This Week in WordPress #328

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It is time for This Week in WordPress, episode number 328 entitled Major Technical Gremlins at the Big Love Seat. It was recorded on Monday, the 31st of March, 2025.

My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I'm joined by my co-host, Michelle Frechette, but I'm also joined by Corey Maass, and Bob Dunn.

We are a WordPress podcast, and so guess what? We talk about WordPress. We have quite a long conversation about accessibility and ai, and in all honesty, that dominates probably about half of the entire episode.

The other thing which dominates the episode is my refusal to stop saying the words Page Builder Summit.com. I'm trying to promote that event and it was somewhat relentless, and I apologize the amount of times that I said it.

We're also promoting the WPLDN event happening.

Oracle. Is going to be the custodian of Bluehost data into the future.

There's a call for a new host city for WordCamp Europe. Wait for it, in 2027.

Contributor days. Should they be a bit more like a hackathon? Remkus de Vries has some thoughts on that this week.

There's a few other bits and pieces packed into there as well, including several bits and pieces that Michelle is doing around creating videos with speakers whose, presentations have not been accepted for WordCamp Europe. And also a video podcast which she's putting out.

And also towards the end, my video goes hysterically wrong. Everything just seems to break, and it's quite a comedy moment. We'll have to see. If any of this is actually usable. But if it is, it'll be starting in just a moment, and it's all coming up next on This Week in WordPress.

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Hello there, and welcome to episode number 328 of this week in WordPress. I've just realized how profoundly unfit I am. I went to get a banana, and during the course of the banana, I must have gone up about eight stairs. Yeah, exactly that. I've been off about eight stairs. That's all I did, and I'm absolutely finished.

[00:03:54] Corey Maass: But they're, English stairs. They're much bigger than your average. Very big. Yeah. They're tremendously difficult on the, on the legs and heart, the British stairs. Yeah, that's a good point. it's this, they're metric work for 3 28. Let's begin again. I'm joined as always to talk about the WordPress news from this week.

[00:04:10] Nathan Wrigley: It's a bit like getting around the fire side. Having a chat. It's a bit of a campfire moment and I'm joined this week by three, three fabulous people. Over there. We have the cohost for this week. It's Michelle Frechette. Hello Michelle. How are you doing?

[00:04:25] Michelle Frechette: Hello. Hello. I'm very well, thank you.

[00:04:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good.

Michelle, as you probably know, is the executive director at Post Status and in addition to working over at Post Status, Michelle is the podcast [email protected]. Co-founder of Underrepresented Under Easy for me to say underrepresented in tech.com, creator of wp speakers.com and also WP Career pages.

She's an author, frequent organizer and speaker at Word Presidents and she's got a new idea. Which we're gonna hear about a little bit later to, to help people kick stuff tomorrow. Yeah. Yeah. It's a really neat idea. So we'll get into that in a little bit, but something new coming from Michelle, which would be nice.

[00:05:06] Bob Dunn: Yeah, I'm

[00:05:07] Nathan Wrigley: also joined. Let's go. What would that be? Clockwise? I think. So let's go there. That's Corey. Corey, where's the hat gone? Look, Cory. Cory Never wanted to miss a promotional opportunity there. I like that. He's got his, he's got his branded mug. What does that mug say by any chart? Cory, tell us what the logo is on the mug there.

Oh, look at that. It's O-M-G-I-M-G.

[00:05:31] Corey Maass: It spells swag is what it spelled

[00:05:33] Nathan Wrigley: that, Corey is, as you may have discovered, he's the creator of O-M-G-I-M-G, which is a plugin, in the WordPress space to help you create your sort of featured images and things like that all inside the WordPress editor.

And he's also a WordPress freelance developer. Anything else you want to add? Hat to wear It

[00:05:54] Corey Maass: would seem, and, apparently today I'm wearing a Chapo, this is actually my father-in-law's, but the, okay, so I'm, having this app has the video where I tilt my head that way and I see it go that way.

But if I mirror Yeah. And while the words go backwards Oh. And so it's really freaking me out that I can't get the hat exactly straight. Oh yeah, Alright. Yeah. Every time I twist it, I go the wrong way.

[00:06:17] Nathan Wrigley: I know exactly what you mean. I've yeah, just There you go. A funky Brewster,

[00:06:24] Michelle Frechette: you just went, from golfer to caddy in two seconds.

[00:06:28] Nathan Wrigley: Over many years I've managed to teach my subconscious mind that if I wanna see Michelle, it's over there. And if I, Bob's easy 'cause he is down there and you are, anyway, it took me ages. Yeah. The same thing. If I wanna adjust the cap, I still get that wrong. I have to, basically deliberately go one way and see what happens and then go the correct way.

I don't always get it. Get it wrong. the old USBs like, these ones. These USBs, the sort of square ones, the old fashioned ones that look a bit like that. The old fashioned

[00:06:55] Corey Maass: ones?

[00:06:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Like how many times, how much of your life did you spend trying to get it in the wrong way? And then you flip it down.

Okay. So and you put it in and only to discover that the first way was in

[00:07:07] Corey Maass: fact the right way. But it's

[00:07:08] Michelle Frechette: always three times. Yeah.

[00:07:10] Corey Maass: Yeah. And the phra and the phrase is 50 50 chance and wrong 80% of the time. Okay.

[00:07:15] Nathan Wrigley: There you go. I like it. I'm glad I had that Propter han. That's brilliant. Anyway, there we go.

There's Michelle. There's Corey. And finally joining us from Portugal is Bob. Bob Don. How are you doing, Bob? I'm

[00:07:27] Bob Dunn: doing good.

[00:07:28] Nathan Wrigley: Very nice to have you with us. Bob is the founder of the Do the Woo podcast. He loves open source and community. He wears a lot of hats, both figuratively and literally. Yeah, honestly, Bob, like your podcast network, let's call it that these days.

how many shows have you got now?

[00:07:46] Bob Dunn: Let's see. I think it's, 13 shows and, what is it? I just. I think 28 host.

[00:07:56] Michelle Frechette: I, like to joke that I'm the only word presser who doesn't co-host one of Bobs shows.

[00:08:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So if you haven't, if you haven't listened to the, the, bits and pieces that Bob, Don, Bob is doing over at, do the Woo, definitely go and have a look because it's just gone, it's gone bananas with different shows over the years.

so there's now basically a show for everything. if you're in the WooCommerce space or, indeed the WordPress space, there's a show for all of the different bits and pieces. And have you pivoted then, has your role become more of a kind of podcast manager for want of a better word?

Yeah,

[00:08:31] Bob Dunn: that's what I, the intention was to stay off the mic and put other people there. nice. It's, come that way. But then I started this, I finally decided I needed to get back into a regular thing. So I started, we haven't started it, but it's called Content Sparks, so I'm gonna be co-hosting.

Every month with four different people. Ray from the repository, Chris, who does the video, the YouTuber. Okay. And, let's see who else? Derek, who is actually works on the project team at Automatic and Robbie Adair, who's been there a while. we're each gonna, we're gonna go, gonna be, one's gonna be more around media, one's gonna be around video, one's going to be around ai.

And then content management.

[00:09:27] Nathan Wrigley: nice. if you, if you want to check it out, go to do the wooo, D-O-T-H-E-W-O o.io, to find out more. So there we go. There's our, panel. if you are joining us today and you fancy making some comments, a few people have done that. Thank you. Appreciate that.

So this is Ryan's joining us from Influence, wp Hello from Charlotte, North Carolina. Thank you. Max is also joining us. He says, from Berlin, we're joined also, by Dave, I'm guessing. Dave friendly web guy, hello from Sonny Barker, UK. And, he has, I don't know why I have, I just need a banana.

It's like my crutch these days, David. I've have a banana. When the show begins, it's like folly. There's no point in carrying on. And Cameron is greeting us just with the word greetings, but he's probably. In, in, I'm gonna say Queensland, 'cause Brisbane is where he normally hangs out. But, there we go.

And also by Andrew Palmer. If you're fancy joining them and you want to, get your, your thoughts and opinions on the show, feel free to do that. The best place to send your friends and colleagues is here, wp builds.com/live. Over there, you've got two choices. On the right, if you're on a desktop is a box, a comment box, and it's YouTube comment.

So you need to be logged into some Google account. But if you actually click on the video itself, top I think in a little black button it says live chat or something like that, you can log, you can click into that and you don't need to be logged into, anything. Just type in your name and and you can, give us a comment.

So that's quite nice. And who else have we got? Hello? Nathan's going Bananas and Chow. Says Jackson from Brighton gonna feature you in a minute, Jackson. So stick around. That'd be nice. your face is going on the screen. Fun fact. I haven't lived in Brisbane since 2017. Okay. that is a fun fact.

Where do you live now though, in that case? Oh, I feel bad. some of my favorite people all in one place. This is gonna be a good week, says Marcus Burnett. Thanks Marcus. We're gonna be talking about Blue Host in a minute, Marcus as well. So there we go. Okay. Let's get stuck into it, shall we? So we are a WordPress podcast, so we're gonna talk about the bits and pieces going on in the WordPress space for the last week.

Let's start here. this is our website, wp builds.com. We produce two podcasts each week. You can find them by clicking on either the WP Builds article or the this week in WordPress, place as well. And they're both archives of the different shows that we're doing. You are watching this week in WordPress, or listening to it now, and the WP Builds podcast.

that's a podcast that we put on each week, and I interview somebody in the WordPress space. And it just goes on and on, doesn't it? It's like never ending. 415 episodes we've got so far. The latest one is with, sir Tim Nash. He's not really sir, but in my book he's sir. And, we had a, an episode all about the transition of WordPress towards B crypt for hashing passwords.

So it's a bit the tin fall episode, but that was quite nice. But if you're in the space and you fancy finding out what we're doing each week, if you put your email into this box here and click the submit button, we will send you an email twice a week to let you know when we drop new content. A big thank you to our sponsors who help keep the lights on.

We've got GoDaddy Pro as a sponsor and Bluehost and Omnis send. And so thank you to them for keeping the bits and pieces going. And I think that's the introductions over. Yeah. Yeah, we've done that. Okay, let's get stuck into it. Let's get the, ball rolling and first one up. It's something Michelle brought to the table.

Michelle came up with the idea recently of instead of putting the bits that the guests bring to the show at the end where they often get lost, why not just put 'em right at the beginning? So that's what we're doing. I am right. Yeah. Yeah. Damn Says Corey in a green. Great. Okay, post status women in WordPress.

It is on YouTube. Yeah. Tell me about this.

[00:13:33] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. So first of all, if you would refresh, you'll see that I fixed all the titles so they match now. But before somebody comes at me and says, Hey, I know right? so March, every year is Women's History Month and then also includes International Women's Day.

And I thought, why not interview some women in WordPress so that the, the community can find out how fierce, how strong, how many, that kind of thing. And I assumed I'd maybe get 10 or 15 and you only see four on there right now. 'cause I'm still in process of uploading. But I've had over 50 women reply to me and I've recorded very many episodes of this.

There, there are anywhere from five to 12 minutes long. I'm usually about five or six minutes, and it's just, I ask the same questions, th the same three or four questions to every woman, and they give me their answers. And I have interviewed now at least one woman on every inhabitable con, continent, in the world.

So it's these women, they're blowing my mind. They are, we are even fiercer than I anticipated. as far as, a force to be reckoned with underrepresented groups. And so rather than do this through any other, means, I wanted this to be part of post status. I was only putting them out on social, and then I thought, no, this needs to be a series on YouTube.

So I've been adding them to YouTube and I have two more going out today and about 40 more coming. So it's just, I've been so overwhelmed at the wonderful, response. So many women that I've never met, I have no idea who they were, and they answered the call, people shared it. I had nobody from the African continent, so I used Marcus's WP World and went on and did a little search through all the people that were there.

connected with one person who connected with me with more. So now I have several women from the African continent as well. It's just, it blows my mind. So this is gonna be more than a monthly thing. This is going to take, carry me throughout the whole year. And I want to continue to tell the stories of women in WordPress, including trans women.

By the way, I've also interviewed two trans women. So this is all inclusive of all women in WordPress, us. You are muted, Nathan.

[00:15:53] Nathan Wrigley: Quite right. I am sorry about that. I was muted. Yeah, that was weird. I don't think I did that. Okay. Anyway. Who cares? the did you, only put it onto YouTube? I say only, is that the place to find it or can I search for that in a podcast player of choice as a sort of, would it be part of the post status feed is what I'm asking?

I think

[00:16:12] Michelle Frechette: it probably will be at some point. Okay. I just have to figure out, how we do that because I'm, I do a lot with podcasting, but the feeds is something that's really,

[00:16:23] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. I.

[00:16:24] Michelle Frechette: Perplexing to me. Bob's

[00:16:27] Nathan Wrigley: all over it. he can school you in that when we finish. I'm sure he's got it 13 on it.

We do,

[00:16:34] Michelle Frechette: they do get picked up and put through on our RSS feed, so these are not on our website yet, so I imagine once they are, then that will happen there too.

[00:16:42] Bob Dunn: Okay. But at the very

[00:16:43] Michelle Frechette: least, they're all, they're on all our social medias. we have, I'm publishing them across the board in our social media channels.

And then also, again, this playlist in YouTube.

[00:16:55] Nathan Wrigley: as you can see, max is saying it's a really nice project. Really great project. That's great. Thanks. And I will put the link in the show notes so it, because YouTube always has horrible URLs, doesn't it? So it's just a string of It does, yeah. Go random letters.

I'm sorry. How do you pronounce that one, Nathan?

[00:17:10] Corey Maass: Say again? How do you pronounce that? U rl.

[00:17:13] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. This one is, clubs. No. Yeah, that would be fun if you,

[00:17:21] Michelle Frechette: but the, if you go to post statuses, YouTube and you go to playlists, there is a playlist, women in

[00:17:26] Nathan Wrigley: WordPress. Let's go with that. The easiest

[00:17:28] Michelle Frechette: way to find it right now, but yes, if you would include it in the show notes, that would be lovely.

[00:17:31] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you.

[00:17:31] Michelle Frechette: Okay,

[00:17:31] Nathan Wrigley: great. Okay, so there we go. There's our first item, post that to women in WordPress series, four episodes at the moment, and I'm looking at them and something that appeals to me is, you've gone brief, haven't you? You rather than doing like the whole hour long thing, which is what I often do.

Yeah. you've gone for the sort of sub 10 minutes, which is quite a nice, sweet spot. Yeah.

[00:17:50] Michelle Frechette: Yep. The reason is I wanted them to be consumable on social media. Oh. And if they weren't very long, they wouldn't be. So the whole idea was just, I was just doing them through social, anticipating a small amount of people.

But with this many women, I decided we're still gonna keep them brief. but they're going to be a YouTube playlist as well.

[00:18:07] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. go and check that out. Anyway, I will just press on if that's all right. So yeah, you, I'm gonna, mention the next thing, which is this piece. This came out on make wordpress.org.

There's quite a lot of news in the accessibility space. I've got another piece in a moment. in fact, there's a few bits including the Cloud Fest hackathon that's got some accessibility news, which we did cover on a bit last week. But this is Joe Dolson. who writes accessibility improvements in WordPress?

6.8. Honestly, I started reading it with a mind to putting the highlights into this podcast, and you can see I've highlighted bits in yellow here, there, and everywhere. And then I just basically about there. I thought, whoa, no, is this too much to, to mention it? So what I'm basically gonna do is I'm gonna push everybody in the direction of this article.

If, you've got any interest in accessibility and the WordPress core project, then go and have a look at this. 6.8 dropping, real soon. And the amount of work which has been done, not just by Joe, but anybody else who's contributed from an accessibility point of view, it really is. A lot. so there's lots of little line items, some of them more impactful than others.

So there's lots of things been added to core. These are all the bits and pieces that've been added to core. There's a whole bunch of stuff which has been added to the customizer, to the sort of editing interface, bunch of miscellaneous stuff, and themes. And then we move into Gutenberg and blocks. So particular blocks have received certain attention and what have you.

Anyway, what I basically drew from this is there's too many bits and pieces to mention, which is phenomenal. I think that's, we can be very proud of the team for doing that. but also, this is just an, it's an, ongoing thing. This will probably be a job of work that never ever ends, but it's really nice to see that there's a whole bunch of people working on that.

So that's really all I've gotta say. I dunno if Bob, Michelle, Corey, you've got anything to add to that? If so, dive in.

[00:20:11] Michelle Frechette: Happy to see it. Happy to see it. Say right now. Yeah.

[00:20:15] Bob Dunn: Okay. Yeah. When I was doing my homework, this pretty, pretty much took up the entire amount Yeah. Of it. And I was looking at those.

There's a lot to see.

[00:20:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And some of it like really impactful in certain ways. And again, I could mention particular things, but No, I just won't bother. But loads and loads of like a quality of life things that you may not notice but are just being added into, I don't know, like the text that a screen reader might read out inside the admin ui, just to make it slightly clearer.

to somebody who's trying to interact with a setting, for example, or some aspect of the block editor, just, to make it e easier to understand what's going on as well, as much more profound things which really, make it better for the, website on the front end as well. once more accessibility improvements in WordPress 6.8 by Joe Dawson on make wordpress.org.

Sticking with Joe. Joe and I have started a show. we are five episodes in, I think five. Hang on. Yeah. Here we go. we're five episodes in. We came up with the most breathtakingly original name. We called it the Accessibility Show with Joe Dolson. where

[00:21:22] Michelle Frechette: do you come up with this stuff? I don't know. I

[00:21:24] Nathan Wrigley: had a real moment of epiphany.

Yeah, I, think I took some LSD or something and just, real zen moment. Maybe you

[00:21:32] Bob Dunn: should. Yeah,

[00:21:33] Nathan Wrigley: that's right. Yeah. Okay. I came up with that title, but it does what it says on the tin. It's Joe Dolson. It does, talking about accessibility and, each of the shows that we've had so far has been Joe finding a particular thing inside WordPress.

So navigation menus, popups, cookie banners, that kind of thing. But we decided to go a bit different this time around because, I dunno if you've been following, on YouTube, ai and WordPress is a pretty big thing, like people trying to make things, use AI to create a website. You a use AI to create a, SaaS app, those kind of things.

And, Jamie Marsland a few weeks ago, decided that, and Jamie Marsland, if you dunno who Jamie is, he's the, the official WordPress YouTuber. He's employed by automatic to, to mod monitor and create content at the, the WordPress, YouTube channel. He created a video, in which he took his personal website, so Jamie marsland.com and, went through AI to do that.

And he used WordPress to con contain the content. And he used the system, which I confess I've never used, 'cause I don't basically use any AI called Lovable, which is all the hotness I think in Europe. it's a European thing and it's growing at some astronomical rate. And he put the website out and during the period where he was talking to the AI and asking it to do things, he said, specifically said, make it accessible.

So I thought, would it be interesting if we see if it's accessible or not? And so with his permission, I got Joe to, to go through the website and, see if it was accessible. What do you reckon? Thumbs up. It was perfectly accessible. Thumbs down. It had things that needed fixing. What do you reckon?

Ai There's almost never,

[00:23:28] Michelle Frechette: there's never such thing as perfectly accessible. So I'm gonna,

[00:23:31] Nathan Wrigley: I'm gonna give it a

[00:23:32] Michelle Frechette: thumbs down.

[00:23:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay. I'll, give you a bit of a thumbs down. It was interesting. It wasn't terrible. So that's one thing. It definitely took cues from things that ought to be done.

But one of the things that Joe noticed, 'cause he is in this every day, all day, every day he noticed, surprise. It basically made the same mistakes that humans do. And when you think about that kind of adds up, doesn't it? 'cause it's taken its data points. Its LLM has being created off the back of human created websites.

And so it didn't do a diabolical job, but it did, an all right kind of job. But it definitely wasn't perfect. So if you're in. To accessibility and you wanna see how AI is performing in the month of March, 2025. It's definitely worth checking out. It's about half an hour long. And, any of you using AI to build your websites or your plugins?

Corey, dare I say I am. Yep.

[00:24:31] Corey Maass: Yep. I've got, how's it going?

Let me ask, the ai, it's fine. From my perspective, the AI might feel differently. it's, it's great. I definitely, this kind of aspect is going to be challenging and ongoing. But as, you said, since it's analogous to the, it's, it makes a lot of the same mistakes that humans make, which kind of makes sense given that.

The information it has is based on humans. I, see the challenges being the same, but using AI to write code, has been, has made a huge difference for me. Certainly. Oh, that's fascinating. Okay. And, yeah, I've got a plugin. I've got an, app that I'm not telling anybody about 'cause I actually wanna rebuild it again already.

But, so I've, spent the last couple of months using, ramping up my use of ai. To learn how to do it, how to do it well. and so built a, little time tracking app that was built pretty much entirely by ai and then rebuilt timer duro.com, which is my productivity timer app that I rebuild every, at least every couple of years, usually using whatever new tech I wanna learn.

and so that's largely built by ai. Like it needed a little guidance. I was definitely the senior developer and it was the junior developer, but, let's hope it

[00:26:06] Nathan Wrigley: stays that way.

[00:26:08] Corey Maass: Nah, I mean if anyway, as long, yes, as long as I'm still employed, then great. But yeah. Yeah, its role can change.

but yeah, and then, actually like I've been having to use it more and more for. Even breaking out of the code that's in front of us. And like this weekend, I, pushed a, big server update to, Mexican train. Online is like a game Oh, the game, online game that I have and I've spoke about.

so the server hadn't been updated in, a long time and it was getting more and more, making me more and more nervous. so used AI to help me work through what, what of this code will no longer run on. PHP seven now that I'm updating to PP eight. and it helped me work through a bunch of things.

it wasn't a hundred percent, but then when I actually push it to the server, and as always happens, there's always some other, oh yeah, something, I'm sitting there asking AI Hey, what do you think might be the issue here? And it said, oh, we'll try this. And so again, just having the ultimate rubber duck who actually speaks back, helping me figure out, and then even update, I needed to update node.

Sorry. I know I'm rambling here, but no, it's good. so I'm, in an editor where I've got PHP and JavaScript in front of me, but I'm, talking to the chat in a, in my IDE saying, Hey, I need to update node on the server, what do I do? And it was like, here are your commands, and it failed.

And I'm like, Nope. Didn't work. Here are the errors. It said, okay, let's run this to uninstall it and reinstall it, and then do this and this, try this. we, had to try eight different things and this previously would've been me Googling and copying and pasting. Yeah. and, or getting in, jumping into the development, post status channel and being like, somebody help, and we, muddled through it.

I'm, I'm, remarkable

[00:28:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I'm sanguine. I. Ish about ai. But, it was interesting watching this video with, Joe or doing the video with Joe though, because it, wasn't terrible, but it wasn't perfect either. But it was that intuition that if you just tell the AI to make it accessible, and I think more or less they were the words that Jamie used.

Something along those lines, just one little prompt. and then assuming that it had done a job well, in fact it did, it really did put elements in that needed to be in, but just didn't get everything quite right. But I guess that's no different from a human. And,

[00:28:57] Corey Maass: that's it, right?

Like I, I, I equate it to like doing a code test and so I'm a developer and I only think about ones and zeros. but having, somebody come to me and say, build a plugin that. Makes, all the buttons in the WordPress admin blue, I will do it, but they'll come back and they'll be like, oh, that's the wrong blue.

And I'm like, you didn't tell me what blew to, to make them, or, whatever dumb comparison. So the more detail, the better. and to me, I'm finding most of the tutorials that you see online are like, write this long spec. and I'm like, okay, that's a great place to start, but it's, you're not gonna think of everything unless you worked at Microsoft where the specs used to be 400 pages.

and then frankly, you're gonna want to like, solve each problem the same way that I usually a developer sits down and goes, okay, what are the, big problems that I need to solve and make sure that I can solve before I care about what the buttons look like? And so it's, to me, it's more of a process of, iterating and, I think it would be the same with this, where you'd go, okay.

especially if you could tell the ai, go look at this documentation, or go look at this list that is the low hanging fruit, the easy stuff, the basics, alt tags and things like that. And then you, and then step back and go, okay, what are we missing? What's a deep dive here? What other tools can we use to find holes that need plugging, et cetera, et cetera.

To me, it would be a process just like anything else.

[00:30:34] Nathan Wrigley: We'll, we'll come onto a tool in a minute that purports to do just that. We'll, talk about that in a moment. But just before we do that, I think, my slight concern is that we're, I. We're I don't know, just slowly backing ourselves into a corner a little bit.

And maybe that's just the inevitability of it. But I do wonder if in the future, let's say for example, that WordPress just carries on and it carries on and it's still going in 25 years. No matter what's going on with the ai, I do wonder if it'll get to the point where you won't want to buy a plugin from almost anybody, because you'll just be able to talk the plugin into existence.

I don't know, I want a PO and I want a Pomodoro timer app. Or I want, I want a, thing which will allow me to have an interface to manipulate featured images. And just the mere utterance of those words will make it And it will reliably do it and what have you. and all the while.

That's great. It's wonderful that, that future is brilliant. 'cause all of a sudden anybody can have anything they'd like, which is the point of life, right? In the western world. but I don't know if that's the right incentive. if, we get to the point where so many of the things that we do are, are now obsolete because an AI can do them, I'm just not entirely sure that's for the best.

But, it's a more philosophical argument.

[00:31:54] Corey Maass: to, to me I'm viewing it as, there's a timeline, right? and there's a point where, what's, the movie? it's not no. The, the little robot, oh, Wally Where all, ultimately, all the humans are just sitting in overstuffed chairs, sipping sodas.

It's ideal in space. Yeah. Bring it on. And how cool would that be? but it's, the, how. There are too many ideas, right? it's like saying, build a house and it's like every house is different. Every, everybody's idea of a house is different. there's different ways to optimize building a house.

and there's complexity underneath, right? So yeah, I think there's going to be, if you say draw a house, most people can draw a square with a triangle on top and maybe a chimney and some windows. you can solve the easy version, right? But the hard problem, is probably always gonna take at least opinion.

And so I think it's us working with AI to build this stuff. And then down the road, ideally, honestly, what you just said is true in that like a, quote unquote simple problem. you'd still have to give it guidance, right? A Pomodoro timer. What in the real world, in the browser, in WordPress, on Euro in Mac os dot. But given, a few choices, ideally it solves it. And then in theory, we get to move upstream to solve the more complex problems. okay, I want a Pomodoro timer combined with, the time tracking that I do, but also remind me to go eat meals, but also plan all of my meals.

and then ultimately build me a chair that floats in space and never ending supply of soda. but it's I think that we're, I'm optimistic, right? And that it helps us move upstream to solve bigger and harder problems more easily, more readily. and or, maybe we can actually get back to just thinking about the philosophy of things, if.

Tech is stunned for us. that's the ideal, but Yeah. Yeah. Then there's the other, what's the Idiocracy? Where we all just consume reality television? Yeah. Wally, isn't it? It could go either way. We'll end

[00:34:19] Nathan Wrigley: up sitting on a, chair in Space, Swally, few comments

[00:34:25] Corey Maass: built by ai.

[00:34:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's right. Few comments around that. so let's go back. Oh, by the way, Cammy's saying that she gets to see Bob twice today. That's quite nice. I dunno if Bob knows that you've seen Kami twice today. Yeah, I do know that. Okay, good. I'm glad. She's very

[00:34:43] Bob Dunn: optimistic. Yeah.

[00:34:45] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. AI according to Dave, seriously, you can't figure that out yourself.

Okay. Try this. Yeah, that's kinda, I always get the apology from the ai. Whenever I use AI and it does something wrong and it doesn't work, it just goes, oh. Of course. Yeah. Okay. let's start again. And it's a very, polite way of dealing with it. Max says he's been using AI for every day, for years, completions discussions, planning, et cetera, but only recently converted, completed his first full vibe coding Tory app.

Which was fun. James Lau. Hello. a lot more power to the developer if you can master it. I don't see the difference. It's like having Stack Overflow or the equivalent at my fingertips. Instant results over reading through comments, and finding the correct answer. Maya is joining us. She's just saying she's here, she's on the mobile 'cause the, the Internet's not working where she is.

Max again, had a similar story, I guess to what Cory was just saying. It helped me set up notarization for app building on Mac Os and all the signing stuff for my Tori app. It was great. I haven't visited Stack Overflow for ages and keeps going. that was nearly impossible. Sorry Nathan. That is nearly impossible today, or sorry, nearly possible today already.

Instant apps on the other hand, there will be new frontiers type setters are obsolete. Yeah, good point. And nobody wants to give up DTP to go back. What's DTP? What's that acronym mean? DTP. I dunno,

[00:36:13] Corey Maass: I refuse to Google acronyms anymore. Yeah,

[00:36:15] Nathan Wrigley: okay. Yeah. Yeah. Just do the ai, ai yeah. Yeah, exactly. I was, it was almost do the woo, but, not quite.

people could cook but restaurants are still semi busy as there enough that people want them to do for them. Yeah, that's true. Do you know, it's interesting, I, do wonder if high paid jobs will be manual jobs in the future. I do have, I do, if you are a plumber, for example, or a, I don't know, or you work in a restaurant or something like that, something which really probably has elements of automation in it, but not likely.

I do wonder if they'll become much more valuable skills because they, the, AI cannot do it. So curious, typically writing code has been a very well paid job, hasn't it? But I do wonder if that's, that is gonna, I. Sort of go in the opposite direction as the AI takes over. I think we always escape to this argument that we'll do difficult, more complex things.

Will we though? I don't know. let's find out. Corey, can you explain quantum physics for us? I dunno why he wants you to do that. Have I missed something?

[00:37:23] Corey Maass: the concept that I've now moved on to higher philosophical thinking. Oh,

[00:37:27] Nathan Wrigley: I see. Okay. Yeah.

[00:37:29] Corey Maass: I, can't be bothered to actually write code anymore.

[00:37:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, Just, just do quantum physics instead. Courtney's joining us. Matt did. Matt did want WP on the moon. Maybe this how we get it there with soda Idiocracy is my favorite movie of all time. and then we've got a few hello's. Oh, desktop publishing.

[00:37:52] Bob Dunn: DTP. Yep.

[00:37:53] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting. But max, I think we've always had the opportunity to escape to things that the, machine or the thing can't do.

So in the Victorian era where we had the industrial revolution. All of a sudden the, technology enabled the machines, if you like, to lift the heavier thing. And so the human body was no longer needed for those difficult, heavy lifting things. So we escaped to the sort of blue collar, white collar work, if Thanks, Cory. that just sums it up nicely. And, but if the human brain is no longer the thing that we escape to as the thing which is, the immutable human thing. Where do we go? And it is obviously into a big chair in space that's now clearly one,

[00:38:38] Corey Maass: one chair for everybody though. Yeah, it's a chair.

We don't each get individual chairs. Okay. Where it's one big loveseat.

[00:38:44] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. One big loveseat has gotta be the title of this show. one big loveseat. That's great. We've got it. Unless somebody comes up with something better, that's gonna be the, top of the chair. Anyway. There we go. So go check it out.

I was talking to, Joe Dolson, and we started this conversation talking about, accessibility and ai.

[00:39:07] Michelle Frechette: Oh, that's right. That's how we got here.

[00:39:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Gosh, we always get here in the end, don't we? The AI conversation. speaking of accessibility, this popped up on my radar this week, and I'm not entirely sure I'm gonna hit the target on this.

Perhaps if Miriam or somebody from Elementor is watching, they can give me the heads up. But Elementor got two pieces from Elementor this week, and it used to be that Elementor was literally mentioned on this show. Every week for months and months on end. And we haven't really mentioned them in ages, but this is something new that they have introduced.

But it's nothing to do with their core offering. Their page builder, it's a new product it seems, and it's called Ally, A one one Y, but it's, spelled Ally, a double LY, and it seems to be a web accessibility tool. It's free to use, although I'll just scroll, it's not entirely free to use. there are tiers.

If you want to go for the free version, you get a certain amount, like one website activation, and then you can pay in different tiers for more things inside the, plugin. And really what they're trying to build is a tool to help you. With accessibility on your website. It's being built out in four phases.

Sounds like the block editor, but, we're in phase one and that is this sort of usability widget with an accessibility statement. So it's gonna try to help you create an accessibility statement for your website, but also give you this widget, which will make some, suggestions as to what you can do coming down the pike from them will be a scanner so that it will go through and detect things on your website.

So it's not just about that education piece, it's more here's the education plus here's what we've spotted on your website, which needs fixing. Phase three is gonna be, remediation. So I, presume they're gonna try to fix the problems for you, presumably with ai. And, and then future phases, who knows what they are.

They're just called future phases. yeah, there you go. I dunno if anybody wants to comment on that, but that seemed a bit left field to me. Elementor doing something. I suppose I'm

[00:41:10] Corey Maass: just pleased to see it. they've got, reach, they've got power, like voice, they've got. Devs, they've got a community of, development behind them.

So I love that they're championing, this. That's a, that's too big of a word, but I'm glad they're, I'm glad they're putting this to the forefront. Anyway.

[00:41:30] Nathan Wrigley: Big and up. Big and up.

[00:41:31] Corey Maass: Okay. that's a misuse of that phrase, but done. They are Okay. Drawing attention to it. And that'll do, I'm taking steps.

[00:41:41] Nathan Wrigley: We'll go with that. I dunno if this is Alli to, Ooh. See what I did there? I did. Yeah. that is not a big word. I was able to use that one. you left a lie. I dunno if it's gonna be bound to the element or page builder. So I dunno if it's only gonna be able to inspect elemental sites or be in some way bound to it.

It doesn't seem to imply that. but maybe it is. Again, if anybody from Elemental wants to reach out and let me know, maybe we could do a podcast about it or something. But, yeah, tools for web creators to make websites more. Accessible.

[00:42:17] Michelle Frechette: Nice.

[00:42:18] Nathan Wrigley: Anybody wanna comment on that? Yeah. While I finish my banana,

[00:42:22] Michelle Frechette: I think more of us should be incorporating things like that into the products that we create

[00:42:28] Corey Maass: and the, and just the more the word is used and more products that are out there.

As Michelle said, like none of them are gonna be perfect and, whatnot. But, any, anything we can do to draw attention to this stuff is just crucial. 'cause it's still, it's still not important enough.

[00:42:47] Nathan Wrigley: yep. It's definitely not getting the attention it needs.

[00:42:50] Corey Maass: Never has. It probably never will.

But every step is a good Is a, step.

[00:42:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. If nobody's got anything else to add on that, we will move on quickly. Thanks. Yeah. All right. Okay. This is a bit of self-promotion. Apologies. I've already promoted WP builds, but I'm promoting. It's back. I sound like, page, I sound like Dumbledore or something.

it's the page Builder Summit. We've had seven versions of it in the past, and we're doing the eighth version. It is at the ingeniously titled url, page builder summit.com. See how good I am at these brilliant pithy names. page builder summit.com. And if I say that loads of times, I'm gonna somehow drill it into your head page builder summit.com.

Page builder summit.com. That'll do, I've probably done it enough there. And if you go there, you can join the wait list and if you fill out the form, we'll just keep you updated when all of the announcements about it drop. If you scroll down, you'll be able to see who the speakers are that we've confirmed thus far.

I think we've got 35 already organized, something like that.

[00:43:55] Michelle Frechette: That's amazing.

[00:43:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And more to come, but, you can have, look, there's David Waley. My good friend David Wamsley managed to coax him at, to literally wrestle him to the ground and, Threatened to beat him up, but he's back, which I'm really pleased about and some familiar front Christmas look.

Cammi, she's on the call. Yay. Cammy. Bob's seeing her twice today. Do you know that? Just in case you didn't know, scroll it up

[00:44:23] Bob Dunn: and scroll it down and before time. Yes.

[00:44:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there she's again, 3, 3, 4. and, it, this is really nice. So Luke Carbu, I was sitting opposite a table, having a meal with him the other day, and, he's oh yeah, I'm in the page.

I was like, oh, great. Oh, that's brilliant. So that's quite nice. Bit of serendipity. Anyway, there's the people that are coming on so far, as I said, it's happening in May. The dates are the 12th to the 16th of May. 2025. Once more. Page for summit.com. It's a cheap trick, but it works. Okay. So there you go.

Sign up. And if, oh, if you are from a company that would like to sponsor that event, feel free to click this link down here. It says, find out more. We are still looking for sponsors to help make the events, happen because, it's really nice when the event actually works out and you're not, you're grinding the gears, and not getting any sort of, any reward in exchange for it.

So that would be nice. page builder submit com, click that. Yeah.

[00:45:33] Corey Maass: is the page builder summit.com, in person or

[00:45:37] Nathan Wrigley: no? It is. Do you know? I've thought about that so many times. And now is it's always online. Yeah, it's [email protected]. Thanks. Yeah, the page builder summit.com, summit, which is by the way, just in case you didn't know.

Thanks. I've just figured out what you're trying to do. It took me ages. It's between the 12th and the 16th of May, 2025. Thanks, Cory. and it's not, it's online, so it'll all be happening, on a website au where, sorry. Bob builder summit

[00:46:11] Bob Dunn: com. So a question about the page builders summit.com. Thanks, Bob.

Yeah. As a, just a, we wanna get back to in person and I, look at it, I look at what, Michelle's doing, I look at other online, it seems like they're never, aside from how sponsorships are doing or not, there's never a shortage for people when it comes to, I. Online events still. as far as speakers, it seems like you always get a good mass amount of speakers and I just, it does give that accessibility more to people, easier to be able to speak, not have to worry about traveling somewhere.

And I just wonder if, more people are gonna opt out for just, online speaking versus flying around everywhere?

[00:47:09] Nathan Wrigley: the flying around bit, if you happen to live in the same spot as the event that you're attending, if it's 10 miles down the road Yeah. Where there's basically no cost, that's something, isn't it?

You can attend that. Yeah. But the minute you get in on a train or a plane and there's a hotel involved. Then it, really starts to adopt, doesn't it? let's take a, typical trip to Word Camp Europe. For me, I'd have to get on a train. I'd have to get on a plane. There'd be several nights In hotel, you're immediately getting into the thousands of dollars territory and, I think there'll always be a need for this.

Having said all that, I think the, I think people do love the in-person events for that different, because you can be in the same room as everybody. So this is more, there's, not really, we don't really lean too much into the, networking piece. We do some Zoom calls, but it's more sort of an aside thing.

So it's more about turning up, getting the, knowledge from the speakers. And and one thing that's quite nice is everything's prerecorded. So the speaker and

[00:48:11] Bob Dunn: where can they find that? no,

[00:48:15] Michelle Frechette: I heard it [email protected]. This

[00:48:17] Nathan Wrigley: is brilliant.

[00:48:19] Michelle Frechette: I was, the only person who hadn't said it out loud yet, so I had to jump in.

[00:48:22] Nathan Wrigley: What's great here is that I've, now, without you realizing it, I've co-opted you into advertising for me and all through the mechanism of humor. And now you're, you're all, in imp implicit, complicit. That was, oh, it's a joke. Is it?

[00:48:40] Michelle Frechette: That was, hi though. That was human intelligence.

[00:48:44] Nathan Wrigley: That's brilliant.

yeah. So there it is. 16th to, honestly, that was supposed to be like a one minute segment and we've done at least 10 minutes on the page Builder Summit. In the comments.

[00:48:54] Michelle Frechette: Comments. Dave wants to know if he needs a web browser to join the summit. You do, Dave, because it [email protected].

[00:49:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, just in case you were think.

Ken, you could go to any other website, URL apart from page builder summit.com. You can't,

[00:49:09] Corey Maass: I'll, you know what, I'll, call him and then just put my phone in front of my computer. Yeah. Okay. and then he can just listen.

[00:49:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. This is perfect. yeah, so if you try to go on an airplane to the page builder summit.com event, you are, you're not going to succeed.

You can get as many hotel rooms as you like. It's not gonna be, no, that's, you could, you can, you could do that. You literally can be anywhere to the town. Oh, that's great. Oh, why didn't you say it was on nine mood. Okay. I should have tried either s hand up,

[00:49:45] Corey Maass: but I do wanna draw an interesting, or what I think is an interesting point that you just brought up, is, or Bob, brought up the, okay.

In-person event versus online event. One of the things that jumped out at me, that's very impressive about page builder summit.com is the, number of speakers and the diversity of speakers. and so well done. and I'm, and I wonder that isn't, and, also as you mentioned, the talks are prerecorded.

I wonder if there isn't a correlation, right? So I always prefer in-person events. I love the networking and all that kind of stuff, but inversely having an event online might make it easier to get speakers of. More diverse locations and more diverse, ability to travel and spend thousands, like you said.

so it's an interesting, like maybe there's an advantage there that I personally just hadn't thought about before.

[00:50:56] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know that the bizarrely that thought had not occurred to me before? So the thought, we always try to make it as diverse as possible. In the past, Michelle has helped us with that endeavor and well done.

and I, so we've tried, but I hadn't really drawn, joined the dots between an online event and an in-person event. And yeah, I would say it is easier to create a more diverse online event because the, what's the, the really all you've gotta be able to do is submit a video and have something interesting to say.

You don't need to be able to dig into your pocket for a hotel, a flight, a visa. So that's an interesting point. Participation

[00:51:40] Corey Maass: is, much far and even, if there's a budget to fly somebody there, there's still an implied cost of meals and things like that, unless it's truly a, an event with a huge budget.

So anyway, yeah.

[00:51:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's interesting. Okay. And what I quite like about the event is that people get to give the best version of their talk as well, because with the best will in the world, I would be very nervous giving a talk a, word. In fact, I would not be able to do it. I would be a shivering wreck, frankly.

But, with this talking into a camera, you can, record it and rerecord it. We've had that quite few times actually where people have submitted something and. Then a couple of days later have said, actually, can I, can we scrub that? I wanna just submit this other version, which is slightly better in this regard.

And so we do that so long as it doesn't cause too many problems with what we've already done. But anyway, there it is. I won't say the URL, I think we've worn that joke out, but it's that summit at that URL, you know where it is. yeah, comment. So that's coming up in May.

[00:52:39] Corey Maass: That's a good comment too.

[00:52:41] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, thank you. Right here we go. Peach Andary. She says she'll be at Summit, again next year. And it's also easier to deliver talks regardless of ability. What do you mean by that picture? That's interesting.

[00:52:59] Michelle Frechette: I'll step in and say that. Oh, as somebody who travels with a 225 pound scooter and has to get on and off of airplanes and around cities that may or may not be accessible, I can sit right at my home, in front of my desk and front of my camera and record something and send it off anywhere in the world.

[00:53:17] Bob Dunn: Yeah, so

[00:53:17] Michelle Frechette: I'm assuming that peaches, you can correct me if I'm wrong, peacha, but I think that has a lot to do with her comment there about accessibility and ability.

[00:53:26] Nathan Wrigley: I think, one of the things that you have to do is manufacture the excitement a little bit more for an online event.

So with the real world, one, the proximity to other people whom they love and like is more or less in enough, isn't it? you go to the event, you hang out with these people and stand around in bars and exchange, conversation. It's brilliant and ideas and what have you, and there is none of that.

So you have to concoct other ways to make it exciting. And so we try to do that a little bit with like bingo and things like that, yeah. It's, yeah. Intriguing, but, okay. I get Peach's comment now. Thank you, Michelle for Explaining that. anybody else got anything on that thing? He said?

[00:54:07] Bob Dunn: No.

[00:54:07] Nathan Wrigley: Trying not to say it again. Okay. That was supposed to be very, short, and now I'm gonna promote something else. that's happening in London. And Jackson was in the comments earlier. Jackson, is doing, W-P-L-D-N, so it's the, the meetup that we hold in London, each month around the WordPress space.

It's called W-P-L-D-N Jackson, who, like I said, was in the comments. He is doing a masterclass all about block theming, for WooCommerce. If you wanna find out more, you can go to WPLD n.uk. Slash masterclass. It's happening on the 24th of April. And, yeah, it'll be an in-person event. So there's a, it's much smaller.

There's like only a few seats available. So if you wanna get involved with that, then and go to that page and find out. Peacher says, that's exactly what I meant. Michelle. Also, carers of other people may find it difficult to travel, but will find online delivery much easier. Do you see now we've wiped out Corey's.

Entire face by putting that comment there only. Yeah, he just got the Oh, nice. Yeah, that's great. I love it when people muck around. Oh, dammit. I took it away at the wrong moment. I'm so sorry. okay. So that's another event that's happening in the WordPress space. Big host, is Bluehost, they sponsor, as you heard at the beginning, they sponsor this podcast, but, dunno exactly what the numbers are, but I think they're pretty massive in terms of their, annual turnover.

They are, in turn a company owned, I wanna say owned by New Fold Digital. There's a bunch of companies under the new fold digital brand. Yost, for example. And Bluehost is one of them. if you're a customer of theirs, you'd probably be interested to know that they're moving all of their data from where?

I don't know, but it's obviously not from Oracle. But, they are moving it all over to Oracle, has been announced in the recent past. I dunno if this matters to anybody, presumably in the background, it'll all be seamless and you won't notice. But if that was something that you cared

[00:56:16] Corey Maass: about there, I'm gonna use that in the future where I'll be like, I'm moving all my websites from Cory Ho to Cory hosting, and they're like, where was, it'd be like Cory Hoick, but it That's right.

To put out a, press release.

[00:56:28] Nathan Wrigley: I had to move some, websites this weekend and, oh, I'm glad. Never fun. let's just say I'm glad to be doing podcasting as my primary thing these days. It was, yeah. Think things went wrong, let's put it that way. anyway, there you go. Bluehost it. They're gonna be working, with Oracle, a a, bunch along with a bunch of other people.

CrowdStrike, Cybereason, Newfeld Digital, who we're talking about, and Palo Alto. They've also recently moved their stuff over there. So obviously things are working out for Oracle. Oracle feels like one of those legacy companies that. I don't see anything of Oracle anywhere, but I guess that's primarily 'cause they don't just don't produce com stuff that would ever sit in my room, if They don't produce technology that I can hold or purchase or cameras or anything like that. But they're obviously fairly

[00:57:15] Corey Maass: big.

[00:57:17] Bob Dunn: Yeah.

[00:57:17] Corey Maass: Salesforce, Oracle, these, these huge companies that are just behind the scenes with Freak and everything.

[00:57:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:57:27] Corey Maass: but you'd have no reason to hear about it necessarily.

No, IBM when was the last time you thought about IBM Just now? When you said it

[00:57:34] Nathan Wrigley: actually. prior to that. Before that, yeah. Oh yeah. Decades. Really. Decades. Anyway, there you go. Let's move on. so here's Michelle's idea. That she, she had, I dunno how long this idea's been in the making, Michelle, but Cool idea and it talks to what we were on about a minute ago.

About

[00:57:52] Michelle Frechette: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So I, I was declined again this year to speak at Word Camp Europe. And I thought, oh, I liked my talk. If anybody's interested in it, I could always just put it out on YouTube and people would be able to consume the content that I was going to create. And then different people said, that's a great idea.

But then also, Isha said, you should do it live so that people can interact with you and you could get better engagement. And then I thought, if I'm going to do one live, why don't I, and there's four, I, the, dare I say rejection email from work at Europe, said there were over 400 speakers that applied.

Oh, Wow. And there's what, 50 or 60 spots total maybe for those kinds of people to speak, people like me. And I thought, I am clearly not alone. And lots of other people said I didn't get picked either, and I didn't get picked either. And, that's fine. I'm. My ego hurts a little bit, but my feelings are fine.

but the thing is, there's so many people who had like great talks that they were going to, submit and there's just not room at one event to do those all. And so I thought, why don't I create a virtual stage series between WP speakers and post status? And so starting tomorrow we have our first, Virtual stage open, rather than call it a webinar series, which just sounds it really is a virtual stage. I really want people to be able to come listen to it. They will live on YouTube forever, so it will be evergreen content. So if you aren't able to make it live, tomorrow at 11:00 AM Eastern time here in the United States, you will be able to consume it at a later time.

But to be able to interact, you would come live to that. And tomorrow, my very first speaker is Chris Reynolds on composable WordPress. So Chris is going to come and speak tomorrow. And since that first application, I have had about six more. So I am gearing up for weekly content and I'm very excited about it.

[00:59:57] Nathan Wrigley: Are you gonna do it, Michelle, a bit like this show where it's always predictably at this same time? Yes, because that's, yes. That, I think over time, I think that brings an audience of its own, if Yes. Because it's just same time, same URL. and if you were to do the same thing, that's the idea, right?

Yeah.

[01:00:15] Michelle Frechette: also, like my schedule needs some predictability to it, so I needed to be able to do something like that as well. and I know that there will be people that say we can't attend at that time. I am one person and, to be able to do a speaker series like this, I need to be able to be on my game.

And so maybe in the future we'll offer another time for people on the other side of the world, another host. It's a possibility. the inability to pay more people is where I right now am, stuck with, I don't wanna say stuck with it sounds terrible, but, and an inability to bring other, hosts into it.

But at least to begin now for the first few months, it'll be, this one series at 11:00 AM East Coast Time in the US and I did put in case you are not from, we say East Coast, like the rest of the world understands what that means. But that would be like New York City, Washington dc, Atlanta, Georgia.

So along the east coast of the United States, if you were to look that up. But yeah, there's all kinds of things coming and so far only men have applied. So ladies, get your talks to me so I can have some diversity in my own series. Please. Would be, I think would, that's a really neat

[01:01:28] Nathan Wrigley: idea.

I like the idea of doing a, because normally podcasts just drop when they drop, don't they? Bob will be able speak to this. You make them edit them and you put them out whenever they're ready to go. you may have a day where you put them out or something like that, but Sure.

The idea of doing something live, because basically this show is the same show, but with different content because of what's happened in the news. But yours is a real, it'll be really eclectic, won't it? Yeah. Each week will be something totally, probably unrelated to the previous one, which is nice. I think that's quite nice.

[01:02:00] Bob Dunn: Yeah. Would you have, they'll, actually be like a. Word camp talk where they're introduced and then they pretty much take the stage and run with it.

[01:02:11] Michelle Frechette: And then I will come back at the end and do q and a with them. yeah.

[01:02:15] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's a neat idea. And Bob, I don't feel you are doing enough editing work, in the WordPress space, frankly, at the moment.

if Michelle, yeah, I'll pop over there and Yeah. Yeah. You sort, you can help with the editor, but neat idea. Really neat idea. I think that's brilliant. Just, quickly to ask, is that the only kind of content that you will accept? Does somebody have to have been refused to a word camp? No.

Okay.

[01:02:43] Michelle Frechette: No. it started out thinking that way, but it does that, I don't wanna close it to people. I would love for this to be open to all those people that, like Pia said, are unable to travel, to give a talk elsewhere as well. And so I would absolutely not turn anybody away, but that's where the idea came from.

[01:02:58] Nathan Wrigley: Do you have any embargoes around, how to describe it? Self-promotion. So let's say somebody's got a talk, but it's basically entirely based upon, a product that they've got and pitching it into the marketplace. Are there, do you have any intuitions around that? I

[01:03:14] Michelle Frechette: haven't put that out so, much yet, but I will be vetting every talk submission, to make sure that it isn't just purely self-promotional.

And if it is, I will talk to the person who submitted that idea to see if we can, keep that to the end and actually talk, bridge a, a gap in the community that people would want to hear more about besides just, I don't want it to turn into a picture idea every week. Series. Yeah.

[01:03:40] Nathan Wrigley: And if, people were to come Yeah.

Could get the mug quickly. Corey, if, if people were to turn up and watch it live, will they be able to Comment in the same way that they can on this show?

[01:03:52] Michelle Frechette: It will be broadcast through YouTube. I use Streamy Yard for that. So yeah, absolutely.

[01:03:56] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[01:03:56] Michelle Frechette: Yeah, absolutely. For sure. Great. Okay. yeah, so it should be, I'm look really looking forward to it and I get to meet more people than that I don't know, by being able to host people who wouldn't necessarily, be where I'm, I don't know what I'm trying to say, but anyway, I get to meet people I haven't met before.

Yeah, that's what I'm trying to say. I know what

[01:04:15] Nathan Wrigley: you mean. That's one of the best things I'm excited it about this show is getting to meet new people. I love it for that reason as much as anything else. Yeah. I, I would never have met the three of you, I don't think.

[01:04:26] Corey Maass: Yeah,

[01:04:26] Nathan Wrigley: maybe. I don't know.

[01:04:28] Corey Maass: and I showed up at your house once or twice, so you had met technically,

[01:04:32] Nathan Wrigley: but honestly, the amount of paperwork I had to fill out with the police for that whole thing was really ob obnoxious, frankly, you,

[01:04:41] Corey Maass: but now we're unlikely friends. Yeah, like a, like in the tiger.

[01:04:45] Nathan Wrigley: I was sorry I threw those things at you.

Turns out it was all benign.

[01:04:51] Michelle Frechette: And I, will say that this series, because it's through post status, which is now officially a nonprofit, based out of the Netherlands, I will not be seeking individual sponsors for these kinds of things. But if you'd like to sponsor post status, that's another story. We can talk about getting your name on some things, but ideally, I'm, in the.

Wonderful place of not having to look for sponsors for specific content, which I think is great. Also. Nice.

[01:05:15] Nathan Wrigley: so once again, that is called, let me put it on the screen, WP Speakers Virtual Stage series. You can find it on the post status.com blog. Don't see a date, but it'll be, it'll be there, I'm sure.

And there's the application form if you want.

[01:05:29] Michelle Frechette: It's a page. It isn't upload itself. Oh, it's a page.

[01:05:31] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. In which case, it'll be in the show notes. I'll link to it in the show notes. Let's quickly move on. Thank, just a quick hat tip. If you are in a WordPress community and you would like to become the host city of Word Camp Europe, they've now pushed out the date.

To for the 2027 event, not the date of the event itself. What I mean by that is normally they do it like a year in advance, but this time they're doing it well. What's that? We're like almost three years ahead there. 2027. They want the, they want to nail down the event. And, so if you're in a WordPress community that satisfies the criteria, head to Europe dot word camp.org.

And again, if you just, search around for this piece, call for host City 2027, you'll be able to see what it is that you need in order to, to do that, you need a venue of at least, several venues inside one venue, if you like. The main area needs to be able to accommodate 1200 people.

Theater. there needs to be a second area of 400 people. Again, theater, and a third one for 200 for the workshops and things like that. That's all in classroom style. 17 rooms of various sizes. So it's not, a small thing. And you'll know, won't you if you're in a community that can handle that kind of stuff.

So anyway, there we are. Let us move on and access to proper tea as Dave and the comments brought up. next time send the correct tea bags. What, does that mean? What do, we mean

[01:07:03] Corey Maass: in, reference to I think me showing up at your house and you throwing things at me? Yeah. Honestly, that I brought Yorkshire regular instead of Yorkshire Gold.

I apologize. Again, it's an

[01:07:13] Nathan Wrigley: insult, frankly. Bringing the wrong kind of tea to an Englishman's house is tantamount to a declaration of war, Cory. apparently

[01:07:21] Michelle Frechette: And those

[01:07:21] Nathan Wrigley: socks, they were not the standard argyle, were they? They were slightly different. And a, and, Whippets, oh, I'm getting on to Yorkshire things.

Let me move on. cloudfest Hackathon, so this is, I'm not gonna get into the nuts and the bolts of this, but a couple of weeks ago I was very lucky I attended the CLOUDFEST Hackathon and, oh. What a room like, what a thing. I had never ever been to an event like that. Like the main event, the cloudfest event is just quite something to behold.

It's in a theme park and it's pretty fantastic, Bob can speak to this in a moment, but the hackathon is a separate event inside the event, and it all takes place in one room and about 110 people, many of whom were developers, but there were other people. so a, designer springs to mind peach in the comment.

She was there. Courtney, was there, who's in the comments and various other people, and 10 tables were created. The subjects for those 10 tables were predefined. Pitches were predefined. the 110 people who got into the room were filtered. In the same way that you were mentioning about speakers, Michelle, I think it went from 400 to 110.

So they knew that the people in the room could map to the tables, and the idea was that you pressed the start and gone at something like nine o'clock on the first morning and the projects got on with the busy work of doing whatever their project was to do. And, and the repository Ray has written up, information about each of the, 10 tables.

So for example, there was a peer-to-peer rag framework, federated rag framework. There was a cost, a CMS freedom, project. There was a project about CMS health checks. WP CCLI as an MCP host, refreshing the supply chain, sorry, securing the supply chain for OSS. There were 10 basically. And the one that won, getting back to the subject, which is dominated today, really was, accessibility and ai.

It's a combination of those two things and the winning, project combined, putting an infographic into your WordPress website, there's infographics where there's just tons of information, but it's a picture. this project would turn that picture into readable text, so you could put it underneath the image as something that somebody, for example, who cannot see, sorry, who, cannot see the image.

They'd be able to have it read out by a screen reader or something like that. they were the winners. And so I thought that was interesting. However, the main point of this, the reason I'm talking about this was that the, when everybody turned up, they knew what they were doing and there was a defined deadline of two and a half days into the future in order to get it done.

And Mku Dre this week, let me just find it, here we go. he was in attendance and he's proposing quite a big change to the way that, word. Camp, contributor days are run. And what he's basically saying is, would it be better if we had two contributor days running at the same time, a contributor day for those people who know what they're doing and just wanna crack on.

So let's say that you've been to three or four of these events before. You don't need to, you don't need to sit and listen to each table's, presenters talk about what their table does. You don't need to be instructed in how to, I don't know, get yourself onto, onto the necessary systems for the project that you want to work on.

And so he's saying, why don't we have two for basically people who are new or a little bit unfamiliar? And for people who are experienced, the experienced people can just walk in at nine o'clock in the morning, just get on with it. And the people who are inexperienced can do the work of becoming experienced over time.

And it's quite a profound change. and having been to the cloudfest Hackathon thing, there was definitely a sense of purpose there, which maybe at the contributor days is not necessarily the case because people, I think, arrive, move from table to table, don't quite know where they wanna end up. And so sometimes I think it can be a bit directionless.

So I'm opening that up. What do you think to re's idea? Think it's got legs?

[01:11:50] Bob Dunn: I think that, I love it because I was at the Hackathon last year and it is, it's a very intense, these people are not just coding while you're watching them. Some of them stay up half the night to work on other things and stuff.

And then by the time Cloud Fest comes around, a lot of them are just fried. their brains are fried. They're, they are exhausted. And some of them just go for the hackathon itself. The only, and I like the idea of doing it for Word Camps, but a few of the comments in there, in the article that I, resonated with was, should these be done as single events initially versus tack it on to Word Camp.

Now there's a, the good thing about Word Camp is you have the people there. The people coming might be harder to get people there. And I think my biggest thing is, getting the people to put this together, it seems, yeah. From what I understand, it's a very, to prepare for something like that is enormous than actually doing the event and that, that involves more volunteers and I, I don't know how to ease into it.

But by theory, I love the idea. It's, a, cool thing and people just really get into it and they're, yeah, they're, not maybe wanting to go contributor day because they would rather get into the meat of things through a, like a hackathon. So it's, something I think is a great idea. It just obviously wouldn't need to really be thought out as far as planning and how word camps would have just another piece that they would have to make sure and accomplish.

Yeah. Do you know what's interesting

[01:13:43] Nathan Wrigley: is because the two things are kind similar, it's easy to say, why can't we do it more? Why can't we do this thing more like that thing? But the more that you think about it, the more dissimilar they are in many respects. So there's this for a start, one's two and a half days or three days.

everybody's brought into the room because it's known what the projects are gonna be, and so we, the, organizers already know that, that person could easily go over to that table or that table. there's a defined goal. It is the event during that time, so it's not overlapping with the other things.

And yeah, maybe, the two things don't really overlap. And there's a couple of comments here. So firstly, Andrew Palmer said he was an observer at the last day and it was amazing. Such talent. Yeah. That's the, bit that you're left with, isn't it? That whole, gosh, a lot got done. How could, contributor days be a more, be more amazing.

Like Andrew wrote, and then Courtney wrote, that Courtney spent three days, sorry, she, I'm just gonna verbatim read it. We spent three days to build the hackathon. If we could do something similar for camps, it really is more than a single day. It should be the event itself. yeah, maybe that's the insight here is that if you want to get something done, a day isn't enough time to do it.

Contribute today is about feeding into WordPress core or the WordPress project or the photo library or some aspect of it that you can dip in and out of seems. Yeah. Yeah. Whereas this is more so may maybe, I don't know. I like Remus idea 'cause I do like the idea that people would show up and just hive themselves off into this different space and get all nerdy like they do at the hackathon and just get stuffed on.

[01:15:40] Michelle Frechette: Might I also add though, that if we're going to do something like this at Word Camps, we have to have reliable wifi. The last several

[01:15:47] Bob Dunn: Yeah.

[01:15:48] Michelle Frechette: Internet, flagship word camps just had either spotty or almost not no, internet at all. And so for things like photo processing that became impossible.

word Camp US was very difficult. Asia did not, we were not able to this last year and we've had that happen in, Europe before. And so all three flagships have had difficulty with, internet for that size of a crowd. So we've gotta get better at that before we can actually be truly.

what's the word about productive?

[01:16:25] Bob Dunn: Yeah. Either a

[01:16:26] Michelle Frechette: contributor day or, oh, we just lost Nathan. a contributor day, or, he's back and now he's down in the lower right hand corner. Now

[01:16:35] Nathan Wrigley: you're muted, Michelle. You could not make it up. As you said the words, the internet is patchy. For the first time in a three years, my internet went, no, I'm not here anymore.

[01:16:48] Corey Maass: That's so weird. Your internet went, how dare you.

[01:16:53] Michelle Frechette: I, if I could speak those things into, to existence, I would also be a millionaire. So let's

[01:16:58] Bob Dunn: just,

[01:17:01] Michelle Frechette: at least Nathan's smiling at us, so that's a good thing. Yeah. Anyway, I don't

[01:17:04] Bob Dunn: have, yeah, Michelle, but what you were saying, the resource seems like that's another resource that, Yeah.

Is to get better wi wifi, because I absolutely, I imagine it can be done, but it doesn't just magically happen by somebody cranking it.

[01:17:21] Michelle Frechette: A wheel faster or something. And does that mean we have to, does that mean we have to have smaller groups participating as well? Yeah. So when you have a hundred people accessing wifi, that's perhaps easier than 300 people accessing wifi.

And do we have to say, look, contributor days are great, but we can only have X number of people per group. Like I, I don't know, in order to make that work better.

[01:17:42] Bob Dunn: Yeah, it's possible. But just maybe planning, have to really think through all the, 'cause the actual event itself. Yeah. Sounds wonderful.

And it'd be cool to see it happen. Yeah,

[01:17:53] Michelle Frechette: exactly.

[01:17:54] Bob Dunn: by the way, am I

[01:17:54] Nathan Wrigley: back? Can you still hear me?

[01:17:56] Michelle Frechette: Yes, we can now. Oh, great. Okay.

[01:17:58] Nathan Wrigley: So what happened there was, just before the show, my Elto lights decided to stop working and the process of getting them working again is to use the apple, whatever it's called, this sort of discovery mode, and it briefly turns your device into the wifi network and then it sucks out the wifi password.

Anyway, my, it decided, my Mac decided, oh, we are just gonna connect to the light for a bit. And, so that's all right then. Yeah. Yeah. So win. We

[01:18:26] Michelle Frechette: just, kept the conversation going. Thought was, appreciate that. See pros

[01:18:30] Nathan Wrigley: all the way down. Pros, we're fast running out of time, so let me just see if we can get through some more of these bits and pieces.

so anyway, we haven't solved that problem, but definitely of interest and I definitely think, Remus is onto something. There's a, there, but I'm not sure exactly what that exactly would look like, but that enthusiasm was totally contagious. there was definitely drive and purpose in that room.

Okay. Let me see where we can get to. I just wanna raise this one. We're not gonna go through this at all, but if you're interested in the work that the WP Community Collective have been doing, they had a meeting on the 3rd of March, so it's not exactly brand new, but, it's their minutes and, and obviously as a project is beginning, making sure that all the bits and pieces are stacked up so that it's gonna operate in a, I don't know, in a professional manner, is important.

And so you can see the me the minutes of the first meeting, that was held and, yeah, I think, what did you say, Michelle? They laid out there,

[01:19:31] Michelle Frechette: they adopted their bylaws. Their bylaws. That was the

[01:19:34] Nathan Wrigley: phrase I was after. Okay. As

[01:19:36] Michelle Frechette: a board of directors.

[01:19:38] Nathan Wrigley: da just quickly go back to Courtney there for w Oh, it's my head that's gone now.

Oh, nice. Look, I can,

[01:19:44] Bob Dunn: at least for w

[01:19:46] Nathan Wrigley: for WordCamp Europe, WordCamp us. We found contributor day does better when we drop several internet wires for core. And WP TV that spares the general wifi. Oh, interesting. So there's a, different set of networks depending on, what it is that you're working on.

Okay. I won't mention that. I'll mention that. And again, on another week. Back to Elementor very, quickly, their latest product offering V four, which isn't around yet. curious. Elementor very, popular tool. honestly, I think it's responsible for a significant amount of WordPress's growth over the last, let's say eight years or something.

I think if you track those numbers, it, a lot of it is elemental and other page builders. they have in more recent times, been, what's the word? They've been criticized for having divs within divs. And, the structure of their HTML is, it gets quite complicated, let's say for the layouts.

And so they're taking this on board and essentially they're gonna be leaning into CSS. as the first relation really for the, way that they do their layouts in the future. And it makes you think, weren't they doing that in the future? the answer is no, not as heavily, I think it was divs.

And those divs would then receive some sort of CSS, whereas now all of the different bits and pieces that are on your WordPress website with Elementor are gonna receive classes. Those classes are gonna govern with the stack and the cascade what happens. It's all fairly obvious, but it's a totally different way of tooling their product in the future.

So I definitely worth checking it out. if you have stopped using Elementor or you've, are an Elementor user, big changes common. It's entitled Why Elementor is going CSS First. The vision behind editor V four and I, highlighted a bunch of stuff, but there's no time, for that.

But it's, brings, it, brings it very much in line with other tools, certainly block editor tools that have adopted this approach. As well. Speaking of which, no. Yeah, I'll just quickly do this. speaking of CSS, I'm running a podcast with the, venerable David Wamsley, who's at the Page Builder Summit.

I'm not gonna say it. and.com. Yeah, thank you. we, that'll come out well in the transcript. We, we started a podcast about, I don't know, about a year ago all about exactly that, about leaning into HTML and CSS, just those things for your website. It's called the No Script Show. And, if you wanna follow us over there, I think we're 17 episodes in and, We have a YouTube channel as well where we produce content all about just building stuff with H-T-M-L-C-S-S and very little else. And about how in the future that will probably be enough for more or less anything that you want to do. So there you go. won't concentrate on that 'cause there isn't enough time.

Couple of things on offer, 20% off, Rex Themes products if you're interested. And also some money off, WP Funnels. If those two products are of interest, they drop this week. So I thought I'd mention those links will be in the show notes. And then what else is the, say? Just one last thing, if you, I think I might have mentioned this last week, I can't remember, so I've included it again 'cause I honestly couldn't remember if you started tinkering with a browser a couple of years ago called ARC and were really beguiled by its UX and ui.

The project died. it died a slow death. They promised to maintain it, but not update it, if It would stay as it was, but they would keep it secure and what have you. the exact same UI has been co-opted by, this company called Zen, and they've released an identical looking browser.

But the novel thing here is it's using, it's using Mozilla's Firefox as the underpinnings, so you won't be able to use all of your chrome extensions or anything like that. But if you were totally wedded to the ui, which I've gotta say I was. then this might be a, thing that you wanna look at. It's just brilliant for organizing things.

I know Courtney was a big, user. I dunno if she still is, but anyway, Zen browser app is where maybe

[01:24:10] Corey Maass: the zen of it is that there aren't extensions.

[01:24:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's space. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it doesn't actually serve up any HT ML it's just a blank screen. It's very calming. Go there and, you look up the page, summit.com on that website, you'll see nothing.

I've got one more in there just before the, just before the, honestly, that was, that was, a lot of mentions. Totally off. I'm gonna search for that in the transcript and see how many times, see how many times we mentioned it. Far too many is the answer still on arc? Okay. There we go. Love Arc says James.

Hi James. And, Courtney says she's still on Arc. Go and have a look. I can't, get myself outta the Chrome ecosystem. There's just one or two things that are just too crucial to what I do to bit of a killer. Actually, I, and I'm confounded by two or three in particular that I just can't live without.

So anyway, go check it out. Courtney. You never know. You might become a prophet. that's it. Unless you three have got things you wanna add. I'm good. You're good. Oh, look, Cory's got his, little promotion. Yours. Yours is way more subtle than mine. I feel. Bob, at a t-shirt or something that says do the woo on it or something.

[01:25:27] Michelle Frechette: I should have wore my post status hat, Nathan, you need a mug that says page builder summit.com. I

[01:25:33] Nathan Wrigley: do need a, oh, I'll tell you what I've got. I've got a slightly beaten up old,

[01:25:39] Michelle Frechette: oh yeah.

[01:25:40] Nathan Wrigley: But that's from 2020 Cluster. That was the first one that we ever did. You had a pull

[01:25:45] Michelle Frechette: up banner behind you last year?

[01:25:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I've got a pic.

[01:25:47] Corey Maass: Oh, Corey, look at that. That's pull the jacket out. once in a while

[01:25:54] Nathan Wrigley: we don't make enough of those virtual backgrounds. We should all have some massive advert for whatever it is that we're doing. that's it. That's all we've got time for. I appreciate you if you came and enjoyed this conversation with us.

I appreciate it. Thank you very much. And of course, oh, this is gonna screw me up. I won't be able to get this right.

And then I'm gonna see,

[01:26:19] Bob Dunn: so he's doing what? Towards

[01:26:20] Michelle Frechette: your door? Towards your door. he got stuck, so he's just there. That

[01:26:26] Corey Maass: was perfect.

[01:26:27] Bob Dunn: Yeah. I need a out

[01:26:30] Corey Maass: of this? No. Now I'll go like this and I'll freeze and then we can gotta do the

[01:26:37] Nathan Wrigley: hands. Can we do the hands before we go?

[01:26:39] Corey Maass: Oh,

[01:26:39] Bob Dunn: he's

[01:26:39] Corey Maass: trying

[01:26:40] Bob Dunn: to,

[01:26:40] Nathan Wrigley: oh no.

Have I frozen again? Yeah, you've froze. You did, but you're back pointing at me. Oh, that's hysterical. Okay. I have no idea what's going on now. Apart from the fact that my lights are doing, I am gonna ask you, however, if you wouldn't mind giving me your hands and we'll do that. Michelle's got, got the silly ones.

That's brilliant. I have enough. I have enough apologies for the technical gremlins. I'm sorry about that. I will go and resate with the internet at large. Unprofessional.

[01:27:05] Bob Dunn: Yeah,

[01:27:07] Nathan Wrigley: and then says again,

[01:27:08] Bob Dunn: poor again.

We should just all leave. That's the last thing. You comes back and be like, what?

[01:27:18] Nathan Wrigley: Dear me.