This Week in WordPress #325

It's time for this week in WordPress, episode number 325, entitled Changes in Life. It was recorded on Monday the 3rd of March, 2025. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I'm joined by co-host Michelle Frechette and also by Andrew Palmer.

There's just the three of us this time around, but nevertheless, do not fear. We have plenty to talk about.

It's a WordPress podcast and so well, we talk a lot about WordPress.

We start off by talking about a meeting which happened at WordCamp Asia, amongst some core committers, and how they've got so much to talk about. All the different things that they're concerned about, and some action plans for the future. It really is an interesting conversation.

We talk about the CloudFest hackathon, which is coming up as well, and how WordPress is core to that, amongst other open source projects.

We also talk about WordCamp Asia and the q and a session at the end, and the fact that, it's perfectly okay, as far as I'm concerned, that we don't know exactly what's gonna be happening in the next five years. apart from AI of course.

We also talk about WooCommerce 9.7.

We talk about Divi, Divi five, getting AI.

Oxygen has been bought up to version six, which I didn't expect.

And there's loads more that we talk about as well. And it's all coming up next, on This Week in WordPress.

[00:01:29] 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. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. I don't think there's any others that'll do. That's, I think that covers it. Yeah. The full gamut of all the things that I could say. Good to. it's 3, 3 25. Episode number 325. Woohoo. This week. It were, I know it's a significant number. Probably it's a prime or something.

I don't know. I like it. Yeah. It's a good number. Thank you. I, I'm gonna be joined today by, you can see there's two of us. We're anticipating maybe we'll be joined by a, third person, but if, not, we're just gonna crack on with the, with the two of us. First of all, we have over there.

Michelle Che. Hello Michelle. How are you doing? Hello. I'm good. How are you? Yeah, really good. Now, Michelle normally comes on here. She's the co-host of this show and she has a bio, and that bio normally says a particular thing, and I've, it's new lost. I updated it. I've, shall I read it for you? No, I wanted to read it, but I just don't know what the heck has happened to it.

Lemme just open it on a completely different tab over here. Hold on. Now I've got a search for episode number 325. Here we go. This is a good start, isn't it? and then go. And I won't even make you sing it like Tim does. No, God, Lord, no. Here we go. I've managed to find it now. I don't. I think I closed it accidentally just then.

Michelle. It used to begin in a certain way, and now Michelle's buyer goes like this. Firstly, I'd like to say thank you very much for her being a co-host on the show. My pleasure. Michelle is the Executive Director at Post Status. In addition to her work at Post Status, Michelle is the podcast barista at WP Coffee Talk.

Co-founder of Underrepresented in Tech, creator of WP Speakers, creator of WP Career pages author and a frequent organizer and speaker at WordPress events. She lives outside of Rochester, New York, where she's an avid photographer of nature. And if you want one URL to sum the whole thing up, try this one.

Meet michelle.online. That will give you I, yeah, get you all of the different bits and pieces. and we'll get into what's missing from that bio in a minute. you may have noticed, or you may have seen Michelle's tweets out there, but, some, news and not entirely great news, but she's amazing. the, words rebound come to mind.

It's pretty amazing rolling through it. Yeah. Good for you. it really is great. And, we're also joined down there. There he is. How you doing? by somebody who only it feels like eight minutes ago, said that we would never see him again in the WordPress space because he's, he was done with it. He was retiring, he was moving on to pastors new, he was gonna put his feet up and read a book, and yet here he is.

[00:05:36] Michelle Frechette: I actually went back through all of his like socials. I'm like, I thought he said he was done with us, washed his hands of us, but he's back. I'm not upset about it. I received an offer I was not allowed to refuse. Will do. Okay, let's get into that. Here's the bio. This will give you an intuition as to what's going on.

[00:05:56] Nathan Wrigley: Andrew Palmer is a former web agency owner and also the co-author of Bertha ai. After recently retiring from web development, after selling his agency, he now has the opportunity via Terri as a customer success manager, utilizing his nearly three decades of experience and coaching skills to help agencies and freelancers complete projects faster and more cost effectively through collaboration and workflow management.

gosh, both of our guests have got exciting stories to tell. oh yeah. Yeah. So let's job. Yeah, Let's, yeah, rub it in. Why don't you, Andrew, just rub it in. Yeah, I have you, you'll get a job. They'll be bashing your door. You've got controversial right at the beginning. let's, go to Michelle first and just outline what's happened.

And I think probably the best place to begin with all that is, is to just pop something on the screen. Hold on. Let me go back to the start. Here we go. And this is, this is your ongoing work if you like, you've still got the role at post status. Here's the blog piece that you wrote. I do. Just the other day on the 2nd of March.

tell us. What's going on? This is called, yeah, near pain and moving forwards. Yeah. I've always, I shouldn't say always. I, haven't always worked at post status. Post status has been my side gig, if you will, my part-time job, in addition to the full-time job that I had at Stellar WP up to last week, when they did some restructuring, reorganizing, which meant that my position was eliminated.

[00:07:28] Michelle Frechette: So I am, I wrote about the fact that you if you hold your breath, you miss a lot of things. you can't breathe in all that life has to offer if you're holding your breath in fear. I took a few days to, wallow in self pity, I guess is a good way to say it. And then, yesterday I decided to start breathing again, and I wrote this piece at about midnight.

My time last night. to which Yos, Deval said, isn't it rather late for you right now? yes, it's, but it's been a particularly difficult, six months I'd say between losing my stepfather, my cat, having. Things like my car die when I got back from Asia in the airport. but I had made plans for some things, and I had some incredible, moves forward, right?

I don't like to travel internationally alone and due to some circumstances, I was forced to do that. And guess what? I'm back. And I made it and there were some amazing people who made it incredibly easy for me to do that. I won't say easy. Who made it easier for me to be able to do that? And yeah, I'm just trying to regroup and figure out what my next steps are.

I do have to have a full-time job. I have to be able to pay the bills. And this week I am retooling my websites, brushing up the old resume and looking for opportunities. So if anybody is looking for somebody with my particular skillset and I have a pretty deep Rolodex, and for you younger kids, that just means I have connections.

hit, me up. I have, a lot to offer still and, think I could be very valuable asset. To your company? go on without being too bashful. 'cause I know the, like in a job interview kind of thing, the enemy of getting hired is being bashful, isn't it? But I, suffer from that a little bit.

[00:09:19] Nathan Wrigley: But go on, blow your own trumpet. What, are you good at and what kind of work would you ideally like? Yeah, I am incredibly good at connecting people, which means connecting myself as well. So I am very much, I, my, I'll put it to you this way. I don't like the word WordPress celebrity, but at Word Camp Europe in Athens, my daughter was surprised at how so many people knew who I was.

[00:09:45] Michelle Frechette: so much so that she called me WP Madonna, the Purple Ambition tour. And so she, even realizes, and I got rid of the purple this weekend, but, she realizes, that, that I do, I'm, fairly. known and made of a role for myself within the WordPress community, which makes it really easy for me to help with things like affiliates and co-marketing with other companies.

things that I used to do at Seller WP, and, putting on events and speaking and public speaking and webinars and in services where I was able to teach people how to build their resume, build their, not only their resume, but do, their personal marketing, how to put their bio together, how to apply to speak at work camps and other events, things like that.

So much so that, I'm actually, if I can blow my own horn, just one little second. Sure, I was picked to speak at the, women's Tech International or Global Conference coming up in May, which has nothing to do with WordPress. And so to be able to speak on a stage like that and also like I was at the Philippines with, with you Nathan and the, The undersecretary for, she's got a very long title, but basically the infrastructure for information systems and the Philippines greeted me, thanked me for coming and gave me a gift for coming to her country. and, so my, my, she knew who I was, my reputation preceded me, all the way on the other side of the world.

And so I think that I do have a lot to give to a company and I can do really good job at connecting people and, helping move forward. I have an MBA in marketing, all kinds of things. I'm updating my resume. People wanna know more about me, reach out. this isn't all about me hour, but, but it's a very big change in my life this week, so I appreciate the opportunity to Yeah, of course.

[00:11:31] Nathan Wrigley: I wanna be really frank as well in that, Michelle does a lot of grunt work for this show behind the scenes that nobody would ever know apart from me, basically. And that is to say that Michelle took it upon herself. I don't know, three years ago, maybe more, that she was gonna just, if I ran out a guess or, she just thought that there was somebody that might like to come on this show, that she would just get on, with it and do it.

Increase the diversity a little bit too. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. And all of that, right? And, I've just been so grateful and I don't really ever get to say that, but, that is all going on in the background. And anyway, the window into that, that I have noticed is that Michelle really does know more or less everybody.

So if you're a product owner or something and you're trying to, I don't know, just get a bit of a quick short circuit into the WordPress ecosystem, Michelle. There she is. And in honor of that, I've apparently picked up a number outta banner. Yeah, there you go. And why I just suddenly found its way into my hand.

but yeah, thank you Michelle for that. Sure. And, obviously anybody listening to this who now has figured out that Michelle is no longer working where she was and is looking for a job, if you've got any, intuitions, what's the best place to, I obviously we mentioned Meet Michelle online. Yep. Have you got a preferred spot?

Would that be the best place? Yeah, there's a, contact form there or you can just reach out to me on any of my socials. My dms are open everywhere. And also my email address is Michelle EAM at Gmail, Okay. Thank you. best of luck, Michelle. And I've gotta say, if the same scenario had have happened to me that had happened to you, I can guarantee that I wouldn't have pulled my.

Stuff together quickly enough to come on a show like this and present myself in a public way, in the way that you have, I would just thank you. I don't know, I would just be different. So bravo for facing that and getting on with it. That's amazing. Then of course we've got the other side of the coin, the, the Andrew Palmer side of the coin, the, employee, side of the coin as he like to point out.

So a Andrew just, I don't know, maybe just before Christmas, I feel like it was December or something. I was standing next to him at WordCamp London, W-P-L-D-N and, wasn't WordCamp London? It's called W-P-L-D-N. Get it right, Wrigley. And, and he said that's it. I'm washing my hands with WordPress.

not in a bad way, life is moving on. I've got other things to do. And so I fully thought that would be the last time we saw you on this show. But you're back, working at Atum. How's this come about? I, was opening a restaurant and we, and our plan was to open the restaurant and earn money doing it for me.

[00:14:11] Andrew Palmer: minimum wage and all that kind of stuff. A little bit more than that. But, the plan was to open it, showcase it, sell it within six months. So that gave me a six month path. And also, I like restaurants 'cause I'm a former chef and restaurant owner. We opened it. Showcased it, sold it in six weeks.

Oh wow. Oops. Major congratulations though. That's fantastic. I just went to Spain for a, I, I'm very lucky that I own a front door and a house in Spain because of a deal I did with a mayor of mine years ago. I literally own the front door, and that means that I can go into the house anytime. It's great.

I don't own the house, I just own the front door. and, I just took a week off of walking miles up the coast of my, my bear and esta and sand rocky and I didn't play golf or anything. I just walked and walked and, I got a call and said, look, we are looking at you.

You, you've been an investor in this company. You've been with them with us since 2019. Advocate, how'd your fans, you getting paid for that? And I went, okay, I, really need to think about this. 'cause I was getting out of web dev and I, the, co-founder and the o Vito and I get on very, well with best powers and we form birth or AI together.

I said, I don't want to be a shoe in. I, literally said, I really don't wanna be a s shoe in just 'cause I know you, yes, I can jump the queue to the interviews, but I don't wanna be a s shoe in. So I insisted on a full interview and, my boss is a lovely chap called Alex. And, he interviewed me and then offered me a job and I went, yep.

Okay, great. And with Ryan, it's absolutely amazing. It's an amazing team. loads of people work at now. we all talk to each other so nicely. It's crazy. It's just such a great company atmosphere. And we onboard clients. My job is to onboard agencies. if they need it, Yeah. But I think all agencies need it.

And because I think Veto and Alex wanted to go back on my coaching experience, go back on, which I learned a lot from Michelle, to be honest, to, go back on, on my experience, three decades in print, web, and advertising and marketing. Quite a lot of experience there. And also to help agencies grow, because that's my, that's in my DNA to help people grow, help people in agencies grow, go from freelancer to agency to selling or whatever.

But it's just, yeah, it's exciting. And, I've worked with a unbelievably great team from support to sales support to bds, people who've actually developed the business. And I'm off to Cloud Fest. I've got a 10 minute slot at Cloud Fest, which I'm fairly nervous about, to be honest, I do.

Yeah. You're be in a different crowd, right? Just, I'm, new in the job. I'm new in the job in as much as I've only just started working for a. Yeah, Whereas I've known AAM from day one. Yeah. Before it was even a pro. Before any programming had been done. Yeah. it's pretty cool that I've got that history with Atri and I can pass that on to agencies as well that say, look, I know that we've gone through this path.

We are here. this is what's happening and this is how we can help you succeed. And that's, I'm loving it. I'm absolutely loving it. there's two highly contrasting stories, I know. Sorry, Michelle. no. I'm sure Michelle is happy for you as well. I'm fully happy for other people's success.

[00:17:54] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, exactly. Me too. So there we go. There's our panelists. We don't normally spend quite that, length of time, but there's obviously two interesting stories to kick the show off. And also slight change on this show, which we, did one show previously, but I didn't really mention it and it was Michelle's idea.

and Michelle said what we should do in this show going forwards, and I agreed was when the guests come on, I put some show notes together. And then in the background, the, guests can add and change and what have you. And there's a section for anything that you found interesting this week. And normally I've put that to the end of the show and quite often, 'cause I lather on too much the, they get lost.

so what I've done is I've decided, again, Michelle's idea to just bump them to the front of the show. So that's what we're gonna do now. We'll spend the next few minutes just talking about what these two, have suggested we might like to talk about. So I'll, put these different bits and pieces on the screen and, yeah.

So first off, there was Michelle's piece. That was the one that she suggested. So we've covered that off, but you can find that it's called Fear Pain and Moving Forward. It was published, yesterday. Or almost yesterday, two days ago almost. and it's on the posts.com blog. So that was Michelle.

That sounds, but thank you for letting me share it. Yeah, you're very welcome. And, okay, let's move to a, few bits and pieces that Andrew mentioned. He's already alluded to this. This is, cloud Fest and it's the, presentation that Andrew himself will be doing called Beyond Speed and Uptime, what Agencies Actually Need from a Hosting partner.

anything you wanna add to that? You've obviously touched on it. but what, often gets missed by agencies and hosts actually is the fact that it's not just about cost. It's not just about support. It's not just about a speedy website. It's about partnerships and collaboration. And that's the whole point of a interim, isn't it?

[00:19:48] Andrew Palmer: And if an agency feels as though they're a partner to a host, the relationship can go on because if hosts aim agencies as partners rather than just. Customers, they can invest in time in them, in giving them ultra good support, ultra good offerings. And also the agency feels as though that they can promote that host, without any kind of bias or any company, with goodness in their heart.

But also if their partners, the, host can almost rely on the agency of being a, funnel of work, of putting more, the more and more customers they put on that hosting, the more and more recurring income the host has and the more and more reliability that the agency has. And that's just one point that I'm gonna try and make at Cloud Fest is that hosts try, to regard agencies as.

Super customers, if you like, or super, if you, if you haven't heard, cloudfest is like this event which takes place. the European variant of it. It's, it takes place in a theme park. And it's happening real soon, isn't it? It's like in, in, roost. Yeah. roost. Oh, is that how you pronounce it? It, I've been saying rost.

[00:21:01] Nathan Wrigley: So jealous. I'm so jealous. I have major fomo. I'm gonna be watching from the sidelines and cheering you all on. I'm a lot of, WordPress people are going actually, because we've, got the, there's a hackathon as well on for three days. Yeah. Which is amazing. I'm missing two of them, but I, and there's a WP Agency Day, which is being hosted, by Jonathan Wald.

[00:21:22] Andrew Palmer: And, there's lots of speaking going on. So if you go back and go to the agenda and go to the Monday, you'll see all the WordPress people talking and having a little chat as well. There's lots on the agenda. It's a busy, time. Yeah. we'll, and I've cover also got loads of meetings.

[00:21:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. We'll cover that a little bit later. 'cause we've got that in the show, in the, lineup of things that we want to cover off. But, I was on the, I was on the, slack yesterday, organizing my transportation and I'm getting the train with Tammy Lister. it was in the comments actually. It was fun, organized.

I've never been on the train under the, channel, I don't think. I have, but in a car. So I'm quite excited about that. I've just suddenly thought I haven't done the, the introductions from the people saying hi in the, in, all of the comments. let's quickly do that. You haven't introduced your sponsors either, I think.

[00:22:11] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. Yeah. we'll, get to that. Don't you worry? Okay. Okay. so first off, what has said about me, what she said, okay, we'll find out, we'll get to that. so first of all, influence WP Hello Ryan. hello from Charlotte, North Carolina, USA, also Courtney Robertson. She's gonna be, featured tangentially in a, little while.

[00:22:31] Nathan Wrigley: Hello from Dave, S nine. I don't know Dave, that's not ringing any bells. Michelle's said hello, but she's right there. So Good afternoon, Paul. Half Penny. I was looking at your product personalized WP just earlier actually. And, some of the nice new features that you put in. Thank you for that.

And also friendly web kit. hello. In the c in sea shanty style. What do I have to think? Something? No, that was because I said you didn't have to style. No, hello from Berlin. Says Max. Very nice. Thank you. And Maria Ansari. Hello everyone. Good afternoon. From Pakistan where it's been raining all day.

Gosh, we have slightly better weather in the UK than somewhere else on the planet. That never happens. James saying hi. Very nice to have you with us, James. Good morning. He says, and he's staying at Hotel California. No, I'm not singing. I'm refusing to sing. waving Hand from Femi. Thank you very much.

And Anil, hello from the Philippines. That's nice. And Nomad Skateboarding, sending good energy and thoughts. Michelle, thank. Oh, so that's a nice comment. Thank, you. Yes. He's a lovely guy, Michelle. Thank you. I still have an actual Rolodex on my shelf behind me. I just looked up and I think there's a cat behind you.

There was either, that was somebody's down. Yeah, the remaining cat. He's one of the most amazing WordPress people. Femme, there's no doubt talking about you, Michelle. I would imagine WP Madonna got your daughter. To thank for that Elliot, who's just down the road from me, says hi. Hi Elliot. There's Tammy that I was just mentioning.

da duh. And Aaron. Erin Bowie. Oh my god, Mr. Palmer. How are you doing? Great to see you. He's back baby. Thanks Barry. alright. So what does, that's Kiss hog. Kiss hog. Is it? Yeah. It's just to go to the next one. Oh, okay. I love, feels like Andrew going to atri should have been a goleman, could have been should have had some sort of oversight.

Unfair competition. Thanks Jess. I like it. lots of other things. GoDaddy is sponsoring the hackathon. Courtney works for GoDaddy. GoDaddy is sponsoring the Hackathon. Hope Fernando and Veto. after for a bit we'll take some snacks. This is me and Tammy on the train. Yeah. I'll bring crisps and things like that.

if that's all right with you. we traveled together, didn't we? You, me and Tammy. Yeah. That was coincidence though, wasn't it? That was more serendipity. We ended up in the sort of taxi together. That was nice. Yeah. I'll be at Frankfurt Airport around seven 30 on March the 13th. If other wants a group to check.

What we ended up doing, Courtney, me and Tammy have got a train to Strasbourg, which is in France, so it's in a totally different country, but it turns out it's only a 40 minute Uber ride away, so you can hop in the Uber fairly cheaply. So that was our little tactic. Here's the weather. Oh no, I thought it was some weather.

I'm in the a HC so Automatic for agencies program. They're doing exactly what Andrew is speaking on, especially Pressable with agency partnerships. Aha, brilliant. I see now that, Jess has always been top of the tree, do you know what I mean? She knows what she's at. She does. She's pretty, does Hello?

Hello from Orlando and. Jess is back. Mark. Andrew, you are the best. I presume she's talking about nomads, skateboarding. Yeah. Okay. I think we've gone through the gamut of the comments and that then puts us back to where we were a minute ago. 'cause I forgot to do that. And we'll just go back to the few bits and pieces that Andrew was wanting to share.

The next one that Andrew was wanting to share is this one, it's on the repository doing great journalism in the WordPress space. This is Ray Morrie's publication and, Andrew as highlighted this piece. Women, sorry. WordPress communities. Mark International Women's Day 2025 with women led events. Do you wanna lead on this?

Do you wanna tell us what it was about? Why caught your attention? It basically caught my attention because of Puja, because I've, in our pre-chat I said that Puja is basically the Indian person version of Michelle. she's omnipresent, like Michelle is omnipresent and Puja is omnipresent, and she's written for I think, WB Tavern and things like that.

[00:26:35] Andrew Palmer: And she writes for lots of other people, but she's also a massive, if you scroll down, you'll see how many speaking events she goes to. And she's a real advocate for WordPress, not just women in WordPress, but for WordPress. And she really does get to all of the little events. And India is massive on, on, WordPress.

They have loads of little word camps. It's got, because we, we are, we're Westernized and we look at them from a Western, focal point and say, oh, there hasn't been any in the US for a while, or there's not too many word camps in the uk. And we know that Whitley Bay is, there and all that kind of stuff.

But India is, I know it's a massive country. But they are, it seems to me that ev, every two weeks, there's a word WordPress in India and that's why it pleased me so much that WordPress or Word Camp Mumbai is going ahead, a major word camp in India and it's well deserved. But I think that what I, really, just wanted to highlight what PU is doing, and she's, An amazing person and, celebrating International Women's Day by focusing on her, which I think is great. Yeah. she also, in this article, which was interesting, she, attended lots of events and then noticed that only two to 3% of, speakers at these events that she went to were women.

[00:27:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And, thought to herself, let's do something about it. So rather than sitting there thinking, that's a, that's not good, but we need to do something about it. She did. And it says in December, she published a call to action on the WordPress community team blog urging WordPress, event organizers worldwide to host women led events for International Women's Day, which is in about five or six days time.

and the call to action seems to have been a real clarion call in that I just scroll down a little bit. There's, look at this. There's a great list here of bits and pieces that are happening. I presume as a result of that. Call to action. So what have we got? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 12 different events happening, and really credible piece about how one person can make a difference.

Yeah. And one of them is online, so if you're not in India, Uhhuh, you can attend the one in Colta. Yeah. This one at the top there. Yeah. Yeah. And oh, and the one at the bottom as well. The Nicaragua one as well. Yeah. Is also online. So there's a couple online there, but look at it, there's just so much going on.

Andrew, you were saying that in the UK it's it's, all a bit bleak in terms of the WordPress events. And then you pointed to Word Camp Whitley Bay, that's been canceled. which is a bit of a shame. The, only word camp that we've got in the UK has now been pulled. and Shavonne, who was organizing it, I don't actually know the ins and the outs, but she's decided, I'm guessing it's because of all the recent bits and pieces going on in the WordPress spaces decided that, it's too much to organize and what have you.

So Shavonne, if I got that wrong, please let me know. But, yeah, sad. In the UK things have collapsed a bit, but it looks like, events in India are carrying on as normal and and there's a nice, thrust to, to make them, be spoken at. And Uganda and Costa Rica are on the list as well, which is pretty cool.

Yep. What else? There another one? Uganda there? Yep. Uganda. That one. Yeah. But she's a real driver, a real, she gets in the car and puts her foot down and doesn't muckle out, she really does drive it. It's great. Yeah. Okay. So thank you to Puja. I'm sorry, I am now mid banana. I make no apologies because if I didn't eat this banana, you would hear my stomach.

so this is a better outcome. So in, in along the lines of the women, celebrating women in WordPress, there's a little clip that I often love and I can share this out on socials afterwards, where there's two little kids and somebody's asking them, do you think that women can be scientists?

[00:30:43] Michelle Frechette: And the little boy says, absolutely not. And the little girl says, and all she says is, I once extracted the DNA from a banana. I was like, and so between women's day and your banana, I, I just remembered that, so I'll have to share that out. Yeah. About it. Yeah. Yeah. Underrepresented in tech. Pardon me.

[00:31:03] Andrew Palmer: Let's not forget underrepresented in tech. Oh, I don't forget that at all. That's my, that's one of my, it's one of my joys in life. But yes, absolutely. let me put a few more comments about that piece up. So Courtney Echoing Andrew's speaking is the best. and Nomad Skateboarding sincerely appreciated and returned Jess and Andrew as Jess and Andrew just said.

[00:31:29] Nathan Wrigley: and then a few bits of other, oh, so back to Nomad skateboarding Poo, you helped me so much with the training team and other areas. That's awesome. oh, I feel like warm and fuzzy about having raised that. Yes. So thank you Andrew. That was great. And we got one more. Maybe there's another piece from you as well.

Now one more from Andrew. and it's this one. So this was a kind of curious one. Do you wanna just lay it all out? There's sort of two stories in one here, isn't there? we all, we're all worried about host white labeling, or, as da, as developers, we were all worried about host white labeling and about other people, white labeling and stuff like that.

[00:32:02] Andrew Palmer: But effectively, there was a slight miscommunication with this one. The Beaver Builder, people are the most genuine people in Word. the, of the most genuine people in workplace, lots of genuine people in workplace. They're generous, they're kind, they're, they want to help. They build people up.

They, do everything. They're phenomenal people. And there was just a slight miscommunication. I, feel When they announce this service because, oh, here we go, a page builder. now this page builder is our competition. Great. just like it was when WordPress announced $450 websites, all that kind of stuff.

And, I think it was just mis, we, I don't wanna criticize anyone because I'm not like that. I just want to, we must read everything. You've gotta don't stop reading the headlines, just read everything and read between the lines and try and understand what people are trying to communicate.

But it, they, got misunderstood in my view about doing white label, do it for me stuff, for agencies and freelancers. So I'm a, young, I'm a freelancer and I'm an agency, and I can go to Beaver Builder and say. Build this for me. I haven't got time. So they're allowing people to, bring on more work, basically.

but they, miscommunicate, it got miscommunicated in the way that they were then competition to these freelancers and agencies, and this offering was going out to the general public for want of a better phrase. So they've now re communicated it, which again, they've still been criticized for it because, Oh really? Gosh. Yeah. But anyway, because you, once you've made a mistake, you, can't un undo that in this modern world wonderful, social media world. But anyway, so they've, basically communicated and said, no, guys, honestly, it was to help you, you've, this isn't gonna be on our public channels.

We're not gonna advertise it on Facebook or whatever. But, and then ironically people are sharing it on Facebook, and on their Facebook things. But effectively you're saying no public advertising. No index on search engines, private access, exclusive to the community, clear comms, dedicated service team support, not competition.

that. And that's the, key. The, Be Beaver Builder guys came from agencies. They know what agencies feel like they were an agency. They built this out from, for, a desire to, make themselves better. They then sold it out to the thing. It's a quite, it's a very popular, page builder.

And now they're giving people the opportunity to grow their businesses With Beaver Builder. Yeah. not General Pub, not if I'm a florist and I go to Beaver Builder and say, build me a website, they'll go. No. And they also have an agency list where they point people to agencies that will help them build websites.

So they are definitely not for general public use, it's for freelancers to grow their business. And that, I just wanted to Yeah. Point that out really. I, think that's well appreciated. I think this is a curious case of just being thoroughly misunderstood. So I received the email probably 48 hours ago from Beaver Builder and no, it was more than that.

[00:35:16] Nathan Wrigley: Anyway, the point was I got an email which said, we're doing these white label services, and I didn't really think much of it. I did read it 'cause I read everything that they put out and then it just, I just thought, oh, that's interesting. if you've got an agency but you fancy somebody else doing the work and it's white labeled, that's a nice offering.

So you can get them to do it for you. And then of course, then read the, sort of Mayor Culper, version. So they've updated the blog post basically saying, look. It, got misunderstood. we're not gonna sell this out into the marketplace and therefore cannibalize your business. We're gonna do this for you, but nobody will know it was you.

And just to clarify it further, we're not gonna sell it outside of our current customers. Google will not be indexing this service. And so was that piece of the jigsaw puzzle that got missed, wasn't it? They just perhaps didn't quite communicate that as effectively. Yeah. And, that happens when you're excited to launch a product or service.

[00:36:12] Andrew Palmer: You, you can say, you know that 'cause they've obviously planned it for months, and then right at the very last minute, you forget the very important line of saying, this is just for you Pete. Yeah, Which, can happen. how many times have you sent out an email and gone oh yeah.

Yeah. And I have loads of times, how many times have you misspoken, when you're selling to a customer. Loads of times, so it's just a, it's just a question of, clarification. These guys are brilliant. I love them to death. And, this is a great service for agencies because we have white label people.

Anyway, I sold my agency to a white label agency. Yeah, So it's not, they're not offering anything revolutionary in that sense, are they? They just got misunderstood by their current customers who thought they were gonna be eating their own launch. And, that is not the point. so yeah, so if you're a Beaver Builder user, you now have a new thing that you can make use of.

[00:37:10] Nathan Wrigley: If if you've got too many projects coming through your pipeline or you just fancy, I don't know, taking a week off and going walk in the streets of Spain or something like that, goodness knows why you'd wanna do that, but maybe you've got a front door there or something. Lucky, but the point is they're not in competition. It's there to help you. And, they've communicated that I think clearly now. So thank you Michelle and for Andrew for bringing those articles to our attention. Yeah, I'll just go back to normal service very quickly, and that is to say this is Oslo, this is, WP builds.

if you fancy checking out what we do, probably the best way to do it is drop your email into this little field here. This is wp builds.com, click subscribe, and then we'll send you a couple of emails, one every week. This thing that we're doing now, this live thing gets repackaged as an audio podcast the following day, so it'll come out tomorrow and, and you'll get a notification about that.

But also if you head to this little archive section up here, you'll be able to see our list of, fairly extensive list of 411 podcast episodes. We do these every Thursday and, and we'll let you know about those as well. The latest one, as you can see is Simon Harper. Chatting all about the WordPress community.

But no, it just goes on and on We've got loads of content over there, so that's what we'll be letting you know about if you put your email address into there. also if you fancy looking at the, archive of what we're doing here, you can click on this link this week in WordPress under archives, and you can see, I think I get the award for the most hands on a website ever.

I think you do. Yeah. Look at 'em. All the hands. There's just hands all the way down. Even, my tiny hands, somebody said to me the other day, why the hands? And I'm like, I don't know why the hands, it's just accept that there's the hands, you can't stop now that you've got it. stop it.

Gotta keep it going. Yeah. and the last thing is, yeah, if you do click that sub, the subscribe link, which we've got, up here, then you'll end up here and you can fill out the, the form that I just mentioned as well. Okay. There we go. That I think is all the different bits and pieces. Oh, just very quickly.

I do need to thank our sponsors. So I'll do that quickly now. this show is brought to you by GoDaddy Pro Blue Host, and Omnis Send. You can see that there are, sponsors for this week and, thanks to them for keeping the lights on. Really, appreciate it. So if you end up on any of their properties, or you see them at a Word Camp or something like that, say that you heard about 'em from WP Builds.

It'll make all the difference. The world to keeping this podcast going. Thank you very much. ho, so we did the beaver builder story, then we're here. Let's move on. Let's pivot. This is, interesting. Jonathan DiUS was at Word Camp, Asia, along with a bunch of core committers. And they had a, sort of an informal sit down together with other core committers, but also with previous alumni.

I think he calls them, em emus. Emeritus, that's how you say that word, isn't it? so they gathered together and they just were throwing around the, hot potato of what the heck is going on with, commitments to core and how do we, pivot and make everything work in the, era that we're now living in.

Of course, I guess the background to this is the, situation in which automatic who historically has been the, vast majority of, commits to the WordPress project. They have decided to step back their commitments to the same number of hours as WP Engine. And I noticed actually, I think WP Engine over the last week has stripped its hours further back.

I think it was from 45 to 40, sorry, to 20. I could be getting these numbers wrong. And so automatic has done the same. So automatic is now contributing 20. So I guess that'll mirror that little, that tennis match will carry on. But in this piece, they summarize what they talked about during that meeting.

And really, to my eyes, there's quite a lot of concern here about the capacity of the project to go forward. With the way it is at the moment. just a quick one, some short term concerns. Gutenberg is product focused. There needs to be clarity around how to receive pro project product based feedback.

There are many ongoing products within the editor that now have no clear ownership or someone with enough knowledge to continue working on. There is a roadmap of high level, of a high level view, but there needs to be short term ones. So contributors know where to focus their efforts, blah, blah, blah.

Those looking to step up and contribute. Don't know where to focus their efforts, having 6.9 and 7.0 releases being maintenance. strip out features, just keep them. Keep the project steady away, make sure there's no, horrible screaming bugs or anything like that. And it, goes on and on making it easier to contribute. There's a load of bullet point lists there, areas requiring more clarity. Again, there's absolutely loads there. Loads of follow up actions. This piece appeared on make WordPress org, it was called, WordCamp Asia 2025 Core Committer meeting notes. So it's not an alarm bell, but from Jonathan's point of view, I think it was interesting that he wrote all this down and it does make you think, gosh, times have changed a little bit and the project really does need sort of good stewardship in the days, weeks, and months to come.

So I don't know if you have any thoughts on that either of you two? I do. Yeah. One, one of the things that I really, the first line of the, no formal agenda allow newer committers to meet more senior ones. Yeah. Interesting. Eh, I didn't even think that was disallowed. if you don't meet.

[00:42:57] Andrew Palmer: Senior, and now I work for a company that has this kind of structure of where the leaders are open and you can slack them and message them and get advice. I can see that this is a, bit of a nuisance. how on earth would I, as a committer know what I'm doing if I've, if I don't know who to connect with and I dunno who to contact, or even if I'm not allowed to contact with, I, I don't think the word allow here means permission.

[00:43:26] Michelle Frechette: It's the wrong word, Michelle. Is it? Yeah. I think it really means facilitate, right? Like in on this side of the pond, sometimes we say allow meaning to facilitate and to make it easier to do those kinds of things, not as opposed to permission and gatekeeping. Yeah, and Tammy actually just said in the comments, it isn't disallowed, it's just not facilitated in a way that is helpful.

[00:43:47] Nathan Wrigley: I think Tammy was in the room by the sounds of it. Yes. So we're just, so I'm reading between the lines. I don't know that she was, but it sounds like it, it was a much needed meeting and a very tiny room, but something just about talking to all the humans. and she goes on to say there are other concerns, but also actions too.

And then for Clarity's purpose, things like this have happened before. Yeah, I appreciate that. Thank you Tommy. And, I just wondered though if the, tenor of this, I have met Jonathan. He's a very polite person as you would, expect. And but there was just so much in here. I did, wonder if the, if it was a very polite way of saying us core committers have our concerns.

and obviously there are, and Tammy goes on to point out that it's not just a laundry list of here's a problem, here's a problem, here's a problem, here's a problem. It is also, what did she say right at the end? she said something about, oh, there are actions to do as well. Yes. Yeah, there we go. So yeah, if you scroll down, there we go.

The follow up action items, there's loads of those at the end, but I did feel that maybe it was, it was an illustration of, of just how difficult it would be to keep a project like this rolling forwards at the moment. given the sort of the nature of. Think Courtney makes a valid point.

[00:45:07] Andrew Palmer: And and I wasn't just looking at the headlines, just like I said, but I did read all of this because you are great. You send them quite an advantage. In fact, we got 'em yesterday or this morning, I read them, but Courtney says it's, basically supporting those connections happening.

And that's not necessarily what's, happening because let's not forget these are volunteers, right? Yes. Yeah. That's, some of them are paid, some of them are not. We don't know who's paid and we dunno who's not. and it, and by paid you mean sponsored by their own companies or outside organizations not paid by automatic, yeah, sure.

Got you. Yeah. Just make it clear. Yeah. but the, key here is, that, is reading something like this, you know exactly how hard it is to run this project and to lead it right. That's the key. Yeah. Got it. Yeah, I, just was seeing things there that I'd never thought about. Basically, that was my thing.

[00:46:03] Nathan Wrigley: And as I As there was another line and I thought, I've never thought about that. And then the next line was, oh, I've never thought about that. And then another one I've never thought about that it, it started to build up sort of anxiety, not anxiety, but, started to build up in me this sense of, gosh, there's so many things, there's so many.

This is about, and this is about core. Think about the fact that this applies to every group. So this applies to community, this applies to the photos group, this apply and, in the photos group that some of us have just taken control and decided we're going to move forward. And, there's things that are outside of our permission of course.

[00:46:36] Michelle Frechette: And so we're working with, people that have those, final say on those kinds of things. But we are moving things forward in a way that. Is without like just creating our own infrastructure basically, because there hasn't been something it was all top down before. And if we're gonna keep this moving forward with less, oversight from automatic side of things, then we actually need to rally together, which is what Jonathan and the core competitors did at this meeting, and find a way to move forward.

because if the open source project is gonna keep moving forward, we as a community need a way to do that too. And one of the things that I saw there that I'm not sure you highlighted was without burning out the people Oh yeah. Who have been so, much part of what makes it happen. So not and so experienced mentors not burning those out, but not burning out people who are leading all of the different, commu, groups within, working groups within, WordPress.

And so I think there's a lot that needs to happen and we need to find a way to structure ourselves and each one of these groups. Very specifically with the core, obviously, but community, all of it needs to have a way to do that. Yeah. It's interesting the language used here. 'cause I, really saw that word jumped out quite handful.

[00:47:51] Nathan Wrigley: It was handful. So we need to prevent burnout with the handful left. And when I see that word in that context, it feels like the implication is it's not many. it's way less than it was. That's the, so anyway. How wonderful, firstly, that these people sat down and had this discussion. That's really nice.

Secondly, thank you to Jonathan for putting it in writing. Absolutely. luckily we happen to have a really credible way of publishing this stuff online. Whoa, that's handy. and so it was put up there so people like us can talk about it and pontificate it and, it's really, honestly, I obsess about WordPress, but it's really educated me just this one piece about how much, how many cogs are moving and how many plates are spinning and how we've gotta be mindful of keeping the plates that really, need to be spinning, going in the, next six, 12 months, whatever it may be.

And, yeah. So thank you to Jonathan and anybody was in the room. Tammy says that she was in the room. Courtney makes a point, let me just get the context right for this. She, Courtney makes a point supporting those connections happening. She's using the op arrow. I don't know what that was referring to.

[00:49:01] Michelle Frechette: Referring to the fact that it isn't disallowed. So the word allow. Oh, okay. Thank, she means supporting the connections. Yeah. Tammy just clarifying that she was in the room and it's for those, she said it's a way for those to share with those who were not. Yeah. And brilliantly. Don, I might add.

[00:49:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I like, nice quick bullet pointed list. Really helped me out. Courtney says she wasn't in the room but heard great things from those who were there. That's great. And okay. Back, I'm gonna have to give more context to this 'cause it won't all appear, it's truncated. Tammy says it was honestly needed and helped so many of us.

It might be, it might read hard, but it was so important to the, for those core people there to be in and hopefully to share with those who couldn't be with us. Yeah. I get way more of it now, so thank you. Core is hard. Note the rules applied here also. It was a beautiful space to be heard. Great. Okay.

there we go. Nice. Go and read it if you are, interested in the project, the core of WordPress. And you're curious about where, it's at the moment. This is fascinating. It's really interesting, and you'll get a real insight into how many, like I said, plates are spinning. Gosh, we spent a while on that.

Sorry about that. okay, let's move on. back to, sorry Andrew, you were gonna say. Okay. Spend some time on it. Yeah, Good. okay, we're back to cloudfest. This is, the hackathon. I've never been before and in all honesty, I haven't really paid a great deal of attention to the sort of press surrounding it either.

So I'm fairly ignorant apart from the fact that I know it exists. And I know that there has been an increasing sort of move towards focusing on WordPress for various isolated little bits of it. But, this is interesting, so I've learned a lot. I'm gonna be there this time around reporting on it a little bit for, the WP Tavern, but this is about the, the hackathon, which is taking place and about how it's all organized.

And so the hackathon, I dunno if Carol Inger started it, but over the recent, I think five or six years, she's been heading it up. And, this whole article explains what it's all about. How basically a bunch of people submit projects that they would like to dedicate. Time to a hundred people have been accepted from 400 to be in the room at that moment.

And there's gonna be, I think six different projects all going on at the same time. And the idea is to, go from zero to shippable. And if it isn't shippable, to then follow up after the event with people like me in the media, focusing on, where did that project go, what worked, what didn't work, and so on.

And and it sounds really exciting getting a bunch of people out there and the fact that it's all open source. And so we're gonna be, looking at AI and Federated systems. There's two projects happening under there, cross CMS and Open Web Initiatives, CMS, freedom, CMF, health Checks and Federated Community Events.

so there's way more than six. there's probably more like 10 or something like that. Yeah, security and infrastructure and then accessibility and inclusivity. So many different projects being worked on by these people at the same time. And, just a nice environment, getting 'em all in the room and, seeing what happens.

It's interesting. Yeah. So anyway, I'll be there, Andrew. We'll be there. Are you going to this, Andrew, are you involved in this hackathon? I, missed, an opportunity to fly out on the Friday. I can only fly out on the Sunday. Ah, so I'll be going to the Monday one as well as the WP agenda thing.

[00:52:26] Andrew Palmer: so yeah, it's a busy day Monday, but what I, there's one, one aspect on there that has been mentioned way before in, WordPress data migration. And that's, yeah. that's gonna be, maybe we get a solution to the data migration problem in, three days. It's over three days. So it starts on Sundays, it goes through Saturday and ends on Monday.

Carol works unbelievably hard on this last hackathon I went to. By the end of it, she literally couldn't speak. Her voice had gone Oh, bless her. Run around. I'm not surprised. Rumbled around and encouraging everybody. And, there are some majorly skilled people at this hackathon. There are. It blows your mind how talented these people are, so it's gonna be Yeah, nice.

Sad that I'm missing the whole three days, but that's fine. I can go, to bits of it during, the Monday and in between the breaks, but, yeah, it's a great, and it's so good that Cloud Fest have opened this up to WordPress. Yeah. Isn't it just great, isn't it Brilliant. Open source. Open source is the whole point now.

[00:53:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Crazy. It used and the idea of. A host thing or servers, here's my servers to make your, here's my servers, Mr. Host, to make your websites run quicker. Okay. Which websites? Okay. you majority is WebPress. Let's just focus on that as well. Yeah. So it's great. It's cool. I'll be poking microphones into people's faces, annoyingly just, and they'll be speaking to you.

Yeah. Getting them to, stop being brilliant and talk to me instead. but there, so my fir first hackathon says Tammy, and she is excited. That's great. Yeah. Okay. So there we go. Check it out. I think, I don't know if there's any, tickets available for this event at all. So Cloud Fest as a whole, but, this was reported on by the repository Cloud Fest Hackathon 2025, an event that hits its stride.

It kind of charts the evolution of the event over multiple years and, and how it is going now. just a very quick hack tip, we'll just move on to this briefly word, camp Europe, which is happening in a few months time. we have Lua Salazar, who is, has now been revealed to be the recipient of the Word Camp Europe Diversity Scholarship.

I, I'm not gonna say, too much about that, but, this person is from, it says hailing from Nicaragua. and they have been, they have been connected. And the idea of this scholarship, or yes, scholarship is the right word, is to, is to get somebody to an event like this who hasn't been to an event like this before, who has proven themselves to be, a good.

A good steward in the WordPress space and somebody that kind of deserves to be there with the, with the help that they need to get them. congratulations to Lua. I just have to say I am very, excited about how far Word Camp Europe has come since my very famous slash infamous tweet of 2023.

[00:55:25] Michelle Frechette: And the, Attempt at, I shouldn't say attempt at the, focus on diversity for the speaker lineup. The focus on being able to have the scholarship and making sure that it's a fairer, more equitable, event. Just if I had to suffer all of the hate that I did for that one tweet, which got almost 40,000 impressions for this kind of movement forward.

And I'm not saying it's all 'cause of me for sure, there are so many people who are interested in diversity, but, but maybe that was a small sparker catalyst that helped a little bit. I am just absolutely thrilled with how much and how. Far forward word Camp Europe has become as far as making sure that there's more focus on diversity.

and the scholarship is such a huge way to do that. So kudos to the team. Yeah. Yeah. so you can check that out of the Madonna of WordPress. There. There you go. There you go. that was on Europe dot word comp.org. as with everything that we discussed today, it'll be in the show notes. So if you do subscribe, you'll get the email and it basically, I'll just, there'll be muddled up amongst a bunch of other links that we didn't manage to cover.

[00:56:38] Nathan Wrigley: 'cause there's too many things happening at the WordPress space it turns out. But there'll be in all of there so you can find the link. Okay. Let's move on. this is an event. This, this is passed me by, I dunno, quite know how I missed this one. Maybe this is because it's the first time it's been announced, I'm not sure.

But, this is WP 25. It's being organized. It's a virtual conference. It's gonna be happening, this week, the 6th of March. And it's, the custodians of this are, it's on human made.com, so I presume that they are the custodians of this. And, you can see the list of the great and the good.

There's, Mary Hubbard, who's the executive director of WordPress. There's. There she is. She's in the comments. She's all over. Tammy Lister and, and Tom Wilt. I was, in the pub with Tom on, the weekend, weren't we? not on the weekend. On Thursday, weren't we, Andrew? That was quite nice to see him.

Yeah. Again, Alan sch lesser. He's, yeah, there's Alan, who's Carol's partner, but he, I was, okay. Sorry, I, sorry. I had a conversation with him at Cloud Fest and I'm still dissecting it, and that was two years ago. He's so clever. It's crazy. Yeah. He's bright. Very, bright. I shared the stage with Noel talk, in Asia about AI as Steve Jones at, equalize Digital is very much a component, a proponent, I should say, of, accessibility on the web.

[00:58:00] Michelle Frechette: This is a, an amazing lineup. Yeah, it is an amazing lineup. for obvious reasons. The event's being run by Human Made, so a significant amount of people, participating are from Human made. But we've also got contributions from, equalize Digital WordPress itself. Mary Hubbard, freelancer, Tammy Lister.

[00:58:20] Nathan Wrigley: although she's working with Grade Suite now, which is really nice. who else have we got? Yeah, at Altus, and various other places. It is, titled as Explore How WordPress is set to be the game changer for Enterprise. So it's one of these enterprise level events you'd expect nothing less from human made and you can click this register button if you want to be a part of that.

And it's happening in a few days time. So the 6th of March, what would that make it? That would make it Thursday, 3:00 PM GMT or 10:00 AM Eastern. there's more on this website and it's human made.com/wordpress in 2025. Event with hyphens, as you would expect. It's looks like that. Go to it because it'll be well organized and it's, just, and Tom, I think Tom does the continuity maybe.

[00:59:11] Andrew Palmer: Yeah, he's good at, he's very good at it. Yeah, he is. I saw him at one event. I dunno which one, maybe it was one of their own events. He's very calm, isn't he? Ai, the AI event. They did, yeah. Really a very calm, doesn't, not, unruffled by anything. Yeah. That's what you need, isn't it? It's very good.

[00:59:29] Nathan Wrigley: Especially when all, is going wrong. When all the dominoes are not falling. Steve's got low to add. And don't forget that Steve being equalized digital. The European Accessibility Act coming in April. Yeah. Not long off now. Very important. Get involved in accessibility and stuff and I think really the team at Equalized Digital have got it pretty much sussed and amika, as well, who's an independent, she's doing a thing at the hackathon on, accessible images and all that kind of stuff.

[01:00:07] Andrew Palmer: And, okay. people have gotta listen up and hear up and to be able to persuade their customers to get involved in accessibility. Gosh, you know what, looking at all this, there is a lot going on, isn't there, in virtual events, but also real world events. We've mentioned all that stuff happening in India.

[01:00:21] Nathan Wrigley: I've coming up, I mention it later. Yeah, please do. we've just, the, two, two of us, have just been to Word Camp Asia. I've just come back from WordPress, W-P-L-D-N, the WordPress London Meetup. we've got this online event. There's just loads going on. It's absolutely, maybe it is, maybe it's more thriving than we think.

[01:00:41] Andrew Palmer: WP London meetup was standing room only, so congratulations to everybody that really organizes that. That was, it was great. And we learned a lot of that. that was a good one, wasn't it? That was a really nice event. They all good, but that was outstanding, Yeah. We had Louise Tower and then we had Keith, Devon, and Mark, Wilkinson.

[01:01:04] Nathan Wrigley: so we had sort of two presentations, one with one person and one with two, and it went down really well. I, I really enjoyed that. It was absolutely excellent. And we do that each month actually. Yeah. Louise's, talk was on accessibility and she nailed. Yeah. Yeah. she's so good, isn't she? She explains exactly.

She's amazing. We, put the, we'll put the, videos out for that. Hopefully they might, Dan who, organizes the video rendering for all that. He might have done it already, actually. But if you go to WP LDN UK. You can see more there and, yeah. Anyway, blah, blah, blah. So various bits and pieces. Now this one, I kinda feel this is a bit unfair, but there you go.

This is Word Camp Asia. I was there in the room. Matt had his q and a, he doesn't do like a state of the word type thing. He, did a very, quick, five minutes where he spoke at a podium and he just put some slides up about, about previous trips that he'd had to Manila. And it turns out that one of the, one of the earlier trips that he did when he was, he really looked like a, such a baby face.

Oh, that was quite, brave of him to put that picture up there because everything about him was different, wasn't it? he was probably about 19 or 20, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. But there he was with a bunch of people in the Philippines and even then the, whole thing was taken off, obviously.

So he did that for five minutes. Talked about his reminiscences about Word Camp, sorry, events in, Asia, and, I dunno if they were called Word camps back then, but then he moved on to a q and a and, various people stood up and asked various questions as you'd imagine. It's just the usual range of things.

There's a couple of mics. Anybody that wants to ask a question can, can ask anything. And there's no pre-written anything, so he's gotta a think on his feet. First person up was Michelle. Who's special? What? Special what? there was such a pregnant pause in the room and I was like, I, have no, I'm not fearful.

[01:03:07] Michelle Frechette: So my, an anxiety about, you got a little hand travel playing gift didn't you? Which was California. I did. I'll show it here. I know that if you're listening, you won't be able to see it, but it's if you can focus on it there or not. But, it's a little. Handmade WordPress sticker before we had a WordPress font.

I know it's really hard to focus on. No, we got it. We could see it totally. Yep, We can see it. And, it's, not the right font. It's not evenly cut because it was hand cut by Matt himself printed on his home printer. and it just says WordPress and sent it centered in the middle.

Different colors. I'm gonna send some people crazy. Michelle, what do you thinking? so what do I, my question is like, what do I do with this? So I don't wanna peel it off and put it on a laptop that somebody will die. So I'm actually going to be researching on Amazon after this Are there little frames like for postage stamps that I could just frame this and put it on the wall behind me?

Kind of. You definitely can get teeny tiny frames. You know what though? That would be cool in a big frame. I think. So what's really nice about that is it's, like, it's really, I don't know, it's really evocative. It goes right back to the beginning, to the era before WordPress was even destined to become a thing.

[01:04:19] Nathan Wrigley: And Matt is there in his, probably his bedroom or something, printing off things on his little home printer, cutting them out, not lining them up centrally being a typical sort of teenager, sticking it in a thing that he probably bought from the local store around the corner that makes, helps you make badges and things like that.

Or pins you call them. And and you've got a little piece of that. And I thought that was, I do, I thought that quite nice. Yeah. yeah. But then the questions went on, on and on they go and various different ones. And then, Courtney stood up and said, ignoring ai. Let's just, 'cause everybody knows AI's in the future of WordPress, what is gonna happen.

That my question actually was about Yeah, That's right. Yeah. what's gonna happen in the future with Yeah. WordPress, but not just the future, the next five years. And this piece is, I don't know, this piece is in the search engine journal. it feels like a non-story in all honesty, but I'm raising it, so there must be something in it.

and Matt was, he, didn't really have an answer to that question. And so he, handed it over to Mattias, Ventura, sat in the front row, is the lead architect for Gutenberg. And he said, Mattias, have you got anything? And Mattias stood up and basically said the same thing. And so the, story here is, there's no, nobody has a clue what's going on in WordPress 'cause they can't answer the question.

But then actually, if you think about it, if I ask you, like you the audience, what's gonna happen within your family? In the next five years, I'll just put you on the spot and you've gotta give an answer right now. And not only that, there's thousands of people listening to you both online and in the room.

lay off. I think we need to put, I think we need to put some context on this. I think Courtney and others were involved in a, round table. They were, yeah, they were, that's what they call it. They were, and that question came up and, I think Courtney was more interested in finding out whether Matt did have a vision five years in the future.

[01:06:20] Andrew Palmer: We've gotta, we've gotta remember also that he's concentrating on a few other things at the moment, whether it's self-imposed or not. there's lots of things going on. There's, he's just bought WP AI and James The page, company page, yeah. Beeps going on and Tumblrs going on and, it's very, I can't understand how someone can focus on.

Everything at all the same time. it's a real talent to me, but it's just, and then you, and then somebody comes out of the audience who's well known is a massive contributor and goes, right Matt, what's happening over the next five years? Then, and he, just went. Oh, yeah, and it's, you're right.

It's a tough question to answer. Yeah. It's very tough. Anyway, the point is the, optics that I thought were interesting was that the search engine journal, rather than saying it, it didn't give a definitive answer. It's just look at the title Word, camp Asia. No plans for WordPress in five years.

[01:07:21] Nathan Wrigley: I mean that not right. I don't think. Yeah. Say. Where do you see yourself in five years? Yeah. What's the right answer? Oh, working here for your company, right? yeah, I'm head of hr and that, that, and that question is, that's right. That's right. Yeah. I, do what I, sometimes think about those events and think about if, that was me, firstly it couldn't be me 'cause I wouldn't have had the capacity to do what has happened with WordPress.

it would've been a failed venture entirely. But I do think, gosh, it is, it's fairly hard course standing up there and just letting people ask you whatever the heck you want. And Courtney who's in the coach, she asked the question, she, there's an emoji there, the moon, that was it.

Yeah. he did be on the moon. Matt indicated what wanting WordPress to be on the moon. Yeah, I, I have, a memory of that, but I can't remember what the context was, but, she didn't say the Mars. Oh, is it something? Okay. Anyway, WordPress on the moon. but then counter to that, we've got Curtis in the car.

Hello Curtis. I don't think we've met before. Curtis says his job is to be the visionary. And said something else. let's not make excuses for his lack of vision. and let's go further down. Courtney says, in our session WordPress in 2023, we spoke about the shift that learners now need to prepare for the job marketing WP amongst other things.

yeah. And then Maria. Sums it up nicely. had to ask somebody else who also didn't know. I didn't get that feeling though in the room. I just got the feeling that, it's hard to answer a question like that. There didn't seem to be a sense of, maybe there was, I don't know. I wanted to hear if Matt thought we'd be out of Gutenberg.

maybe that was the interesting thing or polishing it. Multilingual phase four. So when you asked the question, was that the point then you wanted to know if the, I, wanted her to specifically say, are we ever gonna get multilingual in this? Yeah. Because I felt that might be part of the question.

I just, I don't know. Given, the way everything is at the moment, I, just don't know how long those milestones are gonna take to reach. So we've obviously got through the first two phases of Gutenberg, and now we're gonna go into the sort of collaborative phase, or we're in it. but the, pace of news reporting in the first two phases was pretty intense.

you'd go, you, couldn't go a month without there being some incremental bit of knowledge to put into this show about it. But we haven't really, we haven't really had much on the collaboration. we have a little bit, but not, a great deal. and, no talk about what the multilingual bit would be, so maybe there is some sort of systemic slowing down.

I, guess I saw a tweet the other day about collaboration. Yeah. Like Google Doc and stuff like that, where you and multis That's right at the same time and that's it. Talking to each other. it's definitely on the way forward and I think, oh yeah, and there are bits and pieces happening.

Like you, you've seen projects where you've got the UI mapped out and you've got various different ways that you can add comments and so on. it just doesn't seem to be coming quite as thick and fast, Duh, I asked the Yeah, of course. Yeah, I asked my questions kindly knowing how contention everything feels.

This is Courtney speaking. I wanted to encourage his visionary side. I love listening to that. Truly. Yeah. So sorry Courtney. if the, if you've got the feeling that I'm, in some way denigrating your question. I, that wasn't my intention. I do apologize. That wasn't what I was trying to get across.

It was more the You're not a pot stir, Nathan. No, we don't that. I hope we've realized that after so many years search engine. Exactly. Yeah. But just the inflammatory nature, how basically a non thing can become a thing. Like we don't have any plans for, the, next five years. We do have lots of plans, but he might not have articulated them in a sort of gung-ho way and been entirely visionary at that moment.

[01:11:24] Michelle Frechette: But there's, not a destination that isn't in five years WordPress will have achieved everything and we're done. A journey. The goal is that we should continue to be working in five years and at, the rate at which technology advances. There's a special term for it. I don't remember like the something syndrome or whatever.

Who knows, five years ago, did we know that AI would be as big as it is now? Probably there were some people who could see that. I certainly didn't. No. So I think that there's a lot happening that, how can you plan for that coming up? Who knows? thank you Courtney. You put my mind at rest.

[01:11:59] Nathan Wrigley: That's great. I didn't want there to be a, any sort of, weirdness. all good. Nathan Roger's article is in, quotes. Interesting. Yeah, it was interesting. I, thought it was interesting to put it up. Just, just give you the context of how something can be, represented differently than the way I saw it in the room on that, day.

Okay, let's move on. We are fast running out of time. God, we've got so many things to do. okay. Let's do this one quickly. we have a couple of global sponsors who have been announced. So the global sponsors are the sponsors that you'll see at all of the, word Camp events across the globe. And, as a result of that, it's got a high price tag attached to it.

And, and so far, we have. In the year 2025, we've got a two hosting and Woo, who have stepped up. I remember A two was just recently acquired. We talked about that a few weeks ago. Yeah, group, one wasn't it? Yeah. I think it was Group one. I, yeah. Global, world hosting. That's right. I apologize.

Yeah. I'm mixing up. Group one was WP Rocket. I'm mixing up acquisitions there. Yeah. So thank you for correcting that. and yeah, so thank you to them A two hosting and to woo for stepping up. Hopefully keeping those events going throughout the globe. oh, here we go. Helping you out. Michelle here.

Michelle. Thank you James. It's technological singularity syndrome or future shock syndrome. Gosh, James is a clever chap. Wow. Yeah. And I think it happens faster than like carbon dating, expires kind of thing. The half life and all of that, oh my goodness. When you said carbon dating Yeah, my head went like carbon.

Dating, what the heck? Like dating of carbon. Anyway, I dunno what happened. It was that banana. I Moving right along. Yeah, moving along. okay. 90% cut carbon. Yeah. So a two. And woo. Thank you very much. we would put more time into it, but we are fasting out, WordCamp US is looking for organizers.

Interesting thing about this one. They've obviously been looking for organizers for every event that they do, but they've decided this year that they're not going to constrain it to, in the same way that they have, they're hoping to welcome some new faces from further afield. And the requirements about location have been changed.

I'm guessing that in the past you needed to be, I dunno, resident in the Americas or something like that. I don't really know. but now you simply have to be, have an overlap in time zones with the Americas. So, long as you are prepared to get up. If you live in, let's say the Philippines where we've just been, and you are prepared to overlap your time, that's fine.

And then you have to do all the other commitments, the code of conduct and all of that. So if Word camp us in Portland later this year is something that you'd like to be a part of, but you don't live anywhere near that part of the world, it would seem you are not precluded. So there we go.

Anything to add to that? Probably not. No. But I think Andrew and I were just laughing at, friendly web guys. Oh comment that carbon dating is tinder for old people. Yeah, exactly That. That's where my head You've encapsulated perfectly. That's exactly it. That's where my head went. Oh yeah. Yeah.

And I never know, I can never remember what LOL means. I always get the wrong one. Laugh out loud. Yeah. I always think it's lots of love. Always it, it's not. You're an old romantic. That what it is. that's just, I dunno, that's just the way my head goes and I, always have to go. It's not lots of love.

What's the other one? Laugh out loud. Okay, great. Okay, moving on. Where are we? Just a little sight for you to look at. I dunno who owns this domain, but they've done very well bagging it. It's quite a nice one, WP Gallery. and if you go there, it's updated regularly. it's been updated today.

I don't know if that's just literally a PHP function saying show today's date. I don't know. But, they're saying that it's been updated today. But, it's just a place where you can see, some nice examples of WordPress websites. It presumably is mimicking in some ways the WordPress showcase. So if you Google WordPress Showcase, you'll find a curated list of things which have been curated by automations and people like that.

Jonathan Boer, I think was part of it as well as some other people. And, Yeah, so it's there. If you wanna look at this, you'll get some inspiration. If you click on it, it doesn't do anything other than take you, directly to, what that site might look like and a few different bits and pieces.

I just thought it was quite nice and worthy, whether you've quick mention, but a nice URL Well done for bagging. Hand picked. Hand picked. Okay. So it is somebody take a lot of work. Yeah, I guess it's labor of love, isn't it? One of those things that you enjoy doing. And if you wanna submit your website, you can do it as a little form here and you can tell 'em what your website is about and so on.

Okay. very quickly. don't use WooCommerce myself. I've got an interview coming out this week actually on the, jukebox podcast with James Kemp, who is very senior in Woo. And, gets into a few of the bits and pieces on here, but there's been some, branding changes. Woo. Now looks a lot more modern.

He was saying that really in the past they didn't really have a brand as such. They just had the logo and a couple of colors. Whereas now I think they've got a, a real branding agency in and they're very happy with what it communicates. But, six, 9.7 WooCommerce, 9.7 loads and loads of things.

But I think the most interesting thing from a technological point of view is the, speed, the implementation of, yeah, the performance basically has been shot through the roof in certain, scenarios. So you can read about that. I don't wanna get into the weeds of it 'cause we're running out of time, but I dunno if either of you want to mention it.

[01:17:40] Michelle Frechette: I interviewed recently Tamara, who is in marketing for Woo. Nice. And Ian, who is, in development for Woo about the, not only the changes in the, branding, but also the roadmap of what's coming up. That's a recent, podcast over on post status. Nice. Where you could hear a lot more in depth where we had conversations with them about that.

[01:17:59] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Great. But yeah, this, refactor, I'll just quote it very quickly. We've completely, so it says, faster block editor performance. We've complete, completed a significant refactor of the product, block registration system, specifically around the register, block, register, product block type function, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

One of the most impactful improvements is performance. Instead of maintaining individual store subscriptions for each block, the new implementation consolidates them into a single subscription, significant reducing overhead. The refactoring system reduces subscription callbacks by 99% and cuts execution time by 75% when working with a single product template.

It's pretty cool. and the callbacks goes down from, I can't remember, it was many, and it's now gone down to, oh, it was 4,550 has now been reduced to 24, and the total execution time for that was 2.7 seconds. No, 2.47 seconds. Which has now been taken to a little over half a second North 0.63.

amazing what can be done by a bunch of intelligent people the way you, if, anybody, I, look at, I always look at things from a commercial perspective because I'm just built that way. The, reason for these improvements, not only for user usability and everything, but I just listened to a recent, interview with Matt and he let slip, let go, or just public knowledge said how much automatic, revenue was, and then slipped, just straightaway, just said which WooCommerce is responsible for most of it.

[01:19:42] Andrew Palmer: So the, investment in WooCommerce is very obvious because, we've got the proprietary systems that are quite easy to use. Woo. Needs to be easier to use, needs to increase market space and it's already pretty big if it's earning circa half a billion a year for automatic, so yeah, I think these are important from a usability perspective, and I can see this becoming easier for non-developers to use, as we, these improvements will help non-developers launch a WooCommerce a site much, easier and much quicker.

[01:20:21] Nathan Wrigley: So the podcast interview that I've got coming out where James go, is it great pains to talk about how, how much time they're gonna put into refactoring a lot of the systems and also, how they're really leaning into what the users want much more. So they seem to be much more focused on that 'cause it is a big driver of revenue.

Jess Frick says she's obsessed with how the w in the Woo logo looks like a shopping cart. Yeah. I think in some cases it is. Actually. I think they've got the W and then the O underneath as the wheels haven't they? If you look at it, somewhere, you'll find a little logo, which does in fact show that.

But, the, also, the fact that WooCommerce represents 37% up from 35% last year of e-commerce. so it's absolutely huge. 4, 4, 4 0.8 million websites run WooCommerce. Yeah, it's absolutely massive, isn't it? And e-commerce isn't going anywhere. We're all wedded to our little, rectangles that we put in our hands.

And, just the idea of not being able to buy something from the sofa at four in the morning is, is completely alien to my kids. it's just totally normal, isn't it? Now you wanna be able to buy anything whenever, wherever. And, and in the UK at least, everything is now returnable. That used to be an impediment to e-commerce, you'd buy it and then you'd be stuck with it.

But now everything that you buy it, try it, give it back. If you don't want it, it's all happening. apparently WP Gallery is owned by Y Collette. Okay. Thank you very much. that's good to know. Oh, and he run back and corrected the spelling, so I'll say it the same Yang Colette, but with, C-O-L-L-E-T.

There you go. We really are fast running out of time. Let me just flick through some of these. I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna do that. Oh, let's do this one quickly. I know Andrew in the past has, been like really into divvy and elegant marketplace and all of that kind of stuff. They've introduced ai, it feels like the ship sailed for this exciting announce seven months with, yeah.

[01:22:24] Andrew Palmer: Seven months ago this was, maybe, I may be wrong, but I've been using AI in Dvy before I sold my agency and I, yeah, I am a Divvy fan. it's a great community. Built up over, Nick is a clever chap. Started this when he was 15. Gosh. Started doing themes, 85 themes he had, which are now redundant because of divvy.

Divvy five is amazing. Talk about unclogging the drain. it's, no short codes anymore, so that'll help with, data. Oh, really? yeah, that was the big thing, wasn't it? Yeah. I think he built, he's 15 when he built this 15 years old. We're talking about Matt being 19 or 17 or 18 when he started WordPress, with Mike Little and, developing it off a fork.

Nick built this on his own in a classroom. Yeah. When he was supposed to be doing other things. So this is, and he's, what is he now? 32, 33, 34 maybe. He is an astounding, intelligent person. He's an astounding marketer, and he is an as according to people that work for him. He's an astounding employee employer, and very fair and, very balanced and loves remote and all that kind of stuff.

But also he loves the, technology of ai. He loves design. He's not only just a programmer or a, nerd, he's a designer as well. So whether you love or loathe divvy, you have to congratulate the whole divvy team. they designer for instance, I can't remember his name, which is a shame because I've met him, went off to work for Google Design for a couple of years 'cause he needed a, change and he's now back in divvy, gosh, far run away.

Wow. Yeah. there's, a very strong team and, as I say, if you love all of them, they have made a lot of people very, happy with building websites very, quickly. Yeah. If you look at the market share divvy is still represents a huge chunk. it's a theme, isn't it? So it's the yeah.

Theme out there, more, more or less. But, it's amazing, and if you look at what the AI can do is amazing as well. It's not quite there yet, but it'll get there. And with Divvy five, it's just gonna be speedy, websites as well. That's good. I literally built hundreds, and that's not, it's not an exaggeration of sites on Divvy before I joined Stellar and started to use, cadence.

[01:25:01] Michelle Frechette: yeah, I have a, soft spot in my heart for all things divvy. Nice. Yeah. I, love, Cadence as well. I, in fact, I've used all of them. I used bathroom built on Elementor. I've used Beaver Builder extensively. I used Dvy. I, started my business on Dvy, elegant marketplace was all about divvy.

[01:25:19] Andrew Palmer: and then we went off into other page builders, so I just had to go and learn them, cadence I love, it's great. It's fantastic that these people give us. Facilities or facilitate us to actually earn money out of building websites. Yeah, pretty miraculous. I love it. Anyway, the, they've got DVI ai, which is shipping in version five.

[01:25:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Very cool. And I will put the, link in the show notes, but, you can go and see. There's a, as you would expect, they've very good at marketing. They've got thoroughly excellent marketing page explaining what you can and can't do and how the UI looks to get all of the, the, AI bits and pieces.

It's, it looks similar to what you've seen elsewhere, so I don't expect any great surprises. But, but now it's all. Handled natively inside your, your divvy builder. Yeah. okay. Let me see what I can squeeze in. No, We really have got very little time. No, actually that's important. Allowing, and should we go back to that one then?

Okay. Yeah. So this is the, this is make dot WordPress, core. so it's core track.wordpress.org. I think I got that right. The, this is the, an idea which has been mooted to, it, so it's from one FRA J-U-A-N-F-R-A. and the idea to allow patterns inside of your block editor to be divided into sub folders inside the main patterns folder, if you've used patterns, basically you get this long laundry list of patterns.

You see the little visual representation of it and what have you, and the idea would be. Wouldn't it be nice to, be able to put them into folders and I'm guessing then folders within folders and things like that so that it represents a bit like the finder on the Mac or Windows Explorer or something like that.

And, we'll see how that one goes. I, can't see that being a bad idea. Whether or not it gets adopted is, is one only time will tell, but it's a good idea, right? I would make use of that like in a heartbeat. I always, when it's a site that I am running personally and I'm not handing over to clients, I always install something to make the media library have folders in it.

because I just think having a flat media library is well within a hundred images. You get lost, don't you? So yeah, having somewhere to put them is really handy. Okay. Thank you for that. also what the heck, so another page builder, that's just, I thought oxygen was just gone quiet.

The, guy's over. and I've forgotten the company that, that organized oxygen. Anybody soft so softly or softly. So fly Soly, they, I felt that this project has gone stale, and it wasn't gonna get any updates, but apparently here we are, oxygen six has been released. They've got this rival product, which I think maybe split their community a little bit.

It's called Break Dance. I think it does less, but it took over the, engineering time of the team. So I think a few people got a little bit ostracized by that. I, yeah, I've got oxygen. We, yeah, oxygen six. But oxygen was a lifetime deal. That's the thing. Yeah. So they needed, to have a subscription model and if you are, an owner of Break Dance, you get Oxygen six for free.

[01:28:30] Andrew Palmer: Anyway. So if you're an owner of Oxygen, you get it because it was a lifetime deal. Yeah. And if you're an owner of Break Dance, you get it. So you get it. Yeah. Because you're a subscription. You've got a subscription to break dance. Yeah. And it says here, oxygen has been completely rebuilt from the ground up for better performance, flexibility, and smoother development experience.

[01:28:48] Nathan Wrigley: And you can see all of the different bits and pieces. I really haven't got time to do it justice. But anyway, if you were a lover of oxygen, you thought that's something that I need to move away from. Perhaps not. There's, a massive effort it would seem to, to bring it back from, from wherever it had gone to rest for a little while.

Maybe I'm being a bit unfair. I maybe it was in Spain for a while. Yeah, it went to Spain to look at some front doors. That's right. okay, so Oxygen six, again, it'll be in the show notes. Oxygen builder.com/launch is the, the thing there. And we've run out of time. I've got various other bits and pieces that I wanted to mention.

There's one more. Really? Oh, save them for next week time. Oh, go on. What was the one, Andrew, that you can't live without? What, which one? I can't remember, but it's one more, I dunno. It was very important. Oh, sorry. We've run outta time. I put too much in as I was putting two notes together, I was thinking there's too many here and it's been brilliant though, so it's proven to be.

Yeah. Thank you. It's been a good episode, hasn't it? other guests, I dunno what happened to them. I will be, I'll just make sure that they're all right once the show finishes, but maybe they'll come on another show. But, let me get rid of that and say thank you. Thank you to Michelle co-host.

One more time. Michelle, where can we find you online? Especially if people want to connect to, to offer you some work? Yes, meet Michelle. Do online has all my links and a contact page as well, so thank you. That'll do it. thank you very much. And just before we say goodbye to Andrew, Kamis joined us.

Hey, he says hello Blake from Seattle. That's nice. Thank you, Kami. So you come for the last few minutes. That's lovely. And Andrew, where's the best place to find you? Now Atam do io, but we've also got a summit atam.io/summit. that's from the 7th of April. So I'll be there, but I'll see anybody that's in cloudfest.

[01:30:39] Andrew Palmer: And if you wanna see me, you can go atam, do IO slash. Book Andrew. Nice, nice, Thank you very much indeed. And obviously this show would be preaching to absolutely nobody unless you commenters came in. Thank you very much to everybody that's made a comment today, it really does drive the show forward.

[01:30:58] Nathan Wrigley: Really appreciate that. Absolutely. Yeah. And we'll be back next week, next Monday with a different panel and talking about the stuff that happens between then and now, seven days from now. So all that it remains for me to do is to get the people to humiliate themselves with their hands. look at em.

They're all up for it. That's great. All the hands. There we go. Lovely. Oh, they're there. Yeah. No, we got, 'em. And, we will see you next week. And panelists, if you wanna stick around, we can have a chat afterwards. That'd be nice.