This Week in WordPress #323

It's time for this. Week. In WordPress, episode number 323 entitled, I forgot the clever title I was going to use. That's actually what happened. It was recorded on Monday, the 3rd of February, 2025. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I am joined by Michelle Frechette and also by Cami McNamara and also by Ross Morsali.

We are here to talk about WordPress, so that's exactly what we do.

We talk about the training team goals for the year 2025.

Festinger Vault, which is one of those GPL clubs. It is back. And what do the community think about it? you can find out about that in the next few moments. It's not entirely positive, let's put it that way.

World Host Group has acquired A2 hosting.

And also Drupal CMS has got some really interesting ideas, and I just wonder if some of those ideas could well end up in a future version of WordPress.

WordCamp Kolkata happened in the not too distant past.

And then we have a bit of a conversation about the crisis that's going on in the theme space in WordPress. What are themes even for these days?

There's a little bit at the end about hacking as well, and all of that is coming up next on this week in WordPress.

[00:01:28] Nathan Wrigley: This episode of the WP Builds podcast is brought to you by GoDaddy Pro, the home of manage WordPress hosting that includes free domain, SSL, and 24 7 support. Bundle that with the hub by GoDaddy Pro to unlock more free benefits to manage multiple sites in one place, invoice clients and get 30% of new purchases. Find out more at go.me/wpuilds.

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Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello, hello. One more. Hello. Hello. It is episode number 323 of this week in, I nearly said this week in Google. I, I listened to a podcast very often called this Week in Google. In fact, I blatantly stole the name for this show based on that one. And this is not that, shows way more expensive to make than this one.

but this is this week in WordPress. That's what we do over here, 323 of that. as you can see, I'm joined by three fabulous people all over the place. And, let's go round. Do these sort of round robin. Hello to everybody. Let's start with down there. Beneath my image, at least. Anyway, on my screen is Michelle Frechette.

How you doing? That's the easiest point. You can point up and down very easily. Yeah. Left and right. Gets a little confusing. Yes. It's so straight, straightforward. I'm doing fairly well. Thank you. Yeah. Michelle is the co-host for today and I appreciate her joining us. Let's do the, the little bio. I'm sure you've, if you watch this show regularly, much about what Michelle does in the WordPress community, the short version TLDR is, it's a lot.

but here it comes. Michelle Cher is the Director of Community Engagement for Stellar WP at Liquid Web. In addition to her work at Stellar, WP Michelle is the podcast barista at WP Coffee Talk. Co-founder of Underrepresented Rep. Easy for you to say, Nathan, co-founder of Underrepresented in Tech, creator of WP Speakers and WP Career pages, the executive director of the Shiny New owned Post Status.

We'll get into that, co-host of the WP Motivate podcast author, frequent organizer, and speaker at WordPress events. She lives near Rochester, New York, where she is an avid nature photographer. If you want one URL to sum the whole thing up, head to meet Michelle online. Thank you, Michelle. I know that you are, my pleasure.

You've, little bit of, a little bit of pain at the moment, but I appreciate you. I fractured my tailbone, so it's a little, it's a little tender to sit, but I'm Okay. I appreciate you joining us. Thank you. No fast movements. No. Yeah. Luckily this show is entirely chair based. so that's straightforward, but thank you.

And there's Cami McNamara. I

[00:05:07] Cami MacNamara: got it right. Good morning. Good morning. Yeah, of course.

[00:05:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Thank you so much. What time is it where you are, Cami? I hate to ask.

[00:05:14] Cami MacNamara: it's 6:06 AM It's very dark outside and I have a, nice coffee going though. Okay. So I'm alright. Okay.

[00:05:23] Ross Morsali: I appreciate that. Yeah.

[00:05:24] Cami MacNamara: The dog was, thrilled.

I was up early. he got breakfast early.

[00:05:31] Ross Morsali: I'm truly, she's usually

[00:05:32] Michelle Frechette: out walking or at the gym at this time though, and commenting in the comments. So she is the opposite of me. She is an early bird and I am not person, I'm an early person.

[00:05:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I am actually, these days I've turned into a bit of an early bird.

But anyway, I can't think at that time of the day I'd get up at that time of the day. But if you ask me to think coherently and cogently, the answer would be no. Not really. So I appreciate you getting your, act together and chatting with us today. That's brilliant. However, in the comments section Yes.

Of the show notes that we share, where the, where the bio should go. I just

[00:06:06] Cami MacNamara: noticed this.

[00:06:07] Nathan Wrigley: All I've got is I'll upload it later, but that's fine. We don't need to worry about that. 'cause I'll just, I'll tell you, send over to you.

[00:06:13] Cami MacNamara: I did upload something, but clearly I didn't, click the update button at the bottom when I did it.

So if you like, it's almost like you

[00:06:21] Michelle Frechette: dunno how the web works. Yeah,

[00:06:23] Cami MacNamara: I know. I can do my own elevator pitch if you would do

[00:06:27] Nathan Wrigley: that, Leah. Let's get you. Please do that. Yeah, so

[00:06:30] Cami MacNamara: I, Camie McNamara, I own webcam, ELLC, which is a one person web design agency in Seattle, Washington that I have been running for 23 years this month.

And I also, I have a newsletter for. Web designer, habits.com and this really good friend of mine named Michelle, told me I should build out a whole website for it. And I did that this weekend.

[00:06:58] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Yeah, we

[00:06:59] Cami MacNamara: can see it.

[00:07:00] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. I love these little sort of side hobby projects that you can begin like that on the web.

That is one of the best things about the web. I go down so many blind alleys every year, but the fun that I get from doing it is amazing. And, and I have high expectations for what you've launched there, so just tell us what it is. Yeah,

[00:07:19] Cami MacNamara: thank you.

[00:07:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[00:07:21] Cami MacNamara: every week I send out a new habit for web designers to help them run their businesses and, it's just tried and true things I do myself and that I'm trying to foster good habits and I'm just trying to build a community around that.

That's it.

[00:07:39] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. that was way better than I would've done.

[00:07:42] Michelle Frechette: Can I interject that? Yeah. Yes. Ka and I are wor working on a project that's going to be launched towards the end of this year as well.

[00:07:49] Nathan Wrigley: come on. You're not gonna say though, are you?

[00:07:51] Michelle Frechette: Yeah.

[00:07:51] Cami MacNamara: I'll let, Kamy tell us

[00:07:53] Nathan Wrigley: one,

[00:07:54] Cami MacNamara: we're working on a planner together that's gonna have the habits and tips and, to help you throughout the day, keep your day organized.

like a

[00:08:04] Nathan Wrigley: physical book planner kind of thing?

[00:08:08] Cami MacNamara: And Michelle and meeting every Friday. So that's like the best part of it right now is that you haven't

[00:08:15] Nathan Wrigley: talk. Oh, interesting. Okay. So watch this space. Cami, thank you so much for doing your own introduction there. However, our third guest has, I

[00:08:24] Cami MacNamara: will next, next time I'll do better.

I promise. It's

[00:08:26] Nathan Wrigley: okay. It's okay. Honestly, there's no, I'm not being judgy. There's no judgment here. It's fine. You mean

[00:08:32] Michelle Frechette: our second guest?

[00:08:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, The, however, Ross, did remember to click the save button, so I appreciate that. Ross, how you doing Ross? Sally,

[00:08:40] Ross Morsali: I'm

[00:08:40] Nathan Wrigley: doing

[00:08:40] Ross Morsali: very

[00:08:41] Nathan Wrigley: good. Good morning, good afternoon, good morning.

I've got a, I've forgotten where you are. In the world.

[00:08:48] Ross Morsali: I'm currently in the north of Spain.

[00:08:49] Nathan Wrigley: That was it, Spain? That bit. I couldn't, I knew I was jealous, the

[00:08:53] Ross Morsali: UK history there. But yeah, I left, the UK about five years ago. Yeah.

[00:08:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I, had, I couldn't remember that. It was northern Spain, but I do remember the jealousy that I felt when you said those words, thinking.

Yeah, that sounds good. Okay. So in the UK at the moment, it's about two degrees centigrade, which is, I don't know, in Fahrenheit, but it's not much. where, what is it where you are, Ross?

[00:09:14] Ross Morsali: the north of Spain's typically not the hottest part of Spain. I'm actually looking at the temperature here. It says it's 12 degrees.

[00:09:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. that's nice. That's quite But if you go,

[00:09:25] Ross Morsali: yeah, if you go down to somewhere like Madrid, I think it's a lot colder at the moment. They have quite extreme winters and extreme summers.

[00:09:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, anyway, not that extreme. Not as, extreme as probably Cammi gets, I would've thought. And probably Michelle, in all honesty, it's minus a lot.

We'll get to the weather in a minute, no doubt. But somebody will have sent us the weather, I'm sure they have. but you can see Ross right there. You can see underneath his name it says Search and filter.com. So if he is the creator of Search and Filter Pro, which is a plugin, and he also owns some lesser known plugins as well.

If you didn't know, search and Filter allows you to build powerful search experiences in WordPress and integrates with all of your favorite plugins. Would it be fair to sum it up as faceted search? You you've got a body of data and you want to drill down into it and Exactly that.

Yeah. Show me the things that are less than $2. Show me the things with an image, show me the red things, that kind of stuff.

[00:10:19] Ross Morsali: 100%. Exactly.

[00:10:21] Nathan Wrigley: I've got your elevator pitch sorted Next time you, yeah,

[00:10:25] Ross Morsali: I'm gonna check this episode again and that and paste That's right. Show me the

[00:10:29] Nathan Wrigley: red things. That's gonna sum it up nicely.

so there's our panel. There is our panel for today. Ross,

[00:10:34] Michelle Frechette: do you wanna tell 'em our project working together? What? No, I'm kidding.

[00:10:39] Ross Morsali: That's, the top secret. We're not supposed to, you're not supposed to mention that.

[00:10:42] Nathan Wrigley: That's called, that's, it's, that's Filter and Search Pro, where you got everything slightly the other way around.

It actually doesn't have the pro on it. Okay, it's just filter and search. Exactly. we are joined as always, in the comments by a whole load of people, and if you wish to make a comment, we honestly, we would love that. It really drives the show along. And, the best way to do that is to head here. Sorry, Michelle.

I can't actually change that. There you go. It's under Michelle's chin there. go to wp builds.com/live once more. Wp builds.com/live. Go on drag your grannies and your uncles, and your aunts and your sisters and brothers and dogs and cats. Get 'em there. And, if you do that, I, have nothing else to say apart from what I usually say, which is if you're on a desktop, the comment box on the right hand side is gonna give you YouTube comments, so you'll have to have a Google account.

However, if you don't like Google and you just want to remain a bit more anonymous, then please feel free to click the little live chat button. It's at the top right of the actual video player. It's like inside the video, click that, and and then you just need to give us your name and it goes directly to the platform that we're using.

So there we go. And a bunch of people have given, ooh, quite a few actually. Good grief. quite a few comments already. Here we go. So the first stop, mark, west Guard, guardian of the West, on the show very recently. He says, I'm here a month before this starts waiting.

[00:12:11] Michelle Frechette: I can tell he, he texted me and apparently on, on YouTube it did say that it was March 3rd and not February 3rd.

And oh

[00:12:18] Nathan Wrigley: no, that prompted. Yeah. No, what I actually wrote that or it was in the, anyway, people are here so it can't be the end of the world too much. So that's good. here's Dave. Friendly web guy. That's rather keen. Yes, I apo apologize to everybody for making them hold on for a whole month influence.

WP. Hello Ryan. hello from Charlotte, North Carolina. It's supposed to reach 66 degrees Fahrenheit today, which is good. I guess that's a good number. I don't know how much that is in real money, but it sounds like a lot if you've got the thumbs up. I see that you are here too. Yes, we are. So you got the right dates as Mark in wb.

Hello? At least February short. A shorter amount. Yeah, that's true. It was only 28 days. So we've got 2D three days less to wait than we should with any other month. Did you ever this for

[00:13:05] Michelle Frechette: context? Yeah,

[00:13:06] Nathan Wrigley: that's right. With

[00:13:08] Michelle Frechette: without context we'd all be like, what?

[00:13:09] Nathan Wrigley: What the heck? there was this great idea ages ago to do more, like more or less like decimal the year.

And it turns out that if you did a 10 day week and each day had 10 hours and each hour had, I think it was a hundred seconds, you end up with. Just like this weird bit at the end where there's one day or just two days, which don't fit in and you just call that the calendar day or the annual day and everybody gets it off as a holiday.

But you'd have less of this weird. Stuff. But then again, it's nice having weird stuff in life. So screw that. That's good. Let's stick with what we got. so there you go. Nathan should have started the time of 28 days and it would count on real. No, I'm not doing that. Michelle Ette says Patience.

Mr. West Guard. Thank you. And Reese is joining us. Hello from Newton La Willows that's gotta be in the UK with a name like that actually will be able to tune in live. I appreciate that you have Cameron's joining us from the other side of the planet. He is usually in Eastern Australia. He says greetings.

He's probably typing that whilst falling asleep in bed. So I appreciate you joining us. Good morning says Mr. Warner. Adam Warner from GoDaddy. Good morning, good afternoon to everybody and Marcus Bonnet from Blue House now also joining us and lots of waving amongst everybody and. There we go. Is that everybody base?

Everybody's now getting into just chatting with each other by the looks of it. there we go. Michelle Hoffer is joining us as well. Little hand wave that. My favorite

[00:14:43] Michelle Frechette: comment

[00:14:44] Nathan Wrigley: Nice

[00:14:46] Michelle Frechette: is that Cammi has inspired Marcus's Morning Walk routine now.

[00:14:50] Nathan Wrigley: Oh really? Oh,

[00:14:50] Michelle Frechette: yay. Yeah. So that, was somewhere buried in all of those comments, which I thought was very lovely.

I, then

[00:14:56] Nathan Wrigley: I deployed the, and then Reese said

[00:14:57] Michelle Frechette: he's been walking too, so Kevin started. Oh, good. I do. You do. I'm happy to hear that

[00:15:03] Nathan Wrigley: you go out onto your, like harbor, don't you walk around the, the, shoreline there.

[00:15:07] Cami MacNamara: I believe it's the harbor. Yeah, it's called Alai Beach and it's, Elliot Bay.

So it's the Puget Sound and yeah, ISN that lovely. They cut out there every Monday, Wednesday, Friday I was going to the gym. But it's just so nice to get the nature aspect of it that I've been trying to get outside, even in the cold weather. And

[00:15:30] Nathan Wrigley: her

[00:15:30] Michelle Frechette: photos are beautiful from

[00:15:31] Nathan Wrigley: that. Yeah, they really are.

It's really nice. Thank you. And, here's another one. Morgan. Morgan havin. Sorry, Morgan, I butchered your surname. greetings from Western Australia, another one from Australia. This is great. I'm loving this.

[00:15:45] Michelle Frechette: I'm gonna, I'm gonna guess it's either pronounced vet or vit, but, okay. Morgan can let us know.

[00:15:49] Nathan Wrigley: Is the HA silent thing in

[00:15:52] Michelle Frechette: I would think so, but I have no

[00:15:53] Nathan Wrigley: idea.

I tried guess with sounding the H and it didn't work. So we'll go with whatever Michelle says. Unless you want to Morgan, phonetically explain it to us. Anyway, we're not here to talk about all, we are. Let's talk about WordPresses stuff. a little bit of self-promotion. I hope you acknowledge that at the beginning.

I hope that's all right. This is us. Check us out wp builds.com. If you head to that website and you wanna stay abreast of what we're doing, honestly, we send two emails out a week. I can't remember the last time we did more than that. It's just to say when this show gets parceled up. 'cause we record it live like this and it's fun to have the comments and everything.

But then what we do is we bundle it up as a podcast episode. So it goes out into where our audience really is, which is which is listening on podcast players and things like that. And so it comes out tomorrow, so you get an email to say that's out. And then we do the podcast episode every Thursday where I interview somebody, not live typically.

And, that comes out and we in email you about those as well. So if you wanna fill in, this email box here. We will send you one of those emails twice a week. And, as you can see, we're very lucky over here at WP Builds because we have three very fine sponsors helping us keep the lights on. So thank you so much, to GoDaddy Pro, to Bluehost, and to Omnis send for their continuing ongoing support.

keeps us going, and, yeah, really appreciate it. very, nice to have that, those companies with us. Okay, that's that little bit. The next bit to say is that this is where we're at, with the podcast episodes. If you go to the archives section, this thing that you are watching or listening to now will appear in, here, in this week in WordPress under the archives and the WP Builds podcast.

That's the one that comes out on a Thursday. And you can see that I, I chatted to Mark a couple of weeks ago, for our new nice show we're calling it, where we're just relentlessly nice about things. And then I spoke to Ryan, who's in the chat. About influence, wp. And then for the first time ever, I cocked up and didn't put my podcast out.

Ever. Like every time I'm so annoyed with myself. Every time I've missed a podcast, it's been by design, it's by Christmas or I'm on holiday. I've never ever missed a week. This week, I, I had it all in Descrip, so I dunno if you, follow anything, about making podcasts, but descriptions, it looks like a Mac app, but the data is held in the cloud.

So you think you're editing it on your device, but you're not, you're editing it in the cloud. And I put it into script so that I could take it on my laptop down to London and finish it off. The whole thing was done, tied up, dusted got there, it deleted itself. And, and wow, today's podcast episode, let me refresh this page that we're on now.

Hopefully it'll refresh itself with a new episode. Now it hasn't gone live yet. I've scheduled it for some point later today, so I'm speaking to Bigot and Anne McCarthy, bigot, Powell Hack and Ann McCarthy. But since they're apologies for them to them for messing that up, it won't happen again. I've now got a process in place to stop that happening, and I feel so bad.

About it, but, oh, it just makes

[00:19:13] Michelle Frechette: you normal like the rest of us. Nathan, feet of clothes. It's a human, it's a human trait.

[00:19:17] Nathan Wrigley: But I got to London, opened up the laptop, thought I've got 20 minutes, I can just click the publish button. Nah, all gone. All gone. So anyway, there you go. It'll appear here. 406 is what's happening.

And then I'd just like to give a bit of a shout out to, this is my last bit of, showing off or self-promotion if you like. Anna Herko. I chatted to Anna Herko from Rocco Block about managing that business. She's

[00:19:40] Michelle Frechette: so lovely.

[00:19:41] Nathan Wrigley: She is the CEO of Rocco Block and she really is very, lovely. I didn't realize.

Rocco Block Could do. I thought it was a suite of blocks. 'cause it's called Rocco Block Man. Is it more than that? That is a, I think they were

[00:19:53] Ross Morsali: around before blocks.

[00:19:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So that's what they said. They had the company name Rocco Block, which had nothing to do with blocks. Then blocks came along. And then it was a case of do we change the name, do we not?

And they've stuck with it, but, they do tons of products. So go and have a look. 'cause Anna's the CEO and, talks about the journey from being in support all the way to, running the, whole thing now. yeah, it's really interesting. Tim Nash joins us. He says, I'm still opening, I'm still opening her.

Brilliant newsletter. There you go, Cammy. He's talking about you.

[00:20:26] Cami MacNamara: Thank you. Look at that. Isn't that nice? That's so nice.

[00:20:29] Nathan Wrigley: so the P is silent. Apparently Morgan says it's Vin.

[00:20:35] Michelle Frechette: I think you mean the H is silent. H is silent.

Sorry.

[00:20:37] Nathan Wrigley: The H is silent. The p is the, P is the smiley emoji that I've missed. Yeah.

You don't say that

[00:20:43] Ross Morsali: part out loud.

[00:20:44] Nathan Wrigley: The H is so it's, but to me that says vid. Do you think that's what it is? It's not, is it? No,

[00:20:51] Michelle Frechette: It's, I would guess.

[00:20:52] Nathan Wrigley: we'll go with whatever Michelle says. Okay.

[00:20:55] Michelle Frechette: Let's go with, that's good life advice.

[00:20:56] Nathan Wrigley: Let's go with that. Hello from Berlin. Hello from India.

Very nice to have you with us. Okay. okay, here we go. Here's some actual news content. Now let's get on with it. So this is the first thing to say is that the training team has set some goals for 2025. if you've been following on in the WordPress space, the training team have gone basically from three years ago to being what now looks like a, bit more chaotic than it is now.

At the time, it was fine, but now they've really upped their game. In the last few years, everything is now beautifully produced. Loads and loads of, nice new training materials coming out, particularly on the learn side of things. And I just thought I'd raise this in case you wanted to get involved with helping out make training materials very quickly.

The WordPress training team's 2025 goals focus on expanding our global reach through enhanced marketing, improved content accessibility, and stronger community engagement. We aim to increase learn WordPress adoption through local events. I thought that was an interesting phrase. I dunno how you crowbar learn into local events, but I'm keen to see what that means.

Multilingual support and diverse online workshops while streamlining content management and contributor recognition. And then there's a bunch of stuff here which, explains what's gonna go on. But if you are into WordPress and you've got like a predilection towards education or training in some way, or indeed just want to be the recipient of that training.

Then, go and explore. and if you wanna be involved in the training, this article might be a good place to check it out. It's called Training Team Goals for 2025. It was produced on the 27th of January. yeah, I, don't really have anything to add, I just want to promote that, but maybe Cammie, Michelle Ross?

You do? Is there anything you wanna say on that one before we move on?

[00:22:43] Ross Morsali: I got nothing. That's fine. just, it would be good if, WordPress supported, translations natively. 'cause it looks like they're using poly lung. That was it. Okay. To expand on that more,

[00:22:55] Nathan Wrigley: what do you mean when you say that? Are you,

[00:22:59] Ross Morsali: I think it's part of the WordPress is the, next plan to add translation management within WordPress.

Is that right?

[00:23:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. That's coming in phase four, which we dunno when that'll start, but it'll be presumably some point. Yeah. Fair.

[00:23:14] Ross Morsali: I feel like that should have come a long time ago. but yeah, it's just interesting to see that you're using poly l.

[00:23:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I'll just pop that on the screen actually. So if we go here, so I've slid down a little bit further.

So this is the, goals for, where's it gone? I just had it the top, here we go in q1. So what they're working on now is taking the Polyline implementation from 90% complete over to a hundred percent complete. I, don't know what the, what that means in terms of which languages and, who's doing what and all of that.

But obviously trying to push whatever goals they've got from 90 to a hundred. They're obviously quite rightly proud of a 90% complete barrier. but getting it to a hundred seems like a lot. So then again, there's a perfect way that you could share your expertise. If unlike me, you can speak multiple languages.

That's a great way to, to help the team out. Even if you don't have any new content to add, you could simply be involved in the process of translating previously done content. And it feels like in the year 2025, there's gonna be loads of new content so that game will probably never go away.

Okay. There we go. Cami, shall I move on? Yeah. Okay. In the chat we have Mr. Mark West Guard and, Michelle brought this one to my attention. 30% off WS form Mark, west Guard, I should say. He's the founder, creator, the, man, the myth, the LED gen behind WS form. And he's offering 30% offer a limited time because they are a sponsor at, word Camp Asia in the near future.

And you can see here 30% basically on the agency license is gonna equate to over $70. And you can see the other numbers here, but I dunno how long? Oh, yes, I do. To the 28th of February is when this is going to be, it

[00:25:00] Michelle Frechette: would be longer if. More Camp Asia was in say, a, month with 31 days. Oh, yeah.

[00:25:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I'll tell you what, I'll tell you what Mr. West Guard is a, very, nice man. I went to him earlier this week. No, that's not true. It wasn't earlier this week. I went to him earlier last week. No, I didn't. I went to him late last week. Get it outta your mouth, Wrigley. And and I said, I came up with this idea and I said, would it be possible to make it so that a WS form.

Form can be used to ingest comments on your WordPress website. So at the minute you use the w the, WordPress comment forms and you don't get much control over that. And I thought that would be a great use for, a form plugin. I don't know if any of them do that. and it was about nine ish or 10 o'clock in the evening, No, It was in the morning. That's right. It was really early in the morning. And so I sent this thing thinking, I won't hear from him. 'cause he'll be in bed. Wasn't in bed. He, he replied and he said, wait a minute. And I thought, what do you mean? Wait a minute, an hour later he comes back and he says, yeah, I'm on it.

I've, I'll, do it. I'll, I've got an idea. I've basically, I've fleshed it out and I'll, wrap up the new add-on and I'll ship it in the morning. And, so one little comment. It's all it took from me for Mr. West Guard to come up with what is now a new, a whole new add-on. It's called comment management.

I don't know if it's bound up to, particular licenses. This makes me feel like it would be in the agency edition. So you're gonna get it for free if you've got agency. Otherwise it's $29 a year. And if we go over here, you can see here it is, you can now add a comment form to your, let's say your s single post template or something like that.

and there you go. And so you can do all the things like, I don't know, turnstile, comment, recapture kind of thing. You can put in multiple fields. You can do what you like and make it look nice. make it look like all the other forms on your website. So Mark West Guard, I don't know. What you were doing that evening, but I'm very grateful.

Thank you. and it worked. That's the best bit. It actually. Yeah. Maybe

[00:27:26] Cami MacNamara: there should be a little footnote on that says, inspired by Nathan.

[00:27:31] Nathan Wrigley: to be honest, KA to be honest, when he wrote his blog post to say, launched it, I was furious. That he hadn't given me the, the recognition I think I deserve.

No, but what I'm thinking though, mark, now that we all know that you do stuff like this, anybody got any, anything that you wanted to do? I was thinking, the, there's this intractable problem in Ireland where the, the Protestants and the Catholics, they seem to never be able to get on particularly well.

So Mark, if you could just get on that, would be good. And the, maybe, I don't know, it's expensive to get into space. That would be a thing. Testimonials, yeah, if you could, oh, okay. Michelle's got a real one.

[00:28:14] Michelle Frechette: He's, I, want one in the next two hours. Mark of a testimonials add-on. Yeah, that's

[00:28:18] Nathan Wrigley: right.

Yeah. Yeah. If you could just sort that out. he says You're very welcome. you are very welcome. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Anyway, so go and check out WS form. That was a little bit of an aside. Anybody wanna add anything about West Guard or Ws form before we move on?

[00:28:33] Michelle Frechette: I think we've, I think we've given him enough praise.

His head won't get up. I think so too. Yeah.

[00:28:38] Nathan Wrigley: Be interested to see a photo, see if his face has gone, blue a bit. ah, it's not showing it there, it changed there. I can't remember where I did that. I had a fun one somewhere.

[00:28:49] Ross Morsali: You did?

[00:28:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay, here we go. Here's the next one. Designed to infuriate all plugin developers who have a pro plugin out there.

And I'd be very interested to hear what Ross thinks about this. Now, a little while ago, we heard about a, company, I'm gonna call it that, called Festinger Vault. I had never heard of them before and the only reason I'd heard of them is because automatic with two Ts decided that, this GPL club, was in violation of the WordPress trademark and so they took them to court.

now the GPL club or GPL clubs in general, and here's where it gets interesting, the. I could be butchering this from a legal point of view. So forgive me if I get this wrong, but my understanding is that if you offer a plugin into the WordPress space, if it binds onto WordPress, then it binds into the GPL license.

That GPL license in theory means that software comes with the four freedoms, one of which is to copy it and then potentially sell it on. And so there's a bunch of these, GPL clubs out there who make it their business to null plugins, take out all of those checks and balances for licensing and all of that.

And then they in turn sell it on as a subscription service. I don't know, get 2000 premium plugins for $29 a year or something like that. I think in, in, in the, letter of the law, it's probably fine in the spirit of the law. Maybe not. And so automatic took him to court, I guess probably won.

Because they are now saying in an announcement, on the Festinger Vault site in an unsolicited and in an unsolicited email sent widely across the WordPress community. Groot, his name is Martin Groot said that he wouldn't be disclosing any details about the settlement, but added that he had removed all Woo and WordPress trademarks and products created by automatic from his platform.

And, in a, in what can only be described as interesting soft sophistry. He follows on with a pitch. This site, the site which offers access to more than 25,000 old modern premium plugins and themes under the GGPR license has long been controversial. Critics argue that GPL clubs like Festing Vault profit off the hard work of developers, even though reselling GPL software is allowed under the license's terms and he says they're gonna come back bigger and better than ever.

what matters now, and I'm quoting, is that we're moving forward with a renewed focus and a fresh perspective ready to offer you an even better. Experience. I don't know what to make of this. This sort of catches me in limbo, really. Ble, how can I

[00:31:32] Michelle Frechette: jump in?

[00:31:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, go on. Can

[00:31:34] Michelle Frechette: I just jump in and say we're all foaming

at the

[00:31:35] Ross Morsali: mouth?

I

[00:31:36] Nathan Wrigley: think Yeah,

[00:31:36] Michelle Frechette: I believe so. the comments are showing how much people dislike this. But the one thing to remember as somebody who thinks they've stumbled upon just such a great deal is that there is no support from the original plugins when you buy a Nulled product. So if you buy any premium plugin from someplace like this club and you have trouble or a plugin conflict or any of those kinds of things, and you try to open a support ticket with the original plugin designer and owner, they have no obligation to help you whatsoever because you have not purchased.

That plugin from them that came with updates and that came with, support. So I just wanna put that out there in case people think they've, yeah, oh, it's such a windfall. I've got 2000 plugins for this really low, price. they're usually outdated and you've actually taken food and money out of The, place of the people who are doing this as their livelihood and their income. So please buy from the original people who have produced the products.

[00:32:43] Nathan Wrigley: Ross, what, are your opinions on this? 'cause obviously you've got a premium pro plugin out there in the wild. Do you get bitten by this quite a lot?

Do you get support against,

[00:32:53] Ross Morsali: as well? I share the opinion of many here in chat. they're obviously not really a company that any of us likes, and we don't like the principles or the morals, although they're operating in the gray area of the GPL. I think the only way automatic or, I think the only way to protect yourself actually is to get a trademark.

'cause you can actually get your plugin taken down for trademark reasons, but not for GPL reasons. So that's probably something I'm gonna personally do to fight them. and sites like that's a good idea. but yeah, it's, a horrible practice really, isn't it? just take someone else's work and resell it for cheaper.

yeah, I've got strong, words that I wanna share. Yeah.

[00:33:35] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:33:36] Ross Morsali: Online. But yeah, there's not much you can

[00:33:39] Nathan Wrigley: do about it really. I think we can read between the lines that you're probably saying a proportion of what you would like to say and that's fairly, it's understandable. I get it. Hey, here's a thought, right?

And, again, this is gonna show my le legal ignorance. Is there any, capacity to file trademark across a variety of brands? In other words, is it possible for a collective of plugin authors like yourself to get together and combine trademark? Or no, Michelle's shaking her head. As soon as the words exited my mouth, I was thinking, no, how would that even work?

But

[00:34:14] Michelle Frechette: no, even somebody like Seller WP has to trademark each one of our products.

[00:34:18] Nathan Wrigley: Each one? Yeah. Okay. So it's a very expensive, probably legally time consuming process as well. So not cheap either. yeah, what a shame that you've got to go through it and all the while this, this company, and to be fair, first thing of all, it's not the only one.

There's, I, there's more. I know that much, but I don't know how many there are. They're, they're, making a little bit of money off it. And like you said, it's the gray area in, a sense, the license for the GPL came about before premium plugins came about. It would be interesting to see if there was another way of doing that, but with the way everything's structured at the moment, there isn't.

You just have to go for them on trademark. You're using my Search and Filter Pro brand. You can't do that, so remove it. I've heard

[00:35:02] Ross Morsali: of some creative types doing, Clever coding kind of things to catch them out, but. I'm not doing anything like that yet.

[00:35:14] Nathan Wrigley: no. There, there also,

[00:35:15] Ross Morsali: but we've gotta keep it, probably keep those details quiet.

Yes. Yeah,

[00:35:22] Nathan Wrigley: I've heard some interesting, yeah, I'm not even gonna say it 'cause it would give some aspect of the game away, but I, think some plugin developers have got ways of figuring out an awful lot, of things without, without, stepping a foul of, GDPR and things like that.

it certainly got people angry.

[00:35:42] Cami MacNamara: I, was say there's not a, I think, go ahead. I'm sorry. I think it's a disservice as a web designer to use something like that, and then your client ends up in the predicament Michelle is in and they can't get support if you're not. supplying them with your agency licensing or getting a license just for them.

So that's something that web designers should keep in mind. Like it would, yes, it might be a deal to get access to all of these, but what is happening to your client when you pass the website along?

[00:36:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, but also it's just creating so much confusion, isn't it? It's a bit like me, I don't know, buying a car from a secondhand dealer and then going to a different secondhand dealer and saying, something's gone wrong.

Can you just mend it for me? it's did you get it from us?

[00:36:29] Ross Morsali: What's that? It's actually like going to the manufacturer after buying it from a secondhand dealer. Yeah.

[00:36:33] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that's even better. Yeah. And saying, can you fix it? no actually, because we don't have anything to do. But then you've gotta waste your time as a developer trying to figure out where did you get it?

Is this one of ours where you don't appear to be on any of our lists. You don't appear to, to have a license key. And then that sort of whole, I don't know, disappointment, plugin purchaser has, 'cause they assume that what they were doing is legit. 'cause these websites do look legitimate. And it sounds like Martin Groot is gonna go out of his way to make his website in the year 2025.

Look even more. Interesting. And, probably just more authentic and ah, yay, yay, Should we go through some of the comments about this?

[00:37:14] Michelle Frechette: Not a single positive one, I'll tell you that. Okay.

[00:37:17] Nathan Wrigley: So Mark, who we've mentioned Ws form, not one of my favorite sites. That was, interest. Yeah. That was saying it politely.

Mark, festing a spam. Says Tammy Lister. Yeah, the article by the way, I'm sorry. Ray Moray, I didn't give you due credit. This piece came on the repository website. it was called Festing of Vault Returns after settling legal Dispute with Automatic 31st of Jan Ray wrote that. So apologies, Ray. I didn't do that.

Can we also

[00:37:44] Michelle Frechette: just give props to Ray really quickly because Oh, she is amazing as far as reporting what's going on, not just, sticking links in a newsletter, but reporting on what's happening in WordPress. So major props to Ray.

[00:37:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It's my job to stick links in a newsletter. That's what I do.

She, she actually writes actual content around it. Yes. And we are very, lucky to have her, it's proper journalism from an actual trained journalist in the WordPress. But we are really lucky that she's around. so yeah. So Festinger spam was Tammy's, comment on that. This particular one.

That's. Yeah. this particular one makes it their business to stalk word camps and sign people up to their email list without them asking. Oh gosh,

[00:38:28] Ross Morsali: really? I've got signed up to their email list, so they're basically automatically hoovered up my email address from somewhere and started spamming me selling back my own product, essentially.

I'm sure we've all had, we've all had it essentially. Yeah. And then when you go to unsubscribe, the unsubscribe link doesn't work and you have to contact them directly apparently to unsubscribe. Yeah, just

[00:38:49] Nathan Wrigley: block

[00:38:50] Michelle Frechette: them.

[00:38:51] Nathan Wrigley: Oh. legal robbery. Says, Han Reese says, anything I say about Festing, a vault will be against the co, be against the code of conduct enough to have an explicit tag.

Okay. Alright. we, yeah, but no, but it's getting the sense of the community Reaction to this, isn't it? Yeah, for sure. is the experience they've. That they actually don't stalk us.

[00:39:14] Michelle Frechette: The new experience. Yeah.

[00:39:17] Nathan Wrigley: that new version for the new year. Oh, the new readers with on stalking. Yeah, no stalking included.

Yeah. Yeah. You know what, I'm gonna get some sort of, I'm gonna get on some email list after this. you can be guaranteed, can't you? I believe this was settled out of court. No one. Oh, okay. Okay. we never really got into that, did we? So no one won, which is unfortunate 'cause they're a blight on the ecosystem.

Yes, that is a good point. as this was settled out of court, presumably there isn't a no win. Maybe, there was some mon money exchanged hands or I don't know. But we don't know the details and Martin declined to give those details out. But I'm guessing, Cameron, from your point of view, would you would've liked to have seen automatic drive it to a victory?

I. Yeah, somebody

[00:40:01] Ross Morsali: did actually tweet to that effect saying that they were fighting for the good of the community. Yeah. So I was quite surprised that then, just settled quietly out of court.

[00:40:10] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah. Interesting. Michelle's argument, so this is, Tim, so Tim Nash, as I like to call him, Michelle's argument also stands when the web developer provides the license.

If you don't own the license, you have no rights to update and support. I think

[00:40:26] Michelle Frechette: you were supposed to sing that and. In the tone of the Weller Man though. Oh yeah, that's right. Yeah.

[00:40:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, he's gonna, he'll be back before you know it. And I'll have some other hoops to jump through. You can guarantee I'm having a, I'm having a little brief hiatus from all of that.

mark, I'm biting my lip hard right now. Okay. So that's Mark West Guard again, influence WP Vendors won't provide support. Absolutely. Correct. However, yeah, I wonder if on their website they do make the point, but I bet most people don't read down and understand what they, what that actually means. I'm sure.

[00:41:01] Ross Morsali: I think people, if they're going to these null clubs for cheap plugins, I think people know what they're getting, right? The, they're going for a cheap version of the plugin. Most likely. I think there'll be like a small percentage of people that genuinely don't know that they've been misled and landed there by accident.

And at least official isn't like a double,

[00:41:19] Nathan Wrigley: sorry. Sorry, Ross. Carry on. I

[00:41:21] Ross Morsali: was gonna say, I think most people genuinely intend to go get a cheap copy of a plugin.

[00:41:26] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Yeah, I was gonna say, isn't that a bit of a double whammy then? If you've got somebody new in the WordPress ecosystem, let's imagine that a lot of these people are new.

There's bound to be a proportion of people though, who you know, who know what they're doing and do it anyway, because they just think that's a much cheaper way to be get along. But imagine a proportion of the people are just new to WordPress and they've Googled something and the festival all or other site has come up, they're gonna have a really, like a sharp end of the stick experience with WordPress at the beginning, aren't they?

It's gonna just be even more difficult to figure out, I bought it from here, but apparently the support's over there, but they won't honor the support. So why did I pay this other P? This is all confusing. Screw WordPress. I'm outta here. Kind of thing. Yeah. Which is no good for anybody.

[00:42:09] Michelle Frechette: Don't you think though that companies like App Sumo and Theme Forest confuse people too, right?

So those are legitimate people who are actually selling through something like App Sumo or, Theme Forest or some of the others that you do as a company sign up for, and then, you see something like this company and you think, oh, it must be the same if, unless you're part of the insiders, right?

if you were just a company of one and you don't know, and you haven't been around that long, this looks like it's a really good deal as opposed to, oh, I'm getting something for cheap and I'm screwing over the man kind of thing. It's, not like that. I think that there are a lot of people who honestly think that this is legitimate because there are other, marketplaces out there that offer.

Deals that make you think, this must be even better than those other ones. Yeah. Point. So I think that there's, yeah, I think there's for some of us, yes, absolutely. I think some people absolutely go into it nefariously, but I think a lot of other people are just hoodwinked as we would say.

[00:43:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:43:06] Cami MacNamara: I think, yeah, It's a too good to be true. It's like such a deal that like they can't resist deal. Yeah.

[00:43:14] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Let's just do a few more comments. it might be legal says Ian. but at the very least, sorry. Very best. It's very questionable morals. So trust should be low.

So people may also consider other risks that could be present. Ryan, there are well-known people in WordPress that are offering concierge services support via the vendor. what about security? that's another big part of the puzzle, isn't it? 'cause the plugin is undoubtedly. not undoubtedly, but I imagine in many cases, versions out of date, what are the chances that it's gonna receive the latest updates in a timely way as well?

So that's, it used to be the case

[00:43:52] Ross Morsali: that a lot of these sites, I dunno if these guys do it specifically, but, they used to add malware into the plugins. That used to be my first response, Hey, don't use it because you might have a virus on your site now.

[00:44:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And yeah. Yeah.

[00:44:05] Ross Morsali: That used to be a common, the common theme back in the day.

Yeah.

[00:44:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Maybe even a reason for running the whole operation in the first place. you actually kept money Exactly. For people to put malware into their websites, you can't make thought. mark says he is, had hundreds of URLs removed from GPL sites on Google. Yeah. So Mark and Ross, I'm guessing this is just part of the, game of tennis that you play as a plugin developer.

You have, I personally

[00:44:30] Ross Morsali: don't have the resources of the time to keep fighting it, so I just let it exist and, just get on with my life. But, most of the plugin devs that I know are actively. Do try to fight against these kind of things.

[00:44:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. loads more comments. yeah. So Morgan, with the, surname there.

That's all I'm gonna say. Morgan H Yeah. Yeah. it's worth mentioning that bad actors is exactly what Ross was saying. Also, inject malicious code into the noob plugins. You never know what's gonna go on in there. And the worst thing about festing, a vault vest, festering, stay vault, staying vault isn't even, not knowing it's the spam and disregard for privacy laws.

I confess, I didn't know that whole thing was going on about spamming email list and stuff. That is, Definitely, not on, anyway, they're back. Yay. They're back. Oh, yay. With a shiny new website. and it would appear that, they haven't been bludgeoned by the legal cosh out of existence.

So that's the story there. I'm sure we'll report on this at some point in the future, but, yeah, I kind of wanna

[00:45:39] Michelle Frechette: visit our visit the way back machine and look at how it used to be and see how much they were, breaking trademark. But I don't wanna go to their site and give them any traffic.

So I wanna look at,

[00:45:49] Nathan Wrigley: I wonder, what I was saying earlier about, trademark, and getting a, like filing a class action if you like. I wonder if it would be possible for those companies that do have a trademark to go after places like that as one entity. So in other words, in your case, stellar and all the sub brands there.

And let's imagine that Ross had a trademark and he'd done all the paperwork for that. And blah, blah, blah. this laundry list of plugin companies and vendors and what have you that have done that. If they could join forces and, and obviously it would then be cheap Class action.

Yeah. Class action. a little bit less intimidating to That's good question. Do that. Yeah. So there's my idea of the week class action lawsuit. you heard it here. First question. Won. yeah. So you'll quite right. Tim, Marcus Group will be joining us next week on this week. WordPress, the, he said, looking forward to Festing your owner on the show next week.

Yeah.

[00:46:48] Michelle Frechette: okay. Before anybody gets excited about class action. That's, action that's taken by consumers.

[00:46:52] Ross Morsali: oh, I was, wondering that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I'll also just say what, the only thing that I think is good that's come out with this is we actually know the guy's name now. Oh, it used to be very well hidden until, his name has popped up recently, so we all know who to hate.

That can't, the news,

[00:47:08] Michelle Frechette: it's really too bad that he can't just say Groot like the, character in the movies, right? all he could say was Groot.

[00:47:14] Nathan Wrigley: I'm Groot. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:47:17] Michelle Frechette: anyway, we've 40 minutes think. I know this

[00:47:20] Nathan Wrigley: is apropos of nothing. Don't you think I know this is a weird thing to say.

Don't you think that the word Festing vault, just the way that word sounds a bit weird. sounds a bit odd. Festering. Yeah, I think

[00:47:35] Ross Morsali: maybe it's something from Dutch or something maybe, I don't know, sounds more natural than Dutch. I think.

[00:47:40] Michelle Frechette: if you just say the word fest by itself, its celebration, right?

Yeah. So Fest comes from FE and celebrate and all of those things. So I think they were leading that direction as opposed to the

[00:47:48] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:47:49] Michelle Frechette: Rotting corpse.

[00:47:50] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah, that's where I was heading. Yeah. Okay, great. Yeah. Okay. on that bombshell. Let's move on. oh, what's next? Where did we get to? We got to there, right?

In which case we're gonna go here. We've got a hosting company piece in news and yeah, some surprising stuff in here. So the first one is that, This happened at all. So this article is on the World host group website, URL I'd never heard of or been to before. And it says, world Host Group acquires a two hosting to create the world's most trusted, innovative hosting brand.

so a two hosting, I confess I've never used a two hosting services, so I, can't lean into whether or not I've had a good, bad, or indifferent experience, but they're definitely a name which gets thrown around in the WordPress space. And they have been acquired. By this company, what was it again?

World Host Group. World

[00:48:47] Ross Morsali: Host Group.

[00:48:48] Nathan Wrigley: And it says A Fast grow. So this is from their PR stuff. So it's obviously gonna be lined with just all sorts of positive language World Host group, a fast growing global hosting leader with over 25 brand acquisitions under its belt, announces its acquisition of a two, hosting a performance, high performance hosting provider known for its commitment to customer service, et cetera, et cetera.

We, we know how this goes. and then there's all the usual stuff about how things will change, how won't, how they won't change and what have you. My first question to our panel though, has anybody ever heard of World Host Group?

[00:49:23] Michelle Frechette: No. However, I had never heard of new full digital before they started acquiring things in our brand.

Yeah. In our neighbor. and I will be very honest and say that many of the larger companies in Asia, for example, who are hosting and things are not necessarily in my, My breadth of knowledge, either. So to say that they are a huge com corporation that is a hosting company, just means that I don't know who their sub hosts are.

who's in their, stable of hosts.

[00:49:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And, actually, Michelle, you've touched on where I was going with that, which was that it may be, this is the sort of like the opening salvo, which means that in the year to come, we'll hear about them a lot. I was wondering that more, like you said with things like new Fold digital, the first time you hear about 'em, clearly you've never heard about 'em before, and then They, then they were everywhere. they've clearly decided they're gonna go in this big direction. WordPress was a big part of that. And I do wonder about this, acquiring a two hosting, it cannot have been cheap. They were, and probably still are very successful, I imagine. And, so I'm just wondering if this company's on a bit of an acquisition spree, and it's somebody that we'll hear of in the, In the days, weeks, and months come more and more as they probably try to carve out whatever it is in the WordPress space they're trying to carve out. yeah,

[00:50:43] Michelle Frechette: so let me just say, I'm on their, acquisition page right now, Uhhuh, and they've acquired a two, they've acquired Latin American presence with Columbia hosting, Lux Hosting Web Host Python Easy, which is a Canadian brand that I used to use a lot, wing Go Networks and Indian Market with the acquisition of hosting Raja India.

okay. Yes. So they're looking at different global, pockets of hosting to Okay. acquire.

[00:51:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yep. Yep. So maybe a company we'll hear of in the future, Cami or Ross, anything on that.

[00:51:17] Cami MacNamara: I've used a two hosting in the past. Decent. Yeah. and I, I, read that little post was by Cory Miller, right?

Yeah. So now,

[00:51:27] Nathan Wrigley: which is now, yeah. So that, lemme just say,

[00:51:31] Michelle Frechette: I trust, Cory. So would therefore trust a two. And our friend, Katie is also, Katie Richards is also part of the A two team.

[00:51:42] Cami MacNamara: And, Aaron Campbell. Aaron

[00:51:43] Michelle Frechette: Campbell, yes. Aaron Campbell's also there. Adam.

[00:51:45] Nathan Wrigley: So that was an interesting little nugget, wasn't it Adam?

That sort of got it. Didn't pass me by, but I forgot to mention it. there you go. So Corey Miller. and we'll get onto this in a minute. Actually, let's do that in just a second. Cory Miller has moved on from, post status as of last week. And, whether or not this role was ongoing, prior to that, I don't know, but this is, it was, it says now.

Oh, it was? Okay. Great. It says Cory Miller, chief Evangelist. and then there's an email address which has World Host Group as the end of it. so obviously, a part, a thing that he's deeply involved in, and as Michelle said, if, if Cory's got his name to it, you, trust it. So there you go.

world Host Group, keep your eyes peeled for news stories coming from them in the, in the days, weeks, and months to come. I'm sure that we will, we'll hear more Ross. Did you wanna say something? Sorry.

[00:52:38] Ross Morsali: No, I'm just laughing at the chat there. Three little hosts in a trench coat. That one made me laugh too.

[00:52:46] Nathan Wrigley: So here's something in there. So Ian says, seems to be acquiring just what Michelle said, I think really lots of small players in order to create a global entity. And then so reap the economies of scale, I guess typical acquisition strategy. Yeah. So from what Michelle said, I was trying to think and, talk and listen at the same time, but it sounded like there was a real geographical spread sprinkled all over the world.

So maybe that is in fact the plan. da. Morgan's off. I've, I've upset him far too much. no, it's

[00:53:16] Michelle Frechette: great. He's gonna get up early to research a new last name

[00:53:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeahm. Sorry.

[00:53:20] Ross Morsali: You should come up with a new name by the end of the show. So

[00:53:22] Nathan Wrigley: sorry. I feel terrible. Hi Morgan. Just Morgan, just know that my, name is also terrible and nobody ever spells it right.

it's not just you. I apologize in advance. Hopefully when you wake up and listen to this, you'll hear the apology, right? Okay. That's that. Let's move on. So, really interesting story came out of the Drupal space and honestly, when do we ever talk about Drupal? This happened a little while ago.

Drupal is a. Rival, let's use that word, rival, CMS. when I first got into web development and using CMS, Drupal was actually my weapon of choice for many years. I absolutely loved it and probably still would, but I dropped into the WordPress community and found that to be, it was growing, it was interesting.

So stuck around and a very happy that I did. But the Drupal platform has been going down in market share as WordPress has been going up. And I think over there they've been having conversations like, how can we make Drupal more interesting to people again? So they've come up with this idea called, so the product is called Drupal, CMS, that's not like Drupal is a CMS.

This thing is called Drupal, CMS, and basically it's like a, tailored version. Drupal with pre-built, and they call them modules think plugins. It comes with a pre-B bundled, pre-configured set of plugins, let's call it then, so that content creators, marketers, that those kind of people can, just get going straight away.

They can install it and the whole thing is ready to go and they, the, install process, they outline in this article, which is called What Can a WordPress, I Learn from Drupal CMS. It's by Pantheon. But then one of the interesting things which I really like is that the, whole back end is configurable.

'cause they've got like these sort of panels. So I know that on the dashboard you can move things around in WordPress, but that's about it. Apparently in this you can move more or less everything around, so you're not limited to the UI that you get. You can modify the ui, but also upon installing it, you get this list of things which you should tick off to make the thing as useful as possible.

I know it's nothing but it says, it's not a lot, but it says things like create content, choose recommended add-ons, browse modules, create content type, change site appearance, invite users to collaborate, edit top tasks, et cetera. But it's just another little way of helping people out.

And no doubt in time that like little laundry list there will change. I just think this is really cool. It's like a, I don't know. Imagine that you are a real estate vendor and you want a version of WordPress, which is pre-installed with all the bits that you need. Or if you're a marketer, you want a, or if you're an editor for a newspaper, you wanna download a, a basic version of WordPress.

That has all of those things pre-configured. and it comes from the authoritative source. It's not some sort of, concoction made by a third party. I just thought that was really interesting. And, judging by the looks on everybody else's faces, I'm the only one that happened. No, I like,

[00:56:32] Ross Morsali: I'm, I really liked it.

I've, I have the same, issues as with the article, it's quite hard to get going, at least if you wanna set up a dev environment Yeah. Or something like that to play with. but I did, load up the announcement, the launch, video that they did and all that. I quickly exited because it was a very long video.

but, I was, I'm super keen to see, what other people are doing and, I thought it was really well timed launch considering all the drama that's been going on in our industry. and I think it's good to have competition, but, yeah, I will just say it's quite tricky to use. The CMS is supposed to be the easier to use version of Drupal, but.

It's still very difficult to get going with it. I imagine the dashboard is nice and easy, but to get to that stage, there's a whole lot of work in the way.

[00:57:24] Nathan Wrigley: They've got a beautiful graph on the website. Have you seen this lovely, graphic here? No. Is brilliant. This is the Oh yeah. The difficulty to use, not a meme.

This is see, difficulty to use graph and, and so, for example, mod X is this red line, WordPress is the green line, and then Drupal is just this, absolute cluster of chaos. And it's true, Dr. Drupal is incredibly powerful, but incredibly, it's not that very attractive to look at.

So I think good on them for,

[00:57:58] Ross Morsali: with, I think it looks really nice, the admin area and everything. Yeah. Looks really, good.

[00:58:02] Nathan Wrigley: But also just the idea that coming out of. Like the official thing can is now there's an, there's another official thing and I think it'd be really interesting to do that with WordPress.

And I don't know what those official things would look like, but I don't know, just like a, little content creator or a, site which just has typical needs around, I've got mom and pop store with, I've got five pages, a version which ships with that, with a task list of everything that you need to do pre-built that would be so clever.

You wouldn't

[00:58:33] Ross Morsali: call it WordPress CMS though, would you? No.

[00:58:36] Nathan Wrigley: No. but you could, WordPress, CMS, if it's for marketers, it could have been called WordPress Marketing or WordPress marketers. Yeah,

[00:58:43] Ross Morsali: I'm just having to dig at the name because it was all Oh, I see. Yeah. I thought it was always a CMS, right?

Yeah, exactly. Very confusing. There's a bit of a branding issue though, in my opinion. Yeah. okay. That

[00:58:53] Cami MacNamara: idea, Nathan, that idea that you just had might work in really nice for the new progress planner plugin that Yep. Gives you they could have set packs for certain, tasks for different types of websites that could load in,

[00:59:11] Nathan Wrigley: Let's just have a look. Adam says, Adam Warner says It's a smart move and reminds me of the WP per vertical purpose. Insul discussed in the past. Okay. That's a conversation that I never heard before. So in the past, Adam, it was a thing. Was it this idea came up but never got implemented. Okay.

That's interesting. Little dig there. I like that one. WordPress five minute install. Drupal still install. Do you know what? If you install Drupal correctly, it can be done in a heartbeat. it's just, it takes you seven weeks of reading 10 times

[00:59:46] Ross Morsali: already.

[00:59:46] Nathan Wrigley: That

[00:59:46] Michelle Frechette: was a dig at Tim, if I ever heard one.

Sorry, Tim, that yours is still installing, but Nathan Yeah, that right heartbeat. That's right.

[00:59:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's, yeah. You've done something wrong there, Tim. I really like, oh no, look, he's, dug himself out that he says he really likes Drupal. I'm not sure what that says about me. What could be useful is a set of additional group plugins that installed together on top of the base install.

Wouldn't that be nice as well? And maybe this is playgrounds territory. Maybe this is what Playground will be with blueprints will be used for, here's a bunch of, so you want a real estate site, here's a bunch of gpl.org plugins bundled. But the big step though would be making it all work so that you're not just presented with a, okay, we've installed the plugins, now you've gotta figure out what they all do.

It would be great if it was installed, ready to go and yeah, that's what, playground promises. Anyway, well done Drupal. I think that's a really interesting initiative. Anything else on that before we move on? Okay. Couple of ancillary articles. If you were off the back of that thinking, do you know what, I'm gonna build my own CMS then, then this is a useful article.

Don't do it. Yeah, no, go on, do it. No. Riyad, Benguela, and again, I'm sorry, I'm never sure if I get that name right. produced an article. It's quite short text, five minutes to read. It's about the anatomy of A-C-A-C-M-S, what you would need to think about if you, if you decided to build your own CMS, what the bits and pieces are.

And it's quite interesting. And then, this one, which I thought tied in quite well, this is so interesting. So this is crowd press, and it says the crisis of themes in WordPress. And the more that I went down this, the more that I was nodding my head, I think, and let me just summarize it.

Where, what the heck even is a theme anymore, like it feels like more or less, everything is pl is blocks and plugins territory. Now, the theme might, I don't know, do headers and footers and what have you. But his point is that for if you're not in the WordPress ecosystem, it's quite likely that you think a theme is like what we were talking about just now.

A sort of a, it adds functionality to the site. Now, in my head, a theme should add, like the, way it looks, it should be the, look and the feel and the styling. And that's where it should end and, everything else to do with what features come that should be plugin territory. But theme authors for the longest time have been leaning well in the other direction and bundling in functionality.

Just go and have a look on theme for us to know what I mean. like you want a real estate theme. You want a, I don't know, bricks and mortar shop theme and you buy it. And so this is now the expectation. And so the article is saying, how do we pitch what these new themes are? And there's a lovely piece here where, where Jamie Marlin says, just some background.

He says, I've trained over 5,000 folks on WordPress. Now these have been in classroom settings, universities within companies. I can give a complete beginners, a classic theme. And within 10 minutes, they're happily customizing their themes, design changing layouts, changing the header layout, using all the customizer and so on.

I've run into the block. I've run a block based theme course for the past two years to teach the same thing. In a block theme course, it takes two hours. So he's saying it's like significantly longer, not exaggerating. I love block themes, but the steep learning curve is a drag on adoption. And the more I think about this, the more I think Jamie is probably right.

Had Tammy on the podcast recently talking about this, I think. The, new way of doing themes is way better than the old way of doing things. It makes it so that anybody with a mouse can do more or less anything, but they are really difficult to begin with. And so panel, I want you to solve that problem in the next six minutes.

Go.

I dunno what you think about that.

[01:03:51] Michelle Frechette: It sounds like a really good, advertisement for the, the page builder summit if you ask me.

[01:03:58] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Thank you. the good pitch there, by the way, that's coming around. We're gonna do that again in May, but I haven't really got into the advertising of that.

But, yeah, I dunno. I dunno if like, Cami, you are in this business of you, you take websites. Yeah. You install WordPress, you do things with it, you hand it over to a client. Are you using block themes yet?

[01:04:18] Cami MacNamara: no, I use Beaver Builder. so I'm a page builder user and I use the Beaver Builder theme and Beaver Builder theme, which allows me to really customize that look exactly the way I want.

And my clients, they get it. They really enjoy using it, and I'm not being bothered to do all the small things. They can do it on their own. but before Beaver Builder, I was using Genesis themes, and so you would, you'd load a theme and you were really stuck with what it looked like unless you knew how to code, which always was a problem for the client.

So I feel like the page builders are fulfilling kind of a, need, because my clients, I, they use the block editor for blogging, but that's about the extent of what they're able to master.

[01:05:14] Nathan Wrigley: peach and Mary's joining us. She's obviously, fully conservant, you are UX and all of that. And she says, I think the way forward is industry based template.

Templates. Templates, yeah. Now, rather than themes and peach, you couldn't have been reading my mind more than you just were, because I put this on the screen to highlight in a moment. And she's, so in this article, the Kraut press article, it says, just look at the, how the competitors are handling it and let's take the top one, which is Squarespace.

In here, the homepage of Squarespace prominently features a templates link leading to an interactive wizard recommending templates based on the user need. So that would be, are you a this, are you a that? Do you run in this kind of business? Do you run in that kind of business and so on. And you can, for example, navigate to a real estate and properties category and go.

Click a button and you're off to the races. Wix, something similar. And then Elementor obviously right in the WordPress space. The Elementor kit library is slightly harder to find, but still embraces a utility first approach. Elementor does not have the dedicated real estate category, but it features things like business and agency.

Users can find templates like personal chef, website kit or real estate agency, web kit, website kit that directly solve their specific needs. And the more I think about it, the more this sort of seems to make sense to me that this is the way that we need to. just selling it into the marketplace, make the people of the future WordPress users understand what's going on.

so there, I think

[01:06:46] Cami MacNamara: Divvy, divvy ISS really good at doing that as well. divvy has a whole bunch of templates for all kinds of different industries as well.

[01:06:56] Nathan Wrigley: But if, you go to the, let's say for example, you look at 2025, which is the latest WordPress default theme. it doesn't, with the best will in the world, I, love all those things and I've actually installed it recently and played with it and made it do exactly what I want, but it doesn't, it's not got that kind of hunkering down into one niche.

And I think, that's an important part of the jigsaw. if you're a developer, you don't need any of that, but if you're just an end user, then you probably do. It probably would help. And now we've got maybe it's patterns that will be the solution for that. I don't, yeah.

[01:07:30] Ross Morsali: I was thinking maybe it's patterns and templates.

[01:07:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. in that case, do we even need a theme? We just need a theme, A single one-off theme, which handles things like, I don't know, headers and footers. And, and that's it. You're off to the races. You don't need to have all these complicated themes and things. I'm not gonna solve it. look, she says, I'll

[01:07:50] Michelle Frechette: say Cadence does a lot of that actually already.

Yeah. with the block builders and things like that's built of the cadence. And for those who aren't proficient with that, there's there's a ton of templates that are for different kinds of industry that I've used myself to spin up a site very quickly.

[01:08:05] Nathan Wrigley: and doesn't Cadence also do like an AI kind of wizard as well, where you can We do have that, you can be asked a bunch of questions and then it will spin.

are you a real estate? We call them real estate agents. We, me too. and and if you are, answer a few more questions and then, the typical write a thousand words into chat GPT Yes. Or something equivalent. And it was in the background and gives you something that you want.

will it be the perfect thing if you wanna spend an absolute fortune for the, the, bespoke, utterly unique website, right? Probably not. But will it get most people across the line?

[01:08:38] Michelle Frechette: Yeah,

[01:08:39] Nathan Wrigley: probably will.

[01:08:39] Michelle Frechette: It gives you a starting point. Something you could edit.

[01:08:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And, love our ESP says picture ESP Oh, extra sensory perception.

I get it. yeah. We were communicating across the, across the airwaves there. The new way is better, says Dan. Hello Dan. Dunno if we've met. The new way is better, but I wish there was no theme. Just toggles for choices like fonts, margin, colors, themes are a pain in the ass. And, introduce a bunch of clutter.

patterns and bad choices. That, was what I was trying to allude to. I think, Dan, is that it does seem almost like the theme is becoming a little bit irrelevant. And, for the headers, you just choose a pattern for the footers, you just choose a pattern and everything in between.

You just choose patterns.

[01:09:23] Michelle Frechette: Know, it's almost like WordPress is available to everybody at their level of knowledge and ability. Yeah. That's, oh,

[01:09:31] Nathan Wrigley: Michelle, I'm it up nicely there. and the other Michelle Hoffer says, I feel she, she is such

[01:09:38] Michelle Frechette: a lovely person.

[01:09:39] Nathan Wrigley: She, really is. Yes, I feel that page builders get short shift from developers, but a designer I can build anything I need with divvy.

Yeah. There is that. I think Michelle, I think you're, definitely right about that. Developers. I think when Page builders came out, developers looked at them, from a long way off and thought, but now some of

[01:09:58] Michelle Frechette: us make a perfectly lovely, salary just by using things because we're not developers.

Yeah. Again, WordPress is everything to everybody.

[01:10:08] Nathan Wrigley: And if you look at the rise of WordPress over the last decade, I think a lot of it has been driven by. page we see. Yes.

[01:10:16] Cami MacNamara: A lot of it. Elementor is huge.

[01:10:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I think Elementor, I could be wrong about this statistic, but I think Elementor is now something like 26% of WordPress installs or it's,

[01:10:25] Cami MacNamara: yeah,

[01:10:26] Nathan Wrigley: something like that.

[01:10:27] Ross Morsali: they, the advertis is being a percentage of the web these days. I forget what percentage that is, but it's, yeah, I think it's four

[01:10:33] Cami MacNamara: 14. It's in the, it's in the teens. Yeah. Huge. It's it was big. I saw that too.

[01:10:38] Nathan Wrigley: we had a period where Elemental was in the news all the time 'cause it was just, it just kept clipping up and now it's gone out of that news 'cause it doesn't have that same, oh, it's getting bigger and bigger.

it's just presumably matured. You get the feeling that it's not quite so significant, but of course it is. It's still, it's just right there, just sitting at the top of the page. Builder Tree in that sense in terms of the install base and, yeah. Interesting. Google Spade page speed parameters, scare clients says, I can't make my, button work. Oh, that's because Tim's comment was loading. and he's got a comment about Drupal whilst joking at Drupal's expense, Drupal CMS installed and into the admin in about two minutes locally, but needed to use Composer. So not exactly use, friendly. Yeah. Okay. They'll sort it, wait a couple of years, Tim, they'll have it fixed so that you could use Docker, or something like that, instead, and it'll be way simpler.

okay. Okay. Okay, let's move on. I just wanted to say well done to the folks at this word, camp WordCamp. Cult cutter.

[01:11:45] Michelle Frechette: Yeah.

[01:11:46] Nathan Wrigley: 2025.

[01:11:47] Michelle Frechette: They have to congrats to them.

[01:11:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, indeed. Yeah. They, it sounds like last week they all came together. There. They all are. I dunno if that's the, the entire attendee lot or if that's just the people who organized it.

I'm not sure. But, nothing to add apart from saying, yay, Bravo. Congratulations and, Michelle, you are going to Word Camp Asia, I'm guessing in the next few weeks. I'm,

[01:12:08] Michelle Frechette: yes. All set. I'm, I leave two weeks. Yes. I'm excited about it. I'm on a panel discussion on AI that's gonna be moderated by Taco. and we'll be added to the schedule very soon from what I understand.

[01:12:20] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Michelle, we haven't got it in the show notes, but, last week and we said we would, and I haven't done it yet. Last week, you, you were part of the news that we mentioned because post status, the, the community, which is almost for many people, I think is the community, the default.

If you wanna talk about WordPress, head to post status kind of thing, big news got taken over. So Corey Miller, who we were talking about earlier, has with Lindsay, has taken, a step back. They're no longer the owners. It's now owned by, Yost DeVol and Marika Van Direct. Yes. Has anything changed for you?

[01:12:56] Michelle Frechette: I am still the executive director, Uhhuh, and I am still running things. as far as what's happening with, I'm working very closely with Yost as we make some changes, of course, Yost the person. I always feel like when you say Yost, you have to specify that it's not the company I with Mr. Volker, JVD as I'm gonna start calling him.

and I forgot where I was going with this, but yes, we're, moving things forward. We've, you will see very soon, as soon as I can figure out how to do it, because there's so many things in the back part of this website, we're cutting the membership cost to $50 and we, we have a brand new plan for sponsorship.

So if you're interested at all in sponsoring, post status, it's a much reduced price from what we used to have in the past. You can DM, Yost Deval, and you can, or you can come to Michelle and I can put you in the right direction. And, yeah, we're very excited about things that are happening. new podcasts coming out and, new webinar series.

And actually it's not really webinar as much as panel discussion series that is gonna be coming out this year. And, we're gonna bring back the career summit as well this fall. So lots of things happening. I.

[01:14:10] Nathan Wrigley: If we'll come to one of the podcasts a little bit later. But if I, asked you to do the, the elevator pitch, if somebody was brand new in the WordPress community and didn't even realize there was much of a community What would be the, why would anybody wanna go to post status? What would be the, one or two of the things that you'd say make it worthwhile?

[01:14:28] Michelle Frechette: Sure. So we talked to a lot of people in the community and all of that is available, readily on our YouTube channel, things like that. But if you really wanna be able to talk to people directly and be part of conversations that are happening in WordPress, your $50 membership allows you access to our Slack channel.

And there's a lot of conversations that happen in our Slack channel as well as meetups on the month, monthly meetups for agency owners, for product designers and developers and, for just general, professionals in the WordPress space. So it's just a, it's a place to see and be seen. We do have a lot of lurkers, a lot of people that just like to.

Be adjacent to the conversation and see what's happening in WordPress, which is great, but it's also a place where if you want to join the conversation and be heard, it's a great place to do that as well.

[01:15:13] Nathan Wrigley: Would it be a place where you can get like technical help? let's say you've got a, I don't know, a coding problem.

Yeah. So do you have a channel for that?

[01:15:19] Michelle Frechette: We do, we have a developer's channel, we have a hosting channel, we have a business channel, we have a marketing channel. Like all of those different things where people can, we have an HR channel. So if you're having any of those kinds of questions, it's a great place to just ask.

And most, I would say 99% of the time, people are very kind in giving solutions. Every once in a while somebody cracks a joke and they think they're funny. sometimes they're not. But don't take it personally because it's always just human beings helping other human beings

[01:15:47] Nathan Wrigley: post status.com.

you can go and check it out, and I, don't entirely remember what the old rates were, but, you mentioned 1 97, so it's coming

[01:15:55] Michelle Frechette: down to $50. Oh, about percent of that. Is it

[01:15:58] Nathan Wrigley: full? like a quarter of the original price? correct. Okay. So that's all available now or soon? Soon. Michelle's got the form up and running.

What you need, if you wanna, now

[01:16:08] Michelle Frechette: if you wanna now message me and I will come up with a discount code for you to be able to get it through the current form. Yeah.

[01:16:13] Nathan Wrigley: If only there was this bloke, I am imagining a guy, let's call him, I don't know, Gar best guard or something like that. Just make up some fictional guy, who could, yes.

Who could figure that stuff out you four in the morning.

[01:16:27] Michelle Frechette: I'm in the process of putting Ws farm on the site so it'll, so I can lead into my WordPress bestie to help me solve problems when I don't know how to do that.

[01:16:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And the, follow up question, which of course everybody wants to do is, do you have sleep?

She what? I do

[01:16:41] Michelle Frechette: actually. Yeah. But I sleep, I average about four hours a night because if I go to bed earlier, then I'm up at two in the morning. So I'd rather stay up until two in the morning and get up at seven, six or seven in the morning.

[01:16:50] Nathan Wrigley: Cammy, you just did, you said what? I was thinking, oh man. Four hours.

Four hours.

[01:16:56] Cami MacNamara: No, there isn't enough coffee in the world to keep me running on four hours of sleep.

[01:17:02] Michelle Frechette: I'll be 57 this year and, I'm starting to need six or seven hours some nights, but we'll see how it goes.

[01:17:09] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Anyway, post that.com, check it out. thank you for much. We're gonna move on. I'm gonna miss a few things out along the way 'cause we're running out of time.

I, I can imagine that, some people in our community, especially if they've got, real interest in performance and optimization, are gonna, look at this and have certain thoughts, but let's raise it, see what people think. This is new to me at least. I have never heard of this before.

It comes out of the same company that does blog vault and mal care. WP remote. So they've got a history of, running products in the WordPress space, and it's called airlift and I think it's new. but their, claim is pretty remarkable. Their claim is that basically you install the plugin, I'm guessing AI runs its magic in the background and your site is within a minute or two better.

I'll just read you the blurb. It's airlift.net, ultra fast WordPress sites with a click of a button airlift will instantly speed up your WordPress site and boost your Google Core web vital score. It's a complete performance solution for website, including cach in CDN image optimization, CSS improvements and more.

So some of those things at the moment is quite likely that you're probably going to a variety of different vendors for those kind of things. And then all of the marketing blurb, I'll just scroll down 'cause here's what they claim. incredibly easy to set up, no manual configuration. So that's curious.

Install the plugin on your site. Set it up in 60 seconds, it will automatically configure the plugin. And then it says, let airlift do the best. Your website is now ultra fast. So they, really are making a claim. Install a plugin, click a button, and then you're done. Now I have obviously not tested this.

I, we have Remus on the show and REMCOs talks a lot about speed and optimization and I know that he's got this like really finely tuned process, which really takes a lot of effort and thought and heritage, figuring all this sort of stuff out. I don't know. Camie you said you'd, you'd had a bit of bother trying to even get on their signup form.

[01:19:17] Cami MacNamara: Yeah, I, the signup failed for me, but I'm going to still pursue it. Like I am very interested to see what it will do. 'cause they do have a free version and it can't hurt to try. I I. use WP Rocket and a lot of other little tips that I do along the way. it's interesting to see if it really does what it claims that it does.

[01:19:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. What would be your sort of metric, would you run it up against a site that you've got for WP Rocket and compare the two things? Or would you just see okay, it's working well? Yeah.

[01:19:51] Cami MacNamara: Yeah. I spun it as I, told you all before we started, I just launched Web Designer Habits as a full website yesterday.

So I was reading our show notes thinking, Hey, I'll just pop this in here now and see, 'cause I was doing speed testing at the time and so I still plan to do that 'cause I do wanna try it. but yeah, I, think it's always interesting to see if something that you don't. Configure actually does the trick where, you know, something like WP Rocket has a lot of configurations that you have to dial in.

[01:20:29] Nathan Wrigley: I guess maybe that's where their target audience is. 'cause a lot of the, a lot of the things that need to be done that this handles are really technically tricky. And honestly, when I go into something like WP Rocket and I see all the check boxes, like 50% of it, me, not only do I not understand it, I don't even have a rep point of reference to begin understanding it.

I'm just thinking, I don't even know what half of those acronyms mean. Sounds good. If I tick that box, I'm sure it'll do something incredibly useful. But the promise here

[01:20:59] Cami MacNamara: or it will break your website, just kill everything. That can happen too. Yeah.

[01:21:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That's right. But the promise here is we'll just do it all and you don't have to, it's literally download, install, activate.

yeah. So we'll have to see how that works.

[01:21:15] Cami MacNamara: I'll report back. I'll let you know.

[01:21:16] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[01:21:18] Michelle Frechette: It is from the same people who have blog vault. Yeah. And WP Remote and Mal Care. they're, they've been around for a little while and they, really

[01:21:25] Nathan Wrigley: have. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Actha, the CEO is quite genuinely one of the nicest people I've ever met.

a just profoundly nice individual. so that, you were saying about Corey and his name being attached to, the world hosting group, like we mentioned earlier. I have the same I have the same sort of intuition around acta. I just feel that he's such a nice guy, but the proof of the pudding will be in the testing and obviously it will be for people like, Cammi to try it and Mku and all the other people in our field and give it a go and see how it performs.

But, there it is. It's airlift.net. Ross, you didn't get a chance on that one. Did you wanna say anything?

[01:22:10] Ross Morsali: no, not, I don't have too many thoughts on it. just very curious as to what it is that is gonna automate, with great power comes great responsibility. Yeah. So let's see. Let's see what happens when you guys go on that.

[01:22:24] Nathan Wrigley: I guess the fun thing about things like WP Rocket is that you can click that button and it'll do one extra tiny little thing, and then you can ponder that for a bit and think, what was the result of that?

[01:22:34] Ross Morsali: I, imagine you can drill down into the settings after it's Yeah. Done it all for you.

So maybe it's like a, the onboarding is all automatic, but then you can go in and tinker. I dunno.

[01:22:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. it doesn't seem to make that claim, but let's find out. Okay. When they, launch it and people start playing with it, we will soon see airlift.net. Go check it out. Tim Nash, who knows his way around all of this kind of stuff says, caching can and will screw with you.

and the, other Michelle, Hoffer says, Tim, I second your comment. So there we go, check it out. Have a play, Yeah. See what you think. okay. Last couple of things. The first one is to say that, yeah, it's still a thing in the year 2025, people are still using WordPress plugins to try and get you to display content on websites so that people will click on it and go to other mysterious places.

One thing you could do is not download null versions of software from, amen. L Clubs. And, that, that might, help. You never know. Good, but I just thought that was worth mentioning a tech crunch piece. This stuff is no good for our community. Like when a big. Place like TechCrunch has the word hackers hijacking, WordPress, windows, Mac, malware in its title.

We honestly, the world is a worst place for all of us. 'cause it's just gonna be, your clients are gonna be phoning you up. I saw that these kind of things are happening with WordPress. It's insecure. It's an interesting article. Anyway, go check it out. And I would urge everybody to read this.

This is such an interesting article. It's not about WordPress at all. It's just about a, somebody who really does know their way around the security landscape. Very, nearly falling foul to a bunch of hackers who phoned him out the blue. And nearly got him to click on something which would've started to do bad things in his life.

It's just one of those fabulous stories where you can see that, you can see all of the things going wrong, only 'cause he is written about them. But I reckon that if I was him, I would've ended up getting caught. And that kind of stuff scares the bejesus outta me. you get a phone call out the blue, everything seems so legitimate and just one tell.

There was one tell, which gave them, away. And it was technical and you had to be technical to understand the number. 84. So, go on, go and read that, but,

[01:25:09] Cami MacNamara: does Google ever really call anyone? Like I tell my clients this all the time. It's not Google calling you. Yeah. Because they will get these spam phone calls and I'm the first person they reach out to and I'm like, Google's not calling you.

Yeah. So I'm just curious as to, I really feel like that's not even a thing.

[01:25:30] Nathan Wrigley: I think that the vast majority of people don't have that intuition still. I think, especially I can give you an example of my parents the other day. My, my parents did something that I would never have done in a million years.

And because I'm cynical about that kind of stuff, I've, been, I've learned the cynicism of, that's a, that out the blue call, that's probably suspicious. My parents don't have that cynicism, which is good, but leads to them getting caught out and you're right. My insurance company the other day legitimately phoned me out of the blue.

And I knew it was them because I'd been on the phone to them about 10 minutes before. But they phoned me up and they, then asked me to go through security. So they started saying, what's your address? And I said to the lady on the phone, I said, you just called me. I'm not gonna give you my address.

You just phoned me, point me to a website, the legit website. I'll find the number. I'll phone you back and we'll carry on the conversation. And she was really stunned. She was saying, what? it's me. I was like, I know it's you, but it's the principle of the thing.

[01:26:39] Cami MacNamara: exactly.

You have to be, you can't be too careful. That careful. Yeah.

[01:26:43] Nathan Wrigley: Sad days. Sad days. Seriously. Reese says, nearly got scammed because I was signing up for a PayPal account at the same time that PayPal scam got in touch with. Wow. That's a bit like what I was saying. the PayPal people got in touch.

the fake scammers got in touch with him. At the same time he was setting up a fa a, PayPal account. wow, that's so interesting. The tech, Tim's. Tim's great. Great to hear, Tim. Thank you. The TechCrunch article is such a poor hatchet job. Haters, hackers are exploiting outdated of WordPress plugins.

Shock. I was gonna ask if it was click. Yeah. Unfortunately, TechCrunch, the distribution of TechCrunch is massive, isn't it? And so whether or not it's factually correct, yeah, sadly, those are the words that are gonna land. but yeah, I think you're right. thank you, Tim. Appreciate it. Okay. Where should we go to next?

[01:27:33] Ross Morsali: I was gonna say my, biggest scam here is when they're gonna get AI to. To phone you up as your mother and ask for help or something like that. That's, gotta be on the roadmap for the next few years. unfortunately those scam are gonna be everywhere,

[01:27:46] Nathan Wrigley: unfortunately. Ross, that's not theory that's now happened.

[01:27:50] Ross Morsali: Yeah, I was, yeah.

[01:27:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there was, I think I've read about

[01:27:54] Ross Morsali: it as in this happened that was, I've not known anyone,

[01:27:57] Nathan Wrigley: when was it? I think it was in November last year, something like that. And it was a, dear old lady, could have been in the uk, can't remember exactly, but basically got a call from, an alarmed grandchild.

yes. And you can, you've just already laying out the perfect confection, aren't you? It's just like grandchild, I don't know. Got lost in a city, lost the credit cards and perfect replication of the voice, and the whole thing was over in a matter of minutes. yeah. Guess the heartstrings were pulled.

Exactly. yeah. I, think that, yeah, like you, you're gonna isn't it crazy? We're all gonna have to have some sort of safe word. That we all learn as an in like, okay, child one, what's your safe word? Child two, what's your safe word? And if we don't hear the safe word, it's a scam. like I,

[01:28:47] Ross Morsali: I've stopped saying hello on the phone when you don't know the number, you just wait for the other person to say hello.

And if it's like a scam call, you can just hang up. Yeah. So you're not giving any of your own like voice out to anyone else to, yeah, good point. It's

[01:28:59] Cami MacNamara: really hard to answer the phone anymore, like if somebody isn't in your contacts, it's just I'm gonna wait and see if this is a real call.

[01:29:08] Nathan Wrigley: Exactly.

Tim says his child has been ra, I should paraphrase, this is not true. Tim's child has been regularly arrested in Spain, a to.

Ask them something that only you would know. Yeah. Like this keyword or something like that. Ask them to pick up food that you'd hate or after. Yeah. Yeah. We get the point. Thank you for that, Ian. That makes sense. Or better

[01:29:32] Michelle Frechette: yet, I'll call you right back and then you back call them on the number that you know is theirs and ask them if they had just called you.

[01:29:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Read this article though. 'cause that Yeah, even that got bypassed. I which is interesting. These people, the people who perpetrated this scam really knew what they were doing. at least it comes back away. pixel's AI screening is pretty good. that's in the phone. It knows kind of stuff like that.

Does it? Okay. That's fascinating. Okay, thank you Reese. And how much time have we got left? No time at all. At all. We're out all at all. We are out of time. Sorry, we had a few bits in there including copy jump. Let's just do this quickly 'cause Ross put it in the show notes. what's copy jump Ross?

[01:30:15] Ross Morsali: it's just, it's another AI tool to help you, write better marketing tools.

I just thought I would share it because look, Morgan was in the chat. Yeah. Morgan fit. Oh,

[01:30:29] Michelle Frechette: no, Sad. Sadly he's gone bed and won't hear this, but yes. Oh

[01:30:34] Ross Morsali: dear. yeah, so Morgan h has launched this. I thought it was quite cool because it's quite a lot of WordPress fo branching out into other little ideas.

And this is one that stick out to me because I'm terrible at writing marketing.

[01:30:46] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So I see what you did there. You with a bit of soft sophistry, you managed to avoid the problem of the surname just by going h that's what I should have done. Morgan H Exactly. Yeah, Morgan H I'll do that in the future.

Oh, I'm so sorry. When you catch up on this in the morning. Morgan, have you had a play with it yet then Ross?

[01:31:05] Ross Morsali: no, I've just watched the videos and things like that. haven't actually played with it yet, unfortunately. Unfortunately,

[01:31:10] Nathan Wrigley: this Twitter thread, 'cause I'm not logged in, doesn't give you, more, but there's, if you go to the original one, if you basically, if you just in, search for Morgan, his name is Morgan, and then his surname is H-V-I-D-T pronounced, I don't know, Pascal or something like that.

Yeah, I'm not going there. I'm gonna get wrong again. and you can see all about it. Copy jump. So it's a, it says the writing app for brands and marketers, and I'm guessing it's, Ross said using AI to assist with that endeavor and I feel terrible. Morgan, for butchering your name so publicly, I am very sorry.

I think you've

[01:31:44] Ross Morsali: redeemed it now that you've shown his

[01:31:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. New product, Nathan.

[01:31:52] Cami MacNamara: When you sign up, you're gonna get an email from Morgan, and, when you sign up, there's a video and I think that he is speaking, so maybe the last name will be revealed.

[01:32:02] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, perfect.

[01:32:03] Cami MacNamara: Yeah.

[01:32:04] Nathan Wrigley: That's great. And considering I'll have, considering I have the memory of a goldfish, the next time Morgan comes in the chat, I'll go, it's Morgan.

but I'll try. So copy jump, go check it out. as recommended off Twitter by, Ross. That's great. If you Yeah, I would try

[01:32:20] Ross Morsali: that out to myself. Yeah. Nice. Do you know, Morgan? loosely? Yeah. Loosely. Just as a fellow plugging developer? Yeah.

[01:32:28] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Perfect.

[01:32:30] Cami MacNamara: First name only.

[01:32:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's, I knew the last name, but

[01:32:33] Ross Morsali: of course I've never had to actually say it.

[01:32:36] Nathan Wrigley: I'm gonna take that as today's, as today's episode title, first name only. I think we'll go with that. That's perfect. Okay. In which case, firstly I'd like to thank the three people who are around here. Ah, I've got it wrong. Oh, here. Over here.

[01:32:49] Ross Morsali: That's okay.

[01:32:50] Nathan Wrigley: so that would be the co-hosts for today, which is Michelle Ette, but also our fabulous guest, Cami McNamara and Ross Sally, I really appreciate your comment on the show and giving up your time, especially for those of you that are up at ridiculous o'clock, frankly

[01:33:04] Cami MacNamara: really

[01:33:04] Nathan Wrigley: half seven now.

Time to get up, Cami. Yeah. But we'll be back next week, with a different panel of guests. Hope that you'll join us then. But for now, we need to do the hand wavy thing, if that's all right with you. Three,

[01:33:18] Ross Morsali: the side, right?

[01:33:19] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Whatever you like. That'll do. Yeah. That's great. Thank you so much.

Appreciate it. And one final thank you to everybody who joined us, whether that was live or not live and for, yeah, coping with my butchery of surnames. Appreciate all of your comments. We'll be back next week. Thank you so much. Take it easy. Bye-bye for now. Bye.