This Week in WordPress #329

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It is time for This week in WordPress, episode number 329. Entitled Tret 'Da Yoots. It was recorded on Monday the 7th of April. 2025. My name's Nathan Wrigley and I'll be joined by three fabulous guests. First up, my co-host is Michelle Frechette, and then I also have Tim Nash and I have Tammie Lister as well. Now a few gremlins got into the recording.Basically, when we started the recording, everything just entirely collapsed and it took us about 25 minutes to get things reestablished again. So I'm very sorry. If you are joining us live for this week in WordPress, as you so often do, apologies about that. But we did get the show started, but we weren't able to distribute it in the way that we would normally do, but we did.

Carry on. The show is a little bit shorter, but we got onto some WordPressy things as well. The first thing to mention though, is that we did a few bits and pieces about Michelle's work. She has started a new podcast with. Bob WP over at Do the Woo, and she's also started a new series of talks, which are gonna be happening at the same time each week over at post status.

And then Tammie shares some information about Pen Pot, which is a possible replacement for Figma, and also the Press Conf schedule, which is happening later in this month. And then we press onto the WordPressy bits and pieces.

We talk about the restructuring at Automattic, and the fact that as much as 16% of the workforce has been let go there.

And then we talk about the .org committers, and the fact that we now definitively do have one more major release in the year 2025. Will that carry on into the future? Is this good or bad for WordPress? There's a long discussion about that. We also talk about the fact the page builder Summit is coming up.

As I said, Press Conf is also coming up and there's a few other events happening as well, and then quite a lot of time is talking about whether or not WordPress is for the young anymore. Whether or not it's gonna be possible to reach out to those younger people. And that's inspired by a piece from Marika Vander Act.

And then we mention a few new things that have landed in the WordPress space and some updates to plugins as well. And it's all coming up next on a much shorter this week in WordPress.

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

And by Bluehost. Redefine your web hosting experience with Bluehost Cloud. Managed WordPress hosting that comes with lightning fast websites, 100% network uptime, and 24 7 priority support. With Bluehost Cloud, the possibilities are out of this world. Experience it today at bluehost.com/cloud.

And by Omnisend. Do you sell your stuff online? Then meet Omnisend. Yes, that Omnisend. The email and SMS tool that helps you make 73 bucks for every dollar spent. The one that's so good, it's almost boring. Hate the excitement of rollercoaster sales? Prefer a steady line going up? Try Omnisend today at omnisend.com.

it's this week in WordPress. We're back for the 11th time running this exact episode. I'll give you a bit of context 'cause it'll be funny. we're on episode number 329 of this week in WordPress, but we've had numerous false starts. For some reason, the tech completely let us down. It might well let us down again.

I have no idea, but for now, we're gonna press on and, thank you so much. If you're joining us in the comments, I really appreciate that you sticking around. You've lost 22 minutes of your life to this nonsense. I'm very appreciative of you sticking around. Thank you so much. I can't send you to the normal URL.

Normally I'd send you to wp builds.com/live, but it won't work because I have to copy and paste some API key in and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's not. It's not gonna happen 'cause we're short on time. So what I'm gonna do instead is say go to youtube.com/wp builds, send people there, youtube.com/wp builds.

And the comments will be slightly hollowed out I expect, because there won't be many of you. But I appreciate it if you've stuck around. Down there is our co-host for today's event. How are you doing, Michelle?

[00:04:58] Michelle Frechette: I'm good. Thank you. How are you?

[00:04:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I'm really good now. Michelle has got an extra role today.

first of all, I will fulfill my statutory obligation to introduce Michelle with her biography. Michelle is the executive director at Post Status, in addition to her work at Post Status, Michelle is the podcast barista at WP Coffee Talk, co-founder of Underrepresented in Tax. Cur, easy for me to say, creator of WP Speakers and WP Career pages author and a frequent organizer and speaker at WordPress events.

She lives in south outside Rochester, New York, where she's an avid nature photographer, and you could find out more about her at the sort of generic URL Meet Michelle online and. Hold on for a minute 'cause there's something else we're gonna announce in a moment.

[00:05:44] Michelle Frechette: Find out

[00:05:44] Nathan Wrigley: more about that. But hello Michelle.

Thanks for, being this. Hello.

[00:05:47] Michelle Frechette: It's good to be here.

[00:05:48] Nathan Wrigley: And thank you for sticking with the technical gremlins. Right over there. No, there. There. There's Tammie Tammie Lister. How are you doing, Tammie

[00:05:56] Tammie Lister: I'm good, thank you. Is it episode 500? Yeah,

[00:05:59] Nathan Wrigley: we're on episode number 712. Many years have passed. I had brown hair when

Weaven. Is a product engineer, tin Tinker of pixels and t enthusiast. she lives in a field currently having lambs pop up next to her. She, you don't actually live in a field. Surely not.

[00:06:24] Tammie Lister: Yeah. No. My house is literally in a field and they're literally are lambs that kick in. Oh. Appearing next to me,

[00:06:30] Nathan Wrigley: Tim has usually got some kind of wildlife happening in the background there.

And, yeah, we'll find out more about him in a moment. But thank you Tommy, for joining us. I really appreciate it. And, Michelle contacted me over the weekend and said, now, normally Tim gives me a fun bio and I have to read it out. And, Michelle said, no, I'm gonna write Tim's bio this week. and then I said, if you write it, will you read it out as well?

And she said yes. So I did.

[00:06:58] Michelle Frechette: Here we go.

[00:06:58] Nathan Wrigley: Introducing Tim Nash. We have Michelle Frache over to you, Michelle.

[00:07:03] Michelle Frechette: Yes. in case you didn't know, Tim Nash will share things that will scare about breaches and hacks and malware, but he always comes through with advice that is true and will save you from pulling your hair.

[00:07:16] Nathan Wrigley: Nice, nice. And

[00:07:21] Tim Nash: I went to the, I went, 'cause we have a document that says about what's, fill this in, fill your information in, see the links this week. And I went and saw it there and went. That's so much better than what I put in.

[00:07:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[00:07:35] Michelle Frechette: I actually messaged you, Tim. I'm like, don't look at your bio, don't read it.

But I promise you'll be surprised. That's okay. Obviously you didn't see that, so it's all good. I

[00:07:44] Nathan Wrigley: appreciate that. So there's our panelists for today. We're, gonna have to run through things a little bit quicker. guess I'll probably just drop a view of the links 'cause I know your time is valuable, but we'll just say a few bit bits and pieces that are happening over here.

Let's have a look at the comments. Ross. Hello Ross. you can actually be in the chat. There seems to be a curse while being in the chat is a curse. That's, a blow. hello from Cameron and Marcus is just confirming that you can see us. That's really nice. Cameron is joining us. He says, enjoying the circus from Victor Harbor, Australia Stream at a reasonable hour County championship on in the background.

It must be the British Summer. It is. Actual sunshine is going on out there, Cameron. It's the one day of the year. We're gonna get it. Good morning, everybody says Jeff. I don't know that we know each other, Jeff, if we've met. Oh, you've met

[00:08:33] Michelle Frechette: Jeff. He's, Jeff travels with me a lot.

[00:08:35] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that Jeff, do you know what, for some reason in my head I've got his name with a G.

So when I saw Jeff felt like that, I was misunderstood. Hello Jeff. In which case, yes, we do know each other. That's lovely. Thanks for joining us. Technical gremlins. Did you feel a technical GUI after midnight? Did you feed a technical mugi? Oh, I, yeah, I remember that film. it's from the eighties and yeah, your backs is.

This cam, thank you for joining us. Really appreciate the perseverance. So let's get stuck into the bits and pieces for today's show. This is us wp builds.com. I will truncate all of this, but we are sponsored this week by GoDaddy Pro, by Bluehost and Omnis Send. Thank you very much for their kind sponsorship.

If you want to keep in touch, put your email address in there and we'll send you a couple of emails each week. One, when we produce this show as a podcast. But also when we on a Thursday push our podcast episode out, we only do it with very attractive people. and as you can see, one of the very attractive people is, is featured here.

Look at him. Look, he can barely, cope as I'm complimenting him. we had an episode recently about Rapid Cloud. Then Tim did an episode a couple of weeks ago, and then we had Leo Lovich and it goes on and on. 400 and odd episodes, 416. So go and check that out, right? Let's get onto the guest news.

We offer the feature now. putting guest news up first. So if any of these fine people have something to say, we're gonna feature that first here. Michelle has, and I'm not gonna say Yeah, compostable. Oh, darn it. you said

[00:10:09] Michelle Frechette: it,

[00:10:10] Nathan Wrigley: I just said it. It's composable WordPress. This is an event, like a live stream.

Yeah. We're running,

[00:10:15] Michelle Frechette: Yep. It's gonna be live every Tuesday at the same time, which is 11:00 AM New York time. But I did put a link there so you can find your local time. but every week we're going to have, a talk on our virtual stage. So this is our post status, WP Speakers virtual stage.

And I'm excited about it because it's mostly people whose talks weren't picked up. and other word camps and things like that. And it gives everybody an opportunity to have that shared out, through what I'm doing at post status. And so we've got this week's, we got next week's, is already set up as well.

And that is with, Mohamed, Abdullah Khan and, or maybe I said that back. Yep. No, I said that Okay. And that one is going to be, performance driven UX balancing, beautiful design with speed. So I have about 15 already set up or on the schedule. They're gonna be slow release, so people will have an opportunity to take a look at them.

And those will always be on the website.

[00:11:14] Nathan Wrigley: So the idea is you rather like this show where it's got a defined time every week you're gonna do the same thing. So it's gonna be same day, same time, obviously. One week between them and whatnot. Yeah.

[00:11:25] Michelle Frechette: Okay. That's to save my own sanity and remember when things happen.

[00:11:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. yeah, and honestly, it's such a reliable thing to do a live stream like this. Yeah. Nothing ever goes wrong. no, for sure. yeah. best of luck with that. So first one is Chris Renolds. Thank you. Coming up talking about composable WordPress, and, and if you scroll down on this page, you will be able to see a little bit more about Chris and what have you, and then if you click on the link here, might as well do that quickly.

Click on the link, you'll get to the location, over on YouTube where you can, subscribe and, get alerted to all the,

[00:11:59] Michelle Frechette: and if you're logged in, you can be alerted to when it comes up. Yep.

[00:12:03] Nathan Wrigley: lovely, exciting stuff. Lovely. okay, that was the first bit and then an exciting new development.

Michelle's bio is gonna get slightly longer.

[00:12:13] Michelle Frechette: It is, I'm, I've been teasing, Bob forever about, he, he has everybody as on his podcast, hosting a podcast but me. And so he says, Hey, what you wanna do, Yvette talk? And I'm like, Hey, that's my, it's like totally up my alley. So I am joining the do the Woo team.

Yeah.

[00:12:34] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. We had Bob on last week and I didn't have

[00:12:36] Michelle Frechette: enough things to do.

[00:12:38] Nathan Wrigley: Everybody loves Bob. So what's the plan here? The result, right? You are gonna be talking specifically about WordPress events, I'm guessing? Yeah, like word count, and meet ups and, yeah. Okay.

[00:12:48] Michelle Frechette: Yep. And so press conference coming up this week is AAM Summit.

we have also, the Page Builder Summit, like all of those things coming up. We hadn't said page builder summit.com yet, so I say Sure, we got that in there.

[00:13:01] Nathan Wrigley: We'll do that in a minute. But yes,

[00:13:03] Michelle Frechette: so I'll be covering all of those kinds of events. I'll be talking to speakers and organizers and volunteers in those kinds of things.

So I'm excited to, to bring a little bit more about events to the do the Woo space.

[00:13:15] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, nice. Okay. So a podcast entirely related to the events. That's really cool. So yeah, what have we got coming up? So let's just mention a couple of things. This is gonna move us into Tammie territory now. I like the sound of that Tammie territory.

There's a whole. Other podcast series. There's Literative.

[00:13:32] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. Lot. No

[00:13:33] Nathan Wrigley: worries.

[00:13:33] Tim Nash: Just,

[00:13:33] Nathan Wrigley: I'm

[00:13:34] Tim Nash: sure Bob's just going, Ooh, you serious?

[00:13:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, no, he's, had that in the, he's had that in the works for years. so here we go. Look. So here's an event and coincidentally it's, one that Tammie is involved in.

I'll just do my bit first, Tammie if that's all right. press Conf, is happening April 23rd through the 25th. It's an in-person event happening in Arizona. I'm sure that many of you have heard of it already, but the, schedule is over here as you'd expect. Press conf events slash schedule is the url.

And, and if you look through it, you're gonna see things that are going on and when they're happening, if you are an attendee. And if we scroll, have I gone past it already? I think I've gone past it. one, no, keep going. Come on, Wrigley. There we go. Look, there's one, Tammie is speaking and what are you gonna be talking about?

I know the titles there, but what's the thrust of the presentation?

[00:14:28] Tammie Lister: I'm not gonna give too much away. but it's basically about, burnout and, how, in open source that, that's like the gist of it, but I think the title alludes to what it is. but it's, gonna be a little part story, part also practical.

so yeah. but I've also wanted to point out, there are just such a wide diversity of talks. Something that, Macel and the team behind press comp have done is just really curate. Talks that you just maybe wouldn't see at other conferences. And I'm really excited to see, this is not a talk I would I have ever given.

This is probably more touchy feely than I've ever given in any other space. I normally give like product talks or I give like more practical one. but they have encouraged me personally as a speaker to give a very different talk. And I think they've done that with lots of different speakers. If you look at the talks different people are giving.

So I'm excited at the different talks that people are giving in these as well. Let's have

[00:15:28] Nathan Wrigley: a quick look at that. So obviously there's Tammie's and if you are listening to this, I'll just tell you the title of Tammie's talk. It's a burning bright, burning out the hidden cost of open source. So that's what Tammie was alluding to earlier.

Let's just go down the list a or rather up the list. So it's a, I think it's. anyway, we'll find out. first of all, we've got Sally Rebel Life is an event. How are you going to show up? Then we've got a fireside chat with Mary Hubbard and Mattia Ventura. Two sort of fairly well, extremely important figures in the WordPress space.

Then Oliver Sild, from Patch Stack talking about the future of open source security after regulations. That's interesting. and then there's gonna be a panel with Kimberly Lipari, Brad Williams and Jake Goldman. Then we've got Tammie's talk. This is all still on the first day. Then we've got Kareem Marucci, unannounced in terms of the, the, The presentation title ARA per add. ASRA per asra. Ooh. It's gotta be Latin, but I don't know. It's

[00:16:29] Tammie Lister: LA and yeah. What does

[00:16:30] Nathan Wrigley: it mean A ASRA Per ASAs is MCOs.

[00:16:33] Tammie Lister: Yeah, it's MCOs stock.

[00:16:37] Nathan Wrigley: Mku, if you're watching, let us know then Miriam from Elemental More than meets the, feeds my life beyond social media. And we'll just do a couple more Rich Tabor from Automatic Open Source AI and the new digital RELA Renaissance.

And this is still just before launch on day one. And then we've got Jeremy S, the On Chain Advantage inspiring new approaches to community governance and funding. And as I said, if you go to this page, there's absolutely loads of stuff going. And if at Jake's

[00:17:04] Tammie Lister: talk as well, Jake WordPress for anymore, like a lot of these talks are very.

Unexpected. And also from speakers that don't necessarily speak at word cams who haven't spoken a different way. So yeah, I, think it's gonna be very interesting. It's also only one track, so Yeah. It's one track. Everybody

[00:17:25] Nathan Wrigley: can concentrate on the one thing. Yeah, that'll be interesting. We'll come to a conversation from Marika Vander Act in a minute about this.

Who is WordPress for anymore? We sort of segue into that a little bit.

[00:17:35] Tammie Lister: I think Pika has, got a, translation in those. Oh,

[00:17:39] Nathan Wrigley: thank you Peach. That's brilliant. Peacher, who's apparently speaks fluent Latin from hard times up to the stars, she says it's a very bad translation now. That's great. Thank you.

So it's yeah, when you're, from down to up basically something to the start Add Astra Yeah. To the stars. Of course.

[00:17:58] Tammie Lister: And I think that's the thing, these all. Different people's stories, even if that the title, maybe that's, I dunno. I'm very excited because, definitely I've been encouraged to give a different talk this time,

[00:18:08] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Nice. I know Raquel's done a lot of work with the team, I guess on that, and best of luck, hope that goes well, but there's a few more weeks before it actually starts, okay. And then we'll move on to Tammie's second piece that she wanted to mention. This is, I know that you are, a designer amongst one of the many things that you do, and this is from an app called Pen Pot.

And I've heard of it, but I don't really know what it does or why you want it mentioned in what's, happening to this school. the reason I

[00:18:36] Tammie Lister: wanna mention is often people just use Figma. They pay their, license for Figma and everything. It is not necessarily a replacement for Figma.

And often people will put it with that. it is not future parity with Figma, however, it is open source. You also can self-host it, which I think is incredibly powerful. If you want to use something like Elastic or you want to self-host it yourself and you want use it for a team. 'cause one of the problems with Figma is just scaling from a team perspective.

It also is open source. Which it just plays to that as well. So it has been pretty good, for a long time. but it's now very good and it actually has design tokens now, and it has all, it actually is starting to get some features, which Figma doesn't have. All Figma has been taken a long time to get as well.

so the reason I have called it out is, I think if you are looking to create a product, you are looking, you have a team and you are really burdened by high costs of Figma, which often like more agencies are you often as a freelance are, or you often a, as a product person are looking at as an alternative or looking at self-hosting through last year is really.

Something you can do now on a parity perspective, and you can import between the two so you aren't caught like in the like Adobe import kind of situation. And you can create plugins for it quite easily. There's like an ecosystem where you can code your own plugins as well. So I do design bum kind of weird hybrid person.

and been able to code my own plugin makes me very excited.

[00:20:12] Nathan Wrigley: That is cool. Yeah. like you, you say it's not a perfect swap out for Fgla, but still really good. So Fig

[00:20:18] Tammie Lister: jams, different things you're gonna have to work around, but the workflow I. Very aligned. And the bit that I personally love is a self-hosted because then I can invite people to join my team and I don't have to pay a seat license.

And, that racks up. Yeah. For clients I can onboard a client, have them come into my space. That, and the reason I, there are many services like this. So Elastic is something that I use. It's basically like a service where you can install any open source software and you can have it online basically.

'cause I personally not running my own local server and porting people into it. Not doing that, no. That's Tim's from my field. No, that's Tim's job. but I'll use the service like that. I'll install the open source software and then invite someone in refrigeration of the project and then. You can do that.

And, but with Figma, I tend to have a license, all of those kind of things. It's a complete nightmare, to do that from a scaling perspective and then have someone in, down it is just, or then they have to pay their license. So yeah, hepo does help that. and you can have the libraries and do all of those kind of things.

So it pretty much does everything you need it to do at scale, but from a cost efficient perspective.

[00:21:31] Nathan Wrigley: There we go. So thank you. So couple of things from Tammie couple of things from, Michelle, Tim, anything from you that I think you, you didn't have any links? I just wanna make sure I didn't miss any. No, it's all No, I, I,

[00:21:44] Tim Nash: logged in and saw everybody had done their job, thought all I'll just sit back. and even my bio was recent for me. I'm the lazy person. yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right.

[00:21:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. nevermind. It's fine. Don't feel too bad tip. Just feel a bit bad. okay, let's move on and we're gonna get into some news, which is very sad.

Basically there's no way of addressing this in any other way. This came out of automatic over the last week, looks five days ago now. A fairly sudden announcement. I dunno if anybody saw it coming. It sounds like they didn't. But, it's basically can be summarized as automatic shed. 16% I think of the workforce and obviously.

if you are in any way connected to that, whether it's a family member or you, yourself or somebody that, that's an awful piece of news. There's no two ways to cut it. I don't know if anybody knows anybody that's affect affected. I know that Michelle, you have some initiatives online, which you're trying to reunite people with work and things like that, and obviously I know you've been through things.

Do you just wanna mention that, Michelle? What is it that you do and where is it that kind of, yeah, that job opportunity thing that you have.

[00:22:59] Michelle Frechette: I, aim for Wednesday, but I always get it out by Friday. But every week I do, a list of companies that are hiring and the positions that they're hiring for. it starts on Twitter, but then I copy that to all my social media channels.

I. excuse me, it doesn't go on YouTube and Instagram for, but, it's on Mastodon and Blue Sky and Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn, yeah. Every week. And I also, post it in a bunch of different, slack channels as well. over the years I've been told by people that they found jobs because I do that posting every week, and so I continue to do that posting every week.

Yeah. I, myself am still looking for a full-time position having been laid off. And I know that in the current climate and the way that, at least the US is heading into a recession, it's going to make finding a job that much more difficult. And the number of us right now in tech that are looking feels incredibly overwhelming.

But there's hope and I want everybody else to feel like there's an opportunity out there for you. I'm still looking for mine or making my own, so we'll see how that goes, but. certainly if you need somebody to talk to, reach out to somebody that, reach out to me, reach out to anybody, and, keep your chin up because there will be a way forward through all of this.

[00:24:19] Nathan Wrigley: Also, another place that I found to be a great list of jobs is Marcus Burnett's, WP World. So If you go to wp, you can Google it. That's probably the best thing. WP World, they've got a great big, jobs list, which they put as part wrap up as part of the newsletter and each week it's, there's a lot, there's lots and lots in there.

and there's also job listings on wordpress.org. I don't know the, it might be jobs.wordpress.org or something like that. There are definitely, it could

[00:24:51] Tammie Lister: be jobs wordpress.net, I think. Yes. Thank thing. One thing I'd also like to say is, give yourself time. No matter what. Yeah. And also the people that are left after, in any company, after any layout also need to give themselves time.

Like e everyone needs to be Yeah. Given time to decide your direction, decide what you're doing. and, support. So you now. Have time to decide your path and, yep. Get that support from everybody. And I think it's, really important to just give those people that space and And respect to, tell their story and tell their, time as well.

So both sides. Yeah. So

[00:25:33] Nathan Wrigley: just putting that piece back up on the screen for a minute. So this comes out of automatic, the reasons for the job, which I think amounted. So we're saying 16%, I think it amounted to something in the region of 284 individuals that were affected. obviously people will wanna know what's the reason behind it.

I'm sure that there is some connection between the ongoing legal dispute and automatic, but the reasons, are probably manyfold including, the wider economy and what have you. But, here's the intention anyway. According to this article, it says, as difficult as decis, this decision has been, we are restructuring the company to become more agile and responsive.

Breakdown silos that have created inefficiencies, focus on product quality, doing fewer things better, ensuring a viable financial model for long, term success. I guess many people associate automatic with the giant commitments that they've had to the, open source project over the years.

And obviously that whole realignment has changed as well. And, we've got some, another article which we'll move on to now all about, basically that, and this is,

[00:26:43] Tim Nash: before we do Nathan.

[00:26:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, please,

[00:26:44] Tim Nash: before we do.

[00:26:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:26:45] Tim Nash: Michelle, how do people who are, have a job that they want to advertise through your Twitter feed?

Get in touch with you. Good question.

[00:26:54] Michelle Frechette: Any, way they'd like, they can DM me on Twitter, they can email me, they can go to wp career pages.com, fill out a form there. There's a lot of different ways. Any way that you can possibly get in touch with me, email me at michelle [email protected]. Like any of those white ways, I will get those jobs listed out.

every week. The other. Resource is also, that's really, good. That was built as a result of those is wp remote work.com. that is a site that's independent of mine, but I include it in my tweets every week. and those are, I think they're using, APIs or RSS feeds or something to pull all those, jobs in.

So that's another really good resource. but yeah, I'm happy to include any openings any week that you have them. So thank you, Tim.

[00:27:40] Nathan Wrigley: That's really amazing, Michelle, because normally there's a way, isn't there? There's just you have to end up at this thing, but basically if, you can, get it to Michelle in whatever format, Michelle will take care of it.

Oh, that's really great. Thank you. Yeah. And thank you Tim, for pointing that out. That was good. Anything else, Tim, before I move on? No, you're good. Okay, great. In which case, let's move on to this piece, which is, from Mary Hubbard, who is the new, executive director of the WordPress project.org.

whoops.org, committers check in. And a couple of weeks ago now, not quite, but nearly, on March the 27th, 30 core committers project leaders and core team members gathered to discuss the release cadence of WordPress. There'd been a lot of speculation. I can't remember where it started. I think it might have been on Twitter from Matt Mullenweg saying that maybe we'll go to this sort of one release per year cadence.

And it feels like that was to nail this down a little bit, quite a few people in attendance. There's the, names of the people and, the idea was to see what would happen. And an assessment of core team activity shows the number of Gutenberg. Both Gutenberg tickets and core track tickets remains nearly flat over the last six months.

However, the volume of new features being worked on inside of Gutenberg has plunged since January. In light of this information, the discussion focused on if the current release cadence should be cadence, should be, reduced. And then there were some pros and cons. I won't read them all out, but they're on the webpage There.

All the things that you would imagine. and the conversation moved on to discussing where contributors could feel effectively, could effectively focus their efforts in the project. should the release schedule shift to one release per year. And I know Tammie's got something to say on this, but I'll just quickly go through and that basically boiled down to canonical plugins, backlog management, and then a bunch of miscellaneous places as well.

And then I'll, Tammie just before you drop into this, I'll just summarize it. I'll read the summary in light of these discussions. The current plans of project leadership are for 6.8, which is due this month to be the final major release of 2025. Stress on the word major. Gutenberg releases will continue on their current cadence of every fortnight or two weeks, and minor releases will take place as needed throughout the year.

I'm thinking security and patches and those kind of things. Minor releases will continue to happen as necessary. Necessary with a more relaxed barrier for inclusion, for of enhancements. But the no new files in minor releases rule should continue to be followed. based on this productive conversation.

A decision was made to organize these calls on an ongoing quarterly basis to start with, and Mary's gonna take the responsibility of organizing those and leading on them. Fairly profound. We now have it that the project is gonna go to a one release for this year. Maybe that is the cadence that will happen in the future.

And these core release leads have, paraphrased how those tasks might be assigned. So canonical plugins, backlog, maintenance, man management, and miscellaneous. And Tammie you were most excited about this bit, I dunno if that's the right word. Excited. This was, yeah. Full transparency. I was in the call.

[00:31:01] Tammie Lister: So I, that, this was, Sheer accent that I'm on this, as well talking about this. but the couple of things that you said that I'd like to talk about first, before I get to the plugins was one you said where it was spoken about first. First of all, it was in the core committers channel.

Thank, that's where it first came up. Great. And then the second, as you were saying about the minor releases, this is yet to be determined. What are mi it is determined what are minor releases, which is the new, files. But what the minor releases will likely see is quite a lot of things going into them.

because the second thing to talk about, which is the backlog management, we'll see. A lot of things. Potentially able to go into minor releases from those, which will include, enhancements, bug fixes, paper cuts, all those kind of things that really do improve the day-to-day experience. and is a really good thing to focus on and to do work.

And we need to do that work in order to do some of the bigger features. So there's a little bit of we need to plow the field to do some of the features anyway, so doing some of that is a good idea as well. the canonical plugins though for me does show some potential. I'm not going to get into the ins and the pros and cons and all of that kind of stuff because it's there and that's a debate that everyone can have and they can do their own personal conversations, but iCal plugins does open up, some potential.

And from a product perspective, I'm Really interested to see what happens here. Now, this isn't a new concept. This isn't something we haven't done before. we've had design experiments, plugin, we've had, performance plugins have gone this way. But for things like AI and other different plugin, different things to move the project forward, there's a little project called Gutenberg that started out as a plugin.

I'm just gonna point this out.

[00:33:01] Nathan Wrigley: I'm sure you remember it. Yeah.

[00:33:03] Tammie Lister: I have no memory whatsoever of that sign. The plug in phase with no memory, just the spot. but that's how we have historically moved things forward, mpc, all those kind of things. So being able to do this kind of, its, and with the modern technology, with AI and, doing kind of those things like a drinking game, right?

With ai. but. Being able to explore and plugin is a safe way to also get testing and find out what we then need to add in core, what isn't in core, what do we need to infrastructure. I'm not focusing away from anything else by saying that, but also showing that the potential that these plugins do have as well.

[00:33:47] Nathan Wrigley: Does a canonical plugin once it's been created. So just for those who are listening? Who doesn't know what this is. Canonical plugins landed in my head as core features not in core. Basically something potentially, yeah. Something that could, potential that could have got into core but didn't quite merit being in core.

but the other thing was it was gonna receive the same. Kind of security posture and maintenance and update posture as if it were in core. But it's a plugin. Yeah. So not everybody needs it, but it's basically, it could be considered essential in that way. So this

[00:34:20] Tammie Lister: is entirely personal thought.

One of the things I think that the path might need to be is, does a canonical plugin pair off certain features to then go into core? Or does it always stay as a canonical plugin? that could also be what I was gonna ask,

[00:34:33] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Was canonical plugins basically a way of smuggling things into core without working on, I don't

[00:34:38] Tammie Lister: think smuggling is what we're doing.

No,

[00:34:43] Nathan Wrigley: don't even nefarious. It's a way that people could contribute their time without being a, core committer, for example. But they could have, they could be working on a canonical plugin, which could then work its way up into core. However, the, further question for that would be then if something becomes a canonical plugin, can you ever take it away again?

In other words, if it's gone into core, it's basically in core for. Forever, more or less of that week. So these,

[00:35:10] Tammie Lister: and many other questions will be answered as we follow this path, and I think that's the thing, right? I was hoping you'd gimme

[00:35:16] Nathan Wrigley: all of it right there.

[00:35:18] Tammie Lister: No, and I'm not gonna, no. 'cause one of the things that's come out of this is everybody, and, personally, what I, am.

Love is that everyone's communicating, everyone's sharing the information, everyone's working on these hard, these aren't easy problems. These are great. So we've done, if we are taking this paraphrase. Okay. We, the way we've done plugins before, we've done this before. We've said these ideas, I.

Now let's actually do them. But then that means how do minor releases work? How do these plugins work? How do the questions that we're answering work, we've gotta come up with these workflows in these ways. And how do they work with nowadays? How does AI work? things work. If they are an AI plugin, how do they work if they are a performance, who acquire on these resources?

Like we have to answer these questions in this day and age, not in five years ago or however it was a while ago, wasn't it Phase one. But we, don't answer the questions based on that. And that wasn't canonical. That was something different, right? We, have to answer the questions based on and defined based on today.

And that's part of what we're doing. And if you look at the way it's written is like these improvements were done and now it's how we do it. the best way I can see it is like the experiments, plugins, right? And the way that this is the performance team suite of plugins and all these kind of things, but things have been pulled out from those.

That have then gone into core. And I think that's one interesting way of seeing it is maybe there's an AI suite, I don't know, and then maybe things get pulled in. one of the things that these plugins do allow is a lot of testing. They allow a lot of experimentation and they allow a lot more contribution.

So we, we've seen that in the past when something is a plugin, suddenly it can have more contribution, it can be easier contribution, it can have, more support. It can also have more eyes on it, it can have more visibility. Track and GitHub are amazing if, tracking GitHub and you are in that space of however many thousand tickets it is and you know how to navigate that.

But if you can just go into one little repo and focus on one little thing in one little team, and it's your area that's so much better as a contributor experience to really, enjoy and be able to, and it's probably better for companies as well to be able to focus their contributions.

[00:37:40] Nathan Wrigley: I think it's fair to say though, it's a fairly profound moment in WordPress's history.

This sort of pivot over to, in this case one more release for the year 2025 and now these talks of canonical plugins, backlog, maintenance management, I should say, and then the miscellaneous stuff in there. yeah. And all of the different bits and pieces that fall out of that, the, what this means for other people considering using WordPress, what this means for enterprise and so on and so forth.

Can I just gonna open it up, maybe Tim, I don't know if you've got any thoughts on this whole new cadence, whether that's something that concerns you or if you're sanguine about it. He said dropping almost nothing into Tim's lap at all.

[00:38:22] Tim Nash: No. obviously there was always concerns when you have big changes.

and I think before this call, you said, and it's gonna be the last release and I had to go, I. This year, to, and there, there obviously that worry is stagnation. That if we, at all and almost not so much about stagnation as a perception of stagnation. That's the thing, right? That's the word.

[00:38:47] Nathan Wrigley: I think you hit the nail on the head. Yeah.

[00:38:49] Tim Nash: Yeah. Practically, this is the world we live in. I obviously listening to Tammie talking about minor releases and my, and she's oh, enhancements and paper cuts. And I'm like, yes. But that be, we were introducing lots of bugs into minor releases. We, what we need to avoid more than anything is having, going back to the old days of, 6.71, 6.7 1 2, 6 0.12, even very quick releases, especially as we are shifting more people to automatic updates.

Lots of people on minor updates. Generally we are, it's right when we are not mixing like security updates with feature updates because somebody might not want that feature and people don't think about it like, oh, when a new feature's introduced in a release and they don't want it, what they do is roll back the release and ignore what else was bundled in it.

So we've gotta be really careful about how that is explained and delivered. and the final thing is I'm wondering if we really need to think about splitting canonical plugins into two canonical plugins experiments. Oh, 'cause canonical plugins. when Tammie was talking about MP six, which was the original admin area, so the admin area you're seeing now was originally a plugin called MP six, and that went into WordPress call.

So when the, two factor plugin was created as a canonical plugin, there was an assumption that was going into court. It's never been said. It's not gonna go in. So it's just there. It's just existed. Yeah. It's getting lots of changes recently, which is lovely to see. But there's always been this implication.

A canonical plugin might go into core. So if it was like, this is an experiment.

We are not going to, we, are this and experiments are more, this might work, this might not, this might go into core, this might not. Whereas the canonical plugin is, this is an add-on, but we as the community support this.

This is really robust and this is gonna meet all the standards.

[00:40:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:40:55] Tim Nash: Because at the moment there's two different meanings. For one, for two completely

[00:41:00] Nathan Wrigley: different things. When you say experimental, are you meaning then in the same way that a Canon can plug in, you can take it or leave it? You, either download it or you don't.

are you saying that you it would be a similar to that? So we label things as experimental, so that's features, yeah, experimental features and you either download it or you don't. It's, not like in any way shipped with Core. It's just at the same time as Core is released, we release a bunch of experimental stuff.

And

[00:41:29] Tammie Lister: to phrase it's, there's a design experiments plugin and they used to be, and it's still there. Performance Labs

[00:41:35] Tim Nash: being another good example.

[00:41:36] Tammie Lister: Yeah. so, I actually plus one to you. I think that those should come back a little bit because those then potentially could be a ground for.

Plug. I think a lot of this language is to be cleared up and defined. And there was another point in the post about processes and clarification. And I think to come back to your point release, I don't want point releases to become something that people don't upgrade to because we've now got to a position where people want to do that.

but I also want, if there are. Bugs and issues that they can get in. And we, feel that they are good to be able to get in to be fixed. So we need to be sure of things like testing and really get robust on things like our processes. So that is also part of it, and that's actually listed there, that we need to be better at testing our point releases.

We need to be just as thorough about point releases as we are about full releases and all of these kind of systems come with it. If we're not gonna have a major release, we need to be treating our point releases with just as much respect as our full releases. that's the too long, don't read, around like being, but it wouldn't be like.

Our point releases will certainly have thousands of fixes in them because then they don't become reliable upon them. that's the difference between it.

[00:42:58] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just ask Tim, because I'm really curious about this because I, in SaaS apps that I pay money for, there's often this path, there's like an experimental tag, which you can, you can opt into experimental features and they just, drop and you can just on them and off them as you see fit.

these experimental things that, I don't know, notion might add to their platform or something like that. are you talking about experimental? Canonical plugins or just experimental anything?

[00:43:27] Tim Nash: obviously plugin, one of the beautiful things about WordPress is you can do almost anything.

One of the terrible things about WordPress is you can do almost anything. So I, it's, there are already plenty of plugins that have what, the technical term that tends to be used is feature flag. Yeah. Turn your feature flag on. and there are plenty of plugins that already do that for themselves. We don't really have a very good way at the, current way for distribution of plugins is very much you get a plugin and you get the next version and the next version. So we don't really have branches and things like that. So on an per individual plugin, if you want to add an experimental bit, you either have to build it into the plugin and launch with potentially buggy code, or you launch a second plugin that's your experimental plugin that interacts via hooks and filters.

[00:44:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:44:19] Tim Nash: But for core, we already have these experimental plugins. They already exist. and they, we, that we, things like the performance lab where you have been doing these tests and some of them then got fed into core and And turned up in recent releases. but just if we flag those as these are experimental stuff, changes in them.

Gutenberg's. Another good example, it's actually an experimental plugin. If you install latest version and it has an

[00:44:44] Tammie Lister: experimental flag in it for experiments within the experimental,

[00:44:48] Tim Nash: that's very nice. Yeah, very experimental. Yeah. Danger. But it's an experimental plugin. That's if you want a bleeding edge, but you version, then you get the Gutenberg plugin.

If you want the fun features inside Gutenberg for testing, you tick that button. But if we then compare that with something that is really mature, the two factor plugin, which has been a canonical plugging in inverted commas for nearly 10 plus years. It's a different type of plugin and it should be tracked differently.

and it's fine to say these plugins are really useful. We as a community are supporting them. They have, they get, they're tracked with all the white glove service you'd expect from wordpress.org. These are our community plugins, these are our canonical plugins. But also being honest and saying, we are probably not gonna put them into WordPress call.

they don't, their features don't match with what we want in there. But we appreciate that the large parts of the community need these features. You, which is great because we want a more modular system ultimately.

[00:45:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That's, it. And also, this is gonna sound a bit pathetic, but I actually quite like it when I see new experimental features popping up in my SaaS platforms that I pay for.

Yeah. 'cause it shows to me, oh, they're innovating, they're trying out some new stuff. And also I don't have to use it, but somebody somewhere's going to use it and some presumably gives some feedback. So I think there's actually some. There's some community benefit to it. It gets people excited again.

And we don't need to just bundle everything into core. I think that's a really interesting idea. And also, I've discovered the name of this episode. It's gonna be called Tret, which is which is, Yorkshire colloquialism, I'm guessing for treated. 'cause you said tret there a few times and I've not heard that.

And I'm, living in Yorkshire. Do you, say Tret? When you say treated? I'm just checking

[00:46:49] Tammie Lister: his face. Doesn't say that. No,

[00:46:50] Nathan Wrigley: he's not.

[00:46:52] Tammie Lister: You don't. I think it's

[00:46:53] Nathan Wrigley: part your vernacular. you said the word anyway, blah, blah. cracking idea. I really like that. Experimental. I dunno where we'd put that, but that seems like a really, neat idea.

Anything else to add onto that before you shuffle through to the next piece? No. Okay, great. In which case, couple of community bits I suppose really. first one is to mention that the core performance team, I've got a couple of new reps, if you, new reps, if you've been familiar with the, the faces, Felix Ants and people like that.

We've got some new ones for you. I apologize in advance. I'm gonna try and do the first names. So Aisha, I'm gonna say, is one of the new reps and she, Shyam, Shiam, Sundar, is also one of the reps. And so thank you very much for stepping up, to the community team. Dunno if we've got anything else to add to that, but, yeah, just thank you.

Well done. next one is event. We haven't said it much, this episode page builder summit no.com. If you, if you fancy joining us, Tammie is gonna be one of the, the speakers of the event. It's happening between the 12th to the 16th of May. We're on version eight. This, believe it or not, is the eighth version of that event, page builder summit.com.

and if you click this little button here and fill out the thing that pops up, we will keep you updated as and when it's rolling around. if you fancy sponsor in an event like that, you can click this little bit down here. It takes you to forward slash sponsors and you can find out what we're offering.

There's quite a few, companies that hopped on this week. So do that sooner rather than later. It's it's looking like it'll be a good event if you scroll down from here, you'll see some of the people that have confirmed for this particular round. So look, there's coming Tammie Yeah, she's in the call.

At least she was. and a bunch of other people. I don't know where Tommy's one, I dunno if Tommy submitted her picture. Yay. There she is. There she is. so that's the speaker list that we've got so far. I think we're gonna end up roughly in the region of about 40 different speakers. Something nice. Yeah, it should be nice.

So there we go. That's a little plug for that. Okay. This kind of jives into what we've just been talking about. I don't know about you, but I try to proselytize the gospel of WordPress to my kids not that long ago, a few years ago. And, honestly, I. It was hard, really hard. my kids have been brought up in an era of the mobile phone.

They've decided a long time ago that they're not really, or at least they weren't actually. I've got some intel on that. I'll give you an interesting conversation I had with my son in a minute, but they appear to be quite happy with the trade off of, I will happily give you all the information about me so long as you give me a fleet free platform in return and, sell my data and so on and so forth.

And I think WordPress has got a real problem. Trying to sell it to the Utes, as it were. And, Marika Vander Act, sorry, Tommy, I, have to say such things. the Marika Vander Act, who, as you will well know, I'm sure if you've watched this, she, was right at the top of the tree in Yost. she appears to now be working for, I'm gonna say university or something like that.

Certainly involved in higher education and produced a piece this week, or, yeah, this week, 1st of April called Gen Z Marketing and WordPress. Unexpected lessons from my classroom. So she's public facing, she's talking to 18-year-old students and trying to get a handle on what they think of things like the internet and WordPress and so on.

And these are the conclusions that she's drawn. firstly, they're really visual. I'll summarize it as follows, if it doesn't look good. Forget it. In fact, looks come according to Marika, looks is all of it, if it doesn't look great, nothing will happen with it. And you can imagine, you only have to look on your mobile phone.

A lot of those platforms that are successful look really good. The other one is the, I'm gonna say it, Tammie cover your ears. The Utes, they're, she's done it again. They're, they're not using the vernacular that we're using. Oh. So she used as an example of, she said to her class, oh, she used the word webinar and was met by a bunch of blank faces, and then had to explain what a webinar was and they said back to us, oh, that's called an online masterclass apparently.

So we've gotta get the, we've gotta make it look nice. We've gotta make it so that we are using the right words because the jargon has changed. honestly, can you remember having conversations with your parents? I'm sure you all can, where you'd say a word and they would go, what? And you'd be like, it's so obvious.

Everybody uses this word, so we've gotta do that. They're all using ai, although they might not understand what they're doing with it, they are all using it, and this is what I find curious. It turns out that they're driven by values, many of which seem to J pretty well with the open source ethos that I'm sure all of the four people on this call pretty much share.

I lost sight of this. I just assumed that this wasn't a thing that maybe was quite so important nowadays, like that, owning your own data and worrying about all of those kind of things, that

[00:52:22] Tammie Lister: makes a lot of sense because a lot of Gen X brought up Gen Z.

[00:52:27] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So to

[00:52:28] Tammie Lister: me that makes a lot of sense.

Oh,

[00:52:30] Nathan Wrigley: nice. Okay. As someone who is

[00:52:31] Tammie Lister: Gen X permanently. Yeah. I'm like, sure. Yeah.

[00:52:35] Tim Nash: I'll just go. I've lost, I love how it's, the number three was, they like using CPC number four. They really care about their privacy. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And their value driven

[00:52:46] Tammie Lister: by the environment.

[00:52:47] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. It's, maybe I've summarized it wrong.

not necessarily that, but, the environment, human rights, e equality, privacy, accessibility, basically all the things which if you'd raise the child, you'd want them. I would, I'd want 'em to be that in spades. And it certainly, the students that marika's encountering are that, which is just great.

It gives me great hope and optimism. But also, curiously, I just made a, an incorrect summation that, they're posting everything to all these platforms. No, they're really cautious about what they're posting online. And that leads me then to the conversation that I had with my son. And it was somewhat surprising.

I was in the car with him the other day and we got talking about this, and he said, basically all of my friends, he's, 18, he said, all of my friends have now figured out that we don't like big platforms. We've all stopped, we've made conscious decisions to get off the big platforms. Now it turns out they can't do that entirely, and they've wedded themselves to one, maybe two, that they've all agreed that they're gonna cope with.

But I, I didn't see that coming. I just thought they all used all of the things and, thrown privacy out with the bath water. Anyway, Marika's point is design matters. We need to use the correct language. We need to speak the language that the them are speaking. I avoid, yeah, she's shaking head. we need to, provide value driven marketing and, and she's saying this is what WordPress can do.

I just thought this was so interesting. I've got the feeling that unless we adopt some of this, WordPress is maybe viewed by the, younger people as a bit of a dinosaur. So I applaud this. It seems like a really interesting idea. Anybody wanna comment on that?

[00:54:37] Tim Nash: WordPress being seen as a bit of a dinosaur is going to, becoming, is increasingly becoming a theme every year and every year you have to go, but it's a very, it's increasing, it's not decreasing.

But you listen to some people and they would tell you that this is something from 20 years ago, which is a, weirdly weird, again, we're back to this perception thing rather than necessarily the truth. to the point that I was talking with a, high school teacher and was talking about maybe doing some classes with kids and they were like, oh, no, we don't, we press this really old hat.

okay, do you want these kids to have jobs? It's no, we're gonna teach them something. And he was, and he literally just waffled on about some random CMS I'd almost never heard of. And that's the new cool thing. And it's wow, if the teachers are like in that space are

Losing us, then we are going, then we got very little chance of even reaching the kids in the first place directly through things like school.

[00:55:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I just wonder, so a lot of those things that Marika brought to mind really jived with WordPress. But I do wonder what the future will look like for, so for example, the blog, the idea of a blog. I, like to keep a blog. It's got itself embedded in my life. I'm not very good at keeping it, but I like it there.

And I'll keep that website going as long as I can, as long as I possibly can.

I don't know that my kids would ever want that. So that's a curious thing. Anyway, tell me, so I find this

[00:56:10] Tammie Lister: curious. So I don't have children, so for me this is really curious and one of the things I've tried to do, mainly because I don't, is listen to other generations.

'cause it'd be very easy for me. I am 50 this year and it would be incredibly easy for me to only listen to people my age and go in my bubble and presume that everybody is me, right? Like my age. And the, the more I listen, the more any presumption that I make, it reminds me that generations are cyclical.

When I study psychology and sociology in a level, I learned this, there's only so many combinations of generations and social, combinations. And they repeat. They do. Gen Z is a remix of Gen X 'cause that's who brought them up. that's nature and nurture and the environment that they're brought up in.

And, that's awesome. that means that probably we have a bit more understanding, but it means we won't have so much understanding of the generations that come after. And Generation Z is not necessarily gonna be the generation that we need to bill for. They're the generation that are coming up.

They're not necessarily the ones that we should be thinking about onboarding. It's alpha and all the kind of ones that come up after that. But for me, it's just listening. Because if I stop listening to music that comes after me, if I stop, consuming the, any form of media that comes after me, then I might as well just listen to old, like lavana, like on repeat.

And people still

[00:57:44] Nathan Wrigley: write music. Good

[00:57:46] Tammie Lister: grief. Yeah, I know. Thought we

[00:57:48] Tim Nash: 19 8 0 9, you, can just go online and it will generate it for you now. Oh,

[00:57:53] Nathan Wrigley: okay. Okay. It's

[00:57:54] Tammie Lister: okay. I

[00:57:54] Nathan Wrigley: think that's absolutely fascinating though. I do think the p okay, so some of the experiments, right? But if you don't, if

[00:58:00] Tammie Lister: have children, you have to make a conscious effort to do that.

I think that's the interesting thing, because I don't have that, the, those of us who don't, we have to make a conscious effort or unless like by proxy, right? And. I think one of the benefits I have of that is I'm constantly seeking the input. and I would encourage people to do that. For me, it's incredibly refreshing because it means that I'm very aware that my input is stale.

I, know, if I only listen to the music that I grew up with, my goodness, that would not be good. Or the media that I grew up with.

[00:58:30] Nathan Wrigley: I know that Michelle has got kids, Tim's got kids. Yeah. I'll just relay what it's like for me. my kids, aspirations online, the things that they wanna do.

Bear no similarity to what I want to do. there's nothing apart from the fact that stuff is egressing from a device and it's going somewhere else, that's it. That's where it ends. They don't want, they wouldn't want a platform which would be theirs, I don't know. Child wrigley.com.

because now there's so much like putting yourself out there. There's so much of a tidal wave of nastiness, which can come back at you and, this canonical record of all the things that you said and thought they this a bit to Marika's point. they wanna be careful about it, but, everything's so ephemeral, it's like a fleeting thing, which happens in this moment and then gets forgotten in the tidal wave of scrolling and what have you.

So it's just very, different. Michelle, Tim, I dunno if you've got anything to share about them. I

[00:59:33] Michelle Frechette: would say even if you have kids, you still have to be listening and paying attention because I still think of my daughter as like the next generation and what are the young kids doing?

And she's 33, so she's not the young kids anymore. So I have to listen to the generations after her to really understand what kids are looking for and what young adults are looking for, because my kid is 10 years older than I was when I had her. I have to think about those kinds of things as well.

So never stop listening, I guess is basically my, point, and I know Tim, your kids are younger, but Yep. But do you do, Tim,

[01:00:12] Nathan Wrigley: when you look over your child's shoulder and see what they're doing, do, does any of it cross pollinate with the stuff that you are doing? I'm sure it,

[01:00:19] Tim Nash: I guess maybe.

Mine has been a lucky that she has me for a far, I dunno, she's got security

[01:00:27] Nathan Wrigley: bulletins to read and

[01:00:29] Tim Nash: no,

[01:00:30] Tammie Lister: a terminal that's a toy.

[01:00:34] Tim Nash: there is a level. She is still in primary school. She's, but she, she does streaming. She streams on a YouTube channel. she, which she set up herself. And does she, builds like Roblox games

[01:00:51] Nathan Wrigley: For

[01:00:51] Tim Nash: people. she, she loves chat. GPT, it's similar. there is a level at which the, that we're still at the stage of finding where her own boundaries are. But, perhaps very surprisingly, the most people go, I know, horrified. She, I don't give her, I, there's not any restrictions in her in front of her.

we. Ryan, make it as unrestrictive as possible and let her find the path and boundaries. But I'm really lucky that I have a kid who would basically come up and go, so I saw this and I think it was inappropriate. It was like, good. So I didn't watch it. It's oh. And there will be a point where it's yeah, there, there's, that's

[01:01:31] Nathan Wrigley: not gonna,

[01:01:32] Tim Nash: but then, and then the barriers might have to come in, but we're right in the moment.

We're still in a very explor exploratory stage. Gotcha.

[01:01:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:01:39] Tim Nash: but yeah, so a lot of what she does reflects into, oh, these are hobbies that I quite like as well. the other day I, went up into her room and looked, and she was like, I'm busy. She was busy playing. And I was like, oh, what game are you playing?

And she was like, blender. Oh, it's like that's a great game. And I'm looking and there's a genuine thing, I, dunno if anybody's ever opened blender, but it's, you open, a blender,

[01:02:02] Nathan Wrigley: it's a great game, you

[01:02:03] Tim Nash: panic, you close blender. Whereas her, there was an actual cat, it was blockage, but it was a cat.

[01:02:11] Nathan Wrigley: I, I envisions of her with an actual blender,

[01:02:15] Tim Nash: No, she'd only had that software. For a few hours on, it's an open source. Three, 3D. It's brutal

[01:02:23] Nathan Wrigley: on the learning curve though.

[01:02:25] Tim Nash: But that was only in a few hours and she was like, how did you do that? And she was like, I just watched these YouTube Oh.

And followed them.

[01:02:31] Nathan Wrigley: That's your answer, right? There's your answer. Yep. I see the future being a lot of ai, like we were talking AI content. So you interact with an AI and you say, I don't know, let's say you want a website. I would like a website and it needs this, and this. And this sort of flavor, this design.

Ethic, that kind of thing. and that's the bit, I suppose that worries me is that the whole, like the tolerance of building a website and getting into the minutiae of setting things up on servers and figuring out the WordPress way of doing things. I think maybe Marika's pointing to what, I guess what she thinks is some sort of existential threat where if we don't sweep up these people, WordPress is just gonna be, a, footnote in the history of the internet because it's not something the kids wanna do anymore,

[01:03:19] Tammie Lister: I think as if we don't listen.

so the things that I've learned. Perhaps like years have, been generally from the people who are younger than me, significantly, like by listening to them and just being aware, like I've been taught so much by every single person that's given me that, that insight into different things. So I think that's the thing, just listen to them.

we can't create spaces for people that we presume what they want in the spaces. The visual thing is one thing, but also giving them things to be able to build with giving them the tools that they have. If we don't have a first AI in our space, if WordPress doesn't have that, then they're not gonna come in here.

Oh, I

[01:04:00] Nathan Wrigley: think you are so right about that. Yeah. 'cause the, like the, possibilities of an ai, that communication that you can have. Yeah. Like literally communicate with it. Yeah. I know it's, but

[01:04:11] Tammie Lister: they want to build things. I think that's the thing, that Tim's saying is they've still got that questing, like the, thing from If you imagine when we were, children, but like that questing, like the Choose Your Own Adventure books, the questing that's been passed on to these generations that love of like self-learning and that love of questing has been passed down. So they've still got that, but they wanna play with their tools and they wanna quest with their things.

If they go into a space, their things aren't there, they're not gonna see that. They can quest in those spaces or they can build in those spaces. So they're just gonna move on to somewhere where it has got more fun things to build in. I would,

[01:04:50] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Honestly, it's a really Marika firstly, thank you. Just opening up that conversation.

'cause I, got the sense of it. you go to a word camp and you look around and the age is tending older, let's just put it that way. There's not too many.

[01:05:07] Tammie Lister: we're can need that break soon.

[01:05:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. There's more people by age than there are. I've been doing that for years.

anyway, so there we go. we're fast running out time because we started horrendously late to our technical gremlin. So I'll just quickly do a few things that I had wanted to dwell on. this is the first one. If you are attending WordCamp Europe. You are under the age of 25. Firstly, well done.

I'll give you a sticker and, and we'll, sit down and we'll talk and I'll call you T and, tell Tommy. we'll do that. but here is the schedule has been produced and I was gonna dwell on it, but there's, it's the now Full Monte schedule of all the different bits and pieces that are going on.

two days of conference, one day of Contri Day as well. But I can't dwell on that, so I shan't I will just quickly mention though that the web agency Summit, I, Tammie you had an intuition that this maybe was on this week already. I think

[01:06:13] Tammie Lister: it's on from today. Maybe unless I'm having a, an elderly moment, which could be, it's this began this

[01:06:20] Michelle Frechette: morning.

Okay.

[01:06:22] Nathan Wrigley: There we go. Wanna get into this. Bob, along with, Andrew Palmer on the Do the Woo podcast, talked about it, it's happening this week. So hopefully you've got your, you figured out where all the URLs are for that. and just quick hat tip to the new global sponsorship team that are propping up things like meet ups and, word camps all over the place.

And we have automatic A two hosting and Woo, who have now been joined by Bluehost and Kinter. So thanks to those teams for, supporting the WordPress project. I am just gonna go through this really quick. I hope you don't mind. And then also Kyle Van Dusen from the admin bar. There's probably a better URL than this, but this is where it drives you.

He's got an Airtable form. if you go to the admin bar.com, there's probably a post about this, but he's trying to get people to, fill out his 2025 WordPress professional survey. And with this, he then produces a blog post outlining things like, how much do you work in the WordPress space?

What's the typical size of your project? Where are you based? How much do you charge? what's your demographic in terms of age and expertise and this kind of stuff? And, I dunno, anybody else who does something like this. So the data that comes out of it normally is pretty interesting 'cause the amount of people that fill this out is quite large.

And, and so there's a new 1 20 25, I'll put it in the show notes, which will drop tomorrow. But just Google the admin bar 2025 WordPress Professional Survey and maybe it'll drive you towards this air table, but it's gotta be filled out by the, the 11th of April. Okay, so a couple of days to do that.

What else have we got? Yeah, a couple of products that I spotted. w sorry. Patterns. WP is a free, I think they've got a pro tier as well, but if you're into patterns, then this one came across my radar as far as I can work out. It's new-ish, I think. and it's a set of patterns I should expect. You install it, click a button, add some pattern from a modal and they drop into your page or post or whatever it may be.

I am really going quick. And then stackable, which is a suite of blocks, they've dropped a brand new global design system. So you can do things like, font matching. typography. You can do things like global color system, and things like that. So whenever you drop one of, I guess their blocks, I dunno if it goes into core blocks in any way, shape, or form, but the idea being that you don't have to set the color of the button every time you drop a button and it'll all just be handled natively.

So that's new for them. barn two. Katie's been on this many times before. They have bought a product, I. I wanna call it a plugin. I'm pretty sure it's a plugin called Seti. SETI is a service which enables you in a sort of, like a spreadsheet interface if you've got a big WooCommerce store and you need to modify multiple things at the same time.

If you have to open every product in a WordPress post, if you like, or a WooCommerce product, and then modify the details and click save that presumably over like thousands of SKUs, that's gets a bit annoying. So that's what does, and they've joined forces, they've been bought by, By Katie, Keith Barn too.

So watch this space. Maybe they'll, I don't know, maybe there'll be some crossover there. it sounds like they're gonna be moving into Shopify with this as well. mark, Wes guard, WWS form. He's been on the show loads of times. you know what the plugin does? It's a form plugin, but it's got a 20% off sale.

So I thought I'd mention that. I dunno when that runs out, but it's certainly on sale at the moment. So any license? 20% off at the moment. And, have I got anything else with one minute to spare? Tammie I would so love to have dwell on this one. It's a bummer, but here we go. if you like grid and you like flex and you wish you could combine the two.

Hold on. It sounds like it's coming. So you can do those masonry layouts, natively. these things are a right nightmare. You need a ton of JavaScript to make what really ought to be a browser-based CSS driven thing. it's been really hard to achieve these kind of things. there is moves afoot.

And this is written by the one and only, I'm Tammie I'm sure Jen Simmons work inside and out, but this is written by a bunch of people whose voices we know, Jen Simmons, working at Safari I think now, or Apple, I'm pretty sure, is talking about this brand new thing. It's gonna be called, if it lands and it's called this, it will be called Item Flow.

And basically it's the best of grid and flex all in one, which I. Be great. Done. I wanted to talk about that a lot more. But there we go. I think we've run outta time. I'm so sorry. Nightmare at the start. just quickly, James Lowe. Hello James. His son calls him from the other room and goes bra apparently.

Is that a thing? What does that mean? Think you mean

[01:11:39] Michelle Frechette: bro,

Like bro. Yeah, but they say it open like that bra.

[01:11:43] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. And I think he's five,

[01:11:45] Michelle Frechette: like five years old I think. Okay.

[01:11:47] Nathan Wrigley: And, da That's probably it. That's all I got. I'm so sorry about the technical gremlins team. What a nightmare. We click.

Exactly. We just need to stop

[01:11:56] Tammie Lister: feeding them after midnight and you'll be fine.

[01:11:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you're quite right. All that age. You probably midnight somewhere

[01:12:01] Tammie Lister: that ages you.

[01:12:02] Nathan Wrigley: Have you watched that? Have you watched any film from like the 1980s recently, especially of a sort of sci-fi era? Because when you look at the special, some of Labrinth

[01:12:11] Tammie Lister: stands up.

Okay. Or in my heart, which does labyrinth in my heart, that stands up. Okay. Oh, don't, Tim, don't

[01:12:18] Nathan Wrigley: only in your heart, don't do it.

[01:12:20] Tim Nash: Don't,

watch it too carefully.

[01:12:21] Nathan Wrigley: Objectively, it's, there's a bunch. You can see the wires.

[01:12:27] Tim Nash: Tim, it's it wire, as you can see.

[01:12:31] Nathan Wrigley: I watched, I watched the Matrix recently, and I had, I've, I only saw it one time back in the day, and I thought, I'll sit down and watch it and, oh.

[01:12:42] Tammie Lister: a film that does hold up Dark Crystal. That does not hold up Too bad. Oh look, tinsy, Tim's on my side for that one. Yeah, I'm good. See? Okay.

[01:12:50] Nathan Wrigley: it was Muppets. how you are always gonna forgive. See So

[01:12:52] Tammie Lister: dark was

[01:12:54] Nathan Wrigley: you're always gonna forgive.

[01:12:55] Tammie Lister: lab was Muppets as well.

[01:13:01] Nathan Wrigley: anyway, there we go. We're gonna get into this after we press stop. I think that would be nice. I apologize to those of you who started listening to the show. I apologize to all of them. That was a bit of a nightmare. technical stuff took over. also apologies if you were listening to this.

It's much shorter than normal in the podcast feed, but that's the way it goes. I'm afraid. The, Technical stuff had us defeated. We will be back this time next week for another show, I think. I can't see any reason why we're not. But yeah, we'll see you next week. Thank you, Tim.