This Week in WordPress #337

It is time for This Week in WordPress, episode number 337, entitled AI All the Way Down. It was recorded on Monday, the 23rd of June, 2025. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and I'll be joined today by three fabulous guests. The first one is my co-host, that's Michelle Frechette, but I'm also joined by Steve Burge and Jesse Friedman.

We do spend a great deal of time talking about AI, and we managed to overlap it quite a lot with WordPress, so fear not, not, we do stick to the piste a little bit.

But we also talk about the fact that AI seems to be taking a lot of jobs, especially in the creative film industry. We mention a Verge article which Steve brings to bear, and it shows us a video, which is truly remarkable and is perhaps something, if you are in the advertising industry, that you would need to be worried about.

We spend quite a long time talking about other bits and pieces related to ai, and then we get onto more WordPressy things. So we talk about the release schedule for WordPress 6.8, the SQLite driver for WordPress. Dropping security updates for versions 4.1 and 4.6 of WordPress, and then into some community news. The fact that there's a few events in person and online coming around the corner, and a whole bunch of other stuff as well.

And it's all coming up next on This Week in WordPress.

[00:01:34] 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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Hello there. Hi Michelle. Hi Steve. And hello, Jesse. although Jesse's kind of lurking, in the background, he, says, yeah, he says he sees the, count he's here. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna press, Hey, Jesse, apologies. The reason I didn't press the earlier, because we were in this like preamble music thing and I had no idea what would happen if I, no worries.

Might have killed. I was looping them in all the thing. anyway, here we're Michelle's, my savior. we're at this week in WordPress, episode number 337, as you can see, joined by some, fabulous, old timers to this show. If you like, we've got Michelle Ette, the co-host. How are you doing, Michelle?

[00:03:43] Michelle Frechette: I am well, thank you. It's a little warm here today. Yes. I just put, it's already 29 centigrade and 85 Fahrenheit and about to go up to 35 95 today. So yeah, we've had unusually season. we love to talk about the weather in the uk. Steve and I could do a whole 90 minutes just grabbing on about the, the weather, but, we won't, but we've had beautifully hot weather as well, although it.

[00:04:05] Nathan Wrigley: It's definitely turned back to normal British grayness. anyway, let me do the proper introduction for Michelle. Michelle Frache is the Executive Director of Post Status. In addition to work at Post status, Michelle is the podcast barista at WP Coffee Talk, co-founder of Underrepresented in Tech, creator of WP Speakers and WP Career pages.

She is also an author, frequent organizer and speaker at WordPress events. She lives outside Rochester, New York, where she's an avid nature photographer. The one URL, which kind of coen coalesces the whole lot is meet Michelle online. So if you go there, you'll be able to find out all the bits and pieces, meet Michelle online, and, maybe, I dunno if we're gonna show it later.

We, she's also quite good on the, TikTok as I like to call it because I'm not that cool.

[00:04:56] Michelle Frechette: People on the south say they're going to the Walmart as opposed to just going to Walmart. So Yeah, I, deliberately do it to make my kids cringe. it's a good thing. It's a good way to do that. And they're like, oh, dad, I'm going on the Facebook. The Facebook. we're also joined by Steve, bge.

[00:05:15] Nathan Wrigley: He's right there. How you doing, Steve? Hey guys. Hey Mr. Wrigley. Oh, no. That makes me feel so old. Mr. Wrigley. It is. We'll go with that. Steve is the, the published press founder. That was the entire bio, until a few moments ago, I think. and, but it's more fancy now. He is written something else. He's part of a team building.

Word pressure. Publishing plugins with over 1 million users. They are our published press meta slide tax, press and log tivity. Good grief. Is that right? 1 million users combined. That's quite a lot. Well done. gosh. we have a, lot of plugins They add up if you Yeah, if you add up all the time.

no, Don't, be so don't be so bashful. That is a Tom. It doesn't matter which way you cut it. That's still a lot of people. Bravo, Steve. That's amazing. Which is the, which is the most popular in terms of installs? Probably meta slider. Okay, so you can go and check those out. So let me repeat them.

Publish, press, meta, slider, taxo, press and log. Tivity. And, Steve's bringing loads of ai goodness, today. So we're gonna all have an argument and a bum fight about ai, no doubt. And, also joined by the, by Jesse, Friedman for the first time. Hello, Jesse, I've never met you before as far as I know.

nice to hang out. Jesse and I go way back. Much thank joining. That's, that's really, valuable. Thank you, Michelle. Yeah. Appreciate it. It's a pleasure. I'll read Jesse's, bio and it's quite a bio, the first few words alone. Really impressive. He is the head of WP Cloud at Automatic. he says that's fine, but he's happy to add more to the bio if we want.

I would like you to add to the bio. Just tell us what WP Cloud is 'cause honestly we don't talk about it that much and it wouldn't surprise me if quite a few people listening to this didn't really know, too much about it. quick elevator pitch of WP Cloud, if you don't mind. Yeah. WP Cloud is a WordPress first cloud platform built homegrown by automatic, from bare metal boxes that we created internally to service our own needs, powering some of the largest, fastest, most, trafficked websites in the world.

[00:07:29] Jesse Friedman: And so now we've made it available through, hosting companies around, so you can get it, via wordpress.com. Impressible Bluehost Cloud Conveo. pork Bun, Insta, wp, the list goes on. it is a AWS Google Cloud Alternative with a WordPress first. focus. So you literally bought the bare metal servers and then just got to work in store adapting the OS and things like that to your needs, and then you spin it out as a kind of white label, if you like, hosting solution to other hosting platforms.

[00:08:03] Nathan Wrigley: Gosh, that's fascinating. Exactly right. Yeah. And it has, because of its WordPress, focus, it doesn't require us to compete, on the focus that other cloud platforms have. a common thing that we talk about here is the AWS Google Cloud. They have a, they have a lot going on.

[00:08:22] Jesse Friedman: they work on, warehouse logistics, shipping, virtual reality gaming. The list goes on, right? It's very. Complex list of things that they're focused on. We are only doing WordPress, so we're able to put up guardrails that help us to automate, scaling of your site, the, caching and CDN deployment, full management stacks, tons of development tools.

So it's, it is in a sense can be completely white labeled, but it's other times, hosts choose to say that it's powered by WP Cloud as well. Okay. And if you are running a website and you want, the highest, fastest, highest standard that we're setting, you can go to those hosting companies if you are a hosting company or a registrar.

You can come to WP Cloud to, learn more. Can I ask, is your background were like, were you into all this stuff prior to your work at Automatic? Were you like some sort of hosting Forgive me nerd. before you actually, no, Interesting. Yeah, so I started building websites, as a side gig in high school.

So I didn't want to have, I wanted to get out of bagging groceries and pumping gas. Those were early jobs I had. So I started, getting into web design. went to college for it, became a professor, had a couple of jobs working in web design, multimedia. Did flash websites for years. Got into WordPress in 2003, four when a professor, Hillary Mason suggested it to me, never looked back.

WordPress has been, something that I have dedicated a large part of my career to because it has given me so much the community, everybody involved, we know this, we all know this, who's worked in this. you go to a Word camp and you say, I am struggling with something. All of a sudden you have 50 people trying to eagerly help you, grow.

Because the more people who are doing well in the community, the better the community does overall. and so then, I wrote a couple books on WordPress. I co-founded a company called Brew Protect, which was a cloud powered, malicious script detector for brute force protection. And that got me into hosting.

So I was working with hosting companies to install this plugin to help us to identify attack vectors across hosting companies. Previous to that, hosting companies silo their information so they didn't get to benefit from those attack vectors. That's where I really started working with hosting companies.

We sold that company to automatic, I've been at Automatic for 11 years. Got it. And I started in UX and user advocacy moved into business. And then I've been working in hosting partnerships for, I don't know, eight or nine years now. What a, great resume. That's absolutely marvelous. thank you for joining us and now we know all about you.

[00:11:08] Nathan Wrigley: That's fabulous. So hopefully this will be the first time of many. I'll just go through the usual preamble, which I always do, for this show, if that's all right. So the first thing to say is, if you're joining us live, please, make use of the comments. There's really only two ways to do that. The best, thing I can say is if you're watching this on some platform that's not YouTube, probably the best thing to do is to go to wp builds.com/live.

over there we've embedded the video and we've put YouTube comments next to it, and it really feels like that's where everybody comments from these days on this show. So head to there. The right hand side, if you're on a desktop of the video is YouTube comments. So you'll need to be logged into Google.

If you don't like that, then you can just click the little black button at the top right hand of the video itself. And you don't need to be logged into anything. It's the platform that we use. they have a little widget which enables you to comment. So feel free to do that. That would be really nice.

So wp builds.com. Forward slash live if you want to do that. And a few people have done that already. So for example, Ryan, hello, from Insta, wp, I really do need to click a setting in here. So that also thing I, yeah, what did I say? What did I say? You said Insta, sorry. yeah, influence wp. Now there is a setting.

Let me make that go away and see if I can get these setting. No, I dunno. They've moved things around a little bit. Comments? No. There we go. Let's see if that. Yeah. There we go. That's better. so good morning, Ryan. He says from a super Sony and Hot Charlotte in North Carolina, Tommy Listers joining us from the uk.

Good morning. She says, Marcus Bennet. Happy flipping Monday everybody. Lovely. And and then we've got Dave Den. Hello Dave Den. He's in the UK as well. at least he was last time I spoke. He still spoke to last week. Michelle. Oh yeah, we got something about the speed network in a moment actually.

yeah, you gotta add that to your bio. We'll, discuss that in a minute and then you can add it to your bio. Cameron is joining us, usually Australia, so I'm guessing that's where he is 'cause he's saying good evening. And, Elliot Sby just down the road from me in Sonny Briton is, hello?

Hello everybody. Hello. Yeah. Hello everybody. So please make some comments if you've got anything that I don't know you disagree with or you've got an opinion on as we discussed through the bits and pieces. Just drop it in there and it keeps the conversation. it keeps the conversation going, which is really nice.

Self promotional bit. This is us wp builds.com. If you go to this website and put your email address into this field, we'll send you a couple of emails each week, one tomorrow, which is which we'll pass a up, what we're doing now, along with a bunch of other links about the WordPress news from the last week, and one which will come out on Thursday when we release a podcast episode.

'cause we do that once a week as well. And this time around it was, sure, yeah. I, thought why not? I knighted him on even though the king has, he's not been involved in this conversation. I don't care, sir. Bob Don, joins us and talks about his podcasting journey. So if you're into that, it was really interesting chatting about, we've got similarities, but we've got differences in our story, so come join us for that.

The only other bit of self-promotional stuff, is I did a podcast episode with, two very bright, very cool people. Tom Wilmot and John Ang, they're both from Human Made and they, they were at, WordCamp Europe recently doing a talk, and I collared them for about 40 minutes. And we talked about a new project that they've launched with a global bank called Standard Chartered.

And we get into all of the bits and pieces of how the heck do you do WordPress at that scale? I think they've got something like 83,000 employees and it's literally millions and millions of hits every day. I dunno what it is per minute, but Jesse probably knows this pain. But to me it's all new.

I'm happy with a couple of hundred a day, but not Standard Chartered. So it was a really interesting conversation. We break that all apart, so there we go. Okay. One of the things that we're gonna do now in this show is if guests join us. So we've got three today and they wanna demonstrate something or, promo something.

We're gonna put that at the top of the show. Keep it quite, short and, sweet. But the, idea is to get those things aired. It may be something they've brought or just something they found interesting. It used to be at the end and we never had, we always ran outta time. Yeah, that was Michelle's idea.

We always ran out of time. 'cause I waffle along. so here we go. Let's embark on this and get, through what we can. So this was on Marcus Burnett in the comments was just referring to, speed Network online. This is Michelle's. Tell us more, Michelle. It's, yeah, so I was talking with different people every Wednesday morning I have an hour that I do open office hours and it's a little bit of a meetup type thing, but it's not structured.

[00:15:56] Michelle Frechette: And afterwards, June was saying to me, I don't really know how to meet people to be able to work, build my, business. And I said, what about. Like speed networking. how would that work? Just like speed dating only networking. So we figured out a way to make it happen. We're gonna do speed networking online.

Every month is gonna be at a little bit of a different time so that we can incorporate different, parts of the world. it's probably never gonna be at 3:00 AM so if you're on the other side of the world, hoping it's the year, afternoon, dream on. but I love you. However, I love my sleep too.

but speed networking and so it's five minute conversations with up to 15 different people depending on how many people sign up. We only have 10 spots left for this Thursday. and at the end of it you don't even have to write down people's information 'cause at the end, we will be giving you the list of attendees and their contact information and then that will be wiped clean for the next episode of the next session.

[00:16:50] Nathan Wrigley: So I'll just share RL into the audio. but then I'll put this into the, show notes that come out tomorrow. So it's Speed Network online speed network online.com. dead easy to remember. It's when's the first one? Then there's, it's this Thursday at 1:00 PM New York time there is a $20 fee just because we wanna make sure that people have a little skin in the game so they actually show up and don't, blow it off because they didn't have to pay for it.

[00:17:16] Michelle Frechette: yeah, that seems sensible. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good idea. Okay. So yeah, good luck with that. That sounds amazing. Thank you. So speed network online.com. There's the first thing, and you must add it to your bio from now on, I must, as Mark has suggested. And then the next one, the next one actually, Marcus built the site for us.

So this is, having lost my job in February. within a couple days, Kinsa reached out to me and said, we'd like to sponsor some of your time, and they're sponsoring five hours a month of the work that I put into the open source project, WordPress. And so I thought, How can I get more people to sponsor me?

And I don't like asking people for money. So what if I built in a, da, a database of people and just slid myself into it, solve a problem for myself and apparently 111 other people so far, we just launched this about, Marcus can correct me I think two to three weeks ago. So it's fairly new.

you can sign up, it's free, you can search the data base. If you are a company who wants to sponsor people in the WordPress community, you don't have the, bandwidth within your own team to put time into this. And you don't wanna just write a check to the foundation. You can sponsor individuals within WordPress.

if you click browse contributors real quick, and I know that we won't, take a ton of time here, but you, it, actually, Marcus is brilliant. My idea, he executed it. Beautifully. it will randomize every single time so that the same last, everybody with a name, starting with a doesn't show up at the top every time.

click Tammy, for example. You can see Tammy's got a, She was like, yeah, just talking by there. She's, and she's watching so she can see her. So you, see, her website, you see her ex, you see her. We're on, WordPress. you can see her, which, team she's contributing to and her bio, if you want to talk to her, you can send her an email through the site.

we are using WS form, we're using, terms style with CloudFlare. So everything goes directly between you, the company and the contributor. We are not taking money, we are not funneling money. We do, I do not want that added to my taxes every year. So everything goes between you and the contributor.

This is simply a directory and a way for businesses to reach out to sponsors and find people that they're interested in sponsoring. That is such a cool idea, and I've gotta say, Marcus. beautiful design. And I'll say it also, it grew not only out of my need, but also Marcus had added on the WP world a place where you could say, I'm interested in sponsorship, or you can sponsor me.

And so this was like the perfect blend of what he was already doing right. And taking it a step further. And so he was the perfect person to partner up with on this. Beautiful, yeah. Really nice. Michelle, can I ask a quick question about that? Yeah. Have you considered, making it so that a company who wants to see some, new feature of w WordPress or, wants to see contributions focused in a certain area because they need it for their business or something like that, be able to post.

[00:20:17] Jesse Friedman: What it is that they want someone to focus on and say that they're willing to sponsor this and then have it come into them via these, contributors. So they could, like essentially bid on, I would be able to do 10 hours of this for X dollars or something like that. Good idea. So that's a great idea.

[00:20:34] Michelle Frechette: And Marcus take note 'cause he is watching. but also I would worry a little bit that you sponsor somebody in the community for a specific feature that doesn't get picked up by the release squads. And so you may be putting money into something that will never see the light of day. what you can do when you browse the contributors is you can browse by work team, make teams.

So if you're interested in, let's say you're interested in Gutenberg, you can see next to Tammy, it's, yeah, so you can pick any of the teams and you wanna focus on people who are working on Gutenberg. Now you can see who. Who are the people working in any particular area, but I like the idea and I think maybe that, could be solved by, like a feature plugin.

[00:21:15] Jesse Friedman: Like they, they do it as a plugin first, and if it does get rejected, then it can released plug. And, I can't remember who it was, so forgive me if you're watching, but, yesterday somebody posted, an reply on LinkedIn that they have a project that provides lunch for, independent people who are contributing and could they put themselves in this.

[00:21:37] Michelle Frechette: And I'm like, I don't have any reason why you shouldn't be able to. you just wouldn't pick one of the big teams that you're contributing to. so yeah, there's all kinds of different ways can be used and, and then we are looking to expand it and give, we're looking for feedback.

So that's great feedback, Jesse. And I'm sure that Marcus has written it all down. And if not, I will remember tomorrow. Can I just say that the, the power of WP builds, you've added a, contributor. One contributor has been added to wonder who?

[00:22:10] Nathan Wrigley: Not 10 x, not even one xd, but you, nor 0.9 xd your, I'll be looking later to see who have themselves during the show. That's, there we go. So sponsor me, wp.com Yeah. Is the, the euro. What a great idea. Really, neat. Thank, and I'm glad that we got a chance to surface that as well.

So thank you. I'll bookmark that and put that into the show notes for tomorrow as well. Appreciate it. But there you go. Reading it into the record Sponsor me com. The next one is, the one that you thought was hysterical or like a really, oh, I don't even know what to say about this. oh, no, this isn't the hysterical one.

Or is it? no, this isn't the hyster. you do have to, if you want people to hear it, you'll have to click the, the speaker on the right hand side. I don't think the audio will be consumed by this. Okay. The platform won't, I wasn't sure. do you want me to play it anyway, even though we want the audio?

No, you, can, but we talk about it for a second if few people wanna see. so we have launched, wordpress.org, the free WordPress TikTok channel. we launched it a week, a little before, a little more than a week before. I left for Word Camp Europe. This is one of my contracts I have with Automatic is I'm the TikTok person.

[00:23:18] Michelle Frechette: And you can see on the right hand side there, I did an A SMR video where I speak slowly to the microphone, things like. WordPress, SEO, like just fun things, right? and we do a lot of really fun things. we're doing some TikTok trendy things. You will never see me dance on TikTok, so don't even get that in your head.

Come on. We're having a lot of fun with it. This is, I, did, I went live with, through the vendor hall at Work Camp Europe. I also went live for the. The final q and a with Matt. Unfortunately I had not brought a tripod with me 'cause I wasn't anticipating that. So I held my camera as steady as I could for an hour and 15 minutes.

[00:24:01] Nathan Wrigley: You got the cramp in the arm. I did, Yeah, yeah, I'll bet. Marcus by the way, has dropped in to say thank you. The idea has been noted, so that's good. Thank you Marcus. And also Tammy who obviously we were talking about. I apologize Jessie, there's nothing we can do about that. It will obliterate your face every time.

You can say that if you wanna be seen, Tammy says, or that someone would say that they can do that feature might not be able to do. Matching is ideal. Oh, I see. So excluding not just including, but excluding as well. So cannot do Gutenberg or whatever it might be. Okay. So there you go. Another thing to add into.

Great. So thank you Michelle for all of that. Yeah. Good stuff. Brilliant lot. I'm just gonna quickly raise this one as Tammy was on the call. Why not? AI is this, by the way, came from Steve. Steve's dropped in a bunch of AI stuff, but Tammy produced this 10 days ago now, so it's not brand new.

But, Steve, I think you were raising this one because you felt, I'm reading between the lines a little bit. You didn't really know what the AI team was about and now you do kind of thing. Tammy might be able to fill us in more on this, but I think they started, they thought it would be a good idea and then afterwards started to hold meetings and put a plan together.

[00:25:14] Steve Burge: So I think this was the first time I'd seen a kind of a public roadmap for I. For what they were planning to do with the AI team? Yeah, so this one came on the 13th of June. It's on make WordPress org. It's called AI Chat Summary. So obviously summarizing what they talked about the day before. Usually these summaries are pretty short.

[00:25:32] Nathan Wrigley: But this one, I suppose given the broad reach of ai, this one does go on. I don't mean it goes on and on What I mean is there's a lot of detail there, including, subjects that they're planning to cover. I'll just read out the sort of bullet points if you like. foundational strategy and technical architecture.

shared LLM, abstraction layer tool and resource registry, and MCP integration, AI feature registration, cross system integration, sustainable development and tech debt strategy, implementation, focus use cases, a i I could go on. And then, open next steps to do as well. So if you are in the WordPress space and you are keen.

To follow on with the ai. I am doing it again. then this probably is the place to go, Tammy Lister plus whole load of other people. So Flexio, I think that's Pascal. No Swiss pity. He's Pascal Bula. This is Felix Ants. I don't know who these other people are. I could click the link, but I think this is a fabulous moniker, by the way.

John Billion, what a great, name that is. I dunno who that is, but there we go. So you can check that out. But that then I think sent Steve off in a bit of a, in a bit of an ai, tailspin, because quite a few of the next pieces are related to ai, not necessarily WordPress, but it's a fascinating subject.

So we go here next, which is The Verge showing us a video, which doesn't sound all that remarkable until, Steve, you explained what the heck's going on. you, I didn't even intend to put a lot of AI stuff in the show notes. It wasn't as if I sat down and said. I'm gonna make a more AI focused. Just afterwards I looked back and, yeah, my reading over the last week or so, the stuff that had been on my mind all just happened to be AI related.

[00:27:22] Steve Burge: they had the big, Cannes Festival down in the south of France recent last week, I think. Yeah, it was, yeah. And, this dropped during it. And basically all these big advertising agencies are there spending millions of dollars on parties on the waterfront. And suddenly during the NBA finals in the US one company posts this $2,000 video they generated with AI in three or four days.

And I, followed a few of the people that were there advertising related people, and at least a couple of them said it felt like a kind of a. fall of Rome is what one of them commented, that it really felt like a kind of an end of an era for people who were in advertising, who were selling expensive advertising packages.

[00:28:13] Nathan Wrigley: I am, I watch this in equal Measures, horror and all, because basically if you're watching, I'll link to this in the show notes. I'll put this article into the show notes, but it's a company called Cal Calci, or certainly looks like that. I think they're a betting company. Yeah. Who say that you can basically bet on anything.

This video would've cost tens of millions of dollars to make, because you've got people on airplanes, you've got people, doing jet skiing, the angles all look incredible, and then you realize that the entirety of it. Gone inside a ai, generative AI solution. I don't know which one exactly, but I'm guessing it was something to do with Google, and cost a couple of thousand dollars.

And it, I guess what I thought from that is if you are in, if you are in video making, advertising, video, making your job just disappeared in front of your eyes, I, that could be hyperbole. Maybe I'm overdoing it a little bit, but it does feel as if that video is so unbelievably credible that it feels like, how could you possibly go to any brand now and say, I.

Yeah, this ad campaign's gonna cost you a few million dollars. We need to put a few actors, we've got this exciting idea involving airplanes and dah. Will it be just, we'll do it via ai. Thanks. We don't need the airplane anymore. We don't need the expensive, this, that, and the other thing.

So it definitely, if I was in that industry, I would be worried. I dunno if that's where you went with it, Steve. Yeah, absolutely. That kind of the agency side of things at least seems to be, seems to have the potential to get eaten up very quickly by, by ai. And I think there's room for humans in this still, particularly on the influencer space.

[00:30:02] Steve Burge: Lots of, people who, who have an audience who, who want to, they can make a, they can make advertising dollars through, through the videos they post, through, through their social channels. but the old fashioned agency model of filming a one minute or 32nd video for, a big brand, a lot of that work seems to be going away pretty quick.

and I, guess this year in particular, we're gonna find out which of those, which business models are gonna get eaten by AI and which ones are gonna be safe. 'cause we were talking before that AI is fails in quite a lot of areas. so some of us who are nervous might actually turn out to be safe because of ai, but, I think advertising particularly online, video adv advertising, TV ads and so on, is one way I would definitely encourage people to go and look at this one.

[00:31:03] Nathan Wrigley: So I'll just read out the name of the piece. So it's, on the Verge, it's called, here's the $2,000 Fully AI generated ad that, during the NBA finals, I can you imagine they probably spent like a thousand, 10,000 times more on the ad. Cost of the app placement than they did on the actual ad itself.

But it, honestly, I am having more and more conversations and thoughts around the hollowing out of entire industries in a heartbeat. people constantly talk about things like, the comparisons between the industrial evolution and, the, all of the things that were taken over by machinery.

I feel that all happened fairly slowly, and the building of the machines was probably a fairly labor intensive thing in of itself. So those jobs whittled away over probably many decades. This is like eight minutes, some, person just put together that video and immediately ev every executive with a company is now thinking, we're not gonna hire that agency anymore.

it does concern me. I've gotta say I'm less and less sanguine about it, not from the point of view of how clever it is, because I can fully see how remarkably clever it is. It's just. It just worries me that there's gonna be collateral damage and people that I know and, enjoy spending time with are gonna be put through the anxiety of job, jobs disappearing and things like that.

Anyway, there's my rant. I think I, I hosted a panel at CLOUDFEST on ai and we went through a bunch of different, ways in which AI is being used. One thing that came up that I've been really trying to push lately is this idea that I think as humans, we want things that are authentically human.

[00:32:44] Jesse Friedman: And so if we, leverage that and we as creators really pull and, and, push that into the, community, I think that might actually really help. Because then you can stand apart from ai, if there was some kind of badge or something like that, that, signified that the content that was created was authentically human.

That might actually help to alleviate some of this stuff. I also would, think that, we at Automatic, for example, we use AI very heavily right now, but we're not using it to replace jobs quite yet. I think that, AI is acting a lot more as if we had like a personal assistant or a chief of staff that could take ideas and, run with them.

it's making us more efficient, making us work faster, but I don't know that it's necessarily replacing, and I think Tammy actually mentioned this in the comments. I'm not sure that it's replacing, creative jobs at least yet. Maybe, something like this, I would imagine even that ad, would still have required a great deal of thought and imagination behind it.

even though they're not necessarily hiring a creative agency, maybe they're doing it more internally, but then the, those individuals at those companies become just as valuable, being able to translate that into ai. maybe we're, gonna see that in a few years, but, I'm not sure we're there yet.

No. That we have to be super concerned. I am teaching in a cyber security class this afternoon at the, as my mother calls it, the old folks home where she lives. Because even she got scammed out of $250 last week by a fake McAfee email and, had somebody on the phone and I interrupted the call not even realizing, I said, hang up now.

[00:34:23] Michelle Frechette: Call your bank. Make sure they, 'cause she even gave them some of her bank information. And part of that is they get you on the phone and now they've recorded your voice saying things like, yes and that kind of thing. And they're gonna be using AI to reproduce that, to get access to your bank account and do all the things and answer your security questions.

And so I think it has such. I am worried about how it can impact certain industries, but I'm even more worried about how AI is going to become a scammer's dream. Yeah. through phone and email and videos of your grandchild saying, grandma, you have to send me the money or out, those kinds of things.

And so I'm gonna be talking about that too. Hopefully a room full of people later today to help them think about how not to get scanned. Oh, good for you. That's brilliant. Yeah. I share all of the opinions. I don't, I think maybe I'm definitely a little bit more on the curmudgeonly side of things when it comes to all of this.

[00:35:19] Nathan Wrigley: I'm just, yeah, thank you. Thank, I need a badge that just says That's Bud Krause's. That's my word for Bud Krause. Yeah. but, obviously it does genuinely worry me. you know what you said there, Michelle, about, creating video, oh, sorry. AI's being used to deploy, to make it much more trivial to, to make it so that you can extract bank details and so on and so forth.

and I think also that video was so profoundly real. like that really was the video for me, that for the first time I thought that is genuinely indistinguishable because they didn't try to do something that couldn't be done. Everything in that video could have been done at great cost if you'd have put the actors in those environments.

But they did it. And it just made me think, gosh, if we can all do this for relatively no money down, it's just that worry of. Flooding the landscape. so that then brings me to what Jesse said, this idea of, I don't know, watermarking content or something where you can categorically say, I am actual, I am real.

And I dunno how we do that. I dunno how we would determine that something truly is real. 'cause obviously the AI just watermark itself and say, oh yeah, this is totally legit. I'm real, I think there's gonna be, I think there's gonna be a need. For something that's gonna genuinely show that, something is made is not made by ai.

[00:36:45] Jesse Friedman: There's, we, can already do this. We can take content that was written and, pump it back into AI and ask if it was realistically written by a human or how much of it was written by ai. I think there will probably be tools that exist, especially when you think about education. It's gonna be incredibly important.

students are gonna need to prove that they've written this content or their essays or genuinely created their own videos or whatever it might be, unless they're in an AI class. So I think there's going to be something that's going to exist that's going to, add, authenticity to this. And then, so we just need to as creators really champion.

the, the way in which we, we say publicly that this was authentically human. It was interesting. Can we back to the, sorry. Sorry, you go first, Michelle. Yeah. Can we go back to the days where teachers just worried that you were relying on Wikipedia too much? Yeah, When Cliff notes was was the biggest issue.

W the, yeah, exactly. There was a thing in the British press, I can't remember which newspaper, an online newspaper that I read this weekend, and it was a teacher and she didn't discuss where she was, but she was in the UK somewhere, nor did she discuss the age of the children involved.

[00:37:54] Nathan Wrigley: But she basically was describing this evening, this Sunday evening, where she spent marking, prose basically. it was narrative. So it wasn't like a maths paper, it was a English paper. Let's go with that. And, it was taking an hour or more to mark each paper, and she had the strong intuition that the majority of it was written by, ai.

So this demoralizing moment occurred where she thinks, this is taking me an hour. It took the person that's handed it in four seconds and what do you even do with that as a professional? What, where do you, because it's not like you can go back to the kids and berate, I suppose you could berate them for it, but you, there's no way of proving that's definitely written by ai.

So I think these concerns are just mounting up for me and my, curmudgeonly side is growing and my sanguine side is shrinking slowly. the, interesting thing to me, I think is where we are at this point, we're what, two years into this, maybe two years since open a open API really went public and I, guess I've been on WP builds a few times and the chat is, there's a normally a few people sending messages.

[00:39:10] Steve Burge: we dropped in AI into the conversation here and suddenly the chat has gone wild. Everyone has an opinion. We're at that point, two years into this. AI launch where it's almost the first thing on everyone's mind. If they're in tech, it's almost impossible to escape from that. Everyone is worried about it lapping at their business.

WordPress just has an AI team out. We're just starting to. Come to grips with what it means for WordPress and how WordPress can respond. it's a really interesting moment right now. I'm going to, I'm going to get myself a nice tinfoil hat and start farming job. that's gonna be my, future, an erect barriers.

[00:39:52] Nathan Wrigley: To anybody who's not actually real. okay. Let's go through some of those comments. I'll try to pick up on some of the ones which, which sort of seem to push the conversation a little bit. it triggers, so this, I presume from Zach, hello, Zach is in response to the video itself. So it triggers my uncanny Valley response.

So I don't know if Zach, but Zach is a photographer. I, don't know this is a fact, but I'm imagining that Zach also strays into film as well. So I'm interested to know what you think about this, whether or not you've got, concerns that those kind of things are gonna hollow out, that kind of work, which I know you do, as well as your day job.

Realtime streaming avatar. So basically influencers, educators, podcasters that are real time live, genuine in a sense of playing a character and fulfilling a role coming very soon. I'm not. Yeah, that feels more like a comment than a question. So sorry Max, I've missed what that might have meant. AI is fun as Dave done, but scary at the same time.

Musicians, advert agencies, web designers, AI will take up lots of jobs. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's where I'm at. I'm concerned that sentence is true. I hope it isn't, but maybe we can somewhat come up with some way of proving that we want AI isn't going to take, as many jobs as we think we thought that about digital photography.

Yeah. Always the voice of reason. Thank you, Tommy. I pray that you are right and, just to get us out of AI for a minute. Good morning. There we, oh, thank goodness. that's great. WebLogic says, I wonder how AI is affecting Hollywood. I guess AI will have replaced CGI how long till I get an AI movie? maybe an AI movie will be totally watchable.

there was no bit of me, which probably already there. Yeah. But there was no bit of Me, which was looking at Jurassic Park when it first came out, you know that first sort of CGI type of film. There was no bit of me, which was looking at that, thinking it's graphics. I. I'm not watching this. It's a computer made that.

It's whoa, that's cool. you just suspend all of it, don't you? And say, I don't care. So long as it's entertaining. Like that video that we just watched that, Steve gave to us. Jess, Rick. Hello Jess. Long time No, see, I'm, oh no. She's training my Wrigley A-I-G-P-T on this vodka. Gonna use it to launch a new show featuring British version of Max Headroom.

Okay. Keep it clean and I'll be very happy about that. AI is not creative. It provides an illusion of creativity. Yeah. My concern, Zach, is that if it provides an illusion, which is close enough to what we humans typically do, then it'll be indistinguishable. there's not many of us that are really, really.

tremendously creative. I think most of us, like me, little moments of creativity, but most of my life isn't that creative. take plugin devs for example, previously a dev tool all the time to create a plugin. Now people can vibe code it and on it goes. Yeah, you were right Steve, Reese.

Hello Reese. I can't remember where I read it, but I like the phrase, the world of the world, in the world of AI slop can be. Slop be a crafty human, sorry. In the world of AI slop, sorry, I put a comma in there. Somehow be a crafty human. Yeah. In the world of ai, slop be a crafty human. I put the comma in the wrong place.

Yeah, I agree. I agree. Do you know that's I think where I'm gonna have to land with this is that I think really I'm gonna get to the point where I'm gonna try and find people who are clearly human, probably initially, because I know they've been producing stuff long before ai, and follow those people, because I can trust that they are real.

yeah, that's right. If you're over, if you're over 50, you've got a chance. Can anybody tell me of a comment? 'cause I, there's about 15 more that I haven't yet read and it's hard to talk and read at the same time. Is there anyone there that Yeah, I think it's, mostly just continuing the same conversation.

[00:43:42] Michelle Frechette: Okay. there are now jobs being offered, hired four to, for AI specialists how to use, how do you use chat GPT, for example, and come to our company and show us and use it for us in a way that hasn't been used before. So it may be creating a new industry. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Thank you Steve for bringing this one up.

[00:44:06] Nathan Wrigley: It's that video is so profound. It's so cool. Yeah. there's the Verge article once more. and then there was stuff c Can I, do you mind if, do you want to go into this one as well or do you want skip, you skip to the Axios one maybe. 'cause I think Jesse might have some insight on this. This is fascinating.

So I, I came across this actually. Coincidentally, Steve did at the same time. So this is CloudFlare stepping in trying to do the good fight. So do you wanna just summarize it, Steve? Yeah. Basically, CloudFlare have got some data together saying that, the amount of scraping that AI companies does is growing exponentially, but the number of visitors they're sending is growing far more, slowly.

[00:44:52] Steve Burge: They might be crawling your site a hundred times for one visitor. but the rate, things are going in a few months. They might be crawling your site a thousand times for one visitor. And yeah, there we go. Those are the ratios. And actually, this is where I might have, a question for Jesse about this.

I saw, Josh from Pantheon who was posting similar figures for his platform. He was saying the same thing as CloudFair, that the number of AI bots hitting the Pantheon websites was skyrocketing over the last few months, but the amount of traffic they were sending in order to justify that scraping was minimal.

Basically, they breaking the, there was an old kind of unwritten agreement from Google that Google would scrape your site, take your data and in return, reward you with a certain number of visits. That kind of unwritten rule is. Has broken down now. Yeah. I'm just gonna summarize what we can see on the screen for those people who can't see on the screen.

[00:45:56] Nathan Wrigley: essentially, what, we had, I think really it was getting close to one-to-one. Google would scrape and it would serve up visitors on a more or less. We scrape, we serve a visitor, this kind of one-to-one relationship. However, six months ago, I'll just talk about Google to start with.

That was six to one. So six scrapes to one that we will provide you with a visitor. now it's 18 to one, but then if you look in the AI sphere, open AI six months ago was, 250 to one, anthropic, 6,000 to one. But now, again, this data will trust that Axios is telling us the truth. I guess OpenAI is fif, 1,500 to one and Anthropic is 60,000 to one.

The message basically of this article is creators, you are no longer being rewarded for your endeavors by the institutions that. You imagined were, and actually I would, actually take a step back. If you go back to that number, for, a second there, the way I interpret this, I could be wrong, is what it's saying is that Google's crawling your pages more frequently than it is sending visitors to it.

[00:47:05] Jesse Friedman: Yeah. However, it does not necessarily say that the traffic to those pages is down. So what it's doing is it's saying that it's crawling more oh, interesting. Visit to the site. Okay. But you don't know if you're getting actually significantly higher traffic. You're just getting slammed with crawling, bots.

something just to think about there, because it is something that we are seeing, these ais are I think, very actively looking for, valuable data in real time. And the problem that we start to see here is, that I. I'm not an AI exp expert, in this field, but what I see from my own personal use is that the individual conversations that you have with like open ai, for example, it is, two separate things happening here.

There's the AI being trained outside of the conversation that you're having, but every single independent conversation that you have, the information that it gathers, does not maintain in a longer term memory. So every single time that you ask for something, it's going out and crawling over again, whereas Google will maintain a cache of the things that has crawled for X period of time.

Yeah. So it is much more likely that AI is going to throw a lot more scraping traffic because it's not quite very good at maintaining that memory long term. But in my conversations with SEOs, we actually had one on the podcast recently. They did say that they felt that the, ais were sending more traffic.

two, the, to the actual sites, then Google is these days because the way in which Google is answering AI questions in the SERPs, it doesn't even require you to click through. Whereas, the chat, I think there's still a little bit of, mentality that maybe we don't trust the AI enough, so we always wanna go see the source.

And so maybe it is re actually res resulting in more traffic to the site. so I would just be. the way in which I interpret those numbers is that it could still mean that there's significantly higher traffic. Especially actually, yeah. You're also getting slight, your server's gonna, the cost of that to your, host is gonna be significantly higher.

[00:49:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. This is why we can't have nice things, isn't it? Because we, open them up to all people and then somebody comes along, and in the case of anthropic, according to this, they'll, quite happily go at it 60,000 times to, to give you a little bit of traffic in return. However, CloudFlare to the rescue, so the person involved in this article, the CEO, whose name is Matthew Prince, there he is, if you can see the video.

he says, bottom line, he's optimistic. CloudFlare can stop this. He says, I go to war every single day with the Chinese government, the Russian government, the Iranians, the North Koreans, probably Americans. The Israelis, all of them who are trying to hack into your customer sites, and you are telling me I can't stop some nerd with a C corporation in Palo Alto.

I, hope that turns to be true. I realize Cloud flare is powerful, but gosh, I think these other companies are also fairly powerful as well now. So, to bring this back to WordPress, I think, and maybe what the WordPress, AI team are working on or thinking about is how could WordPress be a kind of a database repository to, to serve data, to AI tools?

[00:50:24] Steve Burge: not just in a, in an entirely voluntary way, but I've seen quite a few people, including this guy from CloudFlare talk recently about some kind of, micro transactions to, to charge AI companies when they come and scrape your sites. So say you have a, WordPress site with all your data, you can look for a, A visitor from an AI bot, maybe they're trying to answer a query and you can charge them a fraction of a cent for scraping the data and and bringing the data back to their customer. I'd be so happy for Anthropic to scrape me 60,000 times if they gave me a fraction of a cent. That'd be alright.

[00:51:05] Nathan Wrigley: That's a fairly good, you would very quickly figure out how to not scrape your site very, often. We would, but that's a great idea, isn't it? If you hobble them at the knees with a tiny, transaction fee. that's an interesting, I dunno, I just dunno how you would implement that, but what a novel idea that is.

[00:51:23] Steve Burge: That's the interesting time. We're right. We're throwing up all these problems, but the solutions haven't really emerged yet. Yeah. So we're, yeah. Cameron is concerned. He, he thinks it's quite likely that this whole show has been AI right from the beginning. That Can I just say that I have met Michelle in real life?

[00:51:40] Nathan Wrigley: I've met Steve in real life. Jesse, I'm not so sure. I think he might. I have, I have. I'm not sure I believe you, but, Cameron's saying, what if he, what if Cameron has been ai, this whole thing? Yeah, exactly. No, I've met him in real life as well. he's much taller than I expected, actually.

[00:51:57] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. he's, no, it wasn't with our virtual, Lives. I don't know that we'd mean we'd know if we were replaced by AI right away. That's true. It's totally true. The, the, thing that Max was talking about that I didn't quite understand, he said, what I meant is that you looked at an AI video like prerecorded, so it's something that had already happened, but the next wave of AI might be trying to, trying to do things in real time.

[00:52:22] Nathan Wrigley: So for example, a show like this, I guess could be done by ai and I would, probably say that as a presenter of this show, it would do a better job. there is a bright and sunny future, but chat bot on two can. Yeah, exactly. The chat bot on your website could be you looking like you giving, like selling and pitching and answering questions.

[00:52:46] Michelle Frechette: And it looks like you doing that. Do you remember when you were, when you were very small, you've seen, Hey, Jen? No. How's, Hey Jen. Hey, Jen. you can upload a video of yourself talking, giving a script, and, it turns your, not only your voice, but your physical appearance into an AI generated character that you can feed scripts into.

[00:53:07] Jesse Friedman: It's not gonna be very hard for someone to tie that into a trained. GBT or something like it to have real time, conversations, so that you can replace yourself in a video chat. This is coming up in the conversation just now. Jesse, this should have been the first thing you told us about. No kidding?

Yeah, that's right. can I just say that? I, was late to the show and that might have been, we were talking about you not being real for many, hours. the, my, my neighbors have got a, very large machine of some kind operating very loudly. So if my audio goes berserk. No, it's stopped right at this moment, but I keep muting myself.

[00:53:49] Nathan Wrigley: but if you can hear it, I apologize. It is me, it is my fault. actually it's not, it's my neighbor's fault. It's your neighbor's fault. Why am I apologizing for that? da Okay, so there we go. That was the Axios piece. However, leaning into this, we're straying away from WordPress a little bit.

this is more of the same in a, in effect, I think this, sort of idea that Google is not really your friend so much anymore. it's not, you don't have that sort of partnership mode where you will produce content. Google will surface it, visitors will come. Google now have launched this.

it's in labs by the way. you have to go into labs in your, Google. Account and switch it on, but they're going to start surfacing a kind of a confection of what the search result would've been as an audio. So a short little, I don't know, maybe less than a minute, something like that. So a summary of what the search result has been.

Obviously this will work really well if you've got a closed question and you just want an answer to that a bit. Like you might chat to your, I don't know, your Alexa or Siri or whatever, but that's gonna come at the top of your search results fairly soon. Which again, I, feel is breaking the, search engine promise a little bit.

And it does seem like strange times for Google. Won't dwell on that one too much. But, but I will say that this one. It's an interesting one 'cause this is the antithesis of all that. I dunno if any of you had a chance to read this, so this is, pic Lilly, no pic, Lil doi. I'm not even gonna try and spell that out for you 'cause it's got too many double letters, but I'll put it into the show notes.

This is, this is supported by the Open Collective, which I think also has, a connection with the WPCC. WPC. Yeah, I got that the WordPress Community Collective, and this is an organization which is trying to deliver, I. Nonprofit websites for no fee. The idea is that you would subscribe to this company and then they will take on the, job of producing websites, which they have determined are underrepresented, if you like, the kind of websites which might not have been built because the fee structure would be too high.

And so they're gonna build them, on, our behalf. And I just thought, there you go. There are humans out there still. It's not all over unless this page was made by an AI just to make me feel good, in which case I give up. So I just thought that was an interesting counterpoint to all of that. I don't suppose anybody's got anything to add to that one, just to say that WPCC.

[00:56:25] Michelle Frechette: Used to be housed on Open Collective, and they no longer are, they're their own nonprofit now. Okay, thank you. like I say, I'll put the link into the show notes, but go and check it out. It's like a nice philanthropic thing. It gave me the, the warm and fuzzy, so I thought that was worth mentioning.

[00:56:40] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Let's move to definitely word pressy things. we've got an hour in and we haven't really touched much on. We're only gonna take a few minutes for those. Remember. I think it's okay though, once in a while. I do too. Take the stray off. Absolutely. we, normally are like WordPress all the way through, and today we've gone off a bit off piece, but that's fine.

here's the first one. WordPress 6.8 0.2 release schedule has been announced. What can I say? There's not a lot to say. The, the final release date should be the 15th of July, 2025. I don't actually know if this is something which has come. Back online since automatic, have decided to go back to air quotes normal, or if this was something that would've happened anyway.

'cause it's not a point. It would've happened anyway. Would've happened anyway. Okay, great. Yep. it was, always part of the planning. Perfect. Okay. So get that one in your diary. Next version of WordPress, 6.8 0.2 should be coming out in July. And, you can link, I'll link to that in the show notes as well.

there is some, there was some talk of a 6.9 this year. I think there was, I think much later in the year. Was it November or something? That is the, that is what has been spur now, the Yes. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Do we have, does anybody have any clarity on that one? I'm still in the, where, I don't know, arena with that one.

TBDI think. Yeah. TBD. Okay. This one is above my pay grade 'cause I'm not clever enough. But, I'll just put it out there. so this was Y Jakes I think would be how you pronounce this, 13th of, June, introduction to a new sq light driver for WordPress. And I know that some of you are the, DEF definition of Propellerhead who, watch this podcast and this is probably of great interest to you.

So it goes into the, all of the bits and pieces. But, I'm not clever enough, Steve. I know you are. Jesse, I know you are Michelle. You may very well be as well, but, I certainly am not, but I thought it was worth raising Steve, Jesse, anything to that before we move on? That's a big fan note, in which case we will move right on.

Don't see it though. I got, tagged by Jonathan Derius this week who wanted me to mention that. WordPress security updates. I think there's this kind of thought in the WordPress community that's security updates just go backwards, infinitely in time, and that WordPress supports every version.

Going back to one, that is really not the case. You basically need to be on the latest version of WordPress to get all of the security guarantees. but certainly, support is dropping for version 4.1 to version 4.6. So that's a definitive black hole in your. clients' websites from, July, 2025.

I was actually surprised. I did read somewhere, I think it was from Jonathan, maybe, certainly somewhere that really, if you're not on the latest, release, then there is some, or rather I'll say that the other way around. There is some definite benefit in terms of security for being on the latest release.

So at the minute, 6.8 0.1 in July, 6.8 0.2. but certainly if you're on 4.1 through 4.6 as of July, you are painting a target on your back. 'cause no doubt the hackers have got a bunch of security, things all figured out just for those moments. Anything on my, any, of you guys hazard a guess as to when 4.1 came out?

[01:00:09] Steve Burge: Ooh, should we go round? That's a trivia question around the houses and see what everybody thinks. I'll start 20, no. Yeah. 20. I wanna say it begins with a one 20. For 15. Michelle. Michelle, 2011. Ooh. Okay. Jesse. Oh man. I remember working on, what was it, three point something in 2012. So I'm gonna say.

[01:00:42] Jesse Friedman: 2000. Thir. 14. Okay. 11, 14. And me 15. What is this? December, 2014. You guys are pretty good. She wins the prize. What does Jesse, win? Oh, let's hear it. Three version of 6.8. Yeah. Yeah. Nice, version 6.82 solid. Actually, can I hijack that? 'cause I've got something weirdly that I want to wanna demonstrate, and it's surprise, if, you come to W-P-L-D-N this, this coming Thursday, we're giving away an iPad.

[01:01:18] Nathan Wrigley: so show up and, oh, so sorry, Jesse. You're not, I'm not giving you an iPad, but if I didn't an iPad. Yeah, I know, But I had a prize sitting on my desk, so I thought it was a solid segue though. Perfect. Yeah, exactly. Thank you. I was gonna say, Jesse got a VA this morning. His virtual assistant gave him the login for this.

[01:01:38] Michelle Frechette: For the show, it'd be pretty sweet if my AI avatar showed up and won an iPad. Yeah, that would be free. That would be the best use of an avatar. Go out on the internet, find every contest and win it, and let me know when you want it. so this is W-P-L-D-N. we, do it every last Thursday of the month, and obviously this coming up is the last Thursday of the month we've been doing this thing there called the Golden Ticket, which is pretty cool.

[01:02:01] Nathan Wrigley: Basically, you scan a QR code and every month that you show up in person, you get an entry into the competition. Last year we give away a MacBook Air and this, this coming Thursday, we're giving away this, the, the iPad. But you have to be in the room. So even if you, even if you were the, the person that showed up religiously over the last five months, if you don't show up this Thursday, then you can't win it.

So come, join us. We'll be there from six o'clock onwards. and go to Wpdn UK and, you can sign up to, yeah, if you just click the, get your tickets link just here, then you too could be the happy recipient. However, I, I've already filled up the Tom Bowler with the name Nathan Wrigley.

Over 8,000 of those tickets have gone in. So there's a, high chance that No, I'm not actually gonna do that. I am barred, but, Okay. Sorry, I think I hijacked the thread there. Where, were we just at that moment? We were winning prizes. 2000, what? 14. 14. So basically we've been pro WordPress has been providing security support.

[01:03:13] Steve Burge: Security support, Going back what? 10, 11 years. Yeah. Maybe 12 by the time this gets dropped. Yeah. So nobody could really argue with that. I think it would be unnecessarily all the folk in WordPress to support it right the way back. In fact, that is very, much more generous than I imagine you would get on commercial solutions.

[01:03:36] Nathan Wrigley: I'm imagining that there would be, a couple of years at best and then open up your wallet because we've got our security fix that you need to pay for. I think that's, that, just real quick, I think that speaks to the reason that why, hosting companies need to take a responsibility around the versions of WordPress.

[01:03:52] Jesse Friedman: I, speak to hosting companies all the time. There's this propensity to think that there, that them updating WordPress is going to challenge the, loyalty to a customer and whether or not they'll churn. And, so sometimes there's a reluctance to update WordPress. And I think that it's something that's really important to remember that, you don't want to end up with, dozens or.

Hundreds of different versions of WordPress across your network. So on. was I right when I said that the latest and greatest version, so we're at, 6.8 at the moment. Do, does that have some sort of special status in terms of updates? Maybe you don't know that. I'm not entirely sure, but I definitely read somewhere that was the, obviously it being the latest release, there was some special, status that it got in terms of security and updates.

[01:04:40] Nathan Wrigley: I can't remember what I read, no, I know that Matt, always likes to point out how fast it gets downloaded and a lot of that is, hosting companies and auto updates, forcing updates on those sites, which is great. WordPress does a very good job of taking care of, sites during that update process.

[01:04:58] Jesse Friedman: But, you do end up with, business and, profits taking, a precedent there sometimes. So it's important to think about. Yeah. Okay. So there we go. I will again link to it in the show notes. So security updates for 4.1 through 4.8. Honestly, what the heck are you doing, watching this show and being on version four point?

[01:05:17] Nathan Wrigley: Anything? Frankly, you are not allowed. you are barred, says Cameron Jones. I'm barring them. okay, so the next piece then is, this is just a shout out for Word Camp Europe. If you were in the room, you would've been there to figure out. That's Crackow KRA of, I want to say, is the next host for Word Camp Europe.

It's Poland. Basically it's happening from the fourth to the sixth and they are already, can you believe it, like one WordCamp finishes and then a year later another one starts. And we're already on the call for organizers. So this is europe.wordcamp.org/ 2026. The numerals, click on the call for organizers button and if that's your bag, you could get involved.

I don't suppose anybody's got anything they wanna say around that. Nope. Okey doke. just a little hat tip to the accessibility team. One of the jobs that they have got is to produce documentation. Great documentation, but, I guess a part of that job is not knowing exactly what people want. So you are definitely gonna have to find this via the show notes 'cause it's a Google doc and obviously Google Doc URLs are just pseudo random noise.

It's just a massive nonsense. anyway, this is the, accessibility team just trying to figure out what it is that they should put into their handbook. What documentation do you need? And so they're basically asking only two questions. Wealth three, what do you do for a living? Where do you live and what are the bits and pieces that you think, are missing?

So it'll take you a moment or two to fill it out, but that work very, important. anything on that one? Okey do. Okay. In which case I'll nip to this. loop Conf, there's been a, there's been a couple of these, hasn't there? These, on these online events gone back to being in person. So I don't think Loop Comp was on.

Maybe it was actually online for a bit, I'm not sure. But, press Conf was just a little while ago over in the United States, and now we have one this side of the pond. So this is a one day event, I believe, it's happening on the 25th of September, 2025. it's, a full day of. Conferences, conference, the usual kind of, speakers and presentations and what have you.

And then also an evening and I think all of it is, comes onto the ticket price at the minute. I think they launched the tickets like about an hour ago. And if you want to get one at the minute, it's 299 pounds at X va, so you'd have to pay another 20% on top of that if you're in the uk. but this was an event which was very, popular back in the day.

It's been in hiatus for many years, I think as many as five, six, maybe more years and it's back. and yeah, it's happening right in the middle of London. Nice looking venue. They've obviously got a nice after party organized as well. And although it says here registration is not available, that's not true, you can now get them if you have joined the weight.

So they're coming, they're 299 pounds at the moment, but only 50 of them, so they might sell out quite quickly. Interestingly. They were much, much more expensive previously. So Loop Comp have taken the, the idea that things are getting expensive, let's make it cheaper, which is quite a nice idea. Billing themselves as the premier event for developers and engineers who build with WordPress.

So there you, they were in, salt Lake City before, which was an interesting trip. And then, the last one I think they tried to hold was on the, on the, Atlantic side of Florida in September, just when a hurricane was rolling into town. So I think they're taking a safer option this year with, yeah.

Yeah, we definitely don't have that. so yeah, I've just clicked on a link in an email so I can see. I'm not gonna convert you. You've gotta go and register on the website, presumably to get that link. But yeah, they're available at the moment, 299 pounds. They're calling them the early bird tickets. so there's 50 of those and then I guess they're just gonna slowly creep up if you're interested in sponsoring that event.

I dunno if this is an early bird price, but starts at 600 pounds and it's a first come, first served thing. So yeah, real world back in the room. Dunno how many people are gonna be allowed to attend, but I have a feeling it's around 200, so it'll be fairly, exclusive. Anybody got anything else on that?

[01:09:47] Steve Burge: We've had a, we do a published press podcast and had a bunch of publishers on, and a lot of them are talking about events lately as a really good revenue generator and also just a great community builder that they have a magazine, they sometimes even a sub a Substack newsletter or they have a.

a local newspaper and a lot of that is, it's okay, it's an okay business, but a lot of them are finding that in-person events are really taking off for them at the moment. 'cause people miss that connection. They, want to get in a room with people who are interested in the same topic as them. Yeah.

[01:10:30] Nathan Wrigley: And get away from the ai, it's, I'm not opening that one up again. okay. alright, so there we go. Thank you very much. Let's move on to, oh, this one. I thought this one was absolutely fascinating. I'm not a designer. I don't know that I've ever used Figma. in all honesty, I've probably seen it being used by a variety of other people.

But my understanding is that if you are a designer, Figma is like. Almost the number one tool across the, industry these days. And, the guys at Fueled have created, a plugin. and I don't really know what a Figma token is. I don't know that I need to know what one is. But essentially, if you are using Figma, I think in the past, being able to take something from Figma and turn it into something which might be, let's say a WordPress theme or something like that, might have been a little bit of a, pain in the neck.

this plugin, appears to take care of that. We'll automate that process and create your sort of theme. Do JSON that kind of thing, more or less by clicking a button. Again, I can't really speak to it 'cause I'm not a designer or a developer. But, I guess if you are one or both of those things, this might be really interesting.

Fabian was, was on the podcast not that long ago, and, he is the director of, Eng Editorial Engineering over at Field. And, I think he's a core committer as well, so he obviously doesn't know what he's, he knows what he's talking about. So those of you that are into Figma, this might be something that you're interested in.

Yeah. This, is very cool. Figma. so those tokens basically act like variables. So as you're designing through Figma, you can say that a font color is this, or a font size is that, and you say it is a variable. This, I believe is just converting that into, JSON so that you can pump it right into your styles, which is really great because as cool as Figma is, it also just came out with a, I, think it's a closed source, conversion tool to build a website.

[01:12:37] Jesse Friedman: So now this is a way to keep funneling Figma in back into WordPress and I think created a defensible position there to help, continue to make Figma into WordPress even better. So it's very cool that the people with Fuel did that. Yeah, really nice. Tammy's Jonu, who is both a developer and a designer, so the perfect person to talk about it, she, in response to me saying that Figma was the defacto tool, of perhaps not, pen pot, which again I've heard of but never opened.

[01:13:09] Nathan Wrigley: I don't think. So pen pot is the, is also one of the standard things now. he is, I guess that's in response to him being a core committer and, Figma is closed source. Oh, okay. So there we go. Pen pot is a, an open source alternative. Does that kind of tooling exist? Tammy, other things like what Fabian has built there, over on the pen pot side of things.

'cause it feels obviously the more those kind of things exist, the, The happier we all shall be. Okie dokie. Let me get rid of, oh, I'd got rid of the wrong thing. There we go. Moving on quickly. GoDaddy and, WP Rocket have joined forces. If you are, If you're a user of GoDaddy, you are now going to be, I dunno if they install this as standard, I can't remember, ba bababababa blah.

But they are now going to be in collaboration, with WP Rocket. And I think if memory says, I read this about, I know, three or four days ago, I think now this is gonna be their SEO sort of, sorry, this optimization is gonna be their weapon of choice. And I think you are now gonna get that rolled in as part of your, package.

So I don't know if that's, meaningful or not, but, if you're a GoDaddy customer, perhaps it is. this I thought was really cool. And I, I don't use Grade Suite, not because I have any, I, have anything against 'em. I just never have used it. You get into your own little tools and use those over and over again.

But, I, I don't, I, don't know why this wouldn't be multi-site, but this is something that they've come out with called Global Content, and the idea is that you can save content from one website and make it appear in other websites. So you change it in one website and then it presumably syncs across all of those websites.

I, I'm wondering why you wouldn't just lean into something like multi-site for this, but maybe you just want it to be on a different, an array of different, so one site on Pressable, one site on WP Cloud, somewhere or other, one site on GoDaddy, whatever it may be, and it would all sink across.

So when you think about something like, like a business that has affiliates, like, a radio station company, Right. They might have dozens or hundreds of radio stations. And the thing about multi-site is that while it's incredibly powerful for large networks of sites, it does run into an issue where if any one site is getting an increase of traffic, a substantial amount of traffic, the rest of the sites are taxed as well.

[01:15:48] Jesse Friedman: And so a lot of times people choose to break apart sites. And so there is a, thing happening, and we're actually working on it at WP Cloud as well, where we're trying to create the benefits of multi-site, but still allow for siloed independent websites to benefit from their independent traffic and resources.

So something like this would be incredibly powerful for think about a higher education, situation where they need to have a, terms of service across every single website that they, They, they manage and it's not in, even if it is in multi-site, like sourced content from a single site is not necessarily inherent to multi-site.

So things like this can be incredibly powerful. Yeah, there's a few companies in the WordPress space, so I'm thinking about companies like, WP Manage Ninja, actually Steve might be a perfect example as well, where they've got multiple brands with completely different URLs. So on the, fluent side of things, they've got fluent forms, they've got fluent CRM, they've got fluent this, fluent that.

[01:16:46] Nathan Wrigley: There's lots and lots of different parts of that business, but there's probably bits and pieces of all of those separate.com websites that it would just absolutely make sense to just change once and it just sync across. All of the different websites. And again, Steve, that might work for your, you mentioned four in your bio at the beginning, your four plugins.

Is any of this kind of present, does it come across to you as a good idea this, or is it just I'll just go to the individual websites and update them normally? Yeah, it absolutely makes sense as a possible solution. We've dug into this as a possible business model in the past and found it to be technically challenging.

[01:17:29] Steve Burge: the last time we seriously dug into actually considering building a plugin that would do something like this, there was a plugin called, WP Site Sync, that was really very good. But they, shut it down right around the same time that we were considering it. Oh, no. Which, kind of turned us off as a, they were saying they couldn't make it work.

It. They said the technical challenges were too big and maybe the market or they'd found the market wasn't quite big enough for this. And then, actually you mentioned Fueled a few moments ago. Fueled is the new 10 up. and they have a plugin, I think called distributor, I want to say that does something like this.

So it's definitely something that's been floating around the WordPress world. and it sounds like Jesse is in the weeds of this right now, has been exploring this. It's a great idea, but there's a lot of technical hurdles to make it work. Yeah. I'm guessing that this is probably, and again, caveat mTOR, I could have misunderstood it.

[01:18:40] Nathan Wrigley: I'm guessing this is gonna work very well if you are using the grade suite of products across your entire network of websites, that's a big help. If it's. I think if you have a very closely sandboxed in terms of the content that you're working with, this page builder and maybe this set of plugins, then you could probably put a, pretty good package together.

[01:19:04] Steve Burge: we, I think, ran into complications imagining how would you deal with elements or how would you deal with Beaver Builder, how would you deal with All those different possibilities. But as grade is. Working within a much more tightly confined sandbox, they may well be able to make it work and make it work quite well.

[01:19:22] Nathan Wrigley: I think it's a really neat idea. I honestly, I can't quite imagine why it's never crossed my radar. Like I, I genu, I haven't seen the solutions that you mentioned there, Steve, the distributed or whatever it was that you Distributor. I think distributor, yeah. but I'm surprised that nobody's tackled this successfully in the past.

Perhaps they have, perhaps there's a really credible solution out there that which we just haven't seen before. But Greg taking the point of view that, you've got this kind of. Capability to create consistent headers, footers, whatever it may be. And then you've got, like this dashboard, apologies if you can't see the screen, but essentially we're looking at a screenshot of what appears to be, things like, here's the header and the footer, and this is what it would look like.

Sorry, not what it would look like, but here's the location of where it is, the, site title and things. So you can manage it all in one place. And I'm imagining almost like you'd set up a unique domain just for this install and then create your assets. it would, it, would've no consequence for me because I just don't have this kind of a setup.

But I can imagine if, I don't know, you're a big university or something with loads of different departments at each of those departments is on a subdomain. This really seems like a quite a cool idea. yeah. Good luck with that. There you go. and Dans, you said that it, not to harp on this, but they also seems that they offer the option for segments of a website.

[01:20:46] Jesse Friedman: So just your footer or just the navigation? Yeah. Which actually becomes quite intriguing. Yeah. when you have, a network of sites, you can check it out at, grade do well, grade is not straightforward to spell. You would probably put an E in it, but it's not, it's G-R-E-Y-D io. So remove the E from the ED at the end of grade io and then it's called Global Dash Content, so grade io slash global content, and you'll be able to see all about that.

[01:21:17] Nathan Wrigley: I guess if you're an existing customer, it's gonna be a bit of a no-brainer to check it out, but, maybe it's a kind of nice little thing to convert people. Speaking of, fluent as I was a moment ago, they have a new, product in the market, which I, feel they're pulling the trigger on something, which is gonna be really popular.

Let's wait and see, but it's called, fluent Cart and, Because it's not out yet, and a few people have obviously got their hands on it. This, I just thought this was an interesting video. It's about 30 minutes long. It's on the WP Roads, YouTube channel and you can go and check it out and they walk you through it.

It seems to be pitting itself. We talked about it a bit last week. Seems to be pitting itself against shortcut, not really in the marketing at least anyway, aligning itself against WooCommerce, but that certainly would. Sure they have their eyes on that target. But, yeah, so you can go and check out exactly what that does.

'cause a lot, a few people contacted me and said I can't actually access any information about it. So there you go. There's a video, where you can check out all of the bits and pieces half an hour long. And whilst I'm on YouTube, I thought I'd raise another one. WP Tots, Paul Charlton, Paul c released a video all about the upcoming Bricks 2.0.

Again, not being a user of bricks, I don't really know the ins and outs, but I know that it's now incredibly popular. And, and so as a result, people will obviously be dead keen to get their hands on this. And, so Paul, in the space of seven and a half minutes or something like that, just. Shows you all of the different bits and pieces that are in Bricks 2.0 that you might be interested in.

I think we're gonna finish early for once. We never finish early, but I think we've gone through all of the different bits and pieces in spite of the whole first hour being a, I know, yeah, it was definitely light on WordPress this week, but we managed to, fill it up with ai, which was nice. It's topic, which is not going away.

This is, no, it's just, Jesse has a couple podcasts that I think he wanted to talk about too, Oh, okay. Please go for it, Jesse. if I wanted to give a shameless plug, it would be to, impressive hosting. I don't know how to do this. yeah. It's not easy though, is it? It's more deeply. Yeah. So I'm running a podcast if, you wanna check it out.

[01:23:40] Jesse Friedman: It's impressive host. It's about, uncovering the core tenets of great WordPress hosting. So we have a conversation about basically everything, but it's about the responsibility that hosting companies have to agencies. Others, to make sure they're providing a great WordPress experience. But, I don't wanna spend too much time on that, but I did wanna talk about, real quick, something that I think is really valuable to the entire WordPress ecosystem is Kevin, oh, Hashi's work on Orderly Ape.

You go to orderly ape.com. Lemme say if I can do that, taken quickly. K six is, what is it? Orderly Ape a p e.com. I bet you spelled that wrong. Yep. nope. WP hosting benchmarks.com. Is that where you wanted me to end up? Yeah, So Orderly Ape is a, side project that, Kevin. Is, working on. And so basically he's, taken the K six, benchmarking tool set that, went, it got acquired by somebody.

I forget exactly who, but it made it, in inaccessible to folks who were doing benchmarking testing, especially in the WordPress ecosystem because it became incredibly expensive. So it wasn't the core technology, but it was the way in which the data is represented and, visualized. So Kevin's gone, above and beyond as someone who has, constantly worked in the, industry to.

Be, somewhat of integrity to really benchmark, hosting companies and their speed and performance. And so he does that through review signal, but he ran into an issue where, the tools that he was using were no longer accessible to do that work. And so he took the time to, to build this as an open source project, and he got some support from, I believe Pressable and other companies, to help, to make that, a reality.

And, and, so I think it's worthwhile showing and I think if anybody out there is doing any kind of benchmarking and they want some, really, I. elite enterprise level tooling there, go to Orderly Ape and check it out. Was the review signal was that, so I've been doing this show for, I don't know, like seven years or something like that.

[01:25:51] Nathan Wrigley: Was, that the thing? Did they produce like an annual report and they would put all of the hosting companies up against each other with the exact same metrics tested on more or less all the hosting companies that you could imagine? Was that what Review Signal was? And then they've stifled it, somehow made it so that you can no longer get to those reports.

[01:26:11] Jesse Friedman: Yeah, so, basically what happened was is that Kevin was running this company, WP hosting benchmarks, and he would do, or, review signals the company and the WP hosting benchmarks was the annual report that he would put out. Right now, because Kevin is doing this work, he, would charge basically for the report.

But when I mention that Kevin is someone of high integrity, I mean it, because the way in which he would run this, program is, that he would have a hosting company pay to be listed in that report, which is incredibly important if you want to make sure that you're standing up against your competitors and showing how well you're doing.

But once you paid, you essentially didn't have any input, and the report would go live. Oh, that's really incredible. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah, so exactly. So he wouldn't, allow you basically to interpret the results, try and change them or anything like that. and he would put out these reports every year.

and so then he ran into an issue in that the tooling that he was using, went close source or basically got acquired and was no longer something that he could use inside of the ballpark of what he was charging to make this happen. And so he, dedicated so many of his own hours to making this happen, but he did take some money to, to help hire some additional developers and other people to bring this to light.

And now he's basically made it available. anyone who's doing any kind of benchmarking, you should do that. If you're thinking, if you run a hosting company, you should definitely be signing up for a review signal so that you can challenge yourself to do as well as everybody else who shows up there.

and if you're trying to choose a host, I would definitely say go to review signal and, use those benchmarks as a way to, determine whether or not, the host that you're, analyzing is going to. stand up to what you have to throw at it. I really like the model of that. The idea that you pay to play, like for a hosting company, this a hundred dollars is, it's.

[01:28:11] Nathan Wrigley: It's not even pocket change, it's less than pocket change. But then from that moment on, all bets are off. You're not paying for a, rev, a good review. You're just paying for an, honest review. And, I think that's cool. I think that's a really interesting model. I'd seen it, but I didn't realize that's how it was all put together just to surface.

they are looking for sponsorship at the moment. So if you click, if you go to, so orderly ape. Dot com. If you go there, you'll end up being redirected to wp hosting benchmarks.com slash orderly ape. And over there you'll see a request for sponsorships link just near the top of the page, and you can, you can download, you can see a PDF about exactly what you can pay for and how you can assist that project.

[01:28:59] Jesse Friedman: I think it's really important for folks to recognize the fact that if you are, we're trying to help hosting companies define what are higher standards in terms of performance and, being able to support, huge loads of traffic. And it also challenges hosts, and I've seen this firsthand that when they get listed on this page that they're like, okay, we need to really get our butts in gear and really start to optimize our sites.

And so it's, an opportunity for, or Kevin's contributing to this Raising of all ships who are involved in this because everyone wants to it's a friendly competition among these hosting companies to continue to rank higher and higher within his, within his benchmarks. Yeah, we definitely raised it every single time it came out and, it was, there was just a deluge of information in, many respects, it was difficult to get through because there was a lot, but it was summarized beautifully and you could really see how one host compared to the other.

[01:29:56] Nathan Wrigley: no, that's great. Thank you for bringing that to our attention. go and sponsor that orderly ape. maybe just Google it. That might be the best way to go about it. I think that's it then, in which case we haven't finished early at all. We finished exactly the right time, so it only remains for me to thank our co-host Michelle Ette there.

She's, and also Steve Burge, who apparently, according to Cameron Jones, sounds exactly like Paul Lacey. the traitor. Paul Lacey, I might add. Yeah. Bless you, Paul. I love you. I always call him a traitor and he wears it ever so well. and also, am I gonna point in the right direction? Jesse, you are Friedman.

Jesse Friedman, thank you so much for joining us today. And what can I say? Thank you to all of you who, who joined us in the comments today. We now know what it is that gets you commenting. It's AI basically. So this will be called this week in ai, from now on. Yeah, as soon as we stopped talking about ai, the comments went down to a normal level.

[01:30:59] Steve Burge: Again, WordPress, what the heck? Yeah, it was just a massive spike. I know. What we need is we need five minutes of WordPress and then a quick five minute shot of AI and then back to WordPress and then back to ai. Just flip flop, just to keep it interesting. thanks for the show you. Of course, Dave, Dan, you are absolutely welcome.

[01:31:15] Nathan Wrigley: Hopefully I'll see you on Thursday. and you could be winning. There it is. The iPad if I remember to bring it. Oh, we'll see. Okay. What Jesse doesn't know is that he's now got to do the slightly humiliating way. maybe he does know. I don't know, Jesse. Every time we end an episode, we all put our hands up so that I can create a screenshot.

So if you are willing to humiliate yourself like that's perfect. Look, he's really good at it. That's ideal. Perfect. Thank you very much. We will be back this time next week, and if you three find people wanna stay on the line, we can have a quick nata. But thanks for joining us. We will see you next time on this week in WordPress.

Take it easy. Bye-bye. Yeah, thanks.