This Week in WordPress #331

[00:00:06] Nathan Wrigley: It is time for This Week in WordPress, episode number 331, entitled Woof. It was recorded on Monday, the 21st of April, 2025. My name's Nathan Wrigley and I will be joined by three fabulous guests.

I'm joined by Mark Westguard. I'm joined by Wendy, whose surname I can never pronounce, so I'm just gonna say, Wendy, but also I'm joined by Steve Burge.

We are here to chat about WordPress because it's a WordPress specific project, and we do rather a lot of that.

We mentioned the Page Builder Summit, which is coming around.

We also mention the fact that WordPress 6.8 is going to be the only major release of WordPress. What does this mean for WordPress and what do we think about minor updates in the year to come?

There's a bunch of performance improvements, which we mention as well.

And also we get into events like WordCamp Europe.

But the significant amount is all about AI and what have we done to ourselves? What will AI do to the web development industry in the near future? So that's where most of our endeavors lie this week.

I hope that you enjoy it. 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.

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.

This week in WordPress, we're on episode number 331. It's hanging together by a thread. By a thread. Yeah. But that's the way we like it. I am joined today as I always am by three fabulous guests. Let's start over here. let's go. Where is he? There he is. There's Mark West Guard. Hello, mark. How you doing?

I'm doing good. How are you? Yeah, good. hopefully my, oh yeah, Wendy, go on. Try. It's Wendy is currently trying to point in the right direction and isn't it crazy how difficult that is? all you've gotta do is wait tapping your head and rubbing your belly. Yeah. But as soon as you realize you're pointing on the wrong, in the wrong direction, all you've gotta do is swap it round.

But that is so hard. Yeah, exactly. anyway, there's Mark. Mark joins us as today's co-host. He is, of course, the, the founder of WS form. And, I'll just read the bio. It's very short. Ma Mark is the founder of the WordPress form plugin Ws form. He regularly checks lost and found to see if Bob, has been found, and he luck this week.

[00:03:49] Steve Burge: It never changes. That's the same bio I've had for. many months. It's okay. I'm still looking for Bob. Yeah, it's just nowhere to be seen. but thank you for joining us. Really appreciate it. Let's see. Thanks for having me again. There's Wendy. I got it right. How you doing, Wendy? I'm all good, thanks.

[00:04:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, thank you. Oh, look, Mark's so good. Oh, amazing practice before and I went that way. Yeah, Wendy, discovered WordPress in 2009 and turned her passion into a profession, in 2011 as a freelancer, she's been active as a contributor to the WordPress community, attending various word camps as a volunteer speaker and mc.

In 2024, she served as one of the lead organizers for Word Camp Europe and is currently co-leading the communications team for the event 2025. Professionally, Wendy works as a WordPress product market [email protected], and when she's not working with WordPress, she is actively involved with, I'm gonna say the English, which is love, doctor, how do you say that?

in Dutch? Leave this doctor. Okay. That word. Yeah. which is a learning collective dedicated to fostering interpersonal connections in all its forms. So what is that then? So Love Doctor, obviously I'm reading the translation. what is it? What, does that mean? so it's, yeah, the company is called Love Doctor and what we do is we do, we are invited to events, workshops, walk around in, we have we dress up like nurses and doctors and we help people connect to themselves and to each other and to.

[00:05:28] Wendie Huis in 't Veld: Whatever bigger thing they wanna connect to. Oh, nice. I'll share an example. We did a big event last week on Wednesday. It was a startup festival at a school. so the candidates who were graduating that this year. They all needed to create a startup business. And, they had a festival to present all those small businesses, and we were part of that.

And we had people step into the lights with their talents and their qualities and they had to stand on the block. And we had these big spotlights, we, shine shown, I dunno the, past sense of that word, but we shown we put them in the lights literally by shining lights on them, big spotlights.

We had those with us. And, to make them feel special. And it is a really nice thing to do. We are a small business. We work with volunteers. We currently have 38 volunteers in our. it's called a learning Collective, so yeah. Wow. Wow. That is, so cool. That's so interesting. What a great, so you show up at events and basically just try to draw people outta themselves and make them feel comfortable and confident and happy.

Yeah. Yeah. That's so great. And it's called Love Doctor. And again, say it in, in, doting. N what is it? Leave this doctor. Okay. Yeah, I can, ah, what a great idea. Thank you for, is it aimed at kids, is it aimed like 100% at kids or everyone? No, it's aimed at, adults. and the graduates are adults, so they are young adults, but they are still adults.

It's not like a high school, it's a college. I'm gonna tell you the opposite story. When I was, a bit younger, I one year and Bury, there was this van driving around and there were these. People surrounding the van who were just going around like pointing at people and laughing and shouting at them and drove away, painted on the back it said Insecurity van and in the UK a van all about we have this thing, it's called a security van and it's where they, you put the money to take to the banks and so these guys decided to do the insecurity van and just made people feel really uncomfortable.

[00:07:59] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, I can imagine each other. Ca you, guys canceling them out. Anyway, there you go. Apropos of absolutely nothing. Our third guest there he is, Steve Burge. Hello Steve. Hey, nice to, nice to have you with us. Steve has gone for the, possibly the shortest bio we've ever had. and it just says Founder at Publish Press.

So there you go. Yeah. I didn't know how much you wanted. Yeah, no, it's fine. That's totally fine. But, go on. As you've saved us a bit of time on the bio, just tell us about Publish Press. Oh, I'm English. I live in Florida. We have a company called Publish Press. We do publishing plugins help, newspapers, magazines, universities, governments, anyone that wants to take care of their, if you want to do something more than just hit publish, after you've put your thoughts on the page, if you want to be a little more careful about it, we have plugins that will enable you to have approval processes or workflows, or to be more careful before you hit that publish button.

You have a free version, you have a free tool, and I think it's called Publish Press Future, which I use all the time, and it, will unpublish something at a certain date. So I don't know, you might wanna publish something for only six weeks or something like that and it just sends it into a different state.

So I would thank you for that. I use that absolutely all the time. It's around Black Friday when we do those deals, and they always have a sort of an expiry date. So I publish them and then automatically say, okay, stop, showing at a certain date. Anyway, there's our panel, Wendy, mark and Steve bge.

Really appreciate it. If you want to join us, feel free. In the UK today we have this thing called a bank holiday. and so most of the people that would join us from the UK are probably out at the beach, pretending to have a nice time 'cause it's about four degrees or something like that.

Eating an ice cream was. Freak it out 'cause it's so cold. but anyway, if you are joining us from the uk thank you for taking the time. Just a couple of things I'll raise on the screen if you want to join us and, spread some love and some comments and things like that. Send people here. it's under mark's chin, wp builds.com.

Thank you wp. Yeah, look at that approach, wp builds.com/live. Send people there and you can comment and if you make a comment, we would really appreciate that. It drives the show along a little bit. And, and we've had one, we've had one here from Wendy, for all Dutch people interested. yeah, I shared a link, but apparently it's not.

Maybe it strips out the links. Don't know. Yeah, I'm not entirely sure whether it does that. If you put it into the private chat, I could probably just raise it as a, as a page or something like that. But, is that the love doctor thing? yeah. Go on. There's a little underneath the, in the system that we're using, there's something called private chat.

Can you see it on the right? Yes. And if you, post the link in there, I'll, find it in a minute. And, and we'll put it on towards the end of the show. We're also, saying hello. Oh, those comments are not being very nice, are they? Let me just see if I can make that a little bit easier. 'cause look, they're blocking people's faces out.

Let me see if I can, I'm gonna raise my chair. no. Look, there you go. Fixed it. Cammie McNamara is saying hello. Hello. Friends up early and working already in the prep for a couple of days off at press conference. Yeah, press conference happening this week. We've mentioned it loads and loads of times and as it's just about round the corner, I haven't really got anything in for this week, but, hope you have a nice time.

Seems like the great in the good in the WordPress community are going, so that'll be really nice. okay, let's get stuck into the bits and pieces for this week. the usual self-promotional stuff. Apologies about that. Here we go. First bit is our website, wp builds.com. If you want to, subscribe to what we're doing and keep updated, just put your email address into this little box and click subscribe.

And then we'll send you a couple of emails a week one when we repurpose this conversation we're having now. I'll send it out tomorrow morning as an audio podcast and, the links that we, touch on, and all of that will be in there. But also the Thursday podcast that we produce each week will come to you on a Thursday.

And here is a list of the ones that we've done recently at Look, this little chap here. Very nice, He's got his head cut off again. Yeah, he's got his head cut off. Yeah. I deliberately tried to make Mark, as, as insignificant as possible, in these pictures. so Mark and I have done the Nice Show recently, which was, nice, let's just say that.

And then I did an episode with Sherry Holo as well. and she was talking about using custom fields to build websites and an interesting approach, let's put it that way. So you'd get all the information about that. But also, I dunno if you've noticed behind me is, is a logo for this little thing.

It's called the Page Builder Summit, and it's happening not that far away now it is from the 12th to the 16th of May, 2025. It's totally free. if you wanna watch the bits and pieces that people have submitted, and if you scroll down, you'll be able to see, a little bit more about who's contributing this year.

Look here, they all are da. There's loads of them. look, there's Cammy, yay, and a bunch of other people, so they're all contributing and it'll be free for 48 hours. So plenty of time to watch it. And if you wanna be kept updated, put your, put your email address and name into that little box there and we will, let you know when all of the schedule and everything is properly released.

But as you can see, it's, I dunno, two or three weeks away now. Getting quite excited. All the work actually starts at this point. We've got lots and lots of editing work to do and things like that, so we'll be keeping me very, busy. Page builder summit.com. And. One last thing from me probably is, I'm organizing, co-organizing the, W-P-L-D-N, the meetup that we do in London, all centered around WordPress.

And if you are in the UK and you fancy coming along, that's great. It happens at the final Thursday of each week. So it's happening this Thur, each month. Sorry, it's happening this Thursday. But if you're fancy speaking, and being a part of the event, you can go to wpdn.uk/speak and you can fill out the form there and you can see the dates that are available.

We've got a few. Different ones, the red ones are full, but the other ones need, need speakers. And so we'd really appreciate that. Wpl, DN UK slash speak. One of the things that we're doing, and you don't have to be in the UK to apply, right? You can No, I guess we always have people live in the venue, so they would have to be, some sort of commitment to get on a plane or a ferry or whatever.

but London's so well connected and often really not that expensive to, to book flights in and out of. So yeah, have a look. No, there's no embargo on where you are from. It's just. You need to be in London at the time. Do you need to be in London? That's right. Exactly that. Yeah. I'm gonna be there just before the event I was checking the calendar.

[00:14:49] Mark Westguard: Yeah, that deliberate miss didn't wanna see you, no, I can well understand. anyway, there we go. So let's move on. And what we're starting to do now is the people who come on are panelists. So Wendy, mark, Steve, they get the opportunity to share a few bits and pieces if they wish to. And, mark shared a couple of things.

[00:15:09] Nathan Wrigley: Firstly, we mentioned this last week, but Mark will mention it again. This is Ws form. This is Mark's form, plugin, and, growing in popularity all the time. And you've got a deal on at the moment how much, it looks like 20%. Is that 20% off all the things? Yeah, all the things. 20% off coupon code Spring 20.

[00:15:27] Mark Westguard: Simple as that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. so ws form.com, you can check it out there and How long, have we got before we gotta redeem that? I haven't put an end date on it yet, I guess when spring ends. Yeah. Yes. when is that? Yeah. I have no idea. Yeah. Go now. Go today before it runs out.

[00:15:46] Nathan Wrigley: As Mark suddenly discovers limited time offer. Limited time offer. I had some, I had somebody submit a deal to my deals page yesterday and in massive letters on the images for the deal. 'cause they have to submit a promotional image. It says limited time and, but they didn't supply an end date, which I was gonna use Steve's plugin for.

So I, I wrote an email back to them and said. When does it run out? He said, never. I said, why did you put, why did you put, you actually took the time to put limited time offer in the image. But anyway, so they fixed that and it'll be, coming up. Okay. And then this came from you. Now we touched on this a bit last week, but I'm not clever enough to really understand what's going on here.

but Mark's raised this one and kind of related to it a CloudFlare page, which we'll come to in a moment. Yeah. But this is speculative loading, which has landed in 6.8. Now my understanding, mark, you can correct me, is basically some wizard inside your computer is standing there constantly worrying about which page you're gonna click on next and makes decisions about what you're gonna load next.

So Preloads it actually, yeah, that's the bit. I genuinely don't know what the trigger is to make things load. So tell us more. it uses, It, uses a thing called the speculation Rules, API, which is, it's actually a draft spec right now, but it's, there's a lot more to it. But essentially what it is, there's a script tag on your page and it tells the browser what type of content can be either prefetch or preloaded.

[00:17:24] Mark Westguard: So a prefetch is where it'll go off and lo get the content from the server and it'll just hold onto it until it's ready to use it. and then there's also pre-render where it'll actually fetch the data and render it in the background, but won't show the user. and it's interesting how it works.

There are, different, what are called, eagerness levels now. I know. I love that word. You're quite eager, Nathan, yeah. Oh, I'm trying to think what I think it uses. conservative. Yeah, conservative. eager. I think the WordPress implementation is on the sort of don't go loading everything more side as opposed to just load all the things.

[00:18:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I actually experimented with it to see what it was doing. And, the way they've got it set up currently is if you, click on a link, actually the mouse down event, it is loading that page, it's requesting that page immediately. So by the time you've released your mouse button, that content is probably loaded and there are more eagerness levels, so you can actually do it so that it'll prefetch the data as you are hovering over a link as well.

[00:18:32] Mark Westguard: you can even. Preload, prefetch content as the page loads. So you could say, if I've got, if I've got a three page site, let's load the other two pages anyway in the background. which, so you've got the positive side of that is the user gets a much faster experience. The downside is if you're on shared virtual hosting and you don't have any kind of CDN or caching on the front end, that can cause a lot more load on the server.

If you've got, if you've got bandwidth levels and things like that, limits, then that can, cause you issues. But, it's cool. So in WordPress 6.8, the speculative loading is enabled by default. it is on that eist level of conservative, I think it conservative, yeah. Yeah, something like that.

so it's gonna load stuff when you, on a mouse down event, when you. Yeah, click on a link. and there's some other rules in there as well. So it only does it on certain types of content. there's a bunch of hooks that you can use to disable this or make it more eager or configure, other parts of it.

But, it's, yeah, it's, cool. I would recommend definitely using it with using, a service like CloudFlare, like a content delivery network so that you've got them actually serving the pages that get loaded in the background. Yeah. Let's load that up in a minute. But that's really fascinating.

[00:19:50] Nathan Wrigley: so there's a measurable difference between there is some measurable moment between the push on the mouse And that just that little tiny amount of time between the click and then the release is enough to begin the load and it, to make a difference. it just seems, yeah, it seems almost impossible to imagine.

[00:20:10] Mark Westguard: Yeah. I think further down this article somewhere they mentioned the, Yeah, see the LCP rate there goes down by 2% which on a big, site can be quite significant. Yeah, no kidding. But then if you go to the next article about CloudFlare, so they've got, a different system. It's similar to, this is quite fascinating.

So what it does is it's, it actually analyzes how people are moving through your website and will preload content based upon behavior. Oh, that's really smart. Yeah. So if you, and I, again, I haven't gone into this in any great detail, but what it's doing is it's saying, okay, if this person, let's say this person clicks on.

Support on your website. It may say, okay, 20% of people are always going to this article, so it would look prefetch that article for you, automatically. So this is more dynamic. So this is actually based upon user behavior and doesn't just prefetch the same stuff all the time or as you're hovering over a link.

And this is actually a free service provided by CloudFlare. So you can, if you've got CloudFlare on the front of your site, you can enable this and. And get it going straight away. I think it's just a toggle, isn't it? Don't you just click Think so, don't you? Just to toggle one setting on and it just takes care of it.

[00:21:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. it's pretty incredible really. So the, WordPress version is really clever, but quite a blunt instrument in that it's, it's waiting until something is happening. Either you could make it so that it was on hover. Typically it's click at the moment, mouse down, or what have you. But the CloudFlare is making decisions based upon past interactions with your web property. So it knows that 50% of people end up over there. We might as well, yeah, just crack on and load that. I think this is all really fascinating. I'm just waiting for the moment where AI gets involved and it basically figures out every link that I'm gonna click in 2025.

It just. Yeah. Takes you to the article that you want that's thinking about its, yeah, I just opened up my browser and it just goes, this is, there's your year ahead, there's 2025. So for like call web vitals with this, I know there was a question in the, yeah, let's put that, the, how does this, so this is web our logic, hello.

Web Logic. web Logic. The question is, how does the Prefetch feature affect Core Weathers? Do you know, mark? So it'll, speed up rendering of a, page basically. particularly pre-render. So Prefetch is gonna of us go off and get the data, and then the browser hasn't rendered it yet, but it's not gonna have to make that request to the server to get the page.

[00:22:50] Mark Westguard: the low time is a lot, quicker. We've pre-render, it's actually rendering that page in the background. You can't see it, but when you go to it, bang, the page is there. Wow. things like. CLS like layout shift and stuff are vastly reduced. yeah. Things like that. but yeah, it, does, obviously it puts more load on your client.

and if you don't have a CDN or anything like that in place on the front end, then you are gonna be, putting a lot more load on the SERPs hosting provider that you've got. Because you might be loading three pages instead of one. or yeah. this essentially, is putting a lot more load on the internet overall because, that was my, that was gonna be my criticism.

[00:23:34] Nathan Wrigley: Lemme just take that page off. We don't really need to see that anymore. That was gonna be my criticism actually. I, wondered what the environmental impact was, Yeah. the fact that we're always worrying about. The environment and the internet recently has been under the microscope as being, I think the internet, if memory serves, is the seventh largest country on earth in terms of pollution.

if you, I thought it was the third. Oh, okay. That could well be me getting it wrong. so thank you, Wendy. But the point being, it's significant, the internet is like a giant country, and if we suddenly all just toggle that switch, maybe in the, CloudFlare case, there's cleverness going on, which means it won't do certain things.

But on the WordPress end with it's less. Clever for inverted comm word. That's a thing I suppose we need to be mindful of, but, I think that they've made a good decision by putting it on a moderate level on the eagerness because it just means nothing's gonna load unless, you're, intending to click on something.

[00:24:34] Wendie Huis in 't Veld: Yeah, They do have the filters to, to up that, but excuse me. yeah, it's okay. Let's, so a reply to, Weber Logic was from Andrea. I'm not entirely sure how to pronounce your sur name, so I'll just go with, Andrea, thank you for commenting. Prefetching resources can reduce largest content for paint by loading, images, scripts, and star sheets in advance, leading to faster rendering of the main content.

[00:24:57] Nathan Wrigley: also can help load resources in a way that minimizes layout shift as elements are more likely to be rendered in their final positions. When the user arrives at the page, it says in the actual comment, but it got truncated. Yeah. Thank you. And, hello Elliot. so can I ask something regarding the loading time?

[00:25:17] Wendie Huis in 't Veld: Because, I know we all aim for faster, faster. There's gonna be a, there's gonna be like a limit to how fast we can actually, how much we can improve our loading times and how much there is to gain with Yeah. Improving loading times with tricks like this, like Nathan said, when AI gets involved, it's gonna be a bigger load.

Environmentally servers. and what are we gaining? Aren't we supposed to create sites and pages that are already quite fast and certainly are Yeah. Is the difference not gonna be like, minimal with a massive impact on things where we don't wanna be impact? Yeah, that's interesting, isn't it? So essentially, if every, website.

[00:26:11] Nathan Wrigley: Approximating zero page load time. Obviously that first time you go there, the speculation can't do anything. But once the speculation has started to do its work, the in, in theory, you're seeing things significantly quicker. what is the point at which we say, okay, we've gotta move the goalposts for, lighthouse scores and things like that.

Presumably, if this all takes off and everything is using speculation and loading in that way, Google will have to move the goalpost to make it even an even smaller amount of time to be the metric. And it's a bit like what I was saying, at some point we'll have to be loading things before we've even decided we want to see them for it to be effective.

I don't know what the answer to that is, Wendy. It's gonna have to be instant, isn't it? Things are literally gonna have to be, have you ever Wendy been to a website? I. You've never visited before and you've clicked around it and it literally has been in instant have. Have you ever done that? You've just stumbled across a website, which for some reason is just superbly optimized and you click, No matter how fast you do it, it's like bang. It is so profound. It's probably pretty own. It makes, yeah, but it makes you realize that virtually nothing on the internet is as immediate as that. 'cause when you encounter it, you really see it as, oh, whoa, that's really different. yeah, I dunno.

[00:27:32] Mark Westguard: I think this has got, we're quite spoiled in the, western world with internet space. it is just getting faster and faster and fast. It's not unusual that I hear friends saying, I've got a 10 gig fiber connection and it's insanely fast. But, being a plugin developer, I also hear from people in other countries where the internet is not very fast at all, and something like this would probably be useful for them because it would, slowly load the page in the background.

Yeah. So when they click, it's gonna, have the content available to them. I nowadays, I very rarely am, am I waiting for a website to load for. Yeah. And if it, if maybe a second or two, even Google Core vitals will still complain about it no matter what. Yeah. people do get slightly obsessed with core vital stuff.

but, Yeah. I, think, is it possible, This is like a nice kind of slight, slightly helpful little feature, hooks into some nice new technology that's coming. But on a normal WordPress release, this might be item eight or 10 on the, change dog. Yeah. Whereas it's, not earth shattering change.

[00:28:52] Steve Burge: We're just talking about it a lot more because this was a quiet release. Something had to be one of the top one or two features. that Steve, is what you call a segue. oh, segue. let's, let's do just that. Nice. Nicely done. I queued you up perfectly there because, yeah, so WordPress 6.8 dropped this week, and, u usually there's a lot of fanfare around it.

[00:29:19] Nathan Wrigley: And obviously if you're inside the baseball of WordPress, it was probably still a big deal. But I think this release in particular has been overshadowed by the talk of it being the release, of 2025. And I'll share a few articles in a minute if you don't know what's going on. Basically, it has been decided that for now, we're only gonna get one major release per year.

So 2025, this is it, WordPress 6.8 is it, there'll be updates for security and, what have you. And again, we'll get to that in a minute. 2026. We'll have 1 20, 27, we'll have one and so on. And, so let's just go through. What was released? so I think this is leaning into what Steve was saying.

Often you get a really packed release, but with the way that the project has had to align itself with a dimunition in, I don't even know if that's a word. It came outta my mouth and then I thought, I have no idea if that's actually a word. It is now. Yeah, it is Now. I'll get my dictionary. I'll go for reduction.

Let's go for that. a reduction in the amount of people who are paid, especially from automatic, to contribute to core. Maybe this was a sort of more scaled back release, let's put it that way. So here we go. These are the headline items. The style book gets a cleaner new look and a few little tricks. For example, it's got, it's got structured layout, cleaner labels.

I'm just reading plus you can now see it in classic themes as well if you've got the, correct theme JSO file enabled. So that's something. There's also a few things in the editor which have been improved. For example, there's more options around data views and you can exclude ticky sticky, posts from the query loop.

and here's the speculation loading. It's item number three. So it was decided it was quite a big thing, but I think Steve's right in a normal release, maybe that wouldn't have been quite such a big thing. B Crypt is in use now to hash, various different things on your WordPress website, which is less brute forcible than Ryt, which is what we used to have.

And then there's a whole bunch of accessibility and other, performance in enhancements. And it says a hundred plus accessibility enhancements, touch on the broad spectrum of WordPress, includes fixes for bundle themes, improvements to navigation menus and more. and so yeah, maybe, but that's it.

That's the features that you are gonna have presumably until about this time next year or at some point in 2026. Now, that makes you wonder, okay, what we gonna do with the rest of 2025? And, there's a couple of articles which kind of touch on this. The first one here is from the executive director of the WordPress project.

I'm saying that as if that's true. That was Joseph's title, so I'm presuming that Mary Hubbard. Took on Joseph's title being the executive director. Anyway, Mary Hubbard, produced this piece a couple of days ago, a few days ago, and the new cadence for WordPress in which she says, after releasing WordPress three times a year, a recent discussion with the core committers, we're making changes for now starting 20 25, 1 release a year.

And it will continue like that for the time being. and although I haven't highlighted it, it says this reflects the current legalities, particularly the energy and resources being diverted due to the ongoing legal matters. And here's the interesting thing for me, if those lawsuits are dropped or resolved, we'll revisit this cadence and strongly.

Consider returning to a three releases per year schedule. That remains the ideal for a fast moving community driven project like WordPress. So it feels like this is the holding pattern that we're in. We don't wanna be here. the, the leadership don't wanna be on one release a year. They wanna be on three.

That's, I think I'm reading that Am I not? It's not like this. Yeah. I think they're only, gonna do bug fixes, right? Yeah. So there's gonna be no, no code added, but there'll be modifying code if it needs to be. Fixed. Yeah. and then WordPress seven is on track for 2027, if that is indeed the case now.

no, Now, so this begs the question, how, is this, being received? I don't really deal with clients anymore, and I'm not sure if you guys are dealing with clients in a way that this would matter, but I imagine if you are, if you're making a decision about using WordPress or you are, I don't know, tasked by your, company to get yourselves a website, and here's some choices.

We've got WordPress, we've got Drupal, we've got Wix, we've got Squarespace. I do wonder if these things are gonna start to play on people's thoughts, oh, it's not on the active development anymore. No new features. Oh, that doesn't sound good. we know why. I've never had that as a concern from a Okay.

[00:34:02] Mark Westguard: From a client. that, that's with the clients I work with. they come to me and say, mark, what platform should I use? I say, use WordPress, and I don't think they're that bothered about how frequent updates and stuff are. if it does the, I just launched a very, large six figure, website using WordPress and we did a full site editing theme and everything else, and.

E even through the drama that's been going on, there's, been no mention of that from the client themselves. nice. I would imagine it, it is really people like you and I who are obsessing about WordPress who have even noticed it's going on. Yeah. I feel it more in the community than I, do Exactly.

Outside, obviously. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It gives us something to talk about. Yeah. However, that means though, we are gonna be more reliant upon the minor releases and what they mean, and I just wanna point all the listeners to this episode towards this piece. Oh, I should probably put the screen on.

[00:35:01] Nathan Wrigley: There we go. This is, Aaron job in Aaron, by the way, is, has the very nice, first. Name. So if you scroll down to the list of contributors who make WordPress, Aaron always squeezes in. Alright, right at the beginning. As far as I'm aware, it's basically always Aaron. there's a couple of Aarons as you'll see, but Robertson, Robert Shaw, sorry, doesn't get the first message in Aaron.

so well done, for that by the way. I should, we should be thankful, shouldn't we? to these 900 contributors who, who made this happen, I forgot to say thank you to them. and he has written an article, Aaron, that is all about, defining what WordPress releases the minor. Releases might be in the future 'cause he wants to get them right.

And it basically, it boils down to don't add new files. I'm just reading, adding new features is a good idea. refactoring the code is probably not a good idea. And instead of adding new themes, why don't we just keep the old themes that we've had all these years and just chuck patterns at them instead.

So instead of releasing a 2026, why don't we just keep 2025? Call it something else like Brian or something and and put loads of work into patterns instead. I think that's quite a novel idea. I like that. anyway, there we go. That was, Aaron. Aaron, Dunno, Jin's, thoughts on what we need to do in the future with the theme.

So any thoughts on WordPress six point a or the, the cycle or the releases? If you've got any thoughts, speak now. It is tricky, and probably me and Mark have been in this situation as plugin developers that, it's tricky to have the right cadence for new features. We've definitely gone through periods with some plugins.

[00:36:55] Steve Burge: We've got 15, 16 plugins in total over different projects where sometimes you move really quickly and you're constantly changing or adding things for your users and it can sometimes be hard for them to catch up. hard for the, documentation and the videos you've created around it to catch up.

And then other times a plugin might be left on the shelf for a year or two years and it gets stale. Its features fall behind the rivals. it's a tricky business trying to Cool Yeah. To get the right cadence where you're keeping fresh, you're keeping up with the competitors and you're not overwhelming the users.

And, I don't know, maybe three releases a year was too much sometimes. and one release a year is. Maybe two is a, I don't know. It's a, yeah, somewhere between, one and three would be, oh, yeah. What would that be? Yeah, I know what you mean because obviously I, cover this, I've covered this for years, and it did feel like, six, let's say 6.0 to 6.1 to 6.2 to six, that, that felt like it came around really quickly.

[00:38:13] Nathan Wrigley: So four months didn't feel like long because we really were, as soon as the release had dropped, the news was pushing out about the next release. So there wasn't really even time to embed and teach the different features that have dropped with this one, it feels like we're gonna have a really long time with those features, and I like Aaron's idea that we wanna put features in that.

if, it's, if 6.8 represents a feature freeze, I think that wouldn't be a good look for WordPress. So having features dropping in these minor releases. Would be good, but obviously you've gotta be, slightly circumspect about the fact that a lot of people will have these updates switched on automatically, the minor releases.

And so that might affect, whether or not you, you wanna push some new feature out to everybody all at once automatically. I don't know. it means a lot more development gets pushed into the, into the plugin space. for example, we do a lot of publishing. We've been talking a lot about the, new comments feature that was coming in Gutenberg, that you'd have the block level comments that like Google Docs you could be adding.

[00:39:26] Steve Burge: yeah. A specific comment, I guess I was expecting it to drop in this release, but, that it's gonna be in the Gutenberg plugin for. Two years now, that's gone very quiet, hasn't it? This whole phase thing. So we had phase one, which was Gutenberg, and then we had phase two, which was full site editing.

[00:39:43] Nathan Wrigley: There was so much, but now I, haven't seen any conversation around collaboration for a while. And for a long time, that was being anticipated as the next big thing. And then obviously translating your websites phase four, that's not being talked about. And I think I, I would imagine that's off the cards for a little while now.

Although there was some UI mockups of what that might look like and different implementations of, whether it be a per block comment or what have you. But that seems to have, oh, gone very far. I think it's ready. It's, good. Okay. Plug if you wanna install it. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I'll take it back right now.

Yeah, Okay. Thank you Steve. That's great. And then I guess you've got other things like ai, like these next two years, it's gonna be transformational for the web for ai, but WordPress is not gonna have any. New AI structural features in it. The, I see some work being done, there's a plugin whose name escapes me, which is basically trying to make a, a framework for all developers to, oh, I think it's the AI Bridge by Felix s Is it that one?

[00:40:49] Steve Burge: Yes, I believe so. No, Pascal, no. Pascal, bler, maybe. I can't remember one of those two. Anyway, they might work together. Yeah. Yeah. basically trying to have 1, 1, 1 single resource for all AI plugins to connect to and maybe, make WordPress a player in this space. so it's not gonna happen in the core.

Now we're gonna be looking to the plugin space very much for the, the creativity for things that might have gone in the core. I'm just gonna flip the subject back for a moment because web Logic is asking another question about what we were talking about just a moment ago. He says, is there such a thing as a plugin that will detect the visitors' internet connection speed to then serve them optimized content similar to, detecting the device to serve mobile versions of pages?

[00:41:42] Nathan Wrigley: I don't know is the answer to that. Any, of our panelists know of such a thing? It's quite a nice idea. No? Yeah. I think the only way you can detect a browser speed is to actually measure it, which would involve Yeah, downloading a block of. Data, which is probably gonna slow down the website as it does it.

[00:42:01] Mark Westguard: Yeah, Okay. So I, don't, believe there's any HTTP header or anything like that. Yeah. That will tell you also the privacy of a website, measuring my browser speed feels a bit iffy. Yep. Icky. Yep. Yep. Indeed. Not iffy, icky. so we don't know is the answer whether logic? We don't think. Probably not very reliable either.

[00:42:24] Nathan Wrigley: no. It's a bit like when you go to the speed test sites and you do it twice within two minutes and it gets wildly different answers. Yeah. Yeah. How actually useful was that? and another plugin idea for joining us today. Great. I'm gonna write these down. Yeah. Another plugin idea is to add the last updated date to the install plugins page in the WordPress dashboard.

Who checks the individual plugin? To check it regularly. Mo most don't. I'm just trying to pause. Why, what does that relate to? Another plugin. Oh, you may have a plugin that's not been updated in four or five years on your site. Oh, I see. Okay. Got it. Got it. Yes, I've been reading that. there is 60,000 plugins in the, thingy and, only 11,000 are regularly updated, so that really yeah.

[00:43:13] Mark Westguard: Wow. Gosh, so is it, wow. There is a plug plugin out there that checks the last updated date. 'cause I, had a customer come to me and say, I've just got a warning. I think it might have been word fence or something like that. And they actually sent me a support ticket saying, what are your plugins has been deemed, like out, out of date.

And it basically 'cause. I wrote it and it works. It, didn't need updating, it just, it, just worked. So it hadn't been updated for two years and, they, yeah, they deemed it basically out of use. So I literally had to just push a version with a, number change in it to say, just to keep it a lot, give it a nudge.

[00:43:54] Nathan Wrigley: So the change log went from 1.00 to 1.01, and the change log said. Updated plugin. Yeah, updated Read me. Yeah, updated Read me. That's great. I, mean I can see the utility at that, but equally that's a, just an utterly pointless, thing. Yeah. 'cause some of your add-ons, they do just connect one thing to another thing, don't they?

So long as that connection works, there's no, if the API doesn't change at the other end. There's no point me doing anything changes to it. yeah. Okay. That's interesting. okay, so let's move on a little bit. So that was Aaron talking about the, the different ways that we might update and what might be updated.

It's definitely worth reading. I didn't really do it justice there, but I'll just give you the title. so it is, Aaron dot job in Dunno if you can see that, but, I'll put the link in the show notes and it's called. X, Y, Z, or Z defining minor releases for WordPress, 6.8 point x and he goes on to, this is a guy who commits to core and he's very experienced and he's got thought five thoughts about what it means for minor releases in the future.

What should go in and what should probably just be left, in the domain of, just put it on the sidelines. Okay. Alright. Felix answer. We were talking about him a moment ago. I just want to mention that in WordPress 6.8, not only did we have the features that we talked about, but a bunch of key work has been done on performance improvements.

We did talk about speculative loading, so that's obviously there. But also, there's a whole bunch of different things around the interactivity, API to make it work better in the future and some of the performance related things. So again, there's far too much in here for me to pause in this podcast, but if you just go to, make wordpress.org WordPress 6.8, performance Improvements by Felix Ants, you'll be able to see all the different bits and pieces in there.

Okay? This is the one I think which will be most interesting for this particular episode. I, honestly don't know. Seriously, if you'd have asked me this question and talked about AI just two years ago, none of this would've made sense. but Brian Cords, who is now an automat, but is a, is, a developer.

He's been asking the question recently, are websites still important? And Brian is not the one, he is not the kind of character I don't think to just throw incendiary topics out there just to see if he can get a rise. I think it's a serious question and really it's revolving around not are they relevant now?

Because clearly everybody's using websites, consuming websites, going to websites, updating websites. It's more about what the heck is gonna happen over the next period of time where AI really, genuinely does seem to be extremely capable in all sorts of ways. Now, I know that it might not get the accessibility right.

I know you might have to argue in inverted commas with the AI in order to get it to do what you want to do, but just imagine. Three years ago, let's go with that. If I'd have told you that you could type in a prompt, an English language, whatever language, prompt a few sentences and you would have something which would build you a website, you'd have thought, that's just bs Wrigley, shut up.

That's never gonna happen. And now we are there. So the question really is, are we in an industry which is gonna be in decline? Not like it'll go away. Not like the humans don't need to shepherd the ai, but are we, and he makes the perfect, parallel, like how many farmers were there a hundred years ago?

And the answer is thousands. Thousands and thousands. And then me, mechanization of farming came along and now we can still produce the same amount of food, but we don't need many farmers, just a handful. And so is the same gonna be true here and I. I know that we would like to imagine that no.

Humans are still gonna be the central cog in that wheel. I am getting more and more convinced that they're not, that maybe we'll, just be at a point where it's good enough for most people to talk to an AI and if that's the case, I'm out of a job. I don't know. I dunno what you think. I think it depends on the type of website though.

[00:48:23] Mark Westguard: Like we're talking about it our, our website's still gonna be important first of all. AI as we know, it probably wouldn't exist if there weren't websites here currently. That's where, good point. It digests all of its content from, if we get rid of the websites, AI's gonna have nothing to chew on.

I think the way we digest information has certainly changed. Whereas, we used to go to Stack Overflow to ask a question about, a maybe a programming question. Now we can just go on open AI and, get a response from it. But, things like, I don't know, small businesses. If I wanna find a gardener or I wanna go to a restaurant, and I wanna see what the restaurant looks like and stuff like that at the moment.

I still want a website to go and have a look at that and read, use it now, don't you? And see what it looks like. Yeah. So I guess it depends on the, type of business. on the argument about, we gonna need web developers to build these websites. I think the, sorry I point out, I had Martin earlier and my, my stomach, really can, it's actually one, it's, Wendy's dog.

[00:49:29] Nathan Wrigley: It's, not my stomach. Sorry, Paul, sorry. Paul Mark Carry on. Paul. yeah. Who?

[00:49:38] Mark Westguard: but yeah, on the, building of the sites, sadly I'm seeing that AI is encroaching more and more on those kind of brochureware websites. Certainly. interestingly there, I think there was a podcast mentioned in that article, but they were talking about, enterprise versus kind of smaller $5,000 websites and stuff.

I think the. The enterprise stuff, has got a long way to go before AI encroaches on that. I think the process that I just went through on the website I was building, AI is helpful a hundred percent, but with their very specific starting guidelines and, integrations they have with third party, behind the scenes it's just a massive enterprise level stuff.

That's definitely gonna be something that you still need an agency for. But I, dunno, I, think, but isn't, the argument curious that the agencies can exist because the environment in which they live is what it is now. But if the bottom gets hollowed out, then can you even have an enterprise agency?

[00:50:47] Nathan Wrigley: Without there being loads of other, like, you need agencies that are smaller, if you like, so that they can train the people who will then become the, and I'm doing air quotes, the, capable developers that can then start to take jobs in these enterprise agencies because they've had years of experience and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But if we, if those kind of the, beginning, the bottom rung of the ladder agencies disappear and those, kind of jobs disappear. Where, are you gonna cut your teeth? Where are you gonna figure out how to do all of this? This work? Yeah. To get the experience. You've gotta do that smaller stuff.

Yeah. And you've gotta get paid to do that smaller stuff, haven't You, you've gotta do the entry level job. And so if those kind of things disappear, it, it feels almost it's such a beguiling promise, isn't it? You type in a prompt, and it gives you a website and it's great. It's really great, but it's not, have you actually done that?

I've seen people do it. I'm not interested in AI on that level, so I, never do that because I. Don't, but I dunno if any of you guys have tried it and because I tested some, option, especially some website builder options where they say, Hey, so I'm seeing, this is might be a little bit off topic, but okay.

[00:52:04] Wendie Huis in 't Veld: I'm seeing WordPress move more towards SaaS where the hosting companies offer like managed WordPress environments and they include a website builder, AI thingy. and you type in the industry you're in and where you're located and what the vibe is you want. And then, they create a website for you.

And I've tested some, but so far they're not really that good. and they do require like a human touch also because they get the same thing. yeah. I see this. I've tried. it's clever. I see it spitting out some quite stuff, but it's, not anything that I would just go publish and use it definitely, yes.

[00:53:02] Mark Westguard: Would, require me putting some human touch on there to, yeah. Make it what I want. Robert, in the comments, asked an interesting question about, yeah. What if you're letting AI pick the restaurant based on what you like? that's a, it's just a whole new mindset, isn't it? Is yeah.

Just trusting AI to pick your date with your wife. But haven't you, done exactly that though with so many bits of your life? e even though we don't wanna admit it, haven't we already outsourced our brains a lot to not ai, but to tech? a perfect example would be my calendar. If you, if Google Calendar went away tomorrow and deleted all my data, I am, I have no idea what I'm doing at all.

[00:53:48] Nathan Wrigley: including the things that, I really should know. Like wh where, when I'm going out to the gym to see friends, this kind of thing. It's just all in Google Calendar. I'm just waiting for that little Oh look. Yeah. I'm supposed to be doing that in a couple of days. Oh, that's nice. I'm glad I'm doing that.

But, we've just, we've given it all up, haven't we? we've let technology, take on, like we've outsourced our brain basically. And if you want to go to a restaurant, do you ever pull out some kind of physical material, like the yellow pages to flick through and find a variety of restaurants, then phone a couple of, no, you go straight to Google or TripAdvisor or something like that.

And it's that looks pretty good. It's got a 4.8 rating with 900 reviews. Let's go for that. yeah, so I'm not sure. That, that we can't even trust. Probably they probably written, by, AI anyway. But, yeah, so, I think we're well on the road to giving up, to giving up our agency if you like.

Even though we don't wish to admit it, we've, done it. Will that mean our heads will shrink? I thought you mean inside? Yeah. Yeah. My head is prodigious empty. Wendy already. still quite big though. So what's in there, Nathan? I have to do this annual, filling it up with cotton wool. I just push cotton wool in on Christmas day just to fill up the empty space.

it's an annual event. It's great, ceremony. yeah, I don't know, but he, okay. Here's the flip side though, and I don't know it how my understanding of all of this is so poultry that anything I'm about to say could be completely wrong. My understanding also is that there is a fair amount of concern from the AI bros, for want of a better word, because the, capacity to make AI with the LLM structure better is going to become very, much more expensive.

To get a, 1% improvement now is significantly more than it was to get a 20% or 30% improvement a few years ago. So it's like AI did, it was like this and then it went like this and now it's going more like this again. And I've heard that the cost of improving the models that we already have.

Is gonna be significant, like really crazily expensive. Not just in terms of finance, but also in terms of the resources and the degradation to the environment and all of that. And so maybe, maybe we're gonna be fine. So there can you, I saw something this morning. I don't, I think it may have just, I dunno whether it was a meme or whether it was real or if it was actually a news article where there was somebody saying that.

[00:56:24] Mark Westguard: People saying Please and thank you in check GPT is costing them a fortune.

Oh. Because there's just a needless prompt saying Thank you. Yeah. And they've got a to be polite to your check gt. Okay. But he said, they said it was costing them millions in resources. That's hysterical. So be rude to your l lm. Just be rude. Yeah, just be thoughtless. Sorry, Steve. Steve go.

[00:56:49] Steve Burge: I, do you mind? Do you mind doing me a quick favor? No. Nathan, can you bring up the original question? The original blog post I. yeah, here we go. It was the tab. This one here. Yeah. I wonder, so the title was, are websites still important? I, it seems like there's two separate questions, are websites still important in the era of ai?

And then the other question is, are we still important when it comes to websites? Like question, one is, are websites still gonna be around? Are people still gonna need websites? And then question two, are humans actually gonna be really involved in building them? those seem like question two.

Are we still gonna be involved? I think you're probably right in terms of the farmers, right? They're gonna be less human involvement. Maybe we will be more at the enterprise at the high end of things. And then, Quite a lot of conversations I've had recently are the actual physical websites that result, whether they come from AI or whether they come from humans, are those actual physical websites still gonna be useful in five or 10 years time?

And that's, they seem Two different questions, I think, and yeah, both of them probably. how much of, work is gonna get sucked up by ai? I, I, know what you mean. So a perfect example is the iPhone moment, right? Prior to the iPhone. the, operation of going and discovering things online was sit at a, computer and have a keyboard and then type things in and, go to a website and what have you.

[00:58:31] Nathan Wrigley: Then the iPhone came along and suddenly it was in everybody's pocket and it was ubiquitous and it's there all the time. And also it's just got this. Really curious screen shape. And not only has that like completely changed the photography industry where everybody stop doing it. By the way, everybody, everybody takes pictures that way round.

Do turn it round and then take the picture please. Thank you. You get so much more in, especially if you're doing landscapes, ranting wr, but depends on what you're looking for, Nathan. I know, But the point being that the, that device, the iPhone completely upended. The, what the internet even was, and we don't know what's gonna come.

There might be some device which gets plugged into your head or something, which, is a bolt onto my glasses or, something along those lines. And, I am less and less going to websites and more and more just the search engine I have totally outsourced my, my, I, type into Google, navigate to this place.

I don't need to go to their website to find out their location and the latitude and longitude. Google just is the intermediary for that. If I wanna see reviews, I will go via Google to somewhere else, and I'm, yeah. I don't really know where I'm going with that, but what I'm saying is, that you're basically taking the points I had was whether websites physically themselves are going to be useful Yeah.

[00:59:57] Steve Burge: In the future. they could be done by us, they could be done by agencies, it could be done by freelancers, could be done by ai. But at the end of the day, does it matter if. Like you say, we're not actually visiting websites anymore. Yeah. So a perfect analogy would be like, when was the last time any of Ocelot looked in an encyclopedia to find something out?

[01:00:18] Nathan Wrigley: What it just an exactly an encyclopedia, You just didn't, whereas a, whereas when I was a kid, that was the method of looking things up. If it was something I didn't need to know, I went to the encyclopedia, and if it didn't have it, I was basically screwed. Now you don't think no, nobody's got encyclopedia even.

You just rely on the internet, Wikipedia, whatever, all of those kind of things. And maybe there'll be some things which will come along in the future. And Brian's point about is a website even needed? Don't know. Don't know. I think we're all aiming for the conduit of information. Like basically, give me the answer.

First time when I ask a question, that seems to be the goal of the internet now. It's not let's serve up webpages. It's, I have a question, give me an answer. Make it right first time around. And if that is, if I can get that 99% of the time, I'll be happy. that's not what I wanna see. But that is, I think, the direction of travel.

Yeah. we could all go back to farming if we had to. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. The number of farmers is going back up again. Yeah, that's, yeah. I like, farmers. Yeah. Yeah. Me too. I wanna start a farming podcast now. I think it's, a bit like when we went from, the, postal service was always worried about email, wasn't it?

[01:01:39] Mark Westguard: Back in the day. oh, we're never gonna send mail again. But we, it, and now we use mail for Amazon package packages instead of letters to our friends. It just, there's a continual evolution of how. Data is used and perceived by people. And I think it's like a library as well. when's the last time I went to a library to go and reference a book?

I don't. It's all online now. Yeah. So is the, next natural progression for that to, for that now to be sucked up by these, AI companies. And that's where we get our information from Now. it's scary, isn't it? it's scary, but also I, think history is a, bunch of cycles, isn't it?

[01:02:18] Nathan Wrigley: And, things that unexpectedly or rather things that it would seem were gonna be the natural course of events get upended and often it's by an individual with a clever idea. And it wouldn't surprise me if there was at some point some kind of, not revolution, but something akin to that where people just said, I am.

Absolutely sick and tired of being plugged into electronic devices. I want to be more connected with my local farmer and my garden and the people that live within 150 meters of my house. And I don't really wanna be worried about dude over there in a completely different continent because he is loud on Twitter.

I don't know if that will come, but there's definitely bits of my life where I think that would be a nice place to get to if, if I could shut down the internet entirely for a period of time, that would be quite nice. I think the thing I like right now is if I do ask, say Check, check GPTA question, I can see it going off and searching the web for content.

[01:03:20] Mark Westguard: So it's definitely referencing the web. Ah, yeah. I don't like the idea of all that content being in their system, the internet right now is distributed across the world. So you've got lots of different people managing that, that information. Whereas yes, if it's all in open AI or some other.

AI system. They've got all that data in one pot. And, who says what they can do with it? I, it would, sorry, Steve or, Wendy, whichever. No, Steve go first. Go for it, Wendy. Thank you. Oh, you go first. We've had a, we've had a, we do a published press podcast and basically talk with publishers who worry about this luck.

[01:03:59] Steve Burge: 'cause their, social traffic is going down and their Google traffic is going down and they're getting squeezed quite badly by AI at the moment. And this topic keeps on coming up. And perhaps the best insight we've had is from one guest who said, basically, right now you need to decide very clearly whether you are building your website for ai.

for example, up here at Publish Press, all our, we put all our documentation publicly. We really want AI to come and suck up all our documentation. So if someone types in, what's the best user role management plugin for WordPress, it'll give our plugin as the answer. You got two lanes, basically the AI lane or the lane where you are capturing that audience.

You are getting them in a newsletter. You are getting their sign up, and you are owning that relationship as tightly as you possibly can. And if you are half-assing it in between those two options, you're gonna be in trouble. so either your website is entirely designed to be sucked up and optimized for AI or.

You are trying to get email addresses, trying to get a customer relationship tight enough that, that if social media traffic keeps dropping and Google traffic keeps dropping, you'll still have the email, you'll still have the relationship, you'll still have something valuable left over. That's really interesting, isn't it?

[01:05:31] Nathan Wrigley: So making the email suddenly like the first citizen, you're not even worrying particularly about your website. It's more website newsletter. Yeah. Okay. Gosh, that's fascinating. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I wish I had the answer to this. I, really don't, but I, am, I think it is a profound moment. I think there's so much happening at such scale that what, was the first thing you pitched at the beginning of the episode?

[01:05:56] Steve Burge: You're like, here's our website. Sign up for our newsletter. yeah, yeah. That, that is, that stuff is magic. Like having an email newsletter is actually amazing because you, to call it a conversation is overdoing it, but you are putting something directly into people's inboxes because they want to read it.

[01:06:17] Nathan Wrigley: How that would work for, I don't know if I was casually looking for a new sofa or something, it's quite unlikely that I'd end up signing up to a sofa manufacturer's newsletter or something. But that's where you'd want the AI capturing it so that if I went to check GPT and I, oh, that is an interesting, but wouldn't you wanna touch it like buying sofas or stuff?

[01:06:37] Wendie Huis in 't Veld: Wouldn't you wanna touch it? Yeah. With all the digital stuff, yeah, AI is great, but buying a sofa, I wanna feel what it is to lay on it. If my head, if the ratio of the side thing to combine to my head shoulder, if I lay like this, yeah, Is like the perfect height. I need to feel that. Yeah. And I need to feel if the pillows are able to carry me.

And so for me, I am excited. I use AI a lot. There are two things that are super worrying for me. It is one thing is that connections we can't do without. We are people. We need like human connections and we keep forgetting that is the thing that we live by. If you, I mean there are so many things that are indicating that we are losing the human connection and it is.

Scary. It is frightening and it is super scary. And the other thing I wanna point out is if we trust AI or Google or whoever to handle all our questions, who owns the information? Yeah. 'cause I want my information to be owned by me and I want the sofa company to own its own information to send me the newsletter about the amazing cushions they created to go with my newly purchased couch and to my local farmer to tell me that now is strawberry season and I should buy strawberries and not go with, I dunno, blackberries because they are, their season is in the fall.

So there is some basic human stuff that is that, that AI is never able to, or for now and not within the coming years, is not able to recreate or to. Replace in the way that we as people interact. And the other thing is, which is extremely scary because nobody's talking about it. there are a few people, but not many.

And it's not like the big people conversation who owns the information and who owns the data. Yeah. Yeah. Wendy, is that kind of directly inspiring your love doctor work? That Yes. Like that, that feeling of isolation, of lack of human connection is directly fueling that work. Yes, because I, I am a neurodiverse person.

when I started it, I, have had so much trouble in learning to connect. I am not the founder of the love doctor that is my business partner. Her name is Ina. She founded it because she believed that there is so much information about how to connect to, to connect with, at an interpersonal level, to connect with other people.

There is so much information. There is so much research, being research being done. I'm getting super excited. I'm jumping over my own words and it's not available for common public. You can get access to it when you study a, for example, psychology or if you start having therapy, which for a lot of people is still, a big threshold thing to do.

The, that kind of information, the way we interact with people, the importance of relationships, it needs to be more common information because we need it, especially in this technology era where it is, where it is getting a smaller part in our lives. before it was just you walk out the front door and there was somebody and you talk to them and then you knew the gossip in the neighborhood.

Yeah. And now you look on X and you see what's going on the other side of the ocean, but you dunno who your neighbors are, which is extremely dangerous for us as people. I am, I remember reading history books about the, about Holland actually about this amazing thing, the, tulip revolution where the entire world just wanted to buy tulips.

[01:11:01] Nathan Wrigley: And tulips went up by a crazy amount. So the tulips were worth more than gold until basically something happened. I can't remember what it was. And everybody just suddenly figured out. It is just tulips, wait, what have we been doing for these decades? We've been spending crazy amounts of money and then it just collapsed.

And I wonder if we've reached or are reaching peak internet where, there are aspects. it's, been a fascinating journey. the devices come along, they're more impressive than they were last year. they've got great utility, they speed things up and they're bound to the internet.

And you can reach all these people. But maybe, we are just getting this sort of glimmer that, oh, hang on a minute. It gives us all this, but it takes away all this. And maybe there'll be a point where we do, we as a, species, we say, look better to disconnect now and have dedicated downtime.

I know that, for example, in, in certain countries, I think Australia, they are banning social media. for people who are under the age of 16. Now, if I've misremembered that, I apologize, but I think that's true. and so it's been decided, I guess I, I don't know, presumably a bunch of politicians decided it that 16 year olds, you can wait until you're 17.

from that moment on, you've still got thousands, of hours to waste on TikTok, but let's just inoculate them, until they're 17, what have you. And, and I do wonder, I think it'll be interesting, and you're right, we don't tend to know our neighbors and we don't tend to know, what's going on in our local environment, which is a bit of a shame.

[01:12:41] Mark Westguard: I think it's, I think it's interesting just watching our children. they're a good indicator of where things are going. And my, kids, I mean it's a digital life lifestyle. They've got, although I must say my. My eldest has now started driving and he loves going out and just seeing his friends and interacting.

I think, yeah, that he's still very, social. when they're back at home, they're on all these chat things, but, they still, love getting together, which is nice to see. I was saying when I was a kid, I was out on my bike with my friends and I think Wendy's right, that social interaction is so important.

[01:13:22] Nathan Wrigley: I dunno if you've, I dunno if it's the same in the US as it is in the uk, but basically the drinks industry, the alcohol industry is a bit concerned because the demographic that the, people that are growing up into being the age to drink, which in the UK is 18. they are increasingly in, in huge numbers, just shunning drinking it all.

They're just. Don't wanna do it, it's not a thing. Yeah. And, I wonder, if something like that could happen, Steve, go on. There is a positive, maybe a positive. I'm not, I think it's positive. 'cause there's a, you always talk a lot of doom and gloom about, we, we tend to be like old man yelling at cloud kind of attitude to a lot of these things.

[01:14:06] Steve Burge: But, with the phones, I, dunno whether this is good or bad. The kids, I've got teenagers at similar to Mark, similar age, who are, their generation is so well behaved. Like they, they drink a lot less, they smoke less, they get in trouble. Less, they go out less they drive less. the. Lots of like social markers.

They are getting in less trouble than we did. Our generation did because they're on their home, on their phone more. Don't have any chance to get into trouble. Yeah. Yeah. and I maybe, I don't know whether that's good or bad, but it is substantially different from our generation when we were growing up.

[01:14:56] Mark Westguard: It's definitely a different, genera. I, went back to my university in Brighton. Last December, I think it was, and I went out with my friend. We both went to the University of Brighton and we went to a bar and I expected to go in this bar and see all these kids drinking and, being silly.

They were all sat down doing a pub quiz and they had an app they had installed and on a TV screen were some rabbits, I think it was, that were running across the screen. And the speed at which the rabbits went was directly proportionate to how quickly you tapped your iPhone screen. And we're sitting at both of us having a beer.

And I was just like, this is a completely different gener. And I spoke to the bar lady, who was serving us, and she said, yeah, this is completely different than 20 years ago. Wow. That is a completely new generation. They just don't drink. They, she said they come in and they are drinking orange juice and water.

they're, appreciative that they're coming in, but they are not. Not drinking the way we used to. It's very, different. Yeah. We, definitely got away from the, do we need websites kind of conversation, but it's been fusing, but no, But, I do think what we've just straighted into this whole alcohol, buying drinks and or not buying drinks as the case may be.

[01:16:16] Nathan Wrigley: I I do wonder if the, youths, will rebel against it. Whether they're, they're gonna be able to, because let's face it, we're all, to some extent, we are addicted probably to social media that has now in the same way that if you have smoked a lot in your life, even if you've given up, I suspect you have to be mindful that if you have another cigarette, it is going to.

Get a screwdriver into your brain differently to somebody that hasn't ever smoked before. He'll probably just think, oh, that's disgusting. But the, same may be true for us. we've all kind of just given up on the social media thing. We've done it, we are addicted to it. We've made loads of friendships, so there's just sunk costs.

There's loads of sunk cost in it. But the kids who are coming up, maybe they won't even just get involved in it. And those platforms, the Facebooks and the Twitters and what have you, maybe they'll fade away and all of these problems that we've got now will be different. So that doesn't answer the question about websites, but sadly, I, guess the answer is, we don't know how these things are gonna turn out for our kids for the next generation, but, there are a lot, there's a, desire among a lot of them, I think, to be more offline.

[01:17:37] Steve Burge: this weekend, I took my kid shopping and what she wanted to buy was one of those old, Those old cameras. You would take a photo and it would print, Polaroid it, print out. Yeah. Like her and her friends are all into actually having a physical hard copy of the photos. and there, there's a desire, but at the same time, this stuff is so addictive that after we did that, she went back and she was on her phone for a couple of hours afterwards.

[01:18:08] Mark Westguard: It looking at websites. yeah, That's right, you can imagine a sort of science fiction movie in the future, can't you? Where they're looking back at the moment in time, in the early 2020s, human humans did this to themselves and, there's everybody was addicted to the phone.

[01:18:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Curious, Bit of history. I'm so sorry if you've been posting comments. There's quite a few people who have been posting comments. I, couldn't, couldn't figure out a way to segue and bring them in, so I'll just do a couple of them now. definitely want a physical connections as Dave done.

I. Nowadays it's all online. Yeah. My impression is that cannot be, can I say one thing regarding physical connection? Because we have Work Camp Europe coming up. That was why I'm, wanted to pitch it because we coming up segue. Yes. And we still have tickets available. So if you are looking for a physical connection to meet and hug and greet and chat and hang and eat food and share fun and laughter with your workers buddies, Basel is the place to be.

[01:19:17] Steve Burge: Yeah. You gotta buy 'em on a website though. Yeah, you need to buy the ticket on, obviously you gotta buy on our website. Yeah. so thank you for the comment. Oh, thank you, Wendy. That was the perfect segue. That was literally what I was teeing up. That was ideal. speaking of growing an email list, WebLogic is saying, yep, the money for want of a better word, is still in the list.

[01:19:38] Nathan Wrigley: That's still a very effective way to go. and then yes, on the drinks thing, talking about the, people drinking less Yes. On the drinks thing says Ross. Hello Ross. I have some hope that kids will rebel and s Shawn social media and harmful parts of the internet. Yeah, I have that hope as well.

Whether or not it happens, I don't know, someday. and by the way, night Oh, that's nice. if Wendy's reading the comments, I have such a good memory of you, Wendy, giving an amazing talk at probably WordPress. Word, camp London. Must be about eight years ago. Yeah, it was 2017. My first ever WordPress word camp talk.

[01:20:13] Wendie Huis in 't Veld: And I cried during my talk, which was, it was also about human connection. So even back then, I was already involved in all this stuff. Yeah. Carswell's coat, that's a great handle. the collapse of LLMs will be interesting to watch, won't it? It'll be like watching Terminator or something. It'll be a moment that we all probably enjoy with great relish.

[01:20:37] Nathan Wrigley: and there's a bunch of other things, so I appreciate anybody that made a comment. yeah. back to word, camp, Europe. It's happen in Basel in the next month or so. Still got about, I know, five or six weeks from the fifth. To the 7th of June Basel, by the way. I, so, here we go back to the internet and using Google to do all the things I ended up, like you do when you wanna see what a place is you go to Google Max and then you sort drop the little man somewhere and just have a look around, think, oh, that looks nice.

Basel is mile after mile of cool. It just looks, I had no idea that it was, it's so nice. Yeah. I was there last month. Okay. For the last venue visit. To do the last check of everything. Okay. It's such a nice place. It has this river in the middle of the city and it was March and it was pretty cold, so there was no, there were people walking around.

[01:21:34] Wendie Huis in 't Veld: They just had the carnival, so basically everybody had a hangover, so it was not very busy while we were there, but. I can imagine when the weather is better. I heard people swimming in the river, but also, terrors, sitting outside having a beer or a non-alcoholic drink. it is such a nice place to be.

It is, and it is. it's not that big. So it's really word camp friendly. You can hang around, you can just wander the town. It, is actually a really good place to, yeah, I, was really impressed when I dropped the pin. I wasn't expect, I dunno why I wasn't expecting. I just, nobody's ever mentioned Basel to me before, so dropping the pin and having a look around and thought, oh, that looks, I'm looking forward to it.

[01:22:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's gonna be cool. Yeah, me too. Me too. so that's happening soon, so yeah. Okay. There we go. So that was that. And then we're in a bit of a rush now. I'll just raise a couple of quick things. I dunno if you saw, this one, in, order to make us more angry about the internet, wouldn't it be a good idea to inject some more adverts into your WordPress admin, some ingenious company, A co If this is true, I'm looking at a Twitter post, obviously, caveat mTOR, who knows where the heck it's come from.

but it would appear that some ingenious plugin developers figured out that if you install their plugin, they can then hijack when you go to new plugins, they can insert their own products at the top of the list. what the heck? That's, it's not new, right? Oh, is it Not Jeff Pack? No. Jeff Pack WooCommerce, psych Ground.

[01:23:12] Steve Burge: They all do it already. Yeah, I did not know that. Okay. Okay. So it's not new. But anyway, it would appear to be spreading and causing ire. I've never noticed it, to be honest with things like Jetpack. So maybe it's just been doing that to me for years and I've never seen it. Anyway, there we go. So that was a non story.

[01:23:30] Nathan Wrigley: next one then couple of updates about some plugins and things like that. Generate blocks 2.1. Kathy Zant, who's often on the show, she's written an article about all the nice new things that have dropped into generate press. I am an absolute fan of this product. Generate press is such a great way to use blocks to build out.

Posts pages, entire websites basically. It's brilliant. And, and 2.1 has added loads of new features specifically around being able to identify whether or not your CSS, where it's coming from. 'cause in the block editor it's hard to figure out where the cascade is and what's inheriting things from what.

So they've come up with this sort of, almost like a traffic light system for showing whether something's global or local or inherited or what have you. So it's quite nice. And so go and check that out. Dunno why you would want to do this, but you can now do this. There is a plugin, called the WordPress Playground Block, where you can drop in a WordPress playground install inside of a post or a page.

Actually, I just thought you have an infinite loop of a playground. That's right. Inside playgrounds. Inside playgrounds. I like inside playgrounds. Yeah. It never ends, playgrounds all the way down. I've just thought of a good example, and that might be, for example, let's say, I don't know, a teacher in front of a class of 30 students wants them to all try something out.

They could just drop a playground into this page, direct 'em to the URL and all the. All the students are off to the races. Yeah. So they don't have to go and type in the weird URL to get a new playground. it's not that weird. I think it's new playground, do something. I can't remember what it is. But anyway, the point is, this will make that a whole lot easier.

So there we go. There's that. I'm just gonna race through a few things this I really like as well. Troy Chaplin has, I, I think it's something I've not seen before. it's got very few installations at the moment. It's only 10, so I don't know how credible it is, but it's called Block Accessibility Check and it will poll against your core WordPress blocks to check if they are sticking to accessibility guidelines.

Again, caveat mTOR. I dunno how useful this actually is, but it will give you warnings. based upon whether or not, I don't know. For example, you've set the area attributes for various things, or if your button isn't done in the, text or the Yeah. Or your, table doesn't have a header or something like that.

Which is a requirement. so that's called block accessibility checks. So that's quite nice. now I'll move on from that as well. And just in case he's watching Elliot Richmond, he's often in the comments, just wanna out, we see you and your culinary business, which you've got going on the side.

I had no idea. I don't know Elliot particularly well, but it was weird. I was browsing the internet the other day and there's Elliot like doing cooking and I thought he was only a, only in air quotes, only a developer. And it turns out he's got a really successful covid inspired hostel, with his wife.

So I just wanted to acknowledge that thought. That was nice. Looks delicious. Looks delicious. And then this, yeah, I got one piece of. Yeah, I want pieces. I want pieces. And let's do this as the, let me just check. Yeah, let's do this as the last one 'cause we're really running outta time. Super cool. Vert sh when you want to convert like a jpeg to a web P or an MP three, sorry, an MP four to an MP three or a whatever.

you've normally got to Google something, find the website or have a piece of software locally installed that will do that. vert is your new best friend. It will convert anything to anything else. on the screen here jpeg to web p MP three to, I don't know, MWA, it'll do doc to eob, that kind of thing.

and it does it all in the browser. So it's not sending anything off to a SaaS service. It's, I'm guessing it's using, I don't know, web assembly. Somebody like Mark or Steve could probably help me out, but some, I imagine it's using some technology like that and it does it without ads. it's completely open source and apparently it says Don on your device.

So I just thought that was a nice one to, to finish this off. So go and convert all the things. That's right. But sh there we go. And that then brings us to an end. I think that's about it. Let's have a look. Any new little things going on in the comments? Oh, very nice statement says that generate blocks, generate press is cool.

Yeah. Very cool product. Indeed, Yeah. There we go. That'll be the comments for this week, in which case it only remains for me to say thank you. I'll start with Wendy. Thank you, Wendy, for joining us today. Really appreciate it. Thank you, mark as well. And where's he gone, Steve?

Steve as well. We will be back, I think this time next week. I, it only occurred to me, mark, and Steve, you all know that it's bank holiday today as because my brain is religiously empty. It only occurred to me. This morning that this show probably shouldn't have happened because, holiday and everything is shot and I should be, but you are showing to the world and it's not a bank holiday everywhere.

So that's right. Exactly. Hey, I'm, me and Mark are in the US doesn't mean anything over here. Bank holidays. Yeah. It doesn't mean anything over here. We work every day of the week in the us I'm on a, I'm on, yeah, I'm on a mission to, to remove bank holidays. we work far too little in the uk.

We should have no days off. that's it. That's all we got for you this week. I appreciate it. We've only gotta do the silly hand thing first before we say goodbye. If you could give us all your silly hands, that would be great. Nice. Thank you very much and thank you to you dear listener, for making some comments.

I really appreciate it. And you three, if you wanna stick around and have a little bit of a netter, we can do that afterwards. But I will end the recording. Bye-bye for now. And bye. Wendy's dog as well. Bye. Wendy's. nice to have you with us as well.