This Week in WordPress #297

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode number 297, entitled get social karma by being a Helptributor. It was recorded on Monday the 13th of May, 2024. My name's Nathan Wrigley and I'll be joined by three fabulous people today. First off my co-host this week is Michelle Frechette, and then the guests are Tim Nash and Piccia Neri.

It's a WordPress podcast. So what do we talk about? WordPress.

We start off by looking at a roadmap for 6.6, the version of WordPress coming up next. What might be included? What interesting features are they going to be?

The page builder summit is back. You can get your free ticket and we talk about that.

The WP community collective have joined forces with GoDaddy to help promote underrepresented speakers at WordPress, and there is some money available for word camp U S.

We also talk about the fact that WPLDN is looking for speakers.

Some AI podcasts that I did over on the Tavern and WP Builds.

And then we get into a really long conversation about what it means to contribute to WordPress. How can your contributions matter? How can you get kudos from your contributions? And it really is the topic of the day.

We also talk about Stella WP, acquiring a Learn Dash, add on from WisdmLabs.

And we talk about the Northern lights.

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

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Hello, there This week in WordPress, episode number 297, coming you from a hot and sticky England. It's about 20 degrees centigrade, which is not that hot, but for us folk in the uk this is ridiculous. I got all the windows open. There's some workmen going on outside, and so we'll see how that goes a little bit later.

I might have to leap and close things, but, very nice to have you with us. I'm joined by, as you can see. If you are looking us and not listening to us, joined by three fabulous people. The first is Michelle Frechette. She's our co-host for today. How are you doing, Michelle?

[00:03:11] Michelle Frechette: I'm doing well, thank you. I still have my furnace on swap.

[00:03:17] Nathan Wrigley: Ridiculous. How? How easy. It's. To forget how much you complained about the cold, and now I'm just thinking, bring me the cold. I want a little bit cold. Michelle is joining us from Rochester, New York, but let's give her proper bio. Michelle Ette is the Director of Community Engagement for Stellar WP at Liquid Web.

More on that later. They've got a bit of news for us this week. In addition to her work at Stellar, WP Michelle is the podcast [email protected]. Co-founder of underrepresented in tech.com, creator of wp speakers.com. car, creator of wp career pages.com, the executive [email protected].

Crikey co-host of WP Motivate, which is a podcast, and another one is the Audacity Marketing Podcast. The WP Constellations Podcast is another, but aside from that, she likes to write, she's an author and a frequent organizer and speaker at WordPress events. As I said, she lives outside Rochester, New York, where she's an avid nature photographer.

We'll see some of that slightly annoyingly later as well. You can learn more about [email protected]. Thank you for joining us once again, Michelle.

[00:04:30] Michelle Frechette: My pleasure.

[00:04:30] Nathan Wrigley: Really. It's good to

[00:04:31] Michelle Frechette: be here. Yeah. Yeah. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. Good morning. Good.

[00:04:34] Nathan Wrigley: A yeah. What was it? What was it?

David Frost used to say hello. Good evening and welcome. we'll not do that. And there, there's Peach's down there. She is in Spain. I'm gonna say, hoping I'm right. And I bet it's not 20 degrees, is it? I bet it's 28 or something. No,

[00:04:51] Piccia Neri: it's probably 27, I would say if it's got warmer in the last few days.

So yeah. I don't know how

[00:04:57] Nathan Wrigley: you cope. I don't.

[00:04:59] Piccia Neri: It was really cold. It was like 19 for, oh no, really

[00:05:02] Nathan Wrigley: cold. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Oh, how we long for cold days of 19 degrees Peach Neri is a UX and accessible design lead consultant and speaker that, that's all we got for Peach. I dunno if you wanna say anything else, but that's the one line you submitted.

No, I'm good.

[00:05:21] Piccia Neri: Okay. I, yeah.

[00:05:23] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Alright, we'll find out more about you as the show goes on, I'm sure. And. Sir Tim Nash, how you doing? I dunno why I wanna say Sir Tim Nash, every time I say your name, I knighted. Yeah, it sounds like a knight's name. I always feel I'm reading a book about Queen Elizabeth at the moment and I keep thinking, it'd be nice if Sir Tim Nash.

I turned up

[00:05:45] Tim Nash: in several passages later on in the book,

[00:05:48] Nathan Wrigley: right? I dunno about this. I glanced my eyes across your bio, but here we go. I'm gonna read it as it's written. what can I say about Tim? He has simply been sin for what seems like forever with a sigh and the looks. He now fulfills the role of old man shakes.

Fist old man shakes, fist at the clouds, at WordPress community events. A professional doom speaker and WordPress security consultant. He would really like it. Oh, this is a good bit. He would really like it if you signed up for his [email protected] uk slash newsletter. That's not hard to remember. The next issue of which goes out this week.

It's really quite good. He wrote that, but I said it and I meant it. 'cause I get it and I actually read it, as 'cause I sometimes reply and give you, my thoughts on it. So there you go. So there's our panel. Thank you very much. little bit of housekeeping. Just before we begin, if you wanna join in the conversation and honestly, the show is better when you do.

Don't be shy. The best place to go is wp builds.com/ Where's the thing? I dunno, I've lost it. Oh no. There it is. slash live once more. Wp builds.com/live. If you go over there, you've got two options. You can either be signed into YouTube and use a Google account and then you can post in the comment box on the right, or if you're on mobile, it'll be underneath.

Or if you want to be anonymous, the platform that we're using to get the video out to you, has a little chat embedded in the video. So at the top right of the video where the little word WP builds logo is, there's a little box which says Live chat. And you can, you can just put your name in there.

You don't have to surrender an email or anything like that, at least I don't think you do. no. It just asks for your name and you can put a comment in there and it'll come onto our platform and we'll be able to see it a bit like these look. Here comes some Robert Cairns says, genetic modification.

I guess GM means good morning, but hello. Nice to have you Rob. it was very nice. I was on Rob Cairns podcast this week with the venerable, sir Bob Don. I. There's two of you, and also hello from Germany. Said bigot. Hold tight, bigot. We've got some of your stuff coming our way today. Cameron Jones, who was on the show just the other week says, good evening from Australia.

I dare to imagine what temperature is like there. Friendly web guy. Good afternoon from slightly overcast Berkshire. Oh, I'll take overcast here. It's blazing. It is cold. No, he doesn't. He says it's cloudy and rainy in Toronto. I think Nathan sent it to us. Yes, I have rain and cloud in abundance. Not just out in the sky, but in my head.

Mike Johnson is joining us Cloudy and cool in Lisbon. Hi Mike. Mike and I spent absolutely ages at Word Camp Europe in Athens in the same room he had. Bless him. When you do a WordPress event and you are a media partner and you do interviews, somebody from the organizing team has to sit in, make sure that you don't contravene any of the code of conduct things.

And, Mike bless his soul, had to sit and listen to me droning on with interviews for about seven hours and, he was very good about it. So thank you. He says, who's getting excited about Word Camp Eu? I am. I'm getting, I am. Yeah. I'm getting excited. and Peter Ingersol, ah, here we go. Normality is restored.

Hello everyone. He says it's a sunny and cool 10 degree centigrade on this beautiful Connecticut morning. Did you enjoy the solar storms? Don't even begin that conversation. We've got that coming later. And it is a, litany of disappointment is all I'm gonna say, Alex, but not

[00:09:35] Michelle Frechette: from all of us.

All of us. You disappointed?

[00:09:40] Nathan Wrigley: professional doom. Speaker. Alex likes that. peaches saying hi everybody and replying in the comments. That's really nice. And okay. I guess that's all of the different bits and, oh, no, there's one more. Alex Danford. Michelle. My coffee cup is Dreamer at work today. Mine

[00:09:56] Michelle Frechette: is a one of, one of a kind that go WP had made for me.

[00:09:59] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah, it looks a bit, racy, that one. And I, it's Wonder Woman, I've got a glass of slightly bubbly water, so this is nice. So there we go. Drop in some comments. Please feel free if anything comes into your head, just drop it in there. keep it clean, keep it on message. But aside from that, I have Courtney Robertson says, I have Word Camp Montclair before Word Camp Europe.

Hoping to find Michelle at both. Nice.

[00:10:25] Michelle Frechette: I will be at both. Yes. I'll see you there.

[00:10:28] Nathan Wrigley: The, the word Camp Whitley Bay tickets. By the way, if you're in the uk, the only, the premier and only event, going on. Oh, picture's gone. hopefully she'll come back. is Word Camp, oh, here she comes. Here she comes. Is Word Camp Whitley Bay and the tickets are available?

I think there's about 73 remaining. So if you fancy a trip up to the Northeast, think Newcastle. That's the nearest place of bigness. it's happening in July, I wanna say. and it's on a Friday. are you going, Tim? 'cause I know you went last year. Do you think you're gonna go.

[00:11:02] Tim Nash: Yes. Yeah. I decided this time I didn't want to necessarily speak, but, okay.

But I'm gonna go as a, I'm gonna go for probably, I think, the first time in my life to any Word camp, just as an attendee.

[00:11:15] Nathan Wrigley: Oh,

[00:11:16] Tim Nash: you are not gonna know what to do with yourself. I've never been there just as an attendee. I've always Oh,

[00:11:22] Piccia Neri: it's really fun. Yeah. I did that last year for the first time, I think, at work at Madrid, and I loved it.

It's amazing. I really recommend it.

[00:11:31] Nathan Wrigley: You people are extraordinary. I've never been to a word count and spoken. I couldn't do that. There's no way I could do that. It would, I would just be a mess of nerves. I just wouldn't, I can't do that kind of speaking. I can do this until the cows come home, but put me in front of a crowd, even like a crowd of four toddlers and I'm like,

[00:11:50] Tim Nash: ha.

I just, to be honest, any anybody is who can deal with four toddlers and still is doing quite well.

[00:11:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's amazing. So I bought my ticket, Tim, so I, hopefully I'll see you there. All things being equal. That's really nice. Okay, let's share the screen and get on with the bits and pieces that we've got today.

I confess I was in a bit of a rush, because of this thing which we'll talk about in a moment. I'm, in a bit of a rush, so I cobbled the news together today. So I'm hoping that the panelists are gonna chip in and help me out. And also your comments are gonna help me with all the bits and pieces as well.

But here we go. Firstly, a few bits of self-promotion, as we always do at the beginning. This is our website, wp builds.com. You can see that we are proudly sponsored by two fine companies. We're sponsored by GoDaddy Pro and Blue Host, and if you would like to keep in touch. With everything that we do, just put your email address in there and click the subscribe button.

I mentioned just a moment ago, an event which is coming up. We've been working hard on this for quite a while now, and everything starts to come to a head at this point. all of the different bits and pieces that you remembered that you forgot to do, that kind of thing is now hitting. And, it's episode number seven if you like.

It's version seven of the Page Builder Summit. It's happening between the 20th and the 24th of May. What else is this to say? if it all works out as we hope, there'll be about 40 speakers. It's live every day, Monday through Friday with networking, sorry, Monday through Thursday with networking on the Friday.

If you go to page builder summit.com and you just scroll down, you can get an inclination of the, people that are speaking. Yeah, there's a few there that you might have heard of. Paul Charlton, Shannon Turn, Dave Fo, Jamie Marsland. Sarah Maskey. I'm just picking him at random. Josh Hall, bud Kraus, Haley Brown, Nicole Osborne, Amber Hines, Don Strikes, skill Ru.

And the list goes on. Down, down, we go. And if you wanna join us, like I said, go page builder summit.com, stick your name in there, email in there, and and you're off to the races. We'll keep you off. I already got my

[00:13:55] Michelle Frechette: ticket. I'm registered.

[00:13:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's free if you want to, if you wanna watch it, the, there are certain rules of engagement if you like, but basically if you wanna see any of the presentations, they're available for 48 hours.

So if, let's say Dave fos one is on Monday at nine o'clock, it isn't, I'm just making it up. But if it was on at nine o'clock on Monday morning, you'd have it. You'd be able to watch it for free until nine o'clock on Wednesday morning. And so it goes, and if outside of those times you wanna see it, we've got this little thing called the page builder power pack, which you can purchase as well.

Anyway, there you go. Page builder Summit. Dots.

[00:14:30] Michelle Frechette: I'm chuckling at Cameron's comment in Cameron, what does he

[00:14:34] Nathan Wrigley: say? Here we go. He says, Nathan doesn't want to admit it, but it's not his public speaking skills, their issue. It is because he's boring. and on that bombshell I'm gonna give up. It's, he's right. I think, he's, you are, this is, this is basically what my wife tells me on a regular basis, Nathan,

[00:14:52] Tim Nash: how not to get invited back on to do, she's just so boring.

That also decline feature that Nathan built into the system. I,

[00:15:01] Michelle Frechette: it's nice knowing you, Cameron.

[00:15:02] Nathan Wrigley: Thanks Cameron. yeah. I'll see you again. Maybe Cameron's had a few beers anyway. I don't mind. It's all water off a docs pack. I know it to be true. Here we go. WordPress 6.6 is coming around the corner fairly soon.

This is one of two articles that, Ann Zazu, otherwise known as Anne McCarthy, who produces just outrageously large amounts of WordPress content. She's produced this piece. It's on the make WordPress, blog make wordpress.org. I will put the links in the show notes, as I always do, and it's a, it's, can you believe it?

We really feel like we've just dropped 6.5 and 6.6 is due to be released on July the 16th, so a little over two months away. Shorter release cycle, she says. And it builds upon lots and lots of the bits and pieces that have, dropped in 6.5. I've highlighted a few different bits and pieces. I'm just gonna mention them and then I'll leave it to our panel to thresh out whether they like any of them or not, or what they think about them.

And it says here, building on the initial launch in 6.5, the new views in the site editor continue to be refined and enhanced. You'll be able to manage all templates, manage all template parts, manage all pages, and also for pages, a new side by side layout. If you're looking at the page, you might get an inclination of it.

There it is. A new side by side layout will be introduced. So one can see both a list of all the pages and a preview of the currently selected page. I. I think that's quite a nice addition. I guess if you've got enough screen real estate, that'll be all right. for patterns, templates, template, part management will be removed and integrated into the current overall patterns section.

Let me move down. A few initiatives are coming together to allow one to focus on building with patterns rather than granular block editing. This seems to me to be the thrust of lot, lots of the marketing coming outside, coming outta WordPress at the moment is just use patterns for all the things, more patterns, use patterns, make patterns, deploy patterns, save patterns, sync patterns.

Just do all things with patterns. so this zoomed out experience in the editor when in certain pa in certain patterns, inserting easy for you to say, to give you a high level overview of the site so you can see it there. It's like. It gives you a bit of a view, so you can see more than just like a narrow, it's narrower, but longer, if ability to shuffle top level patterns with a temp within a template to quickly explore pa alternative patterns. I'll move on. did I wanna mention that? Oh yeah. So this is really cool. Jamie Maslin showed it off in a video, which we mentioned last week. This is the ability to, within patterns, to block certain things to say, I want my client to be able to change the background color, but not the text of that pattern.

Or, I want my client to be able to change the text but not the background color. And then that could be a global pattern. it could be a pattern which you decouple from global. So in that way it offers loads of ability for you to give your clients bits and pieces that they can and can't edit. there's various different pieces about design tools and color palettes and oh, all sorts going on and on, and right at the bottom, this one is my favorite, although I don't know how well this will be introduced at the beginning, grid layout.

the idea of adding grid variations for the group block that will allow you to display blocks within a group as a grid. be nice if we could figure out how to get the full Monty version of grid in there, but I don't suppose, we'll, anyway, there was my little. Little soup song. I dunno if that's the right French phrase, but I'm going with it, of what is coming in WordPress 6.6.

So I'm just gonna throw it out there. If any of you three have read that article and feel like you've got something to contribute, I'd like us to scroll all the way. Yeah, you want the, at the bottom that I never remembered about? Where do we go? Where do we go?

[00:18:51] Tim Nash: I'll be honest, I feel that, if you're going up a little, keep going down.

No, Keep going. Down, up.

[00:18:57] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, up as in, down. That kind of up left. No, the other left.

[00:19:01] Tim Nash: There we go.

[00:19:02] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So

[00:19:04] Tim Nash: obviously everything Gutenberg is. Gutenberg. And to be honest, I reckon about 90% of people are now reaching editor fatigue syndrome and don't care about patterns and things. so there are some nice features that are not related to the editor.

The biggest of which is, for auto updates are being enabled, with rollbacks. So that means that if your, rollbacks have been in WordPress for a little while, but if you manually did an update and something went horribly wrong, WordPress would go, oh, not a problem. I've just rolled back that plugin.

Carry on. now that's being enabled on automatic updates, which means you, if a plugin fails on an automatic update. It will just roll back and you'll be So

[00:19:58] Nathan Wrigley: is that, so if you set automatic updates, let's say you've got a WordPress site and you've got 10 plugins on there, and you set everything to automatically update Core plus all the plugins as you should one.

Yeah. Yeah. If one of them fails for reasons unknown, we, WordPress will automatically say, okay, that failed. Let's just go back to the previous version. Do you know, if you get an alert or something like that? You do because like I have a feeling you get an email or something to say your site.

Yeah. So

[00:20:25] Tim Nash: you get an email, say you get an email and it references it on the plugins page as well. and so

[00:20:31] Nathan Wrigley: then I guess it's time to speak to the developer of the plugin or maybe even the developer of the plugin from their own knowledge will, probably know, hopefully figure that out. But, but that's really cool.

So pre preventing more white screens of death, basically More chance. Yeah.

[00:20:46] Tim Nash: And, taking away that last sort of. argument that, oh, I can't, set automatic updates because, the things might error. now things will just correct themselves if that happens. I think this combined with a lot of people seem to, be really hesitant to do automatic updates claim thinking that they are better than an automatic update system, and they're not, we are not robots.

Why on earth do we think we're robots and press buttons and do this manually? so this has been one of those little barriers to getting people to whose arguments are, I will know if there's been a, if something breaks. Now, the fun part of this is that the manu, it's manually, if you've been hitting the update button manually, rollback has already existed.

[00:21:39] Nathan Wrigley: You didn't, Yeah, yeah,

[00:21:41] Tim Nash: And so all of these people who have been doing it manually have been being protected by this and not realized it. which I find quite funny in its own way. So now needling on automatic updates, everybody gets the benefits. can I, and also if you scroll up just a tiny, now upwards, a slightly as in down

[00:22:00] Nathan Wrigley: that, version of op.

Yeah. Okay. You, you also have

[00:22:03] Tim Nash: dropping spot for PHP 7.1. Okay. which is just. they're only 10 years out of date. It's we, can throw, but the figures for usage now are so tiny and very few people who were ever on 7.1, most people jump to seven from seven to 7.2 anyway. so that minimum supported is now bumping it up, meaning that there's a bunch of stuff that can be done in core to change across.

And it means plugin developers now can do a lot more with types and, there's a lot more guard clausing that we can do 'cause of that. And so you should see improvements in plugins and less failures generally. So I know are two things I wanna highlight, because I realized that we're gonna have multiple articles about Gutenberg and it's often hard not to re to understand that there are other things happening in the WordPress.

[00:23:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:23:01] Tim Nash: And they are quietly. Little things like this have been happening a lot over the last year or two. Chipping away at those little features that most people won't notice, but are actually making life so much better for everyone.

[00:23:14] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know Tim? Just, sorry. peach. Sorry Michelle. Just to carry that thread on for a little moment.

Do you know, so let's say for example, I had a plugin which was automatically updated. It failed, it rolled back to the previous version. Do you know how that, do I then have to disable. The disabled update, if Do I have to go back into the backend and say, okay, actually re-enable this, or do you know if it'll retry on the next version of, it'll

[00:23:39] Tim Nash: retry on the next go.

Okay. yeah. and so the, if there's, if the developer pushes a fix, it will get the next version check will spot that it's bumped up a version and added anyway. but it will retry regardless. because it could have been a conflict with another plugin or yeah. Other things could have been fixed on the way through.

[00:23:59] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So

[00:24:01] Tim Nash: it's not a foolproof system. We're still at the, there are still potential edge cases and that's why you will find that there are still, things, people, mainly hosting companies have got their, their own updating systems. they're probably still a little bit smarter than this is, but this is a massive step.

And if you are the sort of person who has been hesitant about turning on automatic updates, this should be the thing that pushes you over the edge and gets you to do it. So nice. If you're not using automatic updates. Shame on you at this stage.

[00:24:37] Nathan Wrigley: Shame on you, says Tim. Michelle makes

[00:24:40] Michelle Frechette: a mental note to go check all of her websites.

That's

[00:24:42] Nathan Wrigley: right. Yeah. So that you don't change some

[00:24:44] Michelle Frechette: settings. Go and check.

[00:24:46] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. okay, so Peach, Michelle, the floor is open. If you have anything you want to add about that, I call,

[00:24:53] Michelle Frechette: what else is there to say? Yeah,

[00:24:55] Nathan Wrigley: fair enough. Fair enough. Exactly. Yeah. Okay, so the

[00:24:58] Piccia Neri: marker and solve load,

[00:25:01] Nathan Wrigley: I obviously, I just can't cover everything.

You can see that I've read it through and I've added my own little highlights, but honestly, there's a ton of new things, intended for WordPress. Six. I'll just go through, there's a load about design tools. mix and match typography and color palettes from all style variations. This is actually really cool.

There's a little video here where. I guess it's, Anne has made a little video where she mixes and matches. So the colors and the typography are separate and in this way you can get dozens and dozens more combinations than you used to be able to do. syncing specific blocks and attributes of patterns, I think we mentioned that.

Explain expanding block style variations, for more styling options. That's probably what I was referring to just a moment ago. And the grid layout that we mentioned. And there was a comment that came in from, Keith, Devon. Hi Keith. any advice on when to use a sync pattern versus a custom post type for things like testimonials?

Good question. Don't have an answer luckily. Very good question. Alex does, or at least he's got his own experience. He says, for me it depends on if I need a filter, need to filter the data. If I do, I'll make it a custom post type or subcategory. Otherwise I make it a pattern. So if there's no filtering of that data needed, just you're saying stick it in a pattern.

'cause it'll be static. And I. Okay. and thanks. Go to, Alex for doing that. And Courtney says, this post also covered the deprecation of the Ajax bit, allowing onboarding Wi Wizard redirect. We're coming to that, we're coming to that, Courtney. we'll that's why I didn't mention that. That was actually intentional.

That's the first intentional thing that's happened during this show. okay. in the case. Let's move on. Let's go. I think that's more, yeah, there's another article about, more or less the same thing, but it goes into more detail about the design process. So I'll link to that in the show notes as well.

Here we are. Here we go. This is a nice bit of community news, the WP Community Collective, otherwise known by the acronym, the WPCC. And GoDaddy launch new program to empower and promote underrepresented speakers in WordPress. So this is a press release that came out oh, about six days ago now, and I'll just read from the top.

The WP Community Collective is designed to ou delighted to announce that Godad GoDaddy WC Fellowship, it's first corporate sponsorship within the WordPress community. the WC Fellowship aims to empower and promote underrepresented community members who are speaking, and we'll come back to that word in a moment, speaking at regional and flagship WordPress word camp.

So there's a fairly constrained set of criteria there. You've gotta be a speaker and it's gotta be a regional or a flagship. So Asia. US or Europe and Adam Warner, who we've had on the show says, this program isn't just about funding, it's about fostering connections, offering visibility, and ensuring that our community reflects the broad spectrum of people who contribute to WordPress.

What is the meat on the bones though? it's this, each WC fellow, a recipient of this award will receive a stipend of up to 1,500 US dollars to support the attendance of the conference, including. contributor days. Applications for this will begin on the 7th of May. So they've been open for a few days now.

And the event in question is Word Camp us, which is happening in Portland, Oregon later this year. So if you go to this, actually the URL's really long, it'll be in the, show notes. But if you just go on the WP Community Collective, WPCC, blog, I'm sure that you will find it there. It was released on the 6th of May, this article.

Okay. anybody wanna contribute to that before we move on to some slightly related piece?

[00:28:50] Michelle Frechette: you could take the comment down for Courtney so we can see more of the page, but, I'm excited about this opportunity. Oh, thank you.

[00:28:56] Nathan Wrigley: Apologies. yeah, that's okay.

[00:28:59] Michelle Frechette: I'm excited about this. I think, I think everybody knows I do a lot of work, in underrepresented communities and I'm very excited about the fact that more people are stepping up to create opportunities for underrepresented folks.

I know that there's a lot of work still to be done, but this is a huge step and I think that companies putting forward some kind of, Program like this makes it just, it makes me happy. It just is one of those things that it's, it really helps move the needle forward as far as the work that we do for underrepresented communities within WordPress for sure.

[00:29:36] Nathan Wrigley: And, lovely little comment coming in from Matt g. Boots on the ground, Matt G's one of the, people organizing Word Camp Canada. Word camp a. that's right. And he says it'd be really great to bring in some indigenous voices to Word Camp Canada through that program. So there you go from the horse's mouth, as it were.

Some real useful ideas there. okay. Great. Peach, anything before we. Crack on?

[00:30:05] Piccia Neri: no, just my gratitude because I've been helped before. So by various, companies, by various people such as Michelle here. So thank you. And it does mean a lot. It does mean a lot. Yeah. I think that it, I don't know.

it's a wider conversation, so let's start from underrepresented, but also independent voices in general be, it's nice to see. Helped out.

[00:30:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:30:34] Piccia Neri: so thanks. So that's brilliant. I agree with Michelle.

[00:30:38] Nathan Wrigley: If you, if you haven't checked out the WPCC, just Google it or go to a search engine of choice, WPCC or WP Community Collective, and you'll be able to see that they've got these, I'm gonna use the word scholarships.

I think it's actually, fellowships is the right word, for a broad range of different community initiatives. So this will drop into that as one thing that, GoDaddy are paying for. But if you want to help out on a broader set of initiatives, and you wanna drop in $10, a hundred dollars, knowing that, that will help somebody in a specific use case, you can go and see what those use cases are, and you can contribute to those.

So it doesn't have to be a company like GoDaddy making it happen. It could be that you just dip into your own pocket with a small amount. And, and help out in different ways. But yeah, the criteria here, speaker, in this case at the beginning, word camp us and it needs to be in the future, it'll be bound to flagship and, regional WordPress events.

Okay. So Tim, sorry I for, forgot to include you if you wanted to say any.

[00:31:43] Tim Nash: That's okay. Okay. other than this to say going to work camps is really expensive. Yeah. And it's very expensive. The, obviously when you are not a working for a large company that's sponsoring the events or sponsoring to send you there, it, can be for most people, perhaps too expensive.

And so anything we can do to get people who. Just would turn their heads and say, I can't do that. I can't go. Especially if we are then encouraging them to speak is a positive thing.

[00:32:18] Nathan Wrigley: I think also like just flipping this on his head as well, it's actually good, it's nice PR for the likes of GoDaddy in this case as well, because they get to put their name to something which is just utterly philanthropic.

whichever way you look at it, this is gonna help an individual who probably wouldn't be able to go. in, in other situations. And Bravo, I'm sure that if you go to the WPC, you'll be able to pick up the name of a bunch of other individuals and companies that are doing something similar.

But yeah, nice initiative. And, and also the WPCC just makes a really sensible place to go, in the future if you want to check those kind of things out. Having one place seems like a really sensible idea. Okay. somewhat related to that, and I know that at the beginning of the show, bigot was in the comments, so whether or not she's still here and bigot, if I, get the flavor of what you're trying to say here wrong, please just correct me.

But, bigot produced an article. she's got the website, coach big at.com and you'll be able to find it. It was published on the 5th of May, so a little over a week ago. And, this is about that. It's about attending word camps, but with a twist, right? So it says in the world of, so the article, by the way, is called Inclusion in Action, called for Expanding.

Travel funds to WordPress contributors. Four. Two WordPress contributors. Yeah. In the world of WordPress and open source, we started making strides towards inclusivity, especially with some companies setting up diversity travel funds for speakers from underrepresented groups. I refer the honorable lady and gentleman to the article I mentioned a moment ago.

That's a UK parliamentary thing, by the way. That was just awful. I'll never do that again. I'm sorry. that's remarkable. But there's a big piece of the puzzle still missing. Backbone contributor day attendees and table leads are left out now. bi It is one of these people, she says, as a long-term contributor, I've been currently pouring over 10 hours a week, Adam up people.

That's 520 hours a year. That's more work than I do of any kind in a year. She just does it as a contributor. 10 hours a week into WordPress projects as the founder and lead of the global WordPress DEIB working group, not for money or fame. But because I believe in it, and I've just missed out a little bit, but the financial reality of attending word camps, especially international ones, hits hard.

Just like Tim just said, it's time for a change. It's time for companies in the WordPress ecosystem to step up and extend travel funds to active contributors, not just speakers. This isn't about making it easier for us to attend. It's about recognizing the hard work and dedication for all contributors, and ensuring our community is as diverse and inclusive as we aim for it to be.

And I have to say, I genuinely didn't even think about this until I read that article. I swear, that's ridiculous, right? But I hadn't equated. Okay. If you are a contributor in another area. You should also be getting the option to go, not because you're speaking, but just because you've been a big cog in the wheel and helpful and thoughtful, and you'd contribute something by your presence and the conversations that you'd have and the things that you'd say and the, the connections that you'd make and all of that.

And so it feels like being it, if I scroll to the very bottom now, I don't know much about how this works. maybe this is give WP it's, but it does appear from this, it, yeah. Thank you. I assumed it was, it does appear that, bigot on the strength of this article decided to put up a, like a GoFundMe, if you like.

with a value of 1,200 Euros. Now, by all accounts, that's now been met. So if that's the case, Birgit, congratulations for that. And, your voice obviously got heard, but let's talk about the thing in general. like I said, it hadn't even occurred to me. I. I never speak. I'm managed to get there by hook or by crook sometimes being sponsored, sometimes paying for myself.

But what do you think? Do you think B gets onto something? Everybody? I wanted to go at the same time,

[00:36:24] Michelle Frechette: a little over a year ago, I started the selfie challenge that I do at Word, at Major Word camps, especially where I ask people, does it take a selfie with me? Put it out there, hashtag Michelle and me. And through that I have raised over the last year and a half, over $5,000, of my own money, but also individuals and businesses that have contributed to that fund, all of that money has gone to support.

I think now we're up to 15 different speakers and organizers who are underrepresented people to attend Word camps and not just the flagship events, but regional camps. and all of those people, like we, I sponsored somebody, we being the collective people who have contributed to that, sponsored a speaker to be able to speak for the first time, on the African continent.

Forgive me for not remembering where it was. It was over a year ago. those kinds of opportunities are what I wish that we were doing at a more global level. So when, BGE writes about this and, when the w p Collective Community Collective, do does these kinds of events, it does help take the pressure off of somebody like me who is attending Word camps and speaking at them and sponsoring them with my company, with, with Stellar WP and, all of the other things that I do.

Because I'm trying so hard to help other people do that, and that's coming in through, just through me. I'm not a nonprofit. I'm paying taxes on that money to the United States because it's coming in through my bank account. and so all of that goes to say that if more people were able to get behind this, and if we found a better solution for helping get these speakers and sponsors, community members, whoever, volunteers, like whatever, however that looks, those communities come together in a huge way to create these amazing events that push the project forward, but also help people in general learn and do WordPress better.

That's where a lot of decisions are made. That's where a lot of, connections are made and for those opportunities to happen because we're able to sponsor people in there. Would be amazing. And so it, it started at grassroots and it's starting to grow more, but I think we do need to talk about it more.

And I'm really happy that ETT is, is doing that. Jill Binder used to talk about it more. She's no longer part of that process. she's still, her heart is still in it, of course. but she is not been as outspoken in the last six months or so. And but because it's tiring to stand on the soapbox and say this over and over again is exhausting.

I have a podcast, ally Nimmons and I started underrepresented in tech. Now some Oser from a Yost. And I do the continue that podcast every week. It is exhausting to keep saying the same things over and over, but it has to be said, and those things need to move forward. And just because we get tired doesn't mean that the problem doesn't exist anymore.

And so for more people to start using their voices to say these things out loud just makes me happy.

[00:39:29] Nathan Wrigley: sorry, I

[00:39:29] Michelle Frechette: just got myself back again.

[00:39:31] Nathan Wrigley: No, Thank you. That's great. I'll just do a few of the comments before I throw it to Tim and, peach. firstly, yep, of course. Bigot. It was a fascinating piece.

and the next one is from Mike Johnson, who, now will forever be known in my head as the man who had to listen to me for seven hours. member of the organizing team for Word Camp Torino, is also gonna be setting up a similar page. so she's made a huge contribution, but now, right now, can't afford to go to Torino, so that, okay, so that's another interesting thing.

So somebody who's literally put heart and soul, I'm assuming from that, I'm putting words into your mouth there, Mike, but somebody who's put a lot of effort into organizing that event who can't themselves go. Yeah. Okay. That seems unusual, doesn't it? Yeah. And then, just a confirmation that yes, it was give WP and thanks to Michelle for adding in a, license that was needed for making that work.

WPCC, I think I used too many Cs there. WP Su two Cs, SU, that's, yeah. WP C. C, okay. has more news. Next week. Okay. watch this space. We'll be covering it. And is there any

[00:40:41] Tim Nash: me who thinks that we, every time I hear that, I go, when did WordPress start a cricket club? Yeah, that's right. That's what goes through

[00:40:48] Nathan Wrigley: my head as well.

But we're uniquely, that is such a British thing. British thing. Oh, it's

[00:40:56] Piccia Neri: gonna get outta and jug juggle PIs next.

[00:41:01] Nathan Wrigley: Turns out that's what we're drinking, right? No. Where's your pi? It's

[00:41:05] Piccia Neri: so hot. Why do you have pins on your table? Oh,

[00:41:08] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. so I wasn't putting words in Mike's mouth. He says heart and soul, for sure.

That's lovely. And then Cameron says, it's hard to say everything I want to Yeah. But in an ideal world, the WPC shouldn't need to exist. okay. That, yeah, I get what you're saying. Great.

[00:41:22] Piccia Neri: I'll do my take on it. But, and

[00:41:24] Nathan Wrigley: the fact that it is necessary is a sad reflection. on the project. So before we move on to the next piece, I'll just hand it to Tim, hand it to Petra if they've got anything to say about this.

I know in the past, Petra, you've always had fairly vocal thoughts about, those that can of, can attend, or those that can afford to attend. I remember saying things like that. Yeah,

[00:41:45] Piccia Neri: it's like that I'm gonna, I'm gonna keep it short. I just have to commend. I just say that it's really not easy to make that kind of request.

I am so delighted that Bergit can go to work now, and I have, thought for a long time that organ. I have been so privileged to be on the receiving end. And again, thank, with huge thanks to people like Michelle, who really you busted gut for us and I appreciate it hugely at the same time. I do, I agree with Cameron.

I think that it just, it's not it. It would be too long to actually have the long conversation about it. But I don't think it's a positive thing and I think that everybody to have to do this, and I think that especially organizers should absolutely the minimum, at a minimum they should get funded to travel there and of course contributors.

It's crazy that's even a thing. And 'cause otherwise we get to the point where, open source is alba, those who can't afford to do it, and that's never the independent voices. So I think it's a way longer conversation. And as you say, Nathan, I have indeed lots of opinions about it.

Michelle knows, you, you all know, but there's no time for all of it. But right now, I just have to say I am so happy that Berg can go and I hope that more people like her. Can go, I'm not going this. Yeah. Because I am, I'm, not speaking and therefore I'm not going. It's pretty much is like that for me.

[00:43:20] Nathan Wrigley: Not

[00:43:20] Piccia Neri: always. I've had to go, not always. I have self-funded. Some sometimes, but sometimes it's possible and sometimes. Not quite

[00:43:30] Nathan Wrigley: big. It says thanks. Yeah. A

[00:43:31] Piccia Neri: lot of courage because even asking for funding, sometimes even asking to be funded as a speaker takes courage because it just feels weird.

And there is of course, that

[00:43:43] Nathan Wrigley: there is of course that I

[00:43:44] Piccia Neri: really applaud Bernie. Yeah,

[00:43:45] Nathan Wrigley: sorry that No, I was just gonna say there's that, chance that you get egg on your face. I don't mean that in the horrible way, you put a crowdfunder up and then you get like $9 or something and you feel like you've been kicked in the teeth because you feel more undervalued than you did prior to the crowdfunder.

firstly big it, I'm glad that isn't the case and you've obviously exceeded your expectation. okay, so Tim, anything before we move slightly on? It's totally related.

[00:44:14] Tim Nash: I just wanted to, pick up on the speaker part. 'cause speakers are very visible. we go up on the stage and it's very easy for a company to tie themselves to that speaker because they can go, I, they, see them on the stage.

They, the speakers will talk, be talking about them quite often. There might be many. there's an obvious link. You can understand why someone would want to sponsor a speaker. it takes someone to really think about it, to go, actually, I wanna sponsor a. That human being. 'cause they're not sponsoring the human being.

They're sponsoring the pers a per a persona on a stage. And it takes quite a lot to sponsor someone, a human being who's there to contribute. and I think they're different things, but, yeah, I too have many thoughts on independent voices and, a vote for word camps for organizing and bits.

And I think between us all, we could be ranting for weeks. And unfortunately the solution is somehow to get us an infinite bottom money. which I'd love and I if, anybody's got one of those, we could all do with them.

[00:45:24] Nathan Wrigley: Send it

[00:45:24] Tim Nash: my way.

[00:45:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's right. but I distribute it very fairly. Yeah, of course.

Yeah. Yeah. the slightly related piece to this is actually, oh, where's it gone? Where's it gone? Where's it gone? Here we go. it is on the sustainability. I. blog, so it's make.wordpress.org/sustainability. And it's Courtney Robertson who's in the comments, and this was 10 to May, so a few days ago.

Recognizing contributions and acknowledging challenges. And this is a piece all about, how do you acknowledge somebody who doesn't write code? Like how do you say, okay, your contribution was worth this and your contribution was worth that. And it's not even that. It's not trying to atomize it and make it into a value.

Like you get 10 points and you only get six points. It's not that, it's more about how as a project do we figure out. what is a contribution and how do they get acknowledged and recognized? And this is not a, this is not a suggestion list. This is a, here's some thoughts. Can we have some comments about, thus, what this would be?

So in the context of WordPress is five. For the future initiative, there is contributors, and I'm reading, from different professional backgrounds, play a critical role by dedicating a percentage of their resources to enhance the platform. So companies with plugins, web hosts, individual contributors, agencies, community members.

But then how do we make sure that even more than that, if you like, get the recognition that they deserve. How do we make it transparent and traceable? How do we make sure that the quality is measured and that the impact is measured? That boy, I don't even know where to begin with that. How do you measure the impact of somebody who I.

I don't know. just something that's not a piece of code. How do we document it and acknowledge what they're doing? How do you make sure that it can be scalable, at the size of WordPress? Because obviously, WordPress is a load of spaghetti. It's really hard for the hydra to know what's going on with its other heads.

and then there's something about informal structures. So I just wanted to point this out. this is Courtney's attempt to get the conversation going. it hasn't really started as yet, but if you want to go, I'll, it's called Recognizing Contributions and Acknowledging challenges. May the 10th over at make.wordpress.org/sustainability, how do we make the project more sustainable?

I'm sorry, Courtney. I feel like I've butchered your, your article there, but that was what I could manage. and what does Courtney say at the bottom? There's a footnote to Chaos Metrics. Thank you. Let me go and have a look. Here we go. Number here. Let me open that in a new tab. chaos.community. All the metrics.

Okay, I'll explore that at my own length. and then Andy has jumped in Dr. Andy Frain in the comment shares about his Im, an impact of contribution that he faces. Andy Frain is something else, isn't he? He's like a trauma surgeon and in his spare time he gives 15 hours a week to working on call.

Extraordinary, what? Wow. okay. Anything about that? Probably not 'cause it was very much related to what we talked about a moment ago, but it's a little bolt on extra. Tim, I thought, oh, someone else. Oh no, you're all going. You're all going. let's go Tim, first. Let's go in reverse order that we did last time.

Tim, first

[00:48:57] Tim Nash: just, I the only thing that always worries me when we talk about, looking at the impacts an individual has done to a project is that it's, it is comparing it to other people. You can't not end up comparing contributions with other people. And I think that I. Can often lead to completely demoralizing, especially with a project so big and where someone looks and looks across at somebody else who's doing X, Y, and Z who is the director on 28 boards and is got 12 podcasts and she doesn't sleep at all.

And you are there going, but I can't even just get out of bed this morning, but I'll make this contribution today and this is my little thing. And that little thing might have a humongous impact on one person. Oh, no, think I've upset Michelle.

But it that, that, that person's tiny thing that many, most people would look around and say that support forum post that they wrote, where they were like, oh, I know the answer to this one question might change someone's. Entire outlook on WordPress. It might change someone's entire, for all, it might change that person's life.

They may be able to get that, JP give page or whatever it is that they were doing. And so it, it's a really tiny thing, but it has a huge impact and no sort of metric is gonna be able to understand that. or, and so I worry when we start trying to put scores on humans, it's never, let me just add a few things

[00:50:37] Nathan Wrigley: that Courtney's, thrown in.

So she said, first of all, there's a follow up post coming out tomorrow, to that will include tools and working group details in sustainability. Then she's asking you a question, Tim, do you see a way instead of focusing on people this, excuse me, this could help elevate what parts of the project are healthy or needing additional help.

[00:51:00] Tim Nash: that's probably the way to do it, is that the, we have the teams and, so the, within WordPress and within make, you can see all the various teams and if metrics were surrounded about them or, at least, aggregated to the team, maybe that would be a, route. But and, some people really want recognition and want, and they like metrics because they like to, know where they are on the ladder.

They like the social karma of building up the bits, but there are others who will shy away and that will scare them. And so it's getting that balance right. there are certain people I know who ha are really excited that they can get badges and try to gamify the system just to get all the WordPress badges.

and others who like that would just terrify them. and I don't. I think ultimately people, we, put a lot of emphasis on, you should contribute more. You are not doing enough contributing. If you want things to change, you should contribute. And it's, it can be overwhelming for people. they can feel like, oh, I just wanted to tell you that there was a bug.

no, you must now do this. And they're like, oh, no, I'll just go back over here. And we lose so many people. Because they're churned into a machine that's contribute. and that's, and then you're told, oh, you don't need to be a coder to contribute. And it's true, you don't, but it's really hard to tell, to actually convince someone that if you throw that, when they're suddenly being thrown into track and make and all this stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. so I, I guess I've stretched this into a different conversation, but it's. Yeah, I, have the whole mechanism is currently doesn't, I don't think work for most people.

[00:52:54] Nathan Wrigley: I think it's very hard to, to measure something in a project, which is, in many ways held together by philanthropy and good intentions.

and you are right if.

[00:53:08] Tim Nash: Intention, but goodwill and Yeah, Goodwill that everybody is Yeah. There who wants to be there. and then it is awkward because we do obviously have people who are sponsored who are just giving up their time. And then you've got things like whatever it is, five that keeps getting re hashed around.

so it is really frustrating that you got all these aspects and we then it, but it does really feel like you're being forced to do this stuff. and I, feel incredible pressure. I know Cameron's just saying he doesn't know. I'll be honest, I've stopped doing a lot. I've stepped away from an awful lot of contribu what I would consider contribution because it's just grinding my head into a wall and it hurts.

And eventually you just give up. A lot of the, a lot of the time when we are talking about community. It's not, it's a community for some people. It's not a community for everyone.

[00:54:06] Nathan Wrigley: I'll just paraphrase.

[00:54:07] Tim Nash: we think we're really good at being open and brilliant and wonderful, but we are still a really cliquey.

Hard to get into group of people and we, are putting barriers up even if we don't realize them. And I guess for everybody and across all of like different open source projects. So nature of life,

[00:54:26] Nathan Wrigley: A few comments on that then. So first of all, Tim, sorry, responding to Tim Cameron says, I don't even report bugs anymore because of this sort of behavior.

So that was what you were just saying. Thanks for shining a light on it, Tim. And then Courtney chimed in with, I hear you Tim. please know my main focus is on how we can gauge the health of the project holistically, as well as recognizing contributions differently than release props, as primary metrics used.

I think it's the measurement thing, isn't it? That's the hardest bit. That's what you were saying. And then B gets back having better ways to track no code contributions and maybe measure the impact. Helps also individual contributors to make their case while looking for sponsorship. Okay.

That's a really good

[00:55:09] Tim Nash: point. Yeah. To,

[00:55:10] Nathan Wrigley: counter myself.

[00:55:11] Piccia Neri: And it just goes back to, the same argue, issue actually, sorry, Tim. Carry on.

[00:55:21] Nathan Wrigley: I'll just do the next one quickly. There's one more comment from Peter and he says, Tim raises many great points. Crikey, we're gonna have that as the show's title.

and regarding not being a developer, you may not need to code, but it sure helps to know how to use the code of tools like GitHub. That is a barrier. Okay. And there's another one just dropped in. Woo. Apparently. here we go. Oh, barriers. Oh, I get it. I look. So this is Courtney. She's responding to, Peter, I'm guessing.

I get it. I look to other open source projects for inspiration about how we could address similar challenges. Yeah, it was interesting.

[00:55:57] Piccia Neri: Saying contributors like, yeah, because are that open source projects do

[00:56:01] Nathan Wrigley: buried in that article. I'm just gonna put it back on the screen. I don't know where. There was something about, where was it?

There was something in here about the sort of the way that the str Oh yeah. I'll just raise it on the screen quickly. Unlike many open source projects that use formal charters to define the roles and powers of different teams, WordPress, operates without such structures. This flexibility allows for dynamic adaption, but can sometimes lead to unexpected changes such as recent discon discontinuation of the marketing team, which we spoke about last week.

So that's interesting. So the other, open source projects may be able to shine a light on different ways that they do things maybe better, maybe worse, but worse.

[00:56:44] Tim Nash: It's also, remember they have the same problems. We, this is not unique to WordPress, and

[00:56:50] Nathan Wrigley: I guess the scaler works shouldn't just sit there and go, oh, we

[00:56:52] Tim Nash: are doing bad.

yeah.

[00:56:54] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. That's right. yeah. Do doom speaker, speak your doom. okay. So that was interesting. Michelle Peacher. Tim, anything else on that before we move on? Feel like we maybe cracked that one.

[00:57:09] Michelle Frechette: I'll just say that when we have Herculean. Issues or projects or whatever we wanna call it, like funding people, like making sure that things are sustainable, like recognition and those kinds of things.

They are huge problems to undertake. They're big hurdles and that sometimes stops us from continuing to work toward them because of this inertia of how do we, it's so big. How could we possibly begin to chip away at it? But continuing to talk about these things, keeping them in the front line. I don't have a solution.

We, we actually had a session on this at the, community summit before Word camp US last year about recognition and how some people love the badges and some people could care less about the badges. How do we keep people interested in moving things forward? And I think just we need to keep talking about it.

Somebody somewhere will have an idea. Multiple people will come together with ideas and we will move it forward. But I love that we continue to pull it in here in other places because just to say it's too big a problem to solve doesn't help us in any way, shape or form. So the other thing I'll say though is as you start to make huge, changes, so things like this, you will never make everybody happy.

And so we have to be okay with some people being unhappy as we move things forward. That is just the way the world works.

[00:58:32] Nathan Wrigley: I, I think it's a basic of human nature, isn't it, to want recognition. Like you may want it absolutely. you may want it out in the open so that everybody knows, you did this, let's blow their trumpet.

Everybody mentioned them on social media. Other people, bigot would be a good example. Here. The recognition is. Can I just go to a word count that I wouldn't be able to go to otherwise, would that be okay? And in this case, the recognition hasn't come from.org or it's come from individual members of the community.

You've put into their delve into their pocket and said, yes, I recognize you. That's really nice that she's been able to do that. But having something like flexible time, it's not one size fits all. It's a spectrum of recognition. By the way, that's now the universal symbol for spectrum.

[00:59:20] Michelle Frechette: it also doesn't adjust the fact that there are so many gap filling projects.

They're part of the actual project itself. So you know, like, the WP Community Collective, for example, that is not something That's right. yes, there is recognition by folks about it, but it's not something that's universally recognized within the project itself. There are so many projects like that, like underrepresented in tech, I can't even think of all of them off the top of my head, of course.

But there are so many things that so many of us are doing. Marcus, with the WP world, right? Yeah. Connecting people. Those are not part of the project. They're not part of the open source project. They're tangential to it, and they fill these gaps that a project like the open source project has, but there is no official recognition of those either in spite of the hundreds of hours that go into projects like that.

So I just wanna throw that out there as well.

[01:00:08] Nathan Wrigley: no, that's fine. Peacher is back. She went away for about one second Peach. Anything to say before we.

[01:00:14] Piccia Neri: So first of all, thanks to both Michelle and Tim for all the, your wise words. yeah, it's, again, it's another really big topic, isn't it, from my point of view.

the whole thing about contribution is that all the things that Tim said, all the things that Michelle said, plus a little bit, that it's not always easy to find your own way of contributing because of the way con contributing is structured. I think that you said that a little bit, Tim, but it can be, I, sometimes struggle to find the right way to contribute and, but I think that as a com I know lots of people who have never contributed anything to CORE or, to any of the make WordPress teams, but they have contributed locally in so many ways that are, that go completely unrecognized.

And a lot of them are organizers that ha have buried the business, their businesses, into the ground. For the good of the community, of the local community and so many, even satellite events and, things like that. And so there are many, ways of contributing. And Courtney, by the way, Robertson is someone who does so much towards that.

so that's really, great. And it's all, to me, a part and parcel of the same topic that keeps coming up, this week. But there's also some people have more time than others. If you're a, if you're single, for instance, you don't have children and you're not disabled, you'll have more time.

But you may have more time, but you may have other hurdles that make it difficult for you to contribute. But I have heard sometimes that unless you contribute to core, you don't really understand the project. That's not nice to hear, and I've heard it quite a few times and it doesn't make me want to contribute to call.

It's the opposite. it's a, big topic and I dunno whether I've probably made it, madia, sorry, in my sort

[01:02:14] Tim Nash: no. Rambling

[01:02:16] Piccia Neri: free picture

[01:02:17] Tim Nash: on your shell. I want to just throw out one idea. We get rid of the word contribute and just go back to help. Ooh. At some point, contribute became this thing, and it came with baggage and it came with stuff.

But when I am an, I've been involved in WordPress for a very long time, and we started off by just being helpful. You were helpful when you replied on a forum. You were helpful when you did, when you fixed that bug. You were helpful when you set up a user group. Those weren't contributions. They didn't come with a stamp of approval.

They didn't come with some sort of metrics or bits. They were just helping people. I have a suggestion that's where we should go.

[01:03:04] Nathan Wrigley: I'm gonna interrupt. I've coined a phrase and I think we should call them help help distributors. How about that? Yeah, that's the answer. Encapsulate that

[01:03:13] Michelle Frechette: roll. That rolls off the tongue.

That rolls off the tongue.

[01:03:18] Nathan Wrigley: I know. I even practice that reference. No, I do. You know what, Tim, I think there's something in that, the, word sometimes carries more weight than the, than, it appears. And I think, you might be onto something there. 'cause I tell you what.

[01:03:34] Piccia Neri: Yeah. But for instance, it's things like, then it becomes, I, for instance, I contributed as a, an organizer to two work camps.

For some reason it's doesn't appear in my profile. And therefore. I am downgrade made to do you know what I mean? I don't care. But then if you, have a badge systems, then I am someone like that. It can happen is like lower ranked or something like that.

[01:04:00] Nathan Wrigley: here's Peter, to your point.

Peter says, as a meetup organizer and contributor on several nonfic non air quotes official channels, I put tons of time into WordPress. Every month. yeah, and I'm guess he's saying that maybe the recognition isn't there. I wonder, Peter, if you feel willing to share, does that tick you off?

Does it, are you totally sanguine about that or is there some sort of, resentment's the wrong word, but it's the only word that's coming into my head at the moment. some level of, That doesn't seem quite right. and then Courtney's back. Peach and Peach. I just, peach, I just spoke with Mike or Terry about this.

who was involved with Gather Press? Okay, Peacher, I guess maybe hang out with Courtney after this call. Yeah. Enough and Big says, as I learned recently, a lot of WordPress meetups in Africa just organized a load of a, organize all of their community work over WhatsApp. And don't use Slack at all.

So no, no notion of what's going on there. No recognition, in fact, no way to be recognized. But the work gets done. gosh, recognition, eh, and help tribute,

[01:05:06] Michelle Frechette: remember when you said you didn't think there was anything left to talk about this issue?

[01:05:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's about

[01:05:09] Michelle Frechette: 10 minutes ago. Yeah, no, it's certainly is I, that

[01:05:12] Nathan Wrigley: is one of the things that I love about the show is my intuitions are usually quite wrong about what I think people will be interested in Occasionally.

Occasionally. Yeah. I put these articles up and very often the things that I think, oh, that'll be fun to talk about. Nobody wants to talk about and vice versa. And that is brilliant. How nice. I love it. I think we've probably gone through a bit of that, but certainly that's dominated this conversation.

we were talking about events and a couple of things to mention. The first one, as I said already, I haven't got it on the screen, but if you're in the uk, the, premier. Word Camp in the uk. The only word camp in the uk Word Camp Whitley Bay, in the northeast of England, just on the coast in Newcastle, is taking place in Tim July, I wanna say July.

[01:05:56] Tim Nash: it is the Whitley Bay in the, the July the 12th, 2024. It's up on my screen. Is it a Friday? I, oh, it's okay.

[01:06:06] Nathan Wrigley: It's okay because I had it in on, I had it in as a day when I was doing this show on a Monday, and so I was actually talking to Michelle about it this week. No, I'll be at Whitley Bay.

I had to cancel one of the shows and then realized, no, hang on a minute. I dunno what happened there, but it's available. Tickets are available if you wanna be a speaker or a sponsor. If you go to just Google Word Camp Whitley Bay. So is it a Friday? It is a Friday. Friday. I've just checked that too. Okay.

And, another WordPress event. This time in London, sorry, the UK focus here, I'm from the uk. the Word Camp London meetup is after speakers. if you are in and around the London area and are willing to travel, there, thereafter, speakers longform talks 25 to 30 minutes long and lightning talks 10 minutes long, and they're putting that on each and every month.

You can actually see the. The sort of schedule, obviously some of these are coming up very soon, but you can see the dates that they're doing. It's the last Thursday, of each month, and some of them are. To do with Woo. But you can see, 1, 2, 3 to do with Woo. You can see that one of them's fully booked, but these slots, these are the ones that need your help.

So if you're a speaker in the WordPress space and you wanna contribute your time, and you wanna be in person in London, then there you go. Okay. Back to Peter. Just to give us that context. There is a level of frustration when it comes to what is recognized. Yeah. More frustrating for me is how much Slack and GitHub equals contribution.

Okay. That's interesting. Okay.

[01:07:38] Piccia Neri: That on to contribute on Slack. I just can't do you wrote

[01:07:41] Tim Nash: Peter's notes so that Peter can be seen? Yeah.

[01:07:44] Nathan Wrigley: Sorry, I, I apologize. oh. actually it's because the screen is on. If I take the screen away and put Peter's comment, but there we go. Everybody's happy now.

[01:07:53] Piccia Neri: It's all right, Nathan. Yeah, you can take a break from my mug.

[01:07:59] Nathan Wrigley: but that's an interesting point, right? maybe Pete Peter's onto something, if, Slack and get definitely heavily skewed. I

[01:08:07] Piccia Neri: feel the same by the, Slack thing. I just can't work like that. Yeah. It seems I can't do it.

It, really is what stops me. I have tried with a design team and also with the accessibility team and I cannot get my head around it. I, dunno, it's like a limitation that I have. I just can't work on Slack.

[01:08:26] Nathan Wrigley: I don't like Slack either. I'll just say that. I don't like anything linear like that where you get lost.

If you go on holiday for a week, it's like scroll and, I don't know. My head just doesn't work in that frame. I'd dare I say it. Can we do WordPress via email? No. Everybody's face is telling the actual truth. No, you can't. okay. So anyway, couple of events there that's really nice. bit of cell promotion, but in the AI space, I did a couple of episodes of podcasts, which just happened to be about ai.

If you listen on the Tavern, the Jukebox podcast chatted with an magician, called Paolo Bell Castro, who's been working on jet pack API. Honestly fascinating conversation. Deeply thoughtful. Very obviously very intelligent person who is giving thought to what will come with WordPress and ai, inside the editor to help, but also on in terms of code.

Speaking of code and WordPress, I also spoke to a chap on, this is WP builds chap called Alex bto, who has a plugin, it's called WP Turbo. It's at WP turbo.dev. And the intention of that plugin is to help you write code with ai. and so anyway, two bits of content to, to go and check out. Conveo, I don't know much about the Conveo, hosting platform.

I might even be encapsulating that wrong, but my understanding is they're a sort of managed WordPress host and they have acquired a company called Grammatic, to bolster their WooCommerce marketing automation platform. I have nothing else to add to that. It's just. It's nice to see some of these things happening.

A couple of years ago, it was like every week we had about nine of these stories, but it's quiet and dried down, so that's nice. okay. oh, this came from Courtney. I'm pretty sure Courtney, did you send me this? I think you did. and I'd never come across this before. This is the design share.

It's a make WordPress make wordpress.org/design. And this, you'll find this was on the 6th of May, 2024. I have nothing to say. Really, and if you are listening to this, apologies, it's entirely visual. I sincerely apologize. But what we're looking at is, screenshots of what people think might be a nice way of making WordPress in all of its different forms look like in the future.

So we're looking at an upgraded learn homepage. I've gotta say I quite like it. if that dropped into my, if that dropped that, I'd be really pleased with that. And it just goes on and on for all sorts of different things. I don't know, dark mode switcher, there's some possibilities here. Little videos of how that might be implemented.

how open verse search might work, what grid integration might look like inside the block editor with little handles and things like that. block pages, blah, blah, blah. It just, it's a lovely way to, to waste half an hour. Go and look at these designs and see what you make of them. And obviously then make some commentary.

I don't know if there's a deeper purpose to those pictures than that o other, than it just be a collection of. Things that have been put forward as possible Suggestions. Anyway, I thought that was really nice. a comment from Courtney. Did we do that one? Da The titles of this team's posts aren't super interesting, but the content, what they're working on in design is shown.

exactly. Yeah, the title is not great. Is it? Design Share number 55. But, but the, content is brilliant. So again, link will be in the show notes and thank you once more for Courtney for sharing that. All right. This one is on Michelle because this is a stellar WP piece. It's a press release, as much as anything else.

It's announcement Stellar WP Acquires Learn add-ons from Wisdom Labs. Tell us more, Michelle.

[01:12:22] Michelle Frechette: we are always looking to make the LMS process with through LearnDash something that is easier and incorporates more, More opportunities for education and integration, what's the word I'm looking for?

Engagement with your students. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a whole series of plugins that we've acquired add-on plugins to LearnDash, from Wisdom Labs, who have been doing a lot of work within the LMS and specifically within LearnDash for years. And so we're really excited about starting to implement those in, those hit our site and our users last week when this, went live on Wednesday.

And yeah, there's not a ton to say other than the fact that we're really excited to offer more opportunities for our Learn dash users to. to have more features.

[01:13:09] Nathan Wrigley: So the following add on should practice

[01:13:12] Michelle Frechette: that better?

[01:13:13] Nathan Wrigley: no. Get it. the following add-ons will be brought under the learn banner.

previous and they have

[01:13:20] Michelle Frechette: now. Yeah.

[01:13:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. okay. instructor role sup, reports for learn dash group, registration, ratings, reviews, and feedback. I illumine, I don't know how to pronounce that. Apologies. And content cloner. do you know, Michelle, off the top of your head, if you are a Learn subscriber, are these kind of like added in a new need to like upgrade to take those on?

Or is this like just part of the bundle of. Bits and pieces that you offer?

[01:13:47] Michelle Frechette: Yeah, so they're part of our bundle. Okay. And then, yeah, you would still need to download them and put them on your website of course, but they would become part of your bundle and part of your account with [email protected].

[01:13:57] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So there's, in the previous case, you would've had to have had another account somewhere else. Pay them a fee. Now it's part of your bundle fee. If you've got the correct bundle, then they're available. Okay. So you can check that out, learn.com and it will be, available in the show notes. Let us move on. We're not doing that one. That was a small glimpse of HT MX and and. Tim doomed that to death before we hit record. there's no way that's coming in. this is a little community announcement. p Paul Halfpenny, works for an agency, I believe, I'm gonna say founder.

He certainly right at the top of the tree in that agency, it's called, filter. And they have a plugin called Personalized wp. It's, a plugin which enables you to, set conditions to make the front end of your website different based upon, oh, I don't know, it might be the time of year or whether somebody's bought a WooCommerce product or something like that.

You get the picture, you set a condition, and then there's a trigger on the back end, which makes your front end look slightly different. They're doing a webinar about it. It's on Wednesday, the 5th of June. It is called Conversion Boost Strategies for WordPress Success with Personalized wp.

So if you've got that plugin and you want to know more, great. And if you don't have that plugin but you're interested in it, you can go to Eventbrite and search for it. But again, links will be in the show notes completely free. 5th of June. So you've got a couple of weeks to sign up for that, right?

Okay. Earlier I have a memory, but it's going fast. It's slipping away from me. Why is this story relevant to something that we said earlier? This is about the refresh of the plugins in WordPress 6.5. So there's a bit of a kerfuffle in the WordPress. You may have missed it, you may not even notice that there's something that's changed.

But in WordPress, 6.5 sort of snuck in really, I guess is the right way to describe it, a slight change, which meant that when you installed and activated a plugin, there was no page refresh and a lot of plugin developers had taken the opportunity of that page refresh, hooked into it, and then done something like an onboarding wizard because you've activated our plugin, we now wanna step you through setting it up and a bit of a kerfuffle.

And ever since then, we now have, I dunno if you've updated WordPress now. If you install and activate a plugin, you get a helpful little button. I can't remember what it says. I saw it for the first time. I thought, oh, that's new. so you can manually ref refresh the page with the help of this button.

It's right at the top. It's right in, near the admin bar and all that below the admin bar. And that enables you to trigger all of these things and it would appear from the likes of, SM apologies. sm I think this might be, is this, oh, what is it? Sed from? Is that it looks like sed anyway.

I dunno if it is from active. what are they called? Awesome motive. That's it. he thinks that really we should go back and so does Yost. Yost seems to think that really, this kind of was snuck in. Why don't we go back to the old version. If you're not a plugin developer and you're not bothered about onboarding it, this probably won't affect you.

But if you are a plugin developer. You want people to use your product and get to know what's going on. This seemed like a reasonable hijack of the WordPress installation process for plugins. But anyway, let's bring it back. It's not great. Yeah, no, it's not. So tell me why when I activate a plugin, is it not UX to then be, to then show me what to do with that plugin next?

[01:17:46] Piccia Neri: No, I think the opposite.

[01:17:47] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, so the what, WordPress put with the button. I think that,

[01:17:51] Piccia Neri: I think that before you, you would activate a plugin. the point is that a user should never be left there with nothing, nowhere to go, and nothing to do. So before you would e especially for people who are DIY and don't know it then it's helpful to show a wizard because if you know it, you're like, yeah.

It's. Okay. I don't need it. And you don't, you can, cancel it or whatever, but if you're a user that needs it, you, it's just helpful because one thing that I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but the last thing that I, if I activate a plugin, I'm normally moving on from there. I either need to go into the settings.

it is just, I'm not gonna stay on that page, am I want to go and do something else. So show him users where to go is good. ux, taking that option away is not good ux and Andrew Palmer is the one who pointed, made his point quite eloquently. 'cause also saying that for the type of clients that he's got, that was really unhelpful and he had to help out quite a few clients after that.

Change happened.

[01:19:03] Nathan Wrigley: There was a sort of slightly added onto this is the, is the idea that most WordPress users, this is intuition, right? This is not based upon any data and it's not my intuition. It's come from either this post that we're looking at on the screen or from a, a post linked, by Yost.

It's this, this one here, 6 1 0 4 oh. that most people are not bulk installing plugins through something like W-P-C-L-I. Most end users are installing a plugin, clicking activate. One thing at a time, and then they're expecting something to happen.

[01:19:40] Piccia Neri: Something.

[01:19:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But obviously there is the capacity to go into, the command line and like Chuck in 15 plugins all in one here, not just

[01:19:47] Tim Nash: the command line.

You can,

[01:19:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:19:50] Tim Nash: You, can select all to plugins and click activate.

[01:19:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Thank you. but I think that the intuition that is being expressed in the post that you see on the screen and Yost is Yost the person, not the company. I should make that clear. is that most people are just doing it one at a time.

Like they, like you would do, let's say for example, with Apple, apple Max, what's it called? The Mac App Store or on the Android app store. You you might update them all in one go, but you are searching for one, what are they even called? Apps, right? On the Android app store, you're searching for one, you install it, and then you.

Probably are gonna launch it the moment it's, installed and therefore get into whatever wizard they've set up for you. So storming a teacup maybe, but I think the, experience that I would prefer is if we just went back to what we had in, 6.4 and before where the, but I don't know. Anyway,

[01:20:52] Tim Nash: so to take the, the devil's advocate, 'cause I think I'm generally Oh yeah.

[01:20:58] Nathan Wrigley: The

[01:20:58] Tim Nash: argument is that the co the old way was broken and was never intended.

[01:21:03] Nathan Wrigley: That's true. You are right. Yeah,

[01:21:05] Tim Nash: because we, built a system where we can activate multiple plugins at once. You, if you, as Peter was saying, you normally want to do something immediately afterwards, do you want to do 10 things immediately afterwards when all 10 of them tried to fight as to who's onboarding wizard gets to come first.

And all of this was hooked into a filter that was there that, people worked out how to do this. And this is looped through. you can fix this. I, saw a plugin in the wild like a couple of days ago that basically just polls itself. So it has a little, a transient set through. Have I been gone in my onboarding wizard yet?

No. you will redirect me. I will get redirected the second that happens. because the moment you activate a plugin, it's, it, does load up inside the system. and so there are ways around this if you want to hack around even more, but the better solution is what was proposed on Aaron's ticket.

which was to. have a proper onboarding set of APIs that allows you to say, I would like to onboard. And that way we can then have opting out of onboarding.

[01:22:20] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Yeah. So that the

[01:22:21] Tim Nash: folks can say, actually I'm a power user. I can just go ahead without you sending me in funny directions.

[01:22:29] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

[01:22:30] Tim Nash: And then you have, then you can support both routes, whereas at the moment, we are having to favor one route or the other.

And fair point, historically, we've favored the route of click once and stuff happens. And I feel that we should have made that change until that got fixed. But both routes were possible and things were breaking

in where you have a refresh. More frustrating for the vast majority of people, but actually is fixing edge cases so things don't get broken.

[01:23:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[01:23:04] Tim Nash: Not as all immediately, fair through, even though I personally just revert it back if we could.

[01:23:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I, I don't have an answer, but anyway. There you go.

Storming a cock. I know that time is short, so I'm just gonna wrestle and quickly go through a few things if that's okay with our panel. 'cause I want to allow some things to get raised. Here we go. First thing, if you have heard of this platform, it's called North Commerce. It's like a new, incumbent in the w WooCommerce.

If you like space, it's e-commerce for WordPress, but with a different twist. It's called North Commerce. This is a deal they've got a deal on at the moment. You can see $199 one time. for 25 stores. So I thought I'd mention that. Links in the show notes tomorrow. And here we go onto the user submitted content.

This one came from Erim. What, I'm never gonna live this down. what's this one? you

[01:23:57] Tim Nash: can write in to, to request people be, given honors and, okay. Okay. You wanna, if you wanna make it official,

[01:24:05] Nathan Wrigley: you've gotta put the work in. Okay. Okay. so we're looking at, I can't even pause that. Ate thought No, by, I don't even know how to pronounce that website name.

prioritization is a challenge in open source. what's this a piece about Tim?

[01:24:23] Tim Nash: it funny enough links into an awful lot of what we've been talking about. I thought it might all the way through and it's talking about, yeah, the. At its core, open source is about humans and, and human humans doing things, and that sometimes as a contributor or helper, it can be really hard to, find your way.

And yeah, it's, some really good thoughts and I encourage everybody to read it.

[01:24:54] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. because we're in a rush, I will just simply say that the piece is called prioritization is challenging in open source. And I'm just scrolling down to the bottom, see if I can see the author, which I cannot, go on.

It's Tammy. Tammy, it's Tammy's. Okay. Thank you so much. This is Tammy. I guess we're talking about Tammy Lister. she has a piece there I will link to it in the show notes for tomorrow, so that you can drag that onto your screen. and that, oh, honestly, I could look at this for half an hour. I got lost in this again, this is Tim.

This is XKCD. Again, not easy to say who draws cartoons of Stickman on the internet and is very, sometimes very profound, I have to say. But what, why are we looking at this? What's going

[01:25:46] Tim Nash: on EEE every year for their April Fools projects? They do fun things, and this is the background information on their, the, if the XKCD, April Fools from earlier this year.

And I'll be honest, it's pretty

[01:26:01] Michelle Frechette: look,

[01:26:02] Nathan Wrigley: oh, look at it. Oh, it's

[01:26:06] Michelle Frechette: very visual.

[01:26:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, very visual. Yeah. I can't promise that I understand what's going on, but, it is very, you don't meant to

[01:26:14] Tim Nash: just

[01:26:14] Nathan Wrigley: enjoy it. Just enjoy it. Okay. Bit

[01:26:16] Michelle Frechette: of a Rube Gold bond machine, I believe.

[01:26:19] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Yeah. But, lots of balls floating around inside of squares with all these little paths.

It's like a, it's like Donkey Kong gone nuts, in many platform games. That's what I'm thinking of. Oh God. Okay. Again, linked to in the show notes, it's just a bit of fun and global accessibility. Awareness Day peach. Want me to mention this? So I will very quickly. It's happening this Thursday 16th of May, 2024.

Was there anything particularly you wanted to add rather than just where, raise awareness of it. Pieja,

[01:26:52] Piccia Neri: there are so many initiatives, so many different webinars, so many courses, so many free initiatives about accessibility, on Thursday and. It would be great to take the opportunity. It's actually, it's a little bit of accessibility week.

There'd be a lot going on, I think the whole of this week. And this is the page where you can find, I think all of the events or most of the events. I would recommend finding out more about it because first of all, it makes a lot of business sense and also in the light of forthcoming legislation, it is pretty much becoming, it is not in it, it's necessary.

Yeah. Less, let's say. Yeah. So take the, opportunity, to learn for free because of this event, global event.

[01:27:46] Nathan Wrigley: So the website, URL is sublimely great. it's accessibility day. How easy is that to remember? That's lovely. so the Global Accessibility Awareness Day, the 13th such event, may. 16th, 2024. Once more.

Accessibility day if you wanna find out more. And now just to round it off some, some tweets. And this is the first one, which is gonna cause anger. And the second one is also gonna cause anger if you on me. but here's the first one, okay. Pizza. Explain. This is Tim Cook. We can't normally, we wouldn't normally rail against the mighty apple for fear of a takedown, but we're not the first to, to rail at this.

Was it just the optics of this? They produced an ad. In that ad. They put a load of really nice objects into a, basically like a machine, which squashed them Absolutely wafer thin, flat loads of nice things like an arcade machine and loads ofs of paint and yeah, a

[01:28:49] Piccia Neri: piano, a page, an actual

[01:28:51] Nathan Wrigley: piano. an actual piano

[01:28:53] Piccia Neri: guitar.

Was it the optics?

[01:28:55] Nathan Wrigley: What, why did people protest about this app? No, it's

[01:28:57] Piccia Neri: not the optics. it's the concept. It's the waist conceptual. it's the waist, but also the notion that we won't need all of that anymore. You can do all of that with the iPad. So let's take all the fun away from life. give you an iPad instead.

it felt to so many people completely against the spirit of Apple. If you, those of you, those of us old enough to remember the 1984 ad, but you can't actually find it on YouTube. Oh yeah, I

[01:29:25] Nathan Wrigley: remember

[01:29:25] Piccia Neri: they, they were positioning themselves as the opposite to that now to dystopia and now they seem to be promoting dystopia.

It was such a, what? It's a huge mess. Misfire. It was complete misfire and so many people just went completely berserk as soon as they saw it, and so much so that I think as a first and maybe a last in Apple's history, they retracted the ad. You can still watch it. Yeah. I think it might still be on her page, but there was a.

A, an apology and my apology by Tim Cook saying, yeah, basically we didn't mean to upset people. We got it wrong. And they're like, yeah, you did get it wrong. But to me, as a designer and someone who's worked with agencies that might have done this ad, I immediately thought, didn't an agency do this? Because the level of, sign off that there has to be on something like this.

Oh yeah. And it's just not, they've got money to burn. Yeah. But the level, do you know what I mean? How could there have been anybody? Nobody saying, wait a minute, this is not quite right. But then as I was saying, I've got friends who work at Apple and I'm not, okay. I've, I, let's say that I've heard that probably it, it was an in inside, meaning it was in an internal job.

The, Apple created whatever, did it. So they didn't spend any money on, on, on an external agency. 'cause they immediately thought. Oh my God, have they, the agency been paid or whatever? And someone said, yeah, don't worry. The reason why Apple make money is because they don't pay. They try and avoid spending it on things like this.

So it's a whole set of interesting things, but to me, I know if people feel the same about it, to me it was the waste, but more than the waste. It was like they could have spun it in such a way that you could have condensed everything, all the creativity condensed instead of destroyed, like making it turning to something.

Do you know what I mean? Something, it was like some scene really a. You can well imagine

[01:31:38] Nathan Wrigley: a, kind of rival ad that some TikTok will make where, somebody like smashes their iPad up with a hammer and then gets on with things like, oh, I've got some time now to play the piano 'cause I'm not completely addicted to my iPad.

And I might go and paint a picture with the handy tin of paint that I've got lying around. those kind of things. you, heard it here first, if anybody does that video, that was my idea. okay. And last, but by name is least, so over the UK and I expect large parts of the Northern Hemisphere over Friday and Saturday.

The Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights descended upon us. I didn't know anything about it and woke up on Saturday morning, to find the newspapers just rammed. And all of my friends, all of the people that I know showing on social media, all of their lovely pictures of the Aurora Borealis. The Aurora Bo is one of those few things on my bucket list.

I wanna do it. I'm gonna say before I die, it'd be troublesome afterwards, but you get the point. and, there it was outside my house and I missed it. And then the following day it was supposed to happen again. But, sods law, it was foggy where I live, me and my son went out to a nearby hill and we were convinced that we'd seen it until we realized it was the headlights of a car coming over the hill.

But it really looked like the real thing. 'cause there was fog and everything, and all the lights were playing in the fog. So it was shimmering and all that. And then it narrowed, and then it was associated with, oh. Anyway, upon hearing that Michelle Ette sent us this beauty. Oh, how good was it right there outside your house, like no effort needed just there?

[01:33:20] Michelle Frechette: So I live in a village and so there's a lot of, light pollution where I live. So I traveled about five miles up to Lake Ontario, so I was right on, in a parking lot at the beach actually. And along with several hundred, of my closest friends who I've never met before, but it was amazing.

I got outta the car and I just looked up and it was directly overhead and I. I shed a tear because it was my first time experiencing this, that I recall, according to my mother, I saw it as an infant, but who remembers that? these are not AI generated. These were, I did not create these with my iPad, but I did take them with my iPhone.

So I will say that. but it was just, it was glorious.

[01:34:06] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, my pictures

[01:34:07] Michelle Frechette: don't do it justice, I swear. But it was, lovely.

[01:34:10] Nathan Wrigley: I am so jealous. Yeah. I'm sure it would be one of those profound moments in life where you, you actually get to use the word awesome. I. Not like when somebody says something mildly funny, or, anything inspiring.

Yes. Yeah. Awesome. Just an actual awesome thing. Anyway, I missed it. I missed the first one. And then the second one was a car headlight. I'm sorry. There we go. I know, but I'm glad that you saw it and I'm glad that you got that profundity feeling. Thank you. That's it. That's all we've got for, time for this week.

I really appreciate it. We've overrun. I'm sorry everybody. hope that you didn't have anything, too massive going on. Cameron Jones said he, it was down there, although it would be the Aurora Asis.

[01:34:52] Michelle Frechette: It would,

[01:34:53] Nathan Wrigley: not the Aurora bore 'cause that's for us in the Northern Hemisphere. Cameron get off our and that is not boring.

That is not a boring fact. Okay. He also called it

[01:35:03] Michelle Frechette: Aurora Sum.

[01:35:06] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. you could Paul Harpen, he says you could put some LED strip lights on your ceiling, add a smoke machine and turn the lights off. Not as good as Michelle's photos. Okay. Okay. alright, so all that remains for me to do is to say thank you to our, two guests, Mich, sorry.

Tim and Peacher and my co-host today, Michelle Ette. Thank you very much. We'll be back next week. I know. We're gonna do it. We'll be back next week, with some different people. I think we'll be back next week. I can't, no, we're not back next week. wait. Not next week. No. All is it all the week after?

I'm having a couple of weeks off. Hang on. I'm just gonna have a quickly look at the calendar. He said loading up Google Calendar. yeah, we're having a couple of weeks off because next week is the Page Builder Summit. Just saying. There it is. Look. And the week after that, I'm attending a wedding, so we're having two weeks off.

We'll be back on the 3rd of June, which is not the date of Word Camp Whitley Bay, which I thought it was. so 3rd of June, we'll be back. apologies. I dunno how you're gonna contain yourself, dear audience, but, find something else to do. Go and crush an iPad or something like that. We'll be back in two weeks time.

But for now, time to, time to give us the hands. Michelle. No pizza. Come on over. Over here. It's hard, isn't it? It's hard to, where are you? Where there They're pushing forward pizza. Make em big. Make big hands. There we go. There we go. And on that bombshell, we'll, we'll say thank you so much. We will see you soon-ish.

Take it easy ish. Bye bye. Bye.