This Week in WordPress #308

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode number 308 entitled. 1 million potatoes. It was recorded on Monday the 9th of September, 2024. My name's Nathan Wrigley. And today I'll be being joined by Kathy's Zant, by Rob Cairns and by Patricia BT, it's a WordPress podcast. So we're going to get onto that in a moment.

But before then, just to say that if you are at WordCamp us over the next couple of weeks in Portland, please give me a tap on the shoulder and come and say hi. I would really love to speak with as many of you as I possibly can. That would be really nice. It does. However mean that the, this week in word pressure will not be taking place. For the next two weeks.

So we'll be back as soon as word camp U S is over. But what have we got for you today? Well, loads of WordPress stuff, what's in the roadmap for WordPress 6.7. We talk about an article which describes how the WordPress design system is going to be be advanced. We also get into a new show that I'm doing with Joe Dolson, all about accessibility.

What's that about? How often is it happening and where can you find it? We also talk about Tommy Lister's article in which he talks about sponsored contributions and what she's made of the last couple of years, doing that learn.wordpress.org featured on a podcast with me, Jonathan Boston, Joe got together with me and we had a chat all about the new experiences over there.

Patricia talks about gather, press and exciting project natively in WordPress to possibly remove what meetup.com. Yoast. I've got some new SEO features combining AI with SEO, and there's a whole lot of conversation. About black Friday, cyber Monday. And well, yes, potatoes. It's all coming up next on this week in WordPress.

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Hello, hello, Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. and all the other good mornings and good afternoons, depending on where you are in the world, but it's this week in WordPress, episode number 308. If you're watching this live, you can see that there are some nice people, surrounding me, which is always a pleasure.

And, we'll get to the introductions for those in a moment. Just a couple of boring bits of housekeeping, I'm afraid, before we start that if you are watching this, and you happen to be watching it in the Facebook group, or some somewhere like Facebook or Twitter, you, that's great. You can consume it there, but if you want to make any comments or join in the conversation that we often have, you can't do it over there.

You all these platforms are closing down and, circling the wagons a little bit and making it so that services, like the video platform that we've got, can't get access to that. So the best thing to do realistically, would be to go to this URR, there it is, wp builds.com/live. Once more, wp builds.com/live.

What we've done there is just copy and pasted, the YouTube chat in. So you need to be logged into a Google account, and you can start to add your comments in, which would be nice. alternatively, if you look inside the little player itself, you can find at the top right hand corner of the player, I think it says live chat.

It's in a little black rectangle, like a bottom. And, if you click into there, you don't have to be logged into anything. You just type in your name and our video, platform will take care of that. wp builds.com/live. Please drop us in a comment. That would be really, nice. I think that's it in terms of the housekeeping.

I don't have anything much to say apart from that. So let's get on with the introductions over there. Miss Kathy. Kathy Z how are you doing, Kathy? I'm doing great. Happy to be here. Really nice to have you with us once more. It wasn't that long ago that you were on previously, so I'm really appreciative of you, your time.

'cause it's not crazy early in the morning for you, I don't think, but it's still fairly early on a Monday morning with everything I gotta do in the morning. It's, I, got to see like Orion's belt and Sirius, like I was walking the dogs. It was dark. Every cloud has a silver lining. Yeah. Where I am in the uk, we're really far north.

in the uk We're like, like the middle of Canada. Far north, which is crazy, right? Yeah. 'cause we have the Gulf Stream, it heats it up. But we are really far north. So in the summer, the evenings are really, long. And we're at that moment now where it is just plummeting. So at about seven o'clock at the moment, seven 30, something like that, it's, dark or getting dark.

And by the, middle of winter, it'll be like three 30, something like that. So I am like you, enjoying the stars. I can see them all in the evening, which is really nice. and there we go. Apro, absolutely nothing. So let's give the proper bio, for Kathy. Kathy is the Director of Content and Community at Motivations ai.

That's plural Motivations ai the creator of Motivation Code. Motivation Code is an assessment that explains who you are, what motivates us, and how to live a more fulfilling life tied to our individual motivation. Di Dimensions. She's passionate about WordPress. she's also passionate about your stories and believes everyone's voice.

Deserves to be heard. What a pivot. I've gotta say what an interesting pivot you have, Don, and, really, yeah, I think so. I think that's great, honestly, that, your little bio aligns with so much that goes on in my head at the moment. I, won't go into that, but I just think that project sounds really, truly interesting.

[00:07:26] Kathy Zant: It is, I get to talk a lot about, just how we really, what motivation code does, I think is it helps us understand e better and stand understand each other better. Yeah. So we can communicate better, much better than what's coming outta my mouth right now. But when you understand who you're talking to, it's much easier to communicate with people, understand their perspectives, and so it, it's, yeah, it's an interesting pivot, but it's right along, my motivational dimension.

So it's, been a lot of fun. I, have this impression that quite often in my life, at least anyway, my own motivation, or at least what I thought my motivations were, that would satisfy me, weren't actually in line with what I really was motivated by, if Sure. I thought I was, I thought this goal would be the thing that would make me happy in air quotes, whatever that is.

[00:08:16] Nathan Wrigley: But, very often I'd get caught up after chasing that dream for a little while. two years down the road, you're like, Actually gather a great deal of happiness from that. And then you go on that introspective journey, don't you? And you try to figure out what do I really like? And, only you can do that, yeah. Yeah. one of the interesting things when I was cleaning hack sites in retrospect, after taking the motivation code assessment and understanding myself better, I understood some of the games that I did in order to keep that job interesting for me, because I would really, I, I would go to my other coworkers and say, Hey, gimme the tough clients, the ones that are real difficult.

[00:08:51] Kathy Zant: If they're giving you any grief, I'm your girl. And I would take those, and I would love to take somebody from a, I'm going to give you a one star review and try to turn them into the five star. But I'm an influencer as one of my primary dimensions, and I like to convince people of things. Yeah. And so that was like gamifying, which, the take a ticket, do the job, close the ticket, boring job.

I would gamify it so that it was fun for me and retrospect. I see. That's what I was doing. Now that I understand, yeah. Yeah, it did better. funny. Interesting. So motivations, plural, ai, what's the, what's the URL to drop for that? You can go to motivation code motivation code.com and learn all about it and read my content.

[00:09:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, hopefully, having listened to this, people will, 'cause that's such an interesting project and not necessarily related to this, but we know that you've got a great heritage in WordPress and are really keen and interested in it. So yeah, thank you for joining us. We're also joined down there, by Rob, Cairns once again.

How you doing, Rob? Doing good, Nathan. Thanks for having me. You're very welcome. Rob is a digital marketing strategist who operates stunning digital marketing, which is a digital marketing concierge service. He is also a WordPress security expert. He co moderates the WordPress global product community on LinkedIn, which is a group.

Go and join it, I think. What's the number now? It was like, five figures when I last met. Yeah, it's just shy of 14,000. good grief, Courtney and I are just smiling at that. It's been a two year journey pretty well. Gosh, these things have a life of their own, don't they? and, how does it go?

Do you enjoy moderating those kind of things or is it a bit of a pain in the, as it were? It depends on the flavor of the day. Yeah. Yeah. The approach we've taken in the group is every post that goes up has to be moderated to Oh, nice. Spammers. So there's, work involved. And the easiest way, honestly is on the smartphone, not in a web browser, on a pc.

[00:10:49] Rob Cairns: okay. Actually, yeah. thank you for doing that kind of work. It enables us to bind together, doesn't it? The WordPress community. And I think you go. It does very much And, community is everything. So yeah, LinkedIn is not really a space that I have endeavored to put any time into. I don't quite know why.

[00:11:07] Nathan Wrigley: It just never was the thing for me. But, a group of that size is pretty phenomenal and I get the feeling that, Facebook isn't particularly aligned to anybody's best interest apart from their own, whereas at least I think with LinkedIn, the value proposition and what they were delivering right from the get go was what it is, right?

They weren't hiding it as a, eh, you can be social. It was like, this is for business. And so I think maybe I'll get drawn into LinkedIn at some point, but, I haven't just yet, but there you go. the WordPress Global Product Community Group, go check it out with 14,000 other people. And, last today joining us for the first time, is Patricia Bt, how you doing Patricia?

[00:11:48] Patricia BT: Hi, Nathan and Robin. Katie. I'm so excited to be here for the first time. I Nice. try to be watching every week and commenting, so it's, I really appreciate. Yeah, you do. we get comments from you every single week, I think so, yeah. I'm really grateful to have you on. Patricia and I did a podcast episode recently, which maybe Patricia could drop in a moment, but let me do your bio, properly first.

[00:12:11] Nathan Wrigley: Patricia contributes to the WordPress project mostly by organizing events, local and flagship. She likes to give back to WordPress for what it allows her to accomplish on her site, such as interaction.site wp mondo.com. That's where you can find the podcast that I did with, with Patricia or web presence care.com.

She contributes to the WordPress project for about 20 hours a week. Gosh, good grief, Patricia. and is partially sponsored by theme aisle four or five hours a week. Patricia loves focusing on projects on community and human relationships and likes everything open source, which allows everyone to have their voices heard.

What a nice bunch of people you are. And, great, isn't it? Yeah, it's lovely. Honestly, I pinch myself most weeks. It's like we really are genuine. I know that everybody gets this trope out all the time, but it really is quite a nice bunch of people that hang out in the WordPress space and it's a real privilege that I get to, to do things like this.

It really does make my, make my day. Monday mornings are never dull 'cause I think, ah, I'm gonna be doing that this afternoon. So that's really nice. thank you all three of you for joining us. Looks like we've got a couple of people joining the live chat. If you fancy join in the live chat. It does spice up the show a little bit.

Don't be shy, don't be. Don't be afraid. So we've got Lawrence, Lawrence Laie, I'm imagining. And, he's based in Australia. I dunno if he's there at the moment, but, hi. He says hello. Peter Ingersol every week drops in and gives us the weather. Wait. Oh, he's put New England in it this time.

Greetings all. He says It's a gorgeous New England morning here in Connecticut. 14 degrees centigrade, 57 degrees Fahrenheit with clear sunny skies. Shadows are getting longer as the days get shorter. Yes. you can be thankful though, Peter, that you don't live in Northern Europe, like I do when in the summer, the days are literally you blink and it's gone.

If you live like in northern, Norway or Sweden, you don't get any sunlight at all. The sun never eclipses the horizon. You just get this faint glow. And then in the winter, sorry. And then in the other way around in the summer, the sun never sets. It just gets close to the ground and then just goes right back up again.

and yeah, we have very short days in the winter, but, Courtney Robertson joining us. From GoDaddy saying hello. Nice to have you joined us. Oh look, there you go. 14,001 one. That's great. he's joined the LinkedIn group. That's lovely. Okay, so what are we doing today? We're gonna talk a little bit about WordPress and let me get that little caption off first.

There we go. I think you seen that now. And I'm gonna just do a little bit of self-promotion to begin with. firstly to say thank you to our kind sponsors, the WP Builds podcast. All the stuff that we do at the moment is sponsored by GoDaddy Pro and also by Blue Host. I. Omnis Send and member full.

Big, thank you to those companies. Some of them, have been around with us for a very long time. GoDaddy Pro in particular, but also nice long sponsorships coming out of Blue Host and Omnis Send and we've recently been joined by Member Full as well. So great, big thanks to those four companies for keeping the lights on over here.

couple of other things that we're doing this week. The first one, actually the only one really apart from the podcast, which is coming out on a Thursday, is I'm doing a, live webinar with this nice person, Alex Standiford. Alex has got a plugin. I'll just pop the, the URL over there. It's Siren Affiliates.

It's called, you can find [email protected]. And if you've, if you've got an intuition that you wanna sell a product or service or thing, whatever it may be, getting affiliates on board is quite a nice way of, of boosting your audience, with minimal effort on your part. siren Affiliates really does add a ton of new functionality.

I'm not gonna explain it all now, but probably go and look at it. It genuinely does add loads more options than the, than the stuff that you are used to. And Alex has been pretty busy, over the last period, and if you've got a license, you may have seen his emails and things like that, but he's added a bunch more functionality, particularly lifter LMS.

A whole load more stuff as well. So he is gonna be joining me. You can see it down here Thursday, the 12th of September. So this coming Thursday, 4:00 PM in the uk, 11:00 PM if you live on the eastern seaboard of the US or Canada, or 8:00 PM if you live on the Pacific side of things. And I'm sure you can figure out the hours in between, WP bills.com/live.

We'd love to have you with us chatting about, Alex's plugin, even if you just wanna know what it's all about. I'm sure I'll answer your questions. So there is that. Okay. So WordPress stuff. Here we go. Anne, McCarthy, as she always does, produces like a novel's worth of content each and every week.

And this week, she produced something called the Roadmap to WordPress 6.7. As you can see, as I always do, if you're watching this, you can see where I've highlighted things in orange. That's basically where I'm cribbing from, or yellow shall I say. But if you're listening to this, you'll just have to listen to my paraphrase bits and pieces.

It's scheduled for November the 12th, so a few months from now, got a new default theme and a whole bunch of other new features as well. for example, the ability to zoom out to compose contents with patterns, new APIs, theme registration, API and more. it also, it says here, brings refinement to how everything connects together.

and so we'll just quickly go. Through this. So we're gonna have this brand new default theme. It looks like it's, the intention is for it to be pretty much for everybody, but they say things like, from simple bloggers, to complex blogs and any sort of site in between. There's a picture of it there, data views, which is the ability for you.

Let's say you go into, look at how many posts you've got and things like that. It's gonna be possible inside the UI to now change the way it looks so that you don't have to use code to add your own columns or to remove columns or whatever it may be that you wanna do with that. That's gonna all be taken care of inside a core.

The query loop blocks. So that enables you to produce, I don't know, posts and pages where you list out everything by certain categories or what have you, that is going to be customized. And it says here, whilst it's important for the block to be robust in what it can accomplish, it also needs to strike a balance, to be intuitive.

And so they're gonna make it so that you can review the block settings to improve the context detection. and yeah, so basically that's gonna get a bit of a polish and also you'll be able to zoom out to compose patterns. There's a little demo there, media improvements. The big one is that you're gonna be able to upload images directly from your iPhone with this HEIC format.

High something, is what it stands for there. There's my knowledge, high something image compression, I'm guessing. I dunno. and so that's quite nice. And also, you'll be able to add auto sizes for lady lazy loathing images as well, and. What else have I got? oh yeah. Loads of new APIs coming.

Template registration. API, preview options. API interactivity API block bindings. A-P-I-H-D-M-L-A-P-I. And a load of stuff coming to, add support for PHP version eight. So Nathan? Yeah. HEIC. High efficiency image container is, oh, there you go. So it wasn't compression. That's neat. my, I thought it was just a, just an apple thing.

'cause I know that all Apple phones, if you take a picture, that's what it saves it to your device in. But I'm told it might even have been you, Rob, in a comment that if you've got an Android phone, you can choose to save it in that format. You can. But, my Android phone by default just saves it as a jpeg, which, is universal.

Absolutely everywhere. but yeah, you're gonna have, we're gonna have support in WordPress, but my understanding, because browsers don't natively support the display of HEIC images, or at least they all don't, it's gonna convert it to something else. So you can upload it. WordPress will convert it to something on the backend and, then it can be displayed on your, website.

boatloads of stuff coming, I dunno if any of the three of you have anything you wanna cherry pick from that. If you do, just go for it. Whoever wants to speak first. I know it's always a bit, it's always a bit weird, isn't it when I say that? 'cause nobody wants to go first, but somebody take the plunge.

Why I, while I eat some salt and vinegar crisps, I'll plunge. and while we're talking about WordPress versions, not to take away from 6.7, it's worth mentioning 6.2. 6.6 0.2 comes out, tomorrow actually. it's got a pile of bug fixes and I think there's a security fixer too in it's, you might wanna watch for that as well.

[00:20:48] Rob Cairns: It's tomorrow, Rob, right? Did you say? Yeah, this is tomorrow. Yep. Okay. The 10th. Okay. and maybe it's the security patch. I confess. I haven't really kept my eye on that one. I normally do, but that one it's mostly minor bug fixes, honestly. So good to hear. Okay. Thank you. Anybody got anything?

[00:21:05] Nathan Wrigley: And I'll, carry on eating my wrist. Yes. I'm so happy about the contributor mentorship program and that is, synced with the release of, 6.7. we are currently in the process of betting, mentees, that will participate. The call is closed, but what is nice is that a lot of mentees will learn how to contribute to different areas of the release.

[00:21:32] Patricia BT: could be core or that default, the new default team, like 2025. documentation, translation, everything. So people who want to contribute and. Don't really know where to start because it's a huge world, the world of, contribution to WordPress. So they can be mentored. they will be mentored by a mentor, a group of mentor, and discover the WordPress project like that.

yeah. That's nice that when it's synced like this with a, release. So is that, Patricia, is that the first time that's happened? for a specific, I know this project has been ongoing for a little while now, but is this the first time it's gone through the whole iteration to get one release out?

[00:22:13] Nathan Wrigley: Or has it happened one or two times in the past? it's the third cohort and every time it's, synced with, a, release. But in 23 it was in the summer and, 20, the second court was last, winter. So it, it was not synced with a release that as a new default theme. So this is the first time there is a new default theme that mentees can contribute, to.

So the idea of that project is that you as a, let's say novice contributor, you, wish to contribute, but you're not entirely sure how, or maybe you've got fears about your abilities and what have you. You are linked up with somebody else. So mentor mentee relationship. And the idea is that they shepherd you through it 'cause they've done it before.

And then in the hope, I guess that once that relationship and that cycle has gone through, you will then become a contributor and maybe become a, mentor in the future. I think I've got that right. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Perfect. No, thank you for doing that. That's, tremendous. yeah. Thank you.

Anything else from Kathy or Indeed, Rob, again, if you've got some. I'll just say I am happy to see some of the data view stuff and it things that make it easier to deal with things that are stored in the database within WP admin, so you're not like having to go write queries and things like that. I'm happy to see those types of things to make that sort of.

[00:23:37] Kathy Zant: The, higher level programmatic things that people do with WordPress, bringing those into WP admin sounds awesome. Yeah. I, am like when you sign up for a new SaaS service that's data driven Yeah. You fully expect it to be able to, do that, don't you? you wanna be able to present the data in your way.

[00:23:56] Nathan Wrigley: I'm not interested in that co column. Never will be, make it go away, but I do want this column. Please show me that. And the fact that you can't do that in WordPress and you've got this basically very limited set of things. You might have the title and the buttons that go with that edit and publish and what have you.

and then, I don't know, things like meta that go with it, it's always struck me as a little bit on the, on the slim side. I imagine for most people. And especially if you've got like a bespoke website with, I don't know, a custom post type and you're selling properties and you want the featured image of the property and you wanna know how much that property costs and how many bathrooms it got and all that kind of stuff, and the date it was published and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

That stuff seems to be like durga. It definitely should be, in core. So it's exciting to see that stuff coming. So hopefully it will, lead to more database driven websites, data rich websites, whereas in the past, maybe WordPress hasn't been the, the, the option of choice. Yeah.

Cool. I agree. so that was, roadmap 6.7 from Anne and McCarthy. So we will, we'll leave that one there and we'll press on and, we'll go here. So this is something I don't really know very much about. I often like to, say that I have the design skills of a potato. that whole thing about getting an infinite number of monkeys.

And putting them in front of typewriters and give them long enough and they'll produce Shakespeare. I think if you've got an infinite number of potatoes and put them near a computer and ask them to produce a nice design, they do better than me on average. so this is not my wheelhouse really, but this is all about the, advancing the WordPress design system.

I think for my sanity, I'm just gonna read a fair amount of it 'cause I didn't even know that this sort of design metaphor existed really. So it says, we're excited to introduce a long requested initiative focused on consolidating enhancing design system efforts across wordpress.org. The goal specifically is to bring together existing tools like, WordPress slash components, the new Figma Library and storybook into a unified.

Design system, reference sites so that everybody can contribute back to the WordPress, and extend WordPress in line with a shared design language. This means that anyone con contributing to WordPress can be confident they are building consistent, accessible and coherent experiences. This is especially important for phase three, which we're in right now of the Gutenberg project, the admin design effort that seeks to make it straightforward for plugin authors to offer a great user experience.

And then it goes on to say, why this work is being done and where you can find the different bits and pieces that make this up. So the storyboard, figma and component libraries that I was just mentioning, but I guess this sort of speaks to the sort of the need for WordPress to be professional in the future.

the fact that we're competing with proprietary platforms that have got there. Design language probably all figured out. And third party developers can't come along and say, you know what? I've got this plugin and I'm gonna totally hijack it so that when I install it, it looks nothing like WordPress anymore.

I don't know if that's the point. They're just gently offering a bit of a carrot to say, please plug in developers, please theme authors. Can we just stick with a consistent user experience? But, anyway, there it is a nice project, going forward, the idea of making WordPress look unified from the.org point of view.

So anybody got anything about that? And I apologize if I butchered that subject. 'cause like I say, potatoes. I agree with, trying to make the experience, consistent, but one that kind of on one hand, but I'm gonna play the other side of it, that kind of gets away from open source a little bit. the purpose of open source is to be able to do WordPress your way.

[00:27:55] Rob Cairns: So if you make it consistent, are you taking that away? I'm not so sure. So that's, yeah, it's an interesting point. I don't get the intuition from it that it's, a stick. It's more of a carrot, I think, in that, here's a bunch of resources to make it easy for you. Here's a load of components.

[00:28:15] Nathan Wrigley: So if you wanna build out a plugin, here's a bunch of stuff ready to roll. why not just use that rather than trying to, have your own language and create your own UI or what have you. I can think of a bunch of plugins. I'm sure you can name a bunch more, where, you go in and it is quite jarring, not jarring in a sort of bad sense.

the designs can be breathtakingly beautiful, but they don't look like WordPress. And you can be oh, where am I? Where's the save button? 'cause you're familiar with it in a certain way, shape and form. But Max, thank you Max for joining us. He says, much like the Apple design system, switching to Mac Os back in the day, I, is a, is Apple more of a stick?

Do you get to have a choice? If you put things in the Apple ecosystem, I get a feeling that your app icon has to be this exact shape. You don't get to pick whether it's Square or a lozenge or whatever. It's gotta have those curvy corners and, you've gotta use core animations and things like that.

I don't know. but that's an interesting thought. But yeah, unified from over there. Michelle Ette. Hi. She says, happy Monday. That's quite nice. Happy Monday. That was a band in the UK back in the day. Yes. and the title? Yes, we have a title. We have a title. A Million Potatoes. Thank you. Appreciate, that.

and she says that was done with love, so that's nice. anybody else wanna participate with that one? So that was the design library idea Design Showcase. What is it called? Design system, WordPress Design System. If not, I will move on. I'm not a designer. No. But I see so many people building like WordPress sites and Figma and then wanting it to translate over to WordPress easily.

[00:29:56] Kathy Zant: And sometimes it just doesn't. It's like they have this vision in Figma, so I've always been like, design as close to where the front end is going to be. Like, try to design in WordPress if you can. So I'm hoping that, that philosophy is, supported. Yeah. oh, okay. Max says it was a carrot, not a stick.

[00:30:18] Nathan Wrigley: So are we talking about apple there, max? you, didn't have to do it in a certain way. You could do it in, your own way, but Apple had some guidelines about it. I just think it's a good idea, anybody touching the WordPress project, especially if they're just designing something that's, I don't know, code, they haven't the faintest interest in design and they can just drop in components which obey, something which looks decent up-to-date modern.

Exactly like everything else. That just seems to make a lot of sense if you are, if you're not into design, but you are into writing code. So plugin theme developers, block developers now, and so on. Okay. Alright, here we go. this is, forgive me, this is slightly self-promotional and I've done my self-promotional bit, but I wanted to mention, this, and this is, this is Joe Dawson's website.

If you don't know Joe. It's high time that you did, frankly. And that's, that was, what this was all about. Joe is an accessibility, I'm gonna say expert. I don't know whether he uses that word himself, but he's somebody in the WordPress space who is, keenly focused on making the world, on the internet an accessible place for everybody.

And, a little while ago, he and I were sitting in a restaurant out in Torino at Word Camp Europe. And, we just got chatting and we said, wouldn't it be a nice idea to do, some sort of live show together, like we're doing now, but pick out a particular thing, just one little thing on the internet, which.

Potentially causes people problems. And so we decided to do it. And the first show has been released. And this is Joe Dawson's website. So it's joe dolson.com and you can see here it's called the Launch of the Accessibility Show on WP Builds. there it actually is, on WP Builds. And you can see that what Joe spent about 20 minutes looking at, 'cause we had a bit of a preamble where we just introduced the idea of the show.

Joe spent about 20 minutes investigating four WordPress built websites and just looking at how, honestly, it's such a small thing, isn't it? The, the mobile menu toggle, so you know that little hamburger icon. And you click it and you expect it to do a certain thing. How would somebody with accessibility needs, who was using a keyboard or other assistive technology, how would they be able to cope with the websites that were presented?

And actually, not to be controversial, but the, we source the websites from the WordPress Showcase. So if you go to, if you Google WordPress Showcase, you'll find a, beautifully designed website showing off the, the latest and greatest that WordPress can offer. And Joe just randomly picked a few.

And then tried to see how their mobile menu would work. And basically in every case it was a dead end. Somebody with assistive technology would've had a really difficult time navigating that website. So that's what we did. We just picked apart what was problematic with those websites. And again, caveat mTOR.

We're not trying to throw any, throw any dirt anywhere. It was just, that was a good place to start. And then in the next show that we're gonna do in a couple of weeks time, Joe's gonna show how he would do it to make your website accessible. so it's just a nice little, show.

If you're into accessibility, come join us. It's, go to wp builds.com/accessibility archive. Actually, probably the best thing to do is if you go to here, you can see that there's an accessibility show archive just here. And if you click on that. You'll be able to see that there's, as of this moment, there's just one website in, sorry, one episode in the archive.

go there and then we'll add, yeah, we'll add, different shows as and when they are created. So I thought it was a nice little nittle, init, a little initiative and shining a bit of a nice light on, the work that Joe and various other people do. Again, open to comments if anybody's got anything to say about that.

[00:34:10] Patricia BT: Sorry. Let's go Patricia, you go first and then we'll, I'll go Patricia first. Yeah. Thank you. that's great to, to have, one, show focused on accessibility. I have a question. it's always you and Joe or you, or Joe will have other guests. Can have other guests. I'm thinking of people to send to, to, yeah.

Yeah. I don't know. just it, because Joe and I had that conversation, that's how it's begun, but there's no embargo on having more people. The intention really was just to find one little thing, so mobile menu, and then it might be, oh, I don't know, it might be headings or it might be some, text on images or text metadata surrounding images, something like that.

[00:34:52] Nathan Wrigley: no, there's no, there's, I don't have any intuition. I can speak to Joe. If you've got some people that you'd like to be on that show, then yeah, send them my way, Patricia. That would be absolutely lovely. There's no, there's no constraints really. We'll just have to see how it goes. Okay. Okay.

[00:35:09] Rob Cairns: Yeah, no worries. Rob your turn. Nothing. Yeah, sorry. But that Patricia, the other thing worth mentioning is if you're really interested in accessibility, catch Nathan Cho Joe's an awesome guest. I will, say that, time in and time out and also WordPress accessibility days coming up on October 9th and 10th.

and I know Joe is very involved in that as well as one of the founders of that originally. So you might want to, check that out as well. Yeah. thank you for that Rob. over the last few episodes we have promoted that so it didn't make it this time around, but yeah, WP just mention it.

Yeah, no, it's good. WP accessibility.day, I think is the URL if memory serves. so that's great. And couple of comments coming in. Dave Dun says he's always excited when he hears about accessibility. Yep. Go and benefit from, Joe's experience. Hopefully as the show builds up, there'll be more and more content, so you'll be able to find the answers to lots of different things.

[00:36:07] Nathan Wrigley: Only one at the moment. yeah, We, didn't know what, theme or what have you, any of these websites were using. It was just Joe found four websites, right click inspect, went and had a look, tried to interact as if he was, using a screen reader or with the keyboard or what have you. And yeah.

Yeah. Okay. And, I'm getting a suggestion here from Max of Anne and Bobette and yeah, she retweeted it so she knows that the, the show is out there, so she's welcome to reach out to me. I know Anne, yeah, she is one of the person I, I was thinking to, send this to. Nice. Yeah. thank you Patricia.

If you want to, that would be really lovely. Kathy, anything to add or shall we move on? We can move on and just kudos to you for doing it. honestly, it is not that difficult for me. I just click play and then just. Get Joe to do all of his great stuff. It's, it's a piece of cake from my point of view and quite nice to learn something as well.

And there's so much in there that I do wrong. so hopefully it will improve the, the website as well. as an example, I'm sure that this page itself is not that great. we've got, a YouTube video, hopefully that's, fairly easy to do. We've got a transcript here, which I faithfully transcribed.

Hopefully that's gonna be of some use, but I'm not entirely sure that this, is, a detailed summary block in WordPress. So it's a bit like an accordion. Everything's hidden behind this. I'm not entirely sure how useful that set of text is. We'll see. Maybe Joel will give us some more details the next time around.

Anyway, there we go. frequent visitor on this show is, Tammy Lister and, Tammy's got a post out this week on her bin. Nate, thoughts? I, hope I pronounced that correctly. You pronounced that bin, I'm guessing. I don't really know that word. bin thoughts. And, it's Tammy's summation. Of being a sponsored contributor.

And I really just wanted to raise this just, for the sake of it really. And also just to, shine a light on Tammy and everything that she's done in the past. And I'll just read the little bits that I've highlighted. It says, for the last six months, I've been sponsored by Automatic for two days a week to focus on the default theme task force.

So we're seeing some of the fruits of that in WordPress 6.7, as we just saw, wants to say thanks for that, for enabling that work to happen. the number of tickets have gone down from the theme default q, the default theme queue from 400 to 198. So that's obviously where a lot of the work has gone.

Tammy has managed to do 103 commits, 290 closures and 965 updates, which include comments and what have you. And here's the reflections. Overall, having a focus was incredibly rewarding. And whilst it is over, I now look to see what opportunities will be available, in the next period for a similar one.

She is currently self-employed, but wants to highlight how important that is. I still find, I still consider my own five for the future commitment as part of my work. Gosh, Tammy, that is pretty incredible. however, having additional support would allow me to focus in ways that wouldn't otherwise be possible.

So really I think what I'm trying to say here is that if you are listening to this and you have a notion that you'd like to be a five for the future kind of person, but you don't wanna do it yourself necessarily. Why not? Why not help Tammy out really is what I'm trying to say. Why not get in touch with Tammy?

Tammy Lister. You can probably find, her on Twitter, LinkedIn, all these other places. Or you can go to bin nate thoughts.com and get in touch. She has been a really valued member, on in the recent past and obviously that sponsored contribution period has ended and it would be nice to, nice to see that going.

I think what a, nice person Tammy is. So that's me advertising for Tammy. I think, I dunno quite if that was, what everybody expected from that article or if anybody wants to contribute, but yeah. Good luck, Tammy. I hope it works out. Anybody wanna add or shall we move on? I want to say that, yes. if you are a company, that is making money thanks to WordPress and as saying Nathan, not really wanting to be involved yourself to contribution, then it's perfectly fine to sponsor someone else.

[00:40:29] Patricia BT: And that's great that Ami posted this. I did the same one months ago. And yeah, it's, great to be sponsored to allow ourself to really. Work and take it a bit like a job, to be focused and not having, to think, okay, now I have to do something else because I, need to make money on my business or stuff like that.

You're dedicated an amount of time because you know that you are paid for it. Yeah. And, and I think Tammy would definitely appreciate, the ability to do what she has been doing and all of the different pieces continuing. That would be really great. Great. Okie doke. Okay. Let's move on to the next piece then.

[00:41:13] Nathan Wrigley: oh. Unless Rob or Kathy want to add anything. If not, I'll just crack, on with this. No. Okay. so this is WP Tavern, which has been, brought back a, text-based version of the Tavern, at least anyway, has been brought back from the, the abyss, the work, the podcast has been going. But the, The text-based stuff has, come back to life with Ner and this one was a summation of this article, really, black Friday Sales Statistics and Trends for 2024, which came out on woocommerce.com. I don't know if, if you run a product or a service or have something that you sell into the WordPress space, but it, would seem from the data that we're about to talk about that wow.

It's like the biggest thing of the year. and my experience is the same. I end up putting off purchasing stuff. Up from about now until Black Friday comes along. I'm really, reluctant to buy any tech even if things break. 'cause I'm thinking I could probably save a load of money in the near future.

But here we go. Check these stats out. This is really interesting. So WooCommerce has unveiled its 2024 summer survey shedding light on Cyber Monday, black Friday. Okay, black Fri. So here's the, headline, black Friday sales account for a major share of annual revenue. and it says here, BFCM Black Friday, cyber Monday contributes to approximately 30 to 50% of yearly sales.

The survey revealed that 66% of stores re, re reported increased sales during the holiday season. In fact, for some stores, 50% of their annual revenue comes from that period. So here we go again. 46% of stores see a uptick of 30%. During that time, 26% generate 30% of their revenue. During that time.

So that's, in a couple of weeks, they're doing a third of the year and 8% of the company surveyed it's 50% during that period of time. planning is obviously a big thing. larger stores with an annual, income of 250 k, a 12% more likely to begin preparations early. 81% of stores actively plan.

You can see the stats there. 26% of stores are looking at a month ahead, one to four weeks. 27% of stores are like three months away. They're planning 13% of stores, gosh, six months, up to six months. They're planning. And 4% of stores are doing this whole thing six months in advance. So no sooner as one ended than the planning for the next one comes along.

And there's more in this, but I didn't really go into it too much more, just this will be the last little point. 26% of stores plan to increase their inventory as a result of the preparation for this. as well. So honestly, from the end user point of view, I get a bit carried away with Black Friday and I do buy a lot, but I don't really have an intuition as to how important it's, but that makes me think, gosh, if you really aren't planning for this, you are massively leaving money on the table.

It would appear that in the last decade our entire buying cycle has now been skewed towards this little window of time. And, you'd be mad, to ignore that. So I don't know if you are the same as me, you just stock things up from about now and don't buy phones and don't buy computers and don't buy this, that, and the other thing.

But, anyway, over to you. If you've got anything you wanna add, very interesting. What I would suggest Nathan, is first of all, if your business and you're prepping for Black Friday, you probably should have already done it by now. And if not, do it now. That's the first thing. the second thing is, interestingly enough, if we've noticed the trend lately used to be Black Friday, we know falls around American Thanksgiving, that's the stop of the, start of the Christmas shopping season.

[00:45:06] Rob Cairns: Haven't you noticed in the last couple years the Black Friday sale start earlier and earlier and earlier. So I've noticed like early November, sometimes end of October, people already in that mode. So it's become more a period than just a day, which is even more interesting. I dunno if anybody's noticed that trend, but just Yeah.

[00:45:29] Nathan Wrigley: Food for when I was a kid and I'm now exceedingly old. I am not that old, but I'm quite old enough to know. we can, argue about that later. but, when I was a kid, nothing. Nothing was on sale before Christmas. Absolutely nothing. We had this great thing called the January sales and on January the second, so everybody had January the first off, January the second was the day that everything, went on sale.

And they basically were trying to push stock that they hadn't sold over the Christmas period. And then, I don't know when I got to about, maybe 12, 15 it, that, that got moved back to Boxing Day. So that, I dunno if you use that phrase, but that's the day after Christmas day. So the 2020 We do, yeah. Okay.

Yeah. so all the sales started the day after Christmas and then it crept forward to before Christmas. 'cause obviously all these platform, all these platforms and companies are now competing on that as well. So it got moved forward into the middle of December. And then honestly, like 10 years ago, somebody said to me, are you gonna do anything for the Black Friday sale?

And I was like, what the heck is that? That just sounds like a weird made up phrase from a Star Trek novel or something. and I'd never heard of it. And now, like you say, Rob, it's not even that day. It's like creeping into October and I expect to give it enough time. It'll creep into, it'll creep into August and September and all of these kind of months.

And if we, wait long enough, it'll be the January sales, but a whole year in advance. it's not. The other thing that's changed in trends, WordPress aside, is if you look at retail, it used to be those sales after Christmas were true sales. Now they're actually bringing in special merchandise to get people to spend all the gift cards they got for Christmas.

[00:47:25] Rob Cairns: So if you ever look at those sales, like on Boxing Day, which you have in the uk, and we have in Canada, because our, of our relationship with the uk, those sales, 90% of the tech stuff that goes on sale are special skew numbers that don't exist the rest of the year too. Ah. So you gotta be, there's a lot of that going on as well.

So you gotta be really careful. It's not what it used to be when you and I grew up by far. Have you, ever come across a, web app called Honey? It's now owned by PayPal. Have any of you come across this? So it's like a browser extension, you put it in and you say to honey, okay, I'm interested in this, I don't know, tv, whatever it may be, whatever thing you can find online to buy.

[00:48:07] Nathan Wrigley: And you say to Hani. Start capturing data on whether the price goes up and the price goes down, and it's capturing that data whether you want it or not, so when you go to the website and look, what's really interesting is about now roundabout, now all the prices start to creep up. Yeah. So that for a period of time they're up, and then at some point they'll drop so that the retailers can claim that it's just this, like price reduction, which is not true.

It's basically gone back down to the price that it was prior to being put artificially up. And and in the UK there's been a lot of moves to outlaw this practice because it's not really that great, is it? If you artificially inflate the price knowing nobody's buying right now because they're in this Black Friday cycle, then you put the price back to where it was and claim that it's dropped by, I don't know, 40% or something like that.

but we're all playing, we're doing, we're all part of it. We're all playing these games and those stats show it, There's no way of escaping it if you're a store owner. Everybody's involved. We're all complicit, we're all doing it. And I bet we all have shopping carts full of stuff that we don't need on Black Friday.

[00:49:17] Rob Cairns: A lot of online sites like Amazon and others have gone to pricing, like we pay for tickets or hotel reservations, depending on the time of year, the prices fluctuate as well. So you gotta be really careful of that. And they're playing that game. If a product goes into more demand in an online store, they're actually charging more for the product.

They're doing that whole fluctuation game. It's, ridiculous actually. I, find that kind of adjacent to being unethical actually. in the UK it was highlighted really well this last couple of weeks. I dunno if you've heard, there's a band called Oasis back in the, yeah, back in the sort of nineties.

[00:49:55] Nathan Wrigley: They were really popular and they all fell out. The band fell apart. And then just recently, last few months, they decided to reform next year. And, and so they've been, they've created this tour and they've put tickets on sale through Ticketmaster. And, the politics of it, I don't care. I don't care who's done the actual selling of the tickets, whether it's a promoter or whether it's the band, but they've done this like surge pricing.

So people were going onto the website to buy a ticket, 135 pounds, UK pounds, to discover that it was like, it had gone up to 3 50, 400, 500, and in some cases wait for it. Six. Thousand pounds and, I just think that's nuts. it's a commodity. It should have a price and you should be able to pay that price depending, regardless of how many people are in a queuing system anyway.

I think the band have done quite well out of it, so they're not complaining, but public opinion of the band has hit like a bit of an all time low. I dunno, I think playing with things like that is, is a little bit of a, poison chalice really. You might make a bit of money out of it for a few years, but then when people become disgruntled by that kind of pricing and know it, see it for what it is and I imagine Ticketmaster will take the ethical hit at some point.

Anyway, we've gone completely off topic there. Kathy, anything to add about Black Friday, cyber Monday? Patricia, same thing. Yes, I. as a user point of view, I do like you, I'm waiting now for November for to see if, if a product is going to, go down and specifically in the WordPress world, would those, product not sell if there were no Black Friday for them?

[00:51:46] Patricia BT: If they don't do Black Friday, the, sales are spread over, on, the wall here. Or would, they lose, sales, because, if I'm interested now, on a product, I'm going to look in the way back machine to see if they, if they usually do a Black Friday or not, for last November and, November 22 and 21.

So if they never do, I say, okay, I can buy it now. So if you really need something, if you think of the company, would they do the same amount of sale over the whole year instead of 50% of the sales on the, that period? Or would they sell less? It, I, don't really know, but I do know what you mean because you can easily go back and look, aren't you, through a simple Google search whether a WordPress product has had a Black Friday sale?

[00:52:40] Nathan Wrigley: And I, I've gotta say from my point of view, I think it is the minority that don't do a sale. I think those that hold out. And just offer the regular pricing throughout that period. I think they're in the minority because there's such competition for every dollar at that moment. And, also that if you don't buy it at Black Friday, you're probably not gonna buy anything up till after Christmas.

So that's another, it's another couple of months gone as well. yeah, I think most, companies in the WordPress space are doing it, but like you said, you can do a quick Google search, but it's, yeah, it's weird. little comment from Steve comments. Steve Mosby, Sorry Steve, I'm not entirely sure how to say your surname.

the new iPhone comes out later and Steve needs to replace his, hopefully the price of the previous model will drop for Black Friday. Yeah, you can always hold out hope. If it's an iPhone, good luck. Who knows what kind of invented numbers Apple are gonna come up with. And and Peter's talking about that, article he's saying, I couldn't find out how many people were surveyed.

And how it was conducted. So yeah, that's a good point. Obviously the larger number of people that were surveyed the better. However, having said all of that, I do a, I do a Black Friday listing. I do this page where I get people to throw their deals in and, and every Black Friday I delete the data of the previous ones and, I don't carry any data over.

And I get about 400 companies reaching out and filling out the form and telling me what their deal is. And I'll be doing that again this year. We, always have it, actually, I've got the page here somewhere. yeah, this thing, black Friday page, we just list out loads of stuff and it's at wp builds.com/black.

So it is really popular because all the companies seem to go there, fill out that page, and then we, all the deals. I've got these sponsored slots at the top if for that kind of thing. But also the deals appear down here and I've had, no, none so far, 'cause I haven't promoted it, but when I do start promoting it, I'll get, yeah, 2, 3, 400 in there.

So it is really popular. and typically it's somewhere around 25, 30 to 40%. Occasionally you get like a real outlier that does something bizarre, like 80%, but mostly it's in the 30 to 40% range. yeah, my advice would be, hold off, if you're buying something in the WordPress space at the moment, and wait and see.

I don't wanna, I don't wanna say that, but. That's what everybody does, so there you go. Kathy, anything to add to that before we move on? I've run Black Friday sales. I've got ideas of from the product side, and I would just like to tell anybody who's listening that is managing WordPress product. This is the perfect time for you to create content that helps people understand how their product, how the product that you, you're selling helps people that are shopping for Black Friday sale sales, how it's going to help them improve their business, how it's going to help them serve their clients better, like really up your content game and be more of service to the people that you're selling to rather than just sell.

[00:56:02] Kathy Zant: And your sales will blow everybody else outta the water. Guaranteed. Can I ask you, Kathy, what did it feel like, because it feels to me as if everybody. From, not quite now, but from, let's say two or three weeks from now, everybody's gonna be drowning and, in, the content that's coming their way.

[00:56:21] Nathan Wrigley: So that be that, emails or blog posts or what have you, it must be really hard. And I, don't know, demoralizing if that's the right word, to cut through that noise. Were you talking about talking to your existing customers or trying to get new ones as well? yeah, first of all, there's a lot of companies that'll just say, oh, our sale is only for new customers and they don't take care of their existing customers, which is just ridiculous because if somebody bought your Black Friday sale last year, they're just gonna let their license expire and just get a new one.

[00:56:50] Kathy Zant: so make it, make your Black Friday sale. Honor the people who have stuck that out with you for the past year or two or five. so do something special for those people as well. But you also have people who are in your funnels, people who are watching you, who are listening to you, who are wait, like you guys waiting to buy, okay, I really want this license, but I'm gonna wait and see what Black Friday.

Talk to those people that don't try to talk to a hundred percent of all WordPress users, but the people who are watching you And it's a perfect time for you to really solidify not just the sale, but a long-term relationship with those people by helping them not just understand the sale and how much money they're saving, but what is your product really going to do for them.

It's also a great time for all of the marketers to go talk to your product teams and say, Hey, it's coming Black Friday. What. What cool new feature can we launch right before the sale so I can talk about it as a marketer and really help people understand that this product is going to help people build sites faster, better, more secure, all of, whatever your value proposition is and really because there's some, there are people watching and, those are the people you need to talk to.

[00:58:04] Nathan Wrigley: Do you find then, and I don't know what your experience was with, at your previous companies, would you hold off feature releases? Let's say you've got this exciting new feature that you wanna release. Would you, be asking people to actually, can we just hold off, it might have been ready to ship in July.

Are you telling people actually if we just wait another couple of months we can, get it out into the market at this crowded time? It's usually, hurry up you guys, can we get this done and get this launched by the, oh, guess the other way around the sales. Yeah. So it's, always what can we do?

[00:58:36] Kathy Zant: Or if we can't launch it by Black Friday, what, what can I talk about that's coming? because people aren't just buying for what the product does today. They're buying a yearly license, most likely. And so they're buying for, what is it gonna do for me in a year? What's it gonna do for me in six months?

So as long as you have a product feature that's going to release, like within the next month, working with your product team and asking them like, what's this going to really do so that you can at least talk about this is what's coming, this is what you're investing in. So that's all my advice to product marketers.

Nice. Sie, can I, jump in for a sec. I love what you just said and one of the things you hit on was taking care of your existing customers. 'cause as marketers and business people, we know the cost to keep an existing customer Yes. Is cheaper than the cost of acquiring a new customer. and, the worst companies out there, the telecom companies, I don't care what anybody says, the cable companies, the cell phone companies, here's your deal.

[00:59:34] Rob Cairns: And then as a customer you have to fight with them to stay on their gravy train. And it's come on guys, haven't you figured this out yet? And you're speaking to the converted here. So thanks for highlighting that. Appreciate it. The, I had a really interesting conversation with my, with a company the other day and it was really fascinating how quickly they capitulated in the face of opposition.

[00:59:58] Nathan Wrigley: I went to them and I have been going to them for quite a while and saying, can I, Can, you gimme a better deal? And they've been saying, no, And now my renewal is up, so it's an annual subscription, my renewal is up. And and I said the exact same sentence, and they're like, oh yes, oh yeah.

and I managed to cut this subscription in one. so I'm paying whatever it is, I'm now paying a third for the exact same thing. and it was what Kathy was saying, treat your existing customers. So if somebody bought a Black Friday, I know a lot of the plugins they offer, I don't know the, what, how would you describe it?

What would you call it? Where on renewal you get the, mandatory discount. 40%, 30%. And I, I always thought that was a good way of doing it. And sometimes there. S their dis discount for renewing is better than their Black Friday deal. And I always thought that was a nice moral position to be in.

if you as an existing customer subscribing for one more year are paying less than the people who've done the Black Friday deal, that just makes me feel pretty warm and fuzzy about the company that I'm dealing with. And, yeah. Yeah, in the WordPress space, that's a piece of cake to do with all of the sales technology that we've got.

So there you go. If you, if you would, if you are interested in listing your thing on the WP Builds, black Friday page, it's totally free. it'll, all the deals will start to come down here. the best place to go to is, this thing, if you go to wp builds.com/black. And then there's a bottom here which says, add a deal.

And if you click on that, it'll open a new tab. and then there's a, just a form to fill out. It's got quite a few fields. Apologize about that. I have to get a certain amount of information from you because I need to know it so that I can list it and it, so it's an image date. It starts.

What category does it fall under? What it's called? What's the URL and Blahdi. Blahdi blah. So yeah, WP builds.com/black. Click that add a deal, thing. And it, there's no cost. Just, I'll just put it up there and then you can, you can have the bum fight. With all the other, companies out there and try and get your product or service noticed, during, the Black Friday.

have we got any comments about that? Here we go. Rick. Hello Rick. The moment I managed to convince a few of my bigger clients with data not to focus on Black Friday, life simply became, became instantly simpler for me. Nice. That's a good way of going, isn't it? And often It is interesting.

I get an email which drops in my inbox a few weeks before Black Friday, kinda like now from the companies who aren't doing Black Friday, just saying, look, here's a heads up. We're not doing Black Friday. Just so that this is what we're doing. And I always thought that was quite an intelligent move as well, so that there isn't that anticipation of people.

And, Rick, nice to, nice to meet you. Thanks for joining us. Let me make that go away. Seen enough of that. Okay. what's next? just, just a quick one. Say I did a podcast episode with Jonathan, Boer this week over at, the Tavern, and it was all about, the learn learn.wordpress.org. If you haven't been there lately, it's had a, real big overhaul, a lot of.

A lot of time, dare I say it, money, money time kind of thing has been invested, by lots of five for the future types things, but also by automatic and various other entities making those resources really credible. And, Jonathan just explains what the intuition is, how they're gonna make these things called learning pathways in the future.

Whereby instead of just having one course discreet for I don't know, an hour, it's gonna be broken up into component parts and it'll be like an LMS sort of system where you can follow, if you're a novice to WordPress, if you're a novice plugin developer, if you're a prof, an advanced WordPress plugin developer, those kind of things.

And so there's a lot of work going on over there. that was all about that. And, if you haven't been recently, head over to learn.wordpress.org. I'll just click that button. You'll be able to see. It's got a really nice shiny new design and, the content that's going on over there is pretty incredible.

so go and check it out. and if you've got any clients, that are unfamiliar with WordPress, there's tons of nice stuff on there, over there that will help your clients to, to onboard to the WordPress experience. I don't suppose anybody's got anything to that, but I just wanted to thank Jonathan for coming on the podcast with me and, yeah, show me what it was all about.

Okay. here we go. This is Patricia's Moment to Shine. if you are in any way connected with going to WordPress events, it, chances are you've got a meet up account me top.com, and, that's how a lot of the WordPress events are organized. You go to meetup.com and you sign up and you get your ticket and bloody blah blah.

but blah, blah, blah. Gather Press, which is a WordPress plugin, is an alternative to meetup.com. I don't know if you want to give us your little two minute introduction to what Gather Press does, Patricia, and then get into the updates that have been going, on over there. But, yeah, over to you, Patricia.

[01:05:11] Patricia BT: Thank you. yes, gather Press it's too thick is the plugin itself that can be installed on any website, that you have. But it's also the proposal that we published in, January to, have gather press integrated into the wordpress.org ecosystem, the network to replace, meetup.com for the local events.

So this updates, we were asked to, give updates about the advancement of the plugins of the plugin, sorry. And also about, what is necessary now to go to the next step. And actually next week at the World Camp US contributor day, Mike and Vin and Steve, Steve and Mervin Hernandez and Mike Ery, are going to have a table at the contributor day.

So that's, really great to meet the community. They are community, they are working organizer meetup organizers. And, also to meet with the meta team. we were asked to give an update and to have a, to run a test, in independently, hosted somewhere else to have a test, to have feedbacks from current Meetup organizers, and to implement the improvement and the feedback request before we can ask the meta team to integrate it to the workers.org ecosystem.

because it's a lot of work to integrate it and Meta team is, has a lot of work already. So that will be great. They will meet next week at the, contributor day. Do you, get the feeling, Patricia, that this is it's, inching closer towards being a default as opposed to me up.com?

[01:07:01] Nathan Wrigley: 'cause I do know quite a few people who run WordPress meet ups and there's definite gripes about me up.com and the things that they have access to or don't access to. And I think that's part of it, isn't it? Is having access to your own data and the audience that you've created and so on, how close is it getting, are you getting a feeling that you're getting there, that it will become some kind of default in the near future?

[01:07:23] Patricia BT: Yes. actually the proposal we posted in January, was, to have a pilot program. So anyway, there will be a pilot program, to test it and, but before the pilot program can be there, we have to run now tests, somewhere else. that's why if any of you is a meetup organizer, join the tests and please give us your feedback and feature request.

And when this is. Done. then the, meta team can, IM, and, the Gather press team can implement that for the pilot program. And when the pilot program is successful, because it'll be successful, hey, then, all the new groups and maybe the old groups that want to, move could be moved.

I think it's $23. Yeah, 20, $23 a month per group in the world. Okay. So that at the WordPress community is paying to meetup.com. the leadership, I guess in the community team is, eager to see that going forward. And actually, I joined the Gather Press team last year, but it's, a project that is already a few years, and yeah.

[01:08:44] Nathan Wrigley: How, would you, if you are a WordPress Meetup organizer, how would you, successfully run a test? Because if you are relying on Meet Up, then you've gotta use Meet Up. Yeah. So how, do you run a test? Like how, do you decide, because you've gotta jump to Gather Press for one event, right?

And then back into Meetup. how does it work? You have to use Meetup for now. Okay. The official, way is Meetup, but you can join the test and create a event and ask people to play the attendees. So there is, there is a link, If you are a member at, the bottom of the, of, your, page there, if you're a member of the community, no, it's not there.

[01:09:27] Patricia BT: there is, somewhere, join the tests and give us your feedback. is it this one test the second one, second bullet point. this one here. This one? Yes. Okay. If you're a Meetup organizer, you can come and test on our, it's a multi-site where every group has a, has their own, meetup group, which we have to find a new name because meetup is, will, would be replaced.

and how easy it is to use what feature they would like to see and stuff like that. And give us, their feedback and, when. That is done. The real pilot program could start with the help of the meta team. Okay. And for, real pilot, program, you're meaning where you actually use it to sort the events out and you're not using me top.com anymore, right?

Yeah, so you can run in parallel in the, for, the time of the pilot program, but the pilot program, the thing is that it has to be integrated on the.org network means for the user account. Got it. so people sign in, sign in with their, wordpress.org account. Okay. So this is the part that, that needs to be integrated and that will be done only after we have enough feedback and implement the features that are necessary, and ask by the community team.

[01:10:54] Nathan Wrigley: Courtney's saying that there's a table at Word Camp Us. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. we mentioned that. So if you are heading to Word Camp us in like, a week-ish. Ah, yes. good grief. Where did the, what the heck? It was ages. It was really far into the future, and now it's suddenly a week away.

okay. So if you wanna, if you're going to contribute today and you're not quite sure where your endeavors may lie, that's, that could be a good one. If you're into CRE creating WordPress events or just wanna give some feedback, gather, press looks very interesting, says Lawrence, do you run events, Lawrence?

And if so, do you use meet up.com or are you doing it all by yourself? And, Courtney again, I'm so excited about Gather Press because it could help us better track contributions to WordPress among camps, meet ups, do action and other kinds. Events. Nice. The thing is that the data now for now is on meetup.com and there is nothing we can do, and we can ask maybe a feature or two to meetup.com, but it's not, it's not hours, Yeah. Then on workforce.org, everything is possible. You can add whatever your, the, community needs, Yeah. So this is one of the thing, and data privacy and stuff like that, if you are not going to work, s you can still join. an I event means, Mike from the gatherers team will be at the, at contributor day.

[01:12:24] Patricia BT: We will also start a, Zoom call where anyone can join, so you can join and contribute together, press even from. Anywhere in the world. Nice. So you can see that somewhere in, in the post

[01:12:40] Nathan Wrigley: we talk about, go down when we talk about the, contributor day. What computers here? Yeah. Remotely. This one here, you can even, it says you can even join us remotely via a video called During Contributor Day if you do not attend work. Oh, okay. So it's not like a after the event, it, this is actually joining into the table live.

Neat. Yes. Hopefully you're wrangling all of the attendees for that using, gather Press. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Not meet up. Yeah, that's great. And, you, can register for that. Oh, that's Lovely's. Great. Honestly, I think this is, nobody thinks, that it was a bad decision. I don't think at the time Meetup was probably the right way to go back in the day when we were scrambling around for a, solution.

But it does feel now as if, we've got some kind of capture on Meetup. And I think a lot of people would like to be able to know that they're in control of that data and be able to. Do things with that data, especially if you're running a, an event which, although it might not be a WordPress or org event, is something to do with WordPress and you wanna be able to do that inside of your WordPress install.

just replying to my question, Lawrence said, I asked him if he was running an event and he said, no, not yet, but he's looking to run some online and it would be able to help you with that. Nice. Yeah. in the past for sure. meta helped, a lot to discover, but nowadays, a lot of people are. Know about an event because it's in their dashboard.

[01:14:09] Patricia BT: So that would be the same. Yep. And, because organizer promote on social media and less, coming from Meetup because they are there for other things, Yeah. yeah. Yeah, It's a good point. I think a lot of people, rely on Meetup because you do get that kind of organic thing.

[01:14:28] Nathan Wrigley: If you, are browsing around on Meetup is a, bit like YouTube Surface is the next useful video for you to watch. Meetup does surface the next useful event for you to attend. And I've actually been captured by quite a few events that meet up, sent my way, and I didn't even know they existed.

There's all sorts going on in the UK and. really interesting to see. And it'd be interesting, that, it'll be a shame when that goes. 'cause I think the, one that I attend, the WordPress London Meetup, I think there's quite a lot of people that hear about that event through meetup.com just browsing and some kind of thing in the bottom of the, an email that received with their tickets for a different event.

So it'd be interesting to see how this project goes. Anyway, there you go. That's, some updates. Thank you Patricia. And obviously you can probably see here that Patricia was the person that wrote this. It was, came out on the 5th of September and it's called Update about the Gather Press project on make.wordpress.org.

that was a bit of a back and thank, you for mentioning. Oh, no, of course. Yeah, that was a bit of a back and forward between me and Patricia. So Kathy, Rob, anything you wanna say before we move on? Nope, I think it's great. I think it's awesome that we're getting off of Meetup. They've had, some issues over the past and I think, And the, and then Courtney mentioned also in the comments about how it's so great that we're gonna be able to get some analytics about what's going on. I think it's good all the way around, so thank you. Nice. Yeah, I agree. just very quickly, sorry Patricia, that's obliterated your face, hasn't it?

Let me, make it like that. There we go. so Lawrence again in reply to what I said, he said, yeah, I was looking at a meet up or to build something crude himself, gather press looks like exactly what I need. Yeah, it's, it's got a roadmap as you've just heard. go and check it out and you never know.

Lawrence, you might have useful feedback for the team. Lawrence, if you want to join, the test, or, you have two possibilities. Either you install the plugin on, cell, your own site and you test it there. Or you can test in the playground. Or if you are planning to start an official meetup group, you can join the test, on our test site, the, demo site.

[01:16:40] Patricia BT: So as you want. We are welcoming your feedback. Perfect, Thank you. So yeah, there you go. Gather press, really interesting project and is. Tackling from the WordPress side, the whole organization of those events from the WordPress side. Great. Have it all in house. That'd be really nice.

[01:16:58] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. we often have people from Yost on this show, particularly Tacho and, Yost have released something new and it's always nice to, to feature what they do. and it's called, I'll just read it to you. This is a, a PR release. it's got lots of fairly, superlative language, so I've.

Caught a bit of that out, but they've got a new SEO AI powered feature and it says, Yost AI optimized, designed to make SEO tools easier, sorry, tasks, easier for small businesses, freelancers, and so on. AI optimize harnesses the power of AI to enhance users content and ensure its search engine friendly all to improve rankings.

After drafting website copy and content, users often face the tedious challenge of manually optimizing for SEO, simply having content doesn't guarantee it'll be found in rank well, but Yost new optimize ai. AI optimize, simplifies the process, removing complexity, and it sounds like it's kinda like a one click solution.

Yeah. Here we go with just one click. No, it says we're just a click of the spark A icon users can improve their sites. SEO performance, thanks to AI powered suggestions that are tailored to enhance effectiveness of their content. I'm gonna take that on trust. I think Ster is a company that have probably earned a bunch of trust.

they've been around forever and, have a really fantastic product with lots of paid users. if you are a subscriber. it should be out by now. It's, only I think for Yost, SEO premium customers, and if you've booted yourself up to version 23.2, then you should have that. I don't know.

I'm, caught, I'm still at the stage where I would click that button and then read everything that it's created. I dunno if you've thrown in your lot with the AI overlords and have said, yep, you just crack on and do it. But I'm still no, read every word and I'm glad I do.

Because more or less, everything that se that AI creates is 90% at best, with the odd, like total calamity in there. but obviously, SEO Yost know what SEO is all about. There's probably some key things that they fed into their AI generation engine, which make that a little bit easier.

so go check it out. go and click update. Looks like if you're a paid subscriber, you've got it. And if you're not a paid subscriber, I presume you'll have to, subscribe to get it. yeah. Okay. Anything on that or should we crack on? We've got just a couple more to finish. Crack. Okay. Okay, let's do it.

again, this is just another thing. Katie, Keith is often on this show, and because she is, I think it's nice to, a bit of quid pro quo. they have released version four of their product tables plugin, and I just wanted to mention that if you are, I'm presuming they're gonna have a, a Black Friday sale.

But, if you are in the market for displaying your, WooCommerce products in a table with 1,000,001 different customization options, then check it out. Barn two plugins.com and, this is their product table and they've reached a version four. So that's really all I'm gonna say about that. Go and check it out.

Katie always writes, an interesting article if, memory serves all about the, the finances that they go through, and I think Black Friday might play an integral part of that. So very open and honest about it. What have we got, Patricia? Did you pop this one in? I think you did.

This is, Justin Tadlock, WordPress 6.7 Registering Blocks template. It's, a fairly technical piece. Was there anything you wanted to particularly say about this? Actually, you, ask us to add something, and I find this one really interesting. I'm not a developer, but collaborating with the Gather press team allowed me to, be a little more like, oriented in that direction and to see that a plugin can, will be able to.

[01:21:01] Patricia BT: To register block templates, it means you can come with your own plugin and have, those registered and ready to go with your, for example, a customer type that your plugin is, creating. I do not have more technical feedback for, that, but I just saw that some of the dev, that whom I know are very happy about it.

[01:21:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I wanted you to you all to discuss about Yeah, that's true. There was a bunch of people, again, this is, like you say, it's a bit above my pay grade to be honest. But, there was a few people who it, whose pay grade this is definitely in line with, and they were very excited about this. And, and I'm yet to understand why it is so exciting.

But, if you're a developer, apparently this is very exciting. So go and check it out. Anything that Justin writes is probably of, fairly exciting for me at least anyway. But, yeah, there was a lot of people that got very excited. a lot of people get excited when they go here. This is app sumo.com where people tend to go here and then lose the rest of the day buying SAS apps that they don't need.

And here's another one. I'm not suggesting you don't need this, but I did spy, it's been a while since there's been a word Pressy one, but I noticed this the other day. this is called gki. It's from a company that I've heard of before. If I just click on this, I think it'll take us to their website. I think it's WP Met, I think is their, yeah, there you go.

WP Met. And, it's a suite of blocks. it's the usual stuff. It's the kind of thing that cadence and stackable and all those other things do. They've got template libraries and whole load of blocks. But I just thought I'd mention it. If you want to give it a try, it is $59. What do you get for that?

I think it's probably one. Yeah. It looks like you get three sites for 59 bucks, 10 sites for 119 bucks, and then unlimited sites for 199 bucks. But in AppSumo favor. They've got this cast iron 60 day money back guarantee, and they genuinely don't quibble. If you click the re, I want my money back, you'll get it back without any questions asked.

So if this is your thing, go and check it out. appsumo.com and it's called Guten Kit. yeah. What, is there to say? This is like the new land rush, isn't it? in the WordPress space, how many blocks, can you fit into a suite? And in, in here it looks like a lot. There you go.

And that's it. I think. Have I got one more? Oh yeah. I just wanna hat tip to, Mattia Fle for, joining me on a podcast the other day. We talked about activity. Bob, if you are, if you're like me and you enjoy the fed verse, Mastodon, all those kind of things, then listen to this. 'cause it's gonna be really, interesting what's happening in the future.

if you wanna bind your WordPress website to a social network so that when people comment on a post that you create, those posts can be commented on, Mastodon, and then they'll go into your comments and if you reply, it'll appear in your comments, but it'll also go into Mastodon. And so it'll look like a native thread in there as well.

This, I feel, is like the, The gold standard of social networking. I want to get away from Facebook and dare I say it, Rob LinkedIn on all of those kind of things. And, and I want everything to be more open source and this just feels like a really nice way of doing it. Mark West Guard joins us.

Yeah, just right Mark with one minutes ago. And I went away from Facebook too, so there you go. I'm, yeah, I'm in that mode. So I, just think it's such a nice idea, back in the day before, like when Facebook came out. I had this real, like warm and fuzzy feeling about it, it did genuinely feel like, oh yeah, you can post off here and look.

All my mates see it. And I didn't do anything. I just, they just saw it because they clicked a like button or, or they became my friends or whatever. And then obviously we saw how that worked out and we saw that the way that got, hijacked and it became like a money making exercise.

And listen, I'm not gonna get into the politics, but it does appear that, you can have problems with politics and elections and things like that as well. So it doesn't, it just doesn't, I don't know, it just feels a bit icky, on the social network side of things. But the idea of owning your own data and everything being movable.

So if you know your, if your instance shut down, you can just take your followers and go somewhere else. And I don't know, it just feels nice. And the idea of being able to do it and your website, is literally an account on the Fed averse, even that is hard to understand. Like, how can a website be a.

Member of a social network and it's not like it's cross posting, so it's not you click a button, publish a post, and then it goes to Facebook. No, it is the post. The post is the thing that goes on the social network. It's pretty hard to get your head around 'cause of the, what we've got at the moment.

But yeah, really interesting. So go and check it out. Mattia, he built the activity PO plugin and then, I'm guessing Matt, caught side of it and said, come and work for automatic and work on this full time so that we can, we can make that happen. So yeah, really nice, really, nice. Just, a detail about gather Press, an upcoming feature is that the event will be also federated for the Oh, nice.

So are you using Mathias plugin, the activity pub plugin? I don't know how the dev do it. Yeah, I would imagine. I'd imagine you are, but maybe I am. I am here for community engagement and. Everything's that is not code. So Yeah. But yes, I, guess they, yes, it's, working with activity prep, which is a protocol, if I'm not mistaken.

[01:26:45] Patricia BT: That, yeah, that is, all over the, 30 verse, not only Mastodon, also other, yeah. Like things and, activity per actually Yeah. Makes that your site activity per plugin by materials profile is, that your site is on the ERs? Yeah. Your site is an account and if you post something, it goes on as a thing, and then, and it's just so cool when you see that somebody who's never visited your website has posted a comment on your website.

[01:27:19] Nathan Wrigley: But they've never been there. They don't even know it exists. They've just followed you on this social network and then suddenly their comments are appearing in your comments. So when you reply, they still don't need to go to your website. 'cause it's appeared as a reply in their social network of choice.

And like you say, it's not limited to Mastodon. There's, pixel fad and a whole bunch of other ones as well. And they're just using this protocol to send information backwards and forwards. And That's so neat. But, and, Mathias has been very helpful on the support forum of the plugin, because I had, some setup, specific setup, with my multi-site and stuff.

[01:27:54] Patricia BT: So he has been very helpful as well and replies and yeah. Wonderful. I love that. I love activity. Yeah, and Lawrence has asked if Etch is on the agenda, the biggest new story in the WordPress ecosystem in the last 20 years. it's not 'cause I dunno anything about it. Lawrence, do you.

[01:28:16] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know anything about it? Other than that it's the biggest thing. Once you know, let me know and then we'll be able to feature it. okay. That, I think that's it. We've basically reached an hour and a half. We've got one minute to go. so all that it remains for me to do is to eat this chocolate biscuit.

now Rob's got the idea. It's the, slightly humiliating, hand waving gesture. let me see if I can get everybody back. Are you all ready? Are you all ready to give us your hands? Let's do it. I know it's horrible, but I love it. I love it. There we go. There we go. I think we've got everybody. Thank you so much to my, three guests.

Thank you for Kathy joining us today and for Rob and for Patricia. Really appreciate it. I'm gonna be taking a couple of weeks off to the US Yeah, I'm getting on a plane on Sunday so the show can't happen 'cause I'll be on it. Do you know That'd be interesting trying to do it on a plane. Marcus Burnett joined us once from a plane.

not on the show. He was doing the comments but he was actually on a plane, which I just thought was like voodoo. How the heck? but yeah, I'm gonna be taking a couple of weeks off from this show 'cause I'm gonna be going to Word camp us. If you're there and you see me, I'd love to have a chat. I'm quite good at talking.

It turns out. come and say hi. Don't be a stranger. I'd love to catch up with as many of you as is human and possible. That would be lovely. Just quick straw poll. Rob, are you going? No, I'm not. Kathy, I will be there. Yay. All right, I'll definitely try and find you. And Patricia, are you going as well?

No. No. Okay. So Kathy, you see me at, obviously enjoy. Yeah, I, have a, meeting with your name on it, Kathy. That'd be really nice. But we'll see you in a week or so and we'll be back in three weeks time. So two weeks off. So everybody stay safe. I'm gonna try and find the button, which allows the show to end.

Yeah, stay safe. Have a good couple of weeks, and we'll see you next time on this weekend, WordPress, take it easy. Bye.