This Week in WordPress #341

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It is time for This Week in WordPress, episode number 341, entitled Beefy Chunks. It was recorded on Monday, the 21st of July, 2025. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and I'll be joined today by Michelle Frechette, by Tim Nash and by Tammie Lister. As is always the case these days, we

start off the show talking about the bits and pieces that the guests have brought along, and so we talk quite a lot about ai.

Tammie Lister is bringing quite a few things that are happening in the WordPress project, but also a ton of stuff which is happening in the medical sphere about ai.

And then Tim Nash brings us some news about Gravity Forms. Patchstack talking about the fact that they suffered a man in the middle attack. And then also talking about a new collaboration between a bunch of hosts, and whether or not Tim thinks that carries any merit.

Also, talking about Fair, this project to decentralize a repository for WordPress, and the ability to find different places to download your plugins. Pantheon, the host has started to use that, and Tim thinks this is going to be something which other hosting companies follow on with as well in the near future.

And then we get into the WordPress stuff. We talk about WordPress 6.8.2.

We talk about the carbon footprint for your website.

We talk about events, WPLDN, and LoopConf.

We also talk about some ideas coming from plugins. So Ollie has got a really great idea for adapting and amending WordPress content, multiple things all at the same time.

We also talk quite a lot about Felix Arntz. In fact you might as well call this the Felix Arntz episode, because he comes up three or four times.

And there's a whole bunch of other stuff like View Transitions, and a load of other stuff as well, and it's all coming up next on this week in WordPress.

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Good morning, good evening, good afternoon. wherever you are in the world, it depends, That's how it works. It's round. there you go. Your physics fact of the day. Hello. It's episode number 341 of this week in physics. We're gonna be talking about the sun, the moon, the stars, and the planets.

I've got a bunch of experts. It's not that, it's this week in WordPress. We're gonna be talking about WordPress and I can see a collective sigh of relief there on the wrong, podcast. No. Flat

[00:04:00] Michelle Frechette: earthers in the

[00:04:02] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. Yeah. Very nice to have you with us. You are joining us from, we have in the UK all the water.

In the clouds. I don't expect there's any raining anywhere else on the planet at this point because it's absolutely been chucking it down this week. I'm getting in there early 'cause I know that a lot of people like to drop in and talk about the weather. So let's see if anybody does that. We are joined today by three fabulous people.

You can see 'em on the screen if you're listening to this on the audio. Here you go. This is who we've got on our panel today. First one over there is Michelle Frechette. Hello Michelle.

[00:04:34] Tammie Lister: Hello. Hello. Hello.

[00:04:36] Nathan Wrigley: Nice to, have you with us. Michelle. is a repeat, offender. I know you said on this.

[00:04:43] Michelle Frechette: It's true. It's true. I'll cut for that.

[00:04:45] Nathan Wrigley: Michelle Frechette is the director, executive director at Post Status. In addition to her work there, Michelle is the podcast Barister at WP Coffee Talk. Co-founder of Underrepresented in Tech and the creator of WP Speakers, WP Career Pages. She's also an author and a frequent organizer and speaker at WordPress events living in, outside of Rochester, New York.

She likes to take nature photographs, and if you want one URL to capture the whole lot, it's Meet Michelle online. Meet Michelle online, and there's another thing, but we're gonna mention that in the podcast today. we'll keep that quiet for right now. Hello, nice to have you with us, Michelle, once again.

Good to be here. Yeah, thank you. I

[00:05:24] Michelle Frechette: was at, I was at a renaissance festival this weekend where everybody was affecting very, poor British accents.

[00:05:30] Nathan Wrigley: Oh really? Oh really? Okay. Yeah. It's a bit like us when we do the American accents. It's something very, I imagine

yeah. Yeah. and over there we have Tammy Lister.

Hello, Tammy.

[00:05:41] Tammie Lister: Hello?

[00:05:42] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, Tim. Oh, Tim. No, That was, ful. Tommy is joined. Tommy Lester is joining us from where all the water fell, I think during the course of week.

[00:05:53] Tammie Lister: I had a pond this

[00:05:55] Nathan Wrigley: week. I understand.

[00:05:56] Tammie Lister: Yeah. I had a pond for a while. Oh,

[00:05:59] Nathan Wrigley: no. However, rescuing her sanity, is going to be the following thing.

It's a hiq, which I've got to read out, and it's an AI did this, right?

[00:06:09] Tammie Lister: Yeah.

[00:06:10] Nathan Wrigley: How good is it at that stuff? Yeah. So I

[00:06:12] Tammie Lister: basically pointed my webs. Site and my bio and my LinkedIn and AI and got it to write a HAKU for myself. But

[00:06:19] Nathan Wrigley: did it do, is this the first thing that it spat out or is this like number 58?

Yeah, no,

[00:06:23] Tammie Lister: this is the raw first one I just said. Do one.

[00:06:26] Nathan Wrigley: There's, is there a way to read high codes? Do you have to develop like a little in a certain way or do you just read it? No, you just stick it? No. Okay, just go for it. Okay. Here we go. So this is what an A AI wrote about Tammy having looked at her website edges, not the end thoughts unfold in quiet code making space to think, gosh, that's actually quite profound.

That's better than I could have. Tom. I just,

[00:06:54] Michelle Frechette: that's pretty, I just asked it to do a limerick about myself and I will just tell you don't do that.

[00:06:59] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. Yeah. Limericks is a whole different thing, isn't it? Less,

[00:07:04] Michelle Frechette: actually it was pretty fun, but yeah, it's not bad. I just came up with a phrase. Limericks are less

[00:07:09] Nathan Wrigley: profundity.

More profanity. That's my, expectation. I'll actually

[00:07:13] Michelle Frechette: put it in the chat so people can

[00:07:14] Nathan Wrigley: see. Okay, okay. I'll stick it over there. that's actually really cool 'cause that does That kind of encapsulates you really well, I think. Okay. profound. There you go. Everybody going? A hiq with chat, GPT or equivalent and, stick into the comment.

[00:07:31] Michelle Frechette: I love that Tammy's Thoughtful and like really put some energy into it. I want it to be a haiku. And I'm like, what body thing can it say about me?

[00:07:40] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. about two minutes before we started the show, we realized that Tim didn't have a bio. So Tammy requested that Tim do what? She did go and asked for a ask for a Hiku.

From wherever it comes from. T No,

[00:07:53] Tim Nash: no, Hiku. She just said poem.

[00:07:54] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. So we've got a poem and then

[00:07:56] Tim Nash: I said A D and d inspired. Okay.

[00:07:58] Nathan Wrigley: D inspired. Here it comes. Tim Nash is our third guest today. There he is. Doom speaker. How you doing, Tim? I'm all right. Introduce yourself. See what we got. Oh no. You can refresh and do it yourself.

Oh, you've written

[00:08:11] Tim Nash: it in. Oh, dammit. So sorry. This time you've

[00:08:15] Tammie Lister: gotta use a bad voice.

[00:08:17] Tim Nash: Yeah. This and also this was also the first shot.

[00:08:20] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. So here we go. so this is what AI wrote about Tim in the realm of press Spell. What the heck is that? brave Tim of Nash word, M and guard of all your data warded the castle WordPress with spells of two factor dreams.

His firewalls blazed plugins danced as he vanquished vile hack hackerman with a flash of his sanctified scream. God, this is good. Thou shal not pass. He cried. This blade forged a salted hashes strips wailed and crashed beneath his sacred HT access that is actually.

[00:09:03] Tim Nash: Boom. I dunno, the thou shall not pass.

Might need edit, maybe should have copyright pen somewhere, quite pitched the source for that one.

[00:09:16] Nathan Wrigley: If, you'd have asked me to sum you up in about a hundred characters, that's how I would've done it. Just exactly like that verbatim. there's our panel. I'm Nathan Wrigley. I have nothing to say about myself, but, all I'll say is if you wanna write your we Can you check D pt?

No, We can't. No, we can't. I shouldn't have said that. Should I? I realize now, oh, Sammy's gone. She's off. She's gonna, she's what can I do?

[00:09:44] Tim Nash: I'm questioning whether we should go Monty Python. Yes. And I think in the style of Sub Brave Robin Yes. Do that from Ringley something.

[00:09:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Do something out of the, what's that film called?

the, the meaning of no, The Life of Brian Do something like that. That with. Sue me. Oh yeah. That's not the Braves of Robin one, but, okay. Let's see what comes out. so it's supposed to be about WordPress. We'll get to that in a minute. But just to say a few bits of, housekeeping, if you wanna contribute to this show, and I hope you do because it does make the show a whole lot more interesting.

then this is the, probably the best place to go head to this. URL Tammy's Tammy. Yeah, Tammy's Chin is on it right there. go to wp build.com/live, wp builds.com/live. She's hiding. And, if you go there, you've got two options. The first one is to have a Google account and you can log in like with the YouTube comments.

It's on the right if you're on a desktop. And then if you don't wanna do that, you don't have a Google account, you can just click the little live chat button inside the video player and that'll, open up a panel where you, you just pop your name in and it will give us the comments. Hopefully they'll come through.

yep, once more. Wp builds.com/live. Okay. Let's crack on with what we have got today. Firstly, let's say hello to the people joining us. First one is, Ryan. Hello, influence, WP. Hello from Sunny and Hot, Charlotte, North Carolina, US Michelle Frechette's, obviously joining us. Slightly cooler than normal.

Rochester Reese. Reese Win. Hello afternoon Reese from a surprisingly muggy Newton, the Willows. Yeah, it's very muggy here. So much so that I have the state-of-the-art drying and cooling technology. If Tammy's not happy with my fan, it's very outdated apparently. and we're also joined by Maria Ansari.

Hello? And she's waving but it can't pause the waving emoji so it just prints it out. Pink wave handy wave thing. hello all, says Aaron, nice to have you with us. It's raining here in Islamabad right now. Gosh. There you go. We're all over the place, aren't we? All over the globe? How fabulous Reese is back.

I listen to the podcast on one and a half speed. This so the music seems so slow. God, is it, like, what the heck is that? has my camera gone off? Oh yeah, it has. Yeah. Yeah. It's okay. It's gonna, I think it's gonna,

[00:12:09] Tammie Lister: or it's a bo dark cloud. Just no, so I,

[00:12:11] Nathan Wrigley: I use my camera, so it's an SLR, one of those things.

And I used it this week and I think I've, I think I've misconfigured it when I put it back on its tripod just over there. So it'll probably happen periodically during the show if it does happen. Can one of you just yell and I'll switch it off and turn it back on again? But that's gonna probably keep happening as we go.

do not listen to the podcast on one and a half. That must be torture. Re remind you it's over quicker. That's something to be said for it, Elliot Sby from just down the road is saying hello. Thank you Elliot. Patricia's joining us as well. That's really nice. Oh my goodness. It's John.

It's Jonathan Overall, of course. There we go. Morning from the West coast in Canada. Hello. And then Dave. Is joining us. his name is his name that didn't

[00:12:55] Tim Nash: say West Coast, that said a warm wet coast.

[00:12:58] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, you're right. Yeah. I can't read a warm wet coast of Canada. Sorry. I think he is on the west coast though, by coincidence.

So that's worked out. All right. and then Dave joining us, his name is Ryan, not Charlotte. Did I call him Charlotte from Brian? Did I say that? I'm very sorry if that's in fact what I did. Let's crack on. Here we go. This is the, the usual promotional stuff. This is US WP builds. If you like what we do and you want to keep updated, put your email into this field here and we'll send you two things once on a Tuesday.

Basically we package up this as an audio podcast and we'll stick that out in the morning tomorrow. And, and so that's one of the things you'll get. And then you'll also get, an email when the, Thursday podcast drops. This is the Thursday. Podcast is once a week. The most recent one was with Aurelian Deni, who is, who's got a brand new plugin called Mailer Press.

And it's kinda like Gutenberg to build. It's inside a WordPress. It's Gutenberg to build emails. It's pretty cool actually. You should, it looked really

[00:13:58] Tim Nash: cool when,

[00:13:58] Nathan Wrigley: when I looks really cool. What's interesting, I dunno if Tim, if you explored, you know how it looks like Gutenberg. So you think it's Gutenberg it's not.

They've just mimicked the Gutenberg ui, which I thought was interesting 'cause they ran up against a few technical limitations, which they couldn't get over. So rather than build a proprietary UI. They just thought, let's just stick with that. So they mimicked it pixel by pixel, so it literally looks the same.

for me that, that's great. I actually like that they did it that way rather than going their own route. So it is really familiar. Yeah, go and check it out. Mailer press.com. And then the last one to mention, oh no, that is it. So you can check out the episode there. as you can see from this little bit, we are sponsored this week by GoDaddy Pro, also by Blue Host and Omni thank you to them for keeping the, the lights on.

And the final bit of promotional stuff from me, apologies, is I did a web, I did a podcast with, a fine person, Charlotte Bs this week. We recorded it at Word Camp Europe, a few weeks ago in, where the heck was it? Where did we go? Where did we all go? Basel. Oh, that's it. Yeah, we went to Switzerland Basel.

That's right. And, and it was all about pr. It was all about how you can make your website carbon footprint a little bit less than it might be, so you're never gonna get it down to zero. but the idea is that you can maybe get your website footprint down a little bit, and so go and check that out.

It's on the WP Tavern website in its episode 1 7 7. Okay. So the, podcast, the way it works now is we, just allow the guests to bring their stories that they've got on that they think are interesting over the last week or so. And so we're gonna start off with, Tammy. Did Tammy give this one or was this a Tim one?

I think it was a Tammy one was a Tammy one, yeah. Yeah. So I'm just gonna hand it right over to you. It is called, AI building Blocks for WordPress. It's James LaPage, who is like the chief I suppose, of, AI in WordPress. We say were automatic. Anyway, tell us why we're looking at this then. Tommy, what's got your Yeah, so it's,

[00:16:05] Tammie Lister: roadmap has, being released.

It, outlines all the details. It's got, everything that's gonna be built. so you can go into each one of these, look at, going from the client to the abilities, to the adapter, everything. So it's really like a good kind of starting point if you wanna know everything that's gonna be going on from AI perspective.

So that's why I shared it, because it starts and the approach is that. Everything, all of these is gonna avoid that kind of vendor lock in. It's gonna support multiple AI providers, it's gonna allow for adoption. it's gonna really make AI accessible to more people by doing this approach and having this combination of things that combined have this foundation.

So it's like you're starting put a post, to then be able to go and explore all these different ones. Each one's gonna have a repo or has a repo, and then the projects are going to be focused around that. And then go into the core ai slack. Of course,

[00:17:10] Nathan Wrigley: it's been quite some time on, on, I don't use X very much, but occasionally I'll log in just to see what people are sharing.

And it's been quite some time since I saw people sharing things as much as this one got shared. This seems to be really popular. It's obviously a lot of people loving AI and what it can do for them, but I think everybody's been doing their own thing. And then this. This team got announced, but then we didn't really know what the team was up to.

And now they've fired the starting gun. Really, haven't they? They've given us an idea of what's coming. yeah, there's been a lot of information before this leading up to this about the, public information about where the it's been going. You can trace it back, but this is really the, okay, this is now what we're shaping.

and the idea, as you said, is to basically make AI available kinda, pretty much everywhere inside your WordPress website, in all the places in a, whole different variety of ways. Yeah. And, and there's three focuses to begin with. PHP, ai Client. SDK, yeah. Abilities, A-P-I-M-C-P adapter. And then, and the

[00:18:11] Tammie Lister: experiments plugin is really cool if you're gonna go into that.

The experiments plugin roll

[00:18:14] Nathan Wrigley: altogether, doesn't it? Does it like encapsulate? Kind

[00:18:17] Tammie Lister: of, but it's gonna be where you'll get to. See how to, and one of these good things is it's all very well and good. We are using lots of words and we are using lots of technology and that's great to see, but how do you then learn how to do this and how to implement it?

you learn by what we've always done in open source projects, seeing people build core, and that's what you're gonna be able to see in the experiments plugin. It's, we've done time and time again, and that's what I personally am hoping to see in experiments plugin. It also means that other people who maybe are learning about AI can get involved.

You can, be able to jump into projects, designers, different other roles, will be able to jump in as well and collaborate into those as well. yeah.

[00:19:01] Nathan Wrigley: One last thing to mention is, and the honestly, we, I've, we've spoken about 'em a lot on the show, but I don't actually can't think of one where it's actually come to pass this way.

It's gonna be a canonical and feature plugin. So the idea being that it will get that kind of guarantee, if you like, that it's gonna be updated, secure, and UpToDate with the latest version of WordPress and compatible and all of that. yeah, they're gonna

[00:19:25] Tammie Lister: use a combination of those.

[00:19:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Which is interesting.

Okay. So thank you for bringing that one, Tim. Michelle, anything to contribute on that one?

[00:19:32] Tim Nash: Isn't it gonna be nice when you can install a plugin and it will just pick up from your providers and bits that's inside WordPress core and just work and not require you to jump through the 20 million pieces of hoops to use their particular provider to do this one thing that you don't actually care about anyway.

But it wouldn't let you get past that wizard loading screen, which is what we're at the moment. We're in a very wild west where it's like the SEO plugin. Yeah. It needs to use ai, so you have to use their, your credentials there. You Yeah. Some of these are now, are, making things, trying to make things simpler.

They're saying, oh yeah, you've put in your credentials here, but really we are using it as the SaaS service on the backend. And we can be able to say, actually no, I don't want anything like that happening. I want to keep things local and controlled. And in theory we can even say, I'm actually gonna load this to the local LLM that's sitting on the web server.

Might be a bit slow.

[00:20:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:20:29] Tim Nash: But you could do that as well. So you can with it. Ultimately, we're gonna be in a much better place to at least control everything though. there is part of me that's I, really wish MCP was a little bit more, less wild westy. Okay. But that's, we, have the X ml RPC in WordPress call.

We can't ever complain about CP servers. Yeah.

[00:20:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. so the, just to reprise that a little bit, so Tim, if somebody's listening to this just to explain your piece, is that there'll be this sort of central place where you can put the connections. So if you've got multiple connections to, I don't know, whatever's popular at that moment in time, you don't have to then farm it out to, let's say the SEO plugin.

The SEO plugin can go to this and say, are there any credentials? If so, let's use that. They're not

[00:21:20] Tim Nash: even using the credentials, so they, that's nicely locked away. It is just like I, I've, I'd like to make a request to this Yeah. To the AI provider here. Here is my prompt.

[00:21:31] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So the team's looking in pretty good shape.

Actually. 39 people have pledged time to contribute to this core AI team. James LaPage is, obviously in charge at the moment. So that was the first piece. Michelle, anything to, before we move on? Nope. Okay. In which case we'll move on to the Always terrifying to me GitHub. And, this is, so this is coming from James LaPage.

I'm guessing by the, the slog here, but this is track. MCP is, are we looking here at this thing? No. Here or not? No, no, What's

going on here then?

[00:22:07] Tammie Lister: So this is, MCP from Core Track. So if you loaded this and you could actually put this, and the instructions are really easy to follow.

Pottering around. I at time bots myself at the weekend to do this into Claude, for example. And you wanted to query, you could query the whole of core track and you could sell query. There you go. See, it's not scary. It's cool. No,

[00:22:30] Nathan Wrigley: that's not scary. But this is where I, and there's actually a link

[00:22:35] Tammie Lister: down there.

So if you go down to the link into the repo,

[00:22:40] Nathan Wrigley: this one,

[00:22:41] Tammie Lister: yeah. And you'll be able to see what you can do. And that's not scary. It's not dark mode, it's not GitHub. It's all scary and happy.

[00:22:47] Nathan Wrigley: So search tickets, get tickets, get change, check, get timeline, get tracking. Ah, if you

[00:22:52] Tammie Lister: think about the combinations of those that you could do from a report base.

You start seeing what kind of fun you could do,

[00:23:01] Nathan Wrigley: what trends pop out and what things also,

[00:23:04] Tammie Lister: yeah, and then how you could use those to do better ticket management.

[00:23:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's really gardening really interesting

[00:23:10] Tammie Lister: and better work on, and so part of this thing of triage, we've been like, can AI solve our ticket problem?

sure, but as humans we're not gonna trust it, but we can work on the reports that it can help us with. And AI is really good at summarizing and helping us crunch data and pattern matching. And one thing it can really do is reports really, well. And then we as humans can be the human touch on those reports.

[00:23:38] Nathan Wrigley: I think, I do actually trust AI in summary mode, if Summary mode. Yes. Auto closing tickets. Many people don't.

No, Kind. Cool with that. I'm weird.

[00:23:51] Tim Nash: I think MCP with the right access to track people might start padding. Yeah. Yeah. Let's that, let's go.

[00:23:57] Tammie Lister: But ncp, that creates some reports that also we can look at and we can curate the responses and look at what reports it's doing and get those, it's just helping us in summaries.

And guys, so good at the summary stuff. So that's kinda what we do.

[00:24:13] Nathan Wrigley: I guess also the fact that the project's been going so long and there are so many of these data points, it's no matter how bright you are or how switched on your brain is or how long you've been in the project You, can't have that 10,000 mile high overview you can And

[00:24:27] Tammie Lister: track has reporting it has track reporting.

[00:24:31] Nathan Wrigley: Right.

[00:24:31] Tammie Lister: And I dunno if you've ever tried to Tim's giggling. Tim has, tried to do a track report. Yeah. And it's a little bit like, trying to do a report from 10 years ago.

[00:24:40] Tim Nash: Okay.

20, 20 years ago when he was actually,

[00:24:44] Tammie Lister: I've been really generous. But also this,

[00:24:47] Nathan Wrigley: this bringss somebody who's a total novice right into sort of like the de into, right into the heart of it all, doesn't it?

Because they can have a immediately into

[00:24:57] Tammie Lister: Claude and any one of us in this, conversation can put this into, Claude can put this very easily using the language that we like, human language, natural language can query track. Without that barrier to it. Yeah. And understand tickets that way.

[00:25:13] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So I'll add this into the show notes, which will come out as a companion to this audio.

but basically it's, if you go to, GitHub, James LaPage, James w LaPage, and then you're searching for the project called Track, m Which, yeah, so the URL is, fairly self-explanatory, so you can go and check that out. Okay. Now I'm less scared. that's not quite as bad as I was imagining. I always think the cloud, the sky is falling in, but, it's like my mission

[00:25:45] Tammie Lister: to get you into, yeah.

Yeah. Ai, I'll tell you what

[00:25:47] Nathan Wrigley: the next couple of bits have got me really intrigued 'cause I've, skirted around news stories, in regular press where they talk about what it will, what AI will be able to do, for example, for cancer diagnosis and things like that. And you've brought a couple of pieces to Bear.

First One, med Gemma, I hope I've pronounced that right. This is Google Research. research.google.com. no it isn't, it's research Google, of course, they've got that domain. our most capable open models for health AI development. And, go on. Why is this in the show? What's going on?

Yeah,

[00:26:19] Tammie Lister: so this is related to the next one. The next post is, more, news post based on this. So it's. Open sourcing AI models to do with image detection. And one of the really cool things about this is it's not just like a lot of image detection models used to have mass, multiple cards, multiple, mass machines to do.

The whole idea of this is to run on one single card and also, potentially well also run on mobile devices. So it's basically making this technology not only easier, but also more accessible to people as well and open. And, the, I, don't know the mobile heart, but the, stats it has of the, it, the image recognition that it has and the, and it's incredible.

So it just means that backlogs can be worked through that at the small end of this, but at the higher end, easier, better detection are things that maybe even the humans can't detect.

[00:27:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and that's,

[00:27:20] Tammie Lister: and as you were saying about the. We've maybe heard of cancer diagnosis being detected earlier than a human will be able to detect them and things like that.

that's like the big thing, but even detecting like a, minor break that maybe a human couldn't see and things like that. So yeah,

[00:27:38] Nathan Wrigley: this is exactly what it's. this is basically, this is where I felt it was gonna be super excellent. A, you show it a billion images and say, there's a broken leg in this, there's a broken leg in that, but there isn't in this one.

And then it just starts to make, draw those conclusions and the idea that it can do that 24 7 overnight while the doctors, are sleeping. And if you can do it on a mobile phone, yeah, this is a miracle. it's an actual miracle

[00:28:07] Tammie Lister: and it's okay. And, the thing of, Google making it open and what cessful means.

Yeah, the. Potentially a lot of this technology was available if you had the big machines and you had the big Mo, in your hospital if you had the city hospital with the lots of money. But this will be accessible to the locations that didn't have that. And that's the thing that this, empowers people.

There's gonna be a

[00:28:32] Nathan Wrigley: whole new breed of people hypochondriacs, uploading images of their own stuff. I think I've got this. What a, yeah. I mean they already do

[00:28:40] Tim Nash: that. Yeah, they already do that.

[00:28:42] Tammie Lister: They already, like to, to me. it just really means that I live rurally and to driving and as people are aging, having to drive to healthcare is a lot.

The fact that you people can be able to do that is Yeah. Is amazing.

[00:29:01] Nathan Wrigley: okay. Let's, let's ask Michelle if she's got any thoughts on that before we move on.

[00:29:06] Michelle Frechette: I, I think like I, I've been chatting with my mom a lot lately about AI because she is, older and she's very anti ai, and, I get it. I understand.

She thinks, it's telling her what to do and she logs into Facebook, things like that. but also I think that there's, it's never gonna replace everything, obviously. There's, a Netflix, documentary I watched recently on how the New York Times has been using crowdsourcing for, diagnosing or at least suggesting diagnoses for these cases where doctors are completely stumped.

And in many cases because of the collectives, diagnoses and symptoms have been solving. A lot of these issues for people and bringing closure, even if it's not something that can be healed, something where they can at least feel like I'm not crazy. Yeah. And so I think that there will always be a need for both.

And I love the idea that we didn't ever crowdsource things really before the internet, not easily. and that we're able to do crowdsourcing because of the internet. We're able to do these AI models because the internet and technology that we're pulling together. And I think it's just brilliant all of it when it's combined.

Yeah.

[00:30:19] Nathan Wrigley: I'm surprised also that Google, I dunno, I have, intuitions about Google these days and 10 years ago they were all good. Now they tend to go in a negative direction by default, so I'm very proud of Google for taking the step towards. Would you,

[00:30:33] Tim Nash: would it make you feel better if you knew that there was a lawsuit on its way?

[00:30:37] Nathan Wrigley: What about this?

[00:30:38] Tim Nash: That's why they opened it up.

[00:30:39] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, really? Okay. So that may be, that maybe is what's going on here. So Max joins us. Hello, max. he says, yeah, they, had that model already in previous versions, but they didn't release it. It's truncated. So I'll read it off my screen. This is the first time they're releasing it.

It was out.

[00:30:55] Tammie Lister: They're like, Tim's doomsayers. Yeah. Now they have a

[00:30:58] Nathan Wrigley: big disclaimer.

[00:31:00] Tammie Lister: But by

[00:31:00] Tim Nash: doing that, you really are in a scenario where, I, whereas Tammy was talking, I was thinking what this also opens up is the fact that we can have like x-ray equipment that would've been

[00:31:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:31:11] Tim Nash: That people would net would've been going and buying like this really state of the state-of-the-art x-ray equipment, which with all of this stuff embedded in, but then the old equipment, that can now be reused and repurposed that could be sent somewhere that doesn't have an x-ray machine.

Yes. And now they don't need a, they. It's still an x-ray machine. They probably should have a radiographer, or at least some their aprons, but they don't necessarily need beyond that technician, the person, because they, the rest of it comes on a laptop. And even if they're old school and they're like, they're even having to get these X-rays and they're not, they're analog x-rays and then they're taking a photograph and putting it into that machine, that can all be done locally on this, on A LLM, on a beefy chunks, rugged laptop.

That's pretty amazing. You can actually imagine almost an ambulance style setup where it's, you get a mobile x-ray machine in and in certain parts of the world where they're just don't have access to that sort of equipment.

That's. Gotta be worth doing alone. And that's what the open side of this does.

'cause the big, these big models and things will exist and they already exist and somebody's going to, x-ray machines in even now. But I'm sure in two, three years time, the new x-ray machines are gonna have all of this built in and it'll all be very wizzy and also billions of pounds. Whereas by open sourcing it, we have the opportunity to go right.

Let's hack something together nice and come out that way. And that's really where the, I think the power of this come goes.

[00:32:43] Nathan Wrigley: I'm very pleased to announce that unless something dramatic happens in the next half an hour, I've already got this week's title and it is what Tim just said, beefy chunks. I just.

Awesome. That's, that's gonna be the episode. Honestly, that just repelled all three of you. I just thought it was profound. I might go with BE chunks. Laptop. Let's see, a few more things just from our guest. Hello, Zach joining us. He says he's a very tired photographer in Mansfield, Ohio. Thank you for joining us.

Patricia says that I pronounce Ian's name in an almost perfect French accent. I dunno if you are being kind or if that's actually the truth. Thank you. Hello from Helsinki. Hello Vladimir. Nice to have you with us. Jackson is joining us from Puglia, I want to say, but I'm not entirely sure. And Max is joining us from Berlin.

keep the comments comment. Max has followed up. Oh, sorry Michelle. We keep doing that. there we go. That's okay. Demi Hassabis, I guess that's a person, is a big proponent of this entire movement. Must be to do with this ai also with Alpha Fold. And there is a great movie about him called The Thinking Game.

Huh. You go. Thank you, max. That was incredibly informative and helpful. That's brilliant. Very cool. Okay, so I think we've moved away from Tammy's bits and pieces. We're now onto, doom speaking with a capital D. and the, first one, lowercase.

[00:34:03] Michelle Frechette: Yeah,

[00:34:03] Nathan Wrigley: lowercase. That's right. Yes. Not all badge. and here it comes.

So we featured this article in the most brief terms because frankly I don't know what I'm on about. And so we've got Tim, this is patch Stack, gravity forms.

[00:34:18] Tim Nash: Tell us more. yeah, the reason I wanted to bring this back was partly because it, I it, we live in a world where we have like really short press cycles and, especially when it comes to security vulnerabilities, they pop into our feeds.

People go, ah, and then the next thing that they screaming are at happens and you completely get it. And I think this one's quite important, not at least, because in the last couple of days I've found several, clients who still have agra, a unpatched version of gravity forms. So gravity forms themselves aren't on the WordPress plugin repository.

They're a paid for plugin, and they, you get the plugin by, there are different sources, but ultimately you get the plugin by going to gravity forms and downloading it and installing it at some point, how that mechanism, at some point, their site got hacked. And some kind person decided to replace the Gravity Forms plugin and just puts a extra spiciness in for you.

[00:35:20] Nathan Wrigley: Okay?

[00:35:21] Tim Nash: And so for a brief period of time, gravity Forms was distributing a, null version of that own plugin, which, so this has led to obviously them fixing a bunch of stuff, but it does mean there was a period of time when people could have downloaded, a version that wasn't what they were expecting.

and so this is a, one of those reminders of public service reminder that this happens to everybody. Even the a plugin, company who I, it's very reputable. The folks at Gravity Forms do an excellent job. Things like this always happen. It doesn't matter how big you are, there is always the opportunity for bad things to happen, but also just go and double check.

You have the latest version and if you did get one, one of the versions that's compromised, if you scroll down, it does say which, what periods and bits. And there. if you have got that in that period, you may want to go and have a very careful look at your site as, it may be serving malware right now, which would not be ideal.

[00:36:29] Nathan Wrigley: because a minute ago you said it served up a null version. And when I hear that, I always. Feel like they've, I don't know, stripped out the license or something like that. But this, yeah, this was more, it was actually distributing some malware onto

[00:36:42] Tim Nash: It was, yes. So it, it shows you the payload a bit further down.

yeah, and a nu plugin is normally, yeah, as you say, one of the removes the license scope. But in this particular case, I was probably used term a bit too loosely. But yeah, it has malware in it. bad. don't you need to update is basically the, message if you haven't already. But if you do update.

Do pay attention and look for some of the signs of compromise. Okay. and if you did have the plugin installed with the versions that have been referenced from the, from Gravity forms directly themselves, it is probably worth you looking at least doing a couple of, site based Google searches for your website, just to make sure that you're not seeing any pages in there in the SERP index that you wouldn't recognize.

and just keep an eye, if you've got, Google Con Web Console, Google Console, sorry, search console. Then, make sure you've signed up for alerts from there as well. Just on the off chance that you may have inadvertently started serving up malware to your visitors, which would be. Unfortunate.

[00:37:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

And Tim, just, I'm just, I've no idea if you'll know the answer to this question, but should somebody have had a problem with their website, do you know of any like security guy in the WordPress space that might be able to help them with that? No. No, they don't

[00:38:05] Tim Nash: exist. there

[00:38:08] Nathan Wrigley: are

[00:38:08] Tim Nash: a range of reputable sources of people you can go to

[00:38:12] Nathan Wrigley: Tim nash.co uk.

That's all I'm saying. okay. Thank you for that. So obviously, I guess this is a big target, this kind of thing because if you can affect, if you can, if hack one thing, and in the case of gravity forms, I'm gonna put my. Guesswork hat on and say they're probably into the millions of installs. I don't know if that's the case, but certainly they're one of the big players, aren't they?

They've been around for decades, as it were. So if you can get this, you're obviously gonna distribute it for that period of time. Far and wide. It's, it's got a big target on its back. So do as Tim says, go check that out. Okay. There was more, from Tim, and this is, this is, let's just give it a bit of a teaser.

We're gonna relate to this XKCD article in a moment, but, Tim used to work in the hosting space. This is on the repository. A new trust seal backed by WordPress hosts aims to set the standard for ethical hosting. outline this and what you think about it, Tim.

[00:39:11] Tim Nash: So the, we all want our hosting companies to be ethical.

We all would like them to be secure. We'd all like them to be many of many things, including probably cheap, but we definitely want, secure and ethical. And you'd think that the idea that maybe if they bunch of them got together, I think it's 24 companies got together, they created an alliance, which.

Sounds very cool. but basically that means they created a committee to decide amongst themselves how to create a standard for, and give themselves a shiny badge for how good they are at their security. And this isn't digging, being mean on too many of them. There are some really reputable good companies amongst this, and anybody who says, we want to improve security and we should think about how to do this, that's a good step forward.

what it does appear though is that there was a lot of talk and not enough substance, which may, that maybe that will follow. but they have basically created themselves a shiny badge to say how good they are at security. And it, they, as part of their trust seal program, and they're coming up with a standard that ev that companies who want to join their alliance would have to meet.

Now we have those standards already. You SOC two, ISO 2 7 0 1. There are lots of information security compliance standards. There are lots used by hosting companies. Which then makes you go watch this. And I think, yeah, that's, so when I pushed put this in, I thought it was an interesting story.

'cause it, it's really nice to see hosting companies working together. 'cause they quite often can be quite com in quite a lot of competition with each other. But in this particular case, it did feel very much there's, too many standards. What should we do? we'll create, a standard that will combine everything.

now we have another standard, right? And nothing coming from it.

[00:41:04] Nathan Wrigley: And we're viewing an article a, a comic from the wonderful XKCD where they make that exact point. We had 14 standards, let's make a new one to ate all 14. And then the outcome is, we have 15 standards now. Okay. okay, go check it out.

That was on the repository. And, let's see. I, guess you're not, saying it's, Entirely without merit, but it is more the devil will be in the detail down the road. Yeah. it is too easy to end up in these scenarios, which become effectively, paid to have a badge. And, if they don't meet, if, they're backed by genuine standards and they all get together and go, actually we are gonna say that we are gonna go beyond the existing standards.

[00:41:48] Tim Nash: So you have to meet those ones. And then you have this even extra bits, and it's, and we are gonna combine forces and we're gonna have various testing in place and everything's gonna be great. That's brilliant. I'd love to see that. What I fear is that the most important thing for them out of all of this is can we get a shinier badge and can we make it bigger?

And can it go on the homepage? Nathan, you need turn your camera out.

[00:42:13] Nathan Wrigley: I've just, yeah. See that. Thank you. So that's now episode number two. We'll see how many times this happens during the course of this episode, but it's the, the set. So that I reckon is about every 20 minutes. That's my guess. I need to look out again in about 20 minutes time, hopefully.

Okay. So thank you for that one, Tim. That's on the repository again. Links in the show notes. And then finally. From Tim. this was a really hot piece of news a few weeks ago. It was announced, at, not at WordCamp Europe, but at the same time in a sort of bolt on event control alt.org. and it is about the fair plugin.

and you've brought this to our attention. So this says Pantheons website. The article, it actually is not called, the article is called Alls Fair, why WordPress Needs a Decentralized Package Man Management System, but you deep link to this bit. What does the fair plug do? Or at least I think you did. I don't actually remember deep linking it, but I can tell you about the article itself. Okay. the reason I brought this, we big announcement everybody when we were talk, we were, I was on the show, the, show after it was announced.

Yeah.

[00:43:20] Tim Nash: And I was somewhat critical of the launch and the fact that they didn't have hosting companies on board.

And I felt that there were, there, there was a little bit of, it was gonna be very stunted because until you had that, backing and somebody come coming down the hill with you, it's gonna be really hard for them to pick up the momentum. So why I found this article so interesting is, and I'm, not surprised that it's Pantheon, if I had to pick the larger host who might jump first, they would've been high up on my list.

But, to Pantheon are basically now trialing. Fair for their customers. So that, when, you, create a Pantheon site, there's a chance that you will be using the fair plugin and fair bits behind the scenes. and they are experimenting with that. And the Aspire Press mirrors for wordpress.org.

This is great because once you have this one hosting company goes, they are like, they are, like rabbits. They will all go at the same time. If you just need to get one to start running and rest will follow very quickly. it's really nice to see that somebody's doing it. it feel, as I say, it still feels like there was a little bit of a disconnect and if they could have just got the line everybody lined up, I imagine that they might have been a, there might have been a bit more momentum right now.

Had they had managed to get Pam Fum to say that they were gonna be trialing it. At Word Camp Europe. So hopefully this now will start that process and start building on, and I think we'll start seeing the smaller hosting companies, who have not less to lose. 'cause they still have their customers and they want their customers to have the best experience possible, but they will be able to, the smaller companies, which were a bit more, have a little bit more wiggle room, we'll start now testing as well.

Now that they've seen at least one of the ma of the major inverted comments hosts, starting to trial it,

[00:45:16] Nathan Wrigley: you'll be able to see if it all collapses or if it's a complete runaway success. Or in fact if even any of the customers notice, I feel they

[00:45:24] Tim Nash: probably wanted that in the other order.

[00:45:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[00:45:28] Tim Nash: that's right. It start with how great it's Yeah, that's right. But the, answer really should be the, last one. Customers shouldn't notice, especially at the moment with the Aspire Press mirror. and they shouldn't, from a customer's perspec perspective, it should be exactly the same.

Other than maybe that when they go and do the search for WordPress and WordPress, what they think is wordpress.org, when they go and type in, add a new plugin that might have slightly different plugins by default, but they, when they search. they might get better search results back if they're really lucky.

we'll see. Time will tell. I'm

[00:46:02] Nathan Wrigley: guessing that it was, that you, they probably went with the, the announcement at the event just because that event was at that time and they had most of their docs in a row. And also the people probably could, all be in the same room at the same time. But may I wonder if there were intuitions about this dropping back then?

I suspect there probably were. I dunno how quick it is to turn a risk kind of thing around or in a company like Pantheon, but I don't suppose it's overnight.

[00:46:29] Tim Nash: I imagine that it's quicker for somebody like Pantheon than let's say GoDaddy or Mass or, but it's still not a quick process and it's, there's still eng both engineering things, but there is also.

Marketing and there is to a certain extent, I'm sure there has to be some sort of legal stuff where somebody, some lawyers have to sit down and go, is this right? Should we be doing this? Can we do this? And get that signed off as well. So I imagine it's not a simple process of just some, somebody saying, I'm gonna do this and flick the switch.

[00:47:03] Nathan Wrigley: Zach has got a very profound comment. Perfect for you, Tim. He says, I think people with security issues need a good doomsayer, and Tim is a good doomsayer. He's not a bad one. Can I just say, Tammy, when you move out of your chair, because of the nature of what it's made, of, the sort of I don't know, weave or something, it gives me the most profound visual.

It's really can you see, are you seeing that? Is anybody else picking up on that? It's like it's phasing in and out. It's like just move it round a little bit. It's pretty cool. It's like one of those screensavers from the 1990s. It's wobbling pop art or something. I have not taken any illicit chemicals I can promise you.

Okay. Anybody on that before we move on? That's a no. Okay. In which case, thank you for those, Tim. Appreciate it, Tim and Tammy. Then we'll move on to Michelle's bits and pieces. Michelle, she mentioned this a few weeks ago, but you've got another one coming up soon. It is. We have one

[00:47:59] Michelle Frechette: this Wednesday.

yeah,

[00:48:00] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Speed networking online.com. It's, tell us what you can expect if you were to sign up to participate.

[00:48:07] Michelle Frechette: Yeah, so speed network online.com is, once a month. We do speed networking as many people are in the room. We divide it out over 90 minutes and so you, you could have as few as five minutes, one-on-one conversations with other people.

We don't have quite as, I think summer is set in, so people are doing other things. So we have a, few less this month, so perhaps you'll have up to 10 minutes even to chat with somebody else. And we match you up every 10 minutes to five minutes, you switch to a new person. You are able to talk about yourself, listen to what they have to say.

At the end of it, we send you all out, everybody's, contact information, from that event. And so you don't even have to worry about taking down names and numbers and email addresses and all of those things. It's just a great way to connect with other people that you might want to do work with. send work to.

Learn more about build your network. So it's all about, it's like speed dating, but it's speed networking and it's all online so that it's with, it's literally people all over the world that you may want to build a network with.

[00:49:10] Nathan Wrigley: And Wednesday the 23rd of July is the next. What time, which time zone are you?

It's basically, so it is at 2:00 PM in Rochester, New York. an Eastern Time, which would put it at probably pm. PM I believe Probably pm

Yeah, something like that in the

[00:49:26] Michelle Frechette: uk. Yeah. Actually

[00:49:27] Nathan Wrigley: that's the ideal sort of time actually, if you think about it. Yeah. From the UK perspective. 'cause you've already knocked off from work.

so there we go. The URL wants to, how, do you do the, matching? Is it literally Michelle. I like, yeah. Yeah. Then and ooh, him.

[00:49:42] Michelle Frechette: I literally just make a spreadsheet and slide the names down one at a time.

[00:49:47] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. That'll do it. Yeah.

[00:49:50] Michelle Frechette: And then we use zoom rooms so that you do our, you our one-on-one in a Zoom room with another person.

I close the rooms. You come back out to the main room, get reassigned out to the next person. nice.

[00:50:01] Tammie Lister: You should, it's a the buy us together and then see what AI comes up with.

[00:50:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's right. Yeah,

[00:50:06] Michelle Frechette: that sounds like too much work. I randomizing is a lot easier, but it's, this is a small fee. We do charge $20 so that people will actually be invested in showing up because we all know if something is free, people will be like, eh, I'm not gonna go this month.

But networking is important to make sure you're in the room because you're letting other people down if you sign up and you don't come. So

[00:50:29] Nathan Wrigley: there we go. So that's speed network online.com. yep. This coming Wednesday. And then you wanted to mention WordPress Accessibility Day. Now I'm seeing Yes. And

[00:50:38] Michelle Frechette: don't you love, there's a dark mode and a light mode on this.

yeah. It's

[00:50:41] Nathan Wrigley: really nicely Don, isn't it? That toggle, as you would imagine, is really Really exactly what you want. Yeah. Perfect.

[00:50:47] Michelle Frechette: Accessible. Yeah. So we have our keynote, we've announced our keynote speaker who is Vitali Friedman from Smashing Magazine. He's the co-founder and editor in chief, and he will be giving a talk on, I just had accessible design patterns for 2025.

[00:51:04] Nathan Wrigley: Nicely done. So when is the actual event happening? What's the day? It's

[00:51:07] Michelle Frechette: on my birthday. Oh, October 15th to 16th is the 24 hour Okay. Event with, plenty of speakers. So you'll have an opportunity to, and they're all recorded of course. So if you can't miss, if you can't make one that you really wanna see, it will be available online eventually.

But this is all done through Zoom. And you have to sign up. It's free to attend. you do have to sign up. Our tickets are not available yet. They'll be coming soon.

[00:51:32] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So 2025. WP Accessibility. Do day. If you want to find out more, but you now at least know one of these speakers. The keynote being done there.

Yeah.

[00:51:42] Michelle Frechette: The rest will be announced soon.

[00:51:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Thank you for that. Okay. Sing from one event to another. This one in person though, this is, loop Conf, which is taking place in the uk, pretty soon actually. I wanna say in a month's time, something like that. More like six, two months. Two months.

Thank you. and this is just to say that obviously, if you are in the London area or in the uk, this is gonna be right up your street because it is in fact in the heart of London. But, one of the things that you didn't know until this moment perhaps, is who the speakers were and the first round of speakers have dropped.

And, you can see them here if you're watching the video, but if not, you've got, Forgive the name Butchering Ilina Deva, who is the senior developer, RAD team at Awesome Motive. we've got Rashmi Nagpal, who is into machine learning over at Patch Stack, Ross Wintel, who is a software developer over at WP Engine.

And, Ryan Ew, who is the director of Product over at Human Made and one of the chief, chief, one of the main thrusts behind the, the Fair Project as well. So there you go. If you go to loop conf.com, you'll be able to find it and get yourself some tickets. I think they're selling on a kind of like an inflated, like the scarcity ticket model.

In other words, if you buy them sooner, they're cheaper there. There's only a

[00:53:08] Tammie Lister: limited number of tickets. It's a reason.

[00:53:11] Nathan Wrigley: I know they had a few at a discounted rate, and I think they've gone through those already. So the, rates are creeping up. What are the dates? Let's see if we can find it.

There you go. September the 25th and it's in the middle of, London. Speaking of London, I might as well just put this one up as well 'cause it just match. W-P-L-D-N. There's

[00:53:31] Tammie Lister: A-P-L-D-N the day before isn't there as well? Yeah,

[00:53:33] Nathan Wrigley: so we normally do, so there was a conflict on the calendar. Loop comp ended up being on the same day as W-P-L-D-N and we decided that we'd move W-P-L-D-N 'cause the loop comp thing had, they'd already booked their venues and everything and our venue was more flexible 'cause it's, smaller and we don't really have much in the way of pat and stuff like that.

So if you are coming to Loop Conf and you wanna extend your word pressy thing the night before Loop conf, W-P-L-D-N will be happening. So essentially you could come fly into London if you're gonna do that, or get the train or what have you. Come to W-P-L-D-N on a Wednesday and then, get up the next morning and go off to Loop conf.

So yeah, and if you are somebody that likes speaking at these events or want to stretch yourself and give yourself a first try, this is a really. Perfect auditorium to do it. We normally have, I don't know, 50, 60, 70 people in the room. It's very, informal. It's quite, it's a nice atmosphere basically.

and if you want to do that, if you wanna make use of that and you wanna become a speaker, head to this url, it's wpdn uk, forward slash speak, and we just ask a few basic questions about you and whatnot. And, yeah, we'd love for you to come, especially on that night if you're coming in for loop comp.

So loop comp is on the Thursday, the 25th. W-P-L-D-N will be on Wednesday, the 24th of September. And, it would be nice to see you there. I think that's it from Michelle. Have we covered all of the bits and pieces you wanted to cover? Yeah, I segued to loop comp there, didn't I? Sorry. okay, let's get into some sort of specifically WordPress stuff.

Nothing to add here. There's a whole load of links that you can click if you wanna see exactly what's dropped in WordPress, 6.8 0.2. But just to say, if you haven't done it already, just make sure that your WordPress got updated or is in some kind of like funnel to be updated. 6.8 0.2 dropped. I can't remember when it was, but it was basically over the last few days.

yeah, that's really all I've got to say about that. Just, also as part of that 6.82 release, that means that they've made some changes for security updates for older versions. Yeah. so you need to, if you are running old versions of WordPress, you need to make, pay attention as to which versions are now going to get security updates.

[00:56:00] Tim Nash: Wait, I totally

[00:56:01] Nathan Wrigley: missed that. I, in all of my. Endeavor to cover everything. That one totally passed me by. What, does that even mean? Tell me more. I'll

[00:56:07] Tim Nash: pop I'll tell you what, pop it back on the screen. Yeah, yeah,

[00:56:10] Nathan Wrigley: I took it away at the exact wrong moment. There we go. Yeah.

[00:56:12] Tim Nash: Thank you. You scroll down just a little bit.

Yeah. you can see the actual ver bits there, but yeah, so basically, yeah, so the version WordPress versions 4.1, fruit 4.6, which is not 4.6, is not the end of the, sort of four point line, but they are dropping those releases, which will make everything 10 times easier if you seriously, if you're on WordPress version 4.1, point something, don't be on something else.

If you, if you are so adamantly against Gutenberg and, the full sight editing, the classic editor exists, but it is very worth your time to update it. we are, we're very close to a point where. Just the sheer amount of work to backport, and bugs and issues into these older versions is consuming so much time that it's just not worth it doing it for the increasingly small group of people.

I think they, the top is 5%.

[00:57:13] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah. it might be even less than that. It might be point, I, said that and I was like, that sounds really LA large. It might be 0.5%. Yeah. So might be able to say,

[00:57:21] Tammie Lister: I, I dunno exactly what it is, but I'm plus warning about the backporting haven't been part of it.

It's just. no. So

[00:57:29] Nathan Wrigley: Tim did five point, sorry, 6.8 0.2. Did that, make the break? or is it that this is your last chance in, so

[00:57:37] Tim Nash: what happened when you, this part of this release was back ported all the way through to basically give you a very nice looking, modal, the box at the top.

which basically says you are doomed. Please update Now.

They,

I, the only thing I would say is say was, I really loved the original. I saw the original, Mockup, which was, it was gonna be in bright red, with full on just, the message was pretty much just update. There was no other context to it just updates.

And I was like, I feel we should go with that. The version that came that is actually been produced is much more keeping with the color schemes for WordPress and, the, traditional style of a notice box. and there's a lot more words, which I appreciate. I understand why that was the case, but honestly, I, think a big bun that just says you need to update now press, it might have been more effective, but, if you are on an older version, you probably, to be honest, if you're someone's on 4.1 through to 4.6, they're probably not listening to this podcast.

No, be honest. That's true. These are gonna be mostly abandoned sites or sites that are running on autopilot. They're gonna be the sites that you built for your friend, four, five, Eight, nine years ago, and you haven't checked up on your friend how they're doing in a while. they're those sort of sites.

So in many ways by ending the support, it doesn't matter what messaging you send, those sites have been left in that state to decay. And so they're not, they're never going to see the chance of anybody human. Actually seeing those messages is probably relatively slim, but at least it's worth a try.

[00:59:24] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah, There'll be, it'd be seen by one human being, but nevertheless worth for that one. okay. Thank you. I read it. I unders, but I didn't understand it, so that's been great context. Thank you for that. also, Zach is back. Oh, it rhymes Nice. I definitely enjoyed last month's speed networking event, says Zach.

So there you go. A little bit of a hat tip. A nice, pat on the back to you, Michelle. Excellent for Zach. Excellent. That's lovely. Thanks. You're go and sign up. Okay, let's move on. Oh, unless either of you two, Tammy or. Michelle, have you got anything about this update? Probably not. I'm good.

Yeah. Okay. I thought so. Okay. Let's move to this one then. This is a nice community story. Felix t who it I think is part of the, the team that's doing all of the AI bits and pieces, I wonder. Yeah, I thought so. He's one of

[01:00:14] Tammie Lister: the team leads.

[01:00:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, one of the team leads. he, is written a few, Posts that have got nothing, they've got to do with WordPress, but usually, I think Felix is into the code and writing all of that. But he's done a few bits in the more recent past. There was one couple of weeks back, and now this one, which are much more community related. And this just hit me really, it just hit me perfectly.

I, thought this was so worth writing from his point of view. So Felix is now in that enviable position where he's got himself established. He's Beco, he's been employed by Google. He's got real credibility. He's built this foundation within the space, which basically now is brilliant. You would employ him in a heartbeat, that kind of thing.

But this piece kind of paints the picture. It wasn't always like that. It was full of kind of trepidation at the beginning and a ton of imposter syndrome. He uses that language rather a lot. But he's making the case for why WordPress. Was with hindsight, WordPress was the right thing for him, and the one takeaway that I got basically was that he was able to work with no backstory.

On a project affecting millions of people. And he makes the point that if you were to be in corporate or something, can you imagine the interview process that would allow you, or the backstory and the CV and all of that would get you to the point where you were interacting with a piece of software that affected millions of people.

It would be a fairly heavyweight thing. And he's saying you can sneak in under the radar basically. And I just thought it was a really nice story encapsulating this, and it summed up so much of why I think open source is great. There's nothing beyond that really to say other than that. I just thought this was a wonderful story.

I know, Tammy, I think from what you said, you might have read it, so maybe you've got something you wanna add to it.

[01:02:04] Tammie Lister: Yeah. I think, his impact is, large on the project and the impacts of other people on the project. that's the thing that what I got from this. So it's actually celebrating, from Correct.

His 10 years. Yeah, 10 years.

[01:02:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah, that's right.

[01:02:22] Tammie Lister: Which. He's one of those humans that feels like they've always been there in the best possible way. even though I do remember them turning up. and that's one of the ways, but the people that, that they've mentioned in their posts, giving them their story and I think that's the thing.

Like you turn up and these people give you the story. And then I know that Felix has got to share and create, be part of other people's stories, like passing it on it. There's just something about this cycle of it. Plus one to that you turn up in this project and you can make an impact and you aren't always aware of the impact you're making.

I think that's the thing, like his, this post looking back, and he absolutely has made an incredible impact and it's incredible to see the work. he really, makes little of the huge impact he's had, I would say. Yeah. Yeah. Very humble.

[01:03:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:03:16] Tammie Lister: because fast impact and also incredible human, incredible work.

but. Honestly like the, that kind of like silent, quiet mentorship that I would say Felix embodies and lots of people have embodied and passed on as well. Yeah. It just, it's one of those, it reminds me personally of why I contribute things like this. and it is the fuel that can keep you going sometimes.

And

[01:03:43] Nathan Wrigley: it, I know like basically this story has probably been written many times in the past, but I think it's easy to forget it,

[01:03:51] Tammie Lister: but it's good to hear every single time. Yeah, exactly It's just nice.

It's just nice to hear more of it. Nice to hear a success

[01:03:57] Nathan Wrigley: story. Nice to hear humble story.

there's just no bragging going on in here, even though there is plenty to brag about. I'm

[01:04:06] Tammie Lister: not sure he can brag. He's a human. No, that's exactly a good human. I

[01:04:08] Nathan Wrigley: mean, I'm drawn to those people. I'm so drawn to those people. but also like I say, that profound bit of, you can fully start to engage with a community at almost any level.

With no, you don't have that cv, you don't have that backstory of, I worked for Google for 10 years and all of that kinda stuff, so I just thought this was really nice. Tim, Michelle, anything to add?

[01:04:33] Michelle Frechette: I had him on the Cash Up podcast for post status recently following his 10 lessons in 10 years.

What a delightful human he is. I've interacted with him over the years, of course, at events and things. He is just such a sweet, humble person. and you just, everybody, you just want him to be your friend. Yeah. He's so sweet.

[01:04:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. obviously, but very knowledgeable

[01:04:53] Michelle Frechette: and just, he has so much to share.

For sure.

[01:04:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Very, bright indeed. Tim, anything or should we move on? Yeah. they've said it all. Yeah, it's nice. It's a really nice story. Okay. How We're big up the community. We love it. Everything's great, Oh, look at all the great things that you can do in WordPress. Fabulous. And then, I feel it.

[01:05:11] Michelle Frechette: However, coming. Yeah, there's

[01:05:12] Nathan Wrigley: a, there's a massive, however, there's a but. Yeah. But you know what, I think, all of us are gonna have an opinion of this piece, but it doesn't mean that we can't air it. And maybe dissect a few of the bits and pieces in here. So this is written by somebody called Noah Davis, and it's on the web designer depo.com website.

And, obviously my guess would be that Noah fairly, a fairly long time ago, was a big advocate of WordPress. Probably loved it and enjoyed it, and all of that kind of stuff, a bit like we were saying with Felix. But, my, my guess also is that in the more recent past, it's become, exactly the opposite.

it's more of a dislike and. Bordering on hatred. Dare I say it in many ways, the things that he's talking about. So this article sums it up very well in the title, and maybe we agree with some of this, the slow implosion of WordPress 2025 and the CMS that's losing its soul. I am not gonna be able to paraphrase it perfectly.

but essentially he's got all of the usual laundry list of things, gripes that he's put into one article. And the first one, he talks about a platform meeting itself. So he, he's talking about the outdated nature of things like PS PHP and MySQL and stuff like that. But then he goes on to talk about Gutenberg and the fact that really, who wants to use this?

So he says, now WordPress now sits uncomfortably between, Wix and React. Too complicated for newbies, too primitive for modern devs. This one, there's bits of this.

[01:06:44] Tammie Lister: So that's not apples to oranges, though. no, that's confusing

[01:06:48] Nathan Wrigley: between, I'll just quickly go through it and then we'll dice go into the bits and pieces.

I've gotta say this bit has definitely this bit. So we're talking about monetization. There are bits of this which resonate with me, and he is talking about the fact that basically everything now is wrapped up in a pay wall. That's obviously not true, but that's the kind of language he's using. and he says the ethos of just work.

It just works out. The box has been replaced with works after you've paid $500 a year in subscriptions. I can see that. the developer experience, he says, is a study in frustration. again, you can read on the screen, I'll send you the, link in the show notes tomorrow. The idea for a while seems to have lost its popularity now that there, it was gonna be, everybody was gonna be doing headless stuff.

And then the, especially in the more recent past, the whole thing about automatic and the fact that maybe has gone corporate and we've got these two different ecosystems, the.com and the.org and what have you. And, whether or not in the future, obviously things like fair, it's not a fork I know, but it maybe is the beginnings of that kind of thing.

At least that's the message I get here. His, summing up though is it's not gonna go anywhere. He reckons it'll be here in two decades time, but he thinks that we've seen the Zenni. Of it. And and obviously I would strongly disagree with more or less everything in here 'cause of what I do and the people that I know and all of the, the great stuff that we've seen and we talk about each week on this show, but I'm just gonna hand it out.

Does anybody have, does, is there any sympathy here or is this does just doism?

[01:08:26] Tammie Lister: So I, I have sympathy for any human that likes something or is passionate about something and uses it and then. The thing doesn't meet what they want. but there appears to be a tiny little bit of hyper ball, going on. some of the, titles under most popular also indicate that maybe this human likes doing that.

Oh, you mean these? Yeah, I did,

[01:08:49] Nathan Wrigley: I did see that. Yeah, yeah. so

[01:08:52] Tammie Lister: I, I wanna kind of caveat that lens with this post. and I think sometimes when we read these posts, what we have to do is think about the human that's writing it and their reason and maybe what they're also trying to achieve with the post that they're writing or the thing that they're posting on X.

'cause not everyone is posting. Yeah. Okay. So the reason why you're writing it as well is, something to but I'm gonna put that to one side and think about, the platform itself. It is, the bit that kind of gets me is, not comparing the correct things. and I think that is, really important.

it, to me it seems like this person has not, is just, isn't inspired to be using the platform that once they maybe were inspired by, and that fundamentally is a challenge and that could be that they, can't work with it anymore. That could be from a, develop dev rail perspective. but that's a lot.

There's a lot of, variations in language around that, and I'll let someone else speak.

[01:09:53] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Tim, Michelle.

[01:09:56] Michelle Frechette: I, think it's somebody who doesn't wanna spend money either. Quite honestly, I think that when you have an ecosystem around something like this to expect that everybody does everything for free, means you expect everybody not to have to actually put money on, put food on their own table and pay their own rents and things like that.

And that so much of what we offer still is available in the repo, without having to pay for it, I think is, the other side of what he's talking about. I don't know.

[01:10:26] Nathan Wrigley: Tim?

[01:10:28] Tim Nash: yeah. I always find it funny when he's oh my God, WordPress, you need all these plugins to do things. Oh, there's too many plugins.

I hate the plugins. Oh, but we need sort put all these, all of these plugins. That's too many plugins. Plugins are bad. Plugins are bad. Oh, but then I wanted to do this thing that it clearly was never designed to do. I'll just install that plugin. Oh, plugins. he, it's a frustrating, and also

[01:10:54] Michelle Frechette: he's put it all in core.

Oh no. It's so bloated, right? exactly. I meanwhile going, I hate P-H-P-P-P is evil. PHP. why are they using React? React all, all without stopping to take a breath at any point during that whole go. Yeah,

[01:11:13] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, And, some people will be like that. And that's okay. WordPress, when you end up being making your way to the top of the heap, people are gonna throw mud at it, throw.

[01:11:25] Tim Nash: And if you're lucky, if it's mud and tomatoes that get thrown at you and not something else, they, it's just the nature of how these things work. is there chunks comes to mind. Yeah. Preferably not of laptops. No. but if, if we peel away the veneer of what. Just the vile and the anger. It is, as you said, a laundry list of what most people complain about with WordPress.

And we could go down each one of them and I think each one of us could give very reasonable answers for why we don't think that's the case. and we are backed by a large percentage of the web that also uses this and presumably is, doesn't agree with this. I feel that maybe there has been a point where people have taken paths, seen the path.

Nathan,

[01:12:17] Tammie Lister: your cameras going. I know that was

[01:12:18] Tim Nash: exactly. Sorry Tim. That's alright. People are taking their path, taking a path and they've taken a path away and the second you step away from something Oh yeah. It's bad. It's terrible. It's horrible. It's like the, the developer who will, who, who does like t net development or is a JavaScript developer but only does full stack backend JavaScript stuff, telling you how horrible PHP was because they remember PHP from 10 years ago, not what it is today.

And I feel that this is the case. He stepped away and he wants to justify his position and that's alright. Okay. Yeah.

[01:12:54] Tammie Lister: But does he explain what he's using or do they explain what they're using now? No, and I think that's, at least I remember thing for me, I'm like, okay. So what cool thing are you building now?

Why are you building? There was three

[01:13:06] Tim Nash: about static site generators. About just a little bit up, further up. I think the headless bit maybe?

[01:13:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. There was definitely something strappy payload content form.

[01:13:18] Tim Nash: It's, the next section up where he claims that nobody uses the rest. API he says

[01:13:22] Nathan Wrigley: everybody's using GraphQL with third party plugins.

Yeah, totally.

[01:13:26] Tim Nash: Yeah, because nobody uses the rest. API it is never used in at all, ever.

[01:13:31] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Yeah. We should ask Ryan about that. yeah, interesting. Tammy, can I, challenge you with something, and maybe you can pull it off in the next few minutes. Could you ask your AI, and you obviously have all the fingers in the AI pies.

I'd be interested to know if there is an upswing. In this kind of a piece since about this time last year, I wonder if there's a negative sentiment that's creeping in and if it's possible to discern that or if this is just an isolated piece. the reason I found this curious is 'cause my, okay, my, My wheelhouse, if you like, is usually very much positive WordPress stuff. The people I follow, the articles that I have in my RSS reader, it usually spits out to me very positive stuff about WordPress. So I was surprised. I won't tell you where I found this one, but it was in a usual place. somebody linked to it.

They obviously had some sympathy with it, so I, I read it, but I don't normally come across stuff like this, which is why it was curious to me. Tim, it sounds like you are like, ready to start. I

[01:14:41] Tim Nash: was gonna say, I certainly come across this sort of things quite a lot. Okay. I, would say that I wonder, if you were asking, Tammy to go and ask chat GPT or whatever for the data, I'd probably say if you asked it to roast WordPress, I suspect you'd get an article not dissimilar to this article.

[01:15:00] Tammie Lister: Yeah.

and also I would say if we, so, I have asked to scale it on a one to five. so what I did was a prompt, just as a basic one is, the sentiment currently in blog posts and news around WordPress, typical ones, and, tangent ones scaled on one to five going up. I asked it to give me that.

but also if you go back to Gutenberg. I would've said we, had quite a few during phase one.

[01:15:29] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's, that was probably the, that was probably as hot as it ever got, I would've thought.

[01:15:33] Tammie Lister: Yeah. So at the moment it's giving, and again, this is Claude. This is not me. this is just, it's okay. it is saying the WordPress sentiment analysis, based on what I just shared, again, I'm not giving sources.

I'm not giving, I'm just literally giving a snippet. the mainstream is, 3.5. Does that

[01:15:58] Nathan Wrigley: skew so higher, number, more positive. One, one

[01:16:01] Tammie Lister: to five. Yeah. Five is not fair. Is

[01:16:03] Nathan Wrigley: one a higher rank of sort of positive sentiment? No, five is positive. The highest five. Oh, okay. So it's

[01:16:10] Tammie Lister: 3.5 is mainstream. Typical, critical negative sentiment.

developer communities, three out five.

[01:16:21] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting.

[01:16:24] Tammie Lister: so it says overall weighted 3.2 out five.

[01:16:27] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So it's not entirely doom speaking. not

[01:16:31] Tammie Lister: at all.

[01:16:32] Nathan Wrigley: No. I'm, fascinated. The

[01:16:33] Tammie Lister: security interesting though. The, Tims of the world. Okay. 2.5 out five.

[01:16:38] Nathan Wrigley: Oh it's bad. It's brutal over there.

[01:16:40] Tim Nash: Yeah.

Yeah. But I was gonna say you find a piece of software that will also score higher than

[01:16:45] Tammie Lister: that. So this is interesting and this, oh, okay. This relates though the tangent perspective security industry 2.5 out five, that tracks. And I would've said that's always tracked advocates two out five.

That's always tracked because if you think of the developer advocates, they've always tracked for different things 'cause they're writing about different things. Enterprise three out of five, 3.5 out five. Again, that always tracks. And developers three out five. But those numbers are broadly

[01:17:13] Nathan Wrigley: in line from what you said with expectations.

You, you, yeah. It would be fantasy to expect, but that's

[01:17:17] Tammie Lister: one prompt. Okay. yeah, of course. But no,

[01:17:21] Nathan Wrigley: that's, that, that is interesting. Yeah. I think, we should, explore this AI stuff a little bit more on a on

show at some point. Yeah, that's right. No, that was good though. That was really useful. Okay, so anyway, whoever you were, what's your name? You are Noah Davis. I am sorry that it hasn't worked out for you, but you're welcome back at any point and, and we'll. Buy you some biscuits or something just to sweeten the deal.

How does it sound, Noah? Give us,

[01:17:52] Tim Nash: just to make sure we're not gonna buy biscuits for every single person. We're welcome. Just,

[01:17:56] Nathan Wrigley: just Noah, me just checking because I don't think we've

[01:18:00] Tim Nash: got the budgets.

[01:18:01] Nathan Wrigley: No we haven't. It's only Noah. Okay, let's move on very quickly. I just wanna mention a couple of things. This first one, I'm not logged into Excel.

I've got this fairly, poor UI here, but it was to say that Mike McAllister. posted this thing this week and, it's a video, so I can't, I'll have to explain with words. I'm sorry. But, he thought, wouldn't it be a good idea if you had repeated elements on a, let's say a WordPress page that were basically identical to others.

So what we're looking at is a grid here. Think of it like, I don't know, an info grid or something like that where there's six titles, little H threes, h fours, something like that, followed by six paragraphs. Each of them have got a paragraph and what have you. And, if you wanted to change the style, let's say you wanted to change the color of the title from green to blue, wouldn't it be a good idea if some sort of software in the background could say.

Do you wanna do all of them at the same time? And so that's what he's built and I just think that's absolutely brilliant. What a great idea. I dunno if this has been achieved elsewhere in WordPress's history, but well done. Mike, identified a total normal problem that I'm sure we all have and fixed it.

So that's, it's gonna, I guess it's coming in Ollie. which is the, the theme that he's got, the full site editing theme. But Tammy, there was another thing you said he did this week as well, which you thought was cool. Yes.

[01:19:20] Tammie Lister: Mike's been really, proactive and advocating for the icon. so Nick Diego's icon plug to be put into core and, or at least, to be considered.

and he pushed for this, Again, and it's been viewed, invigorated. Yeah. That's the word I'm gonna use. Apparently that's it. Yeah. in, GitHub. So again, Mike is really good at spotting good things to put into call. Yeah. and, he's, been active doing that. I personally, there, there's a few people on X, so like I try to.

Maybe once or twice a day to check it. or when someone really tells me there's something interesting over there. It's, a lot. it's a big space. but Mike is someone that honestly, if he follows someone and you wanna find some good stuff, like he's constantly doing some good stuff on X.

[01:20:11] Nathan Wrigley: He, he recently, as part of his, Ollie project, he released a load of free educational materials around full site editing.

So I don't think it's bound to Ollie, so maybe that's worth checking out as well. But great idea. Mike, you have, I, think if, you've pulled that off, which it certainly looks like you have, I think that's brilliant. What a great idea. Zach is already asking for the free biscuits. Zach, you've gotta go away, write a really like Doomster article, then have it featured on this show.

Then come back to the community at that point. I'll give you some biscuits. How does that sound? Is that a deal? Okay. Everybody's nodding. Okay, great. We've got the budget for that. It's been approved. The committee have nodded.

[01:20:54] Tim Nash: we are talking at value biscuits and he has to Oh yeah, we're not. We're not.

And he has to come to the UK to we, the LDN, to have the value biscuits given to him. We're not getting the five millimeter thick chocolate. And

[01:21:06] Tammie Lister: we're talking English biscuits, right? Yeah,

[01:21:08] Nathan Wrigley: we're getting the, the simulation chocolate? That's a millimeter thick.

[01:21:11] Tammie Lister: Is it Boone or Ca Cream or

[01:21:14] Nathan Wrigley: Jam Dodgers still do, yeah.

Knock off all them. Nobody outside of the UK has a clue what we're talking about. okay. So well done, Mike, is what I think we're basically saying there. So we're in a bit of a rush. This is another one. Look, it's Felix again. It is the Felix Art Show, isn't it? What the heck? Felix has launched into the wild.

It's, been a while. It's not like super, new, but, view transitions. Oh. where have you been all my life? It's like you've made a website into a mobile phone application. let's say you've got Spotify and you play a song and then you tap on the little icon of the song and somehow the UI just changes.

The image grows and it sweeps into this different place, view transitions, which is leveraging. The browser capabilities. It's not a WordPress thing, it's a browser thing. You can now make it so that you can go from one page to another in a more how to describe it a transition way. Okay. We'll go with that transition way and go check it out.

It's free. It totally works. As far as, I'm aware, I've seen people implementing it in the wild over the last few weeks and you can make cool things happen. I dunno, you click on the title and the title then grows and occupies the space where the title would be very nice indeed. yeah. It makes the whole web suddenly feel like a journey and not just a bunch of way points where you click, wait, click, wait, click wait, It's just like you're just constantly moving through something.

[01:22:45] Tammie Lister: Yeah. And imagine the WordPress admin interface with that in.

[01:22:48] Nathan Wrigley: That's, I think one of the most profoundly interesting bits of it. Al like you click on a, I don't know, WordPress post and somehow you transition into it. It's lovely, isn't it?

What? Great idea. So Felix, I think Felix would get a biscuit this week. Should we have the, I'm not saying we're not starting, I think

[01:23:05] Tammie Lister: Felix would get to choose, the, family selection you get at Christmas, he'd get the first choice of a fresh box of that.

[01:23:12] Nathan Wrigley: I think. I think I'd give him of the kit captain.

Yeah. We'd

[01:23:15] Tammie Lister: give him a tin of that. Yeah. It's a whole tin. A whole tin. I think that's too

[01:23:19] Nathan Wrigley: generous. I think we've gotta keep half back. We've gotta keep him interest in the project. No,

we'll never come back. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So Felix, you get the box of chocolates, apply at, admin app and, let's see what we can do. Anybody want say anything about the view transitions? That's just It's really cool.

Very cool. what the web was made for.

It's a browser thing, by the way. And I was speaking to Adam Silverstein at WordCamp. Yeah. I've got a podcast coming out with him next week. It'll, oh, that's not true. It's coming out on Wednesday and Man Alive, there's so much interesting stuff happening in the browser at the minute of which this is one.

But Adam talks to me and we go over about six APIs and features that the browser is shipping, and this is one of them, and this is one of the cooler ones I've gotta admit. But there's a whole bunch of other ones as well, speculative loading and all of this kind of stuff. Which is, happening.

One of them is the carousel, API, if I, yeah, reminds me

[01:24:26] Tammie Lister: back down. Remember the old days where you tried to hack, like with JavaScript and then you could do a CSS carousel and now Yeah. You can actually, yeah, you

[01:24:34] Nathan Wrigley: can actually do it. And you, and it's just HTML and it's in the dorm and it's accessible and there's no JavaScript weirdness.

And there was the popover API as well, which I didn't know about, which is fun and interesting. Anyway, that's coming out with Adam, next week. Also a Googler. Where are we going? This is just to Rob Tim's, Rob Tim's bits. I dunno why. I apologize, Tim. I, regret saying that sentence. That is

[01:25:02] Michelle Frechette: definitely not the title of this episode.

[01:25:06] Nathan Wrigley: No, I think we

[01:25:07] Michelle Frechette: can all agree on that. Yeah.

[01:25:08] Nathan Wrigley: We'll all agree that's definitely,

[01:25:10] Tammie Lister: I really want your camera to just go off. Come on

[01:25:13] Nathan Wrigley: and I come back brightly. so what, Tim's been a ma Every time I talk to Tim, he's, I think he's using Firefox. He's a big proponent of Firefox. And, I use Firefox until I realized that there was just too much that was in chromium based browsers that I was wedded to extended.

[01:25:29] Tim Nash: You mean like view transitions and stuff? Yeah.

[01:25:31] Nathan Wrigley: Is

[01:25:31] Tim Nash: view transitions

[01:25:32] Nathan Wrigley: not,

[01:25:32] Tim Nash: surely it's coming right? It will come at some point, but yeah, it's still not, an adopted web standard. It is just a thing that they put in Chromebook now. Safari Web. Yeah. We'll have that too. Yeah. So when Safari does that, then Firefox will follow.

[01:25:46] Nathan Wrigley: But I had so much hope, like Firefox was like this. Beam like this just, I don't know, point of light on a hill or something. For the longest period of time it got just taken over Google with its might built Chrome and off, they went and got up to 90% or something like this. But it would appear that there's like this growing discontent certainly amongst the people writing these articles.

So the first one is Firefox is fine, it's on the register. Firefox is fine, the people running it are not. And then there's a whole, man, there's, it just goes into all the detail. Bear

[01:26:16] Tammie Lister: in mind, what have we felt about the WordPress articles written about our project? Exactly.

[01:26:20] Nathan Wrigley: There you go. Yeah. So it's maybe the same.

Yeah. Now Tammy, would you go to AI and ask about the sentiment? Sentiment?

[01:26:28] Tammie Lister: Not, I've got Tammy bot. Yeah, that's bot.

[01:26:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I love it. and there's another one here about Mozilla now only seems to speak using creepy gibberish lunatic language. it's a little bit like, I don't know, that's a bit of a political piece more than anything else.

But, Tim. Put the, case for why we should all be using Firefox. Is it still your weapon of choice?

[01:26:52] Tim Nash: It, is. what I would say is that there people, Firefox is a browser, that has been around longer than any of the other browsers that we currently have on the market in the, that's true in terms of large market share.

Mozilla is a nonprofit organization that runs Firefox. Has a tendency to wander away from its core. I think it's core things with Firefox and Thunderbird.

[01:27:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yep.

[01:27:25] Tim Nash: And they are both, I think everybody who every see they are both amazing pieces of open source software. And that's the Firefox is open source.

Now Chromium is open source ish except for the bits that's not, Firefox is the only real open source browser with any mainstream and it's got a very small market share. So it's bit on. There are other open source browsers, but they haven't even tiny yet, tiny market share, but it's one of the very few open source browsers we have.

Mozilla though, they get their funding. Almost exclusively from Google.

[01:28:06] Nathan Wrigley: I such a weird relationship because

[01:28:09] Tim Nash: they are basically, this is the way that Google gets to keep Chrome by going, no, what you mean? Of course there's competition. Look, this browser that we pay for, they are definitely our competition at 2% of the market share.

And that's where we're gonna keep them. so there is this weird relationship where every year Mozilla thinks they're going to run outta money because every year Google has to decide whether or not it's going to give them the money. and yet they still managed to ship two really good products. They also shipped rust.

rust Language is an amazing language that is now used for things like Linux kernel development, yet Mozilla built that out and then they suddenly got rid of the team because they pivoted to some weird ai VPN Bitcoin. Crypto stuff for a little while, which had absolutely nothing to do with their core markets.

And then they did something else for a little while. And I'm, I think I could probably speak for an awful lot of Firefox users where I'd say if they would just cut out everything and just focus on Firefox and, Thunderbird, make those better. That put your focus there. Don't worry about the politics, don't worry about everything else.

But there seems to be a thing that when you become a foundation and an organization, you grow really big. They were huge. Mozilla was a massive Yeah, they were,

[01:29:36] Nathan Wrigley: weren't they?

[01:29:37] Tim Nash: So many of my friends. how were have at one point been employed by Mozilla. and then you look at things like MD Mozilla's Developer Network, the documentation that is like the gold was for so long the gold standard in documentation.

Is

[01:29:52] Nathan Wrigley: it not

[01:29:52] Tim Nash: still?

[01:29:53] Nathan Wrigley: I feel it still is. Everybody seems to talk about it. I

[01:29:56] Tammie Lister: also love Thunderbird. I do, I'm a Thunderbird

[01:30:00] Nathan Wrigley: user too. Yeah.

[01:30:01] Tammie Lister: I don't use it anymore, but I used to, particularly when I had Linux. I do. I love it. I loved it.

[01:30:07] Tim Nash: but yeah, I, you say, I say it's the Goldstone because nobody's working on it anymore because they sacked all the people who were the writers for it.

and we made it a community thing, whereas before it had an employee team on it. so there is a level of, it feels like they d every step they take, they shoot themselves in the foot and they get bad publicity and then they overreact to the bad publicity, which inevitably involve shooting the other foot in a space attempt and try and balance out pain between the two feet.

And if they do carry that way, what loses out is Firefox. What loses out is Thunderbird it. 'cause these are all dis levels of distractions from what our two really good products. And it's really important that we do have. Different browser products. Yeah. that we don't just say everything should be used chromium behind the scenes.

[01:31:02] Tammie Lister: 'cause otherwise we're back to ie. Yeah. We're,

[01:31:06] Tim Nash: they can do what they like and

[01:31:07] Nathan Wrigley: they'll get all, we literally back

[01:31:09] Tammie Lister: to what the whole point of

[01:31:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:31:11] Tammie Lister: Originally why we all jumped when Firefox came out and we were like, fire box is not ie. It's amazing. And then Chrome came out and it was just like Chrome came out, oh, it's an option.

And then like we used to always have multiple, when you had a new computer, you'd have multiple browsers that, and then it was annoying to test in, but you have the choice.

[01:31:34] Nathan Wrigley: I am, I want to love Firefox, but I just somehow can't make it my daily driver. But Thunderbird, I've definitely settled on it.

But Tim, you are reflecting very much what was in that article. It was like decisions outside of the purview of the core products, Thunderbird and Firefox, that just seem to derail them. it's hard

[01:31:52] Tim Nash: because obviously you, as an organization wanna support other things. You, and if you took an example of the Linux Foundation or the Apache Foundations, they have their fingers in loads of different things, but they seem to still manage to.

Ship things and do quite well, even with those fingers everywhere, whereas Mozilla just seems to lose focus every so often.

[01:32:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. and so lots of the Linux world is aghast on a regular basis and unfortunately there are more than, more often than not. I listen to a lot of Linux and the overwhelmingly it's and we're gonna talk about Mozilla and they'll just be this collectively.

[01:32:32] Tim Nash: Oh no,

[01:32:33] Nathan Wrigley: what? Oh, bless them. And now we just made it worse by talking about them on a WordPress podcast. Reese says, plus one to the Thunderbird two Thunderbird as one of the pieces of software I wish I still used. You can still use it. Rece. I give you permission. feel free to, to go for it. That would be great.

And I

[01:32:52] Tammie Lister: understand that was the fact that, even a year ago, I used when, plus when I was using two now, but the fact that you had calendar in mail, it sounds a small thing, but it's just a really beautiful, like integration. That Thunderbird has. It just works. It's just a really nice piece of software.

[01:33:12] Nathan Wrigley: thank you. I'm, we're wrapping up, so a few things over here. Firstly, Zach now wants biscuits. We know that. but Jackson, maybe who doesn't? Jackson? I have no words to describe how, hurt I am by this con comment he says, so the cheap biscuits goes with the value pizza at W-P-L-D-N.

Those pizzas are not value. they're good value, but, they, anyway, there we go. And, we also now know that Zach would like Tammy pop to validate some of his crazy ideas. there you go. There you go. And, sorry, James Lau, who made a few comments much earlier in the podcast, I completely missed those.

It was all about your, the, you've been in the community for only about 18 months, and during that time, things have imploded in certain ways and, how, alarming that has been to see Yes, indeed. Yes. Jackson's now giving me a smiley emoji, so that's good. I don't think we've got time for anything else 'cause we've totally overrun.

However, I would tell you that, very quickly, if you're worried about SEO because of ai, ah, FS tells you, you don't need to worry. Put all the AI slop in your blog you like, apparently that's fine. but the other piece, I've

[01:34:25] Tim Nash: heard that if you write, I, write a piece about how much I hate WordPress.

That works brilliantly for text.

[01:34:31] Tammie Lister: Yeah, really. that's right. And then it'll

get you to search AI and then also promote, feed it back into the system. Yeah. So that then you like, recycling it.

[01:34:40] Nathan Wrigley: I had that article. I put it up, Tammy's findings I put up on the screen and now I've completely lost it.

I dunno where that tab went, nevertheless. And the other one is to very quickly just to say that beeper, if you've been using beeper. Which is an automatic product they acquired last year allows you in one interface to chat with all the different chat platforms, signal what's happened. So on.

it's become a pro thing. You can still have a free tier, but just check your app. 'cause I think at some point they're gonna shut you down unless you start paying for it. but anyway, I think it's one of the few things that I will actually, subscribe to. 'cause I use it so blooming much. It's been really, useful.

That's all I got, I think. Did we miss anything? We probably did, but nevermind. Just, I think we're good. Yeah, I

think we're good. There we go. thank you to you, the audience. Thank you very much for giving us your commentary. Appreciate that. That was fun. Thank you to the three people over here, over there.

thank you to my fan for making life possible over the last hour or so. and now we have to do the slightly humiliating. Hand wave thing. I've got a new thing. I now go like this and then I suddenly do that and that's the way I do it. But you don't have to do that. There we go. We're all here. Yeah.

Yeah. Tammy. Oh, Tim. Slightly controversial. The drooped version. so thank you so much. We'll be back this time next week. appreciate it. If anybody is watching this and fancies coming on, do let me know. You can reach out on the website, on the contact form 'cause we've got a few gaps, coming up and Firefox.

There it is. There you go. We will see you soon. Take it easy. Bye bye. Bye. Bye bye. He said bye before he'd even picked up the mouse to find the button. Let me see if I can, what a amateur. Yeah, do more Firefox. See you later. Bye.