This Week in WordPress #311

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress, episode number 311. Entitled this year's weekly WordPress. It was recorded on Monday the 14th of October, 2024.

My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I am joined by Remkus de Vries, by Tim Nash and Birgit Pauli-Haack.

We're going to talk about WordPress and their sure is a lot to talk about. Caveat emptor, we do try and steer away from the drama. Although we get into the stories there, get into some of the bits and pieces of our ACF and WP Engine. We do try to skirt away from that, but the top of the show is mainly about that, and then we move on to other things.

So we talk about forking WordPress, about ACF, about the checkbox on the wordpress.org website login page, and then we get into the WordPressy stuff.

WordPress 6.7 beta 2. About Gutenberg 19.4, and all of the updates over there. About the fact that WordPress 6.7 is about to drop, and we need your help testing it. And all of the nice new features that are in there, the developer blog gets a mention.

Heropress also gets a mention, and congratulations for turning 10. WooSesh is coming around the corner. The WordPress accessibility day just happened, and some people have got some things to say about that, nice, I think.

We have a new executive director and we get into that story as well. And then AI, plugins around AI. The 10th anniversary of Jeff Starr's endeavors, and a whole lot more. And it's all coming up next on this week in WordPress.

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Hello. It's this week in WordPress, episode number 311, and I've already got a title for it. It's called the Week though. Nothing Happened at all. There's no show here. Thank you all for being here. Bye. Yeah, bye bye-Bye. It's been pleasure. Bye. take, it easy. No, quite a bit happened, but I'm gonna get to that in a moment.

let's, first of all do our sort of round robin introductions to all of the different people who we've got here. first up, where shall I go first? Let's go for Mku first. 'cause he's right, he's just where my eyes landed. How are you doing mku? I'm well, how are you? I'm good. I'm good. I, dunno how I'm gonna be in 90 minutes time, but for now I'm, I'll ask again.

[00:04:21] Remkus de Vries: I'll ask again. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. MKU, let me just find my mouse. Where's it gone? Okay, let's go. REMS, hopefully I've got your, updated bio. If I get halfway through it and it's not the updated one, just tell me to stop, rem. Okay. Okay. mku is a WordPress performance specialist and co-founder of Scan, which is a WordPress site health monitoring service.

[00:04:43] Nathan Wrigley: He loves building fast and scaling websites. And next to that he's also a content creator with the Within WordPress newsletter, which I apparently crib you'll find out about that in a moment. and he also produces a podcast over there. Remus has been very active in the WordPress community for over 15 years as a co-founder of WordCamp Europe.

Word, camp Netherlands. Was that the right buyout? probably. I don't know. Okay, good. That's great. but go check it out. Go check out, go Google scan, S-E-A-N-F-U-L-L-Y, and also within WordPress. And, go and subscribe to all the different things that Mku is up to. next one is, Tim Nash, who's just dropped an email into my inbox.

How you doing, Tim? I'm All right. How are you? Yeah. Random muttering email. Unfortunately it arrived just at the moment when I was getting ready for this show, so I haven't had a chance to, to check that out. Oh, full of nice calming things. There is no drama in whatsoever. Okay, good. I like to hear it.

Tim's bio literally starts with the following words. It says, deep breath, Nathan. Okay. So let's see where this goes. Oh, I see. 'cause it's long. Got it. I'm picking up right now. Yeah. Okay, ready? Here we go. Tim Nash is the managing director of Tempered Limited, a UK based, limited company that trades under the brand name Tim Nash.

Oh, here we go. Under the brand name Tim Nash. Tim Nash is the person who is here, is legally distinct from the Tim Nash, the brand, which provides security consultancy, the open source content management system. WordPress Tim Nash. The person who owns Tim nash.uk has been involved in the open source community surrounding WordPress for a very long time.

He writes a newsletter, Which is distributed through Tempered Limited account, but whose signup form is on the site? Tim Nash co uk, which we have already stated is owned by Tim Nash, person, not the Tempered Limited Trading as Tim Nash. Good grief. You really thought about this. Finally, Tim Nash, the person may or may not be the brand.

I'm not entirely sure at this point. It may or may not be affiliated with WP Builds where he recently did a couple of podcasts. You should check him out. Tim Nash, the person, not the brand. Thanks you. Thanks you for not confusing him with a brand or a lawyer. That was great. Oh, I'm gonna have to have a moment.

Is that all clear? Yeah, I really, got it. I'd have to read that again I think a bit later. Anyway, that's Tim. There or there. I don't know which one of them, Tim. Frankly, anymore. Yeah, that one. That one. There we go. Okay. So there's Tim. I appreciate that humor is what we need in these, dark times.

and we're also joined, but beat that big. we're also joined by big at Pauly Hack. How are you doing? I'm doing well. I'm doing well. I came back from a group hug in, webcam calls for, so I'm all good. I saw you with, beer. And, and I've only ever, I think I've only ever seen you two in like in the flesh on a screen like this.

It's nice to see the two bigots. And I think you wrote the Bigot and the other bigot or something like that, which was quite nice. It was bigots post. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, lovely. anyway, here we go. Bigot Ply Hack is the publisher of Gutenberg Times a site with news around the WordPress block editor and beyond.

She hosts regular Gutenberg live q and as on YouTube and hosts the Gutenberg Change Log podcast. Bigot has been contributing to the WordPress open source commu, project since 2014 and contributes now full-time sponsored by automatic woo-hoo. Anyway, welcome the three of you and, Thank you.

Hopefully this show goes without too much incident. There is, there are many pitfalls along the way in life and, and I fear that I've put one in your path today, but some caveats. But before we get to those caveats, let's have a quick look at the live chat. if you would like to join us. Honestly, it makes the show so much better if people contribute, and the best way to do that is to head here.

you can see Remus is, almost like holding it there. Look at that. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, go on. Oh, nearly. wp build com slash live. Once more, wp build com live. If you end up there, then you've got a couple of options if you want to comment. The YouTube comments are embedded on the right, on a desktop or beneath on a mobile, and you need to be logged into Google.

Yeah, he's got it. Look at the whole breath right thing. and if you don't fancy being logged into Google, 'cause you've got a position about that's fine. You can use the, chat widget, which is embedded inside the video. Top right of the video. I think it's in a little black button. It says live chat or something like that.

Go in there, put your name in, and, the platform that we use, which is called Wave, presumably they'll get some knowledge about you, but maybe just your IP address or whatever. So feel free, put your bits and pieces in there. That would be great. Okay, who have we got? So we are being joined today by Courtney Robertson, joining in with the hot mug.

Tea. Tammy Lister is a tea influencer. Hi, Tammy. Yeah, I, still have the kitten, the kittens, poppies and, sheep video, but I dunno if I'm gonna deploy it. I dunno if we've got any bombs to deploy on this week, we will see, Thanksgiving. To friends in Canada, apparently. Okay, there you go. Yes. I didn't know that.

and Tommy list is hopping in to say it's chai latte with a splash of vanilla and oat milk. Okay. So we've got two things that happen now. Apparently we not only get the weather forecast, we now get tea and coffee updates as well. So this is great. This is all going in the right direction. Andrew, love the brand.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Don't mention the brand. WB Tea. What is this? What now? What is tea? Yeah, it's this warm brown stuff that doesn't taste like coffee that they drink in the uk. And you have to deploy the finger. The little, pinky finger has to come out and you drink it. Andrew says it's gonna be tough.

No, Andrew, this'll be a breeze. All you do is ignore the weird stuff. Do it that way. No, we'll try to tackle some of it. Tim saying that he drinks Yorkshire tea, I. And apparently Andrew says, it's the only realty. I'm on water, just in case anybody cares. There you go. And, Marcel is joining us. Marcel Boatman.

Hey, old fresh bottle of water next to me. Legs on desk. Oh, nice. That's something we should do one week. Everybody with their legs on the desk. See how that No, Remus? No. No. Oh God. Okay. Alright. It's, not a good look. Put the legs away. Tim Wilmot? No. Tim Wilmot says, hi T York. That about sums us up, doesn't it?

Yorkshire tepid. There you go. we've got a few waves and a few highs. Ben, I dunno where Ben is right at this minute, but he's, he hails from the Philippines. so if you're joining us from there, appreciate it. It must be like crazy o'clock in the morning. Wait, something happened? No, Jess, no, nothing happened.

Kathy's joining us. good morning. Eating my yoga with a, with not a fork this morning. So a reference to something. and then here we go. A last normality has returned 'cause Peter Ingersol is telling us about the weather in Connecticut. Six degrees centigrade, 43 degrees Fahrenheit, and it's rainy.

Nice to see so many smiley, happy people. We need more of that. Don't we at the minute smiling. everybody smile or else? halfway. Halfway through Re's bio, we'll take an hour. Okay. And there's where's loads? Honestly, I can't get through it all. I do apologize everybody, but we're joined by Marcus Burnett.

Very nice. We're joined by James Kemp. We're joined by Atif, by Max and Reese and a few other, I'm sorry, I can't keep up. James. Hi there. Hi there. Hi there. Hi there. Okay. Okay. I'm sorry. I can't keep up, but there we go. So it is. It is sad that I have to begin any episode with some caveats, but I'm going to, and it's not really sad.

I'm just inoculating our guests really. So you know what's going on. If you are, if you've got any, ears to the ground in the WordPress space, you know that there's stuff that is fairly difficult to talk about. There's opinions over here and there's opinions over here. we're just gonna stay away from all that.

The, plan is, I'm gonna do this little slot at the beginning, just me. I say what has happened, if you've got an opinion on it and involve, and it involves you being impolite or calling somebody out, please don't bother. Just don't bother. Just go and find somewhere else to shout it. X is a fabulous platform.

If you want to be angry, just go over there and do it. It's really wonderful for that. but not here. Let's keep it nice and polite. Honestly, I feel like a school mom and I'm, I apologize for that. But the idea is to keep it nice and, polite. If you've got an opinion and you can do that politely, feel free, dive in.

But if you sense your, anger rising, then don't, just put a, lid on it and do it somewhere else. The other thing to say is these guests, it's totally up to them what they want to contribute to. I have no idea what the proclivities of their situation is, whether or not they are allowed to say things or not allowed to say things.

So if they want to, they can chime in if they don't want to, that's utterly fine by me. So there we go. There's the rules of the road. And with that. Here we go, right? First thing, bit of self-promotion. This is WP Builds. This is our website. We do this each week, but just to let you know that a couple of things happening over here.

The first one is that we have our Black Friday page. If you want to get on our Black Friday page and you've got a product or service, then feel free. Just scroll down here and you can click this, add a deal button, and you'll go to a form and there you can add a deal. It's totally free. and then you'll be in this list where you can search and filter.

There's a bunch of people that have done that already. You can see it's hotting up typically by Black Friday. There's about three or 400 things on there, something like that. And the way we make this work is we offer these little advertising spots at the top, and you can see that, gravity Forms and WS form have taken us up on that offer so far.

If you're a business in the WordPress space and you would like to gory a place on that, click this get started button. and there's three slots, two of which have gone at the top, and then there's these slightly smaller ones down here. So if you fancy doing that, wp builds.com/black or just hit that button there at the top of our website.

The other thing to say is a big thank you to our sponsors who keep the lights on over here. real big thanks to GoDaddy Pro. Blue Host Omnis Send and Member Full. Thank you so much for helping the podcast. Keep the lights on. That's really, great. And the, only other thing to add is I did a podcast this week, with, Matt Lau from Minds Spa.

And if you're into e-Commerce, but e-commerce in a slightly different way. You know how on your phone now you've got your digital wallet and you can pay for things just by putting your fingerprint in. That's what Mind Spa does for digital products, and it's an interesting offer. So go and check that out as well.

All righty, here we go. you have to say this slowly, and I'm not gonna say why, but I'm going to say the word forking. Okay, is beautiful. So this came, this was Matt Mullenweg, 10th of October. And the context of this, will become clear in a moment if you haven't seen this so far. But, WordPress itself was a fork of a, previous project called B two or Cafe Log, and WordPress grew out of that.

It was, forked initially by, Mike Little and Matt Mullenweg. And then the whole community has been playing with that fork of WordPress or that software ever since then. And the idea with the, license that WordPress ships is that everybody can fork WordPress and turn it into their own variant of it.

And a couple of. Couple of name drops. Classic press did it in 2018, and we've got some new players doing it right now for reasons which, I'm sure are obvious to everybody. Free, wp. And then there's one here called Aspire Press and Open Press, which it says is not a fork. But anyway, I think Matt wanted to get out there and say we're okay with people forking things.

And that leads us to this story. So a little bit earlier in the week, the a CF plugin, which is on the wordpress.org repo i, it fabulously popular, I think millions is the right word, like a couple of million installs. It allows you to, add loads of metadata. It basically allows you to take your WordPress, install your vanilla install, and turn it into a, in air quotes, a proper.

CMS all sorts of amazing functionality. it was originally designed by, and built by Elliot Condo. He's been on this podcast several times, actually. And, an amazing product that he grew the support burden for that I think grew too much for him. So he sold it initially to delicious Brains who then subsequently sold it to WP Engine.

And now you can see where the story goes. WP Engine are the current custodians of a CF. And at some point during the week, the, a CF version on wordpress.org, altered and it disappeared and it got a new name, and its new name is Secure Custom Fields. And at this point you might be thinking to yourself, fine, the name has changed.

So what? there is a bit of a So what? And the, so what is as follows, the, plugin has been taken over, and I'll read it here. So on behalf of the WordPress security team, so this is, I think, forgive me if I've got this wrong. This is a quote from Matt Mullenweg. On behalf of the WordPress security team, I am announcing that we're taking, we are invoking point 18 of the Plugin Directory guidelines and are forking advanced custom fields into a new plugin, which is gonna be called Secure Custom Fields, or SCF for short.

It has been updated to remove commercial upsells and fix a security problem. And then there's a screenshot here of section 18. I'd never heard of any of these sections, frankly, 'cause I'm not a plugin or theme developer, but here they are. And the ones which seem to, fit in section 18 were, the follow following to disable or remove any plugin from the directory.

Even for reasons not explicitly covered by the guidelines. That seems like a catchall phrase for. we can do what we like to anything, something like that. And then to make changes to a plugin without developer consent in the interest of public safety. So if you were in the, your WordPress install and you had a CF from the repository installed and you updated it, it would, update to SCF.

So they forked it, but they kept the same slog, meaning that it's not like this is a separate version of a CF, which has just got a new name. It, is now a CF. They've literally taken it over. And obviously here, Matt is outlining why that is in, his, view, why that's okay. And the, backlash from the community was pretty quick.

lots of people saying, it feels like you've basically just hijacked a plug in. You've used the same s slug and so on. Again, caveats. I'm not trying to paint my side of any story, I'm just trying to raise what's going on. And this article on the WP Tavern, which is entitled A CF Plugin Fork to Secure Custom Fields plugin lists out exactly what happened as far as, Lesner is concerned, and then goes into a bunch of tweets.

The reaction from WP Engine. Who, I guess it would be fair to say feel that the, plugin has been usurped from them. Taken from them. And, they feel, that this wasn't the normal way of going about and doing things. And then you get the, reaction from the community and there's a bunch of tweets, which I'm not gonna read out.

So that's a pretty big story in the sense that I don't know of anything like this that has happened in our community before. So I'm gonna stop talking about it there. I'm gonna just offer it to our panelists if they wanna drop in. That's all cool. If not, I'll just go onto my next bit. Okay. In which case, I will go on to my next bit.

So the, you can see that those two stories are combined. You got the forking story from Matt, which was there, and then you've got this, sorry, I'm modeling things up there. There we go. Then we've got the a CF story as well. Okay. Now a another thing which happened this week, which was new to me at least, this may have happened before, but I've certainly not seen it, is that if you were to trying, if you were trying to log into wordpress.org, typically username, password, and maybe there's a checkbox or something on there normally to say that you, I dunno, you agreed to terms and conditions, I can't remember.

But, there appeared a new checkbox, and here we can see what it said. I am not a affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise. And my understanding is that without actually checking that box, the login was. Was unavailable to you. it, wasn't like this was an option.

I think you had to ticket it, in order to pass through that gateway. And at some point there was a, an actual link to, a story. this I think is now gone. but that was listed there as well. So you basically had to say that you were not, and the words here are affiliated with WP Engine in any way financially or otherwise, and there was a lot of consternation in the community because people who are not legal, I'm not at all, wanted to know what affiliated meant.

the confusion around that because obviously, if you are ticking this box and you are in some way affiliated, I don't know, the examples went like this, I've got a plugin, I use their hosting. I have a client who uses their hosting. you can imagine all the different scenarios.

And so I think again, it was fair to say that there was a lot of consternation about this because people felt that this was new, a little bit unusual and not something that's seen before. And I think it's fair to say that the combination of these two stories have left many people questioning whether or not they wish to be part of the community.

I've seen some people who have left. I'm saying, I'm done with WordPress, et cetera. and pointing out that a combination of these two or one of the two things was enough to tip them over the edge there. And obviously that's a great shame. The, other thing to say is, it's gone outta my head, the other thing to say.

Anyway, there we go. That was that story. Anything to add to that? Can I just go back one story and just please say that this bit you missed when you were talking about the, backlash was, I think, it's fair to say most of the backlash wasn't about forking, it was about forking. and that this was perhaps not what most people would describe as a fork.

[00:24:20] Tim Nash: I think everybody who is rational realizes that the WordPress repositories guidelines say. They can do whatever they like. as do most, if you ever read any legal terms, when you sign up and deposit your code, wherever, GitHub, wherever it is, ultimately there's gonna be this little paragraph that says, no, We can do what we like. So that's but the taking of the slug and therefore keeping the reviews, keeping the name, keeping the SEO benefits, keeping the users wouldn't, if you said that outside of the current events and said this is a fork, people would look at you and go, is it. Is that what we used to?

So it's, not what we used to call Fox. Can, I just, explain that then? So if you were to go to the WordPress repository and correctly find a week ago, correctly find the advanced custom fields free repository plugin, it would obviously be bound with, all of the history and the reviews and all of that.

[00:25:28] Nathan Wrigley: And the thing here is because they've, because they've taken the slog, then all of those reviews are now bound to this new fork. Is that's it. Have I got that about right? Yeah. But you've also now got a different entity Yeah. Managing this. Okay. So everybody who updated overnight went from WP Engine, who were the custodians and are the custodians of a CF to a new product, SCF, which is wordpress.org for most people who actually manages the plugin.

[00:25:59] Tim Nash: It doesn't matter to them, but there aren't gonna be companies who literally have it written in their paperwork that says we have a, perhaps not a contract with d DP engine, but we have, as a one of the people who manage this software, they're na they're named in a piece of paper now, okay, it might be quite easy to swap over a piece of paper and change the names, but there was no option.

You didn't know what was gonna happen. If you as someone who has spent 10 years pushing automatic updates, this is a very scary thing. 'cause now somebody else is managing that and it is a different organization and that's whether it's a better organization or whoever they have, it was justified. All of that's irrelevant.

It simply is now a different organization and this was happened to end users. Without their consent. that's I think, a part of a problem. 'cause with automatic updates and with the manual update process, you couldn't see what was going to happen. It said there is an update available to advanced custom themes.

When you clicked it, you became secure custom themes. Okay. Now that again, is, there was no consent given on those two points and that could prove problematic for certain organizations be Did you, did I hear you wanting to? Yes. so if I'm understood, this whole problem correctly is that if you want to.

[00:27:39] Birgit Pauli-Haack: so WP Engine was, banned from.org. Yeah. And yeah, that, that was context that I didn't put in. I forgot about that. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. and there was a big outcry that now the plugin would be abandoned and stale because they can't update it. Now, the security team has taken over that plugin and issued a security update because they found security issues or one issue.

I'm, not a security expert, but I know that you are not able to roll out an update, a security update, without coming it from the same slug. Right now, they are in a, between a rock and a hard place if they wanna keep that, secure. So I just wanted to put that in because that doesn't seem to be, known around even the most of the plugin developers, that if a security issue is there and the plugin developer is not issuing that, but the security can take team takes over, then it needs to be from the same sl.

Now, I know also, and I saw this in a meta. channel that, people are working on, the security, on the meta team are working on to make it that you don't have to use the same slog. and that's code change that needs to be happen on, on, on meta, but I think that's a the way forward. So it hasn't, has nothing really yeah, but you can see it from any way as you want, but the security, you can, I just clarify?

I have, sorry. Can you speak all your things? Okay. Thank you so much, Tim. And that's all I had to say. Oh, I'm sorry. Just to clarify one thing, you can push an update as a contributor without taking over the, as an organization. For example, the security release that was done before Secure Custom Fields was created, was pushed out by.

[00:29:54] Tim Nash: A member of wordpress.org, they did that. They was, see it, if you go into the subversion control, you can see the, subversion entry made by that member of staff. And that was pushed out and then through that is different to an entire organizational takeover. Now can argue, but there's, how do they manage that long term?

And that's a very fair thing to argue. Yeah. And but the argument that they had to do this doesn't hold weight. 'cause they'd already shown how they could do it. the first time it was somebody from WP Engine who in that window where there were banned and then it was opened up. And then Security Auto, there's a different per auto knocking around.

As far as I can see. The patch was done by auto. So in this particular, I thought there was the last one. The other, it might not be previously, it might not have been, but I, you can see Adobe engine auto wordpress.org. I think I'm going to hijack the conversation here. So Yeah, we're going into real No, Yeah, it's okay. it's really fascinating and interesting. The, I think really you could encapsulate this as. There's a lot of people just detecting things, which are just a little bit different. Let's go with that. Just, not, things that you've seen too much of before. And because of that there's, lots of fear and, whether or not, let's say you are a plugin or a theme developer, whether this may or may not be something that you need to concern yourself about, those kind of things.

[00:31:31] Nathan Wrigley: Anyway, the point is that's the story. So that's, where we're at now. so we had this, login box, which, clearly pointed to the, ongoing dispute between WP Engine and, automatic. and then you had this, plugin takeover. So two really fairly big stories in the course of this week.

Whoop, excuse me, let me see if I can find the other one. So we did that one. We did that one. We did that one. This must be the other one. And then I'll just end this little section where I'm just speaking to the camera. and then something else that happened this week was that WP GraphQL, which is a, I'll just read actually again, this is from the Tavern, WP GraphQL, a popular plugin that provides an extendable GraphQL schema, is set to become a canonical plugin for wordpress.org on wordpress.org.

It's creator Jason Baal, has joined Automatic and, and I, guess the piece that paints it into this part of the podcast is the fact that, he's an employee, which is now, an automation who's come from WP Engine. You can read all about that elsewhere. Anyway, a canonical plugin is something which is akin to.

Something which is in core, but you don't necessarily have to have it. But it's gonna get that same sort of attention to detail. The idea being this plugin. Now, if it becomes a canonical plugin, you'll be able to utterly trust updates and things like that, because hopefully the work has been done in the background.

and so anyway, there are my four little bits at the top that I thought could be I century. And I just wanted to say what's happened. No doubt. The comments have been saying, giving, everybody's giving their opinion. I thank you. If you've kept it polite, that's great. That would be, what I'd wish, I don't at the moment have time to go through and read them all.

But has anybody got one that they've seen, like Remus? Have you got some in there? 'cause you've, I like the, this last one by Jason. 'cause in his, in his own, blog post about this, he highlights that, there will be a, renewed focus on, more development time for, WP GraphQL. And I think that's a, great thing to see happening.

Great. Is that a comment in our show or is that a comment on the article that we're looking at? The WP graph, the article we're looking at? Yeah. Okay, great. Perfect. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. so make of it what you will. I like, honestly, I can totally see why both sides have got an, argument in this and, I, fear that there's more to come.

One of the things which has got nothing to do with the stories, but the stories are the catalyst is it does seem to me. Like a bit of a shame. the, impact, shall we say, on the community. if, you could just push away the stories and just read the text, which are going backwards and forwards, it does seem like we've stepped into some sort of adversarial space and people that seem to be only friendly towards everybody.

There's now a few, there's a few lines in the sand that have been drawn and, it's, pulled out of people lines that they wish they'd never had to have crossed. And, I think let's just hope that time can be a healer and that we don't have more people who are getting fed up and leaving the community.

You never know. There is a possibility that in a year's time, we'll look back on this, the rifts will have gone away. we'll be back to something a little bit more.

[00:35:05] Remkus de Vries: 15 plus almost 20 years. there have been WP dramas before. Yeah. we have lived on, even thrived in certain ways, you could say, but, I, do wanna recognize that this is a, this is one of those things where you, like I'm, done. Done in terms of, having to spend negative energy. Yeah. and that, for me, and this is not, I'm purposely not voicing my opinion on, a public platform like this.

but I think it's important to, I saw a tweet from this morning where he essentially says, if you can be kind, and I think we're starting to lose, a lot of that perspective, yeah. Yeah. So I would just like to, highlight, that as a whole, 'cause this is a very di device divisive thing.

[00:36:02] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Many of us have friends on both sides of the argument. it's just very tough. And, from a legal perspective, we might only know 5% of what's actually going on. So I'd just like to add that as a whole to the whole discussion. you rams it. Thank you. Rams. I just come, back from we, and it was really.

yeah, very. but it wasn't discourage. It was very good to come back to people. You meet them in person, you have a relationship with them, and, we all can talk about things, but we all know it needs to be kind. We, all kind to each other and we know everybody's hurting or a lot of people are hurting.

So we take care of that. Yeah. And, have a meal together and talk about other things that's going on in other people's lives and, what breakfast is about. and that's the community. And I'm, really happy that I went, even if I was hesitant to do, but yeah, been an automat and all one, one thing that I've learned, which I think probably everybody already knew, so it, really is me being just a bit dismally o on.

[00:37:21] Nathan Wrigley: How to describe it. I don't really interact much on social media, especially X, but I found myself looking at the home bond. Usually I use, X or Twitter as a, as an inbox. So I look at the notifications and messages tabs only, and I do literally mean only that's all I ever use it for. but this last week I've found myself clicking on the home button, which I think you could just describe as the feed.

And it is interesting how the algorithm. does seem to surface stuff of a very incendiary nature. It does. And digging a little bit further on all of the incendiary stuff behind it somewhere is, some reasonable position that could have been taken. But what I'm trying to say is, if you're using social media as, the way of getting the information, it does seem, it's a, bonfire, and it, pushes you into all the, oh, it's, everybody hates this, and those people hate that.

Not just the negative stuff. It's also the positive stuff. the Okay that is engaged highly with is the stuff that I see. there's way more negative, obviously. Yeah. Because there's way more, voicing of negative opinions and, There's a lot of sentiment going on. Most of us identify on a very personal level with this piece of software.

[00:38:34] Remkus de Vries: So it's If you touch that, you touch your, you touch them, I think. Perhaps now is a good time to reconsider that direct connection and see that as a role that you do and not you as a personal person being affected. I think that's, could be an interesting, position for some folks. I see, mostly on X, constantly tweeting about it.

at the end of the day it's no longer in our hands if it ever was, Yeah, I think that's a really interesting framing of it, and I think you encapsulate it really there. Like the reason that like it, people throw bombs at each other because they care. Yeah. And maybe that's something I hadn't really thought about.

[00:39:17] Nathan Wrigley: even if somebody's like really having a go at your position Yeah. Is because they care, they're not doing it properly. Let's hope they're not, doing it to, to just get a rise out of you. They're doing it because a real position. Yeah. Yeah. And it feels like certainly the time that I've been in WordPress, we haven't yet been faced with, a a boundary quite so severe as this. Yeah. So anyway, that's the I stuff, which happened this week and we've, honestly done far too much time on that already. go wherever you like to go. WP Tavern's probably a good place to start, but all the, just WordPress news outlets in general will give you all of the details.

There's loads that's gone on this week and, but we will move on. We will press on and do other things instead that are related to the actual software itself. if you're still with us, thank you. Appreciate that. WordPress 6.7, the actual code that we actually care about, beta two is announced and that there's nothing really for me to add into this except to say that if you are a habitual tester of WordPress software prior to its release, we're getting very close.

November is the deadline. It's two and a bit weeks away, to release WordPress 6.7. We'll talk more about that in a moment, but if you wanna test it, now's the time. There's loads of ways of doing that. Probably the easiest way is by look, clicking the link in this article where it says WordPress playground.

In other words, over here. That's a really quick, easy way to do it if you've got a plugin or a theme or a block or anything like that, time to make sure that it's all working. So does that. Okay, moving on. I'm gonna, I'm gonna throw this one at big 'cause this is definitely her area of expertise.

this was a couple of days ago now, a few days ago. Carlos Bravo, what's new in Guttenberg, 19.4. I'll just quickly scroll through. we'll take each one at a time. new right design mode. So there's now gonna be, I mean if you're looking at this on the, screen, that's great. You'll be able to see what I'm on about.

There's new right mode and a design mode, which is gonna be right here next to the inserter. and what is this? Is this like focus mode? Does it just strip away all the UI that you don't need? Is that what's going on? W it's actually a renaming of the two, features that have been there before.

[00:41:35] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay. And they were called edit and Select. And it's a method that you, so if you are a keyboard, a person who travels the internet via keyboard, especially the block editor, you have, you have two modes. One is to, edit, And then go through all the toolbar buttons, by tabs or to select and go from block to block And, the escape key gets you from one into the other. so for those that are traveling by keyboard, that's really important. for us who, or for me who I see a lot of things and can point the mouse to, those difference, differences are not very, prominent. because it automatically detects if I wanna edit that or if I wanna select it and then go to the next, because mouse travels differently.

they are. planning to add additional features to it, but it comes out with a zoom out mode that's already in 6.7. Yeah, we might see an example of that in a minute actually. Yeah. okay. So block binding's editor APIs are now public, I'll just read here. Allows developers to use certain block binding APIs that were previously private and used only in court.

[00:42:58] Nathan Wrigley: And there's some additional stuff here, I should say. Very cool. This article is on make wordpress.org mku, you were gonna say, oh, that's very cool that the, the block bindings API You can do so many cool things with that. Give us a, just give us a nice little example if you can. I don't think I need to give an example, but I can give you a better description of what it does.

[00:43:16] Remkus de Vries: Oh, great. It to bind whatever block you have available in your editor to another block in a way that you wouldn't, like programmatically you can build, for instance. And that this is probably the best example. You can build wonderful mega menus with it. 'cause you can put anything you want in there and the, that binding, is what is needed to be able to do that.

'cause right now you can't. but the block bindings API basically provides us with all the tools we need to ba to build those types of, wonderful integrations. and, then, yeah, I just think, the types of examples that are interesting to look at is, if you have patterns and you'd like to include patterns within patterns in a, programmatically way, or you just like to be more creative than what you are currently allowed to do.

That's what this API will, will facilitate you a lot in. Nice. Yeah. It also allows you to add, custom fields to, When you have custom fields, normally you would have to create a template for it and then add it to the front end. And this way you can add it to a block, can add a block and then say, this binds to the text of my book review description, and then it changes.

[00:44:40] Birgit Pauli-Haack: it, can automatically be on the front end, so that's a really nice thing. Yeah. Nice. Another one would be re if you have a recipe. Yeah. All the ingredients that are in meta. custom fields. you can actually then, combine them all in a display. Perfect. Nice descriptions there. Thank you. There's a bunch of other things on there as well, in under this notable highlights, but I won't go into those.

[00:45:03] Nathan Wrigley: Those are the two sort of main items. So that's what's happening in Gutenberg 19.4, which was, not that long ago. Let's quickly press on. Ooh, hopefully it'll load. I did mention this last week or the week before, but because of the news it got, hijacked basically. So just another quick one, if you do still wanna help, I just mentioned about beta testing, but this article gives you a comprehensive list of all of the different bits and pieces that you can help with, specifically how you can help.

So it's like a, how to article of helping, and then there's a, load of things in this here checklist. which really would like to be helped with. So I'm, I'm not gonna read them all out, but it says if you want to quickly test the update, WordPress versions of compatibility with your site, please verify the following checks.

So that was, help test WordPress 6.7, so the thorough explanation of what you can do to help. Okay. Finally. Some out and out. Done. Good news. hang on. that was good news. Oh, okay. Sorry. Yeah, but it was technical. Good. Yeah. Alright. You're right. You are right. I'm sorry. I, yeah, you are, quite, I'm sorry.

I take that back. Okay. more good news. Here's some more. Good. That's it. That'll do it. Here's some more good news. this is to say that the Hero Press website has, reached the 10 year milestone Hero press. If you don't know is, the foundation story of this is really interesting. It's right at the beginning, I'll just read it 'cause it is interesting.

In late, November, 2024, I woke up to an email, this is Tofa ROIA by the way, who, who founded this, woke up to an email that would change my life. It said, what a curious email. I want you to do something great for WordPress. I dunno if that's all that was in there, but that was what it said. tofa replied, What is it he wrote back? And the reply that came to that was, that's your journey to discover, honestly. It's like you met Yoda in your email or something like that. And so Tofa decided hero press was the way to do it. it seems and I didn't realize this, it seems like version one of Hero Press, whatever that was ended in failure.

it says everyone walked away and it was done. I dunno if that was a, WB drama or not. but people kept emailing me and telling me to do it. And, he did. And now, hero Press is one of those websites where you can go to and, receive, read. inspiring, stories about people from all over the world.

And it, honestly, when you go to these word camps and these events all over the place, it is nice to, nice to meet these people in person, but a substitute for that would be something like hero Press. So far today, 278 essays have been published Wow. In 29 languages. That's pretty amazing. the story's coming out of 66 countries.

and then more stats, 136 women, 134 men, three non-binary. and there they all are. Look at that in 100. It's so cool. it's a roomful and, he's obviously keen to keep this project going, but as with all things, if you're making content, you'll know how this goes. There is a financial cost to all of this.

And so if you have appreciated what Hero Press have done, Tofa goes into the explanation of the kind of support that they need. And you could boil it down, for financial help, would certainly be welcome. And there's a button right here to donate. But he doesn't just say, give us your money.

He, it goes into explain why, why you might wanna help, and what those, what your money would actually be helping with. So firstly, tofa and anybody that's been connected, including all of the people who've written the articles. Thank you. I read this whenever new stuff comes out and it is really cool.

I like it a lot. Anything else about this other piece of good news? I love the fact that this seemingly started because of a spam email. yeah. Yeah. I could've been good. This was just somebody there going, I'm gonna make my millions by convincing him fortune.

[00:49:09] Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, I think it's, really that's the good part of, Bert, it's a community and it's how many laws have changed and, just because of the journey that people take, if I see what happens in Nepal or. In other countries with people who take, on WordPress, translate it, and then, enable other people to, to use it and, have their voices heard.

I don't know if that counts. Elliot, he wanted to some kittens or puppies. So click, one of, click on one of those. Okay. So I'll just, I'll give you a quick demo, right? no, I just wanted to say, click on one of those stories and then I see maybe that counts as well. Okay. just for those of you who wanna see, real cancer.

[00:49:59] Nathan Wrigley: A breeze. It's a tiny, lemme finish having my drink. I know. I did notice I come back from the video and everybody's picking their nose or something. Like I'll keep it on a little bit longer. Next time the cats and the kittens and all of the dogs and the sheep, they'll be coming later. Fear not. Okay. Okay. So there was hero press. Thank you, for the people who've contributed to that and well done for getting to 10 years. No mean achievement. That's for sure. Okay, here we go. Here's something, if you're in the southeast of the uk, seems like the perfect opportunity when I've got Tim on the call. on Halloween, 31st of October, Tim is gonna be joining us in London at the a, a, new thing that we're trying out.

It's called the W-P-L-D-N Masterclass and, felt like 31st of October. scary spookiness. Tim's going to, Tim's gonna talk about, auditing WordPress security like a pro. it is a paid for event. You can register by clicking on that button there. It's at WP ldn.uk/masterclass. The, normal WPDN event, which is free, will be taking place on the same day right afterwards, so it, the whole thing isn't bound off in a, fee.

But if you want to check Tim's stuff out, then yeah, you need to register for that. What you covering, Tim, or haven't you decided yet? No, no. worries. I know you've decided I'm trying to do myself out of a job. so it is basically a, everybody should be doing secure site reviews. Secure code reviews.

[00:51:33] Tim Nash: Lots of people say they do it, not so much on the implementation side of things. And a lot of that is because there's a fear of what do I do? How should I structure this? does it need to be this big formal report thing? They, see pen tests and go, oh, how do I use that equipment? All of that. So we are covering through how to audit your site, how to define what you should be looking at, finding things and developing an action plan afterwards.

But you're basically, pinching all my processes and my SOPs, and you're getting those and then you're getting me to tell you how to implement them on your sites SOPs, what? Brilliant for agencies, brilliant for developers. And if you are in the southeast and your boss has not got you signed up on this.

Send the dm, tell them to DM me and I will give them withing. Looks nice withering. Look, photograph will come your way. Remus, you were gonna add? No, I was gonna say sobs. What? But the joke fell. oh. Yeah. Yeah. so yeah, that's happening on the 31st. So you've got several days to sign up. we're, doing it in the Central London, near London Bridge.

[00:52:45] Nathan Wrigley: And the venue, is it the Ibis? This one? I can't remember. We've been, working in the, if you've an attendee of Word Camp London. Yeah. Then it's basically really, close to who's that handsome man on the screen now, by the way? Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. That's very kind of you to say, why is he looking away from the text?

[00:53:07] Remkus de Vries: That's what, oh, you gotta talk to Dan, maybe your brother. Yeah. Okay. So there it is. Check it out. Wpdn UK slash masterclass. Go check that out. another session, another thing which is happening in the real, in, I guess this is a virtual conference. It's not in the real world, unlike the last one, but not far away now is, woos.

[00:53:32] Nathan Wrigley: It's a virtual conference for WooCommerce store builders designed to help grow your business. it comes around each and every year. I'm not a particular, user of WooCommerce, so I can't really speak to what this event is but I know it's very popular. Is it? That's good. It's good. it's been good for a great many years.

[00:53:51] Remkus de Vries: there's people who build, various different things for WooCommerce and, sharing that information, it's, pretty much, gold. Nice. Like it'd be, not the smartest thing if you were to ignore this one. Okay. that's great way of, yeah. You're building anything with WooCommerce.

At any time, then this is the thing to start, paying attention to. 'cause there's, lots of people going to share very beautiful ways of how to extend and work with WooCommerce. Nice. Commend. Great. the URL is sesh, W-O-O-S-E-S h.com. And, it's put it in the diary 29th of the 30th of October.

[00:54:33] Nathan Wrigley: And then of course you can do the whole trifecta sign up for the 31st of October with Tim Nash. And you've done three days, on, the, i dunno if people can handle that though. Oh, come on. If I can do it. That's right. sign up here and it does say, I dunno what quite, what this means, 'cause I dunno what the sort of structure is, but it says two days, 20 speakers, 17 sessions, infinite font free, $799 down to free.

Love it. And there's a selection of the speakers that I was just showing a moment ago, some of them listening to this call. As we speak. So there you go. Great. Alrighty. just wanna point out that WP Accessibility Day, was last week. That's right, isn't it? I haven't missed a week in all of this drama.

No, it was last week. And my understanding is that if you were attending in person, that is to say live, it was an online event that happened over a 24 hour period, then you were able to watch, the event including live captions, which is pretty amazing. and over here we've got Mike Davy, who's a, somebody that works for Delicious Brains who's given their commentary on that.

But I just want to point out that it happened and the videos are gonna become available really soon on the, the YouTube channel that they've got. So I, don't really have anything to add to that other than that it happened and the videos will be coming your way and I think, was there 24 of them? Was it one per hour?

A bit like Word Fest Live? I'm not entirely sure, but It was 24 hours. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. I'm not keeping an eye on the comments on this particular show. They were going too fast. okay. So James, thank you. Plus the very nice, and then a whole bunch of other stuff above there probably to do with all the, there's a really nice one from the other ot.

The other big at this one. Yeah. I remember, oh, I remember Hero press starting and was once video interviewed for V one. Love reading all the essays and personal stories. That is nice. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Okey dokey. and related to that, what you can see on the screen, is an article. It's, not really WordPress news as such, but I just thought it slotted in nicely with the WP Accessibility Day.

This is, digital Ally, a one one y digital ally.com and it's, an introduction in how to write an accessibility statement for your website. So I haven't, Had to do that, but I just thought that was worth throwing in there. Okay. Maybe this stuff could have gone at the, more towards the beginning, but here we go.

If you, if you've been following the news, Joseph Ser, Hayden Choi stepped down, I'm gonna say 10 days ago as the executive director of WordPress and a replacement has now been sought and found, and the article that you can see here, please welcome Mary. I'm gonna say Hubbard. I presume that's how you pronounce it.

I suppose it could be Hubbard or something like that. But let's go with Hubbard. and the article says, we're proud to announce that Mary Hubbard has resigned as the, and I started reading that. I thought, okay, this is going in a strange direction. Normally begin with those words, but, I guess they're trying to lend some sort of credibility to the career that Mary has had.

We're proud to announce that Mary Hubbard has resigned as the head of TikTok America's Governance and Experience as Will and will be starting as the next, a next executive director of WordPress um.org on the 21st of October. So a little over a week from now. it turns out that Mary has actually worked at Automatic before from 2020 to 2023 and was the chief product officer for wordpress.com.

And then it says here, so she has deep knowledge of WordPress and expertise across business, product, marketplace, program management and governance. This is no reflection on Mary 'cause I don't have any experience with Mary whatsoever. But, what a pair of shoes to fill in. Josepha Hayden Choi, who I just thought did a, an utterly remarkable job.

she did, yeah. Really just quite a, force of nature in the best possible way. Yep. very calm and considered and thoughtful and able to take on conflicting opinions. And somehow out of that maelstrom managed to deliver, a coherent, thoughtful response. That's, I dunno how she does it.

you occasionally meet those people who can take two warring factions if you like, and meld them together and get some sort of consensus out of it. big shoes. But I'm, Mary, welcome. Let's hope that all turns out well. Anybody wanna say anything? Maybe you know her, I don't know.

Maybe some of you. I, don't know her. so it comes from TikTok and automatic we, and that's pretty much all that I know about, or yep, Big is, basically, 'cause it's, it's not an easy time to start. No. that was my thought, right? like if, Joseph had stepped down in, I actually don't know.

I don't know if GI has even published a piece explaining the reasons behind it, but maybe we can. Not reasons, but No. Okay. Anyway. for whatever reasons, maybe they'll become public in the future, maybe not, don't know. But, certainly a difficult time to begin a job at, a time, unlike any, in WordPress.

So I imagine Mary is gonna have some fairly full hands dealing with the, situations that are going on at the moment. Anyway, good luck. I hope it all works out. And here we go. What's new for developers? Just, so this is Nick, ta, Nick d Nick Tadlock. Now there would be a, there would be a force of nature.

How many of Justin Diego. Yeah. I like this idea that they merge together and there's just the two heads just talking at each other, right? Just on one body. what was that dog? they need two lots of hands though. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Double the typing. Speed. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. this is just such a relentlessly cool thing, which happens each month.

It's the what's new for developers and obviously we're in the, month of October. I'll just give you a, I'll just give you a big scroll, right? there's no way I'm gonna be able to pause this 'cause it's just hundreds and hundreds of lines of what is going on. But, I've just highlighted a couple of things at the top.

We talked about the block bindings, API, so there's a little bit more information on that. and big, it mentioned this zoom out mode, which honestly, when I heard that this was gonna be a thing, I was like, I am never gonna use that. But it's interesting. And then I, clicked the button and it was like, oh.

Actually, that's actually quite cool and you know I'm gonna use it again. Yeah. That's why I used it the once. Yeah. But it was a bit like, that experience that you get with things like Figma, where you pinch and the whole UI that you've been creating, just there it is and you just get to see all of it in one frame.

It was like that. And you just got this cohesive sense of, oh, that's what I've created. Not, here's the viewport, scroll up, here's the viewport. Again, just a much more. Rich in-depth experience. And I guess if you're creating, I don't know, complicated patterns and they stretch over a long distance, this kind of thing will be really interesting.

Anybody got anything on that zoom out? Mo, maybe it's just me that's obsessing about that. No, I'm really happy about it. Oh, especially when you do wanna add some, patterns and you zoom out, you can exactly, place them right away, and see how they all flow in with the rest of it. Yeah. and that, that's really cool.

[01:02:17] Birgit Pauli-Haack: And there are, a few navigation buttons on the left and where you can on the left of those section that is yeah. You mean? Yeah. Yeah. That, we can just trash one of them because Oh, that doesn't, fit in. And if you try that earlier, with a pattern, sometimes you couldn't, delete it all, because you couldn't grasp it all.

But you can also move them and drag and drop them and it's, it's nice to, it improves the. Pattern handling, quite a bit, especially when you do long landing pages that it can just go add patterns and then move them around. So if you're looking at the screen, you can see what I'm gonna read. It says the new zoom out mode is no longer experimental.

[01:03:01] Nathan Wrigley: and obviously there were a few bugs and things and it will be included in 6.7, but the click hub, a button, you get a zoomed out view of the editor canvas, making it easier to compose page layouts with patents. It reminds me of an email. builder, some, like MailChimp or something where you can see the whole thing in one go has that kind of flavor to it.

And I, I wasn't expecting that I'd find it in any way useful, but, I did. and then we've talked about the new, and design modes and, okay, so this is also interesting. So the, dropdown menu, which you are probably familiar with, close to the sort of published button. and it's got things like, do you wanna see it as a tablet, mobile, desktop, and what have you?

or you can click to open in a new tab or what have you. now this is gonna be extensible, so people, developers will now be able to drop in whatever custom menu item they want to add into there. the sky is the limit that is gonna be really cool for people who are, do stuff like.

[01:04:03] Tim Nash: Headless, for example. Stuff where it's perhaps, 'cause I'll be honest, when it comes to the preview, I just go to the visit site nine times outta 10. Yeah. And I, just, I, think that's just, age, but it's I just don't, it's I know it says that it, gives me the other options, but it's like I don't trust it unless I can see it on the page like that.

So I imagine a scenario where you have a build pipeline. you might even be as able to go have a whole pipe build pipeline and it pop out the other end in the preview. That would be like, oh, I see. Yeah, Okay. Yeah, that's a very good, yeah, so all those developers out there, you're gonna be able to tap into that.

[01:04:48] Nathan Wrigley: And there's a bunch of, oh, there's some really interesting stuff happening with playground. Playground is the one click in browser, WordPress experience. so they've improved the website for that, but also the team is working hard on new features, including, this is cool refresh list website deployment.

So I'm guessing that. as you start playing with things, it's gonna update in, the background new query parameters for testing WordPress core and Gutenberg PIs P PIs, prs. And there was also, persistent storage. You will have the instant, each instant be, able to add it to persistent storage, either in the browser or in a local directory on your device.

And what I'm reading from that is that the site will be available to you when you come back two days later, even if you've closed the browser down. 'cause at the minute, imagine close the browser down, it's gone. Imagine how this now can start become a platform to actually build apps and localized, stuff that you would otherwise just find different ways of building.

[01:05:51] Remkus de Vries: But you can now just use playground. Yeah, if you do all the, add all the code, make it sure that anybody can download and it works as you intended, that's pretty cool what the direction is going now. So I've used, local, which is, I guess you need to say these things these days, don't you?

[01:06:08] Nathan Wrigley: It's a, WP Engine, product and it installs onto your desktop. But my, understanding, I don't really know how it works, it's a bit of voodoo to me, but my understanding is that all of the bits and pieces are just stored in the file structure in my case on a Mac. So everything I could drill down into the Finder and find that website and all of the files and what have you.

So is this basically akin to that? you'll point playground to. Okay. Save it there. That's you. Can you can even see it a little bit better. 'cause if you look at, studio from workers.com. Yep. That is built off of the same technology. and it'll allow you to do that in the, in a similar fashion?

[01:06:49] Remkus de Vries: Yeah. Oh yeah. Studio is the sort of, it, it li it feels like local in that you've downloaded and app. Yeah, it's same type of different feature set and all that, but yeah. Okay. Okay. So that persistent nature. Yeah, I think, that's gonna be really interesting. I've said that I think. The playground is to iOS what the app store is, if Like it, I think we're just gonna suddenly have a load of people coming up with some really ingenious things. WordPress is f the iPhone's F but combine the iPhone with an app store and suddenly it's whoa, really f And I feel that's maybe what playground will be something truly amazing. Tim Bigot, anything on that before we move on?

[01:07:35] Birgit Pauli-Haack: I'm a total fan of Blue, playground and I have played around with a lot of blueprints to put sites together, or site demos with additional content. And Ws PCLI added to that end. That's really cool because you can now create a Yeah. A user experience, of your plugin or of your theme that you don't have to put on a server and have to spin up 500 times to give it to your clients.

Yeah. You just give them the same link. Yeah. And that's really cool. Yeah, really nice. And then I'm wondering if one of you can take on the heavy lifting of explaining to my dull brain what's going on here. So this is the view meta boxes in the Iframed post editor. Just to be clear, this is the, what's new for developers in October, 2024.

[01:08:23] Nathan Wrigley: So this is I, suppose in a sense it's like WordPress is bleeding edge in a way. and it says in previous WordPress versions, meta Box has prevented the, editor canvas from being Iframed and iframe Canvas offers many benefits. What are those benefits? What, is it that we're, have any of you got any intuition on this?

If not, we'll just move on. But, No, I think it's more of a, they, the, entities can be treated separately, so one couldn't be updated and refreshed in the background why the other one can do the same thing, but maybe 10 seconds later because you then change something in the meta box. So it's becoming more of a real life app as you're building and writing and adding content and blocks and stuff in all the different types of meta boxes that you have available.

So does this tap into what you were talking about earlier with things like the block bindings API, you'd be able to combine things? No, That's more if I am in my Yost SEO settings, and I'm updating and changing stuff there and, I will have a better way of having that being refreshed as I'm doing what I'm doing.

[01:09:31] Remkus de Vries: While, the editor itself, someone else could also be, in a different way, be writing content there. So this, in a way, paving the direction for, multiple, people working on the same type of content. I'm assuming, but yeah, to me that's where we're going. There's, big it.

[01:09:56] Tim Nash: Alright. Okay. Come on. That was my joke. I was gonna do that another 12 times. another, big advantage of having, the block editor and the, post editor and the site editor, being the same interface. Is that the, a theme or plugin developer can style, everything like. It's what is what you get.

[01:10:21] Birgit Pauli-Haack: And it's easier to style if you have, a, non iframe thing. You have to do different styles sometimes. Yeah. And it sometimes, the, what is what you get doesn't work like that. So the, you have different styles on the block, editors on the front end, and, having it all in the, iframe, it makes it much easier for, both of them, to, show, how the block works.

Okay. so that's, definitely one of them. And everything else is streamlined. The post editor are pretty much the same component. Yeah. And what only leaves the post editor is the meta boxes. And now I think they have a good, they experimented quite a bit with that, what to do with the meta boxes because there are quite a few plugins.

Yeah. Like meta boxes or, That rely on the, on, on the display of that. but now having two, two I frames, I think it's a good way to handle that. without, I think it's, I think we're at that moment where we need you to, turn your camera off and on again. I lost a couple of the only a couple of words that, like the gist of everything that you said came across, so don't worry.

[01:11:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Oh, sorry about no. Honestly, just literally a couple of words and it was fine. Apart from that, yeah. Okay. James Kemp dropping in to say, oh, so firstly Elliot, likes the zoom out feature. Thinks that's super cool. Nice ux Okay, great for complex pages. Yeah. I guess once you like really onto some lengthy page, it, lends itself really well to that, doesn't it?

And then James Kemp says they want to rename blueprints. Any thoughts on that? Do you know what two James? Or is they just muting, the fact that they wanna replace the name? I really like the name Blueprint. I do too. I, see zero need to do any changes to that. Okay. The same. Okay. That's it.

It has been decided. By ter that, it's not gonna change. Don't, worry, James. It's all a storm in a teacup. yeah, I don't know that seems perfect for me because it literally does what I'm imagining a blueprint does. Yeah. it's got that perfect one-to-one mapping in my head of, yeah. we don't endorse any change at all.

here we go. I've heard, ooh, recipes. Yeah. No, not us all.

[01:12:46] Tim Nash: It's information and design. A recipe is cooking Exactly. Ingredients in that. That's something else. J James, all I can say is you need to take this important feedback, to the people in high places and make sure that it's kept as blueprint. Old people do not like any changes. Okay. playground? I think blue.

[01:13:08] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah. Okay. What playground in the sense of a child's playground? Some sort of child, but Hold on, There's companies building playgrounds when they build them, they use blueprints. Nice. You've sold it to me, MKU. That's all you needed to say. But occasionally they probably go home and cook as well.

[01:13:25] Remkus de Vries: yeah. But they need recipe for that. Yeah, they bring a packed lunch. okay. Okay. It's not my idea says, James. It's okay. We're not trying to blame you. Don't worry. we don't hold you responsible. But if you wanted, not much a panel. All you need to do is say, a hundred percent of the people that I poll said it should be, should remain as a blueprint.

[01:13:49] Nathan Wrigley: there you go. That's it. We've done it. Yeah. So that article carries on. There's loads more in there. And if you are a developer, please. Oh, you must, read very quickly on the playground as a thinking. That I'd love to see is blueprints in blueprints out. I had love this idea of having you, you start off by loading your blueprint, you make changes, and then the blueprint goes out and the almost you can have the scenario, if you've ever come across a live CD for a Linux system.

[01:14:18] Tim Nash: A live boot. Yeah. You put USB stick or you plug in your CD and it would boot up and let you have Linux on your Windows machine. And it wasn't changing anything until you hit go, and then it would wipe to the hard drive. I can really see a really powerful use case for playground where you, you configure it, how you like, and then you go, I'm ready to write it to disc.

[01:14:40] Remkus de Vries: rm rfs, is that on the better name for blueprints? Is what? No, nevermind. Bad joke again. Oh, it's all acronym jokes with mku today. I don't know rf. I'm desperately gonna be trying to figure that out during the course of the rest of the, you say rm rf you mean hard drive? Oh, remove, Oh, R like hyphen rm.

[01:15:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, with, force recursive as well. Do that? Yes, please. Yeah. Yeah. okay. So please, if you are a developer and you haven't stumbled across this, go to, developer.wordpress.org and then in this case it's Forward slash News. And then follow it from there. But just sign up for this, get this in your RSS feed.

'cause every month they're gonna drop something and it's, just a ton of what's coming in WordPress. So that's really good. the team, woo. Sorry. We glo well, woo. WooCommerce and Welo have partnered up together. This article's pretty thin on the ground, in terms of detail, but I'll just read you the, very first sentence.

It says Welo, by the way, which is a translation, service so that you can translate your, WordPress website and now WooCommerce store, into a variety of different languages. It says, Welo is excited to announce a new partnership with WooCommerce. Welo is now fully integrated with WooCom, with WordPress e-commerce plugin WooCommerce, providing a seamless way to translate your store in just minutes.

I don't know, how to do that. I didn't watch the video, but it just says, simply add the Welo extension via WooCommerce and your WooCommerce store will now be fully translated. Now, it says that in the past tense, like it's gonna do it for you and displayed on the language specific subcategories in just a couple of clicks.

Not being sure how, welo works. I can't really tell you about that, but, anyway, maybe James. Who's in the comments will know a little bit more. I dunno. but there's that. Anybody want to add anything? It just automatically translate if you, if you want that sort of, translation. Okay. So it's like an AI clicker button.

It'll translate it type thing in a way. Yeah. Okay. Nice. Okay. Thank you. That's helpful. And where's my other articles? Here we go. That one's kind of blank. I just thought this was interesting. So we're now in an era where you really are at the point where if you're building client websites, you are gonna be able to very, soon hand over an editing experience to your clients, which kind of matches their expectation.

I don't know if they're just producing text. You could, strip out the editor so that it behaves perfectly to that kind of process. If you wanna do it. Oh, I dunno. For. Different user roles or what have you. and Nick Tadlock, he's back, with it's Nick Diego, 15 Ways to curate the WordPress editing Experience.

And, this is just a laundry list of 15 ways that you can do exactly that, modify the, the WordPress, the block editor, the site editor, and you can see it's tons of code you've gotta drop in the code. So I'm not gonna dwell on it, but here's some examples of the, I'm gonna say it, recipes, blueprints. So it's things like disabling specific blocks, disabling block support, disabling user interface for locking blocks, disabling the inspector tabs, disabling open verse.

There's lots of disabling, set the default image size, un regi, blah, blah, blah. You get the idea. So if you're in, go on. what is the name of this show? WP Builds and the, this podcast. What is the, what is it name? This week in WordPress, I feel like I'm walking into a trap. What's happening?

[01:18:14] Remkus de Vries: This article is three more than three months old. Oh, I know. But I've only just come across it. So it's going in, yeah. Oh no, I don't, read a certain newsletter saying that you read, if you would read a little more carefully. Oh, I'm in trouble now. It's evergreen. I agree with that, but yeah, thanks.

[01:18:33] Nathan Wrigley: Big. yeah, Take that. Recurs is evergreen. That's, what I'm saying. the, he's right though it is a bit on the old side and occasionally we do surface old content. A case in point is me. Yeah. okay. See how I commented my way out of that awkward moment? Okay. Anyway, this article's a bit stale.

Don't bother reading it. and oh no. Tell Diego to, update stuff more often. that's all. That's all I'm saying. Flame mku. Okay. What about this one? This is up to date? This is from last week. From Felix? Yes. Oh, okay. Okay, so it's a week out date. it's not up to date. You know what I should do is I should do a daily show called this Day in WordPress Every day, and, oh, I don't know if the world could handle that at the minute.

I would be able to do that easily. It could be this hour in WordPress at the moment, to be honest. Okay. And I'm not a big user of ai. and the only time I've really used AI is I've connected things, SaaS services and, WordPress plugins and things to chat GPT. That's really my only experience.

But I know that out there is a whole bunch of different ais and I can list the names, things like Claude and Anthropic, but I don't really know too much about them. But somebody that does and is, worrying about them is Felix s from the, performance, I want to say performance team. And he's a Googler as well.

And he's created a plugin, called AI Services. And I, I don't know why rem, I have a feeling that you. You are into AI a bit or you'd like to get in? I dunno, have I got that wrong? Do you? Yeah. not in the hardcore way, but I do more than use it for content, generation Okay. Type of stuff.

[01:20:21] Remkus de Vries: But, this is a, nice plugin 'cause it's basically, wanting to service, the connection to the APIs in a unified way. so anything you need additional stuff happening in your WordPress site, you can use this as a base. basically the, the, this WordPress plugin introduces central infrastructure, which allows other plugins to make use of its AI capabilities.

That is the, key sentence of this plugin. So it enables you to just have this like one stop shop, if you like, and everything binds to that. Yeah. And then, and you build on top of it. Yeah. Okay. and it, as it's all the hotness at the moment, and, everybody's talking about ai, it seems like a really a good time to do this.

[01:21:06] Nathan Wrigley: So it's really new. in fact, it's so new that it's got loads of caveats written all over it. Consider this plugin early access. At this point, there are lots of enhancements and things that need to be polished. Don't use it on production, that kind of thing. so I'll just read the WordPress plugin introduces, central infrastructure, which allows plugins to make use of AI capabilities, exposes APIs that can be used in various contexts, contexts, whether you need to use AI capabilities in server or client side code, API agnostic.

So you can use anthropic, Google open AI to learn to name, but a few, and you can use any of them in any way that you wish. So very cool. Thank you. Felix, anything else on that before I move on? And just to say, I really like framework based plugins. This idea that he's not going, I'm gonna go and I'm gonna build out this huge, complicated thing with millions of features.

[01:22:00] Tim Nash: Instead, he's gone well over time, I. This landscape's gonna change, but we're always gonna want to have a little core thing where we're gonna be interacting with these eight. 'cause ultimately all this is a, wrapper to interact with a bunch of AI services. Yeah. And then expose those endpoints to other plugins.

but I really like that as a look, I'm gonna start with this really small thing and then you can add your own blocks on. And this is a really good way to develop plugins. and I wish more people would think about it from that perspective. it's fast. It's more secure and simpler. And we can do with simplicity.

'cause sometimes we make things ridiculously, overly complicated, especially with ai. Yeah. Yeah. Oh boy. and there it is. You can see it, it is called AI services. Has more to say on the topic, by the way. Oh, I apologize. I thought we'd finished. No, I'm, more meant like Tim was very eager to start another point, of No, keep going, Tim.

no, I just like that. I, like the co the idea of the plugin as much as the, as, a concept. Yeah, I agree. This is the smarter way to build. I'm gonna, I'm gonna wait so long now just to make sure that everybody's even if somebody wanted to dip their toes into it, they can't. They have a.

[01:23:22] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Has everybody finished now? can I move on? so there, it's, the whole thing. Oh, shush. Nathan, No, okay, so there we go. AI services Very cool in the AI space. Oh, and a just a great big, this is I guess a thank you kind of thing. Jeff Star, plugin Planet. he's been producing WordPress plugins for over 10 years, 10 years now.

[01:23:50] Nathan Wrigley: 10 year anniversary for the, for Plugin Planet. He's got lots and lots of different offerings, things like, BBQ, which, and he's got the pro versions for all these as well. But, BBQ, banhammer, black Hole ga, Google Analytics, simple Ajax Chat and USP Pro. if, do you know what I am about to say something that could be utterly wrong.

Didn't Jeff write a book with Chris Coyer? I. Back in the day about, was it Jeff, that did that, digging into WordPress back in 20, yeah. Two, 2008 or something. Was it Jeff? Yeah. Yeah. I had a feeling it might be Oh, great. That's, one memory that I still got left. he wrote a book.

[01:24:32] Remkus de Vries: I don't know if it was that book. Yeah. somebody Google it quickly dig into WordPress and see if Jeff Star's name is bound to it with Chris Coya. I think it was the pair of them. yeah, I think you're right. Yeah. Okay. Good. That sentence will never come out of your lips again. Says you're right, Nathan.

[01:24:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's right. This is the title for this week's episode. No, I'll give you that, credit when that credit is due again. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. You just need to work harder at it. Yeah, you are right. I need to crib your newsletter, Les. anyway, there you go. So he's offering, a bit of gi, a bit of a giveaway.

You can get, money off his licenses as a way of celebrating, getting to 10 years and, a million and a half users a real success story in WordPress. and I feel like, I dunno, he is just one of these people that puts out the right stuff in the right way. I dunno what that means. He does, but there's just something about him, which I really like.

We're closing it out. This is another thing in WooCommerce Woo, brands is now available. Again, I'm not a WooCommerce user, but my understanding is that the brands feature so you know, the ability to literally create and you never bought as anything in the store. That turned out to be WooCommerce store?

yeah, probably. Yeah. The new are WooCommerce user. Yeah. there you go. All right. I meant backend, kind of WordPress WooCommerce user. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah, I'm getting schooled this episode by mku. It's good. I like it. but the brands feature, which used to be, commercial, is now being rolled into WooCommerce core.

So this idea to kind create, manage brands and assign them to products and things like that. And it says here, it's similar to categories, it's completely free, so that's quite nice. I'm on a bit of a rush now because we are running out of time. bigot wanted me to mention this one. We're very fast.

This number is Tantalizingly. Close to a thousand, A bit of a milestone, right? Absolutely. Who was, it Bigot? Was somebody else the one that put this in the show next? I can't remember. No. No. It was me. Okay. It was me. Do you wanna add anything? No, I, really like the variety of all the block themes that come out now and having a thousand in there.

[01:26:45] Birgit Pauli-Haack: I think, a lot of people will, find a good, fit for the new website. and even if they say, okay, I wanna change over, from a classic theme to a block theme, there's plenty of choices now. really like it, we are two, two themes away from a thousand, so it's really cool. Maybe, you never know by the end of, by the end of this week, we'll have eclipse that, but I do remember at the beginning it was like in single digits and then it was in the low double digits and it never felt like it was gonna tick up.

[01:27:17] Nathan Wrigley: And I think Matt's intuition or inspiration was that it was gonna get to 5,000 by the end of, oh, I don't know, 2001 or something. It never quite gained that momentum, but it feels, I haven't looked at that number for ages, but obviously it's at some point started to rise. And so a thousand is a pretty credible number.

Yeah. It's getting all, a lot more mature, so it makes way more sense to build now in the last, 12 months than me four in my mind, I'm gonna show my ignorance. Does being classified as a block theme mean you are, it's full FSE? Yes. Or does that include hybrid? Yeah. Yes. The tag is actually full side editing.

[01:27:54] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Of, you thing. Yeah. you can drill down by, different features and subject matter and things like that, but there's, anyway, you've got a thousand to choose from. So definitely getting to the point where there's gonna be something which is very likely to hit what you want. And obviously there's a load of commercial ones out there, to look at as well.

[01:28:14] Nathan Wrigley: We really are getting close. this is very, cool. for the longest period of time, we kept talking about how the plugin review team was just basically under the hammer. I know that a lot of the processes have now been automated and there's been a lot of education going on to make sure that the team know, how to expedite.

plugins that are being reviewed, but I don't know if it's still on Xero, but we got down to zero for a period of time. There were no, plugins that were waiting to be reviewed. So if you are a creator of a brand new plugin, now's the time. 'cause yeah, it'd be done by Friday. kudos to the team because that's an amazing feed.

Yeah. Pretty amazing. they're all getting checked by the, I think it's called the plugin checker. Is that it just called plugin checker. Anyway, plugin check. So there's a lot of automated stuff, which I think has weeded out a lot of the, sort of headspace that was needed to get that worked on.

Brilliant. And David Paris. I've just screenshotted something on Twitter, there. Or X Sorry. And again, this was not mine, so I dunno who hosted this one? This is mine. Okay, Tim, tell me what this is. Hosting tests. Okay. So basically, many years ago now, a hosting team was generated at WordPress to basically support WordPress in various hosting companies.

[01:29:40] Tim Nash: And one of the things they wanted to do is come up with a common testing mechanism to make sure things worked across a multitude of hosts. and this is now being expanded a lot more. there were some tweaks and changes that have been made. I basically wanted to mainly say bring, put it on to celebrate.

This team's success is going on behind the scenes. 'cause I think it's really important work they do. Making sure that 'cause WordPress has to work. In some very strange places and there's the hosting team deals with some very weird setups. Yeah, I was talking to, who was I talking to? I was talking to, oh my goodness me, this is so bad.

[01:30:24] Nathan Wrigley: I can't remember their name. Not him. Andy Regan, the other day about the automatic rollbacks feature for automatic updates. And he was saying there were so many weirdy edgy case edge cases for different hosting environments and things that were, I don't know, using virtual box and things like that.

Just so many edge cases. That's it. I think we've done it and I think we've all got through it with a certain degree of, not destroying ourselves. So well done team. we got through it. There was a couple of nice comments. there was a couple of comments that came through basically saying, look.

Get into the subject, if we don't talk about it, we won't solve it. And then there were other comments saying, look, nice, you're dodging it. So anyway, that's the way we do it over here. yeah, this has been this year in WordPress, mku, just so that you're satisfied, it's, we've on the whole year.

Yeah. 2024. And I, think I'm gonna call this one, automatic updates, not mku is right? No, that's never what it's gonna be called mku. You. It's just very little chance of, that maybe, I don't know. But, before we end it, firstly, great big thank you to all of my guests and I, appreciate your good humor trying to get through that stuff and, and being cordial with each other and I appreciate all the nice comments that came through.

That's really nice as well. Only one thing to do, and you know what that is. It's to stick those hands in the air. Oh yeah. Tim, what the heck? Come on, Tim. Alright. Okay. Okay. That's, no, I dunno which one I'm gonna go for there. That's fine. Thank you so much. We'll be back next week. Hopefully the sky will not have fallen in.

But, thank you for joining us on this episode of this week in WordPress. What is about to happen is about one minute and 19 of cats. Dogs and sheep just to calm you down. Okay? Okay. It's, the sky's not falling in so much. Everything's gonna be okay. I'll see you soon.