This Week in WordPress #345

It is time for This Week in WordPress, episode number 345 entitled, Where's Miriam? It was recorded on Monday, the 18th of August, 2025. My name's Nathan Wrigley. I'll be joined today by my co-host, Michelle Frechette, also by Dave Grey, very graciously standing in at the last minute, and then also by, Miriam Schwab and then not, and then she's back. And so it goes during the episode.

We are a WordPress podcast, and so guess what? We talk a lot about WordPress.

There's a few bits and pieces dropping in Gutenberg, so we mentioned those.

We also spent quite a long time talking about the state of the WordPress community. Has it deteriorated over the last year? Or can we sense that there's some positive news in different locales, and amongst different age groups?

There is loads of events coming up and helping organize those is definitely on the agenda this week.

We also talk about rocket.net and it's sky rocketing profitability.

And also we get into the bits and pieces in the plugin space. There some new things that have dropped.

And it's all coming up next, that and more on This Week in WordPress.

[00:01:21] Nathan Wrigley: This episode of the WP Builds podcast is brought to you by GoDaddy Pro, the home of manage WordPress hosting that includes free domain, SSL, and 24 7 support. Bundle that with the hub by GoDaddy Pro to unlock more free benefits to manage multiple sites in one place, invoice clients and get 30% of new purchases. Find out more at go.me/wpuilds.

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Hello, hello. Good morning, good evening, good afternoon. All of the other goods, them as well. Good. Everything. Hello. It is episode number 345 of this week in WordPress. That's quite a lot. I dunno how many years that is. Anybody do that calculation quickly? it's quite a few years. Thanks Dave. I appreciate it.

but we're back. We're here every Monday pretty much apart from, when there's holidays and things like that. But we are away. Because, I'm getting on a plane and heading over to Portland in Oregon, to go to Word Camp us. So we will be, we'll be absent from next week, but barring anything's like that, we're here pretty much every week.

Really appreciate it. If you wanna join us in the comments, that's what keeps this show going. It's lovely to have these guests, but it's also lovely to have the comments. Do you see how much sucking up I'm doing already? head to this URL, go here, wp builds.com/live. thanks Dave. What a pro. Look at him straight in there with the finger.

that's gonna be the show title already. That's the winner that already, yeah, he's straight in there with the finger. It doesn't sound good. wp builds.com/live. Bring your friends and relations and all of that with you. and drop as a comment. It really keeps the show going forward. Really appreciate anybody that does that.

Once again, wp builds.com/live. If you do end up there, there's a video player, probably where you're watching this or you might be watching on YouTube. But if you go to that page, then, you've got two options. On the right hand side, on a desktop or underneath on a mobile is a YouTube embedded comments.

So you need to be logged into Google for that. If you don't wanna do that, if you're not into Google, then go to the player itself and in the top right hand corner is a little button which says live chat or something like that. And you can post your comments anonymously in there. So one more time.

WP builds.com/. Live. Okay. As always, I'm joined by three people, I have to say. Tim Nash was gonna be with us, but he's not feeling very well. So Tim, I hope that you get better. I hope you're feeling better soon. He said he was, heading straight back to bed. it sounds pretty, pretty nasty, but yeah, good luck.

I hope that you're feeling all right later. stepping into the breach for that is Dave, and we'll get to know Dave in just a moment. But before that over there, co-host for today, Michelle Ette. Hello. Hello. Your, your video for my part is laggy, but your audio is not, so that's completely fine. It's sometimes it's just bad for one and not for the other.

And when it all ends up getting recorded on the other end, it usually comes out all But how are you doing anyway? I am doing very well. Thank you. good, I'll read Michelle's bio. Here we go. Michelle Cher, as you can see on the screen is the Executive Director of post status. In addition to that, Michelle is the podcast barista at WP Coffee Talk, co-founder of Underrepresented in Tech, creator of WP Speakers and WP Career pages.

She also co-founded sponsor me, WP and Net Speed Network online. She is of course, an author influencer and a frequent organizer and speaker at WordPress and tech events, and she's living outside of Rochester, New York, where she is into taking photos of nature. If you want one URL to sum it all up.

Head to meet Michelle online, and in fact, in just a minute we'll find her out a new thing that Michelle's launched because she's got so much spare time. So we'll find out about that. I've learned the, I've learned the trick. The trick though, to getting things done as partners, if you don't do it all yourself, I can't get done so much faster.

Yeah. I nearly once wrote a book called How Not To Start Stuff and but obviously the clue is in the title. I never got around to it. That's actually quite a good joke. I like that book. I'm Procrastination was never published. Yeah. My idea was to produce basically a blank book, with no advice in it at all.

It was just like, don't start, I'm, I was terrible when I was a bit younger. I used to start things all the time, and honestly, this is true. This is not entirely true, but it's basically true. This podcast is the single thing in my life that I can point to and say, yeah, I kept doing it. I've been a real creature of stopping things, losing interest, doing something else in, in all sorts of ways, career and what have you.

And so I'm, yeah, there we go. That's the one thing I've started, Okay. Dave Gray is joining us today. He's the one that's stepping in for Tim Nash and so I appreciate that last minute. I really appreciate it. Dave, how you doing? Yeah. Good to be you back. Yes. Again. Yeah. Thank you. I'll read Dave's bio, which was put together in just a moment.

Dave has the sixth sense that you'd be on the interwebs today when he put his go Google t-shirt on from Word Camp EU this morning. Oh, he's, is it still on? I can't see. Yeah, no, maybe. he's the man behind Fred Friendly web guy plugins, which has recently had a re rebrand from our WP plugins. and he's, as it kept having to be spent out, Dave is still buzzing from his first sale of click, his latest plugin.

Bravo Dave. We'll show that on screen in a moment, but that's mostly feeling. Yeah, I'd like selfless promotion. yeah. no, that's great. That is great. And finally, Miriam Schwab. It's been a while. How? There, she's down there somewhere. how you doing, Miriam? Good, how are you? Yeah, good. Good. Miriam is the head of WordPress Elementor, where she connects the company with the broader WordPress ecosystem community.

She's a longtime contributor to the WordPress space, active in community events and discussions, and a frequent speaker at Word camps and industry conferences around the world. Before joining Elemental, Miriam co-founded Stratec, which was a static WordPress platform focused on security and performance, which was later acquired by Elemental.

Earlier in her career, she founded and led one of Israel top WordPress development agencies. Yeah. Nice. this pulp thing is full of people who have managed to do loads in their life. And then there's me. I thought of another thing. You started, oh. Your family. Family. Yes. I managed to stick with that.

Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate it. They're still around. Yeah, they're still here. Yeah. Yeah, I try Ever so hard to yeah. With that we all do. Yeah, exactly. okay. So thank you. There's our panel today. As I said, if you want to join us, head to wp builds.com/live and we'll get into the bits and pieces.

In a moment, let's just see if anybody's dropped in a comment a couple of people have. That's really nice. Thank you for joining us. This must be Ryan, Ryan from In Influence. WP is joining us from Sunny and mild, Charlotte North. North Carolina in the USA. Thank you. Daveon joining us. I'm imagining he's in oh.

Where's Sokoto Nigeria? Devon's normally in London 'cause he comes to the WordPress London Meetup that I help co organize, that's interesting. Oh, nice. Daveon, thanks for joining us all the way from Nigeria. Elliot Sby is literally down the road from me. If I had enormous. Thor like hands. I could throw a pebble and he would be able to catch it.

He's about 10 miles away, which is pretty close. And yet when's the last time you saw him? Never seen Elliot ever. No. I'm not entirely sure he is real. he's got a plugin though, so I think he's quite likely. He is. He's got a great plugin, turnstile. If you wanna put turnstile from CloudFlare onto your, protect your WordPress forms and things like that.

Elliot is the responsible, rely WP or WP rely, I can't remember which way around. Michelle Ette. There you go. There's Michelle. 64 degrees Fahrenheit, 18 degrees in sunny Rochester, Marcus. What's that? I said finally, we're not baking here anymore. No, exactly. We've got the same today rep. It's cloudy, it's typical English weather.

Marcus Bonnet. There's only a week to go until I get to see your beautiful faces in person. Happy mon. Happy Monday. Thank you. That's really nice. Yay, Dave. And joining us again, da Dave has other names in today's show. Oh, friendly Web Guy Dave, a team. Great. 18. What's the, significance of that?

What do you mean? You need help when you have to call someone. Oh, got it. Okay. Anybody under the age of 30 don't even. Just not, don't even try. It was a really bad TV show, but it was addictive. I used to watch every episode, this is true about me, says Dave and I have plans to start. So many things, but never get around to them.

This could be a whole show, right? Just talk about all the things that you never I have a list, to, yeah. Good morning. Says James. James Lau. Nice. taking a nice talk walk. I'm guessing around town right now. Yes. 63 degrees outside and Jackson, from AAL East, Southern Italia. Thank you. Keep the comments coming in.

Really appreciate it. That's great. Here we go. Here's all the bits and pieces. First of all, some self promotion. This is our website. I do this every week. Put your email address into this little form field here and we will spam you like no other company has done ever before. It's, you are, it's gonna, you're gonna regret it, but no, don't, put your email in there.

And we'll send you two emails a week, one on a Tuesday when we parcel what we're about to do now as a podcast episode, and then one on a Thursday when we released the regular podcast episode. And you can see from here the, the Tim Nash who was supposed to be on the show. it was the latest episode.

We had a, we had an episode where we talked about the rise of AI in the WordPress space, so you can go and check that out. The other thing to mention is. And Dave, thankfully, has stepped into the breach here. If you would like to be a guest on the show, I'm trying this experiment out. I tried it out last week and I had quite a lot of people fill it out, so I'm doing it again.

And maybe after this one, we'll stop. If you fancy comment onto the show and you'd like to volunteer yourself as a guest, head to this URL. It's wp builds.com, and then slash and then the acronym for this show this week in WordPress, TWIW. I should have had a slide for that. WP builds.com/twi. Iw, fill out the form and yeah, we'd love to have you on.

If you are, if you're capable of filling out a form, willing to talk about WordPress and can start stuff, then, then join us. we'd love to have you on. yeah. WP builds.com/t WIW. Okay. Front loading the show this week are the guest contributions. so, the first one up is, can you believe it?

Michelle has a new thing. this one is called WP Wiki. Tell us more. Michelle. So along the lines of procrastination, I have owned the URL for over 10 years. Oh, that is a long procrastination. Yeah. Yeah. It was, I, by myself, did not possess the development chops to actually pull this site off. And so I, at the same time that I was reaching out to different people to start things like sponsor BWP.

[00:13:54] Michelle Frechette: Thank you, Marcus. And Speed Network Online. Thank you. June. I reached out to Corey Moss and said, Hey, would you have any interest in working on this project with me? And so he said, heck yeah, I got time. Let's do it. And so we decided we would start working on this and we had a lot of meetings to talk about what it should look like and how it should behave.

Excuse me. And we soft rolled it out with a few people to test it. do some beta testing, and worked out some of the bugs while we did that. And now it's available to the greater community at large, but is a wiki that should be and is so far. Contributed to by our community. And so the whole idea is anybody can register and then create an article.

Miriam, go ahead and put Elementor in there because this is not the, this is not something that is run by. wordpress.org or wordpress.com. And so the community can put anything in that they want. It is moderated, so if it gets spammy or if it's too salesy, we're gonna say, can you please rewrite this so that it doesn't look like you're trying to sell us something?

As opposed to be informational. Every listing should be about what you are not trying to sell what you are. And so the whole idea is you can add an article in there. There is one for WP Builds, I believe already. Oh yeah. Some, clown wrote one for that. Yeah, but I'll say if you go back to that art, add an article page, enough people were perplexed with what to do and how to do it, that I actually created a video on Friday so you can, if you are a little confused about it, go ahead and Regis it tells you how to register, add articles, and you can sponsor articles and sponsoring an article allows you to lock that article.

for example, if a mentor wanted to put, a post or an article in here about what Elementor is using their own branding, of course, then somebody else, because it's a wiki, could go in and edit it. But you could sponsor the article which would allow it to be locked, which means other people can't edit your article.

oh, we did put a little bit of monetization in there that way, to allow companies to maintain their branding, especially since some companies, not Elementor, but some companies do sometimes have a little bit of a negative connotation in the community and people have a cha a tendency to want to, poo on them.

I will say that we wanted to make it so that this is not a place where people, can maliciously, go in and edit anybody else's anything, or not even maliciously, but mistakenly change things to incorrect information. And so we allowing you to sponsor your own, if I wanted to write an article about Elementor, I could not lock that article because I do not have an Elementor email address.

So we are moderating these. Got it. We are making sure that everything is on the up and up. I'm only using Elementor because Miriam's in the chat today. but it's true for any other organization and so that's the whole idea is that it should be a repository of articles about information history.

I've put some articles in there already about, the difference between posts and pages and wordpress.org and wordpress.com and things like that, so that it's not just a listing of people and organizations. It should be something that is informative for the whole. Community. I think if you scroll, I think we already have four pages of articles.

[00:17:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it looks like it. Yeah. Four or five. Yeah, submissions, automatic pressable. Obviously I submitted something, to test it, although Bob did, I was completely incapable of understanding what I was supposed to do and so submit something, which was completely off the point. And, Michelle got per, perhaps you and Bob are the rea.

[00:17:41] Michelle Frechette: Perhaps you and Bob are the reason there's a video explaining Yeah. How to do all of that. I, have the capacity to read. I just can't do it. if I get a letter from the bank, it's like, I read, I wish that, I wish bank statements and things like that had A-T-L-D-R at the top 'cause I just can't get through stuff like that.

[00:17:59] Nathan Wrigley: So I apologize and then I resubmitted. No worries. The URL is wp wiki.org. Nice. Like you say, you've had that one for a while. WP Wiki, I have.org no hyphens or anything like that? Nope. And you can go register an account and then obviously follow the add and article link and hopefully over time we'll have yeah, some, some place to go if you are inexperienced with WordPress or whatever your product or service may be.

Thank you. That's great. And if you have feedback, we're absolutely still at the beginning stages. Happy to receive feedback. Okay, thank you. And before you move on, I do wanna mention today is the last day to sign up for WP Trail Buddies. So if you are coming to WordCamp us, I do have more veterans, signed up for this than I that I have, newbies, but that doesn't matter.

[00:18:44] Michelle Frechette: Anybody who's interested in making a connection and having a new friend, I am looking for more people to do this. Today is the last day. Tomorrow you will get your emails announcing to each other who your trail buddies are, so that next week when you arrive at work, camp us, you have the ability to, meet up and have a friend before you even begin.

[00:19:04] Nathan Wrigley: So just to summarize, Michelle's initiative here is to, is to combine people who've been and have experience and, don't have the heebie-jeebies about turning up and wandering around and being a part of that event. for people who perhaps have a little bit more of a concern. Maybe it's the first time you've done it and you are, I don't know, you just feel that you would like a bit of support.

Then, WP Trail Bodies, which you can find at wp trail bodies.wordpress.com. if you head over there last day today to get yourself signed up, so you're, you are more looking for attendees who've not been there than people who, correct. Okay. Okay. Okay. But we'll do this again for future camps.

[00:19:44] Michelle Frechette: nice. If it's something you're interested in and you're going to Asia or Europe, or maybe we'll open it for Canada. it all remains to be seen, but yes. So apropos of that, Elliot Sby says he is considering going to Word Camp Europe next year. Not too sure yet. Maybe we'll finally meet there. Oh.

[00:20:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I Maybe I could be your, I think it, I could be your trail body, Elliot and, could, and see if you actually exist. Not paper thin. And I'll probably meet him before you do, which will be the funniest part. That's right. Oh, like random family news. This is great. James Lau is son turned seven today.

Happy birthday to your son. That's lovely. Yeah, a nice piece of news. Oh, great. okay, let's move on. Let's find out a little bit about something that Miriam is bringing to the story today. So this is called Angie, I presume I'm pronouncing that correctly, the first Agentic AI plugin for WordPress. First of all, Miriam, for people that don't know what agentic means, just clear that bit up.

'cause I think I'm confused by what a agentic means. It's a good question and I keep trying to explain it badly, so I will try again. Try goodly,

[00:20:55] Miriam Schwab: I'll explain what Angie does and then maybe through that it explains what it means, like why it's agent. Angie, it acts like your website building and management buddy, and, sits with you in your WordPress admin and allows you to ask it or tell it to do all sorts of things that, you want to do in WordPress.

The advantage of working with Angie to do that is, there's a few things. One is, let's say something and there's something in WordPress that you know how to do it, but it involves five to 10 clicks to get there. Whatever. You can just be like, Angie, change my per link structure, or Angie, add a user, or, all that kind of stuff.

And it does it very quickly. You can also do bulk actions, but, another thing that's cool about Angie is that it understands she we're calling her. she understands context. and so you, if you don't necessarily know exactly what you want to do or how you want something to turn out, you can give it like information and then she'll think for you and suggest changes to make and even make them for you in your site.

so it can save a lot of time, help people do things they couldn't do before because, interfaces can be overwhelming, hard to figure out. There's a learning curve and things like that. it makes things much more accessible to everyone, like managing their site, but not just managing it. I think it will give people the tools to have greater success with their website because it can also, for example, analyze statistics, analytics, activity on your site, things like that, and give you suggestions on ways to improve it and do better.

Optimize your pages, et cetera. there's a lot that can happen with Agen AI tools in general, and specifically with Angie that it's now an early access. So we're seeing how people are using it and what it's capable of doing, and it's really quite cool, I have to say. speaking of the early access Bit Den, has just made this comment, sorry, it's gonna, oh, no, that's great.

[00:22:59] Nathan Wrigley: It says, what's the timeline for the public release? So first of all, if you want to try it out and test it, obviously not on a production site, you can just sign up for the early access. So be in touch with me and, we can let you try it out. And we love your feedback. If you are testing it, the, public release is scheduled for September, let's say early to mid-September at work Camp us.

[00:23:23] Miriam Schwab: Our entire focus is going to be on Angie, so our booth. Oh really everything you're gonna see, our booth is completely oriented towards Angie and AI and all of our activity there. even our swag will be around AI and specifically around Angie will be doing demos. We're gonna be collaborating with some other.

sponsors who are there will be at their booths as well. demoing Angie for, attendees and whoever wants to see. So we're excited to show people what it can do. I'm presuming, because you've built it, I'm presuming it hooks into some of the various different things that are unique within your, page builder.

[00:24:01] Nathan Wrigley: for example, I'm guessing it can do Elementor type things, which may be a generic AI wouldn't be able to do. So it has great, excellent capabilities when it comes to Elementor, but actually, Angie's agnostic. yeah, I was looking at the logos here. I can see that you've got the WordPress logo, the Gutenberg logo, the Woo logo, and obviously the elemental logo.

Yeah, it works. Yeah, it works with all of those. You can, use it to manage a Gutenberg site. We implemented some WOO capabilities that are really quite cool. Also, time saving, bulk update, products change, products, add sales and coupons and all sorts of things like that. It also works already, to a certain degree with a CF.

[00:24:44] Miriam Schwab: and hopefully it should, we should be able to announce some other integrations by the time, work Camp US rolls around, which is very soon. some other products in the space are creating their own cps. So mcps are their own kind of, again, it's hard to explain these things. Yeah, it, yeah, go Google it into it and get their capabilities and their tools to work with, Angie.

So that's, that's coming as well. But obviously, yes, with elementary, it has very strong, and powerful capabilities. I wanna ask loads more questions, but it'll become an interview episode about Angie, so let's leave that for another time. We can definitely do a podcast about it, but, yeah.

[00:25:24] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So there you go. At the moment, early access, if you go to elementor.com/pages/and then the last three words are hyphenated, Angie. Early access and Angie is A-N-G-I-E. I'll put a link in the show notes so that you can find that. But if you wanna try to remember Angie, just think the Rolling Stone song, Angie.

[00:25:43] Miriam Schwab: Oh yeah. Nice. Yeah. Nice. it's been a long time since we've had singing on this podcast and I thoroughly recommend it. That's great. Thank you so much. That's brilliant. There you go. Ross said, what did Ross, oh, I thought it was an Angie comment. Ross Wintle. Hello? it's this time on Monday. Yeah, I'm on holiday and I can also tune it.

[00:26:02] Nathan Wrigley: Good grief. Ross is all I could say. It's your holiday and you are tuning into this. That's superb. Thank you. You get a, biscuit or a badge or something When I see you next time, I'll, pretend like I've made you a badge and pat you on the back or something like that. Thank you. okay, last one. We had Dave on last week and he mentioned this, but I thought he's here at short notice and he is obviously sold a license, so he is happy.

Click talk version one. what is click? a simple time tracker that sits inside the WordPress install. So it's pretty much aimed for site builders. So if you are working on client site A, you can track what you're doing in there for building pages, post or maintenance things correctly. Track your time, so when it comes into the month, you've got to invoice.

[00:26:48] Dave Grey: You don't need to think how much time did I actually spend so you can actually invoice the correct amounts and make yourself hopefully more money. Nice. And by buying the license, me some money. Which, yeah, I like it. That's great. What was really interesting is about two and a half weeks ago, I did a podcast episode with Dave and he told us all about the latest stuff that he's doing and all of that, and then he released this and I said to him, he didn't mention that.

[00:27:15] Nathan Wrigley: He said, no, I hadn't thought about it. Then, he, came up with it about 12 days ago and just thought, I'll just crack on with that and build Yeah, just make a couple of days because waiting time kick off nah, build something new. We've always, other promotion stuff. Let's build more things, talented people like you.

It's it's great. so there it is. You can see it. the URL you've gotta go to Dave's website, which is friendly web guide.co uk. That's where he is doing all of his marketing endeavors now. And, if you click on the little plugins bit, then it's just there. Click top amongst all of the other different bits and pieces that you can find.

Most of them, I think it's fair to have to do with the WordPress admin and tidying that open. Making life a little bit easier on the inside of your WordPress install. Yep. Okay. There we go. let's move on to the word pressy stuff. Here we go. so this is on make wordpress.org and it's a summation of some bits and pieces which may or may not drop into Gutenberg and Gutenberg.

And we get this piece of content quite a lot. But this came out just the last couple of days and I've just highlighted a couple of things. You can read it yourself again, links in the show notes, but, data views. So imagine you're in your WordPress website and at the moment you've got this fairly poor.

Set of data views. So if you go to a post, you can either view it as I don't know, you can view it in just one of a couple of ways. The media library, again, there's just a couple of options. They're fairly constrained, a little bit unusable, really in the modern world, data views as an endeavor to make everything searchable and filterable.

So you'll be able to come up with your own view of your own WordPress data. I don't know, let's say you've got a real estate website and you want to just filter down the list with houses only over a certain amount. That'll all be possible in the native version of WordPress. The vanilla version of WordPress, and a couple of things which have dropped recently is the, you can have group results, which is cool.

So you could say there's a, there's an image on the screen if you can see that. That's great. If not, then I'll describe it. It's the idea of this website's obviously got something to do with planets, and you can group content based upon, I don't know whether a, planet is a gas giant, for example, or an ice giant.

In other words, you can put. Content into little groups and data views will show that really, useful, I think in certain scenarios kind of thing you might wanna do on the front end, but now it's gonna be available on the back end, so that's cool. there's also a, I don't really know really what the intention of this is, but writing mode, which is like a distraction free mode, is probably the best way to describe it in WordPress that's been there for a little while, but now you'll be able to shuffle through a bunch of different styles.

So you'll be able to click a button and it will just swap out automatically. The font for random fonts and things. Again, not sure what the utility of that is, bot, it might be the vibe that you want. And that's all I had from that, but you can go and check that out. Does anybody wanna mention anything on there that, especially that data views thing?

If not, I'll move on. That's a big no. I'll move on in that case. Okay. Next one then is, is the developer article. And, Justin Tadlock typically writes this piece. He wrote this a couple of days ago, and it's a few bits and pieces that are coming into core. we mentioned this previously, so I'm, we've mentioned a lot of the things that are coming up in this article, so I'll only mention a couple that we haven't mentioned on previous shows.

And very keen to know what your thoughts are panel on this. do we need more blocks in the basic installer WordPress? 'cause there seems to be a push at the moment to get a ton more in. so Mathias, yes. Got his name right. Yeah. Thank you. That's the first time this year. and he has basically suggested that I've, if you wanna push WordPress out to inexperienced users and their purpose is to do writing and build websites, the blocks that we've got at the moment don't satisfy that.

And it's quite frustrating 'cause you might need to go out and find a third party suite. Wouldn't it be better if there was a basic implementation of just about everything that really you need? And, so this is the idea is to come up with loads and loads of new blocks that would satisfy that. So I think that's interesting.

And then there's some stuff about block bindings. What do you reckon to this one though? Let's just stick with this one. Does WordPress have enough in it already? To my mind, when you look at the UI of a vanilla WordPress install and you look at the array of blocks, there's already way too many and most of them are completely useless.

For just about every use case, unless, for example, I don't know, you have a podcast that you wanna launch with pocket casts, or you wanna launch Vimeo videos. There's blocks for all of it. And Animoto, what the heck? How is that in there that I don't even know if that service still exists, but there's a block for that.

all of these different things. However, the endeavor here is to get things so that writers and website builders have all of the things at their disposal. I don't know, maybe it's not. It's over to you if you wanna talk about that. Can you imagine if the WordPress plugin repository stopped at 20,000 plugins because that was enough?

Yeah, I know what you mean. so there we're constantly evolving, so it makes sense that we would continue to evolve with blocks as well. Yeah, some of them, if I go to the, let me see if this is the actual article. Let me just pull this one up. If it's the GitHub. No, that's not the one.

Here we go. It might be this one. Let's just see if we can find, yeah, here we go. So here's some of the suggestions and they are fairly basic, right? Like the icon block, there is no icon block in core, honestly, like maybe you are deliberately not using icons on your website, but probably you are if you're building a website.

I imagine that icons are a part of it somewhere. we talked about this one last week, the playlist blocks, sliders and car carousels. I still dunno what stretchy text is, but anyway, that's apparently a thing. tabs and accordions, mega menus. Marquee block. So that's like scrolling text, that sort of goes from one side of the screen to the other left to right to left table of contents, time to read bread comms dialogue block.

Doesn't this seem like it should have been in there from the very start? even my like CRM that I use has got stuff like this and it's not a writing interface, but it's got this kind of stuff in it. They all seem useful. if WordPress is moving in a direction where you shouldn't have to know how to code things, like time to read, then it's great for there to be a block for it.

[00:33:55] Miriam Schwab: Yeah. a lot of these exist already in elementary, for example, and they exist because people wanted them and use them. not everybody uses everything but. we also don't, I remember the days, I think we're still in those days of the themes that had 1000 options and features.

Remember, it's like you don't wanna be like overloading the product with too much stuff. But, assuming blocks are being developed in a way that, it's only activating what you need when you need it, hopefully, then why not? It can be helpful to someone. also in my early days of building with WordPress, I remember being thrilled when I found a plugin that could do something for me, like easily without having to code it.

And I just dropped it in and I got the functionality. And, with blocks being the direction for the presence in the future, it's, great for to have all these options. I think it only becomes overload if they're not well organized. And findability is hard and surfacing great ones is also not happening.

In the plug room repo, we have some. Measure of popularity, right? There's a popular tab. Someone's I don't know where to start. And then they can go there and can see what is most widely used. So maybe something like that could happen with blocks to just help people get started or help people find things they want.

But, I don't think like I. there's a reason to limit the types and number of blocks if they serve people and give them functionality and they're useful. Great. Yeah, especially the things, I suppose this is talking about core as well. So what would ship with Core, a lot of the third party vendors of blocks?

[00:35:32] Nathan Wrigley: I dunno if the same is true with Elementor, but there's like a whole UI for switching things on and off. So you go to the, I don't know, like the available blocks page or something like that and you just turn off, I'm never gonna use that. Never gonna use that. Yeah, never gonna use that. And you do that one time and then presumably as a new block would be added to core.

That would be something that you would be redirected to do. Again, look, we've got this new block, we've switched it on, but remember you can go back here and switch off and you don't get that kind of overwhelm where you're, the sidebar is full of stuff that you're never using. maybe an experience like that would be quite cool.

Anyway, Dave, Michelle, if you've got anything on that, just piping. I was gonna say, if you had more blocks in there and had some of the UI to say here real, common blocks and some other slightly experimental ones, you could say. Enable those experimental ones or more niche bits on that side, then yeah, it would make things easier to see on that side.

[00:36:22] Dave Grey: So yeah. I agree with what you said. yep, yep. Michelle? I already said my, so Okay. in which case I think that one particular, so Justin's obviously written a piece all about the different things that are happening in the developer community. That seems like a good one and it feels like it's got a little bit of traction going.

[00:36:43] Nathan Wrigley: as always, Justin's written a very long article including, updates to WordPress coding standards. It's now on version 3.2, so if you're a developer, there's some information in there. There's information about playground and block bindings, but we've covered most of that in various different podcasts.

So we'll press on from there. But I will also link in the show notes to this GitHub article. It's in the Gutenberg repository in its, It's the, number is 7 1 0 2 6, so you can go and find that if you wanna follow on from there. Okay. Oh, Miriam disappeared for a moment, but she's back.

There she is. Sorry. Internet. No, it's alright. No, it's fine. okay, next one. We're off to Twitter. We don't often feature things on Twitter, but here we are. this is a post which was written by Jeff Chandler. If you don't know Jeff, back in the day, started the WP Tavern. it was then bought by Automatic and people like Justin and Sarah Gooding stepped in and what have you.

But, Jeff has written a piece which kind of provoke me at least anyway, to have some thoughts about it. And he says this, see what you think. Dear audience members and panelists, as we approach the one year mark since the keynote at Word Camp US 2024, and we'll cover that maybe a little bit later. Do you feel that WordPress is in a better or worse space?

So it's. a closed question, you've got a binary choice there, you can obviously add your own things. and then a few people replied with some thoughtful things. So Courtney, who's been on the show a few times, has replied with, it's very different in some parts of the world in Asia.

Few Dead asked Matt or discussed such topics in Europe. The room was, and she's used the word appalled at the handling of project sustainability or regard for EU regulation in North America. The concern is still around governance and privacy. Katie, Keith, again, been on the show a few times. She thinks it's worse.

I think usage is about the same, but the reputation is worse and people aren't as passionate about it as they were as a community. We need to work together to advocate and it's, advocate about it still being the ultimate CMS. So basically this is the one year on piece, so we're one year on since. All of the bits and pieces happened at Word Camp us.

We don't need to go over that old ground. What's your thoughts? What do you think? Do you think WordPress is still the space? It is. I'm gonna put my thoughts in quickly so that you don't feel quite, I don't know, intimidated by that question perhaps. I think that, it's possibly in a slightly worse state from a community point of view.

And what I mean by that is it definitely caused some disagreement with a lot of people. a lot of people fell out of love. There was a lot of politicking and a lot of people felt ostracized by that whole thing. It does feel like it's in a better place now than it was a few months ago.

If you look at the core project, the actual software. That feels like it took a bit of a hit for a few months, but now it feels like it's really back and there's loads of mojo. if you just follow what's going on in WordPress news and things like that's way, way down, than it was 12 months ago.

In order to put this piece together, I, trolled through just about everything, and I picked my favorite 20 bits and pieces a year ago. Every week I would troll through hundreds of articles because there were hundreds to t tra through. Now maybe there's 30. Or something like that. So the, interest from people publishing content around that space is just, it's just, it fell off a cliff and it never really came back.

So it's a bit of a mixed bag. My personal opinion is it's, the software is going nowhere. I feel very bullish about it. I'm confident I'm still attending events and, helping co organize the WordPress, the W-P-L-D-N, the meetup that we have in London. And, but I think Jeff's got a point. It does feel maybe that question's worth asking.

over to you, your turn, what do you reckon? I guess I'll jump in. I think, we're at a place now, a year in, from, last year where there's been some humility that has. been, digested by a lot of the industry, where we can't take for granted our leading position. We can't take for granted that things will just continue to be the same.

[00:41:27] Miriam Schwab: even before that, there were already signs of that were concerning of, I like the way you described it, going from like a hundred articles to 30. so it sounds like it was good then, but it seemed like there was less enthusiasm, less passion for the project and aging project. We're aging. I'm aging, I've been in this space for a long time and that means I'm like 20 years older than when I started.

so already there were signs of concern and then. This upheaval didn't help, but I think it has led to regrouping, and more positive proactivity in a way, which is hard to quantify, but that's just my sense. I did feel like it also led a lot of people to be like, I can't wait for others to do things.

And my sense was there was like an upsurge of people creating really cool tools and innovation for WordPress since last year in a way that I didn't feel like we had seen, like all these random, but I don't mean random in a bad way, plugins just being added to the repo. people creating numerous plugins for the repo.

John o Sison comes to mind as someone who created a few that were, are really useful and cool. And, I'm not saying anything about him not doing it before or anything, but he's just an example of what I felt like there was more building and creativity and creation around our space. as a result of, I think all of us kind of feeling like we can't, it is not, it's not on someone else to do it.

if we want WordPress to be what it was, then we need to build and there's like pain points to be solved and it helps. Miriam froze for me. Is she frozen for you as well? Okay. Yep. Deep in thought. Yeah, she's deep in thought she'll probably come. Oh, she's trying to come back through.

[00:43:24] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, bless her. Oh, on the audio she's gonna come through as a bit of a garlic. yeah, in a second is I'm gonna ask Miriam to refresh. Michelle, would you mind in the private, I dunno if she'll be looking in the private. Yeah, I got it. I'm gonna mute her in case she comes back and I'll pass, the bat on to Dave Quickly.

What do you think, Dave? Anything on that? Yeah, probably is in the same sort of basket because I'm still trying to invest time and effort into the WordPress space. I think it, as you say, it's not going anywhere, but yeah, it's taken a big hit and people aren't quite recovering from it. But the kind of, the bruising starting to heal a bit and people are not moving on, but coping with kind of the new world and said if we need innovation, we've gotta start doing some stuff ourselves and stop taking things for granted.

[00:44:09] Dave Grey: So yeah, hopefully the community can heal and other key people might need to try and make amends on that side. But. what's curious to me is that you've, jumped into like plugins right? In, the much more recent past. And so for you, this debate is far, maybe it's not more important, but it's certainly, it's very, raw.

[00:44:33] Nathan Wrigley: 'cause obviously if WordPress were to be in decline, that would directly affect what you've just embarked upon. Yeah. Does that, does any of that kind of stuff keep you awake at night? Do 'cause everybody would like to be on a rising tide, right? You get in early, you hope the tide's gonna rise, you go with it, the customer base swells and all of that, and it feels Basically what Jack j Jeff is saying is that over the last year the tide has either stayed where it was or it's gone out a little bit. I think maybe that's where he is trying to go. Does that stuff bother you? Do you have thoughts around that? Yeah, 'cause that's why I while most of my efforts more plugin based, I've still got my little bit ecosystem around kind of websites in general.

[00:45:17] Dave Grey: So most of it is WordPress related, but it's a couple of side bits that just more general website related on that side to try and diversify slightly on that. So not as much as Katie and Van too for going across the Shopify, but yeah, it's kinda like a gentle toe in the water for another side project.

So should the tide go out further, then they can diversify or basically hedge your bets. But yeah, as you say, WordPress isn't going anywhere. It might just get a bit more, less ideal press on that side, but there's still people doing new sites on there for. Our sold folks will still do new sites on that side.

So frankly, even if I could get like 0.1% of the market share on some of those plugins, I'd be quite happy on that side. Yeah. Okay. thank you Michelle, anything you wanna add? Yeah, so if you go by the number of projects I've launched just this year alone, WordPress isn't going anywhere. Yeah.

[00:46:09] Nathan Wrigley: Woohoo.

[00:46:13] Michelle Frechette: I. I am not concerned about the future of WordPress at this point. I think that we are on a very good trajectory. I think that in, we've been around for, what, 22 years now as a, CMS. And so there's always going to be, in a history like that, some course corrections, there's always going to be in a history like that, some times of, unrest, and sometimes what you need in order to spur greatness is a little bit of dis a fray, I'm not sure what the right word is. Oh, yeah. where we don't always agree on everything, right? Yeah. When everything is just always smooth sailing, you can become complacent and it's easy to say, oh, this is here, this does what I want it to do.

People are contributing, whatever. But when you have a little bit of an upheaval, it shakes things up enough for people to be like, Hey, wait a minute, maybe I should participate. or maybe I'm done with this. In which case that's fine too, right? we've always been someplace where people come and people go, and that's perfectly fine.

That's what happens in any community, in any ecosystem. I no longer use Microsoft Word because I am all in on Google. Do you think Microsoft Word is worried that Michelle Frache is not using, Microsoft Word anymore? I don't think so. I don't think they're worried about that at all. So I think that there's just opportunities, What would, when things like this happen? And I think, we're, what, we're not even actually a full year in, we're at what, 11 months, since last word camp us. And so I think that we are, actually reco not only recovering, but we're moving forward and thriving right now. It's interesting.

[00:48:01] Nathan Wrigley: There's gonna be loads of, How to describe it? There's loads of through lines in this episode that I hadn't really realized until just now. So lots of the pieces that we're about to come onto. Will in some way come back to this piece, right? we'll, I'll try to, as we mention them, I'll try to refer back to this kind of worry that WordPress is in a spot of danger.

and okay, with that in mind, let's just move on to something completely related to that. And the first one, therefore, would be, events. Let's think about events for a minute. So the, these are just things that I found really easily, I didn't have to go looking for this at all. So here as an example, if we're thinking about.

Whether WordPress is, stalling as a piece of software as a community. Here's a few things which I think paint a picture that it's probably still gonna be all right. So the first one is this, word Camp Asia. they have now a call for organizers. You obviously have to log in. It's a Google form, so that's broken on what you can see on the screen, but you get the point, if you would like to be involved in that.

Now is the time, but obviously that event is already mooted, in order for that event to happen, presumably. the, the event space has been organized and paid for and all of that kind of stuff. So Word Camp Asia is a green light and they're looking for organizers at the moment. Next one, coming up very soon is Word Camp A, or you might describe it as Word Camp Canada.

They are now looking for sponsors. It's gonna be happening in October this year. So again, link be in the show notes. My birthday. Yeah. is it really gonna be your birthday? Are you going October 15th? I am speaker, yes. Oh, nice. 'cause Otto is not like a billion miles away from you, is it? It's relatively, it's about a six hour drive.

[00:49:54] Michelle Frechette: Not too nice. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That's great. So anyway, there's another event, a major event taking place. and if you would like to be a sponsor for that event, you can more events this one, this time in Scandinavia. This is Helsinki, WP Sue. Probably butchered that word, but, WordCamp in Omi, it's happening in Helsinki, later this year.

[00:50:16] Nathan Wrigley: It looks like it's now on the 6th of August. 2020. Sorry, that was the date you had to submit your proposal. But anyway, the point is there's a, novel, a new event happening that I had not heard of until very recently. And then, finally. Word, camp Europe, probably the biggest of the lot, at least it has been until recently.

WordCamp Europe 2026, is now looking for organizers as well. Back to the word camp US thing, I think, oh, that's not Word camp Us. We haven't got a word Camp US one. until a little while ago, it looked like the ticket numbers were really down, but I think they're now about to pass the thousandth threshold, which they have.

[00:50:55] Michelle Frechette: They're at 1010. Okay. okay, so that's interesting. So I was a bit concerned that number would be attended by, I don't know, five, 600 people and it would feel really different. That now seems to be, changing however. Here's the through line again, student ticketing, the student ticket pricing for Word Camp us, I imagine has swelled that audience quite a lot.

[00:51:21] Nathan Wrigley: In the recent past, you could get a ticket for, I think it was $25 and they had a big push to, to try and get students to attend. So that's interesting. And then a little bit later, that's great if they're getting young, new, fresh people in the door. That's amazing. Exactly that. Yeah. And can you imagine if you're a college graduate at the minute, like how hard is it?

Like that debate? do you want go into AI or do you wanna do a PhD? P based. Sort of CMS thing. You can imagine where the hotness is taking people at the moment, all the venture capital money and what have you. It's an easy, it's an easy one to go for, right? But, but it does appear that some of the initiatives are paying off and people with a certain proclivity for what they wanna do with their life and how they wanna invest their time and the community that they wanna be involved with, and the philanthropic nature of things like WordPress.

Yeah, you could make your million dollars over on ai, but maybe that's not the central part of what you wanna do in life. Maybe you do wanna do something a bit more philanthropic and, altruistic. it's not only about the philanthropic side of things in a lot of, college university courses related to marketing and things like that.

[00:52:30] Miriam Schwab: They'll teach the students how to use WordPress and some, and often I'll mentor as well as their power tool for supporting their marketing efforts. so that's great. And that still continues to be the case. I'm sure AI is coming to play, but with AI becoming a strong component of WordPress. Then we can be the best of all worlds.

I think use WordPress, which is your power tool, the a very robust, CMS that has capabilities that a lot of other systems don't add to the picture, add to the mix ai, which makes it super user friendly and you can do much more. It's it's a great thing to have students learning and using as their tool and hopefully we'll see more of that.

So I think. That's going to be an advantage in the world of WordPress. Then this, here's another sort of through line. So we talked about how student ticket pricing might have swelled the numbers in the more recent past. Obviously time will tell. if we go to Word Camp US and it's bereft of student aged people, then we'll know that it wasn't that.

[00:53:30] Nathan Wrigley: But if we go and there's, I don't know, typically there isn't a lot of young people in that audience. But if we go and we see that there are quite a few, we'll know that's worked. But here's something on the screen now reported by the repository. Which is definitely working. so this is WordPress Campus Connect.

The article is entitled WordPress Campus Connect Quickly, growing With Global Events, student Clubs, and Scholarships. And, and I'll just read the paraphrase. Ray Moray, who will know if you listen to this podcast, 7th of August, she wrote this just three months since its official launch. Word Camp, sorry.

WordPress Campus Connect is picking up serious momentum. Events have already taken place across the continent. Three continents, student clubs are beginning to form and contributors are rallying behind the initiative to help it grow. The first event of 2025 was held in Spain in May, followed by two more, one in Costa Rica and another in the Philippines.

Two additional events scheduled later this year in India and again in Costa Rica with eight more. Eight more currently in the planning stages, WP Campus Connect contributors have also been laying the groundwork to help students stay engaged with WordPress beyond the classroom, including new scholarship opportunities designed to help students attend flagship word camps.

So again, there's that sort of like through line again. So stuff like this is really interesting. And I, have noticed, I dunno if you've seen the same thing, if you look at the, where a lot of the plugin development is being done and where a lot of the community engagement is being done and where a lot of the contributor time is being done, A lot of it is coming from, Africa and Asia and it seems maybe it's lost its way a little bit in North America and Europe, but it's like the pendulum has swung a little bit and it's a little bit more exciting in those locals.

So anyway, that was a lot from me, but here we go. WP Campus Connect if you want to. Talk about that. Oh, we actually supported, the initial efforts that go, campus Connect, last year. And now we're supporting, we're, campus Connect Edgemere and another one, we're just finalizing it there. They want, elementary licenses, which is great.

[00:55:49] Miriam Schwab: Let people start using WordPress and, if they want to use elementary, great as their first like web building tool. also we're gonna be supporting WordCamp Piza, and if you remember, Mary Hubbard announced, I think she announced she was the one who actually announced it, like a collaboration between, WordCamp, Piza and university students getting credits.

Yeah. Which is a really cool initiative. Yeah. So hopefully we're like, hopefully we're gonna be sponsoring that Word camp and there's that kind of collaboration. So we see some really nice efforts around getting fresh faces into WordPress, and into the ecosystem and using it. In general, like in terms of Elliot says here, people have been saying WordPress is declining for over 10 years.

Totally. I think it's even longer. and it doesn't. And in fact, if, you want business proof of, WordPress still having of very strong future, at least. We think it does. You can see that Elementor has been launching many tools over the last year, all geared towards WordPress, image optimizer, site mailer, Angie.

They're all WordPress tools and we're optimistic about the future and our business keeps growing with WordPress. So if, some people need like hard data points, you can look at elementary and other companies investments in the WordPress space and we continue to invest in it, because it's a strong ecosystem.

[00:57:11] Nathan Wrigley: I'll just read, Elliot's comment in its entirety. 'cause what's on the screen doesn't actually round it all off. It says, people have been saying WordPress is declining for 10 plus years. I remember friends would tell me when I was at uni in 2015 not to pursue WordPress and PHP as it will be irrelevant in a few years time.

And obviously that is clearly not the case. do you know what's curious though? Again, some of this is so difficult to sum up. It takes a panel of people like this. To piece together. These pieces and make it e self, e like evident that these things are all happening and they seem to have a positive, cycle to them.

So we've got, student pricing for WordCamp, us. We've got WP Campus Connect and all of the different bits and pieces that's going on there. We've got, we've got plugin authors, we've got the PISA thing, which is happening at university. Those kind of initiatives are taking off. There's a clear emphasis maybe on marketing with channels which are a bit cooler, like YouTube obviously Jamie Marlins contributions, he's been officially appointed to make those videos.

you're finding Utes where they are. but it doesn't get. Never is it anywhere spelled out? Because we don't really have that kind of marketing team that never really took off. So it, it takes things like this, it takes a bunch of heads being knocked together to figure out.

but in it, in the background, I see that there is a lot going on, which is trying to make the project more sustainable, particularly towards locals where it's becoming increasingly popular. I think, Europe, sorry, Asia and, and Africa. But also there's a, real endeavor to try and get it into the hands of.

Young people, let's go with that. And in many cases, children at school. and also ai, a huge, effort on behalf of the, WordPress AI team to make all of the different pieces available, to AI and CPS and abilities and all of those kind of things that we've talked at. So I've talked myself into a much more optimistic position in the last half an hour, which is quite nice, because this is what I do.

so hopefully I'll be here. That was easy. Yeah. So this time next year, anything else on that before we move on? oh. PHB is dead. Says expert web it. Oh, there you go. P HB has also been dying for 20 years. Yeah, that's, it happens to power like 70 to 80% of the internet, but whatever. Yeah. luckily, Elliot says I didn't listen to them or to, expert web it.

I dunno if web Expert Web it is being tongue in cheek or if they're being serious, but, yeah. anything on that? Sorry, before we move on, I'll just say one last thing about events. So when we were planning for work camp, okay. So Work Camp Asia, we didn't know what it was gonna be like and it was very vibrant.

[01:00:20] Miriam Schwab: Super vibrant, great attendance and enthusiasm. But like you're saying, Asia is very enthusiastic generally. Sorry if about WordPress. We word Camp Europe. We were worried about what was gonna look like. Were people gonna actually be there? From our perspective, it was a really good turnout. We had a really good experience there as sponsors, and it was great.

Or camp Us, same story. What's it going to be like? Oh my goodness, they only sold 500 tickets. By the way, we're not gonna have enough swag. because we're like, we hate having extra swag. So we planned for, less people. But now with ticket sales being over a thousand, I think it's very possible that we'll get to us a 1300 tickets sold by the conference.

That's a pretty decent turnout for a conference that everyone was, wondering how it would turn out. so in-person events, there maybe not exactly what they used to be, but. People are still showing up to learn and connect and innovate, and I think that's a promising sign. And then all these additional events, campus connect and this and that.

Wow, there's so much happening. I, we're spon, I'm in charge of development of sponsorships. I can't even remember all the events we're sponsoring because we get so much outreach and I try to make sure that we support basically almost everything. I don't even know what we're supporting. There's so many, I can't remember.

I have to like, I have to go back and reference. It's seriously so many. You need a spreadsheet. I really need a spreadsheet. But it's like all these communities are coming together to meet up and talk about WordPress. Learn about WordPress, and it's a volume in the first half of the year. Wasn't like that.

Then I could keep track now. Forget I can't keep track. Yeah, it's okay. So maybe it's sticking up. I think maybe we've got some mojo coming back. Maybe there is a little bit more chutzpah about the whole thing. in reply to Jeff's post here on, On X. I think it's probably fair to say that at least this panel, we feel pretty confident Dave is making his plugins.

[01:02:13] Nathan Wrigley: There's obviously some confidence there. Michelle's making a load of new projects inside of the WordPress space elements or releasing a load of new things. There's a load of the big push to skew the audience to younger. In the WordPress space, there's a big push to enable people in different parts of the world, particularly Asia and and Africa, to use WordPress.

Yeah. Okay. I'm Ross makes a point too in the, Ross makes a good point in the comments too, that there's also great community run non-Word camp events coming up. we had press conference come back or come this year replacing, omics, which was prior to the pandemic. We had some other events that are.

[01:02:56] Michelle Frechette: On hold, but we also have, cloud Fest and things like that, that are really ramping up. And so there's a lot, there's a lot going on. You've got loop comp coming up, like a lot of things that are, WordPress related that aren't necessarily wordpress.org type events. I have a, I have a link.

[01:03:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Thank you Ross, by the way. that's a good point. Yeah. Okay, so that's a whole new. That's a whole new part of the ecosystem, isn't it? People taking on events that they're obviously, they're monetizing that event, as opposed to it being a Word camp. they're selling tickets for a different price point, but people are still showing up.

Maybe there's more of a, I don't know, different focus on what those events are. Thanks, Ross. and here's one. In fact, this is happening in London. We've mentioned it a couple of times, but I, got sent a, a coupon code this week by the organizers. there's no affiliate or anything like that. I don't think there is any way, but if you append, I guess in the discount box here.

Yeah, there you go. If you put into the discount box, WP builds 50. Then, you can get $50 off your ticket. This is for loop comp. It's happening, next month. It's in about six weeks or something like that. and it's a one day event in Central London. And the tickets, the early birds have all sold out, but you can, you can still get 50 bucks off with the code.

WP Bills 50. yeah, so there's another, mention like you just said. Thank you. Good, Okay. Okay. Okay. Let me see where we can move to now let's go to this one. This is random. a little while ago I had, Charlotte Bax on the WP Tavern podcast, and she was mentioning she, her thing is all about, web sustainability, and she mentioned in that podcast that she was close to launching a project, and I got a message from Charlotte.

The other week to say that it's ready to go. So I just thought I'd give it a mention on this show. It's called, enor. I don't, I haven't used it, so I can't really report of it on its, efficacy or anything like that. But this page is translated by Google, by the way. if there's grammatical errors or whatever that you can see, blame AI for translation.

But Enor is builders a toolbox for online sustainability. And the idea, is that you've got this tool which will monitor your website and give you a report about the sustainability of it. Beyond that, I can't really tell you anything about it, but as she was such a pleasant guest and honestly, anything we can do to remove our carbon footprint is worth looking at.

Then I thought I'd mention it, probably the quickest thing to do is to Google Enor, E-N-N-O-R. But the URL is enor Earth. Nice. I think that's cool. and the, product itself, is called QuickScan and so it appears to be ready. You can buy a license for various different, license tiers. So there we go.

I wanted to mention that. this is interesting as well. So this is on Matt's. So Matt Mullenweg, out of nowhere, I dunno if this has ever happened before. drop in on the tavern on Wednesday. I'm joined by Michelle, actually at this Michelle and by Jonathan roia. And we're talking about wordpress.com and wordpress.org and why that might be confusing for some people.

I've never used wordpress.com except as a login mechanism to like bind jet pack to things and things like that. So I've never been a user of wordpress.com, but, my understanding, and we talk about this in that podcast, is that obviously you get, there's a free experience over there where you can get like a limited subset of things, but you pay no money and you get yourself.

Website, which is nice, but also if you start to pay money, you can then do things like add in theme support or add in the ability to, migrate from one theme to another, use plugins and so on and so forth. But until recently, if you look on this pricing table, until recently, Michelle, correct me if I'm wrong, this business license was the one that you needed to get plugins on.com.

Is that true? Have I got that? Yeah. Yes. That's my understanding. Yeah. Okay. So actually. Yeah, you can install some plugins. Okay. On some of the other, like you could install jet pack and things like that. Okay. but more com, more commercial plugins. Oh, okay. Yeah. You're able to do so a limited subset of plugins, like the ones that automatic produce, so jet pack and so on.

Okay, got it. But, so they're running experiment now where if you're on the personal plan, so that's, in my case, it's saying pounds, I guess it's $3 a month. If you go with dollars and it's, or premium, you can now install plugins. but you've only got, so this is curious.

You've only got until the 25th of August if you wanna buy that thing. And now I don't know what that means. I don't know if that means you'll get a year of that and then after a year you'll have to pony up to the business account or whether that will then be, you'll be grandfathered into that forever and ever.

But Matt. obviously the co-founder of WordPress, he is saying that for the first time ever, we're running a summer special where every single paid account gets full wp the full WP Cloud experience with full customization and control. It's a test run until the 25th of August. it's WordPress without the asterisk, without limits implemented in a way that's intuitive.

And the rest of it is, marketing speak. It looks like it's $4 a month, not three 'cause of the pound difference. Anyway, I thought that was interesting. And I don't know if that means that if it's a barnstorming success and they, tons of people pony up and buy that, whether they'll carry on or if it's just, I don't know what that is.

But it kinda seems to, yeah, I don't have any information about what, what's going to happen going forward. but I have recently, upgraded a few accounts to the business plan so that I can experience those and see how they work. WP Trail Buddies is now wp trail buddies.com. does live at wp trail buddies.wordpress.com.

[01:09:15] Michelle Frechette: Still, I haven't done the home migration thing, but I am able to add CSS, for example, and other plugins so that I can use that as a paid, the paid plan. And my goal is recipes for lydia.wordpress.com is now just recipes for lydia.com, where I'm adding family recipes for my daughter. And so I'm experimenting with it, seeing how I like it.

And so far it's a smashing success because I could do everything in the business plan that I could and self-hosted. Yeah, it feels like these plans though, if that was to carry on, it feels like they've just become like a regular. Manage hosting company without the sort of strings attached of, if you're on these cheaper plans, you can't have these, basically the, you need the plugin ecosystem to make WordPress, valuable in many people's eyes, and now they appear to be giving that away on this trial basis.

[01:10:07] Nathan Wrigley: Who knows? get the offer at the bottom of the screen to see there's any more detail. if you click get the offer, basically you end up here and obviously I'm not logged in, so I can't do anything. I did think about that earlier, but, here, if you see, this is the key thing on the pricing table.

I'm just, it says in store plugins if you click on it, you get this little popup, which says until August 25, unlock pre, plugin access on new personal and premium plans. So that seems to be this offer is that basically you can get plugins on.com for the same price as you would normally have had to pay for the business accounts.

That's interesting. So basically what Matt says in his post, which is interesting, is that, wordpress.com runs on. multi-site, multi-site infrastructure, right? Yeah. It's like the biggest multi-site infrastructure probably in the world with who knows how many sites. Millions. I'm guessing.

Millions. Yeah. Yeah, Insane, Can you imagine that? It's insane that thing supports all those sites all the time. It's thanks to their, server and infrastructure team led by Barry Abramson, who's a genius. And, but that infrastructure, came with some limitations. I don't know if it's infrastructure or their business model, but like in the lower tiers, you actually couldn't install plugins, including free ones.

[01:11:29] Miriam Schwab: It was limited. then they, in the last few years, they rolled out WP Cloud, which is the way I see it is AWS for WordPress, right? Yeah. So it's here's the bare bones, like the infrastructure, but it's more than just that. It also has services and it's tailor made for WordPress.

So, there's your infrastructure if you want to run things, businesses on it, whatever. But here it's, combining the two and allowing people to experience WP Cloud, which is not multi-site, and, is does offer, I guess it has more flexibility. and yeah, it's an interesting experiment.

it'll be interesting to see how it goes, but it's, it's interesting to see that contrast of the two infrastructures being offered and what they, what comes with it. And anyways, it's, yeah, that's an important point, isn't it? So if it's WP Cloud, it's not like you've just been co-opted into this massive multi-site network.

[01:12:22] Nathan Wrigley: You're on a, you're on some sort of different infrastructure and presumably the economies of scale mean that's harder to. make work at a price point of three pounds or $4 a month. It's like fancier infrastructure. Yeah, it's like cloud, but it is theirs. And I don't know how they run their hosting if they have their own data centers, but if they do, then they can keep their costs pretty low.

[01:12:45] Miriam Schwab: and then even WP Cloud can be relatively low cost to run and, then they can offer it. By the way, I don't know if you remember, but Bluehost partnered with wordpress.com to offer WP Cloud to their users as a higher tier. Yeah, I think that's so, that's another example of W Cloud we put out there through a regular hosting company in here.

Anyways, I. This is just my understanding from the outside, but it's an interest. Yeah. But it is interesting and also interesting. It's such a short timeline. So maybe they're just hoping to onboard a couple of thousand websites and just see what the heck happens. It goes. And whether goes, and also in the near future, it does appear that the wordpress.org flavor of the WP admin is gonna become the wordpress.com flavor.

[01:13:29] Nathan Wrigley: So there'll be no visual difference between the two things. Definitely changes afoot. That's combined with the interesting work that's being done on upgrading the WordPress admin ui, right? That's being done by the core team. I think, a ts is leading that. Yep. I can't remember, sorry if I'm getting that wrong, but, but yeah, so once it's upgraded, then it's upgraded for everyone.org and.com.

[01:13:52] Miriam Schwab: And I guess that's part of that. I think this is an interesting experiment and, if you're flip-flopping about which host, then maybe, maybe that's worth a worth pony and up for a few months just to see. It looks like you've got a. Those prices, at least that I'm looking at are annual all.

[01:14:08] Nathan Wrigley: So maybe you can change, maybe this does that, I dunno. Yeah, you can pay monthly and what have you. Anyway, certainly an interesting pivot and who knows, maybe.com will be a different creature in the days, weeks and months to come. Speaking of hosts, last week we had Jess Frick on the show and she was very tight-lipped about what she was gonna be doing in the future.

and she said, you'll have to wait and see. And we waited and saw, and now I can't find the article. Where's Jess gone? Is that it? No, there we are. There's Jess. she's gone to, rocket.net. So another WordPress host, she's becoming the general manager, so like super senior. over at Rocket Net.

She was previously with Pressable, but as of now, and I think for the last month, she's been working over at Rocket Net, coincidentally, and I think it is a coincidence that they also put out some PR information this week, which, paints a very rosy picture if, if it's all to be believed, they, they're going gangbusters at the moment.

I don't really know how to pause information like this because obviously it is a press release and so it's bound to be couched in, very affirmative language and what have you. But, according to this, they are the, if you were to rank, companies, they are number one, one hundred and sixty seven on the, 2025 Inc.

5,000 list of Americans fastest growing private companies, which I presume means that they're having some sort of stratospheric growth. good time to join Jess, so congratulations to her. Jess is amazing. Yeah. Oh, they're lucky to have her. She's and Ben Gabriel was running Rocket Net. He's just powering forward, set a pace and you can see it in their growth, which is super impressive.

[01:16:02] Miriam Schwab: So good for all of them. I just don't even, I don't even really understand how you cut through the noise with WordPress hosting. I just don't understand how, you can grow at a seismic rate because there's just so many and they all have to speak the same language. they're all chart, it's all in the marketing and the differentiation.

[01:16:23] Michelle Frechette: What they've done different then in that case, I wonder if it's just, like that amazing domain authority they've got when they bought rocket.net. It's a brilliant name. I dunno what they've done differently, but obviously something's. Sticking so well done to them. I think it's basically quality support and as Ben says, not charging commodity prices of $3 a month for your hosting.

[01:16:44] Dave Grey: It's cheap as chips actually charge like $30 for your single site so you can actually afford to have a good support team and people behind it. And the infrastructure and things. So disclaimer, I've got a few sites to drop it as well and like them on that side. But yeah, they're charging prices that mean they can actually grow and provide a good service rather than just being raced to the bottom, which never wins.

So what, is it, when you bought their stuff, what tipped you over? Was it the support? It sounds like you couple in that I had quite a few sites. We had 20 I in the UK 'cause I was just starting on the small hosting side and I had all the bits on there, but I had one client two years back but wanted like a site that was like hot on the performance side of things.

So through sort of rocket's marketing and bits on their sort of speed and time to first bys and things. And as there other blog posts and bits they put out there, I thought yeah. Give them a try on that side, play the support team behind that. Could migrate a site from there across rather than relying on the tools and things.

But yeah, I think it's just basically the quality support and things behind that. Even Ben said himself a few times, he's then popped in and applied to tickets just so he can see what's going on in the coal face to get an understanding for what's going on, rather we're running short people, I've gotta help in, it's I wanna see what's running in my own business on that side.

So interesting. And with two hosts, and they're one of them, I, whenever I go to a new website, especially in the WordPress space, my journey goes like this. I end up at the homepage and then I just scroll up and down quickly, just do the kind of like the eye candy bit, just what, the heck are they doing?

[01:18:14] Nathan Wrigley: Then almost immediately I end up on the pricing page and I'll have a scan around there. And then my third port of call, which is where I really want to get to, is the about page, and I will read the about page. In fact, that's the most important metric for me, is who the heck are you? and obviously a company like rocket.net, their about page is probably gonna look really credible.

Now, if they can point to these press articles and all the different websites that they've no, got no doubt got on their domain, but uniquely for hosting, the thing which will turn me off them quickly is rubbish support. and I'm currently with a host that I really like. I won't mention any names 'cause it's, why would I, but they have, intercom, that little chat widget thing in the bottom right hand corner.

And when I click that, I can count on one hand the amount of seconds it takes for me to get a real human. It's like usually four seconds before a real human drops in, and typically they have got the answer. So it's pretty clear to me that they're not employing like tier one, tier two, tier three.

I think everybody's tier three and I'm just totally sold on that. I just, in case they're listening, I'm not going to, but I would pay twice as much next week's article. So and so hosting piece a single customer. Yeah. But that whole piece of mind it, Single customer. It's, so important. It's the one thing that I will pay through the nose for is that hosting.

[01:19:51] Miriam Schwab: When I was running strati, I said most SaaS products, and that includes hosting is 50% the product and 50% the support. Yeah. You, your product is only as good as your support if it's not excellent. People will go elsewhere and that can be one of your major selling points. And so company like Rocket or the one that you're hosting with shows that what Rocket I think also shows, which is interesting from a business perspective, is that you can enter a space that seems super saturated.

[01:20:19] Dave Grey: Yeah. Hosting, but also an industry that's like legacy and old WordPress and supposedly isn't growing. And if you position yourself correctly, marketing sales, I don't know if they do sales, it's probably a lot of word of mouth, bringing expertise to the table, et cetera, focusing on specific value points that you really emphasize.

[01:20:39] Miriam Schwab: Then you can, do well, even in that kind of market, there's no such thing as something that doesn't work. And by the way, the race to the bottom also works, unfortunately. But there are hosting companies in our space that do amazingly well by racing to the bottom, which makes it hard for everyone else because customer support's super expensive.

It just is like providing that, which is what we expect, It's just, it costs a lot. but both, all things work and all these companies position them in a certain place and can find success there. It's it's interesting. Yeah, incredible. I think the first time I'd heard of Rock Up done, it was probably, I don't know, maybe four years ago, maybe I'm being a bit optimistic.

[01:21:20] Nathan Wrigley: I dunno if they're actually a lot older than that or what have you. They weren't on my radar and now they seem to be everywhere. They've, whatever they've done is pretty impressive. So congratulations to them for hiring Jess. 'cause we all know Jess is brilliant and, congratulations Jess to you for doing that as well, taking that job.

Okay. So let's imagine a scenario where you are sitting around to yourself, you're bored one day and you think, do you know what I need? I need more WordPress, AI music in my life because, I'm sure we've all done it. just bored on a Sunday, what the heck am I gonna do with my Sunday?

I could do the chores or I could sit down and I could go here. Oh, I dunno what to say about this. they got a great URL, it's W Log fm. Unfortunately, I can't play my system audio. it won't allow it, so I can't play. I can't play you, but this is basically a never ending source of AI generated music.

all about WordPress. for example, at the moment, if I was to click play, I would be delighted to hear, the song WordPress Queen. but just a short click away. I've got a song called Broken.

[01:22:37] Michelle Frechette: I wanna know who's behind. Do we know who's behind this? I have no idea, but it's just genius. I've, got broke, broken permanently. it's gonna sell right to the top of the charts, isn't it? And then another plugin conflict, plug in conflict. It's so good. Plugin conflict. word camp nostalgia.

[01:22:57] Nathan Wrigley: I've just, my mess, my masterpiece. No doubt about, I have one on my screen called Staging versus Production. Have a listen. just listen to it in your own ears. 'cause and then. And then the one about the actual website itself, wl, log fm, WordPress radio, all the, they run outta space for characters.

So it's truncated there. One called Child Theme. So now you know what, to do with your life. God, listen, God listen to this. they're made by a ai, so mileage may vary. but I had a good chuckle. I dunno if it's making them on the fly or if it's just, they've got, they've made 50 of them and put them on this website, but, the gee, I think they've just pregenerated them because you can see in the page source you've got all the things that been as the player.

okay. There's a few, okay. They've got a, I think called podcast player or something like that going, okay, brilliant. This one's. Four. 4 0 4. Feeling lost. Okay. Exactly. It's so good. Dave done. He's already giggling. He says I should definitely check out w log after the air. Stick it on your YouTube channel, Dave.

make us, make it so that we can all listen to them. then, okay, the very last one, there was so many bits and pieces that we could have got to today. I will get to this one probably last if you, I don't know what to make of this. Usually things in the WordPress space get more expensive or, more things get added in and it costs more money.

I'm curious as to what's going on here. So shortcut, I don't know much about shortcut, but I know it's like a rival to, WooCommerce. Let's go with that. it's a, it's. An entire e-commerce platform. it's by Adam Prizer, and I believe Andre Daniel as well. They're the two people behind it.

Maybe there's more apologies if there are. for a while, they had fees attached to some of the different atoms that you could get. for example, if you wanted order bumps, they would charge a fee, but not like a fee like you'd pay for their extension. they would add in a fee onto the transaction cost.

So let's say that somebody ordered an order bump, they would get 2.9% of, sorry, 1.9% of that order bump, which felt like a pretty incredible business model for them. So I don't know what's forced this about face, but that's all gone. They've decided to get rid of these extra fees and I don't know why. My only thought is that coming round the corner is, a new rival called Fluent Cart.

Which, if you've ever come across their products, fluent forms, fluent CRM, they've got a whole load of different things in the WordPress space. They are, they're probably gonna be treading fairly heavily on the toes of shortcut in the near future. So I don't really know what's going on there.

But, anyway, if you've got shortcut, you are, and you're making money out of it, you're about to make about 1.9% more. so Wow. There you go. things apparently get cheaper. by the way, there's another company that lowered their prices recently, which I saw go on, nitro Pack. Did they? Yeah. They lowered their prices just like that.

[01:26:18] Miriam Schwab: They were like, I'm pretty sure it was them. I, yeah. they were like, we can, so we did. It was something like that. Interesting. You wonder if it's commercial pressure, like some other rival, like Hot Rival is coming along, or if it's just literally why not? We're doing. Why not? In a world of rising prices, it's a nice way to create some positive sentiments and maybe, it's a little bit of the race to the bottom, but not exactly if you retain your quality and yeah, it's, it's a nice thing to do for your users.

Yeah. The interesting thing here is I don't think anything about the product has changed, just the pricing. So whatever you had before, I think you now have the same, they just don't cream off this little fee, in the same way that Stripe does. You pay a transaction, you expect Stripe to take a bit.

[01:27:04] Nathan Wrigley: they were adding in their little fee as well. So anyway, they've taken that away. there you go. I think that's it. We've reached our 90 minute mark. Is there anything else that I missed, our panel? Anything you wanted me to add that I didn't? No, we're all good. Okay. In which case I will say, Miriam, I'll see you.

Next week. Is it? Next week? Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. Michelle, I'll see you next week as well. I'll see you both also. Yeah. Dave, I dunno when I'll see you. I can't go anywhere. Oh, I'm so sorry. You need to sell more Click top licenses. Yeah, let's, let's try and make that happen. Yeah. Yeah. Click here. Yeah. but we will see, you in a couple of weeks time.

I believe the show's coming back, depending on how Jetlagged I am, will be back in two weeks time. so thank you for joining us. As always, the show is kept alive by the comments, so thank you so much. If you endeavor to, make a comment, really appreciate it. The links, as always will be in the show notes.

Head to wp builds.com and search for episode number 345 of this weekend, WordPress. And only one thing that remains is the humiliating hand wave of joy. that's now what I'm calling it, the humiliating hand wave of joy. and look, they're all. Jazz hands, even the vaguest humiliation. Anyway, there you.

There you go. Thank you so much, Michelle Ette. Thank you, Dave. Thank you, Miriam. We will see you soon. Thank you. If you guys wanna stick around for a nata, feel free. We'll see you in a couple of weeks time. Take it easy. Bye-bye. Bye.