This Week in WordPress #335

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It is time for this week in WordPress, episode number 335. Entitled Low Cost, Low Performing. It was recorded on Monday the 26th of May, 2025. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I'm joined by Piccia Neri, I'm also joined by Tammie Lister and Tim Nash.

It's a WordPress podcast, so we actually spend quite a lot of time not talking about WordPress this week, but nevertheless, there is quite a bit of WordPress buried in there as well.

So we start the conversation off talking about rebuilding trust amongst the WordPress community, and the executive director of the WordPress project, Mary Hubbard, has a few things to say about that.

We also talk about the similarities and differences between the Drupal project and the WordPress project, and whether or not we have something to learn from one another.

And then we spend a really long time talking about AI and the fact that maybe AI is going to consume the WordPress plugin repository. The submissions are really up, and maybe that's as a result of AI creation of plugins, and whether or not that landscape can cope with this uptick in plugin submissions.

And then we talk about a bunch of blocks which have been released, and a whole load of other stuff.

And it's all coming up next on this week in WordPress.

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Good morning, good evening, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the world. This week in WordPress, episode number 335. It's a bank holiday in the uk. me, Tammy and Tim, what the heck? What are we doing? we're here on a day when the entire country is out at the beach or having a nice time off, but we are here talking about WordPress.

I appreciate, that, I have to say, c commiserations, I suppose that's not the right word, but, best wishes to, Michelle Ette. She should have been joining us, but, is sadly not feeling particularly well. And, so I'm very grateful to Tim for stepping in at literally the 11th hour. It probably was about 11 o'clock or something like that, something roughly.

so thank you for that. But yeah, get well soon, Michelle. I hope that, whatever it is that's going on there, I hope that you are over it soon enough. So we're here to talk about WordPress. You can see I've got a panel of guests with us. Let's go round the houses and introduce everybody. Let's start with, let's start with Tammy. How are you doing, Tammy? I'm good, thank you. How are you? Yeah, good. Tammy Lister. Tammy is a product engineer who focuses on the intersection of design, development and open source. She helps products at all stages of their journey. She is also a co-founder of Gilden Berg, where she offers a full range of products and services to consult, sorry, product services and consultancy.

You can learn more about what she's up to and thinking at bin eight thoughts, have I pronounced that right? Bin eight thoughts? Dot com. so it's B-I-N-A-T-E, thoughts.com. Along with finding out how you can sponsor her contributions. Just tell us a little bit more about that. Are you in the, are you in the market at the moment for being sponsored for contributions?

Yeah. Yeah. I'm, contributing on call and I'm looking for sponsorship. Every month I write about what I'm doing in court. there'll be monthly posts and you can see, Me a little bit so people will talk for a little bit or me for a amount and it helps, triage all the way through. And I, share what I've been doing in core. thank you very much. I know if it's the same for Tim and Peach, but is Tammy's audio a bit kind of Yep. Peculiar? Yeah. I wonder if you've got like a crisp kind of thing switched on or something.

Or maybe just draw the mic a little bit closer. I, it sounds like that better a soft, just try it, just try saying a few more things. Hello? Yeah, that, I think that's better. I think there's something going on with the, like trying to fade out background noise or something like that. Anyway, let me give you that URL again.

I think we captured what you were trying to say, but it's bin eight thoughts.com if you want to sponsor it is, yeah. Tammy's contributions. That would be lovely. we're also joined by Peach. Peach, who's look at those glasses. What about those? I know how you doing? I'm all right. I'm very happy to be here with all these friends.

[00:05:47] Piccia Neri: Thank you very much, Nathan, for having me and having us. You're very welcome. Peach. Neri is a UX and accessibility design consultant and designer. She's also an educator, coach and workshop leader. She speaks at conferences globally on UX and accessible design. Peach's current main focus is on balancing creativity and accessibility without sacrificing either and on helping businesses and agencies become accessible and therefore more profitable.

[00:06:13] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you for joining us. Any, any URLs you wanna drop? Anything that's going on in the near future that you wanna quickly promote? Yes, Michelle and I. Hello Michelle. get better soon. All the best. as Nathan said, from the Thursday after work Camp Europe, which is Thursday, the 12th of June at 6:00 PM Central European summertime.

[00:06:42] Piccia Neri: we are going to, to, broadcast a limited podcast series, 10 episodes on accessibility. Each episode will be, we'll start from HTML 'cause that's the basics of it. And, we have, so we have a time, we have a topic, and we have a place which will be the post status YouTube channel. Look at that.

Well done. So I did put it know I'm so good at the copy and paste. You are fantastic. Unfortunately, I'm not so good at making it so that it doesn't hide your head. So there's no, I'm leaning over like this. Thank you Kami for Yeah, the glasses are, I know. I am quite proud of them. So for those of you, you can see Thursday, 6:00 PM Central European time.

[00:07:30] Nathan Wrigley: I think that's what that stands for. 9:00 AM Thursday. Yeah. Okay. so Thursday, 6:00 PM at the various times that you can see that. And you've gotta be a part of the post status YouTube. Oh, no. Post status. YouTube channel, I guess is open to the public. It's not a, it's not a post status. no. Yeah. It's a YouTube channel.

[00:07:45] Piccia Neri: It's completely open. Yeah. and you're joining with Michelle and it looks like you've got 10 episode. I'll take it off and then you don't crane your, 10 episodes about podcast. sorry. Accessibility. Yeah. Yes. Okay. Very much. Great. Thank you Nathan. You're very welcome. Yeah. I'll put that into the bits and pieces for tomorrow as well.

[00:08:10] Nathan Wrigley: Tim Nash joined us at the 11th hour. However, he did manage to throw a biography together, which, oh God,

[00:08:20] Piccia Neri: already looking forward to it. And he's made me sing. Come on. He's made me sing in the past. it's it's a variety of different humiliations. This is not humiliating at all though. This is great. Tim Nash, Tim is not the executive director at Post Status. He is not the podcast barista at WP Coffee Talk.

[00:08:37] Nathan Wrigley: He didn't co-found under represent, represented in tech or create WP Speakers. He is not the creator of WP Career pages, but Michelle Ette did and hopefully she's wrestling up and getting well. Soon. You can learn more about Michelle at Meet Michelle online and you can learn more about [email protected].

I think that's lovely. I think that was a really, novel, interesting way of, getting the message out there. That's great. Thank you, Tim. Appreciate it. Anything you wanna plug? no. You sure? I know you've got a thing going. Oh, okay. I, yeah. no. Okay. very good. okay. In which case, go onto Michelle's website.

Okay. Go to meet Michelle online and Tim Nash dot go. Go try that as well. Whilst you're there, have we got any comments coming in? We sometimes do. Here we go. So we've got Ryan joining us from, influence wp. Hello from Rainy Charlotte, North Carolina USA. We've got Tim Nash joining us. The days of Sunshine are over.

No kidding. It's just bleak and miserable. Back to the UK weather. That's how it goes. Cammie's joining us, I'm guessing in Seattle. Yeah, it's raining. It's great. We're all combined in our love of the rain. loving the glasses, she says. Oh, is that what you were referring to earlier? Lawrence joining us from Australia, I'm guessing, saying hello?

And, Bravo, Tim. Oh, that's nice. That was a nice little summation of that. Okay. If you've got anything that you want to put into the captions, please feel free to do that. The easiest way to do it, depending on where you're watching this, it just occurred to me, I've never done this before and it probably was a good thing to do.

the only way that we can get comments from you is if you go to, the YouTube channel. Or we embed the YouTube comments on our page over at wp builds.com/live. So if you happen to be watching this on X or LinkedIn or Facebook or any of those other things, any comments that you type, just go into the void.

It's like dev null for comments. Thank you. look at this. Okay, I'll take it off. So go to w now, you just both look like that. if you go to wp hills com slash live, that's gonna be the best place to do it. If you are not a fan of, being logged into a Google account for those, comments, there's a little button at the top of the actual pod, the, the video player.

And if you click on that button, I think it says live chat, then you don't need to be logged into anything. It, it just consumes the comments and puts 'em straight into our thing here. So feel free to do that. WP builds.com/live if you want to share it, let's get stuck into it. The usual bits of self-promotion.

This is us wp builds.com. If you wanna keep in touch with all that we are doing, then put your email address into here and click subscribe. There is something in the water this week. I don't know if it's a spam bot, but this form has been absolutely hammered this week. And I am, I'm not convinced, it's not nefarious.

Tim's looking around no, it's not me, governor. normally you get this sort of cadence on any form and it's just like you get a predictable amount of traffic. it's not. Been normal this week, so I suspect something perhaps needs to be looked at. But you said last week you wanted more?

I, oh, did you, write a script? That's have to do with me. Okay. Yeah, I did want more, but then actually it happened. So that's curious. go there, put your email address into there, click subscribe, and then we'll send you two things. we package this up as an audio podcast and send it out tomorrow morning, so you'll get that.

And then on Thursday we do a, regular podcast where it's me typically interviewing somebody. here's what they look like, it's this kind of thing. last week I was interviewing Zach, Hendershot about a product called Mai, which is interesting. I might talk about that in a minute actually.

but the podcast just stretch back, so you'll get an, you'll get an email about that as well. This guy. Zach, right? He's got this product called Mai. And it's really an interesting take, you know when you've got this interaction with clients where you, like the client might send you a screenshot of something and you trying to work out what the heck is it they want?

he's got a tool. He is built this tool Mai, and you go to this specific URL, this software pops up, which enables you to take a screenshot and then you draw or write on the screenshot. And then he's got an AI on his end, which tries to work out what the change should be, and then he tries to get the AI.

to create a diff with the change already made. And the idea is that you would, as the agency go in, manually approve it and say, yeah, the AI got that right. They wanted to remove the phone number from there, and they wanna put it here instead. And the idea is that, you would look at it, it cannot be done without human intervention, but the idea is that you would then look at it.

If it's correct, you'd click approve. And if it's not, you'd go back to that normal cycle. And he claims that the success rate is quite high. 'cause he said, clients quickly learn that, you can't do this, but you can do this. so that's, I just thought that was an interesting tool. So anyway, go and check it out.

It's called Uni, M-I-R-U-N-I. okay, there we go. Let's get stuck into the WordPress stuff. a little while ago at WordCamp us, what happened? this whole thing between WP Engine and Automatic, and on the back of that, many people got either excluded from the, the WordPress Slack or wordpress.org, and I think quite a few of them were not entirely sure what the reasoning behind that was.

It happened suddenly and unexpectedly in some cases. And then a few, I'm gonna say a month ago or something like that, there was a post which came out from, I think it was on Matt Mullenweg's actual, his personal blog where he was saying, okay, that's gonna start to be all on Dom.

and so that process has been happening and it k felt like the first moment where some kind of reconciliation was beginning anyway. Ray from the repository has got an article about Mary Hubbard and the. The sort of in, in things that she's trying to do to rebuild trust. The article is called Mary Hubbard Moves to Rebuild Trust after wordpress.org band.

And I'll just read a few things. after months of uncertainty surrounding bans on wordpress.org, WordPress executive director Mary Hubbard, has proposed reforms aimed at restoring trust and improving transparency. Transparency. And so the next question of course is well, what reforms? And here's a list of what is intended introducing a formal appeals process.

I guess so that if you are banned, you've got some mechanism for saying, why? And can we review whether that's fair? expanding conduct guidelines to better cover slack behavior? I didn't realize actually that there wasn't any guidelines about that, but apparently it's, tied to things like use of emojis, which can be, a thing, rotating moderator roles so that one person isn't always in for a period of time.

It, so that complaint couldn't be leveled. And the idea is aimed at rebuilding confidence after a right wave of abrupt, opaque bans that left many locked out of WordPress and Slack. Now, I didn't, I hadn't remembered this. She has some experience in this field because apparently she previously was the head of TikTok America's.

Governance and experience. Not entirely sure what that role is, but it does feel like there was significant overlap there. and she said, and I'll quote from, Ray's article. She said, quote, it's about, it was about restoring trust, in the systems we used to moderate and trust in people behind them.

There's a few bits and pieces further down where people are saying, look, if we are gonna start on banning people, so for example, Mika Epstein makes the point. She used to be very much involved in the WordPress community and especially on the plugin review team and things like that. Can we make sure essentially that we don't bring everybody back because some people were probably banned for what anybody would view to be reasonable reason.

So let's not just undo with a big tidal wave of, okay, everybody's welcome back. can that be a thing? So a formal appeals process, updated guidelines for Slack and rotating moderators and enforcers appears to be there. The knob of that. I've spoken for far too long, but I thought that was important.

Any thoughts on that over to you guys? Yeah. We're all going jump in and say lots of things for you, Nathan, please. No, I will. Actually, I will say one thing. I rea I know Ray is a, really good journalist and he is, and it's really nice to see professional journalism, but because of that article as it's written, is Mary Hubbard says this, Mary Hubbard's doing.

[00:17:36] Tim Nash: and one person can't rebuild a community. one, one person can't rebuild a community. It needs to be the community rebuilding the trust inside of itself. And so I, and I think that is happening, but if we start labeling it as Mary's doing this, Mary's doing this, Mary's doing this, Mary's doing this.

And then she just becomes the focal point for when it all breaks down. We end up in a very similar situation to what we had previously where people had an awful lot of stuff piled on top of them and then were blamed for when everything went wrong. So do you know that's be more spreading out of, that's really curious.

[00:18:15] Nathan Wrigley: 'cause I hadn't paused it that way at all. But now that you say it, that makes per, that makes perfect sense. it, can't be the job of this one individual. What do you think about the idea though of some things where there's a systemic change and obviously she probably has more levers to pull than let's say me or you.

So for example, I don't know, setting something up in order to rotate community leads or setting something up to moderate WordPress, slack. I presume she's got her handle on more levers than somebody like me. So maybe there's something in it there. What do you think I. No. maybe, but maybe I, just feel putting the responsibility on her doesn't seem Yeah.

[00:18:56] Tim Nash: A, a fair way to describe it in, in, in one article. That's, and it was more about how the article presented than it was about Okay. Yeah. What's going on? Okay. Picture, I have a few thoughts. I will limit my output, but just because I was banned for a long time because of an emoji, so of course the mention of that.

[00:19:17] Piccia Neri: Oh, you, is that really? yeah. I don't, I was one and I think maybe was the, it wasn't a pleasant one. Maybe it was a vomiting one. Oh. So not very nice, but it was the first time that I ever had any reaction to all that was going on. And the reason for that is, was because something. That I really felt was very wrong to say in the, community Slack was sad.

So I'm not saying that it was nice, but it's when when I read the article, what it slightly sounded to me was like, let's blame the emoji and not the reason why people put the emoji. Okay. Because maybe I was upset, maybe, and I wasn't the only one. And lots of people were, were abandoned.

And I, do agree though. I do agree that some emojis are just, but then again, we have to be able to say something, express something without, fearing retaliation. 'cause that's not quite a democracy. Democracy is it? and it seemed altogether excessive to be banned for a, for an emoji. Yeah. So that's how I felt about when I heard about that, because it's just the way it's put, it sounds People went, were nasty and they put nasty emojis, which is true, but maybe there was a bit of a point to our reaction. It could be that, that they were provoked for weeks and weeks and weeks until I expressed an opinion. When was this? What year was this and has it got anything to do with the recent like last yeah, totally.

[00:20:51] Nathan Wrigley: It was after, I can say what, it was a post about basically promoting private hosting services on the make WordPress slack. Okay. So you, yeah, I felt was really, wrong. And I expressed my opinion 'cause I was there and I, did it. I'm not saying that it's nice. No, it wasn't nice, but at the same time that wasn't nice either.

[00:21:18] Piccia Neri: So it's a tough balance, realize that. But presumably that's not blame emojis. Presumably somebody has access to what range of, emojis of deployable. On the, on any Slack instance, I don't actually know if that's true, but I imagine if I brand, was there ever a guideline? there was, you could only edit, add, adding in emojis.

[00:21:40] Tim Nash: The core ones are still there. Oh, okay. So because they're part of your operations. So even the incendiary ones are gonna be there all the time. Okay. It's interesting, I definitely saw this article more as a kind of, putting the, putting some kind of foot forward and saying, okay, there is something to address here.

[00:21:56] Nathan Wrigley: And I really didn't pause it like you did, Tim. But now that you've said it that way, I understand totally what you mean. That makes perfect sense. I'm just, yeah. is my sound okay? I'm just, yeah, you're perfect. Sorry. Keep going. so it's really difficult because neither side, both sides have feelings, when things like that.

[00:22:15] Tammie Lister: But all I can say is as someone that has said a comment and then had emojis said it in a completely different situation and completely different thing, it. It sucks to have that. It does. I agree. I know it's heart with both. But that we get to a position to do that is also not good. So I think when we've, when communication lines to broken down to when we're throwing emojis or when we are in that situation, when someone feels that they have to use an emoji, I.

as the only way to communicate, that's also not good. So for me, guidelines are great. as someone that can't use social media 'cause I get shouted at or can do certain things sometimes because, yeah, it's like hard on, on, people, for joining in some conversations in certain pla in certain areas.

there is some really interesting studies done on this. back in the day when Facebook were doing the emo emotions and then Yeah. Yeah. They didn't do thumbs up and thumbs down for very reason like thumbs Yeah. Thumbs down sucks to get as a human being. There's, so that's the best word that I can use to describe it.

if you have ever said a comment on an issue or something and thought you were completely in the right and been ripped into for one of a less term. It hurts. It really does hurt when you think you are doing the best that you can do as a contributor. So I think we just have to just be a bit kinder to everybody and think about some of the stresses involved in everything and just get never to that escalation point as a community.

That would be be nice for everybody and then everybody would be less stressed and then everybody would be better in it. One, one thing, oh, sorry. Sorry, Tommy. One, one thing from the article that was really good Yeah. that I'm really hoping they do is line about moderators because Yeah. Yeah. As someone who's moderated and had to sit there and, cool people's heads off and slash when reach the point where I've had to bash some heads as well to make people fall into line. And not in a about, but just for human decency. We're not talking about anything other than you cannot be stop attacking humans.

[00:24:37] Tim Nash: the one thing you cannot do is moderate when you are at the center of that. No. Yeah. Yeah. And it's never a good idea because you are, whether you like it or not, emotionally connected. Yeah. And you can't separate that. And if you can, there's words for that and it's not a good set of words.

And you need to you Yeah. Go for treatment. So you, so sorry, Tim. Go on t Go on Peter. You go. Sorry. Tim, I didn't mean to interrupt. Yeah, absolutely agree with all of that. And Tammy, I agree with you and we had a conversation per to personally at Cloud Fest. Yeah. And I'm not proud of that emoji, but at the same time it has to go both ways.

[00:25:19] Piccia Neri: And I really, it really didn't feel that it did go both ways. Yeah. And only we had no way, no, other agency, nothing. All I could do was an emoji. And it's the only thing that I did because I really shied away for, I didn't say anything on twist, I just avoided the whole thing. And then I was like, this is truly unbearable.

I cannot stand for this. I feel personally affected by this because I used to be with us host, whatever it, and that's all I did. So I completely agree with you, but it has to go both ways. And at the time I. It wasn't going both ways. I think that's the thing. Yeah. If we have these guidelines, then people, yes.

[00:26:01] Tammie Lister: we can get, we, don't ever get to the point where someone does that because they don't feel they have a route. and I am not a person who likes war rules of regulations. 'cause generally I'm like, eh, about things like that. on Gen X, we don't like rules and regulations, but just by a generation.

but. Communities need them. And communities need them for their health and communities need them for the health of their moderators. Communities need them for the health of their selves and just for the protection, their contributors and protection of everybody who's in those spaces. We can think that people aren't, and out we compete that things, that people are absolutely fine and they probably are now, but they aren't gonna be if we don't have some of these guidelines.

So for me, I know we're saying about one person, one person has to make the push of something. One person is like the accelerator or the start of this, and then everybody else has to take it in, into action. that's how I see it. But yeah, we, have to make a start. We have start healing on both sides.

Like that. That's the big one, I think. I completely agree. Just as long as both sides, the rules apply to everyone though, not just one side. That's, I think, essential. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Everyone entirely. Tammy, thank Yeah. I thought this one was the, most impactful one for me, this formal appeals process.

[00:27:24] Nathan Wrigley: 'cause obviously if something like that hasn't existed and you do get a chance to, I'll just read you directly from what Ray said. So I'm presuming she's pausing. Mary Hobar correctly, it says, one of the three things, a formal appeals process. Hobar said that the project currently lacks a consistent way for contributors to appeal bans.

She said she suggested the need for a documented process outlining how appeals are submit submitted, who reviews them, what timelines apply and what criteria are used. You get the feeling if something like that had to been in place may be, maybe something No, Tim, no. it goes back to that.

[00:28:01] Tim Nash: Who reviews them? Oh, yeah. And as long as we, if, as long as you separate yourself and take a step back and not be involved in the moderation, and then you put your faith and trust in the moderators. Yeah. And the moderators come from the community and our humans do. Yeah. And ultimately we just need to remember everybody as a human being.

[00:28:21] Nathan Wrigley: it's so difficult to actually carry this stuff out in the real world though, isn't it? Which is why we, in, in the UK we have this thing called the Ombudsman. And so more or less every industry has this thing, this ombudsman and, they're supposed to be detached, but able and enforceable. in many cases actually not enforceable by law.

they're supposed to be able to take a decision and say, we objectively having looked at it all from both sides, we think this is a bit like a court, if you like. however, I found to my cost that the ombudsman mostly have no teeth. it's interesting. So your point is well made Tim about who?

it does the reviewing, 'cause obviously that could just cause more ire. a hundred percent agree. Says ta. With Tim on the Mary Hubbard interview. I wonder which point you were meaning there, Tcho, but Okay. Thank you. Clearly he means all of it, all the entire, everything that came outta Tim's mouth.

He agree? Yeah. In the future as well, whatever Tim says. there are, here we go. There are there's more info about the process and rotating roles, elsewhere. Do you mean Patricia, or do you mean within this article? Do you mean, I think it's the next link that you've got on your slides. Ah, okay. In which case, I wonder if you mean this one.

and I'll just raise it on the screen here. So I've just linked through to the article, which Mary wrote. It's, quite short actually. and I won't read it all out, but it, is basically the piece which Ray, cribbed in order to, to create her piece. So this is, on make.wordpress.org and the piece is called Restoring Trust while preserving.

Safety. And so you can see, the ideas on there. Okay. That, that fermented quite a lot of discussion. should we knock that one on the head and move on to something else? Yeah. Okay. It's tangential and we've definitely touched this in the past, and it, this is gonna sound a bit self-serving and self-promotional.

I, it really isn't that. forgive me, but I did a podcast interview with, one of the people who actually I didn't know, until I read the, article by Ray that this person was banned in, one of those, 32 or whatever it was, people. I did an interview with Chris Reynolds who works for a company called Pantheon, who I'd heard of but don't really know a lot of, but it was quite a surprise to me that Pantheon, do ha half of their revenue, I'm gonna use that word, I dunno if that's the right word, but half of their websites are made with WordPress and half of the websites that they host are basically made with Drupal.

There's a little bit more to it than that. They've got a few little bits and pieces, but you said it's almost nothing. So half Drupal, half WordPress. And so we had this conversation about how the two communities are. Basically really similar. If you were like an alien landing from outer space and you were just to be plunked into that scenario, you'd, I think on many levels you'd find them di very, similar.

Free open source software, CMS, they've got communities, they've both got events, they've got meet ups, they've got camps, blah, blah, blah. but Chris was drawing out some of the differences and and I think a lot of what Chris was relying on was, DRIs, whose surname I can never get right. But Dre is the person, he's like the Matt Mullenweg, if you like, of of Drupal.

He's the founder. I dunno if he's a co-founder or just the founder. I think he might be the founder, the singular founder, about the different path that he's taken. About whether or not there's some things that WordPress as a community, might learn. So for example, things like there's this pay to play aspect to it.

Like for example, if you wish to be a sponsor at a Drupal Con think Word camp, but in Drupal world, then you have to go through some hoops, some kind of five for the future style hoops. And unless you go through those and objectively prove that you did a certain set of things, then you can't appear on the drupal.org website.

You can't be in person at the events as a sponsor. And, and some of that stuff you might disagree with strongly. Some of it you might think, oh, there's legs in that, but there's a whole load of different things that they do slightly differently. That I wonder if, I wonder if people in the WordPress community are interested in looking at and seeing.

So that's what that podcast was about and it felt like a good place to drop it in. I dunno if anybody wants to comment on that. If not, I'll just move on. I think in general, it's really interesting to compare open source communities. When I, did a few talks at, type three conferences after which the lead, the community lead for type three came was coming to our to work camps and chatting to loads of people to see how the WordPress people were doing it.

[00:33:06] Piccia Neri: And, it was a really interesting experience. Yeah, I think typo three, that's another CMS. I've never used that one, but I, yeah, it's based on PHP as well. It's very big in Germany and in Northern Europe. And they, it's so funny to be like the. What's the word to infiltrate their ranks as a WordPress person?

It was so funny. The things that they would say were, was, basically we were the other one and refer to jokingly, ev almost every other talk had a barb called WordPress. And yeah, it was fun. Yeah, I guess WordPress because of its success does inevitably set itself up as the, but nice.

not nothing asking like really lovely people. Yeah. And they had live, live a live band for the karaoke, which I have since wished to find at any other conference picture. That's it. We've cracked the nut. What we need is live bands. Karaoke. I think that's great. I love that. That's gonna sold. you really actually gotta to rock on the, on a stage with an It was fabulous.

One of Oh, that's so good. Most of fun I've ever had. Oh, I love it. at a conference, go and check it out though. Go and check out the episode. if you've got any curiosity about that. Just, and, also if you do the reading around it, you might be fascinated to see how those different communities do it.

[00:34:29] Nathan Wrigley: One thing that did come out is that WordPress, I think, captured this 43% got really, big for something that Drupal never allowed itself to happen. And that is commercial plugins. Drupal has never really had this sort of commercial aspect, so But the curious net result of that is that, Let's just use forms as an ex, as an example. In the WordPress space, how many are there? There must be like 40 form solutions. There are some which are very popular. Some which, probably have a few hundred, but there's loads of them and many of them will have a commercial basis. we have Mark West Guard on from Ws form.

Often that's what he does for a living in Drupal. They have this thing where somebody many, years back built a module they call it. And rather than everybody sort of building rivals to that one, the Drupal philosophy is, let's just make that one better. So we'll spend our time and it's called web form.

As it happens, let's make web form better, but you can't turn a profit off the back of it. I dunno how you invest that time. You've gotta obviously do it on a much more philanthropic basis, but it does mean that where in Drupal there's lots of chance for opportunity and profit and all of that, in Drupal, much less But I think it may be, I don't know, it combines the community around these single entities, the forms thing and the views thing and the whatever thing, which is an interesting take as well. But yeah, anyway, that came out of it as well. Anything to say before we move on? No. Yeah, no. I was just gonna say that, both Typo three and Drupal are ever so slightly older than WordPress.

[00:36:08] Tim Nash: Oh. Both of them have had their little drama moments earlier on. Particularly in Drupal's case. they, they their current governance structure came from. Not quite the direct parallels to what we've seen in the WordPress space recently, but very similar sort of the under underlying reasons were very similar.

and they, so they completely gutted their governance model to allow that to happen. And this happens. And pretty much every open source community, at some point that grows to a certain size. It has to decide what it wants to do for itself. you end, you nearly always start off with the person who had the interest, who built the thing, and people come and they, and it's imagine like things just latch latching on the initial person and this is the project getting bigger and bigger and eventually the person right at the start heart of it is going to get crushed if they don't come up with a way to build out a structure that can support it beyond just them. So yeah, that's interesting. 'cause if I go into a shop and I buy, oh, I don't know, like a thousand Casio calculators, I don't feel in any way like I'm part of Casio or I have any capacity to influence what Casio as a company does, even though I've, given them loads of cash and what have you.

[00:37:27] Nathan Wrigley: but in the open source, the minute you've contributed something, it's yours now, right? It's like there's a bit of it, but you're giving. Back to the project, you are not giving back by giving money to custody. no. And exactly. It was a terrible, analogy. But do, you know what I mean?

But the, yeah, but also, okay. Let's say for example that I volunteered at a, a charity shop on the local high Street near me. I wouldn't feel that my, volunteering there would necessarily give me, okay, now we need to change premises, or we need to move things around. I would just see myself as a, I'm going in and doing my hours.

Or, what have you think from, one could argue you shouldn't suggest that the project should move places just because an issue. I'm just gonna, I'm gonna step back from everything I just said. No, but I think you made some really good point about the proportion and about the expectations of contribution.

[00:38:16] Tammie Lister: There's a whole big conversation there, right? And ownership. you put something in, so it is it's yours a little bit, isn't it? There's a little bit of you, which feels like you've got not ownership, but you are wedded to it. You wanna see it succeed more because you've. Put time into it and effort into it.

[00:38:31] Nathan Wrigley: And so you feel bound to it and you want it to succeed and you probably get opinionated about it and Yeah. Gosh. goodness knows. Roll back the clock 50 years prior to the internet. Who could have, even imagined? Conversations like this where there's just this disparate community spread out over the entire globe, all trying to get along all the time.

I suppose human nature tells us that it's never gonna be perfect. But, not to ruin your analogy, Nathan, but I have a friend who worked for a very well known charity and they started as a volunteer in the bookshop, aren't it? And they now run the, distribution. They actually are in charge of distributing aid.

[00:39:11] Tim Nash: Oh, okay. Like Central Africa. Yeah, no, that is really disusing me. They found, they. They were able to gain influence by doing things and building their way up through as a volunteer, and eventually got to a position where there were, someone said, you know what you're doing. Here's some money off you go and do it.

Nice. Nice. So I think everything you've said, perhaps with your model. Yeah. Okay. I take it right. Dear listener. rewind and just delete the last three minutes of nonsense that I just spoke. However, the point was spa, however, wait a sec. we have, somebody called Fat J in the comments. Thank you.

[00:39:52] Nathan Wrigley: Fat J We've got bigger things to worry about. he says AI will save, us from WordPress in three years. There will be no point in using WordPress. AI will make the CMS out the box. we're fine. It's word press with a lower p WordPress with an uppercase P is gonna be fine. Okay.

Typo. and that leads us to the typo three comment. Oh, you see what I did there? I so didn't see that. That was really penty. Yeah. Okay. Typo three has had almost the same drama years ago. Okay. So maybe it's just part of a CMS landscape, if you're in business or just open source in general.

Yeah. Open source. you pick a large open source pro. Everything from Apache page to B Server all the way through. You pick any of the open source projects if you get to a certain size. If you've only got this core nut of leadership that is just one person they get, they will feel the weight of the project.

[00:40:52] Tim Nash: Yeah. Something has to give. Yeah, You have governance and there's also a comment about the rules and regulations apply to everyone. Absolutely. I think by them being clear. then we start doing that and I think everybody goes so stressed. I think that's the thing, like to make sure that everybody comes out of this calmly.

[00:41:15] Tammie Lister: I think that, at least that's my own personal intention. I'm with, Tim that this impacts everybody. and to take a step back and then define it so that it applies to everybody fairly right. So this is Tcho. Hello Tacho. He's often on the show. Tacho, he says yes. So he, is coming to Tammy.

[00:41:37] Nathan Wrigley: yes, we need rules and regulations to ensure safety and those rules need to apply to, everybody, I guess is emphasized the word, everybody in the ecosystem for them to work. And, there was something else again, from Tacho. This is going back a moment or two, rotation already exists. So this is rotation, that we were talking about with Mary Hubbard offering that as an option, team reps are voted in.

Every year. Yeah. I wonder if that, I wonder if there's like a cadence difference there. I wonder if it's more like you get a month in that role, or two months, or I wonder if it's frequency that was being imagined there. I don't know. so Patricia, I, never thought I'd say the words Fat J but there you go.

hello. It's Fat J She's replying to, they now have proper governance, and I'm guessing that's in response to the typo three comment. again, I don't know about that. And then nomad skateboarding. Hello. There are expectations because the efforts aren't usually altruistic on our side. Most of our community we engage with is dollars first.

and it's truncated on the screen, but it goes on say altruism is a ways down the reasoning list, opposing values. And this is I think something that may be. Some of those other communities don't have to face quite so much like the Drupal community for the reasons we said about every, there being much less of a commercial side to it.

Perhaps there is less of a conflict between the, the, the money and the altruism, although, sure, but correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I remember at least type of three, I really dunno about Drupal. They, the contributors get paid. Oh, do they? There's no free contribution. So there's less stress for that reason as well, as far as I know.

[00:43:25] Piccia Neri: And while they didn't pay for me to give the talk, but they paid for everything I was paid, the trip was paid for, the hotel was paid for, my food was paid for. So it's a little bit different in that sense. as far as I know, as far as it was a few years ago, that's the way it was. I think on the Drupal side, it's very, it's got real broad parallels with, WordPress in that there's this overall arching sort of organization, it's called Acquia.

[00:43:52] Nathan Wrigley: So you could basically substitute automatic for Acquia. I think I haven't dug into the weeds of that, but in terms of the software development, I think most of it is, is voluntary. Contributions. I don't think there's a direct route to being paid unless you're seconded by somebody like Acquia or Pantheon or whatever it might be.

I, I don't actually a hundred percent know that, but I feel like taco's given us some in taco's. Comment. Oh, Taco's. Just like basically here. Thank you. Tacho. Drupal's public recognition system is light years ahead of WordPress. Let me just pause that. Drupal's Public recognition system. Oh. So like you get some merit for doing a thing.

You get recognized for something that you did. the way they measure contributions is just, and again, emphasizing so much better. Yeah. That was something that came out of the, the thing, it's like a badge of honor kind of thing. If you do a thing, you get a thing to show that you. you did that thing, but I don't know, apart from the sponsorship side where you get to appear at Drupal cons and things, I don't know what you would get out the other side.

I don't even, wouldn't that get you more exposure to get you more contracts? Wouldn't that get you more of Yeah. Tim's nodding. So that's what it does. That's a really virtuous cycle, isn't it? Is there any downside to that where if you contribute, you get recognition on the official channel so you get more work so you get more recognition?

So Drupal from my understanding, and certainly historically when I was involved in the area, ha is obviously aimed. It was never aimed at Enterprise, but it was picked up by Enterprise. Yeah. Quite early on the, it's safe to say Drupal is not the most user-friendly, even though they've made massive years, but it's, historically not been very user-friendly.

[00:45:41] Tim Nash: And so you need a quite a lot of knowledge to get started in push through. So that gives them, the, people are building these enterprise sites. They tend to ha they coalesce around several large agencies and then there is a much more active contractor space, but like a traditional contractor space.

So I've worked in places where there were 10, 12 contractors on day rates working on enterprise stuff, and they moved from a company to company doing that sort of contracting. Those people in particular, they're absolutely incentivized to contribute back in. 'cause this is how they get into that route.

Okay. They're also benefiting from the fact that they're working on Project A. What you are getting is a more traditional, in some ways open source. Whereas for us, we, like you have people who we, sponsor like Tammy, you sponsor Tammy to work directly on Word WordPress call, whereas they're more likely to be submitting issues or tickets or code in for the thing that they are interested in rather than looking for sponsorship more where more broadly, or they've got a project, they found a problem, they go and fix it within that project, and they're moving on and because they're moving around, they, it, they still picking up all of these buggers and features and it's all getting fed back, which is a very nice way to do it.

And it would be lovely to see that happening more in the WordPress space. But Drupal is geared for that. Drupal truly, they've got a very good way for you to, in terms of issuing from reporting a bug through to committing code, through to getting it reviewed. They have a really good process for triaging first bugs.

If you turn up and say, I, I want to do something and I want help, it's very easy to have gone from that to have something helping put something into Drupal WordPress isn't as easy and getting, if you have, if you find a problem that is your nitpick. It is not about fixing it. You can fix the problem.

Getting that into WordPress core and getting it out the other side can often, it might take years depending on whether it was somebody's particular project or if it's not a focus, it could take a very long time and we just end up with people just not wanting to go that route. So to counter that, so we have momentum, we end up with sponsoring people and saying, okay, let's have people who are working on WordPress core.

Per, and companies who have nitpicks can then say, I'm gonna sponsor someone and hope that I can through them, get my pro my thing through. so it's a slightly different model and setup and they're very, they've got pros and cons to both. But yeah, obviously from my side being that sort of altruistic route that Drupal goes down and I look at that quite often and go, I wish we had more of that.

[00:48:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, because everything that you just said, I'm, it's just passing through my head that first time. And it sounds like the, just the way that my head's grab, grabbing it, it sounds like that altruistic model, that kind of feedback loop that you get of, you do some work so you get some recognition so you do more work, so you get more recognition on the face of it.

That sounds brilliant, doesn't it? But then if you play that, you can imagine two or three years in. You might have this like inner circle of people who do all the work and so get all the new work. And so they do all, and there also is a part of it that you've gotta surface what work needs to get done, right?

[00:49:13] Tammie Lister: So you can just have people turn up and go, I found a spoon. I wanna fix the spoon. you basically need the spoons that need to be fixed highlighted. that's a weird analogy, but No, I like it. But the. I'm sure we can break it. but that the answer. So I know this guy who had a spoon.

the whole, the themes with all these models is they have to adapt depending on the community that they're with. So contribution models. So if we were to adapt completely the Drupal model, it wouldn't work for us because we are a different community and that is absolutely amazing. But it means that we look at all these different, so spoiler contribution models are something that I'm really curious about.

but it's not just looking at Drupal like Linux, this giant projects. We have a lot to learn from those. They've been for a long time sustaining some really complex systems as well. They have very different models. software has very different models as well. So many different, types of open source have been done.

But a lot of it comes down to highlighting the projects. So a lot of contributors that we have now who are doing sponsorship, for example, they are going in areas that need it in the project because they've been around for such a long time and they identify that those areas need it 'cause of their core committers or they, just know, but that doesn't scale for newer people who are coming.

So it's about highlighting those areas. And then there's lots of like system things that need to be done as well as, so the answer is it's not that easy, but the answer is we are slowly as a project gonna be having to do all of this to change. It's all about. It's all very well and good having rules and regulations on how to behave, but we also need a system in place for how to also fix our, plumbing as well.

[00:51:07] Nathan Wrigley: I have, some thoughts on this. So one of the things that came out of what Chris said was that, and again, if memory serves, I think that Acquia and I could be wrong, but I think it's acqui, so think automatic. I think he said that they decide what the goals might be and so when somebody comes in, it's very clear to Signpost them to look if you've got hours, that's the thing that we need handling to drive the project forward. So I thought that was curious. Yeah. The other thing which is curious is they just don't face this 43% of the web problem. This just massive user base. it's much more, the, numbers are just significantly less.

So there's, you put a thousand people in a room, there'll be a thousand different talking points. You put a million people in a room, there'll be a million. And it's that basically. But the other thing is you mentioned the Linux Foundation and the success that they've had. I really don't know anything about that.

And I'm gonna make a few points, which could be just massively incorrect. It feels like the Linux user base is probably fairly technical and driven in a certain direction, whereas the WordPress user base, it feels like there's just. Real non-technical pit, and I'm getting shaking of the head. So the reason I'm shaking my head is I actually started out, back in the day on Okay.

[00:52:24] Tammie Lister: Aging myself, IRC Oh yeah, but that was like, I was dabbling in this kind of like computery stuff and I was really curious. And I did ILC support for Linux and that was like one of my first exposures to community, good or bad. But that was one of my first exposures to a lot of this. and they're not considered technical.

They wouldn't be considered that, way. They, get very technical, very quickly, people who are in there, but. It's generally either people who can't afford systems back in the day. Oh yeah. Who, were just, and I'm also talking quite historic. Yeah. Bear in mind. But also people who are maybe in spaces where they have Linux boxes, which they have more access to.

And Tim was also shaken sense, so I feel a bit backed up here. No, you probably, yeah. Fair play. Yep. gonna say the, if you think of, the Linux desktop and the Linux server as completely different things. So when you're thinking about server infrastructure, so like things that powering websites, water sensors, all of that stuff that's technical and geeky.

[00:53:29] Tim Nash: When you think of the Linux desktop, there is like a branch of it that's super geeky. If you are an arch user or a n user, they're the sort of people who feel that they have to come out and tell you about it. and we'll tell you in immense detail, but the vast, majority of the Linux desktop ecosystem are Chromebooks.

Interesting. And they're in schools. Yeah, they're in, they're low cost, low performing computers that are in all sorts of places, but also your Android device is a Linux system that is the least technically. Bunch of people, everybody who has a phone, who's got an Android is running a Linux system on there.

It's in devices, it's all over the place. So it's not really fair to say that the people using it aren't technical. But there is something to be said that the Linux found. The people who are interested in the governance side of it might. Okay. Yeah. Slightly more technical. There is also a lot more corporates, a larger corporate corporates behind some of the aspects of the Linux Foundation.

It really does get, and it also depends which distribution you're talking about. Okay. And which area you're in. yeah. So I've moved around in different Lin, I'm not involved anymore in the Lin committee. One community is enough for me, often paid into do, and then it just took, but once I do not have the bad word.

[00:54:49] Tammie Lister: but for good example, I was involved in Susie Linux boat back in the day. and that had a very different governance model, whoever the governance. and so that is the idea. One community does not fit and one governance model does not generally fit. Yes, there are. There's underpinning of open source.

There's underpinning principles throughout everything, but everybody should learn from everybody and distill down to what works and is fair for everybody in that system and works for the businesses and products to thrive in that system. And I think that's the tangent what grows businesses and products in our system.

And what doesn't. So what Drupal does grows products in this, in their system, but what it grows it in our system is gonna be completely different. just on the Drupal front, watch this space, they've got this really interesting thing called Drupal CMS, which they've just launched. Which I think, is quite fascinating if I won't go into it.

[00:55:44] Nathan Wrigley: But it's just a different take on their platform made easier, let's just say that. so couple of comments. First thing, tacho misheard what you said when you said, we need more live bands, and he heard bands like BANS, he was like, no, not more. But yeah, we do need more live bands. And then Nomad Skateboarding, we had this conversation about badges, Drupal recognition at the community summit.

Oh, okay. So here's the problem. Encapsulated perfectly. Half wanted more rewards, half saw wanting recognition as opposed to the spirit of contributing. So there in a nutshell, is the problem. half the community want one thing, half, maybe don't. okay, let's, let's see what else he's got. Say, based on profession, almost 40% of Linux users are software developers followed by administrators or IT professionals, 30%.

and students learning technology related subjects is 15%. And I guess I'm not sure where those statistics came from, but yeah, tell us a bit. Yeah, I'd be curious 'cause, as they, Chromebooks outsell an awful, a lot of, computers to the point that they're currently outselling. a lot of the Windows PCs at the moment and the steam deck.

[00:56:59] Tim Nash: Is one of the fastest selling, gaming console devices and again, is a full Linux system on there. And it's so hackable. It is so fun to hack as well. You love it. All that, all new emulator stuff. Oh, so good. Are you the kind of person that when you get a device you just get the screwdriver out straight away?

[00:57:16] Nathan Wrigley: It's what the heck do you I no. I don't get a screwdriver. I go into let have a screwdriver anymore. It's bad. Okay. I feel that we've probably done that one. So let's move on to something else. We're gonna miss out a bunch of stories 'cause we Oh, was somebody else. Just one, one quick thing. Of course.

[00:57:33] Piccia Neri: How do we actually know about, half the people maybe want this or have the people not, but how do we know? When do we have No, to be fair, a, a. Yeah, we don't know. Basically, you can't say I community friend go well in my book. Yeah. Don't talk about referendum. Can we not have one? I don't. No, of course not.

[00:57:53] Nathan Wrigley: She's totally offend the whole, oh, we're all in a bad move now. sorry. As a European. Okay, so yeah, there's no platform. Yeah. Platform to express. Anyway, carry on. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Okay. you've drawn out maybe, so to answer your question though, normally what would happen?

[00:58:14] Tammie Lister: I think the fact from that is no proposal was made from the community summit. What generally will happen is a proposal will happen on the mate blog and then, like decision will happen. So what will happen with a lot of this stuff is proposals will be made and then voices will be added, and then a decision will be made.

[00:58:35] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Okay, the next thing, this is gonna cheer you right off all the listeners. So I'm gonna skip a few bits 'cause we're definitely gonna run outta time if we don't on the face of it, this sounds really good. I'm just gonna read the headline again. It's the repository. So it's reporting from Ray, wordpress.org pub, plugin submission surge 87%.

And then if you get that far into the title, you're thinking, oh great, everything's going, big guns for WordPress. Then you finish the title. surge 87% Amid Rise in AI Tools. Now, who could have seen this one coming? Almost everybody. This on the face of it, it sounds great, right? Loads a new plugins, everybody's, it's democratized, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But, I guess there's a flip side to this and Ray's trying to draw that out a little bit. obviously a surge in plugins is brilliant, but if those plugins are being turned around. a credible sounding title, and it goes to the.org repo, and it turns out that somebody has just made a piece of software that ai.

Now, obviously I'm making sort of various assumptions. I'm gonna use the use case of somebody like me who is not capable at coding a WordPress plugin. But if I was to manage to put that together with an AI and submit it to the repository, I then I guess, join the queue like everybody else. But I'm not sure that my submission.

Probably deserves its place in that queue. And again, I'm definitely treading on some landmines here. but After the submission process had been gone through and my, my plugin was deemed to have this error and that error, and it was clearly done by ai, at that point you could say maybe you didn't deserve your place in the queue, if And the problem appears to be that there is this surge, and it's therefore consuming quite a bit of time. And the concern is also that inexperienced developers, again, I'll use me as an example if it gets rejected, and then all I do is then go and ask the AI to fix the problems that the, that the team have said need fixing.

And then I just resubmit it. Maybe there's a little bit of danger here of consuming uptime that in the past we didn't need to worry about. So on the face of it, 87% said Sounds good. On the negative side, maybe we're just gonna have this deluge of plugins that really. Aren't up to snuff. I don't know what we think about that.

It's just curious. The reality is, yes, you can sit down and you can make endless amounts of plugins in a weekend. You, tell writing a prompt saying, use the crate block plugin, as a whatever, using your cursor rules and set it up and you can way above what you could create in your dreams. And, I do it, but I'm not gonna put them into the repo.

[01:01:26] Tammie Lister: And I think this is up to the individual, what they put into the repo. For me. If I was gonna put something into the repository that would be, something I was gonna maintain and something that I thought was gonna be useful to more than just my. I'm just wonder what happens if I just poke this bit. We poke this bit and see what, happens in ai, which is generally what I'm doing when I'm just trying to experiment.

And I did like way too many over the weekend making into blocks and just seeing what could happen. and some of them it's had, I'm not sending them in, but the thing is, some of them have, JavaScripts and they have security. I'm not gonna send them in because I don't know the implications from security, from performance.

And yes, I can run the check plugin and yes, all of them do pass the check plugin, but that does still does not mean I'm gonna send them in because what passes today does not mean it's gonna pass tomorrow because I don't know what every line of code does. I can learn what every line of code does.

That's the whole point about my experiments and what I'm learning. But it is not necessarily a good thing to have lots, but it's good that people are experimenting. So I think it's a fine line between the amount, but if you cannot respond to it without ai, you probably need to have a bit of a check about sending something.

'cause you can't support it without ai. that's maybe where it becomes a problem. Yeah, I think it, we're not in a unique space, are we? flooding landscape with stuff. it's just the reality. The year 2025, Yeah. AI is flooding all landscapes with stuff, and, AI isn't flooding landscapes with, stuff I'm going to do.

Humans are flooding with ai, and I think that's the correction because AI isn't just doing it. We are being the obnoxious rubbish makers. Yes. Yeah, Yes. Yeah. but this is the thing. We are making the rubbish, we're telling AI to make the rubbish, not ai making the rubbish. yeah. But any, anyway, the problem I think, is one of our boots on the ground, if and obviously the, team.

[01:03:42] Nathan Wrigley: A few years ago, actually not that long ago, maybe 18 months ago, we had this whole kind of 90 day waiting period, and there were a thousand plus plugins and a lot of automation got driven into that system. And now we're down to, we were down to a week wait, and basically nothing in the queue. So you were waiting for people to immediately hop onto It, it would be a shame. if this just, if 10,000 start to go in a week and how do you even, how do even get, there's a bigger problem than that. If you have 70 plugins that do the same thing, how do you know which plugin is actually gonna be any good? Because they all have beautiful pictures.

[01:04:23] Tammie Lister: They all look like they do the same thing. And then you have, we are back to the, you have to try every single one on. and that is also the problem. and it's not that we shouldn't have variety 'cause we absolutely should, and experiments are amazing and plugins are amazing and I want more blocks and I want more experiments.

But I want ones that have been carefully thought out and planned. Not ones that have just been put up just because. I didn't know and I just wanted to like, put a stake in the ground. Yeah, like thoughtful ones. Yeah. I think, and I'm not assuming that no one's thinking, but, Yeah. an 87% increase is quite, that's quite a jump, isn't it?

[01:05:02] Nathan Wrigley: You've gotta imagine that someone isn't spur. Maybe a couple of them weren't as thoughtful as they should be. Like, yeah, there you go. I, dunno what the problem is. It seems like a society wide problem. Definitely not limit. Limited. I think you know, the phrase a puppies not for Christmas. a plugin submission to wordpress.org isn't for Christmas either.

No. I dunno what that means, but I like it. It sounds good. it means that you are responsible for it. Okay. Okay? The second you put it in and you are, there is a difference between, I'm gonna shove this up on GitHub with a note that says, use it, don't use it. I don't care if you raise an issue. I might go and look at it.

[01:05:41] Tim Nash: There is an assumption, it's a wrong assumption, but bearing in mind that wordpress.org is a very visible distribution of a polished thing to end users. If someone goes onto my GitHub and finds one of my plugins, I. Yeah, the, contract's sort of on there isn't like a contract. Yeah. I see. Even a, so even a social contract between me and them, they're taking some code.

They're getting what they're getting. They raise an issue. They know how that goes. I might respond, I might not. But on WordPress org, there's an assumption from an end user that this thing has gone through some rigorous testing, which I'll be honest, it hasn't gone through rigorous testing. It's gone through a plugin review.

There is a huge misunderstanding. Then think that it's gone through a, like a manual code review. The plugins aren't going through manual code reviews. They are going through cursory reviews, get the main gotchas pass through. But you are responsible then, and it's going on other people's sites. So do you want to be the person who took down somebody's site because of a bug you put in?

Now you could be the sort of person that says, I don't care. Then probably submitting to wordpress.org isn't for you. If you want to shiny badge from on wordpress.org, there are other ways to get the shiny badges, but if you do care, then you've gotta think about, okay, I have to go through far more than what my AI just told me.

I've gotta think about things much more wider things, and AI might be writing the code, but it's not thinking about necessarily long-term maintenance practices. It's not thinking about the fact that every WordPress release, you're going to have to retest it. It's not building a test bed for you to do this.

It's not putting all this ti this extra time in. So a word, a WordPress plugin on wordpress.org is not just a responsibility, but it's a bunch of work. So you've gotta be under decide whether or not you actually want to do that work. And for some people, they want to contribute back through their plugin, and that's fantastic.

For some people, it's a means to promote their other thing. For some people, it is literally just a wrapper to their paid service and guru at them. that's very frustrating if you find the perfect plugin to find a SA product. But in all of these cases, they've got a valid use case. If you are putting it up there because it's a good place to store code, don't do that.

Put it on GitHub or GitLab or your Git instance somewhere else. so yeah. can I respond to the comment that says about using AI for code? Because I use AI for code. and I'm not at all saying that I loved using AI for code. It's about the final product that you release. And I think that's the thing.

[01:08:22] Tammie Lister: I will use digital art. I will use AI for code. I actually use AI for my art as well, and I'm more than happy in doing that. But it's about what I release. I still test the thing that I release. I don't just go, eh, cursor did it good enough, eh, windsurf did it good enough. And I use both. I am.

Also running it through usability testing and running it through tests at the end. And it, and I've got tests set up for my code as well, and I have regression testing set up to make sure that I don't do sies on my sites. You still have testing and you still have things, put in, even if the code is from ai, doesn't mean it's, magically better because AI did it.

It just, it's just helping me. Like I'm a dyslexic and I use Grammarly, but Grammarly helps me to be able to do grammar. AI helps me to be able to do code. Doesn't mean that it's any different. It's, a tool that I'm using to enable me. I'll just read the entire comment. So fact J thank you. totally disagree.

[01:09:25] Nathan Wrigley: I dunno at what point that dropped in, so I don't know the specifics of what the disagree is, but anyway, it's like saying you can't use a PC for art without drawing by hand claiming coding with a, oh, it's just jumped on my screen claiming ai. sorry. Claiming coding with AI isn't valid. It's like saying years ago you couldn't use Illustrator unless you hand drew, but I understand the other problems.

Yeah. For me, all of those points are mute. It's, moot. Rather, it's more about the flooding, the landscape problem. if we have a system like ai, if AI is able to, I don't know, let's just imagine a crazy scenario. Let's just imagine that at some point we are getting a hundred thousand WordPress plugin submissions a week.

So the repository, then that repository is totally unusable, from the point of view of new submissions, you can't wade through that. And there's that. I can imagine that's possible if somebody set their mind to it. I imagine that, a bunch of people did it, it probably is possible to do that.

so that's the problem that I'm worried about. And if there is a spike because of AI coding, I don't know what guardrails you put up to prevent that happening. I'm gonna use another analogy. Dreadful though. It will end up being, I'm sure, in order to get to see the doctors in the uk, if you wanna go to the hospital, there are certain things that you have to do to get through the door.

You can't just rock up in most cases and see a surgeon. You have to go through testing and blah, blah, blah. And I don't know if we have to have something like that. This might not be a problem. Maybe by this time next week this will have gone away and it'll have gone down 87%, but it feels like it's only gonna go north of here.

so yeah, let's, Is there any other things? Peach, did you want to chip in? yeah, I replied there just because I do see the part and also agree completely with Tammy, but also it is true. You totally can be, use Illustrator. I do computer art without sketching, but it's gonna be you, would be much better if you did sketch and it would be much easier as well.

[01:11:29] Piccia Neri: So I just, it, I understand that much better than the coding. So I just felt like I had to say it. That's it. I am, I, think I found the whole AI thing quite entertaining in the years 20 22, 23 and 24. And now there are bits of it which are really starting to worry me, not about the outputs or anything like that.

[01:11:52] Nathan Wrigley: It, is just this flooding the landscape thing that, that part of it is starting to bother me a little bit. That's the human bit, not the AI though. yeah, completely. possibly that. What do. I guess it's the scale, at which it enables humans to, to do things. If you go back 25 years, PHP was just starting off on the scene.

[01:12:13] Tim Nash: it's been around for a little bit. Before that you had like CMSs like, PHP Nuke, which were very simplistic, and people started hacking around and coding them. And then so suddenly you had typo free coming along, and then you had Drupal coming along, and then there was this explosions of everybody building their own CMSs and playing.

And so the programming languages got more fancy and more things got put on, and the web could start doing things. So then Macromedia Flash was around and everybody was downloading these things, and then Java wrap appeared and it was a complete utter mess. And we eventually, we went, eh, no, we don't want all this Wiped it all back.

Now we live in a world with JavaScript and CSS and they can do amazing and powerful things. We, these waves and things that happen all the way through, you give humans a bunch of tools, they're going to use it. Yeah. Within the ai, yeah, you're going to use it. I guess we shouldn't stop that. No, I suppose at, the base, what I'm thinking is there won't be enough people to consume the stuff that's put out, and I guess at that point we, there's a re there's, it somehow gets redressed because, what would be the point in making 10,000 plugins if you discover at the end of that enterprise that nobody's downloaded, even one of them ever, you would then rethink, wouldn't you?

[01:13:28] Nathan Wrigley: You'd be like, I'm not doing that silliness again. So I suppose there's some dressing and, I think that we're just in that moment of AI's such entertaining, fun, it would appear that just during the last week, stuff that came out of Google IO is really credible now really, credible at making video.

So video has taken a real. Upswing in just the last month or two months. And will we be inundated with a load of videos that nobody can watch? Probably no idea. But will people who are making videos probably reign in their expectations of what humanity as a whole can consume? Yeah, certainly.

'cause you're not gonna keep making videos if nobody's watching them. But we haven't, we're at the point where it's just too exciting not to play. it's also a human thing, right? Like one, we make messy stuff to move forward. Yeah. And we make a lot of messy stuff to move forward. Like even back in like prehistoric day, we like, we made like things outta mud.

[01:14:26] Tammie Lister: To move forward. and that's what we do. Like any, as Tim you were saying, like anything we've got around us, we like try and shape it into things to try and find the limits of the space and the tools that we have. That's, what we've done. And then that's how we push, like in the physical and in the, what the problem is, we just have, we are in the digital space.

So if you are not in this digital space, you wouldn't see all this AI stuff piling up around you. Like we are in this space where we are just seeing it all pile up around us all the time. Oh, okay. And we're like seeing like the sheer mountains of it. Unless you're like turning into it, then you're not.

But we, what we probably have to do is tune into the good and the bad of it. And we probably have to have more fielders. Like before you were just paying attention to all AI right now, maybe refine that a little bit. Yeah. Because all AI will be a bit much for you. Yeah. So try and. yeah, that's it.

[01:15:23] Nathan Wrigley: I, get you. That makes sense. I, watch a YouTube channel that does like the AI news, and I remember a year ago his, his YouTube videos were 10 minutes long and came out once a week. They now are 45 minutes to an hour long and three times a week. Oh, I've stopped watching his YouTube channel. Not in the landscape. It's not described, but honestly, I can't keep up with it, so I might dip in and out, but I think that really demonstrates the exponential growth in tools and things. And a lot of these tools are built on other, on models underneath, and they're, you can often run down, but it's gonna grow, it's gonna get wilder, and we're gonna get more plugins, but that doesn't stop humans from having responsibility for the actions that they take.

[01:16:07] Tim Nash: And if we grind that conversation right the way back to all of these plugins were being put in. Yeah. I'm not worried about the people generating the plugins. I'm wondering why did they submit them? What did they, What did they want from that and, Yeah. How can plug final, yeah. Yeah.

How, can we maybe better help them if that wasn't the, if they were putting it there because they just wanted a space to upload their plugin for some reason. Maybe we need better education on other schooling in other places because maybe the plugin repository wasn't the right place. Or maybe people genuinely think they're, that this, they do want to put these things on because they're feeling empowered by the AI tools, which is fantastic.

Because one of the best things and worst things about WordPress is that I, I do code reviews for a living and I, I've reviewed code from a literal priest, a surgeon, and professional developers. The priest and the surgeon are quite often have the nicer and better code. Certainly the more code than the development company ever will.

So the fact that the AI can allow anybody to code even is a positive thing. We just need to encourage them down the right path. And that's a good point. I hope that in this. If anything happens that prevents stuff going in, like someone wouldn't get off put, imagine someone's always had this idea for something.

[01:17:37] Tammie Lister: And that's something that I found very, I had these ideas that had been buzzing around my head and I can finally make them real. That's amazing. And if someone did that and they did it with good intent and they finally managed to get this idea that's been bouncing around their head for such a long time, and it's the start of a, maybe they're a single parent and they think this is the start of a business and that was what they were doing or something like that, and they were like, oh my goodness, I'm gonna put on the repo and I'm gonna finally do something.

I don't want that to get lost in all along with the priest and the doctor and the can and the shoot, whatever. I don't want it that to get lost with. All of these are bad. 'cause that's not the ca, they're not bad. There's just a lot of noise. And what we've gotta do is work out what's gonna get maintained, what's gonna be noise for users, what's gonna be good noise or bad noise, and lots of honky noises at the same time.

That was so hysterical. That was just so priceless that you say, talking about there being lots of noise in there. There was just this honky noise in the background. I have a gripe though. honestly it's not fair. Is it the priest, he's got a direct lung to. The creator, definitely gonna write good code.

[01:18:51] Nathan Wrigley: Which, which is AI at this point. Yeah, exactly. But also it's, not anything that we need to worry about. 'cause there's gonna be environmental collapse before we, we have to worry about pitches. That's when we realize, by the way, I'm fine. Suddenly it all got very dark. okay. But it's true though that the classic views of AI has definitely, is definitely, having a serious impact on, climate change and sustaina.

[01:19:19] Piccia Neri: It's not sustainable. That's true. People, just, all those memes that people create because someone did something very. Silly with, chatt and, it's like Bernie, it's let's burn a few miles of forest. It's, yeah. Anyway, sorry. There is also a practical thing. If you are, wordpress.org has not infinite amounts of space, disk space.

[01:19:44] Tim Nash: they, are backed onto large infrastructure provider. But still, if we are storing all this code, that's literally never going to be downloaded by anybody including the offer ever again. Should it really be there? Does it need to be in the cloud? Does it need an SVN repo? Does it need all the bits?

Does it need a forum space? Does it need all that? So there are some. There were other things beyond just the generation as well, that it's worth thinking sustainably about. A lot of that stuff has was it three? I don't remember how many years, how many versions that it becomes like you get that like yellow message and saying it's like outta date.

[01:20:20] Tammie Lister: Yeah. And then maybe we can say they get cutoffs, but we shouldn't have to wait to those. Do you know, this is a problem that I think about quite a lot because I do wonder at what point, no, no matter how clever our technology gets and our storage shrinks, that is to say, the amount of storage we can fit in a physical space, increases so that the space required shrinks the amount of space available expands.

[01:20:46] Nathan Wrigley: I do often think, how long can we keep doing it on earth until we've used up all the available resources just to store stuff like YouTube videos. 'cause YouTube's mental apparently, and, I'm just gonna make up a statistic, but it's adjacent to this. It's something like every minute. A day's worth of video is uploaded, and it might even be less than that, it might be every 10 seconds or whatever it is.

But the point is, it's this, there's this extraordinary running away with technology and I do often wonder at what point do we have to say, we've got no more space. Sorry, there's no more new internet. You've just got the archive.org. That's all we got left. and I dunno when that point will be, but, maybe a I will allow us to reach it ever so soon.

So on that bombshell, let's move on. if you were confused, God, this is gonna sound so banal now. We've had such a, such an interesting philosophical discussion. We're back to blocks and rows and columns and things. I just thought I'd raise this one because if, like me, you are really mightly confused by what rows groups and, columns and things like that do in the Native Block editor, not with your suite of plugins.

I just thought this was a really nice article. I saw it this week. It's, Ask Design blog. and they've got a piece called layout And oh, look at that. You highlights it and the title just completely disappears. That's interesting. it's called layout and design with rows and stack blocks. And it's just a little tutorial with helpful illustrations as to what will happen if you arrange things.

And I really could have done this 'cause I had my intuitions and I got my hardware hammer out. Let's just put it that way. You have any of you got a hardware hammer? You all need a hardware hammer. It's a small hammer. You hold it in your hand and it's made basically of the most compressible foam in the world.

And when you get really frustrated with your hardware, you can just beat the living daylights out of it. And it does No, you can't. Tim, hang on. Let, is zoom into that? I, we got a jar full of squishy things. So what's that hacky say? You just throw that at the machine. Do you? It's a softball thing that it's like you squeeze, it gets squeezed to the point of it extreme.

[01:22:56] Tim Nash: It's, I've got a jar of, it's the joy of the hardware hammer. Yeah. Do you remember, so this goes to Tammy and Tim, sorry, peach. This probably won't land with you. Do, you remember Mallet's? Mallet when you were a kid? Yeah. Tim's nodding. Tim. Timmy Mall. Yeah. Timmy Mallard. It's a bit like that. My hardware as a, as somebody who shares his name, you can imagine the sort of things.

I know he was not somebody you wanted to be associated with anyway. go and check it out if you are, and if you are confused, you are. You should be glad you don't know that reference. It's just not good. this what? Oh, the Tim Mullet one. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. yeah, it really feature, avoid Google it and you'll see the most brightly colored, overly happy individual.

[01:23:43] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Wonder what happened to Timmy Mallard. Now there's there, I think a face showed magic. It's not good. No, the magic roundabout is fantastic. Magic. I know. It's fantastic, but it was totally fantastic. It was clearly done by people on acid, so it sounds like, yeah, no, There's less drugs.

[01:24:05] Piccia Neri: Gimme mullet. I've got it here. Yeah. Okay. No, take that magic roundabout. We've set that well, in an interesting twist, we ended up talking about 1980s tv, shows for children in the uk. There you go. so go and check that article out. I'll link to it in the show notes. Honestly, I think that's probably all we've got time for.

[01:24:25] Nathan Wrigley: I was gonna show you some exciting new things that I caught site of in the block space. I'll just show them quickly. This just gives an illustration for me at least anyway, why I think. Blocks are just such an exciting thing that although everybody's using them, blah, blah, blah, I do think there's a lot of runway still.

Here you go. Just a few things that drop this week. A, new photo block that allows you to, to manipulate your photos in new and interesting ways. A parallax image block with effects. What else have we got? We've got better navigation, which the panel didn't seem to, I think was probably, all that.

I think this is a discussion for when is a block useful and when is a block not? And we don't know. We haven't tried it. Yeah. I think initially when this, you were sharing this, you were saying. what it did is just add styling and for us we could add styling. Yeah. But I think that's the thing, knowing the use case, so when people say the description, something that really just say if you are solving a use case, say in your description that you're solving a particular use case for this and why you're solving it as well.

[01:25:25] Tammie Lister: Yeah. Will really help people. This one, it just marks itself as this plugin is ideal for users who want a quick and effective solution to enhance their site's mobile navigation without delving into custom CSS. So it's definitely not for the panel here who probably love playing with CSS and things like that.

[01:25:40] Nathan Wrigley: Anyway, there's that. And then there was also this, a new one ghost, ghost Lab cycle block light. It just allows you to show a randomized block. so it could be an ad or who knows, whatever, but it just gives me an intuition that blocks their sort of the new hotness and probably will be, for the next period of time.

They hopefully weren't created by ai, or at least they've got human names. That'll be the tell, won't it? If, the plugin is created by XY four pH three, then you know that it, it isn't a human. That's it. Anything else you guys wanna say before we knock it on the head? Crickets. no, I guess that truly is it.

in which case I will bid all of our panel ad. thank you very much to Tim Nash for Oh, thank you, Tim. Especially for, stepping in at the 11th hour. Michelle, if you've been watching this, I dunno if you have or not, but if you have, I hope you're starting to feel better soon. Go and listen to Tim's intro at the beginning.

It was nice. Peach. Thank you very much for joining us. You can go and check out Michelle with Peacher, post status happening when, again, first episode will be on the 12th of June. It's the weekend after. Work on Europe, isn't it? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I will link to whatever I can find. If you've got a link to that picture, will you drop it into our shared show?

As soon as I have it, I, oh yeah. Okay. Absolutely will. If don't then thank you. That's fine. Thank you. Definitely. And of course, finally, thank you to Tammy Lister for joining us as well from Gilden Berg. You can go and check that out. and thank you to you, dear listener for sticking with us right to the very end.

Really appreciate it. We should, I think, is there a reason we wouldn't be back next week? 'cause it worked Camp Europe next. Yeah. oh yeah. It won't be here next week. We're dear. we're, I'm gonna be in, in Basel, Switzerland. So we won't be having a show next week, but hopefully we'll have one the week after that.

He said, hoping that's actually gonna happen. Thank you to you three. Thanks to our audience for watching this week. Pamela, if you wanna stick around and have a little bit of a natter after, I'd appreciate that. That'd be nice. But, we'll see you next time. Time. You gonna do your hands? Oh, we, yeah.

Sorry. We've gotta do the hands. Let's do the hands. no, we don't have to. No, we do. We do have to. We really don't. Tim, you had to remind him. Ah, brilliant. You gotta do the hands. You gotta do the hands. Thank you so much and we will see you next time. Take it easy. Bye. Bye.