This Week in WordPress #296

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress, episode number 296, entitled the laurels will cut your derriere.

It was recorded on Monday the 6th of May, 2024. My name's Nathan Wrigley. And I'll be joined by three fabulous guests today. I'm joined by Kyle van Deusen by Andrew Palmer and by Rachel Winchester.

We're here to talk about WordPress. So that's what we do.

We start off talking about how much quicker WordPress has got over the years, and what it is that we do individually to speed up our websites.

We're get into a fairly long conversation about a proposal to make the inserter in Gutenberg, open by default. Who knew that we would get so into that.

Digital sustainability is a thing. Making our websites greener is very important. How do we do that? And there's a podcast episode link as well.

The WordPress Media Corp is a thing. Has it upset the community? How's it got the right intentions. Are the right people going to be involved? We have a difference of opinion on the panel. There's some word, press events coming around the corner, and there's also some online events that we mentioned as well.

Jetpack stats used to be free. It's not anymore.

And building sites with just HTML, CSS and a little bit of JavaScript. Is that a good idea?

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.

And by Bluehost. Redefine your web hosting experience with Bluehost Cloud. Managed WordPress hosting that comes with lightning fast websites, 100% network uptime, and 24 7 priority support. With Bluehost Cloud, the possibilities are out of this world. Experience it today at bluehost.com/cloud.

This week in WordPress, episode number 296, getting close to 300. That's pretty good. See your maths there. See quick maths. Woo. we're joined. I'm gonna, we've got four, but only three of us are on the screen at the moment, but we'll, we'll get the fourth guest on. they have just popped into the call.

Perfect. But we'll get you, and you know who you are. We'll get you on the screen in just a moment. But first of all, I'm going to introduce who we've got on the screen. First of all, joining us from, just over there about three or four inches that way is Andrew Palmer. How are you doing, Andrew? I. I'm good.

[00:03:04] Andrew Palmer: Thank you, Nathan. Good morning. Yeah. Good. Yeah. Morning, afternoon, evening. Yeah. Yeah. I was gonna say, you're in the same country as me. What the heck? it's five minutes past two in the afternoon, but Andrew Palmer is joining us. Andrew, I'm gonna, okay. I'm gonna read it. Hopefully there's nothing inflammatory in here.

[00:03:20] Nathan Wrigley: Let's see what happens. Andrew is a softly opinionated WordPress and business advocate. He loves his, he loves, oh, okay. All right. I see it now. He likes some podcasts. He owns and runs somebody's hero co.uk. And Hoston maintains over 500 customer websites. He is an end user customer advocate and wants devs of WordPress core to be end user aware first.

I read that really slowly. I apologize. I was just careful of more trip wires in case there's something else. He wrote something highly inflammatory in there, which I'm not gonna read now. he didn't by the way, I'm also joined, I don't know if Kyle's been on the show. Have you been on the show before?

Kyle? Vin Diesel. Vin Deusen, van Deusen? I have, but it's been probably in the one hundreds. It was a long time ago. oh. Kyle has a meeting every single week at this exact time, but he, he got in touch with me last week to say my meeting's not on. can I come on the show? And I was more than happy, to have him on.

Let me read the bio. after spending 15 years as a graphic designer and earning a business degree, he launched his agency, Al Web Design, OGAL. Go Google it. that was in the year 2017. A year later, after finding the amazing community around WordPress, he co-founded the admin bar. Go Google that, which has grown to become the number one community for WordPress professionals.

He's a husband, proud father of three, and a fairly new resident of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Wait, what? Commonwealth? Yes. Why is it called that over here on the East Coast? Is it not a state? It is, I, there's, ties back to the, original colonies here, oh, it's just fun to say, I feel fancy if I say the Commonwealth.

Okay. Yeah, that does, that sounds really, fancy. we were gonna be joined by, Kathy Zant. That was probably gone out on some of the, the promotional materials that we sent out. Sadly, Kathy can't join us. but hopefully Kathy, you are gonna be feeling better soon. I was just about to put our third guest in, which is Rachel Winchester, and as I leaned over to grab the mouse, she disappeared from the call and she's back.

She's back in the room. Here we go. Let's see if it'll work. Hello. I'm here. I need it. Nice to have you. sorry about the technical gremlins. Hopefully you're gonna be able to, stick around and everything will work as planned, I believe. that Rachel, or do you wanna be known by win? I can see you've got win on the screen there.

Yeah, we'll go with it. Yeah. Most people know me by win. Okay. so I don't think win, have you been on this show before? I'm not sure if you have. I have maybe two years ago. Okay. Okay. Thank you. You're in good company then you and Kyle down there on the, on the, I'm not even gonna say it, but let me give you your bio.

So Rachel Winchester or Winn for short. There we go. Is an independent product designer, public speaker, and the founder of the focus assistance, a Brooklyn based startup catcher hosting the Philly WordPress meetup virtually every month. And the www work with WIN livestream on LinkedIn every week. Win Started visual webmaster LLC, where she pursues a variety of internet projects as well as hosts, art and design workshops, showcases and related events.

She's always looking to collaborate with other technologists, creatives, and entrepreneurs in innovative ways. So there they are. There's our panel. If you've got anything you want to say to our panel, feel free to do that. The best place to go and catch the, sort of live feed is this URL. And, oh.

Mostly Kyle, when we do this show, somebody's head gets obliterated by that. But you are like significantly high up you. Yeah, just get your chin on there. go share this. It's WP Builds.com/live. Oh, he's a pro. Look at him pointing to the lower third. You're lucky 'cause I did it with this hand first. We can see it.

That's great. Oh, that's brilliant. yeah, so go join us there, WP Builds.com/live. Please feel free to share it. The more comments we get, the more fun the show tends to be. And we usually get a bunch of weather reports right at the beginning. So shall we begin there? Let's see what we get. First off the bat, first of all, we're joined by Elliot's just down the road from me.

He lives in a place called Briton and, Elliot Howe, nice to have you with us. Appreciate it. I dunno how to pronounce that. T Drayson or Td Rayon who's just saying Hey. Hey. Nice to have you with us. Courtney is joining us. She's said Good morning friends. At just home from Buffalo Word Camp Buffalo. Oh, nice.

Nice. Courtney. Dave Dun web dev. Hi everyone. Nice to have you with us as well. bge. Hey, from Germany and here we go. Here begins the weather. Peter Ingersol every week drops in to tell us about the weather in the commonwealth of Connecticut. I don't know if it's commonwealth, it probably isn't.

Good morning from cloudy Connecticut, where it's 12 degrees centigrade, 54 degrees Fahrenheit, heading up to a nice 22 this afternoon. That is a nice temperature. Funny. You should, this is apropos of nothing. I was just in the car with my wife and we decided that 22 degrees was the perfect temperature. Peter Ingersol.

Nice. You've, you've got it. Kathy's jaw, Kathy in the chat. Sorry to miss it. Oh, I'm glad that you are, you are feeling okay. That's great. And Rosie, Robinson saying hi. It's rainy in the uk. Not where I am. it's nice and sunny where I'm, and good morning says Marcus ett as well.

Patricia, she's coming in from Geneva, Switzerland, where it's rainy today. And WP site helper. This isn't my Zoom traffic court appointment. Dang it. Oh, okay. I dunno what that means, but maybe one of you does. but nice to have you all with us punctuation maybe. Okay. Okay. Alright. okay, so there's our panel, there's how the comments work.

Please feel free if you go to WP Builds.com/live and you are logged into YouTube. You can use the comment box on the right of the, of the screen. But if you are not wanting to be logged into anything, just click the little live chat in the window and you can comment anonymously and that'll all work absolutely fine.

Okay. Let's share our screen and get on with it. the usual self-promotion. I'm afraid I. this is just to say that this is our website. we produce podcast episodes like this on a, we record it on a Monday and it goes out on a Tuesday. And then we do a podcast episode every Thursday, which is just, audio go straight into your ears.

And if you wanna be kept up to date with that, put your name into this box and click the subscribe on. No, don't put your name in there. It will fail. It's an email address. Kyle's no, you did that last week. Yeah, I did the same thing, didn't I? put your email address in there and click subscribe and we'll send you a couple of emails a week and not much in the way of, spammy stuff.

I'd like to point out that we've got two nice sponsors at the moment. Long relationship with GoDaddy Pro, so continue thanks to them. But joining us just recently actually, and for the foreseeable future is Go is Bluehost. So real big thank you to those two companies. They help us to keep the lights on, the podcast and, make it all possible so that we can, we can make this content for you.

Last bit of self-promotion. Here it comes, Page. Ah, there we go. Oh, thought the site had crashed. Then the, the page builder summit is back. It's happening as you can see there between the 20th and the 24th of May, 2024. If you take a little look and scroll down, you'll be able to see all of our amazing speakers.

We've got absolutely loads. This is the biggest one that we've done in terms of content. I think we've got over 40 presenters. Usually it's around the high 30, something like that. it's totally free. You can watch the, content for free for, 48 hours after it comes out. And then we have this upsell where if you part with a small amount of cash, we will allow you to have that content forever and ever Amen. And so that's page builder summit.com. Click that button and then put your email into this box and your name into this box. Then. Click this button and it'll go wrong, it was a joke. so there we go. Page builder summit.com. Check it out, right? Let's get stuck into the WordPress stuff.

So this isn't new. In fact, we had this on a week ago, or maybe a couple of weeks ago, and it was all about how WordPress was getting quicker. And it occurred to me that I, when I, did that piece, it was totally outta context. I didn't really talk with the people on the panel about what they do. So just very quickly, Felix ans who's on the WordPress performance team, was just outlining all the pretty incredible things that team have done to make WordPress core faster.

And so it's all things like image optimization, the, interactivity, API, the fact that the block editor loads a lot quicker. So there's loads and loads of different pieces in that jigsaw puzzle, but I was wondering what you, oh, you good folk do When you think about making your WordPress websites. Fast. is this a conversation that you get into with your clients?

Do you have to persuade them that WordPress is not some sort of, Luddite slow, old fashioned piece of code? honestly, crosstalk, it's over to you. How do you take care of making your websites fast?

Yeah, I can go for it. so as someone who makes Elementor websites, knowing that's a really big, heavy plugin, I always opt for managed posting. And if someone's using, if a client is, wants to make an Elementor site, I make sure I choose the right host. It's a good place to start, isn't it?

If you go for a big, WordPress host, presumably with something like a, I don't know, A-C-D-N-A Content Delivery Network or something like that. The nice thing about the managed WordPress host I always thought is that you can stop thinking about it. You just press the button, pay your monthly fee, and then think, okay, that's somebody else's.

Problem. Whereas if you've, I don't know, digital ocean droplets here, there and everywhere, then you've got all of that to worry about and the OS to update and everything. So anyway. Yeah. Okay. Great. Great advice. Start with managed hosting, Kyle or Andrew, anything you want to add? Yeah, I, moved to using blocks to build sites.

[00:13:40] Kyle Van Deusen: A big reason for that being that it was so much quicker to do things. I'm a huge fan of the Perf Matters plugin. It does all kinds of fancy performance optimization bits there that help out quite a bit. Obviously good hosting, optimizing your images, all those things. I'm also a huge fan of just keeping websites as simple as possible.

So minimalism is good in my book, and that's not only good for, I think for users being able to find information, but for things like accessibility and performance and all those. So that's definitely in my wheelhouse. I was always one for doing it with plugins if I could do Something like the Perf Matters plugin, which I haven't actually used, but I know it, it gets solidly recommended more or less wherever I go.

[00:14:21] Nathan Wrigley: But my problem with those kind of things is I never quite knew what if, okay, if I tick this box, what's actually. What's actually happening and will it break something down the line and there's this page buried within a page, This little thing that might break because I've combined the CSS or something like that.

So I was always a bit nervous to do that and just put on the minimum settings and then looked at it for a few days and then click something else and saw if that broke anything. But yeah, plugins, just the way we actually did like a two hour long webinar with Brian, the founder of Perf Matters, to go through every setting in his plugin and talk about what does this do?

[00:14:59] Kyle Van Deusen: How dangerous is this to turn this on? And it does get very complicated. what's nice about that plugin in particular is you can export all your settings. So if you're using like a similar stack across all your websites, you can have your baseline set up in that and export and import it to sites and not have to worry about that too much.

[00:15:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the, the curious thing about WordPress is there's so much that comes onto a WordPress page that really doesn't need to be there. if you look at the HTML, there's loads and loads of things that you just don't need, and in a sense, it would be nice that. There was toggles inside a WordPress core to turn a lot of that kind of stuff off, but those plugins, handle that admirably.

we'll get onto some other options in a minute, but finally, Andrew, what about you? What's your go-to first? Yeah. I used, the two major hosts I use, have CDNs built in and use Edge caching. So that really, helps. and the only, I've tried perf matters, but it was just too complex for me.

[00:15:55] Andrew Palmer: 'cause I'm not, I'm brainless so WP Rocket, which you can turn off the HTML and the, and unused CSS and all that kind of stuff and make sure that plugins only load when they're being used. they, perf matters is great, don't get me wrong, but it's just for me, it's just, I don't wanna, and I know you can export the setting, same as WP Rocket, you can export those, but on cheaper hosting and certainly on my, I use grid pane for some of my hosting, their caching rules are brilliant.

they're just. Immediately, your sites are just faster. So then all you need to do then is tweak it. But a story one, one thing is over-Engineered. I wrote a blog post, our websites WordPress websites over-Engineered wrote about three weeks ago because I took over a client's maintenance, some guy built, and it was a guy built an elemental webpage for this client that was over 118 megabytes, just the page.

And Wow, that's gotta be some kind of record. That's it. He was going for it. it had this animation that uses 140 little images, but there's three of those animations on the page. Okay. So they're just, if we can take animations away from. From the web, it would just, it would, one, it would save the planet.

Two, it would, save people like us having to explain to our client why their website is taking 23 and a half seconds to load. And we wouldn't have to, doubt. I, honestly that the problem is designers are great and they're very creative, but please, it's the web. It's a live thing.

Design, like things like this for the, for, magazines and, brochures and, make, bring out all your design chops on those things. And then when you, when your client says, my sales have gone down because my website's so slow, stop designing stuff that's WY week. it's all this motion graphic stuff, what's going on?

You can't even see what's going on a webpage these days in a first for the WP Builds. This week in WordPress show, Dave and web dev managed to put in a comment. About something before we talked about it. I dunno if he's if he's able to time travel or something, but that's pretty impressive.

[00:18:13] Nathan Wrigley: That's, that was in there like a solid 30 seconds before we even got onto the subject of animation. So Dave, then tactic to you for, if you can do that again in this episode, I am truly going to start a religion, in your name. That's, pretty impressive, but yeah, he makes the point. Yeah, don't care too much about animations on sites.

Auto to play animations are also an accessibility issue, says Matt G Oh, hi. Hi there Matthew. How are you doing? we were due to do a podcast episode, which never happened because of various things that were going on in, in with Matty, but it's nice to, have you with us. And then Derek, Auer, custom themes, good hosting WP Rockets for some sites that need a little bit more help.

Okay, so there were two reasons I wanted to put that on the screen. IE that article number one so that we could all share what it is that we've done. And I think we've done that now. Number two though, is that I started playing quite fairly seriously this last week fortnight, with making some of my WordPress sites static, just to see how that went.

I dunno if you've come across this principle before, but you basically, in my case, you install a plugin and I was using Patrick Posner's, simply Static plugin and it crawls your website. Flattens everything to just raw files, so H-T-M-L-C-S-S and JavaScript. Then you ship it off to a CDN by clicking a button, and then you can just turn your website off you, you can just collapse the WordPress website, switch it off completely.

And it is lightning fast, as you'd imagine. 'cause it's just, it doesn't have to go and compile anything or go through any PHP loop or anything like that. And, there's a few gotchas, you can't have interactive dynamic stuff on there. You can't afford, you can, but there's a few steps to jump through.

And I wondered if any of you had played with that, because A, it's really fast and b, it's probably quite good for the environment. And if you have, what were your experiences? Did you pursue it or did you just abandon it after a while? 'cause it was a bit of, a faff. Yeah, so I used to work at a. A hosting company, that had shifter.

[00:20:21] Rachel Winchester: Shifter was the first static site generator for WordPress, right? Yeah. Yeah. So for about a year I was the one, answering the support chat for a shifter. but I moved quite a few of my websites and client websites to shifter. just obviously 'cause I have had perks as an employee. but I didn't see moving it from a managed host at Pressable to Shifter.

I didn't see much of an improve improvement. But also the sites I moved, they weren't that large to begin with. however, going back to that person with the very, very large webpage built with Elementor, I do that, but not in the same way. So I build webpage presentations. I. Like 45 minute to one hour presentations that are just in a webpage.

So I scroll down. Oh, okay. Yeah, So these pages ended end up being very large as well. the first few webpage presentations I built, my site was hosted on Shifter. And then after I left the company and I moved my site back to a managed host, I didn't see any, lag. I didn't see any performance, any performance decrease at all.

and I was very concerned that I might and I didn't. So I was very happy about that. Maybe it's something about Pressable and them being great. yeah, or maybe my webpage wasn't as long as I thought it was. Yeah. I think Pressable, along with all the managed WordPress apps, I think they cache everything and, it's all on their Edge network as well.

[00:21:57] Nathan Wrigley: So they probably don, I think press will do it, slightly better than most. rocket rocket.net are great as well, but Pressable are unusually good. And, but they're, I knew, but they're premium prices. that's, the thing. If you wanna pay a cup of coffee a month for your website, it's gonna get spilled occasionally.

[00:22:15] Andrew Palmer: So if you wanna invest in your website, then. 30, $30 a month is the minimum you should be paying. If you've got, if you want a reliable website up, good uptime, great support, $30 a month is really your minimum that you wanna pay. Yeah. I was just doing it a to just to experience what, it would be like.

[00:22:37] Nathan Wrigley: how straightforward it would be. And honestly, it was really straightforward. You genuinely clicked buttons. I followed a tutorial, which is in the. Page build a summit, from Patrick Posner. I'm gonna point to that repeatedly during this episode. And, it was linking his plugin with Bonnie CDN.

And it was just walking you through the steps of how to, where's the API key and all that. 'cause it's, there's, it's buried and the whole, yeah. The, whole process took about 15 minutes the first time. The second time I did it, maybe five. And then the third time I did it like three.

And, it, compiled the site. It's a pet project. Nobody's really looking at it. So I, there's that. and the whole process could be a, reason why elements, there could be a reason why elements are bought stratec with Miriam Schwab. Yeah. Yeah. And that team, they, Strat were one of the innovators.

[00:23:28] Andrew Palmer: what was that win that you mentioned? Who was that? I've never heard of that. I'm too young in the workplace shift shifter. Yeah. Brilliant. it's, but then if you want a static website, then why don't you just build in HTML. that's an interesting point and we'll get onto a podcast about just that a little bit later.

[00:23:45] Nathan Wrigley: but for now, the reason I was doing it, 'cause I could just ship a website that I'd already got, plus I can just re So it's all done on local, local, the, app that you can download for the Mac and windows and what have you. And I just kill it and then start it up again. Make the amendments that I want, click the export button, wait five minutes, shut it down again.

So it's really that simple. Obviously, you wouldn't really want clients doing that 'cause obviously the site's dead to them. They wouldn't be able to log in. You just get this 4 0 4 page. But I just thought it was, honestly, I've had such fun doing it. It was like a real moment this week where I was like, oh wow, there's this whole other bit.

WordPress that I haven't really, it's great for security as well. It's great for security, but it's the, problem is, I know that Strat, when, Miriam was developing Strat for about, 10 years or something, the, problem was, oh, I wanna build a WordPress website, I want gravity forms on it, and, Gravity forms won't work.

[00:24:39] Andrew Palmer: Or I want fluent or Ws form, it won't work. so you, there are workarounds now that they came about before she sold it to, or her team sold it to Elementor. But it's, and that's the issue is that you're not gonna get the animations unless they're gif you're not gonna get the, but it is.

Well, Pete says, I won't worry about SEO if you can't rely on elements of dynamic content. HTML websites are just as SEOable as any other website. In fact, more so in my view. 'cause they're faster. They, so Google likes them. They load immensely quickly. They're full of good content. There's no, JavaScript to interrupt with anything that they get, scanned by the search engines much, much quicker.

I grew up with HTML websites, but I didn't have any problem with SEO at all. I think it's, a great thing not to Disp, 'cause he's great at what he does, but, you don't need a plug. I, there's a couple of websites I've got that are SEOed. Okay. There's no, SEO plugin on there. it's not something that you have to worry about too much, but for speed and everything, I think Strat static websites are great.

And actually if you look at Canva, what they're doing with websites is incredible. And you can, attach your own domain name to them as well. And they're, basic. They're just HCML website. Yeah. The The, one of the things which I couldn't work out, Pete actually was trying to get the XML or any kind of site map, exported.

[00:26:07] Nathan Wrigley: So I actually got in touch with, Patrick and he says he's shipping it in the next release. so it'll have an XM site map or maybe just a site map. I dunno, how that'll work. But he's gonna make ML that Yeah, I would imagine. Maybe something like that, but we'll see. But he was very amenable to that idea.

He immediately said, yeah, let's, ship that. That sounds good. And then, okay, flying Press does something similar, says T dra, I'm sorry if I'm getting your name wrong. something similar where it generates static HT ML files and IES assets, but it's all stored locally in the WP content so that you have server functionality.

Oh, okay. So it's like some, it's like caching in a way. maybe. And then Pete saying running WordPress as a headless CMS is probably a better solution for actual. Production. Yeah. This is, this would be lousy for clients. It's, 'cause it's, switched off when you know that you can't edit the content unless I come to my Mac and then switch local on and then start the site, interact with it, shut it down.

yeah, you're absolutely right Pete. It is. it, is poor in that sense. You couldn't ship anything to a client. Anyway. There you go. That was an interesting aside. Let's move on. One of the, one of the benefits you might get if you went static would be that your site would be AKA sustainable and, sustainability in WordPress is a thing I think, which is gonna be a really big deal within the next few years.

The idea being apparently if the internet was a, if the internet was a country, it would be the seventh biggest polluter on the planet. I think it's bigger than Argentina. In terms of its footprint. Another curious fact, my son told me this the other day, and I may have said it on the show, I don't know if you could take the entire Internet's protons and electrons.

In other words, all the bits that make the internet up. Guess how much it weighs? The whole internet? Guess how much it actually weighs? You don't know, dear, I'm gonna tell you. I have no idea where to start the same and then the same as a strawberry. Wow, isn't that amazing? All of this stuff that we're doing, and it weighs less than the St.

Straw. He could have course been lying. He shown how insignificant we are. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm not even that fond of strawberries. Oh, I love strawberries. Could have said three grapes or something. That would've been, it went way better. but, okay, so I did a podcast episode with, a lovely Spanish, chap called, now I badiola.

And it's really worth a listen 'cause he he sets out the case for why we need to be a little bit more mindful about, sustainability in the WordPress space. Not just in terms of the bits that we put on our websites. In other words, the, the videos, the images, the assets, the server that we using, the CDN that we use and all of that.

But also the sort of socioeconomic impacts of having a sustainable. Community. I gotta say this, is landing for me more after this podcast episode than it ever has before. And I'm taking it a bit more seriously because I think he's right. And the, sort of apocalyptic scenario that we're all presented with in terms of the environment, is something that we need to take care of.

But again, in the same way that I asked you to comment a minute ago about what you do for hosting and things, do you do anything like this? Do you pitch this to your clients? Are you telling them, okay, we're gonna minimize your assets, not because it's clever for s for SEO, but do you say it like, because it's good for the environment, I'm really curious as to whether or not you pitch the environment as a thing.

[00:29:42] Andrew Palmer: Yeah, it's on my website. I use green hosting and. it's on, Bertha uses green hosting. I use green hosting. So that is an offset, right? They, presumably it's consuming energy. It's whatever it is. It's, I went through a, I was told to use this particular thing to get the certificate, or not the certificate, the little thing on the bottom of my website that says, I use green hosting.

So cloud, so CloudFlare, for instance, is, recognized as a green supply. it helps, bring down the stuff. Hannah Smith from the Green Web Foundation, what's her, she got married, didn't she? Oh, I don't know. Hannah Green, is it Hannah Green? Yeah. I, mean she is.

Wow. No way. No way. Is that her surname now? That's just not, what is it? No, Hannah. What? What's her surname now? I don't know. But if it's green, that's best. Its the same. Anyway, I spent, some time with her on flying from, she, poor woman, had to sit next to me a couple of hours on a and flight, a flight to Serbia.

She's a phenomenal powerhouse of green issues, and she set up a, the Green foundation, and she's gotta be on this show. You've gotta be on every podcast that talks about website hosting or how to make yourself greener. I know that win actually, you are a green, I didn't mean to point you rudely there, but you are a green person.

You like, you really you advocate for, on your LinkedIn stuff. You, speak about, I've watched a couple of your work with Win and you, speak about green issues all the time and sustainability and don't put this on, don't put that on all that kind of stuff. It's a big issue as far as I'm concerned, especially as I'm getting older.

I'm thinking, oh, my grand my, my daughter's getting older. She may have children one day. and she, yeah. This is the intuition, isn't it? Is because I'm of an age, I'm fairly old now. I'm not really old. But a lot of these impacts I feel, won't be, won't necessarily be the most severe for me.

[00:31:41] Nathan Wrigley: No, I'm saying, but I have children and, I. What, what are we leaving them, and, all, all for the sake of just making a little bit more, more effort. But it's so easy with computers. everything's shiny. There's no smoke coming out the back of my computer. It's clean, it's wiped downable, And it's it's really easy to just imagine, it's not, doing anything, and you leave your Mac on all night, or you leave the lights on all night and you don't optimize your images, and you don't do this, and you don't do that. But I'm, imagining not only will legislation force web developers to be good at this, but I'm also imagining there'll be like a fairly high moral bar for a lot of clients, especially government clients and bigger clients who just, they have to, they just have to prove that they've gone through the due diligence.

Kyle, or win over to you if you do any of this stuff. Yeah. So last year I actually went to a very, interesting conference. It was called Reclaim Open. by, it was thrown by a, hosting company called Reclaim Hosting. They support higher ed hosting. but it was all about the past, present, and future of the Open Web.

[00:32:53] Rachel Winchester: And the keynote, they had a keynote speaker for past, present, and future. And the keynote speaker for the future was all about green issues and how, in the future, sooner than you expect, we may have to make a decision between turning on the lights and getting on Facebook. and that's a scary decision I have to make and, to think Just that exact decision. I'm okay with that. I can do the lights on Facebook. Oh, okay. Because I'm always lights. Never Facebook or maybe turning on the lights and listening to the, and watching the WP Builds podcast. Oh gosh, that's apocalyptic. Go on. Yeah. but his name is Brian Alexander, and he has a few books and a few lectures on it.

So I really, I'm, I've been following him ever since and I, I think that's when the issue was first, expo. I was first, first exposed to that issue. but ever since I've, really been following it. I think, I think I'm gonna toss it to Kyle and see what he says. so I haven't listened to your podcast episode yet, but that same guy I am assuming this is why you had him on, did a, like a seven part series.

[00:34:01] Kyle Van Deusen: Yeah, that's it. That's exactly why. Yeah. Nice. so go listen to Nathan's first and then go to sustain wp.com. And he has a whole series there. It really opened my eyes to like a lot of things that I never considered were like under that umbrella of sustainability and I thought it was super interesting.

I've actually reached out to him to, have a chat with him myself. If, you've never done any of this thought experiment or looked into how your stack, affects things, if you go to website carbon.com Yeah, you can, go in there and put your URL your page, hit calculate, and it'll tell you, some little facts about how green or not green.

Your website is, and that's a good starting place just to see like what is the impact I have, as an agency, as my own websites, all those kinds of things. So definitely something I'm thinking about more talking with my clients more. I promote, accessibility and performance and all those things.

And most of those things end up making sites lighter weight and all that. So I tie all that in when I'm talking with clients as well. So do, you act, so when you're talking with your clients though, do you use the word sustainable or environment or any of those kind of things as like a hook into, this is part of the, package that you are buying.

[00:35:08] Nathan Wrigley: We are gonna, we're gonna give you an environmentally friendly, or more so environmentally friendly website. Is that part of the pattern? I would say my, my, spiel would probably have some asterisks on it. 'cause I'm not the most yeah, knowledgeable person in this area, but it's something that I want to be more conscious about doing.

[00:35:26] Kyle Van Deusen: So I think it's a good thing to relay to clients. And when I have to talk about it, then I'm forced to actually act on it a little bit more too. So it's a bit of account accountability for myself. so yeah, I think it's, definitely something to be thinking about. 'cause like you said, in the future, this is gonna be a much bigger problem than it is today if we don't do something right now.

[00:35:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And I, I feel like not only will it be a problem, I think you won't be able to put out a website that, goes over a certain limit. You'll just get absolutely crushed by Google. 'cause I can, the core web vitals and the lighthouse scores and all of those, there's a bit of that in there, isn't there?

let's make everything smaller. Let's make everything load quickly. interestingly during the podcast episode, and this is. Check this out. What a statistic this is. He was talking about a person, and forgive me, I've forgotten their name. They have a plugin, a WordPress plugin, which is, it's WordPress to MailChimp and it connects your WordPress website to your MailChimp account.

And I guess, it takes emails and puts them into your list or something. It's got 2 million installs, so it's massive. he took out. 20 kilobytes of JavaScript, right? 20 kilobytes. And then he calculated, and the, link to his article is in the show notes. So if you go to this tavern post, it's number one 18 on, if you go wp tavern.com, click on the podcast link here and it'll be the, number one 18.

And he worked out that he, by taking 20 kilobytes of JavaScript out of his website, he literally prevented tons and tons of carbon. So car sized amounts of carbon by doing that one tiny, little thing. And I don't know, maybe that's not hitting you in the same way that it hit me, but when, now I said that to me, it was like a gut punch.

It was like what He did that tiny thing. Tons of carbon. Were not put into the R. It was like, yep, that's exactly what you did. And I found that pretty astonishing. So every time you squash an image, every time you use a, I don't know, a placeholder instead of a YouTube bed, every time you do something, especially if it's a popular site, it could have a profound, difference.

You can see that now. I had an effect on me. go and check out the podcast episode. but yeah. Anyway. There you go. Anybody wanna do anything with that? Yeah, Andrew. B Ton says, on last I didn't attend, but Amnesty International went through all their website and everything, and it, and they made the design, open source.

[00:38:02] Andrew Palmer: And I'm, pretty sure I listened to some of it because I couldn't go. Because it was more than two hours drive. But anyway, the, the, they showed, the amnesty showed about how they, the fact that because they're amnesty, there's a micros microscope on them. What are you doing sustainability wise?

What are you doing this wise? What are you, do you know, what are you using? So open source. And that, I think that's what the, the conversation that Devon is talking about, because sustainability is important and we've gotta, it's not gonna affect us. I'll be pushing up the daisies way before the sun burns the planet down to, rock.

But, for our grandchildren, for their grandchildren, I think it's worth us thinking about maybe being a little bit more clever about the way we do things with, what petrol we use, what fuel we use, how often we drive our cars, what type of cars we drive, how often we keep the lights on, et cetera.

Do we need two street screens on at the same time? Really? all that kind of stuff. Now I was talking about that he's hoping to get shipped into court. So there's the WP sustain, the WordPress sustainability team now is a thing, which is great. and they are hoping to work on something which would go into core, very lightweight to give you metrics intel about what your WordPress website is doing.

[00:39:25] Nathan Wrigley: I know there are other endeavors, doing the same thing. Sorry. Carl, I think I crosstalk you there. Apologies. No, you're good. Okay. Okay. I wasn't on that one. Okay. so yeah, go check that out. So Courtney says, yeah, so hat tip two? No, I, it is called, sustained. WP is the podcast episode.

Lemme just make sure, I'm just looking in the comments here. Oh gosh. Can you see Su? Yeah. There you go. Sustain wp. So Google that. Oh, I'm not showing it on the screen. There you go. sustain WP is the, is Hannah Smith. Hannah Smith. Is. Yeah. Yeah, All righty. Alrighty. Let's move on. An important conversation.

Possibly the most important thing of our time, right? I dunno what you're gonna think about this. Maybe this will keep us engaged for milliseconds. I don't know. this is a post by, rich table. And he's saying, wouldn't it be nice if rather than, and I know Kyle uses the block editor, I use the block editor.

I love the block editor. It's the default for me in everything now. And one of the things which, rich has noticed is when you basically load up a page, the little inserter that panel on the left, which, think page builder, it's the ba the place where you go to find out where everything is on the page and all that.

it's not open by default. And wouldn't it be good if it was open by default? It's just a little thing, right? Little teeny, tiny thing. But I think that's quite a profound thing. He also says, whilst we're at it, why don't we do this? And this is great. I love this. So at the moment on the screen, this is what You've got the search box, then you've got underneath, you've got this series of tabs. Now plugins and things can add extra tabs, but blocks, patterns, and media. He's saying, let's swap it around. Put blocks, patterns, and media above the search box, and then make the scope of the search box related to the tab that you've got open.

Yeah, I just have to say clever, clever, rich, basically. I think it's a really neat idea. and so little, it's like little micro cots, isn't it? With the block editor. Little tiny little things that we do like this, dead call. again, I don't know if anybody wants to talk about that, but I thought I'd raise it.

So I thought he was suggesting we blur the logo. Oh, yeah, What was going on there? I wonder, I disagree with both of these things, actually. Yeah. Can you believe it? Yeah. I'm just hearing controversy. one, if you scroll back up to the screenshot above that, so where they're seeing the insert there.

[00:41:55] Kyle Van Deusen: I always have that open for the list view of all the blocks on my page. So you are clicking on this icon here? This little, yeah, that's what I wanna open all the time. oh, this would totally get in my way because I'd rather have the list view open. And then when it comes to the search, I feel like I.

Clients would then have to remember, am I searching for a block or a pattern or oh, okay. Right now the fact that you just search and it finds anything that fits in those categories for me makes it a whole lot easier. I'm all for making these little improvements, but I actually disagree with both of these.

[00:42:25] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. alright, I've changed my mind. It's, it's a terrible idea. No, I like it, but I do get your point maybe. Okay. What about some kind of compromise then? What about a set? So I know we don't want endless settings in the WordPress, like vanilla install. What about if you could specify one of these as the default?

So you could say, okay, show me the, this panel, or you show me the, all of the stack blocks with this one and that would be the one that came open all the time. So who knows, can go in your settings and have one, have the list view open by default. But then you have to do that on every install.

[00:43:00] Kyle Van Deusen: And I'm just in way too many websites to worry about that. go change the settings every time. Okay. Okay. Did you, did anyone, read the discussion? Oh, I did, but it was, I, read it at I don't know, last week late. Why, what we seeing there, right? So basically the, to make Carl happy, we're not all happier, is basically if you invoke the list view, the panel disappears.

[00:43:23] Andrew Palmer: And this is so page builder, it's unbelievable. You can collapse a page builder panel, you can expand it, you can drag in, divvy, you can drag and drop it, all that kind of stuff. In elementary, you can make it smaller and just be icon driven to, to open it or invoke it again. and this is it.

With panels, I, what I'm really concerned about is, so when, when in Gutenberg, the patterns appear uhhuh. there, there's, when you first install a WordPress site and the patterns appear in your post, there's a popup that comes up with patterns, right? Yeah, Yep. That's not accessible.

It's no, there's no focus on there. Oh, okay. Oh, you've, opened up another can of worms. So what, this doesn't consider is that there, there's gotta be focus, right? So where's the focus? Is it on the, is it on the, panel or is it on the page? Or where's it, where's the focus gonna be? So this is a great idea.

I love it personally because I'm a page builder. I've come from the page builder world. Kyle's been working in blocks for years now with, generate blocks, I think is your default, isn't it? Kyle? Kyle. So you are used to working with blocks. Win Works, and you work in basic, you work in WordPress, right?

With blocks and stuff like that. Element. Elementor. Oh, Elementor. Anyway, Elementor iss fine. I'm joking. Elementor is great. I find it hard. But anyway, so Elementor has this, you can collapse the blocks, right? And you can expand them, and you can make them, you, wherever you search within.

Whatever, whatever section you are using. So this is almost a tribute to page builders. They saying actually guys, they got it right. Yeah. And then, so I never use the inserter here 'cause I just press the forward slash on my keyboard and then you can click things right on the page.

[00:45:13] Kyle Van Deusen: Developer, you know what you're doing. you've been using blocks for ages. So Jamie Malden, when he, goes through his lovely little courses, his lovely little quick teaches. When he inserts a cover, he goes forward slash cover. He doesn't, yeah, I do that for some, but I've got some saved. It is not for developers.

[00:45:30] Andrew Palmer: Tell me you're a developer without telling me you're a developer. This is my point to my intro. Yes. Developers don't think about the user. If we want users to use WordPress, we have to make it easier. This makes it easier, that simple. But, it, developers have got a, it's a bit of a dilemma.

Do I wanna make this easier for my customers to, to make or do I, wanna make it harder? If I make it harder, I've still, I'm, I've still got, authority over my customers. And that's, the issue. remember when agencies used to lock their customers into, oh, if you need an amendment done, it's gonna cost us 75 bucks for 10 minutes work, or whatever it may be.

We have to get real with real users, otherwise we're gonna lose 'em to proprietors, to, I've got to, I've got a suggestion, right? What about if, when the page loaded, we had more or less a diagonal, like from corner to corner, top left, bottom inserter. That was almost, like three, 400 pixels wide maybe.

[00:46:36] Nathan Wrigley: Maybe with the blink CSS, attribute. Atti. No, don't listen to me. we got t Jason in the comments though. He's saying he agrees the navigator view should be open first. Okay. Yeah. All right. Fair enough. All loads of comments about this. Dave Dun says, yeah, the list navigator view would, he'd like that open as well.

Patricia, Andrew, you need to commit on gi on the GitHub issue so all voices are heard. there you go. I don't, I haven't got a GI GitHub account. I've got so many account, right? I've just make everything on word rate. If mate, if contributors could contribute to work, make it on, make WordPress and I'm happy 'cause I've got accounts all over the place.

[00:47:18] Andrew Palmer: Ask me to have a GitHub account to make a contribution to WordPress is killing me. David's back. He says, from what I've heard, there's lots of accessibility issues in the backend of WordPress and the page builders there are, the only time the insert should be first opened is directly after you create a new page.

[00:47:35] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yep. that strikes me as quite a good time. the moment to insert a pattern does feel like about then, doesn't it? And then Matty says, I build custom blocks for customers. I always think about how they will interact with these blocks. Why can't core do the same? Gosh, I thought this would take us about a minute.

We've got a good. 10 minutes on that little thing. So Rich, you've stirred up the, the hornet's nest. Thank you. That was, it's a great idea, rich. And he is, he's caught, I think he's, I dunno what he's, but I think he's in charge of core pretty much, or he is brought, he's, not, he's a mathematician. he's not at the sort of mattias level.

I, I, and I don't know Courtney, I bet you Courtney, if she's still tuning in, I bet you she can give us his, his job description where he's at. But you're right, I think he's very senior. I think he's, what, he says is listened to. So posts like that do get some attention. Okay. I'm gonna miss a few things out 'cause we're running a little bit late.

So here we go. Let's go to this one next. if you're in the UK and you are feeling the, the sadness because there aren't that many, in-person events, WordPress, London meet up being an exception. Thank you. Somebody was popping in saying they attended that recently. but the only word camp that's happens in 2019 in the UK is one at Whitley Bay.

Which is really, close to Newcastle. so it's in the northeast of England and they are preparing their next one. I've actually forgotten the dates. It'll be on the homepage, but it's just to say that if you go to Whitley Bay and the spelling is on the screen, W-H-I-T-L-E-Y bay dot word camp.org/ 2024, you can get the tickets looking at the moment.

There's loads still available. It's a small word camp one day and you go, it's o on the 12th of June. and you can buy the tickets now. So I. Anybody wanna mention anything there? Should we just crack on? Let's crack on. Okay. get there if you can get there. Okay. Yeah, I'm gonna, I think I might go this year.

'cause last year I couldn't, 'cause there was various other things going on. And this is also just to mention that the word Camp Europe, which is, coming up soon, it's oh, I don't know, a few, several weeks away. A handful of weeks. a collective noun of weeks away. and the contributor day All of the information about it has been released. I'll put the link to that in the show notes as well. Another thing just to mention is that Jonathan Boser, who's an magician, if you were watching last week, automatic, or actually wordpress.com, have put out this thing, called studio. It's just like local, but with a few bells and whistles that are different and a few less bells and whistles.

And Jonathan, in about an hour and 20 minutes, something like that, runs through how to use it and how to make it all work and how you can connect it in your development workflow. I'm just gonna keep talking 'cause I don't think we wanna dwell on these, do we? If anybody does have something they wanna say, just fully interrupt and I'll stop.

and then came out. Couple of days ago, the data liberation project plan, this is the idea of being able to get your WordPress website, get stuff from other website CMSs. So I don't know, Jumela, Drupal, Squarespace, Wix, bring it into WordPress, but do the opposite. ship it out from somewhere else.

In other words, be a good custodian. Don't hold onto your data Facebook and just be, an open source thing. So this project, I think really, really important in the near future. And this is all about the plan to get that project off the ground. And I would really encourage people to read more about that.

[00:51:05] Kyle Van Deusen: I think there's, I think people got the wrong idea of what the Data Liberation Project is all about. It feels like maybe there's some, miscommunication in the marketing of it. 'cause I feel like there's a bunch of people against it and I just don't see why you wouldn't want everything to be more portable, like everything included, Yeah. I don't, what great initiative. I just wonder if maybe people are just thinking it's diverting. I don't know. people's developer time or something. But what a great what. why wouldn't we wanna do that? with stagnating market share, I don't think shrinking but stagnating.

[00:51:37] Nathan Wrigley: If you can persuade a client to come to you because you know that the overhead of importing their site from Squarespace to Wix is as much as it takes to press a button, that's just saving you so much time as a developer, you'll be able to pass that cost on to them. They'll be on this, fabulous CMS that we all love WordPress.

I think it's brilliant. I know I saw the folks at lifter, LMSI believe at Word Camp, us talking about this and like the idea of you, you do get locked into some of these plugins, right? So there's lots of, LMS plugins, but if you pick one and you put all your content in there and you decide, Hey, I actually wanna use this other one now you, you're basically starting over.

[00:52:18] Kyle Van Deusen: Yeah. Like you have content you can copy and paste, but they're not using the same tables, they're not using the same. Fields and all that. So the idea with this is if we could all agree on the same data sets for everything that's similar between the ones, then somebody could switch from one LMS plugin to another plugin and just port everything over, which I think would be awesome for users.

if we're talking about users first, that seems A, home run. I wonder if some of the pushback then is coming from people who have that vendor lockin, Yeah. Let's say that you've got a, plugin where you've got some commercial rivals, they're on the rise, your sales are stagnating and you, but if you, if you're marketing strategy as Yeah, Customers into my Yeah. dying plugin. That's probably not the greatest. The marketing strategies should be. We have the best one possible. make your product better and everybody to come to it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. The, it's in the headline, it's in the hero. We will lock your data down so hard.

[00:53:17] Nathan Wrigley: Sean Barton, who's a, plugin developer eight years ago, still this plugin still exists. Divvy was always criticized for being short code driven. That's gonna change in divvy five, of course. But Sean basically just wrote a plugin called Goodbye Divvy and just strips out all of the short code and gives you the text.

[00:53:34] Andrew Palmer: And links to the images. Okay. So that's, and I built a little thing for a while and ran outta money, unfortunately. 'cause I didn't run outta money, I just ran outta money in my head. 'cause I'd spent seven and a half thousand dollars on a developer and he was absent a lot of the time.

So I just thought, oh, I can't be doing this. But we developed a thing where you could, basically go from, Elementor pages to Gutenberg blocks. And that was when Gutenberg was very young. It's still, a, I still got all the code and everything, but it was, we still had to build our own blocks ironically, because nothing, we couldn't port, we couldn't have a slider block for instance, or, and it was basically mapping.

What went across. So if you had a basic element of page, it was, it's called gutenberg ai.com. I think it's still alive, but, okay. I, you can upload a pa an element of page and see how it does, but, we had to develop a whole new block plugin as well to make it work. And it was just kicking ourselves in the shins every day.

It was hard work, so I just said, no more, money for that move on. No. Who, nobody likes to be kicked in the shins. every day. Yeah. Once a day. okay. Rosie Robinson, so this is going back to Word Camp Whitley Bay. She, she says Brighton had one. Okay. sorry. I misstep there. and Courtney, here we go.

[00:54:52] Nathan Wrigley: Rich is the director of product at Automatic, so very senior. I believe much of the patterns we see in the previews of WP Big Sky. His work. Okay. Thank you very much indeed. Okay, so data liberation. Woo-hoo. Good idea. I think we all agree. Great idea. Great idea. All right. Okay. This is the next one. it's all about the media core.

I think I should bow out of this in all honesty, but I'm gonna quickly say something. The idea has been, the conversation publicly. the idea is that in the near future, the WordPress Media Court will become a thing, and this is, I, can't really think about how to describe it, so I'll just say it like this and I've probably got a lot of it wrong, would be to create like a fire hose of WordPress.

So not like the, plugin ecosystem, the third party plugin ecosystem, the WordPress, the project, a fire hose of things that are happening so that then they can distribute it to a preselected, if you like, pre-selected or predetermined set of media partners. And those media partners would then have the up-to-date knowledge.

They would know what's going on without having to go and search for it on, the make blog or the Slack channels or reading it in newsletters or what have you. and just to see how that goes, just to see what that would be like and the. The, obvious sort of tension here is that in order to get this started, boots need to be put on the ground and the boots that Joe Ser has the access to are magicians.

And so it'll beauticians doing this to begin with. But I, don't think my intuition, what I'm reading is that's not the whole point. It's just we need to start and I can get these automations doing it. So let's make a start with that. I think what this is all about really is WordPress and the shrinking of like events and the possible, combating of third party systems, Squarespace, Wix, and all of that.

Just growing in market share and having gigantic marketing teams. Wix apparently have got 400 people full-time on their marketing team, and obviously WordPress has, volunteers, which is a bit different. And so this is gonna happen as a follow up particle. by, raise Martines and she just outlines what's gonna go on, who's gonna be selected, what the criteria are, and also provides a link to the Slack channel where you can join.

I believe it's WP Media Core, something like that. Anyway, I'll provide the links in the show notes to me, this seems like a great idea because being somebody that is worried about this sort of stuff and wants to share information, not having to go look for it is really interesting. Courtney and I, who were on the call, we had a chat about, I dunno, three weeks ago on a Friday where she went through her process of how she finds information.

And there's a lot, there's a lot going on. And it would be nice if it was easier and if we are spoonfed, wouldn't that be nice? Okay. That's as much as I wanna say about that. Does anybody wanna say anything? it seems let's just try to organize the way this information is shared.

[00:58:09] Kyle Van Deusen: It feels like a whole project. it seems like what you do with an email list to me, so maybe I just don't fully understand it. 'cause it feels like, Hey, everybody who wants to distribute WordPress news, join this email list and we'll email you when stuff is out. Seems like that could be done in an afternoon, Yeah. There are certain criteria at the moment about who will be the recipient of that information. I'm just desperately trying to find it at the moment and I can't see that part of it. is, there gatekeeping and Right. Who's getting decide? Yeah, there is gatekeeping, Now luckily Gate, I think I manage to have the key to that padlock just because of what I do.

[00:58:45] Nathan Wrigley: But that's not gonna be the same for everybody and I am desperately trying to find it. Now it's things Surprise. Didn't you see this coming, Nathan with Jamie Marton now? Working a little bit for Automatic with Bob now having a podcast that is now sponsored by Automatic, you are sponsored by Automatic as well via WP Tavern, or are you sponsored by Matt directly?

[00:59:11] Andrew Palmer: I'm not sponsored by Automatic, no. Are you sponsored by Matt then? No, on Oh, I'm or Audrey Capital. Audrey Capital. So Matt, basically, yeah. so we have already three, three people that are media people going out, doing podcasts. We've got, Bob I think is due, the Woo is now sponsored by Automatic, isn't it?

Or something? Or within, within the automatic, situation. They did an advert on it. And who, is Bob? and I think from, that I thought, oh, what's going on here? Then we've got influencers, we've got people that have WordPress, like Jamie is, I. Total WordPress blocks. he's com completely committed to.

It has been from the very beginning. Doesn't use any other, block situation like, Kyle or me. I use Cadence blocks mainly because of Kathy, so well on Kathy. and you've got, these influencers who are, they're gonna, they're gonna be gate kept because there's gonna be secrets given to them or maybe little snippets or whatever.

And I'm just concerned, I get the automatic it needs to start from somewhere and there needs to be some finance behind it to make, to promote, WordPress better. But why not? Just, why not just build a marketing team and say, this is now the marketing team for wordpress.org and they're paid for by automatic, why not the part of that Yeah.

Discussions will be. Let's let Carl have it go Carl. But the, discussions will be, a nightmare on this. Sorry, Carl. Go, Influencers, that would be, some of the people privy to this information, but it was all white men. So what I worry about with the gate gatekeeping part of it is, are we gonna make this open enough to everybody, Okay. So the what I'm, I, if I made a mistake there, f fair enough. win is an influencer. she does a great little podcast or, thing on LinkedIn every week. Is it every week? Yeah. Try I to every week. Yeah. And you do lives as well. I watch them, I'm lucky enough to know that I, that you do all these kind of things.

So we've got diversity and we've got that. We've got Kathy's answer of this world, the Courtney's of this world who are massive influence. But, it's just the, thing is, I'm not talking about that area. I'm talking about. Why not just build a marketing department if you are gonna have automations, gatekeeping, just make them the marketing people.

It's, it seems crazy. just be very open about the fact that Automatic is sponsoring the marketing department of wordpress.org or get someone to throw some money at WordPress and say, this is now our marketing department for the next year. And we are employing marketers rather than anything else.

I just find it, I, find it very odd that this is, this has come about, I get it, but I find it very odd. The I, I actually can't find on WordPress org. Yeah, I can't find the bit where they mention what the gatekeeping criteria are, but I know it's there. There's about, it's there. I've read it, there's about four criteria.

[01:02:32] Nathan Wrigley: One of them was like, I don't know, is 80% WordPress content? and I can't remember what the others were. And no matter how where I look, I cannot find it. But what I will say is I will, I will link to it in the show notes. Like I said, I think that I might satisfy those criteria and woohoo, happy me kind of thing.

But your, point, Andrew, is not, missed. that if there is gatekeeping, I imagine there'll be some level of pushback, but also I suppose what Carl was saying was you, maybe I'm paraphrasing you incorrectly, Carl, if I am, correct me. Like you've gotta start somewhere. And so this, if this is just okay, here's the shove.

To get it off the ground, then let's let the community take it over. That seems like a reasonable place to start to meet, yeah. yep. Yeah. Then, you will be just lost in discussion. Yeah. let's find out. Yeah, Crazy. Yeah. Okay, so there we go. That will be linked to in the show notes.

The page is, I'll, try and link to both, but the initial one that kickstart in my conversation there was this one by Joe Saffer, WordPress Media Call Next Steps, and if anybody can find what the criteria were, please stick 'em in the, stick 'em in the comments. ba anything's about that, right?

Here we go. It's been frustrating, says Peter Ingersol, that the marketing team is now being archived. Oh yeah. We forgot that whole bit as well, didn't we? Yeah. The marketing team as is, is being put on ice. That's my recollection from the article. it was really challenging to get to see any kind of traction there, especially with the lack of data and clear direction.

Rob. Says, Andrew Automatic did Bob's new website. So it sounds, yeah. Okay. Just Bob's website. I dunno if there's any ongoing sponsorship there. I thought, I saw that the marketing team volunteers were pissed that the slack was suddenly closed without any chat beforehand. Didn't see that. So if that's the case, that's another point, isn't it?

A qualified me, oh, hey Peter. Ingersol, not only does he have the weather, but he has the data. a qualified media partner would have 80% WordPress content have high quality journey. I'm screwed. it says, oh, you out? Yeah. High quality journalism writing. Okay. And maybe I'll get three outta the four, follow WordPress community guidelines, I think, honor Embargoes, et cetera.

Yeah. My understanding was that embargoed content wouldn't even be in the firehouse. That would be n you know, it's not like you'd get a week's notice on something that was coming out that I think was off the table. But yeah, the, have high quality content, but, oh, it was a, nice idea while it lasted.

[01:05:14] Andrew Palmer: have you noticed, and not to be too controversial, but have you noticed that the marketing department of, or the marketing section of wordpress.org has suffered from an awful lot of disrespect over the years with, if you remember Yost, our friend, who's now at Amelia Capital, was announced as the new marketing director of wordpress.org.

Or similar. Yeah, but head of marketing wordpress.org, and they hadn't even told the current head of [email protected] that was the case. Do we suffer as a, platform? Do we suffer from communication issues? no. okay. That wasn't where I was going. It was more do we suffer from just this land avalanche landslide of popularity over the last 10 years where you really, WordPress hasn't really needed to organize itself in the marketing arena?

[01:06:08] Nathan Wrigley: Not really, because there weren't really, rivals that were pumping Super Bowl ad kind of money into their rival platforms. It's just been like a word of mouth thing. But now we're in the situation where those, Rivals, for want of a better word, have got serious money, serious boots on the ground.

And for the first time, maybe, the, people higher up have realized, okay, this is coming. We're gonna have to combat it, but we haven't got Super Bowl ad money. What we've got is a community, so let's just figure out where we go. So I don't even know if that's true, I'm just curious. I think there's been certain amount of sitting on your laurels.

[01:06:48] Andrew Palmer: And the reason you don't sit on your laurels, I'm sorry about that. I have been sitting, they're quite sharp on my laurels. They're very sore. They'll cut your bum. so you have to make sure that's, the where the saying comes, that's the title of this episode. The laurels will cut your bomb.

[01:07:02] Nathan Wrigley: But, that's, and that has been the case and a lot of companies, we've got a lot of plugin companies that have been sitting on their laurels and now they're having to spend money. On marketing and things that they weren't really having to spend money on because the product people like Carl and myself and Win, we are the advocates.

[01:07:25] Andrew Palmer: We are the people that drive the sales of these particular plugins and web building tools like Win His Elementor, Kyle is, generate blocks, has been for years, I think. Haven't you Carl? Like since, it. It came out, I'm, divvy, I love divvy, but now I'm divvy and cadence and Elementor, and, Beaver Builder and I use all, use them, all and blocks.

But the, because that's who's been selling the, product of world. Yeah. The customers. And now we are moving, on, we've got 27 different forms. We've got 17 different page builders. We've got 82 different blocks that we can choose from block providers, crocker blocks, generate press, cadence blocks that they're, that is unbelievable the amount of tools that we've got to use WordPress.

That, WordPress is almost becoming irrelevant. It's, in, in, what it can do. Because with all the add-ons we've got. It basically, WordPress has eaten itself through its own. Ah, yeah. that's key. I didn't anticipate that this story would get quite the level of interest that it did, you've got people like, t Jason on the, call there saying it feels like automatic can call the shots with zero thought for anyone else.

[01:08:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. In my, selfish scanning of it, I wasn't seeing it from that side. I was seeing it from the other side. okay, watch this space, let's see what happens. But obviously if you've got an opinion on it, go join the Slack channel and no, nobody benefits from wordpress.org being marketed better more than wordpress.com.

[01:09:06] Kyle Van Deusen: Oh, ooh. listen, that's the title of this show. Listen, I'm gonna make, I'm gonna make a comment on that. It is still happening 'cause wordpress.com, if you search a plugin, I searched a, particular plugin the other day and I, and it took me directly to wordpress.com and said, free. Free on the, whatever, on the premium plan of wordpress.com.

[01:09:32] Andrew Palmer: Now, if you had searched that and found the wordpress.org, it was free. So there it, there's, some, misleading marketing going on in WordPress, and I think everybody knows that. I completely disagree with misleading marketing in any event, but in WordPress it is getting so bad now where it's just, you're just being, there's just dark patterns all over the place.

And I'm not being the harbinger of doom. But if wordpress.com are doing dark patterns, which is basically saying this is free, if you pay for wordpress.com, then that's a dark pattern. And, I think as plugin developers and as, plugin owners and every, I'm a product owner, I think we have to avoid.

Dark patterns like you cannot believe and start being I, hopefully, I do honest marketing, but I just wish the larger plugin developers out there and plugin owners started doing a little bit less dark patterns. it's, driving me crazy at the moment. I'm gonna move it on. Just quickly, Peter Ingersol, he says, if you are into this topic, go to the make blog, rather than the Slack channel.

[01:10:40] Nathan Wrigley: There's more happening over there. So thank you. That's good to know. links in the show notes tomorrow morning. There you go. Let's find the next thing. It is this quick hat tip to we were talking about just a moment ago. Jamie Marsland. He's got a nice video out on YouTube, on his YouTube channel.

It is, it's just his name, Jamie Marsland. Go search for that. And he has this really nice video and in about, I don't know, six or seven minutes, it's sh Oh, I can look, can't I? It'll actually say four minutes, 55. He shows you, the new feature of WordPress, patterns. And this is the idea that you can lock different parts.

He calls it components, but it's, patterns really with lockable bits. and it's just great, really nice summation of it, and I just wanted to raise attention of it. I don't really have a lot to say. It's caught past three where I live, so we've got 15 minutes to crawl through a load of other stuff.

Does anybody want to add to anything they saw in that video? If you haven't seen this feature. It's really cool. It's buried right inside the advanced menu at the bottom, so you're unlikely to find it by accident, but it's really, great. Anybody wanna talk about what Jamie said? Def, definitely go watch this video.

[01:11:47] Kyle Van Deusen: It's only in the Gutenberg plugin right now. It's not in decor yet. Sorry. Wyn, I stepped on you. Yeah. Oh, I was just about to ask a question actually, 'cause the title is WordPress Components. Does this have anything to do with like web components? 'cause I've been hearing more and more about components. I think my reading of it is, no, it's just his word for, it maps to making bits of patterns feel like little components, but it's really just patterns with lockable bits.

[01:12:14] Nathan Wrigley: But the idea would be that you could, have bits of a pattern that are synced and other bits, which were not. So let's say that you've got a pattern with an image, right? Text left. You could swap those around and it would change on every pattern. But then you could make it so that on each individual instance of that pattern, you could change the text, but you couldn't, I don't know, you couldn't swap it back around again.

Some, something like that. so it's like highly customizable for people who are building websites for clients and they just want them to not have their hands in the design say, but they want them to be able to, I don't know, amend titles or text or whatever it may be. yeah. Okay. De decoupling. It's great.

[01:12:56] Andrew Palmer: It's a good idea. Decoupling. Yeah. Is that, what is that the, you can you've been able to do that in, divvy for years. Oh yeah. No doubt. It's great. It's great that, Gutenberg's catching up after all these years. Yeah. But yeah, you've always been able to decouple, global elements, which, is basically what they are.

So it's, so Partially Sync Patterns is the WordPress name they called it, which is great from TD racing. But it's, yeah, it's a good thing. Why not? And this is great point from Kyle. Lots of confusion with Gutenberg is there's a Gutenberg plugin, which is basically, you've gotta think that's beta, right?

So if you install the Gutenberg plugin, you've got all the beta things that they want to build into core, or maybe not. And then you've got Gutenberg blocks. So it's it's really confusing for non-developers. Let's say what you need, Andrew is a media call. Yeah. Get this information. I reckon you're right.

I don't think you're wrong. I think get this information out to the masses, quickly. No, I think what you need is, we've got Dev re haven't we? Yeah, we need user re Okay, dev Re let's stay with that. we have the developer.wordpress.org blog. they've launched a whole massive section about patterns this week.

[01:14:13] Nathan Wrigley: Everything you wanna know about patterns and probably some stuff that you didn't wanna know as well, but it's all there if you go to developer.wordpress.org/themes/patterns and all, of this content is new. Honestly, I want you to say quite a bit about it, but we're running out of time, but. Boat loads of new content just landed in one hit on the 30th of April.

So loads and loads of nice work has been put in there. Speaking of Dere, this is an event happening. It's, the registration link is over at Meetup. It is, it's Ryan Welcher and Nick Diego. They're doing a, a live webinar kind of thing, I guess called alternatives to custom meta boxes in the block editor.

And so I'm just gonna read this out 'cause I think it's curious custom, easy for you to say, Nathan. Custom meta boxes have been a common tool used by plugin and theme developers to add functionality to posts and pages in WordPress. While meta boxes are supported in the block editor, they are considered in quotes, legacy tool and do not provide an ideal user experiences.

And then they're gonna explain what the other users are. And I'm so wedded to meta boxes and plugins like a c, f and all of that. this is gonna cause me pain, but I'm gonna have to go through it. I'm sure it'll be, maybe it'll be worth it in the end. So I'm gonna attend that. I think. And see what it is that they're mentioning.

Anything I'm, gonna attend it from the, on the basis of, I wanna see, 'cause they're both proper developers, these guys. Proper. I'm gonna see what, if you bring it up again, he, you said it doesn't give a user experience and I wanna see whether it's a good user experience for whom, I guess it, I guess nice to be able to do everything in the same interface.

Not have this save over here, then go over there and see what it looks like. if you can do it all in the block editor and what you save is in a, I don't know, something equivalent to a meta box, but it's in a panel on the side instead of in a, sitting underneath the content. But then it's not dynamic site wide, is it?

[01:16:17] Andrew Palmer: No. let's, and that's the whole point of next. Yeah, we'll have to, we'll have to wait and see. We'll have to wait and see. Maybe they've got some like secret juju that we don't know about. Maybe they can de maybe, they can decouple them, make them and then decouple them. Okay. Let's, anyway, it is on May the 14th.

[01:16:34] Nathan Wrigley: So not that far away, and it's three o'clock UTC, which I never know what that means, but that's, what, it's three o'clock. Three o'clock Universal time, cluster something. I dunno what it means, but that's what it is. Okay. Where are we? Okay. We all love it when stuff which was free becomes costly.

Not costly, but cost something. And this happened this week. I'm not sure that it did happen, but let me just panel, get the panel to say, WordPress, Jetpack Stats now has a fee attached to it. My understanding is that prior to this, it was a free product. You could use it for free and get, kinda like Google Analytics style.

Data, not quite as, in depth, but nevertheless it was free. Now it comes with a price tag. if you're in the UK it's gonna be six pounds 95 per month. I don't know what that means, if that's one site or a whole suite of sites. I'm not sure. But, this is a thing, but I don't even know if that's true.

So does anybody know if what is industry? It's true. No, it's true. Okay. I love, I'm, I love Jet Pack. I think some aspects of Jet Pack are awesome and since they've been. When I was with Elegant Marketplace five years, 5, 8, 7 years ago, I dunno however long, we interviewed the main guy who was running Jet Pack and I've always loved Jet Pack, but I haven't loved the bloat that it brings.

[01:17:56] Andrew Palmer: So if you use certain things, the stats were great for clients that didn't wanna be on Google Analytics. we've gotta remember that Jetpack talks to itself as well back on the service. So we've gotta think what's happening with that data. What, data is, WordPress, or Jetpack giving to WordPress, et cetera, et cetera.

But whenever, I'm trying to think and Kyle will know what's the alternative to Google? That is a stats plugin that charges per month. I use Fathom Analytics, Fathom Analytics. So this is this as far as I'm concerned. Kyle, this is Jet Pack's answer to Fathom Analytics, right? So how much is Fathom Analytics a month?

[01:18:40] Kyle Van Deusen: I think like 14 bucks. So it's double the price. it's, a direct re I think a direct response to, the success of Fathom, because Fathom are massively successful. I dunno when whether you've used Fathom, have you? Not yet. They're just massively successful. They've just put loads of money into something or other, or, this is how successful they are.

[01:19:03] Andrew Palmer: They stopped doing something on AWS, we were talking about taking code out or something, and saving greenery. Fathom took like a little bit of code out of their AWS server and saved a hundred grand a month. That's how successful, good grief.

they're saving them a million dollars a year. just by doing something that is better for them as a, I'm in, in the wrong business. I'm so in the wrong business. So, I think this is a direct reaction to other analytics plugins. Taking some of Google GT tags and Google's work and Jetpack commercial brain saying, we've been charging nothing for this.

It's costing us an absolute arm and a leg. I know it's on our servers, but it's still costing us loads of money. Let's make some cash outta this and let's underprice the market. and I've got five clients that have said, yeah, I'm happy to pay for it. 'cause they don't want Google Analytics. Anybody else?

[01:20:02] Nathan Wrigley: We're, in a blind rush. Now we're like a rush to the end. I. Eight minutes. Eight. Eight minutes. Eight minutes and all this, content to go through. We'll have to some of it out. Yeah, get on with it. Shut up Wrigley, and get on with it. sorry. bit of self-promotion. If you didn't know, me and David Wamsley have started this other podcast called the No Script Show, where we talk about modern web design.

I can't even remember what, I've got this patter that I say at the beginning and I've forgotten it all. but it's all about using HTML and CSS without a, without CSS and JavaScript without a CMS behind it. It's interesting, and we put an episode out about something called Baseline. This, place where you can go to see what the bleeding edge of, browser support is for different things in CSS.

So we had an episode all about that and honestly, I'm really enjoying that show. It is a lot of fun. So go listen, that was an excellent episode. I learned a ton. Appreciate that one. Oh, nice. Yeah. David comes to me with all this stuff and I have to go, what? Each week he is the driver behind all of this.

'cause it's now what he's doing, in his business, he's decided to more or less drop WordPress and he's building everything in a text editor, basically, old school. Yeah. And he's really enjoying it and finding all sorts of interesting a an interesting community out there who have, of people who are just addicted to CSS and what it can do and what the browsers can do with it.

And it's gonna be a fun, fun podcast. I think it's a chap out there called David Bloom that's, building something. Yeah. I'll have, I'll, send you some stuff about what Dave Bloom's doing as well, because it's, it's interesting. Minimal design and code Okay. Is where it's gonna be at.

I'm just trying to decide what we can do in the next moments that we've got left. 'cause we haven't got too much time. Let's go to this one. This is a big story this week, back in the day. Back in the day when I started using WordPress, this Envato was my go-to source. I'd go there and I'd salivate over all the lovely themes and I'd buy them and then almost immediately realize, oh, that doesn't work in the way I was anticipating.

but really popular, ended up having this enormous marketplace of images, music assets, that ended up with a subscription service where you could get everything, if you paid your monthly fee. so if you are an invato user, you might be interested to know that it has been acquired by a the, I think they only do, imagery, shutter stop. $245 million. I don't know if that's probably what they were worth a little while ago, but maybe it's a sort of shrinking business, not a growing business. But certainly back in the day, 10 years ago, this was massive, I feel like in the WordPress space.

It was a total rival to the wordpress.org theme directory. And and I know people who make healthy, livings out of the invato marketplaces. So anyway, there you go. If that concerns you, go check it out. Anybody wanna add something to that? They sold it too late. Go on. Should have sold it.

[01:23:10] Andrew Palmer: They should have sold it two years ago. You think declining market kind of thing? I, think it's a totally declining market. Yeah. Because you've got all of these, you've got cadence, you've got generate press, you've got all of WordPress. Every single WordPress host now is offering AI and prebuilt templates.

And I'm really, and I need to reach out to the guys that, that own bold grid, which is effectively owned by, in motion hosting. Man, did they miss an opportunity with bold grid? It's just come on guys. It was great. Bold grid used to be, great and give you a complete website and then you just rewrite the text.

But just complete disinvestment in it, as far as I'm concerned. It's just, a, real shame that bold grid, should be right up there with the cadences of this world and the generate presses of this world. And it just isn't. And it's such a shame. I'm gonna guess that at some point we've all lurked a bit in, the invato marketplaces.

[01:24:15] Nathan Wrigley: If you've been, I dunno, maybe are we a hundred percent happy? Maybe if you're like, only been using WordPress for five years? Maybe not. But Bill, if you were there a little in the community before that, you were just addicted, it's okay. Anyway, that's, that's that story. So if that concerns you, if you've got an account over there, an ongoing subscription, I think it's called the Invato something, creative subscription or something like that.

Then, you might wanna go and check that out 'cause it's gonna change. Its branding. Okay. 26 minutes passed. That's perfect. We will knock it on the head there. Before we do, is there anything that anybody wants to mention? Exciting thing that they're doing this week, an offer they wanna promote, whatever couple of minutes I do wanna mention That we have extended the call for speakers for Word Camp us. It's in Portland, Oregon on September 15th and 16th, I believe. Yeah. So you have until midnight tonight. is it midnight New York City Time? you've got, some hours left to apply. Yeah. So get your application in. Okay.

[01:25:22] Andrew Palmer: Nice. So you are, you an organizer for that win? Yeah, I'm on the programming committee. It's year in a row.

Cool. I've, got close to 300 applications to, to read through. Oh. Oh boy. Yeah. So thanks everyone. Wow. Wow. Win. You are, you're a glutton for punishment. I think if I had 300 to go through, I wouldn't have mentioned a thing. That's, more, Hey, I did it last year and I signed up again. I knew what I was getting into.

[01:25:49] Nathan Wrigley: That's great. Yeah. To tap it. Thank you so much, Kyle. Anything you wanna say? Anything happening in the admin bar? Exciting this week? Nothing. Just glad to be here. Thanks for having me. Aw, you're very welcome. That's your, you are most, I hope you can come back. Hopefully you can, ditch that meeting at some point in the near future and, come back.

Andrew, anything before we knock it on the head? just if you're in, if you are on Facebook, and you can bear to use it, unlike Nathan, and get in, get into the admin bar and a little, thing for me, just a little promo. if you search Bert a coupon code. You might find a secret little coupon code.

[01:26:25] Andrew Palmer: Nice. 'cause I did a little SO trick 'cause there's loads of people that are saying birth or coupon code and they're all out of date, but my one isn't and it's a real good deal. So there you go. I see. Kyle's hands were Pavlovian. They went straight to the keyboard there and he was like, woo. You.

[01:26:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Nice. Okay. In that case, firstly I'd like to thank, my three panelists today, Kyle Van Dusen and Win. And Andrew Palmer. Really appreciate that. This will be coming out as an audio podcast tomorrow, seven o'clock in the morning, UK time. Who knows why that is, but that's the way I decided to do it.

but also, thank you so much to the people who made comments. Really appreciate it. We'll be back, we're back every week more or less this time, kind of Mondays 2:00 PM UK time. The show is much better when there's lots of comments and we had a fair few today, so really appreciate that. So s as the of Easter, Andra Astel Lata and other words, which mean goodbye.

We'll see you next week. Hands oh, hands. Oh yeah. oh. Wait a sec. I nearly hit the end recording. No, I'm, I gotta, you gotta make me the co-host. You owe me money, man. Life. When, dunno if but I do this, I humiliate everybody every week. We have to do our hands if everybody's willing. Oh, everybody's so willing.

Look at that. That's so willing. That's great. Thank you very much. And then I have to scroll through the video frame by frame to find the one where we are the most smiley. And some weeks it's just, it's not happening. Okay. Thank you for saving my bacon there, Andrew. Really appreciate it. Take it easy.

Cheers mate. Bye for now. Bye bye. Bye.