This Week in WordPress #322

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for This Week in WordPress, episode number 322. Entitled all we do now is prompt. It was recorded on Monday the 27th of January, 2025.

My name is Nathan Wrigley and I'll be joined today by three fabulous people. I'll be joined by Mark Westguard by Tim Nash and Marc Benzakein.

What are we going to talk about? largely it's WordPress, because we are in fact, a WordPress podcast.

We talk about the fact that WooCommerce has got a brand new leader.

We also talk about the fact that Matt Mullenweg has appointed some new lawyers in the fight with WP Engine. What does that mean?

We also get into Mark's brand new styler. He's launched something really incredible for WS Form. We've done a full walkthrough with him on video.

Go daddy. You have donated over $500,000 to the WPCC, the WP Community Collective. Where's that money going to go?

And Post Status has been bought by Joost de Valk and Marieke van de Rakt. What does it mean for that community over there?

We have a fairly long discussion about enterprise based upon a new survey, which has come out. What's the future looking like for WordPress.

And then we spend a very, long time. Talking about AI.

It's all coming up next on This Week in WordPress.

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Hello there. Hello. Hello, hello. How are you doing everybody. This is episode number 322 of this week in WordPress, which is here every week, Monday, 2:00 PM UK time. As you can see, I'm joined by three fabulous people. how you doing? Let's start with, let's go around this way. Let's start over there, which is Tim.

How are you doing, Tim? Hello. How are you doing? Yeah, good. It looks like you, I, I don't know if it's just melted or something, but it looked like you had snow outside your window, which I think probably was my, my vivid imagination. We still have patches, but, nice. On the whole, most of the snow has gone, Tim, in American terms, lives a stones road from where I am, but for, for Tim and I, it's like literally the other side, more or less of the country.

But we both live in Yorkshire, so, we don't really meet up all that much do we? All the kind of word campy word pressy things have kind of taken a bit of a. Bit a hit. We haven't had WordPress leads running now since pre covid. we're still, every so often the organizers get together and we say, will this, we should restart it.

[00:04:00] Tim Nash: it's funny, a venue. Yeah. We really seem to be struggling in the uk. We meetups getting venues, and getting venues that are affordable. You know, it's one thing to say, Hey, we're, you know, we, we, we've got found this venue, oh, it's gonna cost us 750 quid a night. Oh, I know, I know. And for 10 to 25 of us, it's just not financially viable, not feasible.

[00:04:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. I know the feeling, for the WordPress London Meetup, W-P-L-D-N, we've, we've managed to find somewhere, which is really working for us. So, so that's worked out really well. But, I've only, I've just been giggling because I've just seen your bio. And am I, oh, it's just descends into chaos this bit.

Do I have to sing this? I mean, if you wish to sing it that, oh, this is becoming a bit of a theme, isn't it? Nathan sings People's bios. I'm not sure. Not sure. Anyway, here we go. Right? It says, in the style of everyone's favorite 1980s cartoon. I've got a feeling this is Danger Mouse. Is that right? Correct.

Okay, I'm gonna read it. I haven't read it before. So, danger Mouse was a cartoon in the UK involving Danger Mouse, which is like the best name for a character everywhere. And his sidekick, the the Iris Irascible. Penfold. Who do you remember? Mark, you're nodding. Oh yeah, mark hasn't the, I actually, I actually do know who Danger Mouse is.

[00:05:25] Marc Benzakein: Okay. Alright. Yeah, and I'm trying, I'm actually trying to remember if I watched it with my kids 'cause we found it on some obscure channel. Or if I watched it before, having kids as just a full grown adult and just loving it. I can't remember. Probably the latter. I remember my dad one day when I was far too old to be watching cartoons, walking up behind me, watching me watching cartoons and just sort of totting and said, Nathan, I.

[00:05:55] Nathan Wrigley: I think you're a bit old for cartoons now. And, and I, I felt, I felt a deep p of sort of, okay, maybe that's it. And, and I put the cartoons away from me, however, revitalizing Tim Nash's bio in the style of danger mouse. Here we go. He's the greatest. He's fantastic. Wherever there is danger, he'll be there.

He's the ace. He's amazing. He's the strongest, he's the quickest. He's the best. Tim Nash n is that right? Have I got it about right? He's terrific. Oh God, he's magnifi. He's the greatest WordPress. I can't get that out in the right number of syllables. He's the greatest WordPress security consultant in the world.

Danger. Sorry, Tim Nash. He's the fastest. He's the quickest. He's the best. And then there's this big exploit. Yeah. Thank you. I feel slightly humiliated. but I think that's the show. Thanks. Yeah, we'll call it a danger man. That's the show right there. Yeah. There you go. so there you go. Tim Nash. brilliant.

That was who you are. That's fantastic. Thank you. So we'll move round. Thank you. We'll go. Go clockwise. And now we're at Mark Zaca. How you doing, mark? Well, congratulations on getting my name right. That was awesome. I think you're gonna be using it a lot today, considering there's two marks here, so, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:07:15] Marc Benzakein: So, your bio's much easier for me to read 'cause it just says I'll update the doc. Oh my goodness. Oh my. So you, you introduce yourself. There's a, there's a huge time difference between where you are and where I am and I am pretty sure that by the time I saw that you had sent out the, the notification.

on Friday. I was already getting ready to go home for the day or something. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And, and, and then, and this is just me making an excuse, but I was gonna update it over the weekend and then I No worry. Just tell us. I had a horrible migraine all weekend, so, oh, I'm sorry. I didn't even touch a computer.

So, the deal is, I am Mark Zaca. I've been involved with WordPress for about 103 years now. And, and I am with Maine, wp, I do marketing for various companies, but Maine, WP is my, my main WordPress, Venture. and, we are about to celebrate our 11th anniversary of being the number one non SaaS, WordPress management dashboard.

And, I have, I used to work with ServerPress. I was operations manager. I've done coding, I've done all kinds of stuff. but mostly I do, I do marketing and, and getting my face out there. much to the chagrin of many. No, no, no. More than welcome. And, and I'm happy to have you here, and that was good.

[00:08:42] Nathan Wrigley: I'm just talking, I'm talking about the face part actually. Oh, I, no, no, no, no, no. Very nice. okay, so that's Mark. That's Tim. Finally we've got the other Mark. Mark, a k, a West Guard, guardian of the West. How are you doing, mark? I'm doing good. How are you? Yeah, good. Guardian of the West in capital letters.

have you, I've got a bio for you. Do I need, I don't need to sing it or do it in like sign language or. Summer Four or smoke signals. You could do it in a theme of, danger mouse if you want. No, no. Once is enough. Nobody can cope with that. I'll read what it says. It says, mark is the founder of the WordPress form plugin Ws form.

He regularly checks lost and found to see if Bob Don has been found. I dunno where that came from. I dunno where that came from either, but, maybe, maybe somebody else added that in, but it wasn't me. thank you all three of you for joining us today, and I appreciate the, the ability to listen to my singing.

[00:09:40] Mark Westguard: Ooh. But here we go. Here's the, the bits and pieces coming in. If you are joining us and you fancy, sort of spreading the word and you want your mates, friends relations to join us, please send them. This link, as featured by Mark's Chin. there, yeah, there you go. wp builds.com/live. Look at that.

[00:10:01] Nathan Wrigley: What a pro. Just steps up. That's brilliant. WP builds.com/live. we'd really appreciate your comments and a few have come. Firstly, we've got influence, WP oh oh oh oh. We, we had a podcast. I'll explain that in a minute. hi from Charlotte nc. What's NC New North Carolina. Carolina, North Carolina 42 Degrees, early morning and according to the upcoming forecast, we're saying goodbye to the colder temperatures for good.

That makes for a great Monday. That does make God, you get rid of the bad temperatures at the beginning. End of January, we go right through like till March before it starts to get better over here. But anyway, thank you for joining us. hi. All checking in from Orlando, says Mark. Sorry, not Mark Warner.

Adam Warner. I know, I know, Mark Warner, is why I'm saying that. And, I hope that you, you know, I know that you had like really terrible weather there recently, Adam. I hope it all worked out for you. Good morning folks. Says, sir Tim Nash, who, AKA danger Mouse and also joined by, friendly web guy.

We know Dave. It's sun, it's sun, wind, rain, sunshine, Gale, and then rain again, in West London. Good morning, says Courtney. And Michelle says, good morning from sunny New York. It's 26 degrees minus three. Yeah, apparently it's been like colder in New York. Than it is in Antarctica, which is quite a thing to say, isn't it?

Greetings from Berlin. Yeah, we're all over the place. Check this out. And then we got, unfortunately the emoji just doesn't come across, but, hand pink waving. Hand pink waving. Should it be pink hand waving? That seems like a weird pa of it. Anyway, I convinced Tim is actually in the basement space with a fake window behind him and he can change it.

A moment's notice. Yeah, it's not real. in fact, I'm not entirely sure Tim's real. I haven't been real for a many years. My avatar. It's what's left. It's what's left. Danger Mouse. Watch here. Two reruns. I'm sure. Nice work. No, thank you. You are too kind. D Danger. Nash. Nash. Danger Nash. I think that's, oh, there you go.

I think that Nathan should speak at Word Camp. Just sing Tim's bios. I am, I don't have the courage to speak at Word camps. Hello? Says Patricia. And then, Then Nathan is an amazing sport, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Thank you so much. Okay. There's the comments that we've got so far.

If you wanna drop some in, please feel free to do so as the show goes on, right? Let's share what we're gonna talk about. Firstly, bit self-promotion. There's this wp builds.com if you fancy, keeping abreast of what we do. Put your email address into this field and click subscribe. And, then we'll send you a couple of emails every week.

One to do with this, when it's put out tomorrow, I edit it down and, you know, add a little bit of a, a beginning to it and what have you. And, it'll come out as an audio podcast tomorrow. So you'll get that. And then we do a podcast episode every Thursday. I'll show you that in a minute. But also, the lights are kept on over here by, well, I chat frequently to Adam Warner from GoDaddy Pro.

So thank you Adam, for your support and all those at GoDaddy Pro, also by Blue Host. By Omni send those three companies really helping us out. Things like this just can't happen. you know, I should otherwise be chained to a desk writing, writing plugins and things like that, but I'm not, I'm here instead doing this.

So I really appreciate it. The, the archive that we've got over here is our podcast archive and you can see, look, the first comment that dropped in today was Ryan, Ryan Logan from Influence wp, if you fancy checking out that most recent episode, you can. It's all about his project influence wp. And the aim of that is to build a community where you can sort of have, have faith that nobody is sort of upselling or affiliate link into things.

Go and check out that post and see what you think. And then don't, don't forget this one. A week ago we did, 405, the nice show with me and Mark. where we're intending to only raise nice subjects 'cause there's enough not nice. And so we did a whole 45 minutes and I think Nice. It was quite nice, wasn't it?

Yeah, it was nice. Yeah. Yeah. I think we, we definitely overused. I think it was nice news. Yeah. We overused the word nice, but nevertheless, that's that's what it was. It was nice. And then, yeah. Well thank you. I appreciate that. That was nice of you to say that. That was very nice. And so it goes right to the bottom, all the way down.

and then over at this menu here, if you go to the archives and the demos archive, this one dropped. I haven't done one of these for ages. Look, it was like 5th of June since I did the last one. This one I did with, That fellow over there, guardian of the West, mark Wesco, and it was all about his brand new Styler.

And, and I used his new Styler plugin to create the album art here, which I think you totally agree. It's pretty good. I was really happy with the way this turned out. I, I, you can tell I went to art college and I've got a real eye for, you know, color contrast and palettes and what works well together.

anyway, no, it was, I think I'm gonna frame that and put it behind me. Okay. Yeah. My, my behind is, this is looking a bit bland, so I think I need to just put that in a frame. It's a beautiful thing. This bit. I particularly like, you saying that your plugin is quite good. It's quite a good plugin you've got.

I just like the cat cowering to the right there. Yeah. Cat is just sort of about to slide down and be skewered onto whatever that is. anyway, it's a, it's a thing of beauty. It's a, you. YouTube video. So like I said, if you go to the archives page, demos archive, it's there and Mark's showing off all of the different bits and pieces, over 400 ways that you can style your form.

You don't have to go knot. That's for people who really have more time than, common sense in all honesty. But, you can style absolutely everything and Mark basically gives you a quick demo. It takes about 45 minutes to show what's going on. So go check that out and thanks for doing that with me, mark.

Appreciate it. Oh, thank you for having me on to do it again. That's what episode seven now of our little series? Yeah. PS four. Yeah. I'm keen to do more of them, because, just because I wanna do more of this. Yeah, exactly. Have an exactly an excuse to create wonderful pieces of art. I went to the Tate Modern the other day.

I'm just saying. Just saying you were influenced. Oh, I think I'm gonna be influencing, is what I'm thinking. okay. Moving on. Moving on. WordPress, actual news, WordPress 6.7 0.2. release planning. Basically it's just around the corner. If you are a developer or you've got, you know, a plugin and you wanna keep abreast of everything going on with the release schedule.

4th of February, so really a week away basically, is the release candidate phase. And then hopefully, on the 11th of February we will have the final release of WordPress, 6.7 point. Two. And, I'm guessing that the guy's over at Main WP and you mark with your plugin. I'm guessing you, I mean, maybe you don't keep a like full on weather eye on this, but I'm sure it's in the back of your mind to test it and make sure it's working.

[00:16:59] Marc Benzakein: Oh, we have a whole team of people testing and yeah, they stay on top of this stuff and then, and then, when, things get close to to done, they say, okay, mark, give it a shot. And, you know, I, I'll break anything. So, yeah. Yeah. What about you, mark, you, have you faced any gotchas where it's just like suddenly, oh, all hands on deck, it broke.

[00:17:21] Mark Westguard: You know, there's always the, the, the old thing that you, you don't test, but, yeah, we're, whenever we are actually developing, we always try and have the beta versions or the release candidates installed, to, to do testing with. But yeah, every single time there's a new release, we have to test, test everything, as much as we can anyway.

[00:17:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I'm, it's not something that I get myself involved in, so typically I just see these news releases, you know, like the WordPress is, you know, the latest version's coming out. I just mention it, but I don't really get myself involved. But I realize it's probably a part of your, what you have to do. Adam says, by the way, that he loves the nice show.

and there you go. We, look, feel like we need to take, need to take art theme tune. Looking at that. That's nice. and in other news designers feel safe from Nathan. Yeah. I, I don't, I'm feeling seen. I, I don't actually know what that sentence means, but I hear people saying it all the time these days and I felt it fitted in there.

So, I don't know. anyway, there you go. 6.7 0.2 coming round really soon. This was Aaron Jin mentioning that, okay, if you are a WooCommerce user, this is kind of behind the scenes politics and the moving of people around. somebody who I personally don't know and I don't know the name of this person and I'm gonna say it's Bo Lemons.

I'm gonna pronounce it like that. quotes. I am very pleased to announce that after a three month interim period last year, I'm now stepping into the role of leading Woo permanently. This bit confuses me 'cause it says, as artistic. Director. I dunno if that's a job title. I just, I'm not sure how that fits in.

Anyway, my focus will be on delivering an excellent end-to-end customer experience, and I've just highlighted a few bits. I believe in open sourcing, transparently, building great products, and working directly with WordPress to democratize commerce. Make main mistake. We have a lot of work to do. People expect more from an e-commerce solution than ever before, and we're actively working to deliver on those expectations, increasing our community engagement and getting everyone working towards to together towards the same goals more than ever before.

In 2025, we're doubling down on Project Qual product quality and modernizing our platform to meet the increasingly sophisticated demands of modern commerce. Anybody know of this guy? I mean, WooCommerce is a bit of a mystery to me. I don't really follow that whole thing. Nope. Nope, nope, nope. Well, anyway, I, I don't know him and, and I agree with you that the title itself, artistic director, I'm not, I don't know, it's, it's confusing to me when he describes what he's gonna be doing, but, yeah.

Yeah. I just wonder if they sort of playful with their job descriptions or something like that. Yeah, that's what I wonder too. Yeah. Yeah. But, anyway, apparently, in a statistic, maybe on this site, yeah, it was, it was just here. apparently WooCommerce, powers about 9% of the web. So, you know, we've got this market share of woo of, WordPress 43.

So a significant amount of that is, is WooCommerce so biggest, e-commerce platform buyer, country mile, and, and obviously facing stiff composition competition from a load of. SaaS products like Shopify and things like that. So good luck. yeah, absolutely. Hope it works. Well, I can, I can feel Tim's getting ready to say something.

[00:20:44] Tim Nash: No, no. I was just laughing at this. Good luck. Good luck. We're moving on. Yeah. Good luck. Yeah. Why wind him up and see how he goes? No, seriously. Good luck. it's funny, are you hinting at the end of that, article that there's gonna be a, a kind of a period of, of calm, like not adding too many new, I guess, what they're doing with WordPress, right.

[00:21:05] Mark Westguard: Just stabilizing and, where did I read that? Well, I, I think a lot of people in the automatic line of things have been repositioned towards the for-profit side of things, and I've gotta imagine that WooCommerce might have been. The recipient of lots of new development time. I don't know, because you would imagine that WooCommerce would fit heavily into where those people have been redeployed.

[00:21:34] Nathan Wrigley: I don't know. I haven't really kept close attention on all of that. Certainly towards the end of last year, there was a lot of, discussion mainly on Twitter, from with about what do people wanna see in WooCommerce? Do they want more features? Then there being a little bit of pushback from plugin developers for WooCommerce going, hang on a minute, that sounds an awful lot.

[00:21:54] Tim Nash: Like you're about to take my livelihood away from me. Yes. You've gotta start integrating these things into the WooCommerce. And I, I think there were that, that sentence was quite loaded that I I I, you picked on the bit that sounded like stability, and I heard the word modernize, which was big guy. Ah, oh no.

That sounds like lots of more features. Yeah. That's interesting. So I, I do wonder, I think if you are, if you are a user of. WooCommerce, you'd love all the features to be baked into. Well, I mean, you wouldn't love them all, but you'd love to have the capacity to get a lot of those features for free. But if you are a vendor, of like Y or Barn two or something like that, I suppose that makes you a bit concerned, doesn't it?

[00:22:36] Nathan Wrigley: Because traditionally these things, the CMS and WooCommerce core has been fairly lean, feature light. But we'll see, you know, if they, now that we're in a new era where they're trying to refocus on the things that I guess generate revenue, it'd be interesting to see which ones, you know, get taken from third party plugins and get baked into court.

We will see, Patricia makes the point that, Bo means handsome. French, how fancy that. Imagine if you were called handsome lemons. How, how nice is that? That's really lovely. And apparently he was at Word Camp Europe last year. He believes Bo has been working, says Tammy Lister on Woo and other projects for many years is in good hands.

Yeah, I didn't, I didn't make that point, but right at the top of the article, he says he is been working there for, I believe it was six years or something like that. and has a lot of experience working with automatic Yeah. Six years leading W'S engineers and, 15 of his 25 years of development at automatic.

So there's definite, definite, experience there. Anybody got anything else or shall I move on? Okay, I will move on in that case. don't really like getting into this whole drama thing, and in many ways we're not really getting into the drama here, but it's sort of a nod to it in a way. The, the whole legal dispute between, WP Engine and I wanna say automatic, but I, I presume, I'll just go with the words here.

It says, Matt Mullenweg hires new lawyers in the fight against WP Engine. And I, I honestly, I don't think I've hired a lawyer for anything in my life apart from moving house or something like that. You know, I've never had to battle anything. But my understanding is that they, they can be, especially at this level.

Very, very, very expensive. You know, like thousands of dollars an hour per person. And I'm presuming that you have multiple people on these cases. So maybe it's tens of thousands of dollars an hour. I really don't know. And I guess if you don't see what you wanna see out of them, you start looking around for different representation.

And this article from Search Engine Journal makes the point that they don't know if they've got two teams of lawyers now, or this is just the team now. But certainly some new lawyers have, have been brought on board. I. It says a legal document filed in federal court formally announces that Matt The Automatic and Matt Mullenweg, have added new representation.

And those lawyers have previously represented the likes of Meta and Facebook. So, you know, companies with big, big, deep pockets. and, and, and, and, and just scrolling down, the, the company is called Gibson, Don and Crutcher, LLP, and it says they're one of the top law firms. The uk. So anyway, the, the saga continues.

I have nothing else to add to that. Do think law firms, you, the law firms specifically, like when they're picking the name, I know the names are really just the partners, but you like pick the most aggressive name to go last. Yeah. It's like happy, cheerful crusher. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. And there's usually, there's usually three.

Isn't there? Something, something and something, yeah. That's interesting. Well, these guys have been around for absolute ages. They've been, are practicing law firms since 1890 and they represented, so I mean, I guess, you know, what things like this matter at this level, doesn't it? The kind of people that you've litigated for George W.

Bush, apple Inc. And as I said, meta and Facebook, but also Samsung. So it gives you, it does give you some indication of the seriousness with which. This is being taken and, I don't, I haven't really followed the, the current state of things. It feels like that whole, it's all happening in, in offices at the moment and not out in court.

But anyway, there we go. So that's the next piece. Anybody wanna add anything? I, I, I think that no matter which side you come down on this, I think that, just from a lay person's point of view, and as someone who has had to hire a team of lawyers about, 25 years ago, I can tell you that I don't think that his previous law firm was doing him any favors.

[00:26:56] Marc Benzakein: So I do think that it's, you know, for him and, and automatic or, or whatever, it's, it's probably a good move. Okay. To, to, yeah. But, other than that, I, I know nothing about. Anything other than that, other than, I don't think their, their previous lawyers were doing them a lot of favors. So I do, I do seem to remember at the, at the time, I remember seeing the, the cost of the lawyers and I think it, it was definitely in excess of two, two, I think it was $2,500, per hour for the one particular person.

[00:27:27] Nathan Wrigley: But I don't know, I'm presume that one person doesn't act in isolation. I'm imagining there's many, many more people I can tell you that. I can tell you in 2000 when we were going through, we were suing the phone companies. We were running an internet service provider and we were suing the phone companies.

[00:27:42] Marc Benzakein: And in 2000 we had a team of six lawyers and it was costing us, if I remember right, about $1,700 an hour. Then, so that was 25 years ago, so, oh, yeah, yeah. Okay. I'm gonna start a new podcast this week in law, and, please don't, no, please don't. I'm not, I'm not doing that. But it, it gives you an indication, I presume, a, the caliber of the people that are involved, you know, the seriousness with which, I guess both sides are taking it.

[00:28:16] Nathan Wrigley: I haven't followed the WP Engine side too much, but I imagine they've got, you know, equally interesting lawyers, shall we say. But anyway, it will play itself out in the days, weeks, and months to come. But as were a WordPress podcast, that felt, that felt apropos. Okay, here we go. Here's some interesting news.

This is a piece of community news. Got Adam. Adam, Warner and Courtney from, GoDaddy on the, on the call. And, here we, this is really nice. GoDaddy donates $500,000. I, I have a feeling, I dunno where this number comes. I think it was $520,000, but it obviously got rounded off. I could be wrong. to support the WordPress community, I'm gonna read from their press release.

so it says GoDaddy just invested half a million dollars in the WordPress community through a donation to the WPCC or the word. The WP Community Collective, which is in an initiative focused on funding and empowering WordPress contributors. We've actually done a podcast on the tavern, about that.

So if you want to figure out what that whole project is or you, you know, you can talk to Courtney as well. The monetary support will be directed towards providing financial, operational, and promotional support with the greater WordPress community. GoDaddy ultimately also recently re, released a redesigned WordPress hosting platform built with developers in mind.

So back to the community collective. The WP Community Collective contribution by GoDaddy aims to strengthen open source communities by providing resources for designers, developers, and other contributors to make the internet work. And then there's a quote there from Paul Bindle, which I won't, read how, oh, yeah, there you go.

That I was, did have the right number. $520,000. I'm gonna pause this wrong, but it feels like the WP Community Collective is a bit like a sort of escrow service. I've said this before, if you, if you know that you want to commu, contribute to WordPress, but you don't necessarily know. You don't wanna like go and find somebody to contribute at or give the money to the WP Community Collective could be that perfect go-between in that they will, they will have people who, like, for example, Alex Stein was the recipient of one of their, I've forgotten the exact word, but it's like, let's say packages.

There's a much better word for it than that. and so they will, they will figure out, they will find people, but they'll also find projects. And so you can give the money to them, and as a nonprofit, they will redistribute those funds. But $500,000 is a mighty big amount of money. For some organization like the WPCC, which, if you looked at how they were getting funded before, you know, it was in the tens of thousands by the community.

It was, it was an initiative, but it didn't have the legs that it now does. So this is a huge gesture and, and I, you know, I thank GoDaddy for being a sponsor of us earlier, but that's brilliant. Thank you for doing that. Anybody got any thoughts on that? It's a lot of money. It's a lot of money. It, it, it is sort of at the same time not a lot of money.

[00:31:25] Tim Nash: If it gets GoDaddy, the goals that it wants. and obviously Adam have been, I've been quite instrumental in getting this money, so they may be able to talk more, or not this case may be, but the collect, one of the thing about the community collective is that over the last few months it's slightly changed, not changed purpose, but it has switched more into advocacy.

And so this isn't a bad way to make sure that that advocacy's pushed forward and that it's slightly independent from, say, the foundation. So it's providing a bit of a counterbalance between those two. So it's a, it'll be interesting to see how the money's spent. I bet that, that when they're all looking at their bank accounts and they're like, la, la, la, la, la and then the money goes into the Dirty PCDs bank account, like, oh yeah.

Go to the pub. Yeah. Imagine that moment. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. mark or Mum, yeah. yeah, just a big thank you to GoDaddy for the contribution and yeah, I'd be interested to see. Where it gets allocated. I, I don't know, I can't remember the last time I did a donation to WPCC. I don't. I think you could choose where you wanted, you could, you definitely could do be allocated.

[00:32:41] Mark Westguard: Yeah. So I, I wonder how this was done. That's changed in the last few months though. Has a lot. Yeah. Now they've got options for individuals to sign up and become an individual, individual member and individual contract. Right. So, and they're doing it on a very small donation, adds you to, into that.

[00:32:58] Tim Nash: Things like their Slack channel where that's, they're talking very much about the future of DUP. Okay. I'm just trying to find a, whether you can see the different, because it was all laid out in like these little cards where in previous iterations, da, da da. No, I can't, I can't, it's not laid out in quite the same way as before.

[00:33:20] Nathan Wrigley: Hmm. Anyway, I won't waste time sort of googling around searching. Well, $520,000 can't be a bad thing, so, yeah, no, that is, no, there's a lot of money I feel. I feel it's kind of one of the few Okay. How to describe this, right. Without, without sounding like I've got a con conflict of interest.

'cause obviously GoDaddy sponsor me, right? But I feel it's really hard for a company to brag, like, to actually say, we do this thing. so you can put it out as a press release and you can hope that people pick up on it and hope that they sort of share it. But honestly, you know, ignore the fact that they sponsor me.

That is such a massive amount of money to commit. and then what I think is quite nice is that in this article, they also get, because they're, how, how to describe it. Because they're also saying, look, look at this thing that we've done. They also get to mention some of the other things where they might not ever get that chance.

'cause then it's not just about this one project. So here we go. The the other things that they have contributed towards is $12,000 in 24 to WP Code, sorry, PHP coding standards, $24,000 at the end of last year to the PHP Foundation, $40,000 to the W three c. Which, you know, that's so interesting. WP Accessibility Meetup, they're a sponsor there, and GoDaddy currently sponsors 46 contributors across 17 teams throughout this program.

Company ranks as the second largest contributor, with 255 hours page. I feel they need to change that 'cause surely they're now the largest contributor by Quest away. Yeah, they may, that may very well be. I, yeah, that's interesting. and, and then people like me, you know, that I, I'm not gonna be on that list, but there's probably countless things that they do for, you know, newsletters, podcasts, YouTube channels, you name it.

So, yeah, thank you, GoDaddy. And, and they may sponsor people to go to work camps that we never know about. I, I mean. They've actually, they're actually doing a pretty good job. And, and Tim, you said exactly what I wanted to say. Only you did it much more diplomatically than I would have. so I, I think actually, I.

[00:35:42] Marc Benzakein: This is, this may be a way for, for GoDaddy to really show how committed they are to WordPress and the future of WordPress, no matter where it goes. And, and I think this is a really good, I actually feel like this may be a first step, even though it was a lot of money. Yeah. Okay. Interesting observations from you two both.

[00:36:03] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. So, Patricia basically just saying thank you. and then Adam who works with GoDaddy, there will be an application process opening up the WP Community Collective. For those contributors who are looking for funding, decisions will be made and it's truncated, but it says by. Committee. and you can go to the WPCC website and you can see what that means.

You know, what, how that whole process is laid out. In other words, to be clear, not decided by GoDaddy specifically. And then Courtney again, in, in the context of this piece, I think we should say both Adam and Courtney work with GoDaddy. Mark, thank you for also providing a great form plugin to the WPCC as well.

Oh, I see. You've donated your plugin, did you? Mm-hmm. So on their website, oh, that was kind. and then GoDaddy also annually funds open js, and that is in the works for the year ahead as well. there we go. So there, there you go. Good deal. Yeah. Good deal. So thank you GoDaddy for, for that, that piece by the way, was over at, ooh, where was it?

about us godaddy.net, and it's called GoDaddy Donates. $500,000 to support the WordPress community. Okay. speaking of an investment, here's another one. post status started by, I wanna say status. I always say status. I always lean into the American sort of way. they, it was started by Brian CROs guard, whose name I'm never sure I'm saying correctly, Brian.

I've got the, the surname, but I, I think CROs guard, let's go with that. he started it and then about, well, I don't know, three years ago, three or four years ago, something like that. He, he got into, crypto and decided to move on. So said goodbye to WordPress and moved it. Post status over to Corey and Lindsey Miller.

Who turned it, I think I'm right in saying into a for-profit. but kind of kept things going in the way that it has been for the last three or four years. Michelle Cher, who's very frequently co co-host on the show, she's become, and forgive me if I get the term wrong, executive director over there.

Mm-hmm. Contributing work time and articles and keeping the, the ship steady. And then, so we got an announcement, over the last week, totally unexpectedly to me at least, that it's now been bought by, well, sold by Corey and Lindy to Yost, not the company, Yost the person, Yost of all, and, Yos wife, Marika, Vander Act.

And so, and so this, this begs the question, okay. So what are they planning to do with it? Well, according to this article, they want it to just carry on. It's gonna be, or it already is a, a nonprofit based in Europe. So that then has certain proclivities about who they could hire in the very not hire, who they could have on their board of directors unpaid roles, in the short term.

So they're both European, the ones that they've found so far, and they are now, let me get this right. It was Karen Marucci and, Juliette Reinders Folmar. They're the two people at the moment. And the idea is that even though it's a not-for-profit, they're going to reduce the entry fee to $50 a year. And I guess any excess money will go back into the sort of non-profit status mark's just.

Just gone into Halloween. I'm telling you this, this place, no matter which studio I use, the lights go out. If I sit still for more than five, oh, I see five seconds. I thought you didn't make some sort, like scary. So I have to, I have to jump up and down and dance like a monkey in order for them to come back on.

[00:39:50] Marc Benzakein: So, no sit still, just sing danger Mouse in your head. That'll get you going. Okay. You just have it going in your head. So anyway, that's fairly big news. Certainly community news. I know that a lot of the WordPress community have congregated there in the past. I, I don't know what the numbers are, whether it's tens of thousands or thousands, I'm not sure.

[00:40:08] Nathan Wrigley: But, you now have a new steward or stewards, plural, over there. Again, over to you. What do you reckon? Well, if you're not a member of post status, you should be because it's, such a, such a great. Channel for meeting people in the community online. Their, their, I think their Slack channel is probably one of their most valuable assets.

[00:40:31] Mark Westguard: so, it's, it's nice to see that, I, I spoke to Yost about it and Michelle about it as well. I'm excited to see where they're gonna go with it. And, I think, I think one of the things that they would, I might be wrong with this, Michelle, she's in the chat, but, I don't think Post Status currently has the history on it.

They don't have a paid version, so I think they're looking to get that back. Yep. So that you've got all the history and stuff back there. so that'd be good. the article says that if you're a non-profit, you can receive as much as, I think 85% reduction on the Slack fee if you go to whatever it's called, pro or whatever, Slack's history, you know, the pro version, which enables history.

[00:41:12] Nathan Wrigley: and I think your $50 is primarily gonna go into that, I would imagine. Even with $85, 85% off, I still imagine it's not an insignificant amount of money. I mean, for 50, $50 a year, you know, you're looking at what, four or $5 a month to have access to quite a few people. certainly if you are, I use it, you know, if I'm working on certain project and I need to talk to somebody within a certain company, it's a, it's a great resource.

[00:41:39] Mark Westguard: Better, better than LinkedIn for me. So I think Mark's possibly also highlighted the problem with PACE status. I think to be clear, I think Michelle's done a fantastic job in the last couple of years changing the culture because post status has historically been horrible if you are not in the right clique.

[00:42:02] Marc Benzakein: Correct. It, it sums up everything that's both positive about the WordPress community and wrong about the WordPress community. At the same time in that, if you, for some people they like, this is my community, this is, these are my people. And this, they, they're all very close knit friends, and then mm-hmm.

[00:42:20] Tim Nash: New people coming in. It was a very unpleasant experience and for a lot of people, they've got felt pushed out, especially when mm-hmm. Suddenly there were rapid changes and sort of like how things were set up. So, I mean, for me personally, I haven't been in post stasis for a couple of years now, but I've been watching from an outside, looking back in and going, I'm hope that they reach a point where I will feel happy to come back, because at the moment it doesn't, and it's weird 'cause I, for, I should be the ideal person there, all my customers are in that slack.

And yet I, for a long time felt very much like I wasn't wanted. Gosh, that's interesting feedback, isn't it? Mm. Left, left a long time ago and I'm, hopefully, I, I'd like to, I, I, I, I, I have more faith now. There's a chance that the culture will have finally fully shifted away. Do you know there was a, a lot of, that's down to Michelle obviously in her exceptionally hard work.

[00:43:17] Nathan Wrigley: There's there was a paragraph which I didn't quite understand, but I highlighted, I wonder if this is a nod to what you were saying. So let me just read this bit out here that it was, entitled Politics and it says, well, we have a clear no politics rule on post status. We do, of course, discuss WordPress and wide open source politics.

We will individually have opinions and we'll share those. The post status foundation has no plans to take any political stance in these discussions. We want post status to be a safe place to all. So maybe I'm maybe actually thinking about it. Maybe that's more to do with what happened between automatic and WP Engine thinking about it.

But also, I don't know, maybe, maybe there was, maybe there is an understanding that some people, didn't have the best experience and you know, you've got a story there. It's nice that there are stewards who have come from different backgrounds who are starting to realize that. Certain cliques will inevitably form.

[00:44:08] Tim Nash: And I think, Tammy's just put a comment that says that you can always mute channels. And I think maybe that's a nod that post status is much closer to social media than perhaps it is to Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay. That might also match what Mark said that he finds it useful more so than LinkedIn. Yeah, I, I personally struggle with anything like Slack where there's like a channel and it, it can accelerate really quickly.

[00:44:37] Nathan Wrigley: And by that I literally mean the number of posts accelerate. So, you know, I go, go away for 24 hours and if, if something's really difficult, hot, it's hard for me to loop back. And I, I don't know that there's any system which is better than Slack for that, but I find, I find it can be quite hard. Trying to figure out where the replies are and who said what.

Yeah. Even, even with threads, slack can be a little bit difficult. Yep, yep. But I, I actually have been a member of post status since the beginning, which is crazy. and, I remember, well, it's been enough years that hopefully I won't get into trouble for saying this, but I actually had a conversation with, with Brian kras guard back in the day, and, I don't know how we got on the subject, but he was trying to think about ways to, you know, it was for profit for him at the time.

[00:45:26] Marc Benzakein: The whole idea was for profit. And, he and I were talking and I said, you know, just kind of, you know, pig tailing on what, on what Tim said. I said, you know, the problem with post status is it feels very elitist to me. And, and Brian said, that's the intention. And so, he said, you know, I want it to be four people who can afford to pay the fee, essentially.

And so I felt that that was leaving out. It wasn't, I think his attitude, and, and I'm not saying it's wrong necessarily, but I think his attitude was there are enough all inclusive things within the WordPress community. I wanted something that was a little bit more. You know, more, elite or more, you know, ended up being very clique-ish to me as well.

But I stuck with it. And then, when Corey and Lindsay bought it, I thought, okay, maybe it's gonna get better. And it has, it has gotten better. And now, with this, this next iteration here that's coming, I think it's just gonna keep getting better. Nice. So I'm really excited to see where it goes. Yeah, yeah.

[00:46:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So just a couple of comments on that. First one is, where is it? yeah, you'll be able to, there's a $50 registration fee if you are interested. That is gonna be, it says Michelle is giving this comment. Ws form will be on the site soon with a $50 registration fee, so you can start looking. Into that.

Tammy said that, yeah, it wasn't always the easiest space, but I think people all were, oh, people also can, you can mute channels. So if something's getting a little bit hot for your fancy, you can do that. Hope it comes a space where others feel welcome. And Michelle's reply to that was, yeah, we're working on that, Tammy.

and this kind of cuts through it all as far as I can see. So this is Matt Madero, from the WP Minute. he says The challenge when you have thousands of people. In one space. Yeah. I mean, true. It's inconceivable, right? You put thousands of people in one space and say, can you all just get along all the time about everything?

And the first comment would be no. Oh, alright. so yeah, I guess framing and making that community a healthy place to be and you know, just putting some clear guidelines in there will be good. There's a lot of members, so we're sticking with this for a bit 'cause it seems to be getting quite a few comments.

Michelle's saying there's a lot of members who have read and watch lurk rather than jump into the main channel conversations. And then Courtney Robertson, I interpret the self moderation about politics to imply national governmental type of things. Okay. thank you. But less about talking through WordPress things.

Thank you Tammy. I agree. The noise to interaction ratio is hard when faced with 10 lot, well, lots and lots of channels, basically. And a true community. Michelle, again, a true community should include everyone. Not the, not just the WP Elite. And Adam said, I love Tim's comment about it being akin to social media platforms.

What did you say then, Tim? I've, that's gone. I said that, that it, I just, it's more like a social media platform. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Thanks. So lots of comments there and, wow. Loads. And I just wanted to try and find another comment from, Matt Madero from WP Minute who, quite again cutting through, all the chaff saying, how come Mark, mark that.

Mark Zaca. How come he never gets up for his show? That's what you're saying, mark. Okay. In my defense, Hey, Matt, in my defense, you never asked. Oh, you heard it here first. There we go. There we go. There we go. okay. That let's, let's move on. Let's move on. Let's go to the next piece. Anyway. There it is.

You've got new custodians over at Post status. Good luck. Yeah, yeah. Good luck. 22nd of January, that piece came out. Right? Next one, I, I don't suppose any of us, wordpress.com uses. Maybe we are. I dunno. But if you aren't, then this might be surprising to you. so there's the.com side and the.org side.com.

You pay to play. So it's, you know, it's more like a SaaS basically. And the.org side download, put it somewhere, you know, do what you like with it kind of approach. the.com side for various historical reasons, has had a really different ui. And over the last few weeks, it's, it's emerged that one of the initiatives in 2025 is gonna be to make.com look more like.org.

I've gotta say, I'm glad it's going in that direction and not in the other direction. I'm glad the.org isn't going towards the.com side of things. And, and here. Is their piece. So this is wordpress.com, so presumably directed at people who are using the.com platform. And basically they just lay out, look, we've got a new ui, but it really doesn't look that new unless, you know, that's what it looks like.

Now I'm showing on the screen what basically looks like every WordPress install you've ever seen, except it's got these featured images, which we don't have. And then there's what it used to look like. Now this is a platform called Calypso, which is now basically being retired. And I, I just thought wondering with, with all of this, you've obviously got a few people who love it on the.com and there's a few people who are saying, hang on a minute, what?

What are you doing for quite a few comments. Can I have the old UI back? I've got the muscle memory all dialed in. I know where everything is, and now you've just launched this other ui. So there's that. I mean, you're gonna get that. Whatever you do, right, you're gonna get. Dissatisfied people, but that's how it's going.

But it did make me think isn't the intention in 2025 to kind of redesign the admin ui of.org. And if that's the case, will the.com people get like another major reboot in the year 2025? I dunno. anyway, there you go. So, and a another thought from me is that I do wonder if, we are, we're at that point with WordPress where, the a automation side of things, we learned recently that the automatic employees have been repurposed toward things which generate revenue.

And I wonder if this is just a way of, okay, we don't need to maintain these two things. Can we just have one thing to maintain and it'll be a lot easier, a lot less overhead, blah, blah, blah. any thoughts on that? I don't suppose any of you use.com anyway, but never, maybe you do years and years ago. Dot com used, do that, used the same admin interfaces.org, used to click off from their like SaaS application, and you got bumped into something that looked exactly like WordPress.

[00:52:17] Tim Nash: So they've gone from looking like WordPress to Calypso, which was supposedly going to be a lot of experimentation done, which would feed back into the org project about what would've made the new interface. Now they come back and we're gonna be moving them to the next version maybe this year. That would be fantastic.

I saw, I don't know, it's not in the show notes, but I've seen some amazing clips the last day or two of, experiments on the new ui. Oh, like the, like the site editor In the page editor, yeah. Oh, oh, oh yeah. Stuff like, so it's like, oh, so there's lots of interesting and fun things there. Yeah. But can you imagine how confusing that would be if you were just like a.com user and you've got this sort of ified thing, and I dunno, you don't want to tweet too much.

[00:53:06] Nathan Wrigley: It could be, could be chaos, could be really, it could, but you also now have a plan where you've switch over to your new one and everybody goes, I hate this. And you go, we've listened to your feedback. Here's the new version. Oh, I see. Oh, nice. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. We've got a nice new shiny thing coming.

Okay. mark Floral, anything? I mean, I, I have a.com account just for testing plugins, because the user interface, has different dimensions to Yep, yep. You know, the, the, repo version. So we have to actually modify our user interface to handle these different flavors of WordPress that are out there.

[00:53:44] Mark Westguard: So it would be nice if it was consolidated. and then, yeah, I, I guess you're right with the, 'cause I've been doing some work, With, data views, with data kit and looking at their new eyes. So if that does come out, that is gonna be, you know, yet another change. the data view thing is really cool.

Yeah. yeah, I'm actually looking forward to that coming out. It's really, 'cause the, the, the older system of like viewing the post is, that's very, very old code. the data views thing is, is very cool. So looking forward to that coming out. But yeah, that would be, you know, yet another version for them to contend with and get, get feedback on from their customers.

But, actually think about it, that data views would lend itself quite nicely to. Well, obviously the.org side of things, but the.com, you know, I don't know, do you want a featured image? Yeah, switch it off. Do you want to see Yeah, this column, that column. You've gotta make up some column. Yeah. Yeah. I mean I, I love like admin columns Pro because you can really configure it and Data views does that to an extent.

So, just have the ability to choose which columns you want and things is, is really nice. It is interesting 'cause I didn't, I didn't foresee that coming. I thought.org and.com would remain. I, I, I don't know. I just had no intuition that that was gonna happen and yet here we are and I'm presuming getting the two to be similar so that they can produce, I don't know, one set of documentation around.

[00:55:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. You know, if you wanna achieve this, go to this article and whether it's on.com or.org wouldn't really match. Yeah, I can imagine. Bandaging both is a lot of, a lot of work. Yeah. Testing both. Yeah. Yeah. Adam has a question. He says data views is user dash customization. Yeah. So yeah, basically wherever you've got data displayed, like, I don't know, it could be the, the list of your, users on your WordPress website or posts or pages or media or whatever.

Yeah. The ability to customize it, make it sortable, filterable, searchable. and the idea, it'll be handing the control to people like you and I with a point click interface as opposed to, but it's also a nice, it's a nice API. So if you are a plugin or any, any kind of developer, you can plug into it and create list views that are gonna look consistent.

[00:55:57] Mark Westguard: the way it's done right now is you take a class, and hack it basically to make it look the way that you want it to. Okay. So this, this actually has a, a nice API to it that, that lets developers plug into that consistent looking view, without the need for too much hacking. Oh, Tammy makes the point.

[00:56:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That the the they now, so the thing is, she said they meaning.com, I guess now get the benefit of any change in core. Mm-hmm. So yeah, one code base to maintain in that point. And then Adam says what Tammy said. and then, oh, oh, we have a new way of saying Gutenberg. I like it. Calypso, which was the dotcom interface, which has now been retired, did inspire a lot of work in Berg.

I like it. Berg. It sounds like a band from the eighties. There was Chris Berg that was it? Christopher Berg. Yeah. Chris Berg. There we go. Krista Gutenberg. No. Yeah. Krista Gutenberg. Yeah. exciting times indeed. So, anyway, there you go. If you're a.com user, probably a little bit jarring at the moment.

Certainly, you know, you're waking up to something new. It's not that difficult to, to get the difference between the two though, is it? I mean, if you look at it, they didn't, it's not really that hard to pass. The featured image moved from one side to the other. But some people like to complain, don't they?

Yeah. I mean, it is quite a thing, I suppose. Okay. Anyway, there you go. That's what's happened there, right? Moving on. I thought we'd spend a little bit on this, so I obviously don't work in the WordPress enterprise sphere, but the, the annual report comes out at the end of each year and well, we've certainly got, yeah, last year to compare to this year state of WordPress Enterprise.

So you can find this at SOE wp.com. And I confess, I don't know who actually wrote this, but it has been contributed to by, it says here, a hundred organizations, and I'm presuming some of the icons that you can see here are those people. 10 op, American Eagle crowd, favorite web dev to name, but a few, there's a whole great list there.

And, I thought we'd just go through a few of these bits and pieces. The nice thing about this is that you can compare. Last year's data to this year's data. So if I click that, you see 20, 20 four's data and if you click that, you see 2023. And it doesn't go any further than that. But in most cases it's basically the same.

So, you know, if you've got, where is WordPress being used at the enterprise level? Surprisingly, to me at least, anyway, it's EMEA, it's that region which dominates 54% NorAm. So North America and various other locations is a little bit less. So nothing really to surprise you there. Who's it being most used by?

Well, it's media and publishing. That really doesn't change. And in fact, most of it doesn't change. So one thing that did drop a little bit, is education, which was a bit of a surprise to me. I thought that was being used more. It went from 9% disappeared. Yeah. Say, say again. government disappeared as well.

Oh, interesting. So government was on 2%. Hmm. Yeah. Thanks for spotting that. And, that just went off the chart and, education went from 9% down to 5%, but broadly speaking, it was the, the same amount. Hmm. the, the, the size of the website, again, the demographics you'd imagine in the enterprise, it's gonna be big and it kind of broadly stayed the same.

And then, you know, dah dah, dah. Let me just go and find this one. What's it being used for? What did they use it for? It used to be publishing news and basically, it's, it was, sorry. It used to be to create onsite content. Published news came in second, that's now gone to the top. But broadly speaking, the same.

Headless, though that is a bit of a change. Headless seemed to be like this big trend everybody was talking about headless. And so let's go back to the 23 cycle. Are you using headless, in your, in infrastructure to create your, you know, front end And yes. Was this 28%? No. Was 56% and don't know.

Interestingly, you don't know, was 16%. Okay. and then in 2024, so really you're watching the yes bit. It was 28%. The yes bit. It's taken a bit of a hit 16%. So it would appear that organizations at that level anyway, maybe they're just relying on normal, for want of a better word, WordPress ways of doing things.

This chart goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on, and loads and loads of interesting data. But I really wanted to get to this one right here. No, not that one. This one, I thought this was kind of interesting, so I've deliberately left it on last year's data. The question is, do you foresee that your organization will continue to use WordPress?

And obviously this kind of underpins a lot, if the enterprise are moving away, what does that say about adoption of WordPress to everybody else? You know, discuss, go and write an essay about it. But here we are last year. Okay. And Tim cleverly spotted that the question has been changed round. So the affirmative now becomes the non-affirmative, but it doesn't matter.

But basically, yes is blue. In this case we're gonna use WordPress next year, 91%. So high confidence that WordPress was gonna be the platform of choice. I know it's not changed enormously, but it's basically gone to 75%. Now That's, that seems like quite a drop to me. I dunno if that's, so it wasn't that the, it was that they changed the, it looks like they've changed the answer.

[01:01:38] Tim Nash: So it, instead of asking the question, duh, the question, do you agree with this? Yes. No, they were Do you agree with this? No. Yes. And so it's, yeah, there's a slight sl and it was noticeable further up. There was another one where there was a subtle change and it, it might just be the way they're showing this on the page and that the questions themselves were not changed.

But if you swap around question, I mean statistics, the one thing you know about statistics is that there are, there's lies down lies and statistics. and you can make statistics appear what you would like. If you don't ask questions to education com organizations, education won't appear in your. In your report, so Right, right.

When you are, like, if you're go, if you don't ask any government departments, do you use WordPress? They're not, nobody else spoke. No. There's no edu Yeah. There's no government there that Right. Is ever gonna say yes, we use it. We're so, it, it really does depend on who you're asking and what those exact questions were, but I'm sure it doesn't affect it that much, but it was just a noticeable No, I never, I know what you mean.

[01:02:44] Nathan Wrigley: I know what you mean. If you ask questions in a certain way, like a, a positive answer can be different to a negative style answer, it can lead to a different set of data. The thing that upset me more though is that the pay charts, swap sites and that just, that that causes small amount pain. Okay. Okay.

There's no OCD there, but yeah, I get the point. No, I didn't even notice that. Which shows you, but I think this is kind of interesting. So that is at the enterprise level. That's a big shift. That's like a full, what, 15% drop. And I don't know if that concerns you, but it feels like if the, if the, you know, those companies right at that top level, the, you know, the really big agencies are, three quarters of them are happy.

They're gonna just blindly use WordPress in the future. But a full quarter of them now into the next year are gonna be looking around for other ways of doing their, their websites. And I'm, I'm presuming that speaks to, you know, what's been happening more recently in WordPress. I don't know. I, I'd also be curious to see what the actual questionnaire looked like, because I also think that sometimes when people fill out questionnaires, they just go for the first answer.

[01:03:56] Marc Benzakein: So if no, it's number one. Mm-hmm. They're just gonna click number one. I, I, but it also has to do, I've done a lot of reading on how pollsters, when they're hired by company, how they're. Paid basically to form the questions in a way that would get the answer that they want. And I remember very clearly, like right after, Trump's first term, I remember getting a survey that was very clearly from the Trump campaign that basically said, how did you feel President Trump did?

And my answers were very good or excellent. I didn't have any other choice, but very good or excellent. Oh, really? Oh gosh. Yeah. That's a survey. Yeah. So, you know, and, and I thought, well, usually pollsters, you know, do a better job of hiding their intent. But, yeah, that really is, you know, nailing your colors to the master.

[01:04:46] Nathan Wrigley: There isn't, but I, that's why I'm, whenever I look at polls like this, I always am curious, always am curious what the original, what the actual questionnaire looked like and how the question was posed. I, I think that's extremely important. So, and also we have. I put a lot of stock into the actual charts.

[01:05:05] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. Until I see, you know, what was, what was questioned in the first place. And I guess we're reading quite a lot into what a hundred, respondents, you know, it's, it's not a great big survey, but then again, I dunno how many agencies would fit into that really, globally. I mean, there are, I mean, we also need to have the same companies.

[01:05:24] Tim Nash: That they work with every year. Yeah. If you're, if you're not getting the same people feeding back that, that last one in particular, unfortunately is utterly meaningless unless it was the same companies polled. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. What would be really fascinating is to see at the end of this year, how many of people polled, they then went back to poll them again and they said, we don't use WordPress.

[01:05:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Well, that, that is, that is what I'm wondering if, if that's gonna be something that does come out of it, you know, if things will have changed. Because a, another one just sort of similar question is the follow up one and, how thi this is, how likely is it that you will recommend WordPress to other agency, organizations And you can see, so, okay.

Firstly, in 2023, it was Naugh. 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. I'm presuming that means that there were no respondents in the one to four range. You know, I dunno why that's there, that's kind of weird. But if you hop to this year, one to four is included. So I don't really know what that means. Anyway, the point is if you look at 7, 8, 9, or 10, so quite likely that you are gonna recommend, it really does take the bulk of the entries.

And then in 2024, again, seven to 10, I'm sorry if you're listening to this, it's very visual, but the, the bulk of the entries, this, it is still the bulk of the entries, but it's definitely sort of also a little bit on the, the sort of, you know, the naught to, naught to six as well. So interesting.

I wonder if it reflects some sort of. malaise. I don't know. We only time will tell, but, it's, gosh, still very positive. The majority, you know, 23% in 2024 said a 10 outta 10, you know that they will definitely be recommending WordPress. So, maybe the sky is not falling in and Tammy said, yep, proper validity of data.

Okay, so there's 10 minutes of your life, you're never getting back, and we have no idea whether or not any of that data was, was cogent or not. But, it looks pretty though. Yeah, it's very nice. Very pretty. There we go. And that's what sucked me in, frankly, Tim, as you could see from the, graphic that I presented to you, UI is my thing.

I am very good at creating beautiful graphics and, so I, you should do next year's enterprise. Well, I don't like to spread myself too thin. Mark is the, the, I have, I've said it before and I'll say it again. I have the design skills of a potato and they're not a very good potato, either one of those stale ones with black bits in it.

That's the, you know, that's the problem. Right. Okay, moving on. Let's move on. okay, I I, I'm gonna have to cut a few bits 'cause we're short of time, so I'm gonna just sort of scoot around if you don't mind. and I think I'll go here. I'm gonna miss out a fair few bits. I apologize. Team, next one.

this joins a growing, a growing cadre of, of plugins, which seem to do a similar thing. There's, command UI. from our, sneaky trick and the name has, I am so sorry. The chap's name has gone outta my head and I feel really bad 'cause we've talked quite a lot about his product. Oh, oh, stuff's happening.

Check it out. Check out Tim. Look at this first. There's a, this weekend world press, there's window washing happening at the same time. Drop the mic moment when I'm cleaning windows. This is about as exciting as it's ever been. Windows again. That's brilliant. I love that. That's the, that's the best virtual background I've ever seen.

[01:09:04] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. I don't, I don't know what to look. There's your title for this episode. That's right. Window screen washing. Window washing. command, command UI was a thing. somebody helped me out with. Calvin, Calvin Alkin. Thank you so much. That was all it took. But also, Ross Wintel has, turbo admin and now it's been joined by Lexi Command.

[01:09:28] Nathan Wrigley: So this pops up in your WordPress install, a plugin. In this case we'll pop up and allow you to do various bits and pieces. I, I have not, I haven't used it. I have no notion as to how good it is, but I just thought it was kinda an interesting, maybe it's like a new little niche sector or interacting with your WordPress website.

So there's that. And then also. Moving into the AI sphere. if you know, Nick Diego puts out brilliant WordPress content and is a developer relations person for automatic. He's, he produced this really good video this week about using, cursor ai, which I've never used, I confess, to, to do WordPress development and some of the pitfalls and how you can sort of, as the video goes on, it's about 12 minutes, sort of like backpedal and say, no, no, no, I want this instead.

My only experiences with developing code with AI have been catastrophically bad, which either means that I can't ask questions correctly, or AI is catastrophically bad at producing code. I tried it this weekend and I would say 90% of the time it was junk, frankly. So, I dunno, dunno if you've had similar experiences, but, what's that about?

[01:10:39] Tim Nash: A, a person's only as good as their tool. The tools are only as good as the person is wielding them. I, I have no words for that. Slight, I dunno what, dunno what to make of that. No, I'm definitely blaming the ai. It's not me. No, you're right though. I think really hard about what I tend to descend into is I tend to write in the way that I would write to a friend.

[01:11:05] Nathan Wrigley: There's all sorts of niceties wrapped up in my language. So I I, I find that I'm doing things like, please can you, rather than just some sort of like, you know, brute force instruction and I think that is my problem. There's too much, too much politeness. But what I notice is when I go back and ask it to correct something, I, it always the same.

It comes back with, oh yes, of course WordPress can't do this. And it sort of apologizes. So it comes out as this very sort of human entity, which of course it's not. Have they gone, Tim? They have, they're now replaced by the dogs barking and, I can't hear the dogs barking. And a horse trying to attack a dog.

[01:11:43] Tim Nash: Yeah, but we'll, we'll carry on. I may have to disappear in a second. remove directory forward slash s equals window cleaner. There you go. right, so I dunno, I dunno what your experiences has been with ai. I know you've been, you've sort of tinkered with it a bit in the beginnings, didn't you?

[01:12:00] Nathan Wrigley: Mark, but I dunno if that's your thing these days. Yeah, we, we use it. We we're integrated in with open ai. I, I take the code that comes out of open AI with a pinch of salt. It's, you know, you, if you know what you're doing and you look at it, it's, it's, it's missing stuff. and you, you have to. Pro to get it to do what, what you want.

[01:12:20] Mark Westguard: so, but that, that's, I guess that's one thing that worries me is there's a lot of people going, yeah, I just built this plugin or browser extension from one prompt in open ai, and then they push it out. and it's just not secure. And I Do, you know what, it's like the best news ever for Tim's line of work.

[01:12:38] Nathan Wrigley: it's like, let's, yeah, let's just put out whatever open AI comes up with. And Tim's like endless customers. I'd like to figure I already had endless customers. It's surprising how many people don't realize they should become one of my customers. Yeah, listen, that's true. It is. There is very noticeable that, the other day I opened up some, a client's project and I went, normally I, I have what?

[01:13:03] Tim Nash: So I call the Stack overflow moment where I'll be wandering along and go, oh, this is where they copy and pasted from Stack Overflow because the, all the style changes and all the structure changes and all of a sudden it's different. And, I opened it up and I was like. Oh, they used to go for AI and just carried on.

And somehow in my brain now I now can identify code that's been written by, and often I'm starting to recognize multiple AI as well. So there's like, oh, they're using, they're, they're using Claude, or they're using Chat EBT, and that's quite definitely quite terrifying. Open AI definitely has a coding style, doesn't it?

[01:13:40] Mark Westguard: And you can, you can detect that. And it does some just really weird things. I, I, actually when I was coding the Styler, I just, I just wanted some equations for color functions. That's all I really wanted. And it was giving me code back. And I was saying that's, that's a weird, you've gotta function within a function there that doesn't need to be there.

And you can shorten those six lines of code down to one line of cut and you prompt it and it goes, oh yeah, I'm sorry. But yeah, you're right. You're right. The first place. Yeah, I actually. I actually created a plugin a few weeks ago to, a stock screener that I wanted to create for, screening stocks.

[01:14:21] Marc Benzakein: And it actually worked exactly after a lot of prompting, it actually worked exactly like I wanted it to. Mm-hmm. Unfortunately, my theory on what to screen for was, you know, not, not well based, but, I will say that running something like a chat GPT or something, I equate it to having an employee with good potential and a really short memory.

That's what it feels like to me. I like it. Yeah. Yeah. So can't remember what it did moments ago. Well, well, Dave said development. Dave said just treat it like a junior developer. I think this is the thing that really is a little bit scary is that a lot. I hear that a lot and I've said that phrase, exact phrase, and then I thought about it and thought, well, if we do, if we start doing that too much, we are not gonna have any junior developers.

[01:15:16] Mark Westguard: And actually I don't think it, these sort of ais are not gonna take Mark's job away from him. They're not gonna take most senior developers jobs away from them because at the best, if they, if you use them well they do speed up your development process. You can spot the mistakes, you can correct it.

[01:15:37] Tim Nash: You can just go, actually I'm gonna ignore that and write this, write this bit myself. 'cause you're clearly not gonna ever get this. What we that does mean though is that if those developers are working faster, they're working more efficiently, the next generation coming in haven't got that knowledge base that is autocorrecting the ai.

So why do they rely on it? In which case we end up in spaghetti code, which we are starting to see generally populating. Or they don't get that chance to learn. Mm-hmm. Because what are they learning from, they're not learning off the senior devs that they would've normally, traditionally learn from.

They're learning off an ai, which is learning off them, which is learning off. And that's a, a horrible route we could go down. So I, I really feel sorry for people who are coming into this industry now because just treat them like a junior developer. we're not paying them like a junior developer. There are lots of people who want to become developers who are gonna struggle to get those jobs in the future.

Not because we, they're not available, but because the senior developers already have. Skillset and now have AI junior devs to help them. It's like the evolution of code though, isn't it? I mean, 20, 30 years ago we were doing machine code and actually we had to, we had to code to get the computers to do what we wanted to do.

[01:16:55] Mark Westguard: And we've, we've, the evolution has been towards almost a no code environment where we, we are dragging and dropping and we're asking ai and so the need to for the younger generation to code is no, not, is no longer there. and that's, yeah. Interesting. That, that's, that's definitely because I mean, I grew up, I've got a spectrum 48 K sitting over there that I, that's how I learned to code.

I sat there and, and coded in basic and I used to, you know, code 68,000 processes and stuff. You just don't do that anymore. You turn your computer on and. Direct stuff and make it do what you want. So the, the natural desire to, to learn how to code is, is not there, the way it used to be, you mean? Yeah.

[01:17:38] Tim Nash: We, you know, good old fashioned days where we had to get a book or a magazine would come out and it would have part of the code you were gonna write and you had to wait a month for the next issue. Oh, that's right. Yeah. So you could write the second part, you go the second half, oh gosh, I remember this.

[01:17:53] Nathan Wrigley: But also you have to type it all out 'cause there was no internet. You just had to read it off a book and then you'd frustratingly get to the end of that, like two pages, realize you'd missed a semicolon somewhere. And it was like, what do you mean? Yeah. And you what syntax there online, whatever. That's right.

[01:18:06] Marc Benzakein: Exactly that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No help debugging anything. Oh, they, they were the, they weren't the days, but they were the days. But that is an interesting tipping point because at some point I think Tim's prophecy there, that may be something we look back on and think, how did we let that happen? You know, that moment where the developers are not, there's just no throughput.

[01:18:28] Nathan Wrigley: And so because we can get so much achieved with ai, you simply don't hire the developers. 'cause that junior level work now can be done predictably, largely AI will probably manage it. So where, where is that career progression? And hopefully there are people out there with agencies and you know, and all of that who are clever enough to see that, okay, I.

There's a, we're gonna create a problem for ourselves if we don't address this soon. And they do hire the developers and, you know, train them up. And we also could have a whole generation, as Mark said, that they don't become developers because they can become prompters. Yeah. Or please make, never make them call themselves that.

[01:19:04] Tim Nash: Yeah. Yeah. No, that's a whole industry, isn't it? I'm a senior. What do you do for a living? I'm a, yeah, I'm a senior prompter. what do you prompt? well, largely open ai, 4.0, you know, well Don really good at prompting. Yeah. It's like on, remember, do you remember, what was it? The, the IT crowd where they ask the lady who's clearly got no experience with it, what she's good at in it.

[01:19:30] Nathan Wrigley: 'cause they're interviewing, she goes, yeah, I could, I can open emails and receive emails, can send emails and delete emails. I'm good at that as well. It's a bit like that Chicken and egg. So loads of comments about this. So Tammy's saying I use it for prototyping and with cursor you can also run tests against it and rules to make sure.

It's also secure. AI says Corey Mass. Hello Corey, writes good code under my instruction, but mostly it saves me so much typing. Well, that's true. You can just, you know, you can watch in a heartbeat what would take you an hour to type out. That's very true. I think to that point quickly. Yeah, it's, it's great if you can prompt it to say, I'm looking to build this.

[01:20:08] Mark Westguard: It kind of, it gets you going, right? So it gets you in the right direction and, and yeah. And gives you the, the, the framework that you need. Plus you can also ask it questions about like a spurious topic, like just show me an example of how I might achieve this. And so all it's like, you know, save you a ton of time going out on Google and it may not be perfect, but it might launch you in the right direction.

[01:20:28] Nathan Wrigley: So Matt Ros is now gonna make a t-shirt with the word prompter. Superb on it. I like it. get ia, get I ai make a design that goes with it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. prompt engine. No. It's real prompt. Engineer is a role in some startups already. Nice. We're very close. I mean, if you think about it, all of these, if you've, every day, I mean, I get an email that just had, and all that email has is the latest AI projects that have been launched.

[01:20:58] Tim Nash: Not, not new projects within companies, just new ones that have launched and they make up, yeah, this massive long email. Ultimately, prompt engineering is just about configuring an API endpoint. Yeah, well, it's a really, it's, it is a, that style special is a real, almost special is a specialist subject in itself.

But, just something that Mark and we, when they were talking about, one thing that is really useful if you are doing this sort of prompting, you can actually, and it works relatively well with some of the ais, if you say, please rewrite that code using the WordPress coding standard, it does actually have a pretty good get, I mean, still run it through a code sniffer that's actually running the WordPress coding standard, but it does make a huge difference to just say, please actually use the coding standard.

Oh, and scarily the really daffing. Please do it as if you were a good developer. Oh, that should not be a thing that like don't, don't be a rubbish developer, please. Yeah. Assume the role of a senior developer who's been doing this for 20 years and use the coding standards and it produces better code.

[01:22:06] Nathan Wrigley: That's fascinating. Right. Okay. I'm going back this weekend. I'm gonna try my spurious things again, but write that. With the WordPress coding standards and as if you're any good. Yeah. Do it. Imagine, imagine competence for a second, that you're a really good coder. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Imagine that you are a really good coder.

Yeah. Write me something. Okay. Okay. I've got it. capital P word prompter. Woo. Go. Register that domain.com. like it. And then Nomad Skateboarding says the magazines were the opposite of doom scrolling. You knew you were going to get something new and exciting every single time. I used to love getting those magazines.

If you remember T net, I used to get T net religiously. Mm. Like in the era of the internet. They sold at me a magazine at like five quid a month about the internet. But it was so nice. I I very just before, They ceased being a thing. I was need negotiations to write a regular column, and I just thought it was just so hugely ironic.

[01:23:04] Tim Nash: I, I'd written occasional bits and pieces for the, for dotnet, but I was like, every time I would submit something for it was just like the irony of this because for a long time it didn't have an online archive. No. No, it really was just purely offline. A paper based. Yeah, it's like, it's like, I don't know, paper based net.

[01:23:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's like, kind of like receiving, I don't know, on vinyl, a podcast or something like that. It's just, there's something a bit weird about that. what? Right. That was really interesting. But basically the long and the short of it though, is be absolutely terrified of ai, because this is a really interesting piece.

Go and read it at your leisure. it's on WP Shout, so it kind of, it's not about WordPress, but it's, three. It says the real AI threat isn't coming. It's already here. Three cases of algorithms destroying lives. And basically it comes down to like health insurance, and how algorithms are now kind of making decisions about whether or not your care lasts for 16 days or 21 days.

And honestly, it's a bit depressing that some of these algorithms and AI are getting into parts of life that they. Don't really belong. Can, can we all just agree? Can we keep ai? And if we, between the four of us agree it, it's gonna have weight. Alright. can we agree that AI shouldn't really be getting an education or health?

Let's just leave it out of those two things. So meeting this will cheer you up, Nathan. The oh, good. One of the lead articles in the newspapers this morning was that, in the uk, they, oh, I saw this. A bunch of AI projects have been scrapped on the grounds that they were insanely bad, including ones for health, where if they were just like, no, no, this is not a good idea.

[01:24:49] Tim Nash: So, but it, it could have huge benefits. Imagine being, having a position where you could look for, I don't know. The next viral disease and you need to be able to scan for and do certain things. Ah, okay. I have lots and lots of major advantages. Medicine I'm not disagreeing with, but healthcare, let's just leave it out of that.

[01:25:11] Marc Benzakein: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, I agree. Yeah. And, and I think here in the US it's like, they know that it's, terribly bad and they do it anyway. So, apparently right here, here's a, here's a bit of a, a moment. Apparently Tammy says that if you use the word roast this to anything you generate text wise in chat and it will refine it and move, remove the fluff. I didn't know that. So, you know, next time you've got a dodgy bit of ai, tell it to roast this.

[01:25:44] Nathan Wrigley: That we've got loads more that we could talk about, but I can see the clock and it's coming up to like one minute to go. So unless any of those stories were pressing, I'll tell you what I will do. I'll quickly raise Tim's piece 'cause that looked, he wanted to mention this, something about Nvidia.

let me put this on the screen and you can tell us all about it. Tim, what's this one? I mean, we, we, we are still on ai, and, over the last week, you've got open AI and all of all the big, mainly American corporations spending billions on open ai. And then a Chinese, company spent, I think it was something like 6 million to trade their AI model.

[01:26:23] Tim Nash: And it trashes all of the current benchmarks for people like open ai. Really. And the result of this wasn't a lot of people going, oh my, it was the Nvidia who obviously they spent, who are huge in the AI space because they sell the GPUs. Just watched that their price on the stock market go smashed down.

And a huge amount of companies are just losing value specifically today because of this one announcement. And I thought, I think that sums up a lot of what we're gonna see in these peaks and troughs of innovation, where up until now there's been this very much big companies run AI because it costs so much.

So to see a company come along and basically say, no, this, I mean 6 million, don't get me wrong, 6 million is a lot of, oh, it's a drop in the ocean compared to the hundreds of billions that have been spelled. So for somebody to just come along here, yeah, we just did this and we did it, and we are not even in the space.

They, I we're they, they, they'd never worked in that space before and they just did it. And it's like, well, we took some of the learnings and it's all open source. Can I ask. Well, they announced it. Were they in a revolving chair stroking a cat by any chance? I think they might have been listening to lots of TikTok videos going at that moment, just like they've developed a new AI in a sort of like weird, quirky British accent.

[01:27:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I, I'm, I'm not sure if that's more, I feel, I don't know whether it, how, how, if it's just me. I feel that's more of the, like many of the American corporation you describe that. Yeah. Honestly, though, this stuff is going at such a pace, I feel that I'm never gonna keep up with it. And, and the, the stuff, I'm gonna become the oh man who doesn't understand ai and my kids will just be, it's doing this and it's doing that and, but it does, there are parts of it still.

Worry me and the, the rate of change and I didn't know about that story and the fact that that is upending what already has upended a lot of industries, gosh, watch this space. fascinating. billion NVIDIA's down almost 13% today. That's a lot of money. It's billions, isn't it? it's down $18 and 25 cents, 30 cents.

[01:28:39] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. It's, it's kind of, yeah, I, I'd like to say this is a really cheerful moment if I didn't remember what my stock portfolio was mainly made of. Yeah, I, I know say I was, I was just gonna say the same thing as like, is it mainly tech? If it's anything to do with, yeah. US AI based tech, then, Ron run to the hill.

[01:28:58] Nathan Wrigley: okay. That's probably all we've got time for. I'm sorry if you put something in the show notes that we didn't get to, I apologize about that, but there we go. That's what we've got time for. The only thing it remains for me to do is sing. Danger, no. Is to say goodbye to, our three guests. Thank you so much.

To Tim Nash over there. Thank you so much to Mark Ben. Oh, Mark's like, just like raring to go. and, and Mark Wesco over there as well. We have to do this humiliating thing with our hands, as we all know. So, let's do the humiliating thing with our hands. That's perfect. We got it. We got it. We got it. And, thank you to you for giving us your undivided attention in the comments.

I really appreciate it. That sounds so patronizing the way I said I was gonna say. Well, except for the ones who didn't obviously Yeah. Those people that didn't comment you are not well. You are so welcome. Keep coming back. Really appreciate it. And we will be back next week with a different bunch of people, no doubt.

Getting into the, you know, the stuff about AI and all that stuff as well. But certainly WordPress will be back next week. Thank you very much. See you soon. Take it easy. Bye bye. Bye. Bye bye.