386 – What just happened? A new show with Rae Morey from The Repository. Episode 1.

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Wait, hang on. What just happened? Oh, I know. Yeah. Some explaining to do.

So back in 2023, David Waumsley announced that he was no longer going to be taking part in the WP Builds podcast as he was moving away from using WordPress. And although we've smuggled David in with the no script show episodes, it is finally time to turn our attention to pastures new. David will no longer be appearing on this podcast, but we will still be doing the no script show. You can find that over at noscript.show. But it marks a milestone, a line in the sand. And today's the first episode in a whole host of new shows that WP Builds are going to be putting on.

You have reached episode number 386, and it's entitled, What just happened? A new show with Ray Morey from the repository, episode one. It was published on Thursday, the 22nd of August. 2024.

My name's Nathan Wrigley. And I will explain all about this and the other new shows in just a moment, but first, a few bits of housekeeping.

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Okay. What have we got for you today? Well, as I said at the top of the show, it's bye-bye to David Waumsley, although the friendship still remains, but we have a whole host of new shows coming up.

These shows are going to be representing many people that you know in the WordPress community, experts in their fields. And the first one that I'm going to tell you about is a show called, what just happened? It's with Rae Morey.

And the idea is that we're going to, between us, sum up the previous three or four months in the WordPress space. Picking out the stories, which we think have been most impactful and most interesting.

Rae creates the repository email. We talk about that in the episode. I suggest that you go and sign up for that because it's a really, really good publication, but it does mean that Rae has got a lot of expertise thinking about WordPress from a high perspective. She's got her hands on all of the stories. And so it's really nice having this first chat with her, and hopefully it will be the start of many. I will drip feed information about all of the new

shows. As they come up. But welcome Rae to the WP Builds family. And I hope that you enjoy it.

I am joined on the podcast by Rae Morey. How you doing Rae?

[00:06:01] Rae Morey: I'm good. Nathan, how are you?

[00:06:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, really good. This is gonna be something exciting. We've, we've said goodbye to David Waumsley over many, years.

Since 2016. I've been doing a podcast with David Waumsley every other week, and so we've done hundreds of episodes, but he decided WordPress was no longer for him. We're doing something slightly different called the no Script Show. You can find that in the show notes. But, what I've decided to do with the WP Builds podcast is inject other voices into the black hole that was left by David Waumsley.

And, so I've got a cornucopia of fun people in the WordPress community lined up to make content with me. but first up, it's Rae, who's joining me all the way from, I know Australia, but I don't really know where in Australia, where are you?

[00:06:48] Rae Morey: I'm coming to the black hole from, from Melbourne, right at the bottom of Australia. Not, quite the bottom. Bottom.

[00:06:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:06:57] Rae Morey: that would be

[00:06:58] Nathan Wrigley: I'm gonna, I'm gonna just big up Rae for a bit and then, Rae, you can take the opportunity to say anything that I missed out, because there's probably a boatload of things that I won't know about you. But, Rae produces the newsletter in the WordPress space, and I don't say that lightly.

I produce a newsletter, but it's no good in comparison to Rae's newsletter. It's called the repository, the URL for that and honestly, pause what you're doing now. Just press pause on the podcast player and go to your browser of choice and type in the repository. Do email, did I get that right?

[00:07:35] Rae Morey: Yes. That's very kind of you to say

[00:07:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the repository.email, and go and subscribe to it. And every Friday. You're gonna get a bucket load of well written editorialized quality journalism. And there's not much of that in the WordPress space at the moment. there's loads of newsletters, but there's not much written by, somebody that's been in journalism for years and years.

So I know you from that, we met at Word Camp Asia, which was a really lovely experience, but I've been consuming your content for years and it very quickly became my default way of figuring out what I was gonna talk about on the, this week in WordPress show. So we'll do this one time, Rae, because I know that you're gonna be coming back every quarter, hopefully to do this with me every three months or so, but we'll do this one bio this first time around.

Do you just wanna fill in all the bits and pieces that have got nothing to do with the repository or how you got there?

[00:08:28] Rae Morey: Geez. I just wrote my WordPress life story recently for Hero Press, go search for me there. I've been working with, I guess everyone starts with how long they've been working with WordPress or, when they found it. I've always been a bit of a nerd making websites and I wasn't writing stories.

I found WordPress back in, oh, I, don't know the exact year, but, probably started building sites with it around like 2010 or so, making sites for family and friends, non-profit community groups. I worked as a news, newspaper journalist for a while in Australia for, Fairfax and News Limited, and, eventually.

got a bit disillusioned with that, because it's journalism, as much as I love working in the industry. so I decided to, leave that and pursue, a career in web development, having studied computer science at uni. So I made the jump to working from a newspaper to working for WPMU Dev around 2013, and that's when I started working with James Farmer and the team there looking after the blog.

And yeah, it was a bit of a baptism of fire, really immersing myself in the WordPress community and, working with WordPress. and after several years there, I went to consulting and working with lots of great businesses in the WordPress space as, as a consultant doing comms and marketing. Yeah.

And then from there, that's when one of my clients at the time was Kim Gestad, who runs or founded Male Poet. And, it was with Kim that originally, started the repository and yeah, I guess the words, hi, the rest is history there. We've, I, I've been, running that now for, almost five years.

Kim since stepped away, he's, he sold male poet to Automattic and is probably living his best life somewhere. and yeah, so I've continued, publishing the repository. It's, a weekly email for, people who are really, into WordPress and wanna know what's going on. I cover, The big headlines and, just what people need to know week to week.

The, the idea is that it's a quick way for people to get the news fast and, I really prioritize high quality news and writing. I'm very pedantic about writing. I hate going back and finding an issue where I've had a spelling mistake. that kind of thing,

[00:11:25] Nathan Wrigley: It

[00:11:26] Rae Morey: like really hard to go back and listen to yourself or re, reread something that you've done.

[00:11:30] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, it really is brilliant content and, I, have some insight because like I say, we met at, WordCamp Asia. I have some insight into how long it takes for you to write it, but it isn't just a bunch of links, is it? You're actually putting your own thoughts into there and you're making connections between one story and another story.

And, and I realize it must take you a very, long time. And I imagine for a lengthy period of time, it was a bit of a labor of love. But my intuition because of what we talked about before we hit record, is that you are hoping in the year 2025 to take it from just the newsletter into something a little bit more.

I don't know if you wanna talk about that or not.

[00:12:10] Rae Morey: Yeah. Yeah. Why not? well before 2025, hopefully, but later this year, I'm looking to, start publishing longer form news. I really want it to be, I want the repository to be, a place where the, project community and business meets, where people can, read longer form news, really high quality content about what's happening in WordPress.

But also I am looking at expanding into open source because there are so many interesting things happening outside of WordPress. There's so much going on in the open source space in Europe. if, anybody's following what's happening in Drupal, it's really interesting what's happening with their, STARSHOT initiative, which is now Drupal CMS.

there's lots going on that, it's really easy and know this is something I was talking about recently with Bob at Do the Woo. there's so much happening in WordPress. It's easy to just be stuck in this bubble

[00:13:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:13:07] Rae Morey: and not realize what other open source communities are doing to move forward their software.

[00:13:16] Nathan Wrigley: I know this feeling because I am stuck in this bubble. that's exactly it. But I came from Drupal and from a bunch of different open source projects that I tried over the years and just ended up with WordPress, more or less by accident really, but then stayed here and haven't really looked around since then.

So that's interesting. So if I subscribe to the repository, you are hoping to take it off into all sorts of open source directions as well. That's cool to know. By the way, is the repository the website, is that the same URL that I mentioned for the email? So this do email domain, is that the same as the website that you're using to publish your, content or is that on a sort of.com or something like that?

[00:13:57] Rae Morey: Yeah, no. The idea is that it'll be, the same domain, but I've also, I also own the repository news, so that's what I'll be sending people to.

[00:14:07] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Okay, that's, that is amazing. And honestly, once more, if you didn't pause it, stop now. Hit the pause button, go to the repository, email and sign up. And then just trust me, open the email on Friday and you're gonna get this lengthy email, which Rae has written, and it'll give you everything that you need to know that happened in the previous week.

And then, of course, go to this week in WordPress on Monday. and I will have cribbed that newsletter heavily for the items that we, discussed now onto this show. So Rae, hopefully is gonna be joining me every quarter to do well, basically we're gonna recap what's happened over the last three months.

So I contacted Rae probably three or so months ago, and we've started this spreadsheet and we put together things that had happened over the last three months that we thought were interesting, significant. And then just now before we hit record, we cribbed it. We took it down from, I don't know, 30 items to.

Something more like 13. yeah, there was, that was a lot. and we're now down to about 14 or 15 items, something like that. And that's the intention of this show. When Rae's on, we're gonna be summing up the news from the previous three months and doing our best to paint a picture of where did that story go?

Was it impactful? quite a few of the stories that we thought were gonna be important that we added to the spreadsheet just dropped off because, they never got followed up by anything and so on. So there's no particular order to it. It's just gonna be what comes out of our mouths in the order that it comes out.

And, and I'm gonna kick us off with the, first one. I should say that I'm gonna put all of the links to the items that we discuss into the show notes that come with this. So if you go to wp builds.com, search for episodes with Rae Morey in them, then you'll be able to find it and all of the links will go in there.

So the first one that we wanna mention is, was on make wordpress.org. And it was, all it was about the media core. And this is a bit self-serving really, because we're both really into, WordPress media. I imagine that most people who touch WordPress haven't the faintest interest in media or anything to do with that.

They just wanna click publish and, have a blog or whatever it may be. But, the idea really with this story is putting together a collection of people like you, like I and a bunch of other people. I can imagine people like Bob from Do the Woo and various other people with YouTube channels and so on, and to give them in air quotes, special access to information coming out of WordPress so that they can then disseminate it.

I got the feeling that the community didn't necessarily think that this was the best idea. I think there were some people who thought that, what qualifies anybody to be part of that gatekeeping community? And who gets to be in that media core and who doesn't? what were your thoughts on this one?

[00:16:58] Rae Morey: yeah. No, it's interesting to kick off, this News focus podcast with this concept. I think, when it was first announced, there was some shock because. The marketing team was put on ice and there's no, a clear, idea of what's gonna happen to that. And then we've had this media call set up, which is being run by Automattic employees.

And I, get the idea, Jose wants to make sure that, this experiment, runs efficiently. and it's also interesting that this media call is focused on, WordPress, content creators and news publishers. Not external, and not journalists or media external to WordPress.

that's an interesting one. But personally. I am en enjoy. I dunno if I enjoying the right word, maybe that is, but, I'm benefiting from this. hats off to raise Martines, who has been leading this experiment. I am in communication with her regularly and she has been very helpful, as a media contact, media contact, helping, source information for me, putting me in touch with people for interviews.

She understands that the work we do is very time sensitive, so she tries to do things really quickly, which is often pretty difficult with time zones. I'm based in Melbourne and I'm not quite sure where she is, but it's definitely not in my time zone. so it's, interesting to unpack these because people who aren't in the media might not see.

What's actually what the Media Corps is actually doing. But they are, doing something. definitely, even, this week with the announcement of, the state of the word that's happening. I dunno if you got one, Nathan, but I got an invite to Tokyo. Not that I'm gonna go, but it was very, it was all very organized.

We got the media kit, which included, imagery that we can use, text we can use. It was all very professional and very organized and of the standard you would expect if you were like, I've worked as a professional journalist and that's what I would expect from a company that was trying to, facilitate information and make sure that I could do my job well.

So yeah, I think the media corps's doing well so far. it's not clear. how, and this is a question I asked during the last media briefing as well. It's not clear how the media calls work is being. Measured against Joseph's big project, goals that she set out for this year. So I'll be interesting to see, how that pans out.

But from what I understand, they've got until the end of the year to prove what the media calls worth is.

[00:20:12] Nathan Wrigley: It is an interesting concept because it feels to me as if it's born out of something bigger, and that is WordPresses, in air quote, struggle against proprietary platforms who have giant marketing budgets. So if you think Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, all of these kind of things, they, in the case of Wix, I just, I'm cribbing this data from something that, Jamie Maslin put out in a video.

I think he said they've got 400 or they did when he put the video out. 400 full-time, media people at Wix. And so that's a giant budget just for the salaries alone. And then presumably they've got a budget for, I don't know, television commercials, radio commercials, ads on Facebook and what have you.

And with that. In mind, WordPress doesn't have anything like that. Obviously there's no budget, so we've gotta be, or the media core has gotta be inventive with that. And I guess a fairly decent way to short circuit that is to go out to people who, like you have an audience and facilitate. And so it becomes this fire hose of information coming out of.org to people like you who wish to consume it.

they'll send you the information, they'll be on hand to supply you with the information. And that just seems like a really good idea. Where it seemed to go wrong was right at the outset. There was maybe there was a bit of opacity on who got included and what the direction of travel was. But for me, the direction of travel, that was a good place to start.

But it would be nice, in the future to see it stretching out to those bigger organizations. if an organization's got 43% of the internet under it. that's a powerful, that's a powerful proposition. And the likes of the BBC, and I dunno the names of the channels in the US but, or Australia.

But, having communications and relationships with those people so that when a big WordPress story drops, those organizations can pick it up. it may be a, that's maybe a bit grand, maybe it's more like the Verge or TechCrunch or, niche, but

[00:22:18] Rae Morey: yeah. Absolutely.

[00:22:18] Nathan Wrigley: tendrils out there, but cutting their teeth on the people already in the community and seeing how that works.

So anyway, there's our first story. Shall we move on?

[00:22:28] Rae Morey: Yeah. Let's move on. We've got a lot to cover.

[00:22:30] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, we have, so this, it's the year 2024. What are we gonna say? We're gonna say the words AI, because, the AI is literally everywhere. I have this thing that, if I said the words AI five years ago, I don't think most people would know what it even meant.

Now, more or less, all of us in the technology space are using it all the time. But this is a bit of a story about Automattic and maybe Tumblr comes into it and wordpress.com and all of that. using perplexity ai. Now, I think you know more about this story than I do, but, cavi, mTOR, both of us are coming to this kind of cold.

We, this might have been three months ago that we wrote about it, but we'll do our best. what was this story

[00:23:13] Rae Morey: no,

[00:23:14] Nathan Wrigley: up to?

[00:23:15] Rae Morey: this is relatively recent, so I honestly had not heard much about perplexity before this story came up. So basically Automattic has joined Perplexity, new publisher partner program, which I. the idea is that bloggers who blog with wordpress.com or people who have sites with wordpress.com are gonna be able to, be paid a share of the revenue if their content appears in, perplexities search results.

and it's not just Automattic that's signed up. time, de Spiegel Fortune have also signed up. So these, there's some pretty big companies that have signed up.

[00:23:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:24:02] Rae Morey: looking into this story, I found it interesting that wordpress.com is participating in this program, but not Tumblr and also WordPress, VIP.

and smaller news outlets that use News Pack are excluded from this deal as well. So that's a really interesting point because, as Automattic was, on the verge of announcing its, partnership with OpenAI and Midjourney a few months ago, for, wordpress.com and Tumblr, user, data to be, used to train their ai and that got, squashed when 4 0 4 media blew up the story.

so it's interesting to see that Tumblr has been excluded from this program. yeah, I don't know. it's an interesting one because it's not clear how much, how much people are gonna be paid if their content appears in search results.

[00:25:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:25:10] Rae Morey: what's your take on it?

[00:25:12] Nathan Wrigley: it's interesting because I really feel like the whole AI thing has some, it's now proven to be really good at some things. so if I give it, I don't know, Shakespeare's full works, and I tell the ai, okay, only use that corpus of information for my answers, please. then it's really good, it's really useful and I, know what the boundaries are, but I'm not sure that I'm so sanguine about.

The entire internet getting scooped up by these AI companies, largely because I just don't really know what their motives are. aside from I imagine profit, I don't really know. So I feel like we're wandering into something with our eyes closed a bit. And I also feel it would be a shame if we got to the scenario where, and in this case, let's say wordpress.com, but imagine also that we were in a scenario where your wordpress.org website was being, scraped as well, where the search engines perplexity Google, whatever it may be, have.

Have your content and they surface it without necessarily providing a link back to you. 'cause it feels like more and more that's where search is going. It's about providing an answer at the moment. You, ask it a question and not really a list of links. You can see that in the search results pages.

they've got the little bars on the side where they show them map of the business and you can call them directly by clicking a button in the search engine pages rather than going to their property and so on. So that concerns me a little bit. The enterprise of blogging is, obviously you're doing it for a bit of fun in many cases, but it may be that you wanna drive traffic to your business or what have you.

And if Google can surface, I dunno, you type in how do I fix a leak in my plumbing equipment? And it gives you the answer to that without needing to go to a particular website. that concerns me a little bit. And so who knows? I think the year 2025 will figure it out. I'm sure the lawyers are gonna come and get all these AI companies at some point.

'cause I feel like we all got co-opted into this experiment a little bit. And I don't quite know that we all knew where the opt-out button was for all of these things. So I don't know. I'm conflicted is

[00:27:20] Rae Morey: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:27:21] Nathan Wrigley: that. Yeah.

[00:27:22] Rae Morey: So wordpress.com, users can opt out. I also that found it interesting that, when Matt Mullenweg was, interviewed by the Verge, he commented that the partnership with, perplexity, they're going to, I guess whatever happens, it's gonna be a, he says it's a much better revenue split than Google, which is zero.

[00:27:45] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:27:46] Rae Morey: yeah.

[00:27:47] Nathan Wrigley: guess is gonna be bad. I guess history would tell you to look at things like Spotify, if you're a musician, that felt like a, race to the bottom for musicians, bank balances, I imagine the very successful musicians on Spotify are still very successful, but if you were just modestly successful, that might be difficult.

I dunno how that argument will stack up with actual dollars.

[00:28:11] Rae Morey: Mm-hmm.

[00:28:12] Nathan Wrigley: but we'll see. Yeah. So interesting times. 2025 will no doubt. Let us know. So that was our second story. let's move on. And, this next one is all about the, the revamped site, streamlined pathways, new courses.

A long way of saying that is go to learn.wordpress.org. You're gonna find a nice new, shiny website. it's been around for a few weeks now, but it's been redesigned, with blocks and what have you. And they've got these, this idea of pathways where you can, instead of randomly cherry picking a particular article now LMS style, you can, I don't know, you wanna begin development of WordPress plugins.

You follow that learning pathway. And the idea in the future is that all of these, like a spider diagram, will join up, if you finish the beginner, use a WordPress course that'll link you onto another one, and so on and so forth. So there's not really a lot to say about this other than it's a beautiful initiative and totally free, which is just wonderful.

over to you, if you've got anything to add to it.

[00:29:12] Rae Morey: I've got nothing else to add. I think it's fantastic. we had a media briefing recently with, the contributors who led that project and you can see how proud they are of the work, which is really nice. They put so much work into it. They had, a relatively small team working on it, and I think they've, produced a really polished site.

It looks good and it's really helpful. I think the learning pathways are great. how they've, categorized the content into beginner, intermediate, and developer for, a. Yeah. An advanced, yeah. For, people can choose between develop, developing content blogging, learning about WordPress, it's much easier to find an end into the content and find what, what works for you.

I think it's great.

[00:30:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and the quality of the content itself, if you just randomly pick one of the videos and watch them, they're, they tend, to be quite short, five, six minutes, something like that. But they're really well put together. long gone are the days where it was something thrown together by, volunteer.

It still is in many cases that kind of contribution. But the topping and the tailing of it and the high quality and the way it's all been thrown together is just magnificent. So hats off to them. And, and if you are looking to contribute and you don't know where to contribute, but you know that you like teaching people, then this is probably a good place to go because I know that they're desperate.

multilingual might be a good thing. Translation, documenting it, putting the videos together, editing all of that. go to learn.wordpress.org and, yeah, you can find out more about it, but it looks beautiful and there's tons of new content. And again, getting back to a story, which we'll, no doubt, repeat, we're in the era of, this new paradigm blocks and building websites with blocks.

People have to be taught this stuff and, and so this is providing that opportunity. Okay. Story number four is, we don't only wanna surface the good, we're gonna throw a light a little bit on some of the, the bad things for want of a

[00:31:20] Rae Morey: Oh, geez.

[00:31:21] Nathan Wrigley: this yeah, that's right.

This was a story, which race spotted it was WP Tots. So that's Paul C who's a YouTuber with a really large following. He's been doing YouTube for absolutely ages. And, he, I, didn't catch sight of this video, but you did. And he, was saying that the UX UI for Gutenberg, he said was, air quotes a disaster.

Can you tell us

[00:31:47] Rae Morey: Yeah, so he recently, I'm not sure how many views it's racked up, but he recently published a video called, WordPress is a ui ux Disaster Change My Mind, it's only, about 16 minutes long, but he takes a really critical look at WordPress from the perspective, a new user. So he logs into a fresh site and, he pretends to be someone who's never used it, clicking around trying to figure out how to use, the full side editor, going through the different data views, getting lost, trying to do things, ending up in places he wasn't expecting.

And, yeah, he actually does a really good job, showing how it is a bit of a ux, a bit of a mess in some places and. All this stuff is still being worked through, right? it's a work in progress. But yeah, he describes it as bloody convoluted and a real disjointed mess that just isn't a nice place to work.

and he's had, when I wrote a story about it, he had 276 comments on his video with a lot of people agreeing with him. it's not just him. a lot of builders out there, WordPress builders, freelancers who, feel very strongly about it and agree with him. yeah, it was really interesting.

He quickly followed up that video with a livestream discussion with, three other popular WordPress YouTubers, in Imran Sadik who runs, web Squad. web Squadron, mark Crowell, who runs, Wiki Design and Jeffrey Repo, who has Light Box studio on YouTube. Between the four of them, I can't really, can't even remember.

Paul, who runs WPTs, he has 169,000 subscribers. that's a pretty damn big audience. And then combined with, the other, the others that he talked with afterwards in a livestream discussion, following up his views on, the WordPress CYU, so that's another, that's 300,000 subscribers there. But those four guys are all meeting regularly now to, air their frustrations with WordPress.

That was, it's really interesting. I think this story is really interesting, in the context that, it's almost feels like a bit of a YouTuber revolt. Against WordPress, amongst WordPress YouTubers, in the context of, this recent, positive work that Anne McCarthy from Automattic is doing around trying to unite YouTubers, and then you've got, I don't wanna call them dissenters, but for lack of a better word, dissenters, who are airing their views.

So she's really encouraging people to be open and vocal and speak their mind, but at the same time, I know this week she had a second follow up call, which you joined.

[00:34:58] Nathan Wrigley: and

[00:34:58] Rae Morey: you make of

[00:34:59] Nathan Wrigley: Paul C was on the call as well. so the person responsible for the video that, that's under a discussion. yeah, it was just an open discussion, but it didn't really get into the specifics of one particular thing. It certainly didn't dwell on any particular video that people had made.

I think the idea of those, discussions is more to, is to gain a little bit for Anne, a sense of what, where the room is at, what people's gripes are, what people think is working, and, yeah, it wasn't quite related to that story in particular. It's curious for me because I obsess about WordPress and I'm in it every day.

The ui ux stuff is just, it's just muscle memory now. And the things that annoy me, I've completely worked around because I've just done it so many times. I know that if I click that thing, that's gonna be the best way to get to the thing that I want to go to. And I know that if I don't know, click here or do this or whatever.

And, and so I find it hard to empathize with the frustrations. Not because I don't have empathy, it's just because in my own life I overcome them all one at a time and then stored that in my memory. But I can well imagine that if you chuck to complete novice in front of a WordPress website at the moment and said, okay, it, you can build the entire thing in this interface.

You can do your menus, you can do headers and footers, and you can pick a theme and you can create posts and dynamic data. All of that sort of stuff is starting to come. it would be night on impossible. so I get it. I think Paul's onto something and I do like the idea that he's meeting up. regularly, I think it's nice to have some, some corner of the internet in YouTube where some people get together and have a little bit of a grumble or a moan or what have you if everything's always shiny and perfect, that's, that's not serving anybody.

So there we go. so that was WP Tots. That was our fourth story. Should we move on?

[00:37:01] Rae Morey: Yeah, we've got, we've still got quite a lot to cover.

[00:37:04] Nathan Wrigley: We have let's get through what we can get through and if we, stop. We stop. so this next one, let's do this one quickly. This is, word Camp Europe, who, in the year 2025 have organized the event Word Camp Europe 2025, right across a, an a seriously important festival in the Muslim calendar, and I think it was Shahar and Jewel from, Fluent everything, fluent CRM, their WP Managed Ninja is the name of their overarching company.

He pointed this out and said it would be akin to putting Word Camp, I don't know, word Camp US On the 25th of December, right across Christmas, the team came back and said. You, we can't change it because, because the venue's booked and changing things like venues is now an impossible, but it's an interesting story.

just 'cause it is, it's a global thing and you can't really not have things like that in mind, because you hope to attract a global audience, I dunno whether this bruhaha is still going on or not, or people have just become resigned to the fact that this is how it is. But what's your take?

[00:38:14] Rae Morey: Yeah, I think I guess what gives me is that, from what I've seen, some people raised this as, an issue last year that the dates were so closed last year or, conflicted. I can't, I'm not quite sure, but they were saying that, please keep the dates in mind for next year and, different organizing teams or different people working on Word Camp Europe.

for whatever reason I. it's been planned over the, top of this very important Muslim holiday. so that's, really unfortunate. It's definitely not gonna happen in future if this, if, this incident is to, to be remembered in future years. so hopefully that will be a positive moving forward and it won't happen again.

it, we live in a very global community, so it's a shame that this was missed, but hopefully it doesn't happen anymore.

[00:39:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess the peculiar thing here is that I imagine if you pick almost any day on the 365 days of the year calendar, there's gonna be something going on somewhere. But I think in this case, it's mitigated by the, just the magnitude of that particular festival inside the magnitude of that community, because it's truly huge and it's a truly huge moment for those people.

So the likening to it as being Christmas hits the target perfectly. if it was some minus minor festival that is celebrated by a subset of the Christian community, maybe it wouldn't have been such a big story, but. Anyway, so hopefully the, idea here is just to put a calendar together of all of these different bits and pieces and not make the same mistake in the future.

Okay. All right. Then let's move on. Number seven. This time around is a plugin called Quickly, and you're not gonna spell it right? I don't care how many times you get this, you're never gonna get it. It's C-W-I-C-L-Y, that's the name of the plugin. And yeah. What's the story here? It is back from the dead.

The self-imposed dead.

[00:40:19] Rae Morey: yeah. Every time I try to type it, I always mark it up. I then the founder, Louis, he must have named it to be easy, but I dunno, for, whatever reason, it's not easy for me. Is it back for good? Who knows. I'd, never heard about quickly until all of this drama, I dunno about you.

[00:40:43] Nathan Wrigley: I had, yeah.

[00:40:44] Rae Morey: yeah, so fans call it a, a visionary page builder.

and so the story is a few months ago it just, it was as it was pulled offline. So the, the, founder, Louis, Alexander Desiree, I hope I'm saying his name correct, he, it was, he pulled, he announced a, in a very shocking kind of announcement in March that he was sunsetting a page builder, due to relentless criticism and personal attacks.

Made this sudden announcement, and then went offline and disappeared for a few weeks and everyone was wondering what the hell happened. it was, all very shocking at the time. I guess people didn't know, who actually, where did this criticism come from? Who was attacking him?

People were interested to know what was actually, needed more context around what was happening. but then in July or July 11th to be exact, the quickly website was updated, unexpectedly, and the plugin was made available to download for free. So what was previously, something that people had to purchase is just now completely free and, Louis Alexander is saying that, he's hoping to launch this free version of quickly in the WordPress plugin directory soon. And, I am stumped 'cause I have no idea what his plans are. I'm not sure how he's gonna generate revenue from a free product, but he says that he, he said maintenance patches and support are fully funded for the next few years.

that's interesting. I don't know what his revenue strategy is gonna be, but I'm really, I'm curious to see what happens.

[00:42:58] Nathan Wrigley: yeah,

say, maybe it'll go to the traditional model that other things use, to have this core three offering and then they'll build other things on top. It, I don't think it's reach was truly all that enormous, but at the time there were certain parts of the WordPress ecosystem that really jumped on board.

There were certain people that were pushing it as a really great alternative. I think it was like a suite of. Blocks or certainly worked inside the block editor and it handled things like grid, as far as I'm aware, pretty well, which a lot of things don't. And so it showed a lot of promise. And then ob obviously, the founder disappearing with a set of tweets, which implied that they had received some level of.

Abuse. Certainly they weren't feeling as welcomed or happy in the WordPress community. That's never to be commended, but going silent. Obviously if you've been marketing a product for a very long time and you've got businesses who've now who are now banking on your product as the way that they're gonna continue in business, they're selling it onto clients or they've encouraged clients to use it and so on and to, overnight go out of business.

that's fine. That is your prerogative, of course. But the curious. Bit at the tail end of this is how do you come back with that? How do you rebuild that trust with the exact same audience? Because presumably it's just gonna be the same people that are interested in it. Maybe not if it's free, don't know.

but there's always gonna be that question mark, isn't there? How, what's the, what really is the runway here? How long can we trust this? Can we trust it? Is the person going to, I don't know, feel the same level of anxiety or whatever it was, and disappear again? So anyway, as with all things, I hope it works out for them.

I really do. But, a curious story, unlike one I've seen before. okay, number, eight, we're doing all right. We might not get through 'em all Rae, but let's see. See where we get,

[00:44:58] Rae Morey: we

[00:44:59] Nathan Wrigley: mid-year update WordPress to power 85% of the web. is this just some sort of aspirational piece about we are gonna grow it, it's going from 43 to 85.

That's the target for WordPress. What's this about?

[00:45:11] Rae Morey: Ah, this was almost a throwaway line during, Matt Malden week's midyear update. So just trying to recall, because this is a while ago now. So he's, he, his quote to quote him, he said, we don't have to be a hundred per, so he was talking around, market share and, WordPress is always, he set this 50% goal, right?

That, he wanted WordPress to power 50% of the web. And so during the midyear update, he said, Announced that WordPress was starting to pick up steam again after several years of, flatness, I think was the word that he used. But WordPress growth was plateauing at around, 42, 40 3%.

And he said he was exciting to, he was excited to announce that, WordPress was starting to grow again. And, starting to put a few more points on the board as he put it, and to quote him, he said, we don't have to be a hundred percent, but we could at least make 85% of the free web and enforce all the proprietary people to open up with data liberation.

That would be a good life goal, is how he put it. so can WordPress, make it to 85?

[00:46:36] Nathan Wrigley: I don't know is the answer to that. honestly, if you'd have said to me a decade ago, it's gonna get to 40 anything, I'd have been no way. That's not gonna happen. Some it, some new upstart will come along and turn the, turn, the whole thing upside down. And yet here we are, some part of me thinks is 85% share for anything healthy.

[00:47:01] Rae Morey: Yeah.

[00:47:02] Nathan Wrigley: the diff. Yeah. I guess the difference here though is if it's open source and read that how you like, then there's at least that. But I dunno if you can convince 85 people out of a hundred to pick the same platform over and over again. And I think some of the stories we're about to hop into, in terms of commercial rivals for WordPress, they're gonna make that landscape harder and harder over the years to come.

So anyway, it was an interesting, whether it was a, I don't think it was a slip of the tongue. Was it? 'cause it was, it in the slides that were going with it or was he just riffing at the time that he said

[00:47:38] Rae Morey: I think it might have been roofing. It hasn't been followed up. I'd be interested to see if he says it again in a future,

[00:47:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[00:47:45] Rae Morey: future state of the word or some other update. So yeah. Anyway, something

[00:47:50] Nathan Wrigley: I certainly, I won't be feeling disappointed if we don't get to 85%, if it continues to rise at a steady clip, that would be amazing.

I think if, even if it stayed in the forties, that's still pretty amazing and you've gotta pinch yourself once in a while and think, how did that happen? That's remarkable. Okay, so the next one is also Matt Mullenweg related, and this was just something that came about, on Matt's blog, and it was in the announcement for WordPress 6.6.

Again, all of these links in the show notes. This is number nine now. and that is to say that, when WordPress 6.6 came out, it coincided. Just randomly with a, bit of a, maybe a PR snafu from Webflow. it was Webflow,

[00:48:38] Rae Morey: It was weird though. Yeah.

[00:48:39] Nathan Wrigley: you got me to correct it.

Thank you. where they put the prices up, somewhat unexpectedly to a cohort of their users. And it seems that they went up quite dramatically. And so Matt, in his post announcing 6.6, was able to allude to the fact, come over here, the water's warm kind of thing. you don't

[00:49:01] Rae Morey: The grass is greener.

[00:49:03] Nathan Wrigley: outta the grasses, greener over here, that kind of thing.

and I hadn't really heard, that being mentioned before. I think, sometimes it's better not to mention the competition and I hadn't really heard Matt mention the competition, but it was interesting that illusion. Dunno if you've got anything to add to that one.

[00:49:22] Rae Morey: No, I think it was just pointing out, the, the open source na nature of WordPress and, there were a lot of really angry folks on social media and Twitter in particular, after Webflow jacked up their prices. it was really interesting to see the discussion. Suddenly everyone's yeah, we really, showing the, showing, their pride in WordPress, despite all the grumblings,

[00:49:50] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. That's right.

[00:49:52] Rae Morey: yeah.

it doesn't have licensing. and it was interesting to see in Matt's announcement on his blog that he says, there's some fun, fun stuff cooking in WordPress and there's more to come.

[00:50:07] Nathan Wrigley: So let's try and we'll try and encapsulate points number 10 and 11 on our spreadsheet here. So stories number 10 and 11 on our, show notes. Put them into the same bucket. And this is events, really, and I think this conversation could be just much bigger than these two events. So the first one was about, word Camp Canada.

Which was the first ev event of its kind, the first, I think it was called Word Camp A, because the Canadians apparently like to say a at the end of thing. Yeah, it's nice. and the fact that it, whether or not there was, the, kind of attendance they would've liked to have seen, I know that the tickets going on sale at the beginning weren't selling out as quickly, but it sounds from the event after the fact, it sounds as if the tickets sold to a, good level if not selling out, they got to a decent point where the event was definitely worth putting on.

But then also, WordCamp Netherlands had to be rescheduled recently, and again, maybe I'm just reading between the lines a little bit. It felt as if maybe the attendance was the problem there. But also maybe it was to do with the capacity or otherwise of the people involved in organizing it. So really what these two stories are pointing to is there trouble at Mill, at WordPress events and then you've got the whole thing, next gen events trying to re regenerate events after the pandemic and so on.

So I, again, I have no intuition on this, but it does seem as if we are facing something of a crisis trying to get people back in the room. I'm involved in organizing the WordPress London Meetup

uh,

[00:51:45] Rae Morey: gonna ask, what's your insight there?

[00:51:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's going well because that's a, an established event. It went online.

The community there is strong, it's in London, it's one of the biggest cities on earth, so it, there, there is that chance for it to work again. But things like organizing the event, the room hire and all of that has become more difficult 'cause of the cost and so on. But these bigger events, I just don't know, can we, in the next decade, can we expect 18 year olds, 18, 20, 25, 30 year olds?

Is this the kind of thing that even excites them? these people are, these people have got other things to do. They've got TikTok to scroll through, for example. I just don't know. And when I turn up to. Events you don't see so many young people. So really those stories are just about my curiosity about whether or not we're gonna be able to carry on events that are exciting.

Interesting. You've obviously got, Jamie Marsland trying to spice things up a little bit with his speed builds, which is in his own words, he said it to me. it's entertainment, it's, there's learning in there, but it's entertainment wrapped with learning, entertainment first Learning is a lovely byproduct of that.

And I wonder if these events need things more like that. you want to go and have a good time with your free time maybe. Anyway, over to you if you've got anything.

[00:53:11] Rae Morey: Oh God. we could spend a whole podcast unpacking this one. where to even start. it was really great to see, word camp, Canada happen. I know the organizing team put so much work into that, and it was really lovely to see all of the, recaps talking about just what a, cozy event.

It looked really intimate and cozy and everybody got together and had a great time. I'm really hoping Word Camp Netherlands kicks off. They've got a new organizing team and it sounds like they've just needed a bit more help with, raising awareness. it's really great to see that the, WordPress community team has reviewed, actually, providing a marketing budget to organizers.

So in the past couple of weeks, they've announced that, organizers can now access, or it's a proposal hasn't been approved yet, but the idea is that, organizers will be able to access up to $400, for, marketing to spend on marketing activities. Not exactly sure that what that will be. Maybe social media posts, maybe printing posters, I don't know.

but it's, interesting. Marketing is such a, big part of organizing any event. I was really interested to see how Word Camp Asia did it this year. I dunno if much about that, Nathan. But,

[00:54:45] Nathan Wrigley: No.

[00:54:46] Rae Morey: speaking with John Ang, who was one of the organizers, they put a lot of work into, outreach to, Taiwanese, organizations, and open source and, computer related, tech related organizations.

And so they had a, I think about 30% of, attendees to their word camp were locals. there's definitely a case for organizing teams, trying to outreach beyond the typical WordPress circles. Yeah. Then maybe that's where we need to go and just not relying on the usual WordPress people to just Automattically come to events.

Yeah. It'd be interesting to see how this hands out in the next couple of years.

[00:55:41] Nathan Wrigley: The, the fact that there is now money available, and I think you're right, I think it was 400 US dollars, which, when you actually look at it doesn't feel like a lot, but it's literally an infinite amount more than was available previously. So it's, it is something, but it's definitely gonna have to be used intelligently because I can imagine, you sync that into, I dunno, Facebook or Google Ads or something like that, you're gonna, in a heartbeat that will be gone.

So we'll have to be clever with that. And maybe you never know, maybe those things will get revised up, but it does speak to the fact that at least there is recognition that events, bringing events back is tough and there may be a commercial aspect to that, paying for the whatever it is that needs to be paid for.

and in this case, marketing, Something connected to that, is, I had a chat, so this is very self-serving. I had a chat over on the WP Tavern website and it was with a chap called Abraham Whiter who is in the Uganda. I. WordPress community. So this is more about community, not events necessarily, but this was one of my picks for the last three months.

Just 'cause it was so interesting getting a window into a totally different part of the world than really I have any relationship with. So the story here was that they are helping young people, so school aged people to learn WordPress, and it's becoming something akin to a part of the curriculum.

So whoever is in charge of making these decisions sat down and made a decision that open source was the way to go, and WordPress was the way to go because they could see that there was a direct line between. Educating children in how to use it, and then jobs on the other side. jobs without boundaries, you don't have to be anywhere.

It's all distributed, this kind of work nowadays. And Abraham just totally explained how all of that works and how they've been educating these youngsters, but also, telling me about the, problems that they face, the things that stymie them all the time. So the lack of equipment that they've got, the lack of servers that they've got.

And so linking to that as well is this other thing about WordPress playground, which I'll throw in where I'm thinking that will be really useful in the future. Playground has come along, not in the last three months, but it's gone. It's gone offline able in the last three months. So if you close it down, it's now available to you afterwards.

This was something that he mentioned, and if that capacity exists, it will make the work of building websites and educating these children, a lot easier. So it was just a lovely, heartwarming story. So again, over to you if you've got anything to add.

[00:58:22] Rae Morey: Oh, I love it. I love, all these stories coming out of Uganda. Recently, they had their, showcase recently where they, invited, students primary school, I think high school students, maybe university students as well to, show off the projects that they're building with WordPress. I love it.

it's great to see all of this happening in Uganda, that they're really, being empowered to, to build and to, develop careers as web developers. I think it's fantastic and to think that it's being in, it's gonna be in the educational curriculum. That's amazing.

[00:59:10] Nathan Wrigley: isn't that great? I, I just, if, I was to poll a list of the stories that typically make it into my newsletter, and you could probably do the same for yourself, it would be interesting where the geography of that landed, because I'm guessing it would be largely dominated by, north America and Europe with maybe a lot of Asian companies as well, would be part of the mix there.

But the whole African thing doesn't seem, in my estimation at least anyway, that's not a part of the world where I'm hearing a lot of news. But increasingly that seems to be happening. And obviously if you're putting the children through education. wait five years and you can imagine that it'll be, it really solid.

But a Abraham was at, put pains to point out that the community itself is thriving over there. They can, they can barely keep up with the, interest, which is really different given what we've talked about was keeping events going and so on. Okay, we're at the last one, Rae. We're on the last one. We made it.

this is number 15 story. Let's keep this brief 'cause we're just about topping out on an hour. This is just something coming to WordPress, a website near you soon. This is data view, so this is the ability for you to, I don't know, let's say you're on the post screen and you've got a vanilla version of WordPress.

There's not a lot you can do in there. You can just look at the name of the post and you click the edit button and you can, I don't know, see the excerpt and what have you. You can make things visible by clicking the setting and things like that. The idea is that in the future, a lot of that will be open to wrangling and you'll be able to put different pieces, bits, and pieces in there.

That's just one example. You could do the same with users and all sorts of other things, but anytime you see data laid out in a table, inside a WordPress, that's gonna be open to whatever novel way you want to display. It's the realm of plugins at the minute, or your own code, but it's gonna be available to anybody.

So you can customize the way your WordPress looks on the backend, which will be neat, right? Nice little change.

[01:01:10] Rae Morey: Yeah. Yeah, I think it's fantastic. and looking for people to help test this. So I really encourage people to get amongst it and, and help out and contribute. Yeah, no, I think it's great. earlier in the conversation you mentioned that you couldn't really, empathize with people who were criticizing, using the backend of WordPress.

I feel the same. I recently updated my site with Ollie and, hats off to, the guys, Mike McAllister for building that. It just makes WordPress a lot easier. I, you do come across, things that are, that frustrate you building sites, but, you just get around it and get used to it and find ways to fix things.

[01:02:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:02:04] Rae Morey: and I just, after installing, a couple of different, page builders, I just went back to using Gutenberg. Yeah, I just keep coming back to it. It

[01:02:17] Nathan Wrigley: That's where I'm at.

[01:02:19] Rae Morey: I think. I just get frustrated by page builders at the moment. They just seem to add too much and that's not what I want.

yes, so really interesting to see where this goes. Oh, can we finish one more thing? One last thing

[01:02:32] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, it's just like Steve Jobs at the end of one of his talks and the, what does he say? Oh, and one more thing, and the crowd go wild.

[01:02:42] Rae Morey: no, I'm excited to see that, WP Tavern is back and just wanna wish, Jill's now all the best with, her work keeping the tavern. you've been keeping it

[01:02:55] Nathan Wrigley: I, there was a small amount of indignation, there, because I've heard this a lot. the tavern's dead and I keep muttering under my breath. It's not dead. It's just now become a podcast. but, yeah, that was, interesting for me because it was fascinating when you logged into the backend.

One of the things that always happened when there was Justin and Justin Tadlock and Sarah Gooding, you, if you logged into the media library, my fe, my, featured images for my podcast episodes basically look the same. they've got the same background and everything is identical. Whereas their featured images for their posts, everyone was unique.

And so there'd be one of mine, and then there'd be like a mixture of 10, 15, or 20 from Sarah and Justin. And then when Justin left, Sarah ramped up. And so the same thing. But over the last, I don't know, eight months, it's been. Mine,

[01:03:46] Rae Morey: Yeah. The homepage

[01:03:47] Nathan Wrigley: now it's not, now it's a mixture again of, of ones coming from, from, yeah, hopefully I can't say because I don't know.

But hopefully this will turn into, a regular gig and there'll be some other people joining in as well. But yeah, it's nice, really nice.

[01:04:05] Rae Morey: It's great to see more, analysis of, what's happening in the community. I think that's a

[01:04:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. anyway, let's hope it doesn't, let's hope it doesn't stifle your ambitions over at the repository news. so yeah, that's it. That's, that's our, yeah, that's right. That's it.

[01:04:27] Rae Morey: around to

[01:04:27] Nathan Wrigley: know. You've planted the seed. Hopefully flowers will blossom or is that an expression?

Flowers will bloom. Let's go with that. we're about an hour in and that seems the perfect place to stop. All I can say is thank you so much, Rae. You've put a lot of work into your own production, but also helping me out put this show together. We've spent way more than an hour getting this out, so I really appreciate that.

Hopefully we'll have you back in three months time. Yeah. Thank you very

[01:04:53] Rae Morey: my pleasure. I'm really, really, excited to, to keep doing this and to, be chatting about the news.

[01:05:01] Nathan Wrigley: let's see where we go. Thanks so much, Rae. Take it easy.

[01:05:04] Rae Morey: Thank you. See you later.

[01:05:05] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I hope that you enjoyed that. Although there is a tear in my eyes saying goodbye to David Waumsley, I hope that you can see that in the future new shows like this will add something different to the WP builds experience.

We've got a whole host of new shows coming up with some really well-known names in the WordPress community, spanning all sorts of different fields within that space. So keep your eyes peeled, I will let you know, as those shows drop. But the idea is to drop them between the interviews. So going forward, hopefully we'll have an interview episode and then one of these new shows. So it'll be interview, new show, interview, new show, and there's lots of new faces coming to the WP Builds podcast. So it's very exciting.

If you've got anything to say about that episode, please go to WP Builds, search for episode number 386 and leave us a comment there.

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Okay, that is all that I've got for you this week. Very exciting though it is, I'm going to have to draw a line under it.

I'm going to fade in some very cheesy AI music and say, stay safe, have a good week. Bye-bye for now.