This Week in WordPress #353

[00:00:03] Nathan Wrigley: It is time for This Week in WordPress, episode number 353, entitled Blocktober. It was recorded on Monday the 20th of October, 2025.

My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I'm joined by Michelle Frechette, by Tim Nash and by Birgit Pauli-Haack.

First up, we talk all about the AWS outage which happened this morning and how it took the entirety of the internet down? not quite, but it certainly took a lot of it down. Did this impact you? And what does it say about all of the eggs that we've got in these tiny or big baskets as you might view it?

Then we get onto the content itself. The first thing we talk about is Wordfence. They have an annual, actually I think it's quarterly report about security. What does it say about WordPress security? But also what does it say about the state of the company Wordfence? Tim has opinions on that.

Then we talk a lot about WordPress 6.9. What are the things that are coming up in the near future? What are the things that need testing? What are the possibilities of things that might come in the near future? And there is a lot.

We spend quite a lot of time talking about Blocktober, which is the name of this particular episode, but also a project that Tammie Lister has got going on, and it's really interesting. A block a day during the month of October.

There's a few deals in the WordPress space going on as well.

And we also talk about AI. We always talk about AI these days. And how Telex is making it possible to do all sorts of different bits and pieces, and it's all coming up next on This Week in WordPress.

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Good morning. Good morning. It's a miracle. A miracle that we're here, but here we are. AWS had some fun this morning. We'll get into that in a moment, but, yeah, almost everything that I touched this morning seemed to just wither, in front of me and gave me a shocking Was your fault? Yeah, I, I held myself responsible.

no, definitely not my fault. In fact, I'm sure that many heads will roll, but let's talk about that in a moment. First of all, let's just welcome you, is episode number three, a hundred and fifty three of this week in WordPress. We do this every Monday, and unless there's like a holiday or something like that.

But, the best way to make this show, informative and interesting is firstly to invite some fabulous panelists. And, I've done that. Here they are. but the second, oh, Tim's. Full fading in and out there. the, next thing to do is to, is to get a load of people in the comments. And hopefully some of you will feel that you are able to comment and keep the show propelled and going forward.

That'd be really nice. But let's go round the houses. You know who I am? I do WP Build. We'll talk about that in a minute, but first off, let's go there. Let's go to Michelle Fette. How you doing, Michelle? I will. Thank you. Good, You are, you sound as if you've had a bit of a fun weekend, in your larynx.

We'll get to that, in a moment. I'll do the, I'll do the, I'm not sick. I sound sick. I'm not sick. No, you're not sound sick. Yeah. I'll do the bio. So here we go. Michelle Ette is the executive director of post Status and it. In addition to the work there, Michelle is the podcast barista at WP Coffee Talk, co-founder of Under Represent rem.

it's easy for me to say underrepresented in tech. That's a long word. It's, creator of WP Speakers, WP Career pages, and the co-founder of Sponsor Me wp, also Speed Network online. she is an author, influencer and frequent organizer and speaker at WordPress and tech events and lives outside of Rochester, New York, where she likes to take pictures of nature.

And the one URL, which sums it all up, is meet Michelle the, so you can find out more about her there. You've got a funny voice because Word Camp I went to, Word Camp well, last Wednesday. Yeah. I gave a keynote online, at 11 o'clock in the morning for Women Tech Global that I got in my car, drove five hours to Ottawa.

[00:05:28] Michelle Frechette: For Word Camp Canada where I gave a talk the next morning, talked the whole time, and then, oh, I failed to mention that, in the drive up I sang at the top of my lungs. I love that there's a Broadway channel on Amazon music, and so I also sang all the Way Home Saturday to keep myself awake. And so I have very little voice as left as.

[00:05:50] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I'm so sorry. it sounds, despite the fact that it sounds a little bit different, it sounds full and, it doesn't sound weak and feeble. So hopefully you'll be able to comment during this episode last the whole show. That would be good Just to check Nathan Michelle's voice never has sounded weak and feeble.

[00:06:07] Tim Nash: No, that's what I mean. It doesn't sound today, is what I'm trying to say. yeah. Did I say that wrong? Thank you, Tim. Okay, that's Tim Nash look, there he is, making a comment over there. Hello, Tim. How are you doing? I'm all right. How are you? His background b in a moment or two. Yeah, it's, Tim's background at the moment is green.

[00:06:25] Nathan Wrigley: It was very Halloween and scary earlier, but he's, he's, I've gotta say, yeah, look, there you go there. It's gotta say the software that Tim's running is just the native Mac OS software, but look at that. Look, normally there's some sort of, what's the word? Like fragmenting or something. There's something which gives it away, isn't there when you do a, background.

But look how good that. Look how clever that is. Just don't move. If he moves, don't move. there you can just about make out that if you, that I've got a red chair behind me. If you didn't have headphones on, usually it's that little tiny bit in there, which the software can't figure out. Yeah, look at that.

Look at, nice. That is ridiculous. Anyway, that's what Macs can do for you. By the way. Anybody feeling like they want to update to Macs Tahoe? Don't bother. just don't do it unless you don't want to connect to the internet ever again. I can tell you I've done it on two machines and, they only work with VPNs now, so I'm connecting your VPN I've no idea why.

anyway, this is Tim. Tim always gives me a fun biography to read and I haven't read this one through, so let's see what it goes like. Here we go. Oh, it's, a Halloween reference on, I can see straight away. By the flicker of a monitor light, Tim p Prowls the, I'm gonna read it in that kind of a voice, if that's all right.

By the flicker of a monitor light, Tim prs the shadows of the web and I thing horror stories from hack sites, ghostly plugins and passwords long. Instead, a WordPress security consultant by day and doom speaker by night. He's here to make your spine and server logs tingle. This Halloween, he'll be creeping into W-P-L-D-N on Thursday, the 30th of October.

Oh, nice plug. Thank you. With a fresh batch of scary security story. Sure. To haunt every site owner's dreams, if you dare step into his lair at Tim Nash. Uk. There you go. Wow. Scary. It's really good. Your voice too, Michelle. It's perfect for that. That's sort of Cly laugh. That's great. Okay, so there's Tim.

There's Tim, and you can obviously see which. Somebody else joining us. It's big at Pauly Hack. How you doing Big again? I'm good. I'm good. But I also have this kind of a little bit, horsey voice. It's coming from Weam. Okay. In Poland. But, Tim was at that one I believe as well. Is that the one that you Yes.

Yeah, we met. Yeah. Yeah. nice, ums. Go for it. Let's do the bay. Oh, yours is very short. big. That's nice and straightforward. Big at Powerly. Hack curator. Of the Gutenberg Times. We'll show that in a minute. Host of the Gutenberg Change Log podcast, a developer advocate at automatic and core contributor for the WordPress Open Source project.

So there you have our fine panel today. I said that was one half of the jigsaw puzzle. The other half is of course, any comments that come through. I this thing to Twitch. I have no idea why I just click a button in the platform and it goes to Twitch. But it's really clear that whenever there's a comment that comes in from Twitch, it's, always bogus and spurious.

So if you see a Twitch comment panelist, just ignore it. They always are absolutely ridiculous. Courtney Robertson is joining us with some tea emojis. That's rather nice. Thanks for joining us. Indeed. who else have we got? I've got somebody called Pupil five. Okay. afternoon. Thank you for joining us.

Really appreciate it. Imran sad is joining us when Canvas was down. Is that Canva Canvas? I felt the pain of Alderan. Now I'm not. Is that like a, is that a reference to some movie or something? Star Wars. I was wondering if it was Star Wars. Okay. got it, And da. Cameron Jones says, good evening.

He usually joins us from Australia. I expect that's what's happening at the moment. DA. And then pupil file says, does anyone, so it's a question straight off the bat. Does anyone remember a guest sharing an admin customization plugin that had gone free, I think it was in the past couple of months, but can't find it in the archive.

There's one called a SE, I'm not sure if it's free. It's called admin Site Enhancements. I dunno if that's the one that you mean. It's pretty good, but I do think that's on MIUs. I dunno if there's a free version of that. so I dunno if that helps. But a SE search for that admin site enhancements that might get you somewhere.

Do any of you three remember anything about that or no? You probably weren't. Don't on the show in question. A vague recollection, but yeah. This is nice. Michelle Cameron says, Michelle isn't sick. She's sick as. Okay. I'm not cool enough to say things like that, so I guess fill in the blank. I'm too old.

I'm too old. Elliot says, thank you. Go. Hello. Hope all is well. Elliot, your plugins have been, they're gone onto our Black Friday page. I just caught sight of those in a moment. So it's common. Apparently you've all got this problem. my voice is also rough after Word Camp a, because of a lot of chatting, says Courtney Robertson.

Tammy says, afternoon. We're gonna be featuring your blocked Tober stuff in a bit. Tammy, stick around. Marcus Burnett says, happy magical Monday all. How is everyone keeping from just coasting into the holidays? We don't have holidays here, I'm not sure. Have you got a national holiday over there? Is that a thing?

We don't have that one. Oh, I think he's talking. You giving. Okay. Okay. Daveon. Hello. Hello everybody. Nice to have you with us. And it was another one says, pupil five used to be afraid. Is there any chance it could be personalized, WP. Maybe that's not in the admin area, but that one went from being a premium to being free.

[00:12:03] Tim Nash: But that was about personalizing for the front end, not the admin area. Yeah, I wonder if that was it. It could have been that one. Yeah. Personalized. WP was, it was a pro one and then it went into free, so it could be that. Thank you, Tim. That's brilliant. so keep the comments coming in. Don't very much appreciate it.

[00:12:20] Nathan Wrigley: Loving it. The, next thing to say is that, if you, depending on where you are, this is probably the best place to send people. If you fancy, bolstering the show a little bit and, attracting a bigger audience, feel free to send people here, wp builds.com/live. That would be lovely.

Wp builds.com/live. If you end up over there, your, the embedded video is from the platform itself, and there's a little chat box. It says live chat. You can use that if you like. but on the right hand side, if you're on desktop and below it, if you're on mobile is a YouTube. Commenting widgets. So if you've got a Google account and you're logged into that, then you can use that instead.

apart from that, I think it's probably just, time to get into the main content word pressy stuff. So few bits of, promotional stuff from me, as we always do. This is our website, wp builds.com. If you wanna be kept in the loop of what we do, just put your email address into there. We wrap this up as an audio podcast comes out tomorrow morning and, you'll get an email notification about that.

But also when we do our podcast, which comes out on a Thursday, you'll get a notification about that as well. And this was the latest one I chatted to, Jonathan Boser, who's an aian, whose name apparently I cannot spell. so I'm very sorry about that. It all went live and I completely. Bungled his name.

So it was a quick, it was a quick fix except the URL has still got the incorrect spelling in it. 'cause I think, yeah, probably best to keep that. But, we talked about derel, the ongoing nature of WordPress education and dere of the. role that he's slotting into. It's really interesting. You should go and check that out.

And also one thing to quickly mention is that we have our Black Friday page in the run up to Black Friday. There's a load of deals going around in the WordPress space. and we get people such as your good selves to, Elliot's just done it. If you go to this bottom here and click add a deal, then you will get to a form and you can add your deal for free and we'll shove it in on this page.

we normally get about 400, I think at the moment. There's about 90 on there, something like that. So about 90 people have. I've submitted their deal. and you can search and filter by using this spot. And so when you submit your deal, you're gonna categorize it. Tell me how much you know you're giving as an offer and what have you.

And we'll chuck it in on this page for you. And if you fancy support in that page, bit like Ws form have done, there are some, paid slots at the top where you can get your message sort of pride to place. So anyway, there you go. It's wp builds.com/black if you fancy using that book market and use it in the run up to Black Friday.

Okay, let's get stuck into the main event. I wasn't expecting to say this, at the beginning of this show, and I dunno if it affected you. If you're in North America, this might have just passed you by 'cause you may very well have been asleep. But if you were in any other part of the world, oh, we've had fun.

Over the last six hours AWS went down, I think it was the Virginia. center, and I'm not sure which bit of the Virginia Center went down, but basically, just absolutely masses went down and I think the period, I think it went down solidly for about two and a half, maybe three hours. And then there's the whole kind of rebuilding it all and things getting back up and running.

I think by now more or less, everything is back up and running, but for me. It really was a testament to how insane this whole thing is, and how so many eggs are in one basket. I'll just give you some indication of what happened in the uk. If I can scroll down here a little bit and find it, 'cause it was right at the beginning of the day.

You can see there's absolutely loads. I may not find it. Let's quickly go to page two. See if I can, yeah. There we go. Here's a, list of just random stuff that was found almost immediately when the outage went down. So Snapchat, zoom, I'm gonna miss out ones that probably don't matter to us so much.

Canva Signal, slack, and then just loads more money. Wordle. What? Oh, sorry. Yeah, that obviously matters some. come on. I just bypassed that one. the UK government's websites all went down, so if you were trying to pay your tax, there was loads of reports of people whose things like mortgage payments had failed because their banking systems had gone down.

And I dunno about you. Obviously it's really fabulous that we've got this amazingly cheap infrastructure with the likes of Google Cloud and AWS and things like that. And I don't claim to have any wisdom or solution to this, but when it goes wrong, like it did this morning, it just, it prizes open how fragile this whole, thing is.

I dunno if you've got anything you want to add to that, whether it affected you or anything like that, or do you just have an opinion about it? But it was, a heck of a morning over here, that's for sure. It's lovely when you wake up and it's already fixed. Yeah, no kidding. All I got to add,

[00:17:20] Tim Nash: don't big it. I, was just saying that I'm, I switched over to Google Drive to, to review some of my documents that I wanted to publish and get in there and had some quiet moment because Slack was down, so I didn't get any, messages from my coworkers or from the open source project.

So it was a quiet moment, morning to focus on writing. Okay. So there are benefits as well. Absolutely. I always get the benefits for that. It goes quiet for a little bit. That's an interesting point. I hadn't really thought about that. I always celebrated on the phone in, I was, a chef at a restaurant or a boss at the restaurant, and I was always happy when the phone system was not ringing the full morning.

Oh, what a quiet moment. Yeah, Quiet moment. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Tim, you were gonna say, so obviously I. I also had a lovely morning 'cause it was very quiet and peaceful, but I, to be honest, I was doing something that didn't require me to be on the internet. So I, the first person to tell me that there was something was wrong was Nathan.

which was quite, quite a weird moment. okay, the internet's down, but that's it. The internet is down as pretty, AWS East one. Yeah. Which is the default location for everybody. Whoever goes and puts anything into AWS when it goes down a huge waves of the web go down. The worrying things is when you start realizing that most of these sites weren't actually hosted in AWS East one.

Most of the core services. But they all relied on a sub component of a sub component. Of a sub component, which certainly was, for example, HMRC. Isn't based in that data center. HMRC is the government in Yeah, her Majesty's revenue and custom. So the tax man in the uk, you do not have their stuff in that data center, but somewhere in that big long chain, they rely on something that did.

which shows you both how entangled the web is, but also how much we have come to rely on three, four big providers. Because when CloudFlare has a problem, huge waves of the web go down. When AWS have a problem, huge waves of the web go down. When Azure have a problem, email just ceases to function across the world more or less.

Weirdly, when Google have a problem, though, we all just can't search for cats anymore. And it's, we have definitely fine. In fact, probably positivity in the world increases when Google web searches go down. So maybe having Google wiped out is a good thing. But generally, if any of those four major components go, and there are other ones behind the scenes, things like Akamai, which is a big CDM provider or any, and ultimately all of this rests on just free major transit providers.

So if somebody like Cogent or Hurricane Electric have issues, they can take down a third of the web in a, in each go. 'cause there are only three big major companies that do most of the transport at the underlying layers. And that's terrifying really for a decentralized network. Yeah. You, know what's curious is that 20 years ago.

[00:20:40] Nathan Wrigley: This sort of stuff didn't really matter so much, but we've, we've really shoveled everything online that could go online. as an example, my bank, I, actually managed everything, worked on my bank this morning, but my understanding is that many banks in the uk they online services collapsed and blah, blah, blah.

but that's just one example. it's commerce, it's banking, it's taxation, it's dealing with the government, it's booking the doctor and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And on it goes. And, I know it's like it's two and a half hours in this case, but it just prizes open a little window to what if it was a day?

What if it was six days? What if something catastrophically bad that really couldn't be fixed in a heartbeat had gone wrong? And just imagine how big a target a AWS East Coast data Center is to a bad actor. Yep. Because it's how much it affects. But also just from a purely, if you were to start thinking from it, and I'm putting, on your, and like from a perspective, should a sovereign country's tax system be reliant on a third country's third party country's infrastructure being held in a private company where it could have direct correlations to something, somebody not being able to, and obviously two and a half hours.

[00:22:03] Tim Nash: Somebody went, somebody you didn't get to submit their tax form. That's not a massive, issue in the grand scheme of things, but it shows that there's links and fragile little links there. And it's not just the UK happened to Africa. I'm just picking on, I'm picking on HMRC quite rightly. I don't like them.

I have, but who likes the tax office? Whos the tax? They're a good person to, it doesn't matter because equally, there were probably parts of the NHS, the National Health Service that were linked in that way. There's probably whole systems part, the Ministry of Defense, and that's not, again, all in the uk, but every country's the same.

So we have real reliance on. Odd points of failure that are really weak and cr and not just weak from a structural perspective, but weak from governance perspective as well. And we, there re we're all given, like there's lots of data legislation telling you how your ga, your data is being handled, how this is being managed.

But the reality is that's not how the web works. And the web is somewhat distributed and your data is flying all over the place. And so this also exposes just what different parts of machines work together as much as anything else. And for everybody, they should be a bit scared when they see that.

I have a question. Go. So my question is, Tim, so if I have a service on AWS and I just use the Eastern one, can I not only have, also have the European one and the Pacific one and then it just rolls over to the news site? In theory, yes. Okay. As long as you've neatly compartmentalized each one of those into their separate data centers and you've got your failover system is in the, is in all the different data centers.

You've got your DNS set up so that it can manage this properly. You've got your load balancer distributed across. The thing is that on paper, this is really easy to do. No, it's not putting real. Once you start putting it into reality, yeah. You'll cut corners and nearly always, these are single points of failure that you didn't imagine.

the database that manages something. Is only replicated in one location. Oh yeah, Okay. The, DNS is only stored in one location that it, so it's those sort of points of failures that normally trigger this. but in an ideal world, you would use multiple cloud hosting. So you'd have one set in Europe in on both Google and AWS, and you'd have nice failover systems that work for both, but then that becomes expensive fairly quickly.

yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So we heard from Imran that, I think Canva or something. I dunno if he was talking about Canva. It went down, it was certainly on the. list of things on the BBC. I had a few curious things. as an example, slack was up and down. It, that was an odd one in that some of the messages went through, some didn't.

[00:25:05] Nathan Wrigley: Signal was completely down. I had a few things that just I couldn't use, even though they were clearly there because the whole login process was broken. So you could see that their core app was working. I'm thinking in this case of an audio editing app that I use. I was already logged in on one computer and I could.

I could function on that one, but if I went to this other one, the logging in process was broken. So in effect, it was broken if I had been logged out. And also something interesting, I dunno if there's anything in this, quite a few services seems to have logged me out over the last six hours as well. So for example, I just went and watched a bit of TV and Netflix has kicked me out and I've never been logged out of Netflix on the tv.

So I don't know if there's any sort of weird stuff, vestiges of companies taking things really seriously and blanket logging people out just in case, things like that. But two and a half hours, it, whilst it's nothing, it, I imagine, there's billions of dollars, maybe even more, I don't know, tens of billions of dollars in productivity, opportunity costs and things that, that Amazon are gonna have to face the music for.

we'll see. they won't face the music because ultimately they will be governed by a service agreement that says. Eh, and bear in mind, two and a half hours outage over a year is still a ridiculously high percentage uptake. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah. and, because so many people are really housing there Yeah.

[00:26:35] Tim Nash: Amazon has really putting the team together and fixed it all quite, fast. Yeah. David makes the point that, obviously AWS is the backbone for quite a lot. Yeah, agreed. Cameron says, it broke GitHub actions for him, which is very frustrating. Okay. gosh. Marcus, is it bad Marcus spin?

[00:26:58] Nathan Wrigley: Is it bad that I'm jealous that I slept through it? I could have used a few hours of quiet time on a Monday afternoon. It seems like you had the best of both worlds. You ignored it and you got some you quiet time. What could be more quiet than sleeping? But I get the point you'd have liked to have been awake at the time where you couldn't actually, yeah.

What Marcus doesn't say is did he wake up to having loads of alerts walked to his phone because it succeeded? Very, because that's what happened for me at the, when everything came back online, all of a sudden. All the alerts that had failed to get through that had been cached and queued up somewhere started piling through into various alert channels.

[00:27:32] Tim Nash: Oh, so even it impacted things like alerting. alerting for things like downtime of things was, yeah. Oh, that's because the downtime monitors were on AW S. They just started bouncing their way back through, which, but that meant I had CLI clients who had no idea that there was an issue then had came and was starting to contact me.

So I know that my inbox is now filling up several hours later with questions about what was going on. Is everything okay? Do I need to do anything? Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's turn on the news. That's so bad that your downtime detector was down. That's great. That's like a metal detector that detects itself.

[00:28:10] Nathan Wrigley: It's, it's really bad. Okay. so a couple of other things Courtney says, when AWS or CloudFlare seem like the backbone we all rely on, I dunno if that followed a particular comment. Not sure. John overall joining us. Hello? WP plugins from A to Z as you say, it's micro dependencies architecture.

That's the problem. Yeah, I guess that's what you were saying a moment ago, Tim. Dave then says, soon WP Builds will become one of the major players on the web as well. I've been trying for like a whole decade. I've failed until now. I'm not sure Nathan wants to be responsible. I do. No, you the internet.

Oh Lord. Nothing would ever work. Amber Hines just says hi. Hello. Hello. Hello. And James, can we just say you're saying hello to Amber that, WP Accessibility Day was a huge success. Yes. Thanks to Amber and the whole team, everybody behind it. Huge. Group of volunteers, organizers, amazing speakers.

[00:29:08] Michelle Frechette: So kudos to everybody over there. Do, you know Michelle, that's absolutely fascinating 'cause we always mention things in the run up, like we mentioned WP XS about your day multiple times, but we never go back and say, well done for a A job well done. So thank you for doing that. Yeah, that 24 hour event and, by all accounts, a complete success.

[00:29:26] Nathan Wrigley: hello Amber, and congratulations to you and the, the team. James says hello and then, weird internet mystery. Let's ask Tim Nash, which one is that? which weird internet. Mystery are you talking about? Okay. Believe the aws. Oh, I see. Okay. Got it. Thank you. How quickly you forget Nathan?

[00:29:47] Michelle Frechette: I'm bad. and then this look, this just came in. Look, we need to sing. Singing, singing Nathan during, sorry, Nathan. I turned 57 last week. Oh, happy birthday. Thank you. She didn't say no singing. We're good. We're good. We're good. We're good. Okay. Aw, I was enjoying that. She's gone. No, she's gone. Gonna have a little cry.

[00:30:14] Nathan Wrigley: apparently it was lovely and everybody was absolutely so kind and helpful to me up in Canada, so thank you. Lovely. Anyway, we, for making it special and we're glad that you, are joining us. Happy birthday and, let's hope your voice comes back. Maybe during this you never that be lovely. We invite the people on the panel to bring a few bits and pieces with them if they still choose.

And Tim has brought a few articles this week if I can get 'em to load. There we go. the first one is, as you can see, if you're watching the quarterly WordPress Threat Intelligence report from Word Trends, Optum Street. Tell us why we need to know about this, Tim. So all of the sort of like major security plugins, players do these things and some variant, whether it's quarterly, annually, et cetera.

[00:31:03] Tim Nash: We, we've featured Melo Press's annual one, which survey like a few months ago. Yeah. And Patch Stacks turned this one's, that's word Fences turned, I'll be honest. And, anybody who goes to read this article, Wordfence, does. Take this as very much as part of their marketing strategy, not necessarily part of their, reporting strategy.

So it is very heavy on the marketing and very heavy on the sales pitch. However, hiding amongst all of that was a couple of really interesting things that I was like, that makes no sense. And if you scroll down, there we go. yeah, that bit, they're claiming that the total vulnerabilities published from inside their database is down 32.4% from the previous quarter in terms of new pub vulnerabilities published.

[00:31:58] Nathan Wrigley: So a total of eight 1,857 in the quarter, that's just gone. And they were what? Saying? It was more like 2,300 or something on the That's interesting. Do you not believe that? Or, and then they, but they're talking about the, that their WAP attacks have blocked nearly 23.4% previous attacks than the previous quarter.

[00:32:19] Tim Nash: Now, patch stack, less than three months ago, maybe even two months ago, published their report, which highlighted a huge increase. Oh. Oh. I'm like, oh, now we have two competing arguments. Ah, where vulnerabilities being detected down. Up and then I started to wonder is the, at least for the web attacks blocked and, sites infected that they're detecting.

You could understand that in only one scenario, generally looking at the trends across the internet and everybody, else, but word fence is saying that this is, attacks are on the increase. We've got more problems. And then it just dawned on me that the reason they're seeing so many lower, WAF attacks against their WAFs and sites infected is are we seeing that they've had nearly a 23% drop in plugin in installs?

In the last quarter. Oh. Because Patch Stack has been heavily pushed into hosting companies, they've really been pushing alongside, along with several other security vendors have been coming into this space. And are we actually seeing through this report, Wordfence tentatively saying we are losing market share?

Here. Now, I don't know that for a fact. It could well be a mix of things, but I found that their, statistics and that being in stark contrast with so many o some of the other players to be really interesting. further down they talk about passwords and brute forcing and how that is on the increase, which I also found.

Interesting. That does map with everybody else. I think it's quite a bit further down. that does map with everybody else. and they were saying that per, for every IP that tries to start brute forcing, they normally have, they normally try to do a co up to 476 different attacks with different passwords per ip.

which again, is something that maps through that. Basically, if you have a plugin that blocks by ip, it's probably not doing you much good because the bad acts can just go through so many IP addresses. They can attempt to brute force their way in. make sure you have a multifactor.

Authentication enabled because if you've got a weak password, it will be broken eventually. Did you say 500 IP addresses? 500 plus IP addresses per, no, five, 500 passwords per IP address. Oh, sorry. Okay. they got loads of IP addresses. They, can just constantly supply IP addresses. Yeah, that's the joyous thing about if you're an actor, once you've hacked the hack a site, you can just use it to hack other sites. This is why we can't have nice things, Tim, him. you know what you could do is turn the internet off by turning off aws. Yes. Aws. Okay. And on that bombshell, thanks for joining us.

[00:35:15] Nathan Wrigley: We'll, this is the last show we're ever gonna do. We'll see you again. We just put the rice and see if it's better tomorrow. Okay. So an interesting nugget in there, drawn out by Tim. I don't know. I know nothing about the, relative metrics of patch stacks installed base, whether that's going north or south, and word fence, the same thing, but an interesting conclusion to draw.

okay. Only time will tell I from a, from somebody who doesn't. Frequent the WordPress security space. That much, I can tell you that patch stack gets in my face more often than Wordfence did. If you'd roll the clock back sort of five, eight years, obviously patch stack didn't exist. We had webs and it was small at that point in growing.

Wordfence did a tremendous job, but they, I dunno if their marketing, posture has changed or what have you, but I don't, I have to go and find their stuff. Whereas previously it found me, if, they had a really credible way of Wordfence is still installed on a lot of sites.

[00:36:18] Tim Nash: Yeah. but yeah, obviously they're, they are in a world where there was for a long time, they didn't really have. Competition in terms of marketing space. They were very good at producing those blog posts, producing those videos. So they felt like they filled the gap and then other people were struggling to get air for them, and now they're the ones who don't seem to be there as much in the marketing space, at very least.

[00:36:43] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Bigge, Michelle, anything on that? Or should we move on to Tim's second piece? No, I'm just gonna, I, like your, thought about why can this be that one company's is down and the other one's that high, high. It's growing, but I can also not see that fin loses. A fifth of the user or plugin installs in one quarter, that's only three months.

[00:37:10] Tim Nash: Or sustain, I can see it in a couple of years or something like that. Yeah. But in, yeah, they, the only reason that for that sort of like scale is that there are a couple of very large hosts who have now got deals with Patch Stack and if they're actively telling their customer base, disable that plugin, then I can see it seeing it drop.

But I, I feel like there's a bunch of factors, but the fact it was just such a, steep cliff, it's okay, is that down to your user installed count being down? Rather than surely they didn't all just go, oh, we're not gonna attack those word fed sites. We'll only attack these ones over here. So there's gotta be a reason why they're per.

Attack the number of attacks against their network infrastructure is down. it's such a curious business model, isn't it? Because the worst things get, the more you've got to sell in a way. the worst things that get normally in a business, the worst things get. It's really hard to, be in security and not sound like you're in racketeering.

Oh, no kidding? Yeah, I bet this is a constant fight that you have. hello. Would you, do you like your house? Be shame if it burnt down now, isn't it? Yeah. Everybody's best friend. Oh, look, here's Tim. He's gonna brighten up your day. Cousin Vineyard Tim Nash, right? Okay. Tim's got another piece with, a raccoon on the front.

[00:38:35] Nathan Wrigley: And so that was all it took for me to be, in, loving this particular one. It's called How I almost got hacked by a job interview. Oh my Lord. Go on, spill the. I came across this in a, in a email newsletter for some security professionals. And I was just like, oh, that's so fun. somebody who is a developer went and, got a job interview with a company.

[00:39:02] Tim Nash: They checked out the website. The website looked, generic SaaS business type thing. they were given a coding exercise to do before meeting, and then they went through that coding exercise and they, were in a hurry, so they didn't look at it properly. They went to go, it, required the code to be compiled to be run.

They went to compile the code and something at the last second, just alarm bell rang for them, and they were like, hang on a minute. And so they asked chat, GPT. Is there anything I should be worried about in this code? And if you scroll down a little bit, yeah, it, there is indeed something to be worried about in that code.

there was a bunch of obfuscated code that would do nesty things to their, computer. obviously when they went to the interview that didn't exist. and it was an attempt to gain access to their systems through what looked like a legit job exercise for developers. it's like a full on new low that isn't it.

[00:40:06] Nathan Wrigley: You actually get, get somebody think, normally you get hacked and you don't know anything about the perpetrator. You certainly haven't invested time into the perpetrator. But in this case, they've managed to hook you with an email they've used up your valuable time. You think something good is gonna come with this.

And then it turns out that all the while they were just using you. in order to get whatever was in that little payload there. man, that is, that's just brutal. Anyway, just watch out. If you see a raccoon, there's your, that's, what you gotta watch out for. They stoop to many lows.

And this is a new one. that by the way, was on the David Doda DI dunno if that's how you pronounce it. David Doda. It'll be in the show notes tomorrow because I'm not sure how to pronounce it. But yeah, just goes to show the links that people will go to. thank you, Tim. Appreciate it. There's a couple of other things here, firstly from Michelle.

Was, oh, very orange for a brief moment there. word Camp Canada talk this, Was this the, we're looking at Matt Spencer. So Matt came to Toward, yeah. Yeah. He came to Word Camp Canada and he gave a keynote about halfway through, Friday, a little before lunch, I think on Friday. And, with a q and a, like he usually does, which is pretty cool.

[00:41:33] Michelle Frechette: And my favorite was, I don't know if you can scroll down, Paul Byrne, where he talks about Hello Dolly. Oh. but he wanted to know whether or not Hello Dolly should be, Re retired, stripped out. Oh, yeah, I heard about this. What was the, outcome? Should it be retired, Matt? basically the answer was no.

But that, that Matt says he gets asked at least once a year and then, Paul says it's this way, and Matt says, no, you're wrong. And it was really, it was a little bit comical in how, how they went back and forth with the whole thing. And basically it's not a lot of code to include in, in core when you, or when you, when it ships with core, I should say.

but it just. It made me, I asked a question too, but this one was more interesting to me, but I did ask, it's there and I definitely, install it. That's more or less, the first thing I do when I get in, obviously serves no purpose for me, but I It's benign enough, isn't it? It's not really doing anything.

[00:42:39] Nathan Wrigley: One of the things, hello Dolly was actually created in part to teach people how you can build a plugin And, have it in the repo. And I've used it for that. So I have a plugin in the repo that needs to be updated. Yes. that's basically a take on Hello Dolly. So I forked it and I, I've changed a little of the bells and whistles, things like that, that go with it.

[00:43:00] Michelle Frechette: And for that I think it's very, impressive to have something in there that can be inspirational to others to say, I'm not a co gonna see what it looks like to create something like this. Yeah. Yeah. Which I thought was cool. So I don't think it's gonna, but that was a fun part of it. I do not, I did ask him going anywhere.

I don't know either. But, also my question was about the fact that we have almost 30,000 photos in the photo directory. Now we're closing and we're about 1,012 hundred away from having 30,000 photos in the photo directory. Nice. And I think that's pretty impressive. Yeah. That is impressive. Yeah.

[00:43:34] Nathan Wrigley: That's really nice. Yeah. The Matt was Matt joined this event fairly late in the day, didn't he? I understand. I don't think he was expected to be there just a few weeks ago, but obviously, I dunno if you've noticed, I could be completely wrong about this, but it feels like Matt has got a different angle on WordPress over the last few months.

Not angle, I dunno what the right word is, but he's, he seems to be blogging on a more or less daily basis, and, doing these events. So I think he showed up in a virtual way. I think at, what was it, Dakar? It was Dakar, I think it was daca. Yeah. And that, feels like a, different take. I dunno if he's had some sort of epiphany or he is enjoying the interaction with the community and things like that.

But obviously showing up in, Canada at late notice and then doing the Dakar thing, I'm just curious. I, don't know if it's just some sort of, requirement that he has, he wants to be part of that whole community part of it. maybe that got lost along the way, being the, the custodian of a, giant corporation, like automatic.

Maybe he's getting in touch with the, roots of it all a bit more. I dunno if anybody else has got that intuition, but it certainly feels that way. I dunno. But I also just wanna give a shout out to all of the. Organizers, volunteers, speakers. Everything that went into where Camp Canada was a great two day or three day event.

[00:44:58] Michelle Frechette: Unfortunately, I missed contributor day because I was driving up that day. But, the two days that I was there were, phenomenal. And, Canada has a way of being so kind and so nice. The people there are always, the first to say sorry, and that's the way they say it. sorry. sorry.

Yeah. Yeah. but it was lovely. James Lau, by the way, has decided that the raccoon is not a raccoon. It is a trash panda. I dunno what that means, but, I, that's another word for it. Oh, I think it's the Guardians of the Galaxy reference now. I think. and Greg saying hello, nice to have you with us. Just imagine if there was a supply chain attack.

[00:45:36] Nathan Wrigley: Sorry, bigot your, most of your body has gone missing. just imagine if there was a supply chain attack on Helly. Hello Dolly. Like we've seen in the past year or so. Was that a thing? Did that happen? I have no memory. not on Hello Dolly. But we've had supply chain attacks in the past. Oh, I see. Where things have been.

[00:45:52] Tim Nash: Oh, where, a bad actors gay. Hello Dolly would be a, would mean that quite a lot. All good. Yeah. not necessarily do org, but some, core contributor has had their credentials compromised in some ways. Okay. That's less likely to be an issue compared to other higher profile targets. And ultimately with the new site editor admin interface bits.

Hello? Dolly. Might have to change. Oh. Yeah. Interesting. yeah. Yeah. Good point. Courtney, by the way, is saying we need more concrete pl we need a more concrete plugin. I guess we're talking about Hello Dolly. That is, that, that is very obvious about it being an introduction plugin. Paul b has standard British humor, so you can imagine the dry humor.

[00:46:40] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So there was a bit of that going backwards and forwards there. Oh, yeah. It was playful. Oh, good, but I guess Courtney's making the point that instead of it being Hello Dolly, which you know, is obviously a plugin, you can see what it does. And because it's there, you can see that you can click an edit button and a, and a what have you button, sorry, activating and deactivate and blah, blah, blah.

maybe something a bit more substantive is maybe what Courtney's trying to say. and then she also says, Matt did use the term marketplace for what most of us commonly call the plugin and theme directory stroke repository. Again, it's been truncated. I'm not sure if it means much difference.

You'll have to elaborate on that, Courtney, if that's okay. I think she means that we've never, historically the WordPress community has always referred to them as the wordpress.org repository. Oh, I see. Repo. And as opposed to marketplace, is a, new term that. It could have just been a slip of the tongue.

[00:47:39] Tim Nash: It could have been, yeah. Could have been sneaking in some sort of conspiracy theory in there, or it could just been, yeah, I, think it's, it's more from the automatic space. There is a marketplace on webpress.com and there is a marketplace on WebPress, on WooCommerce. So I think it's, oh, I see.

[00:47:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. The whole thing. Easy to insert the wrong word here. Yeah, got it. Probably. Okay. but it's more fun to have a conspiracy. Come on. No, you love it. You love it, Tim. okay, so that was those bits. And then we have, we. Yeah, it's, sorry, I'm just in the background trying to find the right tab.

There we go. and then Beit brought this, which is obviously the Gutenberg times, which is, under the stewardship of bigot. This is the Abilities API block accessibility check, Gutenberg framework, AI creating blocks and themes. This was edition 3, 4, 5. Is there anything in here particularly that you wanted to draw out?

[00:48:36] Tim Nash: yeah. The, top of it is that, I, tomorrow, October 31st is the WordPress 6.9 beta one release. So that's the point where, you know, okay, you can find out which features actually made it, and which are not. And then also, this is the first time you can start testing it, with a beta tester plugin by Andy Regan.

and make sure that your plugins, your themes, your sites are actually working with that and also. Report bugs and, quirks or Yeah, that, you encounter to make it actually better before its final release in December 2nd. So there are probably going to be two more beta releases and then release candidate one, two, and three.

but I know you wanna go on the schedule, but I just wanna point out this is a moment where you can actually first learn about all the features that are in there by following the test. Team's help for testing because how can you better learn what's in there when you try it out and then report back what's not working?

and yeah. And also PS she says, on Monday the 20th, you're gonna be on a show called This Week in WordPress. Apparently. Yeah. But that's already there, so Yeah. Yes. Not important. thank you. Yeah. there was a second PPS, PS there that I actually have. There's a gutenburg nightly that I built almost every day.

That's a good MER plugin that you can use for your test sites, between plugin releases. and that had a five year anniversary. Oh, yeah. So that was a personal, yeah, success Oh, congratulations. Yeah. And a miles, yeah. Something like, yeah. That's amazing. That's a that is a long project.

[00:50:31] Nathan Wrigley: That's really phenomenal. Yeah. So go and check this out. And we are gonna talk about the release cycle a little bit in a minute. Yeah. But you can see on here, we'll cover a few of these bits off in a minute, but there's, there's a couple of things in here. Call for testing, the ability to hide blocks.

Call for testing the accordion block. Co covering a few of those. And then this one helped to change template management, sorry, helped test changes to template management. So let's get stuck into a few of those right away. I just, if, possible, I wanted to point out two things that are in there that I really, like that the broader, distributed one is a video by Elliot Richmond that's further down.

[00:51:16] Tim Nash: further, there, he's, yeah. and he demonstrated how he created a block theme using. Cloud code, from the ground up. And it's definitely, interesting for anybody who wants to grade a theme to figure out, okay, are there, is there help from AI or not? Or how to actually get clo to adhere to the new standards and not bringing something from classic in there.

can I ask you a question about that fir firstly? Yeah. Did you manage to see that video through? did you manage to watch it? and if you did, he have success? Would be my quick question about that. it's definitely on my list to watch it completely. Okay. I went in through the first half of it and that was really cool.

Yeah, I can answer that if you'd like. Yes, please. he did. He had a theme at the end of it that did what he told it to do. There were issues as you'd expect. Yeah. But that's what he, but, it did the fundamental thing is it did what it was told to do. Yeah. you imagine the heavy lifting that you've got to do without that.

[00:52:26] Nathan Wrigley: if it can get you a, I don't know, 50% of the way there or scaffold the learning a little bit. That's pretty incredible, isn't it? Yeah. okay. Firstly, thank you Tim. And then secondly Bigge. Was there another piece you wanted to mention? There was a second one and right at underneath it, I think, this one, it's the recording of, it's about the Gutenberg as a framework.

[00:52:50] Tim Nash: So there is a, the block editor, you can actually use it outside of WordPress and, Mohammed Musin, he did a talk at ESH earlier this year on how he used it for one of his sites, the Career Vision io. And I think it's something that we all could, think about more. if we do some JavaScript site programming and kind of need an editor, why not use the Gutenberg editor?

there are plenty of reasons, but there are also plenty of reasons of not using tiny MCE as you found out. No kidding. Yeah. and, I, think it's a, there's a whole site, that Riyad ELA maintains is how to use Gutenberg outside of WordPress in one of your JavaScript or, yeah.

So there are other, so day one from Automatic as well as Tumblr, they use the editor. And then, Drupal, uses the Gutenberg editor as well as. Another one, I forgot. Yeah. So I just wanted to broaden the horizon a little bit on that. Yeah. I did a podcast episode probably about a couple of years ago, and I've forgotten what the app was.

[00:54:07] Nathan Wrigley: It was, it was Timothy formally from Ithe, I presume he's with Dale. Yes. Yeah. Timothy, is it Jacobs? I wanna say Jacobs. Yes. he was working on a SaaS with a collaborator and they stripped out the Gutenberg editor and dropped it in 'cause it was literally perfect for what they wanna do. just not really the same thing, but I'm, I was this morning when, the script came back up after the Amazon stuff had gone away, I was editing a podcast episode with a a, guy called Seth Rubenstein.

He works for the Pew Research Foundation, and he ho honestly, please listen to that episode. It's so interesting what, they, what he's talking about. Talking about the interactivity. API block bits and block bindings and all of these fantastically clever things, that I basically, that I had to. I had to tease out of him 'cause I couldn't understand most of what he was saying.

So it was a real deep dive with me constantly saying, hang on, is that how it worked? But it was really interesting and leans, leans a little bit into this, like basically web apps inside of blocks. really fascinating stuff. Anyway, I lost the thread there before you skip over.

[00:55:16] Tim Nash: Maybe bigger can answer this. Are, block bits actually coming? Oh. Oh, not yet. Not yet. They're working on it and, it's, no, I'm waiting for it for about two years now, to be fair to shortcut 2.0. Yeah. To be fair to Seth, he does make that point. He makes the point that they are on, on the bleeding edge and he doesn't have any, realistic expectation, but they are using what was already there.

[00:55:44] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. And I didn't even know what they were, so he had to explain it to me. So that was interesting. But, I won't try and explain it 'cause I probably can't do it justice. But, definitely worth listening. That'll come out on the tab and later. Okay, so that was, the Gutenberg Times number 345.

So let's move into some of this stuff. No, of course. You're very welcome. Thank you. So the WordPress 6.9, release schedule. Release party schedule is here and big. It was just touching on those points. Tuesday, 21st, as was just mentioned, beta one, one week later, beta two. And on we go a week after that Beta three release candidate one early November.

And then by the time we get to very, beginning of December, if all things have been equal, then we should get to this general release on the 2nd of December. Let's have some fingers crossed anyway, this is available on make dot WordPress do org. Obviously if you're a plugin theme developer or I don't know, something that, where that would be important, then now's the time to go look at it.

what's new in Gutenberg's with a couple of things. Bigot will probably be able to help us out on this. So we've got the block visibility controls. I think that was just mentioned was that this hiding and showing, bits and pieces. Did this drop, was this a, was this a Nick Diego plugin that got ported or was it.

Something like that. it was inspired, by, okay. But the, the, approach to ha having something that's already existed and pull it into core is you start from scratch and build it up, up, but you build it up and it's just the, other plugin is more the aspiration as not the beginning because if it's, in core, you need to build it a little bit differently and you also need to make sure it works with the other things.

Yeah. so I actually used Nick's plugin this weekend and I was surprised by just how many. Yeah. Conditions there were, I, thought it'd just be, I don't know, viewport size or user agent or whatever, but there's absolutely loads. There's so much in there. Yeah. but yeah, so anyway, the, sorry, getting back to this article.

There's that, there, it, so block visibility controls, it says you can now hide blocks directly in the editor. They won't be displayed on the front end. This marks the first UI for block visibility, paving the way for more granular control in the future. And then probably leaning into some of the ideas that Nick had, all these different conditions, block comment improvement.

So this is the idea, think Google Docs, but for WordPress, where you can make a comment on a block level. so some improvements have been better messaging when no related block exists. So I presume that's just a message coming back, saying, this comment can't be found or something like that.

highlighting for the reference block improvement, improved comment thread, new eye polish, simplified code and better performance. And then this one, this is, I think. Great. I love the idea of this coming into court accordion and time to read blocks. What more can we say they are exactly what you'd expect them to be.

And then obviously, the typical change log and all of the different bits and pieces, which we can't possibly go into, but they're the top three items. So that's hopefully coming in Gutenberg 21.8 or rather. Did, 'cause that was October the eighth. Does anybody wanna add anything to that or should we move on?

Isn't it with, oh, go on. Go on. No, go. Go on Tom. I was just gonna say, isn't it great? I'm, already starting to go, right? That's in, that's two plugins I might not need to use anymore. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to when we have the, visibility the next, because I'm writing, thinking the current version is quite, there's not really many conditional options for the visibility.

[00:59:27] Tim Nash: That's the one. No, there's none. I'm looking forward for the next one where we can start maybe having some of the conditional put in and maybe even the one after where we can expand and be able to have. Plugins can take control. Plugins can leverage it and do go further. 'cause that's the thing that Nick's plugin doesn't do at the moment.

That's oh, Nick's plugins amazing until you go, but I want it to be conditional based on my silly little need. Okay. Oh, it's not exp expandable. No. What it's called. There's potential and filters into that. Oh, it's gonna be amazing that's what they're looking for. Yeah. I just wanted to make one comment about the block comments.

That feature has been because it, amongst, contributors as well as users and con integrators, it has created a lot of confusion with the other commenting. So this blog comments are now called notes. Okay, so it's a little shorter and it's a little bit more, a different, a totally different from the, comments out of it.

Yeah. A note binds to something in the content area, whereas a comment is something about like on the front end. About it's on the front end. Yeah. Okay. or, there's also ping bags and tracks and all that. Yeah, Okay. Yeah. but it's, not that part. It's the notes that makes notes.

Notes, yeah. that makes sense to me. I can see why comments if used in two places would be highly confusing. Obviously in a Google Docs context, you don't have that conflict either. There are no, comments other than the comments on the piece of content. Exactly. Yeah. But I just wanted to point that out.

yeah. No, that's is following up the next publication. Is that, where did block comments go? it's notes now. Notes. Okay. That's good to know. So does that translate well into other languages? Word notes. Yeah. Okay. I'm gonna tell you, I don't have a clue 'cause I only speak English, so I've no idea.

[01:01:27] Nathan Wrigley: if you're in the comments and you speak some other language, would the word notes. Work for you. Let's see if anybody's got a, let's see if anybody's got a comment on that. That felt a note on that. Yeah. Yeah. Very good. A note. A note on that. Yeah. Very good. picked up. it works in German, so that's a language I know.

Would it work? Yeah, it works in German. Okay. It's, yeah. Okay. all Let's move on very quickly. Let's go to here. so Jonathan Boser, who I mentioned earlier, he has a piece today all about the wishing to test the changes to template management. If you are on a block-based theme. Then you'll know that you can man manage all your templates inside the ui.

and I don't know, you, you wanna make a new one that's fairly straightforward. If you wanna amend an old one, you click change things, save it, and you're away and it's great. However, there are some constraints around that. And so the, as with everything in WordPress, there's some ideas up for grabs.

And so it says key changes. I'll just read it out 'cause it'll make the most sense. template management allow multiple templates with the same active slog and introduces the ability to switch between them setting one as active. So at the moment, I don't know, let's say your single. Template, which would go for all of your single posts.

You, you've got one. and you can't have an alternative one. Whereas in this scenario you'd be able to say, I want several and now I want this one to be active. So that's cool. I think that's really cool. I theme template control users can now disable theme templates except the essential ones.

Can you not do that at the moment? Do you have to delete them if you don't want 'em to exist? Okay. That's interesting. and a new UI adds active templates and custom templates views in the site editor. So you can see the ones that are being used and the ones that presumably are not being used. And there's a bunch of other things mentioned here by Jonathan, which relate to what I've just said.

So anyway, if you'd like to be a part of that, this article, was 3rd of October. It's a little old now, but help test changes to template management. Anybody got anything on that before I move? Just to check, is this what's coming into the current version that's going into the beta, maybe? Or is this future planned?

it's the 3rd of October, so I don't know, maybe bigot can help us out with that. you're muted. Yeah, I'm sorry. Yes. this comes to 6.9. It will be in the beta one. and, there will be bug fixes because some of it is a little, on the edges. you, and, whatever you find reported because, Ella, who, drove that feature, Ella Vor, she really, was pointing out that she was spending a lot of time on backwards compatibility.

[01:04:23] Tim Nash: So if you find things that don't work from your current theme, now with the theme management, make sure you file a bug report on that so it can be fixed before it's released. Thank you. Okay. You're welcome. Absolutely. it's brilliant though, that interface, but there is a bit of a learning curve and so having extra options, I think for disabling and enabling and multiple things for the same piece of content is neat.

[01:04:50] Nathan Wrigley: So Jonathan would like your help with that. And then the last one is the call for testing. We mentioned it a moment ago, the accordion block. It's obvious what it is, I'm sure. I say it's obvious. Hopefully it's obvious. You basically get a button like. Which is basically a title and then you get some hidden content.

so far the Kluge for most people, if they were just using Core Blocks, was using the details block or, downloading a third party one. But now we're gonna have a, core, accordion block, which I presume you can stack and, have various different options, but it needs testing so that you can see if it fits your needs.

And this piece was 6th of October, it's called Call for testing on the accordion block. So there, and especially if you are interested in accessibility. Okay, let's make sure that Correct. Works for accessibility as well. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, good point. I've used a bunch of third party services and essentially it looks exactly the same.

you in, I'm showing something on the screen at the moment. I'm, you've got a title and a another title and you just keep adding them in and then the content goes inside of those and presumably you can nest blocks inside the accordions and yada And on it goes. okay. So that'll be fine when that drops.

Actually, I, it's curious to me that, never. Never dropped in core until just now. I've used a suite called Generate Blocks and I dunno if you've heard of that one, but it's by the, makers of Generate press. And ever since it launched, it had five different blocks. It had a text block, a, container block, an image block, and an accordion block, which was interesting that right from the get go, they just, they thought that was important enough to be part of their core thing.

There might have been one or two more, but the accordion was right in at the beginning. So it's, nice that core functionality's coming. I was gonna say I use generate blocks pri principally for the accordion block. Yep. The tabs block. Oh, tabs. That's newer, isn't it? That one? Yeah, it is.

[01:06:50] Tim Nash: Yeah. And then for their dynamic data, which is effectively, bit block bits. Block bits is going to be, that's right. 'cause you can append things and pre-end things and just create like a string of. I hadn't thought about it like that, but that's it, isn't it? It's I don't know, in one sentence, you could have six different pieces of information being sucked in dynamically.

[01:07:13] Nathan Wrigley: That's, yeah. That's a much better description of block bits than I would've thought. yeah. Okay. Yeah, I get it. That makes perfect sense. Thank you. Yeah. so there, we go. Anybody got anything else to say about those? I just wanna say tabs is coming soon. It was in the works and it was, but it didn't make it quite, into the beta, out of experiments.

[01:07:36] Tim Nash: So it's going to, it's the, others as well. The table of contents, yeah. Has been the, and the plugin, gut plugin for ages, but it never made it into core because it had accessibility issues and it had some feature issues, and it was a little bit. Architected that didn't quite match. the, I'd say it like that.

but it also lost a little bit momentum over the last three years, it's interesting what you were saying there, Tim. So one of the key features of your use of generate blocks was the accordion. Obviously block bits, this other dynamic data thing. But now that's in court, we are getting to the point where there's gonna be feature parity for a lot of these things.

[01:08:19] Nathan Wrigley: The block bits thing is, as you've described, is still a way off, but the accordion Yeah, maybe tabs. Yeah. Yeah. Mathias, Ventura, who's the spark of Gutenberg, had an epiphany at, one point where he said, okay, so theme developers want to. create all the styling for, all the HTML that's available, but they're not in core.

[01:08:45] Tim Nash: So it's always hard for a theme developer to, to style towards a plugin and not knowing if it's in there or not. And, that changes that. That you need, certain level of, blocks in core, so the theme can offer more features. And that was the accordion blog. That was a table of content blog.

That's the tabs blog. Also time to read. Those are all things that a theme developer would need, into the query block and all that. So I think that was, he wrote, I'm not sure, how fast I found it, but he found, he had a discussion on new blocks on GitHub. Yes. Yeah, I remember that.

And that where he laid out the reasoning for the change of. saying, okay, all the extensions are just plugin territory. it was coming from a different angle and now thinking from theme area, it really needs, most of it needs to be in, in core. Yeah. I think there was about 15 or 20 different blocks that were mentioned.

[01:09:53] Nathan Wrigley: And some of the ones that we've just talked about, probably not the most technically difficult things to pull off either. You would imagine, a tabs block and an accordion block is nice to have in call you, you say that, but then go back to Michelle's comment about making sure we're testing for accessibility, right?

[01:10:09] Tim Nash: Yeah. Yep, If you wanna do these without JavaScript, it's becomes a lot of fun. Yeah. And you're not doing that for 50,000 or 400,000 people, you're doing it for 500 million. So, it needs a bit of more testing. Also interesting with the sort of modern CSS that's coming along where a lot of the heavy lifting is gonna be done by, what CSS can do and some interesting innovations in browsers and what they can do themselves as well.

[01:10:40] Nathan Wrigley: Anyway, that's a complete aside. Let's move on. Just to quickly say, I had a podcast interview this week with the incredibly bright, Western router, I always wanna say his name differently, but Western Router, where he, talked me through, how WordPress. On a sort of core level is tackling performance.

A lot of it was over my head because he's very bright and I'm not, and he's into this field, he's deep, in the weeds. Luckily though, I was able to stop him and ask him to explain over and over again what a particular thing meant, and I was dumbfounded by the end of it. Frankly, all of the different bits and pieces that are going on in the background and specifically around why, and I'm, gonna just say this sentence and then I'm gonna back away from it.

Why a core? Why a, full site editing, a block based theme from a performance point of view is. Air quotes superior. that's not always the case, but he could, he was making the case of how they are more performant out of the blocks in a vanilla version of WordPress and on picks all of the different bits and pieces.

It was really, interesting. Many of the things that he was talking about I had never heard of before, and I love it when that happens because it's complete, virgin territory for me. So definitely go and give that a listen if you're into the performance side of things. Okay. Moving on.

I. Am I gonna do that one? No, I'm not gonna do that one. I'm gonna go to this one just 'cause time is a bit short. this one caught my attention this week. It's Matt Cromwell. he's talking about the best advice for product businesses in the, 2026. He's kinda making the point that in the past, if you build a product, they would come.

I'm sure that was the case. I've never had a product in the WordPress space, and maybe I will fairly soon, but, maybe, oh, Tim's shaking it what not even 14 years ago or something. I, was very fortunate, unfortunate I probably ran one of the very first commercial WordPress plugins Oh. As a plugin company.

[01:12:48] Tim Nash: So we ran, I ran a company called Coding Futures early 2000. It started in 2008, 2009. And we sold one of the very first commercial plugins. and I can tell you now that what happens if you just try to ram as many features in as possible, and they will come. They will, but so will your competition who then have money and can spend it on marketing.

and then you, don't have a plugin anymore and you go and be sad in a corner. Oh, this is what you drove you to security. Yeah, no, build building something technically, like with the as if you just go down the arms, race a feature, you will be beaten by someone with more money and ultimately you'll be beaten by somebody with more marketing, which is probably what Matt said, and I've just ruined it.

[01:13:37] Nathan Wrigley: what he is interestingly saying is that those days are gone. I think many people have been saying that same thing for ages, but in fact, here's a perfect, this encapsulates it perfectly. It says, for years the rules were clear. Build something useful, ship fart. Fast support, repeat add features, write docs, stay compatible.

But those lines are blurring. Core is adopting AI and MCP. So you know, we are crow barring AI into it, as we always do at some point in this podcast, faster than anyone expected. MPC will subtly transform the definition of WordPress development. AI is rewriting how users learn, search and build, but AI is not the point of his article.

The point of his article basically is that, there's two prongs I think to it. Firstly, it needs to be beautiful. Whatever you are building, if you haven't dis, if you haven't got a designer on and it looks clunky, I'm looking at you Drupal, it's not gonna, sorry about that. then it's not gonna be, it's not gonna be appealing.

And the generation of people growing up who are using the stuff that we're building, they are used to slick interfaces and they're used to things just working out of the box and also. the whole feature thing is not the point anymore. You basically have to get it so that they understand it from the get go, they drop into it and they're immediately able to gain value out of it.

And if that means that they've gotta go through 60 menus, think of a typical, I don't know, like something big, like an SEO plugin where there's 50 menus. Each menu's got like 18 options. Most of them you don't understand. That's hard, right? It's difficult to get to grips with all of that. And he's saying, make it so that people can get value out of it, right out of the box.

And he draws the comparison with Elemental, and how they essentially made it such that, you press a few buttons and you've got a page right in front of your eyes. You didn't need to understand how it was built. Forget the accessibility bit, forget the bloat on the code. You we'll just put all of that to one side from a user's point of view, it became it.

Incredibly compelling. 'cause you'd click a few buttons and you'd have a page. And if you didn't like bits of it, you'd delete them and insert another rival bits that might do the same job. And, and I think it's a really interesting point of view. And, hopefully all things being equal, I'm gonna get Matt on the podcast to, explain it to us.

But anyway, if anybody's got, I wonder, yeah, I wonder if it's different depending on who our target audience is at any particular point in time. So for example, if I'm selling to, somebody who's building their own website, a com, whether it's a small business or company or, whatever, I think that the way we show and the mar market to them and how it looks and the functions that they're looking for might be different than if we're selling to an agency or, some somehow like that.

[01:16:28] Michelle Frechette: Because I think, oh, I don't, I hate the word insiders, but people who've been part of WordPress for a long time, I think approach things a little bit differently. Than those who are perhaps building their first website or maintaining a website just for one or two businesses. Yeah, I just think it might be a little bit different.

So I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, that is an interesting point. Yeah, it's definitely worth checking out. The, problem with an article is like that, is that, I can't remember the nuance and the detail, but as I was reading through it, I remember thinking, that's interesting. I agree with that and I agree with that, but summoning it up now is difficult.

[01:17:00] Nathan Wrigley: Tim, sorry, have we, mentioned the, the irony of using Elementor and saying the word beautiful. beautiful on the front end, right? cast your mind back, Tim. now, but do you remember though, okay, insert for, element or insert page builder, That capacity to just click on a, I don't know.

You insert a row and it's pre-built for you and it basically does what you want it to do. It might not be exactly what you want. That pr i that is. Essentially why I moved over to WordPress. I was actually using Drupal and there wasn't a page builder experience and I really thought it was super cool for the longest period of time.

'cause it enabled somebody without design skills like me to put something half decent on a page. And most of my clients were basically happy with it, or at least they pretended to be. But yeah, go and read it, check it out. my best advice for Word pre WordPress product businesses in 2026. And on that point, Tammy, wrong comment.

It just popped up when I was about to press it. Functional, not beautiful, she said. I say that A designer pretty doesn't cut it. Yeah, it was one of two strands, in the article. It was, it is gotta be pretty and. useful out of the box, not one or the other. So anyway, go check it out. a page builder by default isn't beautiful.

No, I feel I'm backing myself into a corner here.

I'm gonna stop. okay. Go and check that piece out. Anybody wanna comment before we move on? I, think the most important thing for a plugin is not to create new interfaces, but use interfaces that are actually already learned by the user. Like the Gutenberg or the block editor interfaces. Yeah. Not putting another interface on top of it with too many, dials and, and options or in the, settings.

[01:19:01] Tim Nash: Yeah. Using the WordPress, core APIs, is definitely something that makes the used more comfortable because it's already. Known, yeah. How to use the buttons, how to toggle things and, where to find things. I found a, lot of plugins, reinvent the wheel here and it makes me always wonder, what you said at the beginning, Nathan, that with options that you don't.

don't understand because they're not in the same language as, web is, for instance. So there are, quite a few things. and I'm sure Matt mentioned some of them. yeah, this quote sums it up. I think it says that approach. So we're talking about the build it and they will come add features and they will come approach.

[01:19:49] Nathan Wrigley: He said that approach worked when Tinker is made up our audience. But the next generation, I guess that's the important bit as well. Next generation of users expects clarity before control. They expect to see, but they expect to see the end result, not assemble it. And in an, era of ai, and, we can debate that maybe, maybe that's gonna be important.

Anyway, go check it out for more detail, Tammy Lister. Block October. Fun. it, it's been too long since, since we looked at some, actually it wasn't, I think we looked at one every week. But, Tammy is on a mission to, I think it's every day in the month of October, including weekends. It says create a block every day.

Yeah, Create a new, block every day that does something in many cases. fun. hence Block Tober fun. And, that's the name of the url by the way. Block Tober. Fun. And you can see here they are. it's a very, it's in your face. The theme isn't, it tells you exactly what you're gonna get.

And, and I, asked the panelists if they had a particular favorite. I'm just gonna show the ones that, were mentioned and a couple of other ones. I like this one by the way. I don't know if that's, I dunno why liked particularly, but, Tammy has coded up a, an emoji voting system, which I think is cool.

The nice thing that you can do is you can see the prompt that Tammy used on the website. Down there. And also I'm not gonna do it 'cause it'll probably kill the live stream. But if I was to click on this button, it would, I, it will load up telex and and ultimately I think playground as well. I can't remember what actually happened.

Yeah. But I don't wanna risk it. 'cause if playground starts, I imagine my computer will give up, hope because it's trying to do too many other things. But I kinda like that one AVO voting through emojis. Very nice. We've seen it on things like intercom, but, yeah. Nice. What else did we see? We saw this one highlighter, a simple text highlighter with an option to have line height, color, opacity.

some of them are interactive. I dunno if this one is, but you can see exactly what was happening. Why do we have that? That's like a. In every text editor that I've ever come, across this highlighter thing. But anyway, there we go. Notice box, look, it's exactly what you'd imagine. It's a notice box.

This is a warning. And then here we go. Daily color. if you fancy a bit of color in your life, you just keep recycling that nice. And you get, a contrast. You got nice. I like that button, by the way, Tammy. That's pretty cool. And Tammy says she's open to ideas. Yeah. Do you wanna send her ideas? And then the flip card.

[01:22:29] Michelle Frechette: I really love that. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty cool. Has anybody got an idea for Tammy whilst we're live? Just throw it out there, see if she can see if she can knock it up by the end of the show. That would be hysterical. An interesting idea for that, I'm not even sure Tele can do it, so would be, having a speech so that you could have a, have your blog post or whatever read out to you.

[01:22:55] Tim Nash: those style blocks. So you've got a block with little audio. We just let take the audio in. Oh yeah, that's So what? It converts the text into speech and then you've got like a little play icon to Yeah. To play it. Yeah, that's yeah. I feel like I may have just added a layer of complexity that's be then perhaps the telex can actually do at the moment, but be interested to see if it can be done.

[01:23:16] Nathan Wrigley: I'm just trying to think if, IT Tammy, I, know it's silly. I would like bouncing text. I want a paragraph to just bounce just Oh, a ripple. The text ripple before my eye. Also blink marquee is where we're going. Blink and marquee. Okay. Anybody else got a good one that Tammy can be cracking on with?

She's asked Johan Cartwright. Put one in the, chat, have an automatic transcript for videos. I if that's, if I started with complicated, he's just taking it to the extreme. Yeah. That's the next level, isn't it? Yeah. what do you mean by that? Johannes, do you, do No. Jo Johan, sorry, I dunno how to pronounce your name.

[01:23:57] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Johan. Yeah. Johan. Johan. Thank you. so what a video and then underneath it would be a transcript where you'd follow along. There's a, presumably quite a lot of JavaScript going on there to track everything. yeah. I did. if you go to, or, it's Block to Fun. It's the u rl not.com. Oh, thank you.

[01:24:18] Tim Nash: I think it's, yeah. and I, think I was in there the first week and, Tammy started with an KY Tele, Tetris. Game and that where my afternoon went. It was just great fun to go back to Te I, I think that it should be possible to, to have, one, at Christmas where it replaces every image on your website, which just Santa every single, I think I would like to do it a little bit more specific.

So every time, every face of prompt is gonna be replaced with something else. Oh, and look at that. Look at this. The accessibility thing is this is Joe Dolson. He recently took over the custodianship of Able Player, which is a video player with, accessibility chops. Accessibility is the core of it, and you can already do that.

[01:25:13] Nathan Wrigley: Inside of Able players as Oh, nice. yeah, that is nice. I'll see if by the end of the show, Tommy, I can come up with, some more fruity ones. But, yeah, if you could build a platform inside a WordPress so I can do these live shows, that'd be cool. But I think maybe, do we know if Able Player has, got blocks?

[01:25:35] Tim Nash: 'cause I've, for some reason I thought it wasn't part of WordPress. It was. No, it's not. It's, let's just quickly do it. Let's just have a look able player. I didn't put a space in there. You'll notice I'm sporting CAG as my search engine of choice. is this it? Is this the actual thing? It doesn't look like it contributing.

[01:25:54] Nathan Wrigley: Let's see. Not sure. That doesn't look like what I, yeah, this is it. Able player dot GitHub, do io. what was your question, Tim? whether it was actually a WordPress E type thing, but this looks like it is just pure, a straight up inbred. Yeah. I think he is. Got my, I speak to Joe fairly recently. We do this sort of accessibility show once every few months.

I have a memory that his, one of his roadmap things is to have. A block for that. So we will see, there we go. Okay. That's October, may, maybe that is Tammy's block. There you go. Able player Block. Block there, Tammy. That's the good one. There you go. An able player block. Can we have that please? That's, I think that's it.

You've done it? Oh my goodness. I've just looked at the time. We've got four minutes left. Oh Lord. okay. In which case I'm just gonna write time flies. Yeah. Geez. I'm just gonna rifle through these. so firstly, if you're curious, I really would've liked to have had more time, on this one.

So this is, poodle press, AKA, Jamie Marsland. He wrote an article, not that long ago, a couple of weeks ago, called If Automatics Telex Builds This, you might not need that page builder. Basically what you're saying is that if telex, which is what Tammy has been using to build the plugins, the blocks rather that you've just seen, if Telex can do that, do we really, do, are we not gonna be getting to the point very soon where we're, and I'm gonna do air quotes, talking to our website and extending the functionality of the core blocks.

So in the example we've just used with, I don't know, the, conditions for hiding and showing, if a, block has the capability to be extended and you can just tell Telex, can you make the hide and show block, have this condition in it, then. What would be the point in a sense of all these page builders?

'cause they've got all that functionality built into their modules and different bits and pieces anyway, he's postulating a future where telex or something equivalent to telex extends core blocks. I guess extends any block really. and then maybe the icing on the cake there would be like a directory of people's already successfully submitted, tried and tested, adaptations to core blocks.

It's an interesting idea. And if you want a security review for your new telex blocks, do you know what? Tim Telex is your best friend. It's gonna make you a millionaire because everybody's gonna be throwing out all these blocks with no idea whether they're secure or not. And, yeah. Okay. That's a good idea.

okay, so anyway, go and check that out. Let's pick one more. da Oh my goodness. I don't know. Yeah, let's just do a couple of quick deals. I haven't used this, I don't use e-commerce in any way, shape, or form. I know that the, giant in the room is, WooCommerce in the WordPress space, but over the last week this landed, it's been talked about quite a little bit.

I've dunno what it's like. I haven't tried it. But, the fluent community, the, company called WP Manage Ninja, they've got things like fluent forms and fluent CRM and a whole bunch of other different products. they have launched something called Fluent Cart and a lot of YouTube content being created around it.

at the moment they've got this lifetime pricing. Let's have a look. See what that is. it's not nothing, but it's not. Really insane. I don't think so. One site is 2, 4, 9, 5 sites is 4, 9, 9 15 sites, 7, 9, 9, and 50 sites is just over a grand, it's just dollars, $1,100. So I don't know, if you're into e-commerce and you wanna try something different out that might be worth it.

And they also are also doing a lifetime deal on their affiliate plugin. So that's all I have to say about that. That's it. There was some other stuff which I was gonna put in, but I think we've run out of time. What shame, was there anything in that lot, a lot that I missed out that you really wanted to get to Panelists or are we okay?

[01:30:05] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay, we're good. We're all good. Okay. I thought you'd say that. That's very kind. Let's go through these last little comments. I can't, I can hack around using, so this is Tammy again. I can hack around using libraries and APIs, but it needs hitting today. I wanna see a picture of you hitting an PI.

[01:30:25] Nathan Wrigley: I would love to see what that looks like. God, Tim, you were gonna say something. no. I was just mentioning camera hitting an API. Yeah, I wanna see that. able Player has a plugin which uses short codes for now. Oh, so there is a plugin. Okay. Then use a short code to drop it in. Okay. Presumably you can configure different things.

Amber, back again. Yes. We use the plugin with short codes to load our podcast episodes. It works with a file locally, or if you're hosting with a third party service like casts, YouTube, et cetera. and duh. Tammy, one last one. And this is why none of mine are going on the repo yet. because to security, just get him to check out for you, Tammy.

he's not very busy. 30th of to do, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Okay. In that case, go on, Michelle. When I picture Tim, I don't picture him just sitting around waiting for things to do. I, I think you're right. unlike me Yeah. You around doing, nothing, right? Yeah. this morning, let's hope for more AWS outages and we can all sit around and have nothing to do.

That's really nice. Okay. That's it. That's all we've got time for. Thank you much so much. I'll just go round the panel. firstly over there Tim Nash, thank you for joining us and big at Powerly Hack. Thank you. thank for having me. You're, and seeing you all. And Michelle Frache, you made it to the end with your voice contact.

Always a pleasure. Appreciate it. I did. And, thank you to you obviously if you joined us today. That's lovely. And anybody that made a comment, a special heart goes out to you, you keep the show going. That's really nice. We will be back this time next week. I think we've got a slot available still and I believe it'll be our kind of Halloween.

Oh, Michelle's got all the hearts. Look at that. we have a slot available, so if there's anybody that wants to come on the show, it'll be the Halloween special. I don't normally it's Michelle with some incredible outfit that she's their ages, but she available. I have a doctor's appointment that day, yeah.

[01:32:31] Michelle Frechette: Oh, that's, you gotta do what you gotta do. but we will be back next week, so if anybody wants to get in touch, feel free and we'll see if we can get you on. We only have one more thing to do. You know what it is, it's the humiliating can way. Of joy. Oh, what the heck Did that get done with your hands alone?

[01:32:52] Nathan Wrigley: Or did you press a button, Michelle? No, I did. I did. it's, it's the max to the next level. Fun things. Okay. I don't get those heart, I don't get those. You have to enable it if you go to the little screen icon on your Mac. Okay. in the bar at the top, there's a, there's like a little video icon somewhere.

It's usually in green. I think you click on that and, oh, there we go. Yeah, there it goes. Oh, I disabled it 'cause I've had it really annoying. Okay. but anyway, there we go. Yay. Yay. Yes. See now you two. I'm teachable. Yeah. And now we all do. And now we all do this and we can through Now I'm the odd one out.

Okay. You three do that. Let's see what happens. No, it's not working. No, not working. It's not working for Tim either. no, I, no, nevermind. Only Michelle. You noted some custom things in there on that bombshell. I wish I knew how to do that. We will knock it on the head and we'll say, have a good week.

We'll see you next time. Take it easy. Bye bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye bye.