This Week in WordPress #321

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for This Week in WordPress, episode number 321, entitled OG, Peng, Sassy, Leng, Thicc, GOAT, Yoots. Phew.

It was recorded on Monday the 20th of January, 2025. My name is Nathan Wrigley, and I will be joined by my co-host Taco Verdonschot, but also by Nicky Bulmer, first timer and Corey Maass.

It is a WordPress podcast, but we get derailed quite a lot. At the beginning. We talk about Gutenberg number 20, what is in that release? And there's quite a lot.

We also talk about WordPress events, WordCamp Asia, WordCamp Europe, and some rival WordPress events as well.

We also talk about the incredible online conference that Elementor put on over the past week, and the production quality, and how much time and effort they spent on it.

Speaking of spending a long time, Do the Woo, Bob Dunn's podcast has reached the milestone of seven years, and we talk about that.

We also talk about group one, AKA WP Rocket buying the GTMetrics suite of tools.

And Taco tells us all about Progress Planner. Nicky tells us about Stellar Pay.

And a whole lot more happens as well. And it's all coming up next. On this week. In WordPress.

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Hello? Hello? Hello? Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hello. it is episode number 300 and yeah, it is 321. Of this week in WordPress. Oh, that's quite nice. That's got a nice ring to that, isn't it? 3, 2, 1. That's quite good. Exactly. We did episode 4 0 4 of the podcast the other week, which has also had a nice ring to it. And just a few weeks before that episode number 400.

It's very nice. with, there were three of us. No, four of us. Four of us, yes. But we love story. We lost Corey. We've lost Corey. Corey's, Corey's video is a bit jittery, so maybe he's rebooting his machine or something, but nevertheless, when Corey drops back in, we'll bring him back onto the show. But, you can see that there's, there's at least three of us going at the moment, so that's quite nice.

firstly I'll introduce Tcho, the Don shot, whose name apparently I cannot spell. because it's got a c in it in the surname. Not, not in Tacho. I didn't know that. Yeah. It it also has a C in Tacho, but Yeah. Yeah. If you took that out, it'd be Tao, which is actually quite a nice word. but Tacho, how are you doing?

Yeah, yeah. how you doing Tacho? I'm good. Thank you. You, you were saying to me that you're not that pleased with the background there. It's kind of a, it's a lot to take in your background, isn't it, with all the parallel lines. Yeah. So there's a reason why I'm not facing it with my desk, because it's horrible and it would drive me crazy within it.

[00:04:18] Taco Versonschot: Working day. So yeah, that's why it's behind me. But then, yeah, on video, it, it hurts your eyes. I'm sorry. It's fine. It's absolutely fine. Yeah. The plant is good. The plant breaks it up. Yeah. If you can't change the background, just get loads of jungley material and works for me. Yeah. So Tacho, is working in, in a different, line of work at the moment.

[00:04:44] Nathan Wrigley: We've known Tacho for many, many years from Yos, but I'll give, I'll give you his biography. and Corey, if you can hear me, we will drag you in in just a second. After leaving Yos last year, tacho joined the Emelia team to work on Progress Planner. We'll talk about that in a minute. The new plugin to help you fight procrastination on those important website maintenance tasks.

He's also an active polyglot translating WordPress to Dutch. He's also a Meetup organizer at WP Meetup, NY Megan, and the Word Camp mentor for Word Camp Lithuania. Outside. Are you really? I did not know that. That's sn in there. Is that a new thing? well, I, became a mentor for them a couple of weeks ago.

[00:05:25] Taco Versonschot: Oh, okay. Really new. But I have been mentoring other world camps, in the past, like Whitley Bay. Oh gosh. Oh, nice, nice, nice. Outside of WordPress, he's a father of two, husband of one and generally doesn't like to sit still. He's planning, Ooh, here we go. He's planning on doing the four day march. It marches in nine Megan again this year, but might turn out to be too old for that.

[00:05:47] Nathan Wrigley: And then there's a word beginning with S, which has got four letters in it, which I'm not gonna say 'cause we've got a take down notice on YouTube, but, you're not that old. You look too old. Yeah. Four days though. That's a long time. yeah, it's, it's four days, 50 kilometers each. So each day. Yes. Oh, you are too old for that.

[00:06:08] Taco Versonschot: Yeah. I did it two years ago, but without proper training and that was not a good idea. So I'm gonna retry this year with proper training. I still finished though, two years ago. Oh, well done. But in some sort of agony, I suspect. Yes. Yeah, that wasn't fun. Well, I really appreciate you joining us. And just so that you know, if you're spelling Tacho surname, it does have an, it's S-C-H-O-T, not SHOT, as I incorrectly spelled it.

[00:06:33] Nathan Wrigley: I apologize for that. And we're also joined by Nicky Bulmer first timer. How are you doing, Nicky?

[00:06:38] Nicky Bulmer: Pretty good. Thanks for having me.

[00:06:40] Nathan Wrigley: You are very welcome.

[00:06:41] Nicky Bulmer: Kinda the WordPress black sheep here. I don't have all of the credentials in the WordPress world.

[00:06:47] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know what? It doesn't matter if you're a WordPress user, that's all it takes.

but let's read your bio. Nick Buller has been with Liquid Web for over 15 years, initially as a Red Hat certified Linux assist admin. There's all the credentials you need, Nikki. but until, but currently, is the technical hiring coordinator for Liquid Web Nexus, stellar wp, which all kind of come under the same banner, working on the Get Hired podcast, along with post status to help folks struggling to get hired, practice interviewing, and get a free resume, a review.

And we'll mention that in a little moment before the end of the show. We'll talk about that podcast and see if we can get it into your podcast player of choice. So Nikki, appreciate you joining us, and hopefully it isn't a terrible experience and you'll wish to come back. That is my, that is my wish. where are you coming from?

[00:07:37] Nicky Bulmer: I'm, I'm here in Michigan. I don't know if you can hear my heater blasting in the background, but it's like four degrees here today, so, okay. Yeah.

[00:07:45] Nathan Wrigley: let's not get into the US politics, but I know it is a big day in the US politics today, so try not to think

[00:07:51] Nicky Bulmer: about it.

[00:07:51] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Alright. Okay. And here we go.

Just four more years, Nathan. Just four more, more years. Four more years. Hopefully. Hopefully. And, no, look at that. Look at that. There's a nice plug. If ever I saw Choice. Perfect timing. Choice the show with his mug mug. I've been, I've been

[00:08:06] Corey Maass: sitting here for four minutes holding it up.

[00:08:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's great. I love it.

For those of you listening, Corey just joined the show and he is got, his mug is O-M-G-I-M-G plug in mug right there in front of him. How you doing, Corey? What went wrong? Did you, you just like, did it not restart or something?

[00:08:21] Corey Maass: Oh, it's, yeah. my, my computer's having, having a morning.

[00:08:26] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. but it's all working now.

You, you look considerably. is the lag still

[00:08:31] Corey Maass: there? Yeah.

[00:08:32] Nathan Wrigley: No, no, no. And you've not got like square pixels, which make up head, I think You think you can dance

[00:08:38] Nicky Bulmer: a little bit more so we can be Sure That's

[00:08:40] Nathan Wrigley: right. Come on.

[00:08:42] Corey Maass: Yeah. Last week, last week being on the show, a lot of my jokes didn't land and now I'm gonna assume that it was because there was lag in the video, not because my jokes were terrible.

[00:08:51] Nathan Wrigley: I didn't detect any jokes.

[00:08:56] Corey Maass: Wow, you're roasted because you're, it's because you're English and you don't understand. Understand.

[00:09:03] Nathan Wrigley: We have sarcasm. We have nothing apart from sarcasm. Sarcasm, by the way, is the best form of humor. It's easy to deploy. It's, it's great love sarcasm. anyway, here we go. Corey Mass is such a short biography.

is the co is the founder and creator of O-M-G-I-M-G. You can see it on the mug. and he is also a WordPress freelance developer. There we go. That is our panel for this week. I very nearly got you all a piece of music. I was trying to think of fun ways to liven the show and I was this close to getting a little bit of music for each of your intros.

And then I just pulled, didn't pull the trigger and I thought now that's too weird. But now that I'm, now that it didn't have, and I'm thinking next week I'm gonna get everybody. I was hoping you would sing again. Oh gosh, yeah. I got a few messages, I got a few, few tweets about that. Most of it, not very ome.

That's not nice. No, no, no. Not nice. Not sarcasm, sar. It was perfectly adequate. Yeah. Yeah. It was satisfactory. It was perfectly reasonable singing. it was as good

[00:10:10] Nicky Bulmer: as your dad jokes. Yeah,

[00:10:11] Nathan Wrigley: that, that's right. And I can only deploy dad jokes if you are joining us. live. That's really appreciated. Thank you.

The best place to do that is by heading here. WP Builds.com/live over there. If you're on a desktop on the right are some, chat widget. It's coming directly from YouTube. Yeah. The, the other, right? That one, that one. and, and if you are logged into Google, you can obviously use those. However, if you don't like Google or don't have a Google account, then you can click the little live chat button inside the video player.

Top right? And if you do that, then you can, yeah, you can chat without being logged into anything. You just need to type your name in. So go and share that with your friends relations enemies, Guinea pigs, whatever. WP Builds.com/live. That, by the way, was a joke. Don't go and share it with the Guinea pigs.

They don't have a computer. They won't be able to join us. but there we go. The other thing to say is really appreciate it. If you do make a comment, it's terribly nice to those people that do. And here are a few people that have, influenced WP is joining us. Hello, hello. Hello, from Charlotte, North Carolina in the us.

BET h is saying Hi from Bend, Oregon. What a great name. Is that the name of the town? Is it called Just Simply Bend? I think that's fabulous. What a cool name. friendly web guy. Stay tuned. Friendly web guy. Version 2.2 or something of your plugin. Good afternoon. From a secret location somewhere. What?

Somewhere outside the M 25. A few miles from the M three Junction. Three. Okay. What's going on? Working for the military. Now he's rave going. Okay. They're

[00:11:55] Corey Maass: they're 12,000 hippies in a field. That's right. Dancing

[00:11:57] Nathan Wrigley: their asses off. Yeah. Yeah. Something's going up on, he can tell us later. Matt Cromwell. Hi.

Tacho and Nick and Wad podcast. Woohoo. Yeah, I didn't get a, I didn't get a mention and neither did you Corey. I what? I chopped liver. I dunno what to say about that. for Fahrenheit colder than here in, than me here in Germany. Yeah. We get this thing, Nikki, where people tell us what the weather is like.

that seems to have died down this week, but, love sarcasm says Tacho. Thank you. Appreciate it. Good afternoon, WP Builds and all says Atif. Very nice to have you with us and Tammy Lister is saying Afternoon. Afternoon. Very nice to have you. Please make some comments. If you've got anything you would like us to hear or what have you, I'm happy to put those on the show.

And, try. The only bit of multitasking I'm capable of in my working week is doing comments and talking at the same time. so here we go. This is what we've got for you this week. Self-promotion coming up. Firstly, this is us WP Builds.com. Thank you to our three sponsors that we've got at the moment.

We have got GoDaddy Pro Blue Host, and Omnis Send. Appreciate keeping the lights on over here. if you wanna keep up to date with what we do, put your email address in there and hit subscribe, and we'll send you a couple of emails each week about the content that we make. Aside from that, this is the content that we make and, we're on episode number 405 of the podcast.

And I just wanted to, I just wanted to, mention this. This is the, I love this image, art, this album art, by the way, I took a, that took me whole minutes to come up. With whole seconds, I would say Mark West Garden and I have started a new show, on WP Builds. We'll be doing it about once every three months, and it's just called the Nice Show.

It's quite nice. Thank you. That, that's all I needed to hear. My day is complete. My life is complete. And the idea is that we're just gonna say nice things about stuff because there's too much not nice happening and too many not nice things being said on social media platforms. And so we thought we'll do a show based upon only nice things.

And so that's exactly what we did. So if you want to hear it, go to episode number 405 and we'll tell you about nice, nice internety things. We'll tell you about nice real worldy things. We'll tell you about nice people that we've met and so on and so forth. So we'll be back probably in about three months time and, hopefully, hopefully one or two nice things will have happened between now and then so that we've got, got some actual content.

But yeah, please go and check it out and leave us, leave us a comment there. You know, the whole WordPress comment thing that nobody uses anymore down there somewhere. Where is it? I dunno.

[00:14:39] Taco Versonschot: Well, there it

[00:14:40] Nathan Wrigley: is right at the bottom. Use that actually.

[00:14:43] Taco Versonschot: I mean, I've been been blogging for the first time in the past couple of weeks.

Oh, yeah. And I was surprised how active comment sections become again, now that Oh, your

[00:14:54] Nathan Wrigley: comments? Yeah. Oh yeah. Well, no,

[00:14:56] Taco Versonschot: overall, I mean, I've seen that on other blog posts as well. Yeah. Yeah. where people instead of responding on x or methadone or blue sky or what have you, actually respond in the blog comments.

And I like it. It's, you have, it's going back.

[00:15:13] Nathan Wrigley: Have you come across like anybody who's using substack. Because I think Substack is a really interesting enterprise. I, I don't use it, but a few of the, influential people that I follow, you know, nothing to do with WordPress. Just people out there whose opinions I really like and what have you.

a lot of them are on Substack and because it's all on this one platform, it's a bit like wordpress.com or something like that. But because, because it gets a sense, 'cause you log in to comment, it gets a sense of what you like. But it's unlike Facebook, it's not really tracking you for, you know, putting adverts down your throat.

It's just trying to figure out, okay, you like that bit of content, did you, great. Here's another person on our platform who's doing something, which we think is quite similar, so it kind of sucks you back in. But this, this podcast that I listened to, he dropped a podcast episode and I swear I went to his comment section about an hour later and there were over 390 comments already.

Wow. So people are willing to do it. It's just, I think Facebook took that game away, didn't they? And Twitter for a period of time. But maybe we're getting more more into that. Yeah.

[00:16:21] Taco Versonschot: I hope to see more people go to actual blogs and, and comment there because it's nice.

[00:16:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I dunno if you've been following again.

Sorry, Nikki. Sorry Corey, if you want to chip in, this is apropos of nothing. It's not, certainly not what we were intending to talk about, but why not? I have

[00:16:36] Corey Maass: no comment.

[00:16:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, why? Goodness. That was a joke. I got it. I got that one. the, the, activity pub plugin, which is constantly being updated by Mathias Fle, the, and we'll talk about Mastodon in a bit, which is one example of how activity pop can be used.

They that can consume comments on onto your website. So, you know, if somebody comments on your website, it goes back onto Mastodon and if somebody comments on Mastodon, it goes onto your website. So it's like this central hub, your website becomes a first class citizen, almost like it's, well, it is the owner of an account.

and I think the future of things like that is quite good. So you're not cross posting, you are literally posting comments on somebody's website, which then fly backwards and foot. It's very clever, very, very clever. alright, we've got a couple of other people joining us as opposed to the mean show.

Yeah, I was thinking of starting that one, but I couldn't find a guest to do it with me. it was Matt. That one

[00:17:39] Corey Maass: was a bit too average.

[00:17:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. that one was a thinker. Yeah. That, no, I, that was a good one. Matt says, Substack has some great writers. I follow a few good ones on there and get their stuff in my email.

I like the idea that, that platform a lot. Yeah, it's really neat. Really neat. It's just for writers, basically. It doesn't offer much functionality outside of that. And then BET says, actually, I'm seeing folks promoting Zero Click Marketing, where all the content and comments is on social media in long-ish form.

Yeah. Anyway, if you do fancy commenting on the Nice show, go to WP Builds.com, search for episode number 405, and leave us a comment there. All righty. let's get stuck into the actual project itself, wordpress.org. I dunno if you're a Gutenberg user, any of you, but, I am, this is basically all that I use now inside of WordPress and version 20 has come along, which means if you follow it closely, that, that means it's the 200th release of the Gutenberg plugin.

It's been almost exactly eight years. I'm just reading from the website since the initial commit to the Gutenberg repository and about four years since, since the hundredths release. and I think this is really nice, Fabian who wrote this post just wanted to give a bit of a shout out and a bit of a thanks to all the people who'd either who were still contributing or did contribute, but have moved along in one way, shape, or form.

So that's nice. Nice. When people do that. And the, the things which have changed in version 20 are the style book. I dunno if anybody ever uses the style book, but the style book, if I just click play on this, stylebook, enables you to sort of have a, a real overview of all the different, I dunno, H ones, H twos, paragraphs, block quotes, whatever on your website in this one interface.

And you can change by clicking on buttons, how the, how it might all look. they have added, some different sections for typography, color, individual blocks that activate when the user navigates around those menu items. So that's quite nice. starter patterns, get a new ui. I honestly. Haven't used start patterns at all, but start patterns live in here at the top, you've got these ones, which you can basically click in to get a layout, you know, a prebuilt layout of your choosing, which is really nice.

And also it's easy to now set up a page to become the post page from within that editor. You just click, the little three dots icon and you can make your whatever page that you're on into the post page. So it's like this slow inexorable move from what we used to have the WordPress UI into this sort of more block-based, site editing ui.

And also now you can add a little tag, a little thing here, which I'm circling around, which will show what the original blot was, if you rename it something else. So they've changed it into a batos and unless you knew what the icon was that that was the group icon, then you wouldn't know. But now it's, been given a little thing, so it's fairly, fairly minor.

Pretty nerdy, pretty technical, but anybody wanna comment on that? If not, I'll move on.

[00:20:37] Corey Maass: I thought we weren't supposed to call it Gutenberg anymore.

[00:20:40] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Brian

[00:20:42] Taco Versonschot: Gutenberg plugin is still Gutenberg.

[00:20:46] Nathan Wrigley: That's true. Yeah. Are you thinking it should be the block editor?

[00:20:51] Corey Maass: Oh, no. I just, I remembered, I thought I remembered it.

The word going out of somebody stamping their foot. And, and I kept waiting for the introduction of, similar to capital P. Dang it. I, I kept waiting for somebody to introduce a function called it's Block Editor. Dang It or something. Yeah, yeah. Other, yeah. Thing. So I'm, I'm, but Gutenberg, I, I still call it Gutenberg.

I, in fact, I have a, I use, text expander and if I type GUT and hit tab, it expands to Gutenberg. 'cause I complain about, I didn't even talk about it.

[00:21:29] Nathan Wrigley: well rescued, I like it. I use it for absolutely everything. Now, I've gotta say that I wasn't a big fan of the site editor, but I've kind of now got to the point where I.

All of the problems are now muscle memory. You know, I've, I've figured out my way around most of the, the problems that I was having. And, and I've been playing with it actually a lot over the weekend. And every obstacle that I thought I would face I faced, but every obstacle I could work my way around.

Largely it's to do with like menus, really navigation. but I've managed to sort of figure out it for me, for my use anyway, so I'm, I'm pretty optimistic about it and I love the whole templating system inside there. It's just great to see what's going on. Anybody else before I move on? I. Okay. In which

[00:22:17] Taco Versonschot: case, one thing is what I really like is that, it's an eight year project now Gutenberg, and four years ago they were at a hundred release.

Now, four years later, we're at number 200. That means it's super steady. And that's quite nice. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So in

[00:22:36] Nicky Bulmer: four years we'll be back here talking about 300.

[00:22:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:22:39] Nicky Bulmer: Are we, are we making a plan? Yeah, that's it. Okay. So if we come

[00:22:42] Nathan Wrigley: back this date in, the year 20, what is that? I can't do the math. 29?

Yeah. Okay, good. I'm glad you're here then. Yes, we will. unless something has superseded it by then, I'm really, I'm really happy with it. It fulfills all of my needs. I am basically a text editor in, in the block editor. Most of the time I'm writing text and paragraphs, and that's more or less it. which is why I think the full site editing piece was such an obstacle for me.

And honestly, I still think it must be very jarring for a brand new user to WordPress to figure out where is everything? How do I actually see my, the front, the front end of my site? How do I get back to the regular old admin, without two clicks instead

[00:23:22] Corey Maass: of one? This is my big frustration, like, especially 'cause I generally am building for clients, and so I, yeah.

I. Don't bother.

[00:23:37] Nathan Wrigley: Do you still stick with like the old, like a classic theme, for example? Or do you

[00:23:42] Corey Maass: no, I, so for me the, an early point of frustration if we're, I'll be brief, was, okay, the fact that with the tiny MCE, the one box, you didn't, you had no idea what it was gonna end up actually looking like.

And that was supposed to be, to me, in my understanding, that was one of the early things that Gutenberg was supposed to resolve. And to me, you're still typing in, I. In a, in a nicer layout with lots more options, but it still doesn't look like what it might or might not look like once it's actually loaded on the homepage, predictably and easily as opposed to, I mean, no, no.

Page editor is perfect, but I doubled down on Beaver Builder. That's the one that I still use. and love the fact that it actually looks like what it's gonna look like. The mo, you know, as you're building it. And, and that for clients is, is crucial because I. Most of my support tickets, meaning them messaging me in Slack was, it doesn't look like, you know, why?

Yeah. Why is it black over here and now it's blue? Or why is it big over here and now it's small and et cetera, et cetera.

[00:24:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's kind of interesting. I was talking to, Tammy Lister this week, and Oh, she's in the comments. I've forgotten that. yeah, she knows that. And she was saying that, forgive me Tammy, if I'm putting words into your mouth, but she, she sees the whole engine of Gutenberg, for theming at least anyway, as kind of the point.

It's, it's like a tool that other people can build on top of, and that might be with the block editor, or it might be with, other page builders that are in in the future. There's a new one coming out called Block Era. Which is building on top of core blocks, so they'll be expanding what core blocks into it.

It looks really exciting. and so it really, the Gutenberg thing, the whole site editor, Gutenberg editor, is about laying the foundations that other people can build on top of. It was never intended to be a, what you see is what you get editor, but I think we all thought that's what it was. And so we all got a bit ticked off when it didn't look like what it did on the backend.

[00:25:53] Corey Maass: That was the part that had me excited was mm-hmm this describing content in an just objects JSON, you know, and so you could then in theory do exactly what you just said, re reinterpret it. One page builder wouldn't undermine another if, if the data was the same and was reliable. and I'd, I'd love that to still be more of the norm.

[00:26:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, actually this project is out, I think on wordpress.org now. It's definitely worth a look. It's called Block Era, but I would probably pronounce it as blocker, but it's B-L-O-C-K-E-R-A. And the UVP for that one is that every block that looks like it's one of their blocks is actually just an extension of a core block.

So they've added things like grid and flex and break points. To all the core blocks and it, it looks really interesting. Whether or not they'll make a niche for themselves and be successful with it, I don't know, but it's definitely worth a look. I, I did mention on a previous show, but, worth looking at that.

okay. A couple of comments coming in. Matt says More releases doesn't always mean more stability, but hopefully it'll be battle tested with all those installs. and then Tacho replied to that. Yep. Reliable release scheme. Yeah.

[00:27:14] Taco Versonschot: Yeah,

[00:27:14] Nathan Wrigley: it would've been better. And then Michelle, hello, joining us and, all the tachos, Matt.

I love it. Wow. Matt, you look so different in that icon. Is it just me or does Matt Cromwell not normally. Not like that. You look,

[00:27:31] Taco Versonschot: I would say this picture might be from a few years ago. Oh, okay.

[00:27:37] Nathan Wrigley: I was gonna say he's taken on some sort of different approach to life. He's a bit more, a bit longer hair or Germany's definitely changed him.

Yeah, he's, he's gone full hippie. okay. And off of that, right, let's move on. So that was got by two point, sorry, 20 version 20. Right. The next thing to mention is a couple of bits about WordPress events. if you are still on the fence, the, there are tickets still available for this one, as you might expect.

Word Camp Europe. You can still grab your tickets. it's happening between the fifth to the 7th of June, 2025 in Baal. I think you pronounce that as B. It looks like Basil, but I think you pronounce it as Baal. Switzerland. I've been to Switzerland and I just remember spending mortgageable amounts of money on basic things, like a glass of orange juice.

And, so I dunno, dunno what that's gonna be like as an experience for all us WordPresses, you know, be interesting to see if anybody can afford to do the social stuff in the evening, but tickets are available. And also,

[00:28:41] Taco Versonschot: tickets are one of the good things though, Nathan, and that's worth mentioning is that the work in Europe organizing team arranged for everyone who stays at an official.

a place like a hotel or anywhere where you pay tourist taxes, basically, they will get a free transportation card so that you can move around the city for free. Great. Yeah, that is

[00:29:08] Nathan Wrigley: good. So that's helpful. That

[00:29:09] Taco Versonschot: saves some, at least.

[00:29:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, definitely. That you can then spend

[00:29:12] Taco Versonschot: on orange

[00:29:12] Nathan Wrigley: juice. Yeah. yeah.

Yeah. Well you can get like a 10th of an orange juice or something like that. It would be interesting to see, but also, I can't find the tab for it now, but it was, oh, here we go. this was to say that WordCamp Asia tickets. I know this article that we're looking at isn't that, but Word Camp Asia tickets are still available.

I don't know. Taka, you pulled up the numbers just before we started, didn't you? How are we? How's it looking?

[00:29:41] Taco Versonschot: At this moment, we are looking on the website so people can indicate that they don't want to be on the website. So probably it's slightly more, but

[00:29:49] Nathan Wrigley: okay.

[00:29:49] Taco Versonschot: Right now there's 1200 people registered on the website.

Mm-hmm. So that's a decent amount for a flagship workcamp.

[00:29:57] Nathan Wrigley: I think last time in, Taipei, I think it was around about the 1500 mark, but nevertheless, if you are in that neck of the woods or you suddenly realize that you are available, it's in Manila and the dates are written on the screen here. It is the, it's next month.

It's in a more or less where it is exactly a month, month from today, month from, yeah. Yeah. February 20th to the 22nd in Manila. and this piece, which is coming from WP content, is about four people. I was gonna say four lucky people, but that's entirely the wrong phrasing. Four people who have, through their previous endeavors and what have you, justified themselves as recipients of some scholarships.

So there's two scholarships in question, both scholarships, giving out two awards. The first one we've mentioned loads of times, it's the Kim Parcell scholarship and this, and I'll just quote the scholarship, supports women who are active in the WordPress project have never attended a word, camp Asia, and require financial assistance to take part.

The recipient of this scholarship this year is, and I do apologize to both of these people, zeal Kar. who is from India and Puja Deri, who, I believe is also from India as well. So they're the recipients of that. So Bravo. And then there's another one called the Diversity Scholarship, award. and this scholarship is aimed at attendees who have never attended a Word, word camp before and require financial support.

It focuses on individuals from underrepresented demography who will use their experience to support their local communities in Asia. And recipients of that are Macarand g Maine. And Ask the Jane again, sincere apologies if I've got your names wrong, but, round of applause for you. Four people. Bravo. hopefully you'll be seeing the likes of Tacho there.

Tacho you are going, I dunno if the other two are going or

[00:31:56] Taco Versonschot: not. Yeah. I'll be, leading a panel at Wamp Asia. Nice. So what's the panel about? ai. Oh, nice. And we'll have a couple of very knowledgeable people, speaking on the panel. Yeah.

[00:32:12] Nathan Wrigley: Ah, it's just such an interesting subject. It never gets, never gets old that one.

Anyway. Bravo. And tickets, like I said, are still available. Does anybody want to comment on that one before I move on?

[00:32:23] Taco Versonschot: I would say if you can find an excuse to go, probably meeting the community is more important now than ever before. let's make sure that we have a lot of like-minded people in the same room all go to the contributor day and, Work on WordPress together.

[00:32:44] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Yep. Contributor day. I, I don't actually know when the contributor day is. Usually it's, I think in Asia last time. It was the day after, but I can't remember. it'll be one of the days either before or after. And, yeah. just a bit of an aside and I think, we'll, we'll go into this 'cause I like it Atif.

Thank you for this comment. It's interesting, Atif makes the point, he said, so this is going back to the block editor thing from a minute ago. What does success mean for Gutenberg or the block editor as it still rank, as it still ranks very low compared to most other builders or tools? Did anybody wanna take that on?

If not, I'll offer an opinion, but if anybody wants to go with that, what does success look

[00:33:22] Corey Maass: like? I think, I think success would be actual adoption by the majority of people. Right? It was meant to, there, there was a time where yes, everybody had infinite number of themes, but you were. Editing your content using tiny MCE, the built-in editor and, and I, it seems like that's no longer true, that themes, page builders, various other tech have taken that focus away from that, which is built into WordPress.

So I would, I would call success the adoption by the majority of sites using that, which is built in.

[00:34:06] Nathan Wrigley: It's kind of interesting because, sorry. Nikki, you carry on. I apologize.

[00:34:11] Nicky Bulmer: no, I was just gonna say, it's really surprising to me that it's ranked so low compared, compared to other builders tools because every job that we post, we want experience in Gutenberg.

You know, it's a great foundation to build on. People use it. I just, I don't know why they don't rank it. I think a lot of people just. Get so used to using something, they forget that they still need to plug it because you know, if you don't go rate the tools that you love, they're gonna be low compared to others.

And it just becomes a thing that it's always there. So it's kind of faded into the background I think.

[00:34:46] Nathan Wrigley: I have a couple of thoughts on that, Nikki. The first one is that I, I dunno if you kept your eye on it, but obviously doing this show I did when the Gutenberg editor came around, there was just this mass flurry of one star reviews, like literally thousands.

And it became almost a bit of a comedy that it was getting so many one star reviews. So I wonder, I wonder if that has ever been on Don, you know what I mean? Like the thousands and thousands of one star reviews are gonna be there forever and it's gonna be very difficult for it to sort of go up that way.

And the other thing to address CO's point is, I could be wrong about this, does wordpress.org offer any telemetry? Is there anything which phones back home to say to anybody? And I don't think there is. this is what this website is using. So, you know, there, there is, is there where,

[00:35:35] Corey Maass: or is there, if you go to, if you go to the Gutenberg plugin, Uhhuh.

Ve all almo, the vast majority. At, at a glance, the majority of recent comments, recent RA ratings are still one star. Interesting.

[00:35:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay.

[00:35:54] Corey Maass: So I, I wouldn't attribute it to, you know, we're trying, we're trying to overcome, a wave of, of bad reviews at the beginning. I think a lot of people are still not satisfied with it.

[00:36:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Interesting. I, I see.

[00:36:10] Corey Maass: Or,

[00:36:11] Taco Versonschot: or never went back to change their rating. That's what I

[00:36:15] Nathan Wrigley: was thinking.

[00:36:16] Taco Versonschot: And people always being slightly optimistic,

[00:36:18] Nicky Bulmer: people don't usually rate reviews when they're happy. They write them when they're mad.

[00:36:22] Nathan Wrigley: Ah, that's a good point. Yeah.

[00:36:23] Corey Maass: And, and being a built-in project, I mean, it, you know, I and other developers will solicit.

Ratings and we're not gonna, we're not gonna solicit good ratings 'cause that gets you banned. But, we will solicit ratings and so yeah, the, I presumably if this being, this being a, a. Team effort and in, you know, a built-in thing, there's no solicitation of ratings. And so you're absolutely right.

Like there's no, if you love this, please go rate us kind of prompt.

[00:36:58] Nathan Wrigley: I, my, my feelings are that for the, the site wide editing, I'm still breaking ground on that. And I, like I said, I'm still getting to the point where I'm familiar with the ui. It, it's not as frustrating as it used to be, so I'm kind of just getting over that and I'm, I'm slowly moving everything out of classic themes into block-based themes, but I am using third party plugins, in order to overcome some problems which Core doesn't wish to solve, particularly around like navigation and menus and things like that.

but for writing. I think it's blooming marvelous. I think it's absolutely great as a way to create written image-based content in a blog format. You know, where it's start at the top, read to the bottom. I think it's absolutely brilliant. The ability to move up and down, content, the ability to drop in blocks, like in my case, newsletter Glue, which transforms the block editor into a full on kind of MailChimp equivalent.

It's just, it's brilliant and, and I'm really happy with it. Yeah.

[00:38:03] Taco Versonschot: How long did it take you to get to that point where you started liking it?

[00:38:09] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, a while. Yeah. Yeah. I stuck to the classic editor. I, in fact, I disabled Gutenberg for, at least nine months when it first came out.

[00:38:20] Taco Versonschot: Yeah. And, and I think that Nikki, Said that, or alluded to that earlier, is that we are not the average user. Yeah, good

[00:38:30] Nathan Wrigley: point.

[00:38:31] Taco Versonschot: I, I will not ask my wife to just struggle for nine months and then you'll learn to love it when it comes to building her website.

[00:38:39] Nathan Wrigley: I can ask her for you if you like.

[00:38:41] Taco Versonschot: Well, you can, sure. And I would love for you to video video a response because I mean, but that's the reality.

Mm-hmm. If your competition is, easy to use, wy week editor, that's actually reliable in backend, looks like front end, then the block editor, and especially. Full sight editing isn't there

[00:39:09] Nathan Wrigley: yet? You know, you are absolutely right. Look, I, I was saying that I was fiddling a lot this weekend. I really put in quite a lot of hours and there were moments where I shot the laptop in what would, could only be described as something board bordering frustration, went and did something else.

And then it just, last night at about 10 30 at night, I suddenly had a moment of wait, I know what to do. And then whipped the laptop out again. And at 10 30 it began again. No, no, AKA normal people are gonna have that level of commitment to, they're gonna contact

[00:39:41] Corey Maass: me, the web guy. That's right. A web guy on the team so you can

[00:39:44] Nathan Wrigley: get frustrated by it.

This is, this is a

[00:39:46] Corey Maass: nightmare. Make

[00:39:47] Nathan Wrigley: it easier. Yeah. Yeah. That's an interesting point. So in answer to Atif F's question, what does success mean? And, and if adoption is the, the criteria, who knows whether we'll get that adoption, but if, if lack of frustration is the criteria, it would seem that maybe we're not.

We haven't crossed that bridge quite yet.

[00:40:08] Corey Maass: I mean, the same could be said for much of the WordPress admin.

[00:40:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I,

[00:40:15] Corey Maass: I, for clients, I spend half, probably half my effort making the admin I. I won't say not look like the WordPress admin. 'cause I don't, that's, there's, there's a way to take it too far, but, you know, hiding every, every conceivable menu item that as much to protect clients from themselves.

but also to, you know, to make the flow as easy as possible and, and to limit that frustration you're talking about.

[00:40:46] Nathan Wrigley: thankfully Tacho has given us the link for the project itself. If you wanna go and look at it, here it is. It's, some of these

[00:40:53] Nicky Bulmer: reviews are very funny. Oh, oh, are they? Oh, okay. Well,

[00:40:55] Nathan Wrigley: we won't look at, yeah, look at that though.

That is not a great look, is it? Oh, there,

[00:41:00] Corey Maass: well, and click on that. See, all that was kind of, because your, your point is a really good one. Like, you know, time plays a part in this. Oh gosh. And so, you know,

[00:41:11] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, yeah. It's, it is, you're right. If we have a very brief, quick flick through, it's not doing so well, is it?

Oh dear. Oh, well, I shall, I shall be nice anyway. Yeah, because I've been chatting with Mark West Guard.

[00:41:26] Nicky Bulmer: If you look at 'em, a lot of them are clearly written in that moment of frustration where somebody is stuck and they go and they're like, no, this is a crime against humanity. Like, that's somebody in the thick of it, right?

Then going, I just have to say something, get it outta my head.

[00:41:39] Nathan Wrigley: Can we, can we organize them by date? Because I mean, I, I've got one week is the most recent one. Then it tops to a month, and then by the end of this page we're on to eight months ago. So, you know, what is that 20 comments on there? 30 comments, something like

[00:41:53] Corey Maass: that.

Well, you, you know that, you know that they love grouping information, on. Everything on wordpress.org. How many installs does it have? 10. 10,000? How many thousands? Yeah. Yeah. Et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. Yeah. So it, it feels a little like that too, where it's, I'm sure they have the data.

[00:42:14] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I am a very happy user of it, and I will, I've definitely now crossed a bit of a Rubicon Oh, good to get that out.

I've definitely crossed the Rubicon this week, and I think now classic themes are probably in the past for me, so that's kind of interesting. Okay. actually I

[00:42:31] Taco Versonschot: use Gutenberg or the full site editing as well on the sites that I built, which is not a whole lot.

[00:42:39] Nathan Wrigley: what was the, so sorry. What was the biggest frustration for you?

'cause I know there was one. It's just inevitable.

[00:42:44] Taco Versonschot: Well, break points. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How do I make this look good on. A telephone on a, on a phone, on a tablet, on a small screen, on a big screen. And, just to plug an, a company and a product where I have no affiliation whatsoever. I really, really, really love the great Suites.

[00:43:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yep.

[00:43:09] Taco Versonschot: they solve some of those problems and yeah, make that, a whole lot easier to do in, in Gutenberg

[00:43:19] Nathan Wrigley: Tako, can I just point out that you very nearly said the word telephone? Yeah. A word that I have not heard in about a decade. has anybody used that word recently? I'm that old telephone. It's like mobile or phone.

That was No, I just thought he was gonna say telephone. okay, so joining us is Courtney. She's saying hello from the USA. She's a bit late. Doesn't matter. morning everybody says James Patricia talking about, the word Camp Asia. Sorry, word, camp Europe thing. it has not been arranged by us. This is the transportation thing.

It's by the city all, all the time. Free. Oh. You can go anywhere you like in the city. Free transport and discount bike rental, museum visits, et cetera. Oh, nice. and it's been truncated, but it says to, to all who pay, a hotel or apartment, city tax. So that's cool. Yeah, you can travel anywhere you like in the city and also use those bike things.

And, all sorts of other features as well. Like Courtney, I'm late to the show this morning, says Kami, we forgive you, Kami. It's fine. this is a holiday, so I think a lot

[00:44:26] Corey Maass: of people are getting up. Oh, that's fine.

[00:44:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, no worries. And apparently it's the bar Tourism office or Basel, I don't know how you say that.

and, in response to Tcho saying clever people, at Word Camp, Asia, Michelle is on the same panel. She's on the AI panel as well. Yes. Is she nice? Is that how you pronounce a capital P Nathan? I'm not gonna say that. Dang it. what, what, what, what did I do wrong? What did I say? I don't get it.

No, no, no. You

[00:45:00] Corey Maass: were, you were always Oh, I just assumed you were Yeah. Emphasizing that that was the capital. That's a habit that I had when

[00:45:07] Nathan Wrigley: I, when I, I'm cycling things through my head, I said, okay,

[00:45:13] Corey Maass: us Americans, we just mumble everything. So it's, you know,

[00:45:15] Nathan Wrigley: res

[00:45:16] Corey Maass: Yeah. Okay. There's, there's

[00:45:16] Nathan Wrigley: barely a P in there at

[00:45:17] Corey Maass: all.

[00:45:18] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah. There's definite difference in the way that you pronounce some words, and maybe that's one of them. bet Hannon. Are we talking about Gutenberg the plugin? We were not really, I think we probably were talking about Gutenberg, the plugin, but then we got into full site editing and stuff as well.

gosh, the comments are coming in thick and fast. Mac Runwell, I like Nikki's perspective. sometimes the WP Inside Basket Baseball, sorry, community is out of touch with the common user or broader WP Market. I have no idea what that phrase inside baseball means.

[00:45:50] Corey Maass: Insider baseball is the phrase where it's basically a bunch of people talking, standing around, talking deeply about some topic that most people, your average person doesn't know much about.

Okay. So all of us sitting around talking deeply, okay. About, you know, WordPress, WordPress, WordPress, where your average user is like, doesn't know what Gutenberg is or care about the politics behind it or any of this stuff. They either like it or they don't kind of, yeah. See,

[00:46:19] Nicky Bulmer: that's my shtick here. I'm the average user so I can, I can bring you guys back down to earth.

[00:46:24] Corey Maass: That's perfect. Yeah. That's, that's what we need. And, and it's so true for, I mean, this is something I struggle with across almost everything that I do, podcasts and the work I do and marketing and all that is I, I am very much inside the WordPress bubble and, and so it's, it's, and it's hard to get out. I, yeah, because how do you, how do you talk to people who.

Word where WordPress is just a tool. It's, it's, to them, it's the same as Excel or any other piece of software. And so either it's good or it's bad, it's friendly or it's not, you know, that kind of thing.

[00:46:59] Nicky Bulmer: I think that's one of the best and worst things about WordPress is the community, because it's such a wonderful community of people that come together and help each other, but getting into that is like mm-hmm.

A, a huge curve. But once you're in, it's good. So

[00:47:14] Corey Maass: it's, it's one of the biggest, sorry, one, one more quick thing. Like one of the, the community is what Drug me brought me in a decade ago. and it's interesting, I went to a meetup an hour away here in New Hampshire, a, a few months ago, and it's, it tends to be a small one.

We, there's, there's only about six people in New Hampshire, so, but we, we actually had a, the like, the only. Unfamiliar face that showed up at the meetup, had driven four hours from Rhode Island to get help with her WordPress site because she couldn't find it, she couldn't find local people, she couldn't find help online, but she found this meetup.

And so God took a day off from work and drove all the way to the meetup. And so, very kindly, the, the folks who organized the meetup sat, like devoted the meetup to helping her with her website. gosh. But yeah, it's, it was the perfect example to me of, you know, it's not easy, it's not always easy to find the answers you need.

No kidding. That's

[00:48:26] Nathan Wrigley: pri That's full on, isn't it? What a drive. Wow. Incredible. perhaps Elliot Richmond said we need more Gutenberg user tutorials. Ah, Elliot, if only there was somebody online who would make YouTube videos, who could that be? thank you for doing all of that hard work, Elliot. but could end up being a moving type.

Yeah, that's the problem, isn't it? Like, if you're making content in the Gutenberg space, it must be fairly crazy making because the UI gets upended. Well, we've just shown in Gutenberg 20 a variety of new things that have been added, features that have been added, and, so it must make it, incredibly difficult.

Gosh, I'm struggling to keep up with the comments. Driving four hours in London would leave me still in London. Yeah. I suppose it depends which way you go. nomad Skateboarding, hello? we're in a bubble actively fighting against core. There are many people who are thrilled with Gutenberg and Core, including clients.

And, what else have we got? I, I'm gonna put it up there. Yeah. And fair.

[00:49:29] Taco Versonschot: I mean, I do think that there's a huge difference, between using the blocks to write a blog post and full site editing. I mean, yes. Yeah. I, I, I used my wife as an example before. she will write her content in, The in the block editor, that's fine.

That completely works. And that's easy enough. But I will not ask her to create a new page and do the whole layout for a new page. Got it. Because, yeah. Well, it'd be my job within 10 minutes.

[00:50:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I think, I think you're right. I think as a writing experience, it's phenomenal. In kind of, interestingly, I've noticed a lot of SaaS has now adopted the, and I don't think WordPress was the first place, place to do it, but it was the first place I saw it where, you know, this whole beginner new line with forward slash and you get the option to drop in whatever you want.

Almost everything does that now. And I, I'm sure, like I said, it wasn't WordPress. WordPress jumped on that bandwagon, but that is now like what I expect in more or less, any tool, if I'm in a brand new section, row, whatever it might be, if I hit forward slash I'm expecting the option to drop in. whatever it may be.

Yeah. so I like it. Old

[00:50:47] Taco Versonschot: IRC experience from 20 so many years. Ago's never used irc.

[00:50:52] Nathan Wrigley: Is that how it worked over there? Yeah. Ah, okay. Okay. So now a few old.

[00:50:56] Nicky Bulmer: Thanks. Thanks for that. Thanks for bringing up IRC. Oh, you're

[00:50:59] Nathan Wrigley: among friends. Yeah. There's a whole other episode in there. No doubt. right. Okay, let's quickly move on.

So that was word camps. actually, no, I'll just mention this. and I'll be very careful about the way that I pronounce it because I need to, we, in, in London, speaking of London, we have W-P-L-D-N. and in January, 2025, if you fancy attending that, it's happening, on January 25th. Like I, yeah, January 25th, 2025.

Too many two fives there. we're doing a, a, a double kind of 10 30th Dayton say

[00:51:36] Taco Versonschot: again. It says the 30th of January.

[00:51:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And it is the 30th of January. I dunno why I am saying the the 20. Yeah, something's wrong here. I'm pretty sure. In fact, let me just quickly look on my calendar. actually I won't bother.

I'll fix it. It will be correct, but if you fancy coming, it's the last Thursday of the month. So if we've made a, an error with the thing there that, you know, you can fix that in your own calendar. but we're doing a double sort of social event if you like. We're doing a panel discussion and then we're doing this thing called Lean Coffee, which is new to me.

I've never done a lean coffee event to the point where I can't really even tell you what that means, but apparently it's a thing. and if you fancy attending, Head to the links in the show notes or Google, W-P-L-D-N and you'll be able to, to join that event. And if you have got an intuition that you'd like to speak at such an event, then DM me or whatever, you know, that might be quite nice.

And we'll see if we can get you lined up for that event. So, yeah, let me see if I can find the correct date for that ever. So if

[00:52:41] Taco Versonschot: they can't make it to London on the 30th of January, it is the

[00:52:45] Nathan Wrigley: 30th. It's the 30th, so this is right. They, they

[00:52:47] Taco Versonschot: can also come to nme where Yos Deval will be speaking at the WordPress meetup at the same time.

Closer to you. Yeah. Say well. An hour or two later, but Oh, nice.

[00:52:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, we could do like tag team, you throw a tennis ball over the, over the, the North Sea. Do you call it the North C? That C it separates you, you call it the North C as. Oh, okay. That's good. Yeah, we can agree on some things. IRC was the best, apparently.

MIR. Ah, is that getting, is that, are we talking about That's game there. Yeah, that's another client for it. Okay, great. okay, I just want a bit of self-promotion, but I just want to highlight that I did a. Podcast episode with, David dha, who runs an agency in the UK called Atomic Smash. And, if, if, like David, you have ever been through the highs and the lows of growing an agency from you and your mate to 20 staff and you want David's intuitions as to the ways to do that, then go and check it out.

It was really interesting. He was really, really, how to describe it, very humble and willing to share his, successes, but mostly willing to share the things that he thought he could have improved. And, it was quite, quite a nice chat. So that was episode number 152. Now if you happen to be attending Now, which word Camp is it?

It's the word Camp Europe one, right? Yes. There is an event happening at the same time. Now you put this in the show notes. was it you Tacho, did you put that one? Yes, I did. What is this then? Is it like, is it like rival event happening at the same time or is it just like an alternative? What's going on?

[00:54:25] Taco Versonschot: I, I think a little bit of both. I mean, it's at an odd hour after the official sessions for work in Europe have finished and typically before all the social events really kick off. So it's that in-between time where they have a sort of mini conference. I, I'm not sure who's behind it or how big it will be, but given that we'll probably have about 3000 people in Basel, I can imagine that.

This might turn out to be a success.

[00:55:04] Nathan Wrigley: So the, the website is alt control, I'm gonna presume it's alt control.org is, is how you're gonna say it. So it's a LT ctrl.org and it says, join us on Friday. So it's just this one three hour session, Friday evening from six to nine, alternative talks on WordPress that you probably won't hear at WordCamp.

And the website, URL is alt control.org. and I dunno whether it mentioned, food is Served Party or two, you can attend your usual conference then come down. So if, if that, if that hits the, the mark for you, if you fancy going into Word Camp and then carrying it on, then go check that out. Anybody

[00:55:48] Taco Versonschot: else got, well, you need to eat somewhere, so you might as well go here.

[00:55:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Oh gosh. Imagine if everybody showed up at eight. I'm

[00:55:55] Taco Versonschot: curious.

[00:55:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:55:56] Corey Maass: I'm curious if there's a backlash. Oh on, go on. 'cause of the history of, well, the history of people trying to do al events or events in and around WordPress word camps that aren't officially sanctioned. and especially it feels a little finger poking of talks you won't hear and all that.

So the, I don't

[00:56:19] Nathan Wrigley: know

[00:56:19] Corey Maass: anything.

[00:56:20] Nathan Wrigley: Seriously. What, what, tell me about the, the bit that you just said, alternative events in the past. Have there been, and were they sort of like, you know, were they not, did they not go down well? Well, like I

[00:56:31] Corey Maass: remember, I, I don't, I don't know the details so I'll, I'll, I'll broad strokes here, but like, I know that, Brian Kras guard did a post status day around before, the day before one of the, the big word Camp uss in Boston maybe.

and I remember there was drama around it. And then I know that other people who have tried to organize. Events before, after, during. You know, whatnot were faced, bad faced things, had words spoken to them or at them or about them, and that kind of thing. So I'm, I'm curious if that won't in Oh, okay.

So in light of the things that are going on now. Yeah. Got it. I see. Which the front of,

[00:57:22] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Okay. I see what you mean now. So if we look,

[00:57:25] Taco Versonschot: that's, that's actually why I think that they are being really smart, because this time slot is not competing with any of the official work Camp Europe events. So there's no competition.

It's just, hey, if you want to grab food and hear other talks, then. Come to us. And I, I,

[00:57:47] Corey Maass: I think you're right, but I also think it's that maybe there's a reason you don't know who's behind it. Fair.

[00:57:54] Taco Versonschot: There's a button. We've learned more about us, so maybe I should have just clicked that.

[00:57:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. oh, that's interesting.

And I didn't know about the previous dramas about like the post status event and so on, but yeah. Okay. So there it is. alt control.org, and if you are going and you wish to from six o'clock on the Friday to nine o'clock. Okay. There, there are all people listed. Yeah. And obviously we'll see, if, you know, if anything develops on that story in the days and weeks of coming, and obviously I

[00:58:23] Corey Maass: hope to be clear, like I hope not.

Like I'm not, it, it, I don't, I don't want to hear juicy gossip or anything like that. Mm. Like we, all this stuff should coexist. You know, and so it's, it's been rather unfortunate that it, I know that there's been stuff in the past, so Yeah. Oh,

[00:58:43] Taco Versonschot: indeed. On the independent page, you can see, who's, behind this, right?

[00:58:50] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. So here we go. There's some, yeah. There's some names there. Okay. I clicked on this link at the top, the second link along the independent link, so you can check that out if you want. Okay. I just put a comment up. Yeah. Patricia was saying that looks like the 30th of January is the date to run a WordPress style event.

London nine Meghan. And it turns out Geneva are also running events at the, the same time it looks like Geneva, is starting with blocks and block themes at beginner level. So there you go. That's, something that you could attend. Right. Okay. Moving on. Okay. Occasionally something in the WordPress space comes along, which is just so, sort of profoundly how to describe it.

You know, it moves the needle a lot and I think it's fair to say Elementor in the day was one of those things, like the adoption of Elementor for many, many years was just really, really moving the needle for WordPress. In fact, I think if you took Elementor out of the WordPress growth statistics for the last, let's say 10 years, it would be a very different picture, I think.

I think Elementor has accounted for a significant amount. Now, whether or not you are using it or not, I don't know, but they, They decided to launch this event, which took place last week, and it's called Web Forward. And, and I dunno if that's the URL web, FWRD, I dunno if that's a top level domain or not, but I didn't attend the event, but I watched a bit of this recap, video where it's 43 minutes long and they essentially put their entire online event into YouTube.

And I, I just gotta say like you guys Elementor, just a massive haptic from me. That thing was. Really professionally done, like super slick. I, I have no idea what the budget is for these kind of things, but just a bit of a bravo from me for just taking something that you could have done like this in a Zoom call.

You could have done something like that. But no, you dug deep, you spent the money, you spent the time, you got everybody well trained, you hired a studio. The lighting and the videography is just excellent. So just well done from me for all of that. So I scanned through it and it just, this is gonna sound ridiculous 'cause it doesn't, but it, it had that apple kind of quality to it, you know, it had, there was something of the apple in it, the way that they'd put it together and I don't know, everybody coached making sure that they were on point and doing the, the right thing at the right time.

It was really good. So, hat tip from me, really? Bravo. That's, that's all I've got there. I dunno if anybody else wants to comment on that, but that was pretty amazing. Okey doke.

[01:01:38] Taco Versonschot: It's nice to see them succeed and do awesome stuff. And, and some of the things that they introduced, like the new version of their builder, actually looks promising.

[01:01:50] Nathan Wrigley: Can you tell me about that? Because unfortunately, time for me this week was a scarce commodity. So have you got any, was there anything that you recall from then you, is it just like a total overhaul of the ui or is it just a little, pretty much, well,

[01:02:02] Taco Versonschot: not necessarily the ui, but a lot of the logic behind it and, and yes, it comes with UI changes, that will make it easier for people to build with elementary.

[01:02:14] Nathan Wrigley: Gosh, so big, big, big things going on. Yeah, I always think, I always think because Elementor was just in the news every week, every week relentlessly doing stuff because it's kind of not anymore. I, I, it just, it always feels to me like, ah, it's, it's a, it's a dwindling thing. It's is not a dwindling thing.

It's. So not it's

[01:02:34] Taco Versonschot: anything, but, oh gosh.

[01:02:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. you know, back in the day they weren't GPL and they weren't attending, you know, they were attending, but as not as sponsors in person events. And now they always do the big, big booth at the big, events and all that kinda stuff. And, and, yeah, just great, just really an amazing, amazing, amazing story.

okay. Another story in the WordPress, unless Nikki or Corey had anything to add to that? No. Okay.

[01:03:03] Nicky Bulmer: No.

[01:03:04] Nathan Wrigley: All right. normally we, we cover acquisitions and normally it's like a big. Sassy sort of company. Sassy. That doesn't sound good. SAS kind of company. I, okay. Somebody write that down. That's gonna be the name of this episode.

a, a SAS company buying like a WordPress plugin or a big, big WordPress plugin company buying another one. You don't normally find it the way around. IEA company basically in the WordPress space, going out and buying a SAS company. But that's what happened this week, which is curious. group one and I, I'm imagining that most people have never heard of the company group one, but I bet you've heard of one of their biggest things, which is WP Rocket.

So, group one is obviously, you know, the, the bigger company behind various products, and WP Rocket is their flagship WordPress product. they have only gone and bought GT metrics, which I, in my head I've got that as like the, the tool. That everybody wants to be equal to, you know, the, the, if you wanna measure your word pre, sorry, any sort of property online GT metrics is kind of the one that is the benchmark against anyway, they've bought it and, so now it's owned by group one sort of word pressy company, but what a, what a neat match that is.

Mm-hmm. WP Rocket, a website metrics tool, what, you know, just perfect. So Bravo

[01:04:32] Taco Versonschot: and, and imagine what they can do having, WP Rocket and this SEO plugin, I'm not the biggest fan of, but Rank Mat, and then GT Metrics because the data that they will get about websites through GT metrics, if they use that well in their other products and also in their hosting.

products that's gonna be a game changer. What's their hosting product? Do you, I've not heard. one.com. Dodo host net? some of them. Okay. there's, there's quite a few. Yeah. Okay. It's a big group.

[01:05:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But you're right. The, the me the telemetry that they'll get out of GT metrics, as I imagine that is phoning home.

And I imagine every time you do some sort of thing with GT metrics, that's the deal. You, you know, you get the stuff out of it in exchange for the, the data and the telemetry and all of that. Yeah. I imagine it will give them a lot of valuable intel. Yeah. Interesting.

[01:05:32] Corey Maass: So, Bravo, well done. I'm, I'm, I'm hoping that they, so GT metrics was the kind of the go-to for a long time.

And then my recollection is, I dunno, a few years ago they changed, they made it slightly less easy to just go plug in a URL and get all the data for free without. I, I don't know that I, I mean, there was always a paid portion of it, but they started asking more for accounts and things like that. and so I'm, I'm hoping that it goes back to being plug in your URL and here's absolutely all the data.

Enjoy it, you know? Well, I use it just as a lead magnet kind of. You

[01:06:12] Nathan Wrigley: can well imagine that WP Rocket subscribers will certainly be part of that tier of, you know, there's gotta be something for them, right? You just plug in your URL, here's, here's all the data that you could possibly want in your WordPress backend.

Powerful stuff. Yeah. Really.

[01:06:29] Taco Versonschot: But even to prove that their WP Rocket product is actually working, because you can now do a before and after. and there's, there's a lot of cross pollination that you can do. In the suite of, of brands and products that they have within Group One. So

[01:06:49] Nathan Wrigley: I know that, I know that there's a lot of credible offerings in the WordPress performance space and caching and, you know, there's just loads and, and I'm not trying to put one thing over another, but I, I have, I have a lot of friends who are very happy WP Rocket subscribers and, you know, they, they think it's the business.

They're really content with it. And what have you, does this does, does the, even the mere dangling carrot of something like GT metrics in the back end of your WordPress website for free or for a small amount of money, does that, does that give you a bit more confidence? Yeah, I think it would me, I think I'd be thinking this is, this is great.

This is where I want my future to spend in this regard to go.

[01:07:28] Taco Versonschot: yeah. Yeah. I'm mostly hoping that they'll put it to good use to improve, WP Rockets even further.

[01:07:35] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah. You both put your hand up. Tacho. Cory, you're both rocket subscribers. Are you okay? I'm not, I did not. No. Okay. Sorry. I thought you did.

Your, your, your glasses have a smudge on them or something? They, yeah. Oh, yeah. In the shape of a hand. That's kind of, yeah. That's, that's weird. right. Okay. Nikki, anything on that or should we crack on? Nope. All righty. Okay. This, where's it gone? Where's it gone? Where's it gone? Oh. Oh. Bob, Don. Bob Don, very dear friend of mine, missed Sir.

Bob Don, you might call him. he has now been doing do the Woo for count of seven whole years. Now. Bob Bob's podcasting endeavors stretch way back beyond then, but Do the Woo itself has been instantiated now for seven years and he hopped on a call this week with a bunch of people that you can see right there.

I won't name them all, one at a time, but, he was celebrating seven years. So I just wanna bring this video to your attention. If you Google do the Woo celebrating seven years, maybe you'll get to do the woo.com. But no doubt the video will be embedded there. And, as somebody who knows how. How fun it can be at times.

Keeping going. Keep, keep on, keeping on, for that length of time. Well done Bob, and, hearty congratulations from all over here to, to you and your co-hosts and, the shows just seem to, well multiply. So every week there's a, it's a new show on the Do the Woo network, so congratulations, Bob. anybody or I should, should I just move on?

[01:09:12] Taco Versonschot: I, I think one of the coolest things is that we, actually see do the Woo as a sponsor to Workcamp, and WordPress events. And I think he's the only podcast actually sponsoring events, so that's pretty special and Yeah.

[01:09:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. He, it's pretty, like I remember when he said that to me, so I'm a podcaster, I don't sponsor events, and he said, yeah, I'm thinking of sponsoring Word Camp Asia.

And I, I remember actually thinking, why, what are you thinking? And he has got so much out of that. He's now done two, three, this will be his third word, camp Asia. And he's done, you know, word camp us and he's done a few local ones and he's done Word Camp Europe. And he gets, he just, he has a booth and he just hangs out and chats with people and he meets everybody.

I sat in his booth and tried to ruin it in, into Reno last year. It was actually quite entertaining and, and it was fascinating the amount of people that dropped by just wanting to hang out with Bob. Very cool. Very, very cool. And we are, he's

[01:10:21] Taco Versonschot: a

[01:10:21] Nathan Wrigley: celebrity. I know he doesn't want to hear it, but it's definitely true.

Yeah. Yeah, he's great. And he, he has, you know, like he's got the lowest voice in the world. okay. Bob is the og. What does OG mean? The original, right? There's few

[01:10:40] Corey Maass: interpretations.

[01:10:41] Nathan Wrigley: Is it original? Is that all it means? Just original. Original gangster. Original what? Gangster?

[01:10:48] Corey Maass: Mm-hmm. Okay. It was the OG of Do, do, do was I think originally like a, okay.

At least I always heard it in the context of like in la, like Got it. People talking about. You know, he was from back in the day.

[01:11:05] Nathan Wrigley: But you know, when you see like things like that and you know, the, all the youths that you look at me, 50-year-old man, and you kind of interpret that it probably means original, but you're never quite sure.

It's like, I still never entirely sure what LOL means. I always think it means lots of love. Lots of

[01:11:24] Corey Maass: love,

[01:11:24] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Is that what it No, it's not that. Right. It's laugh out loud, but I No, no, that was, that

[01:11:29] Corey Maass: was the joke that like there's, there's those great, threads that went around for a while that were real, or imagine or, or fake.

but texts, conversations and some somebody's mom messaging them and saying, I'm, I'm, I'm so sorry to tell you that your uncle died, LOL because she's not that it, she thought that it meant lots of love. Oh gosh, that's,

[01:11:55] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Gosh. Anyway. OG apparently means the original gangster. Yeah. Bets. Bet's. Got the skinny on that.

See, I used the word skinny.

[01:12:05] Corey Maass: I like, friendly web guys response too. og meaning open graph. Yeah, that's what it is. That's what it means. Open graph.

[01:12:15] Nicky Bulmer: ma'am, daughter's school actually sent home a paper with all of the different abbreviations and weird words that they might use over like the course of the year.

She's in seventh grade and one of the words was thick. Hang on. Wait, wait.

[01:12:28] Nathan Wrigley: No, don't tell us. Let's see if we can figure it out. What was it? Stick?

[01:12:32] Nicky Bulmer: No. Thick feet. Thick. As in

[01:12:34] Nathan Wrigley: wide. Something that's wide. Yes. Thick. Okay. I mean, to me that just means something that's wide. I can't think of another.

[01:12:43] Nicky Bulmer: Okay. It's, it's, it's usually attributed to a full figured person with a great butt is usually sick, so with two Cs, but on the paper they put, it's just an attractive person.

So my daughter walks up to me and goes, mom, you're looking sick today. And I was like, no, I'm not.

[01:13:04] Nathan Wrigley: That's cool though, that they've made the effort to kind of reeducate you into the language that your, your kids are using. My kids sit at the dining table, except we know it more

[01:13:13] Nicky Bulmer: than they do.

[01:13:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Well, my kids sit at the dining table and very like, I don't know, once every three months a word will exit their mouths.

And I'm like, wait, what the heck? What does that, it's, you know, sometimes it's a reused English word, which is obviously got a different spin on it, but occasionally it's a new word that I've never heard before. And, and we, you know, play this stupid game where I try to guess and invariably I, I get it wrong.

But

[01:13:41] Taco Versonschot: yeah. Now imagine that. Then that your kids are Dutch, which means that at the age of four and eight like mine are, they have very limited knowledge of English, but they hear an English term and will completely butcher it in Dutch. And they use it full confidence as they heard it, and then for me to figure out what the heck they're meaning.

[01:14:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Nice. It's go through all the loops. Yeah. okay, so this is interesting. A so the original, I think we've got that it's the original gangster, whatever it might mean. Bes. Okay, so this is sprouted a lot of comments. this is what the Google and Urban Dictionary are for Nathan. Okay. I didn't know they existed.

Well, Google I did. I heard of that. the Urban Dictionary. You never heard of original Gutenberg? I like it Atif. That's very clever. Brandon, who by the way, just slightly earlier said he's joining us from China. Thank you Brandon for joining us. all the way over there must be late. And also Cameron joining us, who I presume is in Australia again, must be like stupid o'clock in the morning.

Thank you for, for joining us. I really appreciate it. Okay, let's get back to this as a non-English speaker. Now I need to google what original gangster means. Oh, okay. So, okay. That didn't help. Defining that. It meant an original gangster merely added to the confusion. and apparently Courtney says the kids, the yutes these days would say that Bob's the alpha.

Okay. Alpha to me is fairly, when I think of alpha, my head immediately jumps to Alpha male, which is not necessarily a great. Connotation, but hopefully it's, there's a whole

[01:15:25] Corey Maass: other subculture of brown Alpha too. Oh, okay. Anyway.

[01:15:29] Nathan Wrigley: Does Bob class, can we say that about Bob? Is Bob the alpha? I, I don't think moving on.

Okay. Okay. All right. Courtney will check back on that later. here. Nice. Bob made the WordPress community happen for me. I first attended a presentation from him in 2013 in a library in Seattle. Nice. That's that's fantastic. Oh, and there's the spelling of it from Stephanie Hudson. Oh, two C's, that

[01:15:56] Nicky Bulmer: is it.

Yes. Two C's. Oh, when you

[01:15:58] Nathan Wrigley: said two C's, I thought it was T-H-I-C-C-K, but it's got, yep. It's like that. Okay. Note to self says, friendly web guy, 11 year old's Fve is yeet to my kids. Say that. Mm-hmm. Yeah. If they throw something in a sort of fairly haphazard way, so it's not like throwing something accurately if you, you just yeet it.

Then it just, you just launch it into the sky and Bobs the goat. Exactly. The greatest of all types. That one I know. Yeah. There you go. GOAT is the best, says Courtney. Wow. Who knew that was gonna happen, that conversation. So in

[01:16:35] Taco Versonschot: our private chat, Nathan, I dropped the link for you to visit once a day. Okay.

And once a day proceed

[01:16:42] Nicky Bulmer: with caution in there.

[01:16:44] Taco Versonschot: Oh, really?

[01:16:44] Nicky Bulmer: Saying that up front. They, there are no boundaries in the Urban Dictionary.

[01:16:49] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So if I put the Urban Dictionary on a different monitor, I'll tell you what I get. No, I'm not doing that one. Okay. That exactly, that warning was fair. no I'm

[01:16:59] Corey Maass: not.

Second one is really horrible.

Some of it's not true. Okay. Or some of it's, you know, 'cause people can enter their own and Yeah. Some of it's not verified and some of it's extremely regional and, and all that kind of stuff. Okay. So, and things change. Don't just start, don't just adopt whatever you see. Sorry.

[01:17:20] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah. Well, I'm not gonna adopt that one.

I can't think of any context in which I'd use whatever that word means. So that's now the third one. And all of them have been very heavily sexualized. okay. SM small. We can use that one. There you go. but that's a bit, that's a break point. Yeah. and then it's gone to drugs. Okay. I'm, I'm never opening that website again.

Tako,

[01:17:44] Nicky Bulmer: I tried to warn

[01:17:44] Nathan Wrigley: you. Yeah, thank you. I appreciate it. okay. Anyway, do the woo. Seven years and, who knew, Bob, that you were gonna spark that conversation? I bet you didn't. What about Lang? What about Lang? Oh, no, we've got anybody. Can anybody tell me what Lang, oh, here we go. Yeah. Elliot, Elliot says Something is attractive, excellent, or delicious.

It's Lang. This is fantastic and isn't,

[01:18:10] Corey Maass: I think, isn't that in English? I think that's English slang.

[01:18:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But I'm trying to imagine what it, how, how would you get, 'cause GOAT is obviously an acronym, you know, greatest of All Time. Yeet is kind of on apathic, isn't it? You know, it's kind of got that Yeet sort of does that thing.

But Lang dunno, but I'm gonna trust you. Elliot, maybe he's trying to upend us all. And we're gonna go out and use Lang when we find something to be excellent or delicious and it'll actually be really offensive. And, Kami says it's fantastic. So, okay, this is, we'll move on from WordPress and we'll go to the, urban Dictionary report.

Oh, I'm thinking next week. Yeah. Okay. Hang. Ready, ho. There we go. Where, where, where were we?

[01:18:54] Taco Versonschot: Okay, let's go here. Language indeed. UK Slang. According to the Urban Dictionary, what does it mean?

[01:18:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Oh, we know, we just said Yeah, yeah, you just said. Okay. That's a UK one. Alright, so here we go. this is time for Tacho to mention what he's doing.

he's moved, yes. He's no longer with Yost, although he is with Yost. Very confusing. He's with. Jot, J-O-O-S-T, the person, not the company. And, progress Planner is the new, is the new thing. All the new hotness. Yes. When, when you attend WordPress events, this will be your hat to wear. Yes. Last week we did a terrible job of mentioning it because we were running outta time and it got pushed right to the end.

So I thought let's give it a few minutes more this week. What is Progress Planner to those of us who don't know? And I understand you've got a little bit of a deal going on at the minute. Yes. Is rolling out soon. Yeah. For,

[01:19:43] Taco Versonschot: for a few more days. So that's, don't be late. but let's super quick introduction.

I mean, all of you have websites, at least one, and there's these annoying, tedious tasks that you need to do to keep your website up to date, to keep the content up to date and all of that, and, and setting yourself to actually sit down and do that stuff. Can be hard because there's so much more fun things to do on the internet.

the Urban Dictionary for

[01:20:16] Nathan Wrigley: example. Yeah,

[01:20:17] Taco Versonschot: exactly. Yeah. You can click the random button all day. Yeah. so, but we figured that there should be a, a way to make it more fun to actually do those tasks, and that's where we added a lot of gamification to your workplace dashboard. To help you get those tasks done.

So, by, for example, updating posts or, by reviewing, a piece of content, by doing the updates on your plugins and themes and, and, language pack, you get points and you can, earn badges, basically the, the Duolingo style of gamification. Yeah. but then in your first backend so that it's no longer boring and tedious, but you actually have a goal of achieving something while you're doing.

The important tasks to keep your website up to date. Can I ask a

[01:21:14] Nathan Wrigley: question? Because if, if, if I was doing this for myself, I presumably would have to come up with the task. You know, I'd create a task list and then I'd have to gamify it myself. Does this shit, we do that for you? Does with, yeah, I was gonna say, does it ship with like the, the task that, you know, basically we all know need to be done that's taken care of?

Yes. Okay.

[01:21:31] Taco Versonschot: And a, a smaller set right now because it's brand new, but we're expanding with every release. We're adding new, new tasks to, to the whole list. but you can also keep your own tasks in there. So it's also a little bit of a to-do list that you can mix in as well.

[01:21:49] Nathan Wrigley: Now it strikes me that if you're a WordPress professional, you've probably been doing this for a while, and you may well have a, like a SOP for doing all of this and what have you, but I'm presuming there's a pitch here for.

Developers to like then push toward their clients. So, you know, if I've got a hundred websites, getting all of those updated constantly is kind of a, it's making my work less likely to, you know, less support tickets maybe. 'cause they're keeping things up to date, but it also keeps them engaged with the website.

And if they're more engaged with the website, there's a much more ch bigger chance of throughput of work coming back to me. So maybe that's a part of the jigsaw as well?

[01:22:27] Taco Versonschot: Yes. Yeah. So, and, and that's the idea. and that's why one of the key elements is that you get a weekly email that will, say, Hey, this is how you've done last week.

This is, the current status of your site. These are the tasks for this week. so every week there's this little reminder to go into your website and, and get some things done, to stop procrastination. Nice. The good thing is, yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. No, I was gonna say, what's the deal. Yeah, so, progress Planner has been out since August last year.

but we will launch the pro version this Thursday. so that's the 23rd. And yes, for those who can, who have a perfect timeline in their heads, that's exactly 11 years after we launched, Yost as yo premium. Neat. It's for fun. so, yeah, the pro version will come with, inline, sort of in, editor courses.

So, for example, if you are writing your about page, there's quite a few things that are on the Good about Page, and there's a little mini course in the backend of your WordPress website that will help you write the best possible about Page. but the main feature for Pro at this moment is that we're doing challenges about six challenges a year.

that will help you focus for a couple of weeks on a slightly larger task that needs regular doing on your website. and the first challenge will be about broken links. And in order to prepare for that challenge, we've looked at a lot of websites, how many broken links there are on the average website, and it's insane.

Oh, oh totally. It's absolutely insane how many broken links are on the average website. So, during this couple of week challenge, we will guide you through how do I find the broken links, how do I fix them, and how do I move forward to prevent building up a big set of broken links again?

[01:24:49] Nathan Wrigley: Nice.

[01:24:50] Taco Versonschot: so that comes with pro.

Now you asked about the deal. because we're currently in the pre-launch, we've set the first 99 customers who buy before we officially launch, which is this Thursday. Thursday. So,

[01:25:05] Nathan Wrigley: okay.

[01:25:07] Taco Versonschot: we'll get the plugin for 99 bucks a year instead of 149 a year. Nice. And that's not a onetime, that's annual. That's

[01:25:17] Nathan Wrigley: every year.

Yes. Nice. So if you go here, get progress planner, dah, dah, dah, get pro, then there we go. obviously in the UK you're gonna be adding that tax, but yes. You know. There we go. Thank you. I hope we did it more justice that time. I appreciate it. I hope so. And

[01:25:37] Taco Versonschot: if, if there's any questions, I'm very happy to talk about it all day, so.

Yeah. Oh, that's lovely.

[01:25:42] Nathan Wrigley: Well, and you'll be at all those events. And this is what Tako is now a hundred percent LA laser focused on. So progress planner.com. If you want to go check that out and see exactly what he's been talking about. Very nice. Yeah, and don't be late. Don't miss the deal. It's a good one.

So, yeah, it's a good one. Yeah. Well, thank you. And I know we've got, just quickly moving on, we've got, now where is he? Friendly web guy. There he is, open graph comment, quick hat tip to Administrator Toolkit by Dave. he's got this tool called Administrator Toolkit and I thought I'd plug it for him this week.

so if you've never come across this, this is a tool to make the sort of the admin area of your website in, you know, like tidy it up in various different ways. and what is dropping in version 2.3 of the plugin is a customized plugin list and it says it allow you to hide one or more plugs. So this is interesting, right?

Hide one or more plugins from other admins. So if you've got a client who insists on being an admin, but you don't want 'em to see a particular plugin just 'cause it's like there's too many, too much danger there, or you know, what have you, you can do that. You can limit the, the people who are admins who in theory have access to everything, which I thought was quite kind of nice.

you can also block repo plugins. So for example, if you don't want Gutenberg to be visible or BB press or whatever, you just add a, add them in a list there and, you can set some featured plugins. So if you want a client to see certain things as being kind of featured, then then that's an option in there as well.

And, so there you go. it's called Administrator Toolkit. And if you go to our as in the, the, you know, our, not your our wp plugins.com, you'll be able to see that over there. And then finally, we'll make this one of the last ones. I know we're missing a few bits, but, Nikki's here today, and she's gonna tell us about Stellar Pay, which I had never heard of.

So, Nikki, what is Stellar Pay?

[01:27:50] Nicky Bulmer: So, stellar Pay is actually the first plugin that we've developed in-house under Stellar wp. All of the other plugins have been part of acquisitions, so we're super excited to, to launch this. And we, we really wanted it to fill where we felt there was a gap in the, the taking payments part of WooCommerce.

So you basically integrate with your Stripe account seamlessly and you can manage everything including subscriptions, pretty easily, right from your, your WooCommerce dashboard.

[01:28:21] Nathan Wrigley: So it, it just, just to be clear, is does it add, so hang on, let me just rewind. You bind your, Stripe account inside the Stellar Pay plugin, but then rather than having to go to stripe.com and look for all the telemetry and metrics in there, does this sort of sock them into your WordPress admin?

Is it that you can sort of see them in there and take so, okay. Yeah.

[01:28:47] Nicky Bulmer: Yep, yep. And there's no charge to manage subscriptions right from it as well. It's a free plugin, so it makes the, the subscription piece so much easier than it is. Preexisting

[01:28:58] Nathan Wrigley: and, and it's designed, so it bolts into obviously Stripe as we've just said, but also it's WooCommerce, it's specifically for store owners with WooCommerce.

Yeah. Correct. It's not, it's not like you are offering, not like you are a vendor of a plugin solution. Here you are just off, you like the go between, between WooCommerce payments and Stripe and you offer that functionality inside of the backend. Got it. Yep. Okay, great. Thank you very much. And the other thing that I wanted to mention as Nikki's here is, if you haven't come across Nikki's Endeavors on a podcast, here it is, it's the Get Hired podcast.

And you very, very briefly mentioned it at some point earlier in the podcast. What, what is it, what is the Get Hired podcast? What do you do?

[01:29:41] Nicky Bulmer: I'm very, very new to the podcast world, obviously. Yeah. but we just started, we recorded our first episode, last Friday with Corey actually. So thank you again, Corey, for being our Guinea pig.

but. It's a, it's a free resource for people who have been struggling to get hired that need practice with interviewing or, you know, we do a free resume review, talk about your portfolio and give you tips on how to interview effectively, and how to get your resume noticed. So we're not actually hiring people for it, but we're giving people exposure to the other side, what it looks like from our hiring side when you're interviewing with somebody, just so that you can get that practice and feel comfortable in that.

Environment.

[01:30:29] Nathan Wrigley: So you'll, the, the trade off, I suppose, in, in Corey's case is that what, whatever you do and say is gonna be public, but nevertheless, you know, it's quite a nice exchange, isn't it? You're getting quite a lot of valuable intel from you and, your co-host, Misty Cos I'm gonna say I hopefully I'll pronounce that.

Combs correct? Combs. Okay. Sorry. Yeah. and you are getting a load of free information back from you and her so that you can hopefully op your resume a interview questioning technique game and what have you. So yeah, that's a neat, what a ni nice idea. Corey did you, did you, not that you're gonna say otherwise, but did you enjoy the experience?

Did

[01:31:06] Corey Maass: you

[01:31:06] Nathan Wrigley: get a lot of interesting info? Oh, it was great. It was great.

[01:31:08] Corey Maass: I mean, and, and I feel as, as you'll hear when you listen. Probably three or four times. it's, it's such a, it's such a crucial topic that just doesn't get discussed enough. So I, I love the premise of there being practice. I love the premise of there being, resume reviews.

'cause obviously everybody can kind of learn from these different examples and, oh, we shouldn't have said that. And, oh, that, you know, that, that bit of info on the resume is great and whatnot. The feedback was awesome. but for me it, it, I was more enthusiastic that about the fact that this topic's being broached and sort of the second half, of, of the recording, we got into some of our own experiences and, and whatnot because it's just, interviewing is tough.

It's scary for a lot of people. and it. You only do it maybe every once. Yeah, once every couple of years or a few years, or, you know, even, even if it's a, a couple of times a year anyway, it's, you know, and there's just so much about it and it's, and it's not readily discussed. And so hearing from a couple of people who are on the hiring side, you know, discussing that I think is, is just awesome for it to be out there.

[01:32:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's really interesting 'cause like most people, you literally only practice it when you do it. And you, and if you do ever get to practice it, it's probably with some like well-meaning person in your family who's willing to listen, but probably isn't gonna provide you with the kind of incisive questioning that you need to be drilled on.

and then give you the sort of technical feedback that you might, might need. What a neat idea, Nikki. Congratulations. Have you enjoyed the podcasting experience thus far? A lot of people start a podcast and keeping it going is, is, is, you know, let's, I hope that you managed to do that.

[01:33:01] Nicky Bulmer: I have to think, Michelle Ette actually, she, kind of approached me and, and helped brainstorm this idea since she's been incredible for everything.

So, but yeah, it's, it's been, it's been fun so far.

[01:33:14] Nathan Wrigley: Great. Well, let's hope it continues. are you looking for guests? Are you looking for potential? Well, I, I don't want to use the word like victims, but you know, people who are, people who are willing to put themselves through this and hopefully, you know, it's a quid pro quo, isn't it?

You get a nice podcast show out of it and they get hopefully some interesting, you know, some interesting in intel from you. Yeah. Are you looking for people to come forward and, and, absolutely. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

[01:33:38] Nicky Bulmer: Yeah. But we have a signup on the, the post status page. I think I linked it over to you in the, the document there.

but it has a little bit of more information about the show, and if you wanna sign up and participate, you're welcome to. There's no, you, you can be from anywhere. There's no restrictions on where you're from or, or what kind of jobs you're looking for or anything. so if you're job seeking at any level, you're, you're welcome.

[01:34:05] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. so yeah, the, the, the post on post status is post status.com/and then the words are hyphenated get hired, podcast. Alternatively, if you wait till tomorrow morning, the links will be in the show notes for this episode number 321 of the WP Builds podcast. So yeah, that's great. Nice. There were a couple of other bits and pieces that I did wanna mention, but time.

Tide has caught up with us. I apologize. We've already overrun by about 10 minutes, so I hope that's not troubled anybody too badly. that's it. That's all we've got time for this week. I'd just like to thank my co-host over there, tacho, birdshot with a c who nearly said the word telephone. Oh no. Was it you?

Somebody nearly said telephone. Yeah, that was me. Yeah. Corey Musks down there. Thank you very much. And look, every single my cup, every single cup is empty, every single opportunity. The cup is actually empty at this point. Send me one of those, please. And I too will promote O-M-G-I-M-G. Well, thank you. And, Nick, Nick, Nick Buller, thank you, the three of you for joining us, Nick.

Sadly, the bit that you don't realize is that we'd have this slightly humiliating hand wave thing that we do right at the end to make the album up for this podcast. And what we basically have to do is put your big hands somewhere, be and get your head between it. We all do it at the same time. So Nikki, are you willing to do this?

There you go. And that does it. And I have all the hands of the WordPress folk on my website, WP Builds.com. Go check it out. But yeah, thank you. And may, may I say thank you so much to those people who've made a comment, nom mud skateboarder. I have no words. He keeps giving me cash. and I'm, this is a new thing to me.

I didn't realize this was possible until he did it. So I appreciate, appreciate you doing that. That's very kind of you. Thank you. thank you to anybody else who commented today. I really appreciate it. Guests, I'll be sticking around if you wanna have a chat at the end. But to everybody else, thank you.

We'll be here next week. Take it easy. Bye-bye for now. Bye-bye. Bye. Bye-bye.