This Week in WordPress #352

[00:00:03] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress, episode number 352, entitled Fully Embrace the Wapuu. It was recorded on Monday the 13th of October, 2025.

My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I am joined by three fabulous guests. I'm joined by Taco Verdonschot, by Steve Burge, and by Marc Benzakein.

It is a WordPress podcast. We get a little bit derailed, talking about doorbells, and a lot derailed talking about the WordPress mascot, the Wapuu. But we also do get into some other things as well.

Taco mentions something by Remus de Vries. It's a really easy to follow article on how to diagnose WordPress performance bottlenecks on your website.

We also talk a lot about the myriad events that are happening in the WordPress space over the next few weeks.

Do you like WordPress navigation in core? Would you like it to be slightly better? the menu designer by Mike McAllister from Ollie, perhaps that's going to be bundled into core in the near future. We'll have to wait and see.

What are the best ways to get your repo plugin recognized. Nick Hamze has an article about that. It's interesting. Taco agrees with some of it, but also disagrees with a variety of other bits and pieces as well.

And the other thing which we spend a long time talking about is WordPress Studio, and how now you can have blueprint websites in a format which is really easy to send to other people.

There's loads more. For example, FluentCart is about to launch as well, and it's all coming up next on this week in

WordPress.

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Hello, hello, Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you may be in the world. Very nice to have you with us. We're on episode number, I think that's right, 352 of this week in WordPress. Gosh, that's like almost a year of days, if How many days are a year? Oh, no, it's not 360.

Oh, almost. Oh, I can't count. 13 more episodes. For some reason I thought it was three and 56 days in a year, which it really isn't. thank you for joining us. If you are with us in the chat, that's really great. we'll get to you guys in a moment, but really appreciate your presence. But, let's go around the, panel that we've got today.

first of all, over there on my, I don't know whether that's right or left, I'm gonna say right. It's the other, right? It's Taco Don shot. How you doing Taco? I'm good. Thanks for having me again. Yeah, you're so welcome. It's always Tacos been very kind. I've been a bit rubbish with the, making the show notes of this week and he was very kind in, in coming and stepping and helping me out, so I really appreciate that.

Tat Taco, thank you so much. Here's Tacos bio. Taco is the CCO at Progress Planner, a plugin that helps you maintain your website by rewarding you for completing important five minute tasks on the site. He's also active in the WordPress community team, WordPress Accessibility Day organizer. More about that in a minute.

WP Meetup. I'm gonna try it now, Megan. Yay. Well done. Organizer and regular volunteer at his kid's school. Oh, I wanna come back to that. He and his family live in Oh, v vi practiced vegan. Yes. Okay. Vegan. Yeah. Like you said, vegan, which is in the, which is in the Netherlands. And today he changed his doorbell to did you to the, to sound like the Super Mario theme.

[00:05:06] Taco Verdonschot: Okay. So I have two questions. The first one is, what's going on there? Why did you do that? the software of our doorbell recently got an update and they had this very grandpa grandma style ding dong sound. Yeah. As a default. And my wife and I really didn't like it, so I started looking into can I change this?

And then I learned I can upload any MP three. Now we have Super Mario as our doorbell. Oh.

[00:05:39] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's exciting. it was funny. As soon as you said my, the software for my doorbell, I was thinking, we have, come on. we're, really, we're no longer cavemen anymore. I have a knocker, I have a, curiosity about doorbells and it has to do with dogs.

How is it that a dog, no matter what kind of doorbell you have, they can hear a doorbell on the TV and they go nuts, and it's not the same doorbell that you have. How do dogs just inherently know? The sound of a doorbell. Yeah. They, are keeping that close to their chest. That is one of the secrets that they're just not, they're not telling us.

okay. So that was the first question. Firstly, Bravo. I think I put some like really screamy death metal music on it just to really freak out now

[00:06:26] Taco Verdonschot: almost Halloween.

[00:06:27] Nathan Wrigley: So definitely have some fun with it. Okay. Yeah. That's nice. Yeah. Okay. The next thing is what do you do at your kid's school? That's lovely.

[00:06:35] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. so this is where we're going to run into English, not being my first language. Okay. but so there's an, a, a body within the school where teachers and parents get to advise the school leadership.

[00:06:54] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. We call it PTA Parent Teacher Association. I'll take it. Probably that,

[00:06:59] Taco Verdonschot: yeah. In, yeah, that exactly, that's what I was

[00:07:02] Nathan Wrigley: thinking.

Yeah.

[00:07:04] Taco Verdonschot: and That is at school level, but my school is in a, or my kids' school is in a group of, 17 schools.

[00:07:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yep.

[00:07:15] Taco Verdonschot: And so there's another of those associations for the whole group and that's where I'm in.

[00:07:22] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. Oh, good for you. doing your thing. I was reading something the other day, which really caught me short, and it was about the fact that we do so much online and we put so much stock in what people out there on the internet are doing that it would seem that a lot of us have forgotten.

Stuff going on in the world, just outside of our doorstep, and we are, we're far more worried about the state of, I don't know, politics, which we don't have much control over. Whereas the primary school, just down the road, you do, but it's easy to forget that all of that's out there.

[00:07:52] Taco Verdonschot: and it, goes for schools, but also for sports clubs, et cetera.

They have a harder time, finding volunteers every year.

[00:08:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. so

[00:08:04] Taco Verdonschot: there's plenty of opportunity to, instead of correcting someone on the internet, who's wrong Yes. to.

[00:08:11] Nathan Wrigley: Help out locally. So last time I went to watch a game with my children in it, I was stood on the sideline watching the game and I just looked around and virtually every parent was staring at the phone.

It's ha, wait, your kids are literally there. What the heck is the

[00:08:28] Taco Verdonschot: message?

[00:08:29] Nathan Wrigley: Anyway, Bravo. Thank you so much and appreciate it. So next up just there is Mark Zaca. Hello Mark. How you doing? Hello, how are you? Mark does not live in a box, despite the fact that it always looks like he does. I thi I think inside the box.

Oh, I like it. Oh yeah. Very good. Very good. Good. Touche. mark Zaca, this is his bio. he hails from the great state of California other otherwise known as the third worst time zone in the world. It is for this show, but just about everything else, it's not where he acts as the marketing and partnerships lead for Maine.

Wp he also hosts a podcast, which he swears is going live any day now where he speaks with people about failure and how it impacted and shaped their lives. Cool idea for a podcast, I love that kind of every cloud has a silver lining kind of idea, That's not always the idea, but yeah, that's, no, just a cloud.

Yeah. It's just talking about failure. It's just, about the cloud, how to succeed in failing. I love it. okay, so there's, two of our guests and the third one, Steve, Birge over there. Now Steve really went to town on the, bio this week. And, frankly, it's, there's a lot. So I'm just gonna try and say it in one breath.

Here we go. Publish press.com. Founder.

[00:09:49] Steve Burge: there's a, lot of stuff in the show notes. You've got 90 minutes.

[00:09:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Nice to move quickly. So I like it. Anyway, thank you, Steve for joining us as well. How's it going?

[00:10:00] Steve Burge: Oh, great. It, I, mark, it's 6:00 AM with you.

[00:10:04] Marc Benzakein: Yes. Yeah, Ouch. I have no idea what the heck you're doing.

every,

[00:10:10] Nathan Wrigley: everybody, everyone works. I have actually had meetings with people in Pakistan that I've had to be here at two o'clock in the morning and it's just like ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah. That is ridiculous. we also have the comments though, so if you are watching this, feel free to, to make a comment, I'll just mention the url, which is probably the best one to do this one.

Go to wp builds.com/live. Send your friends relations enemies even, to that UR L and you can join in the comments. If you are looking at it on a desktop, there's a box on the right with comments in. You have to be logged into Google. Ah, Taco. Now how did you, my brain couldn't pause the whole left right thing in the time that you did.

That was great. and if you're on a desktop, it's below. I can do that. Sorry. If you're on a mobile, it's below. If you don't wanna use YouTube comments 'cause you don't like Google or you don't have Google account, there's a little box inside the, the video window says a live chat. Just click that and you can do that.

There we go. WP builds.com/live and we really appreciate it. When comments come in, it keeps the show going. So just a few coming in. First one is Elliot, just down the road from me in Bri. Hello Elliot. we're also joined by Dave Gray. He's often on the show. Good afternoon from an overcast Boxer uk.

You had a break from me, but I'm back. He's back in the comments. Really appreciate it. Ali is here. It's been some time. Hi there. Hello. Nice to have you back. Tammy List to join us. Good morning. Have you tried turning it off and on again? What were we talking? Oh, the doorbell. I'm guessing maybe, was that what you were on about at the time?

[00:11:47] Taco Verdonschot: no. I think probably, about the Might your medical,

[00:11:50] Nathan Wrigley: oh yeah, not sure. Yeah, not sure.

[00:11:54] Taco Verdonschot: also turning something on and off again, never works. It always works.

[00:12:00] Nathan Wrigley: No, you are not turning it off, right?

[00:12:02] Taco Verdonschot: No, you have to turn it off and then back on again. But if you turn it on and off, then it's not gonna do anything because it will be off.

Honestly, it,

[00:12:10] Nathan Wrigley: unless it has two on settings. Yeah. there might be on, on.

[00:12:18] Taco Verdonschot: But the last thing here is turn it off, then it doesn't work. Oh, I see. Oh, she's got it round. Oh, I see what You can turn it on and off again. Yeah. Okay.

[00:12:26] Nathan Wrigley: If you turn it off. Okay. I get you now. I'm sorry. I, it works if you wanna watch your kids playing football.

Yeah, correct. Okay. A couple of things. Hello Vladimir. Nice to have you with us and also Mark. Hello. Lovely, lovely to have you with us. And, they don't go knots depending on dog. Mine doesn't. We, I had a dog when I was growing up. This is true, right? Total segue, but we'll get to the show in a minute.

We had a relative and my dog, there were two people in the world. It would go nuts for like knots and it was this woman and my mother. If they, if it, if this woman came into our lives, and she lived in Ireland like miles away, my dog knew when she was coming. I'm 10 miles out, my dog would start going absolutely not for no reason, and I don't get that in a good way or yeah, no, just like, barking and like visibly different from every other scenario in life.

And it would behave absolutely consistently in this way whenever this person was showing up and it really would be about 10 minutes out, my dog would start behaving in this. Utterly erratic way, and I have no explanation for that. Other than that, dogs have some voodoo going on that we don't understand and that, obviously, they've got the whole doorbell thing down.

and they can also, figure stuff like that out. Anyway, there we go. Strong perfume. no, boy, that would have to be really strong. okay, right here we go. Let's get stuck into what we're doing today. So here is our website. This is us wp builds.com. If you, if you wanna keep in touch with what we do, stick your email address into that box and we'll send you a couple of emails each week.

we have a Black Friday page, which is going on at the moment. I just launched very recently, and I think at the moment, I think we've already got about 60 plus deals on there. So if you've got a, if you've got a deal in the WordPress space and you want to be featured on our Black Friday page, it's totally free.

You don't have to do anything apart from click on this button here, click add a deal, and then you fi fill out the form. And, if you are a WordPress, I got something about socks the other day. Company decided they wanted to advertise their socks. Needless to say, that's not going on this webpage, but if you, if you have a WordPress thing, feel free, fill it out and we'll promote you in the run up to Black Friday.

And if Ws form the Blessed Mark Westco, if you want pride of place, we've got some advertising spots as well, which, which you can make use of. But that's there. You can find that wp builds.com/black. Okay. And it'll become increasingly interesting as time goes on. Usually we get about 400 deals on there and you can search and filter to your heart's content over there, right?

Next one is, WP Accessibility Day is just around the corner. Amber is involved, but this is not about that. We'll do that in a minute. I, I had a, an in-depth conversation with Amber Hines because she recently did a, a survey where she went through page builders and blocked tools and things like that in terms of their, accessibility credentials.

And, there was a winner. I'll keep that to myself. You can, you can find that by looking at the article. But, just to let you know that, that was the most recent episode that I did with Amber. Okie dokie and fi final one. the, very, very cool Bud Kraus was on the Tavern podcast this week. Bo, if you've not met Bo, he's a New Yorker.

he's irascible, let's say that, and such an interesting guy, but you may not know about Bud, that he suffers from macular degeneration, which means the very center of his eyesight is blurred. So he has to use his peripheral vision, and he talks about how he consumes the web and how he works in the WordPress space, given that condition that he had.

And it's really interesting, really, interesting. So go and have a listen to that. Okay. Onto. the guests get a chance to submit some content if they wish to before the show starts, and, Tacos availed himself of that opportunity. However, he is not promoting any of his own stuff. It's, MKU.

Tell us more. Taco.

[00:16:33] Taco Verdonschot: Yes. MKU did a, well, quite a long writeup on, how to diagnose WordPress performance bottlenecks. And it's really a step by step guide that you can just follow if you want to do your own research and check problems on your own site. And, it is, he lists a bunch of tools and it is super helpful.

It's very detailed, even if you're not a very technical person, but you do realize that side speed is important, which spoiler alert it is. Go read this article. Go test your own website and let find out what performance bottlenecks exist for your site and then

[00:17:23] Nathan Wrigley: fix 'em. Nice. I have to say like when it comes to security and performance, those are two areas which for some reason never landed with me.

I never learned much about them. So having people like Mku and Tim, I guess would be a candidate in the security space who are able to unpack that, even if it's just suggestions, you may not do anything with it, but writing stuff like that up in a non-techy way so that somebody like me or maybe you KO can assume it.

That's really, yeah, very similar.

[00:17:53] Taco Verdonschot: I'm also not a developer, and I really like this because it's written in a way that. Anyone can understand.

[00:18:00] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So I will put all of the links in the show notes, but obviously if you're looking at this, you can see it. But if not, I'll read it into the record. How I diagnose WordPress Performance Bottlenecks is the name of that article.

So I suspect if you Google that and then combine it with the word Remus, you'll probably, find it. Steve, mark, anything on that or shall I press on? I, just have a great deal of respect for Mku. I did an interview for, with him, for Main WP actually talking about performance, and I learned stuff just in that interview.

It's, like he's a great guy to get information from and he knows his stuff, so I highly recommend this article. I read it last week and I was like, wow, this is even, I can understand this. yeah. That's kind of it. yeah. I'm with you. Steve, anything or shall I move on? Okay, I will move on in that case.

Okay. So the controversy, which is gonna dominate this conversation. So I'm, hoping that people in the comments are gonna fully back us up here. This piece came out, it was, after Active is the website. It's after Active com. Scroll quickly to the bottom to see if it's got a, an article name, like an author anywhere.

I don't see it. Maybe somebody here knows who actually wrote this one, but they wrote a piece which was entitled Kapu Outlived Its Usefulness, A Critique of WordPress' Mascot and Community Decay. Gosh, incendiary stuff. I'll take the community decay anytime, but you criticize WaPo. What the heck? and they make the point to, to be fair to them.

I think a lot of the points are interesting. They're coming at it from a, an enterprise level and they're making the point that. They're trying to make the point that this mascot that we've got in the WordPress space, this WaPo thing doesn't belong. if you enter the offices of a Fortune 500 company and you're trying to, I don't know, trying to pitch for a WordPress website, he's basically saying WaPo is not gonna be something that you're gonna put on the, documentation.

You're not gonna lean into any of that. But, there's a lot more to it. he, goes into why we use it, what the history is, why do people like it and what have you, and then does this kind of breakdown of why he strongly recommends that we get rid of it. and, there's a whole thing here.

You can read it and, maybe at the end of it, you'll have a strong opinion about it. Certainly some other people did. so for example, iconic, the website Iconic, which is run by, Nick Hamza making all the waves in the WordPress space at the moment. He, he comes back saying basically, screw you, we love our wapos.

And then makes the really strong case, I think for why WordPress is actually all the better for it. And the biggest win I think in this article was the comparisons. So he makes the case for example, that if you look at the, I don't know, P-H-P-P-H-P space, they have their elephants Elephant logo, right?

Yep. If you go to the Drupal space, they've got this curious little drop icon, which has got some sunglasses. It's very cartoonish. If you go to GitHub, there's what is that? I'm gonna say like a. cat to puty cat kind of thing. Yeah, something. Yeah, something like that. And then what else was there?

There was a couple of others. Tox, the penguin. Oh, of course. Linux. The penguin. Yeah. tox. Yeah. And so his argument is, if these people are doing it and they're successful with it, why they're heck not now. It's, there's this article by Nick. which I, suggest you read 'cause that, seems to me the best distillation of the arguments.

But it wasn't the only one. I don't think I've ever seen an angry wahoo, but there it is. oh, who wrote this again? Taco. this is Chris Reynolds. Chris Reynolds from Pantheon. Yep. at jazz sequence.com. He wrote a, another different defense of the same thing, but basically the same saying that, at Pantheon they kinda lean into it.

They've done a few bits of, video content and o other bits of content where they've leaned into it and it's fine. and so I just wondered what the panelist's thoughts were. So let's just take it like this. the article, the original piece is basically, it's a bit, it's a bit toyish.

It's a bit gimmicky. And then the counter argument is, firstly, who cares if it's gimmicky? But they're actually making the point not just to forgive the gimmick. They're making the point that, no, this actually is a credible thing. It's not just, okay, ignore that it's a gimmick. It's more no.

This is actually beneficial to the community. So I'm just gonna, leave that open. I haven't got the post on the screen and I forgot to find it. Taco, sorry. But Taco sent me a link to an ex post, so Twitter post in which Matt Mullenweg C Can you just paraphrase, what did he say? I can't remember.

Yeah,

[00:23:02] Taco Verdonschot: so basically Matt also responded to this whole conversation that happened on X and said, maybe it's time to draw WaPo into purpose itself and give it a home on.org. to which my response was, Hey, it already has a home. Yes, that's WaPo us. but the fact I think that Nick's right here, Nick Hamey, is that we should embrace WaPo.

And I know that my colleague s Falk and Mkas don't like to hear that because they're not big fans. but it is an identity. It's something that you, it's a personification. some, something, someone you can identify with that has emotions, that has all the outfits. and the original article says this is not suitable for enterprise.

And my response to that is, when ever did we see large enterprise companies with real branding with a real personality? That's the thing that dies first. Yeah. When you get into enterprise level things, it's the whole emotion. it's the like factor that you lose. So if it's not a great fit for enterprise, then we probably have to fix the enterprise businesses.

That's WaPo.

[00:24:39] Nathan Wrigley: I love this bit on the after active where he says, what does WaPo do? Absolutely nothing. Nothing. it doesn't boost SEO it doesn't compress images. It doesn't have a block editor, opin, opinion. It just sits there hugging his song. Yeah. But I guess you'd say, what do cartoons do? Yeah. What do films do? What does art do? It just sits there and, for some people it pushes their buttons. and I ironically, whoever po posted this, I think you've actually probably inadvertently promoted the use of WaPo across the community. Without this piece, I don't think any of this would've happened.

Would've been just the same this week as it was last week. Okay. Thank you, Tako, for your thoughts. over to Steve and Mark, if they've got anything.

[00:25:25] Steve Burge: Did you guys see what they did with the Duolingo bird?

[00:25:28] Nathan Wrigley: No. Gone.

[00:25:30] Steve Burge: Oh, so they killed it. Oh, after it was their logo for however many years since launch, and they gave it a whole like epic saga that the bird, I think it was died or murdered.

And there was a whole story about what happened to this bird and everyone got mad about the fact they killed it and then they brought it back and they got some good engagement through it. So maybe it's wapos time to die and then come back again.

[00:25:56] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes.

That's brilliant. a. Yeah. Interesting. Do you know what though? Because I, think at some level, like something like Duolingo, because it had that app icon and that was the icon, right? The duo thing was the bird in my head, that was the total association with that app. I've never installed it, so I don't have a relationship with the content of the actual app itself.

But that was what I thought it was, that was the, bit in my head. If I saw that, I would go, okay, that's Duolingo and all, we have this W logo, which I guess is the WordPress thing, but equally, I think for some people this sort of more fun caricature thing is interesting.

So anyway. Mark, you got anything? I look at it from the perspective of there's a difference between the logo and a mascot, right? and the WaPo is the mascot. And you don't wanna use it for enterprise fine, don't use it for enterprise. You still have the WordPress logo, which is very professional and traditional and all that stuff.

But I think that getting rid of the wpu, I think that Taco brings up this, really important part, which is people. Are always looking for something to connect to something at a human level, and that wpu brings that human connection that we all, secretly crave or, maybe not so secretly crave, in order to build loyalty and connection and long term effect.

I, I, yeah, from a purely practical on the surface level, like you said, Nathan, It there, there's, it serves no purpose and like it was stated in the article. However, on an intangible level, like art, like cartoons, like all these things that we need in order to have that human experience, which is really important, the wpu fills that gap.

So I, I'm, personally, I don't, I've never thought the WaPo was cute. I know I'm. Being unpopular here. I've never been, like, I've never looked at, I've never looked at the WaPo and said, oh my goodness, I gotta have 50 stuffed wapos on my shelf at home, and I gotta bring one home to my kids every time I go to a Word camp.

I did, when we had server press, we did have, Michelle Schu designed a nice WaPo, sticker for us that, that had the ServerPress logo. And, that was great. But I've never really fully embraced the WaPo at that level. But I certainly understand, I completely understand the need for it and why people like it and, why, people are attracted to it.

And, it brings that connection that whole, which does go to the whole point that a lot of us are in WordPress, which is the community aspect of it. And I think the WaPo bridges that gap between this kind of stuffy, stodgy, corporatey kind of thing and, the humanity. Side of things. So I, yeah,

[00:28:58] Taco Verdonschot: I think that's really

[00:28:59] Nathan Wrigley: interesting.

Sorry. Who? And there goes my, light. Go ahead, keep going. I got, that was literally at the end of what you said as well. That was perfect. Yeah. did somebody want to reply to that? I think somebody was just about to, Steve. Yeah.

[00:29:13] Steve Burge: I actually had a funny story for Mark, but now he is gone.

[00:29:17] Nathan Wrigley: I'm here. I'm here. Listen, I hear you. It's that time of the year where it gets dark early and this studio is, motion detected. Oh, I see. And, the motion detector is not in this studio. It's actually outside in the other room, so I have to go there and dance. Oh. Come back and order to bring the lights back, on.

Next time that happens. Can we watch that? I'll, get one of those cameras that follows me. There you go. Yeah. Sorry Steve, we interrupted. What were you gonna say? Something?

[00:29:43] Steve Burge: Oh yeah. I had a story for Mark. I've got two teenage daughters. they're teenage now, but they know serve a press.

Because I would go to Word camps and come back with stickers and one of them had a server press sticker with WaPo. on when their laptops. Yeah. Yeah. I guess me and you are not the, target audience for the WaPo necessarily. Maybe not. Yeah,

[00:30:06] Nathan Wrigley: I actually still have one of those stickers on one of my old laptops as well.

yeah, it's one of the few. I actually have some ServerPress stickers still on a few things, and, that is one of the ones that I kept because Michelle's a close personal friend and because she did such a great job on that sticker, ah, nice. So we have a contender for the title of this particular episode.

It's what Mark just said, and it was fully embraced, the WaPo that at the moment is the leading contender for the episode name. However, it could easily be derailed by this. Michelle Justice is just a hashtag Justice for WaPo, and then straight off the back of that Tammy's in Leave. WaPo alone, it's another hashtag.

okay, so let's move on this. If e every week there's one thing which gets more comments than anything else, I think. I feel like we've got. For this week. so here we go. Mark Wilkinson. I feel like I'm supposed to lie. I suppose that was Yeah, you corrected that later. But for, to be honest, I'm not a fan.

No, I get it. I totally get it. And for all the rea the thing is, it's kinda like you don't have to engage with it in any way, do you? You don't have to do anything with it if you don't wish to. No. For those that do, and Tammy says exactly that, then don't use it. the community isn't a mascot.

A mascot, it can be used or not. and Tammy goes on to say, all I felt was WaPo did something to them. I don't. Quite understand that one. yeah. About

[00:31:28] Taco Verdonschot: the initial post,

[00:31:30] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I see. Oh, I see. Yeah. Yeah. What did, Wpu do to him as a child? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. nameless person on the internet from that website or her?

It might be, yeah. Yeah. or they, yeah. Mark's putting himself though into the, it doesn't matter if you use it. Basket though. He says, am I bothered that it's used? No. So there you go. People need, so Dave, says people need something to put on the stickers at Word camps. There you go. If it's just that, maybe that serves its purpose.

Tammy's back also culturally, east Japan, which is how the logo came about. Characters are important. We can't just judge our culture and should not, that's really interesting. I feel like the whole, that part of the world is very much more into that kind of iconography than we are, over here.

it's a bit of fun, isn't it? But maybe it has more cultural depth and importance over there. Michelle, there's lots of comments about the WaPo. you can, oh, this is an anime

[00:32:25] Steve Burge: comic with wa.

[00:32:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. Yeah. Or get chat GPT on it. I feel that, we could have a video from, whatever it's called, Sora or something like that as well.

Michelle says, you can pry, wahoo out my cold dead hands. I actually enjoy the fun of it, but recognize it might not be for everyone. da. That's

[00:32:44] Taco Verdonschot: because not everyone is fun, Michelle. No, that's the thing.

[00:32:48] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. Yeah. indeed. no, we just don't use WaPo in enterprise, which is fine. Yes, exactly.

I think that's about. it, although Dave does Courtney Yeah. Dave's back. He does wanna see a dance from Mark as he goes out into the corridor. No, you don't. Yeah, he does. He said it. No, it would be the most cr it would be the most cringeworthy thing ever on. And yet so much fun for the rest of us.

My, kids would disown me. Yeah, I know this feeling. then Courtney, hello Courtney. she's replying to Mark. Any thoughts on PHP, Ellie Fahan? Yeah, it's probably a similar thought, I would've thought. Anyway, mark, over to you. So there we go. However, I would just like to point out the one person who is heavily invested in, the WaPo is of course Marcus Burnett.

who, last time I was in Portland for Word Camp US just a few weeks ago, he, he managed to sell me the, the game, unleash the WaPo. And I'm just gonna show you. it is, it can be a little bit more fun if you try. This is a whole game of about, I don't know what's in there, maybe a hundred cards or something like that.

That's a fairly large amount. And, it's a game in which you join forces with your com companions around a table and have a game all based around WaPo, and there's absolutely loads of them. it does serve a purpose. it gets me and my family to fight each other.

[00:34:19] Steve Burge: I remember we, when we, started building published press, what, six, seven years ago, I remember reading from Yost, there was a, one of the Yoast members wrote a, post about just how seriously they took branding for their plugin.

How they were very, careful about having a. A very strong Yost brand that was taken through the website, through the plugin, through just about everything they did. I read that we ended up doing the, the published press plugins. We have a little, penguin mascots, and they appear on just about everything that we do.

And that was direct inspiration from, from the Yos team. There you go. That having a little mascot, having something that people recognize and think is cute. Like for years when we had people on our podcast, we'd send them a little cuddly penguin, like a little plushy penguin, that we'd get from, a charity that supports nonprofits, that, that help ocean health.

and so yeah, it, I highly recommend it, keep the WaPo alive. keep, if you have a little mascot for your company. I

[00:35:40] Nathan Wrigley: think that's a great point because like firstly, I'd just like to point out that the, whole left right thing totally derail you that I saw you go for the wrong side of your, shirt.

It's all it takes to overcome the human brain is just seeing yourself and it's left is right and right is left. But the, penguin thing. I think I'm right in saying that you've got three penguins, one at the front and then one on either side looking out in different directions or something like that.

[00:36:03] Steve Burge: Yeah. Part of the GIM gimmick with Mascot is the penguins always come together. Ah. There's not just one

[00:36:09] Nathan Wrigley: mascot, but, that's so easy for me to recognize. You would have to, you would, I just see that little thing in a square and I know it's your thing. and that, that branding kind of works.

Obviously if you've got a logo which is recognizable, like Yos has that, they've got that working. Yeah, exactly. You've got I wanna say chicken. I'm going the rooster. Yes. It's roughly the rooster. I don't know the difference between a rooster and a chicken, but I'll go with a rooster. I think it's great and I think if WordPress does this, why not?

Let's just have a little bit of fun and, it looks like Matt is now taking this on board. Maybe wants to make it part of the core platform, which is interesting. I don't really know what that means, but anyway, there you go. Andrew Palmer says he also bought the pack of cards. WaPo for the win.

There you go. Yos did the branding for Bertha AI too, for nominal people. Oh, I didn't realize Yost did that kind of thing. Maybe they just do it. Okay,

[00:37:03] Taco Verdonschot: now I have to show off a little bit, Nathan, because the. Team that is behind the original Yost branding.

[00:37:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:37:10] Taco Verdonschot: Now works a progress planner. What?

[00:37:12] Nathan Wrigley: The people that did all the, the iconography and, the faces of the Oh, yep.

That's Erin

[00:37:19] Taco Verdonschot: and Mike and Nice. They're now colleagues here at, progress Planner.

[00:37:23] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, very nice.

[00:37:26] Steve Burge: Okay. So thank you for that. I, think of, Andrew's work with Bertha. I immediately have, he's got a little purple no robot.

[00:37:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:37:34] Steve Burge: That pops in my mind.

[00:37:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yep, It's exactly the same thing, right? It's brand recognition.

And for those people, I can well understand how you wouldn't walk into like enterprise, you're not gonna go to, you're pitching Deloitte a website. It's not gonna be part of the materials, is it? But if you are doing something a little bit different, why the heck not? I actually do you know what I, I say those words and as the words come outta my mouth, I think why wouldn't it be.

Why wouldn't you emphasize the sort of more community side of the project? Anyway, there you go. my, I guess my question is, if you're looking for a solution, aren't you looking for the solution and not really, would you say, oh, they've got that stupid little logo, so forget it. Yeah. the original article makes that point. They say exactly that, that you, it would put you off, whereas I'm not so sure.

[00:38:24] Taco Verdonschot: But it is the other way around because at some point you're going to recognize the logo after seeing it several times and whenever you need a solution, you go, oh, that was the people with the penguins.

Yeah,

[00:38:38] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, okay, let's move on. There we go. We've done our WaPo bits and pieces for this week, I think, but, thank you. I appreciate that. so you've kicked up a hornet's nest after active, and I'm not sure it ended up the way that you were anticipating. Okay. This is very, interesting.

profoundly interesting. I, really am curious to see how this goes. So we're looking at a GitHub issue. it's Mike McCallister and I dunno if Mike, but Mike has, a theme called Ollie. He has a pro versions of Ollie. So it is way, he's able to monetize that theme. But in the more recent past, I wanna say two weeks ago or something, he released a plugin called Ollie's Menu Designer.

I don't believe that. I don't think there's any reliance upon any paid product. I believe Ollie's Menu Designer is in the repo, so it's totally free. I think you get all the features, but, it has been suggested that it's such a profoundly good solution that it get, get core to have a look at it and see if it could become part of the core offering for WordPress.

Certainly the WordPress navigation system that we've got at the minute is. it's oh, it's what it is. A little dated. It's, it's just feature poor, isn't it? Yeah, there's not much in terms of features. So if you wanna do a basic menu, you're good. If you wanna do interesting, novel stuff like Mike's plugin allows, then, then that, that's possible.

So it would appear that this is gaining some traction and a repo has been opened, whereby I believe that core committers are now taking a look at it and obviously working out whether Mike's work, it overlaps whether or not the are gotchas things that need to be made better, things that need to be stripped out, what have you.

who knows whether this will take off, but again, did I not catch somewhere? Didn't Matt? Chime in on this as well. At some point in Twitter last week, I think Matt Mullenweg also, gave it kind of a thumbs up. Not like an official thumbs up, but more of a let's take a look, kind of thing. but that would be fascinating if in one fell swoop Mike felt that this was something that he wanted to offer up to the community and the community embraced it, and we have this, feature rich way of doing navigations built into core.

That seems really, interesting. Any thoughts on that?

[00:41:09] Steve Burge: So this is, I wanna say the third time I've seen this recently. we had, I had a, something in the show notes about the block comments feature that's about to come in WordPress 6.9. I think they, they're gonna call it notes officially.

That's right. Yeah. But it's gonna, you're gonna have a little Google Doc style comments on, On Gutenberg blocks. And that was basically dropped in from the team at, multi Dots, I think multi collab. They developed a nice editorial comment solution and basically almost presented it to the core.

They had to do some changes, but, it was almost a, pre-built feature ready to go and drop in there. And then, I may be wrong on this, but I think Seth Rubenstein over at, the Pew Research Center has done a couple of, blocks, maybe like an accordion block and a, maybe I'm half remembering this, but actually someone doing outside work and basically presenting a feature that is, 90% done seems to be happening more often.

Yeah. And certainly the work that, the Ollie team have done on this is awesome. It seems like it's polished and ready to go.

[00:42:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess you get that kind of feedback, don't you? That because with the best one in the world, the getting feedback for core, I think is a difficult bit of an uphill struggle.

Getting people to engage with that is, is tricky. Whereas somebody like Mike can put a lot of effort into marketing it. He's really good at like slick videos where he shows off his products. He is got, so he can gather that. Interest and momentum and then offer it up as he did.

Or at least, somebody suggested and then he did, I dunno, which way round that one. but that seems like a really credible way of putting things into core Find, find something which is really brilliantly done. And then if it's freely available and the, I guess the author is willing to have it put into core, then then why not?

I put that on the, on the notes, sorry, on the, the note about notes. This was your block commenting piece. I'll put that into the show notes as well. Yeah, this was the whole notes thing. We covered it a few weeks ago, but, I'll, add it into the show notes as well for this week. mark Tcho, anything on this?

[00:43:35] Taco Verdonschot: I haven't played with the plugin itself yet, but knowing Mike, it's probably very good. And what I'm seeing online is. It is very good, so I'm definitely gonna have a play and really curious to see what Anne McCarthy and her team. We'll find, and if it ends up in core.

[00:43:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, indeed. nomad Skateboarding, thank you.

Just maybe I'm getting the name wrong. He says it's just called Menu Designer. I think on the piece I was, yeah, if you just look at this piece, then right at the top, it's mentioned as being called Ollie's. Oh, IC Ollie's with an apostrophe s Ollie's menu designer. Yeah, I think you've got it right.

Yeah.

[00:44:18] Taco Verdonschot: But on.org it is called Ollie Menu Designer.

[00:44:21] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. So there's maybe some sort of slight confusion there, but maybe it'll just be called Menu Designer going forward or something like that. and again, thank you more commentary. There's a really good overview of the pros and the cons of it all, and things to ponder from Anne McCarthy on her blog.

That's right. There is, and I'll try and dig that out and link to it in the show notes, but I didn't for this. but Anne talks about yeah, pros and cons and what have you, and there's found to be a bit of both. not a direct drop in says Tammy. no, I, maybe not. yeah, I guess none of, no.

She says none of that will be direct. However, wha what it shows is good ideas should be explored and it's amazing when they are. Yeah. Okay. mark, anything on that before we press on?

[00:45:13] Marc Benzakein: I'm, interested to play with it. I actually have a project, That I'm about to start on that actually. it might, be interesting to play with that on.

[00:45:22] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Nice. Yeah. I, I think generate blocks also came out, I think they call it navigation menu or something like that. They, have a similar thing, but I think it's rolled up into their Core Blocks products. So I don't think it's been stripped out, but it does certainly seem that a lot of these third party vendors, I know Cadence have a similar thing.

it seems to be something which a lot of these companies wish to tackle because most people think that the core offering is slim to say the least. Daveon, hello? says, I haven't tried the menu designer yet. I've been. So used to using page builders? Yeah, I believe that. in this case, I think the cadence one is bound up to the cadence offering.

I think generate blocks, their menu thing is bound to their offering, whereas this menu designer one is not. So I, think you could actually use it whilst. Possibly still using a page builder for creating content. I don't think you'd be tied into it in that way, but, anyway, there we go. Certainly. Very, interesting.

And, as if Mike wasn't doing enough with that, he, he, over the last few days released, a bunch of additional add-ons, I wanna say, like a pro bunch of extensions for his theme. and I'll just mention what you get. If you're using Ali Pro, there's obviously a free version of that theme. But if you're using Ali Pro, I believe this is now part of the package that you've bought yourself into, and, here are the names of the pro extensions, hopefully you'll be able to gather what they do from this.

So the first one is advanced grid controls. Speaks for itself. We certainly could do with some, I don't know, design, templating layout, couldn't we? animation designer keyboard shortcuts, advanced group controls. So it says with clickable cards and smart sticky positionings, icon bot icons, da yay. We want that.

'cause six, I think 6.9 is actually bringing in, things like that as well. And then hover colors for interact, interactive elements. And then there's a bunch more as well. yeah, I believe you've gotta be on the, the pro tier to, to make use of those. yeah.

[00:47:31] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah, it looks like Tammy, who's in the comments already played with the grid stuff.

Okay. because she left a comment,

[00:47:39] Nathan Wrigley: oh, I guess that was an, emoji when it first left her keyboard. but it is ended up as chef kiss the grid stuff is. Oh, I'm guessing. Something along those lines. Oh, good. Good to hear. is it, do I, honestly, the whole grid thing in WordPress core is an interesting idea, but Okay.

I'll have a play. I think that sounds good. Anybody else on Ollie or should we move on? I hope that Mike keeps building things. Yeah. 'cause all of them are good. Yeah, indeed. okay. Let's move on to this one. So we've already featured Nick Sey, Honestly, I dunno what's got into his.

Drinks, but he's, he's yes, just can't get himself away from creating. Really interesting to read content. honestly, thi this is fascinating. I have yet to encounter a single human being. An actual human being who for a period of a month has managed to produce engaging content reliably. Like it's normal for somebody to do one or two over the period of a month, but for him to, he just keeps knocking him out the park.

And I, maybe that's just me. Maybe I just like what he's saying, but he's managed to figure out things which are profoundly interesting in the WordPress space, and then talk about them. Whether he is got the answers or not. We'll find out in a moment. So this one is, his take on why on earth you. As a new plugin creator, putting your plugin on wordpress.org, why it's very difficult to get over the boundary of the first 10 installs.

And, genuinely, honestly, I've been using WordPress more than a decade and I didn't know any of what is in this article. Tko can enlighten us a bit more in a minute 'cause I think you did. But, he's basically saying as a plugin developer, very, hard to gain some traction. if you put your plugin in the repo, there is a whole set of rules as to how that plugin is gonna be, surfaced.

So if somebody types something into the search box, how your plugin is going to surface and. Unlike Google, where nobody has a clue how that whole system works. people have intuitions, but they don't know, WordPress is not the same. WordPress, you know what the algorithm is. And, and he's written it down and it's, a bunch of maths.

And, and I'm not gonna try and understand it, but basically he's listed out all the things that you can do. It's like he's, the way he sells it is a little bit like a panacea, do these things and they will come. I'm not sure that's the reality. See, but nevertheless, if you don't do these things, they certainly won't be discovering you.

for example, did you know, for example, these are the things that you need to have in your readme file, your plugin title. This is the thing which matters way more than anything else. If it doesn't in the title of your plugin, say what the plugin does, you've given yourself a bit of a, you've given yourself a bit of an uphill struggle.

There's an excerpt, full description tags, plugin slug, author's name contributor names, that kind of thing. All matters. but the thing which matters most by a long, way is the, is the name apparently, and then you can read the ranking and figure out how it all works. and did you know, for example, if you have no reviews.

The repo actually regards you as having two and a half stars, which I never knew. I thought that was curious. Anyway, go and read it. If you're a plugin author and you're thinking about going into the repo and you wanna make sure that you've at least tried your best to be discoverable, this seems really interesting.

But I know Taaka, you had thoughts.

[00:51:22] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah, so Nick writes this as if, as long as you follow these rules, it's gonna be so much easier to get past that first bunch of installs, get to a couple hundred, grow to a thousand. all you have to do is just write a write description. now I'm not saying that we've written the perfect description for our plugins, but I can tell you that it's not as easy as, just do a few things and you will get.

Thousands of installs. looking at the plugins that we built with Progress Planner, it's really, hard to get installs. yes, all of this is important and it's good to know and it helps you, but it's not the magic trick to, being a million installs

[00:52:27] Nathan Wrigley: plugin. It must be interesting for you specifically, you, because you've, come from, I, don't know how long ago it was.

Let's say it was six months or so, you hung up your hat over at Yost, which had that. Like all the traction in the world on.org, it's in the top two or three plugins installed across the globe. And started out early was the, I believe it was probably one of the first SEO plugins, if not the first SEO plugin.

I don't really know. But you had all that traction and organic stuff going on, and now you've got this new venture progress planner. And so you've seen it from both ends. the enormous success how.org will probably make it easier than ever for Yost to be discovered. And now you're finding out from the other side how, I guess I, I wanna use the word dispiriting.

Can be,

[00:53:19] Taco Verdonschot: yes. it, it's definitely more challenging than I anticipated. and part of that is probably because I was used to, if you organize a webinar, there will be 500 people joining your live because they know you, they follow you on social media. That's easy enough. turns out that is not the case.

No. and so it's, much harder than I anticipated, when I left Jos, which is almost a year ago. Yeah. Wow.

[00:53:55] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:53:57] Taco Verdonschot: and yeah, and joined Progress Planner. when I joined it was on org at a hundred plus installs. and now nine months later, we're at, 10 months later almost. we're at 200 plus installs.

So it's, really hard work to get some traction. And then of course it depends on the plugin, and what you do and the problems you solve and all of that. But just getting the word out, getting people to know your brand is hard.

[00:54:34] Steve Burge: It helps have a mascot.

[00:54:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, he's got a, he's got a Turkey, no rooster, no a Turkey.

[00:54:41] Steve Burge: And Nathan, did you just, launched a podcasting product, right?

[00:54:47] Nathan Wrigley: Kinda, but not did, but. We haven't, Did you put it on the repo? No, it's not gonna be going on the repo and we haven't quite launched it. Okay. We launched it in a sort of beta version and then we got some feedback and we're probably, I don't know, we keep saying we're always about two weeks away from only finally launching it.

we've been at two weeks for about, I don't know, about three months or something like that. the, in the infamous two weeks. Yeah. Yeah. Infa two weeks. But no, we won't have this puzzle. We'll have the, whole Google puzzle, that kind of thing. so we'll be facing a different challenge.

Yeah.

[00:55:22] Steve Burge: do you mind me asking why, would you not try and tackle this challenge and put it on the repo even for a listing for Yeah. We, literally

[00:55:30] Nathan Wrigley: don't, we don't have a free version basically. we, there's, crucial stuff, which it's, it, how to describe it. There's stuff in it. Which we can't, we, can't make it a lesser thing.

so there's no kind of, there's no possibility to make it into a sort of free version that there would literally be no point to it, if The secret sauce, if you like, is, locked up behind this one feature, and that one feature is the thing that we're hoping to monetize off the back of it.

So that's basically why. but yeah, we'll have to wait and see how it, works. okay. We've got a few comments around that. firstly, Daveon says that iconic. Kasey, he's been inspired. Lots of posts popping up. Yeah. It'd be interesting to see if he keeps it going in that way. marketing and collaborators are needed to boost installs.

No kidding. you've gotta get yourself out somehow. Yeah. We need to have a conversation, Dave. Yeah. Dave? Yeah. Dave ta meet Taco. Taco you probably met at Word. Yes. W-P-L-D-N the other week. Did you? Yeah. Yeah, we did. Oh, nice. Yeah, Dave, makes some great content. I'm sure he, yeah, there

[00:56:37] Steve Burge: are, there's one or two companies, including the Astra team, launching their shore products who have the marketing and collaboration down to a fine art.

They're able to put, some of their new products onto 50, 60,000 stores within a couple of months or so.

[00:56:59] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.

[00:56:59] Steve Burge: Between having Facebook groups and cross-promoting with other products. maybe if Taco had launched, progress Prana. With Yost piggybacking off Yost, that's the way to grow in stores faster.

[00:57:17] Taco Verdonschot: I would love that. and we're in conversations, but let's just say that I'm not stalling those conversations.

[00:57:28] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:57:29] Marc Benzakein: Okay.

[00:57:30] Nathan Wrigley: We'll see. okay. We'll wait and see here. You heard it here first. see if anything comes with that. okay. Word of mouth. Marketing is quite hard to trace or attribute to read mes.

Yeah. Fair. Oh yeah. Thank you Courtney. And, mark says, plugin marketing is infinitely harder than writing the plugins themselves. Do you know what? I would beg to disagree. I couldn't mark, I couldn't write a plugin if I, if I gave it 10 years, it would, I wouldn't be able to do it, but I'm, but you did a

[00:57:57] Taco Verdonschot: couple of weeks ago, Nick.

no I

[00:57:59] Nathan Wrigley: didn't. I'm collaborating. Yes, you did.

[00:58:01] Taco Verdonschot: no. You wrote a plugin a couple weeks ago. Oh, with Telex?

[00:58:04] Nathan Wrigley: yes. Okay. I don't view that as mine. I view that as belonging to the LLM. but it's interesting, mark. So my experience is entirely the opposite. marketing is much more my thing.

or at least talking about things is much more my thing, whereas I don't have the capacity to write it, but I clearly, you a developer, have the opposite experience, launch it, as it will be. Never be ready for launch it. It's so close. It's so very close. I promise you it's really close and, you should try it.

I think if you actually did try it, it might be, something that you wanted to make use of all, assuming that install growth is what you want and benefit your monetized product. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, fair enough. Thank you, mark, for your comments,

[00:58:44] Steve Burge: if you care about the active installs. we made one big mistake when we launched, which was to make the, pro version a replacement for the free version.

And I think if I remember, Yost actually made some kind of a change about this. Yep. that you had the free version required and the pro version was an add-on. we've considered doing that because basically every time we upsell someone from the free version to the pro version, they uninstall our free version, our active installs go down.

That's less than ideal,

[00:59:24] Nathan Wrigley: oh, I see what you mean. Okay. So in, in the scenario you are talking about, every single pro version is adding to the, to the, free version statistics. So even if somebody never finds you on.org, if they find you organically and realize they want the pro version right off the bat.

Then they have to have the free version. That number ticks up by one. Okay. That's interesting. Yeah. That's the ideal way to do it. Yeah. That's fascinating. That's good. That was actually not something which was mentioned in the article. we'll just quickly pop that back on the screen 'cause it's interesting.

go and read it there. There's a whole lot more to what Nick is saying than what we've described here. He's, you can see I've highlighted a load of stuff, but there's a, bunch of stuff that you, a, bare minimum should do as Tako said, build it and they will come, is no longer, true.

But, I think it's fair to say that if you don't do the bare minimum of what he's suggesting, you may, you why not do, given that the algorithm is publicly available, why not just do what the algorithm wants you to do? Okay. So there we go. That was that piece. Let's press on now.

I'm gonna miss that one out for this week. Okay. I don't know what the heck happened, but this week. It seems like everybody, wanted an event in the next few days. So normally when I do this, there's, there's an event happening somewhere or other, maybe one, maybe there's two.

But this week it's a bit nuts. So if you're in the WordPress space, doesn't matter where you are on the globe, there's probably something happening close by to you. So we'll just go through a few of these and any notion that WordPress events are dead is, is clearly dead. yeah, it's just not the case.

although maybe in certain jurisdictions, certain parts of the world, low cars, it's a little bit more dead than others. So here we go. Firstly, word Camp Asia, which is happening next year, 2026, I believe. It's, is it Feb? No, it's April. April, April in Mumbai, they released their first tranche of tickets.

There's a whole thing about that, is that just silly? Why don't we all just get access to all the tickets in one go? I see. Both sides. But, anyway, the first transfer ticket sold out within an hour, woo-hoo. That's great. Amazing. So watch out if you, if you want to, grab your pass next time it comes, maybe, go and check it out, sooner rather than later.

I really

[01:01:55] Taco Verdonschot: think they should do something special for those who got their tickets in the first pass.

[01:02:01] Nathan Wrigley: Maybe you should get like a WaPo or something.

[01:02:03] Taco Verdonschot: Oh, yeah. or a open badge or something like that. Just to celebrate those early supporters of word kezia. You gotta imagine

[01:02:11] Nathan Wrigley: they were like just sitting with their button, just like refreshing constantly.

Have you ever done that? Have you ever installed a Chrome extension or something like that? That constantly refreshes a certain page so that at the exact moment that it goes live, in the uk I do that for Wimbledon tickets. When the, Wimbledon Lottery Act, it's like you gotta get in there right away.

otherwise you don't Yeah. On six

[01:02:34] Taco Verdonschot: computers, yeah. An IP addresses.

[01:02:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. And they immediately spot that you are trying to pull it from six different computers on the same IP address and block you. It's oh, Okay. So there's that. There we go. Word Camp Asia. The next transfer tickets maybe next week.

I don't know when they'll come about, but hopefully fairly soon. Next one. This is an online one, so this is not an in-person one, but, very importantly, the WordPress WP Accessibility Day happening, I want to say it is on

[01:03:06] Taco Verdonschot: 15th and the 16th of October.

[01:03:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, this Wednesday. If

[01:03:10] Taco Verdonschot: you're listening. Early enough.

[01:03:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So happening a 24 hour online event. The content has been prerecorded so that it's been, hopefully the best version of everybody's presentation will be coming your way. you can sign up for free. I believe there might still be some, sponsorship slots available. Certainly you can, you can get your ticket and you can watch live.

Live, live captioning. Live. What else is there? Is there ESL, interpreter. Thank you. Yeah. a great expense I might add. I don't think that stuff comes cheap, Bravo. You're not wrong. Yeah, Bravo for doing that. So that's happening this week. and tickets

[01:03:50] Taco Verdonschot: are free, Nathan, so Yes. you can learn all about accessibility for free.

However, there is a donate button. So if you want to help us, organize this event, then your donation is very much appreciated.

[01:04:04] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Yeah. Thank you so much. normally that would be where we kinda stop, but here we go. Not this week. Sorry. here we go. So the WP Agency Forum, which is happening in Madrid, that's happening on also on the 15th, Madrid, Spain, I should say.

So there's another one. also on the 15th, this is the 15th to the 17th, though this is a little bit longer. is Word Camp Canada or Word Camp A? that's happening? there's a whole, like it's multiple track big. like a flagship event, really one of the, one of the bigger ones. and then just to add in something to that, Matt Mullen, we, it says breaking here.

So I'm guessing that this is like something that, which wasn't a couple of weeks ago intended to happen, but, Matt Mullenweg is now gonna do a town hall. I don't actually know what a town hall is, but it's Is it like a panel kind of thing where it just taking questions? Taking questions? Yeah, it just takes questions a ask me

[01:05:07] Taco Verdonschot: anything.

[01:05:09] Nathan Wrigley: okay. Yeah, so that's new. I dunno where they managed to squeeze him in on the, itinerary. But anyway, Matt will be there. So if you've got any questions for Matt, that will be happening. So that's the 15th to the 17th. Ha. Are we over? Oh no, not yet. so Word camp is laa bad. Guess which day it's starting?

Could it be the 15th? Yes. It's, the 15th of, oh, no it's not. Oh, the 18th. The 18th, yeah. Done. I, yeah, but still this week, word camp is Islamabad. It's a three day one, so I'm guessing it's, pretty big. Maybe multitrack, I'm not sure. word, camp Dakar. Which is on the same dates. So I, dunno how the whole visa thing works in that part of the world.

Whether it's easy for people from Bangladesh to get to Pakistan and vice versa. it, it doesn't matter now 'cause there's two events for you to, you can go in Bangladesh to Word Camp Dakar or word Camp Islamabad if you're in Pakistan. Also the 18th to the 19th of October. Are we done? Are we Heck, word Camp Guatemala.

the 18th. So it seems like the 15th to the 18th are very important days, for this one. that's happening. and I can't tell you where it's happening 'cause I don't know. But anyway, it's in Guatemala somewhere. Yes. Apologies for not being as prepared as I should be. university of Galileo. Yeah, but where is that?

that

[01:06:34] Taco Verdonschot: is in, if you scroll down a little bit, there's an address behind, below the image.

[01:06:39] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. It's in Guatemala City. Yep. There you go. Guatemala City. Okay. Thank you so much. so that's happening. Are we done? Nearly, we're nearly done. I think this is the last one. Is it the last one? Yeah, it was the last one.

and word camp, word that I can't say sculpture. Sculpture. Scorp, is happening on the 18th. So if, if your birthday is, on the 15th or the 18th of October this year, then nobody's paying attention because we're Good luck with that. Yeah. Yeah. We're all after workouts.

you know what, like we keep talking about events in decline. When you look at something like that, maybe they're in decline at other parts of the year, but that's, that is a boatload of things going on in the WordPress community. I think I just rattled through about seven or eight events all happening this week.

I have no idea though. Why this week? What is it about? Some middle of October.

[01:07:38] Steve Burge: There was at least one last weekend as well. Webcam Helsinki. Okay. Sue Omi, I think they call it. Yes. Yes,

[01:07:45] Nathan Wrigley: that's right. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. But I don't know why this time, is it like,

[01:07:49] Taco Verdonschot: what's going

[01:07:50] Nathan Wrigley: on?

[01:07:50] Taco Verdonschot: It's, so there's, if you look at the schedule, there's two times a year where there's a lot of events.

Okay. and this is October, late September, early October is the perfect time because everyone's back from summer vacation. You have a couple of weeks for your last minute organizing stuff, and then you can do the event before Halloween, Thanksgiving, holidays and all of that. So it's in that little few weeks that there's no big events happening and everyone's back from summer vacation.

Okay. You'll see the same in. April, may, March, April, may, after New Year's winter's nearly over. and then before summer, you also see a couple of weeks where there's a huge spike in events. So it's twice a year every year. Yeah.

[01:08:54] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting. So this time and beginning, first, third of next year, something like that.

Yeah. Okay. there you go. I know that in my part of the world, events are few and far between, there's a whole load of things to choose from, right there. So hopefully there's something near. Yeah. Okay. I just wanna mention this one. I'm not gonna go into a deep dive, but I know that, page builders are a popular thing.

Block suites, that tackle, all of the bits and pieces that Gutenberg core does not have. there's loads of them. So we're looking at a few on this page here. So you may have heard of some of these. There's things like cadence we mentioned earlier, generate press, sorry, generate blocks, gut kits, the spectra, there's coming soon, I don't know, don't think it's out yet, but there's etch, there's a new kid on the block and then stackable and things like that.

you, know what I noticed

[01:09:52] Steve Burge: looking at these? One of them has a nice mascot.

[01:09:55] Nathan Wrigley: Oh. And it's right in the middle. Oh yeah. Like

[01:09:58] Steve Burge: three, three or four of them have identical logos. Yeah. You couldn't tell them apart. One of them instantly memorable. Yeah. Has a otter blocks, I think

[01:10:07] Nathan Wrigley: Otter blocks. Look at that.

Yeah. He is got a nice little otter. They've only, the only thing they've done wrong is they haven't made the otter big enough. I think the otter needs to occupy more of that square. But yeah, spotted and I appreciate that. That's brilliant. this is David McCann's website. It's called Dynamic wp.

He's got a thriving Facebook group, and he has taken it upon himself to measure the performance of third party blocks and compare it to core. Honestly, I'm not gonna go into the technical details of it, but he lays out in this post. The process that he went through to test them and what metrics he was looking out for.

On the other side, it's a little bit, like the, Amber Hinz one that we did a couple of weeks ago where Amber talked about page builders in terms of accessibility. It's, a similar take, but this is on the performance side of things and he compares the pro version, the light version of each of them and, draw some conclusions.

So without revealing anything, I'll just drop that in. It's called performance of third party blocks and Core compared, and somewhere there it is, somewhere there's a video, 15 minute video if you wanna see what he's up to. And, yeah. And how he's doing. I,

[01:11:15] Taco Verdonschot: think the only downside of this research that he did is that he didn't use an.

An actual, page, for testing, he used a page with just a header and, a single block. But this is not production ready, what it would look like if you had a full page built using those blocks.

[01:11:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I'm

[01:11:43] Taco Verdonschot: not sure what the value of the comparison is actually.

[01:11:47] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay.

Because of the content you would've preferred a more kinda like feature rich, I don't know, a few videos thrown in there and a few images and the headers and paragraphs and a variety of different things. Yeah.

[01:11:57] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. I guess this is way harder to compare because yeah, you might not be able to build the exact same page using all of these, block suites.

But right now it's a. Theoretical, bare minimum, but not something you would actually use in production.

[01:12:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's curious. I wonder how much overlap there is. So as an example, some of the ones that I know, so like for example cadence and stackable and generate blocks, they have some overlap.

Generate blocks has only got about four different blocks that it does. Whereas cadence ships with dozens stackable ships with dozens. And so that it would be hard to do a direct comparison feature by feature. 'cause some of them have and some of them have not. But yeah. Okay. Good point. Yeah, and

[01:12:43] Taco Verdonschot: but that might also be the downside with this research because maybe cadence loads a little bit more.

Right off the bat.

[01:12:51] Marc Benzakein: Yep.

[01:12:51] Taco Verdonschot: But doesn't add any extras. The more blocks you use, where the others might, and then cadence might come out way better if you have a full page instead of just a few test blocks.

[01:13:05] Nathan Wrigley: When Amber did her, Accessibility test. She started it in 2024, so there was one version last year and there was one version this year.

Based upon the feedback that she got as well as intuitions of her own, she amended this year's survey to be very different from last year's one. So maybe David will turn this one into a sort of an annual thing. what's fascinating about this is you capture, in this case, you've captured 10 audiences with one post.

there are 10 different audiences who are keen to read this and compare to the other one. So I, think maybe, hopefully, this will drive a lot of traffic to his website and make it worth doing again. I did reach out to him, see if he wants to talk about it on a podcast. We'll see if he gets back to me and if he does, then we'll, we'll mention that soon.

But yeah, there it is. Performance of third party blocks and core compared. anything from Steve or Mark before we move on? No. Okey doke. Not too much left. couple of pieces. This is the first one, Nick Diego, who, until very recently was a developer relations person at Automatic. He's now been moved inside of Automatic and I wanna make sure I get his new job description right.

Product marketing team is how he's working. he's in the product marketing [email protected] and it says, where I'll be focusing on how we support and connect with developers and builders. Obviously it goes without saying. Nick, I hope that role works out well with you and for you. This piece that he's talking about though is, About blueprints and WP or WordPress studio, I'll put a fuller version 'cause he, this is on nick diego.com, but then he also wrote a piece, obviously this is his new [email protected] where he explains about it. This seems so cool. I absolutely love this. So if you haven't used it, studio is, I wanna say automatic.

Is it an automatic thing or is it a Yeah, Is it an automatic thing? Yeah. so you download it on your Mac, on your Windows pc, what have you, and it enables you to create, a version of WordPress a little bit, like something like, local. Does, but the difference is that it uses playground.

So instead of having a whole ton of complicated technology holding it together, this is very complicated technology largely built into the browser. So it's using playground to do that. and up until recently, if you started up a site, you had a limits on what you could do, templates and things that you could build a site from.

However, we now in Studio 1.6 0.0 have got this idea of blueprints. And blueprints allow you to basically build out a site in whichever way you like. And then in a theme, js ON file, you, specify what that site is like. So for example, you bundle it with a bunch of different plugins, and what have you, and then when you build it in playground, you tell it, I've got this blueprint, and then it will build an identical replica.

So it's like. other tools have got it. They make the point. I dunno how true this is 'cause I don't really understand the technicalities of it. I'll just read this bit. So Nick says, other local development tools often rely on full site snapshots, which can be large, hard to share and locked into a single environment.

yeah, that all scans, studio blueprints by contrast, are portable and declarative. It's a single JSON file, which you can reproduce the same site and set up on any machine instantly. That makes it more flexible for teams, easier to keep in sync and more powerful for testing and iteration. the only question I had, and Taco I think answered it, I wasn't sure whether you could bring along pro plugins for the ride, if because obviously if you've.

If it's just a theme json file, presumably it for, repo things, you're just pointing to the repo URL or something like that and it'll go and install it as part of the Yeah, the onboarding. But obviously if you've got a pro one, how would it know where that maybe you can copy and paste that into a field somewhere anyway.

Yeah, it

[01:17:17] Taco Verdonschot: depends on how your distribution for your premium product set up. But it is possible.

[01:17:26] Nathan Wrigley: But this, it, I don't know, like as an example, main WP with all of its like, I don't know how many, you've got, let's say 20 plus different extensions. Just your own product. Presumably there are certain scenarios where, okay, you'd want these five, but not these 15.

You'd want these eight, but not these 12. With this blueprint thing, you can ship this for people to test in a heartbeat. So that they could check out different variations of your platform. Same for published press, You want this thing enabled and not that thing.

Okay. Here's a version just tailored just for you. It's interesting. It's just a file. It's just a JSO file. It's brilliant.

[01:18:07] Steve Burge: Yeah. that's what most plugins used for, like importing and exporting all their settings, right?

[01:18:10] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, yeah. But this one, builds it from the ground up.

So you could have this as like a, trial website or I presume if you're an agency or something, I don't know. And you've got a, range of three or four, five or six things that you constantly deploy. Every time you build something new, now you can. So that underlying technology is just there for you to, build Pretty cool.

and all happening in playground. So basically all happening inside the browser, which is just phenomenal. I know that when we had, once again bringing up ServerPress when we had blueprints, for, desktop server, that was one of the. Most popular features was that ability to do exactly that.

So to be able to do that on a playground site is, pretty awesome. But then to, if you think about it, you could basically email a site. You could just send somebody with A-J-S-O-N attachment. The entire site. obviously, I, don't know how deep you can get into the con configuration of different things and what have you.

But, here's A-J-S-O-N file. Click this link, download studio, chuck it in there. There you go. That's your site. That's what we've proposed that you Yeah.

[01:19:24] Taco Verdonschot: and even better than emailing is that you can now do version control on those blueprints.

[01:19:30] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:19:30] Taco Verdonschot: Because it's just adjacent file.

You can Store 'em in GitHub. Sure. and have full version control on this is what changed at this date and Yeah.

[01:19:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Very, nice. Anyway, it's all available. now this piece was called, let me just pop it back on the screen. introducing blueprints in WordPress Studio 1.6 0.0. As I said, I'm not sure how the, the whole premium plugin works, but it does sound like, like Taco thinks it's totally possible, so that's great.

[01:20:02] Taco Verdonschot: and the interesting thing, I think it was mentioned either here or in Nixon. article is that it's the same blueprint that you use for playground, you can also use for studio,

[01:20:17] Marc Benzakein: right?

[01:20:18] Taco Verdonschot: so you can build it up locally, test it locally, and then share the j file with someone halfway across the world who can either use that on this local machine or can load that same blueprint into playground and just try it on a web browser.

[01:20:35] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so that opens up. So literally just, okay, here's, here it is. Just click a button and 10 seconds, probably a bit more if you've got a few plugins that need to be downloaded. But, you can just try it out in the browser. It doesn't have to be through Stu, so you don't even need studio. You'll need studio to con construct it, And then you'd export this JSO file. And then you can just send that and somebody can use, send it, use, send it to your

[01:21:00] Taco Verdonschot: customer with a playground link using that blueprint and they can have their demo.

[01:21:08] Nathan Wrigley: It's voodoo. We're living in, we're living in very interesting times. Absolutely amazing. comment about that from Mark.

Mark says, presumably you need to use studio for local development though. So that was what I was just thinking. You would need to build it in studio, I'm guessing to get that export. I'm not sure. but that was my initial thought. And then presumably share the link as Taco said, in terms of it being portable from.

In terms of it being portable from developer to developer? Yes. Yeah. Let's see, let's, all have a collective play and see what, if you're

[01:21:41] Taco Verdonschot: really good, you can just write the Jason off the top of your head and you don't need studio.

[01:21:45] Nathan Wrigley: This is just the sort of thing I do in my sleep. Tack out. I often find myself, yeah, in the morning, never awake a fully fleshed out JSON file.

Just do, you dream? Do you dream in JSO Nathan's? occasionally. I more tend to dream in just bs, wake up in the morning. Enough gents about And how port and how portable is that? Bs very difficult to get outta my head to be honest, mark. It's, nobody wants to examine the content of my dreams. They're, interesting.

I say that. yeah. What did you say?

[01:22:22] Steve Burge: They're private. Yeah, they're very private. Yeah.

[01:22:25] Nathan Wrigley: The day will come though. Neuralink is about to change all of that. It won't be long. okay. New product time. Let's talk about this one. it's not really new, I guess if you're in the WordPress space, here's another company, a bit like Astra that you were saying, Steve a little while ago.

I feel like this company is hot on the heels of, Astra. brainstorm forces the company behind all that. This is, WP managed ninja and fluent suite of products. They've got a new one. New in the sense that it's about to launch tomorrow, I think, but not new in the sense that they've been marketing it for quite some time and, touting its features and what have you.

I won't say a great deal about it 'cause I don't know a great deal about it. But if the marketing hype lives up to the actual what's in the product, it does seem like a really credible kind of WooCommerce shortcut alternative. it's called Fluent Cart, it launches tomorrow. I don't know anything about the pricing, but very often in the past they've come out with a lifetime deal, which, they have, two weeks or something like that to encourage people to purchase it.

So maybe, that's gonna happen again. But, they're a totally credible company and I think one of the things which will win people over is they've got this ecosystem. they've got the forms, they've got the CRM, they've got all of these different bits and pieces which just hang together.

and, anyway, launching very, soon. I don't know what the success will be. I know that, moving from one e-comm platform to another is gonna be difficult, so they claim to have taken care of that. There's a little bit down here somewhere, I can't remember where, but they make the point that they have taken on the onboarding process.

Maybe it's a seamless migration. Says switching from your current platform to fluent cart is as simple as adding it. Adding to the plugin to your site configuration is simple and migration is just one click away. Who knows whether or not they'll fulfill on that promise. Dave Den also. Yeah, join the club Dave.

Then it's just me and you mate. we're doing Ja Jason in our say. Imagine if that was true. Dave den if they, if it in fact is true that you write Jason on your sleep. I have no words. I don't know what to say. Love to see what you build. no, I'm not doing that. Anything on fluent car before we move on?

We've only got a couple of minutes.

[01:24:56] Taco Verdonschot: It's nice to see more stuff happening in the e-commerce space after Shopify launched their plugin a couple weeks ago.

[01:25:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. They make the point that this is all inside your WordPress database. And, honestly though, don't you think they've got this Mark marketing totally down pat?

look, they've just, they've got all these influencers, let's go with that, who've already made video content about the plugin. So they built it, given it to the people who can, make people's eyeballs turn to it. They've already created like full walkthroughs of the whole thing. The hype is real already.

They're gonna launch it tomorrow, and here am I talking about it. it's ama they've done a such a great job, of launching this. Let's hope that, let's hope that it's as, as good as is claimed. The other bits and pieces were about hosting and honestly, I think with the time that we've got available, I won't join, I won't really get into them other than to say that, this is beyond my pay grade.

there's a thing called the Hosting Alliances Trust Seal. And, Ray from the repository, mentions the fact that there's this kind of like self certified, Hosting certificate called the, the Hosting Alliance, and there's this Trust Seal program. I haven't got time to go into it, but I'll just say go and check it out.

There are 10 hosts that are now, sporting this badge. They are 20 I Al Twos host, big Scoots, black Knight, dream Host, green Olive Tree, hosting a Racks Mark, shark Tech and Site Ground. They are the inaugural recipient. So you can go and read what Ray says all about that and, yeah, judge for yourself whether or not that's something that you wanna pay attention to when you get your next host.

Okay. That's all it I've got, I think unless anybody wants to talk about that one very quickly. No. Nope. No. No thought not. Okay. That's perfect. We're about one minute away from when we should finish, so that's absolutely ideal. Thank you so much. If you joined us, what have we got? Oh, couple of things just dropped in.

Dave then says, the big product suites I use these days are WP Social Ninja. That's fluent brainstorm force. Sure. And bit plugins. Okay. Interesting to know. Thank you for that. When you have Paul WP Tots, you've gotten a bit of success already. Yeah. I dunno what his audience now is. I think his YouTube channel's like a couple of hundred thousand, maybe more.

It's huge. And there's a comment by a chap here called Mark Zaca, no idea who he is. but I'll just leave that one. I was, just addressing Courtney's comments

[01:27:35] Marc Benzakein: in the chat.

[01:27:37] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. In which case it only remains for me to say thank you if you wrote a comment. I really appreciate it.

But of course. Thank you to Taco over there. Thank you. Thank you to Mark over there and No. Oh, I got it wrong. It's been No, I, no, I can't do it. I don't even know where to Oh, Steve's over there somewhere. Yeah. Taco, help me out. Where's Steve? You're over there. no. Steve's

[01:28:01] Taco Verdonschot: below you. Surely Steve's here.

Yeah. Yeah. Steve Mark's there. Yeah.

[01:28:06] Nathan Wrigley: And I'm, I can, do you and I can do Mark, for some reason my head won't do Ah, there. in the middle. There. There you go. There you go. Yes. There. That was, honestly, I'm getting older.

[01:28:19] Steve Burge: Stop. We really get through. Did we get through the whole podcast with her telling your eyeball story?

No, no. Nobody wants to hear that.

[01:28:26] Nathan Wrigley: I have an story. Alright. I, have a great coordination thing for you guys all to try. Okay. This is gonna be great. Okay. You can do this, right? Yeah. Oh boy. but can you do this? Is that the other way? Yeah, the other way. Oh wait,

[01:28:41] Taco Verdonschot: hang on. No, that's the same direct.

wait. Hang on. I'll keep one. No, there's this way and then

[01:28:46] Nathan Wrigley: there's this way. Is that's the, yeah.

[01:28:50] Taco Verdonschot: Do with hands.

[01:28:51] Nathan Wrigley: I totally can't do it. I can't do it. It's

[01:28:53] Taco Verdonschot: so

[01:28:53] Nathan Wrigley: hard. Okay. Okay. This is not a coordination thing. Okay. Everybody do that just one hand, right? Every, and then do that. I. Oh, TECO can do it. Mark can do Can anybody do this though?

Can you go 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 1, 2, 3. 1, 2, 1, 2. I can do this.

[01:29:14] Taco Verdonschot: No. Yeah, I can do that

[01:29:15] Nathan Wrigley: one. Yeah.

[01:29:17] Taco Verdonschot: What the heck happened to us? Oh God. Totally derailed at the end. I love it. I was totally expecting you would go do one hand the other and do a slide wave. Okay. So do this. Let's, can anybody ask, oh, I'm so sorry, Steve. Oh, Steve can do it too.

There you go. Okay. There you go. That's perfect. It's live long and prosper. Everybody look like,

[01:29:40] Steve Burge: lobsters.

[01:29:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's exactly what it's like. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Have a great day everybody. We will see you soon. If the three of you wanna stick around for a bit, stick around and we will, we'll have a chat after this has ended.

Take care. See you later. All.