This Week in WordPress #354

[00:00:03] Nathan Wrigley: It is time for This Week in WordPress, episode number 354 entitled Motorized Motor. It was recorded on Monday, the 27th of October, 2025.

My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I'm gonna be joined by Tim Nash, also by Stacy L Carlson and by Mark Wilkinson. It's a WordPress podcast, so we do spend quite a bit of time talking about WordPress, but we also get diverted into various different avenues as well.

So we talk about various bits that Tim has brought all about security in the WordPress space.

We talk about how newsletters never really went away, or at least they're back. Stacey tells us that now is the best time to get back on the bandwagon of newsletters.

And then Mark digs into a piece from Katie Keith from Barn2, all about whether or not it's a good idea to have a lifetime deal for your WordPress product. Stacy definitely thinks that it is.

WordPress 6.9, it needs a lot of testing, and there is an article this week which tells you exactly how you can do that.

We also talk about whether or not some AI slop has crept into our feed, a Search Engine Journal article, which Tim thinks really ought to be discounted, so we get into it, and then we don't.

And then we spend quite a large amount of time getting into various different pieces, all about AI and how it's affecting WordPress. Matt Madeiros did a piece all about how AI can be used inside this new Atlas browser from chat GPT to help you create pages and watch it happening in front of your eyes.

And Mark Westguard from WS form has the exact same thing. An agentic AI, which is enabling you to create forms by just typing in text.

Scary times, amazing times, and it's all coming up next on This Week in WordPress.

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Every week it kills me and I never do anything about it. That music is so bad. two minutes of sheer hell is what you could describe that as. But, anyway, there we go. It is, WP builds. This week in WordPress, we're on episode number 354, which is rather a lot. And, hopefully we'll keep going into the future.

But for now, we have a, Halloween episode. Now I have a confession to make. Usually Michelle Ette joins us and she makes a real effort. She does all this Halloween stuff. She paints her face, she does an outfit and everything. And, and she's not with us this week, which is a great shame. So I'm not sure anybody's made an effort.

Normally I've got a cupboard full of kids stuff just through there somewhere, and I went to check it out and bring all the stuff out to, put on the cupboard behind me. It's all been hit. Hitting the trash. It's all gone into the trash. So there's no Halloween at all. The only slight thing I've got for you, is this somewhat humiliating thing.

let's see what that looks like.

That's, it's pretty bad. I'll be doing that as the, as the episodes go on. probably. Have you spent all morning on that? No. About eight minutes is how long I spent on that. That's really quick.

[00:04:39] Tim Nash: Seven minutes more than you should have done. Thank you.

[00:04:42] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. I appreciate your support. You're quite right.

Maybe I should never do that again, but we're here and, we would love to have your comments. Let me go around and introduce the panel. We're gonna talk about WordPress stuff, but important to get to know who they're first. First one over there is, the Doom speaker. Ooh, it's

[00:04:58] Tim Nash: Tim Nash. Hello? I, was going to make an effort.

I promise. And then,

[00:05:04] Nathan Wrigley: okay. That's easy

[00:05:06] Tim Nash: for house. Yeah, I know, but I

[00:05:08] Nathan Wrigley: move. So that's my excuse. Okay. I don't have such an excuse, but anyway, thank you. Tim always drops an interesting bio and I ha deliberately never go and read it. So I dunno what he's done this time around. Let's see what, he's very tame.

Oh, is he the ordinary? Yeah. Okay, nevermind. Here we go. I'm gonna read it out. Tim is a security consultant and professional doom speaker who peers into the cosmic void. Okay. It's already gone a bit weird. The cosmic void, so you don't have to, when 10 called nightmares rise from the abyss to brute force your login page.

He simply sits the and deploys best practices by day. He shares his arcane [email protected] uk by night. He battles Elrich, PHP Misconfigurations. Did I say that right? Is that you did? Yeah. This Thursday at W-P-L-D-N, he will reveal how to keep your site safe when ancient horrors attempt to guess your password, one unspeakable character at a time.

It wasn't that tam, that was pretty good. Do you do, can I ask, do, you help, do you get help with the AI. Yeah,

[00:06:08] Tim Nash: we've been having chat GPT based bios for the last six months or so. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Fair. I think I peaked at getting you to, do something in the style of, Alan Parsons and we've not Alan Partridge.

Now Edgar Alan Poe. Oh, who was the, and the Raven, which was then Oh, that's right. Yeah, Covered by Alan Parsons, the Allen Parsons project. I'm glad that you, that was my

[00:06:35] Nathan Wrigley: peak. I'm glad that you kept it simple for me this week. that was nice and neat. I didn't have to read it out like a pirate or a witch or anything like that, so that was really nice.

Thank you. You don't

[00:06:44] Tim Nash: take stage direction very well, I'm afraid.

[00:06:46] Nathan Wrigley: I'm sorry. What can I say? Blame my mother. okay. We're also joined by Stacy l Carson. This is the first time on the show, so it's very nice to have you. Hello, Stacy. Hello. Stacy l Carson brings over 15 years of experience in affiliate marketing and strategic partnerships.

She began her career as an entrepreneur in 2005, running her own e-commerce business, which gave her a strong foundation in online business and affiliate strategy. A longtime WordPress user since two now serves. As Director of Global and Affiliate Influencer Marketing at Automatic Overseeing programs for wordpress.com, WooCommerce, marketplace, pressable and Jetpack.

Crikey, you've got quite a broad canopy of things going on there, haven't you? That's a lot.

[00:07:33] Stacy L. Carlson: I, I've, been everywhere.

[00:07:35] Nathan Wrigley: You have, I hope that you'll be everywhere here and, come back. Absolutely. And, and frequent this show many, more times. The last person on the panel, we're gonna get it right, yet down there is, Mark Wilkinson.

Hello, mark. Hello there. Nice to have you with us. Thank you. I've met Mark, thank you. In the real world a few times, a couple of times I think at W-P-L-D-N, but it, we've never been on the show, so we've got 50% of the panel are novices and 50% are, I dunno what to describe, o like Tim, but, on, novice, grumpy, old man, GRU.

Okay. We'll go with that. Yeah. Nice. but Mark is a WordPress developer and business owner at High Rise Digital. He's the author of Job Relay, a WordPress SaaS product for recruitment companies. In addition to this, he helps build WordPress job boards using his Rec Plus or Rec Plus Press. Have I pronounced that right?

Rec Press.

[00:08:26] Mark Wilkinson: Rec Press, yeah.

[00:08:27] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Product and recruitment websites using WordPress, smart love sharing knowledge in the WordPress space, which probably comes from his former role as a teacher. He taught 11 to 16-year-old students over 12 years teaching geography ICT and computing away from his computer marking.

Joyce spending lots of time on the golf course, I'm gonna go back to your teaching days. Is there any part of you that misses that mark?

[00:08:49] Mark Wilkinson: A small part. Yeah. But a very, small part. Yeah.

[00:08:53] Nathan Wrigley: What's you no longer have the, it gave you,

[00:08:58] Mark Wilkinson: when you teaching is so rewarding. Yeah. It's so fulfilling and that part of it is amazing.

every teacher enjoys that. it's just all the rest of it that gets in the way. Really. Okay. Yeah.

[00:09:10] Nathan Wrigley: The, other 40 hours a week of paperwork. Yeah. And needless stuff. Yeah. anyway, there is our panel. Hopefully, hopefully the, newbies, Stacey and Mark will join us many, times.

We are hopefully gonna be joined by some commenters. I'll do the, usual bits and pieces, just introducing how it works. if you are joining us, on wp builds.com, which is on that page, wp builds.com/live. If you send people there, that's really helpful. Then everybody's got a couple of ways of commenting.

The first possibility is to use the, little embedded Google well, YouTube, chat widget, which is on the right, on a desktop and below if you're on mobile. And then if you don't like Google and don't have a Google account, there's a little button inside the video. Top it says live chat, little black button.

You don't need to be logged into anything. You just need to click the bottom and type in your name or something. And and then you can comment and we love it when people make comments. It really keeps the whole thing going. And the first one that dropped in today, of course. I didn't really think about this.

The, I would say a significant proportion of our audience is not in the uk. It's north America, I think a lot. And, Courtney says, oh, did you change the clocks? Yeah. I didn't, I did, actually, I changed three of them, but, it was, I wasn't responsible for changing them on mass. I don't even know why we do it anymore, in all honestly.

Apparently it was all to do with farmers going to church and things like that back in the day. But, yes we did. I'm sorry if that's messed everybody's timing up. Maybe it's like crazy. A clock more Does

[00:10:48] Mark Wilkinson: anybody still have a clock that needs changing?

[00:10:51] Nathan Wrigley: I have three.

[00:10:52] Mark Wilkinson: I think we had one.

That was

[00:10:53] Nathan Wrigley: it. Yeah. Yeah. And it, it is easy to, oh, the car. The car sometimes needs to do it. Oh, the car. I forgot about the car. Yeah. Yeah. Can't, and it's never easy to find houses. It's buried in a menu. In a menu, And then you gotta do a million and then, yeah.

[00:11:10] Tim Nash: See, I, the oven technically needs changing, but I just accept that in summer I need to add one hour.

And it's, yeah, because that's easier than changing it. Yeah, exactly.

[00:11:22] Nathan Wrigley: That's great. I have a smart bed. I'm gonna tell you all about it later. And, it needed changing. I needed to update the bed. I don't have a smart bed. I do not have a smart bed. Tammy list the joining us. Yes, the chop The clock's changed, but we have tea.

That's nice. We're also joined by Jonathan, overall, deputy WP Plugins from A to Z as, oh no, z. He's Canadian. good morning from a very wet coast, Canada. indeed. We change next week tea. I need my Oh, okay. So for a whole week we're completely outta sync. Do we go further apart or did we get closer together?

I don't closer. Oh, that's good. Yeah. Oh, that makes life a little bit easier, if European and North American businesses. great. Marcus Burnett joining us. Good morning. Beautiful people. So happy to see Stacy on the show. Oh, that's nice. There you go. Obviously Marcus and Stacy know one another.

Patricia's saying Hello, And then Tammy's joining us a few more times. Always the oven on the car. It's always the on and on the car clock. Yeah, hopefully not both at the same time. smart And also the heating had to change the under floor heating. Oh, okay. I have one of those, nest thermostats, so I'm assuming it did it all correctly.

Without me having to think. I'm not entirely sure and, better here. 7:00 AM early start. 6:00 AM really early. Yeah. So it's a little bit better. That's good. Okay. There we go. Please keep the comments coming. especially if you've got any commentary about clocks. It turns out that's the, that's gonna be the thing, during the course of this week.

Let's get on with it. This is us. This is our website, wp builds.com. Let's get rid of that. A little nag. If you like what we do and you want to keep in touch, stick your email address into that there box, and then click that there button and we'll send you two emails a week. One of them all about clocks and the other one about.

Electric beds that you can plug into the internet. no we won't. We'll send you things about WordPress, I promise. When we produce bits of content, for example, we just launched an episode with Matt Cromwell, I dunno if Matt, but he actually, he's one of the people in one of the podcasts, which is gonna be mentioned in a moment.

he and I had a conversation, this week and it was called Preparing WordPress products for a changing demographic and AI revolution. You can't escape it, can you? AI is absolutely everywhere, and Macro Cromwell is trying to align his products and the WordPress community so that people are ready for the onslaught of expectations from the, younger people growing up who, who will only be able to do things through the prism of an ai.

go and have a checkout of that. The other thing to mention is that we've got a Black Friday page. We do this every year. and if you wanna bookmark it, it's wp builds.com/black. I think there's about a hundred and something, 122 deals on there that have been sent into me so far, something like that.

And, yeah, there's no affiliate links or anything like that, but if you want to search and filter, you just, click this little button and you can filter down on various different bits and pieces. So it's a good spot to, to just keep coming back to if you fancy, be in Pride a place.

We've got some sponsored spots at the top and you can see Mark West Guard from WS form is taking care of one of those. If you fancy doing that. Then, click the little get started button and, we'll get you sorted out. We get a lot of hits on that each and every year. And that's it for the promotional bit.

I suppose. This is slightly promotional. Ooh, reject, WLDN, is, yeah, the reject was for the cookie, not for WLDN, more generally. W-P-L-D-N is I guess a London meetup for the WordPress community. And, it's happening this Thursday, 30th of October. So pretty close to Halloween. both Tim and Mark have been speakers there in the past.

This time around though, Tim's joining us. He always does, Halloween. And, yeah, if you wanna join us, you can click get your tickets here, takes you to me top.com, which is where all the WordPress, me tops are traditionally held. And, tickets are free. Six o'clock start on the door, six 30, six six on the door, six 30 to start.

And we've got Tim, and then we've got a, a, instead of having a second speaker, which is what we normally do, we've got a sort of more networking time and AI open topic. So we're gonna crowbar some AI into that as well. So come and join us if you're in the, London area or not. you could live in Yorkshire, for example, and go there every month.

Yeah.

[00:15:56] Tim Nash: me and Nathan travel for nearly three hours to go to renovate.

[00:15:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. What's your excuse, dear listener? those of you in North America, you get a pass. It's fine. You're not required to get on our, however,

[00:16:09] Tim Nash: mainland Europe, we, yeah. Thats,

[00:16:11] Nathan Wrigley: that's totally within reach.

Yeah. The channel, okay. That's it. That's this piece that, that I'm gonna promote. So each week we ask the guests if they wish to. To drop in some stories that they thought were interesting. They might be WordPress, they might not. And so we're gonna do a couple from Tim first stop. and obviously it being Tim's stuff, I'm gonna get him to describe it.

What's this one? LJLR firstly, I dunno what that acronym means. Hack is the costliest cyber attack in UK history. Say analysts. I bet you do. You do know that, what that means when I

[00:16:44] Tim Nash: tell you that's Jaguar Land Rover.

[00:16:46] Nathan Wrigley: I did know that. Yeah. Oh, what happened?

[00:16:50] Tim Nash: I if you have ha pretty much under a rock, I think.

'cause it's one of these stories that the BBC and other MA media, they pick up cybersecurity stories and they run with it for a day and then it disappears and you think, oh, that's, that it's all over. Everything's back to normal. But Jackie and Land Rover have had, a rather costly time getting their systems back after a cyber attack.

[00:17:16] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay.

[00:17:17] Tim Nash: Now it got to the point where they were like, yeah, we're having problems. It was about the same time as, at Mark's and Spencer's, which are another big brand in the uk, but that they're a shopping brand also. We're saying, oh, we are having problems, and Mark's and Spencer's recovered in a couple of weeks.

This is rolled on and on Oh, the government had to get involved because Jaguar landro have contracts and bits, their supply chains were being affected. Money wasn't transferring across. It cascaded really quickly. There was a independent research group, have guessing the cost, and I think if you scroll down it says, I think it's 1.9 billion.

Oh yeah. A few pieces for that billion. Yeah, there you go. Point one, 0.9. Yep. The, so this is not just the direct cost to Jaguar Land Rover who are a big business. This is the cost across the board to all the small businesses, all interconnected. And the reason I brought it up was a, because I just wanted everybody to wince at the idea of 1.9 billion, which is what, 2.8.

Billion dollars, US dollars. so it's a fairly sizable chunk of money that has just been wiped out. Yeah. by this attack. yeah. It's, and it, and the really scary thing is that there's like categories of attacks, and this was right marked as a category free event, and the scale goes one to five in play.

This is only a mid-range one. Yeah. Yeah. We've got four and five to get there to be really scary. To put that in context, the m and s attack was like a category two, which is relatively low impact on the entire economy versus this which has a, has had a genuine impact on the economy in the United Kingdom.

So I, basically just wanted to scare people, but also, yeah. that's your job, isn't it? This time of year? Indeed. frightening.

[00:19:15] Nathan Wrigley: Better.

[00:19:16] Tim Nash: It's worth like showing that, 'cause quite often we see big companies just shrug things off. a few years ago we had British Airways, another big UK brand.

They had card skimmers on their, checkout pages. You'd have thought that would have had massive impact on their bottom line. And they bounced and recovered from that really quickly. In fact, they had a better quarter the next quarter 'cause they got a load of publicity outta being hacked. So I did wanna highlight that, it's not all rosy and actually these are, can be damaging.

'cause it's very easy to abstract this away and say, oh, insurance will cover it. Oh, people will feel sorry for them. So they'll, buy more of their products. you don't just go, oh, do you know what? I would've bought a Jaguar. I wasn't gonna buy a Jaguar, but now they've had a cyber attack.

I'm definitely gonna buy a 90,000 pound car from them. That was,

[00:20:09] Nathan Wrigley: that was exactly my thought, Tim. Straight away I was thinking, I need to buy like a pity Jaguar. Exactly. I'm just gonna, just, it's definitely what they need.

[00:20:19] Tim Nash: But because you are not pity buying the Jaguar, that means that chain has almost no chance to recover.

Those orders are primarily lost, but those orders affect the small businesses as well. They, affect the, little business that makes the blue widget or the. The joiners that make the shiny wood veneer. Does Jaguar have wood veneer in? I'm going with that. Yeah. Make the wood veneer in there. And you see there, there's a whole chain of stuff happening behind the scenes and, it all is a knock on effect.

And there have been business, there are smaller companies that have gone out of business because of a cyber attack against Jackie Land Rover and

[00:20:57] Nathan Wrigley: this

[00:20:57] Tim Nash: Jackie Land Rover is gonna do quite well out of it ultimately. 'cause they are covered by insurance and the government's giving them a massive grant.

[00:21:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. oh, okay. Oh, okay. I don't feel quite so bad. I, was just gonna say being behind the attack, but I'm, not gonna say that because I'm gonna get in such trouble. But this is why we can't have nice things, Tim. Wow. because there are people out there who go and do silly things like this.

Honestly, all I've got to say to you dear hackers, is you need to go onto the naughty step and think long and hard about what the heck you are doing.

[00:21:29] Mark Wilkinson: Really does. There does seem to be a lot more of these, or certainly it feels like there's more of these in 20, 25 than we've ever had. Do you think that's realistically true, Tim, or do you just think we're not, we're hearing about them now?

a combination.

[00:21:43] Tim Nash: we, have seen the rise and fall. We've certainly seen a lot more, attempts at ransomware style hacks against companies and corporations. We're also seeing a slight change in, posture where the companies are being told, don't pay the hackers. which means that they then have to go, if we don't pay them, then we have to deal with the fallout from.

I don't think that necessarily the fret has actually increased, but I, certainly, public perception has, and I think companies are much more willing to get to, to just say, actually. We'll ride this out. We'll be okay. Yeah. Whether that's the right answer or the wrong answer, I don't know. But they, tend, I think more companies are riding this out and they also are reaching for publicity earlier.

One thing that has changed is that I think companies' perspective is that they don't necessarily think of themselves as failing by having a cyber incident. Whereas before it would be hush we're gonna hate this.

[00:22:43] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's interesting. Now, it's,

[00:22:45] Tim Nash: it's a bit more, we've had this incident, we might as well be public about it.

Especially if it's one where it is a ransomware style set up where it's like we can't get into our systems. So it's it, people are gonna find this out very quickly. We might as well just say, it's at the same time we are seeing certain industries have had a drop in data breaches being reported, which implies almost the exact opposite where they're, 'cause it's unlikely that there have been less people having data breaches.

It's more likely they're just not report, which. Its own set of problems. So a mixed bag.

[00:23:21] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. let's move on from that one. Shall we, should we go onto the next one quickly, Tim? The, next one is this, it's another security related one 'cause that's Tim Schick. this is on malware bytes labs website, malware bytes.com under the engineering hood.

Why Malwarebytes showed, chose WordPress as its CMS, so it's security blended with a bit of WordPress. Sounds like good news. yeah, this is

[00:23:46] Tim Nash: a, I was gonna say, it's not really a security story other than who. Is moving my, who using WordPress be hunting? Malwarebytes is a very popular security blog.

It's very popular set of security software. it's, and honestly the story is basically why they chose WordPress, the setup. But they do put a quite a lot of emphasis into the security aspects and about some of the app things that they've done and way that they've changed things to make it more secure on WordPress.

But actually, I really did the fact that they went through basically outlining why they thought this was a good choices. It's ironic that in a couple of cases I went, that's not quite what, I would've put there. And

[00:24:30] Nathan Wrigley: so

[00:24:30] Tim Nash: whether though they're gonna be changing their mind in two years time, we'll see.

Yeah, the JU

[00:24:34] Nathan Wrigley: story.

[00:24:37] Tim Nash: But on the whole. It's a good, it's a good news piece and it's a well thought out piece. And it really, shows that the, if you take the time to look at WordPress and not just immediately poo pooh it, you can find, good things and you can actually go, okay, I, there is that good reasons to still use WordPress?

I think there's, we're, as a industry, we've got very, and as a WordPress community, we are like, we are on the decline. People are, don't, aren't coming to us anymore. Oh no, we must look at shiny thing over there. Oh no, we must react immediately. And, this is a good example of actually we do, if we do the right things and stay the course, people will come to us because people do recognize that going for the shiny is not always the right answer.

And that's what this article is.

[00:25:27] Nathan Wrigley: Did you just make a react based joke? No. Ah, it would've been so good. Sorry. Reacted. We need to react immediately, is what you said. I thought that was, very good. yeah. Okay. So there we go. As always, I will put the links in the show notes. So there's two pieces from Tim, and then we're gonna move on to a few bits and pieces that Mark has sent in our direction.

The, this one very much in the, the WordPress space, it's over at WP Product Talk. I mentioned Macro Cromwell earlier. Matt does a podcast with, with, I, I think it's, is it, just, who, who, is it like a whole crowd of people or is it just,

[00:26:08] Mark Wilkinson: I know Katie's on it. I don't know if it's more than that.

Yeah, I just wondered if

[00:26:10] Nathan Wrigley: it was more than Katie. Keith, there's a picture here of Katie and, they're talking about lifetime deals. What did you glean from this mark?

[00:26:19] Mark Wilkinson: So essentially lifetime deals is something in the WordPress plugin space. So I think, Katie says in this article that Bond two who she, she's the owner of Bond two, and they build plugins for, I think it's like WooCommerce mainly, but other things.

Yeah. Yeah. And they offer some of their plugins. I was just looking this morning. Not all of them, but some of them, they offer a lifetime. Pricing package at four times the cost of, of an annual package. So if you want to buy once and never pay for it again, you'll pay four times the cost. and essentially this article was saying that she was worried, sorry.

No, actually she thought that this wasn't a problem, and this confirms it as they've gone through and done all the data, that essentially they make more money from that than they do from selling the cheaper ones, if that makes sense. Yeah. Now, as a product or owner myself, I would be kind, I've always been on the side of we offering lifetime deals, like a one-off cost that people pay, but essentially, as he's saying, those customers use less support and they lead less handholding than the customers that buy it on a manual basis.

And therefore. It actually makes some more money. I think that's the crux of the article, which I thought was really interesting.

[00:27:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:27:36] Mark Wilkinson: it feels wrong to me, does lifetime licenses, but I guess if financially it makes sense, then why wouldn't you do it, I suppose is the, thing I, suppose

[00:27:47] Nathan Wrigley: with the lifetime deal thing, like the four X kind of is a really credible place to put it, isn't it?

Because if your churn rate is, I don't know, let's say two and a half years or two years or something like that, then four, you're doing really well if you get four years out of it. but I think a lot of people, when they think about lifetime deals, they think about that app sumo model where it's bargain basement, $49 forever and a day.

That is a different animal, I think, to this, where, she's, yeah, I think

[00:28:15] Mark Wilkinson: you get the, you get the, when the, when a product first starts, don't you, and you get these offers that's to try and fund it and, initially get it started. This is different to that. This is actually the.

Business model of how they price their products or certainly some of them.

[00:28:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yep.

[00:28:30] Mark Wilkinson: just got me thinking about our products. Would it work for our products and, got me thinking, why as a consumer would you want to pay four times as much for something. Apart from the fact, you know you're never gonna pay from it again.

[00:28:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But

[00:28:46] Mark Wilkinson: four years seems a long time to think I'm still gonna need this product in my tech stack with how things progress and change. So

[00:28:56] Nathan Wrigley: I am an absolute sucker for that psychology though. I am genuinely, all you have to say to me is lifetime deal. And I will, inspect that deal much more closely, Than if I didn't. I will dwell on the page and get into the detail of the product because I, dunno what it is that it's this, like this value over time. And you right, there's, a few things in the WordPress space that I've stopped to for more than four years. Yeah. That's what many, the vast majority is like a couple of years.

they have their moment, they do a thing and somebody supersedes it does a better thing. So you go and get that one. But I can tell you, mark, from the point of view of just looking at all the products that you've got available, if you've got a lifetime deal, I will look harder at it, which is curious and a bit.

A bit weird. It's not, sensible.

[00:29:46] Tim Nash: I guess there's a counter argument that the sort of person who's gonna take that four year deal is already your customer champion. So they're already fully engaged and locked into your product, and basically you are now reducing the ability to maximize that appeal to them.

you're not gonna be able to because they're gonna be, anybody who's gonna buy that for four years is planning to be here for four years. you've just lost that connection with them, whereas you could have been potentially increasing your pricing over those four year periods. So it feels like a really, you're basically going, I'm going want, unless you are offering that deal to the person because you want to do something else, maybe to, make them into influencers down the line or whatever, that might make sense.

But otherwise you are basically just capitalizing on somebody who would've paid you more in the first place.

[00:30:40] Stacy L. Carlson: Yes. And, they become your brand ambassador. So I've been in, I've been using WordPress since 2008 and Divvy used to offer a lifetime license and I own it. I will never leave Divvy just because there's no additional cost and Oh, interesting.

I tell people about Divvy, about it, I am the brand, ambassador for Divvy. Here I am talking to you guys about Divvy. And that's the whole thing. And coming from the old world where plugins had one cost, moving to a SaaS model, that was a huge culture shock when I started using Shopify for a while.

because Shopify is, you pay the SaaS model and, it, it's never ending. And those costs build up over time. And you think about it if you're looking at 15 different plugins for your store. And you have to pay a SaaS model for each one of those. That's expensive. but whereas if you're just paying one price for the lifetime of it, you become very, loyal to it.

because it's supporting you, it's there, it's solid. you get what you need from it, and then you don't have to worry about it. So

[00:31:51] Tim Nash: it's interesting. You've also paid for it, so you Yeah. You'll make the thing work. Yes, exactly.

[00:31:57] Nathan Wrigley: Katie's also Katie's business model is to have a range of products that do a small amount of things well.

So it's not like there's just this giant one thing, So I suppose if, she can get a few people on with this one thing on a lifetime deal, there's an opportunity later on. To, I don't know, send them email or whatever to maybe try and persuade them to get the other products as well. Katie, I, don't know Mark how well you follow Katie's stuff, but Katie really runs the numbers.

she's very, honest and forthcoming about her business and the data behind her. Like it's amazing how honest she's, yeah, definitely. If

[00:32:34] Mark Wilkinson: you, if you're not following her on Twitter, I recommend it. Yeah. Because she, she posts very open about the whole business and what they do and decisions they make and the, things that go into making those decisions.

It's really insight and, the one

[00:32:45] Nathan Wrigley: thing that, that almost nobody is willing to divulge, she tells you her numbers. Yeah. and, so she's run the data and for her, it, I think it said six of the, bits and pieces. 6, 6, 6, 6. Yeah. I analyzed six, no, sorry, six years. That was six years of ban two's real support data.

I'm just quoting off the page here to discover how lifetime customers actually need help and whether the higher price truly covers the cost long term. And, the bottom of the line is that she, She think that it works. It's a, winner for them. So yeah. Curious. I think as a product owner, I'm not a product owner.

I might be at some point in the near future. Hopefully this kind of stuff is something that kind of keeps me awake at night. 'cause I get what you're meaning Mark. You don't really want to give away the baby with the bath water and, have infinite support. There's another thing, I don't know what you get with your lifetime deal with Barn two.

Do you get support forever and ever in a day or is it just the plugin updates or what? I

[00:33:44] Mark Wilkinson: assume so. Or else, yeah.

[00:33:46] Nathan Wrigley: Why would you do it? That's, some people do the, some lifetime deals. You get plugin updates, but you get a year of support. Yeah. Got you. Yeah. I'm not sure. I'd have to check. I'd have to check.

Yeah. But, and interesting, yeah, definitely go and follow, Katie, barn too. But again, links will be in the show notes. Does anybody wanna add anything to that before we move on to Mark's next bit? Okay. In which case we'll move on to Mark's next bit. A feature sorely lacking from core WordPress has been the accordion, but it's common to a, I think, we're all using details blocks or, yeah.

Downloading third party suites of blocks and things like that. However, 6.9 an Accord, a credible accordion, an actual accordion is gonna land in WordPress. And, you are giving us Justin Tadlock themeing article. What do you wanna add to this?

[00:34:36] Mark Wilkinson: Yeah, as always Excellent. From Justin. really easy to follow.

Yep. I love reading his articles and then coming out with something really positive at the end. So if you, wanna know about the accordion block, I guess this is the place to go. Yep. to read it. It's on the, WordPress org site. Yeah.

[00:34:54] Nathan Wrigley: It's one of the sort of

[00:34:55] Mark Wilkinson: like articles that they publish.

I can't remember which section it's in now. Is it in the make section or the, it's developer

[00:35:00] Nathan Wrigley: dot developer dot WordPress org in, yeah. Yeah. so I think

[00:35:04] Mark Wilkinson: the accordion block is, there's two blocks. There's an accordion wrapper. And then an accordion item block, I believe, and they nest. to produce accordion.

we, use a lot of these on sites and like, yourself, we've been using the details block or building our own. Yep. And it's nice to see this come into core. I think so. Yeah. Very good. It's,

[00:35:24] Nathan Wrigley: it's done a really nice job. Some of these look really, nice. he is done a really good job.

And obviously it's for those of you that just wanna short circuit, figuring out the CSS yourself, he's done that hard work. And, I, don't think it'll be all that difficult to work out, but now you don't even have to think about it 'cause Justin has done it. That's, look at that, isn't that nice?

Yeah. That really fits my aesthetic of what I like to look at on a website. Well done Justin. Nice. styling accordions in WordPress 6.9 if you wanna Google it, but it, as I said, it'll be in the show notes. And one more, this is Ryan Welcher, this time another magician.

[00:36:00] Mark Wilkinson: So this, we've all, I presume, I presume we've all used a query loop block at some point in our past.

Oh, yeah. and it does what it says on the tin. It gives you a query loop for posts or whatever, and this plugin gives you all the stuff that you wish that block actually had. Yeah. like querying via, custom fields querying via everything except to specific taxonomy. There's all sorts in there.

I really, I, we had a, actually, a client came to us asking for, a little piece of functionality. He was like, oh, we were using the query block and it doesn't do what they wanted it to do. So it was like, oh, what do we have to do about this? Do we have to build something, blah, blah, blah. And I, had used this before, a long time ago.

Installed it and it was, just lovely. So I just thought I'd mention it. Yeah, no, it's really, if you want more controls on your query to do more things, all the stuff that you really wanna do is probably in this plugin. So I'll give it a look.

[00:36:54] Nathan Wrigley: The one thing that I'm surprised that the core version doesn't do, and, I don't think it does it, I could be wrong, you can't do multiple post types at the same time.

You can't create, you can't create a query of, let's say, posts and some other custom post type you can just do, A post or a custom and post. Whereas this image, I can see it on the, just right here is first out of the bat, first thing that I can see on that screenshot is exactly that it's able to combine.

The other really good thing

[00:37:22] Mark Wilkinson: about it was that when I, once I'd installed this plugin, I could simply, I don't know what the technical term is, but convert the existing query loopt block into Nice. This new one. So I didn't need to rebuild it or anything. I could just, what's that button that says, convert to a different block?

What you

[00:37:39] Nathan Wrigley: mean? Yep. Yep.

[00:37:39] Mark Wilkinson: This came straight up as a suggestion. Just press it and then you got all the other options appeared. So it was really good.

[00:37:46] Nathan Wrigley: Do

[00:37:47] Mark Wilkinson: does

[00:37:47] Nathan Wrigley: this create a new block or does it just hijack the settings of the. I believe

[00:37:53] Mark Wilkinson: it's using the query block and it's just extending it as such.

Yeah, that's rather than a new block.

[00:37:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Ideal. Yeah. 'cause when you've installed a bunch of those things and you type in query or loop, you get about nine. Yeah. And then the icons all look broadly the same. They've got two like overlapping circles that look a bit like a number eight and then, you'd have to, okay.

That one's slightly bluer than that one. I think that's the one I'm after. So anyway, needless to say, you probably won't need anything else if you've got this installed. it's totally free.

[00:38:23] Mark Wilkinson: Totally free. Yeah. And I think recently it's had some updates. It says three months ago there. I call that recently.

Yeah. it's had a few iterations, but recently some, more from the very

[00:38:33] Nathan Wrigley: nice Ryan Welcher. Okay. Next one. All I have to say is shield your eyes. If you've got any kinda like motion thing. Don't, keep looking. oh, it's just full on. Look at

[00:38:48] Mark Wilkinson: it. why are we looking at this mark?

it was simply something I came across, a book Formula One fan that was watching it last night. I don't know how it ended up, I ended up going to this, it's landowner.com. He's a Formula One driver. and I just landed on this and thought, Ooh, ooh, that is interesting. Part of me thinks, wow, that is really cool.

I think that's quite nice. And then you think start thinking technically how would you deliver that sort of thing?

[00:39:12] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah.

[00:39:13] Mark Wilkinson: and but then part of me actually uses it and thinks. I'm not sure this is actually a good experience. Once you've got past that initial, like excitement of it all moving around.

It sometimes is a bit like distracting. It'd be interesting to see what people think. so yeah, it was just one of those things where you, I'm not quite sure whether I love it or whether I hate it.

[00:39:33] Nathan Wrigley: So my, so previously my mouse was away from the screen. This is the default version of it. It's just that.

But then as soon as you start putting your mouse in, look, at all this. To me, it's a video. I'm literally watching a video or an advertising hoarding. like advertisements have stops now. They've, all got like video screens and all that kind of stuff. It looks like something like that.

But the, joy carries on because, you keep scr, oh, look, everything that could be done to make this interesting. Is being done. Look at it like really strange scrolling that sort of goes left and then and then comes back and I have no idea. It's kind cool, but

[00:40:11] Mark Wilkinson: I don't know. I'm just, I'm still a bit un on, tired as to what I think of it.

But then there's some of the other features on the other pages are quite nice as well. okay. Let's try some more simple, say more simple, but slightly more simple on track.

[00:40:23] Nathan Wrigley: Let's get, oh, transition transit transition. Yeah. That was fun. Oh, yeah. Can you imagine how many meetings there were to get this website launched?

There's not enough spin on the helmet. We need more spin on the helmet. yeah. Amazing. Absolutely amazing. It just shows you what a modern browser can do. My personal take mark, if you're interested, is it's just too much for me. It's way too much. See, and I,

[00:40:50] Stacy L. Carlson: and it's stunning. I think it's, isn't that interesting?

It's beautiful.

[00:40:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:40:55] Mark Wilkinson: I think my take on these is I, love them initially. You land on the website and you, it's beautiful and its transitions are amazing. But then I think once you've seen that once and you actually want to read the website, I want to take that away and just get to the content.

Yes. but that's just me. See, this just reminds me

[00:41:14] Stacy L. Carlson: of the old days with like macro media. yes. back in the 1990s, back when everybody was starting to experiment with all the different things that you could do on the, on a browser. And it's just, that's, there's a bit of nostalgia,

[00:41:29] Nathan Wrigley: So I'm looking at it on a phone as we speak, and, it's having, a time, let's put it that way.

The phone is, everything is jittering and, not managing to keep up. Can I just say. I have no doubt that this, he's called Lando Norris. There's no way his parents weren't Star Trek fans, who's, called Lando. apart from Do you mean Star Wars? Star? That's what I meant. Oh, I fluffed the line so badly.

Oh, I feel terrible. Yes. I do mean Star Wars. Lando, what was his name? Calrissian or something? Yeah. Oh, that him? Yes, I remember. Have one job. There we go. Yeah, it looks like a film to me. It is definitely too much. But, it'd be interesting if we got Peach Neri in the comments. We don't, I don't think this week, but she will be.

Be up in arms, I'm sure. 'cause I don't get, I have no agency. I don't know if I can switch all this stuff off. Can I switch it off? I don't to be able, I didn't that. Yeah, no. Anyway, it's beautiful. Very interesting and very, cool. James says the good old days of flash. Yeah. Yep, indeed. That's what it's like.

All right. Okay. And this one came courtesy of Stacy. I haven't read this one 'cause it was dropped in the last moment. So tell us what we're looking.

[00:42:47] Stacy L. Carlson: It's going with the old nostalgia aspect. it's the theme through all of this is that, they did this study that showed that affiliates with all the changes with AI and Google and changing their algorithms, that newsletters are being used by affiliates for growth.

And, I think it's a important thing to relearn. 'cause a lot of companies and businesses have moved away from newsletters and, I think it's time to re-approach the own, your own media and data aspect. yeah, what was it they found that? websites or affiliates that used, newsletters had a 66% increase in conversions.

Wow. their open rate is typically 39% click rate is point. it's about 5%. and I found it interesting that they saw the most engagement on Mondays, Fridays, and weekends. 'cause that is something that has changed quite a bit. okay. They're the days that

[00:43:49] Nathan Wrigley: I would never send email. Exactly.

'cause I thought they were the last days.

[00:43:52] Stacy L. Carlson: Oh, yep. Yeah. That's what I, thought was interesting. But it it goes back to the aspect of, why do we use WordPress? Why did I use WordPress? it's so I could own my data. when I ran an e-commerce company, we installed WordPress so that we could do a newsletter.

that was the sole purpose. 'cause we, my, I had a e-commerce company and my designers, posted on WordPress and we RSS fed that over the MailChimp and sent on a newsletter on a daily basis. And so just seeing it come back and becoming relevant again, it all, it's all full

[00:44:27] Nathan Wrigley: circle. I find that really curious because I've been using the internet since.

Fairly early on, not the very beginning, when email was more or less, the only thing that was a way of communicating. There were webpages and, email and that kind of thing. E email is the one thing that's never been dropped by me. I've, yeah, I've never stopped using email. I've tried different social platforms and used those as a broadcast platform or a way of communicating, but email has always been the way of doing it.

And oddly, I was having a chat with my son the other day, who's now old enough to enter the workplace and he was saying, nobody uses email, dad. And I said, wait till you're about 20. and we'll have this conversation again, because soon as you enter the workplace, it's gonna be email.

I don't care what you think, it's not gonna be Snapchat. but I've always read newsletters. That's another feature I've subscribed to them. The minute I'm curious about something that somebody's doing. 'cause I know that they can get intravenously into my head in a way that I want them to, and I know that I can unsubscribe from them.

So I'm astonished that it even went away. I didn't realize that we, it was a thing which kind of ebbed and flowed. Okay.

[00:45:38] Stacy L. Carlson: Yeah. 'cause the generations are being conditioned by social media.

[00:45:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And

[00:45:44] Stacy L. Carlson: what, people, what they are not being conditioned on is to understand that they don't own that data.

Their brand is not theirs. It's tiktoks or YouTubes and, Even down to I'm on TikTok and seeing people build link trees. link trees are where they can actually put all their links, but it's still not theirs because it's hosted on a different company. And, but to be able to own your own data is so important because nobody can take that away from you.

Whereas YouTube could shut you down in a heartbeat. Whereas newsletters, those are your words, those are your people. You know who they are. You can build the demographics around them and understand exactly who they are, and nobody's controlling that except for you.

[00:46:29] Nathan Wrigley: I think my, my, so my podcast episodes, I've got a plugin which is built inside a WordPress, which kind of in, in some way hijacks the post type and enables you to send proportions of what you write in the post out.

To the email client in, like MailChimp or whatever it may be. And, so I'm just writing it in one place and it's all happening. That's really nice. But I know, Tim, you've got a newsletter and I think you have a kind of on and off relationship with it. I don't know if it's easy for you to keep going with it.

[00:46:59] Tim Nash: it's, it is currently, it's very off state. but yeah, no, I've been doing random mutterings, which is my newsletter, has been going for 15 years on and off. it was a traditional newsletter. It was started as a, this is what I'm doing at the moment, and it's morphed into things over time, but I really struggle.

Yeah. To send that consistently. I struggled to make time for it, and it be, when it became a chore, it wasn't fun. Now, to be clear that for me, random mutterings isn't actually a business part of that. In fact, one of the things I, one of the reasons I think people subscribe is because I pretty much don't sell anything in it, ever.

I, really, occasionally I'll say I'm going to this place or I'm at this conference, but beyond that, I try very hard not to sell anything on it. It's, all about what I find interesting, what I come through. I'm wondering though, on the Monday and Fridays. If those stats will very quickly change because currently everybody, like including Nathan, is currently not posting on a Monday to Friday.

So basically you've just got less competition, which is why Friday it's out

[00:48:10] Nathan Wrigley: every, yeah. I just assumed everybody will

[00:48:12] Tim Nash: just jump on the trade. And Tuesdays are, Wednesdays are where it's gonna be.

[00:48:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I do Tuesdays and Thursdays and I just assumed that Fridays was off because everybody was gearing up for the weekend and Monday.

'cause everybody was dealing with the inbox deluge That happened on Thursday, Fri, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. But that's really interesting.

[00:48:31] Stacy L. Carlson: I think it depends on what you're selling and Tim, you might not be selling anything like, tangible, but you're selling yourself. And that's the, whole aspect of those newsletters.

[00:48:43] Tim Nash: Tell, you've not read one of my newsletters anymore. You buy me after that.

[00:48:48] Stacy L. Carlson: But yeah, so like on the weekends I look at newsletters because. I'm doing hobbies, so if it's a hobby aspect.

[00:48:56] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah.

[00:48:57] Stacy L. Carlson: Whereas if it's a business product that has business, decision making that's during the week. so it really depends on what it is you're trying to sell.

going back to my e-commerce company, we did the same thing they posted on WordPress. it would take a blurb from that and just get into a newsletter. And so we never had to put a newsletter together. It's whatever was posted on the blog would end up in the newsletter. And we sent that on, daily basis and it was phenomenal because there was no thought put into it.

we just posted on WordPress and that was our newsletter

[00:49:33] Nathan Wrigley: and off it went. Yeah. And

[00:49:36] Stacy L. Carlson: off it went. Yeah.

[00:49:36] Nathan Wrigley: It's curious. I've. I'm still using RSS readers. Google readers long since dead. But I've found I've had many alternatives over the year. I still love, that. And email newsletters.

I absolutely love it. And there's just something about the A, you've allowed them into your life so that they can just dump stuff into your inbox, but b you can just ignore it. if you, haven't got the time, you just ignore it. Yeah. And then I go through and, maybe I'll look at it a couple of weeks later or something.

Tim though, just asking you, do you feel like with your random monitorings, does it feel like failure if you don't stick to a cadence, could, you just flip over to a random, not random monitorings, but random schedule. Couldn't you just do it as a, whenever the heck I've got time kind of thing?

[00:50:23] Tim Nash: I, the psychology behind it is quite scary, but yeah, no, basically the reason I haven't part, the reason I haven't posted is because of that.

Feeling of like failure of not reaching the previous cadence and then going, if I start again, I have to be doing this regularly, otherwise what's the point? Oh, that's interesting. I also think that there is a level of expectation. sitting there, where people are like, I've signed up to this.

I expect you to deliver me something. And when you suddenly very much outta the blue go, hell i with my random newsletter, that really is random timings. yeah. And then no context attached to it, it's oh, hi, yeah, here's this newsletter. I've been really fortunate that the people who do subscribe really want that because they're putting up with it.

and it's great and it goes, can

[00:51:15] Nathan Wrigley: I, can I just. I, think they've subscribed, so they, you already know they want your stuff. Yeah, I think, you don't need to apologize to them, I don't think, because they've already confirmed like, I like Tim Nash, I want his stuff, and they'll be happy to get it whenever the heck you decide to drop it.

That's my take on it anyway. And

[00:51:36] Stacy L. Carlson: the name is random. yeah, random doesn't have a cadence to it.

[00:51:41] Tim Nash: I, we should point out that nothing is truly right. Nothing is truly right. Oh, we've done this, is

[00:51:46] Nathan Wrigley: a whole episode. No, we're not going there. Again. I'm gonna prove to you one day that something is random.

I don't know what it's gonna be. it'll probably be something my son says, which is very random, I could assure you. Okay. newsletters are a thing. it turns out, and there's loads of solutions in WordPress, if you fancy getting yourself on, wordpress.com, Jetpack, sorry, does all that kind of stuff.

I'm using a thing called Newsletter Glue. What else is the mail poet? There's all sorts of different ways you can do it. Or you, what do you use? You button down or something, don't you, Tim? Yeah. I,

[00:52:23] Tim Nash: I use button down though. I'm moving away from it. This is, one of the

[00:52:28] Nathan Wrigley: things I've noticed about you is the platform is half the f you just not Yeah.

Isn't it fiddling with the platform? I,

[00:52:36] Tim Nash: do, because I'm a tinkerer at heart. That's what I, that's what I like and that's a part of the problem is that it's like I, I, the reason I chose Button Down was for all the reasons that I suspect Stacy would hate Button down. I have no tracking capabilities. I don't know how many people open the newsletter.

I don't know how many people clicked on the newsletter. This, to me, is exciting because that's, it means it's very privacy focused. It means people can sign up knowing that I can't just sell my newsletter mailing list to a bunch of, companies and say, I could EE even if someone came to me today and said, I'd like to advertise on your blo on your new lecture.

How many subscribers do you have? And I won't be there going. You really, I know the answer to that question. but that's the type of thing I wanted it to be. It's a hobby, it's a hobby thing that was put there. if you take something like, JP security one oh one.com, that newsletter goes out every two weeks.

It's packed full of bits and pieces. That's your business more, isn't it? That's the business one matters more. And you know that one matters. So that has to have, and that does have the Cajuns that keeps going. But yeah, the random mutterings is like. It's very much my tinkering hobby, and that's how I learn, that's how you should learn and develop stuff.

[00:53:53] Nathan Wrigley: So Jonathan overall is saying, the usual thing that we always say in the WordPress space, owning your own data. He's been preaching that for 27 years. so Yep, absolutely. Courtney says, I love Feedly. So we're back to RSS, feed leaf RSS and to receive newsletters. Oh, it does that as well.

Does

[00:54:10] Stacy L. Carlson: it? Yeah. I use Feedly for that.

[00:54:13] Nathan Wrigley: whatever the minimum paid plan is, it gives me that ability. Yeah. Great. Stacy, you were just

[00:54:18] Stacy L. Carlson: Yeah, no, I use it too just because I can categorize. the each little thing that I wanna read, and then, oh, okay.

[00:54:25] Nathan Wrigley: You can tag things and whatnot.

[00:54:27] Stacy L. Carlson: Yeah. Yeah.

And I usually, whenever I travel, that's when I go to Feedly.

[00:54:32] Nathan Wrigley: and then Courtney says, again, RSS Toten. I don't know, do I know Toten is that a person? I'm guessing? just built a blog post Wishing, wishing more of the WP Block CSS layouts could pass over. RSS. Dave Weiner spoke at about it. It's truncated.

last week at WordCamp Canada. And then maybe this is Matt. Matt made Ross. This show got a lot more posh with Wilkinson. Here. There, you go. That's, that's all we have to say. Posh. That's gonna be the title of this episode. Now this show I've intrigued. Got a lot more posh with Wilkinson here.

That's, what it's gonna be. You are very posh. Mark. I've noticed that. Posh. Really? No. Does anybody know what posh stands for? The, acronym? Do you all know that story? It may be apocryphal, it's an acronym. And if you, if you were sailing from the UK to America, the best views could be seen out of a certain side of the ship in both directions.

And so it's the acronym for Port Out Starboard Home. There you go. And, I can prove it 'cause it's in Mary Poppins. There. You

[00:55:43] Tim Nash: right. That's songs. Are we songs. I, just to, check, you do know that, Mary Poppins is a fictional story. There isn't any. I'm

[00:55:52] Nathan Wrigley: gonna mute you. If you go any further, there's nothing you to be said.

There you go. see, look. It comes out of the mouth of the one and only Keith, Devon. I think Mark knows him a bit. poor out star, but home. Exactly. That's what I thought too. So go and have an argument with him, Tim. Okay. Let's move on. Let's do some word pressy. Bits and pieces. Press the bottom on my thing, which makes every, all the screens go into a smaller version, Everything's got a bit messed up. Okay. WordPress 6.9 coming around very soon. if you have any intuition that you'd like to help with anything, can I just point you in the direction of this one article? it's massive. It's absolutely massive. There's no way we're gonna get through it. if I scroll, you'll get an impression.

This article will give you the absolute. Low down on all the bits and pieces that would, that would benefit from being tested on. So all of the new features that are dropping, but it's not just random things, it's, also little video showing you the kind of things that you might be interacting with, the things that they want feedback on.

and so it's a very, thorough piece. So firstly, hat tip to, Cooper Nanda for writing such a long piece is due to ship December the second 2025. So we're not that far away. And you can see from the table of contents. exactly what might need looking at. So it's things like, I don't know, ability to hide blocks.

there's a key testing checklist. Border radius. There's some developer stuff to look at. Social links are getting an update. There's all the new blocks, the accordion block, the math block, the paragraph and heading, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And on goes. if you fancy helping the project out, this is a great place to, to make your endeavors, known in the next what?

Four, five weeks. Anybody got anything to add to that? I suspect not.

[00:57:50] Tim Nash: I was gonna say, just to say that you can still do bug reports independently from this. This is like a big guide for things that they would like testing and help with. Yep, It's okay to just download the beta tester plugin and play with it in your own use cases and just flag things that are issues.

you do not have to join the, full on testing team experience to help provide feedback, 'cause feedback, regardless of how it comes, is super important. Thank you.

[00:58:21] Mark Wilkinson: Thank you. Where, do you provide feedback star interest?

[00:58:24] Tim Nash: if you're brave enough to be on track.

[00:58:28] Nathan Wrigley: there's the core test.

Slack channel is one place that you could join. That's probably the most useful I would've thought. But yeah, Tim, that's

[00:58:35] Tim Nash: where they'll give you, that's where if you are joining in with the scrubbing and the testing that they're asking for, if you're picking up issues and bugs and things, and you, if you think it's just a general issue, then there is based on the WordPress forums, and if you think it is a bug, then if you're brave.

Track

[00:58:56] Nathan Wrigley: it. This is one of the problems that I think we suffer from in this community is there's lots of different places where you can go to do lots and lots of different things and there's not one like canonical, satisfies every kind of thing. Yeah. so it, that can be very confusing. There's a multi multitude of different places all that have utility, all that have utility in slightly different ways.

I think you were nodding there, Tim. I dunno if you would agree. I was just thinking

[00:59:22] Tim Nash: that it's, very organic. we've developed these things.

[00:59:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:59:26] Tim Nash: if we were building the, if project was being built today, track wouldn't exist, but track exists and is the canonical ish place that things are going to, but then you've got.

The, we want to be as flexible and as friendly as possible to people so that you can get your issues reported in the easiest way possible. And so if you open up more channels, then you've got the problem. now we have to manage all those channels independently and we've gotta still bring them all back.

so you're never going to win. Basically, if you have too much communication lines, then things get lost. And if you have one communication tool, like track, people are just gonna go. O and not be able to make their way through it.

[01:00:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So Tammy's saying what we, I think we've just reprised reporting on track stroke, GitHub and core test.

And, she says it's more there are options. Yes, indeed. Okay. Thank you. anyway, there's a, what the reason I was bringing this article to, my, to bear here though was just the range of things that you might not realize it would be useful to cast an eyeball over. Obviously there's a bunch of suggestions here for things that you might wanna do.

it may be that you've got no complaints and you've got nothing that you've ever seen that might need looking at. So here's some ideas, basically. so we can find bugs, don't we worry? We indeed, Okay, so quickly moving on, this is a little bit of a, I dunno, self-promotion. I did a podcast episode this week with, a lovely chap, from the Pew Research Foundation called Seth Rubenstein.

And I, I don't know anything about the Pew Research Foundation, but it turns out if you live in the US they're like this, I, wanna say, almost philanthropic. I don't think it got a political affiliation, let me put it that way. They, amassed huge amounts of publicly available data and then digest it and make it available for people to draw conclusions about the state of this and the state of that massive amounts of data.

And Seth Rubenstein is a WordPress and also works with them trying to make that data presentable. To millions of people who want to consume it in the US And and so he was talking to me about what he was calling block composability, which was not something that I really understood, but it was the idea of combining different things and some of the new features that are gonna come in WordPress in the very near future if they haven't dropped already.

And some of the capabilities that are going to be possible. We actually, Tim and I talked about it a little bit about it last week, block bits, which, whether or not it will happen, yeah, I even put it in brackets still very much in development. Things like the block bindings API and interactivity.

API, it's hard for me to sum up. Seth does it better, but it's idea of, wrangling data and presenting things in charts and all sorts of other ways excites you then go and check that episode out. Number one 90 on the tavern. Okay. shall we do this one? Does anybody have any interest? I'm just looking at the time.

We've only got half an hour left. Do you think we want do this one? Not. Yeah. Tim ish. Yeah, no, ish. Okay, let's do it quickly. search engine journal, I'm not sure what anybody makes of that, whether or not that's a good thing or not. I'm not so sure about whether I trust everything that they say, but they produce an article this week called WordPress versus Ever one, the top CMS for core web vitals.

they're into Google search results, search rankings. The metrics that make your site successful in Google. And, so they say, why call web vitals matter, blah, blah, blah. And then they go on to rank the CM, you know where this is going. they, go to rank the CMSs in order of a out of the box version of the website and how well it does in core web vitals, make of that what you will.

the number one CMS in terms of core web vitals according to search engine journal is the, is doda, is that even how you say it? I'm a bit mindful of saying that incorrectly. Doda, in second place came. Wix well done. They get the silver medal. fighting for bronze was Squarespace. Everybody else is, and also ran Drupal came in fourth June, came in fifth, and our beloved WordPress.

Came in, last out six. It came in as six out six. So my, this point, Tim starts,

[01:03:56] Tim Nash: no, My empty text file came in first. I'd like to point out with a hundred percent. So

[01:04:03] Nathan Wrigley: anyway, the point being, I think a vanilla version of WordPress out the box as a fighting chance of doing really well. I, I, see a, I as an example, I put a website out this week, just for testing a few bits and pieces, and I ran it through, called Web Vitals.

It was vanilla. It had a default 2025 theme in it. I put a bunch of blog posts on, I did some query loops, yada, yada, really ordinary stuff. It was a, across the board, a for, there was no images, I'll say that. it was a, across the board, super duper everything. It was done on Pressable, whatever that counts for.

which is a hosting company if you didn't know. And it all worked out of the box, however. You get a big organization like Search Engine Journal writing something like this, and they say there is also a perception that WordPress is faster than Wix do. And Squarespace, the facts of course, show that the opposite is true.

WordPress is the slowest of content management systems in this comparison. And now of course, we'll have the deep joy of AI consuming this lovely sentence and regurgitating it, adding

[01:05:12] Tim Nash: you don't think that AI wrote that sentence?

[01:05:15] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, now, this,

[01:05:18] Tim Nash: this is just, the, this is just an article written for you, Nathan, to clickbait you into it.

We all 'cause you damn it said it yourself. you've already been through this process. you've ha installed, 20, WordPress for 2024. You did some fiddling around it came out brilliantly. It did. Why would then magically theirs not come out brilliantly? Unless they were, there were some fiddling.

I there probably didn't even run the test.

[01:05:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[01:05:44] Tim Nash: they have that little face. We can't even trust it on

[01:05:47] Nathan Wrigley: that level anymore. Okay. Okay.

[01:05:50] Tim Nash: I just think, yeah, when we get to this sort of thing is this is just AI look that's been put out to make you go and promote Search Engine Journal because they're becoming vastly irrelevant.

'cause the AI is stealing all those search rankings. Oh,

[01:06:05] Nathan Wrigley: interesting. Okay. Yeah, I'm probably

[01:06:07] Tim Nash: being a bit mean to them, but No, I

[01:06:09] Nathan Wrigley: know he's real, I know this chap well, at least he was real, maybe,

[01:06:14] Tim Nash: probably got stacked years ago. He's been, but genuinely, it's, when somebody says it, it's the, oh, the reality is the complete opposite of what everybody else has been saying.

Usually. You have to question at least, how did you do this? If you start this article lacks any sort of methodology for this testing or even what they tested? What, you know was it that they literally, they set from the moment they installed? A, the site, they then went and ran core web type vitals.

on a default Drupal site, there's no data on the front end. It's a white page.

[01:06:56] Nathan Wrigley: That's true. That is true.

[01:06:58] Tim Nash: and that apparently that still came forth.

[01:07:03] Nathan Wrigley: they got a newsletter of over 70,000, thousand people, so everything's good. okay, let's move on from that one Anyway, my concern really, the reason that I raised this is it's just the, sort of noise that you, in the ecosystem, when you're dealing with those clients who just have, consumed knowledge from somewhere that WordPress is basically trash.

You know that it's slow, that it's not very secure, that its performance is terrible. Here's an article which they can bring to bear to wave in your, face and say, no, not WordPress.

[01:07:35] Tim Nash: Do you think the 10,000 K reads is hard coded?

[01:07:39] Nathan Wrigley: It's exactly. Got a zero on it, hasn't it? If I keep refreshing, do you think it'll go off?

Anyway,

[01:07:47] Tim Nash: moving

[01:07:48] Nathan Wrigley: on before I, let's move on. Okay, let's move on. ma, Let's keep it in the AI sort of space. in that case we have. So we're gonna run through about four different things in ai. Some of them that are very much to do with WordPress, some of them that are not specifically to do with WordPress, but there's a, an AI thread running through the next four bits.

So here's the first one, not particularly WordPress E, but here we go. The B, B. C. and again, you can trust them or not. They carried out a study, I think it, I believe in association with somebody else. I think there was some other organization involved in that. asking basically, I'll read you the title of the post largest study of its kind shows AI assistance, misrepresent news content 45% of the time, regardless of language or territory.

Now, there is a, you can, there is a methodology somewhere, I can't remember, I don't think it's on this page, but you can read the way that they did this test. And the key findings are as follows. It won't come as a surprise, but maybe in the, next two or three things, it's interesting to have this in the back of your mind.

45% of all answers had at least one significant issue. 31% of responses showed serious. Sourcing problems. So this is about the news, right? You're asking about stuff that's happened recently in the news. 20% contain major in, major accuracy issues. Gemini performed the worst with 79, 70 6% of responses were, were suspects.

76%, comparison between the BBC's result earlier this year. And this study show some improvements, but still high level of errors. Okay? The reason I'm painting that picture is, AI is a mixed bag. it definitely will help us in some regards, but there's always this creeping element of is it going to be doing the right thing for us?

Does anybody wanna comment on that before I move to, I was gonna say, now

[01:09:43] Tim Nash: imagine if you wrote an article about, you got AI to write an article about comparing some, CMS platforms and where, and you just gave it that as a concept in relation to the idea that it just spiritually generates content.

Do you think they use Gemini for that search? Maybe we should just ask that. I'm just saying

[01:10:07] Nathan Wrigley: anyway, the point being. I, think you'd be very wise, not to a hundred percent trust. If you ask an AI a question about something in the news, then you've got to have a little bit of, something in the back of your head saying, can I really trust this?

And et cetera, et cetera. So let's then map that forward to the new fun trend in web design, which is, using AI to do things like create websites and create content for websites and so on and so forth. And that brings us, actually, interestingly, so we had what I think was Matt Madero in the comments earlier, certainly a WP Minute.

It looks like it was, this is a piece that Matt, so it's a video slightly frustratingly, I think for Matt. Matt created a video and I think had done a, good job on it, and then discovered that Descrip, which is the, software that both he and I used to edit content, it just collapsed on him. So he had to re-shoot it, which is a bit annoying.

But the video's really short and in it, he's using for the first time, something which I have not used. I doubt I ever will. it's chat gpt. Atlas browser. Now if, like me, you're a bit of a luddy and you don't want to go near any of this stuff, this is eye popping. Interesting. In that you chat to the browser, the browser has the chat built in and then it does stuff on your website involving the cursor.

So for example, he might ask it to write a post about, I can't remember what he asked it to write about, but he asked it to do that thing. And you can see the cursor moving across the screen and it lands on the page. the buttons that you need to press. It does that and then it goes to the next thing and it does that.

It's pretty interesting. Is it perfect? No. But is it the future? I hope not.

[01:11:58] Mark Wilkinson: It's so slow. what's the point in, almost I think it, the first thing was like deleting the two cover blocks. That was it. Yeah. And for me and you, it's just delete, delete. And it took, I don't know if it was speeded up or not, but it took a long time.

Anyway.

[01:12:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, we had these cover blocks here that he did. Okay. So that was my first thought as well. Mark was like, imagine how slow that is. And then I thought to myself, is it, that this is, the slowest it'll ever be? And is it just slow because it's not yet really sure what it's doing. So there's some sort of confirmation steps going on in the background that we're, that are hidden from us as the users, but it's maybe just checking, am I on the delete button?

Are we sure I'm on the delete button? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't know, but the speed was really obviously painful. But I did wonder, if in six months it's twice as fast and then six months after that, it's twice as fast as that. At some point you can imagine it would be quicker than you and I.

and so the goal is

[01:13:05] Tim Nash: less about watching it do the thing though. So yeah, the real sort of like thing that they're aiming for is you to go design me a pretty page on this. Hit go and then go to the next tab. Book me a my, Spa treatment. Click go. Next tab, go do this next tab. So you've got multiple tabs all doing things independently of you.

It's not designed with the concept of you sitting and babysitting it. Our only problem with that is it's, we've go back to previous our school. We probably want to sit and babysit at the AHI a little bit at the moment. Yeah. Because it's not very good at doing the things.

[01:13:45] Nathan Wrigley: So you've got the context.

So that was why I put that first article up, just to sow the seed of mistrust slightly. And then you get something like this, which I felt very much felt like you Tim. The idea would be that you ask it to do something, then basically go and make a coffee. That analogy come back, has it done it?

Yeah. Okay. Then I'll ask it another thing and then go off and get another coffee. And before you know it, you've drank 19 coffees and you are

[01:14:09] Tim Nash: Oh.

[01:14:10] Nathan Wrigley: but also once, don't you

[01:14:11] Tim Nash: start thinking of it in parallel though? Yeah, exactly. You see this concept of we, when we talk about AI being, about, enabling and providing this idea that, okay, as one person, I can now do five things at once because I've actually got four AI things doing and all I have to do is suddenly master context switching, which obviously humans we are incredibly capable of and don't ever have problems context switching at any point.

[01:14:38] Nathan Wrigley: no. You get a different browser that does the context switching for You you have a whole different AI to, to manage that for you, and you just go and sit down and drink coffee. It's fine. It is,

[01:14:48] Tim Nash: however pretty amazing to see Oh, in action. And, so I've had a quick play with Atlas and was like, yeah, and the first thing you said was, do you wanna log into your Gmail?

no, I don't want you anywhere near my email. That seems crazy. But I'm willing to, set up a staging site and let you play with it in the word frame. But would I put this on a live site? No. Yet will. Oh, go on, Stacy.

[01:15:12] Stacy L. Carlson: Oh, the thing is, I don't think this was made for you guys. You guys know how to code.

I think this is made for my dad who's never built a WordPress site before in his life. And for him, it putting together a website for him. And it doesn't matter how fast or slow it be, mind blowing for him because he can't design a website. And so I think that's the whole, premise behind it, is giving people who don't know how to use WordPress or build a site, the ability to do just that.

[01:15:44] Nathan Wrigley: I, was like, basically if you could speed this video up and you could ignore the fact that the mouse moved slowly and it did everything slowly. I, the bit with AI that constantly amazes me is how it can do. Any of it at all. And in this case, It didn't just do it. watching the video, it mostly did everything that was asked with a very, small text prompt that, that, you know, and not being, unselfish to Matt, I, don't think he was, the intention was to write a really detailed, long prompt.

It was, 15 words in a human readable sentence, click, return and see what happens. And it did exactly what he was asking it to. I, think even to not capitalizing the page title that he asked it to create 'cause he didn't bother to capitalize it in the question itself. I, am amazed by it and terrified in equal measure.

and Tim, you're right. I'm not gonna be downloading this 'cause I, don't, really have great intuitions about. What, connecting a browser to everything that I have, like my Gmail account and my Google Docs and list all the other services that I've got. I don't have good intentions.

I don't have good intuitions about what will come of that. Even though it might be a real like productivity win in the short term. I'm just not,

[01:17:05] Tim Nash: I think Atlas is a, this is a whole browser.

[01:17:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yep.

[01:17:09] Tim Nash: This is, these idea is to replace Chrome, to replace Firefox. and I'm not sure it is actually aimed at Stacey's dad 'cause.

It's a whole new way of thinking about what they're doing because you, end up with chat GPT in front of you for most of the time. So when you open up Atlas for the first time, it's the chat GPT interface and for a lot of it you just constantly engaging as if you are in chat GPT only.

It has a brow. Only sometimes when you open a tab it might have Google in there and then you might tell Google to do this thing. So it's, very much still transitioning Atlas in five years time will be a humongously empowering thing. I suspect for somebody with at, with minimal learning curve. Atlas right now is a very cool tech demo.

The mouse very slightly across. Did you see

[01:18:05] Nathan Wrigley: across

[01:18:05] Tim Nash: the screen,

[01:18:07] Nathan Wrigley: did you see, an article? Do, you follow a guy called Aneel Dash? dunno if you've come across him. I'm, he, wrote an article this week, which I didn't put into the show notes actually, but basically he was saying that. This is a pitch for, open AI through the browser to stop serving you the internet as we know it.

it's not gonna be like anything that you've had before, you know it's gonna give you something bespoke you, and in the same way that, you could accuse sort of social networks of kind of muddying the political waters and what have you. it'll be similar, like, nobody will know what anybody else's version of the internet will look like.

Your search, I know Google have been doing this for a while, but your search results won't come up necessarily in a list. You might just get like the, the clipped version. It'll, try to paraphrase what it thinks you want instead of giving a list of items that you can then click on who knows what it's gonna do with, if you, if it's trying to give you an answer to something, it might just cherry pick.

Various different bits from different pages. Anyway, it was a really interesting piece and it, didn't sit well with me. It made me feel like, okay, if open AI's intention is to, the internet so that what the viewer looks at through this interface of theirs is different from what I have designed on my WordPress website.

I don't buy into that. I hope they don't go down that route, but, we'll, time will tell.

[01:19:32] Mark Wilkinson: Just going back to the original article, the BBC finding though, isn't that sort of saying that AI is biased towards. Certain views, it's not representing the truth. Couldn't you argue that the media is already like that anyway?

I is the

[01:19:49] Nathan Wrigley: argument about, bias or just what they call hallucinations, it's just like it in the absence of knowledge. It just puts a fact or it puts a sentence in front of you. If it were fact, yes, but it would halluc,

[01:20:03] Tim Nash: it hallucinates significantly more. particularly in political things.

There is a bias within it to what the, specific to certain ais the bias. Obviously there is quite a lot that shifts to the right in political spectrum and therefore it will hallucinate more towards the right because it's more biased that way by default. So you could end up in a position, but it's getting that bias.

It didn't generate that bias because it went, ah, I'm going to be her right wing ai. It's getting that bias because the context in the. Things it's getting are there in the first place, which is coming from the media. So they're all tied together into this scenario where you, it, I was sat next to a very, clever, AI specialist, had a word camp recently.

Garbage in, garbage out. Is that

[01:20:55] Nathan Wrigley: what they said? Okay. Thank Yeah. Garbage in,

[01:20:56] Tim Nash: garbage out. Okay. And if you, depending what you feed into, it really will reflect on what you get out. And so with news in particular, I can see how it hallucinates because let's say, face it your average daily mail. News article is a hallucination.

They have to be on drugs based on how they perceive the parts of the world.

[01:21:19] Mark Wilkinson: And that's point and their news on humanity. Each outlet has a different hallucination already. So is, AI any different to that?

[01:21:29] Nathan Wrigley: What One thing that, that I think's really different about this though, in that we're so used to, we stick stuff on a screen.

Like you, you go to, let's say Google any search engine you like and you get more, okay, they feed ads in and all that other things trying to divert you. and increasingly Google are trying to give you the answer, but it's a list of links and then you click on the link and you go to the thing and you discover for yourself whether that's the answer.

And if not, you go back and you begin again. The, intention of this browser really does feel like. Like an attempt to get rid of that whole thing. so you don't look at the WordPress website that you have built? You look at what open AI can extract from it, and they decide what the hell is gonna go in the viewport because, 'cause the AI's decided that, okay.

In answer to that question, we're gonna take a bit from here, a bit from here, a bit from here, and we'll simulate a paragraph from it. And I, don't, even know. And that being built, on a browser level really breaks a kind of fundamental promise I think that we've had since, Tim Burners Lee kind of invented hyperlinks.

You click on a link and you get to a thing and the thing may be to your liking or not, you go and find another thing. This is not like that. This is like entering a library and instead of it being full of books, it's full of, I don't even know what, it's just full of something that's not books.

now there's the,

[01:22:55] Stacy L. Carlson: and Google's doing the exact same thing with their love AI at the top. And the thing is, we're gonna get to a point where, these ais are basically putting companies that write content out of business. we've seen it as far as like our affiliates when they changed the algorithm last year and promoted other things above other things.

Some of our affiliates are down 62% based off of Google's algorithm.

[01:23:21] Nathan Wrigley: Oh.

[01:23:22] Stacy L. Carlson: Because of that, it's a catch 22. They AI is wonderful for giving you that little synopsis, but you don't have to click on a website.

[01:23:31] Nathan Wrigley: No, you don't. Yeah, you really don't. So if you

[01:23:32] Stacy L. Carlson: put those publishers out of business, where are they gonna get their content from?

[01:23:37] Nathan Wrigley: that's the bit, it's like poisoning the water hole. It's a really shortsighted way of doing things. And obviously in the short term, the investors are happy. the stock market story, the stock price goes up 'cause yada. But it doesn't seem like we've got, we haven't really got the long view in mind.

Can I just say, apropos of nothing, this is really nice, right? if you're fed up with Google, I'm not promoting it. There's no affiliate link here. it's called CE. it was started by a guy called Vladimir, who, whose surname I've forgotten, but he was the guy behind manage, managed wp. He sold it to GoDaddy and then he turned his attention to search.

I've been using it for about, I don't know, a year or something like that. The, sting in the tail is you have to pay, so you pay a hundred pounds of their, they're roughly like that, a year or something like that, but there's no ads. there's obviously some kind of algorithm to give you the search, they're, not trying to, to make it so that it's, the sponsors get their stuff in.

And the other thing is you can tailor it. So you can tell it, I like this more. And then it will favor things that you tell it that you like, which I think is interesting. It's called CGI and I'm really enjoying it. I think it, it's definitely slower than Google. you click return and you wait for like half of a second, but.

Honestly, it's not the end of the world, but I, really like it. so fully endorsing it. If anybody, cares about that. It's also

[01:25:06] Tim Nash: got

[01:25:07] Nathan Wrigley: a cute

[01:25:07] Tim Nash: dog on it, which, yeah, it has a cute dog. I, so much branding these days have, we've lost the internet, little mascots. And, they've all been thrown away with horrible corporate branding of all.

[01:25:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, we need more little dogs and cats and wa wahoos and I'm thinking of you

[01:25:23] Tim Nash: may or chimp getting rid of Freddy. I've never forgiven them. How do they have a lifetime license?

[01:25:28] Nathan Wrigley: No, they don't have a lifetime license. No. No. Damn. you can actually bind all the other ais into it as well, but you bring your, You bring your, now I'm not really familiar with ai, so I'm probably gonna butcher what I'm about to say. You bring your context with you, if So you tell it how you want it to behave. So rather than it just being, you type in a question and it gives you the answer, but you can tell it, I would prefer it, please if you behaved in this way or what have you.

So you can set all that up in the background. My intuitions about CGI are what I thought Google was gonna be like 18 years ago. or in fact what it was, and then it went somewhere else. pray that cgi, remains that way. Anyway, there we go. Another thing then, so was all about, this open AI browser.

This, let me go to this one first. We're running outta time really quick. Ws form Mark, west Guard, good friend of the show. He's on lots and lots. He has launched a, similar idea than the one that we just saw, binding his form, creating tool ws form with. Elementor Argentic thing. I don't know what to call that.

Is it an app? Is it a plugin agent? There you go. Thank you so much. so now if you've got Angie, if you use Elementor Angie agent, you can now bind it to WS form and you can tell it to create a form. And again, very similar, in the same way that Matt Madero did it with Build in a webpage. There's a video.

There it is, it's about seven and a half minutes, something like that in which Mark chats with, the agent and gets it to build a form. And it's pretty cool. it's pretty cool. I guess the guardrails are much more in place when you're building a form. 'cause, input in, input out more. It's much more constrained, isn't it?

if it doesn't give you the field that you wanted, you can see straight away. I didn't ask for that. so hopefully it'll be a little bit more, guardrails. I

[01:27:32] Tim Nash: watched an a very untechnical person use Angie, and I was very. Not, against the concept of it, but obviously, I was surprised at how intuitive they did find it.

So this, whereas the, whereas Atlas perhaps not yet suitable for, I we're gonna use Stacy's dad, but as the example, but, perhaps is not yet ready for Stacy's dad. Angie, actually, they could, they, if they, could describe, as long as they can describe what they want, it sometimes would do it.

Interesting. Which is as close as we could possibly get to Good in ai, if we can get to that state of, if we, but again, even with Angie, you have to structure what you say. You are effectively still prompt engineering. We, still haven't mastered natural language systems with these things. We still haven't got a natural way of describing stuff.

It cannot have a conversation and it be a fluid conversation. We have to think about how would the AI interpret what we're saying and give it structure and boundary and context. And we, you, have to. Even if you don't realize you're doing it, you are, adjusting what you would naturally say to get the re the results you want outta it.

But it did do stuff, it, would, put thing elements on the page and do things, and I was actually surprised at how impressed I was.

[01:29:02] Nathan Wrigley: so it, was the same with Matt Madeira's video. Obviously the AI agent, his was the browser, this, AG agentic browser that OpenAI have got. He obviously knew a fair bit about which blocks to find and how to find them in the ui.

Same sort of thing. Angie, in this particular case, he asked it to build a form with these kind of things in it. And it did it, it managed to, it knew, it had the capabilities figured out of where the, UI was and, which buttons to click to get those tasks done. Pretty impressive. it's like baby steps, isn't it?

But to me it's, all of this is absolutely fascinating and terrifying, in equal measure. I'm desperately concerned that we're, that we're throwing the ba baby out with the bath water, because it's entertaining. yeah, we'll soon see. Okay. How much more time have we got? Not a lot. We've just got a couple of minutes.

What should we try and squeeze out of it? I'll just throw this one in just to, to make you feel so much better. the Guardian, the Bank of England warns of risk of growing AI bubble that could burst at any moment. go and buy some gold. that's, the takeaway of that article.

Basically. I think that's it. A couple of other bits which we could mention, but I don't think we're gonna, oh,

[01:30:21] Stacy L. Carlson: let's just, we have to talk about the bed. We talked about it at the Oh yeah. We have to

[01:30:24] Nathan Wrigley: talk about them, but you're absolutely right. Stacy, how could I, I'm just gonna mention this one quickly first.

I didn't know this was a thing. this came from Steve Burge on Twitter. He was mentioning it. He, he's got published press and he's very keen to see, collaborative editing. like Google Docs inside of WordPress come to fruition. not sure that we're gonna get there particularly soon, but he caught sight of this project on GitHub.

It's an automatic project called VIP. So obviously VIP WordPress is v, oh, sorry, automatics. VIP Lane, if you like, real time collaboration. And it is, here it is a plugin. I don't know what it dependencies are or how it works or any of that, but. The word on the street that I've been hearing is that it's, pretty credible that it does a fairly good job of giving you that sort of Google Docs kind of simulation of being able to edit multiple things at one time.

Sorry, multiple users editing at the same time. Tim, anything on that quickly? I knew you had something previously.

[01:31:28] Tim Nash: j Just that it uses web sock as behind the scenes. That's quite cool.

[01:31:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Alright, so then we get to this one very quickly. We'll do animal pitches, because why not? the guardian again, the guardian have got the 25 best animal pitches from this year, and they're just so cool.

so that, look at that. If all of life was like that, we could, all relax. it's a picture of a squirrel jumping through the air. What,

[01:31:55] Tim Nash: what we now have to tell Nathan is, which one of those was AI generated, and can you find none of them? These are all real, they're not fake.

[01:32:02] Nathan Wrigley: They've got the raw data out of the camera.

I'm telling you, they're all real. it better be real damnit. Ugh. okay. And the very last one that we're gonna do is what we mentioned. I have no words for this. AWS there was a crash last week, or I don't know, 10 days ago, whenever it was now, which caused the, no, it was literally last week. We, was it last week?

It

[01:32:24] Mark Wilkinson: was last week. Oh, okay. Yeah, because we

[01:32:26] Tim Nash: were filming and we were gonna not be able to do this week in wood. Oh, that's right. It was, literally last week. Your relied on AWS

[01:32:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[01:32:33] Tim Nash: that's right. Go ahead. What we were about to say.

[01:32:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. So last week, exactly a week ago, AWS crashed and lots of things went down.

So banking in the uk, some banks, the government websites, and a whole variety of things just. Failed to work in the desired way and including

[01:32:49] Tim Nash: WP Builds this week in WordPress,

[01:32:51] Nathan Wrigley: including wp. No, we managed to pull it off. We were only because AWS came back, but loads and loads of unexpected little things that stopped working and the most extraordinarily weird one that I could find.

Was a bed. A bed? How does a bed stop working? somebody has invented a bed, which you plug into the internet. what, who needs this? And it costs $2,000. And actually Tim's got a very good reason for why, but I wanted to make fun of it for ages, $2,000. And it allows you to, with an app you can preheat.

Bed. That's quite nice, But then again, just walk in and turn a dial, it's not that hard. And then it'll also fold away. And so apparently a lot of the, a lot of these beds, they just, they couldn't be unfolded. There was no unfold mechanism apart from the app. So this incredibly expensive bed, unless you were prepared to climb into the fold, it was completely unusable.

But not only that, the, the thermostat set itself to high. So they were like, red, hot, toasty, like burning things. And so it begs the question, who needs an integrated, maybe it serves

[01:34:06] Mark Wilkinson: you right for buying one in the first place.

[01:34:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It's too much money. Too more money than sense. but Tim, you made a good point.

Your point was.

[01:34:16] Tim Nash: Yeah. okay, so the internet enabled part of it. I've, I'm, fully on board with everybody else on the panel. It's like, why, is this? But I, there is something that's part of me that's a preheating bed sounds nice. And I was like, that's what electric blankets are for. And they never go wrong.

but the, as for why it got stuck upright and why that one and having a motorized moosa. 'cause we, we were like, as a joking before the show and say, oh, why, do you even need one? It's let's say that you are in a wheelchair and you need to move around your apartment. Your bed is a big, bulky thing that gets in the way.

You want to be able to move that so you can move your wheelchair freely around, round. You are not exactly gonna be able to get out, lift it, put it up, make it, use force. So the motorized aspects of it make sense that there a, that you might want a bed that will fold up. Makes sense. All of a sudden you can start to see why.

Oh, now make that into an app. That would be really useful. Then I don't need to go near the bed now. I don't need to lean down to find the buttons, because now it could be a remote. It should be a remote,

[01:35:26] Nathan Wrigley: should be a remote.

[01:35:27] Tim Nash: But I can totally see how we got to a smart bed in a practical way. So I've, I'm afraid I've been a big downer on this.

taking the Mickey outta it. no,

[01:35:37] Nathan Wrigley: no. I think it's good. I was having great fun at the bed's expense. However, what I think, they've missed a trick. There's not quite enough ai, in this bed. In all honesty. I think it needs, they really need to drive the AI forward. I dunno what that means, but, hey, imagine

[01:35:55] Tim Nash: if you lying in that bed and it's slowly warming your butt up to tell you it's time to get out of bed.

I'm sold. It's

[01:36:01] Nathan Wrigley: like I'm sold straight away. That's all I needed to hear. $4,000 I'll pay for that bed. That's, oh gosh. And what a strange world we live in. okay. That is truly it. We have run out of time. I'm sorry. Too long that article made my eyes rot. 'cause I thought that was so funny. Stupid bed. Not a stupid bed.

If you're owner of that company, that was great. Stupid bed for

[01:36:26] Tim Nash: what you wanted.

[01:36:30] Nathan Wrigley: Okay? So hopefully if you're in the uk, we'll see you at W-P-L-D-N on Thursday. Please calm down. Tim's gonna be there chatting to us. It'll be really nice. And Thursday, six o'clock in London Bridge. That'd be really nice if you feel that you can make it. If not, what the heck. There we go.

That's all we've got time for. sorry. both Mark and Stacy, you probably don't know this. We have this slightly humiliating thing that we do at the end of the show. It's not that bad, but we always put our hands up. Everybody puts their hands up like that. And then I video, I just capture that.

Look like that. There we go. That's it. We've done it. We've done the humiliating thing. And I will make that the album up the, I think we're gonna call this episode after what Tim just said. I dunno if you noticed it, Tim. You just called it a motorized motor, which fair enough. Desperate to see what one of those is.

I'd love that. And it's in that bed apparently. Take

[01:37:26] Tim Nash: it to a motor. Yeah, exactly.

[01:37:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So that's it. We'll see you next week. Hopefully you'll have a good week. And take it easy. Bye bye. Bye. Bye bye. Cheers. Thanks so much. Bye bye.