This Week in WordPress #344

[00:00:03] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for This Week in WordPress, episode number. 344 entitled IAATWD - (It's acronyms all the way down). It was recorded on Monday, the 11th of August, 2025. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and I am joined today by, not three, but four fabulous guests.

We have Rob Cairns, we have Jess Frick, we have Dave Gray, and Jonathan Bossinger.

We're a WordPress podcast, so we do spend an awful lot of time talking about WordPress. The bits and pieces that we talk about today are about the block editor. We talk about some possible things which might drop inside the block editor in the near future. Blocks that in the past have been mooted, but then neglected.

WP Tavern. What should happen over there? Should it go up for sale? Do you like the state of WordPress journalism?

What does it take to become a successful WordPress plugin vendor? WebTNG have some thoughts over there?

We spend a lot of time digging into some content which Jonathan brings to our attention, including his upcoming presentation at WordCamp US. We talk about the WordCamp US schedule, and how that event is going to be a little bit different in the future.

Groundhogg have been pulled from the WordPress repo. Why and what can they do about it?

We spend quite a bit of time talking about Divi and how popular it is, and so much more.

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

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That was slightly more successful than last week. We actually got to the end of the yes, got to the end of the two minutes. that two minutes is always a bit of a puzzle to me. I never know what to do with myself. And so I put Twitter open or X open and I watched a puffer fish defending itself against a turtle, which is, which is profound.

It's really interesting watching the puffer fish inflate. There you go. I prefer absolutely nothing. This is this week in WordPress, episode number 344. That's rather a lot, although it's not 600, that number will become important to you later. During the episode, I'm joined as always, by a panel of experts.

There are, as you can see, normally this, this screen is ever so symmetrical. You know, there's two here and two there, whichever way you cut it. But we've got five of us today, me plus four others. And so let's go round the houses and say hi. Over there through Dave Gray's head is Jess Frick. Hello, Jess.

How you doing? I am fabulous, Nathan. How are you? Yeah, good. We're gonna, I'm gonna read Jess's bio and then we're gonna find out a little bit more about, the things that have changed. Actually, we're not gonna read Jess's bio 'cause I don't have a bio for Jess. Oh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, it's weird. Let me, let me just, let me just refresh if it's there.

No, it's got overwritten by somebody else, so it's okay. Don't worry. I'm gonna hand it over to you and you can give us your bio with your own. Oh, I would, I would love to. we're gonna be kind of pompous here and read in third person. Jess is currently in stealth mode until tomorrow. Join her at this year's Word camp US contributor day, where she will co-lead the hosting tables activities.

[00:04:35] Jess Frick: Jess is also an iced tea connoisseur rescue dog and cat mama and proud member of the post status and WP Minute communities. Welcome Jess. Yeah, thank, thank you so much. Just like a pro. And as you were saying it, I looked and next to your name are those exact words. I, for some reason was looking at the wrong part of the screen, so, apologies about that.

[00:04:56] Nathan Wrigley: I could have done that. However, you did it much better than me, until tomorrow. So things have changed for you. Let, lemme just start again. Jess is currently in stealth mode until tomorrow. That tells me. So today, Monday, the 11th of August, something comes to an end. Yes. And then tomorrow the 12th, something new is beginning.

I think you're under some sort of embargo or raps. You're not saying anything about it just yet though. No, it's okay. It's gonna be a wonderful, brilliant surprise. I can't wait to tell everybody. I have been working for this other company for a month now. Oh. I absolutely love it. of course, I also love Pressable, so like ev everything is good there.

[00:05:36] Jess Frick: I wasn't running from anything. I was running two something. Oh. And it was an absolutely incredible opportunity that I just couldn't say no to and I can't wait to tell you all about it. That's so curious. Doing doing work for an entire month and nobody knows who you are working for, that's pretty cool.

[00:05:51] Nathan Wrigley: it's so cool. Are you working for like MI five or the NSA or something like that? You know, you sort of got spy or something. Yeah, look at your face. If I was, I couldn't tell you exactly. Yeah. Okay. It's just the same. okay. So thank you so much Jess for joining us and apologies about the butchered intro.

So if we, if we just come back from Jess back over to towards me. In between Jess and I, it is Dave Gray. Hello Dave. Good afternoon. Good. Can you spell your surname for me, please? GREY. Yeah. much to my shame. I released the pod. Well, we'll get to that in a minute, but I misspelled Dave's name, on the WP Builds website.

And, it's sh it's shocking isn't that you had one job, Wrigley couldn't quite get it right, so apologies about that. However, obviously he hasn't thrown in, you know, put the bath water out with the baby because he is back. Dave was a recent guest on the WP Builds podcast. His bio said, where we talked about his plugins aimed at fellow web designers, namely Administrator Toolkit and Nag Me Knot.

We'll get to that in a minute. He recently launched Click Talk. Again, we'll get to that in a minute. A time tracker to help WordPress site builders make more money by correctly billing their clients. Thank you Dave, and I appreciate you. you coping with my inability to spell things. who else have we got down here?

I, I was, I was gonna say in the second tier, but the minute that thought came out, I think, oh, that's bad. Exactly. If it's second, if it's second tier to Jess, I'll take it. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Oh, it's too nice. but down there on the screen at least. Anyway, let's go from, left to right. So, Jonathan Boer, first off.

Hello, Jonathan. How are you doing? Hello. I'm well, Nathan. How are you? Yeah, good. It's been a, it's been a healthy long time since Jonathan has been on, but, here's Jonathan's buyer. Jonathan Boer is a developer, educator, writer, and open source advocate from Cape Town South Africa, with a career spanning roles such as development lead, senior technical writer and developer educator.

Jonathan is passionate about developer tooling, developer communities, and creating, educating, sorry. And in creating engaging educational content. For developers and I asked him what his job title was and he said it was a developer advocate. And I said, what's the difference between that and a d developer relation and the whole thing?

It's like a whole thing of mystery and intrigue. All turtles. Yes, turtles all the way. thank you for joining us. Appreciate it pr Brilliant. No problem. And, and can I just add that bio is what happens when you feed your about page to an AI tool. Oh, don't tell me though. Like seriously, an intriguing question.

Are you happy with that? Did it spit out a pretty good job? I don't think I've ever been happy with any of my bios, those that I've written myself or those that I've had written by others or those that I've had generated by ai. So it's okay. It's less icky than writing about yourself though, isn't it?

Imagine for example, that you had to come on a podcast show and introduce yourself. That would just be so icky. Well, this way, oh, at least this way. I can blame the AI tool as opposed to I. That's right. Yeah, that's right. Okay. And thank you Jonathan. And finally, is Rob cs. Good morning, Rob. I guess it's morning where you are.

[00:09:09] Rob Cairns: Oh yeah. Brighton early Nathan. Bright early. Bright early. It looks like he's in New York, but I think that's merely a background. Rob is the founder and digital chief digital strategist of Stunning Digital Marketing. He's a WordPress security expert, and he's also the creator and host of the SDM Show podcast.

[00:09:25] Nathan Wrigley: More of that in a minute. In his spare time, he reads, watch Sport, goes to music shows, and he says he likes Coldplay, and spends time with his partner. Tiz, thank you for joining us. Good. So there is our panel for today's show. We'll get onto the bits and pieces that the guests have brought, plus some WordPress stuff in just a moment.

But first of all, couple of bits of housekeeping. I do this each week, so if you watch it, you know you can probably tune out for the next 30 seconds or so. But the best place, if you want to drag your friends, colleagues, relations, Guinea pigs, pufferfish, or turtles into this conversation, send them to wp builds.com/live.

Wp builds.com/live over there. You've got, the video itself and Google YouTube comments on the right. So you need to be logged into a, Google account if you want to comment there. If you're on a mobile device, they'll be underneath the player. But if you don't like Google or you just don't wanna log into a Google account, if you click inside the video player, top right is a little black, button says live chat.

You don't need to be logged into anything to do that. Just drop your name and. The comments will appear, and if you make some comments, we'll try to put them on the screen. Honestly, it keeps this podcast going. It's great when the comments drop in. So I really appreciate that. WP builds.com/live and, have we got any comments in so far?

Yeah, we have a few. That's really nice. Andrew Palmer, AP Hello. 28 degrees Centigrade in Royal Ascot. That's pretty nice. And that's actually a bit hot. and he carries on. Jess has a secret and she's ain't telling anyone I I get from that, that Andrew. Does Andrew know or something? He's just, no, but he has been asking me at least once a week.

[00:11:03] Jess Frick: Oh, has he? Okay. Yeah, he's, he's excited. The weight is nearly over. I know. Okay. Michelle Ettes joining us from Sunny Rochester, where it's 26 degrees. high near 90 degrees Fahrenheit later today. Thank you, Michelle, for joining us. She's often on, did some hearts just appear on Jess? Good. What the hell?

[00:11:25] Nathan Wrigley: How did, did I do that? No. Oh, it's you. Oh, hang on. Oh, no. I switched all that nonsense off. Okay. I, mine's not working. Yeah, it's not working. For Jonathan over, thank you, Michelle, for joining us. Really appreciate it. Dave. Done in the uk. Good afternoon from sunny London, 29 degrees Centigrade. Starting to get a bit unbearable at those numbers, isn't it, Dave?

Marcus Burnett joining us from Florida, Sonny, Florida. Good morning. He says about a five minute walk from Jess. So great to see you all start another wonderful week. What would be hysterical, Marcus, and I'm not expecting you to do it. It would be kind of funny if you walked round to Jess's house.

Knocks on it. He just pops over. Yeah, just pops over. I have a cup of tea. And you could join the show as well. That would be brilliant. some chap called Jonathan Boser. Never heard of him. He's, he's saying, hello everyone. Marcus. Good morning. that's the same thing. It's the same message and, oh. Oh, that's it.

It's gone. The friendship is broken. Andrew Palmer, some friend. yeah. Oh my God. She told us, Andrew before the, before the show started, she, she told, we all know where she's working. We don't, she didn't actually tell us. They don't, Andrew. We didn't, don't believe. Don't believe it. Jess, I believe Andrew.

It's not true, I believe. Yeah. Okay. So, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Keep the comments coming and it really does make the show go forward as you've seen few bits of housekeeping, if that's all right with you. Well, even if it's not all right with you, it's coming. this is our website. It's wp builds.com.

If you fancy keeping up with what we do, put your email address into this field and hit this subscribe button. We'll send you a couple of emails a week, one on a Tuesday. We're capturing this as basically a video, but then I strip all the video out and send it out as a podcast episode on a Tuesday. So that's the first email you'll get and it comes out at this stupidly thoughtless time of 7:00 AM in the UK it's, it's good in no.

More or less, no part of the world. But anyway, there you go. 7:00 AM UK time. It will drop. So tomorrow morning. So keep an eye out for that. But also we do a podcast on a Thursday, which involves interviewing somebody. And so we'll let you know about that. Jonathan, you were gonna say it's nine, it's 9:00 AM Cape Town Time, so it's, oh, it's perfect for those people in Cape Town.

I always have the Cape Town audience in mind when I You go, you're doing it just, yeah. It's always the, the very forefront of my thought. so put your email address into there and we'll let you know about those two things. This is our archive and something new this week. This has never happened. the podcast episode, obviously we drop one a week on a Thursday, and each week we obviously increment the numbers up by one.

We're on 432. And the, the bit that's weird is that the guest. On that podcast is also, well, he is there. Look, he's right on this show. So that's a bit, that's a bit weird. so that wasn't designed, but it's very nice and we'll talk about that in just a moment. by the way, I'm trying this out. I don't know if I'm gonna regret this or not.

I think I might, but I'm gonna do it anyway. If you would like to be a guest on this show, there's a URL for you. It is wp builds.com/the acronym for this week in WordPress. So it's W-T-W-I-W. So wp builds.com. Slash TWIW If you wanna be a guest on this show, then fill out this form. And, and I will think about it.

'cause I'm, I just, it just occurred to me, you know, I have a lot of people that I know, so I contact them. A lot of people that I meet at events, so I communicate with them. And then last week there was a, or a couple of weeks ago, there was a piece on the show, from, web Squadron, on YouTube. Yep. And that they were, they kind of made the point that maybe things like this show are a bit of an exclusive bubble.

So I thought, well, what can I do about that? And that form is my endeavor to maybe open it up a little bit. So if you, if you want to come on this show, there are a couple of caveats. Firstly, you have to be willing to introduce yourself. I mean, we've seen that, you know, like quite literally. Yeah. You also have to be able to talk in English and not be mute though.

If you come on the show and you're not prepared to open your mouth, that's. Probably a bit of a red flag. Yeah. Thanks Dave. I like it. he did like one of those, what are they called, those people? My artist. Yeah. One of those Mime. Yeah. The, my artist. That's it. and also you have to be into WordPress, like to an unhealthy extent.

If you just merely a bit into WordPress, then it's no good. You gotta be really, really into Word. Show us. Go on, do us the T-shirt. Look, he's got a wow that I'm far too into WordPress T-shirt. That was Dave grave. Only clean closing at the moment. Yeah. Yeah. I haven't quite, yeah, look, two of our guests are wearing WordPress swag.

You see, you see how it works. So fill out the form if you are. Yeah, exactly. Jonathan's just got loads of tickets and things from behind his head, from WordPress events as well. So that's the criteria. So if that. If that, if you satisfy that, go and fill out that form and we'll see if we can get you on the show.

There's no exclusion in terms of geography and anything, but we, we film it live at this time, which is 2:00 PM UK time. So, you know, if you're gonna be in bed at that time, maybe, maybe don't put that on. Anyway. We'll see if I, so see if I regret that. And then we'll come back to this. This is the most recent episode with Dave.

As we, as I mentioned, Dave and I got on the podcast and, chatted about all of the different bits and pieces that he has been doing. And so Dave, let's segue into that straight away. Actually, let's make that the first thing. this never really got a mention, but you've got a, a brand new, little, little project going on.

It's called Click Talk. It's obviously reached version one. What's going on with click to What have you built here? Yeah, it didn't exist when we had that chat. Yeah. That was like eight days ago or, that's very cool. Well, it was basically a very, very early version of that bit, but I couldn't just finished it off and we got back from sort of a summer holiday on Okay.

[00:17:18] Dave Grey: Yes. Basically it's kind of usual trying to scratch my own itch on that side. I had a new e-commerce site project to start on and I thought, I've got no idea how long this is actually gonna take on that side. So I kind of quickly threw this thing together to kind of keep track of things and thought everyone likes to own their own data.

So rather than having as a SAS on that side, because we got maintain maintaining costs and whatnot, stick it inside the dashboards. So when you log in, you can either start an entry on there or from your admin in the top corner, start it on that side, select what you're doing, and then yeah, just keep track of things on that side so that when you've got build your clients, it's all inside their individual sites.

So it's kind of own their own data and you can kind of, yeah. Hopefully correctly track your own time to say, you know what to charge people. Nice. That, yeah, it's such a quick turnaround as well. So honestly, we were, what was it? It was, honestly, it was about eight days ago that we spoke something like that for that podcast.

[00:18:09] Nathan Wrigley: Something along those lines. Yeah, A week or two back on that side. Yeah. So you've thrown it together very, very quickly. So this lives inside the dashboard. Does it? So if you're in maintaining a client website, I don't know, you're updating something on a homepage. You just click go, it starts timing. When you finish, you click stop, and then it collates all of that for you.

Pretty much. Yeah, yeah. As simple is is on the tin. Yeah. I'm gonna mention, you can probably Google it at this point, but you, Dave's website is our wp plugins.com. So the word our as in OUR, our wp plugins.com. And then, hyphenated click talk time. Tracker, but you'll probably be able to Google that at some point.

I would've thought so. Bravo, for that. It feels like a real missed marketing opportunity though, to not do like our, like HOUR. Oh, yeah. I see. No, I just need to buy the misspelling on that bit, but yeah. Yes, you absolutely do. Yeah, that's a good one. Well, spotted Jess, I, I honestly, I just. I co completely avoided that joke as well.

I didn't even see it. Brilliant. I love stuff like that. so that's his thing that he's brought to us today. We'll switch over swiftly to, some of the things that Jonathan has bought. Now, the first thing I need to mention is that Jonathan is much cleverer than I am. and because of that, much of this I won't even understand, but I'm gonna put it on the screen and hopefully he can explain it in poor man's tubs.

So the first one is this. Now the URL is impossibly long, I think, but it's playground wordpress.net. Oh no it's not. I guess the instance is the bit at the bit at the end, and then it's, so playground wordpress.net/php-playground html. I dunno if that will get you to this, but we'll see. what is it?

What are we looking at? So I just wanna mention that my intelligence has nothing to do with anything else other than there are just certain areas that I'm interested in, and this has happens to be one of them, but I don't, I don't buy that. I just think you're really bright and very humble. If you've, if you've been following WordPress playground, if you haven't heard about it, it's something that was launched, I think it was last year at WordCamp Europe.

[00:20:12] Jonathan Bossenger: It was something that, a contributor by the name of Adam, Zelensky, I think his, his name is, or Zelman or so like that. Yeah, that's exactly right. Yep. Yeah, I'm not gonna get the pronunciation right, but he, he launched it, it's basically a way to run WordPress in a browser using something called web assembly.

and the playground team recently launched this, this PHP playground, which essentially uses workplace playground under the hood, but it allows you to run any PHP code. Inside of your browser without having to set anything up and get going. now if you're interested in, in PHP as a WordPress developer, which you probably are, you might know that the PHP homepage or the PHP language homepage, they recently implemented a similar solution in their documentation.

So when you're looking at PHP code, you can run the code in your browser, see the output, see the results, and it's a really cool way to learn the language without having to set up local development environments and local installs and all this kind of thing. so this is a way that you can essentially run either standard PHP or if you want to include the WordPress WP Load, file, and then run any kind of WordPress related PHP.

Nice. So you could use it to test a function that you're working on. You could use it to play around with a WP Query object. it's really kind of. Another example of what playground is doing, a lot of which is experimenting with things, kind of throwing them out there and seeing what's possible. but yeah, it's something to check out.

You can change your PHP version, you can change your WordPress version. So you could use it to test functions against older versions of PHP or newer versions of PHP or WordPress or whatever. So if you're a developer and you're looking for like an environment where you can just run some code and see what happens, go and check this out and, and yeah, let the team know what you think.

[00:21:47] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just say, or rather ask, does this have any kind of persistence to it? In other words, if I close the browser, does it kind of disappear in a way? I don't know. You're not sure? Okay. okay. Well, I'm gonna assume that it does, given the nature of where we're at with playground, I know that it's entirely possible to make playground persistent.

Mm-hmm. You actually, you did pronounce, Adam Zelensky name perfectly, by the way. You got it exactly right. And, playground, if you haven't used it, is voodoo. there's no other word for it. It just shouldn't be possible. And yet there it is. WordPress entirely in a browser. Absolutely phenomenal. So there we go.

that's WordPress. PHP Playground. Go there, test out your functions and PHP code. It's so new. There isn't even a post anywhere about it. It was just mentioned in a meeting last week. Yep, yep, yep. so you got the, you got the code on one side and obviously the output once you've run it on the other side.

So go and have a play. The next thing you brought was this one. And honestly, this is really beyond my can to understand. So this is, over on GitHub. it's the WordPress repository and it's under the Abilities API, the title of it is Implement Service Side Registry for Abilities. API, I guess sing.

This is, you know, to do with the recent announcement. I can't remember who pushed this out recently. It might have been the AI team. I'm not entirely sure. Tell me more. That's exactly correct. That's exactly correct. So if you've been following the news, the WordPress news lately, the WordPress project launched the core AI team.

[00:23:16] Jonathan Bossenger: About a month and a half ago or so. and then about two to three weeks ago, that team published their four AI building blocks for WordPress Post. and it covers the three main projects they're gonna be focusing on. And, and the fourth one on that list is an experimental plugin that'll bring all of those three projects together.

this is one of those three projects. It's something called the Abilities API, the original, the original name for it, was, was called the Features API, but it was changed recently to Abilities API and essentially what the Abilities API does, it's actually has nothing really to do with AI yet. but it's a way to register common functionality within WordPress.

So one of the sort of problems with WordPress as a 20 odd year old project is there isn't a standardized way to register some kind of ability and then make it available to something like the command pallets or rest API endpoint or an AI tool. The abilities API is essentially the goal of the abilities API is to make the sort of standard service size registry.

one of the reasons it came about is because we needed a standardized way to be able to talk to LMS to be able to integrate things like LLM Chatbots or, coding tools or whatever the case may be. so this is the first step towards making the Abilities API functional it's being, developed as a canonical plugin.

So once this portal request is merged, you'll be able to install it on your WordPress site. You'll be able to register abilities and then fetch those abilities to be able to use them elsewhere. and then it goes sort of hand in hand with something like MCP or Model Context protocol, which allows you to connect your WordPress sites, your AI tools, or your desktop AI tools or whatever the case may be.

So if you don't. Really, if you weren't really following this along, you won't know what this is all about. but if you're interested in the intersection of WordPress and ai, this is an exciting step forward into making these features or abilities within WordPress standardized, in a standardized registry that AI tools can interact with.

and this actually ties into the next item, so if you wanna pop over to, oh, he is good. He's, he's got it all going on. Look at this, I'm actually presenting a workshop at WordCamp US about how to integrate your local WordPress environment, or any WordPress install really. With these abilities and connect them to something called MCP Model Context Protocol, to be able to essentially, quote unquote, talk directly to your WordPress site from your AI desktop tool or your co coding tool, or whatever the case may be.

so if it's something you're interested in, come and you're coming to Workcamp us, come to the workshop. I'll show you how it all works and how it all fits together. and hopefully you'll work away from that workshop with a better understanding of what's possible and what you can do with it in an, in a, in a breathtaking example of histrionics.

[00:26:01] Nathan Wrigley: Last week we featured the, the blog post. I think there were three or four bound together. So it was, it was about the AI team, it was about the abilities, API and various other things. They all dropped at the same time. These, these posts that were all interconnected. So the histrionics bit was, I said I thought that in the eight plus years that I've been doing this show each week, I think this abilities API is possibly the most.

Important thing. Mm-hmm. That's happened. I dunno if I'm kind of overdoing that a little bit, but it felt like. What what you've done essentially is, is, is tell anything else that's not WordPress. WordPress can do this thing. Yes. And this thing. And this thing as well, and I don't know, it can publish posts, it can delete things, it can add users, it can create custom post types and.

In order to make that work, everybody's had to build their own solution for that. Whereas now there'll be this common framework. And so the, the, the biggest, quickest drop in for that, I suppose, is ai. Mm-hmm. And you'll be able to speak in natural language and say, create me a post type with featured image about, I know it's about dogs.

I'd like it to be scheduled on the 14th of the month. whatever. You get the point. Mm-hmm. In other words, you've given it a bunch of tasks. And in order to do that, it has to know what the parts are that WordPress would need to do to achieve that. And this provides that framework. I, I could be wrong about that, but hopefully Mark Wilkinson, he said, what is an ability?

Hopefully that gives you an example. That's a really good explanation. So if we think about the, all the things that WordPress can do, you know, let's talk about creating posts, creating pages, creating menus. if we talk about, sending emails, those aren't all. Features or abilities that WordPress has.

[00:27:44] Jonathan Bossenger: But at the moment, as you were saying, there's no standardized way for WordPress to say, these are all the things that I can do. And then be able to plug into those things. So for example, if we talk about the rest API, instead of building just the rest API endpoints that then hook into these core abilities, we had to build a whole platform essentially to say, well, when somebody hits this rest API endpoint to create a post, it's gotta go and do all this code.

The idea behind the abilities API is once you have all of your abilities available and registered within WordPress core, number one, now you can hook anything into that. AI just happens to be one part of that. Right? It's just like, for example, yeah, if we use the Create a Post example, if you have an ability that is create post and create post has certain things that you want to have titled that, and you can send that to the, the internal, API function that creates a post.

Now you can have in the command pallets that, that we're moving towards. You can have a create post command pallets, sorry, command and all that needs to do is find an ability called Create Post, send it the data that it needs to send and not worry about what's happening in the background. So you can have command pilot that do that, but you can also have an AI tool, what's called a Model MCP tool that does exactly the same thing that sends exactly the same data.

Finds the ability and the ability handles what the data, where the data needs to go and what it needs to do and how it needs to work. So it's really the standardized way of all the things that we're used to doing within WordPress, be it from a user point of view, be it from a developer point of view, are standardized or formalized set.

You know, they all have the same inputs, they all have the same outputs, and how it works underneath the hood, we don't care about, we just interface with those abilities. It's pretty cool. So obviously that sort of abstracted layer, that means that you know not only AI but your, oh, I dunno. Your a SaaS tool of choice, whatever that may be.

[00:29:38] Nathan Wrigley: S Yeah. Right, right, right. Anything that needs to interact with your WordPress site just needs to hit those registered abilities and say, I want to do X, and this is the data, and it handles the rest. And then it goes even a step further. If you're building a plugin, you can register abilities for your plugin.

[00:29:56] Jonathan Bossenger: you know, in, in, in Dave's, talk, for example, there are probably certain things that happen. He can register those abilities and then people can hook into them. it just, it just opens up. You can tell I'm excited. I'm talking really fast and jumping up and down. Great. Just opens up a whole world of, of possibilities.

[00:30:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So hopefully now Mark, Mark Wilkinson. You've got an idea of what that is. He, he says it sounds exciting, but it also sounds a little bit from his point of view, like it might just be the rest. API, it's, that's for another day, I think. but there we go. We could do another podcast about that. Yeah, there's a whole other podcast there.

But very exciting. I realize that Jonathan and I have been talking, so I'm just gonna open it up to Dave, Jess, and Rob, if they've got anything they wanna say about the bits that we threw on the screen from Jonathan there, anybody just dipping or not? We'll just move on. Plugin site sounds quite cool because I'm already thinking I could get like click talk and admin talk and things to talk to each other and send stuff through and something happens on there.

[00:30:48] Dave Grey: You register your time on that bit. So, yeah. Nice. You're quite looking forward to that bit. Yep, yep, yep. Jess, Rob, anything to that? I just wanna say my boy is wicked smart. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You see? Yeah, he is actually quite clever. Wow. Wow. That's a deep dive. Yeah. Yeah. Oh wow. so there's a whole load of other comments that have come in.

[00:31:09] Nathan Wrigley: I apologize. well actually Sue, have a quick look through them. By the way, I expect Marcus many. Marcus is only a minute away. Jess, just be mindful of that. He's I doubt he's actually coming, but you never know. good morning, say various people. So, Ryan influence WP saying good morning. Yeah, right.

Thanks. Ahmed is saying hello from Dakar in Bangladesh. Very nice to have you with us saying hi to Jess as well. That's really nice. James Lau is joining us saying good morning. Dave done has put a few comments in there. oh. nice bit of community news drop in there. Ahed is saying that he's, organizing Word Camp Dakar after waiting for six long years.

Is that, say the Dakar Word camp hasn't been on for six long years, or your involvement hasn't been for six years? Either way. Very nice. That's kind of cool. don't forget. Oh, so this is if you, you wanna fill out that form and come on the show? Yes. You also have to do these slightly humiliating hand wave of death, at the end and give Nathan all your money.

I wish. that would be nice. are we not doing that anymore? Oh, okay. Yeah, I was told it was half million. I'll reluctantly bring it back just for this show. Jess, you'll drop ears Percentage to 20%. Yeah. Yeah. Boer is a genius. Don't let him deny it. There you go. Elliot Salby just down the road from us is Join Yeah.

From me is joining us. hello. From Patricia and Hey, Patricia. Hey, Annika Ann. As well. Who, by the way, I don't know about this for any other WordPress user. Anne apparently has an acronym. It's a MBI love it. so I'm joined this week by, by dg, by JF, by RC and jb I I'm liking it. Hers is like catchier though.

[00:32:54] Jess Frick: 'cause it's like you down with a MB. Yeah. That is way more, yeah. Absolutely right. That's way more catchy. So back to the, the project at hand. so we're now talking about the abilities API truly making WordPress, a platform as well as the best CMS out there. That's from, that's from ap. Oh, oh, he's done it to himself.

[00:33:11] Nathan Wrigley: Look, he's Acronymed himself. He's ap. That's brilliant. It's on the screen. Jonathan is a genius. See, that's two, three strikes and you're out, Jonathan, you've got no, and somebody else goes. Jonathan's a genius. Then we've got three people. Can somebody fits a bigger door into my office because to walk outta the,

I just watched a video about a puffer fish. It's just like that. Jonathan is a genius. Invite him to a talk. And you just signed yourself up for an amazing thanks, judge. Question. and you got, yeah. Look, it's all comments, nice comments all the way down. Tcho Tcho ISS joining us, from Prot Progress Planner.

Hello. Hey, Tako. Oh, oh. He says I was on my way to Jess's but got stuck in the first day of school traffic and turned back next time. That would be great. JB is a genius there. It's outta,

I love it. The shows just. Such fun. I love doing this show. Okay, so that was all the different bits and pieces that, Jonathan bought to bear. We're gonna stay on the last screen. Well, sort of, so there's Jonathan's talk. If you head into, word Camp us there's obviously Jonathan's bits and pieces, but during the course of the last period, last week or so, the entire.

Schedule has just dropped. So, you know, it's the usual thing. You can go around and, see what it is that you'd like to talk. There's a few little gaps here and there, TBA and so on, but most of it, 99, 90 5% of it, is there. And a neat little feature on the word camp US one, which I actually think is pretty cool.

You can sort of star things as you go around and, you know, ones that you kind of like the look at, I probably should find Jonathan's and click it just to, you know, swell his head some more. but yeah, there it is. How are we gonna see you there, Nathan? I'm gonna be there. Yeah. Yeah. But usually Jess, what happens is I end up in some sort of little cavern, in a, a corner somewhere.

Well, no, no, no. With my, with my interview. So at the minute I'm already lining up some interviews and dare. Say it. I haven't yet asked Jonathan. but I will, I'll ask Jonathan. we do, I do interviews at the event for the tavern, which we'll get to in a minute actually. And, and so normally I'm kind of tucked away, but I will be there.

So I'm kind of looking forward to that. I'll be really nice. That's, if you remember, that's actually where we met at Word Camp Europe in Yes. I think it was Berlin when you were I have tried very hard to expunge that from my memory, but, it was No, no, it was, yeah, you're right. I do remember. That was lovely.

I I I remembered you though, because I had de dealt with you for Casto support. Yes. At some point when we were doing, you were doing the podcasting over there, so I, I seemed to recall that we'd been, chatting around. Anyway, there's the schedule. Go and check it out. It's, it's Nathan, kind of. Nathan, yeah.

[00:36:02] Jess Frick: sorry to interrupt, but it looks like we've got an exclusive here. Oh. Andrew Palmer is dropping some previously unknown information where that the TBA is going to be veto. The Oh. Oh, okay. Okay. Right. So Hold, hold the phone. Wait, wait a second. Which TBA heard it? Your first folks. Okay. You heard it?

[00:36:20] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. It's the, it's the one exclusive We do won a decade and then there it was. so one of the TBAs is gonna be veto peg. From Terin, perhaps this one. Then maybe there's more TBA. Oh, thank you, Andrew for telling us that. Yeah, there's a couple here, but it sounds like Veto has obviously confirmed his spot to talk.

Yeah, that's nice. Bit of an exclusive thing. So it's a bit different. This one though, 'cause you'll notice there's a contra day, there's a showcase day, there's a Thursday and a Friday. So Thursday and Friday as you might expect, contradict, well, I'll come back to that in a minute. Showcase day is kind of interesting because I think Showcase Day last year was a bit of a success.

Showcase day is a bit more like show and tell, like here's how to achieve a thing and, and, and, and. My understanding was that that was very, very popular. The other thing to mention about the contributor day is that they're, they're doing a few things slightly differently. Do you know what Annoyingly, whatever that was, has gone out of my head.

However, I have the antidote to that because if you go to the, I am segue master this week, if you go to, and I've also got a big head, if you go building the bigger doors. Yes, that's right. I need a bigger door too. Me and Jonathan are gonna have special doors at World Camp us. If you go to the WP Tavern website and you click on episode number 180, I talk to a really, really genuinely lovely person, Carla Campos, who is one of the, lead organizers for the event.

And, explains what that role involves, honestly, how, just how much work is involved. That was the lasting message I got. if you attend any event like this, please go and applaud these people because she's given up somewhere in the region of about 30 hours a week. At the minute. There's absolutely no quid pro quo.

You know, you don't get any remuneration for that. It's just purely altruistic. but also she talks about the way that the event is gonna be different. So the fact that the c the the day that I just mentioned over here, the, the showcase day and the contra day, how they were gonna be slightly different and I can't remember, there's a few gimmicks, including, one of the things I can remember is it's.

Gonna be live, so you can participate in Contra Day Live, so you don't have to attend for that. There's gonna be like Zoom phone ins, if you like, for various different tables. But anyway, go and go and check that out. So that's, I do, I do remember when they were looking for table leads, they mentioned they were doing it in more of a hackathon file.

You know, you've hit note on the, I'm not sure. I'm not sure what that means, but that's what I remember reading. Well, I can tell you as the table lead for the hosting table, we aren't planning on doing like a Zoom call or anything like that, but we'll probably open like a Google Hangout and anybody can come and hang out with us.

[00:39:14] Jess Frick: Okay. but we're going to be working asynchronously over Slack with people who can't attend. and we're also hoping that a bunch of people come sit with us. I'm co, I'm co-leading with Zuni of rocket.net and we're going to work through the hosting handbook and a variety of other, testing needs. So.

Quick plug. If you haven't picked a table, come sit with us. Yeah, nice, nice, nice. But one thing I did wanna call out, and I love that Carla, specifically called it out, was our dear friend Michelle's initiative of Trail buddies. She did. She did. Do you wanna explain what that is? I could do it, but I'm happy for you to go for it.

[00:39:54] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So, WP Trail Bodies is kind of like, I don't think it's bound to the event. What, what I mean by that is it's not, I don't think it's an official part of it, but it kind of is an official part of it. If you are attending your, let's say, first WordPress event and you are feeling like maybe that's a little bit overwhelming and you would like somebody to shepherd you around and feel a little bit more like you've got a companion there from the get go, WP Trail bodies will endeavor to make that happen.

Michelle mentioned it on the show last week, but, it's just, it's just an introduction with some commitments. Like, you've gotta be able, you've got to be willing, if you are the person nominating yourself as the more experienced attendee, you've gotta be willing, obviously to talk to that person and to spend an hour with them.

And I think they mentioned having a meal or something together, just to sort of cement that experience and really make it. Meaningful. So yeah, there, there's that opportunity. and if you go to this episode in the tavern and click on this link, then you will be able to see, here we go. There's a post about it on the word camp, US website, navigating word camp with confidence.

Meet your WP Trail body and there's more information there. but yeah, Jonathan got it right. The hackathon was a part of it. So the contributor day is gonna be a bit more hackathon. And I could summarize a hackathon maybe more as having a thing with a goal in mind as opposed to just, you know, contributing for some, you know, wider project thing.

I think a hackathon could be defined simply as that, you know, you start the day with a clear aim and hopefully get to it by the end of the day. And, yeah. Okay. Anybody wanna contribute on the word camp? USE stuff? I think one of my favorite things about Contributor Day is a lot of the tech table leads will have contests over who brings the best cookies for their table.

[00:41:45] Jess Frick: Nice. And I just wanna put it out there, especially for the documentation team, who usually brings something good. that I've got all of you this year. Oh, oh, okay. Challenge. Is that a challenge? It sounds like it. It's not a challenge, it's a promise. Can I Milana? Milana? I hope you're listening. Can I just ask?

[00:42:03] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. I don't wanna know what the end product is. Gimme some of the ingredients. Let's see if it lands. What's gonna, I'm bringing, I'm bringing two variations. Okay. One is going to involve chocolate and one is going to involve oatmeal. Okay. You had me at chocolate? Yeah. Okay. Alright. I'm not saying anything else.

[00:42:20] Jess Frick: I'm just saying documentation team. You're on notice. I, I would, I would, I would like to volunteer as tribute for the judging portion of this.

[00:42:30] Nathan Wrigley: Well, Paul, you take the hard jobs.

I don't understand this comment. I love it. But Marcus, it says it's the lovely and Mika Vallet the lab. What's the lab? Yeah. Oh, a MB. Oh, oh, I'm so stupid. Oh, I'm such a donkey. Yeah, of course. That's the acronym. No, no, no. Not donkey loud, not lie. Thank you. Okay. Oh, so many comments. I'm sorry I can't keep up with them.

huge respect to the event organizers around the WordPress ecosystem. that's great. And Andrew Palmer is being called out by Tacho being the most annoying of people. maybe there's some history to that. I don't know. da da da. What else have we got? What else have we got? We got Mark West Guard joining us from WS Hey, mark.

He's gonna be there. hopefully we'll get up to some silliness as well. before that event. what else have we got? Da, da. If, if any of you guys see something in the comments that you want me to raise, then please do mention it. 'cause I, I'm sort of getting lost. There's absolutely loads of things going on here, right?

Let us move on. So exciting times if you are in the WordPress space, especially if you like listening to podcasts. Yes. here he is. It's, it's, Hey, thanks Vincent. It's episode. Not well. Okay. You can see over on the right hand side here, we're on episode number 579, and I think I'm right in saying that you are.

Maybe you've already recorded it, I don't know, or you are very soon to be recording episode number 600. So, firstly, congratulations to you. Thank you. Is that kind of milestone something that you, you, mark, do you do something different on that one? On the hundreds, I tend to uhhuh. when I, when I started it, I never had intention on doing 600 episodes.

[00:44:19] Rob Cairns: It's just mind boggling. I, yeah. I sat, I sat down at the beginning of COVID and I did an interview and I did a second interview and I did a third interview all 'cause I was bored and really bored at the time. And it, and it's just kind of morphed, six hundred's, gonna have a couple special things in it, including some words from somebody that everybody listening to the show know of, who has never said a word on the show.

Oh. So I'll leave it at that. Okay. And that, that will end the show. So I, I will not say anymore like Jess, I like surprises. So when you said that will end the show, are you saying that 600 is the final won? No, no, that, oh, I see. End the 600 episode. It's not episode. Okay. And what, and the only hint I will put out there, it is somebody who means the world to me.

So that's, ah, all I'll say. Okay. All I, all I will say. So tomorrow we're gonna find out what Jess's new job is, and very soon we're gonna find out about episode number 600. Who that is. Honestly, if you do a podcast and you do it and you keep doing it, it's a ton of work. Yeah. Let me just say that it's not as easy.

[00:45:25] Nathan Wrigley: I mean, you know, it, I'm not implying that it's the hardest work ever in the world, but it is a lot of work. And to get to 600 requires enormous dedication to the cause. And, Bravo, for keeping going. Yeah, you are most welcome. Yeah, it is. It is a lot of work and you know that you do several, our mutual friend Bob Dunn knows that anybody who's done this knows it's, it's a lot of work.

[00:45:53] Rob Cairns: So it's all, it's gratifying though. That's, yeah. That's the beauty of it all. It's a lot of, a lot of nice things to be taken out of it. One of the, one of the nicest things about doing this show is the, the sort of nice connections that I tend make. Mm-hmm. And I, I always love the fact that, so as an example, there's probably people on this show today who hadn't met, but they've got a complete shoe in next time they bump into each other at a WordPress event or something like that.

[00:46:18] Nathan Wrigley: They've got a real way of getting in. And I don't know how many of those kind of connections. have been made as a result of, you know, podcasting and things like that. But it's, it's lovely and I'm sure that you, with your 600 episodes have facilitated exactly the same thing. So Yeah. Bravo. Yeah. Have you had a favorite episode?

Is that fair? Is it fair for me to ask you that? He does, and it's the one with me, but Jess Sprick, that's, that's right. Yeah. And, and j and Jess has, yeah. I all about the ladies today. Right. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna press you on that. That was a very unfair question. And j Jess, if there's any consolation you happen to be wearing, my favorite color today and my favorite person's favorite color scene.

[00:47:00] Rob Cairns: Nice. Aw, there you go. The SDM Schmooze podcast. we've done that one. We did, we did click talk. So we'll, we'll quickly press on. Okay. Thanks Nathan. So I am gonna get this person's name wrong because I always do. I'm gonna, you got it. Hang on. I have got it. Wait a sec. Mattias? Yes. Yeah, you got it. Oh, it's the first time ever.

[00:47:24] Nathan Wrigley: I always say Mattias, so I nearly did it again. Mattias, Ventura has put out a post this week, and I think this is really interesting. It's, it's over at, the Gutenberg. so it's, github.com/wordpress/gutenberg, and the issue number is 7 1 0 2 6. Check me out reading GitHub issues into the podcast.

Woo-hoo. I feel way cleverer than I actually am. this is, this is Matthias's attempt. I did it again. Matthias's attempt to try and sort of pull together, many, many years of kind of failed attempts, I suppose, of things that could be blocks that never quite got there. And I'm just curious as to whether you, any of you would.

Really use any of this stuff. The intention, of course, is to make the block editor by default as useful as possible. I know that we've all probably at some point got ourselves into third, the third party ecosystem, but wouldn't it be nice if some of these, especially some of the more straightforward and basic ones we're in.

So here we go. here's the ones that he's, he's not proposing, he's just gathering things together. He is not giving an opinion, but he's saying, here's some stuff which got mentioned would be nice. And what do you all think? So, icons block, well that gets 180 million votes from me. That should have been in core on day one that I've just decided it.

Okay. Nobody else gets a vote. That's just, can we just say that's happening? the next one is the playlist block, maybe Dunno, slider and carousels. Yeah, I, who cares? Yeah. Well if it's done with CSS, if it's done with modern CSS, we might be all right with that one, but I'm not sure I want a heavy JavaScript library involved.

I don't even know what this is. Stretchy text, but, can anybody tell me what stretch? I mean, what is that? What is stretchy text? Okay. tabs Block? Yes, please. Accordion block, please. Yes, please. Again, I suppose if it's done right, not sure about this one. I think people are gonna disagree. Oh God, yes.

Really? Mega menu. Really? Okay. Mega menus. Alright in. Cool. Can I tell you why though? Okay. And, and I love the point that Rich made. In this thread, rich said further down on the, the thread, the, because there are some people saying, you know, introducing too many blocks could be confusing. but he said, you know, the real issue is that more blocks, the real issue isn't that more blocks will confuse users.

[00:49:52] Jess Frick: It's that users get confused when they search for expected functionality and can't find it, and then they get lost trying to figure out which third party plugin to trust. Got it. Mm-hmm. And I am 100%. In agreement with that because a lot of these blocks that, you know, Mattias has collected here, they are things that people have to use third party plugins for, and now you're counting on a whole bunch of other people's code.

[00:50:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. When, yes, I think you're right. that actually makes sense. Okay. Okay. So it gets a pass. I, I will, I will consent to the, to the mega menu. I don't know if you've noticed, but the, one of the block solutions that I really like is called Generate blocks. I dunno if you've come across this. It's like a really, it's, I think it's a really credible offering to imp improve the UI for the layout mechanism for the block editor.

They recently dropped a mega menu block, or at least their menu block, I think can be extended to do mega menu. So yeah, it seems to be popular. All right. Mega menus, feel free to interrupt me. Don't even know what this is. Math ML block. Nobody else seems to know. Marquee block, I, eh, I don't know that I want that.

Am I right? It's like a marquee block. Is that like a ticker tape thing that just sort of scrolls? From left to right or right to left. Is that what that is? I think that's what I think Geo Cities is making a comeback. Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah. Let's click on that one and see where we get to. Okay. Let's have a look.

See what the marquee block actually will deliver us. Yes. Oh, yep. There it's, oh yeah. Now there's that. We all need that in core. do we, I don't know. I'm not so sure about that. Anyway, that was suggested time to read Block. Yes, please. Mm-hmm. That's a good one. Breadcrumb block. Yes, please. I'd like to be able to drop those.

Oh, see what I did there? Oh, nice. Drop those breadcrumbs. Oh, drop. Thank you Dave. That bell. Hang on. Oh yeah. Like, I'd like to be able to drop those in different parts of my website. That's possibly the funniest thing I've said in my life, and it's such a dad joke. and then finally, the Diol d. Easy for me to say the dialogue block.

What the heck does that do? Let's have a look. Dialogue block. It lets you talk. It's a popup. Popups are very common. Mm dunno. I know the, the browsers are gonna start shipping the popups and popovers API. So maybe we won't need that so much. Anyway, there's a selection of stuff that may or may not be of interest to you.

Anybody wanna comment on that? So I, I think it's an interesting conversation to have. I know for example, Elliot just commented, in the chat about the whole mega menu situation. He feels differently about the, about that. I think that one of the things that was raised, I think Hendrick raised it was the idea about the 80 20 rule.

[00:52:41] Jonathan Bossenger: and I do agree, just, you know, in this conversation, a number of those blocks we all agree are probably a good idea. So I do think it should be something that is maybe a data-driven decision. So like, like Jess was saying, like how many people go looking for this block and then have to install a third party plugin?

If 80% of our users are doing that, then there's no reason why we should have it in, or shouldn't have it in it. Things like the marquee block. Going back to eighties internet, I don't know. So that could maybe stay in the canonical area. But yeah, I definitely think it's great to see the conversation happening.

the thing that, that sits in my mind, I remember asking Matt a question at a Word camp or someone asked him a question about at a Word camp, right about the time the block editor was launched. And he made this very, controversial statement about if it breaks backwards compatibility, maybe that's a good thing.

Sometimes we do need to, you know, break, break a few eggs to make an omelet. and this is a good conversation to have. So I think it's great to see it happening. I think it's exciting and I think more people should get involved in the conversation. but I also would like to see something that I wanted to see for a while now, and it's, it started happening, is, is we get to a point where it's like, okay, fine.

Mathias is gonna make the decision based on the data, based on the user input. These are the blocks we're gonna go with. 'cause it makes the most sense for the, for the project. Yeah. so being a little bit more, What's the word I'm looking for? Opinionated is not a bad thing. Rob. Sounds like you've got things there.

[00:54:03] Rob Cairns: lots. does this, my question is impact a third party block ecosystem and stagnant, progression and development. So if we keep throwing everything in the core, do the third party companies and I think of, cadence or Generate box or any of those big ones, do they say why bother developing anything else?

'cause we know it's just gonna swell up and end up in core and is this worth our time? So that, that becomes my question is, do we hurt the long time development? And a bit of a disclaimer, I am a bit of a cadence user, so I understand what's in those. I'm not saying it's good or bad, I'm just wondering do we shoot ourselves in the foot in the long run?

[00:54:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's an interesting point. I'm sure the, I'm sure those developers would probably, especially if it's a paid for third party ecosystem, I'm sure that there would be some part of them that would like to have less in call so that they've obviously got a market to tap into. But yeah, the whole 80 20 thing, and I suppose they get to finesse their thing as well, don't they, and wrap it with all of their different settings and different options, whereas the core stuff is usually fairly, how to describe it.

more basic should we say? Yeah, more. Yeah. Thank you Dave. Dave, Jess, anything on that before we move on? More blocks couldn't hurt if they're done right, but as you sort of say, sometimes it's just get the basic things in there that then themes and other places can then expand and have the more advanced functionality on.

[00:55:37] Dave Grey: Because frankly, if you're pro, you'd probably be going that way anyway. But if you just learning out, then you just want better. Stick something in the page and get something simple. one of the things that has, come up, there's a few bits and pieces about this that are happening over here in the comments.

[00:55:53] Nathan Wrigley: Firstly, Lam says, I've just adopted these acronyms. Now it's like second nature to me. Lam. She loves the SDM show. I don't Was SDM mean? Oh, I get it. she loves it. and also Tacho trying to catch me Outlook is being a bit spammy today, Nathan, just to test your multitasking skills. I got you. I can multitask.

At least one thing at a time. pretty, I'm so rubbish at multitasking. I'm the kind of guy that if you ask me to tell, you know, to tell you the time, I will spill the pint of beer on myself so that I can look up my clock. That is, that is what I'm like, playlist block. Yeah. I, I, I'm guessing it's something to do with audio or, you know, like repeated cycles of content, but I'm not entirely sure.

as long, so, okay. lamb, Anne, so accessibly ha firmly on as long as the sliders and carousels are accessible. Ready? So we're talking about mega menus here and accordion tabs and what have you. yeah. Very important. And you would hope that in the core product it would. that would be a real thing.

Elliot chips in about that as well. It depends how you define mega menu. If it's schematically sound and just for navigation, then yes. for menus that look like landing pages, no. bit of self-promotion. I do apologize, but it's not really promotion for me. It's more for, Joe Dolson. I did an episode with Joe Dolson, who is, into his accessibility and, We, it's, it's a video, so you can have a look on the screen at what's going on. Joe kind of takes, he, he goes to the WordPress playground website and he picked a handpicked a few, and then he looked at them, the, the menu from a, an accessibility point of view. And it's really interesting. It's not a here's the fix, it's more of a, here's the problem.

We do other episodes where here's the fix gets applied. But this one was just a, let's see what we can find that does and does not work. So yeah, that's, you can find that if you go to archives and then click accessibility show. I think we're seven episodes in. And, yeah, you can see what Joe thinks about that.

Mike McAllister has a mega menu block built for the Lythe. Yeah, that's brand new. And it is all the hotness, isn't it? Jamie Marsland, head of the YouTube at WordPress, did a highlight video a week or so ago about it. Time to read and breadcrumbs are already. Yost, SEO, which everyone is using, right?

He's not even working there anymore. And he's still on the pro what, still on the promo for them. Andrew says that the ol one is not quite accessible yet. These comments just are coming in. I think sitemaps are a good, great example of having basic things in core where plugins do valuable extensions.

Love Joe Dolson, and happy to be part of the organizing team for WP Accessibility Day, along with Tacho, Michelle and Joe. Indeed, a thoroughly nice human being, right? Okay. God, where did we get to? I feel like this, we're about halfway through the content and we got like a half an hour to go. So there was Mathias.

Woo-hoo. I get it right all the time now. and then this, oh no, that's, I've just clicked on something else. Right? Here we go. I. I've gotta opt outta this one, right? And you'll see why in a second. So I'm just gonna raise this one and then I'm gonna step away. it looks like this, this is on Twitter.

There's probably a load of comments. Let me just refresh 'cause I'm now logged in over here. it starts, it's Brad Williams who asks the question is the WP Tavern for Sale. And, he, at added photo map, Matt came back, very quickly and said, no, but it's open to new writers and editors. Oh, oh, oh.

Just to make my ego, just to make my head binger than it already. Oh, I know. I'm, I'm not even gonna read it, but look, there's a nice comment. That's lovely. I do the podcast over there and about, I'm gonna say two years ago, something like that. firstly, Justin Tadlock stepped away. And then, and then, oh my goodness, now my brain has gone dead, please.

Sarah Gooding, of course. Sarah Good. Sarah Gooding stepped away. And then there was a period where there was no written content, there was only, audio content from me. And then Joels nurse stepped in and for about, I would say about four months, stepped up to the plate and did loads of really good content.

And again, I'm gonna say about six months ago that stopped. 'cause Gilner stepped away. Ever since then, it's just been, well basically podcast after podcast episode with content. In fact, if you go to WP Tavern, let me see if I can spell that. That's not gonna do it. Yeah, there you go. WP tab.com. And you look, this archive usually would've been filled with written content about, you know, plugins and themes and all that.

But you can just see, because the, the thumbnails look like this when it looks like this. It's a podcast episode. It's just podcast all the way down. And obviously a variety of people have got the intuition that the tavern is kind of, you know, it's gone out of, out of favor over with Matt. Like I said, I'm still doing content and I'm just wondering what do you guys think?

Would it be, do you want this, the tavern to come back? Did you ever go there? Was this a thing that you miss? So I'm stepping out. You say what you like and I'll, so, so my, my 2 cents, let me start. First of all, the podcast is wonderful and as always Nathan brings it every week. So thank you for that. the problem I have is I question without getting into the politics of the last year, if writers go to the tavern, how impartial they are with where the ecosystem is right now.

[01:01:52] Rob Cairns: So from my standpoint. I usually go to the repository and the vendors WP Weekly for my news pretty quick. I just, impartiality is something, whether it is or it isn't. I like to clear the deck on that and that's a bit of an issue. The other thing I'll say is I have been on the Tavern website in probably over a year.

Nathan, I listened to the podcast, but I get it in a podcast catcher. So, yeah, I don't have any, I don't have any need to go to the website, so I haven't even been on it in a year. And I mean, there's a reason why writers have a tough time staying there. And if we're not gonna have writers, you know, let's keep the podcast going and let the rest of it go.

That's my two such. Thank you. Anybody else? Welcome. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna weigh in as an ex writer for the tavern. there was a period of time when I was, when I was freelancing that I was writing and I say I remember I categorically that we have complete control over our content. when I was writing for the tavern, Justin was one of the editors along with, with Sarah.

[01:03:03] Jonathan Bossenger: ironically, for those of you who don't know, Justin is now my team leader. Automatic, so that's great. but, but we literally could write about what we want. and my biggest, I want to say complaint about the more recent events on the tavern, and I'm gonna mispronounce her surname. Nathan, you did it so well earlier.

[01:03:22] Nathan Wrigley: Ner Ner. Thank you. ner was accused a number of times of writing, articles that were just a big wordpress.com advert or automatic advert or whatever it was. And I have the unique perspective of now being an automation. Seeing her requests to automatic as a company for an article. She was writing for feedback.

[01:03:46] Jonathan Bossenger: So she wasn't being told to write said articles. She was choosing to write it on her own. She was like any other journalist having to request information from automatic about the article she was writing, which tells me that the independence and the, you know, the ability to write the words that she wanted to write were still her own.

So I think that, I think, I have no proof of this, but I think the feedback that she was getting from folks might have had a lot to do with her decision to walk away. I think it's sad because I think she was doing an amazing job, picking up something that was, that was struggling a lot. so I would encourage anybody who is a writer and who wants to write articles for Tavern, there is a, I think it's on the Contact us page somewhere, or somewhere there is a, you know, submit yourself to write for the tavern.

reach out, you know, that's how she got the job. Why not? Thank you, Jonathan. That's great. Thank you. Dave or Jess? No, I've got anything to add to that. Okay. Yeah, I, I think she got the job because she was part of that trial. I know that Matt did a big wide trial and had a whole bunch of people try out, and a couple of those people now work for automatic.

Exactly. But, I, I love the tavern. I miss it. it was definitely one of my go-tos, for written content and of course it still is for the podcast. Thank you. You're very kind. But, you know, giving to the tavern, I don't think takes away from the other incredible media that we're blessed with. Yeah. it was just another voice.

[01:05:19] Nathan Wrigley: let me add, let me just put a few of these comments in here. So, firstly, oh, Anne is making nice comments about Joe Dawson, which is lovely. Thank you for that. tacho is saying, let's be real. All that's left of the tavern is the podcast, right? He says thank, yep, the repository. so Andrew Palmer, the repository has filled the gap nicely, but there's still room for the tavern, back to taco.

but I'd love to have extra. Critical journalists in our ecosystem. Andrew Palmer says, to be honest, the WP Tavern did open up to discussion, and I think that it should be the criteria, just because Audrey owns it, open discussion is essential. Oh, that would be a good point to make. Yeah. the Tavern for fairly obvious reasons, is not Ron and owned by Automatic.

it, I don't know if the tavern, like the.com website is paid for via Audrey Capital, which is like a, it's like Matt's personal, I think I'm gonna say venture capital fund. That could be a, a real mis known there. Yep. But something along those lines. so it's paid for to have that sort of degree of separation.

and Andrew agrees with Jonathan. so does Tacho. I agree with Jonathan. W well, tacho, tacho disagrees with me, and I think the point that he's making is, oh, disagrees. Sorry. It doesn't need rights as it needs journalists. And I actually agree with that statement. So what I was trying to say was. If you're a budding journalist and you're interested in WordPress, apply.

Yeah. So the repository like is utterly fabulous, right? You must go and check it out. So it is the repository email, it's Ray Moray, and she does an utterly fabulous job. We, we do a podcast episode on WP Builds about every three months where we sum up different bits and pieces. I am, I am now gonna say something I didn't think I was, now I am, I don't know if I'm gonna like, commit suicide here.

Here we go. Audrey pays for me to do content on the tavern, right? At no point ever in any way have I been told what I can, can and cannot do. I mean, literally nothing. Complete silence around that. The, the, the conversation went something like this. Will you do a podcast? Yes. Here's the login details.

That that's it. Right. However, and this is the curious bit that this kind of is a difficult thing to pause in my head. However, they, they do pay me and so I am able to give it my all and the, so it's not chasing that sponsorship thing, but, but just marinate on that for a minute. You do get paid and I'm, I'm sure that the same scenario would be the case if you were to come on as a writer, so you would get paid.

And I, I am so convinced that you wouldn't be constrained in what you can write that I, I would kind of like bank my house on it. I just think that's, I just know from personal experience that that's the way it goes. And so that kind of, the, the shackles being off because you don't need to have sponsors and you're gonna get paid so you can do your best work.

All that you need to do is I think, fill out the form or maybe contact me. I dunno, maybe I can forward your email address or something like that to somebody that I communicate with about the tavern. from time to time, I think it'd be good. I think it was the place where I found most of my WordPress news for this show, on a week by week basis.

So there we go. any other comments dropped in from there? Steve Burge says, hello Steve. maybe it's, maybe it's better now that we have a hundred percent independent news like Ray and the repository. Yeah, that's, I guess that's the piece that you have to get in your own head, whether or not it truly is independent.

All I can say is personally experience. That's the thing. They have sponsors. Yeah. You know, like it's, it's still connected to corporate or, you know, bias dollars at some level, but yes, it's independent. Yeah. Again, not digging on Ray, I am 100% team repository, but still Yeah. It's an interesting confection.

There isn't if there's money. Yeah. It, if you are getting paid to do that job, it really, I, I think it does free you up in some way. You obviously just concentrate on that thing and you, you only have to look at Justin and, and Sarah and Lesner and obviously Jonathan and what have you. it that the, the shackles been, I don't wanna sound like I'm promoting it.

I, I wanna be as com I wanna be as fair handed as possible. So if you believe that I've just over egged that experience over there, please tell me. I don't wanna come across as like some sort of, you know, shill for it. No, I don't think. No, but I, I also wanna defend, you know, the writers of WP Tavern, they were not corporate shills.

[01:09:54] Jess Frick: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. And it was so good. I just wanna interrupt with a very small anecdote. So the last article that I wrote for WP Tavern was the one that got me the job at Delicious Brains as a technical writer there. Huh? But I literally, I literally got a message from Justin saying, Hey, Sarah and I are gonna be away for Thanksgiving, week, weekend, whatever.

[01:10:12] Jonathan Bossenger: We've got nothing scheduled. Do you have anything you're writing? and it was around the time of the PHP, I think it was eight release. And Juliette, Rainers Fuller had just released her. in conjunction with, with Yos, she'd released a getting your plugins ready for PHP eight, breakdown. I was ruminating about how do we get that out to the WordPress space?

And so I just wrote that article and he went, edited it. Cool. Done. It's literally was that, that controlled, if you will? that was my experience, definitely. Yeah. just to balance it a little bit, please do, do what Jess said. Go and sign up at the repository email. So it's the repository email. I, I feel it's like such a credible thing to do at the moment.

[01:10:55] Nathan Wrigley: equally, but there's also WP Weekly, you know, there's so many, right? There's WP World, there's the WP Minute. Yep. I think there's a lot of great independent journalism. Yeah. You, you are. Of course. Right. And I, I should have mentioned all of those as well. Thank you for dropping that in. Yeah. I think this call for an open discussion says Ahmed, on how we can get journalists involved in the project, especially with the media core experiment failed.

so we have this institution in the UK called the BBC. Right. And love it or hate it. It has a charter and the BBC is the British Broadcasting Corporation and the charter says that they've got to produce programming, about everything. So they can't just do things which, which are super popular. So they can't just do like, you know, chasing the sponsorships 'cause there is no sponsorship.

We pay a fee. And what that means is that they can concentrate on making programming that only a subset of the people are interested in. And I think that that is an interesting model and I would love to have that back in WordPress. where we, you know, we can just get really into the weeds, a whole long pieces that take days to write.

just about all of those different kind of bits and pieces as well. Right. I've said too much. Here we go. let's get back to the bits and pieces. Right. Okie do, let's put the screen back on. This came from, web TNG, and he produced, so this is David McCann. David McCann produced an article, over the last few, well, it was the 1st of August actually, in which he's trying to kind of figure out what makes WordPress products successful.

And it's kind of interesting and it kind of feeds into suspicions that I probably had for a long time. Anyway, it kind of boils down to, well, how to describe it. Don't, don't. Okay, let's just read it off the screen. Don't do cheap tricks. Don't try to rely on little hacks that you see on YouTube, because the audience over on the WordPress side of things is not that audience.

So it gives an example of a company that kind of pretended to have this sort of fake scarcity. And, you know, whilst it was successful for a few licenses, it quickly turned out that it didn't work. there's a little bit about the, the full site editing and so on and so forth, but basically it boils down to this, turn up with your authentic self.

If you are authentic, you'll probably have more luck because time is running out. I'm not really doing that story justice. I'm really sorry, David. I had meant to concentrate on it a bit, little bit more. Did any of you four happen to read this one? And if you did, did you wanna just sort of paraphrase it in a better way than I did?

[01:13:29] Jess Frick: I was not familiar with this, blog before you shared the article with us, and I'm so glad. I'm absolutely gonna go back and read more because this is really well written. my favorite part is toward the end, because I wasn't familiar with this quote. He said an interesting thing that Nick Roach has been saying at the end of his divvy updates is when you tell us that divvy is ready, then it's ready.

Contrast that attitude with our experience of how the site editor rollout was handled. I mean, shots kind of fired, but also point taken. I love that when you tell us it's ready, then it's ready. and I think talking about the WordPress entrepreneur secret sauce, that's at the heart of it. Listen to your customers, ask and listen.

[01:14:15] Nathan Wrigley: David is possibly the most calm individual you'll ever meet. If you ever watch his YouTube channel, it's like, it, it could be. Therapy, frankly. He's, he's just very, very calm and considered and he goes deep into the weeds of different, basically he doesn't do short form blitzie stuff. He's really into like, getting into the weeds of different bits and pieces.

So highly recommend, web TNG. But yeah, essentially he's saying be authentic. If you bring your authentic self, do things out in the open, you've got a chance of success. And and I've said this many times before, I get quite a lot of email from product owners who've got a thing that they want to sell into the marketplace.

And, and there's lessons to be learned here. Don't, don't, don't watch YouTube for like hot tips on how to do things. 'cause it might work commercially, but it's, I mean, commercially outside of the WordPress ecosystem, but it's probably. Not gonna work inside the WordPress ecosystem. So, there we go. Dave, I dunno if you had a chance to read this, especially as you've got some nice shiny new products in the WordPress space.

I didn't have a chance to read through it properly, but Yeah, just to kind of the comment on the divvy bit of Nick Roach on there for sort of saying, I think they're on the, the 20th release through on the, the alpha on that side. They are taking their time, they're doing it all in public and being honest about those things.

[01:15:32] Dave Grey: So yeah, I'm just waiting for the final. Final d come out to give that, another sort of shot on that aside. But yeah, I'd never heard this blog before, so I'll need to give it a read later on. Yeah, he's really brilliant. Really, really brilliant. I would definitely recommend it. So that's web tng.com. go, go and have a read.

[01:15:49] Nathan Wrigley: there's more to it than, than I've mentioned. However, what it did bring up in my mind again, is this thing I, I gotta say, I am not a divvy user. When I work, when I moved into the WordPress space, it was already, this is gonna sound awful. Lines had been drawn, let's put it that way. People were already using products and they were willing to.

Hmm. Use unsavory language, let's go with that against this product. And I honestly don't know why. I think it might have been, I don't know, short codes that the, the page was built up with short codes. And maybe that wasn't the, you know, with hindsight, maybe that wasn't the best way of doing things because if you remove the plugin, you were just left with a hot mess of content that was unreadable.

But man alive is this product big. I mean, gigantically big. I think probably the only thing which would touch it in terms of user base numbers, and I haven't looked for probably a year, but I would imagine Elementor is in first position and possibly divvy in second. It might even be the other way round.

And, they've obviously been listening to their customers as evidence from the previous article. And and here we are divvy five. it's gonna be out in public fairly soon. They're obviously after some testers, public alpha number, check it out, public alpha number 20. That's quite a lot of listening that they're doing.

And, so obviously if you've got this product and you've kind of put it on the back shelf, maybe you've got a, I don't know if they did lifetime deals or anything like that. Maybe it's time to go and revisit it. I think before we hit record, Jonathan, you said that this was the thing that got you into WordPress, right?

[01:17:28] Jonathan Bossenger: Well, it's the thing that got me into WordPress development and it's, it's kind of ironic that Palmer is in this chat because he and I go way back because of Divi. some of the first plugins that I built, I built with Andrew, it was a elegant theme, users group, Facebook group that he had. And it was elegant marketplace that he, he was running with some partners, and I was building plugins for that platform.

So, yeah, it's, it's. I said this earlier before we recorded, like Divvy was the, the thing before Elementor became the thing. Yeah. Mm-hmm. What, what Elementor did very, very well early on was they, they built it on a very solid foundational code base, which unfortunately Divvy didn't do. As somebody who built plugins with Divvy, I got stuck into the code of Divvy and I kind of saw some of the early days stuff that then got built on top of, and built on top of, and built on top of, and I feel like Divvy five is, is the elegant themes folks going, right.

Let's go back to a good foundation and then build on top of that. So I'm excited to see it. I haven't been following the Alphas or all of that. I've still got my original lifetime license that I got on a Black Friday deal, I think in 2015 or whatever it was. I'm excited to try it out when it comes out and then get stuck into the code and see what's going on there.

but yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's a, a lot bigger than I think a lot of people realize. It's, it's kind of, it's kind of gotten to that point there where the folks who are using and building with divy. Don't tend to have to shout it from the rooftops 'cause it just does what they need it to do and it does it really, really well.

but, yeah, I'm interested to see what, what Divvy five looks like when it eventually gets released. There's probably still some sites out there that I built in my early developer days Oh. With develop days that are still using Divvy, that are still getting updates on whatever the, the last sort of stable version is.

[01:19:08] Nathan Wrigley: I'm kind of trying to, whilst you're talking, I'm trying to Google something which will give me kind of UpToDate data. they, and I can't remember the website that I used to use, but several years ago, I, I used to pull up that graph Fair fairly frequently. I, you know, it is one of those generic websites where they, you know, C-M-S-C-M-S plugins and what have you, and it does little charts for it and Divvy was far and away the winner.

And that was even in the days when Elementor was. Going gangbusters. Divvy was massive in comparison to Elementor. Now, tacho, I presume, based upon evidence, I'm not entirely sure. He says Elementor is much larger than divvy as far as he knows. WP Bakery, according to Andrew Palmer is second as a plugin.

Divvy is number one as a theme. It That's interesting. lots of newer page builder says, Dave Dunn, got fame from picking on Divvy. Yeah, I think that was a it. Sort of punching down a little bit, wasn't it? There was a lot of that going on at the time. and this is why I know he, I, Jonathan is a genius, da da da, which wild head continues.

Yeah. Oh yeah. I'm sure it was built with, thank you Ko. That was where I needed to go. element. Oh, okay. So really has changed. Elementor is about Fi, assuming Marcus Bonnet is true, Elementor is about five times, active installs according to Built With. Thank you, Marcus. That's good to know. Yeah. there's been a precipitous swap in that case, I think it was more like two x for, divvy.

Anyway, the point is divvy is still massive. and they've got a massive update coming, so go and check it out. If you're into that, go and check out the, the latest update, right? Where are we at? Call for accessibility testers. What more is there to say, if you, like Anne in the comment and Joe Dolson that we mentioned, if accessibility is something that you are interested in assisting with in the WordPress product, project, they are, the, the accessibility team is looking for team reps.

I'll just run it by you so that you know what you might be getting yourself into. If you're listening to this on your podcast player, you might, this might pique your interest team rep or an organizational role that is mostly administrative in nature. It's not the, the lead role. this is interesting that they felt they needed to write this.

I thought letting go of the team rep title is not a lot in status. Just a handing of responsibilities over someone who is a team, who is a leader in a team can lead whether they are doing team rep job or not. the kind of job work that you'd be getting yourself into is preparing meeting agendas, conducting biweekly meetings, documenting notes and things like that.

So important work. I know it's maybe not the most sort of public facing, glamorous sort of side of things, but it needs to be done. And so there is that. If anybody wants to, highlight that, I will. Give you a moment. If not, I'll move on. Okay. I just wanna, sorry, before we move on. No, go. I just, I just wanna say that if, if you're interested in accessibility, but you don't know how to accessibility, being a team rep is a great way to learn.

[01:22:16] Jonathan Bossenger: so as, as Nathan pointed out, a team rep role is very much an administrative role, but you're working alongside all of these accessibility experts and you're learning what they're doing and how they're doing things. So I highly recommend that if it's something you, you're interested in. Excellent point.

[01:22:29] Jess Frick: Thank you. Yeah, really good point. So you may well, you know, learn an awful lot in that process. But anyway, you know, it's there. Now. If you've listened to this podcast, you know it's available. I'm just gonna quickly mention this, just because it's in the rundown, but here we are, we're at the repository as per the conversation just a moment ago.

[01:22:47] Nathan Wrigley: and that is to say that, GoDaddy, have this thing called the Ask Arrow. It's brand new, and they're injecting it across their entire platform. I'll do you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna park this one and come back to it next, next time. 'cause it's probably not that specific. So I'll make sure to do that next time.

however, this one's kind of interesting. Again, I'm on x. This is, a plugin called Groundhog. Groundhog is, let me, it's like a system built inside a WordPress. It's a plugin and it enables you, it's like a CRM type thing. So it, it is sir drip feed, emails and this kinda stuff. so I'm gonna read the, the comment from Groundhog.

I presume it's Adrian who has written this, but it may not be. the WordPress plugin team has closed our repository listing because of the, because of trademark infringement using WordPress in the plugin name, the closing trigger code review. So now we must make changes to many in capital letters files to make the plugin team happy.

Will hopefully be back soon. I guess, I guess what he's trying to do here is just make their customers aware that they're not going away. You know, if you go and look for that now, it's not gonna be available, but they're gonna come back. Jess, you wanted me to mention something that was a little bit down in the comments?

Was it, you, you passed it. Okay. Sorry. it's all right. It's Steve Jones pointed out it, here we go. You wanna read it out? Just gimme a happy accident. 'cause it sounds like there may be other things that need to be fixed, but to Groundhog's Point, he'd rather not do it under duress, which I can appreciate.

[01:24:22] Jess Frick: But you know, I. As much as I hate hearing that this happens to anyone's plugins, I hope it's a call to action to consider the WordPress coding standards and to use it against your code base. you know, find issues before the code review team does, and it makes everyone's job easier. And it's better for your customers too.

[01:24:45] Nathan Wrigley: I, I actually don't know because I am not a user of their plugin. I don't know on what level the word WordPress was used in their pl plugin name. But let me just be clear. I I want to jump in there. Yeah, please. And said it was the, it was the first word in their plugin title on their plugin page. I'm looking into the archive earlier this year, which is what got them into trouble.

[01:25:04] Rob Cairns: Yeah. Right. Which is what got them into trouble. And, and this is nothing, I don't know the guys from ground, the folks from Groundhog. I don't know the team. I don't know anything about their plugin. I do know that the Plugin Review team does send out emails when these things are flagged. and so this is just a call to action, as Jess said to all plugin developers, make sure that you're checking the email register to your WordPress account, because when these things get flagged, you will get emails.

[01:25:25] Jonathan Bossenger: I think they give you seven days to reply, and if you don't reply, then they will shut you down. There might be further process to it, but they do, they do let you know. So if you're, if you're hosting a plugin on the repository. Make sure you're keeping an eye on those emails so that you can catch these things early.

[01:25:43] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, so whilst that's very obviously, you know, whatever I'm about to say is gonna sound glib and I apologize Adrian, if it comes out that way. I'm sorry that you have, you know, found yourself in this mess and I hope that you know, that people can learn from the, the story that you are gonna, you know, no doubt be able to tell.

That is a shame. Further down the piece here, it says that there's probably, I think he said something like a thousand files or a thousand things, which would appear Yeah. Need changing. Yeah. so yeah. Okay. caveat mTOR a little bit there, isn't it? If you, if you in any way. So the times have changed, haven't they, since last year?

If you've got the word WordPress and it's, if you're even slightly, unsure whether the context of that usage is wrong. Then maybe reach out and, you know what, reach out to the, the people who would be able to tell you, in this case, the plugin review team, and they'll be able to, to give you an idea, I've noticed on the Twitter it says here, Groundhog, CRM plugin for WordPress.

That seems like that would be entirely fine. but maybe it was the other way around WordPress, CRM plugin or something like that. I think that usage of it would contravene, whereas the other way round doesn't, 'cause it doesn't imply that sort of exclusivity. I am no expert in this, so we're not lawyers, Jim.

Yeah, that's exactly it. Yeah. Thank you. yeah, I'm a gym, I'm a pod, I'm a podcaster lawyer. That's it. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Thank you. okay, so that was that piece. have we got time for this? No, we don't. I'm gonna come back to a few of these next week. I'll just say this one quickly. if you, if you're, if you've got an iPhone and you're in Japan, the Japanese, government have made it such that it's quite likely within the near future on your iOS.

Di device of choice, you'll be able to have a choice of browsers, an actual choice of browsers. So things like, I don't know, brave Chrome, and so on. Firefox and things like that because the, the Japanese government have said you can't do this sort of simulation of browser compatibility, which iOS currently ships with.

From my point of view, on the open side of things, I think this is great. Maybe Apple of, you know, they're gonna count their, you know, pennies. I think they've got a few pennies to, you know, I'm sure they can take the hit here. They worth two, 3 trillion or something like that. So it's not the end of the world.

But anyway, a welcome thing if you are, an iOS user. What else have we got? Da, da da. It's all about ai and, okay, let's finish on this one, just the very final one for today. file this on the stupid idea. so this is, sorry, that was a bit, didn't mean that to come out like that. So this is a kind, this'll never happen, but honestly the, I think the word here is what's the hubris?

Let's go with that. The hubris of this, this is a company called Reflect, reflect Orbital, and they're trying to get venture capital money. At the minute, if you're a venture capitalist, firstly, you're probably not watching this show, but if you are. Don't give them any money. It's clearly snake oil. They want to put mirrors in space so that when it's dark on different sides of the globe, they can reflect.

Look, they've got graphics and everything so they can, reflect sunlight. Look, there we are. Look. Oh look, it's dark. Yeah. Half the world's dark. That's a shame. That wasn't how nature intended it. No. So what we'll do is we'll put up mirrors and those mirrors we'll be able to shine down onto your solar panels at night.

[01:29:18] Jess Frick: You know what, Nathan? You're mad now, but let's talk when you're in your six months of grayness. Oh, in the uk? Yeah. And we'll see how you feel about space noise. No, no, no. But imagine all the unexpected consequences, like those little things that you don't think about, like the seed pod that kind of, in some curious way needs a signal that is so predictable and it's, you know, this hot cold cycle, this light, dark cycle, the ability to sleep and things like that, based upon the cadence of the sun going around.

[01:29:48] Nathan Wrigley: I, I don't know, it just, it just seems like a bad idea if, sure. I like how Jonathan wrapped it up. Sunlight as a service. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes service. Exactly. I mean, it seems great, you know, if you could literally beam it down laser-like onto the, onto the, the solar panel. Sure. Yeah. You build hourly, daily per spin.

Like how does that work? Yeah. Or if I wanted a sunan, you know, at like four in the morning, I just go and stand in my backyard, click the Uber like app. I'll just have an hour of sunlight, please. You just stand and you know, it just comes, I, I dunno. I just wanna, I just wanna point out that this is literally the bond villain's plan in the die another day.

[01:30:29] Jonathan Bossenger: Exactly. It's literally what they build is a satellite with reflecting the sun, whatever. That's all I'm saying. Diamonds. Can I just say in what is probably the lowest blow ever, I get this six months of graders. It's been great for years. It's true. It's why I wear this ridiculous hat every week. Thank you Tacho.

[01:30:51] Nathan Wrigley: I appreciate that. And it's more, it's more than six months. so are you okay? I know it's bad. You know what? If there was no unexpected consequences, I think it'd be quite a nice idea, but I just sort of feel, you know, something will go wrong. A pinpoint laser-like bit of radiation will come from outer space and like slice somebody into one day and then, you know, there'll be questions asked.

Please, if you've got millions of pounds burning a hole in your pocket, send it to me and I will spend it much more wisely than, than any of these. Any of these people. and it will go to, you know, making sure that puppies, cats, alligators, puffer, fish, and turtles have a lovely life. Okay. There you go.

sounds like a global fire starter. Oh yeah, it is. It is. I like it. okay. That's it. That's all we've got time for, I think. unless anybody wants to drop anything else before we finish anybody open for Yeah. Quickly invest in batteries when you've got sunlight during the day. Hello. Yeah, exactly. Just charge stuff up with what we've already got.

there was a great question that we didn't answer from the comments though. Why is Dave, Dave. Why are you? Yeah. Why is it Okay. I hadn't thought about that. Jess, where is that? There's a comment somewhere about that. Is that, yeah. Why are you, Dave? Dave, may, may, for those of you that are listening and not watching, I've got my name.

Jonathan's got his name. Everybody's got their name, but Dave is, Dave is in air quotes. Why you got your email from a few days ago where you got my surname wrong? She's, oh, I see. No, Dave. So that's what Oh, the shame. Oh, the shame. I was trying to not talk about the mistakes that you made already, but someone had to go and bring it up.

Yeah. I put a podcast episode out and basically across my entire website and all the images and everything wrote Dave's name incorrectly. Yeah. Oh, man. And he was very gentle and he, he wrote back and, threatened to kneecap me unless I, unless I fixed things correctly. Get in line Dave, me on the show instead.

So, yeah. Greatest is normal in the uk and this bombshell, this'll be the way to finish it. I love this podcast. You do. Thanks Edra. Love you too. Reason for that. It's made possible by the fine people who join us each week. So this week we've got Dave Gray with an e, we've got Jess Frick. I so want to be able to do that.

I wanna be able to go here and somehow my arm extends through Dave's screen. He is extremely long. Oh, I'm doing it wrong. Hang on. Yeah, yeah. Something like that. Ah, oh. we're joined by Jess. There we go. We're joined by Jonathan Busser and we're joined by Rob Cairns. We'll be back next week. I think we've got one next week, and then I've got a week off for, word Camp us.

So we'll be back next week. please join us, spread the word, let people know that you enjoyed the show. Fabulous. there's only one thing to do, and that is the humiliating hand wave thing. Oh. It just, it honestly, if I asked you to do this in any other walk of life, you'd be like, no. But in this scenario I go all the power normal.

Yeah, it's totally normal. That's it. Thank you so much. We'll be back next week. As I said, if guests, if you wanna just hang out for a bit, please do if you wanna come on the show. Thanks everybody. W thanks everybody slash the TWIW if you wanna be on the show. Yeah. Thank you so much. We'll see you later. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Yeah, bye.