This Week in WordPress #336

It is time for this week in WordPress, episode number 336 entitled AI and Fair. It was recorded on Monday, the 16th of June, 2025. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I am joined by three fabulous guests. I'm joined by Remus Dre by Peach and Tim Nash. What do we talk about? it's a WordPress podcast, so we talk about a whole range of things, but the absolute dominant subject this week is a new.

Thing. It's called fair. It's an acronym, and the idea really is that it will make it possible for you not to use the wordpress.org repo in the future. There's loads of technicality and lots behind this story, so we talk about that for a long time. And also dominating. Today we talk about AI and the fact that WordPress now has an AI team.

What does that mean? Where will their endeavors go and what else do we talk about? we talk about Word Camp Europe, and I go off on a bit of a tangent. And my trip that I had around Word Camp Europe, we also talk about some plugins. So for example, there is a new plugin called Fluent Cart, which is a bit of a rival to WooCommerce, and there's a whole bunch of other stuff as well.

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

[00:01:27] Nathan Wrigley: This episode of the WP Builds podcast is brought to you by GoDaddy Pro, the home of manage WordPress hosting that includes free domain, SSL, and 24 7 support. Bundle that with the hub by GoDaddy Pro to unlock more free benefits to manage multiple sites in one place, invoice clients and get 30% of new purchases. Find out more at go.me/wpuilds.

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Good day, good afternoon, good morning, good evening, whatever it is where you are. This is this week in WordPress, episode number 336. We've had a couple of weeks off because Word Camp Europe happened and I, I decided to go and basically nothing's happened in the last two weeks. No, enormous changes to any part of the WordPress project.

see you later. have a good week and, we'll see you next time. No, there's quite a lot to talk about this week and luckily, I'm joined by some intelligent people to talk about it with because honestly, if it was a show with just me. What would happen, really, the world would come to an and thanks M because I, I appre I appreciate the grin.

okay, so who have we got this week? we've got Tim Nash. He's over there. How you doing Tim? I'm doing all right. You sound good. you haven't got a bio, I'm afraid. It just says I do. You just need to refresh. Ah, did refresh. But somebody's overwritten it. In the Shona. I know this happens most weeks that you do it.

Have you written down elsewhere by any chance? What time? What time did you add it, Tim? Yeah. I don't know, like 10 seconds because I added, I know exactly the same time as me. If you add it in, I will refresh it then read it out and I'll come back to you. Okay. I'll hit the update and wipe out peaches. Yeah.

Yeah, that's, we go, oh, no, you're gonna wipe out. Gonna read Mine is fine. okay. Here we go. I see it now. here we go. Here's Tim's, bio. Tim is a professional doom speaker and security person. He helps organizations plan and survive zombie invasions and other apocalyptic events, as well as more mundane stuff.

He's putting together a WordPress security course at. Wait for it. WP Security 1 0 1, that's the numerals.com. WP security one oh one.com. And you can find his various other program Pro projects at God. That's hard to say. TT It's TNA sh tna. So Tim T Nash, basically, but that's hard to pause. Oh, okay.

So go and check it out. Firstly, WP Security is one useful, very short url. Project URL is brilliant, but yeah, there we go. Rubbished instantly by, I didn't mean to rubbish it. You did. I'm so sorry. yeah. I only wish I had a three letter domain name. I haven't got anything as exciting as that. that was Peach.

Now on there. She was, she's joining us again. How are you doing peach? I'm All right. Thank you very much. Nathan Sporting, how are you? Has anyone asked you yet? No, nobody ever asked me, Peter, in all. then how are you, Nathan? No, don't. I'm good. I'm good. Thanks. KU is gonna resate about that.

Yeah, I'm fine actually. Do you know what, if I'm being perfectly honest, I'm not all that good. I feel a little bit under the weather. So what I've bought this time, I'm endorsing the Coca-Cola company this time Sugar. Is the only way I'm going to get through this, in all honesty. there you go. I'm not feeling all that great.

There is so much that is wrong with that decision, but I'll leave it for now 'cause we're here to talk about other things. I'm not gonna do that. I'm actually gonna drink water. That's what I'm, and, and have an apple during the course of this podcast. I've, that's what I'm gonna do.

Thank you very much. Anyway, here's Piccia's bio. Piccia and is a UX and accessible design consultant on projects as a course provider, trainer, 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.

There's no URL in there for me too. rubbish. Have you got a URL you want to say into the, record?

[00:06:38] Piccia Neri: Oh, that is a good point. No, I didn't, I have several.

[00:06:43] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:06:43] Piccia Neri: Maybe. Oh, yeah. No, I do, the, why don't we use the one that I put later on down with the Accessibility Limited series.

Accessibility podcast that I'm doing with Michelle,

[00:06:56] Nathan Wrigley: and what's happened? that is,

[00:06:59] Piccia Neri: that's been wrote overwritten. I think Tim

[00:07:00] Nathan Wrigley: might have erased it. That's great.

[00:07:04] Piccia Neri: I'm sorry, but your system is a bit,

[00:07:06] Nathan Wrigley: it is rubbish. It a bit rubbish. Yes, I know. it's

[00:07:11] Tim Nash: still there, Nathan.

It's in the, is it, let click on it. Steal that. Okay. Let

[00:07:15] Nathan Wrigley: me click on it. Where does it go to Open Link? okay. No, that's a YouTube link that I've got.

[00:07:21] Piccia Neri: It is a YouTube link. because you can just sign up to the event. There's the first, it's a nice and non-personal promoting. It's free and it'll be Michelle and I talking for 10 episodes on, Accessibility.

[00:07:37] Nathan Wrigley: I'll tell you what, we'll come back to that. when we've done re yeah, because I also

[00:07:41] Piccia Neri: have a free, yeah. Anyway, sorry. Let's No, it's alright. Shut up. I'll shut up. Sorry I'm all over the place. I haven't got a u

[00:07:47] Nathan Wrigley: RL for peach, but, REMCOs on the other hand, I'm sure he's got URL at the ready.

Have you three MK

[00:07:54] Remkus de Vries: us?

[00:07:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That's nice and easy. We'll go with that. REMK do. That's actually very cool. That's almost as good as Tim's one. I want NA but I dunno if is a domain that you can actually buy if it ever available, I'll have that. Or ey, I could go for Wrigley. W-R-I-G-L ey. Anyway, who is, Mku he said, scrolling quickly to his buyer.

Mku DeVries is a WordPress performance specialist focused on speed, security, and scalability. As the co-founder of Scan Fully, he helps site owners stay ahead of performance and security issues. He also runs the, within WordPress, which is a newsletter and podcast for those passionate about building better WordPress sites.

And he shares insights on YouTube. It's not a bad podcast in all honesty. there are definitely better ones. This is not it. what's the rogue that you got here? What you usually There's a scan Flee T-shirt, but today you got Rogue.

[00:08:55] Remkus de Vries: Yeah, What Rogue is

[00:08:57] Nathan Wrigley: No, I just wondered if it was your thing.

[00:09:00] Remkus de Vries: No, Oh, I wish,

[00:09:01] Nathan Wrigley: oh, is it a band?

[00:09:03] Remkus de Vries: no. it's, it's an athletic wear, it and gear type of company.

[00:09:09] Nathan Wrigley: you lost me at the word athletic. I'm afraid I,

[00:09:12] Remkus de Vries: most mostly strength training, so I get it.

[00:09:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. I have no strength. I would say that non strength is the amount that I have. Let's go to the comments and see who we've got.

So we have, Ryan. Hello Ryan. He's coming in from Charlotte in North Carolina. He says, hi Paul. Paul, half Penny in the uk. He's joining us. Hello? Hello? Andre, I'm guessing. Hello? Hello. I don't know that we've met. Hello Andre. Nice to have you with us. And then there's a few from the, the people on the call.

And then we've got Courtney who is drinking many coffees. By the looks of it, Elliot Sby just down the road in Briton Elliot. On, Tuesday I went to sewer B Hall. This'll mean nothing to anybody else but Elliot. I, it was very enjoyable. I went to see the emus at sewer B Hall. It was fabulous. Patricia says, hello everybody.

That's nice. Jackson's joining us. Hello Chow. He says, who's this one? Oh, that's John. John overall morning from the west coast of Canada, where it's a clear, warm day. And Mark West Guard is also joining us, needs collaborative publishing. He does.

[00:10:14] Remkus de Vries: How, okay, quick, question. How young is Mark in that picture?

21, 22.

[00:10:20] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I'd say about nine. He grew up very quickly. He's, he got, he hit puberty. That's false advertising

[00:10:26] Remkus de Vries: right there.

[00:10:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that is false. I'll show you some pictures of him in a minute. I know it's appalling. Frankly hold tight for the Mark West Guard section. It will knock your socks off. We're also, I'm serious.

we're also joined by Aaron Bowie. No, keep 'em on. Nobody needs to see that. my socks are not on Hope you're all well, says Aaron. We are indeed. Yeah. There's about 10 pitchers coming. Leo Mindell. What the heck? He's back. That's very nice to, to have you around. That's lovely. And, hello, says Mark School run shortly, but I'm here for a few minutes.

Yeah, you can watch it on catch up or replay or whatever they call it these days. Nice to have you all with us. I appreciate it. Honestly, this whole show is way better, firstly when I'm not on it. But secondly, when you put a load of comments in, it really does liven the whole thing up. And so if you want to do that, if you feel like adding commentary like those fine people did, go here, wp builds.com/lifespan.

Being featured by Peach there, look, and, you've got two choices. You can either go to the little panel on the right that's embedded YouTube comments. So you need to be logged into Google, which most people seem to do. But if you don't fancy that, you can click the little button in the top right of the play.

It says a live chat or something. And you don't need to be logged into anything, in order to do that. Okay. Righty, tidy. Let's go for the, the bits and pieces that we've got today. I would normally start with the, word pressy stuff, but we're gonna, we're gonna change up a little bit. We started this a few weeks ago.

I'm gonna give the panelists an opportunity just to mention any bits and pieces that they want. plugin, theme, whatever the heck you've got that you want to mention. Of course, whatever it might be. But I'm gonna limit it to one minute. I had this idea of putting a really annoying countdown style clock on, but I thought that was just a bit over the top.

So I'm not gonna do that. I'm just gonna trust that you can count to 60 in your head, whilst doing it. Tim, can we start with you? Have you got anything you wanna share?

[00:12:24] Tim Nash: Hang on. tick, tick.

[00:12:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. You've wasted four seconds already. Oh, honestly,

[00:12:32] Tim Nash: no. I am running a WordPress security course.

it's, I have been editing it for weeks now and, it's running a little bit behind schedule for various bits and pieces, but there, you can still sign up on the main list at JP security one oh one.com and, when it launches, you will be the first ones to know if you're on the mailing list. And if you come on the show whenever the next time I'm on, I will be shouting a lot about it as well.

But JP security one oh one.com, sign up to the mailing list where you first hear about it, and there's also gonna be like all the usual discounts and stuff.

[00:13:04] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Again, that's only in the uk. Nobody gets that apart. The moss, yeah. At certain age. Yeah. Yeah. anyway, there you go. WP Security 1 0 1. Sign up for Tim's course.

Let's go Clockwise. which means Remus? He's over there. Not over there. have you got anything you wanna mention?

[00:13:27] Remkus de Vries: REMK US slash courses.

[00:13:30] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. K US slash courses. It's gonna take me way longer to write it out than I thought you were gonna just keep going there, but No, and I can't spell courses right.

Here we go. This is exciting. There you go. Recur courses. What's there? Just quickly go on.

[00:13:49] Remkus de Vries: this is, very long in the making, but, I am, gearing up to release, WebPress related courses and Really? Yes. Okay.

[00:14:02] Nathan Wrigley: You've definitely have, I don't think you've mentioned that before. So you've kept it closed?

No.

[00:14:06] Remkus de Vries: Huh? it's been on my site for over a year. 'cause it's very hard to prioritize when other work keeps ask, asking for a lot of priority. But, I'm starting to, I think for, There's five defined, and I think I am at, let's say, at roughly 60% for all of them. and I'll start prioritizing, and the working titles make WordPress fast, but

[00:14:32] Nathan Wrigley: Right.

Okay.

[00:14:33] Remkus de Vries: That's the first one I'll launch. and it's not your typical optimize your images, optimize your CSS files and load them in the right sequence. It's taking you through 25 modules of where you'll be explained every single layer that has an impact on performance.

[00:14:52] Nathan Wrigley: nice, So totally leaning into your wheelhouse.

That's brilliant. Yes. Yes, sir. Okay. So let's say that out loud. 'cause honestly, most people don't watch this on YouTube. Most people listen on the podcast. So that's joking aside. REMK, us slash courses not quite ready, but you can, is there a wait list or anything like that?

[00:15:11] Remkus de Vries: There, there's a button that says, let me know when there's more information.

and, After the summer, things are going to start getting released.

[00:15:23] Tim Nash: I can confirm. If you press the button, it takes you to a form which you can fill in and even select which one of these courses you want to get more information about. I thought

[00:15:30] Nathan Wrigley: it all through you, so thank you, Tim. These courses, honestly, they don't write themselves.

I think both of you and Tim know the pain of actually writing courses and major, same. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's,

[00:15:42] Remkus de Vries: a challenge because it's, like I said, you have, you always have a bigger priority and this is something that's an aside that's supposed to be, an integral part of what I do.

And I've known I wanted to do this for a very long time. but yeah, like I said, priorities,

[00:15:57] Nathan Wrigley: don't. You also just get that halfway through. You just suddenly figure out there were a bunch of things that you ought to have covered that you forgot to cover, kind of itis.

[00:16:05] Remkus de Vries: So this is how I went from, 16, 17 modules to 25.

[00:16:10] Nathan Wrigley: There you

[00:16:10] Remkus de Vries: go. Because 'cause every single time you have a chunk. You go yeah, but this is actually, you need to understand the chunk, and then the other chunks start making more sense. So why don't I go deep on this chunk? Wait, this chunk is actually two chunks. Because you first need to understand this layer before you can get to that layer.

Yeah. Oh, okay. And, that's how you, end up with a lot of modules. But all of them con currently, defined our really, yeah, from, not understanding to maybe semi, advanced to whatever level. I'll guide you through the whole, thing. 'cause Nice, like, Tim will say, for security, you can't do security half you need to do it fully.

the same thing for performance. You can't do it. Half optimizing images, yay, great, but. That's not really performance, that's optimizing.

[00:17:00] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So once more, REM us rre, MK us slash courses. Go and check that out. Oh, that's very exciting. So all of us thank you on this panel except me, all the guests that is, they've got courses and things like that going on.

let's flip over to you, peacha, what's your current thing that you want to mention? If you say A URL right at the top, I'll stick it on the screen, but,

[00:17:20] Piccia Neri: do, because this URL is actually not that easy to remember 'cause it's simply. It's a, that YouTube link, Michelle Ette and I'm just, I'm gonna put it in the guest chat, or maybe I should have put it in a live chat.

Michelle Ette. Yeah, put it in the

[00:17:36] Nathan Wrigley: live chat. That'll be probably better.

[00:17:38] Piccia Neri: hang on. So I have to go onto YouTube, which I have here.

[00:17:42] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that is gonna be difficult. What the heck? I'll put it in the, I'll put it in the chat and let's see what the heck it makes of this serious. There you go. Trying to remember that mini

[00:17:55] Piccia Neri: slash watch slash pseudo rando noise. I know, but that's what I've got. What can I say? I should have, I could have correct. I could have done that. I could have done that. I haven't done it the easiest way. Corrected the l the

[00:18:09] Nathan Wrigley: is. I will put that into, I'll just put it into a link in the newsletter that goes over this.

Yes.

[00:18:13] Piccia Neri: I'm sorry. I should have done it. I should have planned it better. Anyway. So then give us the skinny,

[00:18:17] Nathan Wrigley: what you doing with it?

[00:18:19] Piccia Neri: Michelle Fette and I we're doing this limited. Limited serious podcast. So that means that we do, yeah, I need to create a short link Pa Patricia. I know I didn't do it. I can do it, but I haven't done it yet.

Maybe Tim is doing it. I can see him. He's busy. I wouldn't be surprised if he was helping me out 'cause he is a very good friend. But anyway, so that's the story. Michelle and I are doing this limited series podcast. It's 10 episodes. Each episode it's on accessibility and each episode will cover a certain aspect.

obviously we won't cover all of it, but we will. give people enough to want to do more or learn more. And, the first episode is HTML, because that's where it all starts from, isn't it?

[00:19:07] Nathan Wrigley: Are you doing it more on a, so that kind of gets you out of the cycle of Remus and Tim, where you've gotta do everything all in one go.

You are gonna release one and then move on And do,

[00:19:16] Piccia Neri: we're doing it live. Oh, nice. That's why I'm, yeah. We're doing it live. I just, I love, that's, I love live. I'm happy to be here. it's just like something I enjoy very much. So we're doing it live. I. Also, as you you can cheat a bit if you go live.

also, nobody really minds. You're not perfect,

[00:19:37] Nathan Wrigley: kind, constrained in terms of time, aren't you? Okay. You don't

[00:19:39] Piccia Neri: have to script it like this. Flick courses and,

[00:19:42] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. anyway, I'll link to it in this, it's just to

[00:19:46] Piccia Neri: create awareness for accessibility. That's why we're doing it.

[00:19:49] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you. the links will be in the sharing.

I'll put that under the community section in the newsletter that comes out tomorrow. Thank you. We very much, there's our panel. Give them all a round of applause. And, let's get stuck into the meat and the bones of this actual podcast episode. Little bit of self-promotion. First, apologies about this.

I always do this at the beginning, might as well. this is our website, wp builds.com. If you fancy finding out more about what we do, just put your email into there and we'll send you two emails a week. One when this comes out as an audio podcast. Tomorrow morning, I. And then one on Thursday when we do a podcast episode, the most recent podcast episode, was actually with, Ray, and Ray and I, Ray talk.

Ray and I talk every sort of three months or something like that. And we talked over all the bits and pieces that have been happening, but you can find this on the archive section just here. What else have we got? Oh, actually, no, I apologize. That's not true. I apologize. I forgot about this one and I thought we, this could be the first point of discussion actually.

this is Brad Williams and I, talking about his, web dev studios. They've launched a plugin, and I know Tim, we talked about this previously. themes Switcher Pro. So if you haven't come across this before, this is the idea of being able to have multiple themes on one website at one time, so you can go and check that out.

Brad and I nattering on about that. Actually, let's not talk about that 'cause we've done that in the past. Let's talk about this. This came out just, it's a little while ago, in all honesty now, but because we haven't done the show for a couple of weeks, it still felt like we ought to cover it. So I don't know when the exact moment was, but at some period in the recent past, last four months or something like that, the dispute between, WP Engine and Automatic, led to automatic reigning in contributions to the project.

I think the idea was that they were gonna mirror what WP Engine were doing. So if WP Engine were contributing, I don't know, let's say 16 hours a month or a week or whatever it may be, automatic said that would be how they, that would be how they would proceed. That went on for a period of time.

And then 29th of May not entirely out of the blue, but a little bit out of the blue. This piece dropped, and I don't actually know who wrote it. it just says automatic. Maybe there's some indication somewhere that I haven't in, found, and I'll just read it 'cause it makes sense in that, way.

After pausing our contributions to regroup, rethink, and plan strategically, we're ready to press, press play again and return fully to the WordPress project. Expect to find our contributions across the greatest hits WordPress. Call Gutenberg playground, open verse and wordpress.com. this return is a moment of excitement for us.

It's about continuing the mission We've always believed in Democratizing publishing for everyone everywhere. And so I don't know if this means that literally it's a reset, like they're going back to the however many hundreds or possibly thousands of hours it was a month. I dunno if the story's gone anywhere since then, but I just thought it was important to mention it.

We've obviously, the, automatically making this decision of obviously decided they're gonna put that whole posture of copying the WP Engine contribution, in the background and just get back to whatever number it is that they said that they were gonna do. Anything to add to anybody on that one before we move on?

No sugar the shoulders, but it is a bit stale now. I apologize. It's simply because. I haven't had the chance to do this podcast for a little while. I guess most people probably knew that anyway. In which case, if nobody's got anything to add, I'll announce this one. Gosh, these are the letters that you cannot escape, and they are I and a, but not in that order.

I. and this is the fact that WordPress is, like every other tech company has jumped on the bandwagon of ai. And, but it was like a bit of a, there were just bits and pieces happening in the WordPress space, weren't there? Lots of plugins had come out with AI capabilities, but now we have a, WordPress AI team, and again, I'll just do a little bit of reading.

It's dedicated this team to focusing on accelerating and coordinating artificial intelligence projects across the WordPress ecosystem. It's essential that WordPress remains at the forefront, ensuring innovation happens in the open guided by community values, built core standards. and I'll, I won't read it all, but the idea is to lend a strategic focus, to share innovation, to have a rapid iteration.

And I suppose the bit that kind of really matters is who's on the team. I suppose that's the most crucial bit and pretty credible bunch of people in my book as far as I can tell. James the page, who is the automat? Who's leading? This team. That's my understanding. Anyway, we've got Felix Ants and Pascal Bula both from Google.

Obviously Google is a real key player. I don't know what their involvement in terms of AI is on the Google side. And then Jeff Paul, from 10 op. The bit that catches my attention in this though is this bit, this one sentence. The team provides a central place to collaborate, share ideas, and build together, and then this bit to quickly gather feedback and deliver real value without waiting for core release cycle.

So it sounds like they're gonna push this as some sort of canonical plugin or something like that. Anyway, that's the news. I dunno if anybody wants to comment about this. I Go on. Please repeat. I was gonna

[00:25:18] Remkus de Vries: say, I have some inside information 'cause I did a podcast with, James LaPage.

if you, Go to within wp.com/podcast. You can find it. It's the second to last. And in it, he basically shares, so most people connect this, oh, there's gonna be a lot of AI inside of WordPress. That's not necessarily the case. The case is more about we're going to use AI to make WordPress as a project better, which might have an inclusion of a plugin like it's stated, and that plugin maybe allow, some iterations faster and stuff like that.

But I, potentially think that might just be limited in, certainly in the beginning to the AI services plugin that, Felix created.

[00:26:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[00:26:03] Remkus de Vries: it's, more like how can we use AI to make the whole project better? For instance, pruning for, bug reports, everything that's on track. you, if you, if that's a manual task, that's a lot of hours, that's hours.

At a certain point you want, you want to go, can we have this huge bucket of data and can we do this smarter? yes you can. And AI's most certainly, able to help us with that. So that's a example, and there's a whole ton of a whole bunch of examples He, he raised in the podcast.

[00:26:42] Nathan Wrigley: When you, spoke to James, then, did you, 'cause from what you've just said, it sounds like the conversation pivoted around. What can it do on the, like to the project? Not necessarily to my website. And your website. Correct.

[00:26:54] Remkus de Vries: Correct.

[00:26:55] Nathan Wrigley: Ah, interesting.

[00:26:56] Remkus de Vries: So the team is not necessarily just focused on AI integrations inside WordPress for everyone to use.

That's also a discussion, which is why the AI services plugin that Felix has created, most likely will become the featured plugin that they're going to start adding onto. But the AI team is absolutely not limited to just that. It's just everything that you can do on the project with ai

[00:27:24] Nathan Wrigley: that is interesting.

so if you go to within wp.com/podcast, you'll see an archive there and yes, currently it's the second one, but it's called the Future of AI for wordpress.org with James LaPage. That is an interesting insight 'cause I, had the intuition incorrectly. It turns out that the, arrow really was pointing more at, I don't know, content creation and things like that.

no. That's

[00:27:51] Remkus de Vries: probably the last thing they'll add. Interesting. if ever

[00:27:55] Nathan Wrigley: that, so that will just be the domain of third party plugins that hook up to I don't know, chat GPTs API or I would

[00:28:02] Remkus de Vries: expect So for those of, you listening or reading, you don't know what the AI services plugin is.

It is nothing more than a plugin that allows you to connect a. AI of your preference to your site in a unified way, meaning if you wanna switch from anthropic to chat GPT, you can just by changing keys.

[00:28:25] Nathan Wrigley: thank you for that. Let me just pop this back on the screen. Here's another sentence which kind of resonated with me.

So it says, so I'm just reading off the screen here from that blog post, it's essential that WordPress remains at the forefront. Okay? That's a given. Ensuring innovation happens in the open. I guess that's a given. How the heck do you figure this bit out though? Guided by community values, and I guess built to core standards is quite easy, but the guided by community values, that'll be an interesting piece to

[00:28:52] Remkus de Vries: this.

This reads to me as, for any interpretation possible.

[00:28:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay.

[00:28:57] Remkus de Vries: I have no idea what

[00:28:57] Nathan Wrigley: this means. Yeah. Come on.

[00:28:59] Remkus de Vries: What are the community values?

[00:29:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[00:29:01] Tim Nash: exactly.

[00:29:02] Remkus de Vries: Where are they? Where are they written? Where have they been written down? I don't know.

[00:29:06] Tim Nash: There is like the broader core values that, of the WordPress project that's hiding somewhere on wordpress.org that you, it's very, you do take, you do technically tick a box that says you agree to abide by the core, the values of WordPress whenever you do anything to do with WordPress.

So presumably they are the same values.

[00:29:26] Nathan Wrigley: let's just have a little look. 'cause Tammy Lister dropped into the comments. She's got a few things to say about this first meeting. was last week. I am guessing Tammy, that you're talking about this AI team, because we haven't covered anything else off. James is one of the leads, I believe.

James, James, I wonder which, you're not talking about yourself. So this is James Kemp, but I guess he's not talking about himself there. And, Tammy. And to reply to my comment, yes, it's canonical at the heart of Foundation plugin. So canonical for those people that are listening is like a, it's almost like core, but not core.

It's an, you can opt in by installing this canonical plugin, but the idea is it'll receive security updates and be updated as if it were a part of core and the areas are defined on make. Thank you very much. oh. As in there's more than one. Thank you James for clarifying that. Okay. Interesting.

And thank you for that rim. 'cause I had totally misunderstood what that team was all about. So I guess it makes more sense given the four people that I mentioned on there, that they would be doing it that way. Anyone have anything?

[00:30:34] Remkus de Vries: I was gonna say, just think it as, as big as you can possibly think of it.

'cause it's a huge bucket of data that we have. And what would you do to make a bucket of data insightful? you would deploy anything automated as you can and with CPS in between and talking to different, parts and communicating, having data communicated to other parts of the project. Just all of these types of weird combinations are now a possible well will be worked up to being a possibility.

It's very exciting. I'm, I've, I don't remember the last time I got real excited by, make team. Okay.

[00:31:13] Nathan Wrigley: All right. So you're saying that in your very kind of deadpan way, but what, which bit?

[00:31:22] Remkus de Vries: the fact that AI is on a project level, made into a pivotal, subproject. So the, make team itself, the, so the, quote you highlighted, it says, basically we are, focusing very strongly on AI now, which means we're not just looking at the side of everybody coming up with their own AI solutions and things and whatnot.

No, we recognize AI is so important that we need to give it, The highest of priorities in terms of we need a make team that is fully, solely dedicated to looking at how we can use on a project level, on core level, on bug level, on whatever level you can think of. How do we implement that inside our project in a way that is,

[00:32:15] Nathan Wrigley: So it sounds like what you are really happy about is the fact that it has this high status now. Yes. And it's being treated with a level of seriousness that just a few weeks ago, it wasn't apparent it would be, even though Matt had said, learn AI deeply. you were on your own. Now there's a sort of focus for all those efforts.

Okay, great. Tammy is also excited by the looks of it, very much in agreement with that excitement. Also, all roles, types of contribute contributors should notice and get involved. So this is, according to

[00:32:48] Remkus de Vries: this is, also a good example of a team where anybody can join. Like anybody just have ideas on what to do or what to connect or what to bridge join.

[00:32:58] Nathan Wrigley: I'm just, I just come in and moan like a ludite and I moan everybody. go on, Peter.

[00:33:05] Piccia Neri: I would get more excited about it if the sustainability team had also been reinstated, because one of, one of the various issues with AI is sustainability. And so it's a bit disappointing that this is great. I understand why it's great, but it would be nice if sustainability still were an issue because it's not baked, just like accessibility.

Definitely not baked into everything we do. yeah, not that I'm, any more sustainable than anyone else, but it would be, it would've been nice.

[00:33:42] Remkus de Vries: I find myself, agreeing with Matt's reply at Workcamp Europe's, Fireside chat. Somebody basically said had the same question, like, why isn't sustainability being re-added?

But it's, there's a couple of things conflated into one word sustainability that if you were to have them thrive in their best ability should be separated. and to me that makes a lot of sense. 'cause sustainability on the one hand side for the project is something different on the sustainability for how we're using resources on a,

[00:34:17] Piccia Neri: electrical level.

And so you scrap and so by scrapping it, it's better. Sorry, I don't

[00:34:22] Remkus de Vries: get it.

[00:34:23] Piccia Neri: No, that's, no, I honestly don't get it.

[00:34:24] Remkus de Vries: No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying it makes more sense to have sustainability broken up in the chunks that are actually separately approachable than lumping everything into sustainability.

'cause sustainability, the sustainability of a project is not necessarily the same type of sustainability in terms of resources used.

[00:34:45] Piccia Neri: But so will there be someone looking after sustainability in every team? Is that what is being done? Because in that case, no, I don't. I don't. That would be great. But otherwise,

[00:34:55] Remkus de Vries: I don't know that answer.

all, I know is that he specified why it's not the way it was.

[00:35:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Just to, summarize for people who are hearing that and not quite following it along. So we had a sustainability team, which came into being, I wanna say 18 months ago, something like that. Maybe it was a little bit more.

And and then a little while ago that team was abandoned, very quickly. I don't think there was much preamble about that. And then a question was raised at the fireside chat that Rem Mku mentioned. And I think the hope was that at that point, maybe Matt would reconsider and, put the sustainability team back.

give it a table if you like, at Word Camp eu. Curiously, they did have a table at Word Camp eu. I dunno if anybody noticed that there was a table for them with an official sort of set of, cards, stands. Basically it was an official table even though it didn't exist, which was interesting.

I dunno how that happened. but Matt pushed back and he said, if I remember rightly, forgive me if I'm wrong, I think he said it needed to be kind of data driven. there needed to be metrics to say, to show the sustainability team did this, and this. And I think Matt's argument was, we didn't see too much of that.

Tammy, by the way, in answer to your question, picture said it does, so she put some other stuff in it doesn't mean that it won't be done in a unsustainable way, of course. So if there's anything else.

Matt and Mary said that sustainability should run across all the teams. I dunno quite how you manage that, but

[00:36:32] Piccia Neri: how do exactly is there? If there's a person in every team that, let

[00:36:37] Nathan Wrigley: me read out, Courtney's comment, look, does sustainability, then she's got, she's got more to it than this. There's a little bit that goes off the screen.

The sustainability team is modeled quite a bit, is modeled quite a bit after the UN guidelines about what sustainable means, environmental, social, economic, where the areas scoped, what becomes of social and economic is how that comment went on. Okay. I think we went a little bit off piece there. So let me drag it back into the sort of AI domain.

so that was the thing. We've got this new team, we've got four representatives at the moment, and I think if memory serves, at the moment, James LaPage is gonna run that until the team's up and running. So if you've got any questions about AI and WordPress, they would be the people to reach out to.

That post was called announcing. The formation of the WordPress AI team. You can go and check that out. That's on wordpress.org/news, and it came out on the 27th of May. Okay. Okay. So speaking of WordCamp eu, it happened. here it is. and this was the event and, lots of people attended.

It was really great. I'm just gonna, I've got a few things that I've gotta get off my chest. first of all, and firstly, I decided that I was gonna go and have a few nice days, prior to the event with a very nice chap, at least I thought he was nice. it's called Mark West Guard. And, and we spent, we decided to, drive around and park a car and what have you.

And I'm just gonna show you some pictures of the kind of things that you get up to if you hang out with. Mark West Guard for too long. So three days. This was, this is what I got to see.

[00:38:20] Remkus de Vries: this is Mark with all his friends.

[00:38:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. so here's Mark West Guard. he has WS form, which is a, very popular form plugin.

And what I learned about Mark was that, basically he just likes to do support tickets. If you spend three days with him, you count yourself lucky to get three minutes with him. 'cause he likes to just hang out by rivers, hang out by lakes. And, look, there he is. There's a good example of him carrying out a, doing a support ticket.

And, there's another one there. He decided to, rather than talk to me, he thought it'd be nice to, talk to a cow about his support ticket. Thanks for that, mark. And then, this one, beautiful, mountain pass that we went through. I just decided I'd take a picture of the, the nice mountains in the back.

And look, lo and behold, he whips out his phone. He's answering. Support tickets, same thing, not a different view. Magnificent. Just straight on his phone. Support tickets. You can't get a word in edgeways. Look a different angle. Another, beautiful river down there in the bottom of the valley. One of the best scenes I've seen in my life and he was answering support tickets.

Even in the car, you get 10 seconds before this is him whipping out his laptop. We had probably 12 seconds before this all happened. Now comes the laptop. I dunno if you can see in the background there, these beautiful mountain ranges on this little cafe. there he is. Yeah.

Again, where his support tickets. Beautiful lake. This time I thought, let's change it up. Let's have a game of cards. So I set out the cards for us. Both. Got some drinks in Beautiful Lake in the background. What does he do? he's out with a support ticket. So, my one final gambit was, let's go on a boat trip that didn't even work.

and it's just, it's support ticket tic. His support tickets all the way. I hope you figured out I'm being sarcastic. Mark West Guard and I had an absolutely fabulous time, but, but I did learn that if you have a WordPress plugin company that is successful, Ws form is, you don't get away from the support tickets.

I took hundreds of pictures. I cherry picked the ones which made him look like he was wedded to his phone because absolutely loads of them. I got his permission, by the way, to share these pictures, but I thought that was quite funny at Mark's expense. Thank you, mark. It was absolutely fabulous. You, Remus, you always drive to these Word Camp Europes.

I'm guessing you took in some similar scenery with your son.

[00:40:39] Remkus de Vries: I did. I did.

[00:40:40] Nathan Wrigley: Ah,

[00:40:42] Remkus de Vries: yeah.

[00:40:42] Nathan Wrigley: Beautiful.

[00:40:43] Remkus de Vries: There's two, there's 227 mountain passes and I've made it my goal to cover them all.

[00:40:48] Nathan Wrigley: Wow. Oh, okay. there's one final one. Look, here we are, there's, me, Dan, maybe Corey, Bob, Dom, and Ollie there from hosting.com and you can see that there he is.

One last time just it was at this point I said, Sora. And, whether we speak again or not, I don't know. But, hopefully he enjoyed that. He said that it was absolutely fine. There he is. Look, it was a great three days. That's the comment I get. That was brilliant. Thank you, mark. You're a good sport.

I appreciate you letting me do that. It was an absolutely fabulous event. I think the bit that made me so impressed was the venue. The venue was absolutely enormous and it was really, great. Didn't get a chance personally to see too much in terms of the sessions. 'cause I always go and record podcasts.

But hopefully if you, you were there, you, had an enjoyable event, Tim. No pizza. No, it wasn't for you this time around. Too expensive.

[00:41:48] Piccia Neri: Sadly enough, too

[00:41:50] Nathan Wrigley: hard to get to. Yep. Yep.

[00:41:51] Piccia Neri: so I, already got stuck in Basel. At the time of the, on my way back from Cloudfest at the time of the Heathrow fire, so I was like, yeah,

[00:42:01] Nathan Wrigley: you've seen that.

Been there, done that. Yeah.

[00:42:04] Piccia Neri: No jokes about it's not because of that obviously, but

[00:42:08] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, Sorry. Next

[00:42:08] Piccia Neri: time.

[00:42:10] Nathan Wrigley: it was a really nice event and it was a. Particularly, I enjoyed the city. I had a quick look around for a couple of days. It's gonna be in Poland. next time around if you, there is a

[00:42:19] Tim Nash: direct flight from Leeds.

Bradford Airport is there. Yeah, I can actually get there. I'll be on and come back the same day. Yeah. Oh, we could do it at a day if you wanted to do one, just do a day.

[00:42:32] Nathan Wrigley: there's one that goes early morning and then comes later. Yeah, it comes back late in the evening. Okay. No,

[00:42:36] Piccia Neri: and here we were speaking, of

[00:42:37] Nathan Wrigley: sustainable,

[00:42:38] Piccia Neri: baking it, sustainability in every part of the process.

[00:42:42] Nathan Wrigley: Be AI driven. It'll be AI driven. okay. So that was a bit of fun. I was just making light of it. It was very enjoyable. Really cool event. Okay. So this is what you've all been waiting for. I know this is not particularly new news and it's been covered everywhere else, since the word Camp EU announcement, but, this is probably the biggest thing in WordPress in months and months at least.

Anyway. I'm gonna release, sorry, I'm gonna show on the screen the official release, which came out of the Linux Foundation. I'm not entirely sure how all of these pieces hang together in terms of who runs what and where the sort of responsibility and what have you lies. But if you're in the WordPress space by now, I'm sure you've heard of this acronym, FAIR, fair, which is a package manager for WordPress.

And I think the quickest way to describe it really is that it's a plugin, which if you install it on your WordPress website, then it replaces, that's even the wrong word. It hijacks requests for plugin updates and searches for new plugins. And instead of going to wordpress.org it goes, let's just say elsewhere, dunno quite yet where the elsewhere is.

But there's the idea being that there will. If you install the plugin, there won't be one source, of where those packages can be found. So it would be a bit like on your iPhone or saying, we're gonna allow other app stores. and of course in the WordPress space for the longest period of time, this, we've had nothing like this.

Obviously you can go to wherever to download whichever plugin. Maybe there have been. Endeavors like this, but this certainly seems new to me. Sorry, Nathan. Can I

[00:44:25] Tim Nash: just correct that slide? Yeah, do

[00:44:27] Nathan Wrigley: please,

[00:44:28] Tim Nash: In so much the, iPhone is a terrible analogy. Okay. 'cause an iPhone would be, something like craft CMS, that's an iPhone, that's an enclosed, enclosed ecosystem that is, not open source.

A better analogy would be Android, which you have the Google Play Store, which you've had for many, years. But just WordPress is now getting another. Play store, but by a different, by different sets of people and a way to federate and get access to those. And that happens in the Android ecosystem already.

You can already go and get your packages from somewhere completely different. So less iPhone, more Android.

[00:45:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Thank you. That was a, that was a. A, a worthy way of describing it. But the point being that you don't, if you install this plugin, you no longer need to visit wordpress.org if you want to get the packages, which you would traditionally do if you wanted free plugins and what have you.

I think, The, getting the Lennox Foundation to, I'm gonna use the word sponsor, but I'm not sure that's the right word, but in some way put their backing behind. This felt like a bit of a coup. There are some fairly big names, revolving around this project. I dunno if it shows them on here.

Yeah. So here we go. Karen Marucci, who is the CEO of Crowd favorite, Stevo s Yos, who, we all know him from the Yost platform, but now, Amelia Capital, Tracy Hees, from Fastly, which is the CDN, which I believe is responsible for serving all this sort of stuff up. and then Chris, who's.

Forgive me, Chris. I actually dunno how to pronounce your name. and then Robin Bender, gin and a whole bunch of other people. Ryan Chu comes to mind. Carrie Dills comes to mind. There's a whole load of other people. So there was quite a few heavy hitters. I will put in the show notes if you wish to download it.

This is it. You can find the, Package Manager Project on GitHub. you can download it from there and what have you. And then also another supporting piece to this would be Ray Morays piece in the, the repository, which is entitled The Community Response to Fair Hopes Skepticism Support for Decentralized WordPress.

Now she makes the point at the top. She's taken really, she wants to get into why was this even a thing? Why did people see the need to do this? And according to her. This all goes back to that moment where a CF became. What did it become? Was it SCF, secure, Custom Fields? That moment then essentially when something unexpected happened and a plugin that everybody had been, not everybody, but many people had been using for a long time, suddenly became a different thing altogether.

And the people like Yost and Kareem thinking, this is not sustainable. This needs to change. And so they developed this project. It feels like it was done. In the background a little bit, cloak and dagger so that the word didn't slip out and and Matt got to respond to it.

I dunno how much time he had to think about it or learn about it or what have you. But on the face of it, he seemed to say, it's nice that they're shipping code that's better than just bloviating and talking about it. So there's that. But then obviously the whole hard questions of, what does this mean going forward?

Now that we've got multiple repositories for plugins, how do we even manage that? What, is safe? What's secure, what, how do we trust anything anymore if we've got this alternative repo and so on and so forth. So I feel really underqualified talking about this. I think Mku and Tim have probably got more of interest to say than me, but hopefully I did a fairly, pardon me, decent job in just describing what's going on.

So over to Tim or Mku, I think really

[00:48:30] Tim Nash: well let's start off with the, some of the, to the initial thing was that, what was it that the, how can we know what's safe? And that is a problem that we've had since the beginning. 'cause not every plugin sits on the WordPress org repository. Not every plugin on the WordPress org repository is safe.

Over the years, there have been numerous points where plugins have been taken over and abused, where someone's uploaded stuff deliberately to initially to be not malicious and then be malicious. There isn't a great deal of security sticking on the WordPress org repo as it stands now. So we can't really use that as a high bar.

We can say that. We have very limited security across the board when it comes to package management generally, and that's before you're talking about premium plugins, on GitHub plugins from Joe's website. All of these are completely independent, and at the moment it is down to the user to navigate through this and worse navigate through this blindly without having any real way of saying, is this plugin good?

Is this coming from a safe source? Is this coming from a trusted source? And especially when our only vaguely trusted source. Isn't really that trustworthy and hasn't been for a very long time. And it's, I would argue that Ray, it might have come to light for Ray with all the stuff with Matt last year, but this has been a problem for decades.

This isn't a new thing. This is coming from right on the beginning. How do we

deal

[00:50:06] Nathan Wrigley: with that? Can I just ask you, there's some drilling or somebody somewhere, I dunno if the person who's got the drilling, if you could just mute yourself, that'd be great. Thank you. Tim, can you describe then what, how does this.

Endeavor Fair. How does it add that, I'm gonna use the word trust in air quotes. I don't really know what that is. What, are they, what are the, what's the bit that they're adding in that enables that?

[00:50:29] Tim Nash: a lot of it's, future promises and hope that they're going, these things are gonna be added in.

currently as it stands, it's just providing a mechanism to. Swap out your repositories and say, oh, I want things from here. Now there is ideas for you'd be able to have federated, so you could say, I accept things. so you've got this idea of the repositories, these are the places that are storing stuff.

And then an aggregator, which is like a search engine for one of a better thing that there will sit there and put through and be able to, so you'll be able to, use the aggregator to search and it will be able to tell you where the individual packages are. They're using some fancy, backend protocol stuff, which is based loosely around the blue sky stuff.

I say loosely, the protocol for how you identify the end pack, where the end package actually is, uses Blue Sky's DID protocol. And, but the. That package can be still swapped over. If that's, if that endpoint isn't controlled or maintained, then that can be swapped over by a bad actor. So we still don't have a level of real trust.

What we ultimately want to get to is a point where we can have lots of federated aggregators and lots of federated repositories, and then we can start creating some sort of trustworthiness where we can say, these people trust this, these people over here, I trust these people. Therefore, I can trust these things further down the chain because they, oh wait, so

[00:51:56] Nathan Wrigley: what there would be a component of usability like users.

Declaring their own level of confidence in things. Is that a stated goal?

[00:52:06] Tim Nash: that is, I believe one of the stated goals is that you are, they're going to be, you'll be able to pick your aggregators and the aggregators will pick, the repositories that they're going to, basically act as a search engine for.

So you'll be able to say, so in theory, I could spin up an aggregator that could be Tim's aggregated services and I, and therefore I can control and say, I will select what plugins will be available through my aggregated service. We, and then so the, so that you could then just log in and go, okay, I want to use Tim's recommendations and set up a hosting company can set up as an aggregator with their own setup, but also a hosting company can set up as a repository set of repositories so that you can and consume plugins in the same similar way.

Then you've got your premium plugins, which in theory can be hosted back with their. Original place and they can be part of this network just brought in. and so you can, in theory, you should end up with a nice unified system where you'll be able to look and go, I trust these repositories. I, this aggregator is deciding what I see and one I don't.

And then wordpress.org can become one of many. And that's what we call, in the very basic version as we got now. It's just swapping out wordpress.org for Aspire Press, who I felt were really hard done by in all of this. 'cause Aspire Press has taken, done loads of work to get, virtually all the plugins that are on WordPress repository into Aspire onto API press backed by Fastly.

And they got shafted by this announcement into they, they, they have two lines in the entire thing. So I felt really sorry for them. But, yeah, ultimately if we can, if you imagine a scenario where you have a dozen hosting companies. They're each act providing mirrors effectively for the wordpress.org, what's on wordpress.org.

But they, and then you've got aggregators in the middle who get to pick and choose what plugins they're gonna present and how, and you build out a mechanism of trust around this so that, if somebody, if one of the nodes goes bad, then you can go, okay, we, no longer trust this node, so we won't accept things in impact.

It's coming from there. So one of the thing, that's the ultimate goal, I believe. Yeah.

[00:54:21] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's really fascinating. So you've opened up a load of stuff. So the first, thing that will be of interest, I think, to just the regular user WordPress is that it can have paid plugins. So that whole thing of wordpress.org is, everything's free over there.

you have to go and find the website or wherever it may be. for the premium plugins, it will be, the intention at some point is that these, nodes, as you call it, they will be able to package in, let's say, I don't know, in the case of Mark, we were talking about him a minute ago. Ws form, he's got a free version and he's got a paid version.

There may be an opportunity to, Sell for want of a better word, certainly distribute the paid version in some of these repositories. So that's really interesting for end users, certainly

[00:55:09] Tim Nash: they can publish an end point publish,

[00:55:12] Nathan Wrigley: right?

[00:55:12] Tim Nash: So they effectively could publish an end node point that you could go and retrieve that data from.

how they would then handle things like, okay, we are a paid product. Do we want people to be able to just go Google and grab that data out? How they would do that, I don't know. But in theory, they, EE everybody is able to publish a, plugin up and give it. And through this, the, DID protocol, you can then.

Give it like a permanent named spaced that can be then grabbed inside and used for, to pull to a node, which then can be pulled by an aggregator. There's a lot of steps involved in all of this. Yeah.

[00:55:56] Nathan Wrigley: the thing is, if you install it, my understanding is that basically currently you might be forgiven for thinking you've done nothing.

you, it looks basically the same. There's not much in the UI to give away, very much mirroring what is there at the moment. And I guess for obvious reasons, they are literally mirroring what's there at the moment. But, but one of the things that you just said was the opportunity for example, hosting companies to add this as a layer into their platform.

that, that gives me. 50% happiness and 50% worry. 'cause I worry that also a hosting company might not give you the choices that you would like to be able to do. You know what I mean? Can you see a future in which Absolutely Company might want to give you their version of all the things with their stuff promoted to the top and all the ads and rah all of that kind stuff.

[00:56:53] Tim Nash: you could quite easily argue that we already live in that world. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Hosting companies can, at the moment mirror WordPress on their own hosting infrastructure. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. They can de, they can fiddle with the search results. Not many of them do. Some do though. And if you are being really cr cynical and pointing out that automatic is a huge hosting company, they fiddle with the results they choose, they ha wordpress.org highlights, plugins that, are in competition with others that are particularly automatic plugins and they get higher privileges.

There is no rhyme and reason to some of the featured plugins that appear at top of the results and the research results, as acidic could say, have been gamed many a time by them. So if they're not doing that, they certainly already have the ability to do and hosting companies have the ability to do I remember working for a hosting company and working out how we would. Just removed from the search results plugins, which we knew would break our platform.

[00:57:52] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. There's a really nice example of when it's useful, but you can see, and,

[00:57:57] Tim Nash: you we, we actually ultimately went with a, putting a warning on the search result rather than totally blocking it.

But I can totally see somebody going, especially for a larger hosting company where if I don't know my stupid plugin breaks your hosting, you might go, we just don't want my stupid plugin on here. Being able to, at the moment it's fiddly and hard to fix that you, you would have to do either change, look at what results are coming back and change them or whatever.

Whereas in the future, you may be able to run your aggregator and say, actually we're just not accepting that plugin.

[00:58:36] Nathan Wrigley: gosh. There's a lot in there. okay. Thank you for that. Really, sir. It's very

[00:58:40] Tim Nash: technical. Yeah. We're gonna say very

[00:58:42] Nathan Wrigley: technical. Yeah,

[00:58:43] Tim Nash: very clever. And I've given a version that is a lovely, rosy future.

That is, that future relies on so much happening and it co, it misses out so much of the stuff like how do we moderate this? How do we stop bad actors putting stuff on there? How do we make sure that the nodes are reliable? How do we make sure that the aggregators are reliable? How do we make it easy for, to add new aggregators into the, all of this sort of stuff isn't there at the moment.

So this is a lot, they've got a lot of the foundational stuff that's really good, but even the idea of federated how things being federated, it's only there in principle that as say, if you install the plugin today, what you get is Aspire Press wrapped up in the fair plugin.

[00:59:31] Nathan Wrigley: my understanding also is that if something were to go wrong with the implementation at the moment, it steps out of the way, if So let's say that Aspire Press goes down, it would then default back to wordpress.org. And so even in the case of things falling to pieces, you would still be able to get your updates. I'm not entirely sure if that's, I

[00:59:50] Tim Nash: don't actually know if the plugin does fall back to WordPress. Interesting.

[00:59:54] Nathan Wrigley: I heard those words coming up somebody's mouth, but I'm not sure if that's done. Absolutely.

[00:59:58] Tim Nash: I, it may Well then do but in future you may be able to select several repositories or sorry, several back. Your aggregator may have several of the backend nodes attached to it, which are acting effectively as mirrors, because ultimately at the end of the day, everything at the end.

Goes back to this unique dresses right at the far end of all of this.

[01:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: So let's just reprise all of that. 'cause there's a lot to take in. Essentially it's a swap out for wordpress.org. Then there's gonna be a whole range of possibilities, like you've described, premium plugins, being able to, have it as a completely unique marketplace.

Having some kind of indicator for, oh, I don't know, I'm gonna use the word authenticity, that's probably the wrong word, but credibility. Something along those lines. Those kind of cues. So basically the, field is open. It really can be anything that you like. We're on version one. I don't know, Tim, I'm gonna put you on the spot.

From what you've seen so far, obviously it's very technical. Would you th do you think it's been. Done well in, in air quotes.

[01:01:04] Tim Nash: they're not, they, have chosen to go down their own route. Honestly, it would've probably been more I, when with the Linux Foundation, actually we are, Linux World is full of package managers.

There are a good billion of them. Obviously within PHP we have things like Composer and similar things. They've very much chosen to go down a very different unique route that was designed around content management systems in general. I think Courtney spoke commenting there. That's about the fact that this was designed to go outside of WordPress as well.

I feel like that was edged in later. I don't think that was the original intention, but I may be wrong. they have made a lot of rods for their own backs, and the complexity is going to be the biggest problem because people have to understand what you're talking about and understand how it all works.

And the way you do that is through not really detailed, complicated protocols and big documents. It's through easy and simple explanations. And the one thing they haven't managed to do is make it really simple explanations of what not at a human level, what to, what it's about and how it should be used and what the future can look like.

I would've loved to have seen a website, proper explanations and a really good mission statement of not what this is trying to solve, but what it can show, what the future can be with it. Okay? Because interesting what you're trying to solve. Nobody outside of a very small group of people, including me, I, care about it.

But outside of a, very small group of people care. So you need to take that and go, okay, these few people might install it, but once we get past those a hundred people. How are we gonna get the rest of the people on? I, this is me now pontificating, I, there's a huge part of me that wishes they'd taken another few months, done, this launch in September, had a couple of hosting companies standing behind them saying we are ready to be act as part of this process.

Had a decent website in place, had launched Soft, launched a little bit more. You could have still had Aspire Press do their launch at WordCamp Europe, but there's obviously other timings and other things were needed to be done that clearly there was some pressure that meant that it had to be launched then.

so it is a little bit of a shame that it was launched quite so haphazardly and without a really positive message. I think we, if we become a really positive message of showing a fu amazing future, which it can be, then. I think they're gonna now struggle to get that traction because people are gonna go, oh yeah, that's the thing that Yos was did.

And that was the other thing. It is very confusing who even though, Ryan, Carrie and Mika are steering it in the technical level. You've then got Yos and Carrie, and then you've got the Linux Foundation and you've got a Spider Press, and then you've got face's there's so many names floating around.

It's like you, you spend more time telling people who these people are than you are telling them, this is a really cool thing. This could be a really cool thing. Let's do this really cool thing.

[01:04:22] Nathan Wrigley: Oh gosh, that was, a lot. Thank you for going through that though, Tim. firstly, apologies if my mic sounds awful.

Remus has put a little note in the, comments to say that, my mic might be playing up if it is still. Sorry. it, it's selected correctly, so if it's dreadful, I apologize. We'll just keep going. Remus, there was a lot there and I know that you've got thoughts on this. Do you wanna just drop your bits and pieces that I know you've got to say?

[01:04:49] Remkus de Vries: I don't think I have actually much to add 'cause Tim was pretty, pretty complete.

[01:04:55] Nathan Wrigley: I would just say that I've noticed the change of t-shirt that's that's very nicely done. I wish I could, he's like Batman. No, Superman. he's got the other t-shirt on. That's great.

[01:05:08] Remkus de Vries: it, it sounds promising, but there's too many questions for me still.

[01:05:17] Nathan Wrigley: I think the biggest question mark for me is not around it. It's whether or not it gains popularity. I wonder if this is one of those things where the anticipation, when I heard about it, I thought it was gonna cause real, like proper rions.

[01:05:32] Remkus de Vries: I, suspect there. The, the, team is, has been in talks with hosting companies and other.

Whatever. Okay. To for quite a while. Yeah. I don't think I would've announced this now if there were no talks.

[01:05:48] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. So maybe it'll have growth through all the channels, not word of mouth. I think so. Yeah.

[01:05:55] Tim Nash: York have that problem that if you, it's chicken in egg. No, Hosting company is gonna come and stand behind you without a product there. No. Pro. but the product can't get adoption until, until the host, a hosting company or someone big comes and stands behind you. Yeah. So one, eventually you have to step out into this, into the light and hope that someone is behind you.

And if they're not you're gonna look. Silly. Yeah. So I'm really hopeful that we will see the announcements. I also suspect that there is at least one large hosting company that probably would say they are, but they definitely can't be the first ones for political

[01:06:29] Nathan Wrigley: reasons. Okay. Okay. Interesting. Okay.

So it's definitely an evolving story. one of the things to mention then is, there was a lot of thought about it. There was a lot of talk at Word Camp EU about what this would mean. it seems to be much more calm a few days afterwards than I anticipated Maybe it would be, having heard the initial story, I thought it was gonna be much more seismic, but it seems to have gotten quite quiet quite quickly.

Let's just go through a few of the comments. So we've got Courtney Robertson, who's been, I think it's fair to say, instrumental in describing this, this project and perhaps in the background as well. Let's just go through a few of the bits and pieces. so Lauren said the announcement affair also shows how PR is.

Dom, so you mean that in a positive light to you, Lawrence, you thought that they knocked it out the park with like coordination and making many things happen at the same time. 'cause it did feel like lots of stories landed at the exact same moment. Like lots of the WordPress publishing media and things all seemed to have their docs in a row.

So ready to, hit publish at the same time. So here we go. Courtney Carman Juice. I dunno why I wanna say juiced all of a sudden, I never get that wrong. and Yost announced fair in their blog posts in December, but also as people fear for their jobs, many chose to remain anonymous. Okay.

[01:07:53] Remkus de Vries: you should, pronounce Kareem's name correctly as well.

[01:07:56] Nathan Wrigley: Go on

[01:07:57] Remkus de Vries: Kareem.

[01:07:59] Nathan Wrigley: Kareem. Yeah. What did I say, Karen?

[01:08:03] Piccia Neri: And you said Marci, which isn't, it's Maki. Yeah. Sorry Nathan. We're on your case today. It's, sorry. It's fine. I've been on Mark West, which

[01:08:11] Nathan Wrigley: is, I deserve it. bring it on. Every time I get a name wrong, just jump on me. I deserve it. So here's Brandon who surname I'm not gonna try and pronounce after that.

Mauling. it's,

[01:08:23] Tim Nash: not Brandon. It's Brandon.

[01:08:26] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, no, This is gonna be the ongoing theme for this episode, I think now. didn't go to the alt event, on the waiting list, but I heard you can still go and they'll let you in. it's been and gone. I'm not sure I understand what that, the tenor of that question.

I'm not sure. Wp. So Lawrence is bringing the point that the WP project canceled the Media Corps. So that's interesting. Maybe there are certain channels that could have provided some coverage of that. Some registered people didn't show up so others could get in. Okay. so at you, Tim, from Courtney Fair, we'll use the I did, I think Courtney.

Said this, and then you actually, coincidentally, I think said it a moment later, uses the blue tie blue sky at protocol DID, which is an acronym.

[01:09:15] Tim Nash: The Ds are like the individual identifiers.

[01:09:18] Nathan Wrigley: So is that the way that you across federated nodes, for want of a better word, you can identify that's the same thing as that one, even though they might have slightly different names or whatever it may be?

[01:09:28] Tim Nash: Yeah, it's a, it's, it is the unique identifier that I, okay, great. And it's, There are different ways to do it, whether you want, you can do it via a, effectively a name spaced thing, or you can do it as an actual URL. but if you do it in an actual URL, then you have a problem that the URL might change.

So you move from GitLab to GitHub, then the URL might, okay, so this is a way to avoid that.

[01:09:53] Nathan Wrigley: so Patricia, I've missed a few out because they were probably to do with the timing of what was being said at that moment. I like the feeling of the old, of old source Forge plus decentralization, AAF averse, review types, a TripAdvisor, unless I misunderstood something.

Yeah, that was where I got to as well. The TripAdvisor bit being, you've got like 800 people that say that's a good thing. So you have some sense that's a good thing to do

[01:10:19] Tim Nash: because we know that TripAdvisor never gets gained in any way, shape, or form. Okay. So there's, if you just check Oh,

[01:10:25] Nathan Wrigley: top restaurants in my McDonald's.

So will that, would that then be an inevitable consequence of something like this? if you decentralize all this, would it, are people gonna game it? Would there be some economic course they incentive to gain?

[01:10:38] Remkus de Vries: Of course. If you can game something, it'll be gamed. That's fine.

[01:10:40] Tim Nash: Yeah. But you, WordPress org is gamed all the time and fair.

The team support forum team in particular. I spend so much time dealing with, sock puppets, which are basically where people make fake accounts to create five star reviews and the to, set things to download a million times to try and increase download counts. This sort of stuff happens all the time.

A good moderation layer should help that. And it is nice that the Fair Project has started saying, how are we gonna, what we gonna do about moderation? How are we going to moderate this? How are we gonna moderate this across? Not just one server, but lots of them. But ultimately there, there has to be a level of trust and we have to work out what trusts.

Means, and trust can't necessarily mean 50,000 people like this because 50,000 people probably don't exist. They're probably bots.

[01:11:38] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know, this is, gonna be, I think how this story develops for me is a, does it get adoption? Do people actually start to use it? But B, do people start to game it?

I think because I have a, a non-technical understanding of it, and people like you are explaining it to me, I'm trying to get a grip on it, that layout is gonna be of more interest to me, whether it gets adopted and whether it gets gamed and therefore trusted. This comment though, is interesting.

I, I hadn't picked this up at all. So Courtney says, fair also in the future could support package managing beyond WordPress. So it's not necessarily bound to WordPress. It could be for a decentralized,

[01:12:14] Tim Nash: just like Gutenberg is currently in Drupal.

[01:12:17] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. Okay. Alright. No, but

[01:12:20] Tim Nash: all seriousness, it could, this is, the idea is it's been somebody like Drupal might want to adopt it, or somebody like Umbr Umbraco might want to adopt it and use it for their distribution of how they deployed their equivalent and their modules and addons.

[01:12:35] Nathan Wrigley: I really hope that you said Umbraco incorrectly. That would be, that would, I'd feel, I've never

[01:12:39] Tim Nash: said it out loud. I don I have

[01:12:41] Nathan Wrigley: no idea if I did. I feel so vindicated. WP, the WP Coder. Hello. the Aspire, aspire presses a suite of tools. The, aspire Cloud, the API Aspire update, the plugin for end user Aspire Explorer, the OSI repository.

I'm guessing this is in response to Tim. Saying that he thought Aspire Press didn't get the credit, it may be ought to have done in that scenario. Tim, you must be fierce at chess. Okay. Yeah. Yay. and is that it? Playful

[01:13:13] Tim Nash: kitten? I don't know what that means.

[01:13:16] Nathan Wrigley: If a hosting provider smells, they could save bandwidth and money, they will go for it says Dave and right now

[01:13:24] Remkus de Vries: does a hosting, provider, not have unlimited bandwidth just.

[01:13:29] Tim Nash: No, Hosting providers will be, are quite often are paying quite for their bandwidth. but a big thing for this is why you'll find that, in the Linux world, Linux packages are often, if you go and look at where, Linux packages mirrors are, they're hosting companies. And the reason, because if you can get your packages locally and then distribute internally those packages, you save yourself a small fortune, every, for most hosts, they have to rely on the free big backbone providers, and they are often monitored and meet.

So it's meted access. we're still talking packages that are ridiculously large compared to your like. Commercial line, at home residential line. But yeah, no, they are, they're metered and for stuff like updates is a really good place where they could make a saving. so it, it could well be worth their while to be running a localized repository so that they can then distribute internally where obviously they, if they own their own infrastructure, that's not gonna cost them to run through net internally if they're only having to pull the package once over their third party providers transit.

Yeah. So if they have to go to Cogent every time and get these packages down and Cogents meeting metering them, then yeah, it's gonna be expensive.

[01:14:49] Nathan Wrigley: I, I hope that everybody that's been listening to this is able to wear the tinfoil hat because, I think it's fairly difficult to understand all of this, isn't it?

There's like the top layer, what it might be for the Definitely for me. Yeah. Yeah, me too. To be honest, Pete,

[01:15:04] Piccia Neri: I'm listening very intently. Yeah. I'm on it. We're lucky we have such clever friends.

[01:15:10] Nathan Wrigley: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. But I'm listening to it from the point of view of how would I use it?

Would the community be fragmented by it? Will people be able to game it? Will there be trust of it? Will it, I'm going to air quotes, destroy what we've already got. I don't mean the word destroy, will it amend? Let's go with that, what we've already got, would it? I, don't know. I, just think it's really, fascinating and probably one of the most disruptive things that I've seen in certainly several years.

The fun thing

[01:15:41] Tim Nash: is if it's done no one's going to notice. Isn't that interesting? Isn't that fascinating? All this stuff. Ultimately the average person should, if it's done right, will never know.

[01:15:55] Nathan Wrigley: I

[01:15:56] Tim Nash: sign up to their hosting package. Let's say they join Bob's host. Bob's host happens to be, they might have a local, no local node, and they might be mirroring a bunch of plugins that they commonly use.

They won't mirror all of them because they, infinite hard drives are not a thing yet, but they'll mirror quite a lot of them. There's a speed performance there and then. Yeah, from your perspective, you type into, oh, I need to add a plugin. Okay. I'll just go to add plugins. Oh, I'll type in a search.

I'll just hit install or hit activate. For the average consumer, they won't have a clue that anything's changed. One. I'm just gonna

[01:16:37] Nathan Wrigley: thank, you. Tim. There's just one last thing I'm gonna drop in just before we move on from this one. 'cause we've got, we're fast running outta time. The, I think it's fair to say that the community that have gathered around this have done a lot of work in terms of governance of this project and trying to communicate that there will be like rotating leadership.

I want to say that, Courtney, again, if you could help me out in the comments, that would be great. But the intention being that there will be no single. figurehead for want of a better word. I think that's part of the project as well. And we've not really touched on that because we've been talking about how it technically works, but I think that's probably a big part of it as well.

checks and balances I think, have been made so that, there's a panel of people and I guess it needs to launch with a panel in order to launch. 'cause you're not gonna get anywhere unless somebody takes the helm for a bit. But my understanding is that will be, a moving feast, in the future.

Peter Remus, Tim, anything you wanna add to that before we move on?

Nice. I'll just put one other thing in just because it's probably worth mentioning, and that is to say that it isn't really a pushback, but Aaron j. Who, is an aian, I want to say. I think that's right. He wrote a piece, just the other day when the project had a launched and it says some initial questions about fair, so on the 9th of June and he congratulates the team.

And then he has some fairly technical questions about how it's implemented, what might happen in certain scenarios. Again, probably beyond the purview of this, but interestingly, no sooner had he written it than Ryan Chu, who is one of the people very much tied to the project at launch. I. came in and offered what he hoped would be the, the appropriate answers and in some cases it was more a question of we're figuring this out as well.

So definitely worth going to check that piece out, Aaron bin dot com. Again, all these links will be in the show notes. okay. Very quickly, I'll just mention this and then we'll move on. There's a new post bar on the WordPress developer blog. what's new for developers in June, 2025, as usual, just in Tadlock does a great job of explaining all of the different bits and pieces that have been falling.

I did wanna mention a few of them, but I actually wanna move to this one because time is constraining us back to ai. I, didn't even know this was a thing. I didn't even know that LLMs and the, way that they scraped the internet was different to how, air quotes Google Bot does it. My assumption would be that the LLMs were going around scraping stuff and storing it, in the way that Google does.

But reading this article, it feels like it's different. It feels if you do a query, which I think more and more people are doing, they're forgetting the search engine and they're going more to the AI agent to get an answer to a question. it feels the GPT, sorry, the LLM agents are just doing the work at the moment that you ask the question.

So rather than Google having a cache and you type in your question and it serves up the, I don't know, 10, 20 best results based upon what it's got stored. This is going out and spidering at that moment in time, I'm probably mis it, but anyway, that then requires a different approach and Yost. Have come, the company yeast have come up with this idea of L LMS text.

It may not be their idea. Don't,

[01:20:18] Tim Nash: I don't think they came up with it. Thank you. they did not. Thank you.

[01:20:21] Nathan Wrigley: That's great to know.

[01:20:22] Tim Nash: and if you go to LLMs text.org, you can actually see the actual standard.

[01:20:28] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, perfect. That I assume that they hadn't, but also I hadn't read elsewhere of anybody else doing it.

So this is an attempt to make your website smarter and almost if you like, serve up to the LLM, the, just the summary of what your, let's say, blog post is about, so that it can get a handle on it. 'cause apparently it doesn't go from top to bottom and read it all and cache it all. It picks bits here and there.

I dunno how it does that. But this is a, feature which is now dropping into the, Yost SEO plugin. And, I'm f I'm feeling that this is probably gonna be half the battle in the future, figuring out what to serve up to LLMs. So that they've got an understanding of roughly what the article is about.

So I thought that was interesting. Again, I don't have the technical expertise to discuss it, but if any of you feel you want to jump into that, now's the moment.

[01:21:20] Tim Nash: Just as a, slightly side that, if you have over the last few months found that your website is becoming more and more unstable, you can thank, your local LLMs, for that.

increasingly my day-to-day job, it seems to be coming along to sites, which I'm being told are being DDOSed and to arrive and go, no chat. Bt wants to talk to you, or Claude wants to talk to you. Have basically like many things to do with ai, when they move fast and break things, they move fast. And a lot of the AI tools do not obey things like your robots text file. So it is, if we can convince this project is great, but you need to convince. The, the people, the Claudes and Chat, GBT and all the other, all the companies behind them to actually use these.

And at the moment, as far as I'm aware, this standard is just like a proposed standard for please come and look over here, rather than an actual, it's not being actually used by any of the companies behind the actual AI models themselves.

[01:22:39] Nathan Wrigley: So we're at a moment in time where it feels almost like they're taking your website down a little bit, making it less effective.

'cause they're doing all this 'cause they don't know how to do it correctly. And if people start, oh no, they just don't

[01:22:50] Tim Nash: care.

[01:22:51] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. They just, 'cause

[01:22:52] Tim Nash: obviously from their point of view, they're not there to, they're getting the, they need to get the, return, the information back as quickly as possible.

if that means that they have to spawn a dozen processes, then they'll spawn a dozen processes. If that's gonna knock out your filters, so be it. the problem comes that the, Quite often the way to deal with that is that, site owners will start blocking text and then you end up in a scenario where Amazon is ending up using, residential VPNs to scrape your site.

And you're like, come on, that's not on. but this is, that goes more beyond this particular thing to just general behavior of the, these AI companies. the getting, but the comes back to this idea that getting them to obey the rules, or rather the conventions I should say, that we've, we had about the web and we always had bad bots.

We've always had them. And some people who don't obey the conventions of how websites should work, don't list send to robots text. I just think that this is not gonna be as useful as it appears on the face of it unless they actually. Follow through and actually even read the, yeah. Or worse, they're gonna read the file.

Go. Brilliant. You've given me the information. I'm gonna go and do this and look for this other stuff over here.

[01:24:12] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Alright, well interesting. Thank you. You've educated me on how it works 'cause I just assumed A, it was a Yost thing, but also b that yeah, it was to do with just serving up the content that, specifically what you wanted them to deploy once they given their answer.

But maybe it's not as simple as that. Anyway, it's there, it's in the Yost plugin. Dunno if it's on the free version or the paid version, but there's a toggle and you can have that set up in a heartbeat. Alright, very quickly, what else can we do quickly? Let's do this one. it's hot in, up. In the e-commerce space in WordPress, what do we got?

We got WooCommerce, we got North Commerce, we got sho, which has been just killing it recently. And then there's, now there's this, it's called Fluent Cart. It doesn't exist at the minute, but I'm sure that if you're in the WordPress space, you've probably come across this company. They're responsible for lots and lots of things.

Fluent CRM fluent forms a bunch, honestly, a whole ton of other stuff. And, there's this, they're gonna launch, they're gonna drop a, a cart solution it seems. If we go down, scroll down a little bit. I don't actually know if it's on this page. I might be misrepresenting it, but I saw somewhere a table where they compared it kind of feature for feature against shortcut.

So maybe that's the target that they're aiming at. But the big gambit is that it's all in your WordPress website because shortcut, my understanding is there's a component of that, which is SaaS based. So things are phoning into their SaaS and what have you. All of this is gonna be done in your WordPress website for good or ill.

That's the, the way that they've decided to do it. There's a wait list, so if you want to go there, it's fluent cart.com and, you can join the wait list. I don't suppose anybody's got anything they wanna add to that. maybe they don't. No,

[01:26:11] Piccia Neri: I can say a couple of things if you want. Yeah, please.

I don't have to. No, I'd like you

[01:26:15] Nathan Wrigley: to.

[01:26:17] Piccia Neri: So I find this really interesting because whenever I need to sell something for one reason or another, I am still like really always, and Tim knows because I often moan about it and ask people, and, And I, on one hand, I really do hope that this is the answer.

On the other hand, I have fluent CRM and fluent forms and I've been waiting for a while for a, for certain things that I consider basic to improve. And what it slightly concerns me is when a company comes up with always new products, instead of getting one or two really, the best that they can be, rather than coming out with another super shiny object.

And I'm saying this kind of even slightly in spite of myself because I really hope, 'cause I used to use Thrive Cart, which was great in many ways, and now it's a bit of a dumpster fire and I don't use it anymore. So on one hand, I really wish that this. Is because I also use shortcuts. I know exactly what works and what doesn't.

for me, not for everyone, but for me with shortcuts. So I think that there's still space for finally a product that does things and that's easy to use, which shortcuts is not the first time that you enter it, you go, okay, clearly you did not hire a UX designer for this. So I'm hoping that this, that, fluent cart is the answer, but at the same time, yeah, that would be, without having seen anything about it, that would be my main.

Worry. That's, yeah,

[01:28:05] Nathan Wrigley: they are without a doubt, a company with a ton of products. If you go to their, yeah, I think they're called wp, managed Ninja. That's their kind of parent company. Yeah. If you go to their website, they have a laundry list of maybe a dozen, maybe. It's not quite as much as

[01:28:18] Tim Nash: that. No, I think it is.

I think it's 11. if it's not 12, it's, it is over 10.

[01:28:22] Nathan Wrigley: And all of them do a lot. They're not like tiny little things they all do. certainly the most recent ones have done a lot. So Yeah, that's an interesting point, Peter. maybe, they're getting overstretched. However, what a market, if you can capture boy, because there really,

[01:28:39] Piccia Neri: honestly, there isn't, yet the right solution is not there yet.

And I'm wondering, is it accessible? There's a few questions that I'm asking myself, but if it is all the things that it says it is, then it's great. Patricia said, yeah. She

[01:28:53] Nathan Wrigley: says that, they've got a team per product. Okay. So maybe they swell their team, grow their team as they get a new product, let's say.

But

[01:28:59] Piccia Neri: I've been with fluent CRM for. At least two years now, and they're still not doing, in a way I'm okay with it because it just simplifies my email marketing. I'm like, yeah, okay, let's make it as simple as possible. But it's still lacking really things that are really basic in most CRMs.

And it's two years since I bought it, I would've expected for that to have happened, okay. But at the same time, it is, I won't leave it's final, in which case,

[01:29:26] Nathan Wrigley: as the final piece for today, there was several more things that I wanted to show, but we are gonna run outta time. This will be the last one.

oh. Sorry, MKU. Okay. We'll do another one if it's necessary. this, I just thought this was interesting. Nothing to do with WordPress. I just love this idea. It's called Scrappy. scrappy is like a SaaS service for want of a better word, where you go and make basically really ugly little apps for you and your pals.

That is literally how the pitch is for you, your family, your pals. You just, it's, if it's simple, but you can't achieve it, maybe you can achieve it with scrappy. It'll never look good. But if it's just trying to figure out, I don't know who, how to split the bill or what weight you need to lose from your exercise regimen or something like that.

Scrappy is, an interesting idea. And then you can share it with a little cohort. And it's not supposed to be big and take over the world. It's just for you and your family and your close group offender, which I just thought was a really interesting idea. Remus, sorry, what was it I missed?

[01:30:23] Remkus de Vries: I think you need to add slash edit.

[01:30:26] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Yeah, you're right. That is true. Yes. Okay, hold on. Where is it gone Here? No, not that one. Yeah, here we go. So this came out of, a dubious newsletter, which is dropped every Friday.

[01:30:36] Remkus de Vries: Oh really? Which one? Yeah,

[01:30:38] Nathan Wrigley: I think it's called, what was it called? it's Remus newsletter. We spoke about it some moments ago and, this was one of the little nuggets, which I really thought was cool.

Tell us what it does. Remus Dead simple.

[01:30:50] Remkus de Vries: It's that simple. It adds whatever it says, it adds the slash edit to every single post page. Category tag, whatever you have on your WebPress site. So instead of having to log in and do all those things, you can just be on the URL, you wanna change in, change something in, and you just add slash edit.

And it works. It's, a, gem of a plugin. which is why I featured it.

[01:31:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It does one tiny thing, but does it really well, are you like me? I would far rather amend the URL for more or less anything Yeah. Than actually use the ui, Yeah. If I can figure out that it's forward slash edit.

I remember using Drupal back in the day, and that was basically the best way to get around. Yeah. Almost every part of the CMS was to modify the URL and, I miss that in WordPress. It would be quite nice if stuff like this was more widely deployed. So if you're on a post, you just add, whatever the slog ends with you just add forward slash edit.

And if you're logged in, you get to edit it. And if you're not logged in, you are asked to log in and then you edit it.

[01:31:58] Remkus de Vries: Correct.

[01:31:58] Nathan Wrigley: Nice.

[01:31:59] Remkus de Vries: Cannot be simpler. Cannot be sweeter.

[01:32:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. it could be forward slash e That would be easier.

[01:32:07] Remkus de Vries: Ronald, are you listening? This is

[01:32:10] Nathan Wrigley: who's, is it? Okay. Ronald, ignore that suggestion.

It was a bad idea. Don't do that. Stick with what you've got. It's brilliant. I was only joking, with that. I think that's it. I think that's everything we've got time for. We're actually overrunning already, so apologies about that. I guess it was always gonna happen. We had this one big story which was gonna dominate.

I apologize if we just overdid it, but there you go. wait.

[01:32:34] Remkus de Vries: This is not safe, right? This is safe.

[01:32:35] Nathan Wrigley: This one is safe in the uk, the other one is not. So you're gonna do the other one, aren't you? Yes, of course you are. Yeah. so there we go. Thank you to you. If you were in the comments, that certainly livened it all up.

Really appreciate that was quite a few of you in today. Thank you. And, oh, I guess it just reminds remains for me to say thank you to Tim. Thank you to Mku, thank you to Peacher for joining us today. We'll put this out as a, an audio podcast tomorrow. And all things being equal, we should be back next week for another episode.

You never know, but now it's that moment. The humiliating. Oh, he is? Yeah. Yeah. Gone. Here he goes. Yeah, no, do it. Go on. That'll be gone. I won't be able to capture that. There we go. Thank you so much. We will see you next week. If you panelists wanna stick around for a bit of a nater, that would be nice, but, if not, I will see you very soon.

Take it easy. Bye bye bye.