This Week in WordPress #346

[00:00:03] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for This Week in WordPress, episode number 346, entitled extremely, very, very tired. It was recorded on Monday, the 1st of September, 2025. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I am joined by three fabulous guests.

I'm joined by Taco Verdonschot by Dave Grey and by Alex Osmichenko.

We are here to talk about WordPress, but we get into a whole lot of other stuff as well.

On the WordPress side, we talk about what's coming in Gutenberg 21.5. We also talk about the WP Engine, Automattic controversy. It's with the lawyers at the moment. Where are they at?

We also talk about the FAIR package manager. Where does it live? It's got a home. Where can you find that? And what does it do?

We also get into the education piece in WordPress and talk about the WordPress Credits, which is enabling students in the real world to get credits in their institution, in this case, in Costa Rica, so that they can offset their WordPress work against the university degree they are hoping to get.

We talk about loads of events coming up, lots and lots of WordCamps, particularly in Europe, and also the WP Accessibility Day.

Rocket.net has joined forces with hosting.com. What does that mean?

Talk about Press Conf as well.

And then a fabulous new resource called Telex by Auttomatic, which allows you to create plugins and blocks and things like that all inside a UI of a chatbot, and then immediately launch them into a built-in playground instance. It's pretty amazing in all honesty.

And we also talk about why these cards got me stuck at the airport.

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

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Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Depends where you are on the globe. I feel like I'm in about seven places on the globe at the moment. Because I've just come back from Word camp US and it was great. I had a really nice time. We can get into that in a minute, but, I, am of an age now where I don't do flights and then sleep.

My body just goes, no, you're just gonna stay. You're just gonna stay in the uk. so that's what happened. I stayed in UK time, just before I left. It said, oh, now, it's time for Portland time. So I got used to it just prior to leaving and now I'm back in the UK and feeling really tired. So I've asked the three guests to interrupt me as much as possible 'cause I'm not gonna make, we'll, don't worry.

Yeah, please. There's gonna be no sense issued forth from my, mouth. So it's this week in WordPress, we're up to episode number 346. There has been a lot happening and because I was in Word, word Camp, us over the last week, many of the stories that we cover today are not directly over the last seven days, which is usually what we do.

So there might be a few that go a little bit further than that. it would be really boring if it was me just talking the whole time. So that's why we invite intelligent people on. To have a conversation with me so that they can push me in the right direction. Don't be so shy, Taco, point at yourself.

Because they keep the conversation going and they're from all over the globe. They're from different companies and industries and it's just really entertaining having them on. So let's introduce them one at a time. So our regular, one of our regular, we have five or six co-hosts who come on frequently, and I'm very pleased to have Tacho back.

How you doing? Tacho? really well. Yeah. Good. I don't have a jet lag,

[00:05:10] Taco Verdonschot: so I helps. But you were somewhere, where did you go? Yeah, I went to the beautiful city of Amsterdam for the open source summit. The

[00:05:19] Nathan Wrigley: heck, that's like a bike ride almost. Yeah. Yeah. But what was that? obviously the open source summit, I, can get what it would be, but was it big?

Was it a tiny thing? Was it a new thing? What is it? No, that's a big

[00:05:33] Taco Verdonschot: thing. So the Linux Foundation has a lot. Projects, open source projects, and this is basically their European flagship event, where they bring together a lot of people from all of those open source projects. So it was, several thousand

[00:05:52] Nathan Wrigley: people.

Nice. And do you, did you get the sort of same warm and fuzzy feeling that you would do at a Word camp, or is it a, different, more, I don't know, corporate event or something like that? No,

[00:06:02] Taco Verdonschot: it's, definitely very similar to the WordPress vibe. I think that comes with the open source nature for the projects is that people tend to be of the more sharing type.

and, caring for each other, helping each other out. but it was definitely a lot more technical than the average work camp.

[00:06:26] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. I'd be totally outta my depth. I'm glad I went to Word Camp us. Same here. And it was so much

[00:06:31] Taco Verdonschot: fun.

[00:06:31] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I'm glad. Oh, I'm really pleased. I saw some pictures and I thought, oh, he's not here.

But it looked like you were having a nice time. Absolutely. So that was good. Yeah. anyway, let me do the proper bio. meet Tacho Verdon shot Chief Community Officer at Progress Planner and one of the regular co-hosts of Site Spotlight, which is a YouTube series that helps WordPress site owners improve their websites with practical tips.

Tacho has been active in the WordPress community for years as a contributor, organizer, and advocate for open source. He also helps to organize WP Accessibility date more of that later. A global event which focuses on building a more inclusive web. Tako lives in the leather in the Netherlands with his wife and two daughters.

Thank you for joining us Tako. Really appreciate it. Happy to be back. joining us again is Dave Gray. He's been on the show. Dave's like this three in a row. New Monday home, isn't it? I dunno, dunno quite what happened there. Dave went from no, no appearances to suddenly he's like on about 28. Yeah.

Thank you for joining us again, Dave. Really appreciate it. And I'll read Dave's bio 'cause it gives you an indication of what happened there. Dave was the last minute standing for the last two episodes of this show, however, this week is his originally scheduled appearance. Dave is the man behind friend friendly web guy plugins and is creating a range of plugins to help web designers and site maintainers with a variety of client pain points.

Glad to have you back, Dave. Thank you so much. Be back again. Appreciate it. Thanks. You

[00:07:56] Dave Grey: can have a break.

[00:07:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, no you Sean, I should be phoning you up 10 minutes before the show goes live to say, Dave, we need you. And then finally, brand new to the show, is Alex Chenko. Hello Alex. How are you doing?

Hey, it's great. You can see, from Alex's, oh, you are so welcome. I, love it when we have new people. Don't, get me wrong, I love it when we have, returning guests and all that, but I think one of the best bits about this show is over the course of many, months, I end up meeting dozens of new people and, now Tacho knows Alex and Alex knows Dave, and the virtuous cycle continues and that's really nice.

Yeah. So Alex, as you can see on the screen, is the CEO at it, Monks, which is a WordPress agency. He is also over there, the founder, of IT Monks, which is a WordPress agency. They've been, leading projects that push the boundaries of what's possible with WordPress. With over 15 years of experience in custom builds and complex development, he thrives on tackling challenging tasks and bringing WordPress websites to the next level.

Alex specializes in optimizing high performance systems and handling large scale projects, always with a focus on stability, scalability. And long-term growth. So there is our panel. For today. Thank you Alex. Thank you Token. Dave. Nice to meet you Alex. Yeah, indeed. Is that,

[00:09:20] Alex Osmichenko: I think that

[00:09:21] Nathan Wrigley: is definitely one of the nice things about this show is all of that.

Maybe we can add accessibility to that list at the end. Yeah, indeed. Okay. Alright, let's find out a little bit later. so just a few bits and pieces. Firstly, if you would like to comment like these people have done, I'll show you how to do that in just a moment. But we al always get a few comments at the, beginning usually to do with the weather.

So influence wp. So that'll be Ryan is joining us from, a gorgeous day in Charlotte. You, NC North Carolina. I believe in the us. Thank you for joining us. Love it. Reese win is also joining us. His message has got truncated, but I'll read it all out. Hello from a dreary, oh dear. A dreary and miserable Newton la willows life.

ReLife forms. I, oh, this is in reply to my comment saying, invite any life forms that you like. I have shared the URL as requested to the spider in the corner of my womb. Oh, I like it. He wasn't a web guy, so he wasn't interested.

[00:10:18] Taco Verdonschot: That's actually quite funny.

[00:10:21] Nathan Wrigley: played Reese Bravo. Reese, sorry.

That was excellent. Elliot's joining us from just down the road. Hi Elliot. Nice to have you with us. And, we're also joined by, Dan Danielo. I'm not sure how to pronounce your name. I apologize Danielo, but very nice to have you with us. Thank you for joining us. And Marcus Burnett is joining us and this is cryptic and it says Captain Monday.

Sorry. So sorry for the bag search. it's not that cryptic, because when I was leaving Portland yesterday, you have to go through customs at the airport. Yeah. And you put your bag in the thing and it goes through the x-ray machine. my bag, most of the time it'll sail right through.

But this time I got hauled over so that I could empty my bag for, because there was a, suspicious object in the bag. And this. Was the suspicious object. Oh, it's Marcus' Unleash the WaPo game, which I bought from him. And basically they wanted to know what the heck it was, because they're like, packs of cards are not that big.

And, what it is a whole bunch of wapos and it's, like full on. Look at it. It's really, it's like a real chunky game. And Marcus has invented, built, designed, and had made the, wa the game meet the, I was gonna say Meet the Wapos, unleashed the WaPo. And this, for some reason was the thing, the security pulled me over and they went through it all and had a good old look.

And I had to explain what the heck it was. But, firstly, Bravo to Marcus. It's available now. If you wanna buy it. I'm gonna say go Google, unleash the WaPo, which is spelt. That. Dear listener, dear watcher, it's unleash as you'd expect. It's not focusing, is it? For some reason it won't focus? Nope.

Nevermind. Oh, it was just about to focus. I took it away. So it's unleashed the wpu and wpu is W-A-P-U-U. However, word of advice don't take it on an airplane is all I'm saying because, that little x-ray machine has a really hard time figuring out why it's all in layers like that, and it doesn't look like a normal pack of cards.

They thought it was some kind of incentive.

[00:12:38] Taco Verdonschot: and I expect it was recently printed. Yeah. which might mean there's some residue from the printing machine as well.

[00:12:46] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. And that

[00:12:47] Taco Verdonschot: could set off bomb track.

[00:12:50] Nathan Wrigley: they were definitely,

[00:12:51] Taco Verdonschot: in the past where

[00:12:52] Nathan Wrigley: definitely hold me over. what you will get if you are a, one of the people that want to buy this game, you'll get, the usual stuff.

you'll get your, kind of instruction card, which looks a little bit like that. There's the terms of how you play it and what have you. And then each of the cards as you might expect, features a little wacko. Oh, with some, it's, a bit like, I dunno, something like top trumps in the UK and you play against, you play with a team of four people pitted against each other and you all get WaPo cards and they've got characteristics and what have you.

And they're from different parts of the world. And I confess I haven't played it yet, so I will read the instructions and get to you, but like I said, don't go, don't go, on the airplane. So that fully explained, that travel

[00:13:35] Dave Grey: travelers, it's

[00:13:35] Nathan Wrigley: like half the size. There should be. Yeah. Oh, a travel ver No, it'd be really tiny.

It's already just about the right size. But I thank you for that. Marcus, thanks for, getting me a copy of that. And then I dunno if you, I, I got to the lobby of the hotel and Michelle Frache came over and, you, and she gave me this keep your eyes out. Keep your eyes on my screen. Oh, you can't see it.

It's too bright. Oh, that's a shame. But it says the word howdy. She gave me a howdy sign, which I've now hooked up. So thank you, Michelle, for doing that as well. I'll figure out a way to make it so that it's not as insanely bright. As that 'cause darn background. It's just light, isn't it? You can't actually read the word.

You can read it better when it's switched off. But thank you Michelle, for, getting that to me as well. Really appreciate it. okay. If you wanna make a comment from the show, the best thing to do is to go to this, URL, head to wp builds.com/live. if you just look underneath Tachos Chin, you can see it there.

Yeah, lovely. W what a pro wp builds.com/live And, leave us a comment. It really does keep the show going. Really would appreciate that. This is a WordPress thing, so we'll definitely start talking about WordPress. But before we do that, just a couple of bits of housekeeping from me. This is our, this is the address where we live on the internet, wp builds.com.

If you like what we do and you wanna keep in touch, just pop your email address into there and we'll send you a couple of emails a week one when we parcel this show up as a podcast. That'll come out tomorrow. After we finish it off later today. I edit it and put it out as an audio episode that'll come out tomorrow in the morning, but also when we release our regular Thursday podcast episode.

That's how we started. we're onto 435, will be the one dropping this week. But the last one was with, Ross Sally of Search and Filter. And then you can see, look, Dave was on it a little while ago, as well as Tim Nash and a whole variety of the great and the good in the WordPress space. so you can check that out as well, and we'll drop you an email about that also.

Okay. All the self-promotional bits are done. Let's crack on with the bits and pieces that either the guests have brought to my attention this week or that have been brought to attention via an RSS speed or something like that. So here's the first thing. Gutenberg 21.5. This is the regular it is on make wordpress.org.

And this comes out fairly regularly. very often there's not as quite, there's not so many features, but this time around there's quite a few new features because these couple of things are gonna drop soon. Introducing, it's always nice to hear something new. We have an accordion block, the sort of thing that you've had in like block suites for ages, stackable cadence, generate blocks, those kind of things.

Have had it for a long time, but it's now gonna be available to you as a. A core block. I don't know what capabilities it's got, but you can imagine what an accordion can do. I'm sure. The other notable feature would be this one. The command palette thinks Spotlight or Alfred. it's been available in WordPress for a little while, only, in limited places.

and my understanding is with the next version of WordPress, or indeed, if you download the Gutenberg plugin, you can have it sooner. It's gonna be available in far more places. So certainly on the WP admin side of things too, it says all parts. It says here, we aim to bring the command palette to all parts of the WordPress experience as a first step.

The command palette is now available in the admin. Dashboard. So who knows where that'll go. And then the last thing I wanted to mention, 'cause then it just gets into chains, log and track tickets and things like that, is there's also now support for boardus radio, boardus Radio, border Radius. Say it right, Nathan.

that is the measure of how tired I am. that's gonna be available for you to preset in your theme js ON file. So if you're shipping something to a client and you just think actually everything ought to have the same border radius, now you can do that without having to go in and dial it in on each individual image, for example, that you're drop in.

You can do that. So there's that. Does anybody want to comment on that? I was talking a lot there.

[00:17:46] Alex Osmichenko: I wanna make a bet. Okay, let's make, a bet. Everyone, when will be the slider, block ready?

[00:17:56] Nathan Wrigley: Is that, the kind of thing that you want? Do you

[00:17:58] Alex Osmichenko: want a slider

[00:17:59] Nathan Wrigley: block? I want, slider and tabs.

You want though. But tabs. I can see. I, fi Okay. I've got two things to say to that. First of all, it feels like sliders lost a lot of traction. People thought they weren't accessible, they were bloated and what have you. But with modern CSS, you really can build a credible slider in just CSS.

So is that what you are imagining, not like some sort of heavy JavaScript library to do it? Just a CSS based thing?

[00:18:28] Alex Osmichenko: at least, yeah. It should be. It should start with something, yeah. I think, I hope accordion was done right. Relying on the interactivity API and, build the right way. And, last three years we, using, swiper Gs for Library for implementing slider and it's always a pain, implementing that on the backend side of the editor. So front end is fine, but the backend, it's a kinda not native and has certain disadvantages of not having that already in the Gutenberg.

[00:19:08] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that's interesting. So slider block coming soon to a, to an Alex based website near you.

We'll have to see. I have no intuitions as to whether that will happen, but we've certainly got these three things. So lemme just recap. Command pallet accordion and border radius presets, like I said, loads of other stuff as well. But

[00:19:26] Taco Verdonschot: yeah, I think there's a good comment by Reese. On this topic,

[00:19:31] Nathan Wrigley: Reese says, sorry Dave, we've completely obliterated your face.

oh. No we haven't. Just crank the chair off of it. Excited for an accordion block and add a FA, sorry. Add. Add FAQ schema extension to that accordion block. Feels like an easy plugin to make. Famous last words. Is that something you're planning to do? Reese, will we find you here next week? Having done, I'm actually

[00:19:55] Taco Verdonschot: hoping that someone at Yost is paying attention and building this already.

[00:20:01] Nathan Wrigley: You would've thought so, right? I'm guessing that of course, those people at Yost that you know owe so are probably on top of this kind of thing. But yeah, that makes perfect sense. Doesn't it have some sort of schema there? Dave, anything to add? Oh, you can see me again now. Yeah. Yeah.

Apart from the fact that you're back. Yeah. But loads and loads of different things, like enhancements. There's a mention here of like certain features that have been added to the data views and various components and what have you, but it's not really for this show. this is what's new in Gutenberg, 21.5.

Go Google it to find out more. Onto a topic that hasn't really gone away since what, September last year when, Matt. Mullenweg had the state of the word, no, it wasn't the state of the word, it was the address at the end of WordCamp us that obviously got reprised about three or four days ago. And we can talk about that in a minute.

But, let's just go to this one first. So this is, the repository. Ray Moray, as we all know very well, she sums up the article. it's all about, the judge who is deciding what's happening with the automatic bid to dismiss WP Engine's. Antitrust claims, as we know, I'm no lawyer, but I've highlighted a few different bits and pieces and basically, nothing's been decided.

Let's put it that way. we're not at the point where things have been decided. We're at that stage in the legal proceedings. And again, I don't really understand how it all works, where the, lawyers argue with each other. it's like this thing, no, That thing, this thing. And this was all about, it happened.

A little while ago, and it said during the hearing, the US District Court for the Northern District of California automatic. So I've got automatic VWP engine, automatic argued for a dismissal of 14 of WP engines, 20, complaints including antitrust, extortion, defamation counts, and for parts of the complaint to be struck under California's anti-SLAP statute.

So automatic, trying to get rid of 14 of the possible 20 things which WP Engine have filed against them. Automatic argued that WP Engine was relying on WordPress's 64% share of the content management system market, in, the claims of Monopoly power. However, their sort of counter argument there was it's free and open so source, although we're 64% of the, market, it's not like a commercial thing where we dominate it.

You can go and download it. And so I, get, I can see the common sense of that. however. they also argued that WP Engine hadn't shown that automatic could raise prices or restrict supply. And of course that, back and forth, WP Engine counted. including that WP Engine had their access blocked to wordpress.org, which was later reversed because of a court order.

so that they claim is direct evidence of their ability to harm entities like WP Engine. and it goes on automatic, was asked, asked the court to strike the defamation claims, which stem from the keynote that we just mentioned because, and I'm gonna quote here, I'm gonna read it directly 'cause I don't wanna get it wrong.

Automatic also asked the court to strike WP Engine's defamation claims, which stem from Matt Mullen from Mullenweg's keynote at Word Count US 2024. And a blog post published on wordpress.org calling WP Engine's platform, in quotes, a cheap knockoff and accused the company of not contributing enough back to the WordPress project.

the defense automatic said what it, that it was Hyper Bowl. It was rhetoric, basically. And, that's where we are now. So two throw, two throw, two throw. And then the judge. Didn't rule anything and said the motion would, be under submission. I'll read you again 'cause I don't wanna get the legal language wrong.

the judge whose name I'm not gonna try and pronounce, didn't rule from the bench and said she would take the motion under submission with a decision expected at a later date. And then I ignored the last paragraph. But Tacho, you thought that was the most interesting bit, I think, didn't you?

[00:24:15] Taco Verdonschot: yes, because, like you said, there's a lot of back and forth, but what does this really mean?

Why, was this hearing relevant? And I think that's summarized in the last sentence.

[00:24:28] Nathan Wrigley: I'll just read it out in that case. Yeah, maybe if that's gonna be easier. I'll read the whole last paragraph. WP Engine filed its original lawsuit last October and expanded its claim to include antitrust allegations in November, which is what we're dealing with in this article.

The court's decision on automatics motion to dismiss will determine whether the case proceeds to full discovery and trial, or is significantly narrowed. So it is really just outlining what will happen in the future. I expect lawyers to just get this completely. For me, it's, I don't even. What? but

[00:25:01] Taco Verdonschot: hey, there you go.

I'm very happy that I'm not well known in the US legal system.

[00:25:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. but it's important for all of us to be kept appraised of it. And the person that does it best in our space is Ray, without a shadow of a doubt. If you wanna know what's going on, if you want actual news in the WordPress space, go to the repository.

It, the, URL by the way, if you don't know it and you haven't already subscribed, is the repository email. just go and subscribe. she's got a, history of writing. she's a journalist, she's a trained journalist. So when she comes across stories like this, she, it reads like a newspaper, right?

She's done her absolutely due diligence and, does it over and over again. And I had a chat to her. and she does, she literally attends virtually where possible these court cases and sits through them. it's pretty remarkable. We, over here, we're just doing jokes. We're just doing jokes and having a nice time chatting with each other.

But Ray is a, really seriously credible journalist. And I do wanna make the point, draw the, definition of, there's a big difference between what we do and what she's doing over there. So go check it out. Dave, Alex, anything to add on that somewhat controversial topic?

[00:26:15] Dave Grey: It'd be nice to go get,

[00:26:17] Nathan Wrigley: let's go with Dave first.

We'll go Dave, and then we'll go Alex.

[00:26:19] Dave Grey: Yeah, it'd be nice to get like an end result to all of this slot and kind, just not quite move on, but just try and progress and grow and. Yeah, just not brush under the carpet because it can't move on from that sort of thing. But yeah, trying to heal the community and kind of progress and grow rather than in squabbling and just yeah,

[00:26:40] Nathan Wrigley: get back to the happy times.

I think. I think the thing is, I'm, because I've no experience with the law. I've never been in a court of law. I've never, I don't in fact, really even know anybody who's been in a court of law so that I can ask them what it was like. It's just, to me, it's always on television and on television. The bit that we've just read takes like four minutes, and then suddenly in the next scene, they're all fighting out in the actual law case.

And what it's, making obvious to me is, especially at this level where you've got, serious amounts of lawyering happening on both sides, I guess this is the normal process. It just takes months and months, and each side has to be allowed the opportunity to present its best defense and figure things out.

yeah. Interesting. Alex, sorry, I, we, interrupted you.

[00:27:26] Alex Osmichenko: Yeah, I wanted to say that I'm also trying to stay out of this case, but unfortunately what I noticed is that War Camp Europe had significantly lower tendency this year, and I hope that is related to the expensive Switzerland and not to the, to this case.

And hopefully the next year work camp, Europe and Krakow will be back again on track.

[00:27:53] Nathan Wrigley: I think it's, I think it's impossible for it not to have had some effect. This whole thing. Whe whether or not it's an effect which bothers you like Alex, Dave Tacho, whether or not you show up to things like this because of that, or in some cases, whether or not you are prevented.

And I'm thinking about Tacho at this point. whether or not you, can't attend in the way that you'd imagined you would be able to attend. There's definitely an impact. whether or not you wanna engage with it or just, keep it at arm's length. I think we all want it over though, don't we?

And that last sentence that's true indicates that we've got quite a while before

[00:28:30] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah.

[00:28:32] Nathan Wrigley: Before the, moment can be said. It's over. 'cause that's

[00:28:35] Taco Verdonschot: just, and yeah. And I think it's hard to fully stay out of this because the consequences of the court case. Could affect anyone in our ecosystem.

[00:28:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. So that's an interesting point, isn't it? So everything's carrying on as normal right now, isn't it? Apart from, the background of it all. And, may maybe you've, it's caused ructions between you and people that you are friendly with. Perhaps that's happened, but your business is probably going on in the same way.

The caveat of course to that would be if you are a, an employee of WP Engine or, somebody that was using their products or services, during that point, but yeah,

[00:29:19] Taco Verdonschot: I think even beyond that, Nathan, because, what we're seeing is. Before all of this, we'd have, acquisitions nonstop happening all the time.

And that seems to have slowed down significantly since all of this started. And it might not be a one-to-one relation. Obviously there are more things happening in the world, than just this one court case, but it's hard to imagine that there's no relation whatsoever.

[00:29:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So let's see. Let's see what happens.

From the, piece that Ray wrote, I, don't think we have any expectation of things being sorted out in the next few weeks. but hopefully things will sort themselves out. This all began in, word camp us, last year, more or less, exactly a year to the day. So you very, close to where we're at now.

And of course, WordCamp US has just finished. That was the, the card game that I got that I showed you earlier that was given to me by Marcus at WordCamp us. that's just wrapped up and it was. It was a fairly long event. It was different to some others in that there was a showcase day as well as a kind of contributor day.

So they did things slightly differently. So it's a four day long event. I don't know, I don't know the numbers, but my, guess would be that attendance was down. I think you could attribute that to a variety of things. So for example, it was in the school holidays, there's a whole, I am definitely not getting into this one, but there's definitely politics, actual politics going on at play there.

So maybe that's had an effect as well. and the fact that it's in the same place twice, maybe that's the thing, but also adding to the mix what's been happening over the last year, that has probably made a difference as well, seemed fairly well attended for me, but I, it wouldn't surprise me if the numbers were down and in the speech at the end, which Matt gave, he, he, mentioned this lawsuit very briefly. He touched on it at the minute. Really? He, was touching on it so that he didn't have to touch on it, if He, mentioned it as a way of saying, I'm not gonna get into that. but the, but he did say that he thought that word camp US was probably not timed well.

and I think prob my guess there that he was talking about, the holiday, the school holiday thing. I'm not sure. Yeah. Anyway, yeah,

[00:31:50] Taco Verdonschot: there we go. At the same time, they've scheduled the next one even. Earlier in August, which makes it harder. So yeah, we'll

[00:31:58] Nathan Wrigley: circle back to that in a bit actually.

But yeah, we'll come back to WordCamp US and the timings for next year. So anyway, that's the complicated law thing that I fully don't understand, but hopefully you can go and get more information. Ray's been covering it forever, and so she's got, all the facts lined up for you. if you go and look at the tags, you can find it out on Ray's website.

But that's where we're at basically at the moment. I hope that we've managed to explain that. so this is fair. It's an acronym. tachos brought this to my, actually Tacho hasn't brought this to my attention. We've mentioned this on numerous occasions, but this is the federated and independent repositories.

Do you want me to explain it t or can I just hand it to you and you explain it? Oh, I'd love to hear your explanation. Okay, let me see if I messed this up. wordpress.org has been the, ever since WordPress kinda came out and obviously, I dunno how far back we go, but pretty soon after WordPress, was available on the.org platform, it became a repository also for plugins when that architecture was built into WordPress.

So you go to your WordPress website and you search for a plugin, and if it's available on the repo.org, that's the one that you're using the wordpress.org one. However, as a consequence of the, stuff that we've just been talking about, the politics, now let me get this straight in my head.

What, was the thing? There was a thing at that moment? Wasn't that there was a, what got cut off? Did some, did the repository get cut off from the, WP Engine? The other

[00:33:32] Taco Verdonschot: way around, but yes.

[00:33:34] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. What mean the other way around saying,

[00:33:36] Taco Verdonschot: got cut off from accessing the repository.

[00:33:38] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, sorry, I said it the wrong way around.

Yeah. Okay. So, anyway, some people were cut off and that then I, think, led to some people who were already concerned about that point of failure to, to create what is being described as the, federated and independent repository. And federated implies there's no one point of failure. It's like a bunch of things sitting in the background that can communicate with each other.

So if.org goes down. It goes down and nobody can get to those plugins. In this scenario, what has been built, and I guess it to some extent it stands against wordpress.org, but maybe not. Maybe you can have them concurrently. I'm not sure. Yes. but it's a different way. You can hook up this as a plugin to your WordPress website and then instead of going to.org, you go to mirrors of.org.

And a bit like with Mastodon or something like that, you can pick where your server is, you can specify which repository or which repository mirror you want your plugins to come from. And I guess that gives those repository mirrors in the future the option to go off in their own direction as well. They could, I don't know, they could service, page plugins as an example.

That might be one thing that they wanted to do. So that's me trying to sum it up. So how badly did I do?

[00:35:00] Taco Verdonschot: You did a very good job. Oh yeah. I think the key element here is that, WordPress org is controlled by a single person and, anyone can spin up a fair repository and can aggregate those repositories.

So there no longer is a single person who can control, what plugins you can or cannot install in WordPress, or cannot offer through an official repository, basically, where official has a slightly different meaning. So right now, if you have the fair plugin installed, It will serve you everything from web org, but it will also serve from an alternate source, which at this moment is a mirror of the org, but might be completely separate independent repositories going forward.

[00:35:59] Nathan Wrigley: So the reason that we're surface this is because, and again, forgive me if I've got this wrong until now. Fair didn't have its own home on the web. This is a new website, which explains what's going on. And the pretty, pretty cool URL, I guess PM stands for Packet Manager in this case. so they've bagged the perfect, wow, that's pretty cool.

they've bagged the, domain name fair, the acronym perfectly, FAIR pm. Wow. I wonder how much they had to, somebody had to stomp up for that. Maybe it was just freely available, floating around. It was available. Oh, nice. Oh, that's oh, that never happens. These days. You get, the actual one that you want.

And so this website, has all of the bits and the pieces that you need to figure out the history, what's going on, how it works. And you can see at the top we're on the, the homepage.

[00:36:52] Taco Verdonschot: And most importantly, if you want to contribute, you can find how to get involved as well. there's now a Slack group.

there's a very active GitHub, repositories or set of repositories on GitHub. so if you have code skills, you can help out. If you don't have code skills, you can still help out.

[00:37:15] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. So just across the top we've got the about, so fares, mandate and initiatives, governance. So there's a whole slew of articles there about how it's being governed.

there's a blog get Involved Slack and something called Fair Working Groups and they've also got a knowledge base, so brand new Fair pm Dave, Alex, anything to add to that?

[00:37:37] Dave Grey: No, all sounds good. I was around Word Camp Europe last year to hear about this announcement, so it's nice to see things progressing and actually got a live sight to bring it all together under.

Can

[00:37:46] Nathan Wrigley: I ask you, Dave? Did, you, did, the fact that it popped up, did you change anything? Did you, were you, what's the word, persuaded, let's go with that. Were you persuaded to switch over to a different repository than.org or have you remained where you were?

[00:37:59] Dave Grey: I'm all, my hosting is still just on the normal.org one 'cause I'm sitting back to see how things grow and I've only got a few customers on my hosting side of things on that side through.

But yeah, it's good to the larger scale people to have their options open on that side. Yeah, indeed. Alex, any thoughts on

[00:38:16] Alex Osmichenko: Fair? I have, questions actually to tackle. you mentioned that there is one owner of wordpress.org, but, when I was, researching that, I, read somewhere that there actually like three owners, like equal parts.

It is just a fake owners.

[00:38:35] Taco Verdonschot: Owners. so one of the statements, of Matt in the whole court case thing Is that he's the sole owner of war past.org.

[00:38:45] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Oh, was that one of the things that came out? But yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. we will probably have to re research that properly before we commit to that being the answer, but, yeah.

Teco, just one quick question about that. Yeah. If I was to install this plugin, it's a plugin, right? Typically?

[00:39:01] Taco Verdonschot: yeah. One of the parts is a plugin.

[00:39:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. So the part that most WordPress users would make use of would be a plugin, which would then would be plug, which would enable all of this engineering to be, would, how would that look?

Do you have a is I say you forgive me. does it have a, like a different ui or is it basically the same? Hardly,

[00:39:23] Taco Verdonschot: Oh, okay. when you install it, you get a few options and that is, what source do you want your plugins to come from? Is that the.org mirror or.org? at this moment, there's.

Two options. and do you want to, load gravitas from gravita.com, which is connected to the automatic e ecosystem, as well. and there's a few things that change. So for example, the, events feed in your workplace dashboard, will have some different sources. and, there's, minor changes, that all contribute to privacy and, yeah, don't expose, necessarily expose, information to the, usually coupled automatic ecosystem that's very close to WordPress score.

[00:40:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I'll be really curious to see how this develops because it definitely, it, definitely feels like a, how to describe it in an ideal world. This kind of stuff wouldn't matter to people. it'd be like, I can fork WordPress if I like, and I can use this other, repository, this package manager, fair in this case, and, it won't matter.

But for reasons of politics, it, seems to matter. it's almost like you're, how to describe it. if you, can be on one side or the other, which is,

[00:41:00] Taco Verdonschot: that's the good thing that doesn't have to be, the case. You can decide to, use the fair plugin and still publish your plugins on wordpress.org, which is what we are doing with Progress Planner, for example.

our plugin is available more org. Nothing changes, but we're running the fair, plugin on our own site, as one of the reasons to comply with more of the European privacy laws. So they, go hand in hand and there's no. There's no reason you have to pick a side.

[00:41:44] Nathan Wrigley: I suppose the best news is that now there's a website where, if you were confused by any of this, or if it all seemed a little bit complicated or the politics put you off, then now you can go and get the, word from the horse's mouth if you like.

So fair PM is where you're gonna go to find all of that out. And just a couple of quick comments going back to what we were talking a moment ago. word no, Marcus, we'll come to your word camp us comment in a minute, but, Paul Bedford, just saying hi, he's, joining us from Pretoria. Thank you. Nice for you to join us.

And Patricia as well, saying hello. Thank you so much. Alrighty. Unless anybody's got anything to say about fair, we will move on. I

[00:42:24] Alex Osmichenko: have one question. sure. is it possible to implement it with must, use plugins so it's not, interfaced somehow to the customers?

[00:42:37] Taco Verdonschot: Bubbly, I. I'll look into that and get back to you.

Oh, nice. Thank you. I, yeah, probably.

[00:42:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. I don't have the answer to that either, unless Dave suddenly can drop a bomb and, we don't know. And we will move on quickly. No, Okay. In which case, here we go. Let's move on. Right back to the repository again. This is so nice. This is such a cool thing, for me.

About the most profoundly. Interesting. not interesting, exciting. I think bits of anything to do with WordPress is where it meets education. I know that's not everybody's button, but it is mine for reasons I won't go into. I'm really curious about this side of things. And so things like WP Campus Connect, I'm fascinated by it.

And this is another thing that I'm fascinated by. This is the, WordPress credits, idea, and you may not have heard about it, it's got far less popularity at the moment than something like WP Campus Connect because it's much more small and it's footprint at the moment. So last year, the University of Pisa decided, to align itself with WordPress and it was going to offer credits to its current students.

So it's a legit university where you go and you take classes, you know it's a university, that kind of thing, but they're gonna offer credits for people studying. About WordPress, and you can create the, sort of bit of your university degree, which corresponds to your WordPress credits, and then that will count to your degree.

If you do well at it, you'll get more points. And if you don't try hard at it, you'll get less points and so on and so forth. So it was launched last year with PSA University. It feels like that's going well because now we have another place that's completely outside of Europe, Costa Rica. the, I'm gonna butcher this.

I'm so sorry. The fidelity tasks, I'm gonna say that Fidel Tasks University in Costa Rica has joined the program and they're gonna, in the coming weeks onboard 15 students from the computer science faculty. And the idea is to then broaden that over time. I was lucky enough at launch one day at Word Camp us to sit down with the person mentioned here, the WordPress Foundation, sorry.

Otta Pierre p p, forgive me Otta, I can never do your surname correctly. Oh gosh, I can see it in front of me. Ra, but it doesn't ma p Oh no, hold on. I've got it here. Oh, I've got it still written down. Ra is how you say it. Yeah. Ra Zo per sat down with me and just showed me the interface that people are gonna use.

So it's done inside of Learn on the Sensei platform, which is a, an A, a learning management system. And, and the idea is that you get credits and you build it up and you do your thing, but it doesn't have to be this one particular thing it says here that you could do. What does it say? Oh, can't find it now.

but basically if you can do it inside a WordPress, it's possible. It doesn't have to be code, it could be theme building or, there's all sorts of different options. and so that's happening, a university, near you if you're in South America, soon with the idea that it might roll out over the long term Word camp us, WordCamp Europe, word Camp Asia.

If you, look around the room and you're honest with yourself. It's not got many kids there, there ain't many kids or people under the age of 20. And I can pretty much figure out why, there's ai, you could make loads of money, so why wouldn't you do that? but we need things like this to make it appealing to teach people how this sort of stuff works to, get people into open source.

And bravo. I think this is absolutely fabulous. Right over to you. I've talked far too much. Just interrupt one another. Tell me what you think.

[00:46:30] Dave Grey: I think it's a good thing getting some fresh faces and fresh eyes into the project. So you try and get them in young before they start seeing other things like Wix and Squarespace and Right.

Big and all that. A lot to then try and, yeah, get your talent into 'em earlier and then they kind just move on into it. Yeah. Yeah. A nice road course.

[00:46:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. okay. Tacho.

[00:46:52] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. I think it's super important that we show WordPress to students. let them know it exists, how, teach them how it works, and hopefully they'll spread the message and we'll see, youth join us.

[00:47:10] Nathan Wrigley: do, you know what, if you imagine it, if you're at a university and some like random thing comes out the ether and it's to do with the internet and you're a computer science laboratory and you get to design your own curriculum, I think that's actually, I think that's quite appealing.

rather than it being handed down to you as this, here's the curriculum for this year. You've gotta do this module. If somebody were to come to you and say, we've got this module, but you can build it yourself and you get to do it in your own time at home, and you get to meet a bunch of new people.

Maybe even attendance of WordPress events and things like that might, figure into the bit. I think that's pretty cool. I would've been in so many example. Frankly, I

[00:47:50] Taco Verdonschot: think you were a better student than I was. Oh. Because I'd be like, I don't want choice. Just tell me what to do. And Oh, really? I really, okay.

Okay. No, I definitely, and even that didn't work out for me, but yeah,

[00:48:04] Nathan Wrigley: you needed structure. Different

[00:48:05] Taco Verdonschot: story.

[00:48:05] Alex Osmichenko: Yeah. Okay. Alex, any thoughts? I think the, blocker here is probably the lack of free tier on the most of the hosting plans, which can afford free, like not highly visited, like low bandwidth, space for those students to train on, to spin their website on and share the link, show the backend and so on.

So right now, I, guess the only place to try it is. wordpress.com is,

[00:48:43] Nathan Wrigley: or, I imagine, because I think you are trying to create something which, your university, so they provide you with a mentor. Yes.

[00:48:49] Alex Osmichenko: This also,

[00:48:51] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, I guess maybe even something like studio might be, suitable. I dunno if it has to be public facing or anything like that.

I think the, knowledge acquisition is the point. yeah. Interesting point. If, it had to be on a, hosted system, you would want those partners jumping in, wouldn't you? Like the host, the big hosting companies offering free tiers for these Yeah, for students, these platforms. And I know that for the, some other side of it, things like WP Campus Connect, where they're trying to get, different parts of the globe involved in the WordPress community, not at universities.

The hosting companies are stepping on board, so maybe there's more conversations to be had around that exact point. So That's a good point. Thank you. getting back to Fair quickly, Reese hopped in and he thought 99% use case would be an mu plugin for. Hosts, to, to which Alex, who's obviously here said, yeah, that seems like the most common use case for it to be an mu plugin instead of another plugin.

So something's got of basically there, but hidden. Okay. Interesting. All right, so there we go. That's incredibly exciting to me. Costa Rica jumping on board. I'm sure that now we've got two. It's one of those things that maybe the dominoes will start to fall once institutions see that, oh, okay, it's not new.

We're not the first person to move on it. Maybe it'll become a little bit more popular. Certainly hope so.

[00:50:13] Taco Verdonschot: I think part of this announcement was also if you're a company and you can help out by, taking on students, helping them, yeah. Learn WordPress, please reach out because that might be the bigger blocker is not finding the students, but finding the guidance.

[00:50:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Good point. Yeah. Thank you. I found a bit. Sorry, tco, I interrupted you. Carry on.

[00:50:41] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah, I was gonna say, if, you have a company and you have the room to help out with this program, please do.

[00:50:48] Nathan Wrigley: and I found a little bit in the text, which indicates the kind of things that you could be involved in. Were you to be a part of this.

It said, possible projects include translating documentation or writing and editing content. So that's pretty wide ranging, isn't it? Fascinating. Organizing community events. if you're a computer science major, it feels like that's never gonna be a part of your credit, but maybe it is. Who knows?

Contributing code testing, creating educational materials for learn. Each student will be paired with a mentor in their chosen area and supported by the foundation. It sounds really ephemeral, doesn't it? You can't really get your hands on it. But then sitting down with, Otta and seeing on the screen the LMS that they're gonna walk through, it just hit home oh.

This has actually been really well thought through. Here's the ways that people are gonna log in, here's the ways they're gonna communicate with their mentor here. The here's the ways that they're gonna submit the materials when they've proven what they've done and it's all been done, it's taken care of.

So it's really, it's a thing. It's a total thing. Okey doke. Let's move on now we're gonna do events and there's quite a few of these to get through, so we'll go fairly quickly. First one is this, the schedule for the WP Accessibility Day, which is not that far away now, is the 15th of October, 2025, and it's on the screen here.

Starts off with Joe Dawson. He's making the opening remarks. I won't go through it all because you can find it yourself. 2025, the numerals, WP Accessibility Day. They're another one. They got the fab domain name. and it's all there. So you can go and check out that. It's like a full 24 hours of stuff, one thing at a time.

Yeah. So there's no two tracks. You've just got one track, I think, is it more than a day? It starts at what time does it start? It's, yeah, I know. It's full. It's full 24

[00:52:40] Taco Verdonschot: hours.

[00:52:41] Nathan Wrigley: Full 24 hours. So something available. even if you're, in a part of the world which isn't normally service serviced by these things.

so there's that. But also if you fancy lending support to the event, we have the call for volunteers. I'm pretty sure this has been going for a while. This is not a new piece, but can we recently

[00:53:02] Taco Verdonschot: opened up the call for volunteers? Oh, okay. 'cause it's an online event. There is less logistics involved.

so that's why we didn't want people to have to commit before summer holidays. So it's, really, we've just opened it up and, Oh yeah. Are hoping to get a few hands. To help us out.

[00:53:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. 25th of August. and you keep saying we, so that in that implies tacho, that you are in some way, shape, or form connected with this, Yeah.

[00:53:30] Taco Verdonschot: I'm, on the organizing team of the accessibility day.

[00:53:34] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Yep. Yeah. so it's happening in about six weeks time, so if you want to be a volunteer, please, Google it or just go to 2025 WP Accessibility Day. And there's a get involved, tab right up here. So volunteer. Or donate or in my case maybe be a media partner or something like that.

So there you go. Okay. That's the first thing. Just whilst we're on the subject, Joe Dolson here, who is the making the open opening remarks, he's one of the board members and what have you. I just thought I'd give him a bit of a hat tip. 'cause he comes on, WP builds fairly frequently, you can see that.

I dunno. Every two months or so, he and I sit down and we we tackle one thing in accessibility. literally one thing. So we might do navigation menus or something like that. Yeah, I've got another episode, which we recorded a, day before I went to WordCamp us, so it's not quite edited yet, so I'll be doing that in the next few days.

So you can get to that if you go to wp builds.com and use the archives menu and it's here. Accessibility Show Archive. And you can see, Joe in real life. going through WordPress showcase websites very often and just finding out how they do navigation or finding out how they do buttons or finding out how they do one thing or another.

Okay. Righty ho. This is still accessibility. God, this is nice. We don't normally spend like any amount of time on accessibility, let alone four things in a row. So this is great. equalize digital, this is written by Amber Hines, who is there one of the founders She has, created, I think for the second time, maybe it's, more than two, but the, accessibility comparison of page builders in the WordPress space.

And there is no way that I'm gonna be able to do this justice. So my scrolling will give it some, give you some indication. So I've got a track pad here and I'm gonna start scrolling fairly quickly. You get the idea, it just keeps going and going and going ba basically this, it's a lot. And the reason it's a lot is because they break down the first, quarter of it, is breaking down what the heck they're up to.

what are the tests that are gonna perform? How do they do it, how do they cause it to be fair and so on. And so you go through that whole thing. How does, the testing work? And like I said, that's about a quarter of it, this whole spreadsheet thing that they've got and how they score points.

And then you get into the actual data and. It's all done in these tables. And, so for example, at the minute we're looking at only one thing, which is navigation accessibility. And here across the top of the different page builders and, ticks and crosses and warning signs and so on, it basically boils down to a score at the end.

And I'm, sure you all just wanna know who won because that's, isn't that what everybody just wants to know? and here it is. Or

[00:56:31] Taco Verdonschot: how is my page builder doing? Yeah, Probably, especially if you work

[00:56:35] Nathan Wrigley: for one. how's my page builder doing? The one that came out on top is cadence followed by generate press and blocks.

I guess really it's generate blocks We're talking about there. Grade Elementor. I don't know if that's a big shift, but it feels like Elementor being in fourth place is a, would be a change, I dunno, compared

[00:56:53] Taco Verdonschot: to a couple years ago. Definitely is.

[00:56:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. green Shift, not one I've even really come across much.

Beaver Builder breakdown. The list goes on. on we go. However, caveat mTOR, I just do wanna say one thing, which Amber makes the point of, cadence who've got a hundred percent on everything. You think, gosh, that's remarkable. There's maybe a reason it's remarkable. Amber and Equalize Digital were employed by Cadence to go in and really overhaul their systems, With that in mind, it's no surprise that the testing that Amber then did, reflected a very favorable score because, they, but that doesn't in any way, shape or form mean that the, test can't be relied on. it, just so happens they bothered to pay her. So she did the hard work of doing all the due diligence.

I think in that scenario, you'd expect them to come first, right? Yeah. But, so I

[00:57:48] Taco Verdonschot: hope all the

[00:57:48] Nathan Wrigley: others will do

[00:57:49] Taco Verdonschot: the

[00:57:49] Nathan Wrigley: same. Yeah. Yeah, exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. But, some of them, like generate press and blocks did really impressively grade elemental. some of the things were extremely minor, but they, knocked the overall score down.

it's broken up into these different sections. Here's, does for example, hover focus, content accessibility was one of the things they did. Page builder, context change, accessibility, page builder, a reflow, it's all getting very technical. Animation accessibility, image accessibility, default color contrast, link text.

I could go on. Yeah. the

[00:58:26] Taco Verdonschot: interesting thing is if you scroll all, almost all the way down,

[00:58:30] Nathan Wrigley: there's a

[00:58:30] Taco Verdonschot: sort of a, quick summary and it has some positive notes where you can see that there's a couple of page builders that have seen a huge growth in, Last year. Yeah. Slightly further

[00:58:46] Nathan Wrigley: down, below that.

[00:58:47] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. Further down there's conclusions and then there's a positive, positive signs. Signs, yes. Nice. And you can see that the Beefer builder team did a huge improvement Wow. Over a year.

[00:59:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Below 50% to almost 70%. So 70% reflects, 70% of the test. Got a green light, basically. bricks from 50 to 60.

Let's call that 64. Let's round it up and generate press from 68 to 82, holding them into second place.

[00:59:22] Taco Verdonschot: Wow. Yeah. That's pretty cool. So I think this is a very good example. It is possible you have to be willing to put in the work. So let's hope they all do it.

[00:59:34] Nathan Wrigley: And also, if you are working for one of these companies, like a really positive marketing.

Bit, if you're working for generate blocks, cadence, whichever, the ones appearing closer to the top, you've now got something really credible to sell. Especially, the year that we've just had, we've got the European Accessibility Act, which is now in force and in law and essentially doesn't matter where you are on the globe, that's probably going to matter to you, especially if you're selling stuff to within Europe.

Yeah. yeah, really credible and you probably, I would imagine, are favoring some builders over others on the basis of this. Find out more at WP Accessibility Day. Maybe Amber will. Give us intel. Is she, do you know if she's doing a talk on this? TI dunno if you're doing that.

[01:00:20] Taco Verdonschot: she's one of the lead organizers, so she might be a little busy to do a talk herself.

[01:00:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Bless. Yes. No kidding. Yeah. Okay. Dave, Alex, anything on that? Gosh, we're not getting through these in anything like a timely way. I'm just glad to see HBO

[01:00:34] Dave Grey: to cross two in more and like the last year and a half is now at the top and the one I moved away from is probably near the very bottom, Oh, interesting.

Okay. Not gonna name any names, but it's got four letters and we're still waiting for version five.

[01:00:48] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. oh yeah. Not to name any names, but, yeah, we can all work that out. Okay.

[01:00:55] Alex Osmichenko: and Alex, sorry. Yeah, I was gonna say that I'm a bit, behind on the accessibility stuff. though we are located in, Europe as well, we, I'm mostly relying on my team to handle that.

so I'm more performance and scalability, a oriented guy. But yeah, I think accessibility is becoming more and more important, in, real world. And, it's, really valuable for, other companies to, to keep track of that on the builds

[01:01:28] Nathan Wrigley: that they're doing. No kidding. Yeah. Without a shadow of a doubt.

And, and I guess WP accessibility day is your perfect antidote to that, isn't it? Absolutely. You don't have to give a, great deal of your life away. One day is all it takes to get upskilled in the, in many, things. okay. I dunno if we've done the accessibility bit for this week.

Yes, we have. so that was a lot. So that's really nice. Moving on. This was announced at, WordCamp Us. I dunno if that's true. It's probably announced adjacent to it. But, rocket.net, a very popular, an increasingly popular WordPress host has joined forces with another increasingly popular one.

So you may have heard of hosting.com. They tell me again. Tacho, what was the, was it a two hosting, I believe? Yes. Yeah, A two Hosting, got rebranded, but also, hosting.com has been doing a, job of acquiring, purchasing lots of, smaller hosting companies, particularly in, in Asia where I think WordPress' growth is, really taking off.

They have joined forces. There's the word here is partnership. It doesn't say acquisition as far as I know. and they've partnered together. So rocket.net over the last few weeks, we heard that the, one of the regulars on this show, Jess Frick. has taken over there as the, let me get this right, her name is mentioned, general manager.

Thank you. Yours so much more. Me. You've got much better memories than I do. Jess has become the general manager of Rocket. I guess that means Ben, Galer, who was the founder, has stepped, away from that role and is taken on a different role, [email protected], more generally. But the, idea that rocket.net sell into the marketplace is that they are fast.

and I understand Ben has quite a heritage in, working, making WordPress websites fast. And the idea is these two companies will stay as separate brands. I think hosting.com will still maintain that brand name and rock. It will still maintain that brand name. A whole load of different experience around WordPress hosting, brought into the room now.

hopefully these two things can offer something to all of their customers. I don't really have anything more to add except well done. I imagine that was a fairly fraught, lengthy process, but very well done to everybody involved. anybody wanna, anything? Someone I,

[01:03:58] Taco Verdonschot: yeah. Someone I, trust very much in this area said that vodka.net might be the single best host out there at the moment.

and if they can bring their expertise to the scale of hosting.com, and if I know Ben, I mean he's, present and he will not back down. So if he can make, that change within hosting.com, they have the potential to. Really disrupts the hosting industry, with this partnership.

[01:04:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's the word that I'm hearing as well is exactly that, is that the, with hosting go dot com's scale and rocket net's sort of technical layer, that, that was basically what I was hearing as well, is that these, they're hoping to amalgamate the two things and to do that at scale will be incredibly difficult, I would've thought.

But obviously if you've grown a company on the back of exactly that promise, who better to hire really, than Ben. So he is, yeah. Maybe freed up to do that. Ben said, this is not an exit, it's an entrance. We've taken the best of everything, both companies have built over decades, and we're providing it under one platform.

so there you go. And my understanding as well is that, the, technicalities and the devil in the detail of how hosting doc, sorry, rocket Net go about doing what they do is the Secret Source. Honestly, I heard words from coming out of people's mouths, but it was like going so over my head. I was like, okay, yeah, it sounds impressive.

but I didn't fully understand it, but okay. Good luck hosting.com and Rocket Net. Anything else from anybody else? Okay, let's move on to events quickly. So there's a lot of events happening at the moment. I, please just interrupt me, you three if you've got anything to add. 'cause there's five or six just to get through.

Oh, I'm gonna be, I dunno how to pronounce most of them. So there'll be that. the schedule for this one, WCEH, word Camp A. So this is the Canadian one, WordCamp Canada, you might as well call it. But they've called themselves, WordCamp A, their schedule is now available, it's happening in about six weeks, so that's available at Canada.

Do wordcamp.org. Don't really have much to add apart from that. There it is. Then this one help. Where's this one? The, yeah.

[01:06:38] Taco Verdonschot: Serbia. I really don't know how to pronounce. Okay. The city name?

[01:06:43] Nathan Wrigley: No. it's spelled v well in, in the alphabet as I would say it. It's spelled V-R-S-A-C, but the s has got a, curious looking character on the top.

So I dunno how that letter is actually deployed, but, that's happening in a, just a couple of weeks. So if you're in Serbia, WPVS, so it's WRSA c.wordcamp.org. You can find the home of that there. and it's happening very soon, the next few weeks. So shout out to them more. Shout out. There's another one.

This one, Lithuania. Yes. happening later in the month, 25th of September to the 26th of September. This one's curiously all in English. I wonder if Google has translated it for me or if they've gone to the I

[01:07:30] Taco Verdonschot: know they intentionally go multilingual. Okay. So it might just be that. They've done the site in English.

I'm not entirely sure.

[01:07:39] Nathan Wrigley: Is that a photo from last year?

[01:07:41] Taco Verdonschot: Good grief. Look at that. Plumbing, eh. Hundred people. this is work in Europe. I think the photo, because this is Oh, I was

[01:07:51] Alex Osmichenko: gonna say during,

[01:07:53] Taco Verdonschot: yeah, in sure. in the factory. I was

[01:07:56] Nathan Wrigley: gonna say that, that is that's massive. That's really, oh, here you go.

400 participants. You know what I suspect that probably is about 400. So anyway, there you go. There's, Lithuania. So that's gonna be happening 25th to the 26th. You can find that at Lithuania dot Word camp? yeah. Dot word camp.org. We're not finished yet. There's still more to come. this one I'm not even going to, I apologize.

The people who've come up with this one. U-V-U-Y-O. Eo. Oh yeah. Something like that. We don't know Nigeria. Okay. it's where. Nigeria. Isn't that, amazing? So we've got one also in Nigeria. So we've got two in Europe, one in Canada. here's one in, Nigeria. So this one is happening also this month, 20th of September.

It's loads going on. This is great. Yep. It feels like we're back. Last year there was none of this. there was, but it wasn't quite as frenetic, I don't think. And we got two more, two more events to come. Here's the, first one. This one is Oh, dear. Yeah, it's okay. Ebola. Lovely. Thank you for helping me there, gya.

There we go. Thank you so much. and what are the dates? We have the 26th to the 28th of that month, whatever that month is. Maybe I could do a quick chance. September. Thank you. September. thank you so much. so quite a lot of overlap. If you're in Europe and you're towards the middle and the end of this month, there's three going on.

That's great. And they're all, they're not massively far away from each other in many cases, so that's quite nice. You might be able to get to more than one. Yeah. at the same time I'll be

[01:09:39] Taco Verdonschot: at an event in your backyard.

[01:09:42] Nathan Wrigley: Which one are you going to? Luko in London. Oh, that, that's, Luko we've mentioned on several occasions.

So Luko is happening, on Thursday. The last Thursday of September. Yeah, 25th. I've featured it three or four times, so I thought I'd skip it 'cause we had so many this week. But I'll be featuring it as we run up to the event. You're coming over for that, are you? Yes. Can I just ask you to come over a day early?

Do you know why? Yes, because there's a meetup and I'll be there. Yeah, I Nice. we, run the w Dan, maybe, and I run the, the W-P-L-D-N. So it's a meetup in London. We do it every month. And, a bit of bad luck was that the loop comp event took place on the day that we would be doing hours. So we phoned up the venue and we got it shifted one day further forward.

So we are doing hours on the Wednesday, so we're hoping that quite a few people will come in, do the event with us on the Wednesday evening, go to the pub and have a few drinks, and then, and then hopefully in a good frame of mind, not too many drinks, mind, head to the luko on the following day, which is a central London based event.

yeah, c, come and join us. We have a limited space because our event is normally what it is, so we can fit in what we normally have capacity for, but this luko font feels like it might be a bit different. So when the event goes live. I will publish it on the tweets and things like that. So make sure to book your space.

Otherwise you might be, the meetup system might lock you out. So Tacho get in early. That's all I can say. Will do. Yeah. Thank you. So there's that Luke comp as well, so we're mentioning that. But this one I thought I'd mention because we haven't mentioned it for a little while. Very successful event last year over in, Tempe, Arizona.

this slightly different in that this one is not available at WordCamp org 'cause it's not, a charter program one, but it's, it was very popular last year. 200 and 140 delegates attended last year, but they're up in the number to 200, but the venue will stay the same. Everything basically is the same as last year.

So I think to a person, everybody said that when, that they'd had a really good time. I think so. it's happening the eighth to the 11th now. W but there was some clash here, right? Yes.

[01:12:01] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. last week at Word Camp US, Matt announced the dates for Word Camp Asia, and that is the ninth until the 11th of April.

So it overlaps with press conf.

[01:12:18] Nathan Wrigley: it entirely overlaps.

[01:12:20] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. You have to decide either you go to, Phoenix, to Tempe, Arizona, or you have to go to Mumbai, India.

[01:12:29] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's, there's

[01:12:31] Taco Verdonschot: no way

[01:12:31] Nathan Wrigley: to do both. No. And what's curious about that one, I think is that there's the people who attend the, Luko one, I think, a lot of them would've chosen to go to both of those.

So that's really curious. Dilemma that they're gonna face. Okay. anyway, there you go. It's been organized that way. so that means that you've gotta pick one or the other word, camp Asia in Mumbai or press Con, in Tempe, Arizona. and Word Camp US has also been announced and on a kind of curious state.

It's gonna be in Phoenix, Arizona in probably the hottest month of the year. It's gonna be in August. Now, I say that like it's no big deal, but my understanding is in Phoenix, Arizona in August, it's like really, hot. yeah, it's, no,

[01:13:24] Taco Verdonschot: I've heard 40 degrees centigrade or a hundred Freedom units. Scorching heat in the desert.

[01:13:33] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, there you go. That's what it is. But it's right in the middle of the UK summer holidays. And I imagine if you're in North America, it's quite a likelihood that it'll be during your summer holiday as well. And as I said, I think, those kind of things do actually have a bit of a material impact on the, attendee numbers.

So anyway, that's, what's been decided. on the stage. One of the, one of, when Matt went up and did his q and a at Word Camp us, one of the questions was just literally somebody asked, do it was something about the temperature, do you know how hot it is in Phoenix? During that time of the year, he said, we can use air conditioning.

Yeah. Okay. we can. So anyway, there we go. So that's all happening. They're the events. That's what you've got. This, I, have no words. I honestly, I, want to not like AI so very much, but every time I use it. It's oh dear. It is. Okay. It's got that much better. So this was announced, or at least I hadn't heard of it on the stage at Word Camp us.

It's called Telex, and this is gonna change your life. It enables you in a prompt one little box there. To, to create a block to, to, it'll do the code for writing a block. All you've gotta do is add in a prompt. So I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna add in a prompt, live and, watch it fail. But I can tell you about five minutes before the show started, I did the same prompt and it didn't fail.

It totally works, but here's what I want, right? It's dead simple. Obviously, I'm not really pushing any boundaries here, but here we go. I've written, I want a block, which will enable me to add a date, time feature to my WordPress posts. I want to be able to pick a date in the, and time in the post editor, and then have that surface in the post with an included block.

I've not given a lot there, have I? It's fairly straightforward and I was thinking, yeah, let's see what happens. it goes away. It does things. The UI exposes that it's up to things. You can't really make anything of that ui. It's not really showing you anything. It's just scrolling through.

But look, it seems to be. Seems to be doing something. I dunno if that's the real thing or if that's just some sort of animated gif that they've got there. But it apparently already it's done 120, 130 now 160 now. Lines of code 180, something like that. And on we go. But the secret source, the bit that I think makes this project more interesting is that when it's finished this bit, oh, good timing, telex well done.

it then starts playground and there it is. There's my thing. And so it says no date time selected, I'm presuming I have, oh, okay. So this is different. This is not what I had before. So it's done a different variant of the same thing. So let's go. Before I had this like picker, let's go and put one in, see what we got.

I'm gonna put in a date. Let's go for 1964, something like that. And let's put in the, something was at 12 midday. Da Let's see. Go. I'll run this date. Nathan, is that your birthday? No, I'm not that old. I am quite old, but I'm not that old. so, what's curious here is it's given me two completely different things.

Previously it gave me a graphical UI that you could, click on the dates instead. Here, I had to type it in, but look, it totally did it. it's, is it flashy? Not, I think

[01:16:59] Alex Osmichenko: quick. Yeah. If you try the calendar icon on the right, yeah.

[01:17:04] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, yeah. Okay. So that's equal it, I can tell you it is totally different though.

the, UX wasn't using whatever this state picker is. It obviously relied on a different date picker technology, but okay, let's just change it around a little bit and look, you can see it's totally doing its job. And what did that take? what, 40 seconds from start to finish, something like that.

and the fact that it's launched it in playground and given me an actual demo of it. I think is pretty cool. What did, you make of that? is this like totally normal these days or is that something reasonably extraordinary that it can piece together all those bits in playground at the end?

[01:17:46] Dave Grey: I was just gonna suggest, can you make it or ask it to make a CSS based slider so Alex can start using it.

[01:17:53] Nathan Wrigley: Oh my gosh, Here we go. Let's, okay, so I want the prompt 'cause I'm not very good at prompting. So let's leave the site, let's refresh it. So there we go. it says project forward slash new.

So what do we want as a block? Let's try it. I want a CSS based slider. What else do we need? maybe that like it's image and text or Oh, okay. Would want to, what's that? Want to upload images and add text, like alt text, something like that?

[01:18:32] Alex Osmichenko: No, Like

[01:18:32] Nathan Wrigley: just a regular paragraph.

[01:18:34] Alex Osmichenko: Mini

[01:18:36] Nathan Wrigley: underneath it.

Okay. and text for each image. Should we just stop there and see how it does? Yeah, that's almost nothing. Should we go with that? I want to add a CSS based slider. I want to upload images and text for each image. We'll have to just keep waffling and talking for a moment, but, we'll come, we could come back to that in just a second.

I feel that's not gonna probably require as much time, as the previous one. So what we'll do is we'll leave that spinning in the background. We'll come back to it in a second and, we'll go to these ones.

[01:19:06] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. Interestingly, and I'm not a developer and I have no intention of being one, but I wonder what the code quality is that it outputs.

Would this be production ready?

[01:19:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that bit. I can't

[01:19:20] Taco Verdonschot: speak. We can look at. Reese or Tim Nash to do a full review of the code quality that comes out of this.

[01:19:29] Nathan Wrigley: as luck would have it, Elliot Richmond has just dropped into the comments, and Elliot is a UK based developer of some renno. I would say that we could trust his intuitions on this.

Ha. And here we go. It failed. Great. Tried Tellex yesterday and it failed at the playground end for me. Okay. So in this scenario, when it fails at the playground bit, presumably you get nothing in return. It just fails horribly. It's a complete like Dev Knoll goes into the abyss. but we seem to have it working.

Any introdu? Have you got any intuition as to what we should do? Okay, I clicked on the click on bar and

[01:20:09] Dave Grey: add some slides.

[01:20:10] Nathan Wrigley: I clicked on the block. Which was obviously, buried in here somewhere. It says, called CSS image text slider. It's named the block for me and it says add a slide. Okay, let me select an image.

I haven't got any so I'll have to upload one. I'll quickly do that. I've got loads of wp let's add a few WP Tavern ones. Now I'll do a WP Build one. Let's go for episodes. Let's pick last week's and find an image. Let's go for the small one. There we go. That was the one that we had, right?

Let's select that so I can add in some alt text if I want. There it is. Can I add in another one?

[01:20:45] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah, you can add some text load as well. Okay, so

[01:20:49] Nathan Wrigley: I'm just gonna put text one for the sake of it. Change image. Add in a slide. Okay. Let's select an image. I'll have to upload another one. Go back to a previous week.

Let's go for that one. You did the week beforehand and there'd be like two of me there on it. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, there'd be absolutely loads of you. I know. Oh. And, oh, no, that's work. That's fine. All right. Okay. And then let's put text two. All right. And should we just stop there, see what the heck we got?

it's probably not gonna be all that great, but let's save. It's, let's try and publish it. Let's have a look at it on a new tab. Can you still see that new and it failed?

[01:21:24] Taco Verdonschot: my

[01:21:24] Nathan Wrigley: reload. I wonder if it's a No, don't

[01:21:27] Taco Verdonschot: reload because that will kill your playground.

[01:21:30] Dave Grey: Oh, okay.

[01:21:31] Nathan Wrigley: I think it did a new tab

[01:21:32] Dave Grey: from the look

[01:21:32] Nathan Wrigley: of it.

Yeah, it did. It started in a new tab. I've got it here still. Yeah. Maybe don't let me see it. Still on the preview, right? Oh, it says front end here. I didn't realize there was a front end button. I don't normally play in playground, so let's see what that gets us. Okay, there we go. Let's see what we get. Is that our slider then?

Okay. I dunno if it's CS, s based, I dunno how what, what level of incredible that is. But that's it's, it is purporting to do what we asked it to do. That's not bad. Is it images? So it's trying a couple of images. There's a bit of text. Sorry, Alex, say

[01:22:08] Alex Osmichenko: again? I'm saying it's trying, it's, yeah, it's really good.

Like comparing to nothing and just was just one line

[01:22:16] Nathan Wrigley: of text. It gives you it, it did exactly that. So go back into the editor. Obviously we've now got our block. That's the block. it did what it purported to do. It's given us the options that we asked for. it was like 12 words.

That's pretty, pretty remarkable. I think

[01:22:39] Alex Osmichenko: it's, not the backend experience we typically deliver to our customers. No, because everything is in the UI and you have less controls on the So we're trying to make everything in the middle at the Gutenberg. Yeah. But considering there is like the person who has no coding skills can do that.

And

[01:22:57] Nathan Wrigley: that's cool. Okay, so that is the bit that I think is curious about this is that it suddenly makes available to regular people. just, oh, I'll, just build my own little block. I've, got a, I don't know, I'm putting on a town hall or, I dunno, I'm, I've got a car boot sale we call them in the uk.

I've, I have a requirement to sell a bunch of stuff off my backyard and I'd like to put a little website up to say, what I'm gonna sell. We just did it. is it perfect? Probably not. Is the code gonna be the best you've ever seen? I'm sure it isn't, but did it do what it needed to do? It certainly did, and it took minutes and it's absolutely breathtaking and horrifying.

An equal measure.

[01:23:44] Taco Verdonschot: yeah, and that's where I wonder about code quality, because if anyone can put anything on, on the web. Does it add enough value? Is it, good enough or are we just polluting the web with

[01:24:04] Nathan Wrigley: we are crap

[01:24:05] Taco Verdonschot: code and Yeah. Half working?

[01:24:08] Nathan Wrigley: I'm sure. I'm sure that's what a lot of us are doing.

Alex, sorry, I think I interrupted.

[01:24:12] Alex Osmichenko: Yeah, I said we are, we, that's what happening, if you look at the WordPress ecosystem right now, and there are obviously like 43% of the web, powered by the WordPress. But is there any statistics, like how many, of those websites are outdated with outdated plugins and, stuff like that, which are, still giving us a good percent on the, market, but they definitely need some rework and maintain.

[01:24:46] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, now that's an interesting point because in effect, what I've just created. Is a plugin in effect which will never be updated. Yeah. And so whatever the heck that code is gonna sit there for the rest of my website's life. And I have no idea that I'll ever go back to it and update it. And that's one of the constant calls in the security community isn't it?

Is keep your site updated. But I've just given myself a free reign to put something on my website. I have no idea what the code is in the background and I it, I'll probably never come back to it 'cause it's just like disposable. That's interesting. And I hadn't thought about that. I was so carried away with how easy it was to do it.

I forgot about whether or not it's actually a good idea to deploy that. That's do the drastic part quote. Just 'cause you could, doesn't mean you should. Exactly. But I think we're in that space with ai, aren't we? We're all totally beguiled by what it can do. And so we are just creating just stuff, loads of stuff, make all the stuff 'cause it can do it.

And, Alex has just come up with a really, credible reason why I might wanna put my foot on the break a little bit. however, it was fun, honestly. Can you imagine? Sorry, ta

[01:26:03] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. and at the same time, it's a perfect proof of concept.

[01:26:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yep.

[01:26:08] Taco Verdonschot: If you want to get something, could this possibly work?

You get something and then you improve and you build something out of it if you have those skills. So it's, not absolutely useless, but there is a risk to it.

[01:26:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think that's right. Okay. So maybe, if it was to be used in the wild with. With, if this was something that automatic might want to ship into WordPress itself, we'd want those caveats.

Wouldn't we want the warnings about how it was? But remember, all I wrote was, I want a CSS based slider. I want to upload images and texts for each image at. Pretty much did that. It just fairly scary. Good lord. And, yeah, tacho. Thank you, Courtney saying I was with Courtney just the other day.

Gosh, that feels like a million years ago, Courtney. And it was literally like a day and a half ago. how I managed to stay awake. I am not awake. I, the real, one of me is asleep in over there somewhere. This is the AI version. Dave

[01:27:12] Taco Verdonschot: is just a fantastic fin fan. Fano Quist. Jesus. What? No, that's

[01:27:17] Nathan Wrigley: easy for you to say.

You pick the most typical word to say. yeah. thank you Courtney. I am trying to stay awake, but I'm struggling a little bit. Let's press on. Time is almost out, so let's, let me just cherry pick the ones which I think were interesting. Okay. quick hat tip. That's my playground. Just. Very quickly.

There are three interesting things if you wanna convert things in the web. Ben Intel from Stackable has built a plugin called ci o or Chimo, or whatever that is, CIMO, which in a will enable you to do things like cre turn JPEGs into web PS and things like that. It's a plugin, but also I noticed that on the back of that, that this week, a couple of things using web assembly, I'm guessing in the background, have launched this week.

They're free to use. One's called How to Convert Co and it does it all in the browser, and one's called. Con with two o's Convert tools, so you can go and check those out. I wanted to give this more time, but we haven't. Got it. I wanted to give a hat tip to Mike McAllister from the Ollie theme, in, I'm guessing it's the pro version, but I don't know, it might be in the free one.

They've built what looks like a really credible navigation, builder, I dunno if it binds to the Ollie theme or if it's available, in any old theme. But the, ability to create navigation in the, block editor is basic to say the least on a vanilla WordPress site where he's suddenly made it possible to point, click, drag, create fun things like mega menus and style the links so that they look attractive rather than the extremely basic version you get with, with the vanilla version of WordPress.

So there's that. It's called, menu Designer, and I'll put the links to the show. It's on your pro,

[01:29:09] Dave Grey: you can see on the button.

[01:29:11] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, get. Yeah. I see, It says get, I dunno if it's bundled with, yeah, maybe. I think you're right. it does seem that way, doesn't it, Dave? I think it probably is in the, version, speaking of AI as we were, my understanding is that ai, loves a good bit of documentation.

If it can slurp it up and, learn from it, then it's as happy as can be. WordPress, as I thought it had done a pretty good job, open sourcing all of their materials, knowledge bases and docs and what have you. But, it's been taken to the nth degree. This is Caspar SD on GitHub who has turned everything into markdown files, which I presume an LLM can pass much more quickly, easily.

I dunno. Does anything like that, yeah, it can be

[01:29:59] Alex Osmichenko: used as a context or probably like some CP server can be built on

[01:30:05] Nathan Wrigley: top of that. Got it. Okay. Okay. that makes sense. Okay. So thank you for basically taking the time to do that. That was that one. what have we got here? No, Quick hat tip. 'cause he's a good friend.

Mark West Guard over the course of Word Camp US had a 30% offer his Ws forms. I've got a feeling you might still be able to make use of it, so if you wanna do that, the coupon code was WC 30 if it's run out, I'm sorry, but, I thought I'd try it. I've got a feeling it might still work, go and get 30% off this fabulous plugin.

you've seen it everywhere, I'm sure. also fluent the company that seemed to be like releasing a fairly credible plugin about every eight or nine minutes, they've released, they've released fluent affiliate. Their product suite is so self-contained now they've just got everything.

And this was a missing piece. They're launching a cart solution very soon. Fluent cart coming out very, soon is my understanding. They've got a lifetime deal, and I know you all say that you don't buy lifetime deals, but I know that you all buy lifetime deals. So there it is, two sites for $199.

I'm sure it'll go much more like that per year in the near future. there was, here we go. This will make this the last one. and then we'll probably be out of time. Let me just check. Oh no, that's gotta be the last one. Are you all right for another couple of minutes, you guys? Absolutely. Yes. Dave, you okay?

Yeah, we're good. Okay, great. Okay, in which case, I'll take my foot off the pedal a bit. We've got two left. The last one is knots. This one though is Security Patch Stack. Case study finds hosting defenses fail against 87, let's call it 88% of WordPress Exploit. So Patch Stack. honestly, years ago there were a few players in the WordPress security space who were making all the noise.

I think Patch Stack has basically. Come right to the, it's risen to the top somehow with a lot of hard work. So they've got a new case study and they found that, hosting companies, and they picked 11 hosting companies, and they only picked them because they wrote in their advertising materials that they took security seriously.

So they opted themselves in that way, if 11 security, sorry, 11, hosting companies. And they did a whole range of testing. for example, there was privilege escalation, SQL injection, arbitrary file upload, ran a bunch of these, exploits and discovered that basically, not ba, 89, 80 8% of them, failed.

And even the good ones, things like, CloudFlare, where they had the CloudFlare firewall in front. Even then CloudFlare only caught four of them. I dunno what the takeaway of this is. Alex, it sounded like you had a bit of wisdom to do with this. Do you wanna hit, it?

[01:33:03] Alex Osmichenko: Yeah. so basically security is, one of the most important, things of WordPress.

That's why we talked before, like keeping things, up to date and, making sure that you're secured, if you're well maintained. but there is only one source, as far as I know, and it was WP Scan, I think, yeah, the repository of, WordPress Security Vulnerabil vulnerabilities, which I think is owned by Automatic as well, and is now integrated into Jetpack.

So the only way for hosting platforms is to run scans, on the plugins version and the versions that are, affected, on the source. I know that WP Engine doing that, but it's, it's not an instant event. So if those tests were run right after uploading something, there might be like some time that has to pass after automatic scanners are parsing those files and plugin versions and things like that to take any action and notif notify the owners of the websites that, their WordPress websites contains, like hacked or, plugin with the security issues.

[01:34:38] Nathan Wrigley: So the winner here, according to this at least anyway, is Cloud Cloudflare's, web application firewall. They se they seem to see that as being the most, the most likely to stop things, but only four out of the 11. Because in many cases that some of these hosting companies, which by the way are not named, which I think is probably a good thing, failed all of them.

So all of the 11, things that they injected or, uploaded or whatever it may be, did what they were intended to do. I suppose it with this, with the patch stack piece, there's always that in the back of your mind, there are obviously. Sowing the seed of doubt and sowing a bit of fear. that's their marketing, right?

So Yeah. if 88 things are failing, oh, and then obviously, oh, I wonder if Patch Stack's got a solution. that's their marketing shtick I guess. But, nevertheless, interesting. the

[01:35:31] Alex Osmichenko: CloudFlare, I wanted to add that the CloudFlare blocked the four threads because it's a real time proxy and firewall, so it doesn't need any time to, to check the, code and scan the code of the website.

Yeah. To spot, the security thread.

[01:35:48] Nathan Wrigley: I dunno if you all do the same thing as me, but basically if I put anything onto the internet, it now sits behind CloudFlare. I just see that as a, for me, at least a sensible default, because yeah, I often just use the free tier speed. Yeah. So yeah, speed every, it's just incredible what they give away, with the hope of getting you onto the paid plans.

But the free stuff is just. Remarkable. I think CloudFlare workers might be a part of the rocket net secret source that we were talking about earlier. I don't really know, but I think that might be part of how it all hangs together. Anyway, there you go. that was that. Now we'll end on this complete doozy.

I, I'd never heard of this thing, but there's a magazine called B-Y-T-E-I love the internet. This is so great. And what you're seeing here is, it is junk, isn't it? It is just a random series of lines. It looks like a bar chart. What the heck is that? Yeah. until you become a little bit more curious and you start to pinch and zoom.

So I'm just gonna place my mouse in the middle of this load of nonsense and I'll pinch a little bit. And I dunno if you've detected that now, a bunch of images seemed to come into view. Zoom out again. There we go. Same view. Zoom back in again. Okay. And you think, okay, they look curious. They're all slightly different colors.

They're all the same shape. Oh, they look a bit like magazine pages, don't they? And then you zoom in a bit more. What the heck? and then you zoom in and you keep zooming in and you can read every one of their, I guess they haven't put all of their content out there, but they've got a, something from each issue that they've ever done.

And you could get right in. Look at it. It's mental and right at the beginning, absolutely brilliant, isn't it? Isn't it just, what a great way. look at that. Look at that. And my initial response was firstly, how the heck do they do it? that's a naughty image. it's two terabytes of image or something like that.

But then I thought, no, that loaded straight away on my machine. And so presumably they're doing some as. I don't know. A sort of loading in the background a Alex, it felt like you had some intel there. I don't know. On a technical level or,

[01:38:09] Alex Osmichenko: yeah, probably different C set for different screen sizes and dynamically reloading them because.

If they would load all them all at once, it would just blow your

[01:38:20] Nathan Wrigley: browser, break the internet. Oh, yeah. but is there an application for this apart from this? Not really that I can think of, but it's very, clever and I love that about the internet, when I see something which has no practical application whatsoever, but it's still fun and remarkable.

It's very cool. I don't know why Im here.

[01:38:44] Taco Verdonschot: I can see Marcus Burnett doing this for the WP world with all the avatars of all the WordPress.

[01:38:50] Nathan Wrigley: There you go. Marcus was in the comments before, I dunno if he's still there, but you've now been given a job, by Tacho also, Marcus, while you there, if you could make your, your card game, which is absolutely fabulous, if you could make it radar proof or lidar proof, or whatever the heck they use.

That would be nice as well. Okay. So that's the, final one. You'll find that at, the URL by BYT. I'm not gonna read that. I'll put it into the show notes. It's in some formulation of Japanese, I think, and I can't quite read it out, but I'll put it into the show notes and then you too can be scrolling around mean meaninglessly for our, on the website reading stuff that you have no interest in, but you're curious as to how it got on the page.

final comment then from Elliot. Elliot says, like Tacho says, so we're going back to the telex thing. I may use it as a POC starting point, but rip it apart and check it and build. Myself. Yeah, I think that's, I would imagine that's what that telex tool is built for. Not to deploy live, but to just get a starting point and, be able to get a starting point without using any of your, I don't know, you don't have to use a site that you've already got running.

nice site that by stuff says, Patricia, at the final moment, but for some reason I can't show it. There we go. we can search and download the PDF from that edition we found. Oh, I didn't spot that. Oh yeah. When you click on it, you get a little downloadable version. That's cool too. Check 'em out.

They're killing it. Nice. Yeah, indeed. There we go. That's it. That's all we got time for. Sorry that we overrun. I apologize. We're nearly at the one hour, 45 minute mark, but thank you. I apologize for my gaffes and saying incorrect things, which I probably did from time to time 'cause I absolutely exhausted.

The minute we hit stop, I'm gonna lie down on that floor and doze off like Netflix. But before we do that, we have the, Alex apologies, you probably don't know this. We do this thing every week. Every guest raises their hands a little bit like that. Ah, it's like a pro. And then we use that as the featured image for the, for this episode.

So firstly, thank you very much. Go around the houses firstly, thank you tko, for joining us today. Hopefully you'll be back at some point in the near future. Absolutely. I'd be happy to. Yeah, and I would appreciate you comment on. I'd love it. Dave Gray, who's been on for the last, I don't know, 14 weeks in a row.

Thank you once more. And also, Alex. Thank you very much. My pleasure as well, and hopefully you'll be back. We'll certainly be inviting you back. Okay. That's it. That's all we've got time for. We will see you on the next edition. It will probably be next week. Take care. Stay safe. Have a good week. Bye bye. Bye.