This Week in WordPress #300

​[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress, episode number, wait for it. 300, entitled Tammie stole my answer. It was recorded on Monday, the 1st of July, 2024. My name's Nathan Wrigley and I'm joined today by Michelle Frechette, also by Tammie Lister and by Bowe Frankema.

It's a WordPress podcast, so guess what, we're going to talk about WordPress.

First up, we talk about WordPress 6.5.5 and also 6.6. What's new, what's coming? Tammie goes deep into all the exciting things that you can do with themes.

We spend a lot of time talking about an initiative to make it a lot more straightforward for volunteers to help sponsor WordCamp events. And I don't mean sponsor as in reach into their pocket, but to assist the enterprise of getting sponsors into things like WordCamp US, WordCamp Asia and WordCamp Europe.

We also talk about the fact that Cory Miller and Katie Richards have joined A2 hosting as part of their endeavor to reach out into the community.

Also potential snafu WordCamp Europe next year in Switzerland conflicts with a major Muslim holiday. What should be done about that?

We also get into a security related incident where five, maybe even 12 now, plugins on the wordpress.org repo have been distributing malware, much to the plugin authors surprise.

And all of that is coming up on this week in WordPress.

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That, that moment when you realize you've forgotten to embed the chat onto your website so that the chat won't work and then you horridly go around YouTube and find the Correct. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Tell me, so there was quite a lot of that going on, but nevertheless, loads of people have managed to make comments regardless of the fact that the chat wasn't, so that tells me that you're not going to my website.

Yeah. you're doing it on YouTube, which is fine 'cause I know they send out the emails and all that. But thank you so much for joining us today. Really appreciates it. It's, episode 300. Wow. 300. I'm gonna say that again. It's episode number 300 of this week in WordPress. I was gonna celebrate in some way and then I fell asleep on the couch about an hour ago, and so the most I've managed to do is.

Color the word what in the show notes. Each, letter has a different color. That's the extent of my, that's the extent of my energy, into turning this into a significant episode. But I'm really pleased that we've got this far. here's to the next 300, but as always, joined by three fabulous guests.

First off, we got Michelle. Where is she? She's there. No, she's there. There she is. How you doing, Michelle? I'm good. How are you? Really, nice. very nice to have you with us once more. Thank you. so I'll just do the quick bios of everybody. Michelle Frechette is the Director of Community Engagement for Stella WP at Liquid Web.

In addition to that, work at Stella WP Michelle is the podcast [email protected]. Co-founder of underrepresented in tech.com, creator of wp career pages.com, the president of the board for Big Orange Heart, director of community relations at post status author, business coach, and a frequent organizer and speaker WordPress events.

She lives outside of Rochester, New York, where she takes nature photography and you can find her website, which is Meet. Michelle online. Very nice.

[00:05:16] Michelle Frechette: We gotta update, we gotta update that. I gotta get you my new bio because I'm executive is, I'm executive director of post status, so

[00:05:22] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah. I probably copied and pasted that from an old field in our No worries.

Yeah, you're right. But I didn't even spot it as I was saying it, but yeah, executive director of post, that was ages ago as well. There's no excuse, Michelle. I, know.

[00:05:35] Michelle Frechette: come on. I apologize about

[00:05:36] Nathan Wrigley: that. It's all good. But very, nice to have you with us. We're also joined by Tammie Lister. How you doing?

[00:05:44] Tammie Lister: I'm fine, thank you. How are you?

[00:05:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good. We're gonna have fun with Tammie's audio today. it's entirely possible that Tammie will go mute at various points 'cause that's what's been happening prior to hitting the Go Live button. We'll see these platforms are ever so fun. the, buyer that I've got for Tammie is much, much shorter and it goes as follows, product designer and creator.

There's more than that. Come on. Give us a little bit more. You don't have to, but do you wanna give us a bit more? Yeah,

[00:06:12] Tammie Lister: I think that does. I like it's, the summer. Let's go with short bios. but I am super happy to be here.

[00:06:18] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Short and sweet. Thank you very much. And first timer. we, and what about it?

First timer on episode number three? Yeah. 300. and it's Bowe I wanna say Bowe. f Franker. How are you doing?

[00:06:32] Bowe Frankema: I'm very good. I had no idea I was dropping in their 300th episode, and I, feel I should have something very substantial to contribute to this fantastic milestone of an episode, but we'll see.

We'll see it. Oh, didn't

[00:06:45] Nathan Wrigley: we tell you, sorry. Each of the participants has to give away a MacBook Pro on,

[00:06:57] Bowe Frankema: It

[00:06:58] Nathan Wrigley: was really nice. Just draw one.

[00:07:00] Tammie Lister: Draw one. He didn't say it was a real one.

[00:07:02] Nathan Wrigley: Tiny one. Yeah. It could be an imaginary one. A little sticker of a MacBook Pro. Yeah. He's gone off to fet. That'll do. Yeah. We'll take that. Oh, we got a WaPo instead. That's perfect. Bowe is the founder and head of product at Dolly, the growth platform for WordPress agencies.

Go on. I'm gonna, I'm, as it's your first time on the show, just give us the, quick elevator pitch. What's Dolly? Ooh.

[00:07:28] Bowe Frankema: Putting me on the spot, huh? No, it's a growth suite for WordPress agencies, so if you want to, do centralized management of all your clients and all your websites, and you want to basically move into growing your revenue as a workers agency, we got a whole suite of solutions and we tried to make it easy and accessible and fun.

To scale your WordPress agency. So that is the elevator pitch. We don't have to dive in any deeper because then the whole episode will be over.

[00:07:55] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. Yeah. And we've got, a lot of things to talk about. okay. But thank you. What's the URL Give us that bit.

[00:08:02] Bowe Frankema: Oh, it's very good. It's get dolly.com and it's with IE it's a bit of a reference to, the first plugin for WordPress Dolly.

Yeah. Inspiration and yeah, about me. I live in Berlin. I'm 37. have a dog called Mocha, which is my, my, the love of my life besides my actual girlfriend. and, yeah, that's about it. I'm happy to be here.

[00:08:26] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. thank you for joining us. Hopefully it's the first of many times. We do tend to have people back on, once they've been on months, they tend to come on, repeatedly.

I've no idea why, but I'm very, musts be a

[00:08:36] Michelle Frechette: good experience.

[00:08:39] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Yeah. I hope so. It certainly isn't too intimidating. Few bits of housekeeping before we begin. first of all, depending on where you are viewing this, there's a few options, but the, probably the easiest thing to say is if you wanna drive any traffic or indeed block out Tammie's face, then you could head to WP Build.

Look at that. That's brilliant. You're ing off over the top of the caption, WP builds.com/live. Send people there. The YouTube, captions, or sorry, the YouTube chat is embedded there, however. If you don't like that and you would rather just use an anonymized chat, you can do that by, on the same page.

If you go to the top right of the video, it says something like live chat. I can't remember exactly what it says, but you can use that so you don't have to be logged into to anything. So send people there. I would be most grateful. That would be great. the other thing to mention is that, no, that'll do, I think that's probably all I've got to mention in that case.

but we have a few people who've made some comments, so thank you very much. If for some reason the chat isn't working, then, just keep persevering or sometimes we have a bit of a disconnect with what's on YouTube and what comes through to this platform. So I'll try to keep my eye on both, but here we go.

So Nero. Congratulations on show number 300. Here's to many more. Thank you. That's really kind. bigot. Who was on She bigot Pink. This is not Bigot White. celebration of 300. She's congratulating us on that. Oh, that's nice. And Matt is joining us. Thank you. Second time listener. First time live stream watcher.

Appreciate it, Matt. Hopefully it's the first of many more times. Bob. Bob, Don. I'm guessing it's Bob. It's gotta be Bob. He's given, what is that? What is that? It's like a little emoji of a party. Oh, it's a party. It's a party. It's the party emoji. Oh, thank you Bob. Appreciate that. Courtney Robertson.

Good day. The, ah, now. Okay. Bowe won't know about this. We always have weather reports at the beginning. No idea how it happened. I do. It was Peter Ingersol. We

[00:10:41] Michelle Frechette: do. It's definitely blame Peter.

[00:10:45] Nathan Wrigley: It started a trend. so here we go. The heat in Mid-Atlantic states is temporarily lifted. It's 15 degrees centigrade, 60 degrees Fahrenheit, and it's breezy.

thank you for that. Appreciate that. Hey Bob, from do the Woo. Let's celebrate our dear friend. Ne, I don't like the soft congratulating stuff. Breaking news, BB Press just shipped an update, 2.6 0.1 led by JJJ. Is that's John James Jacoby, right? Have I got that right? Yeah. Yeah. Good. I didn't wanna get anything wrong.

Elliot, who lives down the road from me, he lives in Bri. I live in Scarborough, scar, BDOs as we like to call it. thank you for joining. I know Tammie. I know, but that's what we do. And then Cameron Jones is coming all the way from Australia. Gosh. And here he is, the man, the myth, the weather forecaster extraordinaire.

It's beautiful. Sunny morning here in Connecticut, it's 21 degrees centigrade with low humidity and a bit of a breeze, mostly sunny skies. Congratulations on 300. Thank you so much. And it keeps coming. 300 episodes says Marcus Burnett. At least half of them have been,

at least half of them have been really great. That's great. Thank you. Just kidding. I love starting my week with this show and all of these wonderful faces. Yeah, if you're in the UK or Europe, it's kind of Monday's all not quite over, but you're, getting towards over. Whereas in the US I am always surprised that a bunch of people tune in 'cause it's like the first thing on a Monday morning.

But there you go. And Marcus has given us a little love heart instead, fun fact says Cameron. The first time I heard WP Builds was the hundredth episode. Epic giveaway. Well done on getting to 300 live shows. Thank you. And Dennis joining us main, WP Dennis, congratulations, Nathan. There we go. That's what we got for you so far.

How do I make that go away, Tammie? We don't want that there, the whole episode. No. There we go.

[00:12:41] Michelle Frechette: Great,

[00:12:43] Nathan Wrigley: I dunno why, but the video embed on our website doesn't seem to be working. and that is not a problem of my creation. I think we might have some problem with the, platform or something.

So just head to YouTube and search for it on the YouTube channel over there. Okay. Let's get stuck into what it is that we do. First thing to mention is this is our website, wp builds.com. If you wanna stay up to date with the bits and the pieces that we do. Typically this show on a Monday, which then gets repurposed, recycled, comes out on a Tuesday as a podcast and a video.

State your email address in that little white box and then click the subscribe button. And then we'll send you two emails, one about this and one about the show that we do on a Thursday, which is a podcast episode. quick thanks to our sponsors. Firstly, GoDaddy Pro. You can see there, they've been sponsoring us for many, years and I appreciate their ongoing support.

We're also joined fairly recently, probably about a month ago by Bluehost. So thank you for their, new participation and then joined this week, first week, by Omnis Send. So thank you to them for, helping us keep the likes on over here. I really do appreciate it. That's really remarkable.

Okay. Let's get stuck into it. So WordPress 6.5 0.5. It was a automatic release. Hopefully you got this. It was a security one. I don't really have a lot to say except I quite like this sentence. This, it says here, this release features three security fixes because it is a security release. It actually, I've said it incorrectly 'cause there's a full stop in the middle, but I read it that way when I first read and I thought it was quite funny.

but the, here are the three things. There was a Crossy scripting vulnerability, affecting the H-T-M-L-A-P-I. and you can see the names of the people who've reported each of these things. There was another crossy scripting vulnerability, which was affecting the template part block. And finally, a path traversal issue affecting sites hosted on windows, reported by the people that you can see there as well.

apart from that, nothing much to say. Hopefully all of your websites got updated successfully and everything was smooth and easy. Bowe, Tammie, Michelle, you've got nothing to add to that, have you or have you.

[00:14:48] Tammie Lister: I'd like to say that, the sponsorship that J'S getting has allowed a lot of this to happen.

So I think that's, kudos to all the people that kind of sponsor people that, contribute to this. the people that do security work, it's often, it's never seen, but it's incredible. just it's all magic. And to watch this release, if you go back and you just see the man of testing that had to happen in this release, and the sheer amount of people that had to support, like normally when you watch a release party, it's like a little bit of testing, right?

But this is so far back, it had to happen. And, the intricacies of security releases is just. Mind blowing. That's the best way I can put it. So my hat is firmly off to everyone that was involved in this, yeah. thank you. So just kinda put that out there.

[00:15:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's a nice, that's a nice thing to say.

And I, yeah, I think it's always too easy for people like me to forget to commend people like Erin for the hard work they do. So you're quite right. thank you. On that point, actually, by pure coincidence, if you listen on Wednesday, if you go to wp tavern.com, I have an episode coming out with, Aaron bin all about minor releases and why they're more important.

And he actually fully deep dives into the process of getting a minor release out because they don't often get the, the light that they deserve. And there's a lot going on. And, yeah, so that's coming out Wednesday. about, I dunno, about this time on Wednesday. Speaking of which bit of personal news, for reasons unknown, the, the WP Tavern website has looked like it's been dead for a long time, and I, don't mean dead, what's the word, ocar for?

No new articles have been coming out, except my podcast has been coming out every single week, relentlessly. And then to my nice surprise the other day, I went to the WP Tavern website and they've actually put the, the podcast on the homepage, so at least that kind of look, it looks like there's content getting refreshed, which is quite nice.

So now I can just say, go to wp tavern.com and you'll see the, latest episode there. So yeah, go and do that. Yes. Bowe, Michelle, anything on 6.5 0.5.

[00:17:10] Bowe Frankema: everything Tammie said, there's nothing I would like to add. I actually, she started speaking before me. I was about to say the exact same thing.

no, I'm just kidding. That was, that, was that the time? Like she stole my

[00:17:22] Michelle Frechette: answer. Yeah. But sure.

[00:17:24] Bowe Frankema: Yeah. I should not have shared my show notes with Tammie so that she could take all the credit for my, insights.

[00:17:32] Nathan Wrigley: You're gonna learn the ways of this show soon. This is, it's very cutthroat over here. but yeah.

Michelle, anything to add before we. I'm

[00:17:41] Michelle Frechette: good. Bowe stole my answer.

[00:17:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, this is, okay, so this is getting written down as the name of this episode. Tammie stole my answer. That's great. Okay, let's,

[00:17:52] Michelle Frechette: lemme just stick that now,

[00:17:54] Nathan Wrigley: by the way, Bowe, that's what we do. Oh. Join the episode. Keep your ears peeled for a fun thing that somebody says.

And I'll write it down and it become, becomes the, the title. There you go. Tammie stole my answer in my neatest possible handwriting. There we go. Okay, so quick hat tip then to Aaron. Thank you for all of your hard work, plus all the other people that were involved in that. Okay. So WordPress 5.5 has come around.

WordPress 6.6 is on the horizon. and this came to my attention this week and I haven't really had a chance to go too in depth on it. So hopefully our panelists have had a little chance to look at various bits and pieces. But this is the, a field guide, an article which tries to encapsulate and summarize most of the stuff which we know about, which is coming up.

So it's, it's always a fairly long bit, article, but it links out to all the other bits and the pieces on the Make website where things have been added and just gives you some high level thoughts on it. 299 core track tickets were included in this. it includes. 392 enhancements, 462 bugs fixes, 46 accessibility improvements for the block editor.

and it encapsulates 17.8 to 18.5 of the block editor. And really, I think what we're gonna concentrate on in this show, because it's Tammie's area of expertise amongst many, is the themes aspect to it. And if you're looking at the screen, you can see that I've highlighted a bunch of things coming around in themes.

But Tammie, do you, just wanna peel back the curtain on this a little bit? It sounds like a fairly big release from a theme point of view.

[00:19:35] Tammie Lister: Yeah, it is. I also wanted to call out something not listed there, which is one of my like side favorites, which is the site wide background images. Just because the hacky things you had to do before, I think that's a really amazing thing.

Just checking my sounds working. It is as well. It is. Yeah. There you and forgive the coffee. I wanted to say I think when you see the new version three of theme, Jason, that's optional and I think that needs saying before anything, you do not have to have theme Jason. Three, you can choose to opt into theme Jason three.

You can just prodder along as if you wanted to have it, if you wanted to support older versions. But what this is really doing is taking a lot of things that people had before in themes, even making them visible as settings, or just making it easier to do from section styles to presets. So presets is a good example of where maybe you had to have a global style before, just for colors or typography.

You now can use a preset for that. Super cool, super fun again using JS files, but all of these things are things you were doing before in a maybe more roundabout way you can now do in a more official easy way. Okay. I guess that's, the best way and fun things like grid, but be gentle. Don't sneeze too near grid layout yet.

'cause it's still getting there and baking. yeah. And registering aspect ratios is something also, but there's hallway hangouts, there's videos, there's all these kind of supportive things to look at. And I would suggest watching those and, go through those first because if you jump into something like grid layout without maybe watching a demo on it, you might, if you want to waste a few hours and get really deep, that's.

Entirely your head space, but maybe have a good soundtrack to do that.

[00:21:32] Nathan Wrigley: okay, so we'll come to some more specific things like the articles that I'm putting on the screen now in a moment. But just, roll down here. So there's a whole bunch of things and there's a bunch, of miscellaneous as well, to do with the block editor and what have you. interactivity, API, it says it includes updates for the interactivity, API, such as a new async directive, support for derived state props from PHP integration with preact dev tools and new warning messages.

H-T-M-L-A-P-I. the update includes helpful maintenance release for the H-T-M-L-A-P-I. The work includes a few new features and a major improvement to the HTML processes. Usability, and then I, oh yeah, I guess this is fairly important. Hopefully everybody on this show, at least anybody will watching this show has, not got this problem.

But, WordPress 6.6 drop support for. PHP version seven and 7.1. my suspicion is if it begins with a seven, stop using it. but anyway, that's a fairly big deal. So that's all of the bits and pieces from there. As always, I will link everything that we mentioned today in the show notes, which will come out tomorrow, so you'll get those.

But then Tommy, was there anything specific you mentioned about this theme, JS ON, version three. Where you could opt into it. Was there anything specific in this article, in which Alex lend or lendy, I dunno how you pronounce that. Yeah,

[00:22:56] Tammie Lister: so there's some really good walkthroughs and steps, if you only wanna support the latest.

So if you are just experimenting yourself, I would encourage you to try it because what it allows you to do is cut out a lot less code. that's, the kind of too long don't read, on particular settings. So if you can scroll down, some of the presets, rather than declaring them, you can use defaults.

So a lot of defaults came in earlier and by change in, and it is a breaking change. but this breaking change is needed to set the groundwork for. Easier things in the future. The thing is, you don't know what you don't know. When you start on these journeys with the Jason files and our very first version of Jason didn't maybe envisage and it didn't, that we would have all the presets and that Jason would become, we could hope and dream it could become the backbone that it is now.

And if anyone has created using it, it's incredible. It really is to just be in that space. But there's so much like our custom. Section is growing and we are able to not do that by having more presets like this. So it's really, hallway hangouts are the best thing I can recommend for people who are starting to explore with this.

And there's quite a few round themes, but just try using as many of the default settings in one of your themes. That's also one of my recommendations because a lot of these things have those, and then you can add your custom like scales and things. So you don't need to always do that. And that just means faster theme creation going forward.

And then you can choose to override those if you want going.

[00:24:33] Nathan Wrigley: I guess it also means a bit more of a, I don't know, more straightforward interface for end users of themes a little bit as well. So the interface

[00:24:39] Tammie Lister: for end users doesn't necessarily change, it's more that you have the option. Yeah, just to be able to not have to configure it from the start and you just have good defaults that you can just spin up a theme.

So yeah, it basically comes packaged with Underscores to put it bluntly. And, those packaging things, to hark back to the day are already baked in. that, that's the best way to frame it. Yeah, so you can just call on those without, by one line, without having to like, declare every single piece.

but this is just for one section and then where things go. Don't have a crystal ball. No, But, sometimes things need to be broken because you can't foresee where things are gonna be. When you start the journeys,

[00:25:24] Nathan Wrigley: you can he make an omelet, Tammie, without breaking eggs?

[00:25:29] Tammie Lister: I'm a vegan, so you can just break the tofu.

Okay. yeah.

[00:25:35] Nathan Wrigley: you can he make a vegan omelet, without, bashing the tofu. Yeah. but here we go. So some default font sizes. So if you use the, the, presets, you're gonna get small, medium, large, extra large. Yeah. Extra, large. And, what I was meaning by what I said a moment ago, that's gonna be easy for the end user, the non-experienced worker.

And it's just one

[00:25:54] Tammie Lister: line as well. That's the thing. You don't even have to declare these things now. So that's what I like about it, is. You don't have to declare it, but if you really wanna dive in and you really wanna get macro, you can then declare it rather than you have to start off knowing these things.

Yeah. To declare them before. So it's basically like the learning curve does get easier, right? Because you just have that line and it's set there by default.

[00:26:19] Nathan Wrigley: The other ones, so there's some examples of it in the real world, default spacing sizes and the defaults are 20, 30, all the way up to 80 in increments of 10.

[00:26:29] Tammie Lister: and that's just baked in. And, Courtney mentions about underscores and that's the thing. Things like underscores used to have it baked in and you'd have to get the theme and it would be baked in to be able to have it. You don't need that now 'cause it just comes with that by just having that line decoration, which is also set.

If you look at these default settings is true. So these settings already set there. You have to choose to go against them.

[00:26:53] Nathan Wrigley: So making the life of theme developers just that little bit easier. So that's quite nice. And then there was this other one which was related. No, not that one. I think it was this one.

I dunno if Tack. Did you put this one in Tammie? I think you did. Yeah. So

[00:27:05] Tammie Lister: this is, developer hours just sharing what's going on in themeing. so this one in the grid. I don't remember this happening last release, but I love this. I, may be the perfect audience. but, just, if you watch it, it's just basically here you go through section styles, presets, registering aspect ratios, which is also super fun.

You can do your own custom aspect ratios. Amazing and good layout and specificity changes, which if you wanna nerd out about CSS hierarchy, there's a section in there for you.

[00:27:39] Nathan Wrigley: So it says here, WordPress 6.6, coming on the 16th of July, and as Tammie said, they talk about the major update upgrades to the block style variation system, new color and typography only settings, the, enhancements to the grid layout, and core styles and more.

Again, the link will be in the show notes, but if you want to Google it, you can google WordPress tv. And the thing is just go for developer hours. And it's, what's new for theme developers in WordPress 6.6. So a lot is out there for theme developers, it would seem, Bowe and Michelle. Anything to add to that?

Cornucopia.

[00:28:19] Michelle Frechette: MichelleTammiemmy. Tammie stole my answer.

[00:28:23] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. This is, perfect. AnythinBoweie

[00:28:29] Bowe Frankema: or should we move on? No, I'm, not as deeply involved as Tammie, I think, and no one is as deeply involved as Tammie. but, I'm just, I'm happy to see that there is just a bit of momentum here and just to see Justin, Tadlock be back is fantastic.

He was like, he did hybrid, I believe, which was a massive inspiration for me when I just got started with WordPress. So to see him back in this role to see. Incremental improvements and like what Tammie said about like theme js, ON going back to the drawing board in some areas, trying to, making it easier that is, as someone on the sidelines that do wants to see these block themes succeed and, get WordPress a little bit back to how it used to be with a lot of excitement to develop these themes, that will lead to products and a better ecosystem and happier users and happier developers.

So I, I'm just happily following along on the sidelines and, this is a good, thing to see. 'cause it was gone for a bit I, in, in my, as an outsider, part of the community, but outside of the core development, team. yeah. Good stuff. I like it. I

[00:29:44] Nathan Wrigley: know what you mean. I feel like themes kinda.

I don't know. They didn't, they weren't cool for a while. Everybody was talking about other things. But Tammie is here to bring them back, into being cool again. so there we go. as I said, everything will be linked in the show notes. Just a couple of things. Firstly, always nice to find a new audience member.

Jamie. Jamie Quero. Apologies, Jamie, if I've just butchered your name coming from Rockville. what's md? Michelle,

[00:30:13] Michelle Frechette: Maryland.

[00:30:14] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. hello Jamie. Very nice to have you with us. And, and Cameron's showed up, to give us a one word appraisal of this show. I feel stagnant is, is what it No, I think he was trying to help me out because I was trying to figure out a word for the tavern wasn't fort.

Yeah,

[00:30:34] Michelle Frechette: that's when, that popped in. Yes.

[00:30:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I like that more. and then. Courtney was talking about, what were we talking about? The release back to 4.10, was that the four point, sorry? 6.5 0.5. And Aaron's, job in that. Okay. All right. Let's move along. I'm not gonna do that one just yet 'cause it's quite in depth.

So let's just quickly do this one. we mentioned earlier, Aaron bin and the, work that he and the team have done to get, the, the, the. re latest release out. This is the, 6.6 release squad, which according to this, came out a little while ago, but I just wanted to give a hat tip.

here are all the people who are gonna be in charge of 6.6 coming down the pike. Some familiar names there. And again, it was just me trying to give a bit of a hat tip to the people who put in all the hard work. As we know, when a big release of WordPress comes out, all the names go inside the, everybody's version of WordPress.

So hopefully you'll be, seeing lots of people in there. So there's that, no, we'll come back to that. Okay. So community sort of news. I'm suspecting that if you are somebody in the WordPress space, maybe this is a little bit too straightforward for you, but it just, it really prees a, move in the learn.wordpress.org community for getting resources out there and bundling them up in courses and making them easy to access this.

Isn't brand new, but the reason I've got it is because it's now, it's finished, it's ready to go, and it's the beginning WordPress developer course. so if you are not a developer, if you're more of a tinkerer or a hobbyist or what have you, but you do fancy getting to grips with how to use a modern version of WordPress, this course will take you from zero to, I, I don't know how much of a hero, but it will get you through.

So it's done in categories. so it's really encouraging you to do it on a local development environment. So overview of how WordPress works, so that's things like permalinks and what have you. local development requirements, getting yourself set up there, programming languages. Little bit of an overview in all of those theme, development stack that you might wanna use.

WordPress hooks interesting, I can't read that language, but, interesting that there is something buried in there in a, different language. developing themes is in there. I dunno if that'll stay up to date. Tammie will no doubt be able to tell us, developing plugins, blocks rest API, extending WordPress and et cetera, et cetera.

as of the moment it's 273 people. I'm gonna click the refresh and see if it's gone up. Ah, two more in the, last 20, yeah, in about 20 minutes. That is keep clicking refresh, and the enrolled learners just keeps going off. Anyway, I just wanted to give a massive shout out to the learn. Crowd. I feel that sometimes a lot of this work is hard to, how to describe it.

It's hard to make, but then it's also hard to publicize that it exists because there's so much going on in the WordPress community. This is a big endeavor and and I just wanna really just raise the alarm that this is out. So anything about that? Bowe, Tammie, Michelle.

[00:33:48] Bowe Frankema: I, just think, sorry, Michelle, you were starting to speak.

[00:33:51] Michelle Frechette: no. Go ahead.

[00:33:52] Bowe Frankema: Oh, I was just thinking it's like a massive undertaking. Like I, I've done, I've tried to do courses, like I've done one for Dolly for our customers, and I thought, oh, it's not so hard. I'll just start writing and then I'll put it in a course, and maybe get some help from chat.

UTP kind of make it make sense. And then I realized it's incredibly hard to, summarize in, my case, as a relatively small product and then to see this course. the only thing for me, as a, as looking at this, it deserves more attention, right? Like it's sadly tuck away under learn work, With all the resources that we have. If we, if someone, or if a team has spent so much time building a fantastic course that is so in depth, I just want to academy further, like more modern sort of, doesn't feel like it's part of, wordpress.org in the design sense. I would love to just have a dedicated LMS I, looked at the code a bit.

I think it's using the sensei, it's from automatic, like Yeah, go a bit, further. because this deserves that and it's almost, it undersells the incredible value. And if you look at Squarespace, Wix, all those platforms, they have a lot of onboarding for developers and, customers.

WordPress needs that too, and it needs to be. Shiny and, modern and, the content is there. So take this one step further and this could be the entry point for any WordPress developer. So I love it. It's great work.

[00:35:27] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Yeah, that's a really good point. The, marketing of it I think is really difficult to achieve.

'cause obviously there's, at the moment, I don't know, anything about budget or, how many auto automation hours are put into this and all of that. But, yeah, I think, you make a good point. Another nice thing, of course, in the modern era of WordPress is just things like this little button which, reads practice with WordPress playground.

And, if you haven't come across playground, just. Oh, what the heck? Like it's total voodoo. you click a button and there's WordPress right in your browser. C can you imagine in a year or so that just like every single one of these little lessons you'll be able to click the practice with? Maybe it is already done in that way, and I apologize if it is, but, you learning about, gosh, I dunno, PHP or something, and it launches a perfect encapsulation of what they're trying to tell you inside that exact specific lesson inside the browser, including, I don't know, custom posts and pages already pre-written with the content inside of it.

LMSs in playground are gonna be a really interesting experience. yeah. Anyway, there we go. That's an aside. Michelle, it sounded like you wanted to say something.

[00:36:45] Michelle Frechette: I'm just a little concerned that the average day is to completion. Being one is gonna make me feel really stupid when it takes me at least 10 days to get through this.

[00:36:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's a good point. It looks like

[00:36:58] Michelle Frechette: a lot for one day, but yeah, I don't, yeah, that's a good point where that's coming from.

[00:37:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:37:03] Michelle Frechette: but I'm excited about it and I may actually do a couple of those courses just to get a feel for it. So

[00:37:08] Nathan Wrigley: the nice thing about the fact that there's no, there's no paywall around it or anything like that, as you can just drop in and drop out, can't you?

You just, you fancy just learning about, oh, I don't know. The word installing WordPress or HTML and what have you. The other, thing that I would add to this, goodness knows how difficult it's gonna be to keep this. Up to date because of the changes that are happening in WordPress.

So if we just took the, theme development bit, obviously Tammie's just pointed out a whole bunch of stuff, which, in here might have to change, but even things like, the HTML spec, which is constantly undergoing changes and what have you. So there's that concern. One of the, one of the nightmare things I think is creating content, which you, you can't allow to go stale, but hopefully people can keep this going.

Tammie, anything to add?

[00:37:59] Tammie Lister: I think, yeah, it opens up to, to, if you. Just from a hiring perspective, we are all amazing and we're all incredible, but we presume that everyone knows how to use WordPress and there are incredible developers that don't know how to use WordPress. And being able to have them empowered to take those skills and apply them to WordPress.

it was interesting. So I'd be curious whether some of, if they knew PHP, whether it's like the WordPress PHP and, different things like that, the kind of interpretation. and I've been in agencies where that definitely is the case. They're incredibly skilled, but the kind of knowledge transfer that they have to do interpretation.

So I think there's, just such a place for that. and a lot of agencies have that as part of their onboarding, so been able to. Offer this course, rather than having to add extra courses, it, or having to write your own course, just empowers people as well, or just adding it in as part of the mix.

I know it says for developers, but I've also found that a lot of the learned resources are really good for people who are in product or even selling WordPress in agencies because, they get to understand what WordPress is in a really, Powerful way as well. So Learn is just a great resource to start.

And I'm

[00:39:18] Nathan Wrigley: interesting, I just clicked on one of the links and just went in on the very first, one of the first items in the entire course. You can see it's the top one here. And so here's the LMS structure of it and you obviously get the video itself, which interestingly is on YouTube, which is nice, So there must be publicly a avail. all of this must be publicly available to just consumers of YouTube, which is quite nice. I dunno quite how it's organized over on the YouTube side. you can see a lot, of work has been put into this. That's lesson number one. And this point, I'll just raise Courtney's comment.

So she says, well done, training team and Jonathan Boser, who's an magician on the beginning WP Dev course. Can't wait to see the site refresh rolling out later this month. Oh, I'd forgotten about that. Yeah. So we'll have a modern, a more modern take on it. Yeah, I had forgotten. Thank you. Michelle, I have a bunch of days.

I have a hunch, sorry. That days completion will change when more people compare. Yeah.

[00:40:17] Michelle Frechette: Course. Yeah. Other, otherwise, right now it looks like 275 people completed it in one day. Yeah,

[00:40:23] Nathan Wrigley: that's right. Okay. okay. And Courtney also says, I think the completion score of the early testers of these course. Yes. I'm sure it is.

It's testers have got skin in the game. there's a post on the tra Oh, Courtney, thank you so much. there's a post on the training team, seeking feedback about what content the team would update every release or not. Please give feedback. What would your thoughts be on that? Every release seems like a bit of a burden, but equally if you don't do it every release, quite a bit of that stuff will go out of date.

it would be lovely to have the notion that this was always up to date, but you'll know Bowe, if you've got a product, it's just, you develop a new feature and suddenly you've gotta change like 18. Yeah. Knowledge based documentation pages and keeping up is a bit of a nightmare.

[00:41:12] Michelle Frechette: I stopped teaching course. I stopped teaching WordPress in 2019 when Gutenberg came out because I had, would have to change the entire course that I created. And even though I know Gutenberg now, I was like, yeah, I just never got back into it because changing and updating coursework is a, behemoth of a job.

Absolutely. Sorry Bowe.

[00:41:33] Bowe Frankema: No, exactly. I was about to say the same thing. And it's also, I think what Courtney also outlines that there's a pretty good vision and there's a new website coming. There's a structure in place to update the course when it needs to be updated. I think that will only get better.

what I was thinking with Tammie referred to I would like to see, just looking at how people, the, time they have to learn stuff. These days it might be a bit intimidating. It's what the joke Michelle made, right? oh, I'm intimidated by the one day completion. I would probably have that same sense, like if everything is at some point stable and we figured out, okay, this is actually a good resource, I would like to see, potentially by doing some splitting up of lessons or making lessons a little bit more generic.

You can repurpose the same lesson for different audiences very quickly. So you can mix and match individual lessons and say, Hey, this is the agency onboarding course for WordPress. This is the developer onboarding course. This is the absolute beginner, end user. So I just see a lot of potential here and I would love to see the redesigned version of, this coming out.

And then I hope, but that's my personal kind of opinion. Maybe a little more granular, like smaller courses that could be offshoots of this big course if maintainable would be fantastic as well. I

[00:42:59] Tammie Lister: think one option could be things you should know in the latest release and that's like a good, yeah, that's something that constantly and yes, we do have the field notes.

Yes we do. But being able to like have a. A, a section on learn where you go and you can take like a test and I like tests. I'm weird. where you can go through that could help everybody. there are the workflows and ai, but it's a workflow that you can do for updating screenshots and find a in place now that do help, with releases as opposed to like the old manual way that we used to have to do it.

So I think there is an easier way to, to update things, but every release, having to update all the documentation, particularly with data views and the design system changes coming, could be a little bit, of a task going forward if we don't have some automation behind that, which I imagine we will do.

[00:43:59] Nathan Wrigley: Gosh, honestly, I'm the more I'm just clicking about inside this course, which I confess I didn't do prior to starting it, the more I look at it, the more. Profoundly impressed. I am. We are really, fortunate to be in a community where this kind of stuff is going on because, it doesn't have to happen.

Nobody, re is required to do this, and yet here it is just gratis for free. in this case done by Boer, who is an Aian. So I don't know what the, what the financial constraints around that are, but amazing. Absolutely amazing. And a great help to anybody, position our positioning WordPress

[00:44:40] Bowe Frankema: incredible regardless of, that person or he, or is working for automatic.

The, there's obviously a lot of care and I would say almost love in, in describing this, because like you say, like that's the thing. You start oh, let's make a beginner development course. But in this case, you can see you're gonna be starting from the apps, assuming that the, developer knows nothing in, the best sense of the word.

So that is where the, tension that like final 10, 20% for someone to actually understand, that's often the stuff that's usually skipped because we cannot go back to that state. It's PCR, manuals, remember like you had a DVD player or PCR, and then it was completely, it was just.

Could be a different language. You had no idea what was going on. 'cause all this stuff was skipped and that's why you ended up with 500 pages. It seems like what's happened here is just a fantastic, really smart way of, taking the time to explain all the components and then you can just choose to skip a couple.

but yeah, fantastic. Really,

[00:45:45] Nathan Wrigley: I, I was lucky enough at WordCamp Europe to, to chat to somebody. And I'm just trying to remember, it wasn't Ko, it wasn't Riyadh, who was it? I've forgotten the name of the person, but, it was somebody who is, highly active in, the Nigerian WordPress scene, particularly in schools.

And they've, made WordPress a part of the, curriculum, the actual school curriculum because they can draw a line between employment. And, and this free open source, easy to download piece of software. they can see that if they put some time in with children at school, that they can have a credible job, which is not bound by the constraints of geography or anything like that.

And so things like this. just imagine the profound impact it could have on, people's lives from different parts of the world. could put it in front of my children or a child from almost anywhere. I guess there's the constraints around the language and I dunno quite how that will, be done.

Maybe it'll get translated into different languages, but honestly a a, career could come out of something like this. Yeah. Which sounds a little bit grandiose, but I hope you, I'm also get the attention. I'm, yeah.

[00:47:09] Tammie Lister: I'm also really curious the ever end, returning mum who wants to go back to work or something could, train in this at home, or people who maybe have lost their jobs could be able to get a job by training for free.

'cause boot camps are super expensive. have you seen the cost of like development boot camps, right? Yeah. They, just don't like the finances aren't there to support people, but been able to do this. And if you think about how most of us got started. Way too long ago in WordPress. It was by hacking and learning Kubrick and all those kind of things.

'cause we had access to it. So sharing that knowledge is in the DNA. So that's like super, gets me excited to know someone who's long term Ill been able to empower themselves to get a career by this information. It's both ends of the spectrum, right? kind of agewise and anywhere in between.

[00:48:04] Nathan Wrigley: Courtney I've found, I've dug out the name. It was, it was Abraham, whiter. WAIT is an magician. he's on the woo, he's a woo support engineer, but he's a big into the communities of two countries. And, yeah, just, it's a fascinating story. It'll be out on the, It's happening in a few weeks, but, thank you for that, Tommy.

I think you're right. It's profound. It's pretty cool that you can have yourself a job. it looks like all of us are at home. Maybe I'm wrong, but it feels like every, all four of us are in, a house somewhere. and this is

[00:48:40] Tammie Lister: a shedding a garden. So shedding a garden.

[00:48:43] Nathan Wrigley: Where do you work? Shed in a garden.

That's, isn't that great. I'm in an attic basically. It's absolutely brilliant. So we're very, lucky to have all of this stuff. Okay. all right. We were just talking about Word Camp Europe, at least I was, and I think this is a really interesting idea. It's by, somebody called ksu, C-R-I-X-U.

It's on make do wordpress.org, released on the 21st of June, so it's a little bit older than a week, but I didn't spy it. So here it is. and it's called Proposal for a Unified Sponsorship Initiative. And, I'll just read the, sort of headline item. It says, this proposal aims to enhance support for Word Camp organizers by forming a task force focused on streamlining sponsorship efforts, ensuring sustainability, and improving the overall sponsor experience.

This is not intended to diminish the autonomy of World Camp organizers, but to offer them additional resources and help, and support. so this is specifically aimed at flagship World Camps at the moment. So that's the intended audience here. one of the biggest issues with becoming bigger. And they mentioned prior to that the fact that, word Camp Europe in particular is just truly huge.

one of the problems of becoming bigger is the need for more money and therefore more sponsorship activity whilst relying on the work of volunteers to organize this, selling all the required sponsor spots gets harder and harder from year to year due to inflation and corporate consolidation. And so the, here's a summation of a few of the problems that a new, tranche of, volunteers may face.

What companies should they approach? How do they reach them? is there a list for that? What sponsorship packages even exist? how can we make sponsorship that's sustainable? how to even approach this topic, how to handle global sponsors and so on. In the worst case, the whole team is different from year to year, relying on solely on the documents of the previous year.

And so this proposal is to create a small task force inside the community that supports sponsorship teams. And this would focus just on, as I said, the three flagship events. So that's US, Europe, and Asia. trying to make there to be some sort of consistency, some structure, some team. And I can imagine if I was volunteering and I ended up in the sponsorship area, I'd be pretty intimidated off the bat, to be honest.

With all of the amount of hard work that you need to do, there's actual money involved and you are promising things in return for actual money. And, and so I think this is a really, neat idea. and obviously you can go to this post and make a comment. A few people have. But I just thought that was a really neat idea so that there was some contin, some continuity between all of these flagship events.

So over to the panelists, if they've got anything they want to add.

[00:51:42] Michelle Frechette: I do a lot of events, as and I'm a mentor for Word Camps and I also have been an organizer on various levels. And I think having some basic guidance like that, even for the smaller local camps is really helpful. also like just having a list of companies maybe you're not supposed to approach because they, somebody said to me, oh, can I ask, I can't remember what company it was.

And I'm like, they're a global sponsor, so you can't ask them for more money. they've, that's, there's a limit to how much we can ask certain sponsors. And getting local sponsorship is always the goal, but also, most of us are not fundraisers. We're not, putting together events isn't our primary business for sure.

And even if we have a lot of experience, there are things that just are either more uncomfortable, more difficult, whatever it is. given your own set of skills and how small some of the local, organizing teams can be. Last year I had an organizing team of two and a half people and the half was, 'cause he had to quit halfway through organizing the event.

So there were two of us that put on an entire word, camp Rochester, which was only about 70 people. So it was small, but I still had to raise the money. I had to get the venue, I had to have all of the ba the paperwork signed back and forth. You almost become the conduit between the venue and Word camp.org because you can't sign anything.

You have no authority to do that, but you still have to do all the legwork to get it done. And then you sit and you wait and you're hoping that people are, at the other end will do things quickly. And and that's just one small part of it. The sponsorship then is huge, right? Because you have to.

Raise money to be able to do these things and we can't charge exorbitant fees to attend. So it does become this very big, how are we gonna get this kind of thing done? And it feels very daunting, especially when you're working a full-time job and trying to organize an event on the side. So anything we can do like this that helps and gives guidance, I think is a good thing.

Sorry, I'm on my soapbox.

[00:53:39] Nathan Wrigley: no, I think that's, no, that's really interesting. 'cause you've already raised a couple of things which I, my intuitions hadn't, figured out. But one of the things that you said is that it's not, everybody's got this. Oh, I don't know. Sales mentality for want of a better word.

I'm encapsulating that role. Skillset, yeah. Yeah. And I'm I, oh boy. When conversations about money come around, I just turn into this like little, form version of myself. It's just not something I'm really into. And, and you need to, right? A lot of us are

[00:54:10] Michelle Frechette: either, yeah, we have a lot of people who are introverts in our business, right?

So they're not comfortable necessarily cold calling anybody anyway. And then you also have people like me who have certain kinds of executive dis dysfunction. I could order a pizza online, but don't make me call a pizza store. 'cause that's an anxiety thing for me, even though that sounds really silly, right?

But cold calling a company who's, even if they're a word company going, Hey, you wanna give us some money to hold this event? Even though I worked for, give for years in fundraising, right? It's, that's not my skillset. My skillset is other places. And so you have to have somebody on the team who's willing to make those kinds of calls, but they need guidance too, because 10, 10 to one, they're not.

So ingrained as some of us are to understand how to navigate these conversations.

[00:54:54] Bowe Frankema: I would also argue it also goes the other way around. if we, if you're a small product creator or a small company, and like for example, we would probably, sponsor smaller word camps. If we then, if we would have the resources to have oh, we have, a community marketing, builder, but we have one sales guy on our team.

So for us to be in a directory where we could say, Hey, we are open for sponsorships, huh. And then, someone from an organizing team. Which might be smaller. It's Hey, Dolly seems to be, a small company. Maybe they wanna do a micro sponsorship, right? So for me, as a product builder, I immediately see, just give, a potential sponsor, give them a, an account, and just have it's like a dating site.

Like I'm open for sponsorships, and then the organizers log in and they're like, oh, let us collect a couple, some of them that have the resources that are like big and established, we sponsor everything, right? We just want our name on any word camp. And that's great. But then there's probably also a lot of smaller ones where I could go to my team like, Hey, we can sponsor, a local, US event.

We can sponsor a local European event, a local Asian event. Let's all pick one. Maybe one of our team members that is remote can actually go there and everyone wins. And to also go back to what, what was said before, it's like the charm. And the reason why I love world camps is because money is always.

In the background, it's almost always the last thing, sponsorship. So it's ridiculous. If you go to something like Cloud Fest where everything is, in the end, for, networking to make money or to spend money, and then you go to WordCamp and it's night and day, even WordCamp Europe, there's, at no point you feel it's not a community event, but a commercial event.

It's it's not even on the, on in, in anyone's maybe if you're networking to make a relationship with something or someone, but the feel of a work campus is completely non-commercial. And that's also why maybe sponsorships, which are increasingly important, it's not their first or probably last on the, line of motivational things for people that want to join organizing a work camp, if So that needs to be made easier. So I think it's a great idea.

[00:57:15] Nathan Wrigley: I'm gonna make a prediction. my prediction is that by this time next month, Michelle will have built a directory website, to do with getting the pressure sponsors the pressure we'll together. Michelle, I'd be happy to combine like exactly what you said, the double-ended marketplace of sponsors.

Events to just combine those two things together. Because that, honestly, I hadn't even made that connection Bowe, but that's really interesting. So easier for you to sign up in one place and say, I don't know. We can put people in Europe. We can send people to European events, but we are, we're not going to North America.

We're not going to Asia. and we'd be interested in events of this size and up Ooh. And we're open for the whole of 2024. Yeah. those kind of little caveats. And then that's just easier for you, You are suddenly like contactable Everyone wins. Yeah. Yeah. Is Marcus

[00:58:13] Michelle Frechette: Burnett? Is Marcus Burnett still listening?

'cause this would be a great feature on the WP world. Yeah. Okay. If he's not

[00:58:19] Nathan Wrigley: I bet Courtney will tag him. Yeah. That's,

[00:58:23] Bowe Frankema: I would also argue maybe just making an official, like WordCamp thing, right? have something like sponsors dot WordCamp dot. Org and that would be, the, sponsors hub where you know, the, organizers and the, you make your account once you tell, maybe, like I said, you give, maybe you could even make it as.

Transparent as you want. You can say we can sponsor two events and we've done one. Or just as simple as a checkbox, like we are open for sponsorship proposals and, that then they will come into your inbox. Like we would use that with Dolly. We'd love that.

[00:59:00] Nathan Wrigley: And I guess the churn of the volunteers is, one of the big problems here, isn't it?

If the, events in, I forget where word Camp Europe 25 is, I've already forgotten. Where's that? basil. There you go. It's Switzerland. Yeah. So if the organizing team in Switzerland is quite likely to be largely different from the organizing team in Turin. I mean that by coincidence, they're actually fairly close geographically, so that might not be the case.

But if it was say Spain and then I know Poland or something like that, the, overlap's gonna be quite small. And so everybody's got a start from a completely standing start. So the, sponsor people have got to learn who to contact, learn how they can contact and what have you. And I'll just put this proposal back on the screen quickly because here's the idea, would be to this team, this, whatever it is, would talk about the, sponsor.

Whoa, crikey. we'll talk about sponsoring itself, what that would mean. the sponsorship life cycle and then support for sponsor teams. And then setting up, the usual SOPs, tools and processes. I. And those kind of things. One thing's for sure. Those lovely events that we all attend, they will not happen without sponsorship.

And so making that process as easy as possible will free up the time from all of the volunteers to do other things that they, they might wanna do and look as if by magic, Mr. Burnett. Says it sounds like a good idea. You heard it here first, but Bowe gets the credit. 'cause it was No,

[01:00:32] Bowe Frankema: I don't, I think, if you go up a little bit, on the page first was like, CRM of UpToDate a little bit down.

Oh. So I think the person who wrote this proposal gets the credit because I, I, just reacted to, the brainstorming session. This person obviously has, a very good grasp of what needs to happen. So I, hope that this, proposal work will become like an official component of, what we just discussed.

I don't want to take any credit here. This is definitely, I'm happy to take the credits, but I don't think it would be fair. here, we

[01:01:09] Nathan Wrigley: go. So Steve joining us, GE Mosby. Mosby. Sorry, Steve, says, yeah, the person is Lucas, who was a member. Of the sponsor team at Word Camp this year.

And then, we've got a surname as well. Lucas Radke, ear is telling us, so Perfect. And was also part, I've seen

[01:01:28] Tammie Lister: an, a different event here. and I think that kind of says it, it used to just be like there was just word camps, right? particularly like WordPress. People went to sponsored WordPress events.

Now there's outside, there's so much you can sponsor and the. You have to look as a business, particularly the smaller business, and particularly in the economic environment where your money goes. And I think that's also part of it. So having a unified, we, that kind of team helps with that, helps with the messaging, helps with finding what kind of the right, for the right events.

[01:02:08] Michelle Frechette: Yep.

[01:02:09] Tammie Lister: because it may be that you are not the right sponsor for a flagship. you are not gonna get return and that is totally groovy. It might be that you are the right sponsor for a particular event on a particular thing. and that could be incredibly good for your business. and, those are the.

The things which I think looking at the lens from, particularly from a product perspective, you have to, we just get better as an ecosystem if we find the right sponsors for the right spaces. Otherwise people are just gonna sponsor big events and just not see the returns that they want or need. And then that also doesn't give the, right event.

So it, it's a, like you can't over promise, as you were saying. Like it, it's, but I also wonder Flag, there is a handbook that is being created over the years and handed down through generations and generations of World Camp Europe and big flagship event people. So there is, I. Information, but there's in these silos, so by all these people sharing it, they're sharing all that information from AMP Pure, from AMP US as well.

So that can only be good. I would like to see it for other teams as well, because I think these flagship events, there's so much information to be passed on. And I say that from someone that kind of was there at the beginning and saw kind of some of the roots, and I can only imagine how big those trees are now.

[01:03:31] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. So thank you for all of your contributions. This has been interesting, and then Cameron makes an interesting point, which actually completely wipes out Michelle's face. So sorry about that, Michelle. That's okay. Cameron says, I would love to see something in the vein of WP Speaker, WP World, but rather than just word camps, non foundation events, so that, just for clarity, I organized something with an called the Page Builder Summit and Cameron's mentioning that just as important to the community.

yeah, so that's interesting. So stepping outside of just. The word press specific events, so word camps. Okay. And it may be

[01:04:11] Tammie Lister: that you need to do that for your product at the particular time of its growth, and that's okay. Andrew's also got some interesting comments that Okay. Are a tangent to that as well.

[01:04:19] Nathan Wrigley: Andrew Palmer. Let me just make sure that, I'll just take that off. And then Michelle's not being hidden by it all. it's Andrew Palmer joining us says, I must have received a hundred or so emails, connection requests, et cetera, from WordCamp, your sponsors and attendees is getting much more commercial behind closed doors.

what do you mean by that, Andrew? Do you mean you were inundated to the point of being slightly. It's too much. It is too much of a deluge. what were you meaning there?

[01:04:50] Bowe Frankema: I'm sorry Andrew, that I sent 98 spam. Oh no, I did the other too. Mean if you discount those 98, I think you got hundred two.

[01:04:58] Tammie Lister: 'cause two were mine as well.

[01:05:00] Bowe Frankema: Mine must been in

[01:05:01] Tammie Lister: spam

[01:05:03] Bowe Frankema: also. Those 300 business cards of Dolly I sent to you that, that was a mistake obviously. Sorry,

[01:05:09] Nathan Wrigley: this is ideal. Oops. maybe it's time to admit Word camps need to take a nod from the cloud for us to get more sponsors and allow them to commercialize it.

Yeah, this came up didn't it? If you, I feel it was like a couple of months ago. Something about what, what do sponsorships, what can be allowed within sponsorship at WordPress events? Things like, I don't know, I dunno if you noticed, but at Word Camp Asia, right at the end, the sponsors all had this little moment where.

They, could go on stage and give away the prizes that they'd been offering in their booths. And it was nice to round the event off like that. 'cause it ended on a bit of a high, it was a bit like a, I don't know, it was a bit like something you watch on telly, a bit of a game show feel to it, where the people in the audience were getting excited 'cause they had a chance of winning things.

So mucking around with it a bit like that. Oh, okay. So the opposite intuition from Andrea, he was pleased to receive them. Okay. Got it. Sorry. Great. Happy to. So

[01:06:03] Michelle Frechette: I just put in the, chat, Nathan, the WordCamp US is doing something working in that direction with their showcase day where if you have created a product or something, I can't remember exactly how it's said one moment.

[01:06:18] Nathan Wrigley: it's okay. I can put it on the screen. Yeah. Here we go. this piece here, the

[01:06:22] Michelle Frechette: breadth of possibilities. Yeah.

[01:06:25] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah, this is the extra day, right? This is day four. Yeah. Actually I think it's day two of the schedule, but it's something like that. Yeah, it's a fourth extra day. I, haven't really got my head around what this is.

Do, you, can you sum it up or are you,

[01:06:39] Michelle Frechette: basically like what it says, what a showcase day. It's, opportunity to see the breadth and possibilities of what WordPress officers from high profile, large scale projects to niche creative implementations. So following on the NASA keynote last year and the technical workshops that they had, they wanna make, be able to show a little bit more.

there's, you were allowed to have some branding on it because how can you create, show something that you created without it. So it's a little bit more in the direction of, businesses, but. At the same time, it isn't saying, Hey, sponsor, and you get this stage, but it's, blending a little bit more of what it looks like to be a business within WordPress.

[01:07:19] Nathan Wrigley: So it gives you an opportunity to show your stuff, but it maybe without just all of the commercial bits and pieces that you might get on a television advert, for example. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's interesting. And then Katie, Keith joining us saying, I didn't receive as many as Andrew, but for WordCamp Europe this year.

I was surprised at how many sponsors contacted me beforehand asking me to visit their booth. That never happened before. Yeah. Yeah. I, get the impression that a few companies out there go and, scrape the, the attendee page, don't they? And so you often get like a slew of tweets two or three days before.

Saying, what you're doing and what have you. I, guess that can be viewed in two ways, can't it? That could be, on unwanted, but also if you are turning up to network, it could be great if somebody makes the effort to reach out to you like that. And then, Courtney says, Bowe, what I hear is that you should send out, he should send Andrew more emails in a business card.

I think we should make this as everybody's constant study is to deluge Andrew Palmer with, spammy sponsor emails.

[01:08:25] Tammie Lister: I'm just gonna see Andrew create a PO box as we speak.

[01:08:28] Nathan Wrigley: A quick,

[01:08:30] Michelle Frechette: I, I'm not a developer, but I'm sure Tammie could write some code to make that happen really easily.

[01:08:35] Nathan Wrigley: Really make his life really fun.

so he's back. I had a chat, Bowe and I had a chat. To not send stuff anymore stuff. Okay. Got it, got and then, oh, this is Bowe, that's his comment. so there we go. Too late. Just sent a batch of cards and t-shirts coming your way. Palmer, hope you had a nice time on holiday, by the way.

hope you enjoyed your time. Where, you went, which, it was quite nice. me and Tammie, sat with Andrew Palmer in the, in the, airport on the way home, and, oh,

[01:09:08] Michelle Frechette: that played his legs and spread

[01:09:09] Nathan Wrigley: the covid joy. She

[01:09:12] Michelle Frechette: wasn't the only one who got it.

[01:09:16] Nathan Wrigley: Did you escape it,

[01:09:16] Michelle Frechette: Andrew?

[01:09:19] Nathan Wrigley: if you did, then you're getting the right kind of stuff through the mail.

Not the, it's the only

[01:09:23] Michelle Frechette: souvenir I bring back consistently from work. Maybe this episode

[01:09:26] Nathan Wrigley: should be called Spread the Covid Joy. No, maybe not. Okay. Moving on. Moving on. That was a really interesting subject, though. I honestly Fascinating. I think that's a great initiative, a great idea and make, I dunno, just make that whole process a whole lot easier.

Okay. Back to community news this time. A couple, certainly one face familiar to me, but I think two familiar faces. this is to say that, Corey Miller and do forgive me because I don't know the other person. Katie Richards. It's Katie Richards. they have a, new role, up until, oh, I'm gonna say about a, year ago.

Corey, was he the executive director at Post Status before? Prior to

[01:10:11] Michelle Frechette: He's the owner.

[01:10:12] Nathan Wrigley: Owner, yes. Okay. But that was where my interactions with, Corey were at least focused. That's how, what I knew him for. But he's taken on a new role at the co the hosting company, a two hosting, and along with, Katie Richards, they're starting up this thing called the Community Growth.

Team. So I just thought I'd mention that. I don't know a great deal about that team or, so Corey

[01:10:36] Michelle Frechette: also founded iThemes. So Corey goes back quite a ways of, and Katie has worked with her husband, is it Brian Richards? I think Yeah, Sorry. yeah, who does woo session? word esh. I think, that's their project as well.

So Katie's got a lot of experience and she's also one of the leads for the photo mods over at the photo [email protected].

[01:11:04] Nathan Wrigley: Okie dokie. Anybody wanna add anything to that nice little bit of community news? Again, getting hired.

[01:11:10] Bowe Frankema: I'm, happy that, after what also from my perspective, quite a bit of silence in, where I felt like hosting companies were very busy acquiring, not actually contributing, and, trying to basically have a better relationship with their customers and to have such big names, with such a good track record to start this, community.

initiative, like of course we have to see if it's an actual community initiative or, something else. you don't know the intent of exactly why this has, been started, like to be completely neutral. But I think it's a good sign that big hosting companies are like, okay, we're going to have a community, outreach program or success, team or anything in that vein.

I think that's exciting because I think there's a lot to, to be gained from hosting companies. I. getting more involved in WordPress. Of course, we, there's plenty of hosting companies that already do. I'm not trying to say that they're not doing anything. there's a lot of WordPress hosts, a lot of hosts doing WordPress stuff.

They have to because it's the only market that's still growing in the hosting industry. Like I, learned that at, cloudfest that there is actually, every type of hosting is stagnating or going down, and WordPress hosting is still growing. So this makes a lot of sense. And it's also great to, to see actually, well-known people that we all know and love for what they've done, in the WordPress community to, be part of this, So it feels genuine or else they wouldn't have not have taken that position. So I'm really curious to see how this, how this plays out. yeah, it's

[01:12:49] Nathan Wrigley: interesting putting boots on the ground and, and people who've got that history relationship. I. I want to use the word like notoriety. No, that's not the word I'm after.

something akin to trust is what I'm trying to encapsulate, but the word won't come into my head. But a, trusted member or members of the community. and the idea of this team is to, make connections. Obviously, they've gotta pre presumably justify their existence in terms of revenue and things like that, but also, build a community and create lots of nice WordPress related content.

So putting a human face, they recognize human face on the front of your hosting company. Bravo. Anybody? Tammie, is there anything you wanted to add to that before you Yeah, to

[01:13:36] Tammie Lister: me the, that focus seems really awesome on agencies, which it's hard particularly being an agency, in the environment at the moment.

So I think any focus on that is, is pretty smart as well. and, Andrew's got a really good word for you.

[01:13:56] Nathan Wrigley: That's the one. There you go. Yeah. Authenticity. That, was, I think

[01:14:01] Tammie Lister: it's really interesting. So often when we hear community, we think one thing in here, but community can be the community of the people using your product as well.

And that maybe is what I'm reading a little bit more here. It's the community of the people using the product, which is incredibly important and feeds back into the community of WordPress as well. so I'm really curious because as the community of their product grows, the community of WordPress is gonna grow as well.

I'm excited where that goes.

[01:14:28] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. getting quickly back to Covid, here we go. bigot was with us quite a lot during Word Camp Europe. She said she didn't catch the RONA at Word Camp Europe. I'm surprised. I'm happy though, spending a bunch of time with you all. Only nasty bug bites.

Oh yeah, I got both. Much sympathy over there. and then Andrew Palmer saying I can see more and more of this happening at larger WordPress related businesses. Good luck to Corey. Katie. Yeah, it's interesting. I, can't put my finger on, not immediately out of the, out of my head anyway, of something quite like this.

So that is, that's certainly, I thought that was eye catching. Okay. The fun news. Oh, no, not this one. Let's do this one first. here we go. This is first of all another community piece, and this is, from, jewel. He likes to go as but Shahar and Jewel, who released a letter just a few days ago, to about Word Camp Europe and the, collision of dates.

jewel, if memory serves is, is coming out Bangladesh and, I'll just read the, salient sentence here. It says, as you may be aware. Eid Al Adha, one of the most important religious holidays in the Muslim calendar falls on the same dates as the planned word, camp Europe 2025 in Switzerland. This overlap poses a serious conflict for Muslim attendees, including myself.

And there's a lovely little sentence just down here and it, goes like this. Imagine the scenario where a flagship world camp is scheduled on December the 25th Christmas day. All of the conflicts that would cause. And, and so he's, by the sounds of it, he would welcome, a change of calendar dates and, but there's obviously all the stuff in there.

He understands being a, creator of WordPress events. He's an organizer at where various Word camp, local events and things like that, has the realization that, things like booking rooms and all of that does cause problems, but it is interesting, that there was that collision and that collision didn't get spotted.

And again, talking to Aaron, as we were mentioning Aaron job a bit ago when he was talking about the minor releases, I. This is one of the things that he mentioned was they don't put a minor release out on a date. So they all get the calendars out and make sure there isn't some sort of major religious holiday so that people, if their website breaks, because WordPress is automatically updated in the background, that wouldn't be a date when a release would occur.

And and yet this one seems to have slipped through the net. I dunno how to square this circle. I imagine it's gonna be very, difficult to unpick what's already been set in, motion. the event, the date, the publicity, the actual venue. Presumably, sponsors are already on board and things like that.

Maybe a bunch of people have booked airline travel already, but I guess it's just a bit of a, can we bear this in mind? For next time. So again, over to you, the panel,

[01:17:39] Bowe Frankema: I think it happened before as well, two years ago. Ah, gosh. so that's why I can completely emphasize with the frustration there. And I think what was said by someone on the team of this year is like they had an incredibly limited window of when it needs to happen, and then they only had this specific venue available for this specific date, and that was their only option.

So I, I'm not sure if they overlooked it. I'm sure I, cannot speak on any of the, I just, that was just what I saw. It's like they find it probably incredibly unfortunate and if it was up to me like, ev, everyone should be able to attend and like the, Muslim community who are like, why are you doing this at this weekend?

Because it's literally one of our most important, celebrations of the year. I would be just as annoyed and probably less friendly than how they, how this person wanted it. They did a fantastic job in making the case. I'm just afraid that, That it's too late now, right? I hope next year or may maybe then consider maybe those two weeks, because I think it often falls in the exact same time, right?

Like it's, it maybe a better time of year where this simply cannot happen. That window of when the event needs to take place should be considered,

[01:18:58] Nathan Wrigley: I could be wrong and I probably am wrong, but I'm gonna say it anyway. I think the, is the, the, is the Islamic, for want of a better word, calendar?

Is it a lunar calendar? So does it, move throughout the year? I think it does

[01:19:12] Tammie Lister: change. I don't think it's a set day. Yeah. So

[01:19:15] Nathan Wrigley: it, wouldn't be like December the 25th, which is every year. Yeah. And predictably, so, that one's dead straightforward. This, if this would require opening up the calendar each and every year and making sure that the, key holidays, and then I suppose you'd, if you do it for one, you've gotta start doing it.

For all. So I don't know what that would leave us with as well. If we had this, hodgepodge of different calendars like the Christian calendar or whatever, calendars, just line them all up together and find that there's not so many overlap. I, don't know how difficult that would be, but

[01:19:47] Bowe Frankema: it does strengthen his argument saying this would even not happen with Christmas.

So how can it happen twice with this? So that's, I think that is a very fair point. Like then obviously there is something going on where you just don't consider the Muslim community well enough. Yeah. Like that would be my conclusion. It's probably not what's going on, but it is the end result.

So I can completely emphasize with their frustration.

[01:20:12] Michelle Frechette: It's not a small religion either. It's a major world religion. Yeah. And it's their, one of their two major holidays that they have. So it's, yeah. Yeah.

[01:20:21] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. We don't often touch on the subject of religion, but that was an interesting one. 'cause it collides with, the WordPress community perfectly.

So there, there's the open letter. I will link to it again in the show notes. And, it, it has comments open so you can, I. Go and lend your support to that. But, yeah, have to see what comes of that. All righty. we'll move on 'cause we're a bit late, so we'll go to, oh gosh. Really, do we have to deal with this?

so AZ Technica, this was just the first place that I saw this news story. It then got picked up by more or less every outlet on the planet that has anything to do with technology or the internet. backdoor slipped into multiple WordPress plugins in ongoing supply chain attack. So this is just, this is like the, this is the security problem that just is so great because, you infect one package and you've then upon update, you've upset everybody who's using that plugin.

so I'll just read, security is not really my strength. as Technica said on the. Was this, was the 24th. So this story has probably changed a little bit since then. WordPress plugins running on as many as 36,000 websites have been backdoored in a supply chain attack with unknown origins.

Security research has said on Monday, I believe it was actually Wordfence. So far five plugins are known to be affected in the campaign, which was active as recently as Monday morning. and again, yeah, it was word wordfence, which reported it. Unknown threat actors have added malicious functions to updates available for the plugins on wait for it wordpress.org When installed, the updates automatically create an attacker controlled administrative account that provides full control over compromised sites.

Yay. the updates also add content designed to goose search results. Yay. and so they've described this as poisoning the well now. I, again, I'm not a security expert, but my, intuition here is that you can't point the finger directly at.org. That's not it, right? this is people who got credentials for five plugins who were then able to access the.org repository.

And basically, rather than going to one website at a time and trying to infect it, you op, you poison the, you infect the plugin when an automatic update of that plugin is downloaded, or indeed any version of it is downloaded. You've then got yourself into people's websites. Now, there's quite a few people who in social media were saying that they've gone out and they've just, they've checked their repo.

If they've got a plugin, they've made sure that nothing weird appears to be in there. They've even gone as far as doing things like, resetting their wordpress.org password and putting two FA on and things like that. But this is. This is just low, Ugh, if we didn't have to deal with things like this, the world would be a nicer place.

But here's the plugins. Social Warfare Blaze retail widget wrapper link element, or contact form seven Multi-step add on, not contact form seven simply show hooks. So I'm not that familiar with any of them, in all honesty and social warfare seems to be the big one there with up to 30,000 installs.

But, I don't really have any advice other than just, if you've got a plugin, just make sure that everything is tickety boo and as it is. yeah, that's the story. There's nothing much more I

[01:23:59] Tammie Lister: wanna channel Tim Nash of keep calm here. yeah, because, I think that's always security isn't necessarily my thing, but I.

If you maintain a plug and change your password, pretty good idea and make sure it's secure would be like the baseline here. But also kudos and props to all the people behind who have been fixing this while we've all been running around like beaker panicking. when we see articles 'cause the. Plugin review team working overdrive doing this.

There are people who are, there's so many people in the back room of WordPress that are organizing and supporting us so that we can be safe here. so yeah. There you go. Andrew just flagged that up. Yeah. So that is impressive and it's worth saying.

[01:24:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Oh yeah. I'd forgotten this part of the story.

Yeah. Yeah. big shout out to the.org contributors who issued a password reset and also worked over 20 hour period to, approve updates on plugins over the weekend. Again. Thank you. Amazing. Amazing. Cameron says it's up to a maybe a dozen plugins by now, and then Courtney adds in a plugins team has Yeah.

Post wanting all devs to reset their password and

[01:25:14] Tammie Lister: don't just reset. Reset to a secure password to factual authentication if you can. Yeah. Yeah. So don't just put your cat's favorite name. do a secure one and do just. Be sensible, but if you look at the plugins as well, the ones that are listed there are probably ones that are really good to be back doors, right?

Yeah. The, little add-ons and all those kind of things. Oh, interesting.

[01:25:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Apparently the, again, I'm not an expert, apparently. The, the, action that the malicious actors took, is described in this article as not all that sophisticated. So let's hope that is the end of that and that, that we won't hear too much more about it.

Scott Kingsley Clark Courtney says, at pods, WordPress plugin developers make sure you enable release confirmation emails. It require. Oh, interesting. So that requires you to what? Click on a link, Courtney, in an email that you get when you push an update, it sends you some sort of confirmation, which she has to then double check.

That's interesting. That's more belt and braces. So new password, make it long, make it pseudo random noise. Two factor

[01:26:21] Tammie Lister: authentication. Two factor

[01:26:22] Nathan Wrigley: authentication and enable. release confirmation email and

[01:26:26] Tammie Lister: don't panic.

[01:26:27] Nathan Wrigley: And, don't panic. There you go. and carry a towel

[01:26:31] Bowe Frankema: to make that mandatory.

Why that? That's to me seems like 2024, like mandatory confirmation email for plugin releases.

[01:26:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah. Doesn't sound

[01:26:40] Bowe Frankema: like a weird idea to me, but

[01:26:42] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. I think you're right. Bowe, I think that

[01:26:45] Bowe Frankema: it might, mess up some, automatic, automated deploy flows for the big guys.

But I think this, makes a lot of sense.

[01:26:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's interesting. Anyway, I didn't even know that was a thing 'cause I'm not a, plugin developer, but there we go. The joys are being, but that's also the

[01:27:01] Tammie Lister: thing. If you are named as a developer on a plugin, also reset your password. 'cause a lot of people who are adjacent but just named on repos, they also need to reset their password.

So you might be like riding along on a repo, to make sure that you're not doing that. as a tester, a reviewer, all of those kind of different things as well. that's an important thing when you're saying like, I, don't maintain one, but a lot of people are like credited as well and have access

[01:27:30] Nathan Wrigley: and my advice to the people who are responsible for this.

Stop it. Just stop it. All right. Just go and have a sit down, have a biscuit, find a

[01:27:39] Tammie Lister: hobby,

[01:27:40] Nathan Wrigley: do something else, do something useful, which is helping people, not this nonsense. So there we go. That's gonna fix all of it. Okay. Very, quickly, because we are fast running out of time. you mentioned this hallway hangouts and I failed to do it at the right moment, but I will put that in the show notes.

Tammie, is that all right? We won't dwell on that one, but there it is on the screen. a recent one on the 19th of June, however. This is quite an interesting one. this came to us courtesy of Bowe. I didn't know this was a thing. Snuck this in at the last minute. Welcome to a new era of partnership with Automatic, with two Ts, become an automatic partner and gain access to discounted pricing, commissions on referrals, premier support, and cutting edge tooling so that you can get most out of the suite of best in class products.

Then we've got the logos for wordpress.com. Woo, Jetpack and Pressable, the, the hosting company, and then join the program. But I don't really know what this is. Have you scraped in a, have, have you got into it a little bit more?

[01:28:44] Bowe Frankema: Yeah, this is the, this is also the same, pool we're all fishing in.

I think, even also, liquid Web, Michelle, we are all trying to do the best work we can for agencies. to me, when I saw this and it was released under the radar, I and I. But what A two is doing with Corey and, what's her name? Sorry, I forgot her name. Katie.

[01:29:09] Michelle Frechette: Katie.

[01:29:09] Bowe Frankema: Katie, sorry. Yeah. there's a new, renewed interest in really doing something turnkey and appealing to agencies. So that's interesting from, the product that I'm building, but also an interesting sign, where automatic is, is, going, and I think it's a good sign, like I'm positive about the, this, type of initiative because it means that hopefully we will make the lives of e agencies easier and we're gonna give them, I think, a bit more attention because in the end, that is also the backbone of our commercial, sustainability as an ecosystem, right?

And, it's community and open source. But in the end, if agencies feel to be successful because they're losing their best clients towards, the Squarespace, the Wix of this world to see automatic, making renewed efforts to start an agency program and bigger hosting companies doing agency success teams and new products, or existing products doubling down on the success of agencies.

That is, I think, very much something that if we don't do that as a WordPress community or as a entrepreneurs who, however you wanna call it, we're gonna be in trouble in the long run. That is just really, important for us to acknowledge. And I think Matt also made, for the first time I've seen at Word Camp Europe, a direct reference to the threat of these big page build or Yeah.

Platform builders, page builders, that we have to be careful if we don't pay attention, we're going to be losing, our community, which was super, To me surprising, almost a bold statement from Matt. and, this is another sign that, this is happening. And I think that's a good thing that's why I want to bring it up.

[01:30:57] Nathan Wrigley: I think this is the kind of thing that I need to ingest a little bit more and, cogitate on a bit and probably. See if I can get somebody in on a podcast episode to talk to me about it so I understand what's going on. However, if you are an agency, and you are trying to scale, I'll just give you the URL.

It's automatic two ts.com/four-agencies. You probably can't see it on the screen particularly well there, but anyway, there it is. And here we go. We've got the join the program button. I'll dig more into that as the, as the days go on and see if there's something, interesting for another week there.

Just back to the security story, Cameron says that the release confirmation emails or whatever that is, they have to be manually configured. There is no toggle. Apparently, you have to reach out to somebody on the team, at least from what it implies he said. So maybe, that's an extra step that we need to do.

I think that's it. We've reached, we've gone over, I apologize about that, but, that was it. That was the super special party edition. Of Word this week, this week in WordPress, episode number 300. Woo. sorry I didn't, I fell asleep on the couch basically, and so forth. We were gotta prepare anything, but, it was quite nice having that extra 40 minutes of dosing.

So there's my reward. Bowe, I'm so sorry about this. The, here comes the slightly humiliating bit. We have to, we don't have to, it's not like anybody's going to tell you off or anything, but at the end we always raise our hands like this so that I can get a nice piece of, album art. Look, they totally complied straight away.

That's absolutely perfect. Maybe a little wiggle of the fingers there. Okay.

[01:32:36] Michelle Frechette: Jazz hands.

[01:32:37] Nathan Wrigley: Just jazz hands. Oh, I saw this brilliant image this week. It was a, it was an alligator in Florida somewhere, and it was, did you see it? It was swimming in a lake. And, for some reason it had its little hands and they've got like little hands and both hands were just jotting out the water and it just looked like it was doing, it really did look like it was.

That's evolution.

[01:32:57] Tammie Lister: I don't wanna see.

[01:32:59] Michelle Frechette: You can just replace my picture on the album art with that and it's fine. It's the perfect

[01:33:04] Nathan Wrigley: predator for jazz musicians all over the world. That's it. Anyway, we're done. thank you for joining us. Firstly to the panel. Thank you to Michelle Ette. Thanks so much. Thanks to Tammie Lister.

and thanks to Bowe, franca as well. Really appreciate hope you'll all come back soon, sooner rather than later. And thank you to you dear audience member. We had lots of comments today and that was really nice and I appreciate all of your people giving us their time and attention, at the beginning of the week.

Really appreciate it. So on that bombshell, I'll say Siara, and we'll see you next week. Take care.

[01:33:37] Michelle Frechette: Bye bye.