This Week in WordPress #327

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for This Week in WordPress, episode number 327 entitled, Where Did John Go?

It was recorded on Monday the 24th of March, 2025.

My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I am joined by three WordPresses. First up, the co-host is Remkus de Vries, but we're also joined by Anna Hurko and by Jonathan Overall, in some cases, audio only. He was still here nevertheless.

It's a WordPress podcast, so you know, what do we talk about?

the first thing we talk about is WordPress 6.8 and the source of truth document, which describes in great detail what is coming in WordPress 6.8. It's definitely worth a read.

We also talk about the OSI model, and how it underpins the. Entire internet. Every single thing that you do on the internet runs through this incredibly complicated and extraordinarily unlikely series of protocols, and it's really, interesting.

We also talk about the fact that WordPress might, I stress, might be going to one update per year. What would the consequences of that be, and is it a good thing?

Then we get into whether or not the WordCamp happening next year in Mumbai, it's WordCamp Asia, whether or not it will exclude certain nations, for example, those people from Bangladesh, because of Visa restrictions.

And we also talk about, for ages about CloudFest and the CloudFest hackathon. I was there last week and I really had an extraordinarily interesting time, and we dissect that.

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

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Good morning, good afternoon, good day, good evening, whatever. Good stuff. Have a good day. it's episode number 327 of this week in WordPress. As you can see, I'm joined by 1, 2, 3, not three. There are three people gonna be here, but one of them was, inadvertently dismissed by me a moment ago, and I incorrectly identified a problem on their computer.

In fact, it was me. I had a problem on my computer. And, anyway, they went to reboot and, got caught up in the, the update cycle of death. And so hopefully John will be with us in a moment, but for now, we've got Mku dice. How you doing Mku? I'm well. How are you? Yeah, good. Mku and I hung out and, unnecessarily insulted each other for almost an entire week.

It was a, it was good fun. Yeah. Thank you. I think you got the better of me a little bit from time to time. Yeah. I'd say there's an split. You are very, you're very good. Anyway, here's the bio mku. Dre is a WordPress performance specialist focused on speed, security, and scalability. As co-founder of Scan Lee, he helps site owners stay ahead of performance and security updates.

Mku also runs within WordPress, a newsletter and podcast for passionate people, about building better WordPress sites and shares. Insights on YouTube. Drop the links. Kus, where do we get Scan? scan fully.com and within wp.com are the ones to fit to, to check out. Nice. Actually, I can see that under your name.

It says scantily.com, so that's very helpful. John, I can see you there. We'll drop you in just a moment. But for now, I'm gonna introduce, Anna. Anna Herko. How you doing? Hi, I'm great. I'm still on my way from cloud first, from Germany. I have, that's why bad lighting. So sorry. Oh, It takes a while.

[00:05:08] Anna Hurko: Yeah. Yeah. Gosh. Okay, we'll get into Cloud Fest in a moment, but, Anna has possibly the shortest bio we've ever had on this show. So this, it is gonna take just a moment because it's nice and brief. Anna is the co-founder and CEO of Crocker Block. I introduced, Anna in a podcast, to our audience not that long ago.

[00:05:28] Nathan Wrigley: And, go on As your bio was short, you have a moment to pitch. Tell us about Rocco Block quickly. What is it and what does it do? Rocco Block is creating plugins for developers for creating dynamic websites. And it works with a mentor, Gutenberg and Brix for now. So that's basically it. Nice. Thank you very much.

it's an absolute pleasure having you. So let's see if we can get John in as well. There he is. There's John. Hey, how are you doing, John? Hey. Hi. I'm doing better, John, I have an apology to make. I thought it was your audio. It was actually mine. Oh, that's good to know. My, my computer, when it, when my computer rebooted it decided to scan one of my hard drives and it's still scanning it, so I set up my laptop.

Oh, thank you. I appreciate the efforts you went to. I, yeah, my audio was like, can I, interject real quick? Yeah. Nobody can watch this because the live page hasn't, does not have an embedded video working. It does, it's going out on YouTube and nobody watches it on our page particularly.

So it's there for more of a convenience. If you go to the, YouTube live, we're good. I'm gonna fix that. I dunno what I did wrong. I must have pasted the URL in, slightly incorrectly. Maybe I've got like a close trailing tag or something, but I'll check it. I was getting right. So yeah, it's a curious thing.

So the way it works is I stream it to YouTube, but as a convenience, they also, the, playing system, it's called Wave Video. They offer this embed code. So I just put it into our site and a few people watch it over there, but most people don't. I'll get it fixed in a minute. I've definitely copied and pasted something incorrectly, but most of the audience are watching it on YouTube, so we should be good.

but look, it's John overall. Yes. And, I'm so glad that you've come. I don't know if Anna and Rem. followed John's podcasting adventures back in the day. But I was on a podcast with John recently and I was telling him that when I got into WordPress in about 2014, something like that, I used to take my children to drum lessons and I, it was also the time I started listening to podcasts.

So I got into WordPress, got into listening to podcasts, and settled on, John's podcast. And so hearing his voice, talking back to me on the podcast that we did was eerie. it was really nice. but there he is. It's John overall, and, I'll read John's bio. I might, expedite it a little bit, John there.

Oh, please do. Yeah, it's a bit windy. Yeah, it's all right. No worries. The last 16 years, John, overall it has been the creator and co-founder of the WordPress plugins. A to we say Zed, and I know you do as well. podcast five years ago, his daughter, Amber, joined him as his co-host on the podcast, and in each episode, John and his daughter Amber, delve into the vast world of WordPress plugins, helping listeners navigate through over 100,000 plus plugins available on the internet to separate the junk from the gems.

We'll pause it there, but, Jonathan, tell us where we can find it. What's the website for the podcast? you can find me at wp plugins ada z.com or WP Pro, ADA Z. Dot com. it's so weird listening to somebody with a North American accent say, the letters, my, that's what happens when you live in Canada, Yay. You get a, you get adjusted to the English version of many things. Yeah, I'll bet. Yeah. okay, so this is our panel and we're gonna talk about the word pressy things. As I said to a minute ago, I'll try to fix, if you, are trying to watch this on wp builds.com/live, just go to YouTube and search for, WP Builds over there, and hopefully you'll find it.

You never know. okay. What have we got for you this week? Let's put the screen on. First thing to mention is that this is our website, wp builds.com. if you wanna subscribe to what we're doing, we send a couple of emails each week, just put your email address into this box and click subscribe. And we only send two, we repurposed this as a podcast episode, which comes out tomorrow morning, so you'll get a notification email about that.

But also we, on a Thursday we produce just a regular audio podcast episode and we'll notify you about that. And that's basically it. So the subscribers over there, I'd like to make our sponsors are sponsored at the moment by GoDaddy Pro, blue Host and Omni Send thanks to them for keeping the, lights on over here.

And I really appreciate their contributions and helping us keep going. nothing else really to mention over there, but, let's crack into the news this week. First thing is this. I'd like to point this to everybody's attention. recently, and McCarthy has been making this great big, long, complicated document called the Self Source of Truth.

But, as Anne is an magician, time has been, time has been. Used in different ways, let's just put it that way. And, so this has been taken on now by, big at Pauly Hack over at the Gutenberg Times. And it's a massive, it's really long look, it just, it's really long. So lots of depth here.

It's all about what's coming in version 6.8 of WordPress. I'll just go a few through a couple of things which I think of interest and as always, panel, if you, wanna interrupt, please feel free. here we go. Focusing this time around, we're gonna be making improvements to the data views, the query loop and block integrations.

There's a more streamlined experience with the zoom out editing mode. Expanded. Here's the thing, I've never used Go on what? The zoom out thing? Yeah. I've looked at it once and I go okay, fine. Whatever. Never use it, don't you? Doesn't it force itself on you when you drop in a pattern? Yeah, I click it away to use and I click it away as soon as I can.

Yeah. Okay. yeah, oddly I do. but now you'll be able to edit with it, which is quite nice. There's also API developments, including the block hooks and the interactivity. API the most exciting one of their there for me is the interactivity. A PII think that's really interesting. also Remus will be absolutely loving.

I assume Mku will be loving this, speculative loading. Yes. is dropping into 6.8 with performance optimizations as well. Speculative loading is, is voodoo. It's your website's capacity. Yeah. I know it sounds like AI, but it's not really, is it? No. it's the, your, WordPress website's ability to just before you click something to go out and start loading the page up.

Yeah. But tell us how it's done. Rim. 'cause I honestly don't get it. I assumed it was something to do with your mouse hovering over something for a period of time. Yeah, there is. it's basically tracking what your mouse does over, intentional links inside your. your WordPress site, meaning if you are hovering over any of the menus or anything else, linking to, for instance, in a category archive, whatever, there's a delay between when your mouse is over it and when you actually click on it.

[00:12:26] Remkus de Vries: And in that delay, there's time to optimize. And that's basically what the, speculative loading does. it's it, figures out, look, if you're going here this intentionally, you're going to click this link, and then before you click it, it already starts gathering all the assets and resources and basically create the, the dom, the H TM L document ready for you without when you click, it's there.

It's just poof. And this requires absolutely no kind of fiddling with, from a WordPress user's point of view, which is correct. It's if you've got WordPress six point a, is it on by default? And, but there's no settings, right? It's just either on or off. There's no settings. And as far as I remember, there's pretty much a safe setting there now.

And I think at some point it's going to be, improved upon. But it, yeah, it ev any, everybody will start benefiting from it. There are filters if you don't like it, if you want to turn it off. But, yeah, it's a great feature. the only downside of it, but all of these features have that, is that it, if you are a hoverer and you hover, 'cause I don't know if you've ever seen somebody else process a page, there's loads of people who select text and link here and just hover everywhere.

They will spend a bit more resources on processing a site. You could see that as a negative. But on the whole, on the browsing experience, it's a wonderful, solution. Can I suggest one possible other negative consequence? And that would be, the environmental impact. Yeah. Are we not loading things that we may not actually need?

That's what I mean. Oh, it is what you mean? Yeah. Yeah. I didn't connect it to the environment, but it's essentially wasting resources. Is that Yeah. So if you, yeah, okay. So you might be, I don't know, adding 1% or 2% extra, stress onto your server because people are hovering and they're not actually ultimately clicking.

[00:14:21] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Correct. Yeah. May, but maybe there's, there are, ways in the, a PII think to be able to be less aggressive with it. You can throttle back the, so that one of, that's one of the things that's, yeah. I'm sure at some point we'll see some sort of UI helping you with this, or maybe it'll stay as a developer, filter.

[00:14:42] Remkus de Vries: I don't know. But, there's way to, there's ways to play with it. I've made the, website work. By the way, if you wanna go back and watch it on the website and, Michelle Frache says, that's actually how she does it, each week. So apparently I'm wrong. There are people who watch it over there.

[00:14:59] Nathan Wrigley: It's fixed. And it was me not toggling a button in the platform. When you, when you copy and paste the. Iframe or whatever it is, you've gotta switch it on. And I've failed to do that in my, busyness. So it's fixed over there. okay, let me just press on and then if Anna and, and John wanna just interrupt, they can, I'm gonna just push on into this article as loads.

global styles are gonna be available on the main menu. Quite nice if you're into theming. Previously, they were just in the sidebar on this right hand side here in posts and things like that. And now they're all available and you can click on things like, there's a little video down here where, you can click on this.

Like for example, if it says typography here where my mouse is, you can click onto that and you enter into a subsection where all of the typography is displayed and change it. you can also hide and show the template. Yeah, moving on. The style book is now, available and this is where you actually click inside the bits and pieces that I was just mentioning, zoom out view that Remco says, he's not actually managed to use.

I feel if you've got like a big landing page, I don't know, a sales page or a Sure. And I've, built those as well, is just, I don't, see the point like it's so small. It's lemme just scroll and see the thing in actuality. So here's a point, here's a point that I think it's quite useful for if you, I've got a small MacBook, it's a Mac, I think it's 13 inch or something.

And if I'm on a, if I'm on a page with, that's quite long and I've got the sidebar WordPress sidebar on the left, I've got the menu on the right open and I've got the, navigator inside the Gutenberg editor open as well. I've got this tiny, like three inch window where I can actually see the content of the post.

And so in that scenario, it's quite good. Because I can zoom out and look at it all. I would recommend you get a proper monitor. Yeah. Chuck that away. I do have a proper monitor at home, but out, out in the wild. Yeah. When I'm, like, as an example, I put together some links for this post whilst I was in, cloud first, which we'll get into in a bit.

and I had to collapse all the menus in WordPress. And also I used the sidebar in my browser. I don't have the tabs arranged at the top. I have the tabs arranged down the left side, so that constrained it even more. So that zoom out view in that scenario was pretty good. okay. what else have we got?

We've got a bunch of, basically borders have been added to a bunch of blocks. So for example, the comment block, the comments link, comment count, latest posts. You can see a list here. borders have been added and it goes on and on and I'd like to thank big for putting this together.

[00:17:37] Remkus de Vries: This is a wonderful resource in instead. Yeah. It's over on Gutenberg times the URL in case you wanna, yeah, I suppose you can go for the url, gutenberg times.com/source of truth, WordPress six eight. And if you just hyphenate everything I just said, you'll get there. But if you're looking at it on the screen, you'll be to see the words there.

[00:17:56] John Overall: John, Anna, anything on there before we press on? No, not a Gutenberg user. that'll be, yeah, that's easy to, that's easy to move on from. I love Gutenberg and I believe in it. and for me it's just, I like that it's developing. It's not about this re resource, but to see that it has some new features and develop itself, it, makes me happier.

[00:18:21] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. let's get into that in a moment. It just occurred to me that usually when we start the show, I, I mentioned the people that have dropped in to say hi and I failed to do that this time. Yeah. And you being roasted, am I, getting told off? Oh yeah. A little bit. A little bit. A little bit. Ah, okay.

let's go through that then. I am sorry. I apologize. First of all, Lana, works with Anna. Does Anna work with Lana? Is that Yeah. Lana is our best of the world, partnership manager, so she's quite known. Nice. thanks for joining us. She says, good evening everyone. Michelle. she. But we haven't found you.

[00:18:58] Anna Hurko: Somehow I failed to see any of these people. I'm so sorry. yeah. Thank you for pointing that out, Michelle. It should be fixed now. If you wanna go back there and refresh it, it should be fixed. blah blah, blah, blah. Okay. Okay. They're saying, okay. Ah, Andrew Palmer is joining us. I met Anna and Lana at cloudfest for about two minutes.

[00:19:14] Nathan Wrigley: Fantastic. He says That's nice. Okay. This is where it gets back to the normal stuff every week for reasons unknown. people drop in and tell us what the weather is, where they live. So we tell 'em we just get it out there. So Michelle Frache is in Rochester, New York, and it's 44 degrees in some incomprehensible unit of measurement of temperature or seven degrees in a sensible unit called Celsius.

And, and it's partly cloudy. What do you use in Canada? John, please tell me. It's subgrade. Oh, everything in Canada's on metric system except for when we go to buy meats and stuff, and then it's, and pounds. Canada uses a Okay. Beautiful mix of the. Old system and metric system, the conventional and the metric.

[00:19:57] John Overall: So it's a crazy mix. So we are way worse than that. In the uk We use Miles for driving on the road. Most builders use yards and inches for measuring like the lengths of things we use. Yep. Nobody really uses Key. And then for our own height, we use feet and inches. Yep. And then for how heavy we are, how much we weigh, we use stone.

Yep. Canada doesn't use stone, but we do have that wonderful mix that you just, mentioned. Yeah. None of it adds up. okay. Let's press on. We're joined by also by Influence. Wp. That's Ryan from Charlotte in North Carolina. Thank you very much. Good afternoon, Sonny Yorkshire. I can confirm it.

[00:20:38] Nathan Wrigley: Is Sonny in Yorkshire. it's Tim Nash. Thanks for joining us. Tim Lana's back. From the Ukraine, she says Claire. And unfortunately the system pauses the, the emojis as word. So apparently it's eyes purple crying. there we go. Reese is joining us from Sonny Newton La Willows. That sounds like a nice place, Reese.

I don't, I've suddenly got an urge to go to Newton la Willows Tacho. Hi all. It was so cloud cloudy in that word, which is impossible to pronounce. Mka, step in. It's what, how do we say that? Ve Okay. Thank you. it was so cloudy in ve I couldn't even see the podcast on the webpage. It was just one big gray mist.

Luckily it's less cloudy on YouTube. YouTube. Oh, I see you're com. That was me failing, wasn't it? I get it. Hello, everybody says Elliot Sby. Sorry, WP Minute tutorials Matt made. Joining us is this where I joined to get free performance audits from Rems mku. Is this where he joins to get free performance audit?

[00:21:39] Remkus de Vries: He's at the wrong place. 'cause this is where you can get free roasting. Okay. So no, I don't know where you get the free performance audit, audits. Does one of the panelists have a doc matrix printer going? I don't know. I can't hear anything. I think that was John's chair. That might be my chair. I have, a sneaky chair and I'm trying to keep my mic muted on most of the time.

[00:22:04] John Overall: Oh, okay. Okay. No, I can't hear anything, so that's, okay. C Chao from Italia says Jackson. Jackson's a really nice guy and he, will give you free olive oil if you see him in input. I have really nice olive oil as well. He makes his own, and it's delicious and it's, it actually burns the tongue.

[00:22:23] Nathan Wrigley: Did you know that if you've got really pure olive oil. If you drink it, it like, it's hurts, like chilies do. Yeah. I didn't know that until after Jackson had given me some. Ah, bless him. I'm getting a bit worried for Nathan. We covered speculative loading in the previous episode. We did. You are right.

we've got some new guests, so here we go. Kami saying good morning from Seattle, it's raining again. These comments just go on and on. I'm sorry, but we can't keep doing this all the time. Can we, should we stop there? Excellent. Michelle, last one. Weather in C. Backing in F. Okay. There we go.

Thank you to the other people that have joined us, max, Cameron, Tammy, and all the other people. Thank you. But let's crack on with the, the bits and pieces in the show. Okay, here we go. Next stop. We have this one. We were just talking about this, about the release schedule for WordPress 6.8. And although Tacho don't shoot the messenger, we did speak about this in the last show as well.

Tacho discovered it moments before we, we had the last show, so we just briefly covered it. And so I'm gonna dig into it properly this time. This is the, idea that, given the state of play in the WordPress community at the moment, and the lawsuits that are surrounding Automatic and WP Engine and what have you, and the, shrinking of commitments from a lot of companies and individuals.

So they're shrinking the number of hours they contribute, right down. So automatic went from, I think. I gonna say 1200 hours a week or something. I think they're currently on about 20 or something like that. other companies, I think Bluehost have also recently shrunk the amount that they were doing as well, until everything's stabilized.

And so one of the knock on effects of that is should we just basically move WordPress core releases. So WordPress 6.8 to 6.9 to seven and so on to one a year. Now on the face of it that there just seems to be no problem with that. But I think there probably are some problems with that. And, and so Matt Mullenweg put out a call to, to ask core committers what they thought about this.

Now, I've no intel on what those core committers actually said, to, to each other. I don't know if that call has taken place yet or what have you. But, anyway, hopefully if that has taken place. We're gonna get some clarity on this. But, yeah, the idea being that if we do a release just once a year, what will that look like?

How often would, we do little minor releases in between, I don't know, big security patch that needs to be pushed out. How would that get done? and also, this is probably the main thing that came up. Jeff Paul, who is the director of Open Source at 10 op, pointed out that if you want a bunch of volunteers to commit to a release cycle, the current model of three months is something that's, that's fairly easy to commit to.

You can do that in a normal run of events, but if you are asking people to commit to a 12 month cycle, how likely that's a lot. Is that. It is a long time, right? Yeah. Yeah. so he makes that point. And Aaron Jeb Jin, emphasized the importance of increased testing for minor releases if the project shifts to fewer updates.

And, and I dunno what you thought really, here's a bit about the company's pulling back and so on. I'm getting this information. By the way, from the repository, WordPress could see just one major release per year under new proposal. So it's over to you. What do you, as the three panelists make of this?

Is this something that concerns you? Obviously, Anna, you are in the plugin space. Does this bother you? Does it make you feel a bit more nervous about WordPress? So for me, it makes some issues because it just sound, first, it sounds not stable. So you have just worries what is behind of it and what will be in the future.

[00:26:21] Anna Hurko: What is the strategy for this decision? For example, the second is you say that 12 months is too long time to commit, and if the release will be too big. It'll be unusual just technically if we put a lot of features and so on or we just not, don't, not going to put a lot of features in the new release versions, then what is it?

Does it mean, does it, maintenance of WordPress? So what we miss here, what is the strategy for WordPress itself? Do we have one of it, we of WordPress for five years or 10 years, for example? This is what I'm thinking about. I have started to work as a supporter and we have a big support team.

So of course I, I'm worried about minor releases, bug fixes and all that stuff. But if we talking more strategically, what does it mean? I just put a comment on from Tammy who is a core committer, Tammy Lister. I'm glad, I hope you got home safely, Tammy, by the way. she said the meeting takes place during the course of this week, so I guess we'll get some clarity and feedback on that next week.

[00:27:24] Nathan Wrigley: But that, that, I guess you've raised there, Anna, the same concerns raised up in the article there. whether or not we've got this blockbuster release, which happens, I don't know, let's pick the month of June or something. that's a lot for developers to cope with if there's a thousand different patches and updates and features and what have you all dropping at the exact same moment.

That's a lot of things I guess possibly to go wrong in one moment. Don't know. Breakfast John, for example, for something, it won't work so. Just because it's open source, we can't say if we in Croup block make one release for jet engine for our main plugin a year, we'll be killed by our customers because they don't feel securities and don't feel the plugin is developing and so on.

[00:28:12] Remkus de Vries: I should, I think we should distinction between major releases and minor releases. So minor releases will just happen, like security updates will happen, maintenance updates will happen. I don't think that's the thing that's being, suggested to also slow down. It's the major releases, so the big ones, so six eight is upcoming.

Six nine would be next year, 7.0. Potentially, 27. so it's not been decided. It's a suggestion, but it's, and I, there's a lot of things, I think the exhaustion is probably the worst one because I think that particular comment that you highlighted was the comment that make the most sense to, to consider, you three months, three to four months doing stuff on release.

Sure. Doing that for 12 months. I don't see that happening. That's just too long. And sure, the amount of time will be less, but it's, it also is something that will be, it will, will it, your mind is working on that anyway. and if that's eight hours per week or 24 hours per week, I, have no idea what the amount of hours are, but you're, busy thinking about it anyway.

I think that is actually the biggest issue, besides the, we're not progressing fast enough when all of our competitors are. Okay. That's an interesting thought. So the, I guess at that point, does, do the competitors get to, get to use that almost like a PR strategy against the WordPress, Yeah. 'cause we've seen that, haven't we? We've seen like subtle digs at WordPress from some of the proprietary platforms that you pay a subscription to. their advertising is not immune to having a go at WordPress. and that could be an interesting angle, the, long on updated WordPress, tired of not having new features in your platform of choice, and the advertising is doubling down.

if you see the amount of advertising that's being done by both Shopify. which is technically a competitor of WooCommerce, but it's the same principle. Wix, Squarespace, they are all over. If you watch any YouTube video with, a advertisement in front of it or in between it, first of all, get YouTube premium 'cause you don't want that in your life anyway.

But, the amount of, the sheer volume of it indicates that they're ready to get even harder in, in pursuing that market share. this would give them for sure a good argument. see, they're not really doing that much. See, they're stale, they're behind, Gutenberg as the project has delivered, the site editor than the block editor, both of them are not mature yet.

Block editor way more than the site editor, but it's, we're not there yet. That would mean we see an incredibly slow pace of refinement for, those two editors at a point where we really need to accelerate instead of, decelerate incredibly hard. I don't know, I don't, think it's a good idea, but I get why we're having this, discussion.

I get where the, debate comes from, but it's not a good sign. Yeah. Interesting. by the way, YouTube premium, I have YouTube premium. I'm quite happy with it, but I didn't really know how many ads were on YouTube a lot until I looked at somebody's YouTube feed the other day. and I was like, oh gosh.

Yeah. Wow. That's, it's every eight seconds or something, you get a new ad. and here's a nice tip, by the way, if you've got a VPN Oh, it's easier, Albania apparently. Brave browser already filters out the vast majority of any of your scripts, but it's, yeah, if you don't protect yourself, it's too much.

[00:32:14] Nathan Wrigley: But apparently YouTube are not allowed. So I dunno why I'm saying this. That's funny though. apparently YouTube are not allowed to put ads in an Albanian feed because it's against the country's laws. I was told that, if you use an Albanian VPN, then you get YouTube without ads. Anyway.

I'm not endorsing that. Who said that? It wasn't me. I didn't say anything about vpn. It was an echo. It was an echo, yeah. Some, guy over there said it. okay. yeah. anything on that, John, on, on the, this possible shift to a different relationship? The possible shift? on one aspect, I think it's nice to slow it down a little bit, but on the other, as it's mentioned, by stretching it out, it will bring out the competition to say, Hey, look, WordPress isn't innovating, it's not moving forward.

[00:33:03] John Overall: And whether it is or isn't is irrelevant to the advertising promotion and the perception of the average user out there. They want something that's new, fresh moves forward, and has all the latest features. And if WordPress starts slowing down to that point where once a year they dump all the features, that does also create problems for all plugin developers that have to catch up to those features all at once.

and of course, as Mka said is that, the, it doesn't it, it shouldn't stop the intermediate updates such as security releases and other things. So it's still gotta be put out when the security problem is discovered. yeah, it was remiss of me really not to highlight it in those terms.

[00:33:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So the patching and what have you, carry on as normal, but the release of the new features coming to an annual cycle, I don't, from the way it's, from the, from all the conversations that I'm having and all of the talk about hours from contributors being, being drawn in it, it seems like this is maybe where it's going to go.

But Tammy, keep us posted on what the core committers, sage or in the course of that meeting, that would be, really interesting. Tim Nash makes the point that WordPress already gets labeled as legacy. It will make the idea it's stale. Hard to argue again. Yeah. Can you imagine if we get to the 11th month, how brutal those adverts will be, seen any updates in your WordPress lately?

Knowing that they're all gonna come. But also I would imagine that plugin developers, so Anna and all the companies out there that are producing commercial plugins, there's just so much scope for things to just like your support burden for the weeks following the day that the next version of WordPress drops, I imagine will be fairly insane because all those Yes.

The things that, yeah, the issue is that now it's too much. So we have too much updates and our developers need to integrate it and plugin, but once a year is another extreme. So say and one idea from Aramco say, I like that. I tried to say about strategy, but he highlighted it more simple. So with a product is not perfect, WordPress is not perfect, and we have a lot of things to perform and develop and to add them just once a year, it won't work.

[00:35:28] Anna Hurko: if we'll have a perfect product and we just need. And Okay. Once a year we'll be okay, but I want to be our best grader and we miss a lot of features in Gutenberg. And so wanna have nice experience that makes me, that makes me set as a user, not as a plugin developer more because if I want, so we have made it integration to all good of our plugins was Gutenberg because we believed in Gutenberg future.

But now, so it's not perfect now, and I know that next performance I will get in one year and then in one year. So why we have made integration Yeah. Know, yeah. Period of uncertainty for sure. The, moment where I guess all of this becomes clear from, this article's point of view, hopefully we'll be next week and Tammy says that, a make post will come from it, There was from Word Camp Asia. We'll see. and Tacho saying he disagrees with Anna. He thinks, that we don't have too many updates. way too few. We have way too few. He says, ideally we'd be able to integrate WordPress, like your browser does updates. So what in the background? so everybody's automatically getting updated and what have you, I guess Tacho.

[00:36:48] Nathan Wrigley: but yeah, let's see. Let's see what drops next week. Tammy, keep us posted and the lawsuit, which I guess will be the end of all of this uncertainty and the hours of all the companies like automatic or maybe come into focus again. I think that's due to take place in the year 2027 now. So it really is like a long, have I got that if my memory failed me there 2027?

Yeah, that's what I remember. if every, the whole thing gone through all the judicial layers. 27. So we just into 2025. So we've got two years to, to ride this one out. Anyway, it's a movable feast. So let's see, where we end up. Let's go to the next one then. Okay. The next piece that I've got up here is this one.

And I'm gonna go off piece a little bit here. Let's pop that on the screen. I did a, did an interview with Robert Jacoby, who by the way, was working for a company called Bogar, which no longer exists. Bogar is now called Black Wall. And I don't know Anna and Mku, if you noticed Blackwall at cloudfest, but they, boy, they were doing a pretty amazing job of getting their branding out there.

there was Black Wall like ads almost everywhere. It was pretty impressive. So Blackwall is the renamed BOC guard. And in order for this podcast to happen, We, the idea really was that Ro Robert and I were gonna talk about how a company like Bogar get in the way of malicious traffic. And in order to do that, we started talking about this thing called the OSI Model.

Now, caveat mTOR, I am not like an expert at this at all. I basically read around it a little bit for the interview, but the more I read. The more disbelief I had. the OSI model is basically what underpins everything that you do on the internet. And there are seven layers to it, and I'm gonna butcher it horribly, but every time you try to do anything on the internet, it, whatever you do, has to basically percolate down these layers until eventually stuff leaves your computer, then travels around on the internet.

In the most breathtakingly unlikely to happen, series of events. It finally arrives at where it wants to go, and then it makes its way back up the layer and the person on the other end can see it be that an email or a text message, or in this case video. But honestly, if you haven't looked, go and look at what's happening on your computer right now watching this.

It is rid. Ridiculous that it works. Every single packet encapsulated in data and then goes down the model and gets encapsulated in more data and Oh, isn't that's your machine because you're clumsy. Yeah. My machine is, is doing a hell of a lot more work. Yeah. I've got the OSI Nathan version of that model, and it's got cotton wool around the edges just in case something goes wrong.

But I know REMCOs, this is your, like bread and butter. I, guess you are really into all the tech, and I imagine you understand this stuff, but I'd never really peeled back how it works. And I was utterly like, just think about it. You, go to an email, you write an email, and you click send and you just think it's, arrived.

[00:40:18] Remkus de Vries: Yeah. There's not, how the hell did it get there? It's mental how it works. If you, combine all the protocols that work, how they work, how long they've been in place. Because that's another thing. it, and you start adding all everything up, just a simple thing doing and the amount of connections and checks and packet tracing and all the protocol native stuff that makes you know that the thing that you just intended to do.

Can you check that, that I actually did it? all of that happening in nanoseconds. It's, it's a bit much to keep in your mind. just. okay. Okay. Back and relax. Just, I'm not gonna encapsulate it very well, but, every time I, let's say we're streaming now, my camera is consuming the data, my microphone is consuming the data that's going into the browser.

[00:41:17] Nathan Wrigley: The browser is then handing that off, like thousands of times a second to another layer. That layer is then handing it to, trying to figure out, okay, where the hell do we want to go with this? That then hands it to something else, which goes further, down. Then it gets to the transport layer.

It's then thousands of times per second encapsulating packets of information, teeny tiny packets of information saying, okay, this is what it is, this is where it wants to go. And then more layers get added. Then it just fires out onto the internet and basically says, figure it out. Just get there where, however the hell you want to get there, just get there.

So some of the bits that I'm saying are probably rooting through San Francisco, some through London, some through, I don't know, Geneva, Stockholm. They're just getting there. And then on the other end they're going, yeah, let's just reassemble ourselves. And I described it like, imagine you had a bag of rice and you get the bag of rice and you throw it on the ground and a tower assembles itself.

That's what's happening. All the time, every time. And we just totally take it for granted. And it's an absolute miracle. this is how teleportation will work in the future. Yeah, please. I'm not trusting that. No. Yeah. Thousands of packets. It'll be a new protocol. It's surely they'll figure, yeah. Never fail.

But I just thought that was really interesting, peeling back the curtain of how it works. And then, because everything is getting drilled down these seven layers, the job of what is now black wall, but was, B Guard is to intervene a, layer, long, before WordPress ever gets hold of any traffic.

They stand as a guardian seeing that data traveling across the internet and basically decide you can pass like Gandalf in the, fellowship of the ring. none shall pass. They stand there and decide what packets can get through and what packets cannot. And, It was absolutely fascinating.

and apologies to anybody listening to that episode. I get quite excited like I did in this one and probably put my foot in it several times as well. 'cause I'm not really an expert. anyway, the miracle of the internet. There you go. Mku, Anna, John, anything to add to that walking bot? Traffic is good.

[00:43:34] John Overall: And, I saw something from, CloudFlare. They've created a, AI labate for bots. Should we do that now? they've just out. I was gonna come. Yeah, that was gonna come at the end of our show, but let's stick it in now. Oh. 'cause it's absolutely perfect. Rem I confess, I read rem s's newsletter and diligently plunder it for links, so that we can talk about them.

[00:43:56] Nathan Wrigley: Look at him nodding yeah. Credit where credit's due. It's nice to, he raised this one finally confirmed this. Yeah, I'm being honest. and he can confirm that this was in his newsletter. So what a piece of genius this is. So we're talking about these bits and pieces flying around on the internet and, this is on the Cloud Flare blog, I guess it's a new brand new feature that they've added into their platform, and it's called Trapping Misbehaving Bots in an AI Labyrinth.

I read it and then about halfway through I thought I've got the gist of it, so I stopped reading it at that point. But go on Rim 'cause beef up the, tell us what Cloud FLA are doing. This is cool. the title basically says it, it's, they create a trap for a, misbehaving bot and then send it down a loophole that just never has an end.

[00:44:48] Remkus de Vries: or labyrinth. but you'll end up with a bot that doesn't know that it's not, that it's being blocked and it continues to go, but it's wasting resources on their end, not on Cloudflare's end. It's just a really smart way of just, so the easy way would be to block and then done. but this way it actually costs money on their end.

And I guess it's a more, you could say it's a more petulant way to do it, but I think I like this way. I think this is a, yeah. A very smart way to do things. I'm a big fan. Cool. Yeah. 'cause if you've got, if there's no, sorry, you finished, John, I apologize. Oh, yeah. I, thought it was a great idea as I was reading through it.

[00:45:25] John Overall: And what they do with the bot is, as Mkas mentioned, when the bots are just blocked, they go away and they'll come back again. But when they take 'em and throw 'em into this AI labyrinth, the bots just keep running in circles and it keeps 'em busy and keeps 'em out of everyone's hair, so stops 'em from going elsewhere.

[00:45:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess if you've got a, network and your primary objective is to do malicious things on the internet, if there's almost no cost to that procedure, if basically, as Reka said, you're just blocked. You're just blocked right at the first port of call. And so it is just kinda okay, move on.

let's try another one and then try another one and try another one. So you could probably go through thousands in moments and then finally get somewhere. But whereas with this, the first port of call looks like fertile ground. So you keep going and it keeps offering up AI generated content that masquerades as being your content.

But I was thinking at that point, hang on a minute, this is just AI build and it's not, they're going out and creating authentic content so factually correct content so that whatever they're scraping is, firstly it's not coming from your website, but it's not AI drl. It's something which is true, but totally divorced from the enterprise of what you are trying to do.

And then it links to further things, which it's made well, articles, which it's made, which are again, verifiably true. And the poll process just keeps going on and on. And so it's a bit like when somebody from a call center phones you up and says, we think you've got a problem with your Windows installation.

And right off the bat. That is complete bs that they're lying to you and the quickest thing to do is to hang up. And then of course, they're then freed up to try it on somebody else. it's a bit like keeping them on the phone for a few hours and just pretending. And I'm not saying I do that, but yeah, I do that.

and it gives me great pleasure to do that. You should try it sometime. So mku, is this free? can anybody make use of this? What, do you know what the deal is? I don't remember that, but I know it's, as far as I've read it, it's part of what their, their main service is. So I'm just looking at a screenshot.

If you've got CloudFlare, it's under security and then settings. Oh, okay. You can see this on the screen and then there's literally a toggle and it's called AI Labyrinth. and you just toggle that on, but I don't know. Yeah, I read somewhere in their stuff that they're giving it out to even the free accounts.

There we go. I just Google for cloud. Just Google the word. Yeah, I just search for the word free. AI Labyrinth is available on an opt-in basis to customers, including the free plan. Maybe there's some constraints on how long they keep them going, but, but yeah, great. We're gonna be, it'll be an arms race, I'm sure.

I'm sure that at some point the, the bad guys will figure out a way around this, but for now, it's gonna cost them an awful lot of money. well done CloudFlare. Joy, joy. Joy, what have we got here? Tim Nash says, email is as close to being magic as we can get. Email should not work, which why, which explains why so often.

It does. Thank you, Tim. tc, TTCP. Teleport over TC Oh, stop it in my head. and then Tcho says somewhat in, somewhat nicely. Everyone reads Rem S's newsletter obviously. Thank you. Not everyone just yet, so just not everyone quite yet, but many, never ending loophole says re. Thank you very much. and here we go.

So Tim, who's a bit of an expert in all these kind of things, has a contrary point to make the resources to do this surely is greater than simply dumping the traffic or taring it. I don't know. Tim, I'm imagining CloudFlare sort of cash, deeper in their article, they go on about how it uses very little resources that CloudFlare is in because it's all generated.

[00:49:44] John Overall: Already, and it's just in an AI environment and once the bot hits it, it just stuck in that loop and there's no new content being generated at Cloudflare's end. It's, ah, interesting. So they've pregenerated the content. Okay. it's a, it was an interesting on how they accomplished it and what they've done and doing, considering what cloud player's done over the years.

It's really interesting that they've come up with this idea and they probably use their lava lamps to help create the data. Oh yeah. That sort of like pseudo random noise generator. Yeah. So the wall of chaos. Yeah, yeah. Okay. The article by the way, if you wanna follow up on this further, is trapping misbehaving bots in an AI labyrinth.

[00:50:25] Nathan Wrigley: It came out just the other day. So you can go check it out. It's on the Cloud Flare blog. So we went off in a bit of a random direction there, so let's pull it back in. did we do this one? Yeah, we did that one, but we did not get to this one. Okay. This is a, this is fascinating, and a bit of a shame.

Let's see how this one pans out. word Camp Asia is just finished. It was in Manila, in the Philippines, and, no, Sooner does one end than the other. One is in the planning and, and during Word Camp Asia, it was announced that the next destination would be, India in the city of Mumbai. but we have this piece from Ray at the repository.

It's called Word Camp Asia. 2026 goes to Mumbai, but Bangladesh. May be shut out over visa ban. Now, I honestly, I'm what I know about international politics and relations could be written on something very tiny. I'm imagining a grain of rice, frankly. I don't know a lot about these kind of things, but it would appear that, Bangladesh and India are not exactly the best of friends at the moment, which means that it's either impossible or exceedingly hard for somebody from Bangladesh to get a visa to travel in India.

so that therefore means that these, the people from Bangladesh will be, left out of this massive event. I don't think anybody's saying that the, that the event itself necessarily should be moved because of all the, and of all the low cars on planet Earth. it seems that India, I. That is doing more in terms of events and all of that than elsewhere.

So it does seem like a sort of justified place to put the event, but the question is, how do we get these developers from different parts of the world? How do we get them to attend? Is there any dispensation that we can extend? can people from, I don't know, automatic reach out to the Indian government?

I don't know what kind of clout that would have. I'm guessing there wouldn't be a lot that the, Indian government would change in order for a word WordPress event to go on. I very much doubt it, but I could be wrong. but also it was mentioned in this article that, not just, people from Bangladesh, but also from Pakistan, the, relations seem frosty there as well.

So I, I don't know what we do about this. It strays into international relations, but it does make me think, I wonder, how that got a nor ignored in the, in the sort of process for the deciding of that event. Interesting. I don't think it got ignored. I think that, there's an exception that at some point you are going to make a decision and that decision has consequences and you live with the consequences because yeah, I don't, expect them to willingly say, whatever, all the Bangladeshi, you, we don't care.

[00:53:13] Remkus de Vries: I don't think that's the case. but any choice you make has consequences. So are you going to satisfy everyone? No. am I glossing over a, huge country with a, enormous amount of people? Yes. But bottom of the line is these, decisions have these types of consequences. There's, and if there's, not another team that, wanted to host it, then.

Or this is what, it's not a one decision based on one, little data point. I don't think, yeah, I'm guessing that it really wouldn't matter where you put it. Then there's probably some thing that would go wrong in this sense. is maybe that what you're saying, however, I'll just raise this on the screen 'cause this sort of adds a little bit more clarity.

[00:54:05] Nathan Wrigley: the, if you are thinking of going, the, process of applying for a visa is currently on hold, it would seem from this article. however, if that process was to resume, it says we've unofficially learned from the, the Indian Visa application centers that should visas be, started again for people from Bangladesh to head to India.

Then the process is a three to four month backlog. So that's quite a lot as well. 'cause you really do have to make decisions. I don't know what you people are like, but if I attend a WordPress event, it tends to be more last minute than the sort of three to four, three to four month schedule. So you'd obviously have to have all your ducks in a row long, before, attending.

So where, anyway? Where does one actually get those ducks? oh, the ones that stand in a row? Yeah. what do you Walmart? I think Walmart. We don't have a Walmart. Yeah. Six nine. 9 6 9. Nine for 12. Okay. And then, if you buy I think 50, you get 'em for $8 or something like that. And they're very obedient.

Yeah. That they are that Yeah. They stand. Okay. So there we go. Anna, anybody wanna contribute on that? So for me it's very difficult to say something about politic issues, but we know that there is a lot of developers in India and I have started to build websites before I have started to work with WordPress.

[00:55:30] Anna Hurko: So maybe it's not so bad idea. So maybe I don't want to go so far, but it sounds very logical to make it in India. Yeah. M's. Point is echoed down here by Tacho, in terms of Word Camp Europe. You're saying that it's extremely hard for people from, African countries to enter the EU or to attend Word Camp Europe in this case.

[00:55:56] Nathan Wrigley: and again, echoing what Mka said, the challenge for every country is that some folks will or will not be able to get a visa. So I guess, that's, it's unfortunate, but it's what happens. You have to choose a city and go with whatever the laws of the country are. Yeah, it's an unfortunate, it's an unfortunate side effect of our world today.

Yeah. People get excluded from literally every word count for visa reasons, says Cameron. Hello Cameron. Nice to have you with us. and Reese Wind says, India. India Visas are fun to apply for. And then he is got a sad. Emoji, I'm guessing they're not fun to apply for. also Reese says Folks do get excluded from word counts of non-res visa reasons.

Sadly, lg, I can never get this acronym out. Mind mouth in intact l I'm gonna do it really slow. LGBT IQ plus, I think I did it. Folks get really, get, don't feel safe in some countries that have hosted word camps. Thank you, Reese. Thank you. okay. I think we covered that one off, in which case we shall move on and we'll go to this one.

Actually, let's go to this one quickly, quick hat tip to, Kyle from the admin bar. It's a video so we can't really do it justice, but, Kyle released a really neat little video this week. It was about, I think it's about six oh, it says there six minutes, 21 seconds long. It's not very long. You'll be able to consume it really quickly.

And it says, it says, attempts to, to make, a WordPress website more. App and by app, like he means, those sort of nice interactions you get between clicking a button on a mobile phone app and the sort of the core animations that you get from those kind of things. So he chalks a few things in where he animates titles into different places and what have you.

It's really nice and, and I support what, what Carl's doing over there at the admin bar. So I just thought I'd mention that. I dunno if either of you, any of you, sorry, saw that. Probably not. In which case I did. I did. It was nice. No. Did you like it? I thought it was neat. Yeah. Yeah. There's a, lot of, stuff inside of WordPress now that allows you to do this, more and more now we're slowly but surely moving to a position where we can have these types of almost non refreshed, content sites.

[00:58:11] Remkus de Vries: We're, getting there from the putting your speed and optimization hat on. do, is that a better experience for the user always? Or is a hard page refresh a more desirable outcome? In most cases, because I'm still stuck to the, I kind of wanna click a button and I want to see something, not, I just wanna see the whole thing change.

[00:58:35] Nathan Wrigley: I wanna know that I've gone somewhere else. And so sometimes I get a bit. as an example, do you remember the TechCrunch website About two years ago? Yeah. Horrible. You clicked on a, there was the archive, yeah. And they did this clever animation thing where you clicked on a title and the whole post was in like an accordion, so you felt like you were still in the archive.

But the post opened up on the, and it was really clever, but I had no idea where the hell I was on that website. I got really lost and I, noticed that they quickly. Of on did it? So I, don't know. I'm, I, mean it, I'm saying that I think it's brilliant what Carl was doing, but I don't know if that's always the best outcome for end users.

[00:59:15] Remkus de Vries: So first off, consider your age mine as well. I often consider my age. It's not Yeah, I know. I was just, I, there was no gentle way to bring this, sentence here we're, you are used to this behavior as you grew up on the web, right? So that's true. Yeah. Younger. you do a lot of, discovering the web via apps.

So that is a different type of behavior. so the, you wanting to see it in a particular way Sure. that makes sense. But if you look at it from a performance standpoint, it's more a question on can you deliver the. Newer experience in a as performant way as you can do the old one, yes you can, but, stuff like fragment caching becomes more interesting.

stuff that's, built inside, the interactivity. API inside of WordPress does, facilitates this. and are those properly cashable? Is it, can you build on top of that in a smart way? Those, are questions you need to test your scenario with the, what would that normally look like and what if I make it a one app, easy refresh type of approach.

That one isn't necessarily slower or faster. it's more like how do you build it? And that's with all these things. If you're just, copy pasting stuff together and you have no idea what you're actually doing, then chances are you're building a slower. If you build what you understand. Again, chances are higher.

You're building something performant. You should go check it out though. It's it's on the admin bar YouTube channel. The, the URL for that I actually don't have off the top of my head, but if you just google the admin bar on, on YouTube, you'll get to it. And this one is called Create an Impressive App, like Experience with a few lines of CSS.

[01:01:18] Nathan Wrigley: So go check that out. Okay. Let us move on. I want to just do this one very quickly. this is a segue into something else in just a moment. This is, this is a piece by Anne. I can never say Anne's name correctly. I always say Annmarie and I know it's not Annmarie. Umlet. Ika. Yeah.

Thank you. That was what I was gonna say. That was verbatim what was gonna come out of my mouth. but I'm glad that you said it, just like Remus did. and this is, I thought this was really interesting. So this is Anne who, is really into accessibility, and you'll find out more about that in just a moment.

she wrote this article about how with the advent of the European Accessibility Act, which is coming in force late, I think like in a few months time, I can't remember. I've got a feeling like it's June, 2025, something like that. Anyway, the, point is it's, coming and it's coming quickly. it feels and a bit in the same way when Google said they were gonna, enforce things like core web vitals.

It's like gold rush of. People reaching out to their clients and saying, we will magically do all the things so that Google does not drop your rankings. this is, I think Anne feels there's a moment in time where that could be something that catches, people with their websites, developers who don't necessarily know what they're doing in terms of accessibility, reaching out and basically being cowboys.

And so she's got this article, which is called How to Identify Accessibility Charlatans. I won't go into all the different bits and pieces, but she talks about, whether or not people are actually gonna be liable under the law, or whether that's just people coming and trying to scare you into giving them work.

And then she goes into tools that you can use to find out whether or not your site really is, in need of work, questions that you can ask of people. Who claim to be experts and then listen to the kind of answers that come back and compare it to, what somebody that really, does know what they're doing, and so on.

And, digging into their actual processes and probably having a look at the website that they actually produce and seeing whether it's accessible. Anyway, that was an aside. Anne was at Cloudfest the other day. She was leading one of the tables. So let's just segue into cloudfest. MKU and I and Anna, were there last week.

I saw Mku a lot. I didn't see Anna there. but Mku and I attended a thing called the Hackathon and oh, what was that? That was like the best, some of the best days of my life. I really enjoyed that. I arrived, oh, I'll cry now. I'm sorry, Anna. I'm sorry, but you just hear what we've got to say and you too will be, will, you'll be there next year.

So I had no expectations of that. I went as a media partner, so I'll be creating some, podcast episodes and things from it, but I didn't really know what to expect. I'd read a small amount about it from previous years, but I arrive and there's 110 people in the room. And those 110 people, me excluded, there were, a, few media partners and so we were the non-developers.

Everybody else was like developer or developer adjacent, and they'd been selected to be in the room. So REMCOs was one of them, and I think they had 400 people apply, to be in the room. And they'd managed to whittle it down to. 110, something like that. No, there were no, no shows. Everybody that said we're gonna come, came.

So that's pretty impressive. And then 10 projects were announced and the idea, this is so great, the idea is to take a project from idea, the ideation to much further on, maybe even finished in three days. And so the 10 table leads, if you like, with their co-lead or maybe it was just one person or two people, they go up onto the stage and they say, I wanna work on this for three days.

Join me. And I thought this is gonna be chaos. There'll be some tables which have got 92 people on and there'll be like eight tables with one per. It didn't work that way. Everything evened out. and then the hacking began. And what was really interesting is how complicated you can make a whiteboard in a heartbeat.

So there were all these whiteboards next to the tables, and within the space of two minutes, they were, full of incomprehensible jargon that, the likes of me can't understand, relationships and database tables and what they're gonna do and how they're gonna do it. And I was like, anyway, after three days, the winner was announced of all of these projects and we'll go through what they were in a moment.

And it was Anne's table that want it in. What I can only describe as pretty sublime. Do you wanna know what they did? Dear audience? It was so cool. imagine you've gone to a website and let's say that you are blind and you come to an infographic. So a picture of data. Represented in pictures.

So it could be a chart, it could be a pie chart or a donut chart. It could be text with a chart next to it. The chart could be, really straightforward for a human that can see, but it could be quite complicated. They built a plugin, which using AI reads the image and translates it into human readable text in a couple of seconds.

So it takes that thing that is basically a void to somebody who can't see total black hole and it takes the data and puts it into a summary. It summarizes the data, it tries to extract the data from the pie chart, maybe set it out in a table, which is accessible. And and it was pretty cool.

I've gotta say, Remus is nodding. I know he is slightly disappointed 'cause, his table didn't I. No, I, think this is, there's, two projects that I like the outcome, the most of this is one of them, and the other one is the, the W-P-C-L-I, meets, magic, basically. Yeah, we can talk about that in a moment, but I don't know, Anna or John, if I encapsulated that.

But did you understand from what I just said, what that project's enterprise was? So I haven't seen you, but I have seen Ed, so we have talked about it little bit, so of course I understand it. Yeah. Yeah. I had some logic. John did you get it from what I said? I think John is frozen. Yep. Yep, I did.

Oh, no, your, audio's fine, so keep going. My audio fine. The picture seems to have frozen for some strange reason. Yeah, don't worry. As long as we can hear you. That's the main thing. Yep. No, I did, get it. That was, quite nice. Yeah, I thought was, it would be something neat to see and watch.

that was, it was three days. And I was just surrounded by people who were obviously very intelligent, very bright, and in, just about every case. Very driven, and achieved in the group that Anne was working with. In that case, they got from nothing to complete, I think basically in three days.

Wow. So a thing which didn't exist suddenly to something which did exist. I know Remus, you were dotting around from table to table, but do you wanna just tell us about the one which you mentioned there that you quite liked? the W-P-C-L-I one. 'cause that was a cool project too, wasn't it?

[01:09:11] Remkus de Vries: Yeah. most people find W-P-C-L-I, the command line interface for WebPress. They find it a little daunting. once you get familiar with it. It's basically understanding how the structure works and then the commands allow you to do various things. Now, one of the things it doesn't do, it doesn't, understand certain, like you would talk to an ai. So if you were to use a prompt inside A-W-P-C-L-I, it, it just errors, it don't, doesn't know how to do that. that project basically connected AI with the command line, meaning you could say stuff like, write me five posts in this category about this topic in and just do it in the background.

or, show me the last seven posts that have, the tag, Nathan and builds, added to it. And it just in the terminal just does all the things you ask it to do. the, Yost even showed me a, the creation of a plugin that did something. So the, you are basically saying, I need this type of functionality and can you please create a plugin for me?

I. Put it there, activate it, and then move on to the next, question I have for you. So stuff like that should, To work on the command line, making life easier. I just, I don't know. I thought it was close to, as close to magic as, as you could, make it. Yeah. It was really, fun to watch, wasn't it?

[01:10:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Really fun to watch. They were leaning heavily, I think into, Pascal ULAs. I forget what his plugin is called. It's something like the AI connector plugin or something. But he was sitting, no, thats Felix. That's Felix's. Felix answers it. I apologize. Yeah. That's it. Thank you. but that was a profound one.

And like Reka said, you could see people typing into the command line, which usually results in, if you're an inexperienced person like me, that's heartache. But in this case, you could type in English words as a sentence. Yeah, But results, literal AI prompts, create this image and then you are presented with an image.

[01:11:23] Remkus de Vries: You go, yeah. And it's done nicely in the media library. And then you say, that's lovely, but I'd like a black and white version of that, please. And then the AI turns that into a black and white version, like things like that. Yeah, it's pretty cool. So we've lost John on the video, but hopefully his audio's still there.

[01:11:40] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I'm still hearing, yeah, we got, that's fine. Honestly, John, the video, I don't know why my camera's shut down. It just could be my laptop. Don't worry, So long as we can hear you, the main thing is that we can hear you. That's all good. so I'll just put it back on the screen and we'll show you again an article from the repository and it's demonstrating there's Ann's team.

We were just talking about Anne, and it's describing that vis or vis ally. is the project that won, but let's just go through some of the other winners as well. So the overall winner was the one that we just mentioned, and, you can find more about that. The Tech Visionary Award, was won by the peer-to-Peer Federated Rag framework, and the Dream Team Award, also by the peer-to-Peer rag, federated Rag Framework.

The Social Media Master Award, it's doesn't really fit into, it was a, it was an odd ca category. This one, it was about how well you could promote what you were doing via social media, but that was done, won by the W-P-C-L-I. As an MCP host. Pitch Perfect Award was a tie between the CMS Freedom.

So this was a project which was trying to make it so that you could port things from one CMS to another and Visuali again, breaking Barriers Award, again won by the Accessibility Infographics team and, it's gonna happen next year. Can I just say. If you are a developer and you really enjoy working with a bunch of like-minded, bright, interesting individuals, just whenever the application process opens, just get your form as fast as possible.

I would say it was such a cool event. And the, I think, honestly, I know it sounds a bit cheesy, but the energy was pretty cool in there, wasn't it? people getting stuff done in short shrift was just so cool to watch. Yeah, Really nice. Excellent, vibe. Yeah, really nice. okay, so there we go.

That's what happened there. Let's see what the comments are. Da, but every will can attend accessibility. I dunno what that was in reference to. Sorry, Tcho. there you go. Tammy Lister, who was there, she was working on one of the tables. She found it exciting and yos the person. Demo the A So Yost Yeah.

The person was sitting at the table that Mku was just talking about This W-P-C-L-I meets ai, project, demoed al, image alteration via the command line. It was insane. Yeah. they showed me a great example before it was working where they, they showed me, I think it was like somebody on a surfboard and it was on the sea and there were waves and everything, and then they asked it if they could get rid of the waves.

The, they prompted the AI get rid of the waves and it just removed the surfboard. Yeah. And the person on the surfboard. It's just quite funny. So we're not there yet. It was nice. Yeah. but okay. I don't mean this to come out the way it comes out. And please forgive me for what I'm about to say. I thought it was really interesting attending an event, which felt like a WordPress event, but there was an end goal.

Insight for everybody sitting down. so we have contributor day in the WordPress space, which is meaningful and impactful, but it was very interesting sitting down with a bunch of volunteers, just like a contributor day. Only there was an, absolute moment in time when it had to be over, which was obviously three days.

That's impossible for a word camp, but it was just really interesting seeing how those people coalesced, combined, got energized, got really busy, and in some cases you'd walk past the room where everybody was supposed to have left at five o'clock and there was still people in there at eight and nine o'clock just hacking away in the evening.

I got stuff done and it was brilliant. and the winner, such a valuable thing for people that, need those kind of things. Anybody else wanna add to any of that before I, move on? no. Nothing. Me. I think it's nice to do the. The, I'm excited for the hackathon thing and what happened there and people should try to get in there.

[01:16:00] Remkus de Vries: Sure. But I also think it's nice to mention that, on the Monday, so the end of the hackathon is around noon, and then around noon WP Day begins. So you hack actually have an afternoon, basically panels discussing topics we are curious about inside the WordPress world. and then the, actual Cloud Fest event, which is a separate thing, is also quite nice because there's because WordPress as a whole is growing inside Cloud Fest and it's quite nice to see the, like there was an entire room called the WP Zone, which where a lot of, WordPress companies were present with a booth and all that.

That for anybody working with WordPress, you are also touching a whole bunch of other cool stuff that is happening on that cloud, right? The, internet. it's interesting to be there 'cause you'll see a different side of what you will normally see in a Word camp. It's a, it's similar-ish, but it's also quite different.

So I highly recommend you if you haven't ever considered going to a cloud fest that you for 2026 or if you're in the us there's a Cloud Fest us version as well, to consider going because, it's one of those things that breaks out of the bubble of a work camp, which is a particular format and a particular type of content.

Generally. and this is different, this is in a way refreshing, Again, highly recommend you consider that for the next, time. It's being helped. Yeah. And what did you do there? I know you weren't at the Yeah, so it, it wa it was my reason to come to just to visit one event for WordPress with WordPress, but not WordCamp.

[01:17:51] Anna Hurko: to compare and to see what happens actually. And the second reason was, so first of all, Lama just told me I should go and she's responsible for all events. if she says I should. So what together. And her reason was because everyone goes, so basically we have the same partners as you will catch and world, but in little bit different format.

Yeah. For me, the reason was to see the partners, some media partners as well, to discuss in person and for example. We had meeting with, and after I talked personally, I had a completely different, point of view what doing and how and why. it's just for me important to meet people and it was nice.

Yeah. the bad thing, it was cold and I didn't like the party side. I think for me it was cold. Okay. and I like more word camps, in, summer. So I'm complaining about outside and all stuff. Yes. And I like this WordPress zone and that, Place for speeches made like a boxing ring. It was quite interesting.

yeah, it felt, more like a, there, there was definitely more of a sort of corporate feel, wasn't it? Because a word president? Yeah. You are basically surrounded by WordPress, plugging companies, theme companies, block developers, hosting companies and all of that kind of thing. But in this, the, remit of the sponsorship area really was anything that touches the internet and, so there were like big representation from people like, Nvidia and to see hardware and hardware.

Oh my, yeah. And there were, yeah, so companies where they were just demonstrating all of their new developments in rack technology and what the servers looked like. for, people who don't know what is cloudfest, it was, 10, 11,000 people. So you can just imagine. But you didn't feel it because it was a big, territory and there was a lot of places.

[01:19:57] Remkus de Vries: Nathan, it's all, can you highlight Cammy's, comment? Yeah, sorry. Kami is saying, yeah, I can. thank you Kami. Nice to have you with us. Kami says that in Miami, so there's a US version, Miami in November might be nice. What if you're a designer, not a developer, still a good event. are you talking about the hackathon?

[01:20:17] Nathan Wrigley: I'm guessing. on the hackathon, the case that's the case. Yep. Definitely. There's a place for you. for example, Kami, the one that we went to, I think I mis described it. I, think I basically implied that the people in the room were all developers. That is not the case. So as part of each of the project, in many cases, there were people that were working on documentation for that project.

because obviously if it's launched as a plugin, it immediately needs to have, knowledge based stocks and things like that. But there were also people who were designers who were doing things like making, I don't know, the logo for that thing, or designing the landing pages for that thing. Yeah.

So I, I have, I did misrepresent it. It is not, it, maybe it was like an 80 20 split or a 70 30 split. I can find that out for you. it felt More than half of the people were probably had developer chops, but I, could be wrong about that. But don't, put it if you are, if you don't consider yourself in that, serious developer category, don't let that put you off.

There's work to be done and, furiously busy, interesting work to be done as well. So it was so interesting. Kami, REM does that, do you think I answered her question right there? Yeah, I think so. okay. There, there's a, a good mix of different types of, qualities, skills, and whatnot.

[01:21:42] Remkus de Vries: yeah. Yeah. Yeah. and Andrew Palmer says it's a true business conference. Yeah. There is that side of it as well. So it's very much, there's lots of people who go there, really business to business, and business is definitely a big part of the agenda. The hackathon, I should say, takes place prior to the main event, so it basically doesn't overlap.

[01:22:04] Nathan Wrigley: So you do the hackathon and then you can move into cloudfest. so they don't really, they combine, put it that way. So you can do both of those things. Reese says he'd like to go next year. Honestly. Oh. Do it. Tammy, as a product person, it was ace. A lot of cloudfest is aims aimed at product.

Yep. there's loads about Cloudfest here. I'd very much to feel, I'd very much feel like the stupidest person. no. Nathan will be there as well. Oh, I was the stupidest person in the room by far. I was really dumb. see? And, and I felt great. you'll, you'll, have a lovely time.

And Reese, I've got an intuition that I win the award of, stupidest person if it was a contest between me and you. I'm betting my mortgage on it, in fact. So don't you worry. and then, oh, tacho. Come on. Tacho. We'll, we'll join forces. He says he is also, gonna win that award. And it's also good if you're looking for a job.

Yeah, that was a part of it as well. in the room there was a job support, I don't know, for Cloud Fest in general, but there was that, I was hoping. Oh, I was happily the stupidest person on my hacking team says, Tammy, you are being bashful. But Tammy says, I learnt so much. Yeah, Nice. fabulous event. definitely check it out. I dunno what the configuration of the one in Miami is. I dunno if it's got the same vibe. The one in Europe is in a theme park. I'll say that again. The one in Europe is in a theme park. Okay. Let that percolate for a moment. The rides, some of the rides are open.

I went on the teacups, felt a bit ill and, that was it. There was no more rides. Funnily enough. It's the one thing I do not care about as part The teacups. No. The whole rides. I don't care about 'em. Ah, it was great. So good. So good. Yeah. I'm a boring old man. I didn't say it. I saw it. Yeah. Yeah.

Moving on. anyway, check it out. There'll be loads of, I imagine all of the, all of the tech community will have articles about it and various things, and I hope Anna, that you've got out of it what you, intended to get out of it. It sounds like you, you enjoyed it, but you still, there's a, sounds like also there's a big place in your heart for Word Camp Hacka stuff as well.

Hack, yeah, yeah. So now I'm really sad because I wanted to visit Hackathon and I saw it only on when we came for day and now, and I understood from first, second, okay, we missed something most important. yeah, yeah. honestly, just everybody attend and get to the hackathon if you possibly can.

It was so worthwhile. they, Tammy says they will have a, they will have a hack day. So I think we're talking about Miami now, Tammy. They will have a hack day and at least one project with a WP component to it. The, US one, I think is a studio, is in a movie studio or something along those lines.

that's better. It's got, there's a gimmick. There's still a gimmick, which is quite nice. Thank you, Andy. Andy, said. I'm not, I can't repeat that's said. No, you can't. That's far too true to be, said on, let's see. okay. Yeah. Shock. Let's move on. We're nearly out of time, so what have we got time for?

Have we got time for this? No, let's move on. Have we got time for this? No. Do you know what I think probably with two minutes to spare, if we launch into another one, we're gonna run overrun, so let's just knock it on the head there. We've had a good run. We've done nearly the allotted time, so Yeah.

We'll do that in a minute. Oh, we can't do it with John. I'm gonna have to make Yeah, you're outta luck. I can't get my hands up. For some reason I've been trying to reset the camera, but it just won't reset. I don't know what went wrong with it. Nevermind. We'll do it like that and I'll just put a fake Yeah.

Ult. There you go. Put fake hands up. You'll Yeah, If it, works, send me an image of you going like that and, and we'll do it. Yeah. I could send an image of you later. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Do it on, that'll be hysterical. I'm still waiting for my, primary computer to reboot. Oh, it had to fix that.

[01:26:20] John Overall: when I rebooted this morning when you had me reboot it, decided one of my hard drives needs scanning and still scanning it. Yeah. Never. Nice. Never. Nice. so first of all, thank you to all the people that showed up and gave us comments. Really appreciate it. That's great. it always makes the show much more interesting when people comment, and I'm glad that you all did.

[01:26:39] Nathan Wrigley: And then it remains for me to thank Mku over there from scan for lee.com. Go check it out. And also within WordPress, you said within wordpress.com. Within wp.com. What did I say? Within WordPress? Oh, yeah, you, yeah. We're not going there. Yeah. Yeah. and also to Anna Herko from, crocker block, crocker block.com.

[01:27:03] Anna Hurko: Yeah. Okay. She's nodding. It's crocker block.com and also John, WP plugins A to z.com. That's right. And there's a, if you wanna catch me later, noon my time here. I'm interviewing, Ryan Logan from, influence WP for my show live on YouTube later this afternoon. It goes live at noon, Pacific time.

[01:27:26] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Thank you. I appreciate that. So that's, three, three and a half hours from now. Okay. Okay. a wp plugins data z.com. Go check it out over there. Yep. WP plugins data z.com/live and you can catch the show. Oh, neat. Okay. And, hopefully my live page is now working. It should be just as we end the show.

Yay. but that's it, that's all we got for you this week. We have this thing, Anna, I'm sorry, where every week we raise our hands in this slightly humiliating way. I. And, and we'll wait, and I then put it as the album art. Anna, do you feel okay? Yay. And look, John's hands are nowhere to be seen, but hopefully I'll get an AI version of that in a moment.

[01:28:06] John Overall: you'll get a, you'll get an image later when I can get a camera. That's yeah, that'd be great if you could send it over. I'd really appreciate it. So thank you for joining us, our panelists and thank you for joining us, our guests. I gonna, as we say in the uk, knock it on the head and, we'll be back hopefully this time next week.

[01:28:22] Nathan Wrigley: So yeah, see ya. All right. Take care. Bye bye.