This Week in WordPress #330

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It is time for This week in WordPress, episode number 330. Entitled after 329 episodes we finally talk about toilet paper. It was recorded on Monday, the 14th of April, 2025. My name's Nathan Wrigley and I'll be joined today by Taco Verdonschot by Piccia Neri and by Corey Maass.

We spend a little bit of time at the beginning talking about the bits and pieces that our guests have brought.

So for example, Taco tells us all about how Google now want you to give them all of your marketing emails.

Piccia tells us about the fact that Canva are really getting into the website building workplace, and how incredibly credible that product seems, as well as the accessible data visualizations course that she is running. There are some links to that in the show notes.

And then we get into the WordPress news more generally. WordPress 6.8, the final release is just around the corner. In fact, it may already have shipped by the time that you listen to this podcast.

We also talk about the Page Builder Summit, which is back pagebuildersummit.com if you're interested in signing up for that.

And also WordCamp EU is still on the lookout for some volunteers.

Kinsta have updated their platforms so that all of the problems you may receive on updating plugins have been taken away. That's the hope, anyway.

If you are in the APAC region, there is a new community for you to join. We will give you some intel about that.

And then on the show, the thing that gets all of the comments going, as you might expect, is ads inserted into the WP admin. But wait, not into the admin area, into the block editor. Let's see what our panel think about that.

Newsletter Glue has been sold. It's something that I use. And so we talk about that extensively.

And it's all coming up next on 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.

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Hello there. Episode, I dunno if that's right. 330 feels right. episode number 330 of this week in WordPress. Thank you for joining us. If you, if you fancy putting your friends, colleagues, relations, pets, whatever I. In front of this and you'd like them to join in the conversation, feel free to do that.

We'd love it. The, the best way to do that is to send people to this here, URL, that one there underneath, underneath Peach's Chin. And, yeah, the other left, Corey, the other left. it's w Yeah, go look a pro. wp builds.com/live. Wp builds.com/live. Send people there. And if you do go there, then you've got a couple of choices if you want to comment.

If you've logged into Google, then you can use the YouTube, comments. They're on the other left. They're, on there somewhere. Just Yeah, they're over there. Yeah. go, and find them. But if you don't wanna do that. Then you can use the platform's commenting system. We use a platform called Wave Video.

Wave Video, and you click the little button at the top right hand or the other left. There we go, the top right hand. I'm just no good at this. at the, it's at the top of the player. Go and click it. It says something like live chat or something like that. And then you don't need to be logged into anything, you just type your name in and the comments will come through.

feel free to do that. Thank you very much, peach. Yeah, exactly. Tacos on fire. Look at that. That's so good. Perfect. You point at him pointing. Yeah. Yeah. You point at him. I'll point at him. Everybody can point. wp bells.com/live. We're here to talk about the WordPress news. And in order to do that, we're always joined by some fabulous people.

I'm very grateful for, to toward these people because a, they're willing to spend an hour and a bit with me. That's quite nice. I appreciate that. And that's not a small task, put it that way. But also they're giving up their time and I just think that's absolutely lovely. And, so joining us today, we have got tack over on shot.

How you doing Tcho? He is our co-host for today. I'm all good. Yeah. Yeah. Really nice to have you. And look, I in the show notes, I spelled your name correctly. You did. And I love it. Do you, what do you wanna know? I figured out why I get it wrong every time. I know now why I figured it out. Do tell. When I type in.

So the platform that we use is, something that I had built for podcasting and doing show notes and things like that. And it's logged your, I obviously, the very first time you came on the show, I obviously typed your name in incorrectly. Yeah. And it's now bound your email address. To that incorrect spelling.

And so then I would copy and paste it into the show. So now I know how, that's happened. So now is fixed forever. No, it's still broken by note. I know. To manually do it. So, there we go. anyway, here we go. This is Taos biography. I don't know exactly what this says, but here we go. Nobody really knows what Tako does exactly, but you can find him all the time in online and in-person conferences.

I know he used to work at Yost for a very long time, but he's left them to start working with Yost. Deval again. Nowadays, he's known for promoting a new plugin called Progress Planner, and we'll feature a couple of pieces from them later, which helps website owners keep their websites up to date. He's also one of the writers in the progress for WordPress series on the Progress Planner blog.

You can find him very often in the post status chat, but outside of work, tacho is a father of two. He's happily married to his wife Faye, and he's currently training for the four day marches in n Megan. And just before the call, he was telling me that, yeah, that's not a small task, is it? You're doing like seven gazillion miles in four days or something?

[00:07:19] Taco Verdonschot: Yes. Yeah. So I have to walk for four days, 50 kilometers a day. in Freedom units. That's about 31 miles. We just looked up. so I did a training session yesterday. I've got some blisters, so eh. Not ideal, but they say it's fun. Yeah. they say it's fun. And I thought you guys over there were always into bikes.

[00:07:45] Nathan Wrigley: Why don't you just get yourself on a bike, do you? yes, but this is, so this is happening in my hometown. Oh. the, closest city to vi and it's the largest walking event in the world, so it's cool to participate. Okay. Alright. So that's why I'm doing it for the sixth time. Yeah. Oh, okay.

So you've done it before. Yeah. Okay. you know, the pain. Okay, congratulations for, for at least, signing up for something like that. I can't even manage. End of June, I'll be able, July I'll be able to tell you if I made it. Okay. Alright. Okay. thank you for joining us.

So that's Tacho. and joining us there, there's Peach. Peach. Hello Peach. Hello. Nice to, nice to have you with us. I was lucky enough to spend actual time, with, and, I. she broke my goggles, but we had a nice time. Anyway. I You keep, I gave them back. They were fine. I didn't break them.

They were fine. They were fine. I wore them for one length. That's all it takes. Gave them back. Gave them back. They were fine. And then it's my fault. Clearly. Clearly you're a father. Clearly it's clear that you're a father blaming other people. Seriously, though, all joking aside, that was. So lovely. It was really nice.

It was so nice. I spent a bit of time in, a place called Roost in, well for Cloud Fest. And and it just so happened that we both enjoy swimming, so that was lovely. So let's do Peach's biography. Peach Andary empowers agencies, businesses, and designers and developers to thrive and win on the web by putting their users at the center of their process.

She does this as a UX and accessible design consultant on projects as a coach and a workshop a leader. And by conducting transformational audits, she speaks at conferences globally on UX and accessible design. Peaches. Current main focus is on balancing creativity and accessibility without sacrificing either.

There you go. So thank you for joining us, Peter. You sounds good. Is that May unbelievable. Yeah, that's, right. Did you write that? so there we go. And who's that? The, last one Who's got a very, short bio? I, yeah, I was gonna say, I didn't know we were allowed so many words. Yeah. yeah.

it's Corey Mass. How you doing Corey? Good, good. Now, Corey is the founder and creator of O-M-G-I-M-G, which is a WordPress plugin. he's also a WordPress freelance developer as well as a WordPress product organizer. And Hush hosh, he likes to write chrome extensions and we'll find out about that in just a moment.

But, he's got nice mug. He's very good with the, with the, advertising. They're loving it. the camera can't see the shirt that I'm usually wearing, just give us a little blast. Okay, there it is. O-M-G-I-M-G. Go and check it out. I'm, very happy you're moving up the mug and not the Sure its correct.

Yeah, it's a different kind of show, altogether. So that's us, that's our little panel for today. If you want to join us, as I said, wp build.com/live. Let's see who's here. so hello from Charlotte, North Carolina. Us. We're expecting. Oh, nice. We're back to the weather. Here we go. we're expecting a sunny 85 degrees Fahrenheit day, so that makes for a better Monday along with this show.

You are too kind, Ryan. That's very nice. And and this must be Tacho, I'm guessing the sun's clock. in for work. It's mostly sunny and a pleasant 70, 17 degrees where you are. Not quite beach weather, but perfect for pretending It is. Yeah. We had, we had really nice weather over the last couple of days.

It was excellent. Except that you don't have a beach in, how do you say that? Vegan? Yes. Oh. I got a Dutch word, right? Nice. and Hello? There we go. Tim Nash, the certain Nash. hello from a windy Yorkshire. We have, we seem to have lost the sun. No, it's not with me. sadly he should make some Yorkshire gold tea, which is what I have currently in here.

So all tea that is made in Yorkshire is gold. Thank, frankly, Corey. Fair enough. we only make the box is red, we only make the good stuff Peach has put in a, a bunch of comments as well. It's sunny, apparently. where it rightfully belongs. She said she's got all the sun in Spain.

Michelle Ettes joining us from dreary Rochester. The prognosis, the, outlook for weather seems to be dismal. More or less, all in all the places. That's a shame. Oh no, the metaphor, Nathan. No, here we go. It's sunny in Germany, says bigot. Hello bigot. Nice to have you with us. And Marcus Bennet from the Sunny State in Florida.

So happy to see you all at the start of the week. And, good evening. Of course, Cameron Jones joining us to say good evening. And he's in, I keep saying he is in Brisbane, but I found out last week that he isn't, or the week before or something, but I've forgotten. I'm really sorry, Cameron.

and Jackson is joining us from semi Sonny Brighton, and it's caught to 11. Where Cameron is. That's ridiculous. Thank you for staying up. I really appreciate it. So there's our panelists. Give them all a round of applause. Clap, clap, There we go. And so just before this show started, I had the usual technical gremlins and I'm now sporting a wired mouse.

I had to go down. Mine decided to die about 30 seconds ago. And so now I'm this, yeah, you've got a wire. Of course. There's no reason not to have a wired mouse. Yeah. You've both got a wire. No, I thought wires were gone. Cory, if you please tell me you don't have a wire, just show me the mouse. Or does he even know he's not got any mouse?

He's got some kind of interactive brain control device. I, for better or worse, I spent way too much money on one of these. I did the same, but I can't, do it correctly. Let's, what, I had a Wacom, but it stopped working with my. Mac Mini, so I couldn't this for Corey is that three three gesture where you do three fingers up and it makes all the screens go into different places on the screen.

That's literally all this gets used useful. I had really high expectations. Anyway, the, problem I have with the Wired one. That it keeps colliding with my setup. So I do apologize if, if everything goes wrong and I we all get to the side. All of that. Exactly. Okay, so let's get stuck into the bits and pieces that we got for this week.

this is us. This is WP Builds. This is our website. Let's get rid of that. if you fancy subscribing to what we do, please put your email address into that little box and click subscribe. Actually, boatloads of you did that this week. I really appreciative. Thank you for doing that. put your email address in there and click subscribe and we'll send you two emails, one on a Tuesday when we parcel this up as an audio podcast.

And then we'll send you one on a Thursday. To say when the regular podcast comes out. A big thank you and a tip of my Yorkshire hat, to these three companies for keeping the lights on. Over here, we've got GoDaddy Pro, we've got Blue Host, and we've got Omnis Send who have been fine sponsors for many months, and I really appreciate all of their endeavors to help us keep it going.

What have we been doing? we've had a couple of podcasts recently. I thought I'd mention these. The most recent of one is, is I've been chatting to Mark West Guard. We decided a little while ago that we'd do a show and we thought we'd do a show about code, and then we got to record the first episode and we basically said.

Nah, let's do something else. And so we've decided to do something called the Nice Show and on the nice show with Mark West Guard, we just talk about nice stuff. there's no, like category particularly for that, but we lump it into nice people, nice community thing, nice internet thing, nice real world thing and nice news.

And his nice person was Derek Shower. Mine was, Miriam Schwab. I'm sorry, panelists. I, another week. It'll be your turn. his nice community thing was the WP World, Marcus Burnett. Mine was a plugin called Code Blocks Pro. and then another nice thing that we, thought, was quite nice, I thought daylight savings.

I thought daylight saving was quite nice. And he, it's the only thing I disagreed with on the entire show. no, I'm sorry. We're not, this is not up for debate. this is not a democracy. Daylight savings. Good period. And then there was this video, which I'm not gonna show you now, but it was on TikTok.

Can I just say It's the most profoundly amazing thing ever. It's seven seconds long. It's a lady walking across a courtyard and an entire massive empty septic tank, falls out the sky for no reason. She's nowhere near where tanks should be falling and lands on her. Perfectly in line with her body so that she just pops her head out the top and just looks around.

[00:16:44] Piccia Neri: I don't think you can get away. We are not showing it now. I can't. we all need to see it. no, You can watch it if you go to that show, you can watch it and the link is there. It is called, I've called it Tank Falls on Lady, but that was a nice video. So there you go. That's the level to which I will stoop.

[00:17:03] Nathan Wrigley: another different level, quick bit of self-promotion is, we have the page builder summit coming up. If you're fancy joining us between the 12th to the 16th of May, 2025, it's totally free. We put the content out there for 48 hours for free, and if you scroll down a little bit, you'll be able to see who the confirmed speakers are.

You've heard of some of these? Look, there's this lady over here. Look, she's some, ah, you actually earlier pictures. Yeah, I forgot to. Yeah, she doesn't know it yet. Of course. I've just added it to the website and thanks, Nathan. Those, little grab handles on the sides of the pictures, can you actually resize them?

No, sadly, they're just, a PNG. I have the same feeling. I re time, I wor up medal with 'em every time. Idea. Yeah. So we tell you, Nathan, to have something on the side of the picture, show that when you. Make it bigger on the side that there is something surprising showing up. Oh, we could actually use, everybody should have their cats or their pets voting system.

Yes. Users resize the pictures based upon the, the ones that they want to see or something like that. Yeah. anyway, there they are. Look, there's all the people that are coming so far. There's a few that we still have yet to add, but look, it's as, always, it's a pretty amazing lineup. Cammie's joining us.

She's often in this show, in the chat, so page builder summit.com and if you just join the wait list. So I do, I have a question for you, Nathan. Yeah. 'cause you've been talking about the Page Builder Summit for quite a while. Yeah. we have heard it a couple of episodes, but who's the target audience?

[00:18:38] Taco Verdonschot: Who do you expect to show up for this summit? It's really interesting, actually. I'm glad you asked. if we, it's really, when we started it, it was just for people using page builders. So things like beaver builder, divvy, Elementor, those kind of things. And then by this time, the second one would come around, the block editor had started to become much more of a thing.

[00:19:00] Nathan Wrigley: So now there's loads of block editor content. But then as the, as we sn in other content around like marketing, SEO and design in Peach's case, that stuff, I, thought to myself, it doesn't align 'cause the name's wrong. And then I thought, the name shouldn't be the thing. Just because we've got a name.

We'll keep the name 'cause it's what people are familiar with. But, so the content is basically anybody who builds websites. And I would say it's more to do with people who build websites as a sort of, one solopreneur or two or three in an agency, something like that. As opposed to, your 10 ops and, big agencies.

It's that kind of audience. Yeah. Yeah. Solopreneur small agencies. Exactly everyone doing something with the Web summit, formerly known as Page Builder Summit. There you go. So page built. And I do thank you for that was just expertly done. You just dragged me in and forced me to talk about it some more.

I love it. page builder summit.com. If you, if you're interested and if you wanna sponsor that event, we've got a few spots open. You can click on this little link here and, find out more. Okay, so that's my self-promotional bit. Now what we're starting to do more with this show is we offer up an opportunity for the guests to raise something that they think is interesting or something that they have done, and we put that right to the top of the show now.

So we're gonna start off with a few bits and pieces that Peach, put in my direction. And the first one is this, so it's over at canva.com/canva. Create. And it's a video. there's a, whole thing, there's a whole website. This is not particularly massive, but, peach. Why this, why are we staring at Canva?

[00:20:42] Piccia Neri: because apparently I actually didn't watch the video, but apparently the video is hilarious and you got Nathan in the real frenzy of excitement. if not appreciation, because you shouldn't like it. But and actually I realized I missed out on a lot by not watching it. I will watch it. I will watch it, but I will Yeah.

Flick through it. So it is just because I, Canva is omnipresent. I am a designer. I've been using Adobe products as much as I hate having, I'm basically trapped in an Adobe product. I could have probably bought a couple of houses with the money I've given to Adobe since the nineties. but I'm trapped because of legacy because so many reasons.

Of course, even I have occasionally had to use Canvas and it used to irritate me a lot because, just because it just wouldn't do the things and I didn't like the way you organize the files and then everything is online. I want ownership. Over my files. So it's, there's a few things. However, can I afford as a designer to ignore it?

No, I can't. And now, from now on, can people that build websites afford to ignore it? No, you can't either. Because not that I don't, I also build websites, but however, because they're coming out with incredible new features. And these people are very, clever. They, have, if you know the story of Canva, it was created by a couple of design students who were frustrated with products like Adobe.

There were, gatekeeping, people who weren't designers out and very expensive and so on. So they democratized. Design, whether they did a good job of it all the time or not, it's a difference. So I won't go into that, but they, hats off for how they did it at an incredibly young age. So they understand marketing very well and they are expanding in ways that are logical if you think about it, because it makes sense that a tool such as Convert that is to say an online design tool should then give you the ability to create websites.

And apparently that's what's coming next. yeah, and I think because also a conversa, one of the many conversations that have been in the WordPress space for a while is how do we compete with people that are much faster, that can offer, Instagram, how can we compete with 'em? Because you just click, if a couple of clicks, you set up an account, which is virtually if you want, it's a kind of website.

How do we compete with that? Now there's another. I'm sorry, I didn't want to be the haring or bad news, but the thing is that I also, I think that most of us now just look at if you do it, if you are sensible and rational about it, these are all tools that we can use. So if right now delivering a, website with WordPress is what works great, but what if one day can for or for a client, for a certain type of client, I.

Maybe that's the best option. They're just tools that are at our disposal, so we can use them. The video is, pretty impressive actually. the thing that kind of got me entertained by the video is it is a clear, like they've basically taken the rule book from an Apple presentation and gone, we're gonna try and do all of the things except we are gonna dress in monochrome colors and have a bat, and then have a pianist come on at the end with a full gospel choir just to round the whole thing up.

[00:24:20] Nathan Wrigley: However, I, honestly, that's just nothing really. The point is this event was massive. it was really well executed. These, they clearly know what they're doing and they are building and who they're audience, a website building tool. And if it's anything like Canva, once you get over the hump of it doesn't work.

Like my thing that I know at IE, like Photoshop or whatever. Once you get over that hump. I, imagine it'll be really impressive and ignoring it would be stupidity. this is something that we will have to, as a community, address their ui, their ux, all of the things that they do. So this is their, opening salvo, trying to get their designers presumably, which rank in the millions.

and they're paying customers as well. it's not like a free tool. These guys are wedded to it. And if they suddenly throw in like a website building component, I dunno what the price increase for that will be. We, need to be mindful of it. yeah. Okay. tacho, Corey, anything to add to that?

[00:25:26] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah, I've, my wife started her own business a while ago and she's into interior design, so nothing web design, nothing, old fashioned, leaflet design. but she was asked by, a client to create a bit of a flyer and it took her about half an hour to fire up kva, understand how it works, and create a flyer.

Wow. Yeah. If they're able to do the same thing with websites, then I fully agree with Pcha. This is a new competitor on the block. Yeah, Their templates. Whilst, there's that sort of slight overwhelm when you go into a tool like Canva, 'cause there literally are hundreds of thousands, you just end up scrolling, don't you?

[00:26:17] Nathan Wrigley: And your eye settles on one and you just think that's good enough. That's close enough to what I want. And then you go in and you tweak the font, change the text, and it's you just look at it and you think. That's pretty good. And I'm like eight minutes in and I'm basically ready to click save and there's a thousand YouTube videos on how to do specific things in Conva.

[00:26:39] Taco Verdonschot: There's so much content that will help you do this quickly. it's absolutely brilliant. They've built an amazing company and, yeah. Yeah. One thing, so one point, sorry, I'll just, quickly say one thing that they threw in, which I thought was quite interesting. It's this collaborative editing for design agencies where they basically created a spreadsheet.

[00:27:01] Nathan Wrigley: So all of the things that go into the designs end up in a spreadsheet cell. So the text is in one cell, the images for, image one is in this cell image two, so whole teams can go and put their ideas in. Oh my God. You can just look at, you just click a button on one row and say, show me what that person intended.

And it's there it is. So all the bits that make up that clever we image or the, the, in, in, taco's wife's case, the sort of flyer you could get your team to make a hundred different variants and you just click through them one at a time and it's all like a, yeah, it's like a spreadsheet.

It's called canvas sheets. It's pretty cool. Anyway, sorry Peter, I interrupted. I'm amazed. I hadn't noticed that. I didn't know. I think it's, as a designer, I can tell you that is such an organizational, lifesaving thing. But yeah, what I wanted to say was that there will of course be people tearing their hair out and saying, oh, now we're, we're doomed and we'll lose all our jobs.

[00:27:58] Piccia Neri: But notice that your wife taco had a client ask her to do a brochure because there's still plenty of people who don't want to even touch any, anything like with a barge pole. You know what I mean? So we still, this is just, it's gonna be a tool that if you like it, I dunno whether I like it, but. If you like it, it's gonna make your own life easier.

Why the hell not? at times I have used Canva instead of Figma. 'cause Figma was complete overkill and I just needed to hash a few ideas together. and so it is just yet another tool that we have to make our own lives easier. I don't think, 'cause drag and drop has always used temp existed.

Templates have existed and yet still we get, clients asking. Ask to please do it. Yeah. yeah, I don't, see that being a problem. Thank you. Corey, anything to add on Canva? My small town runs on Canva, and I imagine almost every other small town in the US at least, and probably everywhere in the world, runs on Canva.

[00:29:01] Corey Maass: Like I have, I work with a, I built a, little website. A one page website for a local locksmith. All of his artwork, his business cards, all that stuff was done on Canva. He would've done the website on Canva had they offered this, our, the country club where I bartend, more and more we're putting stuff out on Canva.

And then last week I met with the Parks department, so an actual government agency, talking about promoting pickleball, which I play three times a week. and you're busy? I am. and we're about to start tennis and golf, so yeah. Playing, doing lots of stuff. But the point being, wow, that, talking to the director about promoting pickleball to get new players, he's come around the back of my desk here.

I've got, a Canva, subscription, paid for by the gover, the local government. and they, so that's what they do. All their flyers and all their promotion in. my mom runs a golf league. She's like, how do I create a little graphic? I'm like, here's Canva. And, she figured it out readily enough.

it's, they, know their audience. They've knocked it outta the park with their products. And, why do anything more difficult? Yeah. And people can, it's DIY right? And there's, high end design, there's art, there's definitely, things, everything and everything in, in, in almost every industry I've seen on online for almost 30 years, including WordPress.

Everything moves upstream. And so I, there's super smart for coming in downstream. Where these local businesses, oh, there's a food truck. A friend of mine runs a food truck. Everything he does is on Canva. I. Because that's not his job. And it's not even once he's got his logo in there and his black and yellow theme.

Yeah. Yeah. It's good enough. Yeah. And, for better or worse, that's largely the world we live in as much because his food truck is parked in front of, the, what's it called? The beaver something ca No, the black bear campground today. And so he doesn't need to spend money or spend hours designing a graphic for something that's not relevant tomorrow.

yeah. And so I think that's, a, lot of the use case. One of the things that I'll be curious to see is that obviously Canva is a tool where you literally want this thing right here of this size and it's gotta go there. We live in a different universe. We live in an H-T-M-L-C-S-S JavaScript universe where things have gotta be accessible and sizes, screen sizes, exactly.

[00:31:45] Nathan Wrigley: Different viewpoint, screen sizes and all of that. So it'll be interesting to see how they accommodate that, because I'm imagining that their audience space will be very familiar with no, what do you mean it can't go exactly there all the time there? No, it'll be interesting to see how they accommodate the vagaries of the dom, and the accessibility as well, because they're not great on accessibility yet.

No. Okay. So anyway, there we go. Canva create, the links will be in the show notes tomorrow. It is worth watching. The presentation is super slick and it really does give you a, sort of slight insight into how they, they got a lot of, Attention. Some of it. Good. A lot of it laughing, but it attention in this case, any attention is good attention.

[00:32:29] Corey Maass: last year when they did the same, they had somebody like, do a Canva wrap. That was awful. Oh. But you couldn't look away. And, then a lot of people were just making fun of them for it. Yeah. But that's totally okay. Yeah, because I feel like, again, their, branding, their ethos is fun and friendly.

So it works. Yeah, exactly. Nathan, your image froze for me at least. Exactly. Yeah. Dave and Hello Dave. And, he says Canvas saved his life many times. it can desire a sim design, a simple flyer in minutes. And Michelle Ettes joining us using it all the time. She says, yeah, I you're used to hearing Nathan.

[00:33:11] Taco Verdonschot: what percentage of speakers at the Page Builder Summit used at KVA to build their presentations? I don't know what I should do is, I should probably just mention the whole, but you are so good. I just have to say tacos just spoon feeding me. I don't know how many people, I dunno how many [email protected].

[00:33:33] Nathan Wrigley: we did this a couple of weeks ago. I don't know. It'd be interesting to see. Yeah. Thank you Tko. I appreciate it. Let's move on though. Let's move on to, something that Peach's gonna do. I know she wants to, promote something that she's got going on, so I'll just raise that onto the screen quickly.

enroll in, get It Seen Accessible Data Visualizations. Peacher, what you doing here? Look at my amazing sales page. Clearly I'm a marketing genius. You do this on camera, I suspect. Yeah. more or less, no. but I am, I, and I, I was part of, I was very happy and proud to be part of the team of visually the, accessible infograph, visual, data visualization, this one swan plugin at, at, the Cloud Hackathon.

[00:34:27] Piccia Neri: And the interesting thing is that this project had already been started. It's existed and just by complete chance, I had been working a lot on making infographics accessible with a client of mine. So it was a perfect fit. it would've been, anyway, that was gonna be, the accessibility team was gonna be my team, but this, made it, obvious.

And what they, so I. Helped with this, but the, what the team did, not me, the team, the developers, and the rest of the team did in a couple of days was extraordinary. Because if you look at what this plugin does, you need to design your, you need, if there is a good start, that's good. That you need, that's the, that's why I am teaching the masterclass because you do need, we need, we need data visualizations all the time.

It's much more, if you think about it, we need them all the time. So to learn how to, make them, accessible and do them correctly is a great skill to have because also in the meantime, I'm teaching a lot of sort of accessibility principles, so you should start from that. But if you have existing data visualizations that don't work or if you don't know how to code them correctly, this plugin is the.

I was gonna say word that probably is not allowed on, but it's just, it's rather good. That's what you wanna say. It's, so good and it's, good. Yeah. It's complete. It's Charlie Good. It's just, it dialing to plug in. It's, it, does a lot. So you will, the plugin will, if you, scroll down Nathan, the plugin will, the plugin will give you the old text via AI so that there's a description for your, inaccessible data visualization that doesn't have a description because you do need a text description.

but it also give you, look, we create an accessible alternative, whether it's simple sta text if sufficient, or a fully structured table with sorted data. I think this is almost magic. It's just really, miraculous. So do you know to order, do you missed the enormous segue between Canva? And this didn't, we really, because Canva's the sort place.

[00:36:47] Nathan Wrigley: Well, Canva does charts as well. You can generate Yeah, but that's what I mean. You make the chart in Canva and you bring it over to your WordPress website and now it becomes a black hole for somebody. Yeah. Who can't see the chart 'cause the data's held in a sort of ized image or something like that. And and so this plugin base, I watched it happen.

I, was there watching it happen. This plugin will extract the data from a, an image not creepy off and present it as text so that somebody can read it. It's breathtakingly good. but in case you think, okay, so why, are you even doing a masterclass on how to do accessible infographics then?

[00:37:25] Piccia Neri: I'll say, because you still need to know how to do it accessibly. From the beginning because, for a number of reasons, but also because this plugin won't necessarily do everything. So this, the plugin is thought is, conceived for things that already exist and that's how wrong. And so it helps you with that.

But you still need to learn. And that's why you should come to my, my workshop for which you have a discount with, which is WP Build 10. That gives you a discount. Nice. A 10 euro discount. Let's, in, let's just go through that then. it's gonna be, it's coming up, it's it Wednesday. Wednesday. It's on Wednesday the 16th of April at 4:00 PM CET, it's called Get It Seen.

[00:38:16] Nathan Wrigley: And if you use the coupon code, I don't know where you put it, but somewhere in here, you put it, put there at the bottom coupon code, go and show it in there. If you put in WP builds 10 like that, oh no, that's not 10, then you're gonna get 10% off. Let's see if it works. So woohoo. And also, yay, it saves me googling, coupon, plus brand name to, to find the discount code like I usually do.

[00:38:43] Corey Maass: Oh, that's the one that's such a great way to, that's so clever. I didn't know. So I know you, you want to, I just to say that, one thing I'm really proud of is that the people who take a class with me always, come back so nice. So I'm really, proud of that. So if you also, if you enroll in this, you probably will become a serial student of mine, which will be nice for everyone.

[00:39:13] Nathan Wrigley: The, so that's it. The URL is pary.com/ PAI. Yeah, P-A-P-A-P-A-I. I've done this the short, you taught me this trick, Nathan. Oh, sorry. I written it. Not a short, yeah, I've done a redirection. You taught me this. So PAR means EAI. Sorry. So peach peach.com, EA. What is it? What's the short, bit at the end? EAI.

Okay, so peach.com/e ai, I'm gonna go for, yeah. Is that, what I'm gonna go for? Yeah. EAI. Let's see if it works. Give it a second. I, say giving you the wrong way. there's always this possibility. no, that's what, yeah, pH, I mean it, sorry, I'm not trying to interrupt. Oh, shut. so peach.com/e.

A I'll put the link into the show notes if you fancy, the get It Seen Accessible Data Visualizations course. And I will just mention once more. This is the project that Petra was involved in at Cloud Fest. It's called Visually, V-I-S-U-A one, one Y like ally, dot org. And you can download the plugin there.

And it is, I dunno if it's still available actually. 'cause last time I asked it was not quite ready to be Okay. Shared with the general public, but it will be very soon book market and it will come around. It's, this project will continue. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Thank you so much. In which case, I'm gonna move us on and Corey's built a Chrome extension and, it freezes your Chrome tabs.

I want to say it's called the pause tab. I've had no time to look at this. Tell us what it is. So I, the, here's, the full transparency. I haven't had a chance to talk about this publicly. So for, I love, snoozing things. back in the day there was a system called Getting Things Done. It was like an, very yes, early popular method of getting things done.

[00:41:18] Corey Maass: Thus the name, and one of the, one of the things there was, get through your inbox or get through your list of things to do and, one of the act, you either do it right that day, you delegate it, or you snooze it. and so I am, I'm a big fan of snoozing things. Gmail has snoozing for emails, get this out of my inbox, bring it back on Monday when I'm actually gonna deal with it kind of thing.

for a couple of years now, I've used, an extension called Snooze tab. Same idea, like you open up a bunch of tabs of, stuff you're doing a bunch of research, about your trip next weekend, but you're like, this is Thursday at 10:00 AM I put this away. Let me look at this at the weekend.

oh. But, but the, amazing snooze tab. and then there was another one called Snooze or something, and they all got ripped out of the Chrome store. I don't know why. I think they just hadn't updated it in enough or whatever. So I waited and waited for them to get fixed or updated.

They, all their domains now have expired. P everybody's abandoned it. So I said, all right, here's a great, excuse for, I've been trying to build more with letting Cursor take the lead ai writing the code. Chrome extensions are just JavaScript, but configured in a specific way. So it was a really fun project to.

Create a real tool, largely built by ai, to fill an actual need of a, product that's gone, away now. So, yeah, I, I couldn't do anything with the word snooze. So we've switched to the word pause 'cause the domains were available shockingly. Yeah. pause tab.com. That's cool. So, just, can I just ask then, if I'm on a tab and I pause it, how does it come back as a notification on the Mac, for example?

[00:43:22] Nathan Wrigley: It just says this thing is, yeah, so if you, oh, you don't have an, I'm like, we're watching it go. I'm like, so just click on the No, I haven't got it. Actually have, we're watching your video yet. but if you, yeah, in, the little window that pops up, so you're looking at a, you're looking at a tab, you're like, I wanna pause this until the weekend.

[00:43:40] Corey Maass: So you click on the little icon, you select, pause until Saturday at whatever time in the morning. and then there's also a button, I think it'll show it here at a second. Oh, if you scroll down a little, it shows you all the paused tabs. and you can set. What, what does morning mean to you?

So it'll wake up in the morning, but is that 6:00 AM or 9:00 AM and that kind of thing? and then, yeah, either the next time, either when the time rolls around or the next time you open your computer or restart Chrome, even if it's after the time allotted, it'll op reopen the tab and it'll show you a notif, a system, a standard Mac notification.

Yeah. That's neat. That is neat. So you can, so again, the idea being just, get, this outta my close this tab, but make sure it comes back when I actually want it. yeah. so right now it's, all custom or it's all, there's six presets and then a, pick your time, date and time.

and then coming soon there's a, there'll be a, repeating, that's what the, other extensions have. Oh. Come back like once a week or something. Yeah. oh, that's neat. Which is, yeah. Yeah. I absolutely, to me that's almost more crucial. So every Monday make me go look at, my bank account or whatever.

Yeah. That's a neat idea. and then the, and now I get, because now I'm in charge, I get to add the features that I've always wanted. And so there's things like, for me, like I, there's a couple of web comics that I, I read and so I have to like, I have to re snooze it every week because like I'll progress to the next page.

[00:45:22] Piccia Neri: And so I'm gonna have rolling, follow the changes and if the URL changes in this tab still open the newest, yes. Taco I'm calling on you in the back. Yeah. Is this, room for feature requests? Because I would love, SNOO this until I'm home button, so that tell I'm on my desk, my laptop, I can do all the personal stuff.

[00:45:47] Taco Verdonschot: When I go to work, it will close all the personal stuff and keep the work stuff open. I love it. Yeah, I'll definitely look into that. there's, a lot of the to-do list apps, do that kind of stuff. So I'm taking, I'm trying to take cues from those other systems too that have, yeah. Location specific or mood specific, weather specific.

[00:46:10] Corey Maass: It's sunny out. Show me all my sunny day tabs. Okay. Yeah, Which none of us get to ever see. Apparently. You've got a few nice comments here. Jackson says he thinks it's awesome. And then ml, I don't know who ML is, but, Corey mul up top memory and processor says Thanks. Yeah, that's a, that's another good reason just to do it, just to take, the heat out of your That's true process there.

[00:46:30] Nathan Wrigley: That's true. That's a good idea. And then Jackson, again, can you do for a whole window with multiple tests? Oh, in other words, can you close down a, to five things in the same window and snooze all of them? That's, I, should be able, I, know I can. Technically, I haven't. Added that yet. I think one of the, yeah, one of the existing extensions offered that.

[00:46:50] Corey Maass: So yeah, on the long term, I wanted to basically, like all of this was, yeah, it's a neat little product. There's not really a way to charge for it. I'm not so concerned with that. but I also want to emphasize that this was all meant to be a bit of an experiment where it's yeah, I know, enough JavaScript to, muddle through or to get through the code stuff, but the, way that chrome extensions are set up is a little, different than web JavaScript.

and so it was actually really fun to let AI. Pretty much do the heavy lifting on this. Yeah. Using it. We started with a boilerplate and then I, obviously I skimmed the code, but, letting it take charge and, double checking the work. And then just basically being in charge of testing and then actually getting this into the Chrome Store.

The truth was it took twice as long to get through the Chrome Store application as it did to write the freaking Chrome extension. Because they wanna verify my business and all this stuff, which I get. But I, you're okay, what if code isn't the issue anymore? Is it now? Is the businessy stuff now what's actually holding up, technological progress?

[00:48:07] Nathan Wrigley: I have a couple of questions. First one's gonna annoy you. when's the Firefox version ready? And I'll move on quickly 'cause I know the answer to that is gonna be, it's, not Nathan. and the next one is very technical and a bit not really related to the product. What did you use to make that lovely little video that we're looking at now?

[00:48:28] Corey Maass: the answer to the first one is I think the boilerplate that I used. So I'm, it's, React JavaScript. Oh, okay. And then is how you build chrome extensions. And then I think bundling for different browsers is largely down to configuration and stuff like that. Okay. And so it's, what I love is the ability to, again, ask AI way beyond the code You're looking at okay, now I've built this for Chrome, how do I bundle this for Firefox?

And it'll go, And gimme the code or whatever. I, the steps I need to, do exactly that. So I definitely plan on, explain, playing with that. Yep. And the video, and then. And then the video I use screen recorder. Screen. Studio Screen Studio. Okay. Screen Studio. That's what I wanted to know.

[00:49:22] Nathan Wrigley: I wanted to know. That's the one that does it, it does the, yeah, the Zooms. I'm, gonna, I'm gonna, I was thinking about getting that this last week and, I wanted to see somebody that had actually used it in the real world. So you've now Yeah, you've now opened up my wallet for me. That's good.

Okay. Thank you. I've bought it. lemme send you an affiliate code and I'm Oh, nice. Yeah, Okay. Yeah. Let's, do that. I, yeah. I, bought it when it early, when it came out. and I'm glad I did. it's not, it's, like you, I often end up essentially creating, it's the equivalent of creating something in Canva and then driving Yeah, Into Photoshop. Yeah. it's, a bit of a one trick pony with, in this case, I was able to just use the app. Yeah. That's what you've got here is exactly what it builds itself as, isn't it? It sort zooms in on the appropriate bit automatically. Yeah. And so I thought for a product demo it'd be quite good.

Yeah, it's great for that and, the ability to control the Zoom and settings on the Zoom and, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. I love that. 'cause like I, I like free like a lot of us, and so then I end up doing the actual final editing for most of my other videos in iMovie. Okay. which I hate, but it's free.

[00:50:34] Corey Maass: because I'm also, I'm a music nerd and so like I need my audio levels to be correct. If I'm doing a voiceover, I need bed music, all that kind of stuff. but this is what I use to capture, I. Whatever I'm doing. Nice. And they now have a nice little thing where you can put yourself in a little circle in the corner.

Yep. so you can use it, you can, you little by little, you can get further and further along in the final product. My, export from that. My wife does that to me in real life. She puts me in a little circle in the corner and, just tells me to, nobody puts Nathan in the corner to stay there for a couple of days.

[00:51:08] Nathan Wrigley: Nathan, you're on the naughty step. okay. Better a circle than a square. At least. No sharp. I'm in such trouble now that I've said those words. I want to take them right back. She doesn't do anything like that. She's a lovely wife. She's, So good. Moving on. You dig that? I'm gonna move on and I'm gonna go, where am I gonna go?

We've done that one, we've done that one. Let's do this one quickly. So this is tacos little endeavor. so over on the Progress Planner website, we've got an article called Google Now Wants your marketing emails. Literally, I haven't had a chance to read this, but you've got me with the title. I'm, already slightly annoyed, I think what's, this about?

[00:51:49] Taco Verdonschot: it's, basically what the title says. Google Merchant Center, is for people who sell products and, they've now, introduced, or invited, merchants to send them their marketing emails. or they'll subscribe themselves or you can subscribe them to your list and they will use that content as well to rank your business and to learn more about your business.

Huh. So literally Google wants you to send all your marketing messages to them. So and so is it a bit, it's like SEO for newsletters? Yes. So you just basically add them, in effect, you're adding them to your email list in a sense, in that when you send one, Google gets a copy for, how? for what reason?

[00:52:44] Nathan Wrigley: What, why? it's not gonna surface these in the front end of Google on search, is it? Or, is it? I don't know yet. Okay. It might, pick up on sales that you're doing, it might pick up on other stuff. I, don't know exactly yet. Interesting. but I thought it was big enough news that everyone who is in Merchant Center should start doing this.

[00:53:08] Taco Verdonschot: Okay. If you scroll down a little bit in the, article by Yost. I think he included the email address. Yes. because this is the best bit. Gmail has a fixed length, so it's marketing email to Google at gmail own. Yes. This is legit. That's great. So you basically Google wish you to add marketing email to [email protected] to all of the lists that you've got around there, and then we'll just see what Google does with it.

[00:53:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It won't start crawling the stuff that you put in there. Interesting because they are very, keen, especially on, with Android and things like that, they are really good. I dunno if you've had that. I don't really use my, a mobile phone of that nature much anymore, but I do remember Google offering me some fairly credible suggestions based upon my geolocation and things like that.

it sense that it was the time of day when I might wanna grab a bite to eat it, knew where I was. And so that kind of information could easily come out of a newsletter. 'cause that's easy to fire off, isn't it? And maybe you wouldn't have put it on your website 'cause you, I don't know. You're just promoting it in a different way.

Yeah. So interesting. potentially amazing. So Tuck, because I can never be bothered to actually post my e the emails that I write to my list on my website, but I should, because I write really quite interesting stuff. People do, does your platform not automatically create a web version so that people who want to click that button usually at the top or the bottom of the email?

No, it, doesn't, but I don't, what I mean is also posting on my website, I use, fluent C-R-M-C-R-M. Okay. I, yeah. And it doesn't do it. it's within WordPress. Yeah. But, I should just post them, have an area on my, just copy and paste without worrying about yours. Little green light. So not just post it there, but I don't do it.

[00:55:11] Piccia Neri: So are you saying that I should, if I add marketing email. To goog at gmail com. Gmail com. to my list. Am I allowed to do that though? Can I say so? yes you of course. 'cause GDRI should, I do. I have their implicit. authorization to add their email. Oh, that's amazing.

[00:55:35] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. it's, another person. So yeah. So it says here, the content may be, displayed on, search, Google search, the shopping tab and Google Maps. So guess amazing guess. Yeah, that is, interesting. Okay. the maps feature is the one that has been most useful to me over the years, actually on my phone.

[00:55:55] Nathan Wrigley: okay. So that was, progress planner.com. if you go to the blog, no doubt you'll see it there, but the article was called Google Now Wants Your Marketing Emails. Literally, let's just totally segue a bit and let me get the right tab because it perfectly segues and let's just go to this. So we're straight back into WordPress.

And, now this is news about a WordPress plugin, which is very much related to what we were just talking about. a little while ago, oh, I say a little while ago, it's probably four or five years now, Leslie Sim came onto the scene with what I considered at the time to be the best implementation of anything inside the block editor.

And it was a newsletter plugin, which enabled you to use blocks to create a newsletter and a post simultaneously. And the beauty of it is, which, the beauty I think is that you've got this toggle inside all the blocks and you can say, show this in the newsletter. Show this only show this in the post only, or show in both.

So you can write your newsletter and then you can say, actually, do you know what? Turn that image off in the newsletter. But turned this paragraph on in the newsletter but off in the blog. And so I now create all my content inside the newsletter glue structure, which is subsequently inside a WordPress post.

So this, came across my, anyway, brilliant. Clearly I should have got that instead of, it's when we finish the core feature, I'll show you what it can do. And honestly, why am I got the wrong tool? it, anyway, it's a great tool. Anyway, sorry. Sorry. It's a great tool. I did interrupt before they put the prices up because they made it a very enterprise pricing structure about two or three years ago, and now it, it is fairly expensive.

However, hold the phone because, Leslie and Ahmed, who are the, her sort of developer, they've decided to sell it. And when you hear all these stories about things getting sold in the WordPress space and 99% of them don't affect you, and so you just go, eh, this one affects me.

So I'm not going, oh, I'm thinking, oh, what's going on? So she sold it. two, a co. Anyway, this article is all about that. She sold it to a, chap called Tyler Chanel, C-H-A-N-N-E-L. And what makes me feel pretty sanguine about it, is that Tyler is very much in the WordPress and newsletter space already.

'cause he's got a project called Paywall Project. And this, the idea is, this is, you've been to like a, newspaper and you've seen after reading for 30 seconds, they gatekeep and say, you either have to have a subscription or sign up for a free trial, whatever. that's what they do.

And so they're very much in line, but anyway, so that, that sort of segued nicely. So I'd just to say honestly, Leslie was so amenable when I bought the plugin because I was, I think I was one of the, one of the early customers and I just kept going back to her and saying, can you make it do this?

Can you add this? Can you add this? And she very often would say, yeah, great, We'll do it. And she did. And, and so I just want to wish Leslie all the success in the world. She's launched a project called Event coi, which is a bit like an events management plugin. So the concentration needs to go there, I think.

So good luck, with the, with, the new project, but also I hope that, this carries on because I am, using it, a lot. sorry, totally segue. Started Nattering. Anybody wanna talk about that one, or should we just move on? I'm, I'm happy for her from a business standpoint. Yep. that's to build a business to the point where you're, you sell it successfully.

[00:59:44] Corey Maass: and it seemed like a successful, business. Obviously. I don't know the. Circumstances around selling it, but, congrats to her. That's amazing. Yeah, because she's a lovely person and a lovely, very active member of our community and, all that. So I remember thinking we'll, to see her succeed.

[01:00:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I remember thinking just before she came out with a project, the newsletter glue, literally three weeks before somebody should build this. And in my mind, like you just have that idea. You don't think about it much more. But I came up in my head with exactly what Leslie built. So the minute I saw it, I was like, that is what I want.

And Peter, I will show it to you. And, you might, yeah, I, only just. Re bought the annual subscription to the other one. Okay. So it is gonna make me suffer, but 'cause presumably it's got some kind of CRM as well must handle your contacts. Cameron's saying, does the stream keep dropping out for everybody else?

Is it my internet? we're, the four of us seem to be fine. so I'm imagining it's maybe you, sorry, Cameron. I don't know. okay, let's move on then, in that case. Let me see where we got to. I think we got to about, yeah, that's it. We got to about here. So Tacho brought this, actually this came to my attention via an email, but it never made it into the show.

'cause it, the email dropped after I put all the links together, but Tacho wanted to raise it and, it's WPA apac, so WPA A PA c.com. and this seems to be the first post announcing WPA apac, a collective of WordPress professionals in the a well in Asia Pacific. Did you have anything you want to say specifically around that?

[01:01:19] Taco Verdonschot: Tackle mostly the fact that they are organizing is probably interesting. what we've typically seen is the WordPress space being dominated by, Europe and, the US for a very large part. And obviously, with World Camp Asia and a lot of the, larger companies that are in India and Bangladesh, there's a huge market on that side of the world as well that has been slightly harder to discover, at least from Europe.

and I hope that this will be. A nice way for them to get organized and to really put a spotlight on all the amazing companies that exist in the APAC region. Yeah. The, if, you look at the contributions to, core, more recently it has been skewing towards Asia, a lot. Yeah. Yeah. And also, if you look at a lot of the innovative products.

[01:02:27] Nathan Wrigley: the new things that seem to be coming out, a lot of that is coming out of Asia as well and the APEC apac, sorry, region. And obviously a bunch of the community members, and I don't know who wrote this particular piece. They've obviously felt, maybe it's time that we got our own voice and got our own community together and so that we can bang the drum and Yeah.

Fair enough. Yeah, quite exactly right. so here it is, it's WPA apac and I'm, guessing, I'm imagine the first port of call is to get members and people interested who actually do live in that part of the world, to bang the drum. And maybe it's gonna be about creating events or creating media attention or creating a collective of people that can talk to you if you've got a business you want to get off the ground.

But, apac wp apac.com, Corey. and I'll bring up, I love telling this story. I'll try to do the quick version, but at a, press pressonomics, pre covid, so many year, many, years, many moons ago, I wound up having dinner with, four gentlemen from, India in particular. And, it was absolutely fascinating.

[01:03:43] Corey Maass: A variety of, I think they all owned agencies, but of varying sizes. and we're, going around telling everybody what we do and what our businesses look like. And, the, last guy goes, yeah, I don't get outta bed for less than 6 million. And, we were like, you've got our attention.

And he proceeded to describe how he builds the, basically the White house.gov. but of all over Asia, India, these, huge, markets where there's an unbelievable amount of money that I literally didn't know existed. Yeah. and there's a reason for that, right? Like the American tech bubble, the European Western Tech bubble.

Different languages do. Anyway, the point being that this kind of. Organization, this, kind of coming together, they're calling it a collective. The coming together of people in different markets makes so much sense. 'cause we all have bubbles. Bubbles within bubbles, different bubbles, different markets, different audiences.

and often you need that. It isn't just about us, us westerners and our little bubble, little big bubble. Yeah, for sure. One of the things that I always find interesting is, for example, at work Camp Asia, I had a lot of conversations and several times, someone told me, yeah, I have a small agency.

[01:05:15] Taco Verdonschot: I'm like, what? What do you say? Small agency? Yeah. 50 people or so. Wow. Wait, what? So the skill difference is. Yeah, the perception of skill is so different, and I love for them to get a voice through this initiative. So solving different problems together, facing different challenges together, just different context, yeah. But boy, wouldn't it be fun to be able to listen? Yeah, I, haven't really had a chance to poke around on this website, but no doubt if this project takes off, then we will be hearing much more from them. And I, expect a very vocal bunch they will end up being as well, because there's just, there, there is just so much interesting stuff happening there and so much opportunity for people building stuff in WordPress to fit into the markets, to become the CRM, the, website for the, the different properties over there.

[01:06:10] Nathan Wrigley: And, and so yeah, go check that out. So thank you for raising that, this time around. And I would just say, That you've, your t-shirt is exactly the same color as their branding. Yes. You've done a fantastic job there of aligning yourself with that. Okay. Moving on very quickly. I would just quickly add, peaches just had to nip away.

She did say that was gonna happen, so hopefully she'll be back soon. She's, she's got somebody coming and. She said she'll drop back in as soon as she possibly could. Okay. So WordPress core stuff very quickly. WordPress 6.8. I suspect we were all imagining WordPress 6.8 would be, important but not quite the important first of three.

Yeah. Yeah. Not, not quite as important as it's gonna be. WordPress 6.8, your final chance to test it. Release candidate three. it is hoped that it will be released in, in very short order. Basically tomorrow. Yeah, tomorrow, yes. and that will be it for major WordPress releases for the year 2025.

the, if I rewind the clock, just a few months ago, we had articles that I'd put on the screen, which were showing release cycles, which included, 6.9 and when they would land and all that kinda stuff. That's no longer the case. 6.8 is gonna be the big finish for the year, and then I kind, I guess it raises the question about what does that all mean?

But anyway, you've got 24 hours if you wanna quickly check that one out. And if you've never been to a release party. because that will happen tomorrow if the release is happening. go over to the Make plus Slack if you still have access and go check it out in the core channel because it's like watching magic happen.

[01:07:55] Taco Verdonschot: Nice people from different companies coming together. you can help test. It's absolutely fantastic to watch. Oh, Cameron's just, so obviously Cameron is in Australia so fits perfectly under the WP APAC thing. Sorry, let me just get rid of that. So Corey's head is not missing. I'm very excited for WP apac.

[01:08:15] Nathan Wrigley: It's very hard to be Sorry I bruised you. it's very hard to be involved in the broader community here when everything else is in the, going on in the middle of the night. Yeah, right on. So that'll be really significant for you and, the, that part of the world. I'm so pleased. That's great that you've, you've found that to be useful.

Okay, so there we go. WordPress 6.8, allied to that kind of. is, I was just explaining that WordPress is gonna have its final release, major release, in 6.8. And I don't really wanna dwell on this article 'cause I don't really find a lot in it substantively to be of, particular interest. However, it's more the fact that this is out there now and I wonder if this is a perception that we need to be mindful of, worried about and so on.

And so this is on Search Engine journal. and it's an article which really doesn't focus on WordPress much. They do a bit, they, they're obviously very much aligned to what Yost is doing and the SEO plugins and things like that, but not so much just WordPress core. They occasionally write something but not a lot.

However, they felt the need to dip their feet in the water for this one. And it's entitled WordPress contributor Cutbacks cause core development to stall and already. I'm thinking, that doesn't sound good. as a, outsider, as somebody that's using WordPress, if I, don't know.

Let's say I'm a business owner and I know that my WordPress, sorry, my website is using WordPress. I'm reading that and I'm probably starting to think, hang on a minute. What, do you mean it's beginning to stall? And, then it goes on to explain all the different pieces that we all know about, because it, we've done it on this show many, times before the fact that we've got this one release in 6.8, and what does that mean?

The track tickets have stagnated, new features obviously won't be added to 6.9 in a way that we might have expected. maybe things like canonical plugins or take over the, reigns. But that's difficult because honestly, does anybody know where to find these canonical plugins and report back feedback?

And anyway, all of that, so the reason I'm raising this really is do we have a messaging crisis at the moment? Inside the WordPress baseball, we know what's going on, we understand it. We may be disappointed by it. We may have wished for 6.9 to happen later in the year and possibly seven in November or something like that.

This is what we've got. But are we starting to, when news are news, I dunno what the right word is. when places that produce the news, for want of a better word, produce content like this, do we need to be slightly worried or should we just bat our clients away and say, don't worry about it.

It's all being taken care of. So that was what I thought really just, it was a slight concern. over to you if you've got anything to add. I, think it's a little bit of both. yes, we should be worried that it's reaching the mainstream media, although search, that's the word. Worried Journal is still Yeah.

[01:11:19] Taco Verdonschot: A niche website. So it's not like CNN headline yet. Because indeed that will have an effect on, the public perception of WordPress. But at the same time, we can still say, don't worry, WordPress. with the release tomorrow we'll be the best version of WordPress that we've ever had because it continues to get better.

am I worried about the speed of development? Yes, definitely. With everything going on, it, there's reason to worry. but it doesn't mean that it's an instant write off, so it's not, WordPress is gone because we're slowing down. so we can definitely tell customers, clients, potential clients. Yes.

WordPress is still, a good to tool to build your website with, it's open source, which means that. Whatever happens, you always control, its source. You can move it somewhere else. You can, you have a lot of people around the world who can work with it. so it's still a safe investment. Can I just say in a breathtaking development, that's only just happened.

[01:12:43] Nathan Wrigley: CNN have in fact decided to say on the homepage of their website, WordPress contribute to cutbacks cause core development. To stall and then there's a picture of Donald Trump inexplicably. It is almost like somebody went into the inspector and copied and pasted some text, but of course nobody would, dream of doing that.

Yeah, I don't think we're gonna see this happen anytime soon. No. no, but I, it does, slightly concern me. And then, all of the other bits and pieces in the, like you say, search engine journal is fairly niche. but yeah, but we had, but we saw, WP Drama reached, TechCrunch and other bigger outlets previously.

[01:13:28] Corey Maass: Like I think we enjoyed, no news is good news for. Decades, unless it was an extremely slow day or again, like smaller news outlets. but I think this is all part and parcel of that, that bigger WP drama that I, had, friends and colleagues who are not in, the WordPress space, messaging me during that and going just 'cause they know, they, they associate me with WordPress.

as does everybody, let's, and vice versa, people. yeah, You can't, think WordPress without thinking Corey, obviously. No. it's terrible. Whenever I produce a podcast and, talk to other ge all I can see is you, it's, it's, I know right back at you buddy.

You're very kind. okay. So maybe it's a, maybe it's something we don't need to worry about, but the perception. I dunno, maybe they were just looking for something to say. I thought I'd mention it. We need to scoot on a little bit because, time is of the essence. I'll very quickly mention this. If you are heading to, Basel or wish to for Word Camp Europe, they still have, the voting form open, not voting form.

[01:14:48] Nathan Wrigley: They still have the option for you to offer your services as a volunteer. I believe that's going to end in about four or five days time. make plans now, 18th of April. It's open to you. Fancy joining the team, at work Camp Europe, which is happening as it says here in Basel, from the fifth to the 7th of June.

so not that long ago. Are either any of you two? I'm gonna, I'm gonna imagine that maybe Corey's not because of, it's a long further away. But are you going, Corey? No. Tcho, are you going? I'm still on the schedule as a speaker, so Yep, Nice and picture. I said no shake of the head. Okay.

That is definitely a no, it's a big no. Okay. If you wanna be a volunteer, you can do that. Let me quickly move on. I don't really know, if this is news or if there's something technically brilliant here. but Kinter have dropped this press release this week in which they, are touting a new feature of those.

So if you're a Kinta customer, this may be of, great interest. They release, they are releasing automatic plugin updates to make WordPress updates seamless and secure. How this differs from the core offering of updates. and therefore, unlike rollback mitigation, if something goes wrong, I do not know.

Maybe it's more on a sort of platform level. Anyway, the point is they are now offering what sounds like a kind of cast iron guarantee. That a plugin update will not take your WordPress website down. it, I'm imagining it's something to do with taking a backup, doing some updates, inspecting the backup, because they do a whole set of sort of regression testing by the sounds of it.

[01:16:33] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah, I think the visual regression testing is the part that's very different from what WordPress itself is doing. that's a good point. So they're presumably creating a staging website or something akin to that, doing the update, doing this regression testing, looking at some metrics, seeing if anything is different, and then if all is okay, update the real live site or, migrate the staging to live or whatever.

[01:16:58] Nathan Wrigley: and anyway, so this is, if, other hosts are not doing this, I'm sure that they will be soon. But this is what Kinta have, just recently rolled out. So I thought I would mention that. Now this I find curious and I bet you this is gonna annoy a lot of people. Morgan. I'm sorry, Morgan. I'm gonna go with Morgan because that is unpronounceable to me.

Have Morgan, can somebody help me out? Did, yeah. Thank you. That Morgan, what Tacho said, has put this on Twitter and I just thought this was really interesting and guaranteed to cause annoyance. So here we have a view, and again, caviar mTOR. If all of this turns out to be just made up, I apologize, but I'm just assuming that what we're looking at on the screen here is legit.

It's a picture of the block editor inside the block editor. Somebody's making a poster or a page or something like that is an ad. it is an ad for a product. it's an upsell. It says upgrade. Now there's a button and it's for Spectra. So I'm guessing that the, person that's doing this is inside here, has already got the free version.

I. So it's like the free version is creating, has created some code, which will notice. Look, they're in the block editor. Why don't we try to upsell them? I don't know how this is gonna go down, however. just taking it a little bit further, this is interesting. So somebody then, obviously the, floodgates opened up on a bunch of people express their IA and other people posted some other, in this case, a gif.

And what we're looking at here is something, and this is WP form, is it WP Form or forms? I think it's forms plural. They have gone even further. It would seem in that if you've got their free version installed and you begin to create what looks like a contact form. So in this case, the person who shot the video has created a title in a post of contact and then an ad appears, which says it looks like you are creating a contact page.

And obviously at that point they're trying to upsell you, WP Forms. And so the point of the original post is. Is this the new sort of thing? Is this something that we're gonna be able to tolerate? Is this what we're going to be expecting in the future? Now obviously we can turn it off, but it do. It just seems to me.

But would you want, given how much public castration you get, if you put anything in the admin area, now that you're putting it inside the block editor, it feels like you're only asking for her, aren't you really? I dunno. Yeah. What do you think? So I just fact checked the second screenshot, the second gift you showed.

[01:19:40] Taco Verdonschot: Thank you. with WP Forms, and that is indeed legit. So that does happen. You've tried it, right? Okay. Yeah. When you create a contact page, it says, Hey, it looks like Yes, that's correct. Does that annoy you? obviously you work for a commercial company and Yoast unbearable. You find it. Okay. Okay.

[01:20:00] Nathan Wrigley: I'll find it unbearable. let's let's just pause this for a minute. We don't have much time, but I watch the television, I watch commercial television, and I just recognize it's the trade off. I get the ads. I put up with them. Usually I put mute on or I go and make a coffee. But I get that the programming doesn't happen without the ads.

I make a podcast, I put ads into it. You can skip them if you like. and I get plugins and I get a free version of the plugin and there's a thing and it's, and I realize how annoyed people become. So I don't know, I don't know where I land on it. Some of it does take me a little bit of getting used to, but I, know that Yost, for example, they've in, put ads in, in there, in the interface before.

So let's go to Tacho first. What do you think about this implementation? It's specifically in the block editor, so I hadn't seen this before. however, if it's smart enough and it's showing in context, so you're doing something that's relevant to a plugin you already have installed and it helps you do it better.

[01:21:10] Taco Verdonschot: I'd say it's fair game. it's actually smart, I'd say. interesting because you've just planted the seed in my head. It doesn't have to be an ad. Like this could be a conditional logic. okay, we think you are doing the thing. Do you want help with the Okay. Yeah. But that's the thing because the popup from, WP Forms doesn't say by the pro version now it says, it looks like you're working on a contact page.

We can help you create, a context. Sure. So it's in context. It's relevant to the task you're doing. The, you already have the tool installed. It's not out of nowhere, an ad. So it's actually helping you complete a task. I think this is fair game. That's, that is an interesting observation. And I, think, there's something in there.

[01:22:07] Nathan Wrigley: I guess maybe a boundary that I would draw is a, so let's say for example we got, Megacorp over there and they've got 50 different plugins. If Megacorp starts selling, like pitching, like I don't have your contact form plugin, but I now see Mega Corp's contact form plugin with an install button. Maybe there's something that would feel a little bit icky there.

It's this is so a tightrope, it's such a difficult tightrope to track. It's easy get gray area. Yeah, we see that you've typed the word contact. We're gonna show you this. Notice we see that this appears to be a credit card number. Should we just go ahead and upgrade you? Yeah, I think we've definitely gone over a, boundary there, haven't we?

Definitely. I, think that both your takes Nathan and Tucker there. There, yeah. Is my immediate reaction would be, no, unbearable, stay off. Yeah. This is not where I want, I'm here to work. I'm here to build my thing. This is not where I want to see an ad, so I take your point. But you have to do it in a really, I.

[01:23:12] Piccia Neri: Like just helpful way. 'cause otherwise, come on, I'm working here. It's just really? And telly, I understand Nathan, I accept it as well. Yeah. And I understand it's the price to pay to watch Channel four and channel four are amazing. Yeah. So, I, and so that's, that really makes me think. But during, if I watch telly, I'm not doing it for work.

I'm relax, I'm relaxing. You're not necessarily interrupting my flow when I'm working. I'm way more irritable. Do you know what I mean? It's okay, it's bad enough that I have to be here and on top of that I have to put up with your, upsell. But, I take especially your point, Tako, it could be a helpful way of introducing another part of the service that I do need.

And I, I believe in selling. I try, I just. Try to sell something online. You know what I mean? We all need to do that, otherwise our businesses stop existing. fair enough. If I just do a few, couple of comments quickly. So Dave then says, some of these upsells are not really very nice. I use plugins like a SE, which is admin site enhancements, I think it is, to hide these admin notices.

[01:24:18] Nathan Wrigley: So that's a plugin that you can download to hide all the plugin stuff, which is, and it does a ton more than that. Corey, a SE should admit some admin. That's this. Corey, should add some admin notices, prompting, promoting how they hide the admin notices. Okay. It's very meta. Elliot Richmond.

Isn't it interesting how this topic always gets the comments? advertising and upselling has always been a bit of an issue in WordPress dashboards. Top menu items very annoying, but it's possible. But it's a possible thing in the WP Eco Ecosystem Code base. Sorry, that got truncated on the screen.

Cameron says, I hate it. There you go. that's fairly clear, isn't it? But new users would definitely find it useful. That's interesting too. It just needs to be able to be disabled. Yeah. I noticed in both the cases that we saw, there was a little X icon, isn't there? Yeah. But I'm guessing you are not thinking that.

You are thinking, I want to disable it with a toggle so that it never happens again or comes back. admin notice hook. Says Elliot again, nomad skateboarding. Hello. It's out of nowhere because it's not stated that you are ad that you are adding the ads. It's obfuscation at the best. Let me just read that again.

It's out of nowhere because it's, yeah, and that's where I disagree because, like Pya said, while at work you get frustrated more easily than outside of work. I would be royally frustrated if I just spent half an hour building a contact page only to find out later that I had a plugin installed that could help me do this in five minutes.

Yeah, that's, yeah. So I'm actually glad it's giving me that help. hey, you realize you have this tool ready to do the task that you're currently doing? Yeah. Yeah. So I, I don't think it's out of context and outta network. Thank you. No bad nomad skateboarding. yeah, it's out. I, get what you mean.

Now it's out of nowhere because it's not stated. You are, you are getting ads when you install the plugin and then, this one from James. I love it. your toilet paper is out. Would you like to upgrade to the newest two ply Ultra soft edition? It's a bit late in that case. Yeah. And, again, it's, your toilet paper is out.

[01:26:28] Taco Verdonschot: Do you realize that you have some left to the left of you? I'm not. You've already bought it. You've already got it. Ready. It's just that you forgot that it's in a different place than you usually look. I'm so glad that we've ended up combining toilets and toilet paper and WordPress plugins. I, I'm delighted.

[01:26:51] Piccia Neri: I think you should be really proud of our audience. Of your audience. That's thank gig. I love that. That's brilliant. And then, it carries on to say Samsung refrigerator ad on digital door screen that exists. Oh, that's brutal. 'cause that's literally in your house, isn't it? Gosh, yeah. Okay. And then Elementor says Dave, then Elementor love their ads.

[01:27:10] Nathan Wrigley: You're on the pro version and still get ads for their. Plugins like ai, image, optimizer and so on. Okay. The ads is always gonna cause fun, is it not? It's a guaranteed. and I will usually be on the side where I defend most of the ads, because I know how hard it is as a freemium. Plugin. Yeah.

[01:27:31] Taco Verdonschot: You've been there to get people to upgrade. Yeah. Yeah. You have been there. Anyway, predictably, I suspected that would cause some commentary. And there we go. A very, quick run through a couple of other things. I just want, any plugin developer out there to know that this now exists. It's called WP since it's available on GitHub, it's here.

[01:27:50] Nathan Wrigley: Make sure your plugin works with the right WordPress version. Automatically scans your WordPress plugin to detect all the used core symbols and validates them against their official at, since versions for accurate compatibility checks, scans for functions classes, class methods, action, and filter hooks.

I can't say how well it works, but it's just right here. I will put post the link in the show notes, but if you can see it, it's github.com/eduardo. Vila vi vio, V-I-L-L-A-O. Slash WP Dash since. Thank you. I'm curious why you would use this, because that information is on the wordpress.org repo. It's so that you can automatically guarantee that your plugin will work against a particular version of WordPress.

So you can then say that on the wordpress.org repo and, you're not having to go look up every function method. Yeah. Yeah. Fair. So if you've got, if you've got a plugin and you suspect it might work with, I don't know, version 3.6 or something crazy old, right? Yeah. So for plugin and not end users to Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. plugin developers. Yeah. Yeah. And I'd say, also site, site admins, right? Like before I upgrade. An old site from 6.1 to 6.2. Interesting. I, if I'm worried about a plugin or, yeah. if I, update on staging and it breaks, here's how I might figure out which plugin is causing the issue.

[01:29:21] Corey Maass: Got it. I see a few different use cases. It's, yeah. Very nice, effort. No, no doubt. I imagine developers will hop on this with, with, great gusto. okay. very quickly we've got a, just an article about Beaver Builder and their road roadmap to 2.2 0.1. Haven't got time to delve into that.

[01:29:39] Nathan Wrigley: We did Newsletter glue. Let's have a look at these bits and pieces. I'll just mention ever so briefly, you've probably seen it in the news wordpress.com. Have joined the AI party and they've now got, an AI powered site builder. So there's that. And what is that one? No, the final one. We'll end on this one today, which is Tachos, tachos contribution.

He had one at the beginning, but he's dropped this one in as well. It's called Level Up. Your SEO Game Progress Planner's. New integration with Yost. do you know what Tacho I'm, I am, I've gotta say I'm not surprised that, this has dropped. tell us about this. Yeah, so the idea of Progress Planner is that we help you, do the important maintenance tasks, to help your website move forward, to help you, your website do better.

[01:30:30] Taco Verdonschot: And obviously there's more to your Rev website than just core. So what we're. Doing, and this is the very first step, in that direction is help you find all the things that you need to set correctly in the plugins that you use as well. Oh, okay. So you've got installed, but maybe you've missed a couple of settings.

any plugin, and this is the other topic that no one wants to talk about, is notifications can throw only throw so many notifications before their users get completely fed up and uninstalled a thing with progress planner because we have the gamification element. Our users are asking us for more notifications so they can get the points and collect the badges.

You win the game? we can, yeah, we can help plugins, get their users to do the things that they would really want their users to do, but can throw notifications for all the time. And because we know the Yost plugin quite well, as most of the people at progress are former Yost, we've, built an integration with Yost as yo to help you set some of the things correctly in Yost as yo, as the very first venture into a.

Large number of integrations that we're planning to do. So obviously this was a great place to start. 'cause Yost inside and out and what other sort of top items, the, easy ones to cherry pick at the beginning. Do you have any, do you have any, like if you are, if you're able to, can you give us some sort of insight into what other plugins might fall, under the purview of this same sort of approach?

I would say that any plugin that has, set more settings than they can advertise, could be fair game. But obviously we'll start with some of the bigger plugins. think of WooCommerce, maybe Elementor. so stuff that we can, can do there and then, For plugin owners, plugin developers who want this ahead of what we can build.

There's developer do progress planner.com and they can build their own integration with our product, to be ahead of us being ready to build their integration. Okey dokey. Okay, so plug progress planner.com. Again, I imagine you'll be able to find it on the blog. The article is called Level Up Your SEO Game Progress Planners, new Integration with Yost, and that was, published on the 8th of April, 2025.

[01:33:17] Nathan Wrigley: There were a few bits and pieces that I did want to cover, but as always the time I. Time gets the better of us. So all it remains for me to do is firstly insist that these people behave in a highly on, on intelligent way and do this with their hands. Just for a few seconds. Yeah, we go. Nice. Got you. Thank you so much.

And then obviously it goes without saying massive, thanks from me. Firstly to Taco over there and then to Peacher over there and then to, I don't know, where are we? We there over? Nah, we're over there. Corey over there. Thank you so much for joining us today and thank you to you. If you gave us some of your attention today and joined the comments and put some comments in.

It's interesting, I get, quite a bit of email, like a few a month from people who just say they have an opinion on the thing that we've talked about. But they just lurk and they say, I'm a lurker. And I'm like, oh, that's fascinating. I love lurkers. But please do feel free to just join in the comments.

We definitely don't bite any heads off. And, max says he's joining us from Germany. Please send a helicopter to pick him up. It's on the way, max. I've sorted it. It's, yeah, you're sorted. Don't worry. And we'll be back next week for the next edition of this week in WordPress. Take it easy. Thanks so much.

[01:34:35] Piccia Neri: Bye-bye. Bye-bye.