This Week in WordPress #305

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It is time for this week in WordPress, episode number 305 entitled Subscribe to the Pool Party.

It was recorded on Monday, the 12th of August, 2024. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I'm joined by my cohost, Michelle Frechette, and also by Piccia Neri and Steve Berge. It is of course, a WordPress podcast. So what are we gonna talk about? Well, WordPress.

The first thing up is the rescheduling of WordCamp in Netherlands. Why has that happened and what are the reasons that we can make it not happen in the future? There's also an option in the

future, hopefully for WordPress events, to have a small but hopefully meaningful advertising budget.

We also get into a couple of articles by Patricia who featured me on her brand new podcast, but also as she explains why it is that she needs sponsorship for future attendance at WordPress events, and why that might be a useful model for everybody across the community.

We also get into WordPress Accessibility Day and their keynote speaker.

We've got some new events coming up. WordPress Developer Hours, a couple of new things going on there.

Playground is now going to be able to persist after you close down the browser. That's really interesting.

And then we've got a couple of bits about ai, especially on wordpress.com.

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

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Good morning. Good afternoon, good evening. Depending on where you are in the world. It is this week in WordPress. It's number 305 in the uk. We're in full school holiday mode and, so there are children everywhere in, in this place. And, I have to lock myself away and shut doors and ask people to be quiet.

And, I dunno what it's like where you are. Maybe the school holidays are finished, but the heat is on in the uk and this is a new feature in my life. I have a fan. I have a fan and occasionally I'm gonna have to put this fan on because it is actually warm in the uk, which is, it's happened once in my lifetime and it's today.

So if this comes on my, T-shirt starts to blow around like that, know. And then, you know what's, you know what's going on and if the mic noise gets a bit like then you know what's going on. But, happy to have you all with us. It is, like I said, number 305, joined by three fabulous guests.

Let's firstly start over there. Michelle f and I'll be very careful to get this right. Michelle joins us so frequently that she's been classified as a co-host and, very pleased that's the case. And, yeah, thank you for joining us once more. Michelle, how are you doing? My pleasure. I'm good, thank you.

[00:04:12] Michelle Frechette: How are you? Yeah, really nice. Michelle has the, biography as follows and, I think we figured out where my errors were coming from. Now You did. I put it in a certain place and now you know where to update it, so I dunno if this is there. It's. Okay, hopefully this is the new, updated, accurate, version of Michelle's introduction.

[00:04:32] Nathan Wrigley: Here we go. Michelle Cher is the Director of Community Engagement for Stella WP at Liquid Web. In addition to her work at Stella, WP Michelle is the podcast barista [email protected]. Co-founder of underrepresented in tech.com, creator of wp speakers.com, and also wp career pages.com. She's also the executive [email protected].

Co-host of WP Motivate, which is a podcast host of the WP Constellations podcast, this incredible, author and frequent organizer and speaker at WordPress events. She lives outside Rochester, New York, where she's an avid nature photographer. And the final URL, actually not, the final URL. We've got a new one, which we'll talk about later.

but that's for later. the final one for now is meet. Michelle online, which I guess is more your personal stuff, right? It is. It's like my link tree. I decided I wasn't giving money to Link Tree and letting them have all of my traffic, so I created my own with Cadence. you did just right. That's what WordPress is all about, isn't it?

Yeah. That's lovely. Anyway, thank you many times over for joining us. My pleasure. Let's go round in a sort of clockwise direction, which takes me there, which is Peach. Peach. How you doing? I'm very well, thank you very much. I, I've stopped counting the degrees here where I am in Spain, Nathan. Oh, shush.

Shush. No, I know, but Trisha says 30 degrees in Switzerland, but I've stopped counting. Better not to know. I think it's, I think it's akin to that here. I think we might be in the high twenties, but bearing in mind, the high twenties, we're not used to this. Wow. We're not used to this. It's nothing set up.

We nobody has air con. There's no switch you can say. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. And I think we're probably high thirties here. Yeah. I would say. I'm on a roof, so yeah. Now you're making me feel bad. but there you go. I'm gonna complain about the heat a lot. It's only 18 here, so you all have it worse than us today.

[00:06:26] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. we'll get to the comments in a moment, but Peach is joining us, obviously from Spain, and I'll read out the biography. Here we go. Peach is a UX and accessible design, lead, consultant and speaker empowering digital product owners to win on the web. I like that phrase. Thank you. Empowering digital owners to win on the web by putting users at the center.

[00:06:47] Nathan Wrigley: She loves educating product managers, designers, and developers on the best UI and UX plus accessibility practices via workshops, courses, and talks in three languages. that's, showing off. I don't know why I said I, I gotta have to take it out. It's showing off. Alright. Own it. Own it. Yeah, exactly.

If you can do it, own it. Yeah. Peach's current main focus is on balancing creativity and accessibility without sacrificing either. Let me guess what your three languages are, right? obviously it's one of them's gonna be English, the other one's gonna be Spanish. I'm gonna guess Italian. But that, really you've got, have you got ESP?

[00:07:26] Piccia Neri: amazing. Oh know, I'm so good. What with what? With me being Italian. Incredible power. Know of deduction. I know. extraordinary. I need to add, I need to add to my biography. Clairvoyant, tender. Clever. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. we've had one from across the pond. We've had another one in Europe.

[00:07:45] Nathan Wrigley: We're back across the pond. Although his accent makes you believe that he might be in Europe. 'cause it's Steve Burge, who's originally from the UK and is now, he's he's flown the nest and he's over in, he's over in the us Where are you in the us Steve? Florida. It's like the south of Spain. Yeah.

Okay. So it's hot there I'm guessing as well. Honestly, I wish I'd broke my mouth about the heat. Now where in Florida though? Just south of Tampa. okay. And it's just like the south of Spain and that it's foot of British people here. Is that right? Is that a which you're one? Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Are there lots of like fish and chip places and stuff like that?

Really? I've lived in a bunch of places in the US and I. People always say, oh, you are the, you're the Brit. And it's unique in most places in the us but down here in Florida, the British people are everywhere. they grew up like you and me, Nathan. They grew up in 10 degree weather. Yep. And they flee to the south of Spain or to Florida.

They flee to where it's nice and warm. that's, brilliant. I'm, I'm highly jealous. let me read Steve's bio. It's a little bit of a shorter one. It says, Steve Burge has been involved with open source software for 20 years. Currently, he helps run the popular WordPress plugins that have over 1 million installs and they are as follows, publish press tax, press, meta slider, and Log Tivity.

I struggled to say that one when I was practicing. for some reason that word couldn't exit my mouth, but I think I got it right. Yeah. Log. Yeah, that one. We may need to rebrand it. I saw someone say that. if you have more than four, if you have more than three syllables in your company's brand name, then.

[00:09:31] Steve Burge: You may need to consider rebranding. Oh, okay. Some of them like Coca-Cola you can get away with, but log, Tivity log is a bit of a t4. Yeah. Okay. Alright. log itty. What about log? You could do that. Something like that. yeah, Okay. If, by the way you end up using that, there is a fee. let's see.

[00:09:52] Nathan Wrigley: But there, there are exceptions. Stair alert wb. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's, and WP builds SOP build. Yeah, that's fine. As soon as you add WP to anything, you may as well just hang it up. Yeah. You've immediately gained four with two letters. That's no good. okay. there's our panel for today.

We're gonna talk about the WordPress news and bits and pieces in a moment that our focus is to, is to just shine a light on a few choice stories that either me or the panel thought was interesting from the previous week. I've never done this. But it occurred to me, or maybe I've done it once, it occurred to me that I should say something like, and subscribe.

do that YouTube thing. Smash that button. Yeah, do that. Hit the bell. Go and smash a thing. no. If you, enjoy this content, you wanna be, notified about it. The only reason I said that is 'cause I subscribed the other day and I got an email just now and I'm like, oh, is that what it is?

Is that what actually happens? I'm such a Luddite when it comes to YouTube. Wait, you subscribe to your own channel finally? Is that what I just heard? Yeah, I've never subscribed to it before. 'cause I thought, I know what, describe it. I don't mean to do it, but, now I realize that you get an email.

That's the point. That's why everybody says it. So anyway, and subscribe. If you're watching this, I'd really appreciate that. Let's go to the comments and see, who's here. We have, somebody called Adam, s who's saying hi. Very nice to see you. I'm gonna ignore the ones from the panelists.

mainly so I can see for example, that Peaches said something there. Patricia, you are coming up next. Patricia, 30 degrees, wherever Patricia is at the moment. I think you said Switzerland. ba Yeah. Thought so. I dunno what that one means. Greetings on WP builds. That means. That means by the Peter's weather report.

[00:11:39] Piccia Neri: Oh, that's what Patricia was doing. Okay, got it. Okay. Peter's weather report is about to come up, but we're also joined by Cameron who joins us from the other side of the planet. Can I have some temp? Can I have some of your temperature over here please? Oh, okay. He's cold.

[00:11:53] Nathan Wrigley: Ah, okay. there you go. Look, he's got a little cold icon. no, sadly, Cameron, I'm enjoying the heat to some extent. You are gonna get your turn in about six months time and it'll be lovely. Peter Ingersol as always, having a beautiful morning here in Connecticut, 20 degrees Centigrade 68 with clear skies.

Lower humidity. Tim Nash from just over the pennines there from a gray and chilly Yorkshire. I'll tell you what, it's not the same Yorkshire. I'm in Tim. So yeah. I got blue skies and heat. so yeah. sorry about that thunder and lightning this morning. Honestly, we could do the whole thing as weather, couldn't we?

I dunno what happened there. Tim Nash, I'm from Yorkshire, but I can't speak English, says Tim Cameron again. Florida man joins WP Bill's podcast. Chaos. Excuse. What is this Florida man thing? I hear it a bit, but I don't get It's brilliant. It's brilliant. What is it? Is it like somebody that's not that bright or something?

[00:12:52] Michelle Frechette: It's that in Florida, anything that can be done by a person that's absolutely insane gets done by somebody. Yeah. Who is native to Florida and okay. Okay. just if you just put Florida man and then a date in the browser, just see what comes out. It's so much fun. Do you want me to actually do that now?

[00:13:12] Steve Burge: Okay. It'll be things like someone, someone opens the back gate to their house, lets an alligator into the swimming pool and breeds as a. like a That's what I was thinking. We need a video bomb by your pet alligator, Steve. Oh, there's a, yeah, there's a Florida man website. It's Florida man.com as you'd expect.

[00:13:34] Nathan Wrigley: We have the same thing here, but it's not to do with Florida man. We just, it's basically like local news. you say something like, man Park safely would be the headline in our local paper. 'cause there's just nothing, man. Y'all live on the edge over there. yeah, exactly. anyway, there we go.

There we go. And a nice comment about, oh crikey, Tim got in there quickly. The published press website seems not to have one single bit. Oh no it's not. so that's a nice comment. Peach's loving the UI going on over there, which is really nice. It's, and Tim, sadly, Peacher, I'll just say this and then we're done.

for bonus points, add the word gator to the end. Florida Man Gator. Okay. Alright, I'll do that. Whilst Peacher says what she was gonna say. I'm just gonna say it's almost as if you came from. The old publishing world. World. 'cause that's the people who don't send a text is what I'm, what I thought when I looked at your website.

[00:14:31] Steve Burge: That's part of the thinking. We aim at publishers and. Having things aligned properly is a, little, throwing a little nugget to them. Go and check it out. Publish press.com. It allows you to do all sorts of clever things inside the editor, if, especially if you've got a team. That kind of thing. Okay. There we go. That's the, main introductions. Firstly, thank you so much for, making comments. If you want to do something like that, there's a few little bits that you might wanna know. but can I find them? That's the question. Crikey, everything's moved around in this platform this week. They do this kind of thing, don't they?

[00:15:06] Nathan Wrigley: the first thing to do is to say this. if you are watching this and you want to share it with people, please do. That'd be great. WP builds.com/live. if you're logged into Google, you can use the comments on the right of the box on desktop. If you're on a mobile, they'll be underneath the, the video or if you don't wanna be logged into anything, you don't like Google or anything like that.

The platform that we use, which is called Wave, it has an embedded chat in the video. So top right of the video, it says something like live chat on a black button. click that, and you don't need to be logged into anything. So that's a, nice way of doing it. Okay, so click the comments coming.

Let's get into the stuff from this week. The first thing to say, is that if you want to subscribe to what we're doing, stick your email address in there and click subscribe. And then I will just spam the living heck out of you. like that's not true. At least two emails a week related to actual content that we create.

So no, no spam guarantee. It's just basically when we produce a new piece of content, I will send you an email saying that it's come out. The other thing to mention is thank, our kind sponsors. as of this moment, our sponsors are, as you can see on the page there, go Daddy Pro and Blue Host and Omnis send real thanks to them for keeping this whole enterprise propped up.

really appreciate it. WP builds.com if you wanna get any of the stuff there. All of our podcasts are organized on that page, Some sad news. I don't know if this is sad or not, and in fact, peach might have a unique take on this, so we'll see if she, if she wants to share that or not.

But this is the, central.wordcamp.org website and it says, WordCamp Netherlands 2024 Rescheduled. It sounds benign, but then you read on a little bit. Let me read it to you. Word, camp Netherlands has been rescheduled from its initial date of September, late in September to new dates of late in November, so it's been pushed a couple of months In February.

An organi, a new organizing team began preparations for the word camp. Despite some setbacks, the teams continued with enthusiasm and optimism. Most of the delays have been overcome and nearly everything is in place to make this addition a success. However, one crucial aspect be is beyond our control, which has become a major obstacle.

Attendee registration. Now, I won't. Say anything else about that? You can read between the lines, whatever you like there, but certainly on the face of it, this piece seems to imply that if there's no not enough attendees, a solution to that would be, let's just move the date backwards rather than cancel the whole thing.

Let's push it back a couple of months. Let's see if we can, I dunno, get in amongst the community, do things like podcasts like this and see if we can get people to sign up. Peter Dunno if you wanna share what it was that was in your head or not. I'm just gonna share my thoughts on it because I don't know any of the, I haven't spoken to any of the organizer, organizers and I don't know any of them.

[00:18:05] Piccia Neri: But what I'm thinking is that I've worked on local work comps and attendees. I dunno whether they had no attendees, which I doubt or, fewer than the two 300 that were expecting. 'cause I don't think it's normally a big word comp anyway, and you would worry about that. Like the last week at work in Valencia that I've helped organize, we got like a hundred people from local schools signing up the final, we went up to 400 rather than it, it's, it like two full months before I found it.

Strange. I'd love to hear from them and hear what they have to say about it 'cause to, to move it in early August. it was earlier. It was, about a week ago, wasn't it? Yeah. This is not, yeah, when you've got two, four months. People in Europe are on holiday right now. Nobody's, if even if they sold no tickets in two months time, of course I would've sold them.

I just, I find it really strange. I don't know who's, I have no idea, this is just what I'm thinking. I just wonder what the real reason is or whose decision it was because I. Of course two, they had two full months. It's not a good enough reason, in my opinion, and I'm not saying I'm not, no, sorry that came out wrong.

It's not like I'm saying. that work. Netherlands made the wrong decision. Who am I to say that? I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that I, was surprised that they gave that as the reason, because I would find it absolutely normal if you had sold 50 tickets now. So knowing that you got the whole of, September is when people go, oh, okay.

ah, yeah. Work on Netherlands. Of course. I wanna go. And you would sell, you would, sell it out. I think. No problem. If there's anybody watching this who has any insights into that, it'd be really interesting. 'cause that's a really good point, right? If it's got two months to go and, but also in the article, I'll just pop it on the screen again so that anybody watching this can read it.

[00:20:13] Nathan Wrigley: it does make the point that you know, that they lay not labor, but they make the point fairly clearly that there was a new organizing team. So I wonder if perhaps some of the things which would've happened in a sort of domino effect from a previous, more experienced team. I wonder if some of those dominoes didn't fall.

And so the whole thing, I don't know, maybe the marketing of it and what have you, got pushed back a little bit. But you are, you're right. That's curious, isn't it? With two months to go, you'd expect sales to start to come in Now. really wouldn't be a worry. Yeah. okay, so Cameron said it's some sort of privacy.

Oh, so this is, Florida, man. This is Florida man. Florida man. we're back to that. Patricia, let's see if she's on message with what we're talking about. The minute I agree with Peach and people at least in Europe tend to buy their Word camp tickets last minute anyway, so there we go. hi Corey.

We'll be talking about you in a bit. I may have dumped him off. You may. Okay. Got it. Okay. yeah, something about fonts. but okay, so that's Peach's point of view. Anything, Michelle, anything? So I have a lot of thoughts. Go for it. Oh, So I don't know about this camp in particular, so I'm not going to comment specifically on Word Camp Netherlands, but Ha.

[00:21:30] Michelle Frechette: But being a Word Camp mentor, and working with different sized organizations and also being an organizer, of Word Camp Rochester and Buffalo. I can say that our numbers have been trending down. I can't, that's not the same for the flagship events. Of course, those are much larger. but Rochester last year was about half the size.

It was prior to the pandemic, word, camp Atlanta last year. I was, their mentor and they used to have about 500 and they had a little over a hundred. And it's was not for lack of a, of getting the word out. It was not for lack of anything else. Yeah, the team, it was a huge team. They were gung-ho, all of that.

but it has been a struggle post pandemic for local camps to build. and depending on the cost of your, everything that goes into your camp. So if your venue is very expensive and you aren't able to pay for that, there's just, there might be issues. I don't, again, I don't know what's happening with that particular word camp.

I just know that overall it's been a struggle to try to raise the funds through ticket sales. Like you, you can't put on a an event for. 75 people in a place that holds a thousand and expect that the costs are going to cover themselves. And I'm, again, this is not that situation or might not be. but overall it's been a struggle and it's been one of those things that there's a lot of, still online meetups have been difficult to get up and running again.

And I know that we've been post pandemic for quite a while yet, but Covid is still real. I've got it twice in the last two years having attended word camps. And so I think that there's just a lot going on. I don't think we can point to just one thing in particular, but I think that there's, there's just a lot that goes into it and it sometimes disappointing when, when you have to make that decision or if the decision is being made for you again, I don't know.

But, but my heart goes out to them because I know that it's a struggle and it's very difficult, to have to postpone as well. can I just say one thing though, that's all very true, Michelle, but it's true. In the us in Europe, it's, again, I don, I don't know about everywhere in Europe, but I do know that in Spain last year work camp Valencia, 2023 was the biggest.

[00:23:51] Piccia Neri: It was ever, it ever was. W work camps are happening all over the place. Again here, the meetups here, we gone way above pandemic. We, we've got a bigger venue than we did before and I know that the UK is still struggling and I, don't know enough about the Netherlands, but I'm quite good friends with people that who say that the, their meetups are going really well.

So again, I don't know. I don't either, but it's, and I know that in Italy as well is going, back to, there's quite a few local work comp that are happening. in Spain, I haven't counted them. But there's the, we're back to the usual, like a workup a weekend or mostly, which is, what happens in Spain.

So again, it's only conjectures anyway 'cause we haven't spoken to any of them. But I think that each local reality is different and I think that's what, it, I don't know if, people from Work Netherlands can share whatever we feel for you, that's the thing.

'cause surely it's, disappointing to have to move it when you've been working on it for so long. Yeah. Steve, any thoughts? Oh, we used to have three four just in Florida alone every year. I think one year we even had five when wood camp us or Wood campus, I. I'm trying to pronounce that properly.

[00:25:21] Steve Burge: the Education University, WP Campus. WP Campus. There was Tampa, Miami, Orlando, Jacksonville plus an extra WP Campus event. That was probably the maximum that we hit down here in just one state. And now, I can't remember the last time we had a, word camp here in Florida. definitely pre pandemic. I think it's very us certainly in the uk.

[00:25:52] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah, sorry. in, in the, UK it really has nosedived and it hasn't really returned. So I think maybe we're mimicking more of the kind of the USA model there, or at least, maybe this Netherlands model. but it sounds like in Italy, and I know I think in Spain as well, and Portugal, it seems to be like on the op, obviously Yeah.

Is young. Yeah. And, but the Spanish community's always like famously vibrant, isn't it? There's just something in the water over there. Italy. Yeah, definitely. But Italy as well, from what I've seen and, heard. I don't know if it's a, and after effect also the, having worked on Europe there maybe has galvanized the community, but some small work camps.

[00:26:38] Piccia Neri: have come back into existence like work and Verona and work and Milan has happened where they've done local community events. So it's, it, feels lively and I know it isn't there everywhere, but yeah, you, I, guess every place is different, but I feel like Europe is. Slightly more active. Yeah. So anyway, if you were thinking of attending, I presume that if you've bought a ticket already, the organizers will have been in touch or shortly will be in touch.

[00:27:07] Nathan Wrigley: Hopefully there won't be a load of, refunded tickets or return tickets. 'cause the dates no longer fit. But, it's now moved to what would've been a really pleasant time of the year in terms of the weather, September, late September to something which is. Probably in the Netherlands at least gonna be pretty darn cold and short nights and all of that kind of stuff.

But anyway, that's what's happened. We'll, a wait to see if there's any more news behind the scenes there about that, that we don't yet know about. Tim Nash makes the point that he's really surprised that the venue was happy, to move the event if low attendance was in fact the issue. Yeah, that's curious, isn't it?

without grassroots he goes on to say meet ups. there isn't the support for word camps. Yeah. What's curious in the UK is that it's, definitely not word camps that are, it's not just word camps. but it's just this swath of, like pubs and things like that, that have just closed down post pandemic people's lives have.

Definitely changed. I think there's more doing things at home and less going out and all of that kind of stuff. So it's not just, WordPress events and the excitement or lack of, in, but isn't also that in the uk the issue that the venues have. Pushed up the prices immensely. Really expensive.

Yeah. Like it was easy to find three places before and now it's 15 grand. Yeah. It's crazy expensive for a meetup. It's what? Yeah, So that's the issue there. I think. Absolutely not. Yeah. Okay. anyway, that, that was that story. So word, camp Central. If you were going to the Netherlands meet, word Camp, then just have a look in your inbox and see if something drops about that.

Let's move on. this may be entirely connected. Actually. There might be a, segue here that I didn't actually spot, but here we go. So this is an article which came out just a few days ago, the 7th of August, and this may address that problem. Proposed changes to advertising, marketing expense guidelines.

And I'll just quickly read 'cause it's gonna be the easiest way to do it. The current, event guidelines state that the inclusion of advertising expenses in an event budget is very rarely allowed. and then I'm quoting from that document, which is on the page, you should plan not to include the following expenses in your budget unless an experienced deputy approves the expenses and expenses.

And then there's a bunch of stuff which is missed out. And then advertising is one of those. In other words. Don't allocate money to advertising. Okay, so why the change? It says the community team's goal for upcoming events is to warmly welcome more first time attendees. The aim is to get 50% of participants to be newcomers while celebrating returning attendees.

To achieve this event, organizers should focus on attracting new participants through well-planned event design, messaging, marketing strategies. And we propose that updating the guidelines to allow a variable or fixed amount of money for a WordPress event to budget towards marketing and advertising.

However, if you are a, somebody involved in these, don't. Don't imagine it's gonna be like a really large amount. 'cause it's not, again, I'm quoting from the proposal, a proportion of the budget may be allocated for marketing and advertising. We suggest a minimum of $50. I'm guessing that's US dollars and a maximum of $400.

So not a very large amount. And and they're recommending that instead of going to places like Facebook ads or Google Ads, which are gonna drain that pot almost immediately, be a little bit more intelligent and go for places like event directories, newsletter listings, influencer partnerships, you could come on podcasts like I do and what have you.

Collaborations, physical marketing, and then yeah, social media, marketing and traditional media. But bear in mind the cost of those. So it's a slight change, but I guess if you had no budget, going from zero budget to, I don't know, ceiling of $400 at least it's something. I dunno what you think. It seems to me that seems like a very small amount of money.

$50 or $400, the ceiling there, but it's better than nothing I guess. And we've got two of you at least Peach and Michelle are deep in the weeds of this. What are your thoughts? I have Peter, you go first. Okay. Peach first. Yeah, I, dunno because I, as far as I 400 for each meetup For each event.

Yeah. I guess for each event. So I dunno if that means if you've got like a monthly meetup, but also 400 was the absolute ceiling. I'm guessing that would be more constrained if it was, a monthly meetup. I don't know if it would be 400 for every single time you did it. Yeah. So I don't know enough about advertising.

[00:31:50] Piccia Neri: I know that when I've tried Facebook advertising, basically if you don't, you have to spend a, minimum. That's the minimum amount you spend on a monthly basis, and it would only be worth it if you keep spending that amount. It has to be constant. Otherwise, there's, no point. I don't know if local advertising makes any sense and I don't know.

How much that would cost. So I actually dunno about this one. it just seems to me like it's not very much. Anyway. I, guess also if you've got a bunch of people on your team who, haven't been that focused on marketing with money in, the back pocket, you're gonna have to upskill and learn those things, aren't you finding influencers and finding novel ways Yeah. to do it. and it feels like reaching into your pocket to give the money to Google and Facebook is probably, it looks like they're really not suggesting that, that seems like the last thing. They actually want that money to be spent on more sort of organic or, Tim is saying that $400 is not, it's not even going to be enough to make it possible to track if it's making a difference yet.

[00:33:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Okay, so that was Tim. Tim Nash in the comments. Thanks Tim. Andrew is also saying something interesting. Okay. So Andrew Palmer. Thanks Andrew for joining us. He says, basically WordPress didn't want to pay for advertising. The only place funds come from, from I guess is WordPress community support, who've lost last year had a shortfall of 175,000 all from donations.

and yeah, that's the commentary we've got at the moment. picture of you wrapped up, we'll take it to Michelle. Please. So it, it's, I like the idea of it, that they're going to put some money behind, helping us get more attendees, but it's, just a drop in the pan as far as the amount of money.

[00:33:49] Michelle Frechette: the fact that they even add traditional television and radio with a cap of $400 is laughable. I can't buy a radio ad on the least, listened to, radio station in small Rochester, New York for $400. So it's just not really something that's accomplishable with that. Now, could I maybe run something in a small local paper?

Yes, but nobody's reading paper anymore, so there's that as well. I really don't know where I would be able, and I'm imagining $400 would be for like Word Camp. Word camp us, and. $50 would be for Ward Camp Rochester. Where would I put $50 in the local economy that would actually move the needle any at all?

and I'm a big, I love all the ideas and things like that, but this one just feels like, when you're going to the store with your mom as a kid and you say, can I get a toy? And she says, we'll, see, it feels like that placating, step to make you feel like, oh look, we're doing something and it's going to be x number of hundreds of thousands of dollars across all of the events.

And yet the smallest portion that you get, it's, like a class action lawsuit. Like they're gonna give you $75 million, but you as the individual user gets a dollar 52 and you can't even buy a cup of coffee. yeah, I guess if these events, it's hard, isn't it, because we've had a sys, we've had years of events which have totally run themselves on a voluntary basis, and they became the norm.

[00:35:23] Nathan Wrigley: And obviously we discussed a minute ago about things like covid and maybe decline in certain parts of the world in attendance, if you want those attendance numbers to grow. Again, maybe it does require some radical thinking and paying for, advertising is gonna be part of it, but on the numbers are so dramatically different from what we all know you'd need.

unless you did something a bit more gorilla. But trying to find the people who don't already attend these, I think it's the really difficult bit. Like how do you discover the people who would attend a WordPress event who don't already follow that kind of thing? It's difficult. Really, difficult.

Anyway, sorry, Steve, maybe your local colleges. Yeah. Maybe you could spend a little money at your local college, but, yep, good point. Sorry, Steve. Sorry, Steve. I didn't, mean to put down newspapers. Steve. I, just realized I, we've had a tiny bit of experience with this. On the Drupal side, they did some advertising for their drip book on, and they had a very, clear target audience.

[00:36:25] Steve Burge: They wanted to hit more enterprise people. So I guess my, question around this particular advertising is, do we have a target audience? Where would you advertise? Where would you actually go to reach these people? all of this seems quite unclear from these initial guidelines, and maybe they have something more specific in mind, but.

The actual blog post itself is quite unclear and hard to pass. Let me just raise a few comments here. So I think, did we raise this one? Yeah, we did that one. So Andrew's come back with another one. He said if every meetup had $400, which I think we've realized it probably isn't, that it's more, more towards the other end.

[00:37:12] Nathan Wrigley: But anyway, if that number were the case, Andrew's done a quick bit of maths. $1.5 million would be the cost of that. why not put money into a general advertising budget? and then actually coincidentally, at more or less, exactly the same moment. Tim suggested something similar. this is one of those times that actually a central pot would have more buying power.

So what are you saying there, Tim and Andrew? Are you saying that just advertising WordPress events on somewhere and then when you are attracted by that, you would go to a website where you could then drill down into where you lived and see something geographically more targeted. Every ad is for.com, though it isn't for any of the self-hosted nest of WordPress. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. and of course you got things in the WP admin, but I'm guessing most people wonder why that is. Yeah. just.com. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Wonder why we could digress. Couldn't we into We could only guess.

Yeah. Yeah. okay, so anyway, it is a change. Maybe it's the beginning of a change and maybe there's now a realization that the money might need to be spent on those kind of things. If we are gonna attract, as it says, 50% of new people, it's nice blue sky thinking, but we'll, wait and see how that all transpires.

Okay. I did have an article which I was gonna raise all about the switch from Webflow to WordPress, but unless anybody's, 'cause the time's moved on and we've done quite a bit on those two pieces. Can I just skip that? Did either of you three have something specific to say about that? And if not, I'll just roll past it.

[00:38:52] Steve Burge: Use WordPress, not wood, not workflow. Yeah. Okay. that's basically the takeaway, isn't it? Yeah. Nice. I'll link to it in the show notes Anyway, as with everything that we discussed today, it'll be in the, show notes that you'll get if you hit that little in, email contact form that I shared. S yeah, subscribe.

[00:39:09] Nathan Wrigley: Hit the bell, that thing. Okay. So look, it's now Patricia, she's on the screen. so two pieces from Patricia. I'll get the slightly awkward bit out the way. First. I did a podcast episode with Patricia, a couple of weeks ago. We recorded it. And, nice new show. Always nice to have new shows in the WordPress space.

You can find this at WP Mondo. WP Mondo, M-O-N-D-O, all as one word. and this is episode three of the podcast. And, and it's me. I. And you just go there and, have a listen if you want to hear anything coming out of my mouth, which, Patricia sadly, I think you've, you've hit a loss leader there, but nevermind.

but she's got something a little bit more interesting over here. She said, why I decided not to ask for sponsorship for Word Camp Eu. And this was one of those like narrative stories where you're reading it and you're just, warm to Patricia more and more as the, as the article goes on.

I'm gonna just paraphrase it very briefly. Patricia did what I think many people have done in the WordPress space. She wanted to just be a good citizen, and she wanted to fund all of the things from her own business and attend the events, through her own pocket and with the, the profit that her business generated and actually the contribution.

She, so Patricia was one of the organizers of Word Camp Europe this year in Torino. And. As you read through it, the, requirements of that, at least for Patricia, were fairly substantial, including three trips to Torino, and if I'm right, Patricia, you, are in Switzerland, so maybe not quite as far as, me for example, but nevertheless, a sizable, investment to go and, and was quite, would tell her friends that, this was what was happening and their friends would all be what, and you're paying for it out of your own pocket.

Yeah, I'm doing that. And, you can imagine how that might go down. and, so there's just the story of all of that and what's required, but then a sort of change of direction. I think Patricia, forgive me if I'm putting words in your mouth, Patricia, about this, change of direction and would like to, onboard sponsorships to continue the, the contributing work that Patricia's doing in the near future.

it's patricia bt.com/blog and this particular piece is called Why I Decided Not To Ask for Sponsorship Before Word Camp Eu and then write about halfway down the page. are some ways that if you want to help Patricia out, you can do that for other Word Camp events. And, maybe it goes back to this piece a little bit, the, are we just now living in a world where people are more aligned to doing things where there's a, I don't know, dare I say it, a profit motive.

they want to attend a WordPress event, they want to get value out of it. Maybe the organizers are more interested in that. And, in Patricia's case. You can't keep doing this stuff forever for nothing. You have to at some point realize that it's gonna empty your wallet if you keep doing it forever.

And, anyway. There you go. There's Patricia's story. Just paraphrase nicely. anybody want to add to that? I'm happy to. I'm sorry. Go ahead, Steve. No, that's okay. I'll just, let's go, Steve first and then Michelle after that. Oh, I had a one liner. Basically, I was gonna say, it may not be so much as a profit motive so much as a, a avoiding a loss motive.

There you go. That's a better description of it. Thank you. That's, I think quite a few that yeah. Contributors are happy if they break even and Yeah. It doesn't cost them big outta their own pocket. Exactly. I wouldn't call it profit. It's just not ruining myself. Yeah, while I burn myself out, out completely on this wonderful event.

[00:43:05] Piccia Neri: you know, how I, feel, I won't activate myself on this, actually, I just leave it. But I hope that, I personally think that organizers are the first that should be even remunerated because I per, actually, no, I am, I can tell I'm activating myself. I am leaving it at that. I am not carrying on any further.

Please don't let me. Okay. I have spoken at length before on this show about the need to sponsor people and have, not have people paying, especially, people who are freelancing. And, and of course I speak a lot about underrepresented groups too, because typically underrepresented groups make less money already than our more represented groups.

[00:43:53] Michelle Frechette: And we've talked about my selfie challenge and how I've raised over $5,000 in a year and a half, and given that money away to underrepresented folks who are speakers and organizers to get to Word camps. The WPCC collective or WP Collective? ccc. Yeah. W that's not easy. WC C. WP C. C, that's the WP C.

C, has also been, really good at helping and getting people to, events. Yost does, has their, A diversity fund that helps sponsor people to events as well, because it is not easy for people to raise that money and then also have to decide, am I going to word camp, which I'm working the whole time, or can I also afford to take a vacation this year and actually have some downtime, which is so important to all of us to be able to have that time to rejuvenate and relax.

You shouldn't have to make the decision between working an event and paying for that outta your own pocket or being able to take downtime for yourself and your family. And so I think that, yeah, we, I hope that people do sponsor her, but I also agree with Andrew that we shouldn't have to have this, there should be a way for us to, as a community, have sponsorship for these kinds of events.

It could be worked into budgets. There's lots of different ways that we could do this. I'm not saying I have the answer for this, but I think that we need to keep raising the question. About why, it's why we're seeing so many people have to find ways to afford to attend events. And I think that, Patricia, I applaud you.

I think that it's great that you're, look, you're seeking the help that, that you should be afforded for all of the work that you do. I see BGI in the comments. BGI and I have both raised money before, and I'm hoping that some of the work I've done helps reduce the stigmatism of asking for help. I think it's important that if you have something to contribute and you want to be there, that it's okay to ask for help.

and to see if other people can that help you achieve that. Because when you speak at an event or when you organize an event, you are giving back to the community in, in great amounts. Pizza. Go ahead. yes, thank you very much for saying that, Michelle. So I completely agree and I, have been in that position before and it's not an easy position to be anywhere.

[00:46:21] Piccia Neri: Actually, having, being involved in a work company anyway becomes a problem. That's what this situation is. But my main thing that I wanted to say about this is that because if organizers are not paid, the quality of the event really suffers from it because you have other priorities and therefore, we need to think that these conferences are serious conferences.

They are professional events and therefore the people, organizing them should get paid as professionals because they're doing a big job. And if they did get paid, then maybe a lot of issues wouldn't happen that make World Camps less feel if you're involved with them. in some ways, sometimes feel less professional than does than other events.

That's, that's what I think it does feel that we are maybe approaching a tipping point or maybe, somebody has to grab this bull by the horns at some point because it feels like this. Voice gets, this commentary gets louder and it gets repeated over and over again.

[00:47:33] Nathan Wrigley: we've had a few comments come in, so I'll just raise those. yeah, firstly, bigot who, Michelle mentioned, is joining us. Hello. Nice to have you with us. and Ally is saying congratulations on the show. I'm presuming he's meaning the WP Mondo podcast, which we showed. Again, it'll all be linked in the show notes tomorrow.

So Andrew Palmer says he disagrees with this. Absolutely. I'm guessing he's disagreeing with the fact that you need to be a volunteer and there's no payment there. there is a way for the WordPress Foundation, WordPress communities. To, support to pay for contributors to attend. it, I'll carry on with Andrew for a moment.

It is astounding that word camps do not remunerate organizers. he says he finds it astounding. Tim goes on to carry on. He says, I'm always amazed when folks say I will see at Word camp us like, do you know how much it costs if you're a freelancer, let alone then working by organizing, speaking and volunteering.

Yeah, good point. and then Patricia herself jumps in. Thank you for mentioning it. Oh, nice. Nice. she says, by the way, got one sponsor now. I'll publish about 'em soon. They sponsor a quarter of my contributor, time and it's theme aisle. There you go. Hat tip to theme aisle. Congratulations, Patricia.

[00:48:50] Michelle Frechette: That's awesome. Yeah, that's totally alright to mention it. She says, Patricia says, I hope it's okay to mention that. Yeah, of course. That's absolutely brilliant. so bravo for finding that and, let's hope more come your way. And then bigot chimes in since over 10 years. I advocate for a kind of official contributor fund.

[00:49:10] Nathan Wrigley: so bigots been advocating for that for 10 years, but then says it's cricket. So there's no been no, no comeback on that, project leadership have said, and she's quoting, I'm quoting Bigot here. It's too complicated to set this up. And the current foundation is not set up as a fiscal host.

okay. Web friend, friendly web guy. Ah, I can never remember who this is. Somebody help me out. Who is this? anyway, it would be nice to see N 0.5 of five for the future funds go towards funding of this type of travel. Ooh, that's interesting. So make it a slice of the five for the future pot cri.

Yeah, that's interesting. Andrew Palmer said here, I don't know exactly which sentence he was, saying it about. and Patricia's coming back to web friendly web guy saying There is no five for the future funds, for reasons mentioned by big it, it's private funding between sponsors and contributing.

Crikey, this is generated interest, doesn't it? Organizing speakers should be paid, says Cameron Jones. That's where I'll leave it because otherwise I will join, Peacher in ranting. okay. So lots of commentary about that. What I'm getting, the sense of what I'm getting is you can't, we can't keep doing what we're doing and expect the events to be of a high quality and to make everybody happy.

and maybe this is some sort of systemic thing which has been able to. Happen for the last 21 years, but maybe the ground is shifting and and it needs to be changed. And the comments just keep coming in. Oh, it's Dave, Gray. Thank you. Of course. It's Dave. It's Dave Gray. brilliant. Thank you for that.

I appreciate it. okay, there's that. Does anybody want to carry on? That seems like the hot topic of this week, but we can move on if we're ready. I think we're ready. Okay, great. Alright, let us do just that then. So this is a piece that, Michelle brought to my attention this week. It is, we've mentioned it a few times on this show and it's getting closer and closer.

WordPress accessibility Day 2024. You can find it at 2024. So the character, the numbers, the numerals 2024, WP Accessibility Day, and it looks like we've got somebody, Laney Finegold, I confess, I don't know. Laney. Yes. Tell us about this. That, this is a keynote speaker, right? She's the keynote speaker and she is a disability rights lawyer, author, Ooh.

[00:51:44] Michelle Frechette: And an international speaker. So we're very excited to have her join us for WP Accessibility Day, which is October 9th and 10th. It's a 24 hour event. all live and free to attend. Registration will be opening very soon. I. So follow us on all the socials, because you'll be able to get, all kinds of information there.

And, subscribe to our email list. Is that the sub That should be the title of today's episode. That's, yeah, that's, yeah. Subscribe to the email list, to get all of those, updates. I am one of the, I'm the team lead for marketing for WP Accessibility Day, and I'm very excited about all the work that we're doing over there.

It's my first year helping out with that event. but yeah, it would, it looks to be great. And she is a dynamic person, The, the presentation that, is gonna be presented, according to this is entitled, accessibility is a Civil Right, the digital Accessibility, legal Landscape for the WordPress community.

[00:52:40] Nathan Wrigley: I always think this, whole accessibility thing, which is right now one of the hot topics, isn't it? something's come and go and accessibility seems to be having its real moment in the spotlight. I always feel it breaks down into two areas, one of which is just that moral thing to do the right thing because it's the right thing to do.

And then there's the other side, which is the legal thing, which is you do it because you, now have to do it. If you, can't summon up the morals to do it, then you the carrot and stick, here comes the stick and having somebody who actually knows what they're on about. A lawyer, specifically an accessibility related lawyer.

That's gold. That's really cool. that's pretty well and the, we are gonna start to see in the next 18 months some really strict rules coming outta the eu Yep. Regarding accessibility as well. So it's really important to pay attention to what's going on. And this free event is a great way to do that.

Yeah. I think it's June, 2025. What is it? The ea the European Accessibility Act. The ea A 2028, June, 2025. But that's the European Accessibility Act, is actually a directive. It's a benchmark guidance as to what each member state needs to do about it. And then each member state issues, legislation, and some countries already have Germany, Ireland, I'm pretty sure Spain as well have already done this.

[00:54:11] Piccia Neri: And, in Ireland. You get the maximum fine I think is 60 k, 60,000 euros, which you might say for a big company is not that much. But the CEO can do go to prison 18 months. Yeah. 18, 18 months. And in Germany you can, if you, so there, there's a limit because its, companies with more than 10 employees and more than 2 million euros in revenue.

So not the small guys yet, which I'm slightly disappointed about, but still. and so there's that. But in Germany, you can report your competitor. If you've done it and your competitor hasn't done it, you're allowed to report them. Oh gosh, this, yeah, it's serious. It's, coming up and it, it's serious.

I'm talking about it at a, non WordPress conference. In Berlin in September. Nice. And because it's not WordPress, I get paid. Oh yeah, there you go. Yeah, the full circle. That's, I got a hotel, it's that's beautiful. And a honorarium huge, and that's great. And although it's not apropos of the, event, the WP accessibility day, I did, I recorded an episode with, Anne Feld, about the European Accessibility Act, which came out well.

[00:55:28] Nathan Wrigley: Anyway, it's on WP Tavern. Brilliant. And it's episode number 127. And she dives deep with me into explaining what the implications are and demystifying it a bit. But also there are some mysterious areas still where we don't know what each individual country's gonna do, but, WP Tavern. Episode 1, 2 7. if you click the podcast icon here, then it's really a great episode, if I might say.

Yeah. Yeah, it was good. She's, she was actually at Whitley Bay a couple of weeks later, so I got to hear her twice in a very short space of time, but yeah. but anyway, back to the original piece. There it is. yes, the, so please ask La Laney Finegold. and this is gonna happen 9th of October at 3:00 PM UTC for 24 hours. Steve, anything on that? you've mentioned two cases, the legal case and the moral case. There's business case as well to be made for accessibility. That true, you're increasing the size of your audience. Yeah. I think Han, said that. I can't remember the numbers, but basically if you aren't catering to the, and obviously accessibility is a very broad umbrella.

There's a lot of things which fall under that word, but there is a lot of money on the table. And it is a staggeringly large amount, not only as a percentage, and I can't remember what the number was, but it was much, much higher than my intuition would've led me to believe. But the numbers that are tied to that are really, truly eye watering.

And and if you can unlock that by making your website accessible, then you're not leaving that, money on the table. So anyway, there we go. Michelle also dropped another article, but this is about something which has already taken place, but you're obviously Very proud of this event that happened recently.

I'm, and we offered an honorarium, so we paid our speakers and they were all online, so there was no travel expenses, of course. Nice. And if you scroll down to the very bottom. Of that. And BET Hannon on the left hand side get ready for the European accessibility app. Oh yeah, So click on that.

[00:57:28] Michelle Frechette: Nice. This is just to show people how to, use the site. So we have all of the different talks are now available online. If you click the talk that you wanna see, and then expand watch here, you can actually, either click over to YouTube or watch it right there on our website. So we have that whole, everything that happened at Sellers Spark is now available online.

just Josefa was our keynote and did a great job talking about WordPress there, and we've just got some really amazing talks. Nice. some of our, I think, if he's still in the, chat, Corey Moss was one of our speakers, so he's, Was talking about, images and how to use images. So just the whole day was really phenomenal and I had a great time, MCing it.

[00:58:11] Nathan Wrigley: so yeah, again, the links will be in the show notes, but if you go to stellar wp.com/stellar-spark, and then in this case it's Spark dash 2024, you'll be able to catch up on all of the, presentations as, as a YouTube video. Or as Michelle said, you can just go and watch 'em on YouTube.

Seems like the conversation is still carrying on between members of the community. So I'll, just leave it there 'cause we've moved on, but you, guys carry on. that's lovely. but okay, so that's an event which has happened and is now free to watch. A couple of things coming up in the coming week on the developer side of things.

whether you're a theme developer or developer. the first one is, this is Ryan Welcher and Juan Mar Garrido. They're doing something, I believe it's tomorrow. Yes, it's tomorrow. 3 2 4 UTC. And this is entitled an Introduction to Block Development. So if you have an intuition that you'd like to begin that as a thing and you don't have the skillset, those.

The pair are gonna try and, and educate you in that. It was really nice actually. We had Juanmar Garrido at the WordPress London meet up the, other day. He did a little talk about WordPress 6.6 and what was coming in there, both Ians. And the other thing to mention is, bigot P Hack and Tammy Lister, both of whom are regular visitors on this show, they're taking a different angle.

it's a developer hours thing again, this time it's on August the 27th, so you've got a few weeks to book this one in. theme development building WordPress themes with the create block theme plugin. and again, these are both on meetup.com and links will be in the show notes, but I'm sure that you can Google those.

Okay, so that's a little bit of nice advertising for those two events. This is super cool. I honestly, the whole playground thing just has me so excited j on, I dunno why, but I'm really excited about it. And up until now, if you start an instance of playground that whole thing goes away when you close the tab.

Now persistence seems to be around the corner and I'm imagining there'll be a million uses out there of people who will, be able to do something useful with it. For me, it's just an academic exercise. I just love the fact that it is persistent. anyway, Barrow B anyway. There. This person Barrow, apologies for butchering the, the name there on the 5th of August said, introducing offline mode and PWA support for WordPress playground.

We're excited to share that WordPress playground now supports offline mode and can be installed as a progressive web app. These features allow you to explore and experiment with WordPress without needing an interactive, sorry, an active internet connection, making it easier to develop and test your ideas on the go.

And then there's a little description of, offline mode and PWA support. Honestly, it's above my pay grade, so maybe Steve can go into that if he's, if he's willing. I dunno if he's looked at this, but, yeah, quite exciting. The idea that you can have a persistent WordPress website, which just is inside your computer.

I can imagine. it's almost like having an app on your computer, isn't it? you've got Evernote or Trello or whatever it may be, doing things on your computer. This could be the same. So yeah. Anybody got anything to add to that? I'm probably gonna direct it towards Steve in this case.

[01:01:41] Steve Burge: I've been, I haven't set up any examples of the playground for our plugins yet, but I found it very useful following some of the chats in the WordPress Slack. People will just share a link to the playground with, say an example for a new feature or a new port request. They'll say, Hey, click this link.

Test the pr. It will spin up an example of the playground with the proposed changes. it seems like a quite a flexible product that they're using the playground for to help. Help people communicate what's going on with development to show examples of plugins, of themes. I seem to remember seeing other ideas proposed as well.

Yeah, it seems like a flowering project that's spinning off quite a lot of different use cases. Yeah, it's really interesting. So obviously on wordpress.org now, if you want, I mean in many cases, so there's now a flag you've got to opt in if you're a plugin developer, but if you wish your plugin to be available to anybody to try in a heartbeat, including dependencies that you may have.

[01:02:51] Nathan Wrigley: I dunno, let's say that you're a, you've got a WooCommerce related plugin. You can tell that the team [email protected] website that you want WooCommerce installed in there and what have you, and it just in a heartbeat, you've got WordPress installed and that's like novel and really interesting that can work and how it works.

But then the idea that you could have that just sticking around as a progressive web app on your machine. you can imagine the educational like consequences of that like in, I don't know, primary school or secondary school where children are just working on a website project and they've got a Chromebook or something or a laptop and they wanna just keep doing it when they go home and they can carry that on now and they don't need an expensive setup.

They don't need to install a server and all of those kind of things. I just think it's really fascinating and it is gonna be genuinely really interesting what people come up with. And I think it's one of those situations where invent the technology, throw it out, and just see what the heck people come up with.

And I was liking it. I was talking to, Adam Silverstein. No, who was it? I've forgotten the, one of the guys who came up with the whole thing at, anyway, I did a podcast interview with him and and I likened it to when Apple's iPhone suddenly got the app store, but it was a great product. It was brilliant.

It could do a whole bunch of stuff, but then if you throw the app store at it, suddenly everybody's oh, we can do stuff as well. And then all that happened and we know what it did to the iPhone sales. And I feel it's a bit like that. I feel playground's gonna be like, let's just see where we go and now having it offline.

Really cool. And please would somebody put me outta my misery and tell me what episode I recorded with about and who he was because I've forgotten and I'm really embarrassed that I've forgotten that person's name. Sorry. okay. Testing plugins and trying out themes seems like an option to Elliot. He's also saying playground is really useful for testing plugins before you buy.

Yeah. How cool is that? And I'm guessing that, the commercial plugins, you could have your own examples of them. So Steve, you could sell your commercial plugins and. Issue a, button to allow everybody to look at the what commercial version you've got and so on. I think you may have to for it or do some other work.

[01:05:03] Steve Burge: Yeah, you would do commercial plugins. Yeah. Yep, You wouldn't be able to do it on the.org side, but you could certainly have your own example set up on your own website. So anyway, that's really cool. And, there are some limitations, like for example, you can't change the PHP number, but it's all a bit, it's a bit technical for this show.

[01:05:21] Nathan Wrigley: Peter, Michelle, people are helping you out in the chat again, I think. Oh, thank you Adam Zelensky. Oh yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much. I dunno why Silverstein came out in my mouth. I think he's a Googler to do with, like web optimization and performance and things like that. So thank you so much, Elliot.

It was indeed, it was Adam Zelensky and it was episode number 122. Brilliant. Yeah, I've just crowdsourced my brain. I. This is great. who needs to remember anything when you've gotten Elliot in your life? Yeah, who needs to, yeah. Have you not known? Has that happened to you just in life in general?

Is that you've All the time. Like basically given your brain out to like your mobile phone and like your Google calendar and stuff like that. So you don't need to remember it anymore. And because you don't need to remember it anymore, you don't make the effort to remember it anymore. Do you know what I mean?

[01:06:09] Michelle Frechette: I don't know anybody's phone number except my daughter. No, And I was very proud that I used to know people's phone numbers and now it's just now you just click the icon. I don't know where their phone number is. Yeah, Anyway, we go, let us move on. So I don't know where this is gonna land with the org community, which is basically what this podcast is about, but this is something coming.

[01:06:30] Nathan Wrigley: to.com and I imagine that the jet pack nature of it will mean that it's available to jet pack users. I don't know, did somebody just wanna say something then? It sounded like somebody took a breath to start. I just was laughing at the next comment. Oh, okay. Shall I do that quickly first? oh. Oh yes.

Thank you. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, I just, thanks. He, tweeted that he was gonna be late with the dad jokes, but Van, did he come through his face once? He did. Wait, hang on. that could be true. I have no idea. Tim Nash says, you owe me a hundred quid from last week. Do I? Is that actually a, I don't think I do.

Worth a try. You said his next comment says it was worth a try. Yeah. Oh, brilliant. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. I don't have any comments about this article. That was that. Yeah. okay. wordpress.com has, issued, and I guess it's part of Jet Pack. I'm not entirely sure. da dah. Is it, can anybody see Jet Pack anywhere?

Anyway, unfortunately the video's not working anymore. But what they've done is they've built into their AI offering the option to click a button. So this is for something that you've already written, obviously, that could, be ai, conceived text, but also it could be your own text. And then it will highlight areas where it thinks you could make improvements.

And obviously, caveat mTOR, it's an ai, it's gonna screw things up a little bit, but you can see on this here a little bit. for example, it will show suggestions for complex words and then it will underline that in a certain color so you know what, what you're targeting there. sentences which are overly long.

Again, you can see this one in purple, apologies if you're listening to this. But basically text is underlined in a certain color and on confident words, which I thought was a really weird one. But then they show you an example. So it might be starting a sense, for example, with probably instead of saying that it's definitely, or something like that.

And then you can get the AI to fix it up. It, I dunno if it's something that I'd ever use, but again, it's just like the evolution of these ais and, how they're going. So it'll measure readability. It will tell you about long-winded sentences. It will try to boost your confidence and simplify your vocabulary, and so on.

So anyway, there it is. Maybe it'll come to Jetpack. I don't know. Over to you guys, if you've got any commentary about this. Maybe there's a better rival service. I don't know, but I've not seen anything quite like this. I, think quite a lot of these AI use cases become almost like table stakes, that you have to have them, Google Docs has had something like this for years.

[01:09:00] Steve Burge: Even Microsoft Word. there's lots of free tools out there like this Hemingway, Grammarly, family. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. it's interesting to find the AI use cases, which are, which are more powerful, but good on wordpress.com for adding something like this. it's not groundbreaking, but it's like the baseline that people expect these days Yeah.

Is to have one of these Yeah. Writing advice tools. Yeah, you don't really expect WordPress in any way to be groundbreaking in this kind of thing. Do you really? it's not their thing. They're obviously selling, getting that data from something like Open AI and shuttling it back and forth.

[01:09:45] Nathan Wrigley: And I, would imagine it's the, the more agile startups out there that are breaking the ground and then places like WordPress are coming up with suggestions off the back of it. Okay. anyway, there it is. I thought that was quite novel. It's in a WordPress editor near you if you're on the.com website, but, it says from the team at Jet Pack ai.

So I imagine if you're a paid user of Jet Pack and you've got all the AI stuff that they offer, that that will come to our website near you. Not sure. Michelle, Peter, anything on that or should we crack on? I just always think it's funny when it says that AI is gonna strengthen your writing when it's actually just replacing your writing.

[01:10:23] Michelle Frechette: So it's not actually strengthening anything that you're doing. It's doing it for you, which is Yeah. Yeah. My writing is bad. Yeah. Also, it's what? What is unconfident words? Maybe if I use the word probably it's because it is only probable. And not for sure it's, there was a, really nice example in the video, which sadly I can no longer play.

[01:10:48] Nathan Wrigley: If I, refresh that page, let's see if the video comes back and yeah, it just says there's an error. I don't know what I did, but the, first word, it might have been probably, but the context of it at the beginning of the sentence, it didn't, it wasn't the probably that you are thinking of right in the middle of a sentence.

it definitely felt oh, this could be something that you're interested in as opposed to you should check this out. Ah, okay. You have that kind of feel to it. Do you know what I mean? So it lacked that confidence. It lacked that a sort of assertiveness, which I do all the time. My writing is punctured throughout with those kind of, self-deprecating words.

And obviously if you're, business and trying to sell things, you probably do wanna root a few of those out. But, anyway, there it is. did you wanna carry on picture? Sorry. No, That's, it. I don't Okay. I haven't been terribly successful with ai. Improving my writing. No, I do feel we've maybe reaching Max AI at the moment.

I don't know if that's the case, but I've yet, when it all came out and OpenAI started, it was all so groundbreaking that everything felt like just a massive step forward. And now what is it like six months since I've seen anything in AI that's made me go, Ooh, that's fascinating. It seems a bit, I have really given it my time.

[01:12:08] Piccia Neri: To understand it, but a lot of the time, the effort that you need to put in order to get any valuable output is like, yeah, I could have done it myself. Yeah. Or, and there are things that I've had to completely give up on. It's it clearly this is not gonna happen. You're not able to do this.

[01:12:26] Nathan Wrigley: I have a really fabulous tool picture, which, which is just so amazing and it takes audio, transcribes it. Then summarizes it and it's very good at, summarizing is very good because it's working. Summarizing is very good on that corpus of information. It's not trying to gather facts from the internet, it's just working on the 45 minutes of text you gave it.

it's shot through with name errors, like spelling errors and stuff like that. But basically if you give it the text of a podcast, it's pretty good, no. Summarizing is brilliant. I actually got the best use I got out of chat. Chat GBT was to help me with a possible legal case.

[01:13:10] Piccia Neri: It was brilliant with that. It was like, oh my God. So it has good uses, but not, I think proper creative uses because also it's only ever regurgitating things that someone else has said. Yeah. So if you've got anything really original to say, it's not gonna come from chat GBT, it can't because it doesn't have the lived experience.

But anyway, once again, we could go down this, we could off on, on tangent. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Okay. I'll just raise this Steve, founder, an article which maybe explains the whole story a little bit better. It's on TechCrunch and it's called Automatic Launches AI Writing Tool that aims to make WordPress blogs more readable and succinct.

[01:13:49] Nathan Wrigley: So you can find that was published on the 7th of August. Something else that's new. and it again, in the realm of a IC Segue Central today, what the heck, is a new AI feature by Yost. It is called, Yost AI Optimize, and it was released just the other day. I haven't had time to delve into it, but I'll just read you their little potted story about it.

It says, receive AI powered suggestions to optimize your existing copy, and I guess that's quite an important sentence. Existing copy for SEO in one click. It says that it, the AI powered suggests edits for your posts and pages. You get flexible results, start with starting with AI generated features, then you adjust it to fit your requirements, and so on and so forth.

And then there are also some gotchas about, woo, dear, about the different bits and pieces that it can't do, Yost AI optimized, like all other AI features. And currently in beta, this means you may experience limitations, but, yeah, we have Yost, we have Tacho very frequently on the show, and, I like to feature the stuff that Yost as a, platform are doing.

So anyway, there you go. You can go and check it out if you've got a subscription to them. more ai. Goodness. And let's just go here quickly. I had a, podcast episode with Kyle Van Dusen. he is the person behind the admin bar. And I just want to raise that, Kyle and I chatted about this, which is a little bit, older now, but, we managed to surface it just a few weeks ago, and it was a survey that he did with of about 1,144 roughly, specifically WordPress freelancers about all the different bits and pieces.

So if you're into that kind of content, we've got that for you. And. So I don't know if Corey Mass is still in the comments, but if he is, this is intriguing. Michelle put this in our shared show notes and I, okay, this is big. I feel big Michelle, what's going on? This is called IPA or the Independent Plugin Alliance.

By the way, IPA, I dunno if in the UK IPA stands for a type of beer, India Pale Ale and, yes. Okay. Yeah. Yes. Okay. That is not, tell us what it is. What is the accidental? That is not it. Okay. I was not accidental. We did that on purpose. So the idea is, as or you may know, Corey and Cory, Moss and Cory Miller, started last year developing.

[01:16:23] Michelle Frechette: O-M-G-I-M-G, which is a plugin to work with open graph images and to create your open graph images for any blog posts and, actually any images on your website. And, as we turn into this year, they brought me on to help with marketing and we have continued the live podcast, live stream on Tuesdays with me and Corey Moss talking about ways that a small plugin like O-M-G-I-M-G could start to build, clientele and subscriptions like smash the button, kind of stuff, right?

So we've been talking about that. And it is not a free plugin, it is just a premium plugin. And, Cameron's like now I'm interested in crisis. Me too. So what we did, we've been talking over the last few weeks is wouldn't it be nice if we didn't have to spend a lot of money to try to build? Because when you're first starting out with a plugin, you're pretty much bootstrapping and you're trying to figure out ways for people to start to follow you and learn about what you're doing, but you're not alone in that because there are lots of other plugin companies that are doing that same idea, that same thing, even if they've been around for a little while, trying to gain ground and build that clientele.

So we started talking about wouldn't it be great if we did something like an end of summer sale, like a WP pool party kind of idea where I splash water on WS form and WS form splashes water and do this all through social media to try to like boost each other up and that Comment went from there to, I wonder if we could do something a little more organized.

And, Corey Moss said, like we, we could build some kind of a directory, but like a craft idea, like the, like craft beer does, right? so you're bootstrapping your scrappy, you're trying to get that. And so we started talking about like pool party WP, and like trying to figure out different ways to have a website that we could start to build a directory.

And we leaned into that craft beer IPA kind of thing. And then we started with IPA WP and then we had to figure out what the IPA stood for. And so we came up with the Independent Plugin Alliance and we now have 17 entries into, we just launched this last week live while we were building the website on the podcast.

It will look better. We promise it'll have a better, I made that logo in Canva as we talked. The logo's gonna be better, the website's gonna be better, it's all gonna be better. but we already have 17 plugin companies that are interested in joining and doing some co-opted, marketing so that we can keep things very inexpensive to try to help each other build our clientele and get the word out about what we do.

So I hope I said that right, Corey, jump in the comments and say if I missed anything. Yeah, I've got some questions around this then. yeah. inde, I dunno why I read it this way, but for some reason when I saw that word independent, I, my head went open. I read that as like open plugin alliance almost.

[01:19:24] Nathan Wrigley: but I could have misheard you. Did you say this is a, like a, thing that you'd need to pay for? Or is this anybody can be a part of it? Did I mishear that? Sorry. No, we're, not charging any money for anything. Ah, okay. So the idea is, there may be at some point if we want to co-op, hire somebody on Fiverr to create some images or something like that, that we'd ask people to chip in a little bit.

[01:19:47] Michelle Frechette: but we are not charging money to join this, and we are not putting, affiliate links on here. So if you join this, it's your link to your website because we don't want anybody to have to lose money. To even to each other to move things forward. So the idea is that it's free to join, but we are going to gate keep a little bit because we don't want, no offense Yost, but you're big and you don't belong in the independent Plugin Alliance.

So this is for the scrappy kind of startup craft plugins to help each other, boost our viewership. So will there be any kind of like gatekeeping in terms of, I don't know the, quality, dare I say it, of the plugin or anything like that? Or is it just, come along at the beginning? Let's just work all of those kinks out a little bit later.

[01:20:34] Nathan Wrigley: And also allied to that is the idea that you are there to support each other. It's not okay, I'm, signing up to this new, repo, if you like, and I hope to. Squeeze it for every single thing that it's worth. Okay. Is it more look, we're here to help each other. we're not gonna denigrate each other, we're gonna mention each other where we can and that kind of thing.

[01:20:58] Michelle Frechette: Exactly. So Macquarie has put in the comment there. If you could pull that up, that'd be great. yeah. Can do, this one? Yes. Yep. independent developers and companies really do have more time than money, right? as you're getting started and you're trying to get the idea out there, so the idea is how can we, a rising tide lift, sailboats kind of thing.

And so how can we pull those kinds of resources to work with one another to help get the word about word out about the good work that we're doing. How our plugins can help our customers, because we want everybody to rate, to make money off of the work that they're doing, just like we talked about with sponsorship, right?

You shouldn't have to give away your plugin for free in order for people to learn about it and grow about it. There's other ways to do that. And so if we can shout out about each other, Use that time in the way that we use social media and blogging and those kinds of things to talk about one another as well, then that really helps everybody.

so if I talk about, I talk about WS form already. 'cause we all know Mark West Guard's one of my besties, right? But if I start talking about, I, don't, I'm trying to think like Cameron's plugins and other people's plugins, then I'm helping spread the word about them. And if they're talking about O-M-G-I-M-G, then people that I don't have a connection to will start to listen to that as well.

So the whole idea is that we can help one another. Andrew Palmer says that scratching backs, right? You scratch my back, I scratch yours. But the whole idea is that we're doing that publicly so that we can help raise awareness of each other's work. Okay. So just nicely, there's already a little bit of interest amongst the people watching this.

[01:22:33] Nathan Wrigley: So Cameron says he's interested, which is nice. Andrew Palmer immediately followed up with, he's interested and an adv, he's an advocate of all sorts of plugins if I, he would, if he knew about them. So that's nice. And then, you've already got a submission, Dave. Great. Yeah. Two submissions in the last five minutes.

Okay, there you go. the power of social media, which is not, that's really great. having an alliance with, so this is Corey. another comment. so Corey is the person in question working with Michelle. having an alliance with other plugins, indie devs and products also gives us more to talk about as we're all looking for good content.

Do you know what's interesting, Michelle? You can probably identify this. my inbox is fairly full of people who have a plugin and they are probably extremely good at writing code, but they are not very good at marketing it. or they don't have a budget for it. And so something like this really is like the glue between the wider world and them and unfortunately, I, can't.

I can't necessarily have all these people on the podcast 'cause I just do one show a week. So having something like this is really nice because there's a genuine need. People who are expert at coding but don't have the marketing chops, don't have the budget, don't even necessarily really know who their target audience is.

They just know they've built something cool and they want the people to use it. This is nice, Michelle. I like it. I think you've found a, you found a peg to hang something on here. This is good for, more great, ideas. Watch us live stream on Tuesday. When tomorrow we probably go through some of these a applicants and figure out what our next step is.

[01:24:18] Steve Burge: Okay. Sorry Steve, I cut you out. Steve, sorry. Oh, I like the pool party WP name too. You have to keep that And we use it for something else. It's fun, right? yeah. And then in the winter we can have, snowball fight WP. Nice. Elliot just says it's a great idea. superb idea, Elliot, in fact, this is great.

[01:24:39] Nathan Wrigley: And then Andrew Palmer says, plus there are 2,700 plugins in the repository queue. I wonder if the view team were, if they were, oh, we're circling back to that old chestnut and there, if the review team were paid, it might be a little bit quicker. To be clear, this is the beginning of an idea, says Corey, we are, and I can still iterating, can sense that, right?

Yeah. You don't have the meat on the bones here. It's just come and see. Let's see what happens. okay, so we should say, oh, one more quick one from Corey. Part of the CoLab is we need ideas, please. Anyone get in touch. And, So the URL is sublimely easy to remember. It's got hang on. IP wp, ah, it's got five I syllables, nevermind.

Oh, IP, wp It's seven, six syllables you've topped out, but only five letters, so it's fine. Ip a wp.com. More syllables than letters. Yeah, that's interesting. okay. And final one, RW it gets you every time. I used to have a podcast, the, that promoted plugins with Mike Demo ditched it when I sold Elegant Marketplace as Andrew Palmer.

Yeah, I try to do what I can with that, but it, you can't always do content about. Plugins and marketing. 'cause people don't, not necessarily interested to hear that week in, week out. But anyway, there you go. IPA wp.com. time is short. So we'll just quickly move on to this last one, which is brought to you, courtesy of Steve, but it is, a piece on the rocket.net.

Is that right? Yeah, rocket net. They're a host, is my understanding. and it's called Rocket Net Paving, the way for massive Scale, I'm guessing. Is this your host of choice, Steve, or why did this come your way? No, I was just impressed with the way they've operated in terms of getting launched. They've bootstrapped, I believe the f the founder is a Florida man too.

[01:26:36] Piccia Neri: Yes. Okay, nice. Yes. And regardless of, the bigger picture of the company, this particular blog post is just. Excellently written, gives a lot of background to the company, like specific details of the challenges. it's really quite a, an interesting insight into what it takes to launch a hosting company, God.

[01:27:05] Nathan Wrigley: And can you imagine the giants and the leviathans that you are up against if you go into this space? 'cause we always say aren't, the deep pocketed companies in the WordPress space are all the hosting companies. if you come up with a, I don't know, a form plugin or an SEO plugin, sure enough, you've got some stiff competition.

But if you launch into the hosting space, man, whoa. And, rocket.net. I, feel like they've been around for several years now, but definitely not decades. And, and you've just found this article to be really useful about their journey and how they did all of their bits and pieces. So it's called rocket.net.

Paving the way for massive scale. It will be linked in the show notes tomorrow. It, reads like it's not ridden by, ai it, reads like it's ridden by a real human who's had some real challenges. Yeah. Nice. Okay. Oh, I, yeah. So having that whole challenges that you faced in the narrative, that's always really nice as well, isn't it?

Not just admitting we're successful from day one, we're great. but saying we had problems and it didn't work out. Yeah. All of that's really nice. So there we go. And that's it. three hours, sorry, at 3:29 PM in the uk. One hour 29 on the podcast. That's perfect. We've, we've done it and up the comments keep coming.

Oh. Oh yeah. I haven't really, yeah, we need to come up with the title. Somebody did suggest one, but I failed to write it down. What did you say earlier? Somebody said one. It's gone. I did have one. Oh my goodness. Yeah. It's all right. I'll come. Oh, subscribe. That's what I was about. Oh yeah. Let's just call it subscribe.

S We could call this pool party WP Pool Party. Pool party. Let's call it that. Pool party. Subscribe. Subscribe to the pool party. It'll be something along those lines. None of our titles have any context to what is actually in them, and it's interesting because of that. So thank you for all of your comments.

I really appreciate it. thanks Corey. He's just saying he's thanking us for mentioning it. That's really nice. And yeah, before we go, I. The slightly humiliating hand wave that we always do. So if you wouldn't mind giving it your best shot with the hand. Oh, look at Peach. She got 'em in there. I'm trying to maximize the hand there.

Perfect. I'll get a screenshot of that and stick it on the post. We will be back next. Oh, will we be back next week? I think I might have an unexpected holiday, Nick. I don't know. we'll see. I've actually forgotten, but there is gonna be a missing episode at some point in August, but maybe it won't be next week.

Hopefully we'll be back next week for episode three. Five. Thank you to Co-host Michelle. And thank you to our guest, Steve Burge and Peach Andary. Really appreciate a pleasure as ever. Yeah, thank you. You have a nice day and we will see you next week hopefully. Bye bye.