This Week in WordPress #343

[00:00:03] Nathan Wrigley: It is time for This Week in WordPress, episode number 343 entitled, Only MaRcKs can appear on the show. It was recorded on Monday, the 4th of August, 2025. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I am joined by Mark Westguard. Marc Benzakein, and okay then Jesse Friedman. We are here to talk about WordPress, but we do an awful lot of other stuff as well, largely to do with AI.

We talk about the WordPress roadmap. 6.9 is coming around in the latter part of this year, December, and there is a load of information starting to drop about all the different bits and pieces dropping. It is one of the most exciting times I feel in the WordPress space. There's lots of UI changes coming, AI being rolled in, and a whole load of interesting stuff. So we talk about that.

Then we talk about some other things happening in the WordPress space. For example, WordCamp US is just around the corner. You can still get tickets for that. And also one of the keynote speakers has been announced. It's Danny Sullivan from Google.

We talk about the Automattic timeline. The company has been around for 20 years and it's really interesting walking back down memory lane, all of the different bits and pieces that have happened in that company.

And then we start talking about AI, some really interesting things happening in the WordPress space about AI but also some products that are launching. For example, Google have got a new product.

And there's a whole load more as well, and it's all coming up next on this week in WordPress.

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Good morning, good afternoon. Good welcome. Let's go with that. It is episode number 343 of the, WP Builds this week in WordPress show. We're joining You live from all over the globe.

I'm in the uk. and we'll go round the, houses and we'll say hello to everybody and they can tell us where they are. Let's start with Mark West Guard, co show, co-ho Hosty thing, co-host thing, whatever that is. How you doing, mark? I'm good. How are you doing? Yeah, I'm good. I am good. Genuinely good.

We've got a little bit of sunshine in the uk, which is Yeah. you are from this part, that's not normal. Yeah. I just got back, I just got back from yeah, two weeks of sunshine, had amazing weather and I've come back to rain. Hey, I'll tell you what, we've got the reign here. Mark is the founder of the WordPress form plugin Ws form.

I'm sure you've heard of it. If you haven't, you really should check it out. and, he wrote this, not me, he's often photographed by Nathan answering support tickets. It's true. true. Mark and I spent about 72 hours together. It's, it was an a never to be repeated moment. And, we spent three days just before, word Camp Europe driving around and getting lost and having a nice time.

And, and I took lots of pictures of markups

talking to medication. He's very dedicated. That's right. So go and get Ws form. Check it out. What's the URL mark Ws form.com. Nice. it's like you've said it before. That's right. okay, so that's Mark West Guard. He's here, he's gonna join us today. He's not in the uk even though he sounds like he is Georgia.

I think Georgia today. Yeah, Today was tomorrow. Where will be tomorrow? Who knows? Okay. Yeah, who knows. Portland. Is that, the country or the US state? Oh, that's the, state. That's the state. That is the state. Alright. Okay. okay. So over there joining us surrounded by a black border, but we don't know why.

We dunno why he's got, it's, gotta be a camera setting and it's too early for me to figure it out, so it's all good. Luckily it's, it's basically in line with what we want. It's perfectly encapsulated, so don't worry. It's Mark Zaca. How are you doing, mark? I'm doing great. And, good job on pronouncing my name.

Yeah. I, now remember, do you know what it is that I do every time? Do you remember the band Eels? not that there's a direct connection between that and you. I'm like, where are you going with this? Yes. they did a song, they did a song called Novocaine for the Soul. Oh. And whenever I think of you, have you ever used NLP, you make connections with things so that you remember them in the future.

Yeah. Oh yeah. Sure. Yeah. I've made a connection with you and that song, which I really enjoyed when I was about 20. Okay. And so I think of that and so I get Novocaine Benzocaine and that's, yeah. Yeah. and and there is actually a, a. An actual topical ointment called Benzocaine, oh, okay. But they haven't written songs about it yet.

[00:06:03] Marc Benzakein: No, That's right. That's not gonna fix itself in my head. No. Let me read your bio. It's a little bit longer, but here we go. Mark Benzocaine is the marketing lead and partnership manager at Maine, wp, which basically means he convinces plugin developers to play in team WP, and somehow makes fun newsletters to read his career path.

[00:06:21] Nathan Wrigley: Looks like he chose, sorry. His career path looks like a choose your own adventure book. One that includes importing coffee without a distributor. Launching an ISP without knowing what DNS was. I like that one. and surviving the early internet with only a fax machine and raw optimism. I'll figure it out.

Seems to be his motto these days. He splits his time between building connections, crafting creative chaos into strategy and explaining to his kids what a modem used to sound like. I remember that. That was a great dude. Oh no, that's a spectrum. I was about to do a ZX spectrum, but I do remember what a modem sounds like.

Anyway, thank you, mark. Appreciate you joining us here from Maine, wp thanks. Thanks for having me. You. Thank you very much. You're welcome. and last but by no means least down there, we have Jesse Friedman. How are you doing, Jesse? I'm doing great. Nice to have you with us. I think this is Jesse's second time, so he is fairly new to this show, but like a veteran now.

Yeah, you are. Yeah, that's right. Two, two is enough. I don't suppose. We'll, see you again. He's the head of, he's the head of WP Cloud at Automatic and a long time lover, contributor and evangelist of WordPress. I should have just truncated that whole. Thing just to, he's the head of WP Cloud at Automatic and Longtime Lover.

[00:07:39] Jesse Friedman: That's it. Stop right there. Actually, you don't have to keep going. that's perfect. Yeah. Okay. That's the next time. Next time you're on, we'll do just that. That is our panel. That's who we're gonna be talking to today, all about the bits and pieces that happened in the WordPress space. I'm Nathan Wrigley, and, just a few bits of housekeeping before we begin.

[00:07:57] Nathan Wrigley: If you're fancy joining us, or getting people to join us, head to wp builds.com/live. Hopefully it is live over there. We had a bit of a, an upset at the start, but, there it is. WP builds.com/live spa. What a pro. Still can't do it. F yeah, he's got the fingers out and everything. that's the place to send people.

If you go over there and you wanna make a comment, the you probably have to be logged into Google if you're gonna use the chat box on the right. If you're on a desktop, it's below if you're on a mobile. But if you don't like being logged into Google, then you can click on the video and there's a little black bottom top right.

It says something like live chat. If you go there, you can just do it anonymously. You can just paste your name in if you like. in other words, you don't need to be logged in to anything at all. So say hi, come and join us, interrupt us as you see fit. We love it when people do that. There's a few people joining us today.

First of all, we've got Ryan. Hello Ryan. Ryan's in Sunny and Mild, Charlotte, North Carolina, us. You've given us the weather update. That's lovely. Thank you so much. yeah, you're live. Thank you Elliot. Elliot, you are on. Later. I've got your article. Hopefully we'll get to it. That'd be nice. Reese Wynn is joining us from a Blu Street.

Newton La Willows. Thank you very much. Dave is joining us. I Dave says I have a Ws form coaster currently sitting on my desk from Word Camp eu. There you go. There you go. Yeah. Nice smoke. It works. I've got a WS form bottle and oh, honestly, it was here about 25 minutes ago, and then I took it downstairs.

I was gonna Trump, Dave, I've got a coaster. I was gonna raise my bottle and be like, look what I've got. what else have we got? Hello. All from Elliot Sby. He's just down the road from me. Hi indeed, Patricia. How you doing? Patricia? Coming to us from, I'm gonna say Germany. I hope I got that right.

Marco spin Florida, I think. Hello? From a Oh yeah. Look, it's, in writing. hello from a warm and sunny central Florida. Really, jo, enjoying the amount of Mark Marks on this way. I know we talked about this earlier, how difficult it's gonna, I think it's an insurmountable problem, frankly. That's the kind of thing that my brain can't cope with two people of the same name.

So that mark over there, he's gonna be Mark. And this mark down here, he's gonna be like Karen or Cynthia or something. Or we could just both talk over each other. Yeah, let's do that. I'll just say, mark and you, I was, just gonna defer to the other mark on everything. Okay. No, I still go there. okay.

So yeah, I've got your, I've got your article, later, but it's too technical to actually, show in great detail. But yeah, we'll get to it. we'll get to it. I, saw it and it looked great. Okay, so what have we got for you this week? WordPress stuff coming up in a little bit, but firstly, a little bit of self-promotion.

I hope you don't mind too much. This is our website, WP builds dot. Com if you fancy getting in touch or staying in touch with what we do, just put your email address into that little box there and, we'll send you a couple of emails each week. We parcel this show up as an audio podcast and we'll send that out tomorrow morning.

So that's, we, Tuesday send you one of those every Tuesday about the, this week in WordPress show. And then we do a podcast episode every Thursday, which is just me and usually one other person having a chat. This is the archive for that. And so you can see that the last person that I spoke to was a chap called Mark Schwartz, who has a cool thing called Check View, I think.

Mark, which one? I think Mark West Guard. You will know him, I'm guessing. I do know him very well. Yeah. He, he has a product which enables you to, let's say that you've got a website and you've got forms on there that could be e-commerce, like WooCommerce or something like that. Yeah. E or it could just be a WS form or something, Pick your form, plugin of choice. And it will do checks to make sure that the forms are actually working, but it goes a little bit further. So it does things like, so in the emails that should come Make sure they're all working. It does it in as an actual person. It doesn't do it like a robot would do it, so it fills out the fields, types them all in very slowly so it doesn't trip any sort of CloudFlare nonsense, anything like that.

And, and then gives you reports. So hopefully this is the sort of thing you could deploy. And I believe Mark, I think I sent you an email, didn't I? connecting you with him and Dennis. Yeah. I actually, I. I actually, had about an hour long conversation with him. nice. A couple weeks ago.

[00:12:21] Marc Benzakein: Nice. Fantastic guy. Fantastic person. Yeah, we had a great conversation. Oh, that's lovely. Yeah. 'cause I figured that main wp, given what you do, there was a real nice overlap there. yeah, so that was the, most recent episode and that was 4 3, 1. and then I did an episode with Google's, Maria Mova, I dunno if you've come across this product before, but it's called Psych Kit.

[00:12:46] Nathan Wrigley: Kind of gone under the radar a bit for me. But it's now got over 5 million installs. And what it does is in the backend of your WordPress website, it enables you to like coalesce all of the Google services, Google AdWords, Google Analytics, and it just surfaces the bits that they, that she and her team have decided are gonna be useful.

So it's not like your deep, dive. Google Analytics I think is pretty confusing. They surface all the bits that they think WordPress users would be able to make use of, and it's all in this one suite, but it's gone up to 5 million, active installs, over just five years. So it's pretty cool. So you can go and check out what she and the team over at Google have been doing with that.

Anybody use that? obviously 5 million installs. Yeah. I guess it's pretty popular. Yep. Yeah, Google Psych. It's been around for a while. I've, I've used it since the beginning. Oh, okay. I can confess that mostly to test it in the beginning and then, yeah, it's helpful because anything that you're doing in terms of integration with Google around, like the webmaster tools, things like that that's all, deeply integrated, so Yeah.

A one shop. Yeah, I was genuinely quite impressed and she came across as a really, I, just got a really good feeling about her and her, her being in charge of that team. You know how sometimes when the person makes you into that product, like Mark from WS form down there.

I think it's fair to say that you are that product. you do all the bits and pieces and you've gone to great lengths to make it what it is. And I think people have, you've swayed a lot of people by your personality and your showing up. I got that same intuition with her. and obviously this is not her product, but I got that same good feeling.

and if you could send Mark West Guard the check into the mail, that would be, that'd be great. Thank you. It's funny, when I first started out, I was promoting the brand WS four. Yeah. And, very quickly learned that people like to engage with the person behind it. And yeah, personal brand is very important.

[00:14:48] Mark Westguard: So yeah. So I try to be a nice guy, but I'd say you're very nice. You're a very nice guy. Can I just say, I've got, over here, I've got some hexagons. Mark Zaca seems to have a plank of Wood Mark, west Guard. You've got, I don't know what they are, like 3D squares. Yeah. Jesse's. Jesse's got squid and, and what looks like a superhero.

[00:15:09] Nathan Wrigley: So did you paint those? I did not, but they're actually the best, icebreaker of all time. Everyone has what's going on with the artwork. So the funny thing is that this is like a resume or a CV for me. I worked on a product a long time ago called Blue Squid that we had to move to WordPress and I saw this at a, art festival.

[00:15:31] Jesse Friedman: Bought it from the guy who painted it, put it up on the wall at the, company we were working at. And then when the Blue Squid product was finally replaced by WordPress when we killed it, I commissioned him to make the harpoon. And and then we hung that up in the office. Then I, left that company, created Brew Protect, sold that to Automatic, that's Brew Protect.

And then, joined the Jet Pack team, which is the Rocketeer. Ah, too clever. That's us. Although, I've got a similar story. I once did a website called really uninteresting hexagons.com, and that's what's going, that's all you've got. Yeah, that's all That's such a cool story, Jesse. The reason I hadn't spotted it is 'cause when you joined the call, you were in a tiny little square.

[00:16:19] Nathan Wrigley: And this is the first time you've gone. Oh yeah. Yeah. You got all big. And actually the last time I was here, I had the podcast background, which I take down the art and I put up the neon signs. So definitely stay with this one. It's very, I think if you move just a little, I think to your right, it really will look like that squid coming outta your head.

[00:16:37] Marc Benzakein: The other The other. There you go. There you go. There you go. Yeah. on your head. Ly. We could have fun with this. I'll see if I can sit here. Yeah, that's great. We like large from the Simpsons indeed here with eyes. It's like a Simpsons, Halloween episode. It is either Mark or Mark.

[00:16:58] Nathan Wrigley: we're not getting to the WordPress news for a bit. I can see that already. I've got derailed by a squid. And now, Marcus that hijacked us, he says, is either Mark or Mark Short for anything. I went by Mark for one year in school before sticking with Marcus. Is Mark Short for anything? Mark. mark with a no.

Just given Mark. Yeah, that was it. and, it is short for Mark with a c I'm not kidding. What? Oh, I know you're, I'm kidding. Okay. Oh, I was so sucked into that. This is gonna sound so great on the podcast. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Paul Hbe joining. Says hello. Happy Monday. I thought you were more into Depeche Mode, but we'll go with Happy Mondays.

That's right. And, David Wamsley, if I remember correctly, there, had a security issue early on and removed it and, and forgot about it then. Okay. Thank you, David, for joining. David's in the UK now as well, which is nice. He's moved over from India for a few weeks, which is lovely. Let's get onto the bits and pieces that we were talking about.

So there we go. There was Google's site kit. we often give the guests an opportunity to raise something and, Jesse just dropped this one and never so quickly before the show started. I confess I did see this, but somehow I forgot to mention it a little while ago, I don't know, a decade ago, something like that.

Google created their URL shortening service when they were, all raged. Do you remember? There was a whole slew of them, J MP and Bitly, which I still think is around Google had their goo gl service and then they killed it. But they said that the old links would keep working forever. And guess what?

Google lied. and they've killed another product. Is, there anything more to this, apart from the fact that I don't know, a gazillion links will die, Jesse? I think it's interesting because, they, have actually retracted this statement that they're gonna kill every link now.

[00:18:52] Jesse Friedman: Nice. And they're gonna, they're gonna hold onto a small subset of them. Oh. I can't imagine in the grand scheme of things how much this is costing Google. It's, a few pennies in our pockets, I'm sure. but it's interesting because I think this is it highlights for me some of the issues that we have with the fact that, WordPress is made available to, to folks to, with a very low barrier of entry, very little technical knowledge needed to, run a business.

And, you go out and you seek out tools on the internet. And understanding the implications of using third party services like this is often lost on people. And I think this just highlights for you that, if you're doing something like this, if you're publishing documentation, if you wrote a book and you're using Google short link, thing inside of it to make it easy for people to reference.

Those links in, literature or, in a, how to book, it's all gonna be lost in, a few examples they gave, there were some scientific, documents, some papers written, things like that where those things are no longer gonna resolve. And, oh. And it's gonna have a disruption.

There's something like 10 million links that are gonna be broken. Yeah. So I think it's important for, just like gen in general, I think it's important for people to have, hygienic knowledge of how the internet works so that you can make sure to avoid these things in the future. Do you give a reason why they're getting rid of them?

[00:20:17] Nathan Wrigley: Like short of cash? Yeah. Yeah. They must be. It's only made, they only made something like 76 billion in the last quarter. It doesn't make sense. Yeah, no. Yeah. I would imagine the few hundred bucks a month, in, three oh ones there is, yeah. Excellent. I don't know. I didn't see anything other than the fact that it seems like, they're always just trying to consolidate, I think Google has a reputation for, if they don't have people working on it, they don't put things in maintenance mode for very long. They tend to, shutter it. I wonder if, I think it has its reasons, but I wonder if they've also got plans for that. Maybe they're gonna just hijack the entire, subset of URLs.

But obviously if they're keeping a collection of them around that kind of, that me maybe means that they're not just curiously, it's related to that. I dunno if you've heard about this project, and I can't off the top of my head remember the name, but file formats is all also goes the way of Google gl.gl in that at the minute everybody's using, I don't know, MP three and jpeg, but if you cast your mind back, there are whole file formats which are now obsolete for which people have got like loads of documents out there.

And there is an, I think open source is probably the wrong way to put it, but let's go for philanthropic project out there There's a whole team of people who are trying to make it so that at any point in the future there is a converter available no matter what it is. So you know when inevitably the jpeg.

System of storing images disappears, which of course at some point it will, you'll still be able to view them at some point. And, as these platforms drop, I don't know, your Google docs and things like that, the same would be true. And I, think it would be a shame to lose that. David Worsley, who was in the comments I just mentioned, that he's in the UK at the moment.

He, a little while ago, out for no reason that he could discern his Facebook account was basically deleted. and so all of the hard work that he put into kind of curating that and being in groups and, everything overnight in a heartbeat was gone. I think for a period of time he tried to get it back, but then just thought, it doesn't really matter.

I'm not that bothered. So he, made peace with that, but it just does go to show how. somebody clicks fingers and it's gone. Oh, you're touching on something there that's actually really near and dear to my heart. I've been using this term for quite a while now, called, or just basically saying that you should own your influence.

[00:22:47] Jesse Friedman: A lot of people don't necessarily recognize this, but you're building, a business, you're building a reputation. You're building an audience on a social media platform. It feels stable because of the fact that they never go down, as a platform. But what you don't realize is that you can get shadow blocked.

You can get maliciously reported, the algorithm could change tomorrow, and your type of content would no longer be important. And the biggest problem with that is that you could build up an audience of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people. And if they're not seeing you in the feed anymore, how are you communicating with them?

If you build a business, this is even scarier. If you build an e-commerce, business on Instagram and tomorrow they decide that you're no longer relevant. What happens to your employees? What happens to your product if you're not leveraging the open web to mirror the audience that you have? You're, building on a very fragile foundation.

[00:23:41] Nathan Wrigley: We're all about that as well, aren't we in the WordPress space? But I, feel that conversation is really difficult to penetrate into the, head of somebody under the age of 25. So I have three kids and these platforms, like Instagram is a perfect example. It's been alive for as long as they've been aware about the internet.

And so it feels immutable. It almost a bit like Google feels immutable to me. It almost feels like a public service, like a, utility that I can rely on, Google Docs and things like that. but of course it can disappear. But it, it's so difficult to imagine that scenario that I, I think it's a bit like, you just throw caution to the wind, screw it.

I'll just put my endeavors all onto Instagram, to Facebook, whatever. But, boy, the day that it does disappear, which it inevitably will, let's hope it's sort slow and gradual and people can wean themselves off it in the process. Yeah. Interesting. yeah. But what's the answer? because the reality is I can create a TikTok account right now and have content up five minutes later.

Yeah, It's compelling. And, so when you go on the open web, all of a sudden it's a completely different, you have to know things and, I, first of all, Jesse, I completely agree with you. You, I, love that term. You have to own your influence. But there has to be a way to bridge that gap then, because Absolutely.

[00:25:09] Marc Benzakein: The appeal, Of Facebook and TikTok and Instagram and all that is the ability to just instantly get your content up and get views. yeah. Social media should definitely be leveraged. It's not something that should, should be ignored. The short term games of building an audience or, un unparallel anywhere else.

[00:25:32] Jesse Friedman: But the long term, the long tail strategy for anyone online should be to mirror that audience somewhere else. and so that way you control and have a way to communicate with them. It's just this idea that people don't understand that they actually don't underst, they don't own the connection between them and their audience because it's built on a platform that they don't control.

And all it takes is, shadow banning is one of the worst things out there for people because they're putting up content, they're not blocked. They don't understand why things are starting to fall apart, but their traffic starts to decrease and they can be screaming from the rooftops creating new content, and their audience is just not seeing it.

So what do you do at that point? if you had brought those people over to WordPress as well, or to an email newsletter or anything else where you can control that level of communication with them, then you can say, Hey, I'm moving to this platform. I'm doing this. If you love my content, don't, go to YouTube instead of Instagram, whatever it might be.

But right now it's just you, have a bullhorn into, into a muted audience, into a bunch of people with soundproof headphones on. You can't get, you can't get, contact with them. You know what the answer is? I have the answer. It's dead simple. It's called an RSS feed and a podcast. And, then you've got the, you've got the lot.

[00:26:47] Nathan Wrigley: It's yours, right? literally, I think, honestly, RSS feeds, it was like JavaScript back in what was it, like 2010 or so, right? Yeah, In terms of popularity, flash was really coming out of the woodwork. And then, and then. Folks like Matt, said learn it deeply.

[00:27:04] Jesse Friedman: Other people were building out all these other projects for it, and then all of a sudden now, like it's the backbone of everything that we do. I would imagine RSS feed is in the valley right now, but I think it's coming back. it's one of those things that you don't even need to know it exists, really.

[00:27:17] Nathan Wrigley: It's just I have a, podcast player and honestly, if I didn't know that there was an RSS feed behind anything, I would just know using the vernacular of word of, YouTube, I would just know that I'd subscribed to a podcast, but I wouldn't have any notion that there was a an RSS feed there and it was independent of a, a particular company.

I, I would hope that creators would take that message. And even if you do put stuff online, let's say to YouTube and you make that your, the fulcrum of everything, at least have a backup of it somewhere. stick it on a hard dis somewhere and back that up just so that the day that it does go wrong.

And, like Dave says, Dave Gray, Facebook will never surpass my MySpace. Oh. I remember when MySpace was all the rage and yeah, it felt like it could never go away. And then it came along and then David Sey says, indeed, like a OL MySpace is too big to fail. That's right. Michelle, hello Michelle.

Claim all the platforms whether you use them or not. Then you don't have to scramble later. Yeah, Okay. Anyway, Google, the URL shortener is going away, thankfully. they have a bunch of other stuff, which is still available. But yeah, that, that was a good story. Thank you for that. Spurned a little bit.

Shall we move on? Let's get into WordPress stuff. Okay. Here we go. Oh my goodness. I was just saying, just before this call began, it felt like the WordPress news to some extent had dried up a little bit. make wordpress.org a year ago, it was incredibly busy and then it calmed down quite a lot.

And now just in the last two or three weeks, it's really. Got really hot again. There's an awful lot going on and this will be of great interest to everybody. So if you're into WordPress, this article matters. WordPress 6.9, the Roadmap to it. So it's by, Anne McCarthy, and she wrote it not that long ago, 28th of July.

And I'll just paraphrase what I can. WordPress 6.9 is scheduled to be released. At the beginning of December. So the latter part of this year, it was decided for a period of time that would not in fact occur. But now project leadership has said, yep, let's go for it. Let's put that one in the calendar.

And so here are the high level items which are intended to ship. So evolving the site editor, the idea here, this is pretty cool, is to have two states for editing your own content, a simplified state and a normal state. And you would toggle it with a button at the top left where you would add blocks from, that kind of thing.

And, there's a little video of it on this piece, and I'll link to this piece in the show notes. But essentially you just get far less options. So you're into a, an editing interface, which an editor, an actual. Somebody that cares about writing text only would want to be involved in. So I think that's cool.

Expanded template management is also on the cards. Adding support. I don't really get this, but I'm gonna read it out anyway. I'm not really sure what it means. Add support from multiple templates per slog with the ability to activate or deactivate them for easy switching. Switching between custom templates, it doesn't mean at the same time though, does it, it surely it means like you could have this one or yeah, so I would imagine what that means is that, like if you're a newspaper and you have a template for, and by editorials or something like that, and then you want to switch all the editorial templates, for a small period of time because of a, special that's happening with the newspaper where you're trying to drive, a subscriptions or something, you could switch the template, then you won't have to go in.

[00:31:00] Jesse Friedman: And change all the things that are using that template. 'cause you would be switching it behind the slug. Okay. Okay. I get it. That, that, that makes sense. I just didn't pause it that way. So that's really helpful. Thank you, Jesse. The next one, this is super cool. the ability to hide blocks. So basically you could have blocks in the editor, which when you hit publish, never make it to the front end.

[00:31:22] Nathan Wrigley: So you could have a half finished piece of, I don't know, a paragraph, which you never quite got, right? You just tell it don't appear on the front end, and so you can show it, hide it essentially, which I think is really nice. Block level. Think about that. For Black Friday. specials, right? Yeah. The, week before you can have 'em all loaded up, ready to go, all your specials and then, publish it.

[00:31:42] Jesse Friedman: Yeah. You just go to the block and hit Yeah, go live. Yeah. So it's not copied in from a, I don't know, a draft document or something like that. It's all there in the document, but it's just not there quite. then moving on to what feels like, collaborative editing. You've got the idea of block level commenting will be dropping, so you can see it.

[00:32:02] Nathan Wrigley: If you're looking at the screen, you can see it. So you're in a paragraph block. Say for example, you'll be able to have people view comments, comment on comments, reply to comments, close comments, that kind of thing. Again, very cool. It's not, like the collaborative thing quite, but it's a part of the journey I suppose, getting there.

Then the command palette, which, so think Spotlight on the Mac. This already exists in WordPress, but I suspect the many people don't use it 'cause it's really only available in a subset of places. The idea is that it'll be available. Everywhere. And imagine this with the new AI capabilities, that would be an interesting thought.

So that's also common. And then there's a bunch of slightly more technical things, including the WordPress admin experience, which we'll come to in just a moment. But I think, some of those features sound pretty exciting. Over to you guys, if you've got anything to add, I was interested in the, PHP AI client, which is further down on that document.

[00:32:58] Mark Westguard: Thank you. and I spoke to James LaPage about this at Workcamp and where were we? Europe, I think. Yeah. Yep, and, what this basically is gonna provide is, a single kind of API that developers can plug into to make AI related requests. for example, making a chat request or asking it to create an image, et cetera, within a, unified interface.

So at the moment, developers who are using AI in WordPress plugins or themes or whatever, Or having to custom code that, stuff to talk to these open a, open a, API APIs, manually. So this is gonna provide just a, single interface for doing that. So I'm actually interested in having a play around.

I haven't tried it yet, but, it looks to be pretty cool. we, we featured, so James LaPage, who's the head of AI Automatic. we featured an article that he wrote about, and it wasn't the PHP bit, it, I wanna say it was The Abilities API. Okay. is that right? Have I got that right? and I thought, I've never said this, I thought that was the single most important article we've ever mentioned on this show.

[00:34:16] Nathan Wrigley: So I've been doing this since 2016 or something. I just thought. That is profound. If you can offer something which makes kind of WordPress the centerpiece of all this AI stuff, and you all know that I'm not, that I don't use a lot of ai, so I don't really truly understand it, but it does feel like there's a lot of what you were saying, mark, developers having to write their own thing to make it behave in WordPress.

And then of course, they've got this silo that they've got to maintain, and this idea that WordPress will deliver this connector, this ability to have these abilities. I don't know, the AI knows that's what you do when you wanna make a post. That's what a comment looks like. That's what the backend, the list view looks like.

Whatever. Yeah. If all of that is possible, it suddenly makes WordPress like this engine, this powerhouse. I think this is a, big stepping stone for all things AI in WordPress and, it needs to be there. yeah, I'm interested in playing around with it. We, have an open AI. add-on for WS form.

[00:35:19] Mark Westguard: And again, I had to write all of the connectors to it. manually. You were the first that I knew that did anything like that. And I remember thinking at the time, why the hell's he done that? this is, such a flash in the pan. This is going nowhere. Open ai. What? Yeah, what does that do? Yeah.

[00:35:36] Nathan Wrigley: What the heck? Yeah, we use it for making forms, but also for adding AI interactivity on forms. So you can use it to create content like a visual editor or create an image for a blog post or whatever. so eventually I'd like to migrate that to this new client that they've built, so that it's, all centralized within WordPress.

But imagine just going into your WordPress site and just typing in, create a blog post with seven images I don't know about dogs and something, whatever. You get the point and then just check the SEO settings for me, make sure that it is working with my SEO plugin. You just type it all in.

And if it goes, that all seems now to be within reach, whereas it's, it felt like you would have to subscribe to a bunch of paid for services. Obviously the AI APIs you've gotta pay for, but you'd have to find, cobble together a load of plugins that would do all of that work. And it now feels that's gonna happen inside a court.

And Tammy? Yes. Okay. So you'll finally getting excited. I get excited by how it works, not by it. Let's go with that. anybody on the AI thing that we just mentioned there, or the bits and pieces is 6.9 Jesse or Mark Zaca? Do you wanna drop in there or not? I'll move on. If not, it just seems, exciting for the same path that Gutenberg is on, which is that it can become a.

[00:36:57] Jesse Friedman: A editor that lives outside of WordPress, Gutenberg Anyways, so like maybe this is a foundation for. A framework for building on the internet through ai. What I'm enjoying from this is that it feel like for the first time in a while, I feel there's a bit of mojo in, in WordPress, which I haven't felt for seven or eight months.

[00:37:17] Nathan Wrigley: It felt like there's been a lot of little bits, interesting little bits. But it feels like this AI team have got a really large amount going on. And, Paul Hpe, who is in the comments by the way, I should mention, he, was one of the speakers last week on Thursday at, W-P-L-D-N. We do a meetup in London for the WordPress community in London.

And he has a, plugin called Filter ai and it would definitely be worth checking out. He did a demo with, with his, comedy partner, Ali. They were like, they, were like, the two Ronnies actually. They were really funny. and a lot of plugins are doing it, and gonna be redundant shortly due to ai.

Yeah. So go and check that out. Great presentation, by the way, and I got your email, Paul, I'll answer it after I've tied up this show. so there we go. Any, anybody? Mark, do you wanna comment on 6.9 before we move on? I, like you. I, agree. It's good to see some, actual momentum starting to pick up again, because you're right.

[00:38:21] Marc Benzakein: It felt I wouldn't say it felt like things were dying, but things were definitely a little, sick for a bit. and, so yeah, I'm, excited about where things are going and, I am, I think like most of us, I'm. I have a love hate relationship with ai, but I know that there's no avoiding it.

And so learn it and, work with it. Yeah, I think that was maybe the bit that was going on in my head. I just saw this tsunami and couldn't see a way for WordPress to figure that out. I couldn't see how WordPress and, I just couldn't see it. Fortunately, leadership could and devised a really credible team of people.

[00:39:02] Nathan Wrigley: really credible people on that team. and they're doing this work, for the first time in automatics history. I think they're putting them all in a. In a same space. they've got an office for them so that they can knock their heads together constantly. so that would be interesting.

So you just always have to have the attitude of there's always someone smarter than you that'll figure it out if you think that you're not gonna be able to. Yeah. Yeah, this is my watch word. There's always somebody smart than me, even in a playground full of tiny children. This is my mantra. okay.

Let's move on. That was very exciting. Okay, so the next piece then we'll just go briefly on these, is that, introducing WordPress test group con, sorry, I'll just restart again. Introducing the WordPress test contributors group. I don't know if any of you do, testing in the WordPress space.

But, there would appear to be, have been in recent times, a bit of a decline in that task. Lots of people, I don't know. The, numbers seem to have gone down. So it says here, on top of that, the committer activity basis been significantly declining in the past few months. The gap between contributors and committing attempts has been increasing over time without a clear upfront solution.

And, and so there's a piece here where they're laying out how they think they can improve the process of testing. Having not been involved in this in any way, should I put shape or form? I can't really comment on it 'cause I don't really truly understand it. But I would draw your attention to this. It was, produced on the 23rd of July is by Sir Luen.

I dunno how you pronounce that. I do apologize. and the article is called Introducing the Word, the WordPress Test Contributors Group, this new group. Hopefully you can go in and. Give your opinion on how to triage things and, how that whole process is gonna be structured. It sounds like it's gonna be a little bit leaner.

and they are going, I'll read the first proposal. The first thing they're gonna try and tackle is the proposal that has been brought more, that has brought more attention to achieve. A new level of quality to the organization has been the idea of having contributors specializing in one single area or component within WordPress or Gutenberg.

So instead of just being like a master, I don't know, like putting yourself up for everything, the idea in the future is that you would nominate yourself to be an expert in one area and hopefully that would then get noticed and you would become one of the default people, in that area. I'm sure that's happened in the past, but yeah.

Anyway, here we go. Anything on that or moving on? Moving on. Okay, moving on. this I'm not gonna mention 'cause it's really related to the last one that we just did. So I'll just quickly move on. Actually, here's the next one then, Mattias Ventura, who is one of the project leads he has produced. It's over on GitHub actually again, links in the show notes.

It's called Admin Materials and Surfaces. and I'll just read out what he says as we further develop the primitives to make up the overall admin system, it seems important to map out main elements that compose it. The issue focus is largely on how things might work and how things are structured and how they look.

and he's, Splitting the whole thing up into something called materials, concepts, and screens. And, if you can see here, this is, sorry if you're listening to this on the podcast, this bit is gonna be a tough listen, but this, we're gonna have to look at the screen for a little bit. the overall admin interface is composed of a few core materials, grouped into bases, surfaces and overlays.

And he gets to show those, then he shows what some new of new surfaces might look like, and then he moves into what different screens might look like, different ways that you might, have things. I quite like this one, this table view, where you've got this idea of a faceted search almost down the side here, another table view here, surfacing things like media and what have you.

And basically it's a call for. For help with what do you think the admin should look like in the future? And I noticed Tammy, who's on this call, has put her comments in as well. And there she is though. That's one person's opinion. Oh, this one here. Now this issue rocks. Yes, it does. anybody got anything on that?

I don dunno if you had a chance to read it. I didn't really summarize that very well, I don't think. But anyway, I mean it's it's, the roughest, draft of wire frames for what the admin could look like. And when you went down to that, screen there where you showed the pages, I think it's exciting because what you start to see there is, if we, modernize the admin, I think you're gonna be able to browse around a lot faster.

[00:43:43] Jesse Friedman: And I think then this new idea of the way the interface is gonna work is that it's gonna be a lot more focused on the path you want to take. If you're a designer and you're building, you'll be able to. Focus much more on that. If you're an editor and you're writing, it'll be a little bit easier to do that, and I think you'll see that you'll be able to navigate and understand the admin a lot faster.

I think one of the problems that we see when we interview new users, trying out the WP admin is, that at least with, I think most hosts don't always put the biggest emphasis on the admin speed over the front end speed. And you can te you can see that it takes a little bit longer for the admin to load on some hosts.

And that can be unbelievably frustrating when you don't know where to go. So the admin doesn't give you a whole lot of previews in the sense of, what's gonna happen after the click. And so this looks to me like a, way to help solve that UX issue in that, people will be able to start to, to discover a little bit more without having to reload the page.

That's what's, that's what's got excited, exciting for me. Yeah. And, Jesse, you said far more eloquently than I could have said it, exactly what I was thinking. So thank you. The, I'm not a great user of SaaS apps, which align with the same purpose as WordPress does. So I really have never been inside of Wix or Squarespace or any of those sort of rival competing platforms.

[00:45:13] Nathan Wrigley: It's been a, real age since I use things like Drupal and things like that, so I don't really know what the state of the competition is but I do know that even to this day, I am still confused by how to get around, especially the full site editing to editing part of, WordPress. I'm still massively confused about how to get there and why I can't get back to certain places with a single click.

And, essentially where I've ended up, I still find it remarkably con confusing and this kind of thing with all these like panels that you can pop out and filtering and searching it. It definitely, I don't know, it just seems a little bit more modern. And, and obviously this is the beginning of a journey, so you can go and check this out.

it's, it is on WordPress's GitHub. It's under the Gien Gutenberg, repository, and it is issue number 7 0 9 1 3. So you can figure out the URL for yourself, but I'll put it in the show notes. Anybody, one of the thing there too is I, hope if you're a plugin developer, you, maybe you rethink where settings and the, ways in which plugin interacts with the admin.

[00:46:19] Jesse Friedman: it takes some time to think about that with this new interface because the biggest issue that we see with, users installing new plugins is that every single plugin changes the admin in a different way. Yeah. So some put it into settings, some open their own settings, some integrate it into the editor, and you spend half your time trying to figure out what actually changed after an install.

So maybe something like this can also help with, the walkthroughs as well with plugins, but I think plugin developers should really try to think about, take a step back and take advantage of the fact that the admin's gonna change drastically. This is your chance to really rethink the way in which your, plugin interacts with that as well.

[00:47:00] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. Do you think that they're going to, like when Gutenberg was released, you had the classic editor, do you think that they'll, still allow for the classic admin so that people can have time to ease into, and then how much overhead is that gonna create to have that? I wonder, WordPress is inly good at backwards compatibility, right?

I think one of the things that's, that, that kind of bleeds into this idea of transitioning you. really well into new interfaces. anytime, any type of SaaS product, the second you change anything, visually, people erupt in anger. And even if it's amazing a few months later, they're gonna be angry about it for a while.

[00:47:44] Jesse Friedman: I don't know. I have no knowledge as to whether or not the actual core team is gonna maintain that, but I would imagine that if they don't, someone else will. Someone will create a plugin that will. Restore the old admin is so the nature of WordPress. Yeah. David who's in the comments, he said in groups, I'm thinking, I'm imagining he's thinking about Facebook groups and things like that.

[00:48:04] Nathan Wrigley: I see Many would like to know the impact for classic WordPress users. and then actually on the article, I didn't spot your comment, David, but David's made a comment as one of about 10 on the actual GitHub issue, and he's put, how does this affect those who want to disable Gutenberg and use WordPress for the PHP functionality?

It can add to an HTML site. Okay. That's really interesting. 'cause this doesn't appear to allude to any of that, does it? It definitely feels your full site editing all the way. I obviously don't know, but maybe Mattias will get back to you. But as Jesse said, we definitely have a history of backwards compatibility to the point of insanity in some cases.

Yeah. And, yeah, we'll wait and see. It's the first, first shot over the bowels. Tammy, if you've got anything to say about that, let us know. Otherwise we will move on. I'll link to that in the show notes. I was gonna just mention on this. please do the same comment Jesse was talking about plugin developers.

[00:49:03] Mark Westguard: A lot of them are coming up with completely different UIs right, for their product. So you may have 10 plugins installed, all with a different look and feel when you click on them. some of them popping out of the admin and then coming back in. I actually took the decision with my plugin to try and incorporate it in with the look and feel of the WordPress admin.

For some people, they don't like that they actually criticize my product and say it looks dated. And I'm like, I'm trying to keep it, within the same ui, so I can't really win. but I hope that the, from what I've played with so far, I've done a lot of work with, with Z Katz, with data kit, and the whole data view system.

and sorry, my wife is calling me, turn that off. but, the data view thing, has been progressing on the previous, article that we were just going through Nathan, on the 6.9 roadmap. Yeah, that was in there too, wasn't it? There was something in there as well. Yeah. So there's a lot of stuff they're do in there with different field types and stuff.

I hope that this is gonna be, extensible enough and adaptable enough to plugin developers and not just the Gutenberg interface. 'cause I'd really like to see plugin developers take advantage of this new UI that they're coming up with. so hopefully there's, enough in there for, everybody to, to work with.

and, not. Hopefully this isn't a hundred percent focused just on the Gutenberg project and, what it needs given, that this is the WordPress way, obviously Mattias is doing this all, these screenshots and what have you. It's all in the open. Obviously, you can contribute and add your comments and what have you.

[00:50:41] Nathan Wrigley: James Lau, I presume in response to David Warms is just saying, just given, just giving, He's, I actually read that as a pun. Yeah. Oh, given as in hey, in the WP admin, he, he's given in, he has given in, he's given in with WordPress altogether. Basically he's gone to HT ML and, CSS almost entirely.

yeah, Tammy says, so here we go. who also has a comment, a lengthy comment in that post as well. The maintenance burden of supporting backwards is intense and substantial. At some point, we need to make decisions. this is a personal opinion. Yeah. I'm with you, Tammy. okay. Anything else on that?

Nope. Okay, we'll move on very quickly. am I gonna do this one? I know it's not on the screen, but I'm just deciding whether Yeah, let's do this one. no, let's not. I'm sorry. You dunno what I'm talking about. So I'm just gonna move on in the background. The, most recent event coming up in the WordPress space, one that's coming up next.

The big flagship one is gonna be WordCamp us. It's being held in Portland, in a, I don't know, three weeks time, something like that, a little bit less. at the minute, the last time I looked, they've sold 750 tickets. It's definitely, down on the numbers from last year, it at the exact same venue, which at previous numbers felt massive anyway.

it really isn't. Gigantic venue. They're doing student tickets. So if you've, if you're a student and can prove through some kind of accredited ar sorry, ID that you, see the slip there, if you can improve through some sort of accredited ai, that you're a student, you can get a ticket for $25.

For the rest of you, it is a hundred bucks. And this is the one of the keynote speakers, which I thought was in, interesting, Danny Sullivan, who is of WordPress and has been involved in search for the longest time. And, it feels to me like a really pivotal moment for Google and search.

That would be interesting to see what Danny Sullivan has to say about that. By the way, if you, if you are thinking of going and you go to the Portland website, you too can receive a free copy. Of the Guide to Portland, and they will mail it to you for free. It only costs the US taxpayer $12 and 95 cents.

And so I recommend you get it and you can be the recipient of a booklet entirely full of ads. no, I'm joking. Hopefully that's just the Oregon, taxpayer, not the US. No, that's right. It's actually pretty good. I was being, I was mocking. It's actually pretty good. You can get it for free and yeah, $12 95, they'll send it to you and you can find out things about Oregon, and Portland in particular.

I should turn that into a WordPress website. That's just send them photos of it. Say turn this into website soon. Yeah. Yeah. I dunno, which of you. Folk are going, I'm gonna be there. I know Mark's gonna be there. Are you going Mark the other mark? Are you had in there this time? I actually am not.

[00:53:49] Marc Benzakein: No. So this is the first word, camp us. I am not attending. And we'll see how that goes. Yeah. It's gonna, it's gonna feel strange to not be there. I will tell you that. Yeah. I'll send you updates. Jesse, are you going? I was accepted to speak, but I unfortunately had to decline. Oh. because I will be out on sabbatical.

[00:54:10] Jesse Friedman: So Automatic gives a three month, paid sabbatical. They kick you out the door, every five years. And, mine starts on Monday, one week from today. Oh, nice. So you got zero. Do you get this just hanging out? That's so good. Yeah. Yeah. Do you get to decide when that sabbatical is or they just say, no, this is your sabbatical.

[00:54:30] Marc Benzakein: See you later. It would certainly be interesting if they just booted yet. That's right. You get to work one day and it's sorry. Yeah. Sorry. It's today. Yeah. In the old days that you get suspended without pay or something. Yeah. I'm hide. I'm actually hiding that. Yeah. I've, I've, been suspended for, I was trying to come up with something funny there.

[00:54:53] Jesse Friedman: No, I, chose it. actually I was gonna originally go out in June and be back, just. But, things got postponed a little bit, so I'll be back in November. and, I will be missing working in us. The, the couple of comments to come in about what we were talking about, sorry, we probably don't need that one there.

[00:55:13] Nathan Wrigley: Let's just put this back. 829, sorry. 826 tickets sold as of today. The target I was speaking to, was it Carla Campos, I think, who's one of the organizers. there's a podcast episode coming out on Wednesday from her. Their target is a thousand and, it was literally this time last week that I spoke to her.

So they've added another, they had 750, so they've added 75 in the last week. So hopefully if that trajectory continues, they'll get up to that. Target is a thousand. Yeah, I hope so. As, someone who's run word camps in the past, I can tell you the last two weeks are the most stressful. Oh. 'cause you planned for all these meals.

[00:55:51] Jesse Friedman: Absolute, yeah. These big auditoriums and Yeah. And it, that's where like most of the tickets are sold is, the last few weeks when people, she was, she was saying that it's 30 hours a week for her at the minute, and and she's. Stealing, robbing Peter to pay Paul, she's taking it from time off, like evenings and weekends.

[00:56:08] Nathan Wrigley: She's just putting in an extra 30 hours. because the whole volun volunteer basis of the entire thing, every time she gets on a plane, she's gotta pay for that. Every time she does an hour, she's gotta pay for that. So I, very thankful for people like her putting these events on. I, the, gratitude is enormous.

but also it must feel very difficult at this time. She, I, she wasn't expressing any sense of regret or anything like that, but you could definitely tell her words were chosen carefully. She's, under pressure, high attendance would be great. speaking of attendees, if you are gonna attend, just know this.

I just got an email about 20 minutes ago. It's beautiful. this is the email I just got. I love how they've got the total attendee figure of 1,594. Yeah, so honestly, I got an email about 15 minutes ago. It says, hi, I hope you're well. We are following up to confirm they're not following up. I've never heard of these people.

We're following up to confirm that you're interested in acquiring the visitor attendee list from Word Camp us between blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But they've highlighted in yellow, which is so nice. There's nothing tasteless about that at all. each record contains name, email, address, company, URL blah, blah, blah, telephone number, and I'm supposed to reply.

I don't know what to say, frankly. yes, it's publicly available information, but stop it just. Stop it. Say send me cost. That's one of the options. That's right. Send me cost. Send me the cost. Okay. Okay. This could be fun, right? Maybe by next week I could have a long, a real, I think, you should absolutely follow up on this and maybe you should give them the, the, link to the attendees list.

Yeah. Okay. Okay. That, okay. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna follow up with a really slightly sarcastic reply and see if they notice that. I'll just string 'em along. If you can tell me my phone number, I'll buy it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. This is my promise. There's a guy, you'd be amazed, you'd be amazed with the way that they've po they tie your contact information Oh.

[00:58:15] Jesse Friedman: across several different mediums and they, they give you a unique identifier and then, they look for you on these public, lists and things like that. So I would imagine actually one of those probably, sorry. I was gonna say that this is, this could be complete spam, but it could, it is spam either way, but like it could be a complete spoof or it could actually.

Really have people's information and it'd be creepy to see what they, yeah, I'm not actually gonna get anything from them, but there's a guy in the UK who does he does standup and one of his skits that he does in his standup, I dunno if you've seen him, mark, I can't remember his name, Joe.

[00:58:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Is it Joe Lyer? That's it. One of his things is that he does exactly this. He replies to spam email really politely and then just gets into this like crazy email exchange with them where it just gets more and more absurd and he sees how long he can keep them going and how long their interest is maintained, even though it gets really, ridiculous.

his. Hysterically funny, but it's a way to tax 'em too. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, It's great. Yeah, exactly. CloudFlare are gonna do that with, with bots, aren't they? They're gonna just trap them in a endless nonsense, bunch of websites and URLs and just keep them cycling around.

yeah. Didn't they have an old lady that. Just calls up these emails for hours on it. You've got an AI of an old lady. That's exactly it. And she just constantly is, she's counting out her, cash with coins. Yeah. And it's things like, they'll, the, call operator at the other end will be saying, okay, just click this button.

and they've programmed it so that she's as dory as possible. What do you mean click which button? The blue button or the red button. And eventually obviously the, operator figures it out and hangs up. But they can waste so much time on this old lady. Yeah, don't redeem the gift card. This, is the reason AI should exist.

No other. okay, so here we go, Marcus. So I will report back that next week if I remember. I will try to get that email thread, watch this space next week. Marcus Bennet though is saying, there's a special limited edition of his Unleash the Wahoo card game. for attendees. Oh yeah, if you saw that last week, he's had a whole load.

He's had a card game. he invented a card game and he's been, in the process of getting the prototypes if you, whatever it's called, like the factory versions, just to check the quality and what have you. And I saw that you've rejected one. Marcus one, I don't know the quality on the corners or the edges or something wasn't quite as good.

So he is finalized all that I think. And the card game is, here. I think it's a bit like something like top trumps. We have that in the uk. We don't probably have that in the us just saying. and so you can get that. You'd be able to pick that up on, what did he say? And a special limited edition.

how many are you bringing just out of interest? Four. Very heavy. 9 76 or whatever the number 1,574. Yeah. so are we gonna have a Pokemon type collectible Waku cards now, or it's. a un unleash the kittens or exploding kittens type game where it's like you get all the cards at once.

Hang on, let me go and see if I can Google it, see if it's got any, yeah, there you go. so it's called Unleash the WaPo. This is it. nice job on the website. Lemme just get rid of that comment. So here we go. Very cool. We getting di we're getting off, way laid, but it's great. So yeah, here's the, here's the card game.

So you can see it's a bit like, each of these characters I dunno if there's an equivalent like this in the US that I can lean into, but each character has certain characteristics and those characteristics means points. And I'm guessing that you compete against each other and try to win each other's cards or something like that.

But, anyway, there's the how to. That is a nice website, Marcus. Good job. Look at that. it would be a lot of fun if you could, trade cards, trade wapos, and, then go back and look at all the different unique wapos from old, word camps. Yeah. That people customize. That would be very cool.

Says collect wapos, deploy plugins. Rule the dashboard. So that's, all I know. but you'll, it'll be there. Oh, it looks like you, there's something about how you set it all up and what have you. go, and get it. You can buy it. Look, click on the buy now button. you can get it before the, for the event on a discount rate.

but you can get it at a different discounted rate. If you turn up to the event. Tammy List is saying, will there be a digital version for those of us that prefer that? It's not a game. Tammy wants to play against an ai. I dunno if that's just taking it too far, Tammy. He's put a lot of time into that.

it says it's more oh, okay. It's more like exploding kittens than Pokemon. Okay. got it, got it. And there will only be 50 limited edition cards. Thank you very much. We're turning into the sales channel for the, the Wahoo game, but I'm happy with that. Marcus, maybe it's not too late to get an ad in that Portland.

[01:03:21] Jesse Friedman: Oh, yeah, There you go. There it is. You could have a whole center spread like that. There you go. Actually, I opened it on one of the useful pages, so that's good. I got a map, there. That's quite nice. Okay. There we go. Meet the WaPo. Where were we? We were here, speaking of automatic.

[01:03:41] Nathan Wrigley: As we were just a moment ago, and your sabbatical, I know that there's a lot of, discontent in the WordPress space and what have you, but, this is such a nice piece. What this is the, exactly. Yeah. Thanks Jesse. Yeah, you tamp it down. I just thought this was a really nice summation.

So automatic have reached a milestone. I believe it's, 20 years. And if you go to timeline.automatic.com, with two T's, you'll be able to, see what it is that company has achieved over the years. And honestly, I don't, I, wherever you sit on what's going on at the moment, it's a lot. It's a, really large amount and some of it is incredible, frankly.

2005 company started. It was obviously Matt Mullenweg off the back of Forking B two with, Mike Little and what have you. wordpress.com is launched as well. The first automation in Europe was hired, and then later on, one in America was hired, jumped to 2016. This looks like it was the first ever kind of WordPress event.

It was called a Grand Meetup in San Francisco. Eight people were in, it. And there's a sort of fairly, how to describe it, there's, I don't think I've seen Matt Mullen with short hair like that before. So there he is at the table in two 2006. And at this point, WordPress VIP was launched. They got a CEO and had a venture for capital round of 1.1 million.

And then fast forward that, that person at the back of the table there. quick anecdote, that looks like Brian Veloso, who is one of the first designers at, Automatic. Oddly enough, he was directly across the hall from me in my dorm in Providence, Rhode Island when I went to college. nice. It all ties together.

Whole world. You see this whole episode is beautifully conceived. and then 27, sorry, 2000 7, 2 8, some acquisitions. It all started to get very serious at this point. They acquired, Akismet, which we all now know Gravita as well. I didn't actually realize that was an acquirer until I read this Body Press intense Debate Crowd Signal, which used to be Poll Daddy.

And at this point, they were, getting another round of financial, a B round at 29.9 million on a valuation. I don't know what they don't mention that 2009 to 10 2009 video press was launched. 10 million blogs were lodged on.com. first Tian coming from Asia. WordPress, excuse me, WordPress Foundation, 2010.

VaultPress also came around as well, and 50 automations by the time we got to 2010, through 11 and 14, jet Pack is launched a hundred automations. At this point in 2011, it's worth, it's worth 126.7 million. by the time we get to 2013, simple Note has been acquired and 160 is RA 160 million, not dollars.

160 million is raised on a valuation. Gosh, what a, what, A few years, of 1.16 billion. Dollars. It's all starting to get very serious. I, the year I joined Automatic. Oh yeah. And it all went from there. Yeah. Nice. I like it. Same. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. 2015 WooCommerce was acquired. Sensei was acquired.

Calypso happened. another round 160 automatic. There are 500 employees at this point. Gutenberg is launched in 2018. 2019. Jetpack, CRM, came from zero Bs that was acquired Z zero Bs. CRM was acquired. Tumblr as well. News Pack was launched. Now we're up to the valuation of 3 billion, series of funding at 380 million a thousand employees at this point.

And, then we get into the much more recent past texts was acquired and so was beeper in the more recent past. And, yeah, that's probably where it ends. What a lot. It amazes me the valuation of automatic Versus the number of staff they have is just quite incredible. Yeah. Even when they had a hundred staff, that's nothing.

Yeah. And they had that valuation. It's just incredible to me. Where, do you guys, where do you fit on this timeline? Like in terms of the first time you actually seriously took a look at WordPress? Mine is here somewhere. I think I'm around the, I think I'm around the 2014 mark. it's a pretty serious endeavor at this point.

Most of the world has probably heard of it. That's where I live. What about you? Let's go Mark Zaca. Where were you hanging out the first time? I, wanna say around the 2010, 2011 mark. Okay. You're much earlier than me. Still a fairly, yeah. Yeah. 50 automations only. At that point, it was still fairly small.

[01:08:29] Marc Benzakein: I do actually remember when the WordPress foundation was established. So, there you go. That would be, it might have even been 2009. Okay. I didn't like market on my calendar, unfortunately. Yeah. Damn. Yeah. You never knew. Yeah, Never knew it was gonna be, but that, would be about the time.

and I, used WordPress for purely nefarious purposes as a affiliate. Dumping ground to just make money off of affiliate marketing and did actually pretty well with it. Yeah. So that's how I just, would WordPress sense that somewhere that was written on this page, but they just deleted it at the last moment?

[01:09:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, they've introduced that whole comment, that whole block that they can hide and show on the backend. Your contribution is there, mark, but it's not showing. I feel, I prefer to work in the background anyway. That's right. I like it. What about you, Jesse? Where, you said you joined, I joined Automatic in 2014.

[01:09:28] Jesse Friedman: 2014, for an acquisition that is actually not listed there, but, the, we were a small group. We actually had a lot of, impact with group protect, with a very small team. I think I'm actually in the negative timeline here. Ew. Back in 2004. Gosh, you're right back. Oh yeah. so you are on the time you, before the timeline existed, you're like, doctor who, what?

[01:09:54] Nathan Wrigley: How does that happen? Wow. Okay. You really go back and, yeah. It was very early on. Yeah. Yeah. Mark, what about you? about the same as you, but I think 2014, something like that. Yeah. One of my staff members said, Hey, we need to look at this WordPress. He went off to a work camp and came back with bags full of swag.

[01:10:13] Mark Westguard: And, I was like, that's all very nice, but what does it do? And that's what I was introduced to it. So I, I was, for me it was when Drupal eight came along, whatever that was, whenever Drupal eight came along, I was heavily into Drupal and I just couldn't, so they don't do backwards compatibility, they just throw it all out and you start again, which is great, right?

[01:10:34] Nathan Wrigley: 'cause they keep up with the latest tech and they don't have to worry about all that. but it does mean you've gotta rebuild existing sites. and you really do have to start from scratch. So I, started whenever that was. It feels like it was 20 14, 15, something like that maybe. here we go. Syn and WP wrote my WordPress book at 2012.

That's cool. That's really nice. Me too, actually. Yeah. Okay. And back to the game, Marcus is in fact thinking about doing a digital version, Tammy. So there you go. but it's gonna be $20 billion he says, holding his little finger in his mouth. 2015 for Elliot. Sorry, not 2015. I cannot read 2005.

So he's right with you, Jesse, right back at the very, start. Okay. Keep your comments coming in. That's really nice. There's your timeline, that's your automatic timeline. Let's, let's see if it continues. Okay, this is interesting. I can't play it to you because I can't suck in the audio, but this caused a bit of a controversy this week.

This was, Imran over at Web Squadron. If you haven't had a chance to watch the video, I'll just tell you basically he, he feels that. so it's, directed towards content creators. So it's the likes of newsletter creators, I guess bloggers, but things like YouTubers, podcasters, that kind of thing.

And his, central contention really is that it's gatekeep a bit and only the people who are in the inner cabal, for want of a better word, get onto the, these shows and get to demonstrate their stuff. And there's a lot of people who deserve to be shown, but never quite make it. I think he's probably got a point in that, I, you guys have all been on the show before.

I thoroughly expect you to be on again. We do have that kind of relationship, don't we? I can email you and you feel comfortable coming on. And so, it happens. I. I, I don't really know. I wish it wasn't like that. I wish it was much more open and everybody could come and have their say so. I'm gonna have him on and he can air his views, but I don't know if that's a, if that's something that you've noticed in the past, are there just like a bunch of people that always come onto the radar?

Always in your Facebook, always in your Instagram, always on your YouTube, and you think it is a little bit of a cabal? That certainly was Irans Kentucky. I think that's the same. He did it. He did it in a non, he didn't, throw any, he wasn't punching any punching down on anybody. He didn't mention any names or anything, Sorry, but I interrupted. Oh, no, I think, I, watched it. I, think it's the same in any industry. There's, YouTube people that are more vocal than, others. There are, particularly conferences, like work camps for example. you, when you go to work camps, there's a common crowd there, who spend a lot of time together, build friendships, build relationships, and for that reason, they're gonna be the ones that, come to mind when you want to talk about a particular topic.

[01:13:42] Mark Westguard: Yeah. And I think that's the same in, in, in any industry. I don't think it's anybody doing anything bad, not fair. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's just not at all, just, the way, industry is, Yeah. I think there's also something to be said that even if you're an incredibly talented person in the role that you have, there's still the work of promoting yourself, being a great public speaker.

[01:14:05] Jesse Friedman: Animated, like all these other components that go into it and, And so there's only, in that Venn diagram of people who are talented and working in this industry and all this stuff, if you're gonna play in that space, you also have to fall into that as well. And I think when you combine that with what you were saying, mark, the, yeah, everybody has an inner network and when you're Doing these shows and things like that, you're leveraging your network of people who you've run into at these camps and talk to and all that stuff. And so if you're out there and you're not feeling like you're getting publicity, I would say just keep working it. I run a podcast. Impressive hosting. If, if you're not getting publicity, if you're not getting out there and you wanna come on the show, come ask me.

It wasn't hard to get on this show, I don't think. yeah. There's a masked group of folks out there influencing who you're allowing On the show, I'm certainly not experiencing that. The one thing I would say, which is, might be interesting, is what I do is I do interview, so it's me talking to another human being.

[01:15:03] Nathan Wrigley: So the, already the gatekeeping is, can you speak English, because that's all I can do. but then also can you reply. Because it's an interview, so if you can speak English, but it's not gonna be consumable by anybody. That is also a, sort of subset of criteria. So there I get probably about three or four email a week from very, credible developers who have a thing.

And, I delve a bit deep and I always reply and I always ask, tell me a bit about what you've got. And, then often that will dry up. So I feel, okay, that was cold outreach. That's not going anywhere. But then sometimes when I do reply, I get, okay, so you're a podcast, are you? No, we don't have anybody that can come on.

We're not confident in English always. So it dries up organically in that way as well. and I would love to raise those voices. I, completely agree. There are a bunch of really talented people who've got really credible products, but the, missing piece to success is the marketing bit.

And I can only do what's on my. what's in my skillset of things that I do on my podcast. I'm not about to go out and, I don't know, get a translator to do a, an episode between one person and the other, because in all honesty, the audience probably wouldn't, make it through that episode.

So I do get what you're saying. but there you go. yeah. so here you go. Just to emphasize how low the bar is. Dave Grace, as he interviewed me, so Oh. I started pulling teeth. Not, I'm not sure what that says about the group of people who are here right now. Yeah, Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. you, said it wasn't hard to get on this show.

That's the standard. I like to, maintain aim low and you can't, Nathan, always pushes me away. Yeah. I always trying to get in. here we go. I feel like, so the syn and wp, I feel like WP World needs more TikTok, Instagram shorts, creators. We have lots of podcasts. Nice channels, but not enough socials.

Okay. I will leave that one to percolate in my head. So I think Iran's got a point. He's not trying to propose a solution, he's just trying to raise the thing. I'll have him on, the podcast, hopefully I've offered, and hopefully he will come on and we'll throw that around a little bit. Cool. And see if we can figure it out.

God, we're like with 13 minutes to go and we've got less than halfway through. So let's see what we can do with AI space. I know you're about to start ai. Yeah. Oh no. Okay, here we go. I'll raise this one very quickly. Jamie Marsland, over on Poodle Press, so not the, I don't know if he's doing this outside of the, sort of WordPress, the head of WordPress YouTube because he's done it on his own personal site, but he's, he's trying to imagine that, WordPress is maybe not as exciting as it had been in the past.

We were talking about things like that, and AI seems to be able to offer the promise of livening it up a little bit, but he, wants to push it further and say, let's not rely on website building. It's more, let's use, let's use WordPress to build. The infrastructure of the web. Anything that's possible on the web can be built with WordPress basically.

And so that's, that was his contention. I don't know if you, all the stuff that we just talked about a little while ago about what the AI team is doing, I feel that is addressing exactly his concern. So I dunno if this piece was written, with that in mind or whether he is bullish or confident or he is, he is a bit nervous about the future.

But, I, feel that AI team is probably tackling this head on, to be honest. So anyway, you can go and check it out. Any comments on that one? No, it's exciting to think about the ways in which WordPress can pivot from just being purely, we already know this, it's building apps, it's doing other things, but I think a lot of times people think of it as a website builder, which is interesting because, it was only 10 years ago or so that we were pushing heavily for it to not be considered just a blogging platform anymore.

Yeah. And it's how do we extend beyond that? And, he's making the point that WordPress is uniquely positioned to pivot into the AI space and kind of dominate that because, and he makes these points. He said, we can leverage a huge open source project, WordPress, it's perfectly positioned to fill this gap, this AI gap.

And he says, why? WordPress already has a brand, it has distribution. and it has a developer community that already, is using it to extend things. I guess the missing slightly obvious elephant in the room is the AI companies behind it all. And the fact that you none of the credible ais that I, don't know of anybody using open source ai.

Realistically, I think everybody's paying into the, to have an API key for, I don't know, chat, GPT, Claude Anthropic or whatever it is. Maybe that's the, missing piece. But, I feel like, it's finally good to see. I think we had a good solid two years of people just. Doing nothing but complaining that WordPress was no longer sexy and nobody was coming up with like real solutions.

[01:20:14] Marc Benzakein: And it's, really encouraging to see people throwing stuff out there and seeing what sticks, but actually looking forward now rather than just all the complaining that's been going on over the last couple years. so I think we've. Gotten over that hump of here are our issues and now we're actually getting to that part of, okay, what can we do to progress?

And, people are throwing things out there and this, article's kind of an indication of that. I think he starts the piece off by saying that Lovable, which is a company which I think has been around for about a year, has now has a valuation of $1.8 billion. we were looking at automatic and how incredible that was.

[01:20:53] Nathan Wrigley: That's really incredible. that's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Like just a few short months. and Jamie amongst a bunch of other YouTubers, I think like Matt Madero would be another one have, really demonstrated what you can do with these solutions without necessarily being a coder. This whole thing of vibe coding seems to be really taking off.

So anyway, there we go. ba. There is a piece here. I'll just quickly mention it. it looks like, documentation is gonna be written for WordPress 6.9 with a nod to ai. I guess it kind makes sense why in the year 2025 wouldn't you get AI involved, but the, but there's a, this piece is all about how that's gonna be handled.

And so basically, It's gonna be shepherded by humans, it looks like, although they're gonna use it to save time, there's gonna be no point at which there isn't a human fact checking and a human running, just to make sure that before anything is published, there is accountability and that there will be a guardrail in place.

But it's interesting to see that WordPress make wordpress.org. This is Jenny McKinnon. this is a proposal to, put that idea forward. why wouldn't you? Basically, the corpus of data is out there. AI can slurp it up and make something sensible out of it in a heartbeat. Why wouldn't you do it that way, But having a human shepherding that whole thing is, tremendously important. and really important. Okay. I think that's one of the, that's, a great use of ai. Yeah. that's the kinda thing that AI is gonna do very well. it can read code, it can understand what it's gonna do. You can train it to, to teach it through other documentation on the writing style that you want.

[01:22:37] Jesse Friedman: The way in which you wanna inform people and then the crowdsourcing of corrections will, shore of that very quickly. And one of the places we've struggled for a very long time is documentation. Then translating that documentation. So indeed, yeah. So if this process can, yeah, that's a really good point.

[01:22:54] Nathan Wrigley: So documentation, like with the best one in the world, it's a little bit uninteresting. I suspect Mark West Guard, you can speak to that documentation is probably hard. And probably one of those things that often gets left to the last minute when it's, you got other things to do. so there we go.

Free. And it frees up the human need. The human talent, right? Yeah. this is the curious thing. This is the bit that I, that is the exact moment that I can get concerned. I am worried about that thing, that exact thing. This idea that we're gonna free up the human. I worry that you're gonna free up the human so much that they don't have a job anymore.

That's the bit that, that's the piece that I think we've got to navigate to make sure that we get through the next three or four years. And all the humans who's whose, who are now freed up are in fact freed up. They're not just freed up. it's, funny that, we have this very large panic about AI taking jobs.

[01:23:47] Jesse Friedman: And if you look at every industry since the beginning, since Electrons started going into batteries and powering things, we have simplified things, paired things down, and used technology to replace people. the answering machine is a good example, right? Then it became touchstone screens and all this other stuff.

There were thousands of call center people who have probably lost their jobs to, things like that. It's not AI in a novel way replacing jobs. It's the next phase of technology. And I don't think that AI is quite there yet to just go in and scoop out a job. The way in which I've been using AI is much more like a, like a chief of staff in that there's, it's, I leverage my ideas, it's my concepts, it's my things, but I have someone else there to help me.

so right now it's in an accelerator point for me, but, but I think it's, I think we need to think about the fact that just technology in general has replaced jobs as a whole and it's not a new thing. As far as the human races phase. All you clever people doing stuff with ai, it's fairly remarkable.

[01:24:51] Nathan Wrigley: I get it. To draw pictures of cats. that's about the level. I'm, no, seriously, that's the level I'm on. I am constantly amazed by what people can, promote it, to do, prompt it, to do it. It really does baffle me. Yeah. I just don't, I just don't have the interest to get stuck into it.

I know that's gonna be my, my death nil, I'm sure. But, that's the way it is. okay. We are very short on time and so I did promise Elliot that we would mention his article. I just thought I'd mention this. it. Elliot, thank you for sticking with us. I noticed this piece that you wrote during the course of this week.

It is highly technical. I was never gonna go into it, but it is, you can see there's lots of code written to the screens, but it is Elliot and we were talking about, the classic editor earlier. and so this is all about migrating legacy WordPress content to the block editor, a real world case study.

this is obviously something that, has had to be done, by Elliot in the recent past. I know that this is probably something a lot of people are doing taken on sites. We seem to be at that point now where, if a lot of WordPress websites will be coming to the end of life and they're probably using the classic editor and things like that.

And if you are unsure about how to do it without literally copy and pasting each blog post one at a time, then then Elliot has your back. So you can go and check this out, follow through on the real world way that he did it on a fairly substantial. Very cool. Yeah, very cool. Nice. there's some sales on, if you wanna go to Stellar, this is through the events calendar, but if you go to the events calendar.com/stellar sale, you'll be able to see that they have, a sale on the events calendar.

But if you scroll down, you'll be able to see that, Loads of other stuff on the Stellar brand. So for example, things like cadence and learn dash and give and solid and iconic and what have you. That's all on sale. I think it's 30% at the moment. It's got you got one more day if you'll make use of that.

Also, never use this company, but there's a company here called WP Expo wpx, and then po, they've got 55% off. So if you wanna go to them, wpx po po.com, you can make use of that. And the last one we'll probably be able to fit in today, despite the fact that I had loads more that I wanted to talk about is this one.

Back to ai. I am afraid nothing to do with WordPress. Google, who I think are probably, is it just me or does it feel like Google are about to leap ahead a little bit in this space? It feels like they've been a fairly. Quiet, benign force in the background, but it seems like a lot of people are using their products now.

And a lot of talk about Gemini in the way that there wasn't a year ago, they've launched a new vibe coding app called Opal. And the reason I thought this was quite interesting was this interface that they've got for it. so you're gonna chat with it and then you will be able in Opal to break it down and it what is that kind of thing?

It's got like a flow diagram or something like that, isn't it? Like a process. Yeah. Yeah. And, and you're gonna be able to interact with each part and connect each part up to all these other different bits and pieces. I know that for me, this is of probably of no interest, but there we go.

Google have launched this new thing called Opal and I'm sure it'll get very many people very excited. And funny how much it looks like those kids coding programs. Yeah. Drag crop. Yeah. That's where you'd lean though, right? Wouldn't that be what you'd, if you wanted to just take on the total novice and dominate, can you imagine how big the market for an actually credible, my grandmother can use it.

AI is, it must be. Must be trillions of dollars. if you could build something to switch your lights on when you left the house, or if you could We, we thought that, yeah. Home mode automation saw, boom, wait till, yeah. Wait till you can actually start to actually code this stuff. Actually do it berry pie or something.

Yeah. But also just I don't know, look at my bank account and tell me if I've spent too much this week, or, I don't know. Tell me where my kids are, the answer. The answer to that is always yes. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's an easy one. Yeah. Return. Yes, mark charge 20 a month. You don't need AI to tell you that.

Okay. that's the, okay, that, therefore is gonna be my job for this week. I'm gonna build the AI that always says yes to everything. Only one question is left. So my, my task this week is to build that AI product, but also to write to the person selling email addresses. Yes. See if I can get something fun out of them.

I think that's it. I'm sorry for not raising all the articles. Was there any that I missed that you thought, oh, darn it, I really wanted to talk about that one. If there was, say it now 'cause we've got like 30 seconds. No. Okay, perfect. I didn't see any of those. But the one thing, massive report came out saying that, something like 40 to 50% of all web traffic is, bots.

[01:29:43] Jesse Friedman: and, that's before ai. Wow. Something, to think about it. I think it's gonna, I think it's gonna seep into everything else we're doing, but especially in the marketing realm, your Google Analytics reports and things like that, I think you're gonna have to start to look at 'em from a different.

Perspective of the different lens there. 40% of what if you just took like a million hits on any random website? 40, 40%. Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting report. I'll share it with you so you can, yeah, I'd love that for next. I'll pop it on the show next week. That sounds really interesting. Yeah, I guess that trend is only set to continue with ai.

[01:30:18] Nathan Wrigley: last week we were talking about. And, just this kind of idea, like a creative commons license kind of thing for saying I do not want my stuff to be scraped. And if you do scrape it, I wanna be paid for it. So we'll see if any of those kind of endeavors take off. It suddenly got bright here. I, if you've noticed, I'm now in heaven.

it's come very, bright indeed. that's it. That's because you've been enlightened on ai. Thank you. This will never happen. Yeah. I will never be enlightened on ai, but I am slightly less curmudgeonly than I was a few weeks ago. And I'm glad that I used the word curmudgeonly. It's been far too long.

there we go. Might wanna just dive in. It sounds like it's just delaying the inevitable. Yeah. No, I'm, have you seen my hair color? It's fully gray. I reckon I can get And you have nothing to lose. I, yeah. but also e equally, I'm so close to the end that, I can maybe just sneak on her as one of those people that don't need it in the same way that, my grandmother might not have a mobile phone.

She's fine. It's totally all right with her. and on that bombshell. Let's leave it there. It only says, all I need to do really is go around the houses and say thank you. So first of all, thank you to Mark that one, this mark down here, or Karen, thank you for having me, or whatever. And this mark over here, thank you very much for joining us.

Really appreciate it. And for this mark over here who's goes by the name of Jesse, not too sure about that. we only have Marx here usually. Just so that Jesse, next time you, come back and also thank you to you, the people who made the comments. I really appreciate it. of course, Elliot, I'm so sorry we didn't do it any justice.

We just run out of time. I had managed to just waffle on about AI instead. I apologize about that. We'll be back next week. I think it's the final show before Word camp us, but we'll definitely be back next week. Only the humiliating hand wave thing to do now. I hope that, oh, look. You're all just like totally primed.

Oh, there we go. That's perfect. we'll see you next time. See you next week, and if you three wanna stick around for a little chat, that would be quite nice. We'll see you next time. Take it easy. Bye-bye. Bye bye.