This Week in WordPress #310

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode number 310 entitled. Taco shaped hole. It was recorded on Monday the 7th of October, 2024. My name's Nathan Wrigley. And today I am joined by co-host Michelle Frechette, but I'm also joined by Courtney Robertson and by Marc Benzakein. Marc Benzakein can never quite get it.

But you'll hear more about that in the show. It's a WordPress podcast and we certainly have a lot to talk about, to be honest with you, we try to stay clear of the WordPress drama, which is going on at the moment and try to hunker down on WordPress itself. So we talk a lot about WordPress, 6.7 beater, one what's coming up and how you can test it. We talk about automatic plugging rollbacks.

This is the ability to roll back a plugin, which has automatically updated itself. I did a podcast with Andy freegan and we get into all of that. We talk about Drees from the Drupal project, his opinion on how WordPress as a community. I can move forward from what's going on at the moment. We also get into the WP campus research project.

They want some information from you, me and everyone. About WordPress and higher education. We also talk about web AI. Baked into a Chrome browser. I am excited about it. Apparently nobody else's to FAA is going to be enforced to log into wordpress.org. If you are a plugin developer, and there's a whole bunch of other bits and pieces. As well. And it's all coming up. On this week. In WordPress.

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Hello there. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. and all the other good things. It's, what is it? It's the 7th of October, and it's this week in WordPress, episode number 310. If you've tuned in to watch us drone on about the WordPress drama, then, you may as well stop now because we're gonna try and avoid it, if that's all right with you.

I think there's enough loudness elsewhere, and so we're gonna try and actually focus on some word pressy stuff, which will drop into it. I don't think there's any avoiding it entirely, but the, plan isn't to go like thermonuclear on that topic. Go to Twitter, just type in the hashtag WordPress, and you can enjoy it all there.

It's all happening, live in real time with lots of people getting irate and angry. But over here, we're gonna maintain the happiness that can come from being part of an open source software community. We're just gonna join forces, sing Kumbaya. And be, be very happy. More kittens and puppies please.

So many more kittens and puppies. Yeah, I've still got that video actually. I might be able to must that up in a few moments. as always, I like monkeys. I think we need monkeys. I don't, have monkeys on tap, I'm afraid. I've only got the cats, cat's dogs. And next week, it's gonna be all about circus, the Monkeys Circus.

Yeah. as always, if it was just me on this show, it'd be dreadfully boring. 'cause I wouldn't have it anywhere near enough stuff to say, and I certainly wouldn't have the intelligence to say it. So I always bring in the intelligence. The intelligence this week comes in the form of three other people, first of all, over there on my screen at least.

Anyway, Michelle Ette, co-host of the episodes, which she's on. Nice to have you with us, Michelle. How's life good to be here? Life is good. I'm a little tired because we had a, oh, tell me why. We had a Word camp this weekend, so Word Camp Rochester happened on Saturday. Yeah. And if you've ever been an organizer for a Word camp, you know that Monday is difficult.

Oh, I'm, pleased that the event is now behind you at least. And can I just ask you to sum it up in a, shorter space of time as you feel comfortable with, did you, was it an enjoyable experience? Did you manage to talk about WordPress and not just the politics around WordPress? We had 16 amazing speakers who gave some really awesome talks.

[00:05:58] Michelle Frechette: We had a workshop. It was phenomenal. And the drama talk was absolutely very limited. most of the attendees weren't even. Aware of what was going on because they're business as usual. So it's mostly the insiders that were, having some private conversations here and there. But for the most part, it was just business as usual and it was a phenomenal event.

[00:06:19] Nathan Wrigley: Gosh, that's really interesting. 'cause even people in attending an event, they're not inside that little bubble. That's fascinating. I watched a tech podcast the other day, which tried to tackle the story, and it was so replete with errors, and I just thought, do you know what, that's interesting that it's full of errors because it's not that important for them to do the fact checking.

It's just, they're just, it's not that big of a story, but of course to us it's a big thing. Anyway, there she is. Michelle Fette. She is the Director of Community Engagement for Stella WP at Liquid Web. In addition to her work at Stella WP Michelle is, here we go, the podcast barista at WP Coffee Talk.

Co-founder of Underrepresented. Oh, easy for me to say. Underrepresented in tech.com. Creator of wp speakers.com and also wp career pages.com. She's the direct executive [email protected]. Co-host of the WP Motivate podcast co-host, also Audacity Marketing podcast and WP Constellations podcast. She's an author, a frequent organizer and speaker as we heard an organizer of WordPress events and is living outside of Rochester, New York, where she likes to take nature photographs.

[00:07:28] Michelle Frechette: I did. And one final URL. If you wanna just check out the whole gamut of things on offer from Michelle Head to meet michelle.online. yeah, thank you so much for joining us once more. I really appreciate it. Good to be here. Thank you. Yeah. And we're also joined by Courtney Robertson. There's Courtney. How you doing Courtney?

[00:07:47] Courtney Robertson: I am doing well today. I'm enjoying my coffee and getting started for the week. Yeah. Nice. I had a lovely time. Escaping to state parks and such over the weekend. Okay. Yeah. Trying to get into nature and stop. it's easy when you go where there's no mobile reception. Oh, yeah. Nice. cannot be bothered there.

[00:08:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Perfect. Courtney Robertson is an accomplished, open source developer advocate at GoDaddy, a dedicated WordPress training team, faculty member, co-founding board member of the WP Community Collective. And she engages with audiences with her relatable insights on getting involved in supporting contributors in the open source community.

She's a professional educator merging her teaching expertise with her passion for technology, both on and off the stage and in the WordPress community. Courtney is one of two or three people that I go to every week. While I don't directly go to her, I just consume all. Bits and pieces that she posts everywhere.

And, sadly, took a bit of a weekend off this weekend. And so my page, that's okay. I took a bit of a weekend off too, but it was fascinating to me actually, on a, on that, what's been happening in the WordPress space. It was interesting that my normal roots of finding what's going on in the WordPress space came up very dry this week.

I would say there was about a quarter of the amount of content there normally is being published in RSS feeds. yeah, and I reached out to a few people and said, what's going on? And they basically said, it's just everything is getting drowned in all the noise. Yeah, yeah. anyway, thank you so much for all that you do.

Absolutely. There was loads more to auto biography, but ly and I wanna, oh yes. We don't need all of that, but I wanna give a shout out to James Lau, who is in the chat. I know James was one of the speakers for Rochester. He was, I didn't get to go to Rochester, but I had the opportunity to meet James at Montclair last year.

[00:09:35] Courtney Robertson: had some food together at the after party and such, and I know it was a big deal for James to be speaking at this event. So congrats James. Looking forward to seeing one in person, hopefully at a camp in our general North Mid-Atlantic vicinity in the near future. nice, I'll get to the comments in a moment, but first of all, I feel it's important to introduce our third and final guest.

[00:09:57] Nathan Wrigley: There he is. Mark. Oh, no. Oh no. I know it. I know it. I know it. benzocaine. Yes. Awesome. Awesome. I was just gonna tell you to say Johnson or something like that. it's, I got it this time. I had to say the word mark. I had to say the word Novocaine in my head first, and then I got it. Oh, dear.

[00:10:20] Marc Benzakein: as long as you, as long you spell it correctly in your head, I'm good. Yeah. I fully appreciate you being here. It was very nice to meet up with all three of you in Portland, Oregon just a few weeks ago. And, yeah, mark was there too with hanging out with, with the person he works with Dennis Dawn and from Maine, wp.

[00:10:37] Nathan Wrigley: And, on that note, mark has been involved in the WordPress community for over 14 years. He's currently the marketing manager at Main wp, which is a self-hosted non SaaS WordPress management dashboard, and will soon be starting his own non WordPress related podcast. You can learn more about the podcast, right?

I'm gonna have to try and pause this XV or XV. SZ or Z you say podcast.com. What's XVSZ? What's that? So it's a, basically a podcast, where we bring in like different generations and discuss issues of the day. So it's, it could be politics, it could be pineapple on pizza, it could be anything.

[00:11:19] Marc Benzakein: But the idea is that each generation, this each generation, yeah, I know Generation X. Awesome. But, Anyway, the idea is that every generation has something to bring to the table. And so, my, concept is, I like to think of myself as like a generation of wisdom and things like that, but maybe not as much energy.

and then you've got the younger generations who have a lot of energy and a lot of ideas and creativity, and you bring it in together in the same, under the same roof, and have these very respectful conversations where we share our perspectives and, learn from each other and grow. That's, I think that, I think that generations tend to disqualify or dismiss other generations very easily.

And I'd like to actually open up the dialogue a little bit more, other ancient cultures have done over the years. They've respected the wisdom of the ages, but also they've also respected the, energy of the youth. And, so that's the concept. And, I've been working on it for, I've been working on it for about two years and I'm like, okay, I really gotta get this thing going.

So you gotta do it. Yeah. Yeah. I'll tell you what I've just realized. I paused it utterly wrong, didn't I? It's X versus Z, correct. Podcast. Okay. Okay. It's not, is Paul, which is more o which will be more obvious on the website than it's okay. Like in the actual URL. Yeah. But the URL, if you wanna check it out when it finally comes out, is XVSZ podcast.com, all one word.

[00:12:42] Nathan Wrigley: and, and I have a landing page up right now, but it's nothing. It's, work, a work in progress. I don't know, I don't, I, I feel in my own heart, I feel like I'm still 15, you have to take one look and, sadly the reality, all you have to do is talk to your kids.

[00:12:59] Marc Benzakein: And That's right, dad, you're so not cool. yeah. Yeah. Okay. So let's go to a few comments. Just before we do that, I'll just tell you how you might comment best. the quickest way to do it is to go to wp builds.com, slash live. So you can see that URL on the screen, wp builds.com/live. You've got two options if you're logged into a Google account.

[00:13:21] Nathan Wrigley: Then you can use the chat widget on the right. If you're on desktop, it's below. If you're on a mobile and feel free, go for it. If you don't wanna be logged into Google or you've got an objection to that's fine. You can be a non logged in con, conversation list. If you click on the little live chat, which is inside the video, it's top I think it says live chat.

It's in a little black, what looks like a bottom. That'll pop out. It'll hover over the right hand side of the video, so you can use that instead. So send people there. If you've got friends relations dogs, cats, stick insects, beetles, anything you know that you wanna send here, I'd be fascinated to see how a stick insect would cope near a keyboard.

That would be an interesting view. but send them there and hopefully you'll be able to join in the conversation. Quite a few people have done that already. Let's have a little look, see who we've got from where. So we've got Lawrence, l Ledy joining us from, I guess in Australia. James Lau just got a mention.

Was that right? Was it James that you mentioned just now calling? Yes. Yeah. So congratulations for your, speaking endeavor, Cameron Jones. He's joining us. Hey, I, thought Cameron was gonna be on a yeah. Anyway, won't go into that. He sent me a message and anyway, sorry Cameron. I'll be quiet now.

Adam is joining us and saying, hi. Jose is also saying Hola and who else have we got? Max saying hi big. It's joining us. Saying hi from, is that the German flag? That's the German It is. what else have we got? Oh, of course Peter Ingersol as he does each week, joining us to tell us about the weather.

16 degrees. He says. Good. Good. Rainy morning. I dunno if the two things go well together. There you go. rainy morning from K Connecticut. Kinetic cut. Easy for you to say. I wanna say that a lot this week. 16 degrees. 61. Oh, it's a palindromic number. Look at that. 61 16. I didn't know that one was one. I know.

82 and 28 are, with some sun on the way. Thank you so much, Peter. I really do appreciate you dropping in each week. I really do. da. Oh yeah. Okay. this is about Cameron getting blocked. We, who knows if we'll get into that. Atif saying Hello. Hello. Hello, Marcus? good morning over here.

Headphone gang. Yeah, we're all doing the headphones. Good. See you all at the start of the week, Jeff, joining us. Gosh, there's so many. Thank you very much. this'll be Matt Madero, although it's marked as WP Minute. Mark has been involved in WordPress for 40 years, he says. okay. And feels like it sometimes.

Yeah, I'll bet. Cammie listening on my way to the gym this morning. Happy to see you all. Oh, that's nice. That's really nice. And Patricia is the final one to drop in something there, just before we hit record. and I'll bring Marcus in one up. Courtney, you were saying about the fact that there's, trouble in store in the neck of the woods where Marcus lives.

I don't know anything about it, sadly. Do you wanna just Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. half of my team directly at work is in the Orlando area, Marcus and Adam, Adam Warner that is, and I'm keeping a close eye on the weather, but also if you want to check out where pressors that are near zones that we know have some major weather patterns or other natural disasters, go from your average news source to the WP World site and you could zoom in and see what pressors you may know that might be impacted by that.

[00:16:46] Courtney Robertson: So if you scroll down just a little bit, Nathan. we go look halfway. There you go. There's a map and you could start the zoom in, towards certain areas. And this works for people around the globe. Now I am more a aware of what my direct coworkers are facing than I am at other parts of the globe, but the path right now looks like it's heading through the middle of Florida, coming in from the Gulf and heading west.

So if you wanna check in with any of your friends and loved ones in the area, this might help you find some of those folks. Thank you, Marcus, for making the WP World. Yeah, indeed. And, stay safe everybody. I, have no real intuition as to what that means, not having been in a hurricane, my thoughts are with you all.

[00:17:31] Nathan Wrigley: I hope you managed to stay safe. Yep. Nathan, on each of those, if someone clicks on the little, w flag icon that's there, you'll see the folks that are in that area. It does not give down to street address. Just city level. Yeah. Okay. Thank you so much. What a good idea. So you can check in with the WordPress community over at the WP.

World. So the title of the site is the WP World, but the WP World, if you wanted to do that. Okay. We, do we have any more comments, just David joining us as well from Phoenix. Hey, Dave, Arizona. okay. in which case we'll get stuck into the word pressy stuff. Before we do that, just a few little bits of self-promotional nonsense.

I hope that's all right with you lot. this is us wp builds.com. we are sponsored by, as you can see at the moment, it's GoDaddy Pro. Bluehost Omnis send and member full. Thank you so much for their ongoing support. Keeps the lights on over here once more. GoDaddy Pro Blue host, Omnis sender member. If you end up on any of their properties and you genuinely did come from us, don't, feel shy mention that was the case in it.

that's a nice quid pro quo. We, have a Black Friday page. It's very smart at the moment. There's only, I don't know, a handful of deals, but the way this goes is probably over the next week or two, companies will be contacting me and getting their deals put up there. But it's at wp builds.com/black.

That's wp builds.com/black. I'll pop that on the page. There it is, bookmark that. And then when your word pressy stuff comes over, the next, your word pressy, kind of Black Friday stuff comes around. You'll be able to search and filter for it. You click that little button. You can do it by category, by price, that kind of thing as well.

And you can see at the moment, we've got one person that sponsored us, that's Mark West Guard. Mark West Guard has sponsored this page. And if you wanna do the same and get yourself on this page, click this little get started button and you can find out more. WP builds.com/black. Okay. Have we got anything else to say on a sort of self-promotional note?

Yes, we do. One more thing, a couple of weeks ago I started a new show with Courtney all about community and these new shows that I'm doing are gonna be kinda like once every quarter. And each quarter Courtney's gonna be joining me and we're gonna sum up the WordPress community over the last three months.

Gosh, Courtney, we're gonna have a fair amount to say during that one, but thankfully the episode that you did was more or less exactly three months from the next one. So hopefully things calm down a little bit. Oh, dear. Yeah. if folks wanna find out how I'm following all of this news, that and keeping a pulse on the community, that's the episode I'm directing everyone to go find, how do I do this?

Courtney and I talked through how you, how you, how Courtney actually manages to keep on top of all the things going on. But I've started another show with, Tim Nash and we're gonna do the same sort of flavor. only his is from a security position and, we're gonna call it feeling insecure, with Tim Nash.

And so that was episode 3 9 2 of the WP Builds podcast. Like I say, it's gonna be every quarter roughly, and he is gonna focus in on some things that have been happening in the security space in WordPress, and then a few little tips and tricks to help you keep your site in tip top shape. Okay. That definitely is all the promotional stuff.

So let's get stuck into word pressy stuff, actual word stuff, not the stuff going on around WordPress. So this is way more than I remembered. So WordPress 6.7, beta one has come out if you're inexperienced or not, that's not the right word. If you're not really that new, if you're not really that. long standing in the WordPress community, you might not realize that the software goes through these like beta cycles where it's put out for testing.

And the more people that test it, the more likely it is that the version that ships and goes into the 43% of the internet will have less bugs in it. And so here we are, step one. Normally there's three beta cycles and this is the first of those. And this article, which you can find written by David Ald, came out on the 1st of October.

So it's pretty new and it indicates some of the bits and pieces in beta one. If you do wanna test, it's dead easy. It's genuinely drop dead easy these days. And the instructions of how to do it are just there. I won't bore you with that, but you can figure that out. I would recommend this last option, this playground option if you just want the super simple version of that.

Okay, so what's new and the answer is a boat load. So we've got the new 2025 theme. and it says some stuff here, which I, never I don't really know how to pause it, but it says here we are. I'll just read it. Inspired by glimpses of natural beauty and ancestry. Heritage invokes ideas of impermanence, the passage of time and continuous evolution, mirroring life's journey.

Okay? but you can check out the new theme if you download that and see what you make of it. You've also got the option to zoom. So this is new stuff. This is all new things that are gonna be dropping in, so you can zoom out to compose with patterns. And this idea is you've got this little icon, you click it, and rather than being right inside the full editor, everything just zooms right out so that you can see everything.

Oh gosh. I imagine like in a Google Doc, just clicking the, minus button and taking the, size of the page down, it just gets smaller and smaller so that if you've got a complicated, big pattern, you could see everything that's going on. It's really cool. You've gotta try it to see, and it, just does exactly what it says.

You get one eyeball on the whole thing, you can see all of it in one shot. Without the detail media improvements, you'll now be able to upload directly from your iPhone with the HEIC, image format, it's not gonna keep that because most web browsers won't display it, or at least some won't display it.

It's gonna turn it into a jpeg that's all happening. expanded block supports. so basically some blocks are gonna have, an extended range of options. The preview options, API, this one's a little bit above my pay grade, but it says here, the latest WordPress release enhances the preview options in the block editor, empowering developers to customize content views.

A new API allows plugin and themes to add custom items to preview, download dropdown menu, enabling users to see content in different formats or environments. And seemingly, quite a few theme developers are exceedingly happy about this. And, I'm sure they could explain more why, data views, which is the ability to add different context to your, lists, if you like, of posts and pages and things like that in WordPress, that shipped in 6.5 and there's gonna be more features added into that.

Block bindings so that you can connect one thing to another thing. that's gonna be, you're gonna be able to manage it directly. So it says, 6.7 will add polish to and open most underlying APIs, improving the overall user experience and add a ui, which allow you to connect attributes with custom fields to their binding sources.

Dead. Cool. Really interesting. A simplified and smarter query loop block. edit and control font size. Presets. View meta boxes in, in the i framed post editor. So you can decouple the meta boxes from the, content editor, which means that you can push it out the way, if you like, making it bigger, the, area that you're editing the content in.

Really big. And I think that's it. that's it. That's it. That's it. Yeah. That's it. That's it. Is it? That's it. So basically there's a boatload in there. Okay. And just reset, right? Cast your mind. Back two and a half weeks ago, I think we all lost sight. Of this, the software, like I said at the beginning of the show, if you wanna do the drama, have that fun on Twitter or whatever, I'm back to being about the project.

and there it is. There's the project in a nutshell. A ton of noise. Can I features? Yeah. Can I confess something here? I firmly believe in testing. This is not a, the test. This is not a confession. at that point. So the next test window, for beta two, we have going on at, midnight UTC into Tuesday.

[00:25:43] Courtney Robertson: So for me that is 8:00 PM Eastern time. I will be present, for that one. But the confession comes that I caused the rebuild because I showed up to the release party and Nathan at the time. So the rebuild means that something happened before we shipped. there is the party schedule. You could see what time this is all taking place in court.

Inside of a Slack chat. the general policy is once the release starts, you could tell the world the release is beginning, but you don't say it's out or anything until it's done. so it could take an hour, it could take a little longer. The betas tend to be a little slower during the release party.

Then others, especially if you're like me and you find a thing that causes the rebuild before we ship. So what I found is that on the, this is why I show up to these things. Nathan, do you still have the post up that had the, the info about? If you scroll down to the part where it has the testing playground right there.

Oh, we haven't pa yet. Ah, that one there. Here? Yeah, that one. So this link. I helped Adam Zelinsky customize a blueprint that, comes with what's called theme unit test data, which means that if you're going to test the query block, you probably want some content and you don't wanna have to make six posts to test the query block.

So it's already included along with other dev kind of plugins and ways to quickly log your tickets and issues in the right places. It's great. that picked up the new theme, but whenever I was testing on upgrading an existing site with Andy Regan, in that case, it did not find that 2025 was bundled in when you're doing an update, like I had an existing site and I was upgrading it and because 2025 is the big new theme of the year, which I'm super excited about, it's pretty important that we get folks in there and testing.

So I went to run the update and said, team, should I be seeing this in here? So even if you're not a really skilled developer. It's worth testing these things. And anyone that works for a plugin or a theme company or even hosts absolutely should get in here and test, because you find weird edge case things like does, is it file upload?

thank you. We need to make sure we test these things. And so please, if you can come to the release parties do, and if you cannot slot some time that on each release you test, if you are building your own plugins or what have you against it. and the more eyes that we have on things, the more stable we are on release day.

[00:28:15] Nathan Wrigley: I'll just post these back on the screen for the benefit of people's calendars. So obviously the first one, the beta one happened already. That was last Tuesday, but you can see the cadence. It's every Tuesday from now on. Tuesday the eighth is number two, Tuesday the 15th. Number three, RC stands for release candidate and it just carries on, 22nd, 29th, all Tuesdays, Tuesday, November the fifth, release candidate three, and the intention is to ship.

on Tuesday the 12th. So you can, see how that whole project works. You have this eight week cadence, or it's maybe a little bit more than that, but we're right at the top of that, so you've got a chance to, get your voice in there. okay, so there was loads in there.

I'm just gonna hand it over. Lemme just reduce the size of that. Hand it over to either Mark or Michelle if they've got anything they wanted to add some things in there that they like or, not. If not, we'll move on. I just feel like, WordPress may be bringing sexy back, which is cool.

[00:29:11] Marc Benzakein: So which bit, are you? I think I, think the new theme actually sounds, pretty cool. And, actually I know that this, I don't know, I the, the iframe thing a little bit. I think that's cool too. just to pull that out and separate Oh, yeah.

And the zooming the Yep. The ability to zoom in. I really like that. yeah, I don't know. it just seems like it's, I, wonder about how fast all that will be. but I, I have been inspired by Courtney's, last five minute talk about actually testing the beta, which I have always, I.

Skipped. but yeah, I, think I may actually, after this I may actually load it up on a test site and run some tests on it and see all the descriptions and how cool it is. and, and maybe, maybe people start thinking that WordPress is a little less boring again.

[00:30:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And also just concentrate on the stuff, right? The actual bit of software that we're about. Sorry Courtney, I cut you off. Oh, one thing Mark, if you go to, sorry, Courtney, just one second. mark, this may not bother you at all, but on this short, this clipped version where we got the, my screen, she, and there's the four of us on the right, the, we can only see from your, like nose upwards.

I dunno if you can Oh, really? Yeah. I dunno if you want to twist the camera down or, in school I can hop up and lower the camera a bit. Yeah, Sit up straight. Okay. Sorry. That was, I know. Yeah, no thanks. Point that out because my nose is my least attractive feature. that's the last thing you need to see.

There you go. That's today's target. I'm just grabbing the link that on the test team site, there's directions for what, would be helpful from dot org's perspective that you test, but also please, my own acknowledgement is, extend that testing into also trying it against any of the things that you maintain.

[00:31:10] Courtney Robertson: and I could speak more to that, another time. Okay. So there's a post here that Courtney just pasted in. I'll try to get it in the show notes. it's called Help Test WordPress 6.7. So speaking to what you were just saying, there is the laundry list Awesome. Of ways to go and the things that they want.

[00:31:25] Nathan Wrigley: So that was, An Kit Gupta on 1st of October, 2024. and, Courtney, I will probably lose this link, so I'll hit you up afterwards. Yeah. To give it to me again. Put show notes too. I'll put it in the show. I'm so sorry to talk. Yeah. Anyway, so there we go. Michelle, anything you wanna add before we move on?

I. I love the poetic language around 2025. I think it sounds like it's gonna be really beautiful this bit here. Nice. Yeah. I've never been that good with poetry, to be honest. when, when you were in school and the teacher would be reading out the poem and loads of the kids would be like, yeah, I get it.

It's really mean. I was always the kid. I don't know. I'm not feeling it. So that's not me denigrating what's been written there, but I struggle to pause that kind of thing. okay, that's, there you go. So WordPress 6.7 B to one, hopefully by November, so not that far away now. A few weeks we'll have a nice, shiny new version of WordPress.

Let's go back to the live chat, see if there's anything that's common here. Dennis joining us, Saying Stay safe to the Floridians. Is that how you pronounce it? Floridian? It's the people in Florida who obviously got the, the, sort of gamma You pronounce that better than you pronounce my last name.

[00:32:38] Marc Benzakein: Okay. I feel bad now. Colin, says, Colin Dero says, I'm guessing he's talking about the release. This, is great for us plugin developments. Oh yeah. Any testing? Yeah. To test our plugins against the upcoming releases. Cameron? yeah, he says it's time for bed. It's late where he is. Of course, it's probably like 11 at night.

[00:33:00] Nathan Wrigley: hoping the soothing tones of Nathan Wrigley rocks me to say good grief. no, no more. oh Lord. There's no pressure then. if Cameron's still here at the end of the episode, we know that it didn't work. and Lawrence, who's also in Australia says it's, time changing Australia making it a bit hard to watch.

Okay, I, sorry about that. we'll keep it probably at the same time, just 'cause it Nathan. Yeah. One of one of my friends calls your voice, the audio. oh, what's, bulldozer? No, the, sleep aid. I can't think of the, oh, like a frying pan to the forehead. Valium? No, it's like Valium. You're saying?

Valium sound like Valium. I love it. Knocks you out. Oh, that's great. I, the sweet dset tones. Yeah. Oh, that's kind. Thank you. Whoever they are, say thank you and a nice soothing, smooth voice, Elliot saying hi. That's nice. Belated applause, for moving on and focusing on the project itself, though without heads in the sand.

Of course. Yes, Colin. Appreciate it. It was a. It was a, definite decision and not a hard one. it came quite easily the desire to talk about something else. Patricia says, the mentorship program starts today and we'll invite all mentees to test. Okay. So that's another bit of news that I seem to have missed.

Sorry, Patricia. Patricia, that's awesome. if you wanna drop any more comments in that, like URLs or anything like that would be fine. She loves your nose, mark, so just your nose is perfectly fine. Thank you. Very, I appreciate that. Tim Ash joining. Okay, I'll ca I'll cancel that appointment with the plastic surgeon later.

Way cheaper just to stay with what you've got. Tim, we've already mentioned the podcast episode that we did the other day, but I appreciate you joining us and a shout out to all who contributed to the call for testing post. I worked on it for 6.4 and it is a load of work. Indeed. Indeed. Indeed, Yeah. Isn't that interesting? We've got three things around that. Just that one thing. So we've obviously got this long post, then we had. This one, the help testing one, and then we also had this one. There's a lot of work goes into this, let alone, let alone the actual software. yeah. Which itself had to be up to that point.

Speaking of the software, I was lucky enough to, to attend WordCamp US in Portland a few weeks ago. And one of the people that I spoke to, 'cause I went there so that I could do podcast episodes for the tavern, the WP seven. And one of the people that I spoke to, I was saying earlier about Courtney, giving me all the things to say on this show if memory serves Courtney, I think you, you collided me with, Andy Ragan.

I think it was you. and I do, I love connecting people. Yeah. I appreciate that. It was really, helpful, Andy. Okay. Firstly, let's get something out the way. Andy contributes to WordPress, in a very, high level way. he gets the code. He is very expert at that. And so you're thinking he's probably working for an agency, he is fairly high up in the agency.

He's been doing this for No, What Andy does. Is Andy saves people's lives, actual lives because he is a trauma surgeon. And once you've got over that thing and think, wait, hang on, that's a pretty high powered career. And he said to me, he has literally actually answered support questions whilst in the, you call it the emergency room.

So he's ready, he's almost ready to go, but the prep hasn't started for one whatever reason. So he is got himself a, he's got a few minutes, lying around and he thinks, I'll just whip out the laptop. And he is, he's one of the few people that can take a scalpel to both humans and code.

But he's so graceful with it. he just, I think he's described it as the only fungible commodity we've got is time. And so he obviously sees that as an important, mechanism. If he's got time, he's gonna try and use it. So when your jaw comes off the floor that he's a trauma surgeon and is committing.

To WordPress core, then go and listen to this episode. I, we get into that a little bit 'cause it is interesting. But he was one of the people, and they're mentioned in this podcast episode, who have created a feature in WordPress core that, let's hope a never, it needs to be used. And if it is used, you'll probably never, like you, you might not even know.

You will know, but you, it's not like you're gonna go rushing out to Andy and saying, oh, thank you so much. But you should. So quite a while ago, WordPress shipped the ability to switch on automatic updates for plugins. So you go in and you click the words, it says, I don't know, enable auto update or something like that in the plugin screen.

And it thinks for a moment and it, and then it says, yeah, it's enable. From that moment on, if the WordPress repository has a, an update to that, your website will just find it on its chrome schedule and it will update itself. But what the heck happens if it goes wrong? You could be in a really big, a much worse problem than you were in before.

So the idea was let's build auto rollbacks for automatic updates. Now you say oh yeah, we'll just roll it back. Yeah, piece of cake. That'll be easy. no, It turns out that was fantastically hard. not just hard from the point of view of difficult to execute. There were just so many weirdy exceptions like that they had to take care of.

And honestly, I'm listening to it thinking if that was me, that exception, I would just, I just ignore that one. It's nor point nor n 1% of the population used that. No, They did it by the book. So go and have a listen to that episode about how they did it, and thank you. To people like Andy who just doggedly commit to core and make our lives so much better.

if you've got a website that you never wanna touch, you just wanna set it up, and forget it, this kind of feature really does in the future, make that kind of thing possible. brilliant. And, I dunno if any of you have got anything to say about that, it's a brilliant feature, but it's the kind of feature that you'll never know about particularly, so there we go.

Anybody I, I just wanted, I'm just glad that you out to how great of a guy Andy is. he's one of the most humble people you'll ever meet and you'd never know that. He's like probably the smartest guy in WordPress, but, Yeah. I've known him for a long time and, I consider him a friend and, we used to hang out in the same Southern California meetups and stuff like that.

[00:39:41] Marc Benzakein: Oh, nice. Oh yeah, Nice. Just a fantastic guy. I didn't even know he was a trauma surgeon until probably a year after I met him. Wow. yeah. And that was the moment that you were on a table underneath the knife and it was like, Hey, hang on. it is, Andy. actually, it's a little bit like that.

if everyone knows John Brown. John Brown actually was in the hospital, a few years ago, where he had some sort of a, brain thing. I can't remember what it was exactly, but, but Andy ended up like, working on him, and that's when I was like, wait, Andy Freegan, And yeah, I was like, he's, so, humble, and he's so fricking smart.

I've been fortunate enough to go to dinner with him once or twice, and. Just, yeah. a great guy to talk to. you could talk to him for hours. So yeah. He's one of the kind, kindest people as well. He really is so generous. Yeah. Yeah. With a fine, if he's not burning ears at the moment, then he really should have, I don't wanna give, I don't wanna give him a big head, but, Yeah. But we will. the, thing I wanna say about Andy in this case is that I am really glad that it was recorded on the tavern, especially because I've been watching this thing build momentum. When I worked at the events calendar, a lot of us were using GI Updater, which is a plugin Andy has. And if I was doing, I like to test things before they get out and try and break them before so that other people don't break them later.

[00:41:08] Courtney Robertson: so when I worked at the events calendar, we were using Get Updater, and Andy's developed a pro version of that now. But what it did for me was the ability to basically toggle between the beta version of the plugin and the stable version, because I had to bounce back and forth between writing.

Technical documentation for the knowledge base and answering support queue and all of those things. Andy has just solved so many things that developers face as challenges and it was great to hear the backstory of the crew working on this in a recorded place because Andy only has so much time and I'd rather him use the time how he wants to, but all of us should know this story and I don't expect him to tell it to everybody.

One-on-one. Yeah. So thank you for recording that. Yeah. That was the thing about the episode. We don't, really get into the knots and the bolts of the coldness. It is the story. Yeah. And the story is really interesting and it goes back like a decade or more. it does, yeah. Where this thing was suggested and it never happened.

[00:42:06] Nathan Wrigley: and then obviously Gutenberg came along and made that whole proposition a whole lot more difficult and finally have achieved it. And they've, I think he said that in the time it's been in core, I. They've only had one example where it didn't work and he was able to solve it At Word Camp Portland, somebody came up and said, oh, this happened.

He was like, oh, I know why that is. I'll just hang on. Did a quick fix and obliterated that problem. So really interesting, fantastic feature, kind of quality of life thing that you'll probably never know is happening, but it's all baked into core now and make means that you can confidently switch on, updating your plugins automatically.

So here we go. Tim Nash is saying, Andy is amazing. Massive shout out for all of the work he's done on the automatic updates. Yeah, that's lovely. Graham Tucker. Howdy from Atlanta. Please be careful and consider relocating if you live in Florida. Okay. is that where, people go?

Do they go to your state? Hi, everyone says Ali. Nice to have you with us Colin. commenting on the feature that we're talking about, the Automatic Rollbacks, a great feature, however, nerd Press Founder Bug in the automatic update rollback feature this past week for sites on shared hosting. And we will be, you can't see it on the screen, so I'll just keep reading.

We'll be documenting and reporting it. Okay. There you go. I bet you Andy will be all over it. and Kami says that she met in Portland. Yeah. Have a listen, it's on the Tavern website now. It's episode number, I think it's 139. yeah, there it is. 1 39. Anything else before we move on? Yeah, give it a listen.

Absolutely. Okay. Yeah. Give it a listen. Please do. Yeah. So we are gonna stray into the, the stuff that's been going on in the WordPress space, but we're gonna, we're gonna come at it from a different angle. we're not coming at it so that we can explain all the drama to you so you can get hot under the collar.

We're gonna offer somebody's perspective from outside of the WordPress community, and this is the Dre Bagar. I think that's how you pronounce it. I've heard it a variety of different ways, but I'm gonna go with Dre Bagar or Bagar, something like that. Now, if you don't know Drees Dre is the founder.

Courtney, did you manage to find out whether Founder Singular was correct or not? I believe so. Just from a very quick, I'm gonna founder. Singular. Yeah. Yes. of the Drupal Project. Now, Drupal is a CMS in much the same way as WordPress is. It's got a really vibrant community. It's probably nowhere near the size of the WordPress community, but you know what?

You go back 20 years and roll the dice. It had everything in it. It could have been Drupal, it could have been WordPress. It just ended up being WordPress for a variety of different reasons. The point being, the Drupal community has many of the same problems that the WordPress community has. and we obviously over the last few weeks have encountered a fairly gigantic problem.

And so DRIs decided, I'm gonna put pen to paper, or I'm gonna put pixels on a screen to say what they did in the Drupal community because they saw, this problem and took some action early on. Now. I guess one thing that you could say in the mix here is that because the Drupal community is smaller, maybe it's easier to turn that ship around than it is the WordPress community.

but DRIs encapsulates the problem as maker and taker. So if in the WordPress space you are thinking about people who contribute and people who don't, just think about it like that, people that contribute, you could generally classify as makers and people who are in the community, but only consume its resources.

And I guess you could describe it as profit from it, purely profit from it. You could describe those as takers. And so he goes on and he, lays out the story of, how this all happened in the WordPress community. But then if we scroll down. we learn that Drupal has got what's called a credit system in place, so that if you are a maker, you contribute, you earn credits, and if you are a taker, you don't earn credits.

And I think that's true, right? It's not like you get credits taken away, I don't think in air quotes, I'm doing air quotes. I don't think bad behavior consumes your credits. it is not like you've got 20 this week and you did something silly and so you got 10 this week. I think it's, you just don't earn them, you don't earn any more.

But the point is, here we go. and so the dr, it's the Drupal Foundation or the Drupal Open Source community, whatever the thing is, this is what they've done and this is how they accomplish it. So they say. Things like benefits like event sponsoring or advertising on drupal.org are reserved for organizations with a minimum number of credits.

The Drupal marketplace, so think, i dunno, wordpress.org or something like that, is only available, only lists makers ranking them by their contributions. Actually, it's probably not wordpress.org. I imagine it's something different in that case. Organizations that stop contributing, gradually drop in ranking and are eventually removed.

We encourage end users to require open source contributions from their vendors. Drupal users like Pfizer and state of Georgia only allow makers to apply in the vendor selection process. So you're gonna get more clients because some clients literally say, we won't allow you to build our Drupal website unless you are a certified maker.

Now I know what you're gonna say to me. I, actually don't know what you're gonna say to me. You could say anything frankly, but this is what I anticipate. How do you enforce it and how do you keep it fair? Good job. DRIs figured that one out as well. Here's what he's got to say to make the contribution system credit, system fair.

It benefits from an of an oversight from an independent neutral party in the Dr. Drupal ecosystem. The Drupal Association fills this critical role. The Drupal Association operates independently free from control by a single company within the Drupal ecosystem. Some of the Dr. Drupal association's repo responsibilities include organizing events, Drupal cons, managing drupal.org, overseeing the contribution tracking and credit system, and then he makes some recommendations for WordPress.

He says, ex. What WordPress could do is expand the current governance model to be more distributed, provide clear definition of makers and takers within the ecosystem, implement a fair and objective system for tracking and valuing various types of contributors, and implement a structured system of rewards for makers who meet specific thresholds.

Priority placement at events. Increase visibility on the wordpress.org website. Opportunity to exhibit at WordPress events or access to key services now. Cavi mTOR. I am not advocating any of that. I'm reading it right? I'm just reading it off the page. It's Drew. It's Dre's idea. So don't come after me with the pitchforks just saying, this is what somebody else thinks.

And this is somebody who is, closer to this than I am. they've got a community and all that, What do you think? Do you think Dre's idea's got legs or is this just, blowing hot air from another community, which doesn't quite map onto the WordPress community? So go on over to you.

Silence. Who wants to go first? No, it's okay. No. okay, so I'm trying not to caveat aware that I have been, sorry. Lemme all go and then I'll follow, let me caveat something first, right? you don't need to say anything. if you've got nothing to say, just don't say anything. I'm totally happy. I've, just read out Dre's ideas.

I know that, you, there's the potential for this to go off in a different direction. I don't want it to, so I don't want anybody to say something, under duress for me. That's the last thing I want. So if you want just move on from this article, we totally can, but I'm just, there. It is.

[00:50:11] Michelle Frechette: The, one thing I do wanna say is that I don't, and I mentioned this last week and I committed to doing a webinar, which I am working on right now actually, is that I don't think enough people understand how to build their wordpress.org profiles to actually. Comment or, commit their hours, to different, make teams.

And I think that setting up your WordPress profile is an important thing if you are going to be a contributor to the community. And so I want to help people be able to do that. It's, not enough to just have a login. So that you can, favorite plugins and things like that. I think if you really wanna be, a robust comm contributor to our community, having more information in there, like maybe even just your name as opposed to some, strange handle or something.

But also being able to say which make teams you are working on how many hours a week you're doing that so that the information that's being com, transmitted over to five for the future and things like that would also be more accurate. And so that's one of the things that I'm committed to helping people do.

[00:51:22] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Interesting. So the, there's some sort of relationship between what you put in and some visible. thing that you get out, it might be a badge or something like that. Okay. That's interesting. So it, it is a bit like this sort of credit system actually thinking about it. This, the bits that I read refer, it's definitely companies, it's not, really mentioning individuals in Greece's article, is it?

So that is a bit right, but individuals are part of the companies, right? So Yeah, So like for, Stellar WP, my hours as an individual person count towards the company, right? So that's, and I want other people to understand how to make that work into, and it's a, it's an honor system.

[00:51:59] Michelle Frechette: So I could say I'm putting 40 hours in there and nobody's gonna say, is she right? I didn't do that. I put my four hours a week in that kind of thing. but it's an honor system and so we ask people to be, honest with the, their contributions. And maybe this week I did two hours, and maybe last week I did, 10 because of a word camp.

What is your average number of hours that you're contributing to the community on a weekly basis? And that's the information that we really wanna know. One of the things that, DRIs mentioned, and I, could, I might be making this upright 'cause I read it a little while ago and then reread, just quickly reread it today.

[00:52:34] Nathan Wrigley: I have a feeling that these people are in some way separated from the community and there's a panel of four of them which make decisions, And they have to be like, there has to be a quorum to make the decisions and no one person gets to override the decision. So there's gotta be some general consensus.

Was it four or 12 or you mean it was documented? Yeah. The fact that it's documented that. that's what I've been asking Matt about whenever I speak to these things. And it came up, even in, my question to Matt right after the address at us is, can we document what the procedures are?

[00:53:11] Courtney Robertson: Because otherwise it feels like we have moving targets. and that the rules can change. And that's a challenge then because, getting the buy-in that, that organizations need for funding contributing. when the rules feel like they can flex and change, it's harder then to make the case because it's at the whim of perhaps information we don't all know about.

And that gets all these big feelings. And then Drupal. I know that this, it was a challenge when they implemented this and in fact, somebody, Roger at Kinta, thank you Roger, for doing this. When Drews made the post on LinkedIn to share his link, Roger tagged me in and it opened a conversation a bit between Drews and I shared here is what we're doing in the contributor dashboards initiative and contributor dashboards.

I shared the link. We don't have to show it on the screen again right now. Oh, I have it. No, I'll pop it up. We don't, really, it's, yeah. So from there you can track off to the various teams that we have so far. Consider this an MVP. Some of it is very manual. We are automating, though, gathering the data that can be gathered.

So for instance, it's hooked up to GitHub. Right now we have the opportunity to hook up, slack to it pending budget. But additionally, there are some other areas I'm gonna talk with auto about getting track. Data piped into the source of some of the dashboards. It is just solely activity points. It is not necessarily an hourly pledge, but the activity points should help verify the hourly pledge.

And if someone is doing knowledge work, that work, that can be automatically tracked or attributed. Then I think Drupal's crediting system certainly comes into play. And I, just wanna say community. I am super glad that you're looking at what other, how do other projects solve some of the same things?

Because we are a very large bubble, but we stay in our bubble sometimes and learning how others have addressed this, wins and losses, pros and cons, understand just because that worked for their community, doesn't work for ours necessarily, but it might spark ideas that might improve our experience and, I think is a bit of our way forward.

So I'm curious to talk with, If I managed to have a good conversation further with Drees to understand from that perspective, what were the challenges that he as a founder faced as well, and getting that buy-in. I'll tell you the, idea of makers versus takers is a lot easier for me to go to my executives and say, versus, let's explain for some of is not particularly acquainted with open source, what does the cathedral and the bazaar mean?

Or free rider or tending the commons, right? Like we gotta boil it down because these people are not, their headspace is not solely in open source. They are dealing with other issues in life too. And so they are very smart individuals, but. The learning curve to jump into open source and understand then why organizations need to do this funding.

We need something distilled down that is still at their language skill level, but is not, going to involve a lot of research into these open source philosophies. the nice thing that I took from it is that it was really, that's a really easy thing to pause, right? It's binary. Yeah. It's, you take as and makers, but also it's all carrot, right?

[00:56:35] Nathan Wrigley: Everything's carrot, there's no stick. Yep. the stick is the lack of a carrot. so if you don't contribute, you just don't get the extra stuff, which is fine, in, in that scenario not contributing is you're just not getting the stuff, so you can't, I don't know, appear in the marketplaces and things like that.

It's that, that I quite like. It's also a good time to mention that just the, four in the dashboards that Courtney had up that you had up there a second ago, aren't the only ways to contribute, like all of the make channels are con contributions. Yes. So just because it's not measurable through GitHub or something like that.

[00:57:13] Michelle Frechette: Like I organized a Word camp last week. And Yeah. But at this point I just want people to realize that you don't have to be a developer to contribute to WordPress. I have been doing it for years and I have written maybe 30 lines of code in my entire life. And and that was not something that contributed to WordPress.

you don't have to be a developer. You can work in community, you can work in marketing, you can work in the photos, you can do testing, all of these other things to be part of the contribution to WordPress. Thank you. mark, anything to add? you just, you just brought up something and I am really debating whether or not to cross this, 'cause it might get a little bit into the drama, but I wonder if you bring up the carrot part and I wonder if one of the reasons that, that the drama exists right now.

[00:58:05] Marc Benzakein: One of the main reasons is that I think we all thought that it was all Carrot and WordPress too, and then all of a sudden the stick came out and, I, out of, Dre's article, the one thing that I think everybody keeps talking about and bringing up is, this idea of an independent oversight, committee that kind of decides what counts and what doesn't.

But also the, having a rule book or a playbook, so that we know because, the interesting thing is the closest thing that we have to, that is the five for the future. contribution program. And it's interesting, the dialogue that's gone on over the last couple of weeks to see how many people didn't really know what counted as contributing and what did and all of that.

And so if nothing else, I always try to look at what's the positive of all the stuff that's come out. One of the things right now and, actually, people are becoming aware and once the shock settles down and whatnot, we may actually be able to build something that, that is, you know, as, as simple as maker versus taker, as far as understanding goes, but actually has a little bit more meat to it.

So we have a better understanding of, what all is involved, with the, contribution process. Yeah. It'll be interesting because obviously we've got this, what feels like a big inflection point at the moment. and it'd be interesting to see if any of these things do come into play, whether or not, as a project, we have, we reach out and try to figure out what other projects are doing because obviously there's value in other people's thoughts as well.

[00:59:54] Nathan Wrigley: Speaking of that, let's just raise a few things. J James, I noticed the, slightly pregnant pause as well. None of us, wanted to get into that, but we did. I think we did it and we did it well. So congratulations. The three, three panelists. brilliant. I think we've sidestep that. Tammy says it's not an easy problem to solve.

But we're gonna solve it together, by listening to all the needs of contribution. That's been my thing this last couple of weeks, is just get my head down and just keep listening. See what everybody else is saying. equally though, she carries on. equally though, we need to ensure our essential contributions are covered.

We often distract saying not code and leave those areas with people, leaving and unsponsored. Thank you very much. And, I don't, even know what this is. What, is that? That's got What is that? Can anybody help me out? It's got like a dollar amount attached to the, yeah, I think in the, I've seen YouTube doing this in a couple spots and like on Theos in, interview with Matt a week ago.

[01:01:02] Courtney Robertson: I see that, I think there's some financial way of, in YouTube chat making sure your comment gets really highlighted by kicking really some funds. Has Graham given, I haven't learned it all yet, but I No idea. Graham, if, you've just given me some money, I, have no words. if that's what you, I have no idea whether you just did that and if you did, I'm, I'm eternally grateful.

[01:01:25] Nathan Wrigley: I shall go out and buy a, buy a coffee or something and I will say, cheers to you. Go. Thank you very much. written on top of a purple Heart. It says, that's a, oh, it's called a super chat. Okay. from this moment on Graham, you are a maker. You are a maker. Everybody else just taken, you just, you come into these comments, you give the cash mark Andrew.

[01:01:53] Courtney Robertson: Okay? But Nathan, mark, Andrew sl, make maker, then I've no idea. so apparently Dons take coffee. Honestly, I don't wanna get derailed by this 'cause it's not the point. it is. Okay. I'm rich, apparently. Yeah. Thank you. I thought the money went to you. Maybe it will. Thank you Graham. I appreciate it. Whoa. No wait.

[01:02:11] Nathan Wrigley: What the heck's happening? This isn't real. Mark Andrew and Nomad skateboarding character. If you see these on YouTube themselves, then you'll understand the I see. Description. I see that's a description of an emoji. Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Mark, Andrew. Okay, so there's a, so Nomad. Skateboarding's just a $5.

Okay. F let's firstly, greatly appreciated. Thank you very much. Let's move on. I appreciate that. Ever so much. I suddenly feel too old to be on YouTube. Thank you. that's amazing. Thank you to Nomad Skateboarding and Graham Tucker. Okay. That's great. What's next? Okay, we're gonna go to this one.

First of all, let me get that chat thing off the board there. I didn't know you could do that. It's fascinating. YouTube is amazing, isn't it? Spend it on one place, Nathan. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. okay, so we're gonna just deal with this one. no fallout, but this is just an interesting one. It obviously, Matt Mullenweg has, was the sort of the prime mover in the, I suppose he would argue differently, but in, in terms of the debate and the way it started over the last few days, I, I'm saying that when he stood on stage at Word Camp Europe, he was the prime mover in letting us all know that there was something that was about to happen.

And clearly, quite a few of the automattic, the people that work for automatic, obviously in some way. Let him know that this what was, going on wasn't in line with what they were thinking. And so automatic decided that they would have this thing called, alignment. I can't remember the eco, what did they call it?

I think it was just automatic alignment or something like that, where they, offered all the staff, automatic, a way to opt out of being an automation anymore. In other words, if your thought process was disagreeing with Matt's thought process, here's a quick way that you can extricate yourself from this so that it doesn't get messy and it'll stay simple for both sides, automatic and X automations.

And so what they did was, I thought this was just interesting. They offered though the alignment offer is what they called it. So you had a few short days. you had to make your decision by Thursday, the 3rd of October, and it was a binary stay. No stay. If you stayed, everything carried on as normal, I'm imagining.

but if you decided to go, then you would be offered $30,000 or six months salary, whichever was higher. you would however, lose access to automatic almost immediately that same evening, and you would never be eligible to be rehired. So you were making, you're making your bed and you were lying if you like, 159 people.

So 8.4% of the company decided to go for that. Which obviously tells you that a, lot of people didn't, 91.6% was the remainder. They gave up a hundred. So Matt's obviously calculated what that would've meant. 126 million pounds, dollars, sorry. that would potentially been what he would've had to pay out there.

63.5% were male. 53% were in the us. 79% were involved in what's called the ecosystem business, which is, I guess more WordPress facing. And 18.2 were Cosmos, which is other things like Pocket Cast, day One, Tumblr and things like that. And, one person who decided to go left two days after joining Automatic, and I presume under the offer, they still got the $30,000 or six months salary.

And, I guess Matt's added that in because it's, it's an interesting statistic if you were that person. That's a very interesting two days work. It's a big ROI on two days worth of work. Yeah. so I just started to put that out there. I, don't know if this is like a normal thing to do, I presume it's like quite abnormal a thing to do, but I guess for Matt at least anyway, he's got to concentrate on whatever it is that he is gonna be in the future.

Having the knowledge that your company is. Is the way it is and that you've given these people the opportunity to remove themselves. And so presumably, you've got a company that is aligned with you and all the employees are aligned with you. It does raise the question, I guess in my head is if you lose close to 10%, 8.4% of your workforce overnight, I pre presume that was just peppered throughout different teams.

I dunno how you quite manage the, the fallout of that. if certain key staff left, and obviously it's not on this screen, but a tweet came out, there was a bruhaha about that as well. But the bottom line is the executive director, Joseph Hayden Choi, has also left automatic, as well, which was a, an interesting development.

So I dunno if you've got anything you wanna say about that. If not, I'll just move on. But I thought that was certainly newsworthy. I. Chloe and Naoko have also taken leave. Naoko assumed the role that Angela Jin had held, Angela left about a month ago. Hari Shankar has remained, and it will be interesting to see the community management of wordpress.org moving forward, having those significant leaders, that have taken their leave.

[01:07:50] Courtney Robertson: And my only wish is that, they've chosen what is right for them, for sure. and I'm looking forward to continuing on and contributing to WordPress with Hari as we work on the dashboards and the new contributor mentorship and get into all sorts of other good fun together. but it's, got my heart feeling pretty heavy.

[01:08:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it was interesting that there was quite a lot of Ians who clearly felt the need to publicly, state that they hadn't left May, maybe there was some speculation and they just wanted to avoid that. And so there was quite a lot of tweets. Basically it was just two words, I stayed or something like that.

And so you were able to figure out on social media if the people that you were, I don't know, in relationships with or maybe working with or what have you had, had managed to stay. best of luck to everybody who's made that decision. Obviously, the best will in the world. I hope that this turned out to be the, right thing for you.

I'm sure that, I'm sure that it will be anybody else before we move on, it seemed like a good way to work within your company with being a gen, a generous way to allow people to opt out. Yeah. Yeah, indeed. yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay. The only thing I would, the only thing I'd add is, I think we as a community need to be careful not to whichever side of the coin you fall on this particular issue, just to be careful not to judge the, the, people in their decisions.

[01:09:18] Marc Benzakein: because, we don't know what went into their decision. and I don't like seeing that animosity, when it comes to the, choosing sides of, things. And, everybody has their own story and they gotta pay their bills, That's totally it. You, I imagine that there's a proportion of the people who've stayed who, maybe would've made a different decision had they not have got the constraints of the economics of life, let's just call it that.

[01:09:51] Nathan Wrigley: family and what have you. and so I guess we can't read into the decision that you stayed as I am gonna be this sort of benign. feature, a figure in the future. Maybe you've stayed because you, needed to more than anything else. And there may be disagreements still, to come.

It's an ongoing story. We'll, we'll see how it goes. Okay? Alright, back to some sort of community related type news. This is over, oh gosh, I've clicked the wrong bottom there. Apologies about that. Where are we? Here we are. This one, WP Campus, which the strap line of that is where WordPress meets higher education.

They are on the lookout for information from people. If you are connected in any way with WordPress and higher education or, I don't know, maybe you've just got an interest in that. You don't necessarily have to be involved. This article says, announcing WP Campus Research Project on the state of WordPress in higher education.

and this came out just a couple of days ago, five days ago. WKP campus is excited to launch a large scale research project, which they're calling the state of WordPress in higher education in partnership with human made. The aims of the project are to spotlight the challenges, goals, frustrations, hopes, dreams of people working with WordPress in higher ed, to examine organization considerations, tech stacks, governance, and more WP Campus, and I guess that should say human made, will share all of the, findings publicly.

So if this is something that you're interested in, you can click this big blue button links to this article in the show notes, but it's [email protected]. I have to say, I'm not in any communities which kind of where those two things collide, but obviously there is enormous, interest in higher education and WordPress, and so obviously trying to figure out what that is, I guess I'm guessing just reading between the lines, I'm guessing that human mades, A portfolio, maybe there's an overlap there. Maybe human may build websites for a lot of, edge higher ed websites. I don't know. anyway, if you wanna contribute to that, you can. Anything or shall I press on? Yep. Just a reminder that, WP Campus was also behind the, they did fundraising and some research on accessibility within WordPress a few years back as well.

Okay. Thank you very much. just going back to the post that we said a moment ago, Dave and, says a hundred percent agreed, a hundred percent. everyone has their own story. Thank you. And, here I second Mark's view. Thank you so much. That was from Graham, who is a maker by the way, just saying, just.

so I don't know what to make of this. I just genuinely, that's freaked me out. I didn't even know that was the thing. And there's like holler amount suddenly on the, on the thing. Wow. Okay. Moving on before I stop, breathing. okay, so this is just so interesting and just snuck right under the radar.

I, I feel that if Pascal had put this piece out three weeks ago, everybody would've been like just totally all over it. But it is come out at this period where obviously there's a lot of noise elsewhere. So strap in, ai, everybody is talking about it, right? It, I, don't care who you are, even if you hate it, you are using it a bit.

you are, you're just a tiny little bit somewhere you've used it. And obviously there's a cost to that. It requires you to connect to some third party, API like chat, GPT or Gemini or whatever it might be. And you're paying for it. There'll be a cost associated with that. There'll be a bit of lag.

You are, you're propping up one company that you might not know too much about. Anyway, Pascal, who is a, he's a Google employee and he works on, is he on the performance team? Somebody help me out. I think he, yeah, thanks Courtney. He's nodding ahead. I think he's on the performance team. so doing great work over there.

A little while ago, he introduced us to some things that you could do in the browser, which was like, I don't know, upload an image directly into a, WordPress post and it would be done handled by the browser, not by some sort of upload service, right? So it turns out that in the, what do they call it, the canary version of Chrome, a lot of this AI is, now.

In the browser. So I'll just let that sink in for a minute. So it's in the browser and it's, if it's not in the browser that you've got, it's coming soon. These LLMs are gonna be inside the browser. And so that got Pascal thinking, what can we do with that? And the answer is a lot. Now, first thing, it's not in your browser unless you're on the Canary Build.

It's a stripped down version, so it runs Now which one was it? It's something called Gemini Nano. So Google's, LLM, Google's AI endeavors are called Gemini. And there's this thing called Gemini Nano, which I don't know much about, but I'm guessing it's, they've stripped it down to the bare essentials, made it smaller so it can C carry out certain tasks and presumably it can be on device.

And that's the point, right? It's all happening on device in your browser. There's a load of technicalities here. We'll just quickly stroll, scroll through it and we'll get to the interesting bit for a WordPress podcast. If WordPress core wants to offer AI capabilities to each and every one of its users, it can't jeopardize users' privacy by relying on expensive third party services.

I'm just gonna inject a little bit of my own thoughts into there. You're still using Google's ai, right? So presumably there's a caveat there, but it's not leaving the device, I'm guessing, would be Pascal's position there. So here's some other things that you could do, right? Remember, so this is all happening in the browser.

None of it's going off to chat GPT or anything like that. So he says, why don't we write a post and then get the browser's, AI to summarize it. So he's built a button to use this. Gemini nano to do just that. And if you're watching on the screen, you can see these little videos that he's put together.

What about if you've written an article and you can't be bothered to do the SEO steps? So the meta descriptions and what have you, you can't be bothered with that. Just click a button, get it to do it. That's fine. you could summarize bullet point, eyes, elaborate short or rephrases. What we've got here, and again, you can see it on the screen, we're not stuck with text though.

What about if you wanna generate some images or some alternative text to go with those images? Again, it's great. You don't need to go anywhere else. It's done inside the browser. Help generate some meaningful quotes, assign tags and categories to blog posts. Do sentiment analysis to see if you're on the right, if you're on the right, course for comments and things like that.

And all of this is happening in the browser. So this to me feels like that moment that I saw playground and went, what? What happened? What? Just. What just happened there because it was all done in the browser. This feels pretty transformative to me. Like it's in the browser, that's one thing, but it's bound now inside a WordPress and you're clicking buttons to do all the fab things that you see, with things like chat.

GPT. Sorry, I got really excited there and droned on far too long, but I'm hoping you're excited as well. over to you. Nobody's excited. I like to tinker. I like to tin. No, I like to tinker. And this makes, this is something I'd like to tinker with. yeah, but does it not like, like one of the whole things about the AI thing is it freaks me out that all that data's going off and, you might have written the most heartfelt thing imaginable and you've sent it off to chat GPTI just love the fact that it's in the browser and you can ship a version of WordPress, which is agnostic.

You don't need that. API key. It just feels pretty cool, al be it. But on the other hand, write some. If you write something heartfelt, then it goes out to the world. Isn't that what we all want anyway, so Yeah. Yeah, you're right. Okay. Yeah. Good. Good catch there, mark. Yeah. You've undermined that argument.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Courtney, Michelle, I got nothing. Nope. Same. Gosh. I thought that was really interesting. Okay. it's, yeah, it really, no have any Cary, that's all. Yeah, no, it's okay. It's, but it, but like you said, it's flown under the radar and because of that, I don't know about the other two panelists here, but I just wanna go and play with it.

[01:18:30] Marc Benzakein: And I, until I get actually dig in and play with it, it's, hard for me to. I'm one of those people that I can read all I want and until I actually have my hands on, it doesn't really impact me. do you know what I think the interesting thing about this is it won't be that inspirational when you actually do play with it, because presumably the nano variant of this Google Gemini AI will not be as good as chat GPT-4 Oh but it's just, the mere fact that it's in the browser is fascinating to me. So it's completely offline able, you could be sitting in a cafe with no internet connection writing your blog post, and it can still do a proportion of these tasks and that just feels like a really interesting thing.

[01:19:09] Nathan Wrigley: And married with WordPress, if you've got the browser in this case, Chrome, you're suddenly unshackled from that. you could launch a playground version of Chrome disconnect from the internet and you could do all these things and you don't need to be. Paying anybody, I dunno what the heuristics will be, that Google managed to suck out of it on the other end.

I'm sure there'll be plenty of data mining, that they get. So I'm sure, and, maybe, that's part of it too, is the fact that there's that whole, Yeah. But it's Google, yeah. You're right. We need a credible AI that's come outta the open source community.

Yeah. Don't we? I'm sure it won't be too far behind. And, Patricia says the Great Pascal. That's right. yeah. So anyway, go check that out. it was called, what was the piece called? It was called Web a. I'll put it on the screen. Sorry. I knocked it off. Web AI for WordPress and it was on pascal bler.com.

I'm a fan. Pascal, I think you're doing great work here, keep it up. I absolutely brilliant. Okay. Another thing which I failed to mention last week, because we got stuck in the weeds of the big story and we talked about it endlessly. I, had this on the screen, but it, the tab never got raised. and this is a set of.

e-commerce shipping? No, not shipping. I dunno why I said shipping Payment Gateway solutions. the company that is behind it, they're called, we are Ag, so we are ag do co uk and this is Forward slash Plugins. I think this came to me, I think Andrew Palmer tweeted it and I saw it. And, So it's, if you're based in the uk some of these are gonna be a bit specific to the uk, but if you're not based in the uk, some of them will still work.

So it's all these payment gateway solutions like Stripe, Barclaycard, trust Payments, Lloyds Ingen, Barclaycard, author Pay, and all these other ones, you can see them here. But my understanding the difference here is that the guy that's building these, who is called Aaron, sorry Aaron, if that's not your name, we spoke last week, but in the height in the moment, I can't sum up your name.

they don't take a co so they're not creaming off anything off the top. I dunno how much the plugins actually costs. There you go. They're relatively inexpensive. $35. Some of them are a little bit more obviously based upon the work he's done, but I just thought these were worth mentioning. So if you'd get these, what you're, getting paid, what you're creaming off with the, payment gateway, that's all the fees, nothing is going into their back pocket, which I thought was quite nice.

So the, alright and an event. Insta WP announces the world's first WordPress online hackathon, which they're calling anyone. Can wp dates for your diary? It's gonna be starting on the 11th of October. The submission deadline is the 26th, and then final judging will happen on the 10th of November. it's gonna be, there's a panel of people that are gonna be judging it, blah blah, blah, blah.

Keynote is gonna be announced by Joseph Volk, and we've got a little bit of news about him in a minute, sort of him tangentially. and the winner will take home $3,000. Second place gets 1000 and 5,000 for third place. So if you wanna be a part of that and show off your WordPress skills, particularly building websites, then you can register.

Now you've got until, what did we say, submission deadline 26th of October. If you wanna take part, and it's been done by Insta wp I'm sure you've heard of by now. I'm guessing nobody's got any say on these bits. I'll just keep cracking on if that's all right. you might have something about this though.

If you are a, plugin developer, there's a few new little things that you might like to know. Firstly, you're not gonna be able to log into your.org account, unless you've got two fa switched on. So two factor authentication, that's now gonna be mandatory as of, now you, if you can't get in, that might be the reason.

you need to have set that up by a few days ago. And the other thing to say is from now on. any plugin submitted to the plugin directory will first go through the plugin check tool, which is gonna check for any, obvious errors. It obviously won't be able to spot use cases, but it's gonna go through a, bunch of things like w sorry, PHP code, sniffer, things like that, to see.

And the idea would be that this will automate a lot of the things which previously meant that queue was astronomical. And we have good news if you're a plugin developer. the number of plugins that are now in the queue was

8,306, no zero. for the first time in living memory. The team have managed to get that down. I imagine it's something to do with tools like this, but that is pretty phenomenal. I remember saying not that long ago that it was still a gigantic amount of time between submission and getting your plugin approved.

So that's amazing. Is it still zero or is it crept up for four or something? It's at 17 right now. Oh. But, a bit of the plug and review team, do their shifts at night. And so I would say, check back when you're up, gets into nighttime and see where things are. Yeah. There we go. So 17 is, tantamount to zero basically.

It was way higher than that. That is really amazing. Yeah. Yeah. It's, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. basically now if you're a plugin developer, you're gonna go to that fully expecting, like next working week kind of return of your, of the bits and pieces. And obviously, if it's failed due to the automated testing, you've got something to work on.

If not, I presume you're gonna be hearing really soon. So there, there's economics involved, there, isn't there, if you're putting something like that in, you want it to be, recognized quickly rather than the three months that we were at until recently. Patricia, I'm gonna, I'm classifying you as an honorary maker, Patricia.

Now you are also a maker, she says, loves your enthusiasm, when you're impressed by something every time. Yeah. Sorry, I get a bit carried away, don't I? and then Dave then said, it's interesting, I probably wouldn't need to use Grammarly as much there. Yeah. I imagine it's a bit of a Grammarly killer.

sorry, Grammarly. It does look like they, they're coming after you. There you go. Aaron Bowie. Thank you so much, peach. That's great. oh, and there's Erin. There you go. thank you. Peach. Yeah. and then peach because you are mate, she says. Anyway, there we go. So that's quite nice. Thanks. Michelle, it's over to you.

We are very close. Yeah. To the end of the show. Here we go. I know. Navigating accessibility with role mobility. Yeah. So underrepresented in tech last week we interviewed the, makers of role mobility. It's an app that you can, put in the accessibility of any place that you have visited. So as somebody who uses a mobility device, I have been able to say, this place has these amenities and I can also look and see in, advance.

[01:26:23] Michelle Frechette: sometimes the restaurant will say it's accessible. But that means that you have to come in through the kitchen. So if I can see that there's actually a ramp up in front and I don't have to be lesser than because I'm entering through the back alley, so to speak, I think this is a great opportunity.

And it's a free, it's a free app, so I've got it on my phone. When I saw them on TikTok, I invited them to come on the podcast, and I just think anybody who has any accessibility issues will benefit from this. That is really cool. So it gives you confidence when you get in the, the taxi or whatever it may be, that when you get there, you're gonna have an experience, which is, desirable, like you said.

[01:27:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. You don't wanna be rolling in through the kitchen, what have you. So underrepresented in tech.com, I'm guessing if we go to all episodes on the podcast, it will appear. Yes. It'll be there. There you go. Yeah. So underrepresented in tech.com, you can find out all about role accessibility. Just a other few quick bits and pieces.

I've got this thing from X here. Oh, interesting. So Tacho, who is often on this show, he's leaving Yost Yest, but he's not leaving Yost. He's leaving Yost, but he's going to work for Yost, work that out. Yeah. How does that work? it's all about, it's all about the spelling. It's all about the spelling.

So he's leaving Y-O-A-S-T, the company that he's been working with for many years, and when he is been sat on this show, you've always seen his yo the Yost logo, the company. And and he's gonna go and work for Yos, the person who, and Marika. Yeah. And Marika, who founded, Amelia Capital And No Doubt, other things.

I'll just read it out 'cause it's nice. It says, I'm leaving Yost, this is his ex tweet, whatever. There are thousands of things I want to add. How. Absolutely epic. My journey over the past 11 years has been how much I've learned here, how much I'm going to miss my colleagues at Yost, how much I appreciate all the opportunities Yost has given me to travel the world, learn new things, meet new people, how strong my connection to the Yost brand still is.

How great the adventure with new fold digital has been. How much I love that. Yost introduced me to the WordPress community just to name a few and it goes on, but that's really bravo, mate. congratulations. It goes without saying. We wish you the best. I'm sure you're leaving a giant taco shaped hole, in the company behind you.

that's gotta be the name of this show. There's no way. That's not it. Taco shaped hole. I'm just writing that down. Sorry. There you go. but bravo, you'll be missed, I'm sure, but also you'll be warmly received where you're going, so that's lovely. Anybody wanna throw anything towards that before we move on?

It's best wishes to him. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. WordPress Accessibility Day. What a phenomenal job. It's coming up this Wednesday, man, alive. You are killing it on the socials. Just my social feed is full of this, so it's getting spread beautifully. Yeah, so it's coming up Wednesday the 9th of October.

It's a 24 hour event. It's at 2024. WP Accessibility Day. we've plugged it a whole bunch of times, but if you still haven't got the memo, go to that website, sign up and you can attend. it's run through Zoom, so you do have to register to be able to attend. Yep. and then you'll also have access to all of the videos after, afterwards, so you can replay them.

Okay. So if you're in the accessibility space or you're just curious about what you can do, then yeah. Accessibility is everybody's issue. So every, it applies to everybody. Nicely done, Michelle. you turned that. Around. Yeah. My faux pa there. have we got anything else on here? What is this one?

I've got these, there was one about cord dev days. cord. Oh yeah, that's it. I'm looking at it now. Yeah. Great. Okay. right over to you. Schedule's been announced. This is an official WordPress event along the lines of a next gen camp. so the schedule's posted and if you go to the main page, there's like a link to, or even here, there's the link to go by the tickets.

[01:30:30] Courtney Robertson: so we could see who are the speakers coming up at this. This looks really interesting. I think it's gonna be heavily on the, dev side of it. Just looking over the schedule that's here. Miriam speaking about scaling the WordPress release process. Miriam Schwab from Elementor, Carlos Bravo, new public APIs for block bindings.

There's a BARC camp track, which, word camps sprung out of. Bar camps have been around a long time. They're just general Unconference tech events. So there's a couple blocks for that in the schedule. It looks really interesting. There's two days of different tracks going on. It looks like a spot that those that are really active in contributing to core might be interested in as well as those that want to become more active in the developer side of this.

So check out, it's on events.wordpress.org/rome and you'll find lots more information about it there. November eight and nine. Yeah. da dah. So it's coming up well tomorrow. It begins. we just showed the schedule that I'll link to it in the show notes November a month from tomorrow.

Sorry. I apologize. Yeah, quite right. Thank you. you have time to buy your, plane tickets yet? Yes, because it is being held in Rome and the venue location was just here. The hob zest a great name for a location. I like that. And we did that. We did that and there's nothing to say about that one. So that's it.

[01:32:01] Nathan Wrigley: I think we've cracked it, we've nailed it, and we managed to, to get through it without throwing any mud at anybody. So Bravo team. Good job. unless anybody's got anything else to say, I will just thank all of my panelists. We've got the co-host, Michelle Ette, and we've got our two wonderful contributors to today.

We've got Courtney and Mark. I'm just gonna say Mark 'cause I'm never gonna get it right twice. No, I am. You, got it. You got it. Benzocaine and I had to say that word in my head again. That's okay. That's okay. Nathan Wiggly. I don't have a problem. Yeah, I love it. That's good. Just throw it right back.

That was perfect. oh. Lovely. so that's it. Thank you so much. And thank you to the two makers, nomad skateboarding and, who else was it who joined? Me and Graham. Graham Tucker. I have no idea what just happened. That was so cool. So we're just gonna do the wave, which we always do at the end of an episode, if it's all right with you.

Three, shall we raise our hands and, give us a smile? That's perfect. And thank you for joining us and making the comments happen and, really appreciate it. We'll be back next week for another episode of this week in WordPress. Do we wanna see the cat and dog and other video? Or do we want the user?

Yeah, we want, okay. Yeah. panelists, I'll be back in a bit. It's about a minute and a half. I'll be back when it's done. But, here it comes. If you're feeling stressed out. If you're feeling unsure about the future, if anything is, making you feel not calm, here comes an unadulterated 90 seconds of cats, dogs, and sheep.

We'll see you next week. Take it easy. Bye-Bye.