This Week in WordPress #302

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode number 302 entitled, we mainly talk about moose and waistcoats. It was recorded on Monday the 15th of July, 2024. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and I'll be joined today by Jess Frick, by Tim Nash, and by Paul Halfpenny.

It's a WordPress podcast. So what do we talk about? as I said, mainly moose and waistcoats, but we do get into some other things as well.

WordPress 6.6 is about to drop. What are the features in there and how can you get involved?

There's a new beginner WordPress user course, which we explore.

The Kim Parsell 2024 Memorial scholarship has been awarded. You can find out how and to whom.

Wordsesh is an event which is coming in the next couple of weeks.

We also have a long conversation about the WP Tavern and how it might come back. Not how it will come back, but some ideas about different ways that it could contribute to the WordPress news in the days, weeks, and months to come.

We also talk about the acquisition of Buddyboss, and the new Ollie Pro theme.

And as I said, moose and waistcoats. It's all coming up next on this week in WordPress.

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Hey, hello, Welcome back this week in WordPress, episode number 302, and I'm already giggling at Jess's image there. That's what, image My face? No, It's the cat, Jess. It's the giant cat in the background. Cat. Cat. Yeah, exactly. There's park here. Imagine if that was real. That's funny.

Jess, by the way, is she's using one of the platforms, virtual backgrounds, they're called, I dunno if it's a new feature, but I've never seen it before. I've never seen it before either, but I'm very excited about it. It's great. There's a massive cat licking the back of Jess's head. We're we are of course, talking about, Jess Frick, who's right there.

How are you doing, Jess? Oh, never been better. Never been cleaner, I should say. Never been cleaner. Yeah. Yeah. Clean. Clean in the sense of, there's no actual physical dirt on you, but mucky in the sense of you're now covered in cat bacteria. yeah, there are. Okay. Covered in cat bacteria is already the winning title.

This show. It can't, get any better than that. I'll write that down in a minute. it is, of course. Jess Rick, and Jess is the Vice President of Operations for Pressable. Go and check them out. Pressable a, a really solid WordPress host. She's an ice tea connoisseur. A proud member of the post status and WP Minute communities, and the cat seems to have gone, which is a great shame, I think, Jess, during the course of this episode.

Feel free to use any of those, and it'll make us all giggle because presumably Oh, thank you. I It's back. The cat is back. but thank you for joining us today. I really appreciate it. Yeah, no, so happy to be here. Be here. Thank you. And over there. Is Timothy Nash or Tim Nash? Are you, Timothy? on some legal document somewhere, there is a, there's a birth certificate somewhere saying Timothy Nash.

Yeah, Okay. we won't, dwell on that. You obviously, there's a sore point there, but, this is brilliant. Tim has written this as his introduction and only residents of the UK will have the faintest idea. What I'm on about, let's see if Paul catches on. Tim Nash. This is 29 Acacia Road and this.

Tim, the middle aged man who leads an exciting double life for when Eric, sorry. Tim eats a banana. An amazing transformation occurs. Tim is Banana man. Ever alert for the call to action to help secure your site? Ring any bells, Paul? Absolutely. And I believe I've got a photo of me in a Banana man costume.

Gonna try and find, that's for next time. We'd like to see that. Yeah, if you can find it and show it. Oh, that'd be great. it was a TV show for kids in the UK called Banana Man, and it was, yeah, it was mediocre at best, I would say, but it was, I think oversell it. Yeah. But well done for the, the good introduction.

I love it. That's fun. And finally. We're joined by Paul Hbe down there in the corner. How you doing Paul? I'm really depressed 'cause we lost the football last night. Oh. Yeah. Big fan. Are you big fan? Big fan. We didn't play very well. Didn't have a very good tournament. stayed up late, to watch it stayed up late.

You finished at 10? That's really late. It's a Sunday night. Okay. It's a school night. Be better at night. A Sunday. Yeah, it was a school night. Yeah. Oh, that, that's fascinating because I can watch that. I ha I don't follow any sport. I'm interested in some sports, like tennis I can watch a bit.

So the Wimbledon was fun, but the, football, I can totally take it or leave it. So as soon as England lost, I just turned the tele off and just did something else. Just, alright, let's carry on. I'm sorry though. I'm sorry that they lost. I would love for them to win, but, think of all those happy Spaniards.

They're having a great day. Yeah, but they've won. That's the fourth time they've won, right? Yeah. It's not fair. We've never won, and in my lifetime, it's just been a crushing series of disappointments every two years. Okay, Paula, every two years. What I want you to do is just push that chair away, go lie down on that couch behind you, and we'll try to comfort you as the episodes goes on.

we'll straighten this out. Thank you. Tell me about your father. No. Okay. Here we go. Paul is the CTO of the fitter. Oh no. Oh, you see what I did there? Only Paul knows that Joe, the filter agency and founder of Personalized wp, go and check that out. personalized with a Z or a Z with a ZZ WP brand new tool that's been released into the, into the WordPress repo to personalize your WordPress website, with blocks and everything.

so go check that out. But, thank you for joining us. Thank you. You do a better job of selling it than I do. Yeah. I need to be on the payroll. Here we go. Thank you. If you are joining us, a few bits of housekeeping before we get into the actual meat and the potatoes of this episode. The first thing to say is that all the platforms are cutting off access to things like this Facebook team, Facebook in particular.

So where you used to be able to comment on Facebook that's now been killed. They don't allow that kind of stuff anymore. So really the best place to send people or to go yourself is here. WP build.com. Sorry. sorry, Jess. that's right. You have to go wp build.com/live. Wp build.com/live. You go there, you've got a couple of options.

you could be logged into a Google account and use the YouTube comments, which are on the right, on the desktop below on a mobile, or if you don't wanna be logged into anything, then there's a live chat icon at the top right in the video itself on that page, and that's the platform's chat.

And you can use that instead if you like, so you don't have to be part of LinkedIn or Facebook or Google or anything like that. So that's that. and that's probably everything that I've got to say in terms of housekeeping. We always get a few little comments dribbling in at the beginning. So let's see what we've got today.

We've got Cameron Jones, who's joining us from Australia, Brisbane, I presume. Good evening everyone. Did Nathan get a haircut? I'm, I'm pretty pleased actually with it. It's, left me, is the only longhead intimate at Word Camp Whitley Bay. Yeah. Yeah. I did it for the word Camp Whitley Bay because it was, at that length where it was neither one thing or another.

So off it came. Thank you for noticing. I appreciate that, Cameron. It's not, how does, Bob feel about this? Yeah, I, yeah. He's not gonna be happy I don't think. Nothing that I do can make Bob happy, frankly. But here we go. Peter Ingersol with his usual weather report. Good morning from Steamy, Connecticut.

Oh, it's currently 27 degrees centigrade. Oh, that is steamy 80 degrees Fahrenheit and rising. As we start off the week with a heat advisory. Oh, that doesn't sound good. But thank you for joining us. I love the fact that he does that each week. It's come. Oh, what's it Paul? It's coming, huh? Oh, definitely not.

It's a football show, but, yeah. Thank you. And Patricia. Patricia. Hi. I'll be chatting to you tomorrow. That'll be nice. Thank you for joining us today. She's saying hi, and we've got Charlie. Hi for Sand back in the uk. yeah. Weather and British sock. it is pretty terrible the weather here at the moment.

And finally, but thank you for joining us, Charlie and Bi Za. Hello from sunny Germany. If you've got any comments that you wanna make during the show, it does liven the whole thing up a little bit, so please do that. but shall we get stuck into this week's episode? Let's see what we've got in store. The first bit is always a bit of promotional stuff.

Sorry about that, everybody. But here we go. WP Builds.com. There's our website, isn't it Smashing, isn't it Full of unique and interesting designs full of, vim and Vigor. It's brilliant. That's what we've had for about eight years now. One day I'll change it, but it won't be this day. WP Builds.com.

If you wanna stick your name into that field there, and then click, or no, don't stick your name, put your email address into that field, then click that subscribe button and we'll send you two emails a week. one for when this goes out tomorrow. One for when the Thursday podcast goes out on Wednesday.

No, Thursday. So let's do that. That'd be great. And, I'd like to big shout, a big out shout out a big shout out to, GoDaddy blue host anoma Stand for keeping this podcast going. There've been supporters now in the case of GoDaddy for ages and ages Bluehost joined us probably a couple of months ago now on Omni Send a few weeks ago, so really appreciate their, their commitment to things like this.

They don't need to do it, but it's nice to be out there in the ecosystem and thanks to them for helping us keep the lights on over here. Okay, let's get stuck in, this is the first One minute. Wait a minute, Nathan. Yeah. Yeah. Participation in this is optional. Participation in what? In W Oh, yeah. Yeah. You, said they don't need to do it, but no.

[00:11:54] Jess Frick: You don't actually need to be here. Yeah. Yeah. I'll let you go if you like. Jess. totally fine. I'll, I don't know. I know Tim. it's a mute, I tell you. That's great. I love it. I love mucking around on this show. It's part of the best bit of it. okay, here we go. WordPress 6.6, release candidate three.

[00:12:17] Nathan Wrigley: If you didn't know WordPress, 6.6 is about to drop. It is really, it's one of the bigger ones. It feels like there's more in this 6.6 release than there has been, in a, release in a really long time. If memory serves, it's either dropping tomorrow or maybe it's Wednesday. I've got a feeling, is it Wednesday?

Just it's next week. Is it? Next week? Why did I, had, the 18th in my head for some reason. And then somebody said to me the 15th, sorry, the 16th yesterday, which made me think, I'm not really sure. And I didn't really look up. Anyway, the point is it's really close. Oh my God. And, if you don't follow the project closely, we do these things called release.

I'm Go on Nathan. I'm an idiot. It's tomorrow. Yeah. Good. No, that's, not good. You're an idiot, but good. I'm glad that I'm no. I'm so glad that I did it live though. Yeah, that's okay. You're a whole week out. but the idea of these release candidates is just to squash any bugs, and it's a bit late for us to, announce this, but it's always good to get it out there.

If you do want to join this kind of endeavor in the future, you can go to the release candidate page as they roll out and download the latest version, test it on a local site, something like that, and then give you feedback. And if anything breaks, that's critical to you, you can contact the. all of the teams and what have you.

But, yeah, drop in this week. and this'll be, the last chance you get to make any comments. So you've got about eight hours and counting if you wanna really influence WordPress. This is probably not the time to do it, but there we go. okay. Should we move on? Anything? Anybody got anything about that before I move on?

[00:13:47] Jess Frick: I have a question for Tim, our security guy. Go for it. How often do you really test the release candidates on your production sites? On my production sites? never. Do you test them all in staging the release candidates or do you wait for it to come out? For my personal stuff, I am one of these people who will run the bleeding edge nightly.

[00:14:16] Tim Nash: On my live site, but that's for me because it's my personal little site and it's can break quite happily. and more importantly, if it was to break in 24 hours, it will fix itself 'cause it just spins up a new site every, so my site changes every day. It spins up a new site every day. for clients I'd say go test it on your staging site.

But I would be testing. so most clients I was recommending testing two, three weeks ago with a previous built release and we were testing their plugins then. the thing is that if you test too early, you get testing fatigue. So unless you are involved in the project, cus customers do not want, and clients do not want to be testing eight times, but you'd need to be testing maybe about a week before release on a staging site somewhere.

Check nothing's broken. for these major ones, for minor ones, automatic updates all the way. Yeah. And, for all my clients, I think, yeah, for absolutely everybody. This will be one of the few, times that we've managed to get automatic updates for everybody. So they should all be just none. No one will notice tomorrow.

They should just all roll out. Yeah. Fa famous last words. Can I ask, why do you rebuild your site every day? What's going on that? it's really every night, I, my site takes a backup and then it spins up a new container, installs the backup on the new container, runs my little test suite to say, Hey, the backup's working.

So now I know I've got a good backup. I then run whatever updates need to be run, whether that's pulling from nightly and whatever plugins I'm updating. Then I run the test suite again. Now I know that the test passed twice. I then just swap over the, literally, it's like behind the scenes. It's not quite DNS entry, but it's behind the scenes on the low balance, or it just swaps it over to the new one.

And if any problems happening during the day, you can roll back the site to the old site if you really want to. But at midnight the next day, the old site gets deleted and a new one process starts again. So there's always two versions of my site knocking around the one that could be broken and the one that was the previous days could be broken.

[00:16:37] Nathan Wrigley: I think you are quite unique. I don't know. I don't know that I've encountered anybody that does all of that. That's fine. if you're going to the, some of the more top end, WordPress hosts do something similar. Similar, yeah. Yeah. It's blue green deployment. It's not an uncommon thing at certain levels, but it's, can be really fi finicky to set up and it's fine for, personal projects.

[00:17:04] Tim Nash: Couple. I do this with a couple of clients, but, the vast majority of clients do not just the concept of, hi, we're gonna create an immutable file system and then we're gonna destroy it. Just terrifies the daylights out. Yeah. Yeah. No kidding. I think that's pretty cool. I think we should get you on a podcast and talk about that weirdness, not weirdness, just that, that sort of level and all the bits and the pieces that you're going in going into there just as well, you and I have a call booked in for That's right, yeah, Have a topic written down for it. I, I, Jess can speak to this. I guess the normal typical thing would be to just take a backup on a nightly basis and store that somewhere, I don't know, offsite on some sort of different CDN is that's what you do at Pressable, right? Just a nightly backup so that you can get the database and the file system back if it goes pear shaped.

[00:17:55] Jess Frick: I'm so glad you asked. no. We actually offer far more, frequent backups for things like databases. so those are hourly. Oh, nice. But we do have nightly full backups offsite. I've actually used your backup because I actually have had a problem where I've got the white screen of death, and it was at a moment where I couldn't really be bothered to figure it out.

[00:18:18] Nathan Wrigley: I just wanted it to go back to where it was, and then I'd go and not update the plugin that I think was responsible and, took about four minutes and I. Back to normal isn't, it nice when a feature is, so good that it's unexciting it? Do you know what I mean? It's not all you do is go, oh, thank God for that.

Now moving on. Oh yeah, backups, DNS, those are the sorts of things that are very unattractive, but if you don't have it, it's so much worse. Saves your bacon, as it were. Yeah. Yeah. But again, just one, one more side note is, pressable is unique in that we are great for dynamic websites. And if you're running a website like yours that has people filling in forms, comments, e-commerce, a daily backup's, not gonna cut it.

Yeah, good point. Yeah. I guess e-commerce in particular, if you're taking lots and lots of orders, you need something a little bit more. There is nothing worse than telling your customer. So good news, we've restored the backup, everything's fine. What do you mean you had 15 sales? Yeah. you're just gonna have to go and contact them and ask them what they sort Yeah.

[00:19:27] Tim Nash: What they bought. Yeah. Yeah. It's not that, oh, that was the one thing. It was that like e-commerce, I got out of it as soon as more or less, as soon as I got into it, I was doing e-commerce websites with things like Magento back in the day, and that whole electronic transaction thing and the ability for that to be deleted maliciously or otherwise, or just go wrong, that just kept me awake at night.

[00:19:49] Nathan Wrigley: I couldn't cope with the anxiety of it. And so just thought to myself, I'm not getting into e-commerce. And I bet you there's a whole load of freelancers out there just like me, who, although it's very attractive and it's obviously a real easy selling point in WordPress with WooCommerce, it's also as soon as the money gets involved.

Oh, and that was before things like Stripe. So I was using things like Sage Pay and you had these weird integrations and Oh, it was just a horror show. Yeah. Anyway, so that's my, That's my little story for you. So there we go. WordPress 6.6, release candidate three. You've got about seven and a half hours now to, to, go and make your, make your comments, Let's move on. Let's go to this one. I don't know if this is new or not actually. I've no idea. But, but it's the first time I've seen it and the context in which I saw it implied that it was brand new. apologies if this has been around for ages and the enrollment number here. Of nearly well over 1,100 suggested.

It's been around for a little bit longer than I think, but I'm just pointing it to you in case you've not come across it. Nice free resource on wordpress.org, although Tim's got something to say. and it's called beginner WordPress user. So this is aimed squarely at, WordPress novices. there's a bunch of other ones, like if you scroll to the bottom, there's an intermediate one, and there's one for developers as well, which we mentioned a few weeks ago.

But you can tell it's, 1 0 1 stuff because introduction to WordPress domains and hosting, installing a theme, installing a plugin, that, that's the beginnings of it. And then it, using the media library, but nice free thing, right? If you've got clients, they're unfamiliar with WordPress and they just wanna become acclimated, acclimatized to it.

Then, then it's here. It's at Word, it's at learn.wordpress.org/course. And then, beginner WordPress user. And we've been talking recently in the, WordPress media, all of the different media outlets about the competition and the marketing efforts coming from places like Wix in particular that seems to be getting more mentions these days and documentation and all of that, and ease of use and all of that.

This kind of just speaks to that. but there you go. That's there. Tim, you've got a gripe, haven't you? Only a little one. Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. That's not what you said earlier. Yeah, I. I, the problem is that I want gripe, but I also really like the idea and I really want more of these things to happen.

[00:22:13] Jess Frick: Yeah, nice. And I, it's, and it's obviously always volunteer driven, so you definitely, and the quick answer is, you should fix that. so I was, I glanced through it last night and by glance for it, I mean I jumped to the two security sections, and, the getting started, one at the right at the top.

[00:22:34] Tim Nash: So not, in the security and spam, we're not even there if we go right the way to the top and we've got getting started with WordPress security, this one. Okay. Yeah. and I just read through the transcript and I just sat there and going, if this is how we're introducing WordPress security, what was the, what was the bit that sort of caught you short?

it spent more time talking about weird things to do with hosting companies. okay. Rather than just, I think this is partly down to the fear we have of generally we, as a community, we seem to be incapable of just saying, go with these hosting companies. but yeah, there was this whole section about choosing and then, but if you go slightly up, it was the password that really got me.

So you've got the choosing the right hosting provider that just read like a sales pitch for a specific hosting company. Okay. And I don't think anybody read through it. They might network out which one that was. Okay. but the password was, let's take a quick example of a password that is easy to remember, but hard to guess.

The password is monks drive to the beach. But of course I've included special characters, capital letters, lowercase numbers, spaces, et cetera. It's yeah, you haven't, you, apparently the password is monks drive to the beach. And it's just the little things like that it would just confuse people.

Okay. Why do we put we, it's. WordPress security's not complicated particularly, and if we start focusing on the wrong things too early, people go down the wrong route. Yeah. I guess, you've, like anything, because you are in the weeds of all this all the time, the little things are gonna, they're gonna stick out, aren't they?

[00:24:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I, would've so much liked it if they just, if that opening section was like, pointed them at other resources. And the, to be honest, the thing that they did right at least was keep things up to date, was the very first thing. And if only they then made the second thing, keep your pa strong, passwords, keep your WordPress up to date, audit your users, and then everything else got shunted into the advanced section E even have, choose a good host, here's how you do that would've been great, but it, felt very much like a, oh.

[00:24:46] Tim Nash: I'm halfway through a sales pitch midway through. The second section's a little better, but it still repeats most of what was said in this one, which has expanded. And it felt very, weird. but I don't really know how to get involved with editing and changing this. Oh, interesting.

[00:25:07] Nathan Wrigley: Let's see. So I, there's a thing that says, let us know about grammar mistakes, but there's nothing about, please just completely write, rewrite these sections. Yeah, I don't know, actually. That's an interesting thought. so I don't know who, who generated it, how it's generated, if there's anybody that's on me, because I've not been involved with the Learn WordPress team, but maybe it is as simple as me just pressing that button.

[00:25:29] Tim Nash: And Courtney Robertson, who often joins us in the comments, I know she's been, connected and I don't on what level, but it might be if you are interested in that, it might be worth, there's. Reaching out. Oh, Jess, are you, there's a link right at the top that says Contribute there. Let's see where that goes.

[00:25:47] Nathan Wrigley: Shall we? I wonder if that's just a general contribute. Yeah, I want to get contribute training. Oh, no. Join the training team. Look, so it's, specific to that. So there's your answer. Look at that. Jess. Jess, troubleshooting live. nice. So I'm not going into make WordPress. We're doomed. Okay. Okay.

There's impediments to this already. but it's really nice. And here's a nice thing as well. This button, I think we're gonna see increasingly on all the WordPress properties, practice with WordPress playground. I haven't actually clicked that button, but my guess is that this course will just roll straight out into that, WordPress.

Shall I press it and see what happens? Go on. Let's wait for the five seconds it takes. Oh, that's a nice ui. Liking that. Here we go. Preparing WordPress. Is this gonna grind my Mac into the ground? It probably will wait for it. Logging in. I was imagining that I would see a site, let's see if there's something in here.

No, it just looks like a WordPress website. I wondered if the course was somewhere in there. I'll close that down and release like eight gigs memory. anyway, there it is. Nice course. Paul, you've not said anything much for a bit. No, sorry. Yeah, no, sorry. I it's, really hard to write beginner level stuff, right?

[00:27:03] Paul Halfpenny: Isn't it? Especially when you are, experienced and too much. So last week I was writing an exec summary for a project and trying to get to the point where you can take all this really complicated stuff that we're doing over here and just turn it into three slides worth of.

Information for an exec level audience that doesn't understand any of it, apart from like business outcomes and things like that. That's actually really tricky. So I think we should, should remember that it's Guinea. Something's better than nothing. Yeah, that's right. I think that's right. That, yeah, this is why I was really like, it's, it is a gripe and it's a big gripe and there are things I really don't like about that.

[00:27:42] Tim Nash: I don't want to like stab things because this is someone's time and effort and it's doing a service that's, and it will help people. Even the bits that I griping at will help people. I, thought obviously the people that are watching this are probably a little bit more, I would imagine they've gone through something like this many, years ago.

[00:28:02] Nathan Wrigley: But if you, if you have clients, it might be something just to point them in the direction of they've got a larger understanding of the project. But as I said, there's an intermediate version. I haven't looked at that, but there's also a developer version. I dunno if that counts as the sort of, the more advanced version or not.

Currently, like I said, nearly about 1100 people have taken it. lots of people seem to be getting through. It says the average final grade is 94. I dunno if that means that 94% of people have got through it with a good grade, or 94% of those people have got to the end. did well and seems to take roughly a week, about eight days to complete.

So anyway, there you go. learn.wordpress.org/course, and you can take it from there. Couple of comments coming in. Firstly, Lawrence, oh, I wonder if that's like Lawrence, we might be talking about one of your bits in a bit, one of your bits in a bit. so stay tuned. And Cameron's saying, pretty sure they're all on GitHub, so you could open a poll request with an improved version.

There you go. or just click the, yeah, the little contribute button there. Max is joining us and he's telling me that he's, Recently switched his site to the Ollie theme. We've got some, news about that you probably know. I imagine if you're using the Ollie theme, we'll talk about that in a little while.

and we will wait. Let's crack on. Okay. Here's the next piece. Not that one. We've just on that one. So this is nice bit of community news. so this is on the WordPress foundation.org website and it's, a piece entitled, announced in 2024, Kim Parel Memorial Scholarship recipient. and the name of that person is Cynthia Norman.

Let's just spell out what that, Kim Parel bit means. So it says in 2025, sorry. In 2015, very forward thinking that in 2025, in 2015, the WordPress Foundation established an annual memorial scholarship to honor the memory of Kim Parel links tomorrow in the show notes, and you can click on some links here to find more about.

Kim, beloved and influential co contributor to the WordPress community. I'm gonna skip little bits, but here's the next bit. This scholarship is awarded each year to a female WordPress contributor who has never attended WordCamp US and would require financial assistance to do so. it's fairly specific.

We're happy to announce. This year that the scholarship recipient is Cynthia Norman. Cynthia's commitment to WordPress training and education embodies the values that Kim cherishes. And there's a nice picture of Kim in what looks like an allotment or something like that. and there's a little bit more information about it.

One of the things that I found out is that, Cynthia has a YouTube channel, which I'm gonna also link to in the show notes. It's called W-P-S-O-S Hub. And although I haven't consumed any of the content, you've obviously been busy with it. yeah, I can see why, Cynthia has been chosen. But yeah, just a little, I guess a little round of applause to, yeah, there you go.

We actually got the sound there. That's nice. Nathan. Yeah. Nathan, can you go back to her YouTube channel? I have a question for Paul. Since he's our resident. Zoologist. What animal is that? At the top? Oh yeah. One, hang on, lemme zoom in. You mean this one here? Yeah. Oh, then there's another photos. Yeah.

[00:31:14] Paul Halfpenny: That one because there's loads of them. So it should be really obvious exactly what this animal is. It is a what? It is a moose. Is it? Is it a moose? Is it, I dunno. I dunno. I think it's, I think it's a slightly wonky horse or, that's my, A horse with a big nose. Oh, it's an elk. You, calling me big nose.

[00:31:37] Nathan Wrigley: What's case? We're being told in the comments. Oh, okay. Let's find out. Said it's an elk. It's an elk. It's not only that, it's a female elk, apparently. No horns. What's, an elk? An elk is like an elf, but with a K. Oh, elk is like aose. Yeah, it's just like a moose only the other way on, it's slightly same but slightly different.

I wouldn't know. Okay, now we've gotta do it and wait for God's sake. Here we go. Okay. Elk pictures, right? I'm using do dot go. So let's see what we get. Okay, here we go. no, I'm, not thinking that's not male, but you gotta go email male. Okay. Okay. Alright. I've gotta adapt the search.

female. Oh, that's not how you spell Female elk. Female pictures. No, I'm not getting the elk vibe from that. That's got more of a, yeah, more of a, I dunno, that's like the front of an airplane. It's very sleek and pointy. Whereas this, what the heck are we doing? this is more saggy and droopy, I feel.

Jess, any other suggestions If it's not elk, we're, should we try moose? Moose? Yeah, we can try moose. Okay, let's try. Oh, that's not how you spell moose either, but it's, trying to figure out, I'm getting moose vibe. Nope, not her. Mo. Here we go. There we go. I'm, it's a moose. It's a moose. It looks like a right.

All along Paul. Yeah. you heard first? Yeah, that was definitely me. I definitely knew that. Yeah. Good job. Oh, what the heck just happened? I've never seen books in real life. Are they, Canadian? do they, live in Canada? I don't think they, I don't think they have passports if that's no, but just in terms of where they come from.

[00:33:23] Paul Halfpenny: I know that they have them in Canada. Yeah. Did Troopers ride them? Is that what they like? I'm sure the No, they ride horses shows. Oh, Okay. You're thinking of Northern Exposure. They were definitely on Ian Mounted Police. On their Moose On Moose. Little did Cynthia? No, when she set up this YouTube channel and came up with this image and put the, obviously now, duh.

[00:33:48] Nathan Wrigley: The moose picture on there. Little did she know that it would occupy a tiny corner of the internet for five minutes. You know what though? I think we all need to go subscribe because she knows one subscribers and it looks like she's putting a lot of work into this. Yeah, I'm with you. look at it like a, the Silly Moose thing aside.

Oh, this is great. Look at all this content. it's not nothing to produce a 12 minute video, 7, 6, 5. There's lots of different lengths, but, it's really nice, right? Oh, she's bringing it. She is bringing it. It's called WP, SOS hub. so youtube.com/at uuv at symbol, WP, SOS ho. So go and subscribe.

but also congratulations for being the recipient of that award, which we'll send you. I don't know exactly how much it covers, but it'll get you started on your word camp. Us, trip. There we go. Lovely. And, I'm gonna have to take a small lie down from that ridiculousness. No, I'll just, I'll take a bite of an apple.

[00:34:50] Jess Frick: Oh my goodness. I have really good news. Go on, word Camp US is in Oregon and apparently Oregon has a herd of moose. Oh. Oh. I'm going, I'm totally going. I'm gonna ride moose. Cynthia is going to be among. Friends. Okay, I'm going. I'm gonna do it. Here we go. So let's see what happened here. So it's a female elk, said Patricia, let's move on.

[00:35:16] Nathan Wrigley: Lauren said, Santa's reindeer, spend from frozen. Oh, he rides a moose. Does he? Okay. What are we doing? okay, I was wrong. It's a moose then says Patricia and Cameron says the title of this episode should be, it's an Elf, but with a K. I'm agreeing with you so far. That's the winner. and then Patricia obviously feels the need to explain this.

this era, this erring, right? Massive par. Yeah, that's right. Massive, visual. Fapa. I mistook because in French it's ellan, so I thought it was elk in English. Oh, okay. So slip at the tongue. and in German it's called elch. That was my German accent attempt. Sorry about that. Nathan, you are not going to ride a moose?

I, oh, I am. I'm gonna do it. Hang on. I feel you need to ask permission of the moose before you try things like this. Can you not go to a stable they've got like where they've got moose that have got like saddles and things? if so. No, you're right though Barbara. I am not actually gonna ride a moose.

you could at work camp us. You could go to Oregon. Yeah. And it there. Yeah, a moose riding academy. Okay. And you could get on a moose. Is there a Moose Riding Academy? Probably. Oh, okay. Anyway, what the heck are we talking about? Let's get back to the actual WordPress news because here there really is a moose.

[00:36:42] Tim Nash: They, they, used to have moose cavalry.

Moose cavalry are military units of cavalry men mounted on moose rather than the more usual horses. this is, they ha they were used in Sweden. What's the, this is a measure, this is a measure of how much control moose I have on this show. I say the words, let's move on and stop talking about moose. And then Tim immediately says, wait, hang on.

[00:37:08] Nathan Wrigley: There is a moose academy. also, just to make it very clear that, the moose or elk, they're, one of the same. Ah, that's strange. Yeah. Is the world stares and largest and he species of deer? there is no indication on this Wikipedia page for the plural of moose, ah, although plural, moose, Yeah. Moose. Yes. Yeah. You dig Meese, but no, see, yeah, moose is moose. Can I just say Paul, whilst, whilst all of that was coming outta Tim's mouth, you were literally like robbing your beard. You were like, just, and then, you went

genuinely like into this. It was, yes. Moose conversation. is it a slow news week? No, not really. There's slow week as slow as we could be covering, but this is way more entertaining, isn't it? Moose Week? There we go. Ah, I'm. Take a bite of an apple to calm me down. No, I'm not. That'll just get in my teeth right back to WordPress.

Here we go. Hang on one, one more thing. No Apple, no Nash. no. He's not gonna let us do this show together anymore. he's not. Okay. Okay. Here we go. Some serious news. This is word sesh. I think we've mentioned it be, we certainly mentioned previous iterations before, but just to say that, it's coming around again.

It's an annual, I, think it's annual. But it's a virtual summit, that I've said woos, I apologize. It's actually word sesh. You can see it on the screen. and happening on the 30th of July, 2024. So what, just like a couple of weeks away. And it just says a virtual conference for WordPress professionals.

It's a live virtual conference for exactly what I just said, WordPress professionals. Each event is highly curated to provide you with the absolute best possible experience. Head to word sesh.com if you want to find out more. And you can subscribe by putting your email in there. It's it's just a nice quick one day event, free and eight speakers, four of whom have been announced.

Alex Thomas, Daniel Bba, I dunno how to pronounce that surname. Kimberly. Hope I did that And then there's somebody there, black and white is, I'm not sure who she is. She's some ui ux lady. peach. That peach. And then four to still be announced. And then the schedule is there. So word ses.com.

Anybody wanna mention that or just, generally get back into the moose topic? Obviously I'm very excited to see who the other report are gonna be. Okay. I think one of 'em is gonna be a moose obviously. Is it you? No. Oh no, But actually I'm really looking forward to the sessions. They look really good.

[00:39:58] Tim Nash: Yeah. Great. And they've got the, four speakers have ever been announced are all excellent. Yeah. Nice. That's good to know. Thank you. Cameron has a question for you though. Cameron has a question. Do. You mean esh? Oh, whoa. That's good. I love it. I love it. Half, just imagine halfway around the world is a is in Brisbane, is a guy tuning into this show who's just totally committed to to that.

[00:40:25] Nathan Wrigley: That's brilliant. I love all this nonsense. Keep it coming, Cameron, and it makes my day. but what a world we live in, eh? okay, so that's Esh. Go check it out. The other thing to mention, Lawrence joined us a little while ago. he wrote a comment, I can't see it now, but he definitely said, oh, it from Frozen.

He made that comment there. this is a piece that I, have to be a little bit careful here, right? I'm just gonna get that out there. if you don't know, I do a weekly podcast for the WP Tavern. And in fact, if you, go to the WP Tavern now, this is what it looks like the WP Tavern is now, contains basically.

Just podcast after podcast. 'cause that's all that's been made for a really, long time. And I'll just set the scene. So Justin Tadlock left several years ago, and he was writing full-time with Sarah Gooding, who was also full-time that left Sarah as the, sole contributor in, article written content for the WP Tavern.

And then in about November last, no, it was earlier than that. I think it might have been October or September even. Anyway, last year. Sarah Gooding moved on and she's got a different job outside of the WordPress space. And so there were, there was a hole created and it turned out that a lot of people really enjoyed reading the content that Sarah and Justin had made over the years.

So it was decided that new, talent would be, brought forth, but that didn't happen for a while. And then eventually after many months of total silence from written content, seven people were put through something which has been described variously as, it's a bit like the Hunger Games or something like that.

Seven people wrote in a, in a competition for two or a month live, they were all competing with articles. And the intention was that soon after that, decisions would be made about who would continue. Anyway, there's the history of it. the truth is though, nothing happened in terms of, or at least publicly, maybe the decisions have been made, but publicly nobody has been appointed and taken up that job.

and so this tweet came out from mku. It said, surely we must conclude that, that the WP Tavern is dead, right? apart from the WP Builds podcast. So the bit, the audio content that I make, and then, obviously Matt Mullen were caught site of that, and he said, just that I'm so sorry. there's only so many hours in the day and lots of mine have been kept.

Other thing been, been on keeping other things moving. I'm sure that, if I was to have Matt's workload, I wouldn't be able to speak frankly, I'm sure. really very difficult. But it's ultimately, it's Matt's decision, who these people are. And so with that in mind, Lawrence's. Pen, this article saying, what about if we just change it up a bit?

So instead of it being two people writing full-time or three, or whatever is the decision, why not just make it into something a little bit different? So the idea here that he raises is, one of them raises several ideas, make it more of a an in-flight magazine. Now, I don't really have a great experience with inflight magazines.

I open them and then immediately put them back. but these are, some interesting ideas that dropped into, Lawrence's article. So instead of the tavern just being, WordPress News after WordPress News, what about some of this, featured stories highlighting great things about WordPress interviews, spotlighting contributors, end users, and the wider WordPress community product reviews, use cases and feature highlights.

then he is put airliner specs. then he is saying in that case, the WP Tavern version of that would be block themes and components that make them up. then safety information obviously would translate to security tips. Tim, I can see your, See your fingers already moving toward the keyboard to pen an article, the Entertainment Guide, the tavern version would be highlighting podcast, WordPress TV and events streamed live.

And finally you'd find shopping in that. And the article here says, WP Tavern's version would be WordPress merch selling WordPress merch on the WP Tavern website. And then he's suggesting Power It by News Pack. And if you dunno what news packing is, news Pack is go and Google it. We haven't really got time to cover that, but it's an interesting idea.

So with all that said, I'm not gonna comment 'cause I, have a total conflict of interest here, so I'm just gonna drop that bomb, let you three fight it out and I'll, I'll shut up and eat my apple. How's that sound? that's great. Off you go. So I think that w. What was really great about WP Tamon is more long form content and I really enjoyed the Hunger Games style, everybody submitting all their stuff.

[00:45:26] Paul Halfpenny: 'cause suddenly there was a bunch of content from different people around the community. And I think that the, way, there's a lot, bunch of new sites out there. There's a lot of people doing WebPress news every day. But what is really interesting about, Sorry, I'm gonna go back a step. So what, I think is there's too many news sites out there, so you, can't just employ somebody full-time to do news and to do long form news and detailed news.

'cause there just isn't time. And what you saw with the tavern over the last couple of years was the speed and the cadence of those new news articles slowing down because they're writing them. So why not just get an editor that is responsible for sourcing content from other writers around the WordPress community?

And they've got a budget to just pop 'em a note AIP end or something for doing an article. And then what you can do is just let everybody go, I wanna publish this on WP Tam. And it gets sent in, it gets edited, it gets approved, it goes up on, and then you don't need somebody to sit there and write.

You can take views from around the community and you'd hopefully keep it alive. Okay. That's really interesting. yeah. Okay. That's fascinating. So like an editor role. So you, instead of employing writers, you employ an editor whose, job it then is to go out and, either, commission content or find content, that is, that they see could be repurposed into the tab because I think that it was pretty clear.

When they did the, they trialed the seven writers. There was a lot of content that could be written about interesting niche areas that wouldn't be covered elsewhere. That's not just news, but is an interesting subject. And I think people want to write and about those things. And I think there is supplier for it.

[00:47:21] Nathan Wrigley: I think Cameron has, basically hit the nose, the, the moose on the head. The tavern needs more moose content. there is that as well. and I think that Tim would right in ask corn it, this, there's nothing, this conversation has nowhere else to go. That's the end of the road there. no. I think me and Patricia are now going to, who's also been thoroughly researching in the comments, and I noticed that Nathan skipped over them.

I, haven't seen them, I swear go off a little bit. There's, but on the tavern, the one thing that it had that nobody else could do really was that it was. Two journalists who were paid to be journalists, they weren't paid to run a site. They weren't worried about how their income was gonna come. They weren't having to chase sponsorship deals and advertising.

[00:48:14] Tim Nash: They were just there to write. and sometimes people hated what they wrote, and sometimes they thought there was these conflicts of interests. But they genuinely were impartial journalists. And I think we don't really have that at the moment. It we, have lots of individual sites that do the news, but they're often doing news based on who's paying them a little bit in a kickback.

They have to have affiliates, money coming in. They have to think about adverts and sponsorship and all that stuff because. That's how they make their money to be able to carry on writing. And there's nothing wrong with that, but it's different from being that pure journalistic sense. So I think there is still a space for that old school on what Lawrence was describing to me.

Sounds an awful like post status. The post status is email that I get. I think it ticks most of those boxes that he was talking about of the in-Flight magazine and it links off and I, so I think there's a place for that, but I'm not sure the taverns, that place, I think that could be done by other things.

And post data is almost there doing that, where that core journalism, I think we've lost. let, can I just clarify a few things? So the WP Tavern is a property which I'm gonna say owned, I dunno if this is the right word, but owned by Audrey Capital, and Audrey Capital is the.

[00:49:46] Nathan Wrigley: and again, I'm not sure what the correct wording is, but let's say it's the venture funding arm, for Matt Mullenweg. So again, if this much money fund, yeah, if I've, misrepresented that though, somebody correct me if that's not the thing. But the point of that is, firstly, it is disconnected with, wordpress.org, wordpress.com.

there is a bit of, of a gap there. The second thing is, and I can only speak for myself, I can't speak for Justin or Sarah or anybody who's written in the past or the seven people who went through that Hunger Games. There is zero pressure. To write anything of any kind. If I chose to, I could just publish a podcast full of incendiary content.

I'm given full autonomy. and I imagine the same is true for the writers. and, I think there's something pretty amazing about that. And out of that comes proper journalism, journalism with a capital J. And what I mean by that is there's no, tainting of, there's a look, there's an ad on that site, and it's from a hosting company and this article's about hosting.

And isn't it coincidental that those things, there seems to be some overlap with that ad and the conclusions that have been drawn that doesn't exist. and because there is no request to produce content of any kind, and I dunno, if you saw, Sarah at various points was fairly critical.

Of, leadership in WordPress and things like that. And, that's unique. We, that's hard to get. and having said, I wasn't gonna make any comments about this, I've just talked for three minutes, but I wanted to just paint the picture that it genuinely, the only thing I can say to you is no matter where that money's coming from to pay those salaries, it is, there is no part of the machinery which is telling you what to do.

Absolutely not. And you're just gonna have to take my word for it. and I hope that you do Anyway, carry on. Jess, have you got anything to add? Selfishly, I would say keep it un pressable, right there in the footer hosted by Pressable. I love it. That was great putting that out there. Yeah, it is right in the footer every page, right? Yeah, it sure is just putting that out there. Yeah. but also, is it an affiliate link? it's not. Strangely, they, don't wanna earn an affiliate commission on that.

[00:52:26] Jess Frick: the jokes aside, having come from a journalism background, I have always loved the tavern. I loved that, Sarah and Justin, like you said, Nathan, were always free to say whatever they wanted to say. and to Tim's point, sometimes people really didn't like that. But that's good journalism.

If everybody likes it, you're not doing it right. but the thing is, I also can't imagine how Matt has to prioritize what he focuses on. I don't see how the WP Tavern is going to push any of his big rocks forward. It's a pet project at best. And I'm sure before he went on his sabbatical, he had full intentions to pick somebody from the trials and to go forward with that.

And then he came back and had a whole company to run. So I get it. but to Lawrence's point, it's interesting because they've got this new media core team and that could be something interesting for them to take on. but I also like Lawrence's point where he's saying, this should be more outward facing.

soap bops were invented by soap companies. Were they? Oh yeah. Yeah. That's why they're called soap operas. Yeah. Wasn't it commercials in between the, it was just largely driven by soap manufacturers. The, that's correct. There you go. You've, and so I'm not saying that we turned WP Tavern into a commercial thing, on that same vibe, perhaps this could help us attract more of that outside audience with the content.

but then comes the question, who's gonna run it? And Yeah. Does Matt have enough time? And of course he has 10 minutes in his day to deal with stuff, but you have to code switch and, when is it going to become a priority enough for him to stop doing something in order to do this? Yeah. Yeah. And the answer is, I don't know, but Audrey Capital, he's the boss, so he's got a.

Figure out when that's gonna make sense for him. Yeah. so first thing, you, just, learn the lesson that when you watch this show, we give you top information, right? First, you've learned about the difference between Elks and Moose. That's the first one. And now you've learned why soap operas only?

[00:54:51] Nathan Wrigley: We haven't because we didn't put Patricia's comments up. That's ah, Okay. Talked about. Okay. I'll come, to the comments now. Okay, here we go. Firstly, Barbara wisely telling me, hello Barbara. We Whitley Bay later last week. she's saying step away from the moose. she's right. and then more about the moose, I think.

Don't encourage than Cameron. okay, so here's Patricia. Some more knowledge. Oh. I thought this was about the tavern, but it's not. It's about should we carry on? Should we do this one? Yeah. Okay. So more knowledge. I just found no need to show this comment. Oh, I just did, American Moose, which is the same species as the European elk, just two different names.

There you go. European Elk or co, also called Eurasian moose. That sounds like a nice dessert. Is the same species as the American moose. but it is not the same species as the American Elk. I'm totally confused now, Cameron, if you take the W from WordPress and flip it upside down, you get M for moose.

It's awful connected. This is the most bizarre show I've ever done. I've got episode 302 and it really is being hijacked. Here we go. Where? Okay, brilliant. No, we've done that one. Lawrence? The idea really is to try to appeal to a non WP audience and not just to be an industry publication. Oh, okay.

And if you're looking at the media cycle at the moment, there is a lot of effort to try and get WordPress outside of the WordPress ecosystem. and the media core and all of that is trying to figure out ways to, get, to get media, big media, or the other media like TechCrunch, the Guardian, whatever, the New York Times, whatever, interested in talking about WordPress as well.

So that's interesting. editor role. Good idea. Thought Lawrence. That was Paul's suggestion. Barbara says definitely the way to go, but I've, I'm not sure what, that was in the context of Tim Ray. The repository is close to what you say. So this is about it being a bit like post status. Is that what Yeah, so I, the repository, if you don't, haven't come across it as an e weekly email, that's very similar to post statuses weekly email, but it's nicely broken down into little, chunks of, different parts of the WordPress community.

[00:57:05] Tim Nash: I get both emails in my inbox every week. They're a fantastic way to get a quick overview of what's going on and they link out to loads of different people.

[00:57:17] Nathan Wrigley: I was on mute 'cause I was eating an apple. they just a hammer at home. The main point Lauren says is that the content is not just for the WordPress community, but more outwards looking interesting. Just bigger doesn't have to be encapsulated in just WordPress stuff. It could become a bigger thing.

And then finally, the last comment, so far, the WP Project needs to look outwards more as far as marketing is concerned. Hence the recent changes, which we just mentioned. The WP Tavern could help with that. Okay. Have we have, we said everything we need to say about that. So this is on, the WP Biz Dev website.

So we go to WP Bizz dev and I guess hit the blog. And, right at the top you'll find it, and I'll link to it in the show notes. Just think about the new branding with the moose head. Yeah. On the wall of the tavern. Yeah. Yeah, you've got things like ghost CMS, it's just one short five letter word, just moose, what else?

Moose, CMS. Yeah. We can shorten it and just be moo just, okay. Okay. all All right. It's no, no longer WordPress. We're just gonna call it moose or moo for sure. I think we've gone too far. okay, let's move on. Let me share my screen. So WordPress 6.6, as we were discussing drops in the next few hours, but, that the, it never stops.

The carousel just keeps turning. And WordPress 6.7 is already in the planning stages, but. In order to make it happen, we need, volunteers to assist with that endeavor. Now it might be that you wanna drop in and drop out, but if you want a more substantial role, then, here we go. There are some stats here about the dates and things.

We'll come to that. WordPress 6.6 is almost ready, so it's time to start planning for 6.7 so that release leads can participate from start, from the start of the release cycle. The timeline for the third release of 2024 takes a into consideration word camp us, which is happening in mid-September. So trying to avoid that collision.

and the, proposal suggests having WordPress 6.7 beta one, after Word camp us with a small buffer in between. If you're watching, you can see the dates, but essentially beta one would be mooted for October the first, and then final release is on the 12th of November. That's the intention there.

And here we go. There is a release. Lead call for volunteers. There's a few posts that have been taken, like the release lead is gonna be Matt and the core tech leads is Peter Wilson and Kira, or Kyra Schroeder. and then the tech leads, Robert Anderson and Kai Howe. But the other ones are all to be decided.

So if things like, communications, interest you, triage documentation, test, design, performance default theme, if any of that interests you, then, I'll link to this in the show notes, but you can just head over to make WordPress dot core. And Hector Preto wrote this on the 5th of July, so you can, find out from there how you can become involved as a link here for the release squad.

Anybody wanna contribute to that or should I just crack on? That's a crack on, I think. Okay, here's the next one. I'm not gonna go into the weeds of this, but I do love these articles. this is where Justin, went actually, when he left the WP Tavern. He went to automatic and, produces, content on the developer blog as well as having a.

A substantial input into the project as a whole. But, just a few days ago, he released one called What's New for Developers July, 2024. You can guess from the title that this is usually a monthly endeavor, and I'm just pointing it to you. There's absolutely loads in here and unless somebody's got something specific, it's very hard on a podcast to actually go through it.

But if you are a developer and you wanna see what's coming down the pike in 6.60, there it is, look black and white, tomorrow, then everything is encapsulated fairly nicely in this one single aspect. I just wanna say that, Justin's work on this and Nick Diego and Ryan Welcher as well, with what they're doing with developer, ours is really helpful.

[01:01:29] Paul Halfpenny: Yeah. Particularly with all the new stuff that's coming through. do you tend to, do you tend to lurk with that or do you, are you one of those people that kind of, pops up and goes to the meetings and all that? Or do you just ibar it from articles like Justin has written.

No, I, lurk a lot because a few other things going on. Yeah. But I think getting stuff like this in an email is really, useful to be able to go and consume it in my own time. and to be able to go into it in detail. And there's a lot around things like the interactivity, API, the block bindings, API.

[01:02:04] Jess Frick: Yeah. Ryan's doing some really nice stuff with slot fills as well. that's just really valuable content and, they're making a real effort to go out there and, talk about it and invite people onto, podcasts and things. So yeah, live streams. There's a live stream last week that, that we attended.

[01:02:23] Paul Halfpenny: That's really nice. That was really interesting. So yeah, thank you to them. Yeah, indeed. A lot of work goes into this kind of stuff. it's not a small article, is it? There's a several thousand words I would've thought with and many, links. So there's a lot of curating going on there and, yeah.

[01:02:40] Nathan Wrigley: Brilliant. Thank you Justin. And as you said Nick and others. Thanks for that. anybody before I move on, I can hear clicking. What's clicking? Something's clicking. Anybody else say clicking or is it just me? it was on my side. Sorry. Oh, no, it's all right. you just, getting into the, yeah. Yeah.

Nice. All right. She's, did some acapella just whilst we were, you were talking. It's the lookers. Nice. Yeah. Something. Okay. Alright. This is apropos of nothing. let's just, let's, I'm just here to mess up the show. no, Let's take it, let's, go with that and, let's throw in some, wait a sec.

Let's, try, this one. Ah, okay. I love this. Clip it away way through the whole episode. And maybe we could just say the word moose in unison. Every sort. Yeah. Moose. Moose, yeah. It's very, I love that I do all that. Do you know one of my things, I just want to, I want get to New York and I wanna sit in a jazz bar.

[01:03:42] Paul Halfpenny: Okay. just one of my dreams. This certainly gets nowhere close to Yeah. At Target. But, I dunno, it took me slightly close to that. I just felt very relaxed. Let's try this one.

[01:03:57] Nathan Wrigley: No, I'm not getting, I'm not getting that. Oh, no, Jess is in, Jess is No, Tim's. Tim's immovable. There's no.

I am like thinking Arizona or something like that. Raising Arizona, that film? No, I'm interested more Canada Uhoh. Yeah. But honestly I didn't think we could go further down the depths. But we have plumbed new depths, haven't we? It's got worse. Not better. And also the live chat, obviously, then contributes to that.

That'll be Andrew Palmer saying Jazz hands. Thank you. And camera's tell me to sleep. All right, there we go. Let's get back to it. You can only have fun in life when there's silly music, right? That's true. Jessica, and I'm gonna try Jessica, I do apologize. Jessica. Ick. I think that was what we decided, wasn't it?

I think you did a good job. Thank you. Only Jessica can truly say, but Jessica was actually one of the people that went on stage at WordCamp Europe, for, Jamie Marlin's, speed Builds. She was against just, rich Table and they had half an hour trying to build a, website that, they'd only just seen for a few minutes.

And, yeah, it was really entertaining. It was brilliant. But she's written a piece. How'd she do? what's that? How'd she do? Yeah, they both were brilliant. It actually, it was really interesting 'cause they both set off at like breakneck speed and, and what was fascinating about that whole thing is really the end result isn't the winner, if you like.

Yeah. It's more about the, what did they do? Yeah. And how did they do it? And oftentimes Tim's gone, he's fed up, oftentimes you'll see them doing things and you've, seen no mouse interaction. So it's things like, hang on, there must be a keyboard shortcut for that then that I don't know anything about.

But also you get to see them playing and doing things that, yeah, and it was just really interesting, like achieving layouts by complete muscle memory. 'cause both of them, just by looking at something, they could immediately encapsulate it in the block editor UI and put it together in moments. and Rich Table was just using Core Blocks, I think, and Jessica was using, I think she works for Grade Suite.

I could be wrong about that, but I think she might work for Grade Suite or one of those companies that has a selection block. So there was a little bit of that thrown in as well, which kind of spiced it up. Anyway. love it. Yeah, it was brilliant. Really. it was actual entertainment, which was really great.

not that every presentation at Word Camp has to be like that, but it's nice to throw one in there. here we are. This article is called What would you Like to See in the Default WordPress theme? So this is gonna be 2025, and really it's just a, call for. Give us your ideas and, what, they want to hear is what types of sites do you want to create with the theme?

What problems do you need the theme to solve to create these sites? And is there any, existing feature that you want the theme to support? And the way you're gonna do that is just to scroll down and, add, add a comment basically. And we've seen a few people do that. Alex Moss from Yost saying he wants to see easier ways to import and export from other themes.

Maybe that's gonna be part of the, I've forgotten the initiative in WordPress. What is it? the transport transportability thing that everybody's talking about anyway, that, a migration themes assistant might be quite nice for 2025 itself. default themes, specially orientated towards shops was one option.

And, dark mode, anyway, go here and just, chuck your stuff in. I'm not very opinionated. I just wait for the theme to come and then, then have a play with it. I don't really have a. An opinion on that, but do any of you, if so, now's the time to speak. I'd love to see, post formats getting, revisit Yogi school.

What, what's go on? because that kind of gets a bit No, there's no love for that. Is there this whole post formats thing? It's the kind of thing that it, feels like, it was like, oh, Tumblr's got it. We should have it in WordPress kind of thing. Back in the day when Tumblr was like really on the rise.

But do, would you actually make use of it? And if so, how? So when it originally came out, that's exactly what happened. And, there was lots of the, we are talking many years ago, but we still enjoyed WordPress drama. and Twitter was more friendlier place. So the WordPress drama was rif.

[01:08:34] Tim Nash: But I actually kept very early on, tried to extend them to just have different formats for different types. And I really liked the idea of not everything had to have a different data structure. IEBA custom post format. A custom post type, sorry, but some things needed to look visually different.

Maybe like I might have, I dunno, news and I might want to present that in a different way, or specifically I might want to mark it up in a different way. I might want to use a different schema markup or something like that. And you can do that. You can add it on, you can fudge it around with templates.

You can make it if it's in a certain category, change your theme to do this though. That's becoming harder and harder with block themes. Block themes don't have quite the same customization that you can with a traditional theme. You can't go and just start adding some PHP for this particular edge case.

So I actually see a real use case where we might want to visually change the way the default page looks for a given post. So I think there's a, they have a place, whether, I don't think they'll actually ever get in there. I think there was, I think there's just too many people. I think there probably, I don't know for sure, but I'm sure there's, if you went into the, code base, there's probably code that says Do not touch.

[01:09:58] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, that's right. None shall pass. Yeah. The they do have a place, but isn't it like a really teeny, tiny, grain of rice sized place? Tim, do you not think, imagine if, you put that grain of rice in a pan full of oil, how much it will puff up. Okay. Could, now we, that's it. That's all it took.

[01:10:18] Paul Halfpenny: Could you achieve that? In the very near future with patterns and style variations and block binding. So is that's what I going, is that not a place that we're gonna get back to? 'cause block bins will give us custom content in the same blocks, and then a style variations will change the theme of that block depending on where it is.

And patterns and sync pattern. You could put a pattern on multiple pages and modify the styles maybe. you certainly could. there was, you could certainly replicate, what the post formats do currently and like old school themes. the thing is that the second you said we, you could do this with a pattern, but that requires someone to build that pattern and for it, it's, and then someone tinkers with it and changes it.

[01:11:01] Tim Nash: And just part of me that thinks we, the more we make these things really complicated, some people just want to push a button that says, this is a, I want to make this a news post. That's, they want to push that button. It does it for them. and I don't think we've currently got a UI that will let you do that easily, even with patterns, help.

But I don't think that would totally help. Yeah, I get that. I'm, writing moose post category, sorry, post format in the comments right now, because that's what everybody wants, frankly. Yeah. video, text, moose, it's the obvious third one, isn't it? Yeah. It just trickles down from there. I think we've settled it.

[01:11:47] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Okay. That's interesting. all right, we've got one suggestion. Anything from, Jess or Paul on the theme thing there? What would you like in a default 2025 theme? If not, I'll move on. I, no, I just think, greater use of the style variations and, sync patterns. Okay. Which is coming up.

[01:12:05] Paul Halfpenny: I think it'd be great to see that. Jess, can I move on? Could you open that tab again? Which tab? the, yeah, I'm on the wrong one. One sec. Yeah. This one here that I think at least two people watching this show need to subscribe. What do you mean

[01:12:26] Nathan Wrigley: to get what have done? There's so close, Nathan, what have I done? 5,998 subscribers to, what, am I looking at? In the right sidebar, buddy. Under the big subscribe button. Oh, gotcha. Yeah, we need to four of us. okay. I'll do it once the show is finished. Yeah, we've gotta get that over the 6,000 mark.

Yeah, I got you Now. I'm so sorry I wasn't picking up. No, you're, all good. I'm just thinking, we're WP Builds. Yeah. We, get off topic sometimes, but we do social good. Yes, that's right. we're sending people to YouTube. We're getting people signed up for core updates. Make WordPress core.

Two people to go to 6,000 go and create a fake email address. And no, don't do that. Don't actually do that. That wasn't actually what you wanna do. Okay, so comment, from Cameron on message, which is completely wiped out. Paul, half Penny's face, let me make that, there we go. Oh, you want it back, right?

There it is. No, I don't, no. Okay. Yeah. Post formats could have taken off. If you could make custom ones. I tried to use them on a project once and it was a nightmare. Oh, interesting. Yeah. I had a plugin back at the time and it still running, hiding on my GitHub somewhere. which was basically, it let you do custom post formats and we could have had it perfect with the nice little icons we had needed to add one filter.

[01:13:54] Tim Nash: This is what I meant by, I'm pretty sure no one's allowed to edit that code. Okay. 'cause the arguments over adding this one filter that would allow custom post formats to just be, you could just make your own. Yeah. no. yeah. Interesting idea though. I like the idea of doing that actually.

[01:14:13] Nathan Wrigley: That's got a lot of utility for me. Jess, Jessica's name, that is to say not Jess in the call. Jess Frick. Jess The surname pronounced, Lee. Lee Schick. So we'll make that correction now. And Ali, it's got us up to 5,999. Ali is a really nice chap. When I was at Word Camp, in Europe the, a few weeks ago in to Reno, Ali was the poor soul who was given the responsibility of making sure that people showed up for interviews and things like that.

So he was absolutely lovely. and thanks for joining us, Sally. I really appreciate that. That was, that's nice to have you with us. That's lovely. okay. Where are we going next? We're going to purchasing news. We're going to news about somebody buying something. We used to have this every single week.

Remember three years ago it was like every week there was something being bought by something else. It all seems to have quietened down a little bit, so it's back in the news. this is to say that Body Boss has been acquired by, you guessed it. WP Beginner. which if I'm right. That's awesome.

Motive is like the. The big umbrella behind that. Am I right that I've got that right. Gimme a nod. Somebody on the panel. Yeah. Yeah. Got it. Okay. body Boss is a, fork of body press with a ton of other stuff added in. I don't know if there's like a, A GPL version in the repository, but I know that for a long period of time they were, advertising it as a commercial product and it seemed to be having great success.

I dunno if that success continued, but it's obviously for creating, online communities, body press style with all of that plus extra bells and whistles. But it has been acquired, by WP Beginner, AKA, awesome motive. And yeah, it just says today I'm excited to share that Body Boss is joining the Awesome Motive Network.

and you can make of that what you will. Then it turns a promotional piece about what it is and who is buying it and all that kind of stuff, but. if you've got your online community really strapped together tight with Body Boss and Buddy Boss and WordPress, this is gonna be important news to you and you might like to check out who the new custodians are and, draw your own conclusions.

Anything on that? I was just gonna say that in the UK there's a platform called Guild that oh. is four communities that, was developed and run by Ashley Friedland, who, ran Econsultancy back in the day, which was one of those first sites that, that gave information to, agencies about how to run digital agencies and things like that.

[01:17:08] Paul Halfpenny: and Guild is closing down because they can't get the business model to work. Is it this one guild I'm looking at here? That's right. Okay. Yeah. One of the companies that we, we work with uses Guild, and yeah, and it's closing down and they need to, move on to something else. And, yeah, it, wasn't necessarily a, business model.

It, seemed like there was a bit of a downturn and a, didn't necessarily make a profit. So I guess my, I'm just intrigued as to whether communities have. run their course slightly and people are using tools like Slack instead. 'cause I know post status runs run Slack and whether the, I assume there is still a market for these kinds of things, but it seems like a quite a big operation to keep managing and, lots of people.

[01:18:03] Nathan Wrigley: I, I, yeah, I think it's really hard to make a community, I think you probably need a lot more dedication than, I have. but it, does seem that, Facebook won that race a bit, didn't it? Facebook, LinkedIn, all the other platforms that you can think of. The, groups tend to go over there.

How, however, having said that. Just in the last two weeks, I've signed up for a couple of groups and they both actually look identical, but they're about completely different topics, nothing to do with WordPress and and I think they're using an app, a SaaS app called Circle, I think it's called.

Oh. And it offers all the functionality of a Facebook book with, it's a total walled garden, you can only get access if you pay your dues and that kind of stuff. Yeah. And, and, it's thriving, absolutely thriving. There's thousands and thousands of people in there, so I think if you can get it right, those communities can still exist.

But I do think Facebook made that journey really hard to separate people out into separate communities. I've got a login in over there. Can't we just have a. Yeah. Facebook group kind of thing. And for the community themselves, the, fear for me is just always not owning in your own platform.

Yeah. not being able, like if somebody pulls the plug, suddenly you are in trouble. Yeah. everything's gone. Yeah. and that worries me. Yeah. my, my Facebook account for reasons utterly unknown to me about, oh, I don't know, six weeks ago, five weeks ago, got, got banned, got whatever the word is, Oh, delete, not deleted, just banned. I got an email saying you can no longer use your account. And, I did the, it was absolutely hysterical. They send you an email with a link. So that you can begin the process of reviving your account and the, link in the email sends you to a page which tells you your account has been banned.

So that got you nowhere apart from just alright, thanks for that. I know it twice now. That's good to know. Yeah, I've been double banned. So then I went through the, I, Googled 'cause I could be bothered. I Googled and found it and within 24 hours or 48 hours it was. On band and nobody told me what, but it did make me think I don't own that.

And that sizable part of my online life is not in any way, shape or form in under my control. And it really does just take somebody in Facebook to go, no, I'm sorry, and you're gone. So it, being mindful of that I think is, is good. Patricia says, body boss is probably great, but she would rather see people contribute to body press by, and BB Press, by the way.

Good point. I'm guessing it's Andrew Palmer, but it's coming across as Bertha. body Boss is not in the repository. Okay. Good to know. And, Cameron, you got ba posting. There you go. The solution is clear according to Cameron, to fa to stop any form of banning. Just go crazy with the moose pictures.

If you, so long as you're posting loads of moose pictures, you will be fine. I think the theme of this show has definitely been moose. Anyway. There we go. Anybody else wanna comment on that one before we move on? Alright. Okay, here we go. little while ago there was a bit of controversy, WP Drama if you like, because, the guys who make Ollie Pro, which is Mike McAllister and then more recently been joined by Patrick Posner, they released into the repository the Ollie theme.

And the Ollie theme came with an onboarding wizard and it, fell over a few trip wires amongst people who were, allowing themes into the repository. And they then took it out and made it into a separate plugin. I think all the while the theme's been growing in popularity, lots of people that I know talking about this as their go-to now, and this week they dropped the pro version.

And I don't know what the difference is. Obviously there'll be extra stuff, but here we go. I'll just read it out. WordPress, like you've never seen it before, design beautiful, responsive websites faster than faster with Ollie, the ultimate WordPress block theme and pattern library for creators. So if I click on the Go pro, what do we see?

unlock hundreds of beautifully designed patterns, page layouts, templates and styles to help build a site faster. This is the new holy grail, isn't it? If you're a theme developer, it's this bit, isn't it? page layouts, templates, styles, patterns, all of that kind of stuff. and. Knowing what I know about Mike McAllister, I'm just showing various bits on the screen.

I think this is probably gonna be a bit of a runaway success. Everybody seems to be talking about it. There's no, I've got no skin in the game. If I, when I post the link, it'll just be a link. So anyway, there you go. Ollie Pro. Go to Ollie W-P-O-L-L-I-E wp.com, and then click on the pro button and you can find out more.

Anybody wanna comment on that before we move on? Okay. another quick one, thi this is more of a plug because I've spoken to, Alex Standiford about this. Just to say that I dropped an episode with him about his new affiliate plugin, which is called Siren Affiliates. It's episode three 80 on the WP Builds website, and he's talking about his Siren affiliates thing.

in much the same way that WordPress page builders upended the way that you built things in WordPress for a period of time, I think his plugin is gonna upend, affiliate systems that you might be running. It is really interesting. It's well worth a lot. It's got loads of different permutations.

Way more than I've seen in other plugins. So Siren affiliates, go and listen to what he says and also I'm gonna make it available. If you were at Word Camp Whitley Bay, Tim Nash was at Word Camp Whitley Bay Sporting a fantastic waistcoat. I might add. I, I was quite jealous. This is true, Tim. This every word I'm about to say is true, right?

I hate getting dressed up. I absolutely hate it. There's it literally makes me feel Ill getting like looking smart and everything. But I saw you and I went to Marks and Spencer's this weekend. Ooh. And I got myself a waistcoat.

Are we gonna see it? No. I have to get over the, the gut wrenching feeling of putting it on first. But I honestly, I took one look at your thought. He is a handsome chappy. Look at that waist coat that's doing great things to him. So I, I got over my, got over my inhibition of wearing nice clothes.

It's always jeans and a t-shirt with me. But, yeah. So there you go. anyway, word Camp Whitley Bay. We were both there. It was a one day event last Friday. It's the only word camp happening, in the UK this year. So far. Yeah. Maybe that'll change. You never know, but I'm, I've got a bunch of pictures and if anybody wants to see them, I'll put the link in the show notes so that you can see them and look.

There he is. Check him out with his waistcoat. Oh, that's a bit scary.

All we need is a picture of a moose in there. Let's get another one. If we've got more of Tim, like an interactive beard experience for Medicare. That's a good one. that photo does not do justice to that waist coat. In all honesty, it was a humdinger a really, it was, like the herringbone tweedy kind of thing, the Tweeted thing.

It was very nice. You didn't expect us to talk about your waistcoat, did you? When you joined this call? No, I do have a range of them. I. A few, basically. Oh, dear. No, I just, it's like you've been hit by something. I, used to work for a, company that required when going to Word Camps to wear the company T-shirt.

Oh. And the company t-shirt was not pleasant. No. It was. Not the nicest quality and the color was not good on me or anybody. It should just never have been allowed as a T-shirt design color. and I vowed that I would never go to a Word camp in a T-shirt again. I think we should have the Disco Tim Nash section.

We should we get that? Hang on, let's get that banging music on again and see how, let's see how this goes. I don't know. I dunno which deep energy, how, here we go.

Lemme see if I can center him. There we go. Right here we go. Put Yeah, your humiliation is complete, Tim, now. Oh look, Jessica's got the, Jess's got the background. Oh, brilliant. I'd like to put to Joe on the screen and just say, I, feel for him. I think, anybody who is watching the show has now thoroughly lost the will to live.

[01:27:00] Paul Halfpenny: they've all left Nathan. They've all gone. Yeah, that's right. That's right. No, they haven't. There's plenty still hanging around. okay, so there's that word, camp Whitley Bay. it was brilliant. It was a really nice event. and if you're thinking of going into a WordPress event in. The uk this is definitely worth checking out.

[01:27:17] Nathan Wrigley: That's from the window. You can see. it wasn't a particularly nice day in terms of the temperature and everything, but the beach is right there. It's lovely. It's really, nice. so go check that out. I'll put that in the show notes and then we've got a few more minutes. Bit of self-promotion coming your way from the Venerable Nash.

look at that logo. I know. Look, let's, we can do that as well. There it is. There he is. what's this then, Tim? It says, confidently clean a hacked WordPress site workshop. Yes, that's probably what it is. this is the second time I run the, this year and this is also gonna be the last time I run this.

[01:27:51] Tim Nash: It needs current format. It will come back at some point in the distant future and probably in a slightly different form. it's a, 90 minute workshop. We've followed by a half an hour q and a, followed by access to loads of documentation and video all about how to clean up a hack site. Something that I was doing just this morning.

so it's something I do every single, not every single day. I do regularly. And I have seen lots of people try to clean up hack sites, not brilliantly. 'cause it's something that for most people they do infrequently and they often are really worried, stressed as if it's your hack site. You are particularly stressed.

But if you're an agency, there's nearly always a lot of pressure from a client who's going, what have you done? 'cause it's your fault. Even if it's not, it, they, as far as they're concerned, it's your fault. And I've seen it just handled really badly and it's right the way through from hosting companies, through to agencies, through to clients.

They all have different approaches and different methods. And some work, some don't. So I have my method and it's brutal and efficient and effective. so this is a workshop going through how I do it. but it also covers all the nice things like, Hey, do you check on the client afterwards this? Have you done the, these steps afterwards?

Making sure that the sites hopefully don't get hacked again. The last time I ran this workshop, it got lots of people saying they really enjoyed the it. I think I had more, when I did the feedback, I had more feedback about my choice of music in the intro and during the, like breaks. now it's gonna be about the waist coat, frankly, isn't it?

[01:29:38] Nathan Wrigley: that's what's coming, Yeah. Are you wearing the waist coat for this? If not just I get it. Something I will wear something appropriate first. Okay. Sorry, I interrupted you Tim. How much does it cost? How much would it cost to clean up a hacked site? When it gets really bad, you play your space.

[01:29:53] Tim Nash: If you just go down, it will show you. no, but that was my question. How much does it cost to clean it up? okay. laying these things out, meetings coming along and doing it, you are looking at hundreds of pounds. there are the bigger firms like, the work fences of this world charge you at the low hundred dollars and I would charge at the further end because you hire me when they didn't work.

[01:30:21] Jess Frick: So then this is the post prevention for free. So you get what you paid for though. Yeah. So you're basically making money by buying this workshop, get hacked twice and you've definitely made your money back. Yeah. I'm not sure I really approve of this message.

[01:30:43] Nathan Wrigley: I, I'm just here for the ride now. so there it is, Tim nash.co do UK slash workshop. The, important thing is it's tomorrow. Yeah. so if you want to come on it and I, there, there is not, I'm not trying to be doing the whole scarcity marketing. I really wrote won't be running it in its current form again.

[01:31:02] Tim Nash: So if you want to come on it tomorrow, it's at 6:00 PM BST. 1:00 PM EST. You need to be booking before 1:00 PM Okay? Okay. again, the links will go in the show notes, which will come out at 7:00 AM UK time. So there'll still be a few hours if you want to, to book onto that. But, we did have a story about W-P-L-D-N, but we've overrun, so I'll probably park that until next week.

[01:31:27] Nathan Wrigley: That is to say the WordPress London meetup and a kind of rival that has, cropped up. But, I think we'll cover that on a subsequent week. 'cause time is short and I know that you good people have probably got things to do and people to see, and moose to ride. but that's it.

That's what we've got for you this week. I hope that you enjoyed it. I just remains for me to say a great big thank you to Jess Frick from Pressable, Tim Nash from the Waistcoat Brigade, and Paul HPE from that room. I don't,

thank you also to everybody who made a comment. There was quite a few coming in today that was really nice. And, thank you for putting up with, me getting a bit silly. Andrew says, has, the only thing I've eaten today is an apple, which, which really, that's about all I've eaten today. no, this is all done from my own stupidity.

And with that, it's time to show the hands. Oh, just one last thing, Nathan, that you might wanna put. Andrew Palmer's comment up. Oh, wait, where, which one? The ironic one. Where's the ironic one? Just to help Paul at one. no. Keep going down. Andrew Palmer. Oh, this one, ironically. Ironically, the word camp was in the Spanish quarter, right?

In Spanish City was where we were at Whitney Bay. Okay. What am I missing? What am I missing? Football. Oh, football's coming. I've just about forgotten that. I know, We've moose. Sorry. We've reintroduced that. You've now back at the dregs. I do apologize about that. Or I'm not. It was Andrew Palmer that made that you can go and have a fight with him.

alright. He's too big. He Yeah, he is. He is. he's, let's do the hands, waving the hands. Thank you to everybody for joining us. Appreciate it. We will be back next week with another show full of interesting panelists. But for now, have a good week. Stay safe and we'll see you next week on this week in WordPress.

[01:33:32] Jess Frick: Bye bye.