Taco Verdonshot: neither, but I'm curious

[01:09:42] Nathan Wrigley: to see where it goes. But don't you think that, don't you, is there a bit of you that thinks the UI is fascinating? And again, I apologize if you're listening. We're just looking at the UI and there are buttons, like I said, to take you directly into what.org has been, Talking about for months and years, how to get people excited about full site editing. How to make them understand that, styles live here and the navigation is a thing. And it's all been terribly confusing with these non joinin bits. And one month it's over here and the next month it's over there.

I think this is really interesting and it wouldn't, I dunno, I'm, going to, it would be fascinating if something like this were to drop into WordPress. I don't suppose it will, but anyway, yeah. You can see, or, as

[01:10:31] Taco Verdonshot: a plugin that will bring this feature to WordPress for the

[01:10:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. I think you are right though.

Tcho, I don't think anybody's gonna stop using what is already a totally credible tool. And if you are a WordPress. if you are developing sites locally with WordPress, I suspect the chances are, your way around WordPress anyway. But I did wonder if the experience for a, non-professional or just somebody tinkering with WordPress wanting to give it a try and not wanting to pay for hosting, but happy to download a bit of software and click a few buttons to see what WordPress can do for you.

Yeah, I just thought it was pretty neat. and I didn't see it coming.

[01:11:10] Taco Verdonshot: And we haveta, WP we have local, there's other setups that people use. I'm sure the market isn't fully saturated yet, so there's gonna be an audience for this as well.

[01:11:27] Marcus Burnette: yeah.

[01:11:28] Taco Verdonshot: Anyone, any

[01:11:28] Nathan Wrigley: thoughts on that, Marcus or Cameron?

[01:11:31] Marcus Burnette: it feels to me like this is a. A good tool for someone that's new to WordPress, right? yeah. yeah, They haven't made, they haven't formed an opinion on using a page builder or not, or certain other plugins. They're being dumped into the native experience and, you get to tinker with that and see what it looks like.

I think as far as I know, it runs playground. So yeah, really not that much different than simply opening up playground in a browser other than you do get a chance to share a link with somebody else for a week, as it creates a version of this on.com and gives you a link that you can then share.

So I guess in that sense it's a little bit different. I am curious to see what other than. Straight into.com, what the export options are if you already have a host that you'd like to use instead. Can you spin this up? I know it's difficult to do with playground right now. If you, spin up a playground site and then you wanna move that to a host, that's not the easiest thing in the world.

I imagine. This is the same unless you're going to.com, which they've obviously built an immigration path for. so honestly, great sales tool for wordpress.com to take a playground site and get people onboarded into wordpress.com. There's no doubt in my mind, I haven't gotten a chance to play with it.

There's no doubt in my mind that you can't take one of those week long sites and turn it into a full wordpress.com account. hosting plan, there's. Be silly not to be honest. so I, think it's partially a sales tool. I think it's partially a great tool for beginners to check out what WordPress is all about without getting deeper into the community of plugins and themes and all of that are out there as well.

I find it interesting like Cameron, none of the six buttons under customized here are gonna do me a whole lot of good because I don't tend to use the full site editing experience. but that's not what this is intended for. I don't think this tool is intended for me, someone who's built lots of websites and has a list of plugins and a page builder that I'm already comfortable with.

[01:13:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So I think you're right. The more that I think about this, and honestly, my intuitions weren't really, fully, switched on, I don't think. I think this is a a.com. Play, isn't it really? it's a, bit of software. You download it onto your computer, have a play, and then you literally click a button that says, add a demo site.

I've combined it with my wordpress.com account 'cause I wanted to see what that did. And then you, just wait a few seconds and it really is that simple. there's no configuration or anything, it's just go wait a bit and, it's up there in the, in the.com cloud. But the, lim, it's definitely not got all the bells and whistles that the other ones have.

So what you can see on the screen there is the first screen, and if you click on share, the, only [email protected]. There is no other option to, I don't know, combine it with some sort of SSH or something like that to get it elsewhere. It's just.com and then the settings are also more stripped back.

You've got, you can edit the site name, you can copy the, port that it's on. You can see the path change, the username and password of the website. But that's it. you don't have all the sort of email catching and all of that kind of stuff that you find on other sites. so yeah, so now that you have all spoken, I'm seeing it as a bit more of a.com thing than I had seen it as, which was a local development environment.

Of course, you never have to click the share button, you can just use it as a local development environment and these buttons on the screen. I just think that's such an interesting idea to try and get everybody involved in those bits, which I know a lot of people struggle to figure out. Michelle says, not sure trying, I'm not sure.

It's trying to get anyone to switch as much as providing for tools for those who haven't a clue. Already. Yeah. Okay. I think you're probably right. And, Patricia, I'm not switching from Ragone, she says so on, on our panel, nobody's switching, but I, certainly installed it and now I've got a WordPress logo on my desktop, so there is that, but then the, desktop background is just the Word press logo, so there was no great win there. Alright. I thought that was fascinating. Anyway, I just wanted to mention this. I have no idea how long this plugin has been out. It's probably been around for ages, but I just want to give a hat tip to, Ryan Welcher for his advanced query loop plugin.

if you want a free, fully credible way to loop through something inside the block editor, I don't know, blog posts, custom post types, showing featured images, all of that, it's there. And we were talking about playground. I just think. Boy is playground. Cool. So I know there was all this drama about this button, here, if you've got a plugin, and should it be there, shouldn't it be there?

now Ryan has decided it should for him, not that he didn't say it anyway, but, he certainly made the decision. I want the button. And just, where, what era are we living in? How easy is our whole life? Do you remember when like trying out a plugin was just fraught with friction? You just click the button and in another browser, WordPress in playground is in, is installing itself.

it's not on any computer anywhere else. It's not doing anything weird. It's just in my browser. If I close this window, it's gone. It's ready.

[01:17:35] Marcus Burnette: Yeah. It's just with, dependencies and potentially sample content depending on, it has got sample content

[01:17:43] Nathan Wrigley: because if you go into the, if you go in here and you click on his little query loop, I think it's this post template now it's probably inside the query loop.

You could, I don't know, let's do, what did he say? Three posts per page or something like that? You just, I dunno, slide it across. Did you see look at it doing its thing? oh. It's just honestly, anybody who's starting WordPress now you've got studio to. Click buttons to make your site exist. Now you've got all these things to try your plugins out for free.

old curmudgeon in me. it should. We need to introduce friction. It's too easy. Yeah. Anyway, hat tip to, to Ryan for that and just a

[01:18:27] Taco Verdonshot: quick look at GitHub to see if I could find, if this is an, a completely new plugin and, version 1.0 0.2 is about two years old.

[01:18:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's not new at all.

I just came across it this week and just thought, I'll try it and then. immediately click that playground button. And I, that's, honestly the first time that I've really delved into a plugin off the strength of clicking that button. And I just thought that's not only is it smashing plugin, but what a nice thing to show on the screen with ev.

just how easy it is to do that. And you can see I've done it multiple times. It's a whole load, different browsers. Anyway, I'm gonna close those. And they have now gone, they don't exist anymore. They're gone. And it's saying leave. I don't want to click leave just in case I close something that I didn't intend to.

There's yet another one. okay. And then if that excites you and you want to use, playground, do your own thing on your own website. For example, I came across this article, which came up this week. Ronnie Shawney, is explaining how to use playground for interactive demos. And it's all code, so we're not gonna cover it, but there it is.

quick hat tip to, This person, which is Leonardo or Leo Lovich, who came on the podcast and did, some episodes with me about his GraphQL. He's written a really nice article about GraphQL on the Smashing Magazine, and I just thought I'd give him a bit of a hat tip. and let's move on to some presenter or co-host or host, whatever you people.

Are you panelists joining me? your content prisoners got, yeah, that would be, yeah, People, the people with me on the screen. and this one coming from Yost is obviously coming from Marcus Burnett. 'cause his name's Cameron. no, this is from Taco. Tell me about this. please explain and honestly, whilst you're at it, can you just clear up the whole WooCommerce woo thing for us so that we know what went wrong there, please.

The,

[01:20:33] Taco Verdonshot: let's start with the last thing first. Okay. but I'll do the dummy summary because that's about my level. they made the decision to go from woocommerce.com to woo.com, whilst also rebranding their, some of their stuff, that led to, Slight loss of visibility in, search engines and they attracted some smart people and now reverted it.

And it looks like they're more visible than ever with woocommerce.com. So in the end, it turned out fine. What we should

[01:21:13] Marcus Burnette: all switch our brand and switch back, is what you're telling me.

[01:21:17] Taco Verdonshot: That's not the story that we should have. Yeah. It should be a calamity, but it always great news. I, think the key there is to hire EO experts when you're making

[01:21:28] Nathan Wrigley: a switch.

I did wonder, and I'm not gonna get you to say anything, but I did wonder who the, SEO experts were. 'cause they were just labeled as SEO experts, but nobody was mentioned. yeah, I'll just leave that hanging is all I'm gonna say.

[01:21:43] Taco Verdonshot: that's fine. We can leave at that.

[01:21:45] Nathan Wrigley: okay. wow.

Off the back of that expert advice. They've actually, maybe they've improved their SEO over time. Okay. But a big part of that was to do with this update on Google in March. Now, honestly, I don't follow the Google news at all, but, by all accounts, every anecdotal thing that I've read is that it was a big deal.

It was like a fairly seismic change. Okay. You've got a piece on yost.com called Surviving the March, 2024 Google Core update. Yeah. Give us the top level items, what's going on.

[01:22:18] Taco Verdonshot: Google regularly does big updates where, they introduce new things or focus on a specific problem. and they started rollout of a quite a big update on March 5th, and that is, was aimed at, getting rid of low quality, Results in their search results. So AI generated non informational websites that do not add any value to the web whatsoever, basically. and that, update has been rolling out for a very long time Now. This article was, published four days ago. but in the meantime, we already have a new update and that is that the rollout finished, which means that we can start doing postmortems now to see what really changed.

But according to Google's own accounts, they aimed for a 40%, improvement of the, the search results, and they managed to get around 45. But it will take some time for, SEOs to really dive into this and see what the effects were. but yeah, it's, been a very long rollout for a sort of regular update from Google and a lot of sites were affected.

So if you are managing a website, do check your analytics to dive in to see what happened to your website, because things may have changed for you in the past

[01:24:06] Nathan Wrigley: couple of weeks. Was the update, broadly speaking, I'm sure that there'll be other things in it, but was there a big focus on the whole AI thing then?

Was that a large part of it?

[01:24:17] Taco Verdonshot: it was focusing on non-helpful content. which by default AI generated content is if you just go to chat GPT and say, write me an article about. Without, yeah, A real decent prompt and original ideas and yada

[01:24:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:24:39] Taco Verdonshot: So yes, as part of its target.

[01:24:45] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. I have to say, my intuition would be that Google would have to do this at some point. the whole AI thing does seem like a bit of a. A puzzle, put it that way. You can't just flood the landscape with 15,000 word articles that took four seconds to create and forever that be the way it's gonna be.

But equally, I'm so confused as to how Google even knows, because when I read these things, I know there's some tells in there. You read the text and there's, I don't know, there's a load of fantastic language that no human actually uses. But still, as it gets better and better, I do think Google's job is gonna become harder and harder.

And I do feel a little bit sorry for companies who got beguiled by it and just through their marketing teams under a boss, and just decided to go all in with AI and now a. Paying the price. I don't feel sorry. You know what I mean? I feel that, anyway. Okay. So this article is helping human

[01:25:43] Taco Verdonshot: writers would be valuable.

[01:25:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:25:46] Taco Verdonshot: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:25:47] Nathan Wrigley: Maybe more so than ever. so yost.com surviving the March, 2024 Google Core update. So this is your, this is the beginning of your postmortem piece, trying to figure out what was going on and,

[01:26:00] Taco Verdonshot: this, yeah, this was, this is what you should be looking forward to see if you were affected.

[01:26:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:26:06] Taco Verdonshot: and it will be updated soon to reflect, okay. What we learned postmortem.

[01:26:13] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Thank you very much indeed. And we're nearly out of time. I I think, to be honest with you, I don't really want to go into this. I was gonna do the ai, image generation, but now that we've had a chat with Taco about ai, content, but this is, I've just very briefly, if you've got a bunch of Adobe products, they've got this firefly.

Three AI image generation in Photoshop. I don't own Photoshop, but I watched a couple of videos and I just felt like giving up, frankly. It was like, what the heck? We're not needed anymore. the AI images, they're getting so good. So there we go. I've had to miss a few bits and pieces out. There'll be extra links inside the show notes that I didn't get to today.

but thank you for joining us. Thank you to, taco down there. Thank you to Cameron, who's really I go to bed. Cameron is, is my advice. Now go to bed. In fact, don't delay. Off you go. We'll understand. yeah, that's right. Yeah. And over there, no where is, it's Marcus Burnett. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you to anybody who made a comment. Really appreciate it. We'll put this episode out, tomorrow morning about seven o'clock UK time. For reasons nobody including me fully understand. Seven o'clock in the morning. But there you go. That's what I decided to do and that's what I've done. but we'll be back next week.

We'll have three other guests. Thank you for joining us and we will see you next week. Thank you so much, guys. Oh, no. Wait. wave. What the heck? I didn't do the wavy hand thing. Oh, honestly, I've never have forgiven myself. So we must do that before we go. So you would've

[01:27:56] Marcus Burnette: just used Photoshop to ai hands in.

I would've.

[01:27:59] Nathan Wrigley: Give me your hands Photoshop thing. There we go. Cameron's refusing. No, he is not. No, he is not. No, he is not. There we go. Perfect. What a silly gimmick that is. And on that bombshell, we will be back next week. Take it easy. Thanks guys. Bye-Bye. Thanks. Bye-Bye.