This Week in WordPress #319

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for This Week in wordPress, episode number 319 entitled, everyone needs snowflakes on their websites. It was recorded on Monday the 16th of December, 2024.

My name's Nathan Wrigley. And today I am joined by two co-hosts. I'm joined by Michelle Michelle Frechette and Taco Verdonshot. I'm also joined by Tim Nash.

we are a WordPress podcast. So guess what? We are going to talk largely about WordPress.

We talk about the WP Consent API and whether or not that should become a economical plugin or go directly into Core.

We also spend a little bit of time talking about the State of the Word address, which was delivered by Matt Mullenweg, in Tokyo, Japan, just a few hours before recording.

WP Gives a Hand is a charity hoping to raise some money over the Christmas period. If you are in the WordPress space, you could give them a hand.

We also talk about some awards which have been happening in the WordPress space. And I am very grateful and happy to announce that WP Builds was the winner of the podcast category. And I would like to thank anybody who voted on that.

We also get into some plugins. Kadence has got a new temple, table, temple, something like that, block which allows you to display tables all over your WordPress website.

WPAI has been taken over by Automattic. What does that mean for the future of AI in WordPress?

And there's a few companies which are diversifying. Barn2 plugins and Patchstack, and a few others are moving outside of the WordPress space. Not entirely, just for a few of their offerings in the near future.

And then we also get into some mind boggling CSS towards the end as well. It's all coming up next, on This Week in WordPress.

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I've got such a bad cough. that's already, the episode title is episode number 319 of this week in WordPress. If I get through this, it'll be a miracle. I've got myself a pint of water, so we'll try. Thank you for joining us. Check. Yeah. Would it be a Christmas miracle? It would be a Christmas miracle. I don't actually know what that means, but I guess it's got something to do with the nativity and things like that.

I'm not entirely sure. yes. We are back with, I think this is probably the last one before Christmas. Let's have a look at the day. It is the 16th. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, it's, thank you, Michelle. I'm, I appreciate the fact that you are here telling me all the things that I should know. It's slightly ridiculous.

Oh, I double check these things all the time. Make sure we, you're very good. You're very, good on all those things. Thank you. so yeah, happy Christmas everybody. I guess we should get that out the way right at the beginning. Yeah. We're gonna be taking a few weeks off, so that I can spend time with my children and things like that.

And, generally have a nice time. Hopefully you are gonna be doing the same thing too, but we're gonna have a load of word pressy stuff over the next hour and a half if you're joining us. Firstly, thank you very much. Secondly, and subscribe all of that nonsense, click the bell, smash that button.

[00:04:35] Michelle Frechette: Yeah, do that, thing. Hit the, small bell icon very gently with your mouse. Click it ever so gently. and, your, you two will be able to know when this is happening each and every week. We are joined, as you can see by three fabulous WordPresses. I'm gonna go right into the, I'll go, bottom corner first I'll do Michelle first.

[00:04:55] Nathan Wrigley: Michelle joining us. We've got kind of two co-hosts today. Michelle Frechette, as always. Is joining us. not as always, but you're here an awful lot and I appreciate that. How are you doing, Michelle?

[00:05:06] Michelle Frechette: I'm doing well, thank you. How are you?

[00:05:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, really good from the cough. Michelle Frechette is the Director of Community Engagement for Stella WP at Liquid Web.

In addition to that, Michelle is the podcast barista at WP Coffee. Talk more on that later. Co-founder of underrepresented in tech.com and also w, can I remove the dot coms? Can I just go through them? Absolutely. We mentioned that one time, didn't we? Creator of WP Speakers and WP Career pages, the executive director of post status, co-host of the WP Motivate Podcast and the host of WP Constellations.

She's an author, frequent organizer and speaker at WordPress events. She lives outside of Rochester, New York, where she's an avid nature photographer. You can learn more about her at Meet. Michelle online. Here we go. Thank you. And over there. Here's, KO tco. I always wanna say your name with some sort of rise and fall.

I always wanna go verdon shot, but

[00:06:04] Taco Verdonshot: yeah.

[00:06:05] Nathan Wrigley: Sounds

[00:06:05] Taco Verdonshot: good.

[00:06:06] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. Tako Verdon shot is joining us, from the Netherlands. up until recently, we would've said some, yosty things and there would've been a Yosty logo in the background and all that. No more. As you can see, he's now working for the parallel planks of Wood Company.

No, he is not. No, he is not. Tacho is the director of community and partnership at Emelia Capital and Projects. His favorite project to work on right now is Progress Planner Amelia's, project Planners latest, sorry, I'll start that again. Amelia's Project's latest plugin for WordPress. I've had a play actually, and it's jolly good.

It's for turning your web, it's like gamifying your website into something interesting rather than the sort of drudgery can often be. next to his work at Amelia Tacho is spending some time contributing to WordPress in various ways and outside of all of that work. And WordPress, taco recently picked up a new hobby.

Okay. his remote control electric car. Nice. Yep. That's a thing.

[00:07:08] Taco Verdonshot: It's so much fun. Yes. the only thing is that I am preparing more than I'm driving, because I still have to learn the driving part.

[00:07:19] Nathan Wrigley: When you say remote control car, is it the kind of thing I would've given to my chil You hold the box which has got the area on it and it's like a foot and a half long kind of thing?

Or is it advanced since then? Yeah,

[00:07:28] Taco Verdonshot: no, it's exactly that. But then in the version that goes about a hundred kilometers an hour,

[00:07:36] Nathan Wrigley: what, wait, a hot actual actually does that Speed Well? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It's no surprise that you Okay. If you haven't learned the story, no wonder you have

[00:07:45] Michelle Frechette: to repair it.

[00:07:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. there's no surprise any given wall becomes like a totally death. Death, no object. I haven't finished, I haven't finished the bio. Sorry. you'll find Tacho driving around his hometown of, Vian. Close. Yeah. Oh,

[00:08:04] Taco Verdonshot: sorry. All those such things. vCAN.

[00:08:07] Nathan Wrigley: That was my second guess. Yeah. v in the Netherlands.

And you can find him online on x and blue sky, where he's known as Taco Verdo. thank you. Thank you for joining us. Really appreciate it. Thank for having me again. And finally by Tim Nash, who always pops in a, an interesting bio and I haven't read his yet. So here we go. Tim Nash is, oh gosh, here we, Tim Nash is the Santa Claus of WordPress security, delivering the gift of safe and secure websites to organizations worldwide.

When Tim isn't guarding sites against Grinch like hackers, he's making spirits bright with his witty insights. A trailblazer as bold as Rudolph. He joined Blue Sky this week. So Nathan, it's time to update your starter pack. Blue Sky has this. Go on Michelle

[00:09:01] Michelle Frechette: Taco and I need to up our bio game, whatever Tim's.

Oh yeah,

[00:09:06] Nathan Wrigley: you too. Chatt. Tim. Tim updates them every single week and it's highly entertaining that you do. I appreciate it. I want a haiku

[00:09:13] Michelle Frechette: next time, Tim. It's gotta be in the form of a haiku.

[00:09:16] Tim Nash: We've already done a haiku.

[00:09:18] Michelle Frechette: I didn't know.

[00:09:20] Tim Nash: Sorry. We've done That's okay. Haikus. We've done various poems. We did a song, remember the lyrics, refused to sing it, which I was disappointed.

[00:09:27] Nathan Wrigley: Maybe we should put some of them to music or something and I could get out. Oh, get the ukulele out and, SUNO. You suno. Yeah,

that

[00:09:34] Taco Verdonshot: suno did. Darn thing. that's brilliant.

[00:09:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's it's crazy making, isn't it? If you are a musician and you come across Suno, it must be a little bit soul destroying when you click that button and 10 seconds later something half decent pops out.

I know it's not music in the sense that you're gonna go out and buy it, but you've gotta imagine that is eating, into the market share of like jingles for radio and things like that. where the whole point is that it's mediocre at best anyway, there's. Thank you very much for joining us.

I really appreciate it. We'll get onto the WordPress stuff in a minute. Just to say that if you are lurking here and you fancy putting a comment in, that would be great. We'd really appreciate that. I'll tell you the best place to do that. And it's here, WP builds.com/live. Let's see if Tim's gonna respond to that.

No, he's not. I thought he might put his hands on it or something. No. Yeah, he's looking at it. wp builds.com/yeah, exactly. Wp builds.com/live. Go share it. Write as a comment. If you're there, you've got two choices. You can either use the YouTube box on the right hand side. The comments are there.

You're obviously gonna have to be logged into Google, and if you don't fancy that, there's a little black button. I think it says live chat inside the video player, and you can press that and you don't need to be logged into anything. And so feel free to give us a chat once more, wp builds.com/live. Let's see if anybody's joining us apart from us.

we do, we've got several dozen people joining us, but whether or not they're gonna make comments as yet to be seen, happy Monday friends. Thank you Courtney. Really appreciate that she's joining us. And, then we've got Tim and Michelle's kicking off the weather. Thank you. it is 38 degrees Fahrenheit, three degrees where she lives in western New York.

I don't know what it's here. It's about 11 degrees. It's actually quite nice. And, you don't know what the weather's like tcho you not look out the window and guess. I, I can. It's drizzling, but yeah.

Okay. Yeah, this is typical where I am. That's basically what's happening. Courtney also says it's right at freezing foggy.

We had our first significant snow last night. I am jealous. I really want the snow to come. Paul Bedford is joining us. Hello Paul. he's in Pretoria. Gosh, we do get around 38 degrees there in Pretoria as well. I'm guessing that's centigrade, and I'm guessing I'm jealous. cent. Oh yeah. It says Centigrade.

Not Fahrenheit, though. We have a series, of heat waves for the past couple of weeks. Thankfully, I have a swimming pool. There is nothing like that comment to cause jealousy. seriously. Yeah. Yeah. We're all feeling it a bit in the Northern Hemisphere at the moment. Aaron Bowie's joining us higher.

He says, I think you and Tim are good friends, or Tim and Aaron. You, know each other, is it? Yeah. You know each other fairly well. That's nice. he's up in Aberdeen where it's 11 degrees, so it's summer he says. And Marcus Bonnet is joining us. It's balmy 67 degrees 19 in Florida. That's actually about the perfect temperature for me.

19 degrees centigrade is, whoa, neither too hot, nor too cold. It's just right. It's that goldilock zone dealing with a bit of a migraine. Okay. That's not the goldilock zone. I am sorry about that, but it's so lovely to see you all. We'll find out at the end of this, whether it's a cure for migraines or makes it worse, I.

Some suspicions which way that's gonna go. okay, let's get into it, shall we? You're here for word pressy, bits and pieces. So let's see if we can provide some of that. firstly, a little bit of self-promotion. I do apologize, but we have to keep the lights on and what have you. So here we go, wp builds.com.

if you fancy, keeping in touch with the bits and pieces that we do, put your name in this ear box and click this ear button. And, you will be subscribed and we'll send you two emails a week. One, when we produce this piece of content. We'll strip the audio out and send it out as a podcast tomorrow morning.

So you'll hear about that. But then also every Thursday we produce a podcast and usually they're on this homepage here. So look at that, as if by Magic. Aaron is not only on this show in the comments, but he's actually in the podcast. We did, 402, we did an episode with Aaron all about his fabulous suite of.

Payment options, which connect you directly to banks. So that's there. But also, yeah, this episode will be, taken up this place tomorrow morning. like I said, put your name and address or rather your, just your email into there and we'll keep you posted. And big thank you to the following three companies for keeping the likes on over here.

GoDaddy Pro Blue Host, and Omnis Send. Really appreciate your support for helping us keep going. Believe it or not, black Friday isn't over. it is, but it isn't. Over on this page, our deals page, wp builds.com/black, you can just hit this button here if you like. we still have all these deals, which are still going on.

Some of them, like on, I think the very last one kind of ends on the 1st of January or something. It may be worth going and check it out if you're in the market for, some hot deal that hasn't expired from Black Friday. And I was

[00:14:41] Michelle Frechette: expect, I was expecting you to do like the. The used car salesman voice, like Black Friday is over, but the deals keep going.

Oh,

[00:14:49] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, I could do that, but I don't, I, that's not within my soul. I, that I just, I, incapable of doing that kind of thing as you're about to find out. so I. First of all, thank you. if you, if that just, thanks. If you voted our podcast as a podcast that you quite liked, I really appreciate that.

That's, I'm very grateful. So there's this monster awards, thing that they do. They do an award and one of the categories is podcast. And, and we did, all right. We came out in a, in that spot there. thank you for that. But look, there's another one just here.

[00:15:27] Taco Verdonshot: Yay. But Nathan, let's be real.

you're being, your, typical, Englishman, but we're doing all right. You got 25% of the votes. Yeah. And there were more than four competitors in the category.

[00:15:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And it cost me a lot of money to get those people, my aunts, uncles. You

[00:15:47] Taco Verdonshot: absolutely aced it.

[00:15:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Oh, thank you. So congratulations.

[00:15:51] Taco Verdonshot: Take that win.

[00:15:52] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, thank you. It's, yeah. Okay. I appreciate that. Yeah. Okay. Ah, I can't keep going. There it is. You can go and see that there's loads of other companies in the WordPress space. there was like forms and page builder and hosting and all of that. and you can go and see that by clicking on this all categories button.

But look, congratulations to, Michelle as well, wp. Thank you. Coffee talk. How, I'm excited about that.

[00:16:16] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. it feels like first place too, you know what I'm saying?

yeah, it does. and I'm gonna take 25% of the first place too, since I'm here so much. That's right. So yeah. I'll celebrate it with you.

Yeah.

[00:16:27] Nathan Wrigley: If you think about this combined, we're on like a solid, what's that? 30 something percent? 30%, 34%? Yeah. Yeah. We're doing all right. Yeah. Nice. I'll take it. but honestly, sincerely, thank you. I don't mention them in the pre-run up to it or anything, but, anybody that did vote, I am very grateful.

I, that's. Okay. And another bit of, blowing the trumpet again, apologies. the me the media partners have been announced for WordCamp Asia and we've managed to bag one of those as well. So if you've got any stories around WordCamp Asia, I'd really appreciate it. If you send them my way, you can either do that on X WP, but at WP builds.

But if you, basically, if you've got anything to add about Word Camp Asia, my job will be to promote it and make sure that the event is as successful as possible. I dunno if I'm going to go yet. Not entirely sure, but, I'm certainly not going at the moment 'cause I don't have an airfare or anything like that.

But, we'll see maybe as time gets closer. But, thank you to Word Camp Asia for putting your trust, into me. That's very, nice. Okay, let's get stuck into the word pressy stuff. So the WP Tavern, has an article this week. I think this was the only place that I saw that had caught onto this story.

So it's interesting. WordPress core team proposes adding WP consent, API to WordPress core. I dunno if anybody can do a better job of saying what the WordPress consent AB API would be, but to me it just feels that whole thing where everybody's these days is trying to get a cookie banner onto their website.

And it feels to me as if it's ramped up massively in the last six months. now I can't go to, like genuinely, if I go to any new website in the UK of any magnitude, if they've got more than like a hundred visitors a, week or something, I have to go through this horrible process of giving my consent.

And in every case, the con, it always feels as if it's aligned to confuse me somehow. The, boxes are either checked or pre-checked. The button that I wanna press is a text link, and the button that I don't wanna press is actually a massive button, which, and there's lots of double negative language and what have you.

it'd be nice if there was a, sort of standard way of doing this. Obviously, WordPresses, we've got a whole range of plugins and custom code that you could write to do this, but it says here, the WordPress core team is gathering consensus around integrating the WP Consent API into core. The consent feature plugin was originally, introduced in 2020 to standardize the communication of accepted content categories between plugins, automation, Brian Alexander has placed two options before the community add this feature to core, make it or make it canonical.

In case of adding it to core, the existing API would be updated to meet the current core merge expectations. And the core could introduce a default cookie, popup, or block that could be activated similar to the built-in privacy feature. And this sort of speaks to the bit I was on about since the European Union's Digital Marketing Act, DMA came into effect in March this year, the WP Consent, API plugin has seen a sharp rise in adoption, surpassing 100,000 active installs.

There's more to say on this, but I think I'll just hand it over. Would it be good to have some sort of standard way of handling this in WordPress? My feeling is it would be whether it should go into core or not, so sure. Canonical kind of feels like maybe the right way to go. What do you people think?

[00:20:04] Taco Verdonshot: Yeah, I, agree because, as you said, every larger website, it, and that is because you only have to get consent for cookies if you actually set cookies or do anything with tracking or analytics or what have you. so it's not for everyone. And so I would say it's plugin territory.

[00:20:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:20:31] Tim Nash: Okay, so I'm gonna go to the counter just to be and play devil's advocates and say it probably should be in court on the grounds that to do this properly, if you are, actually following the law, the cookies aren't meant to be placed until you consent out. Now, as it stands at the moment, you can install a multitude of plugins that will say, Hey, click here to consent to cookies.

Most of them don't work, and they completely rely on a set of very limited set of interactions to assume that those are the only cookies that are being placed in. If someone goes into their theme and just shoves a piece of JavaScript in it will just load, yeah, so that this won't fix that. But this would, if by putting it into core, you're at least giving a proper authorized route for this to through there.

And you, like you, if you're gonna set a cookie, you just follow the standard core way of doing it. Then the consent API will work with it automatically. Whereas if it's a canonical plugin, you need to start putting actions hooks and filters deeper and deeper into WordPress, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but every time you add a, filter or a some sort of hook in there, you are opening up the possibility of, people using it.

[00:21:53] Nathan Wrigley: I, I think that's interesting. I, actually didn't know that bit of information about setting the cookies. That's probably something which has gone in one ear and out the other, many, years ago. But that, is a bit of a revelation to me. So just, can I just pause that correctly? The, cookie should be in effect, triggered or exist only after you've made some kind of selection.

I, I just assumed that it's for

[00:22:19] Tim Nash: analytical purposes. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. If it's like a cookie for when you log in, That is a required cookie for the functioning of the site.

[00:22:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. If it is

[00:22:27] Tim Nash: your Google Analytics cookie or your top secret marketing thing you don't want anybody to know about, but really it's still tracking you in some way, then that is, that needs consent before it's put on.

[00:22:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And now that you say that, that makes perfect sense. But I had just this. Incorrect intuition that, if you, when you went through the whole procedure of selecting which cookies you were allowing and what have you, that it would somehow stifle the it at that point. But that's not the way it should work.

And of course that makes perfect sense. I just had misunderstood it. This, is kind getting a bit outta hand though in some scenarios. I went to a website that I am a member of, it's got nothing to do with WordPress. And I decided to take on the task of looking at all the options. So they did not have a reject all option, which for me is really frustrating.

So I opened up the, cookie, the banner, and then it opened a modal. I am not kidding you, I had 200 plus choices to make. and every single one of them was couched in a paragraph of text. It wasn't like, this on or off, this on, or it was a paragraph text with the toggle. And I just thought.

What is even the point of that? Like clearly nobody's gonna have the capacity to read that and not having the option to decline all just seemed really wrong.

[00:23:54] Tim Nash: How would you

[00:23:54] Nathan Wrigley: just

[00:23:55] Tim Nash: answered your own question with what was the point of that? yeah. Specifically stop you from clicking it through. It's much like the, a new wellknown, British newspapers that started, charging you if you wish to, opt out of tracking.

And so when you went to go and reject all, you had to get, subscribe to them instead. How did that work for them? they made some splash on social media.

[00:24:19] Taco Verdonshot: Yeah. There's an also thing

[00:24:21] Tim Nash: as bad press is there. Yeah. basically a newspaper. Possibly that's the one time that, that's true.

[00:24:29] Nathan Wrigley: I, think, Okay.

I think maybe I, think both of you are right. but I'm gonna lean towards the more, I think Tim maybe has it with the, if it's, that way around. Yeah, it's difficult 'cause it's gone. I'm interrupting tactic. If

[00:24:45] Taco Verdonshot: they're able to make it not opinionated and just an API, then I'm with Tim.

If it has any form of opinion on this is what you should always ask for, example, then it's. we'll get to that later with some of the articles we'll be discussing today. Okay.

[00:25:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:25:11] Michelle Frechette: Okay. I also think that be the only person from the US in this group that we overhear forget that if we're going to be presenting a website outside of our borders, that we should have those consents in as well.

And so I think having it as part of core where you could toggle on or off and you can go through and set different switches, would be advantageous in at least educating people. especially if it came default on that, you would have to specifically go to turn it off. Just a thought.

[00:25:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. No, that is an interesting thought, and I always forget that the, rules are different over there as well.

Do you, have anything like the kind of same requirements that we do over in, in, on this side of the pond, or is it much more laissez-faire?

[00:25:53] Michelle Frechette: It's ridiculously state by state.

[00:25:56] Nathan Wrigley: Oh. And so

[00:25:56] Michelle Frechette: California has a, law and a few others. and certainly, the term, again, could speak to this better than I could.

but I know California has a very stringent law for consumers. New York does not, and most of the other states do not.

[00:26:13] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so I'm, okay. What I'm taking from this though is at least the conversation is going on, the community needs to come to some sort of consensus because if I just pause that, if I just read that first line again, the, WordPress core team is gathering consensus around integrating the WP Consent API into core.

And if you go to WP Tavern, this post was written by Ner on the 9th of December. And you can click on the link here, to find out more about it. And the API as well the plugin. possibilities. Two. I'll go and check that out. Just a couple of quick comments that have come in. Firstly, Aaron's is just saying that he's very shy and, thank you Aaron.

I know that pun comment on a podcast was not necessarily the first thing you wanted to do, but I appreciate you staying the course. That's a, that's great. Thank you so much. hi, says Giles. Hello Giles. I'm guessing this is Giles that I was hanging out with on Thursday in London. Should talk about that.

That was really cool. Patricia says hi as well, and getting into the content banners, she said with so many switches, they're awful. I love those with the reject all one click to, to me, that should be the law. May, maybe it is, and these companies are just ignoring it, but the reject all to me ought to be.

The, standard that ought to be the absolute baseline. apparently that wasn't defined in legislation. So the workaround is to completely bombard people with options. So they're gonna go for the easy. Yeah. Whatever.

yeah. Damn, honestly. here we go. Google Analytics says Elliot. Hello Elliot.

Google Analytics cookie compliance policies require users to provide explicit consent before cookies can be used to collect personal information. So that just spells it out from the Google Analytics side. And that's what Tim was saying, of course don't, the caveat from Elliot is don't use Google Analytics, anyway.

And influence. WP is saying, hello, they're in North Carolina. Hi. And just joining us, thank you for joining us. Appreciate it. Let's get back to the bits and pieces. We're all done with the cookies, Zoe. I. Yeah. So yeah, we are literally all done, never done with cookies. Oh, yes. Get they were, can I just point out they were not cookies, they were stroop waffles.

We all know

[00:28:38] Taco Verdonshot: correct.

[00:28:38] Nathan Wrigley: Miniature ones. Yeah. I know you taught me how to say that word. Ah, Michelle has, and they pancakes. Michelle. These is Stroop waffles. Oh, you are? It's Stroop waffles all the way down. Tim, where's your Stroop waffles? He's looking sad. Sad Tim. Sad Tim. Place. No Stroop waffles for you.

Oh, Tim. Oh yeah, you'll get some in the mail very soon. okay, let's crack on. earlier today, dunno if any of you got either got up early or, stayed up late to, to check out state of the word Matt. took the stage in, I want to say Tokyo. It was Tokyo, wasn't it? Yes, it was. Tokyo has it on the screen there.

Yeah. and did his typical state of the word address, which has now been hived out of a word camp. It's now a, sort of standalone event. It's done it once in, has it, is it now just Spain and this one where it was a sort of unique event? Yeah. Two

[00:29:33] Michelle Frechette: in the United States.

[00:29:35] Nathan Wrigley: Ah, okay. Thank you. I

[00:29:36] Michelle Frechette: first for in New York City and then Madrid.

That's

[00:29:39] Nathan Wrigley: right. Yeah. That was the Covid Times, wasn't

[00:29:41] Taco Verdonshot: it? That was still during Covid when it was small in person.

[00:29:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I

[00:29:45] Michelle Frechette: was there for those ones.

[00:29:47] Nathan Wrigley: so that took to the stage and essentially summed up the previous year. Do you know what's interesting is if you obsess about WordPress like I do, then I.

It's an event where every single thing that comes out of his mouth, you go, yeah, I knew that. Yeah. Yeah. I knew that. I knew that thing as well. And there was at one point when Mathias came on the stage and asked the crowd about, has anybody heard of, block Bindings? And he looked at the crowd and we couldn't see the crowd, but he said, oh, it was a few people.

And I think he meant there was literally a few people. And, and it really did make me think, oh gosh, I am at the end of a spectrum of, being interested in WordPress. It's not good to be as interested in WordPress as I am. But what I, the reason I'm saying that is because these state of the words, most of what Matt says, I've at some point covered in a podcast or what have you, but what did you, make of it?

Was there anything in there that you thought was interesting, revolutionary, something that you wanted to highlight? Or was it just Yep. Knew it all already?

[00:30:53] Taco Verdonshot: the pianist was absolutely fabulous. Pianist. She was fabulous. Yes.

[00:30:58] Michelle Frechette: Yes. Open with Claire de Loon. It was very nice.

[00:31:02] Taco Verdonshot: Yeah. and I think that also junco to serve a shout out.

she presented in Japanese, so I was very happy with, YouTube subtitling because my Japanese is non-existent. but it was really interesting to see her like this because we've met several times in the past and always had conversations in English. And, English is not, an, easy language for her, not for me either, because it's also second language, but she's typically using a translator app on her phone to help her get by, also listen to presentations, listen to people, and seeing her shine on that stage in Japanese, having the full expression power that she, Can have because it's her native language, was absolutely amazing.

[00:32:04] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. And yeah, I agree. When, you say about, because I was watching it, but I had it I had to do various other family chores at the same time. So it was online, but I had to turn away at various points, and I think I missed that entire portion plus another few bits here and there.

But are you saying that YouTube in real time is transcribing what, or was that done in the room by, and put on the seat put on the screen by somebody that was actually standing in the room?

[00:32:35] Taco Verdonshot: I don't know. I clicked the closed caption button on YouTube.

[00:32:39] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, then it's YouTube. Yeah. That's a, that's amazing that it can do that.

okay, so let Tim, anything, Michelle, anything?

[00:32:50] Michelle Frechette: I was, I. I was almost bored by it. I gonna say there was nothing exciting, nothing new that I wasn't expecting. Mattias did a great job at explaining what was coming up and those kinds of things. So I did, I wrote down a few things about percentage of the web and things like that that, Matt presented.

And I am impressed that there are so many people on a regular basis contributing like literally thousands of people contributing every year to just to core alone, much less all of the other projects that go along with WordPress. yeah, it was one that I did a watch party through post status.

We had about 15 people all watching together on Zoom this morning. And the comments were mostly like, why is nobody asking the harder questions about the drama that's going on in WordPress? And honestly, I'm, glad that it didn't turn into that quite honestly, but I also understand why people would want to know that.

I think taco's question that he posted on, on Twitter was really funny too. So I think we're gonna talk about that a little bit later. So I'll let that go for now.

[00:33:52] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. Tako, it looks like you were about to say something, but maybe not.

[00:33:58] Taco Verdonshot: I want to choose my words carefully because, I think the most interesting part of the state of the world is the decision not to talk about some subjects.

[00:34:11] Nathan Wrigley: Okay?

[00:34:12] Taco Verdonshot: Yep. And we, had a, obviously an interesting week with, some stuff that we'll talk about later, but where, Matt basically completely lost the injunction against WP Engine and I. It was have a byline in the state of the world. While this is the one thing that's been keeping our community busy for the last three months, ever since work camp us, there have been long time contributors have been banned from the project.

And today, during the state of the word, he goes on that stage and says anyone can contribute to WordPress. That doesn't add up. there is a new checkbox that replaces the, I'm affiliated with WP Engine.

[00:35:11] Nathan Wrigley: Should we just take a look at that quickly? 'cause it is, it's a bit of a moment that, isn't it?

Okay. So let me just see if I can find it. I, genuinely don't know what I make of this. So this is me trying to, this is wordpress.org/login. and here we are at the redirect. So everything looks normal and we'll get into what's now missing the other day. but we, now have this, it says pineapple is delicious on pizza.

and apparently I'm not even gonna try and put in my username and password, but apparently that box is a requirement. Yeah. Yes, it is. It

[00:35:47] Michelle Frechette: is. What do, you think is going on here? Because I, my intuition was that this was a. This was just like a lighthearted way of making how to describe it.

[00:35:58] Nathan Wrigley: when, you know when just things are not going so well, you might try to comedy your way out of something. I, wondered if maybe that was it, it was just a, a lighthearted way of doing it, but it doesn't seem to have gone down too well on, on the social networks.

I've seen. The only time I've seen it, actually that's not true. A few people saw it as something funny and lighthearted and a, nice way of offsetting all of the bits and pieces, but I think most people framed it as what, what's going on. So what do you, three make of it?

[00:36:34] Michelle Frechette: I, nothing. I think, no, I think, it's good that there's no way to double check if you really find it delicious or not, because to, in order to log in, I had to check that box this morning. So of course I like. Pineapple on pizza, you have to. but you have no way to know that for sure.

[00:36:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. I, my intuition when I first saw it was I thought that it was gonna be there very temporarily, and it maybe would get mentioned in the state of the word, it was just gonna be something which would, I don't know, get a, few moments of attention and then it would be pulled.

But, let just quickly refresh and see if it's actually still there. Oh, it's

[00:37:10] Michelle Frechette: still there. I just checked it. Yeah.

[00:37:11] Nathan Wrigley: it's still there, isn't it? It's interesting. Yeah, it's very strange. Tim, anything, most people

[00:37:17] Tim Nash: who would've been doing that are now asleep because they're all in Japan.

[00:37:19] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay.

[00:37:21] Tim Nash: But, it is, if it was, it's a joke. It's clearly meant as a joke.

But given the feelings of everybody, what poor taste, and I know that it some, we always have a go at people when we're like designing by community, having committees for everything. Passing it through some sort of vetting process.

But I feel at this stage, having a bunch of people who go, do you think that's a good idea? And it's not gonna upset a few more people like, the entire of Italy. Have we upset it up? No, we're

[00:37:59] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, it's pineapple not a thing over there. Okay. Yeah. Is, it possible that somebody has done this without the knowledge of others?

[00:38:08] Michelle Frechette: As a sort of,

[00:38:10] Taco Verdonshot: it was changed by Dion who's made all the changes to do org on behalf of Matts in the last couple of months. Okay. So unlikely. no.

[00:38:20] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Just curious. I just think it's fascinating. I'm not saying No,

[00:38:24] Taco Verdonshot: I'm saying unlikely,

[00:38:25] Nathan Wrigley: right? Yeah, no, I understand. Yeah. the, I love to just mess about basically.

I really enjoy that. on, on a, great many levels, personally, I think this is quite an interesting ruse and it, I get it. I get the sort of, okay, we had a thing, we've changed out the thing, but here's a nod to the thing that we got asked to get rid of. And again, we'll get to that in a minute.

But, yeah, it's definitely not necessarily gone down. As it happens, I actually don't like, pineapple on pizza, so I am very conflicted now 'cause I've said it publicly, so I dunno what, we can do.

[00:39:06] Taco Verdonshot: And that's the thing. had this been added on April Fools and not be a required checkbox, then it would've been a brilliant joke.

[00:39:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:39:16] Taco Verdonshot: but with everything that's been going on, reading the room, it's just silly. And, the fact that we have to discuss it, and I know I brought it up, but, it is beyond insane because we have so many bigger problems to tackle, with the direction of WordPress and with everything going on that a state of the word where we're gonna go, it's all unicorns and rainbows and whatever order you usually say those, I am sorry. It's not, businesses are struggling because of decisions that have been made by the project leadership, AKA math in person. and if you want to have a state of the word, this is what you have to address. And he didn't. And I think that is sad and, It should have been different

[00:40:18] Nathan Wrigley: if I'm very interested in audience participation.

We never do this. I don't think I've ever done it in the 319 shows that we've done. I've never asked for particular comments. But I'm gonna ask, if you could personally swap out that check box for anything, what would your sentence say? we've had the WP Engine thing, we've now got the pizza is delicious.

Sorry. pineapple is delicious on pizza. just keep, it light please. I don't want anything, horrible or incendiary. Just give us a laugh. What would you have put on that page? And, we'll come back to state of the word, but let's just, go for this. we'll go through some of the comments.

Here we go. Just be plea. Do

[00:41:02] Tim Nash: that. David Uhhuh. Can I just reinforce what Tacho said? Yes. Which is that this, in many ways, there was gonna be free outcomes from the state of the word there was gonna be. Something stupid was said and it was all gonna blow up. And we would be, we would've been, our pre-show would've been much more interesting.

it, we would've had this, which was the, we're gonna celebrate ourselves and we're gonna do this. It was so scripted and people were falling. You could tell the bits where I, feel there was two versions of scripts and they probably didn't know which version was gonna be said until the morning. I really, there were people, there was words were skipped over.

There was a lot of confusion sometimes of what, certain sentences were gonna be. And you're like, wonder if that was a different sentence? Was meant to be there. We could have had a third option, which was a healing moment, without having any, without, you didn't have to, miss anything or you could have had a healing moment.

And we didn't get that. And so I. We just carry on in this really weird world where we're going. WordPress is wonderful. We're democratizing the web. Everybody can contribute except for, anybody who clicked an emoji once in a slack room or, were on Twitter at the wrong moment and decided that they liked something or, disliked something and made a comment.

So we are in a really weird work parallel universes between these two points. And these gap is feeling like it's getting wider. And so it was a real shame that we didn't have that healing moment where we could have all got behind. And the other thing was it really was a boring. The test was not interesting.

it's good to hear about responsive controls coming back in, for blocks. That sounds cool and interesting and obviously the real time stuff that was demonstrated. Very cool demonstration.

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

[00:42:59] Tim Nash: it's really hard to do and not centralized stuff, so I'm really looking forward to seeing how they're going to manage this for the next decade.

'cause I suspect it's gonna take a very long time before that truly makes it into court. but yeah, this could have been a healing opportunity and I just,

[00:43:15] Taco Verdonshot: yeah.

[00:43:16] Tim Nash: Yeah, and that, raises the question, who's the state of the word for, because it wasn't for the inner WordPress community because like you said, Nathan, you, there was nothing new.

[00:43:31] Taco Verdonshot: You've seen all of this already and I think that was true for anyone in the room and the 400 people watching the livestream live.

[00:43:43] Nathan Wrigley: is that kind of the point though? Because I is the, name. 'cause we don't have anything in the uk, but I think the name is a spin on State of the Union, isn't it?

The, address that the president gives. And forgive me, Michelle being the only American here, I'm gonna lean into you as the person that knows everything about that. I've love to hear 56

[00:44:00] Michelle Frechette: years. So yeah.

[00:44:01] Nathan Wrigley: is the idea of the state of the Union and therefore the state of the world, is it supposed to be that it's a mechanism to say what we did within mostly a little bit of time for what we might do?

Yeah.

[00:44:13] Michelle Frechette: It's mostly like, where are we today? Got it. So what has brought us to where we are today? It's the state of things now with a look to the future, but it isn't about the future.

[00:44:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. So maybe that event is for that. So my comments about, I follow obsessively, the WordPress project, so it I felt like I knew it all is also actually reflected by, I think it was Patricia.

She says, yeah, she like me. It's such a bubble that we already knew most of what was said, but it, that is probably the nature of the event. I've gotta say. yeah, I, am, I think so. Sorry. Say, that again tack. I didn't catch it.

[00:44:53] Taco Verdonshot: Yeah, so to briefly interrupt you, one of the politicians was very active in the post status slack earlier today and pointed out that the state of the war 2023 was, viewed on YouTube 28 million times.

so if that's in true, I didn't fact check it. but if that's indeed true, then we are not the target audience,

For this It's the broader community. Yeah. Broader workplace user group. Yep. yep. I would say

[00:45:31] Michelle Frechette: too, I'm sorry. Just like the state of the union for the United States most. I'm not, I am not one of them.

I do follow politics, but most US citizens do not follow politics. And so the state of the union is away once a year to bring everybody up to date with what's going on in our country. Okay. And I think the same is true, right? So there's a lot of people who use WordPress that aren't focused on the things that we are insiders too.

So I think that's very true.

[00:45:56] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So I've gotta say everybody that came up on stage, so there was the pianist, there was Matt, there was Mary Hubbard, there was Mathias. They all looked very, very relaxed. Mathias in particular, I don't know how people can manage on stage and be that calm. In all honesty, it's pretty remarkable knowing that there's many, people watching.

And obviously every single word is gonna be dissected from every single angle. which is, I guess what we're doing now. what have we got here? A few comments

[00:46:28] Taco Verdonshot: That the room was half empty though.

[00:46:29] Nathan Wrigley: What was it? I didn't catch that. Was it? Yeah. Okay. It

[00:46:32] Taco Verdonshot: was, visible in a

[00:46:33] Nathan Wrigley: few shots.

[00:46:34] Taco Verdonshot: Okay. But it wasn't completely

[00:46:35] Nathan Wrigley: filled.

Web squadron. So Imran, I'm guessing, it felt like a pat on the back meeting that you only attend where there is a good buffet available except there was no food. Courtney says, I love the captions too. So we're talking about the translation from Japanese into English and presumably vice versa, think that more Americans and English speakers need to experience having the content translated for us.

Yeah. No kidding. keep in mind that a thousand contributors include people who just test during releases. I was surprised to be credited for that, by the way. Oh, nice. there, Elliot says, I appreciate, so I don't know if that means you are cognizant of, or you like that there are things which probably shouldn't be, we shouldn't be discussing, but thoughts on pizza and pie?

Okay. I think we've done the pizza and pineapple thing. Yeah. found it interesting. Says Courtney Mary use WordPress, the platform versus core. I'm not sure I've heard leadership refer to it as a platform before. Can

[00:47:33] Michelle Frechette: I comment on that really quickly though? She has come from TikTok. And we talk about social media and you, that is your background.

You ha you use the word platform. So that might just be a semantic thing in her head because of her most recent job.

[00:47:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Thank you. I'm just seeing if there's any comments about the whole pineapple thing, da dah, So few people saying they hate, fruit on pizzas, great pond, poor taste, You

[00:47:59] Michelle Frechette: asked them to replace it. So there's a few that have a checkbox that Oh.

[00:48:03] Nathan Wrigley: That they intend with Mark. Oh. alright. I like this. Yeah, there go. Marcus Burnett says Star Wars is superior to Star Trek and that I can totally endorse. Yeah. I'm gonna tick that box a hundred times outta a hundred. Tim, it doesn't look entirely satisfied with that response.

No.

[00:48:22] Tim Nash: I, I. I don't mind a good Star Trek or Star Wars. I was more a Babylon five fan personally.

[00:48:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. They both had their failures. Kubrick is the best theme.

[00:48:35] Tim Nash: Oh yeah. that could be ticked. Yeah, that's clearly

[00:48:36] Nathan Wrigley: happy with that. okay. I like stepping on Lego bricks in the middle of the night.

I have done that. That is pain like you've never experienced. It's like standing on a sea urchin or something. Okay. That's brilliant.

[00:48:49] Taco Verdonshot: Mind you that the checkbox is required, so yeah, this is

[00:48:53] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Anybody who hasn't stood on a Lego brick is not permitted into WordPress org. I like it. Marcus is on a roll.

I'm not affiliated with glitter in any way.

[00:49:02] Tim Nash: The problem is I've been to, word Camp Brighton, so I can't tick that. Tick Rock.

[00:49:08] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. anymore? No, I think that's all the ones that we've got, but we've got lots of comments. star Wars always Wind says Imran, and Cubic is the best theme. Just

[00:49:24] Michelle Frechette: checked the box.

[00:49:25] Nathan Wrigley: She's just, confirming that's true. we need a big UK event. We do let ourselves down. all I can say is you haven't been to Word the WordPress London Meetup, have you? which we did last Thursday and we had Jamie Marsland taken on. Dan, maybe in a speed build, plus we gave away a Mac and and did a pub quiz.

[00:49:47] Tim Nash: I feel it's, as much as I love do p London, it's not quite the same as the 900 plus people that were Camp London in its heyday.

[00:49:56] Nathan Wrigley: We try, yeah, we try. Yeah. It's a series of rebuilding. Yeah, it is. It is. Yeah. Indeed, Okay. So was there anything about state, the word that we wanted to add? for me it was a summation of all that we knew about, but it was nice to see a few of the bits and pieces, especially from a technical point of view that Mattias put on the screen.

I have had a tiny play with the commenting on the, the, collaborative editing phase three side of things. That looks really cool if that's the interface that we end up with. I like it. It's basically, it looks almost exactly apart from the UI is slightly bit different. the interaction is just like in a Google doc, you pick a bit.

Comment, and then you can have replies to those comments. And, that's neat.

[00:50:41] Tim Nash: I have remembered one thing I did please. The, UB builder Oh, wasn't that nice. we've, we, so basically it was a, for those who didn't watch, they've taken the Gutenberg and a really stripped down version of playground.

I think, I, turned the, at the wrong moment to see the technical details. And basically you now have an interface to build a book that you can then save as an UB or potentially save as a Word document. And as somebody who writes ridiculously long blog posts and thinks one day I'm going to write my book, it's do you know, I could quite see myself just dragging and dropping get, if it worked actually on my website.

I've been quite, I, think they missed a trick. That is a really great canonical plug. Just there.

[00:51:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Brilliant. Just post

[00:51:26] Tim Nash: book and that interface. I'd be very happy with chatting if that happened. This was, as somebody who

[00:51:32] Michelle Frechette: has taken a blog and turned it into a book. I agree. And I have already decided last week before you even mentioned that, that's what the talk I'm going to pitch to you, to, Europe, is this year is how to go from your blog to a published book.

[00:51:48] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Oh, they just made it really easy for you. It's click here. so they showed, also, they showed dragging in an EPOD document into basically a blank, Gutenberg screen. And it just dropped in with all of the different pieces, the the images and what have you. And that was just really cool to see.

the, to be fair, it wasn't them actually doing it. It was a video and it was obviously, I think it was created so that you could see what potentially would happen. 'cause it, that the icons coming in didn't look like real icons on a real desktop, but you get the idea. But also, one of the things that was really nicely done was the video I thought were Mathias.

Showed off the, sort of zoom out view. I thought that was quite nice. It just encapsulated it really well for those people who hadn't seen it before. But also the, capacity to just move things around on the canvas, dragging images. And then what he said was a very difficult challenge was taking an image and then basically putting it next to another image and it created this little gallery.

I dunno what would happen if you, went to three or four or what have you. But, just little UI things which make it a little bit more, intuitive. so yeah, you

[00:53:00] Michelle Frechette: remember when you used to open a thing and all the windows would just open on top of each other in Microsoft?

[00:53:06] Nathan Wrigley: Oh gosh.

That's all I have

[00:53:07] Michelle Frechette: is picturing there.

[00:53:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Did you ever do that where you literally opened up like 900 and you didn't know how to. Make it stop. And they just kept, yeah. On Turn it off.

[00:53:19] Michelle Frechette: Turn it off. Just turn it off. Yeah.

[00:53:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, just switched it off. And they just keep coming. I've got to make this comment.

That was really nice. Thank you Jackson. Appreciate that. He came, on last Thursday and he said it was, best, best ever meetup last week, I'm guess. Nice. And, the pub quiz. The pub quiz was epic and the zoom out is cool. Yeah, I would agree. Okay. So where did we get to exactly? We did that one.

I think we were here weren't we stated the word. Have we said what we need to say about that?

[00:53:50] Michelle Frechette: I think so. Yeah.

[00:53:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay, great. Okay. Which for the case, we'll move along. Let's do some charitable thing. WP gives A hand is a, WordPress based charity that comes around at this time of the year.

And if you are in the WordPress space and you are making money, the intention here is that for a very short and limited period of time, so between the da, gosh, it's, I'm making it really hard to read. I'm sorry. I've highlighted it and it looks really difficult, from the 23rd to the 29th of December.

So for this very short window of time, the idea that you would, give a proportion of whatever, to the charity. Charity. Now last year, let me just get this right, last year, $11,200 was made by, 16 companies, and nine organizations. And, it's not the biggest numbers you've ever heard in your life, but it's, giving a hand, it's making a start.

And so if you would like to do this and give back, and to be honest with you, I have now forgotten for reasons unknown in my own head. I've forgotten where the money lands, so I apologize for not having that to hand

[00:55:02] Taco Verdonshot: each, company can select their own charity. Thank you. So I think if you scroll down a little bit, you can already see some of the 2024 participants and you can see that Visual Composer and Indie Stack donate to Yeah.

You're scrolling too far.

[00:55:19] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, sorry.

[00:55:20] Taco Verdonshot: Thank you.

[00:55:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. This is 2024. Great. Yes. Thank you.

[00:55:23] Taco Verdonshot: so they do SOS Children's Villages in Latvia. y. Found another, charity. so each company can just say, Hey, we're donating to this charity or these charities. but it's about giving back.

[00:55:45] Nathan Wrigley: and the idea is that at this one moment when, we're used to, giving and receiving, that you just tell your, tell your board of directors or whatever, we're just gonna give a proportion of, this week.

And, yeah, it's just a really nice idea. So WP gives a hand.com, is the URL to go and find that, and there's some, there's information about what, what happened last, year here and, yeah. And you can see some of the companies. That have joined so far. So Visual Composer, indie Stack, WP Bakery, Amelia WP Data Tables, traff, bookstore and y have all contributed so far, so thanks to them.

okay. Shall we move on? Very briefly. this is the Verge write up. It's interesting. We, I don't know that we've ever featured the Verge before because the Verge is the wider press. But, I guess this story does reach the, reach the wider press. if it's okay with you, I don't really want to get into the ins and outs of it, so I'll just say my take on what happened, the preliminary injunction.

so this is in the rift between automatic and, WP engine. The, and I don't understand the sort of machinations of how the, dominoes fall with the different lawsuits at different times. But the preliminary injunction. it was decided the other day and basically to sum it up, I'm sure you know this already, to sum it up, it feels like you just rewind the clock to September the 19th.

that is to say that the, checkbox that we mentioned, on the page, which is there, that has been removed. Now, my understanding is that also stretches to, participation in the wordpress.org. if you wanna log into wordpress.org, you that all of that has now been returned to everybody.

assuming that you like pizza with pineapple on it, and also the plugin, a CF Advanced custom fields, got, its. Permalink back on the.org repo, but I'm not sure what the state of play is regarding any reviews that may have dropped in the intervening months. So is does that sum it up about Right? Is it basically, we're back to September then.

I wanna say 19th. I think it 20th was the day. Or did I miss something? Was there something that I failed?

[00:58:12] Tim Nash: That's one thing to add that, the, DOP engine staff have been given their logins back, but. Anybody else who was caught up in the whole thing, and was blocked, haven't got their logins back. So it's the only people who have had their logins restored to WordPress org and to Slack are DOP engine staff themselves.

[00:58:34] Nathan Wrigley: Do you mean to say that they're the only people who've received clarification that they've been returned? Or do you literally mean that the accounts in, in, so it's only the WP Engine staff that have had their accounts actually returned to them? Yes. Everybody else is still, disabled or deactivated or deleted depending on what version of what, where, in the timeline you are talking.

[00:58:57] Tim Nash: But yes, so if you're not, if you were basically, if at some point you were thrown outta the WordPress, slack or blocked on wordpress.org and you were Adobe Engine member of staff, your account hasn't been restored because the judgment is only affecting WP Engine. And WordPress org. Oh, I

[00:59:16] Nathan Wrigley: see. So there's a compulsion in the writing of the judgment that says that the WP Engine staff must have theirs return. Yes. And so that has happened, but it didn't, encompass, I guess it couldn't really, could it, if you think about it, it wasn't an argument, about that. okay. I didn't know that.

I didn't know that was a thing. So that then has to, let's see what the fallout of that is. This happened how long ago? When did this Judgment night, was it like a week ago now? Friday, I think. Friday. It was last, wasn't

[00:59:45] Michelle Frechette: it? Yeah. Very

[00:59:46] Nathan Wrigley: recent. Wow. Gosh, it feels like much longer. Thursday. Thursday. But yeah.

Yeah, it just last week. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. you can read more about that on the Verge and honestly, you can read about it in just about everything, in just about every tech publication, I think, to be honest. 'cause it was, it's quite interesting news. the, official WordPress X account, wrote, the usual that you'd expect, the, sort of repost, which is, we look forward to our day in court, or something like that.

it's a preliminary judgment and I don't even know what a preliminary judgment is, but I guess this is not over yet. what's interesting is that in order to. Get that, injunction, you have to prove that it is very likely that you'll win the court case that it's connected to and reading the, and, I'm not a lawyer or don't have any legal expertise, but as I understood it, it's not obvious that you'll win an injunction, unless it, the judge thinks it's likely that you'll also win the court case.

Oh, I see. So there is some sort of thread between the two things. yes. Okay. Okay.

[01:01:09] Taco Verdonshot: Basically, this injunction is to stop you from doing more harm to the other party until the moment the court case has a verdict.

[01:01:21] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So presumably then at this point, the, automatic side of things, they, now have to come up with some other arguments or other things that they're gonna bring to bear, but they should, yeah.

Tim, you look like you're about to I was gonna say,

[01:01:36] Tim Nash: so an injunction is literally that it's somebody going stop, just hold, sort yourselves out. But you, so it's not saying that, automatic have won or, lost, or the w engine have won the injunction, but the injunction is just saying, stop.

We must give an emergency relief, which is their way of saying aid effectively to, protect. In this case WP Engine from what? From, what Automatic have done. While the ju part of that is the them to say WP Engine have to say, look, there's a reasonable chance we are gonna win. And the judge has gone, yeah, there's a reasonable chance.

You've gotta remember, there's still things like discovery, which is where they basically exchange a bunch of emails. There's loads of other stuff. So the, just because the injunction has been granted, it shouldn't in theory weigh on the decision of the judge further down the line.

[01:02:31] Nathan Wrigley: But of

[01:02:31] Tim Nash: course, at the same time is saying that it's the same judge.

So if this judge had now gone, there's at least enough grounds to make me pause. And these arguments, they use the word not convincing, which I think probably is a good word, set. So if it's not convincing now, automatic really do have to somehow prove with evidence that it's gonna become more convincing.

So they've got produce evidence, if that makes sense.

[01:02:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it does. And speaking of injunction and stopping things, I think it's time that we cleanse our palettes just for a few moments with, we can all relax and look at some cats, sheep, and little puppies, but it won't be for long. Here it comes.

Okay, good. we're back. I love that video. It's like a whole minute and a half. Move on. Let's move on. Let's get into some other stuff. Okay. couple of pieces here. Very much connected, one written off the back of reading. Another, this will be interesting for the involved in. Hendrick, who I don't know, but, in a minute we're gonna flip over to a piece by, Yost as in the person, Yost Deval, Hendrick wrote his article and then it prompted Yost to write his, I think basically in broad agreement.

And, Hendricks. Assertion in this piece, and I'll try to paraphrase it, basically is that, the title says it all really, WordPress isn't WordPress anymore, and it can be summed up as follows. WordPress is now, too complicated. It used to be lean, it used to be very simple to understand. And in the more recent past, and I think really we're talking about, the advent of Gutenberg and all of the things that can bring.

But he actually does mention, particular things like light box functionality, duo tone filters, footnotes, and the proposed marquee block and slider block, things like that. the assertion is that this is just making WordPress more difficult, more bloated, and less desirable. And the proposed options are, and there's an awful lot more in this, but it's basically canonical plugins.

And we mentioned this a minute ago, the idea of. Plugins is a plugin which basically behaves from your point of view as a part of core, in that it will receive timely updates. It will be checked against best security practices and you can rely on it when you install it, as if it add shipped with core.

it will be trustworthy, updated, and what have you, but it won't be in core. this is something you'll have to go and find. so those functionalities that we just described would be there. And so there's an awful lot in this article, but I've stripped it down to that. And then if we just move over to Yost side, Yost, as he so often does, brings the data to bear.

So rather than just saying, okay, I think it's bloated, what impact does that there therefore have, and this chart, apologies if you can't see it, but I'll try to describe it. It's going back to 2018 and it's the market share of WordPress and basically it has been on a steady. Climb for many, years, since 2018.

It's gone up from 26%, 20, something like that until we get to where we are now, which is, in the sort of 30 fives according to this, the data that Yost uses we're used to hearing 43. But anyway, ignore that. but Yo's point is that really basically we're stagnant for the last 12 months.

WordPress is stagnant. you could argue that it's gone up in the most recent months, and I think Matt Mullen on stage said something like that. Then if you look at, CMSs, open source CMSs, so Magento, Drupal tumor press, the shop, they are all in fairly precipitous decline. And again, I'm showing a chart which shows that, but WordPress, so at least WordPress has bucked that trend.

However, some sort of interesting data to bring to bear there, that really can be put at the door of Elementor according to this data. if you stripped Elementor out WordPress, it would be, it may not have done quite the rise that it has over the last, let's say four or five, six years, something like that.

and then why is this happening? We'll paraphrase again, slow, technically stagnant. and it's perceived as insecure. People do regard plugins as WordPress. Whether that's fair or not is not really the point. it's difficult to use and you only have to get inside of the block editor with your, your inexperienced non-tech friend to realize how quickly they go down blind alleys and it doesn't work.

yeah. Basically, there's a call to action here. Let's make it simple. Let's canonical. I'm gonna, I'm gonna make up a word. Let's canonize. Yeah. let's canonize. What can be canonized? Oh my goodness. and make WordPress lean again. Basically, I think is the, is the idea. And I think, the data maybe would support that.

So I'm just gonna hand it over to you. Do you agree with that? Is that just, is that too much? Are we happy with where we're at the moment? Discuss. I think, WordPress has two audiences. it has the developer and the inside play. baseball kind of people who follow it, watch it, understand how it's morphed, and understand what we need to do to continue to move forward.

[01:08:13] Michelle Frechette: But then we're also trying to market it to people who have, are deciding how, where to build their next website and aren't. Insiders and aren't, we're, aren't web builders. And so I think that, by trying to put as much in there as possible, they're trying to compete with the Wix of the world, right?

Where you can just log in and drag and drop and it's easier, but it doesn't look easier to people who've been using it all this time. I'm not sure what the right answer is, because you can't have you, you can't have it both ways and have everybody be happy with the way it works.

[01:08:45] Nathan Wrigley: Michelle, honestly, I was hoping that you would have the answer.

I was just, you just fix it all for us. If you could just make WordPress work for every student, that would be splendid. I'm, yeah. I'm only a Christmas angel in print. Yeah, it's, interesting. I, think people like Hendrick who've been in the space for a long time and people like Yost who've been in the space for a long time, valid criticisms.

You only have to watch, like I said, people I. Inexperience trying to use WordPress, especially the site editor. And what am I doing now? What, where have I got to? What is this that, am I not on the page anymore? no, you're not. Oh, you're no longer editing the page. You're doing the header now.

Really? Okay. Okay. and so it goes, but, okay. Tim Taka. So

[01:09:33] Tim Nash: first of all, canonize is a word I'm afraid to say. Oh, Haven made it up. You've mentioned nothing. I didn't have to double check because Sure. But, yeah, we're damned if we do, damned if we don't, if within the space of what the last 45 minutes we have said, this should go in court.

Oh yes, definitely. This should definitely go in court. It should be plugin. Yeah. And it's the same with everything. I, agree. Most of the things that were highlighted as why are these in core for me, were like, why are these in core? These clearly are plugins. But then every so often, you, only have to go on Twitter now and, you'll find at least one comment in the last couple of hours related to WordPress where someone says, wow, this plugin should be in core.

And it's and you at that second, you are probably going, yeah. It totally should be. So these decisions are really hard to do. one of the, going backwards to this data of Word, one of the things I actually was surprised about, maybe not surprised, but one I liked was Jo Mateo's, talk, where he was like highlighting this idea of, block bindings, custom fields and custom post types.

Oh, yeah, Make a true CMS and Okay. I think that custom fields entry was probably more to do with a CF than anything to do with the future of WordPress, but it was nice to see that trio there. Because, yeah, for me, A CMS is all about the power of being able to generate some custom fields, attach some data to it and pump it out to the front end.

That is where A CMS is. But WordPress never was a CMS. WordPress was a blocking platform as is really demonstrated by Max when he was trying to do his speed build thing and he couldn't use this, the full site editor because, oh, I use Gutenberg, but I only write with it. yeah, 'cause you blog with it because you use WordPress as a blogging platform, which is fantastic.

It's a brilliant piece of software for blogging. 'cause that's what it was designed for. We've spent the last 20 plus years making it not that, and now we're paying for it. We're paying for it with the underlying layer underneath it's in how the database works. We're trying to shove JavaScript libraries on top to try and make it feel modern.

And it's getting bigger and bigger. And we are now at the stage where, if you cut anything, how are you gonna do it?

[01:12:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. as soon as it's gone in, it can't ever really come out again. Can it? That's the sort of,

[01:12:14] Tim Nash: it would take some pretty radical.

[01:12:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:12:17] Tim Nash: Hey, we are doing WordPress 10.

It is not backwards compatible. So are you, can you imagine those words ever being uttered?

[01:12:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Are you in the camp of it's not

[01:12:27] Tim Nash: backwards compatible,

[01:12:29] Nathan Wrigley: are you in the camp of site editing and Gutenberg and blocks and all that? Should have been a, like a, if you like a canonical plugin, would that have, would that be.

[01:12:38] Tim Nash: it, I, personally quite like the science editor. I've got used to it. I was a, I've never been a full on naysayer. I, remember, sitting with, Tammy Lister at Word Camp London many years ago, we're talking maybe even 10 years ago, and her talking about the idea for themes and that they would just be A-J-S-O-N file and some CSS and pretty much thinking that's pretty cool, but utterly crazy.

It's never gonna happen. And it did. so I from that beginnings to where we are now, it's amazing. And I think there's a really good case for We are here. We cannot go backwards. Yeah. This is, this train is going forwards, but we should learn from it. And one of the things that we are terrible at within the WordPress community is stopping and doing postmortems.

[01:13:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[01:13:32] Tim Nash: we'll only go forwards. We, will not look back at our mistakes. We are, and consequently, we are doomed to repeat them. And so we will, after every major project go well, communication was a bit of a problem, wasn't it? It's oh, marketing is a bit of a problem, isn't it? Yeah. We'll just, oh, and, it's even something as simple as running a word camp where we require the pe, the people in charge of running the word camp to be replaced after each and every word.

Camp is a symptom of this. We must only go forward. We can't like, have experience. Yeah. Anyway, that's okay. That didn't solve your, don't solve our problem. No, I don't think you solve the problem on a, podcast

[01:14:16] Nathan Wrigley: in all honesty, but it was worth a shot. Tcho, have you got anything to say about that or shall we press on?

[01:14:24] Taco Verdonshot: I, really sometimes have a hard time envisioning what it would look like if we take that other route. So will it make it harder for me not being a developer, building a website, or is it going to be easier because I can pick and choose the elements that I need? and, I don't know. I prefer to rely on people who have experienced building a lot of websites like Hendrick.

[01:14:58] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting.

[01:14:58] Taco Verdonshot: Yeah. Just following what.

[01:15:01] Nathan Wrigley: They say, I'm gonna link to both of those pieces, both the Yos piece and Hendricks piece as well into show notes, which you can get, you'll drop into your inbox tomorrow. But also if you search for this episode, it's number 319 on WP Builds. After Tuesday, the 17th of December, you'll be able to find the links there.

I'm gonna skip a few bits that I'd put into the show notes, just 'cause we're running out of time. So I'll go to this one next. And this is a nice little feature, added into cadence. If you're a subscriber to Cadence, you've now got, something called the Cadence Temple. temple. What the heck happened?

Yeah, they've the Cadence Temple. They've, built a shrine to something. by the way, can you just get in touch with Ben Ritner for me, Michelle, and say that we need a cadence. Temple, the cadence table Block. Yes. And it is what you'd imagine it's a table block, but the kind of, the thing which is of interest is that the, and I'll just read it.

The new Cadence temple Block Advanced will redefine table. Did I say it? Did I? Did I? You

[01:16:07] Michelle Frechette: did. This is

[01:16:08] Nathan Wrigley: hysterical. It's in my head now, right? Let me pause that. Lemme do it again. The new cadence table, hold on. Nathan Block will redefine how you display data on WordPress, unlike the standard core table block.

Yeah. This advanced solution lets you insert any block into table cells. And so that's why it's interesting to me. So you can see some sort of interesting ideas here where you've got, you've got images in certain table rows, you've got email addresses with I'm guessing this is custom post type data, social handles and things like that.

Pricing tables, the usual stuff. But the idea of being able to drop any block. Into each and every cell. I just thought that was interesting. I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna start

[01:16:49] Michelle Frechette: blocking, dropping tables into tables. Into tables.

[01:16:52] Nathan Wrigley: Oh my gosh. It's gonna be inception and blocks. Way down yeah.

Drop a really inception, a really complicated spreadsheet into one table cell and then another one, another table sounds,

[01:17:05] Taco Verdonshot: please have Amber Hines or someone check how that works. Accessibility. Yeah. Yeah. No, We can just assume, but neat idea. yeah. And not one that I thought of. kudos To the cadence team. presumably you can pick, pick that up if you're a Cadence subscriber already. Yes. I would imagine. Block Temples are the future system. Tim. They're, yeah, you can, Oh, there's so many things I can say. It sometimes does feel

like we have to pray to the gods of blocks to make them go the right position.

So

[01:17:38] Michelle Frechette: fair

[01:17:39] Nathan Wrigley: Cadence

[01:17:40] Michelle Frechette: doesn't ask you to worship us, but we're not gonna say no either.

[01:17:46] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah. That, okay. There we go. So there's that. Go and check it out. Cadence WP it is on their blog. and it came out, this piece was on the 5th of December. Go check that out. Okay, let's move along. ai, it's all the hotness.

you can't move for AI and Automatic are getting in on the act. They have acquired, WP ai. Gotta say I'm not familiar with that tool. I've my, all of my efforts in the AI world have ended up centered around things like, the SaaS versions, if you like, the chat GPTs and the Philanthropics and what have you.

But, they have acquired it since today we're announcing the acquisition of a company that's going to help us in our mission. WPA ai, which is a startup, with the following people involved. James LaPage, Greg Hunt of ViDu, excuse me. Julian Ga Gallan. I'm so sorry. I'm so bad at names. I could be wrong about this, but I, seem to have a memory that no sooner had this been bought than the previous tool.

WP AI was shuttered. And if that is in fact true, presumably then this was a, question of, acquiring the people. and not necessarily it's both.

Is it a bit of both? So it's, yeah. What the WPA I is carrying on. Or did I get that true? That's my

[01:19:09] Michelle Frechette: understanding. Okay. I chatted just very briefly with James last week and asked him, 'cause I hadn't read it yet, if he was going with it, and he said he's committed to, I believe, a year.

but they brought in the product and the people who've bought it to support it as they move it forward. Yes.

[01:19:26] Nathan Wrigley: and so obviously this will h hopefully help you with your WordPress website coding endeavors. I presume there's some alignment with, the code base and building plugins and helping people do all of those kind of things.

It was interesting, although I didn't manage to see it, I heard reports that, last week, another speed Bill Jamie Marsland put Ryan Welcher against, Nick Diego, but Nick Diego was wearing the AI hat and they were given the task of creating like a, timer. I. like a countdown timer, obviously with Christmas being what it is.

And, as you may expect something as utilitarian as that, I guess the AI was just gonna excel at that a million times. And, and apparently Nick was finished in a heartbeat, really just a few minutes. Whereas Ryan, with the constraints of having to write it himself, I dunno how far he got through.

You are nodding your head. A couple of you, did you see it?

[01:20:21] Tim Nash: Yeah. Ryan did an amazing job to keep up

[01:20:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:20:25] Tim Nash: With what I felt was a little unfair.

[01:20:28] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[01:20:28] Tim Nash: in that they, the tasks that were picked were indeed very hand picked towards favoring the ai. it would've been much more interesting to watch a traditional speed build with a, here we redesigned this site.

[01:20:45] Taco Verdonshot: he almost had that, Matt partially relied on

[01:20:49] Nathan Wrigley: AI during his speed build. That was an interesting take on it as well, because the way that Matt did it was that he took a screenshot, I dunno if you were watching that, but he took a screenshot of something. So it wasn't like he was, I don't know, taking a bit of HTML from, he was viewing the source and taking the HTML or, basically it was an image, drop the image into the, chat and then it did its best.

And I think on, I think it's fair to say that on most occasions it got a pretty decent rendition of it, didn't it? there was this three image layout was some text and the padding and everything was, yeah, way off. But the, it figured out that there were three images and here they are, and they're side by side.

And I'm sure it would've been dreadful in all sorts of respects in terms of accessibility and responsiveness and what have you. But it was pretty amazing. anyway, more ai. Coming into the WordPress space and it looks like three people who know this stuff inside out have been, hired to do it.

Okay. Anything else? Or shall I move on? Time is, short. Okay. In which case, I will just mention that, a few plugin companies and something that's not a plugin company, are diversifying beyond WordPress. So I'm at pains to point out that they're not moving away from WordPress.

They've just decided to, to explore some different. different ecosystems. barn two, I guess famous for their extensions to WooCommerce have decided that they're gonna enter the, Shopify ecosystem as if memory serves correctly. Yost did, right? Yost did a, yes. That's correct. Yeah. so that's happening in 2025.

Katie Keith, who's been on the show a few times, said, we'll diversify into selling Shopify apps as well as continuing to focus on WP and WooCommerce plugins Patch Stack, are gonna be expanding. So they're currently really focused headlong in WordPress and they're gonna be, putting there.

Putting their endeavors as well into the Laravel ecosystem, which is of a pretty hot thing. And Layer wp, which is, I, don't know entirely what Layer WP would be doing, but they've got this WP Deals, page, which they're gonna be moving presumably out into, I don't know, maybe more SaaS kind of solutions.

So stay calm essentially. If you've got ban two stuff, it's not going away. But they've definitely decided to explore, avenues new and I wonder. I do wonder, maybe harking back to the post that Yost himself wrote with all that stat data about, possible, and I'm doing air quotes, stagnation. Maybe this is something these businesses need to look at.

Okay, let's just flick to some user content. Let's go to this one first. This came from Who put the Felix aunt one in? Was that you Tcho? I did, of course. It's called snowfall. Let me guess you tell us.

[01:23:47] Taco Verdonshot: Yeah. talking about snowflakes in the commu, no, I mean it's wintertime, everyone needs snow on their website.

And back in the day you would load complete Java app uploads to make that happen. but Felix Orange being on the Workplace Performance team built a performance version that adds snowfall to your workplace site.

[01:24:17] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. So there we go. And it's on version one. And yes, I would imagine that if we come back to this in four years time, it'll still be on version one, but it probably does what it needs to.

So if you need, if you need snowflakes on your website, everyone does every on. no, I'm not doing it. I'm not gonna do it. But you said something and I'm trying to write it down. You said some, I think you said everyone needs snowflakes on their website. Of course, yes. I'm just writing that down and I'm not gonna manage it 'cause I've got to keep talking, but I'll try to write that down in a minute.

That could be the, episode title. Okay. So there we go. I will link to that in the show notes, but it's on Felix. Answers is GitHub repository. It's a, release candidate. but no doubt it will put all the snowflake. On your WordPress website. Did anybody else put in links? 'cause I've got a few here that I can see, but I'm not sure if they were using I gave you one.

[01:25:09] Michelle Frechette: Did you? I gave you one at a Reuters link. That

[01:25:12] Nathan Wrigley: one. This one? That's

[01:25:13] Michelle Frechette: the one, yep.

[01:25:14] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, go on. Spill the beans. I'm surprised this is happening. I heard about this for the longest time and I just assumed it would never actually happen, but here we go. Tell us. I think most

[01:25:22] Michelle Frechette: of us assumed it would never happen.

but TikTok has been, is being banned in the US because our government doesn't understand how it actually works and that the information that we're using is housed here in the US and isn't being sent to the Chinese government to figure out, what dances we like the best, But, yeah, it's, it's being turned off.

[01:25:47] Nathan Wrigley: It's pulled, it's taken.

[01:25:48] Michelle Frechette: It's, sorry.

[01:25:49] Nathan Wrigley: It's

[01:25:49] Michelle Frechette: being taken out. It's being taken out of the, the, you call 'em the app stores on both iOS and, Android, and we will not be able to update them anymore and things like that.

[01:26:05] Nathan Wrigley: but, do, you know, does this mean that you are the, application, so the app on let's say Android and, iOS, does that mean that it will be removed from your phone involuntarily, or does it just mean you'll be stuck on the version that you're on?

[01:26:18] Michelle Frechette: My understanding is that you'll be stuck in the version that you're on. Oh. Which as we all know, eventually will probably stop working.

[01:26:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. But also, and

[01:26:27] Michelle Frechette: my understanding is that even with VPNs and things like that, it's gonna be difficult to keep it updated if you can

[01:26:31] Nathan Wrigley: it. So yeah, Tim made the point prior to hitting record that this was the, basically the best news you could possibly have if you're a VPN provider.

yeah. 'cause yeah. yeah, we'll see how that goes. I'm really surprised because you would've thought that the, the shoe being on the other foot, this could easily work in, like against all of the social platforms that come out of the us Facebook and LinkedIn and X now. And that's what, yeah.

[01:27:00] Michelle Frechette: it's, I think it's a sad state that it's, anyway, I use TikTok a lot 'cause I have a single person who lives alone. And, starting with the pandemic and lockdown, that was my connection to feeling like connected to the outside world, because it's. People in action. It wasn't just reading Twitter or reading Facebook, things like that.

And so it allowed you to feel like you were connected to the world in a, different kind of way. And, I'm a little sad that it's happening this way. I honestly think it's because we have, as a people here in the United States, especially the left wing, have really motivated people through TikTok to take action on certain things.

It has become a way to spread news faster than anything else. And so when you. When a government can't control the narrative, it seeks to push down that narrative. And so I think that's what's happening.

[01:27:51] Nathan Wrigley: So firstly, Elliot Richmond is, making the comment that, yeah, this, oh, sorry. Michelle, Elliot Richmond makes the point that, it's a global trend.

Australia, I'd forgotten this story. It's fascinating. Australia are banning, children under 16 from using social media, of which I imagine TikTok would count, but I'm also imagining it would go to Facebook and Twitter and all of the other different bits and pieces. So a much more beefy stick, if you like, but at least at the age of 17 or 16 years, under one day, you'll be.

Back on the tiktoks before you know it. And, that proves just how much of a dad joke person I am. I called it the tiktoks, the TikTok, yeah, the tiktoks. I've never seen, I have literally never even seen TikTok in action. And, I'm gonna, that is gonna be my goal in life to get to the, get to the ripe old age where I finally give up life.

And on my gravestone it will be. He never saw TikTok. And, and I'll be a, proud person. I won't, I'll say that. Just like

[01:28:52] Michelle Frechette: any social media with a good algorithm, it becomes what you put into it. Yeah. And so a lot of people can think of it as silly kids dancing and those kinds of things. I myself have learned so much over the last four years by Oh, okay.

Being engaged in TikTok. I've learned about the world. I've learned about different places. I'm following somebody who is able to go into the pyramids, in Egypt, something that I would never be able to do because it is not an, those are, they weren't built for accessibility, it turns out. and I'm able to see the world through things like TikTok, and it's not that I can't explore other ways, but not in the same way that things come up on TikTok.

And so I'm a.

[01:29:31] Nathan Wrigley: So TikTok is for entertainment. What's also for entertainment is CSS. You didn't know that. Here it comes, CS. Oh, you gotta love it. Ken. What a segue. Chris Coya. Yeah. Thank you that I've been rehearsing that all week. Chris Coya, what's Not to love? Look at the teeny tiny amount of CSS, which is required to make this fun thing happen.

Two things here. This is scroll driven animations. I dunno why I'm showing this. I just thought it was great. so you scroll. look, there he is. what, I can't imagine a scenario where I wanna do that. But look what you need to do it. This followed by this. It's about 12 lines, 15 lines of CSS, and then you've got this, grid class over here.

As if that wasn't enough. Let's take you to the next one. this one is, a different take on the whole thing. And again, look, basically no, ht ML and this time we have this much CSSA little bit more modern. CSS is truly remarkable. And I'm gonna scroll. Did you see that? Look at all this stuff going on.

There's your snowflakes.

[01:30:38] Taco Verdonshot: Isn't that great? Honestly, I sure what the snow looks like in the uk. Nowhere near snow

[01:30:46] Nathan Wrigley: since 1999. We haven't had any snow in the uk. but the, I just thought that was brilliant. If you're not keeping up with modern CSS, it is transforming what's gonna be possible in the future.

Really interesting. But I wanna end on this one because I don't have words for it. this is the BBC, talking about Google's new chip. They've got this, excuse me, quantum computing chip. It's called Willow. And, I don't know what the constraints around this information are. I have no idea how exaggerated all this is, but let's imagine that this is true.

Google has unveiled a new chip, which it claims takes five minutes to solve a problem that would currently take the world's fastest sup supercomputer, 10 septillion years, which is 10, with like massive amounts of zeros, 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 21, 24. So it's 10 with 24 zeros after it, it's longer than, It's crazy long now. That's fascinating. Well done Google. Good job. Great. You created a fabulous chip now. Alright, that's interesting. But then when you scroll a bit further, look at that is the nerdiest picture ever? There's two people staring at something so bog like you can barely take it in. But the bit that is confounding, I'm gonna take it off the screen, is that the people behind this technology claim wait for it, claim.

Claim that it is possibly proof of the multiverse. They claim that the leap is so astronomically large that it might be in some way using other universes in order to solve the problem. The qubits are literally interacting with other universes. I have no words. it's not April the first. These are credible people and I don't know what to say apart from, I'm going back to WordPress, but yeah.

Tim, you look like you've got some

[01:32:54] Tim Nash: No, I was just gonna say, just, going back to the article itself and the 10 sec to 10 big

[01:33:01] Nathan Wrigley: number. Yeah.

[01:33:02] Tim Nash: 10 big numbers. a computer 10 years ago couldn't count that high.

[01:33:07] Nathan Wrigley: Wow. Wanted

[01:33:08] Tim Nash: to start at N and went all the way through. Yeah. It would run outta it couldn't actually do it, and it would die.

And you get a kernel panic. Give you that as a thought that the number is so big that a computer couldn't count it.

[01:33:22] Nathan Wrigley: But j just to me, it's insane that somebody who's a computer scientist is leaping like they've made this chip and they're leaping into like multiverse in order because the, jump is so astronomically, unexpectedly big.

But, yeah. Anyway, Willow, it's coming for your job. Thanks Google. but it's okay 'cause there's somebody in another universe doing the same work as you are, so it's completely fine. Only they've got, they don't wear glasses or something like that. That's it On that bombshell, I'm going to, I'm gonna say very big thank you to our three panelists.

We've got our co-host, tko and Michelle. Thank you very much. And, Tim Nash. That's it. We won't be back until after Christmas, I hope you enjoy that. If you do celebrate Christmas, enjoy it. Thank you for joining us today. If you made a comment, does anybody wanna have a particular sign off you doing anything exciting over the Christmas period or are just hunkering down with the family and friends?

[01:34:20] Taco Verdonshot: I'll be spending most, not Christmas days, but the days around it, working on something new to be released early in the new year over at Progress Planner. Nice.

[01:34:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, just drop that and then leave. That's the, yeah. That's how you do it. Yeah. I too, I've decided I'm gonna work on something very important over the Christmas holiday.

I've just decided it. I'm gonna work on something truly revolutionary. When we come back in January, your minds will be flown. I'm gonna

[01:34:54] Michelle Frechette: work on my novel.

[01:34:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I won't actually do anything, frankly. I'm gonna sit in a chair and enjoy it. What about you, Tim?

[01:35:03] Tim Nash: I'm gonna eat mince pies. Yes. just stare out the window with the, I think the daily mail declared that we were gonna have 10 days of snow, which is obviously not gonna happen, but

[01:35:14] Nathan Wrigley: No,

[01:35:15] Tim Nash: I get to look out the window and pretend that there's 10 days worth of snow there.

[01:35:18] Nathan Wrigley: Minced pies is fully endorsed from this side. I love the minced. Okay. That's it. That's all we've got time for. We'll see you in the new year. Take care. Stay safe. Thank you. You three

[01:35:28] Taco Verdonshot: waving. Oh yeah. We haven't done the waving my word. Thank you for that. Gosh, I was hovering over the bottom there and I would've regretted it.

[01:35:34] Nathan Wrigley: Can we do the waving? Thank you. Everybody smile. There we go. Thank you so much. We will end it now, and, if you three wanna hang around and have a chat afterwards, we'll do that. But, the rest of you, thanks so much for the comments and mark Westco, I've only just seen your one. Thank you for joining us right at the 11th hour there.

Appreciate it. See you later. Bye. Bye. Bye.