This Week in WordPress #339

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for This Week in WordPress, episode number 339, entitled Living Up to the Title of Doomspeaker. It was recorded on Monday, the 7th of July, 2025.

My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I'm joined by Remkus de Vries, by Tim Nash, and by Zach Stepek.

Apologies, right at the outset, about 15 minutes in the recording software completely collapsed. We restarted it and hopefully you won't be able to tell too much, but there will be a little bit about 15 minutes or so in, where obviously we've cobbled the two bits together. Like I say, hopefully it won't be too noticeable.

But what did we talk about this week? Tim has a new security course, which he's plugging.

Remkus has a new performance optimization course, which he is plugging.

I have got a new plugin coming out, it's called Podcaster Plus, and I would like some beta testers have a listen. There'll be a link in the show notes for that as well.

And then we talk about the WP Awards, which is coming up next.

We talk about whether or not WordCamp US is going to be something which is very low on numbers. What will that event eventually look like?

Tumblr, the migration to WordPress that appears to have been put on hold.

The developer blog for WordPress would like some help.

There's a new plugin called Better Loops.

And we talk about a piece that Tammie has brought, saying maybe we should pause the idea of having default themes.

There's a load of security stuff, and some interesting chitchat with the panel as well. And it's all coming up next on this week in WordPress.

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

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[00:03:22] Tim Nash: The last 10 seconds.

[00:03:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate that. I really do. Yeah. it's this week in WordPress. It's episode number 339.

Gosh, that's a lot. And, we're joined today by three fabulous guests. Thank you very much for joining us. I'll introduce them in a moment. I'll get all the housekeeping bits out the way first, if that's all right with you. Three. First thing to say is that if you are joining us, thank you. There's a variety of places you could be.

I think it goes out on, x it goes out on Facebook group and, stuff like that. The best place to cut. Oh, Remkus has gone all narrow. I dunno if that's the same for everybody else. But it's, look at that, it's, it stay like that. Gone go. so yeah, if you're joining us on any of those different locations, the best place honestly I would recommend you go is wp builds.com/live.

the reason for that is because if you go there, then you can comment, more easily than anywhere else. Basically, wp builds.com/live. If you go to that page, then on the right, if you're on a desktop is a box, and it's. Copied and pasted directly in from YouTube. So you need to be logged into your Google account and you can comment over there if you are watching the video over there.

There's a little option, which you can use an anonymous sort of system. It's the one that comes with this platform. You don't need to be logged into any account. You just type your name in and you're off to the races. So there you go. Share it with your friends neighbors. Guinea pigs, whatever, wp builds.com/live.

Zach nodded the Guinea pig's suggestion, please, share it. Share it with the Guinea pigs, with a tear in my eye. Actually, I'm talking about Guinea pigs. We had a Guinea pig for about six years and sadly it passed away this week. Did you eat it? I don't even know how to respond to that.

It did look like a potato. I have to say. So the way that you respond to it is, no, I didn't eat it. It was very sad. it was a well cared for. cared for. Giddy pig. I've honestly, what the heck are we talking about? Let's get rid of that and introduce our guests. The first one to mention is the ever so narrow.

Is it me or is Rem, was he really narrow?

[00:05:35] Zach Stepek: No, he, definitely was narrow.

[00:05:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. There was something going on there. He was narrow.

[00:05:39] Tim Nash: So re this new weight loss program.

[00:05:44] Nathan Wrigley: He's got a course and it's not about. It's not about speed in your website, it's about sudden weight loss. He's gone. No doubt he'll be back in a minute, but I'm gonna introduce him in his absence anyway.

REM DRE is a WordPress. Oh, he's back. There we go. What rem DRE is a WordPress performance specialist focused on speed, security, and scalability as co-founder of scan fully. He helps site owners stay ahead of performance and security issues. He also runs within WordPress, a newsletter and podcasts for those passionate about building better WordPress sites.

And he shares those insights on YouTube, and you're gonna find out in a few short moments about something else that he's been involved in. we'll do that in a minute, if that's all right. Chris, happy to have you. Thank you. Happy to be here. Thank you. we're also joined by Tim Nash. Hello, Tim. Hello. I never know what Tim's gonna write.

It's always novel and interesting. So here we go. Tim Nash. It says the following Dodd, lots of os doomed is what you will be if you don't have Tim to guide you a speaker, mentor, and security consultant as well as a professional doom speaker. You should patent that word. That's a good word. you can follow him at various social media sites.

And Tim Nash co uk to be significantly less doomed, more mildly terrified with a side of what the. Then there's a gap. There's an ellipsis, to fill that in with an F word, But, I'm not going to, anyway. How are you, Tim? You all right?

[00:07:09] Tim Nash: I'm doing all right. Very nice. The wonders of what Chatt PT thinks of

write a scary bio.

And that was the best it came up with.

[00:07:18] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's, yeah. That's not too scary. okay. Okay. And then we're joined by Zach. Zach Steppe. How you doing, Zach?

[00:07:24] Zach Stepek: Doing well, thank you.

[00:07:25] Nathan Wrigley: Zach is the Director of partner programs at Big Scoots, co-host of Dev Pulse, expanding the stack on Open Channels fm that was Do the WOO until recently, but it's now been rebranded as Open Channels fm and he's also a music photo journalist.

What's been the latest project? Where have you been?

[00:07:46] Zach Stepek: I went and shot a show last week in Joliet, Illinois. That was a fun show. my friend Taylor, the guitarist for Taproot was there with his other band writing with Killers. I'll be out this month in about a week and a half, two weeks, doing four days worth of festivals.

[00:08:07] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, nice.

[00:08:09] Zach Stepek: for me, festivals in a row. I'll be on the road with taproot and it'll be a, it'll be a great time.

[00:08:15] Nathan Wrigley: It's that kind of time of the year in the uk. All the festivals fall about now. We just had the big one. There's one here called Glastonbury, and it was it last week? Yeah. Not the weekend it was gone, but the weekend before that.

it's ridiculously huge these days. I went many years ago and it was big. Now it's like a, honestly, it is genuinely like a big town. It's 200,000 people. That's 200,000 attendees. And then, yeah. That all the staff and the people that are managing the event, I think it touches like a quarter of a million.

It's pretty insane. And and they always show pictures in the newspaper the day after everybody's left. And it's just, it's quite sad actually. you've got this whole vibe of lovely, and then it's just total chaos. Everything left, just beer cans everywhere and stuff like that. But the, yeah.

Anyway, there you go. There's me. Doom speaking. you are joining us for a WordPress podcast, so we'll get into that in just a moment. If there's any comments though, I'll raise those first. Hello says Courtney. she's given me some emojis, cup of coffee. Looks like a sunrise and a hello wave. Hello Courtney.

Nice to have you with us. I'll pass over Tim's 'cause he is right there. Greetings from Atlanta, says James loud, Georgia, 81 degrees Fahrenheit, 27 degrees centigrade. Here it is not like that here. and he says, good morning to everybody, Courtney, writing words. This time I suggest a new intro composed by ai.

I did try that. I did do it. When, what was that? What's that service called? Suno. Is it the one that makes the songs and it was pretty good. but I could only cope with that for a, like two weeks. So, I went back to the really bad one. AI and music is not, it's, they're not good bedfellows. Lauren Laie.

Hello. Good evening. He says. Nice to have you with us, Kami. Good morning. Sorry, your family lost a beloved pet. Yeah. Yeah, it was, my son discovered it and he, he's never seen a dead thing ever. And, it was quite, he stood motionless for a bit. It was quite a thing to watch. anyway, moving on, Tcho, Glastonbury did make the international news, but not in the best way.

What about, what was going on? Oh,

[00:10:20] Tim Nash: the whole controversy with the B, C and what was said, people being said, and they decided to stream it anyway, and all that jazz.

[00:10:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I guess with that though, if you're streaming it live and the performer. it's not like something going on in the crowd is it?

If it, they weren't

[00:10:35] Tim Nash: streaming it live. They had delay. Oh. They weren't streaming it live. They, all of these events are on a, on at least a minute, if not two minute delay. Okay. And there is literally a lawyer standing by the stream going, yep. Yeah. And clearly he was asleep at certain points where yeah.

What do they just say?

[00:10:52] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Oh

[00:10:53] Tim Nash: gosh.

[00:10:53] Nathan Wrigley: And then B, C in a bit of. Bother for that? Okay. Paul Bedford. Hello, Paul. I don't know that we've met, greetings from midwinter to South Africa. Sunny, but only nine, only 19 degrees is the middle of summer here, Paul. And it's about 18 degrees. You've got nothing to complain about.

Tammy Lister is joining us. Afternoon. It's actually shining again here. Yeah, same here. Sorry. We're gonna go through all of these because it's nice. Monday morning says Marcus Burnett. Catch in some of the life for the first time in a while. Lovely to see you all. You too. Nice to have you with us. Marcus TCOs back.

Hi. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. And Tammy, last one, Huda Thunk it. Glastonbury Festival. Founded on counterculture, having alternative political views. Yeah, there you go. And a load of trash. it would seem, honestly, a good business would be to go to Glastonbury the day after it finishes and just collect the tents.

There seem to be like thousands of perfectly serviceable tents that people just can't be bothered to collapse. 'cause they themselves are in a state of collapse, so they can't do it. So they leave and you must feel right at home. Yeah. that's right. okay. Okay, there we go. So let's get onto the show, that we're supposed to be doing.

So this is us wp builds.com. If you fancy, go in there. we've got all of our content. Put your email into this little box, and we will send you a couple of emails each week, one on a Tuesday. The reason that we do this is to parcel it up. We're gonna pass this up into a podcast and we'll put it out tomorrow morning.

So that's. The first email that you'll get Tuesday morning, but then you'll also get one on a Thursday when we do our, regular podcast, which is usually an interview with me and somebody else. the most recent one was, all about a plugin that's come out of Elementor. It's called Ally, and it's not an Elementor.

Thing, if It's not bound to the page builder, but it's, it's to, to make your site more, hopefully that's the intention anyway, to make your site, more accessible so you can go and find out about that. But obviously there's a whole bunch of other content, 4 27 episodes all the way down.

So that's the first thing. there is the episode there. And the next thing to me, I have such mixed feelings about this. I'm such a bad self-promotion list, but I feel I've got to do this, so forgive me. I'm going to promote myself, not me. I joined forces with a lovely chap in the UK called Dan May.

He's huge. He looks just like Mku, and he's a tiny bit bigger. I discovered from a recent photo on social media, and Dan and I have decided that we're gonna start a plugin and it's called Podcast A Plus. And the idea of this is that if you've got a podcast and at some point in the future, it'll just be audio, like MP three files and things like that.

But for now, we just decided to do it as a podcast thing. If you've got a podcast, the idea is that in a few quick clicks, you'll be able to put the podcast episode into your WordPress website. Which sounds fairly ordinary because that bit is quite ordinary. But what we've decided to do is atomize the player.

So the podcast player is made up of I don't know, I think it's 11 different little blocks. So you can move the play button around in the block editor. You can move the forwards and backwards slider it. Essentially, you can customize. The player to be whatever the heck you want. If you just want a play button, that's fine.

If you want a play button that I don't know, sticks to the top of the page, you can do all of that kinda stuff. And we're after some beta testers 'cause we're at the point where we think it's basically baked enough. So if that sounds like your thing, the URL for, that's podcaster plus.com. beta, we say in the uk, BETA, podcaster plus.com/beta, and we're after people, testing it and breaking it and giving us.

Feedback. So if that sounds like you, we'd appreciate that. I dunno, if you, before

[00:14:43] Tim Nash: Nathan, moves on, I've had a chance to see it. It's very good. And thank you. When he says, oh, there's a little bit of, you could do a little bit of customization, now you can do massive amount of customization and it's got pre-built in patterns so you can, if you do just wanna just.

Pop on a singular block. You can do that by just dropping a bat on, but the amount of, customization that you can get into, really there isn't another player video or audio player. And when I got to sit down with them and have a play with it, I was very much so when's this turning into an audio player?

Yeah, Turning into a video player so I can use it. Because really there just isn't. Anything else on the market that works with the block editor quite like this.

[00:15:31] Nathan Wrigley: So Tim, you also have something to promote again, cough.

[00:15:36] Tim Nash: Yeah, like Nathan and I really struggle with self-promotion. So to have to do it twice is like bright red and I've been on the show a few times. I've said, talked about DP security 1 0 1, it's WP Security, then 1 0 1, the numbers.

Com if you, and it's a se WordPress security course, covering all the fundamentals of WordPress security. there are gonna be in total 52 episode, two topics over nine modules. And the good news is the first module will be up on Thursday.

[00:16:18] Nathan Wrigley: Nice.

[00:16:19] Tim Nash: This means that if you'd been to the DP security 1 0 1 site, you, and it previously gone down to the form at the bottom that says, join the waiting list, it would've taken you to a nice thing that said, thanks, and then you would've got an email from me and all that jazz.

Now, if you go down to that form and get, fill it in, you still get told. Thank you. I still really appreciate you joining my, the mailing list, but. You can also buy the course on a pre-order. So the pre-order price is 145 pounds. That will be going up on Thursday. So when we go live we will be putting it up to the price to 1 9 5.

So this is your chance to buy the, course early and Yep. The first module should be available on Thursday. There's been some delays because, I like built an LMS system to go with it and stuff like that. We can't be

[00:17:13] Nathan Wrigley: shock now.

[00:17:13] Tim Nash: we're not a shock. I know, we know that.

But

it, is. But yeah, things have progressing and, yeah.

go. Some find yourself access.

[00:17:24] Zach Stepek: I heard somewhere, Tim, that you're not releasing the first module first, though,

[00:17:30] Tim Nash: did you? Yeah.

[00:17:31] Zach Stepek: Where

[00:17:31] Tim Nash: did, where, how do you know these things, Zach? That's amazing. Yeah, that's and a really good point. So rather than starting with module one like any normal course would do we jumping straight into module?

No, we're doing straight into module two, which is all about users. And the main reason to do that was 'cause module one might bore you and I really wanted you to actually get something useful outta the course. And to be honest, the one of the biggest section is on users and the second one is on updates and managing updates.

So those two modules are the ones that I really want people to focus on. So I thought I'd release that first and then we can go back and do module one in a couple of weeks time.

[00:18:11] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Nice. I'm just gonna read into the record for the benefit of people who are listening to this when we release it as a podcast who have no idea what just happened.

We, we had to record this twice a, few minutes ago. The original recording totally failed and, we are basically redoing Tim's promotional bit. And so Zach saying what he just said and, Remus being able to say what he just said, it's because they know what Tim was about to say. So there is that. But, roll with the punches.

the URL for that, I'll read it out. WP security one oh one.com. So the numerals 1 0 1, WP Security one oh one.com. Go and check it out. And thank, you, Tim, for coping with being able to promote your thing, twice. I really appreciate that. another promotional thing that we got is, REM. Has been, has been busily working on this.

I'll show it on the screen. It's a slightly longer URL, but I'll read it into the, I'll read it into the podcast Anyway, so it's within WordPress, sorry, it's not, it's within wp.com/courses/make WordPress fast. That obviously gives you some idea of what this is about. So this is your make WordPress fast course.

Tell us more.

[00:19:30] Remkus de Vries: there's a lot to tell Nathan. What would you like me to tell?

[00:19:32] Nathan Wrigley: give us the, I guess give us the MVP if you could some, if I was stood next to you in a lift, what would be your, little quick elevator pitch?

[00:19:40] Remkus de Vries: that's pretty much the text you see there on the left in normal text.

It's a full stack purpose for performance and optimization course. Full stack, meaning I'm covering all the layers, not the optimize your assets and CS, s and JavaScript type of stuff. I want you to understand that there's way more going on in making a site fast. 'cause most people see making a site fast.

They see that as, I'm turning on caching and I'm, tweaking and configuring a little bit and I'm calling it a day. And then, when, their visitors see an uncashed version, they are met with a slow site. And you go, how did that happen? 'cause I just turned on caching. But again, caching doesn't solve performance.

It just, hides it very eloquently. So my goal is for you to fully understand all the controls you have to your availability, make the right choices, and build fast as a foundation.

[00:20:40] Nathan Wrigley: Done. That's you. Yeah, that's the, pitch you wanna, give us, so let, me go through that again within wp.com/courses/make WordPress fast. I guess I really put Remus on the spot there because if you were to, if you were to do what I'm about to do, and apologies for people that are listening, if you were to scroll, on Remus course, you would see that, really it's soup to knots this.

there are four modules, which are three modules, which are illustrated in more depth, open. But there are 25 modules in total, each of which has got multiple lessons inside. I'm guessing this is all video content when it's finally launched, is it?

[00:21:20] Remkus de Vries: the majority will be video, but, okay. I will have every asset I mention inside the video available as text, as well as the transcript.

whatever your favorite, learning style is, I'll try to accommodate as much as possible. and,

[00:21:35] Nathan Wrigley: a, question to both of you. How much of your lives have you put on hold to do what you just did? Because honestly, when you look at these courses, you just scroll past it and you think, oh, that looks nice and, what have you.

But my, guess is that you've, been at this for possibly years. I don't know. yeah. So I, I started preparing this one over a year ago.

Wow, okay.

[00:21:57] Tim Nash: Yeah. I have owned the domain name IP security 1 0 1 for over six years.

[00:22:02] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. That gives you, it gives you, some idea. okay. your, at the moment, MKU, is this actually available That, that is to say, if I nch this pre Yeah.

Okay.

[00:22:15] Remkus de Vries: It's a prelaunch because, I still have to finalize it, but I'm, let's call it 95% sure. These are the modules, these are the lessons. Sure. There might be some reconfiguring here and there, but the essentials will not change and there will only be additions. But sometimes as you are building a lesson, you think, maybe I should combine this with the other one and maybe I should prefix this with, so you end up playing more than you anticipate with the sequence and what is grouped together and stuff like that.

But, it will be released in September.

[00:22:51] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. So yours is a little way off. Yeah. If you

[00:22:54] Remkus de Vries: purchase it now, it's with a good discount. and I specifically am also, targeting agency, so there's an agency in license as well, which gives you quite a few more extra perks.

[00:23:05] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so once more w within wp.com/courses/make-wordpress-fast.

thank you very much for bringing both of those. thank you

[00:23:15] Remkus de Vries: for highlighting it

[00:23:16] Nathan Wrigley: no, and also quite nice, little comment at propo of exactly what we've just been talking about. Caspers, hello Caspers. saying Love seeing new and modern educational content created in the WordPress space.

That's a nice thing to hear.

[00:23:29] Tim Nash: And Caspers also has a course. Yep, he does. Okay.

[00:23:33] Nathan Wrigley: obviously, thank you for that comment. That's really nice. Thank you very much. Zach, have you got anything you want? Have you got a new course?

[00:23:43] Zach Stepek: No, but, we are working on our new agency program over at Big Scoots, which I'm heading up and we are going to be focusing on some educational content.

We're looking for people who want to share, with other agency owners. And I think it'll be a really neat program, filling the void that's been left by some of the things that, started during the pandemic that aren't really happening anymore. like the, agency Happy Hour from Go WP and some of the other things that have been, Missing in, in my opinion, lately. So we're going to be trying to set up at least a once monthly thing, for agency owners to get together. Nice. And, talk. So that's coming soon.

[00:24:33] Nathan Wrigley: When you've got all that, let me know and, we'll see what we can do to get it in front of the audience. The, honestly, you obviously, with the two courses that you've just made, I know this is a ridiculous comment, but how nice it is that you are in the space that allows you to publish the content without all the headache of learning the publishing bit.

Imagine that you were doing, I don't know, sewing 1 0 1 course or something like that. Oh, yeah, You've no experience with an, with A-A-C-M-S, let alone an LMS. At least you get to sidestep all of that.

[00:25:04] Remkus de Vries: Yeah, but I'm not going down Tim's route. I am gonna, I'm using a, LMS prebuilt. Okay. I'll just modify what I think I should modify.

[00:25:14] Tim Nash: Yeah. Yes. I just CII, I honestly, there it was so many late nights with me going, I just want the button not orange. That's all I want in my life. But are you

[00:25:27] Remkus de Vries: familiar with the important part? Yeah. Yeah. but genuinely the, main problem with most of them was just that I only, have one course.

[00:25:37] Tim Nash: I'm only selling one thing. Oh, I see. Yeah. I don't, want to be Udemy. I don't want, I, just want one and yeah, they all are brilliant. For the right person. Yeah. And the right in the right settings. And for me it was just like one of those things where it's it's not gonna work quite how I envisioned.

And I'm lucky that I can be in a position to say, actually I could probably build this quicker than I can. Yeah. Hack this. I think it's curious. Do that. I'd rather be able to maintain it long term.

[00:26:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's curious that your, both of you, obviously you, like in Rems case, is going with an LMS platform, but probably has tweaked it quite a bit, but you've got that whole thing of the default is not what you want.

And because we're, because all of us are in that industry where we know how to modify it here and there. You do get fixated on that. The button must be orange and it must be there, whereas it was probably all right with the default blue and wherever it was, if But you go down that rabbit hole of modifying what

[00:26:36] Remkus de Vries: have you.

But I, get Tim's choice, if it's only just the one course. An LMS is from that definition, you could potentially see it as a little bit too much. Yeah. Depends on but many more factors. But, I'm going to launch a whole bunch of courses, so for me it makes sense to have everything, oh, in the lms, be able to bundle it, be able to have people cross over, there, there's gonna be some free stuff in there as well. I need one platform.

[00:27:06] Nathan Wrigley: And, Reese from the uk Hello Reese. he says he thinks Tim's got a learning ma platform, learning management system that he can sell. Oh, no. Number two. no. Ha. Having, my, my sort of original, the very first thing in WordPress was selling a membership software.

[00:27:22] Tim Nash: I am not doing that.

[00:27:24] Nathan Wrigley: You could go with that. You go with Casper's solution or Casper's wife's solution. his wife ended up using a password protected page in WordPress for her knitting course.

That's fine.

[00:27:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That works.

[00:27:34] Tim Nash: Why

[00:27:35] Nathan Wrigley: not? It works. He says Not sure how many times, how many Tims there are in the world to sell to though.

Just the one, there's only one. Tim Nash. We should know this by now. Okay, moving on. Let's get on to some of the other bits and pieces. We have lost a bit of time to our technical gremlins. Tim brought a piece of content to the table today and, whenever I see the word pseudo, I start to panic.

is this, an actual panic, Tim? Because normally when we do security stuff, you are always like, this is fine. Don't worry about it. You know this, it's rah. But today. This one

[00:28:10] Tim Nash: might not be so fried. Okay. You also, a lot of, for a lot of people, you can't do anything about it.

[00:28:16] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, lovely. Tell us more.

[00:28:18] Tim Nash: so pseudo, which is, is an underlying part of the Linux system. It's used across, both Linux and BSD and quite a lot of other unixes, including, macOS. The, there was some code introduced a, couple of years ago, to do something that absolutely no one cared about, which was to do with Charu.

Nobody used this piece of code at all. Only problem is that if you could manipulate it so that you could basically get the thing to execute what you wanted before it checked the permissions. It effectively allowed you to pseudo, even if you didn't have the pseudo rights to do so now. Yeah. You didn't really have to do anything particularly complicated about to do that.

you just needed to have put a couple of files in your home directory and then ru run a single set of commands and it would execute your what was in your file, thinking it was trying to authenticate you, and instead it would just execute it as a root user. Which, if that sounds scary, it is. It's really terrifying.

Now the thing is, the way they've solved this is they fixed it and then they've put in a fin saying, we're deprecating that feature. 'cause nobody used it. Oh, no. Oh. This is a core bit of how Unix systems work. It's, not actually there by default. It's a separate library that is brought in and you have to install it though most distros it comes already pre-installed, but we become, we use pseudo.

Everywhere. and it's old, it's clunky, it's not memory safe, and it has bugs and a very tiny team who work on it, which is gonna sound oddly familiar whenever we talk about serious security problems. In the Linux system world, it always says the same thing. It's always this little pillar that we're, that's holding up the, and this just another example news is, And so hopefully it's out. The bad news is that nobody updates their systems. So you're gonna have hosts who, hosting companies who will have pseudo installed, but they'll be running a version of Red Hat that may be a couple of years old, and they're not running pa regular patches. And so they've got it just when the, they've probably got it installed just when this feature was introduced and the bug occurred, but won't yet patch it for another two or three years down the line.

There's, you can put your own word in there, but then they're screwed. for anybody else, if you run your own systems update pseudo, you should be absolutely fine. Alternatively, there are now several alternatives, pseudo libraries including pseudo rs, and, oh no, the other one's gone out in my head, but there's another pop.

Very popular pseudo alternative, and then system CTL has its own pseudo alternative inside it as well. So maybe it's time to take that pseudo and go, do we actually want to still use it? Maybe we should just go back to using su

[00:31:26] Nathan Wrigley: I've, I've no idea what he just said, but it all sounds very important.

But no, I'm, joking. You're screwed. Bye. Yeah, exactly. However, I have put the caption on the screen which says, live Doom Speaking.

I thought it was important to, identify the, because you don't often doom speak, you always talk about Doom Speaking. Most of it's very positive, and, but this was Live Doom speaking.

However, I have discovered there's an audio track built into this platform called Fail. It's three seconds long. Let's see what it sounds like.

Wasn't that good? Was it really not worth, just 'cause I

[00:32:00] Tim Nash: spotted the, a comment from Courtney. This affects any, anybody who runs pseudo, if it had the expected versions. It's not just, very specific. I used Red Hat as the example because that's just happens to be the one that most Linux systems using, hosts will be using under the hood because they'll be using CentOS normally under the hood, Orix, et cetera.

but yeah, no, your Ubuntu, your, our malign, your, yeah, across the board, your NIC systems, all of those will be affected. Your very latest versions of Ubuntu won't because they're running a different, or they're trialing, pseudo RS, so they wouldn't have been affected. But yeah, most link systems are affected.

A lot of free BSD and BSD systems are also affected. You'll see a patch. Patch. Okay.

[00:32:52] Nathan Wrigley: I'm, I'm gonna try another sound. This one's called Painful Ow, which I feel sums up this moment. the Doom speaking. Here we go. did anything happen? Yes.

[00:33:03] Tim Nash: I think that sums it up. that is that it?

[00:33:06] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, it's terrible.

I'm not gonna bother with any more of those. That's awful. okay, let's move on. Let's take that caption. Oh, where's the captions? There we go. Let's see if we can get Courtney's caption gone. Let's put Patricia's one up instead, she says she's just joined and she's watching at times two. Speed. Don't watch for too long, Patricia.

The show disappears, very soon. Let's go to the next bits and pieces that we've got. What have we got here? That's Tim's course. So let's go to here. This is, d. D every year for the past few years, he's launched his WP Awards and, and he does it really a long time in advance. So he gets lots and lots of opportunity for people to vote on all the different bits and pieces.

He's after some sponsors at the moment, but he's also, launched. He's launching very soon in a couple of weeks. the nominations, I dunno if this is your thing, but it seems to, gather lots of interest on social media and things like that, but he's got a couple of slots if you're a sponsor, looking to get in front of a pretty big audience, I think with this award ceremony, you can, you can have a look at the page, it's double the wp weekly.com forward slash awards.

Couple of spots for sponsorship, but also if you wanna stick your nominations in, it's things like best page builder and best theme and best plugin and all of those kind of things. But it's deep and broad as well. if you wanna look into that, you certainly can. Okay. Anybody got anything on that or should we just move on?

I will just move on in that case. Now, I don't know if what I'm about to say is true, but the, this is a story about Word Camp Us and, word Camp us if memory serves the, organization team. I. Began the process of organizing it later than would be typical. I don't really honestly know the reasons behind that, but it, feels like it got stalled and then it got started again, not that long ago.

ticket sales, I don't know exactly how they're going, but it feels to me at the moment as if they are possibly lower than they would typically be at this point. I think they're into the, couple of hundred territory and I'm, thinking normally it would be maybe up into the sort of thousand territory by now.

And, so it feels like maybe there's a bit of a push in the, from the people organizing this to get awareness out and, and I just thought this was a curious piece of content. So rather than the usual call for speakers, call for sponsors, they're updating their, blog. And this one is, this piece is just trying to emphasize the fact that, if you are a sponsor and you would like to attend an event like this, the sponsor hall is quite a UA unique place. if you go to a normal tech conference, it can be, I don't know, a little bit dry. You get the feeling that you're being constantly sold to and what have you. I can speak from experience the, if you go to a word camp, like a Word Camp Europe or a Word camp, us, the sponsor hall is actually a good place to hang out and, it can be quite entertaining.

You meet old friends and all that kind of thing. So that's what this one was about, really. I think that doing a job, trying to make it so that event is popular. but yeah. Anybody got any commentary on that one?

[00:36:14] Tim Nash: you could try and tell people that you're go, that the sponsor hall is not a place that you're gonna be flogged to, but let's face it, sponsors the day, sponsors pay for the event.

And and they're paying for the event. Some of them do not realize that it is a complete loss leader and genuinely think that they might get money out of it. I feel that in those people go there with the intent to sell to you. Yeah. It's

[00:36:39] Nathan Wrigley: interesting though, isn't it, because I, think it's quite rare though.

Yeah. Yeah. I'll just read out the comment that Andrew Palmer made. He said he bought his ticket to go yesterday. Andrew's working with Terim now, and, 300 plus sold so far. So I dunno if that represents a, maybe at this time, this many months or weeks before, Courtney says

[00:36:59] Tim Nash: 319, total tickets sold, 37 of them are without payment.

IE volunteers, sponsors, staff, et cetera.

[00:37:05] Nathan Wrigley: So we're into the high, two hundreds of attendees at three hundreds,

[00:37:09] Tim Nash: 319.

[00:37:11] Nathan Wrigley: but if you took out the 37, if Yeah. So I'll put that on the screen. 319, sorry, Tim. Each time we do this, your face disappears. Wait a sec. Yeah. it doesn't actually disappear.

Don't be that alarmed. 319 tickets sold 37, and without paying so into the high two hundreds. That is a curious number and not to paint a downer on it. does that feel like, is that, are we into scary territory for that event, if Does it feel It might

[00:37:38] Zach Stepek: not. It's low though.

It's low for now.

[00:37:43] Remkus de Vries: Yeah. But I think the whole thing is on the ramping up side of things, what potentially might be more of an issue is that it's end of August, which at least for the European crowd, which, is, I think still significant.

[00:37:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:37:58] Remkus de Vries: is in the middle of vacation season, so that's probably not helping.

But that said, I would expect. quite a bit of bump in, in certainly in this month coming and in the last couple of weeks. Okay. 'cause I've organized a few of these things. They, they do the hockey stick thing.

[00:38:21] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Alright. So we're norm. The normal, run of events would be like where we're at ish.

And then it, you have an

[00:38:29] Remkus de Vries: initial blip.

[00:38:30] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:38:31] Remkus de Vries: originally for work Camp Europe, we try to solve that, get a little bit more hype by doing batches. batches have now become entirely useful because it's just being done for the sake of doing batches, which. If you just release and do not do the extra stuff, it's just that.

but I feel for work, MPS it actually might be beneficial to do batches and make more noise about the whole thing.

[00:38:56] Nathan Wrigley: So I think

[00:38:57] Remkus de Vries: on, social, they actually do, they have somebody manning the, social accounts and actually engaging, which the work MPS, accounts have never done before. So there is a change.

[00:39:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So Tammy makes the point contrary to what I was thinking based upon what I've seen. Normally she says, Mo most word camps do content like this. Maybe it's just a confection of what I've seen before. But also if what Remus has said is true, if they're making more of an effort on the social platforms and what have you, maybe there's something there.

Maybe it's being taken more seriously. Tacho makes the point. can we also talk about how much the word camp us sponsors pay per attendee now? Yeah. that's

[00:39:34] Tim Nash: $75,000 for the top spot. Imagine if you have, and if you, given that they're saying they're looking for 1,500 attendees, that's what they're talking about in terms of the size of the conference, 70 5K to talk to a 1000.

You, you don't buy that sponsorship unless you are expecting something I amazing back or you are willing to give or you are writing it off entirely.

[00:40:02] Nathan Wrigley: So ROI is not really the point. Even if it was a gangbuster ticket sale event, I don't think it ever has

[00:40:08] Tim Nash: been.

[00:40:08] Nathan Wrigley: No. Okay. Yeah, fair enough. But even the

[00:40:11] Tim Nash: smaller ones where they are, let's say you are, I dunno, you, go for your offer sponsorship.

Your smaller, little booth, that's $15,000. Now at that price, if you are a small company and you are thinking, I'm gonna go to Word Camp us and make myself make it, this is where I'm gonna launch my thing. That's an expensive way to do it. And comparing that to, given that if you were to do a proper return on your investment and look at the other Word camp events, you're gonna be looking there and go, hang on.

Word Camp Netherlands has got five, 600 people at it.

[00:40:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:40:52] Tim Nash: Wow. the sort of 3 50, 3 50, okay.

Oh, three 50. But, and, but your sponsorship levels are like a 10th of the amount charging.

[00:41:03] Remkus de Vries: I, there's a simpler comparison. Just go to the pricing of what, where Camp Europe costs versus where Camp us where Camp Europe gets about double the projected visitors.

So 20, not entirely, but that was like 2100, in Basel. But, previous editions have been well over 2,500. and yet the sponsor, The, amounts have never been in, in the vicinity of what, KPS is asking all the time.

[00:41:37] Nathan Wrigley: It's interesting. This isn't it. obviously we are talking about all of this.

my, my hope is that it is a barnstorming success. but obviously, yeah, it is where it is at the moment. Andrew Palmer makes an interesting point. somebody commented in the post status, I'm guessing Slack, that it's the start of the school. I'm gonna say term. For people in the us. So that's a bit of a double whammy.

It hits, if it is literally the first week, then that's gonna rule quite a few people out. if it's like the second or third week, presumably the kids are back to school. And as a parent you might feel that you can take your foot off the pedal a little bit more. if you've got kids and they're going to a new school or they're just beginning the school year, you've got that anxiety.

So that might cause you to take your foot, foot off the pedal. Oh, here's Courtney. that's back to school week for Northern States of America. End of summer vacation. Yeah. And it is basically slap bang in the middle of a summer holiday in the uk. It's properly in the middle. so I imagine for a lot of people they would've booked their vacation many, months ago.

So it's curious timing. So maybe the timing isn't really helping. And then, Courtney also makes the point that, obviously there's the. Political situation in America, she says, and many internationals are not advised to travel to America at this time. Having been says Courtney, to other tech conferences lately.

I saw pictures of you at the, what was it? The open web. Something, I can't remember what it summit, I believe. I'd love to see a comparison what the sponsors receive commonly elsewhere for the price tools. That, and it's truncated, I'll just read it. Tools that provide leads and what can and cannot be claimed.

I. Tammy says, I will add the other conference. I will add at other conferences. I have been to sponsors certainly sell more and get more than at Word camps. Tim, as you share your points, it sounds like the value for money is much more like a contribution. Contribution rather than a sponsorship,

[00:43:32] Tim Nash: which is a very awkward thing.

'cause what are you actually contributing to, or you're not contributing to necessarily the wider WordPress, being organization set up whatever you want. You're not, you are literally contributing to an event that at the moment 319 people will go to and some money in a pot for a very good party. I hope if you're at that sort of price.

Yeah.

[00:43:54] Tim Nash: so what is the va the value back for the sponsor? both in, not just in the return investment in and tangible co, but even if they're thinking of this as their contribution. There's still gotta be a return on that contribution, not in terms of even recognition. Just are we giving this money to the right people?

Could we take that 75,000 and put it into the WordPress collective? For example, could we put it into hiring dev to go and work? Could we put it into sponsorship? And when you start having those conversations, these events look. Less appealing. And when they start looking less appealing, you're gonna see sponsors stepping back, especially as the audience gets smaller and we end up with this cycle going downwards.

So it's a really slippery slope. If this, if we want to have big, events like this, they have to be big. Or we have to completely rechange the expectations, which is something that's been talked about a lot, about whether or not we should be having these style events.

[00:44:59] Nathan Wrigley: Tacho makes an interesting point about Word Camp Europe in Poland next year.

The, anticipation, I think is already, I get this feeling that the, crew that are set up to do the po I feel like they're really hungry for it, if they have been, they've got all these promotional videos out already and like a whole year, ahead of schedule and it, yeah, it's interesting, isn't it?

And also in another bit of conflicting planning, didn't realize this, but Tacho says the something, the open source Summit eu, not one that I know about also conflicts with Word Camp Europe, us. Okay. So that's another. Maybe another reason that the numbers are possibly down. Gosh, there's a lot, there's a lot to, to get through here.

Like I said, it sounds like we're banging on the head of Word camp us. That's not really the point. We're just trying to make the, make the story available. So I'm hoping it's a real success. I'm going, there's

no,

[00:45:56] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Yeah. Is that you going.

[00:45:58] Tim Nash: I'll be there. So just to point out, we now have a 1% of the people going are,

[00:46:05] Nathan Wrigley: Tim, if you come, we'll have a close to one and a one and a quarter, percent.

Anyway, I hope it's a great success. It goes without saying, I love those events and I, really want it to be a success. Courtney mentions that the word camp, Asia team are already in meeting, right? We're gonna have to get through a lot of this very quickly. We probably won't get through all that we meant to get through because of the technical grem that we had earlier.

'cause I've got a hard stop at the usual time. Let's move to this. a little while ago it was announced that Tumblr obviously bought by, automatic, I'm gonna say automatic. Maybe that's right. Okay. Zach's nodding his head. Thank you. Bought by automatic feels like a couple of years ago, something like that.

And the intention soon announced after the purchase was that it was all gonna be moved over to WordPress installs. that's now been stopped. My, my intuition would be that, it's not a priority. What, with everything that's been going on in the WordPress space over the last six or eight months, it's more like coming onto a year now, isn't it?

Gosh. Wow. it's been mothballed basically. Matt Mullenweg has said that the, I think this is something that will be hopefully revisited. 'cause it will be, he describes it as cleaner. He says it's still wanna do it, it's just cleaner. But right now we are not working on it. So if you had an expectation of that and getting your Tumblr on the Fed.

No, they're gonna put that kind of fed deverse. They're gonna put the Fed Deverse stuff into the Tumblr code base instead of doing it on the WordPress way. Anybody wanna comment on that? Free. Free Now. Shocked. Absolutely. you are sarcastic, aren't you? Yes, I am being sarcastic

[00:47:43] Tim Nash: when they now announced it.

And then they did their big appeal for would Brave Souls come and help us? And it's this is just a can of worms that anybody with any architectural background would've gone, yeah, no, let's not do that.

[00:48:00] Remkus de Vries: Does, Tumblr actually make money now?

[00:48:03] Nathan Wrigley: No. No. They lose money. he actually says in the piece, da he literally says that it is a loss.

It's a loss making project. Let me just try and find the line. Da It's the last

paragraph there. Thank you, Mullen. We also reiterate, reiterated that Tumblr is not profitable. I have this feeling that Matt himself has got like a personal affinity with Tumblr. Yep. Maybe he's got a heritage of using it and admiring it and what have you.

So maybe there's, maybe there's components post format. What? Oh, is that? Yes. Yep. Of course they had post formats, didn't they? You could be like a video or an audio or whatever, and then that got pulled into WordPress. Did anybody use post formats? One of the

[00:48:44] Tim Nash: original WordPress drivers.

[00:48:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay.

[00:48:47] Remkus de Vries: Yeah, I did.

I, I, for a while I used it and I liked it.

[00:48:52] Tim Nash: Oh, okay. Go. My second plugin I ever wrote was to create custom post formats and then wordpress.org when let it. Be submitted because it went against somebody's opinion on how, they should exist.

[00:49:05] Nathan Wrigley: we now know your angle on this story as well.

So yes. Okay. okay. So there you go. there's not much to that really, apart from the fact that it is no longer happening. We'll try and go through this quickly again. developer.wordpress.org slash news is the location of the developer blog. And Mary Baum has written a piece, basically asking for some contributions.

They're particularly asking for people who have knowledge and writing experience with, react. So they're looking for articles a bit like the following titles, react best practices and pitfalls, writing and running automated tests for blocks, linting, all the things in an IDE and extending user profiles natively with data views.

I'm guessing that is the gamut of what they're after. But they do say, if you'd like to write something else, you certainly can. that's been a, really, well maintained and updated blog of late, the likes of Justin and Ryan Welcher and Nick Diego and people like that.

they're obviously wanting to extend it, so you can join on, again, links will be in the show notes tomorrow. Anybody wanna chip in? Should we move on?

[00:50:19] Remkus de Vries: basically saying what you said, the, quality has been tremendously high over the last, year and a half. it'd be a shame to see that dwindle.

[00:50:30] Nathan Wrigley: Not just, obviously not being like the developer that you three are, I can't really say that I could read it and get a great deal of technical understanding from it. But you saying that makes me assume that there is truth in that. But also the cadence of it, it was really, it was coming out very, frequently.

yeah, and I think the, that stresses the importance of it. whether or not they've got, whether or not there is the future where people who have been writing for it are being reshuffled to do other things, I do not know, but obviously they would like some additional assistance.

Okay. Quick plug for a plugin. Daniel.

[00:51:08] Remkus de Vries: Daniel post.

[00:51:09] Nathan Wrigley: Daniel pos. Thank you. is he from the Netherlands by any chance? Yes, he's, yeah. Daniel pos, I'm gonna just try and get it right each time. he came out with a plugin not that long ago for, to integrate WordPress with your Blue Sky account. A little bit like, the fed averse the activity pub.

Plugin did for, the Fedi US and, he's got a brand new plugin, which I thought I'd mention. there is no affiliate links or anything like that on this podcast, but it's called Better Loop. And the idea is that you can create faceted, cer you can create custom loops that you can put onto your WordPress website, but then you can create like faceted search and filtering and all of that kind of thing.

You've seen this a thousand times before. There's a bunch of plugins that do this, but it was just the notion of building it inside the block editor, which I thought was interesting. I've not experienced a plugin that does it that way. There's always been a, separate UI where you have to go in and build all the things and then I don't use short codes or something.

So I thought that was quite nice. I haven't played with it, but the demo that he's got on the website looks really credible. I have a, yeah, there we go. at the top. Apparently there's a 40% off whatever the pricing is going to be, there's a 40% discount at the moment. So there you go.

quick, plug for that. Anybody, anything.

[00:52:29] Zach Stepek: I've used some of the other solutions that do this in the space and, this looks more usable. Yeah, looks easier. I think that's an important thing, for, end users to be able to, build things like this without as much, as much work Builders need, tools like this that, you know, people who can't build it themselves.

[00:52:53] Nathan Wrigley: The, the familiarity of the block editor is becoming I, don't know, it's not for everybody, is it? But it feels as the weeks and months go by, it feels like more and more people have at least been in there and had a bit of a play. and so hopefully, and that this kind of thing always felt like the promise of blocks to me, it always felt like mini app, I'm gonna say apps, like mini apps built inside of a block that would just do loads of heavy lifting.

It always felt like that was where blocks were gonna shine, not just paragraphs and images and things like that. But, anyway, so the URL for that is better. What is it exactly? Better loop, WP. So go and check it out. And 40% off with you.

[00:53:35] Tim Nash: Daniel is a really lovely guy

[00:53:37] Nathan Wrigley: in these. You've met Daniel, have you?

[00:53:39] Tim Nash: I've met him and also he, before he went to automatically, he did a, he made a plugin that did, allowed you to build, like thumbnails. And which I think now got brought into Jet Packer, but at the time it was. Like pretty revolutionary and, yeah, I believe it's still actually running on my site, albeit a slightly modified version because he stops avoiding, because you can't

[00:54:04] Nathan Wrigley: cope with an LMS, that kind of thing.

You no. But to fiddle

[00:54:08] Tim Nash: just because, he stopped, doing bits with it. Yeah. But, yeah, no, he's, and he's, every time I've interacted with him, I've come away thinking what clever and nice person he is. So

[00:54:19] Nathan Wrigley: isn't it interesting that in, in our community that stuff actually counts?

I always think that's fascinating that though, like you feel that saying those words that Tim just said makes a difference. It does to me, whenever I go to a, plugin, this is my journey, I go to the homepage, then I go to the pricing page, then I go to the about page. It turns out that the combination of pricing and about is basically my intuition wrapped up in just two things.

I want to know who these people are and what they've done. And, being, a nice person, opens my wallet for some reason. So that's nice. I don't dunno what's happened to Remus. He's turned into a circle and a letter r maybe he'll be joining us in a moment. Last time he did this, he had a different t-shirt on.

Oh, he is on the phone. Oh, Oh yeah. Yeah. I hope it's, I hope it's important. so anyway, we'll have Remus back in a moment, but there you go. Danielle Post, better loop. wp.com right? Let's have a look. I'm not gonna go through that one. That was one of the ones that I was gonna drop if we run out time.

And we certainly are. This is from the Woo Developer blog. I am not a user of WooCommerce, so honestly, this is all a little bit moot for me. But, I know that for a very long time they've been talking about having a dedicated woo block theme. You, I don't need to explain that, I hope to this audience, but, it would appear that today is the day it's gonna finally drop.

And on the Woo Developer blog, a couple of days ago, a few days ago, they wrote all about it. And it's a fairly long article outlining all of the different bits and pieces that they have put in. There's quite a lot of commentary actually for such a piece. I don't know if you're a WooCommerce user and you wanna experiment with that, hopefully now or very close to now, it will, it will be dropping, but I can't really comment on it 'cause I don't really use it.

Do I? Do either of you two?

[00:56:16] Zach Stepek: my understanding is that, it's the spiritual block successor to storefront. Ah,

[00:56:22] Nathan Wrigley: okay. Got it.

[00:56:23] Zach Stepek: And, yeah, I've built some sites on top of storefront, so it's, it's nice to see a modern option officially from Woo coming. it looks like it's being submitted.

They're not gonna unveil the name of the new theme until it's been submitted. Oh, interesting. Okay. one of the interesting things that I, thought was cool is that the GitHub repo for this is now the opposite of what things used to be. woo. Themes was acquired by. Automatic and created WooCommerce.

Now, WooCommerce has created a sub, a repository in GitHub called Woo Themes.

[00:57:14] Nathan Wrigley: That's funny.

[00:57:14] Zach Stepek: That's

[00:57:15] Nathan Wrigley: full circle.

[00:57:16] Zach Stepek: Yeah. Yeah. So I thought that was kinda interesting. it does look like they're, really working hard to improve the block-based editing functionality of WooCommerce, in general, product gallery fixes, add to cart fixes, things that are just preparing the way for this entirely block-based theme.

and based on some conversations that I've had, I know that they are definitely working on trying to make the blocks that are part of WooCommerce more modular, more block like than pattern like. Yeah. Yeah. Which I think is an important thing.

[00:57:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. so you can go and check this out. There really is quite a lot of de detail.

When I say detail, there's a lot of links out to the enhancements that have been made. So it links out to the GitHub, issue in each of the cases. But, the sub headings, if you like, are it's built entirely out blocks. They're improving the product, gallery making add to cart more extensible, enhancing the product image block if frying product details, and getting it ready for theme submission, which presumably will be at some point in the next, I dunno, 12 hours or some, I totally

[00:58:32] Tim Nash: get what, Zach said, but I just love the idea that only in our world could we say something along the lines of making a block more block.

[00:58:40] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, why? But you're

[00:58:43] Tim Nash: absolutely right. It just tick me.

[00:58:46] Nathan Wrigley: yep. Anyway, will. Certainly I think something that you probably want to gonna check out. Okay, no time for that. We really are running short of time. Tammy's on the line, so let's go for this one. Tammy wrote a piece like yesterday and I had actually put it in for next week's show 'cause I didn't have time to properly read it.

But then Tacho brought it to my attention so I bumped it up into this week's one. And, Tammy here has raised a p nice theme, by the way. Tammy love the boldness of this. what if we pause default themes? She wrote it yesterday and essentially she is, she goes to great pains at the beginning to say.

The word is paused. It's not stop, but, but goes through the, whole idea, do they basically serve a purpose anymore? Times have changed. Obviously they provide an opportunity if you launch a default theme every year, it provides that talking point, I guess is what she's saying. It provides that education piece where the theme can be bound to all of the different things that have been recently launched in WordPress, that kind of thing.

But maybe in with the cadence that we've got in WordPress at the moment, we don't really need to have something like that. So she's, I don't know if she's proposing that they're paused or just raising it as a possibility, but, I have to agree with her. tell us your strong intuition though. What is the, what is it that like, brought that out?

W what, why

[01:00:12] Tim Nash: So I, while he is doing that, can you press the, recycle button here. Oh, really? Yeah, that one. Press it. Thank you. Keep doing it while he is talking. I'll keep doing it.

[01:00:24] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. I'll keep doing that while he talks. Every time he says something sensible, I'll refresh.

[01:00:29] Remkus de Vries: Oh, that's not gonna be a lot of time.

No.

[01:00:31] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. I give up.

[01:00:34] Remkus de Vries: I think the whole have a new one for the sake of having a new one, because we can, it's, if before 2010 we went with the default theme for ages, nothing really happened. meaning was there really a good reason for, a new theme? Maybe, but it never happened then From 2010 up until now, we've had default themes pretty much every year, if not every single year.

At some point it's, I think it's less of an added value. I, I haven't used a default theme since 2013. I. if anything, I look at 'em like, oh, how did they solve this particular, how would you do it from a best practices, best implementation standpoint? But you can do that in one single theme anyway. You can go from a 1.7 to a one, a two, a 2.0 and have okay, this is, this is how we do it now.

and you can find those changes and look at that. But it's, it, there's a lot of work that goes into building a theme, like a lot of work. I did a podcast recording with, Ika, who's part of the, not the current one, but the previous one. I think. But, it's just a lot of strain and, given that, that all has become a bit of a pressure thing, why not go with, a good theme?

Continue that along. 'cause mind you, one of the reasons we had default themes in different variations in the beginning was to show different use cases of how you could use a theme. Some themes were more bloggy, like the 2013 theme, which my mom's blog actually still rocks. it, nice.

it's a good theme. but, there then there was a CMS type of theme. Then there were some really ugly themes that make no sense. Nobody used them. You just stripped all the CSS out and you just did if you were doing that thing of starting from scratch, from a, a default theme. I just don't think it makes the worth the effort there anymore.

[01:02:46] Nathan Wrigley: you're getting like corroborating commentary from Tacho, by the way. I probably recycled that good eight or nine times, oh. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, it was, good. having new themes says Tacho was very useful for a while because they helped us understand how to use new features in yeah.

But the focus on full site editing, that doesn't exist anymore. And then Tammy, obviously, the creator of this piece and the creator of this wonderful refreshable theme. By the way, my case is proven, by this theme pretty much being pretty much no theme, many defaults and a lot of plugin functionality.

It's about redefinition. Courtney's saying, I love default theme still to be the source of receiving updates as I make all, my customizations in a child theme. And that makes

[01:03:28] Remkus de Vries: sense. But you can have one that lasts for five years and just update the. The versioning in a more major way.

[01:03:39] Tim Nash: Yeah.

Counter that. we are asking now that we've had major themes for the last 12 years.

[01:03:48] Remkus de Vries: 15.

[01:03:49] Tim Nash: 15, yeah. 15 years. And they, those have receiving updates.

[01:03:54] Remkus de Vries: Yeah. Also,

[01:03:55] Tim Nash: which is a massive amount of work. And by maybe taking a pause. And going, let's just, we, can slowly remove some of those themes that maybe, that don't need updates every time we have a new release, every time a new feature comes in, we don't need to backwards compatibly support something in 2013 as theme that will massively help reduce that maintenance burden down a little bit.

And let's face it, if we are pushing everybody towards full side editing a default theme in like 2024, which gives some basics, and then off you go, the whole promise or one of the promises of full side editing was ultimately it would be very little more than a. Theme Js o file and css and it, that, that's the route we've, gone down.

Let's accept that and go Brill, like just have a basic theme. JSO file and I, really nice default set of CSS and off let everybody else have, the themes back to themselves. Let the creativity flow a little bit more. For one, I'm a bit bored of seeing the same theme over and over again. Uses OL on every one of his sites.

[01:05:10] Nathan Wrigley: I, I'll just, but to, Courtney says, sorry, modeling my words, but to Tammy's point, pausing could be good. So she mentioned a comment a moment ago where it got half written. Let's focus on templates and patterns for the default. Tammy agreeing, I think with Tam, Tim here. the maintenance burden is massive.

And then finally, tacho says, I'm curious how many sites around the world would be running on one of the default themes. I remember Kubrick in the day seeing that everywhere, but ever since then, I don't remember really seeing, are you, I

[01:05:42] Tim Nash: suspect you'll find that. There are, the percentage wise are gonna be ridiculously high because every spam site doesn't go and get a new fee.

Are you? Just guess you could also aid tight by the year based on the default theme that it got, yeah.

[01:05:58] Nathan Wrigley: I, like the idea of leaning into patterns and things like that as the, as the way of doing it. So anyway, thank you for raising that. Tammy, maybe we'll revisit that article next week when I've had more of a chance to actually think about it.

'cause it was quite rushed. So we are very quickly running out of time. If you have a brother printer, then Panic, basically. or I don't know, Tim. firstly, I'd just like to show you this picture of a brother printer. There, there's an look at that lovely little printer. It is. And then, show you this picture.

Gee whiz. There's a, picture of me panicking because hundreds it says of brother printer models have been made unpatchable, with this security floor. Tim, I'm hoping you've read this and can put my mind at rest. Otherwise, I'm gonna go and burn that thing sitting behind me over there.

[01:06:49] Tim Nash: Wait, will you do it live?

[01:06:51] Nathan Wrigley: No, I wasn't actually gonna burn it. I was just gonna probably ignore the problem entirely and I hope that, I didn't care. I have to print for goodness sake. This is the no,

[01:07:04] Tim Nash: you've, every, so often, if you've listened to this show or listened to me on other shows, I will go on a little mini rant about the CVSS rating system and how, silly it can be because anything that is connected, basically the, you get, get a score and the higher the score around 10, the more scary it is.

And things with ratings like five, three or four, and obviously they're really low. And then you see ones at medium five, six, and they look a bit scary now. For something like WordPress, we can't get below five or six because one of the categories of problem is if it's net, if it can be exploited over a network.

And of course, your WordPress site is, it's on the internet, so it's always gonna be over a network. This has got a rating of 9.8.

[01:07:53] Nathan Wrigley: It's a printer with a 9.8, so that sounds really bad until, oh, you think

[01:07:58] Tim Nash: about that. The thing is that you live in a house with a little cheap plastic router down in the bottom that is sitting behind, behind a net, and your printer can't immediately be accessed by a bad actor.

They have to get onto your network first. However, once they're run to your network, if you haven't changed the default password, your printer will print things. Lots of abusive things that you, and it will burn up your income. Maybe they'll make it catch fire and burn your house down. but this is

[01:08:31] Nathan Wrigley: not helping,

[01:08:33] Tim Nash: but they have to be on the network.

Okay. And you're not going to exclude. So in the grand scheme of things, yeah, sure. if you are exposed to your printer, to the internet without a pass with the default password on, really bad things could happen to you. If your printer is in your normal, regular network, it has to be compromised. Your network has to be compromised in some way, or you have to.

When you think about that and you start looking at that as like a, you start doing your own assessment, the fret reduces down dramatically. But because you could put this on the internet, it gets that really scary score still. So when I Worth changing your password.

[01:09:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. When I woke up this morning and there was just this strange chat that I'd never met, just loitering around my printer, he'd obviously broken in or something, I don't really know.

But he, was there, he was wearing some kind of mask and he had this bandit outfit on and stuff like that. He was carrying a clipboard and there he was in my printer. Do I need to panic now?

[01:09:33] Tim Nash: do you have your wallet?

[01:09:35] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, now you're fine. Okay. It's all good. okay. Honestly, you, do put my mind at rest.

I immediately saw a picture of a printer that I own and I thought, oh, darn it. This is more stuff to worry about. Let's still

[01:09:47] Tim Nash: change the default admin password, please. Yeah, I didn't know for everything.

[01:09:51] Nathan Wrigley: I didn't even know the printer had a default network password and have you got this printer?

Do you know this printer? It has this tiny LCD screen about this many. It can fit about nine characters in it. Using that is like trying to extract unicorn blood out of a stone. in other words, it's quite difficult. I did manage to set a wifi password in it, but that took me about eight weeks. I got a hernia from doing it.

I didn't actually get a hernia from doing it, brother. In case you're listening and you want to get your lawyers onto me, I didn't. but it was tricky. So stuff like that. I know what you mean and I know that we should all be co cautious of that kinda stuff, but honestly, people like Brother, would you just make that process really easy?

IE the first time I turn it on, will you force me to change the password? That would be helpful. 'cause menus within menus. Within menus. Anyway, there you go. I don't need to worry quite so much. So this version of me. can go, just do something else instead. Calm down. Yeah, calm down. Exactly right.

This last one, I wanna do this. I honestly, I think this is so cool. I have my suspicions that AI is not in the end gonna be our best friend. I don't know if I'm like, getting a bit worked up about ai, but, it looks like the people at CloudFlare have also had similar intuitions, but for a, kind of interesting reason.

So this piece is by the CloudFlare blog. It's called Content Independence Day. No AI Crawl without compensation. And I'll summarize really quick. Years and years ago when Google came around, the promise was, we will scrape your site and in return we will send you traffic. It's a pretty cool relationship.

It allowed loads of people to make loads of money putting ads on their site or just getting traffic. it was a great deal. Google did well. We did well now Google is increasingly not doing that. They're showing like snippets on their platform. I think the ratio is now something like 300 to one more difficult, 300 times more difficult.

anthropic apparently is something like 30,000 times more difficult than it would've been to get people to go to your site. In other words, content creators are no longer being rewarded for their content. It's being consumed and nobody's getting driven towards your content. CloudFlare who apparently runs something like a fifth of the entire internet through their network, have got this idea that's also not fair.

And so they're gonna do something about it, and it's gonna be this like pay to play model. You're gonna be able to decide I want to be compensated, otherwise you can't see my content. And I can totally see this being a massive dilemma. For content creators, do you just charge for it and know that probably you won't get paid?

Do you open up the floodgates, never get paid and probably never get any traffic, but at least it's freely available. I don't know technically. I'm sure CloudFlare can pull this off, but I just was curious as to what you, the panel, think about this as an idea.

[01:12:54] Zach Stepek: I think, an important thing here to recognize is that we are seeing in the hosting space an increase in traffic overall from these AI crawlers.

And it's not a small increase in traffic. It is a significant increase in traffic and who pays for that bandwidth in the end if it's something that's getting crawled constantly by these AI crawlers, the owner of the site Yeah. Has responsibility to pay for all of that traffic, not the AI crawlers.

And I guess in the past though, the more traffic you got there, there'd always be a relationship with more traffic, more visits, more potential revenue. But that seems to be falling off a cliff from this article at least. Anyway, more traffic now just means a bigger bill with no, no possible way of being compensated.

[01:13:52] Nathan Wrigley: I'm sure it's more nuanced than that, but, and I know, that you, MKU, I know that you are like team CloudFlare all the way down. I at least I think you are, I have a memory that you are, you're liking this kind of stuff.

[01:14:05] Remkus de Vries: I think it's, what I like about it is that this provides an option.

[01:14:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay.

[01:14:13] Remkus de Vries: And, site owners now have a choice to do something with this. Yes or no? I like the principle of this. I like the. Certainly how the, services outlined. It also indicates that if you activate this, there's a chance you get no traffic from those sources. So be aware that is the consequences you are opting into.

but as it, from a general perspective, you can have all sorts of opinions about Google and how they go about their business. At least you were somewhat certain there were some reciprocation of, I put stuff out there, you call me, and then maybe not, depending on how well I do my job, I get some traffic back.

And if you live off of traffic, it's a very different question to answer than I have a blog. And it's nice if people can find what they need to find.

[01:15:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, like you've been producing content regularly for Yeah. A long time, right? So you've, got your audience probably, obviously you'd like to grow the audience, but you've, already captured an audience and presumably there's some kind of loyalty there, right?

Yeah. But if you were to be beginning now, it's a challenge. Why wouldn't it? Wouldn't it just be like a total black hole that you are throwing your content into? At least it feels like that

[01:15:38] Remkus de Vries: in, in a way. I think the landscape has changed a lot. 'cause not only, is there a less reliance on, search engines, the place where people look for information has also changed, to video, whether that's YouTube or TikTok or reels or whatever.

So e everything is quite a bit in flux. so it's a, it's as black as box as it. Possibly has ever been, I'd say. but what I like about what CloudFlare does it, it, thinks about what are ways for us to start protecting people who need protection. So there's a way to opt in there, there are other initiatives that sort of wanna do this as well.

but it makes much more sense from my perspective that CloudFlare is doing this because it has the volume, it has the insight, it knows what's happening. they recently published a, post about some analysis on what the percentage of AI was and, all of that. And it's, wild, Zach, hinted at it, but it's on a global scale.

It's wild. The amount of, traffic or resources, AI is using, generating whatever you wanna call it. so it's, I think it's, I think it's wonderful that an organization such as Cloud four flare, steps up and has an opinion about how it could be mitigated.

[01:17:04] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know what's really curious in what you just said?

it's cloudflare's your mate. Yeah. It's like CloudFlare is a pal. they're like looking out for your interest and I don't have that feeling about the AI companies. I have exactly the opposite feeling. Yeah. Okay. I have a feeling almost like, how about I help

[01:17:22] Tim Nash: with the opposite?

[01:17:24] Nathan Wrigley: Say again?

[01:17:25] Tim Nash: How about I help with the opposite? CloudFlare manage about five to 15, 20% of web traffic based on volume.

[01:17:34] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[01:17:36] Tim Nash: What if they're an evil corporation?

[01:17:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:17:40] Tim Nash: What happens when they, when, Matthew finds out that actually he really would like a larger paycheck and sells out, which he will, it will happen. We are then, we have basically handed over all of the keys, in some cases, quite literally everything.

We're throwing things onto their workers, et cetera, and we are putting ourselves in a really dangerous position where we are advocating, handing over our content control. To a company on a promise and a whim that they are gonna be good this week.

[01:18:10] Remkus de Vries: But you're, they are known for changing their minds.

[01:18:14] Tim Nash: They are known for not following through on things just like every company. I'm not, I'm actually not saying you can say this

[01:18:19] Remkus de Vries: about any company,

[01:18:21] Tim Nash: but that's what I mean, that's what I'm trying to say. So you are, but in this case, we are, if we give con control over content, moderation and management and whether or not our content can be accessed to another, to, to a company like CloudFlare, we put ourselves on a slippery slope.

One of the reasons that we, if you've talked can, now for some people that might be the right thing to do. They might not be able to do it. They might be doing it through their hosts, but. We, the more we hand over, the more control we hand over, the bigger the price they are, the bigger they are, the quicker that they are going to be turned into the evil company that they inevitably will become.

So we've gotta, there's gotta be a level of caution attached to it. We don't want to hand over everything just to protect ourselves from. the problem with ai, which is real, I, look, if I look at my own analytics, well over 90% of the traffic to my own sites is AI based. And is that, and I'm doing quite well.

I, 'cause I actually have occasional human being to come and visit. There are plenty of sites where they will did it. It's much, much higher. Yeah. I have a single and frustratingly I have a single post that every AO bot on the planet wants to see at least a hundred thousand times a day.

to the point I'm like, how many people care about customizing nano? It can't be that many people because

[01:19:47] Nathan Wrigley: the AI love it.

[01:19:48] Tim Nash: I know. they're there. They, the AI there going, so this Vim, I'm gonna customize Nana instead. But it's also, it was all too easy for me to say, oh, I, I'll block that traffic or I will, I.

Try and change the narrative. And I'm, and I think it's good that we try and find a solution like, can we make the AI pay? But I am just concerned that if we put somebody, we give hand over that sort of content moderation to somebody else and say, you, decide whether or not the traffic comes to me.

We are putting them in a really scary place and things can go downhill very quickly.

[01:20:28] Nathan Wrigley: It's robbing Peter to pay Paul, aren't you? in a way, I have the solution by the way. I am a root that printer. Put a small Linux install on it, connect it to the web. What could go wrong? It already has a small Linux.

Okay. I'm gonna modify this. Yeah, I'm giving off on that joke. It was not very good. No, Okay. but I hadn't even thought about that. Do, you know what's interesting about that is I trusted Google. Forever. I was full on Google. And now I think that in many ways I want nothing to do with them way, the hint

[01:21:02] Tim Nash: was when they said, when they drop, don't be evil was their message.

That's the

[01:21:08] Tim Nash: moment. That was really a good sign where they were like sitting there going, what should, oh, let's just get rid of, don't be evil. That should have been a sign to you. Yeah. The curious,

[01:21:17] Nathan Wrigley: thing is, I view CloudFlare in the same way that I viewed Google. I almost see them like this company that can do no wrong.

They just seem to be EE, everything that they produce. And I don't have the history of you, like the things that, the failed promises and all that kinda thing. so I view them, I would give them all of my trust at the moment. I would tick that switch a thousand times over, to, allow them to do this on my site.

You are right Tim. You are absolutely right. We can't trust anybody. The sky's falling in. I'm gonna end this podcast now. We're in peril

[01:21:47] Zach Stepek: living up to the title of Doom speaker. That's,

[01:21:52] Nathan Wrigley: I love it. That's today's episode title. What did you just say? Living up to the title.

[01:21:57] Tim Nash: Nathan has complained. I am not suitably doomy enough gloomy on his show.

So I would just like to point out that you are all screwed and that we should just self-host everything in a cave. Hide away from mankind, and we'll all be your that.

[01:22:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, only go back to farming. That's the only, that's the only way of, achieving anything in life. Okay. There we go. We had loads of other things that we were gonna talk about.

Unfortunately, we have run very late because we, had a massive technical failure in the middle of the show. So I apologize for keeping our guests, for an extra 12 or so minutes. I hope that it hasn't eaten into your day too badly. but I would like to thank them. So first of all, thanks to Zach Stepak for joining us.

Thanks to, I nearly said Tim Nash down there, but it's not, it's Mku. Just feel like if I could just go a little bit lower with that and I could rob. The top of your head very nicely. Oh, look at that. you're getting that. Oh, shiny. and, Tim Nash, thank you so much.

[01:22:57] Remkus de Vries: You're just jealous of my shiny hair

[01:22:59] Nathan Wrigley: under here.

You've, it's chaos, honestly. Yep. Tim Nash, thank you very much for joining us as well. Appreciate it. And thank you, honestly, a massive thanks to the people who made comments. I realize, I don't really know how the heck you found us again, but thank you for staying the course and coming back. I really appreciate it.

Thank you very much. We didn't get a chance to raise all the comments, but it, made. Yes, you're right. Here we go. We're gonna do our little thing that we do and get everybody's picture. And I no v signs this time, Remus, we put that one out last time. That was quite fun. and we will see you next time, hopefully less technical gremlins.

Thank you to our panel. If you wanna stick around for a brief chat, we can do, but we will see you guys later. Thanks a lot. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.