This Week in WordPress #357

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It is time for This Week in WordPress, episode number 357 entitled eat the banana. It was recorded on Monday, the 1st of December, 2025.

My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I am gonna be joined by my co-host, Michelle Frechette, but also by Marcus Burnette and Steve Burge.

It's a WordPress podcast, but we do stray into some other bits and pieces as well.

So first off, for example, we talk about a card game, Cards Against Humanity. We get really lost in that and their website and all of the silliness that they do around their Black Friday deal.

And then we talk about an award, which Michelle is up for. Maybe there's a chance if you're listening to this early after it's published, you'll be able to vote for her, and allow her to win that award.

And then we get into the wall, the WordPressy, bits and pieces. There is a lot coming up tomorrow in WordPress 6.9. Where can you find the information? What is available? We get into all of that, plus a lot of the bits and pieces coming in 7.0. Lots of it to do with AI. Should AI be a core part of WordPress or should perhaps it be in a canonical plugin, like it seems to be implied at the moment.

We talk about the CloudFlare outage that happened a few weeks ago, and a podcast that I did with somebody from BigScoot about how their company works with CloudFlare.

And then lots more about AI, lots about Steve Burge's PublishPress plugin, their new direction. Our Podcaster Plus plugin, what we are doing with that, and then a whole load more as well.

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

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

Hello there. Good morning. Good. A oh, I've got a banana in my hand. Good afternoon. Good morning, good evening. Welcome to that. That was surprisingly funnier than I expected it to be. I don't know why. it's episode number 357 of this week in WordPress. And, yeah, during the break I was, trying to, during that two minute video I was thinking, I was weighing up this banana thinking, can I finish it in two minutes?

And I just thought, no. And then carried on holding it. Apparently you didn't even peel it in that two minutes. Just I was really giving it some thought. but I never did. Anyway, there we go. That's probably the episode title for this one already. 357. Thank you for joining us. The idea of this show is for about 90 minutes.

We talk about the bits and pieces that's been happening in the WordPress space for the last week. Some of it gets a little bit older than that because, we don't manage to squeeze it all in. But, in order to make that even vaguely more interesting than if it was just me, I'm born, I'm bringing you three fabulous WordPresses.

We do this each week. It's at 2:00 PM. UK time. And just before we introduce all of the people, I will just alert you to the, probably the best URL should you be watching this in some disparate random place. So for example, if you're watching it on Facebook, there's no capacity to comment. They don't allow that anymore in groups and things.

If you're on Twitter, same thing. they don't allow commentary. So what I mean by that is you can't comment in a way that we can see. We'd have to be in all these different places. So the best place probably to go is to our page where we embed that, and it's an embedded YouTube video. And it's here, wp builds.com/live, wp build.com/live.

And if you go there, there's YouTube comments on the right and then also there's a little button inside the video player you can click and you'll be able to comment without being logged into to anything. Anyway, so there we go, right? Let's go round the houses and say hello to all the people. First stop over there.

Michelle Fette, how you doing? I am well, thank you. How are you? Yeah, very good. I've had more sleep than you, Michelle's had very little sleep, and if we see Michelle dozing on, actually that would be quite cool if if you were enjoying this show so much and felt so relaxed that at some point you just fell asleep, that would, oh, I'll leave that to our president.

See how we go? Yeah. okay, so here's the official introduction. So Michelle Che, let me say that again. Michelle Ette is the executive director of Post Status, as you can see on her image there. In addition to her work at Post Status, Michelle is the podcast barista at WP Coffee Talk, co-founder of Underrepresented in Tech, creator of WP Speakers, and also WP Career pages.

Also co-founded sponsor me, WP, and Knee Speed Network online. She is an author, influencer and frequent organizer and speaker at WordPress Press and Tech Events. She lives outside of Rochester, New York and likes to take photographs of nature. If you want one URL to summit up, meet Michelle. Online is the best place to go.

There we go. that's Michelle. Thank you Michelle. Appreciate it. My pleasure. And going round, let's go clockwise. I think Clockwise over there. Marcus Burnett. Hello, Marcus. Hello. Hello. Nice to have you with us. Marcus is, working at Bluehost, but also if you haven't actually had a chance to explore it, go to the WP world.

it's really great. Like honestly, it's probably the best kind of community based resource that we have out there. if you want to connect with people who are attending events and things like that, it's really great. And Marcus keeps adding new features week by week, month by month.

It just gets better year on year. So his introduction reflects that. Marcus is the mind behind the WP world and is also a leader at Bluehost, where he helped shape pro-level WordPress experiences. He's all about community creativity and finding smarter ways to help people do their best work on the web.

I get your emails, Marcus, when you update the WP World and bits and pieces. And, you've, you sent one, I'm gonna say it was like a few days ago. I don't exactly know, but what have you been working on over there? What's the recent updating stuff? Yeah, the newsletters have been a little bit, slower this time of year.

[00:06:39] Marcus Burnette: Been very busy. That's okay. I think the email that I sent out was mostly just a, we're celebrated Thanksgiving in the US this week, so it was mostly just a gratitude email thinking everyone who's part of the community sponsors pressors, anybody who has anything to do with. WordPress on the WP world.

So it was mostly, thank you. Nice. but yeah, I'm continuing to work on stuff behind the scenes. I've got, actually a game, an online game in the works that is 90% of the way there. I just have some polish to put on it, and then, it's so cool. Have you've seen it, I'll able to share it widely. Oh, okay.

[00:07:16] Nathan Wrigley: And I'll tell you what, next time we meet up in person, I'll try to pitch you something and then surreptitiously, you can slip in the game and I'll buy it this time. It's this time it's free and it's online and it just needs to be, it just needs a few tweaks to, to be finished. Oh, lovely. Oh, I can't wait.

Is it a word pressy thing or I'm guessing it is if it's, yeah, it has to do with the community. It's a community kind of focused game. Okay. All right. I'll wait and see. Hopefully you'll, let us know when it's near in completion. Oh, that's brilliant. Thank you. And, and Mark, this is. Marcus is also the other half of sponsor me wp.com too.

Oh, that's for true. It doesn't actually say that. Developed that with me. Do you know what? I did wanna say it out loud, but I wasn't entirely a hundred percent sure as I was reading, I just wanted to give him props because we did the lion's share of the work on that site. Thank you. Thanks, Michelle. Yeah, there you go.

And, our last panelist today. There he is. Steve Burge. Hello Steve. I knew I would go the wrong direction. Yeah, it's so easy to get it wrong. Steve has the tiniest of, bios. It just says publish press founder. And, that's it. But because he hasn't consumed up a whole minute of, bio time, we'll spend a bit of time looking.

It's plugin a little bit later. How's that? We'll go with that instead. Perfect. Oh, I got some news. Oh, go on. I beca I became an American last week. I saw that. Congratulations. I did actually tell from my accent. Yes. Yes. okay. I guess some of me is glad not a part of me is like I trail one of them thinking why, oh, king George think and now he can vote.

[00:08:51] Steve Burge: Yeah. Yes. That's amazing. It's additional. Still British. Oh, you can have both. Yes. Do you know, I always thought for some reason, 'cause I know that with the British passport, you can have multiple, like Australian, British, Irish, British and so on. I, for some, I erroneously thought that the American system required you to renounce citizenship of the other, the country.

[00:09:10] Nathan Wrigley: But obviously that's not the case. Oh, that's amazing. There are some funky things when you, if you're a kid, you have to, I think when you turn 18. You have to choose one direction, but as an adult, not so much. Okay. Okay. that's interesting. I think it probably depends on what the other citizenship is as well.

[00:09:27] Michelle Frechette: Friend or foe. Oh, okay. yes. Okay. That could be part of it. That makes sense. congratulations. Well done. I'm presuming you had to go through some like testing to ensure that you actually knew what it was to be an American. I know that over here they ask you all sorts of questions. Which is always so controversial because they're supposed to figure out if you are, I'm doing air quotes British, and yet as a British person you read those questions and think, oh, faceplant, that's so not British, now Steve can answer questions about US citizenship that 70% of you natural born citizens cannot.

[00:10:06] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah. You have to actually learn the dates of presidents and things like that. Interesting. it was things like how many people in the House of Representatives, what was a war that the US fought in the 18 hundreds? not rocket science, but things you had to think a little bit about.

Okay. Okay. Interesting. Oh, well done. that's fabulous. Yeah, I did see, I saw the pictures that you posted and, it, it looked like you'd had a lovely day out. Congratulations. Congratulations. That is good news. Yeah. Brilliant. Okay, let's move on to some sort of WordPress stuff. The first thing I'm gonna mention though is if you, if you do put a comment in on this, particular program, we'll try to raise it.

The comments keep the whole thing going. As always, there's always one story which seems to get the comments. I dunno what it'll be this week, but feel free to just drop a comment in regardless of what we say. Just introduce yourself or something like that, if you fancy it. So Courtney's done that.

Courtney Robertson joining us. She says, good morning. P Burn. I'm not, hello. P Burn. It's Paul. Paul. Oh, thank you. Hi, Paul. There you go, Paul. Hello Paul. Thanks, Canada. There you go. max is joining us. Hey, cyber Monday. Cool down. Yes, I let's get into that in a minute. The whole Black Friday thing.

Hello says. G or Vanc, I'm not sure how you pronounce that. Reese, says Hello folks. Reese was one of the, speakers at W-P-L-D-N last Thursday. Graham and Reese did both of the presentations, and it was great to see you. And I saw that you did your part on some Saturday as well.

So well done for that. we are also joined by WP Plugins, A to Z. Ah, there you go. It's Jonathan. morning. Welcome to Monday morning, and, did I say z? You did. I too could become an American too. Exactly. That's the final test. Yeah. Now, if he starts saying beta instead of Vita, we'll know. no.

that was a slip of the tiger. I'm never doing that again. 'cause he says A to Z as well. 'cause he's Canadian and in Canada they sell, they say z welcome to Monday morning and the last stretch of the end of the year. Indeed. Indeed. An Elliot down the road from me saying hello all. There we go.

That's what we got so far. Okay, here we go. This is us wp builds.com. If you wanna keep in touch with what we do, put your email address into that field, and we'll send you two emails a week when we produce new bits of content. This is one of those bits of content. Then we typically do a podcast episode on a Thursday, and, wrong one.

There we go. And this was the most recent episode that we did. I chatted to a lovely chap called Jonathan Jernigan. Dunno if you've come across him. He has a popular YouTube channel and he makes courses and content. He was doing a lot of content around generate press and generate blocks and things like that.

But he's also got a plugin called PI Calendar, which I highly recommend. I actually use it on the WP Builds website. It's a minimal, calendar implementation. So if you've got a, if you don't have complicated needs and you just wanna make a post bind to a date and show on a calendar on your website, it does all that.

but now they've got ICS integrations and they link with Eventbrite. So we were having a chat about that. And then I'll also just say that we've still got our Black Friday deals page, if a deal is still live. Then it'll be on this page basically, some of them go on for weeks and weeks. Some of them, believe it or not, go right into next year, 1st of January.

I think a few of them run to. So if you are still, if you haven't already emptied your wallet, already, then this page, all of these deals are still live. Honestly, I can't say how many, but it looks like there's several hundred. Still there at the moment, but as they drop off, they'll, start to trickle off the website in the next day or so.

And I use a fabulous plugin by this developer, Steve Burge, to, expire the posts. So when the, the, when the post expires, I set a date using your published press plugin, and they disappear off the website. It's awfully good. we had a few sponsors for that. So thank you to WS form, thank you to Event Co as well, and thank you to Fluent Cart for helping us make that page go live.

And then this is a bit of self-promotion. I've got a plugin in the works. no, it's actually now live. It's called, podcast the Plus. So if you like podcasting and you make a podcast with WordPress, have a look. Check it out. We've got a bit of a lifetime deal going on, so there you go. The other thing, I'm still on the self-promotion train. I'm so sorry. nothing to do with WordPress specifically, but I do a, another podcast with a lovely chap called David Wamsley, who I started WP builds with. It's called the No Script Show. And, we launch episodes sporadically. So we just do 'em when we get the, urge.

We did a one recently about Google Ads curiously, and how to get it right and how to get it wrong. and so no script show is the title of that website, and if you go for the latest episode, it's number 26. You can learn all about that. But the no script show website really is our endeavor to not use a CMS.

It's just using HTML and CSS to, to build websites. And David does all the work and I get all the credit. It's great. It's kinda being Marcus. yeah. Okay. It's a lot like that. He really does do all the work, but, if you fancy. From, I, I don't wanna spoil the entire episode, but can you do anything with Google Ads only in HTML and CSS?

No. So that was our first episode where we strayed away from that exact subject. Everything up until this point has been that. But David has been working with a lot of clients, recently and just promoting this HTML and CSS thing. And then he is just seen this massive wasting of money with Google ads.

'cause it turns out that if you don't get it set up right, you really can burn through money pretty quickly. And so he basically speaks to that. This is the first episode where it wasn't really related to that. So we just thought, oh, let's go for it. It's an interesting subject, yeah.

Fair enough. There we go. no, you're right. You're well spotted. okay. So next few pieces are brought to us by our guests Each week. I asked the guests to bring something if they wish, to share with us, and Steve's brought this fun website called Cards Against Humanity. I confess Steve, I know literally nothing about this, so you're gonna have to just take it off me and run with it.

So what are we looking at and why? Oh, I guess Michelle, Marcus, maybe. It's a very American thing. it's a card game, There's, it's mainly designed for adults, as you can see from Yeah. Some of the questions they have up there did not introduce this to your children. Oh, okay. It's a bit spicy.

Is it? Okay. There are some kids versions available. Like I've got a version. Which is designed for like teenagers that I play with my kids. but this is very, definitely for adults only. But the reason I wanted to put this up is it's Cyber Monday and every year they have a ridiculous, crazy Cyber Monday offer.

[00:17:08] Steve Burge: I think you can find it now. If you click on that black or black, click on that red link at the top. Oh, okay. Here we go. Lemme click the very accessible black text on the red thing. So one year I think they said, you donate money and we're going to use it to dig a hole. And they just dug the hole deep, deeper and deeper as people kept on donating money.

Okay. And it ended up like a hundred feet deep

one year. I think they sold, potatoes with, yes. Okay. I remember that. with like diamonds in, I think, like lab grown diamonds. So you'd buy a potato with a d with a bunch of diamonds in, one year they said it's a reverse Black Friday sale and you can send us $5. How many they got rid of it. that's genius though, isn't it?

[00:18:08] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I love it. And so this year they've, I think this is the second time they've done this 99% sale. it's probably over at this point, but they would sell ridiculous things for 99% off. I think if you scroll down, you might be able to see some of them. Okay. you can buy like a, is some of this gonna be slightly fruity?

wow, I don't think so. You could buy a, you could buy a hundred inch TV for, $20. Wow. Indiana Jones, actual god damn hat signed by Harrison Ford. No way. obviously they were one of, one of those, so they sold out of that one man sized teddy bear coddle pill. I'm loving this website. Oh, where has it been all my life.

They've got this thing. I'm not gonna read it out. But, it's got something to do with diamonds and, other stuff. act actual human skull. Is that legal? Can you sell an actual, that's just borderline insane. You can buy a dumpster, so everything's basically sold out, because it's very cheap, limited stuff.

If you click that top one, you should click the top one. Okay. This one here is the spirit of Black Friday. Okay? If you click. Takes you to an eBay page and it's $40,100. 96 bids so far? No, it's used lightly worn. Oh, so what you can buy the red suit that they have? Yes. 96 bids. 96. $40,000. There are some very wealthy people out there on the planet.

Isn't it brilliant though that stuff like this can happen? O obviously, if you tried to do this 999.9 9, 9 9, 9 times out of a thousand, it's gonna be an absolute flop. But for some reason this is taken off. It's, it is. He's taking off the red suit and he's got another one on underneath. so there's $80,000 right away.

but apparently this year they're giving away the money to a bit more of a laudable cause, Steve, is that right? They're giving away the money to like some charity or other, or they just keep it themselves? I think they do most years. Okay. Like the year when they said give us $5 for no reason.

[00:20:29] Steve Burge: Yeah, all the money went to charity. Not every year, but I think at least half the years, all the money they raise ends up going for charity. It says here, a hundred percent of proceeds donated to the greater Chicago Food depository. So maybe there are Chicago based company or something like that. It's a brilliant website.

[00:20:47] Nathan Wrigley: I wish I'd, I've definitely missed out on some fun stuff here. I'm gonna check this out next year for sure. I think this is genius. I

Okay, we're laughing 'cause we're looking at fossilized dinosaur poop. There's the episode title right there. okay. I thought it was good. Counter programming on Cyber Monday. Yeah, loving it. Absolutely loving it. Please. That's great. Go check it out. Maybe this time next year is better. you will find it.

I don't actually know what the original, it's called Cards against humanity.com. Obviously you can buy the card game, I would imagine year round, but Black Friday it seems that they put on a, and on message by the looks of it, it looks like the card game is a bit risque and the Black Friday sale is also a bit risque as well.

Brilliant. Loving it. Okay, so let's move on. I had loads of links all about that. This is our next one though. This is WordPress adjacent, Steve, you were mentioning this one. This is news Pack. Do you wanna just tell us what News Pack is and then tell us why you've surfaced this article?

[00:21:54] Steve Burge: Yeah. It's a branch of Automatic that basically focuses on helping publishers and they have a hosting platform. They have a whole bunch of plugins. they have a theme as well, and. They're basically doing a really awesome job, from what I can tell from the outside of onboarding. Some really interesting publishers, Texas Tribune is when it comes to innovative, successful nonprofit news in the United States, at least, they're probably number one.

they've been around 15, 16 years. Broken some incredible stories. and they've recently, I think they were trying to build their own platform for a while. Ended up giving up and migrating onto News PACS platform and I see hints. All the time in buried in other people's social media posts and buried in LinkedIn, that News Pack is doing a really awesome job, but they never seem to promote their own stuff very much.

That's interesting. Their blog is, yeah, they're doing good work. but also curious that this surface. For you on LinkedIn as well. you wonder if it's promoted elsewhere on their own properties. I don't know. I think with a few of these automatic things, you often see them, don't you in the footer of the product itself, it'll say something like an automatic airline or an automatic this, that, or the other thing. And sometimes I'm really surprised that is a thing that's owned by automatic, or WordPress or whatever it may be. 'cause I've never really heard of it.

[00:23:31] Nathan Wrigley: News Packer had heard of, but I don't think I would've heard of it unless I was in this, that space. Maybe Steve, they don't need to advertise it because there's such a finite amount of, newspapers, let's call it that, that it's self-promoting. And these people talk to each other all the time.

So maybe they don't need to, to promote it in the same way. Don't know. They go to the right conferences, they do the right networking. Yeah. they talk to, obviously they're talking to the right people 'cause they seem to be killing it right now. Yeah. and I think it's. Awesome that so many of these successful publishers, nonprofit newspapers that are springing up to fill the hole that we have in.

[00:24:14] Steve Burge: The news void are moving to WordPress. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, okay, so just a couple of quick comment things. So the first one is to, there we go. It's Gerard, the guy with the red beard from Luke Comp Breakfast. Ah, hello Gerard. I recognize who you are. Got it. Thank you so much. we're talking about Black Friday a little bit.

[00:24:38] Nathan Wrigley: I dunno if you, the panelists bought much. I put a blog post out saying I was. Literally buying nothing. I succumbed this morning, I was doing so well and then something just came into my email and I was like, oh, that's actually really good and what I need. So I got that. But, max saying he hasn't bought much this year.

He was planning on buying s Sure. Rank Pro is that's an SEO Oh yeah. S sure. Rank Pro. SEO plugin. But the price was outrageous. He said he went for mail press. Oh. That's the one that I went for as well. So Max, you and I were on that together. did anybody buy anything else in the Black Friday sales like WordPress, I guess would be the thing that we'd be talking about, it might be a vacuum cleaner or whatever.

One more for mailer press. Yeah. Okay. It's still there. By the way, if you want to get mailer press, it's $99 for an unlimited site license and it allows you to build, emails inside. Okay. It looks like the block editor. It feels like the block editor, but it is not the block editor. at least that's what the guys from SEO press who built this told me they, they've made it look identical, but it's their own thing.

So I don't know if you're gonna have any mileage chucking other blocks in or anything like that. But even I thought being inside the WordPress website is useful enough to me. And then you connect it to Mail Go, or, I don't know, Amazon, SES or, I don't actually know which ones yet. I haven't had a play with it, but, so Steve got that.

I got that. Michelle or Marcus, did you get anything from Black Friday? I'll be getting the, podcaster Plus by the end of the day, will you, oh, you'll become customer like number three or something. Hey, I wanna use it and believe in supporting my friends, but at a deep discount. Yeah. thank you.

That's amazing. If Nathan would stop giving it away to people. Yeah. Maybe you could spell some. They've given it away to quite, not that I said out loud. I guess I can't ask for free. no, it, it's been, it's been a, an interesting journey, let's put it that way. But it's now out there and in the wild or something like that.

Max also bought the Amen plugin from theme over AKA, yeah, theme over. They've got another product as well. what about you, Marcus? Did you get anything? No, I, a couple of Christmas gifts for kids, but that was about it. Yeah. also this, how, what was it? Was it Gerard? Gerard, hasn't bought anything this year.

Too many renewal payments from the last couple of Black Fridays. That catches up, doesn't it? I don't know if you've noticed that as well. Like I've, I, there's so many things that I've got over the years and every year I think I really should probably not be renewing that. And every year, something slips through the net this morning, something for $80 came up that I haven't used in years.

And I'm just thinking, oh, but I'm probably, not doing right by their terms and conditions to go back and complain. We'll see. ba baba. Anything in here? So there's all sorts about Cards for Humanity. but the rest of it is just saying hello. So for example, webcam is saying hello.

So there we go. Alright. Let's move on in that case and we will move on to Michelle's bits and pieces. Here it is. Look. Woo hoo. Michelle's up for an award. I'm a finalist. Yeah. Yeah. I'm a finalist for the Speaker of the Year for Women Tech Network. Speaker of the Year award. How do we, how do we make sure that you win it?

[00:28:05] Michelle Frechette: What do we do? I don't know that there's a way to make sure, but if you scroll down a little bit, you can see that sh sharing it on social media. Okay. We vote by sharing and, yeah, when you share it through there, there should be something we'll populate there in a second. and when you share it, it increases the counter on the sun, Oh, okay. Alright. The awards are this Thursday, so they may already know who the winner is. Okay. Maybe you dunno know who, dunno if they've done that yet or not, but, but I'm very honored to be a finalist for this. It's, yeah, no kidding. I, I love speaking, I love sharing and I love, pushing forward other people's causes and Yes.

Especially when it comes to DEIB and things like that. And so it's really an honor. Oh, that's great. This is not a WordPress specific, it is not WordPress across tech in general. This is across tech in general. I've spoke, I spoke for them twice last year and did a, a keynote on my birthday October 15th, after which I got in the car and drove right toward Camp Canada, to give a talk the next morning there as well.

And so it was very, exciting for me to be able to be a keynote. Deliver a talk earlier this year as well, and then be notified that I was a nominee and now a finalist for the award. So thank you vi, that's yeah. That's so lovely. congratulations. thank You obviously it'd be nice if you won, but if you do not win, it's still an honor to be an nominee.

[00:29:27] Nathan Wrigley: I have a history of not winning these things, and yeah, yeah, me too. what they say at the Oscars, it's, it's an honor just to have been nominated. Oh, yeah. And it sounds, it's, it rings hollow, but it is absolutely true. to have been nominated for this. I always have a great deal of pity for, things like those award ceremonies, especially something on the magnitude of, the Oscars where there's probably literally tens of million people, millions of people tuning in, and there's always a camera on.

All the nominees faces at the moment when the winner is house and they have to keep smiling. Yeah. Like it's only human nature to want to win and so Sure. to suffer the indignity of showing that and going, oh, it's like totally vebo. And yet they must all, all of them that didn't win.

Must be thinking, oh. Done. I wish that would've been me and yet they've got a smile and cl would be incredibly happy about it. this is all online. We won't get to see Michelle's face if she, if she doesn't win. But anyway, all the best. Let's hope that goes well. Thank you very much.

back to Black Friday, just very quickly, webcam you says no purchases, but she did renew Beaver Builder Big. It got herself a shiny copy of Josh Cuomo's CSS for JavaScript developers. Ooh, interesting. babababababa and I think that was all of those kind of things. Yeah. Courtney says, actually she was a, exercising my American demonstration and buying nothing through the 2nd of December.

What's that? What's American demonstration? Is that like a thing? I not dunno what that means. neither does, neither do you, Steve. I think this is you.

No, maybe a typo. I think. Yeah, maybe. Maybe. aside from what I can buy from small business owners, oh, maybe it's some sort of more broad, don't buy from the big corporates or something. Anyway, tell us if you wish, Courtney. All right, let's move on. Marcus, did you have anything just tangentially that you wanted to share?

I know you haven't been quite No, my brain has been all, I'll my children's basketball games. So if I would've posted a link, it would've been a scheduled to their basketball games and that doesn't do anybody anything. Next time. That be interesting. Watch their basketball games. Okay, let's go to the WordPresses stuff.

So here we are, the thick of it now, WordPress is returning, says the repository two, three major releases in 2026 as planning begins for 7.0, during the last, let's say 18 months. Something along those lines. Not quite, but something like that. The, the release schedule for WordPress has been upended from its normal release schedule.

We've had far less of that in the year 2025, but according to a release and core developer's, meeting, it's gonna go back to three releases. So the usual cadence, Mary Hubbard, who is the executive director of the WordPress project says, that only one release would ship in 2026. due to on, sorry, this is.

This is explaining about the previous year. it was decided previously that only one release would ship because of the legal bits and pieces. But, anyway, now the idea is to go for three next year with WordPress 7.0, being targeted for March or April, something like that. Dunno what you feel about this feels a bit peculiar to me.

or at least a bad idea. I dunno what you think. the group discussed the idea of aligning future major releases with flagship WordPress events. now. Okay. I can see why that might be a fun idea, but aren't there a lot of people at that event who would need to be part of that release cycle?

So that would be a, like a double header for them. They'd have to be doing sort of two things at once, but also in 2026 aren't all the three flagship events, like in this tight little window of four months or something like that. So maybe this is June and August. Yeah. So maybe this is a speculative idea that the word flagship word camps would be spread out evenly.

So every four months or something like that. But, I don't know. Got any thoughts on that? Seems odd. May maybe someone in the chat might be able to refresh my very old memory at this point, but I remember being in maybe Philadelphia. a big word camp us And I remember a big version dropping, drawing the event, uhhuh, and suddenly everyone was running around.

[00:33:51] Steve Burge: Our stuff's breaking. I know some people had to leave the event to right, to suddenly fix problems that had come in the update. It was 2018. Kami put that in the, there you go. yeah, it was when they dropped the block editor, the, Gutenberg part. And we were all worried that our sites were not going to operate as they should have.

[00:34:13] Nathan Wrigley: So maybe that was a, sort of more significant one. The fact that it was in 2018 and it was the Gutenberg block editor dropping that's maybe more significant than in previous times Nashville, is what I'm reading there. But, I don't know. it's a curious idea. I can totally see the PR value of it.

It would be really interesting to be in a room at the time when that happened. You can imagine like a load of people gathering and somebody on stage clicks the update button and woohoo. It's live. Everybody's getting the, but also I can see that being fraught with Yeah. Then people running around panicking 'cause something with their plugin or theme or whatever it may be.

Did. Drop so I can see the PR optics. It sounds like a really fun idea, but equally I can see why you maybe wouldn't wanna do that. Any further thoughts on that before I scroll down a bit? 'cause there's a few bits over here as well. Okay. In which case, let's just talk about this. So there's a lot in this article all about the, the 7.0 cycle and the foundations being laid out for.

AI coming into Core. Now, when I say AI coming into core, it sounds like there'd be some, I don't know, chat, GPT embedded into core it. It really isn't that. The idea is to release something agnostic, and we'll get onto AI much later in the podcast, but I am curious that there's even a thought of AI dropping in as a core feature.

Because my understanding was that it was always like this 80 20 rule, that if 80% of the people need it, then it would make it into core. Maybe that pendulum has swung in that direction. In that case, maybe we are at 80% of the users of WordPress needing something like AI baked into core. But I don't, I, I don't have a strong intuition as to whether that's true or not.

So my broad question is, do you think that any aspect of AI belongs in core or do you see this as Plugin territory. so just, I'm just gonna open that up and see if anybody wants to chip in. I'll start. I think that, WordPress is aging right, and we keep it fresh, but people don't see it necessarily as a fresh thing when they're first considering how to build a website.

[00:36:26] Michelle Frechette: And if we don't grow with what everything else grows, that is in the competition for WordPress to create sites, which means including AI and all that we do, then we are going to quickly become a dinosaur to anybody who's new to building a site and looking for, an option and how they wanna do that.

[00:36:44] Nathan Wrigley: Good point. Thank you Michelle. Marcus, Steve, anything on that? We on Friday? I was talking with some of the guys on our team and we made a list of the ways we use ai. 'cause we are thinking ahead to next year trying to see if we could use AI and some of the stuff we do and everything that we use AI for is external to WordPress.

[00:37:06] Steve Burge: Use it for some coding, use it to, we increasingly now to translate some of the plugins. using it for some security checks, a bunch of other things. But at least personally with what we do, we haven't come across a good use for AI inside WordPress. I'm open to ideas on that, but we haven't started using it inside WordPress yet.

[00:37:31] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting. And, Marcus, anything to add? Yeah, just taking a look here. I think my, what I would love to see is for WordPress to continue to be as lean as possible. Yeah. I think a lot of feature stuff should be plugin territory. However, what this looks like to me is providing sort of an AI framework, Plugins and the like, can hook into, and I think that makes sense. and know, 80 20, all the AI stuff is just con continue to be more and more a part of everybody's life. And certainly web design development is no different, in that. And I think having. Having a more standardized way for people to interact using AI inside of WordPress.

[00:38:20] Marcus Burnette: Makes sense. and so if it's really more the framework for using AI within WordPress, then I think that makes total sense to me. What I wouldn't wanna see necessarily is let's bundle telex inside of WordPress, right? 'cause I don't think that makes sense for the majority of users. but if there is a framework for something like Telex to be built in a way that it can connect to WordPress or anything like that, then I think that makes complete sense and does what I think Michelle was alluding to as well.

Keeping WordPress fresh at the forefront of current technology for, people that are picking it up for the first time. Yeah, so it's interesting in that my assumption from everything that I'm reading at the moment is that if what is in this article, it turns out to be true. You won't be able to use AI inside of WordPress with the core implementation.

[00:39:23] Nathan Wrigley: You would need to bring your own key or something like that. So you would need to bring like a chat GPT key or a Gemini key or something like that. So all it, I say all that's not a big deal, but it is a big deal. But it's providing the foundation for it. it's just there. It will be available and it'll be inside, but you'll have to have your own key.

So it won't do anything out of the box. but it will then provide the framework for, I don't know, creating post titles or creating, I don't know, summaries of articles or excerpts or featured images or whatever it may be. All of that stuff will be in to core, but it, given that it won't do anything without keys, it felt like you would have to go into some sort of setting screen.

But I think Michelle's right, in, in the era that we're in, if you go to a SaaS platform, you know that it's gonna be there. the only, I suppose the only strange hurdle that may need to be crossed is that you will need this other third party account in order to make it work. Whereas I'm imagining people like Squarespace and Wix and all of that, probably as part of your package, you won't need an API key or something like that.

They'll just take care of that for you. So anyway, it'll be really interesting. Go and check out Ray's article. she makes the point that in the meeting, the lion's share of the chat about seven was dominated by, AI and putting AI into core. So go and have a look. My personal opinion is that you've gotta have this stuff in core, but it should be agnostic, which seems to be the way that they're going around it.

let's see. The piece, by the way, was called WordPress Returns to three major releases in 2026 as planning begins for seven. Point. Oh, okay. Let's move on. So speaking of 7.0, honestly, I could have found you 15 bits and pieces about what's coming in the next version of WordPress, which by the way, 6.9 drops tomorrow.

So by this time tomorrow you'll be waking up and if you've, got things on auto, can you automatic update to another major release? Or do you have to do that manually? I don't think you can do a major one automatically, can you? No. So tomorrow morning you're gonna need to wake up and go through your WordPress websites and update them all in whichever fashion you decide to do.

And presumably part of that is learning. Finally, what is in WordPress 6.9. And there's loads of resources out there, but here's a few ones that I think are worthy of looking at. This one. All of them are videos, I think actually mostly. So this is the first one. it's the official wordpress.com website and it's, Nick Diego and Ryan Welcher.

They are, It takes almost an hour, 59 minutes or something like that. it's called WordPress 6.9 walkthrough. And you can imagine what they're gonna do. They're gonna walk you through 6.9. Another one, which I thought was interesting was this WordPress TV one, how to prepare your WordPress site for 6.9.

again, go through and have a little look, see what's coming. And then finally, I think, no, that was it. They were the two that I selected. But there's honestly just Google 6.9 tutorial or something like that. You'll find absolutely boatloads of them. And because it's been such a long time since we had a major release of WordPress, there is a lot that's dropping.

So there will be a lot of stuff which you and your clients probably need to. to know about. So it's definitely worth familiarizing yourself. And you've got about eight hours, so crack on. But no, there should be nothing breaking at this point. I wouldn't have thought. Okay. Anything about that or shall I just press right on?

Okay. In which case I will, I shall press on. Amber Hines has, a company I forget her husband's name. I think he's, is he Chris? Is it Chris? Chris Hines, yeah. Chris Hines. I don't know if they're the only people behind Equalized Digital, but certainly I know they're both involved in Equalized Digital and, Amber's often in the chat, and she's been on the podcast several times.

Equalize Digital is a. it's a whole variety of different things, but they specialize in, accessibility, specifically WordPress accessibility. And they have a new course. It's not brand spanking you, I think it's been out for a few days, but, it's called start Selling Accessibility, build Offers, win clients and drive changes.

I know that not everybody's area of expertise is accessibility and so I thought I'd bring this to your attention. it's $102 90 cents, which is an, oh, I guess maybe that's some sort of saving. It's down from 1 4 7. Dunno how long that'll last. But, here's the blurb. This course is designed for digital agency owners, freelancers, and consultants who want to position accessibility as a strategic offering in their business.

Whether you are new to accessibility or looking to formalize your accessibility offering and sales approach, this course provides everything you need to get started. Clearly, there's more to it than that, and if you go to the page and pop out the accordions, there's some free content where you can get like.

it's not dummy content. It is the content, but it's not all of the content. Obviously. You can check out what it looks like, what it feels like and how it's done. And yeah, it's equalized digital.com and I'll put a link in the show notes, anything about that one as well. It's so much easier to build an accessible site than retrofit a site to be accessible.

Interesting. Yeah. And so when you sell accessibility as part of building a website, you help the client actually have access to more people, more eyes, and potentially higher sales. And so this is a great course to be able to help you build that into your, sales prospecting when you're meeting with a potential client.

I dunno what the teeth, the legislative teeth are like in North America, but I know that in the eu obviously Great Britain, where I live, is not really part of the EU anymore, but the, the teeth, they're pretty robust now. So if you are building a new website, you don't really have a great deal of choice about giving this at least a nod.

There is no, it's not, it's a journey I think would be a way to describe it. It's not like this perfect destination where you get everything a hundred percent but you've gotta be able to prove that you have begun that journey and you've taken steps to make things that were like this more like this and so on.

But for me, it's really about not knowing what those changes are and what that legislation requires and what best practices are. And so having somebody to shepherd me through that with a course like this would be really helpful. I believe it's still state by state as far as requirements here in the US right now, Steven, which makes it even more brutal.

[00:46:11] Michelle Frechette: Raise your hand. Yeah, it's for sure. Steve. California seems to be the only one trying to do anything about it. That's what I thought as well. Yeah. Oh, in terms of hammering, legislation, power stick kind of thing. Yeah. will come after you with lawyers. The, the curious thing is you in, in the, I guess if you are selling something, for example, you probably are selling it to Californians, and so does that not, does the same law not apply if you're selling it into California, do you not need to apply Californian legislation for Californian?

[00:46:49] Nathan Wrigley: if you're a dentist, you're only selling locally, right? So that wouldn't apply if you're in New York. So it depends on what you're selling and how your, what your site is delivering to whom. I suppose that's true. Yeah. Good point. I've often thought about being a dentist, Michelle. I think, I think I've left it too late.

It's someone that comes to the top of mind because, I don't go to California to have stuff work done. no. Honestly, I'm not being facetious. When I was a kid, I did think about being a dentist and now I can think of very, can you imagine during COVID being a dentist, that would've been like, oh my goodness, the most like freaky, occupation, wouldn't it?

'cause you're literally staring into somebody's mouth and the last thing you wanted to be doing was staring into somebody's mouth. Anyway, I digress. But, anyway, go and check it out. equalize Digital. I'll put the link into the show notes so that you can have a look for yourself. Alright. Now I'm no hosting company.

Marcus can probably tell us more about this than I can, but, I dunno if CloudFlare Dunno if you had fun with CloudFlare a few days ago. I think it was about 10 days ago now. Something like this. You guys in North America, you got a break. 'cause I think it was more or less over by the time that you woke up.

But, where we were, it was. It was everything, like the entire thing. Internet went down completely down. really ordinary things went down in massively unexpected ways. for example, turnstile wasn't working, so logging into a lot of things, which had got some sort of capture from turnstile was broken, Twitter was broken.

Chat, GPT was broken, and suddenly people couldn't use ai and for, they'd already realized they'd forgotten how to live. that was a, problem. And then, and then it all came back on slowly. And as they always do, they're very transparent. And it turned out it was this sort of file that had got doubled in size in some way.

And, anyway, the storm in the teacup was over. What's always surprising to me is just how quickly we move on. there's always this. Ah, we rely far too much on the single points of failure, Azure and Google's cloud and CloudFlare. And then the minute, the second it's over, it's who cares?

Just like that work. Yeah, exactly. Where's the next one coming from? But, I was chatting to Samya from a company, called Big Scoots. They're a hosting company in the WordPress space, and they've built their entire, I won't say entire platform 'cause I don't know, but I think it's true to say that they've basically built their entire platform on the what CloudFlare offers.

So if you're familiar with CloudFlare as a bit of a WAF or something like that, or A-A-D-N-S provider or something, turns out that, CloudFlare can do a lot more than that, including page level caching and stuff. So I have a chat with Samya all about that. It's really interesting. Marcus over at Blue Host, did the Skyfall in, or were you, were you mitigated from it?

What happened? yeah, CloudFlare Power is so much of what's going on the web that, it affected us in different ways. We don't use CloudFlare for, host the actual hosting and stuff. CloudFlare does offer those services. We use, Oracle Cloud for that. we have our own DNS and stuff, so I, the damage was minimal.

[00:50:21] Marcus Burnette: some of our tooling went down. obviously some of the tooling that we use internally, it relies on cloud cloudflare's services and CloudFlare being up. so there was a little bit of that. But again, like you said, a lot of that happened while I was asleep. And I think I remember even tweeting when I got up that I was jealous that I was asleep while Twitter and all of that was down.

'cause it would've been nice to have, a few hours of silence. What was curious though was that it impacted things in such, so this gives you an indication of the tendrils of CloudFlare in that I'm used to a 4 0 4 or something like that, like a service is down and it's gone off the internet.

[00:51:01] Nathan Wrigley: We really didn't see that. We saw just bits of the internet break. So for example, the Twitter UI. Was completely functional so you could navigate through all the menus and it loaded up Twitter. The bit that was missing was the content. There was just nothing in that little familiar bit in the middle.

So no tweets came up. And so you could, in theory be on Twitter, but you couldn't do anything on Twitter. The best version of Twitter. Yeah, it's very nice. It's really quiet in there for a change. But then other things like, I would be able to go to a website that I would traditionally log into and just parts of it would be missing, like some function, some key functionality would be down.

Some of my own WordPress websites have got CloudFlare turnstile on them, so I couldn't log into the, I could, I just went in and switched off the CloudFlare Turnstile plugin, which Elliot actually builds, who's in the comments, just turned that off and then logged in successfully. And everything was fine, but it was so impactful over here.

It was things like banking. Just gone. So people's capacity to pay bills and stuff like that is just gone. And, we'll inevitably have, well affected a lot of packages. I think that like resources, JavaScript, external JavaScripts and stuff that Yeah. People's sites rely on. And when those weren't accessible to, because CloudFlare was down, I think it broke a bunch of other stuff that normally wouldn't have broken, Yeah. Site's not reliant on CloudFlare for DNS or something, but because some script somewhere is, that wasn't loading, it was still causing site to, to not be usable. Yeah. And, Gerard makes the point interestingly, that, you couldn't, you could yeah, actually log into CloudFlare, because Turnstile wasn't working.

Samya told me that there was, on the CloudFlare side, apparently at the beginning, the people on the CloudFlare side who were brought in to figure all this out in real time, I guess there's some kind of, I don't know, like elite bunch of developers who get thrown in the, like the SAS of the CloudFlare network.

they initially thought that it was a DDoS attack because many of the signature hallmarks of a DDoS attack looked like this. So there was a period of time where they went off in completely the wrong direction, only to discover that wasn't it. I dunno how many minutes or hours or what have you, were wasted.

But can you imagine how much CloudFlare loses. Every minute that goes by because of their SLA agreements, 99.9 or a hundred percent uptime or what have you. I dunno if they actually hemorrhage actual money or if they're, I don't know, maybe they credit their accounts or something like that in the future, but can't have been, can't have been particularly nice for them.

Anyway, go and check out that, that podcast if that's your thing. 'cause Samya actually understands what went on and, tells you how big scoops did it. Steve, Michelle, anything on that could just that I woke up to a big fixed, we should get CloudFlare to just turn off the internet like couple times a year.

[00:54:17] Steve Burge: Maybe New Year's Eve. Oh yeah. Shut it down. Yeah. go touch some grass guys. Just, that's, do you know, that's a really interesting, I've never. That's actually a genuinely good idea, except the first that it, it would never work first. First Tuesday of November would be great. Yeah. Do it Cards against community style where you ask for $5 and every $5 is a minute of the internet.

[00:54:42] Marcus Burnette: Shut down every Monday at 2:00 PM UK times, something. Something like that. But no. Do you know what, that's such an interesting idea 'cause we're always talking about digital detox and people claiming that they've I don't know, taken hold of that on New Year's Day. they have this epiphany that they wanna do less technology and yet somehow it manages to creep back in having some sort of mandated downtime.

[00:55:08] Nathan Wrigley: That's such an interesting idea. It'll never fly, I'm sure. But boy, I dunno if you've seen recently or this week, in fact, Australia has turned off the faucet for social media. To all of their pre. So if you're not 16, basically anybody that's 15 and below, it's now illegal to be using social media.

The social media companies are not allowed to allow users under the age of 16 to have accounts or use accounts. And so that'll be an interesting experiment that country's running and just see how, how that promotes things in the future. I imagine for the 15-year-old who's already wedded to that'll be fairly brutal.

But for the 4-year-old who's never used social media, it'll be really interesting to see if they can keep that experiment going for multiple years or a decade. It'd be really interesting to see if things like schools, primary schools report. Better engagement or just, I don't know what those metrics would be, but do you know what I mean?

Be interesting to see if there's a, you can prove that social media is, a good idea for 16 plus, but not necessarily below 16. Anyway, I digress. I got lost a bit there. Elliot says, some people don't understand. I don't run cloud. Oh, Elliot. Oh, bless you. Oh no. How many installs have you got of that plugin now?

Is it like 40,000 or something? It's not nothing. Some people don't. So Elliot makes the CloudFlare, I dunno what you've called it now, but you had to change the name, didn't you? he runs a plugin, which enables you to use turnstile on your WordPress website for things like form submissions or the login screen.

Some, people don't understand. I don't run CloudFlare. So if Cloud Elliot, why did you let Twitter go down? Yeah. What the heck? That's so bad. Oh, how many emails did you get? He says, was thinking about some kind of failover system for the plugin when turnstile is down, but need to figure that out.

Just switching it off would be, But yeah, an automatic detection system, which pulls the plugin out of use during a time when CloudFlare is reporting errors. That's a, yeah. Maybe worth doing. Okay, let's bit cla to write it for you. yeah. Oh, We'll get into AI in a minute. but for now, this is right, right up Marcus's Street.

so over there, oh no. Over here is, this little thing. this is, you picked up a banana. I was gonna laugh. Yeah. Two, both at the same time in color as a WaPo in color. his Marcus' unleashed the WaPo game, guaranteed to set off an airline security control mechanism near you. But, Marcus built a whole game out of, out of the idea of WaPo.

And, they're really popular wapos. And if you are a graphic designer or you have intuitions that you'd like to make one for Word Camp Asia, they, they have a pay job. It's a bit of fun, right? We all enjoy them and we enjoy, I don't know, emojis and stuff like that. Everyone last time I was on the, on this podcast.

[00:58:20] Steve Burge: Yeah. Someone was ranting and raving about Wapos being a bad thing. A couple of na sayers said Yeah, the curmudgeonly, whoever that was. Yeah. Somebody who was saying that it was pointless. Oh, that's right. It was, yeah. Some guy had written a post online and, but the, in the internet in more broadly had come down with what could only be described as a hammer.

[00:58:39] Nathan Wrigley: I think that person, it didn't go down so well, did it, but if you fancy making a WaPo for the Mumbai version of Word Camp Asia next year, you have until the 1st of February, 2026 to do it. Get on that, Marcus. Yeah. Oh, Marcus, come on. I can see the ideas. Some ideas, but you could have a whole.

Another card, like an elite level card that costs, I don't know, $10 or something like that. $1 million, yeah. The W card, which nobody has. Yeah, that would be fun. No, I did design a special, I didn't design the Wpu. The Wpu existed already for Word Camp us, but I did a special Word Camp US Card based on that WaPo that I handed out to people at Word Camp us.

[00:59:28] Marcus Burnette: I think I have it It's in there somewhere. It's in there somewhere. It's like Rose, rose City, WaPo. Yeah. Okay. If I can find it in the, oh, I'm never gonna look. They're all out of order. We've played it several times, and so they're all out of order. I'm never ever gonna find it. but if you fancy yourself as a, a budding WaPo creator, you can do that there.

[00:59:49] Nathan Wrigley: It pains to point out that it's not really just open for graphic designers, because I guess the constraints are fairly small. broadly it's got the same shape as every other one and what have you, but it's more about being creative with that bit in the middle, where the pores are gathered around and, but the idea.

[01:00:06] Marcus Burnette: Yeah, they have props and close and stuff that you do though. Yeah, props close. But the, so what they're after though is obviously something with a bit of a local feel to it 'cause they want something. So it must follow these guidelines. no it doesn't say that. It says it could be inspired by Mumbai's iconic landmarks.

[01:00:25] Nathan Wrigley: I've not been gateway to India, marine drive and local trains. Okay, interesting. Everyday Mumbai Life, local train rush. Oh wow. cutting chai tea culture. Carly Ley, I dunno what that is. Black and yellow taxis. There we go. Bustling market, sea breeze. and the idea is that anybody can do it.

So you don't need to be a graphic designer, but if you fancy doing that, I think that's quite a nice little thing to feature. So go and check. Yeah. There, there are some requirements down towards the bottom, that there's a. Yeah, right there. The link in the middle wabu design guidelines. So just right here?

Yeah. There are some guidelines. Oh, interesting. So is that more generally, is that a, is that like a, that's not to do with, ah, interesting. Correct. Oh, there's rules about what? Oh, that's fascinating. So there's an actual set of criteria which makes it a WaPo and not a WaPo. So if you do something outside all, okay.

Okay. We're getting into this. all WaPo noses are the same shape regardless of there's a role for that species. That's so interesting. a rounded upside down triangle, but you don't have to have a nose. That's the other thing. But it does. Yes. But nose is not mandatory. So if you do a nose, it has to be a, who knew we were gonna do, go into this Eyes Must be a solid color.

Usually black and beady. There can be no white in the pupil. Why not? What's wrong with a white pupil? Why would that not work? That's not a border thickness of the illustration. it's usually 1.5 thickness of the internal lines, the outside. I'm so surprised that this page exists. Oh, that's so interesting.

Oh, yeah, those rules. and they've been very correct here. Typically Wahoo has a rounder shaped figure. Yeah. It's all like leaning. So do I leaning around? Yeah, but it's almost like it's almost like it's grabbing onto something like a beach ball or something, but it's gone around it, if So it's shaped like this round thing, and there's some examples. There we go.

hang on a minute. Those do have, you've white. Those have white, yeah. those are, so those are examples of fandom? Yeah. Fan fanin fandom, however you pronounce that. they're allowed to be part of the WaPo family, but not official wapos Follow in the guidelines. Okay. So they're labeled as WaPo Adjacent.

[01:02:52] Marcus Burnette: WaPo adjacent. There's another possible episode title. I, all I can say is I am pleased to report, just casting my eyes. I think that Marcus's game. most of the wapos, I think, adhere to the official guidelines course. Course. I'm not sure, of course, I'm not sure if they do. 'cause some of them are standing up.

[01:03:13] Nathan Wrigley: so they're not rounded in shape. But anyway, there we go. Take stands. They're allowed to stand. that's absolutely, who knew that somebody had written an official field guide for Wapos? Anyway, so go and read those and then submit your bits and pieces and let us know if you did it. and let us know if you win.

That'd be fascinating. Okay, oh, like nobody outside of the uk so that this includes Steve, is gonna care about this, but it's such an interesting story. couple of times a year in the uk there's this, I dunno what the US equivalent is, but I'm guessing there is a US equivalent, the kind of next six months of.

Of spending trajectory, is announced and we call it the budget. And it's basically the most important financial thing that happens in the year. And it happens twice, and it happens in the houses of Parliament and the chancellor of the exec, who is this person who has like ultimate authority for the money, all money that is spent, the pub from the public purse Chancellor stands up and delivers this budget.

and everything is cloak and dagger, that everything is secret until the moment it's announced. And the idea behind that is nobody should have any notion of what's coming so that everybody's got the same level of surprise, disappointment, excite. Usually it's disappointment, but you get the idea, oh, my taxes are going up.

there's a surprise that doesn't usually happen. Of course it does. Anyway, the point being, it's never to be released. This is like a full on public castration, sackable offense. If you, if you were to release this stuff early because the markets move, people lose jobs, all sorts goes on. Anyway, this time around two hours early, the document containing the, all of the budget, proposals was.

Was made public. And, Ryan, Ew, from Human Made, has figured out, he's not saying he's definitely figured it out, but he thinks he's figured out that it's WordPress is fault because it's so simple. if you ever upload something to the WordPress Media Library, let's say a, an image or a PDF, from the moment it goes into the media uploads folder, it's public Now, typically, nobody's gonna know what the heck that is because.

You don't make it public knowledge, but if, for example, you were to, I don't know, let's say you uploaded photos and just added, and every file had the A number in it, like number one, number two, number three, number four, it wouldn't be that difficult to guess that the next image coming along is number five.

And so that's basically what's happened. Somebody who's in control of a WordPress website, which is pretty cool, which holds this information, has uploaded that document as a PDF and just changed the word march to November. And so somebody guessed it. And, I have no words, just go to the end of the file name and hit the keyboard a few times, with a boxing glove or something.

Add some pseudo random noise to the end of it, or don't use WordPress, use something else. Anyway, this was really fascinating. you may know, Steve, the BBC correspondent for the doing the politics thing. they're usually the person that gets to lead this story. Their jaw was on the floor in real time.

You could see him. You could see him literally like

what? 'cause he suddenly had this document, which told everybody what the UK was gonna do for the next six months. Anyway, dear WordPresses, you've got something secret. Don't upload it. Don't upload it to the media library unless it's got a fun name and even then know that it's public. So I dunno if anybody's got anything to add to that.

I talked far too long and I'm sorry, but that just tickled me pink. Oh, the same thing happened with the Nobel Peace Prize, I think. Did it? Yeah, 'cause you can bet on it. Now you can't, I don't think you can really bet on the UK budget, but you can bet on things like the Nobel Peace Prize. So people were scanning the website trying to find any indication of who was going to win.

[01:07:39] Steve Burge: They could win their bets on these new, betting platforms that are popping up. And it Yeah, same thing. The, the winning file was in the media library of the Nobel Peace Prizes WordPress website. Yeah. so it turns out the organization that run this is the, WordPress website is the as a OB uk, and it stands for the Office of Budget.

[01:08:01] Nathan Wrigley: Wait for IT responsibility. okay. and so last month, sorry, in March, it was the, here's the file title. And you can see that this time all that they did was they substituted the, word march for November. And, so this coming next March, all you gotta do is replace, five here with a six and they do it again.

And, all this stuff will be available to you, but honestly, who knows how long somebody had that. I know that I'm joking about it, but if you had that for 10 seconds ahead of everybody else. You could bet, like on the markets, you could really could make mil, possibly billions of pounds betting on the way the economy's gonna go and whether taxes are gonna go in this direction and that direction.

And so it's serious stuff. but hysterical at the same time, mean, can password protect these things, right? the government No, not the media library. No, If it's in, oh no. If it's in the media library, the minute it hits it, it's, it's gone. it's it's out there for public consumption.

There are ways of doing it. Like you could upload it to, I don't know, AWS or something like that, and that would potentially be password protected. But no. and yeah, this broke at W-P-L-D-N. That's right. That's right. We were there. We broke the story. W-P-L-D-N because somebody from human made, Ryan Ew is from Human Made and somebody else from Human Made was there.

So yeah, that was absolutely fascinating. Reese says, beginning in WP content 20 25 11, budget top pdf DF was silly. Yeah. Pretty much. Hardly a WordPress' fault if the OBR is incompetent. That's the point, right? it's just, it's a curious story that happens to feature WordPress in it. and.

Jonathan overall says they should have a plugin that secures PDFs on uploads such as secure PD. Yeah, there you go. So plugins, clearly it's possible. Yeah. Yeah, totally possible, but not, not out of the box if you like, but, Maybe the OBS, but you would think a government should a year for the license.

[01:10:15] Steve Burge: So I'm friends with the guy who, builds download monitor. Okay. Christian isn't Christian rib and, I think he felt a little bit on the wrong end of this article 'cause OBR definitely don't seem very competent, to hear Christian tell it, there was a pretty obvious setting they could've.

could have clicked to, oh, to keep the files private and they didn't. So as, plus obviously the naming of the file, the OBR could have done better. yeah. Like I say, just add some random junk at the end. Just let, get Michelle's cat to walk across the keyboard a few times. That'll generate some random noise.

[01:10:54] Nathan Wrigley: Did you see me grab that keyboard outta the way? So bad saw, I saw the, I saw it looked quite weird for a minute. There wasn't enough in the cat of the cat's head in the screen to show that it was a cat. So there was just something moving up and down Anyway, it was clearly a cat after a while. Yeah.

Jonathan makes the point that no, there are plugins to secure the media library. Yeah, exactly. So you need a plugin to do it, but WordPress out the box, doesn't do it. But, Steve, it sounds like the O-B-S-O-B-R, sorry, in fact probably do have a plugin to secured things. They just didn't. Tick the box.

if they don't now they should. Yeah, they definitely will. Anyway, that a fascinating story to do with the UK and WordPress and what have you. Okay. quick mention, I dunno if this is something that you're interested in, but tomorrow, at 11:00 AM PST, is that Pacific Standard Time? Is that what that is?

state of the word is happening in San Francisco, California. It's where Matt takes to the stage, where he talks about what has happened and I guess more about what will happen. I don't suppose there'll be any updates about the legal stuff. 'cause that's off the record still.

And it's, a little more complicated than simply saying it's in San Francisco. It's at some top secret location. So yeah. So that, okay. So is the actual thing at the top secret location? I think so. I think the people who are going have had to go through some approval processes. maybe, I'm not sure if they're being told to keep secret about where it is.

[01:12:30] Steve Burge: Yeah. But there's definitely something unusual and surprising coming up for they don't upload their invites to the, WordPress media Library or anything foolish like that. Yeah. It's all dead top secret, isn't it? Like the location is in, and then there's like another loca, like an overflow location where you can go as well.

[01:12:46] Nathan Wrigley: So who knows, that's interesting. But, it's happening tomorrow and it's your chance to see Matt talking about, the future direction of WordPress over the next year. Whether that interests you or not, I don't know, but there it is. And then, so this is probably the biggest news, of.

This week anyway, the, AI experiments plugin, version 0.1, has been announced. So this is what we were talking about earlier, this idea of putting things into core in WordPress. Seven, I guess this is part of the sort of dog fooding of that and figuring out what that will be. I think this is a pretty big deal.

Those people that I know that are using AI think this is a real milestone, a real moment in time. It's what's called a canonical plugin, meaning that it's gonna get updates and security patches as if it were part of core. but it provides, I'll just read it out. It provides a home for exploring experimental AI powered features and integration patterns.

It creates a dedicated space where ideas can mature before they might reach WordPress core. And it lets the community experiment with real AI workflows in a safe and optional way. It's exciting because it connects directly to the long-term goal for AI and WordPress. We spoke about that earlier.

Providing a consistent open set of building blocks that can be extended more, in this article. And there's different bits and pieces about what you might wanna test. I think particularly if you are getting in at this early stage, it's very straightforward what's being asked of you at the moment.

If you do experiment, they want people to test things like simple things like title generation, stuff like that. So the idea would be, I dunno, you create a post, it consumes that post at the point of publishing it and comes up with titles and things like that. Sounds a bit like what jet Pack is doing already, that kind of thing.

Anybody got anything on that?

[01:14:40] Marcus Burnette: Yeah, I just, I like the canonical plugin idea concept. I like what the performance team has done with the performance plugin. And it gives us a chance to have core, like stuff that can be updated more often than two to three times a year. they can continue to rapidly work through what's working, what's not working, and, move things in and out faster than if that was built in the core stuff.

So I like the idea of it, and I'm excited to see what. What ideas that they come up with for the ai version of this. Like I said, I feel like the performance team has done a really great job with a lot of performance stuff in that canonical plugin. Yeah. This, this was what I was alluding to earlier about whether or not this should go into core, but it feels like the expectation is gonna be that there'll be something in core, 'cause you have to go and hunt for a canonical plugin.

[01:15:33] Nathan Wrigley: It's not like obvious that it's there, Familiar users would probably never find it. Whereas if it did get baked into core, then at least you can make use of those bits and pieces. But, anyway, most they're featured, I don't know if all of them are, but they're featured on the plugin, install page.

[01:15:51] Marcus Burnette: Correct. Yeah. So yeah, they're in that feature. The discoverability is a little bit better than zero. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Good point. Good point. but anyway, there you go. So it's available now to have a play. It feels like a pretty landmark moment from that team. The new. AI team, it does feel like a bit of a watershed.

[01:16:09] Nathan Wrigley: They've got something out into the public, which everybody can play off play with. but I would imagine at this point you wouldn't be putting this anywhere live. Just go and have a look on a test site or something like that and give feedback. And here's the below is information for developers, what they're trying to do next.

So they're trying to do, if they get through this round successfully, then it'll be things like excerpt generation, image generation, alt text, things like that. Okay. So go another play. Okay. Massive company that we've all come become familiar with. Yost, they have joined with, I've never heard of this NL Web, not heard of that before, but apparently it's some subsidiary of Microsoft.

because this is on the yost.com website. They've got a blog post entitled Yost Collaborates with Microsoft to help understand Open Web. It's exactly what you'd expect. So there. Presumably there'll be some benefit to Bing in this, the search engine that Microsoft has. But, I'll just read you out.

It's a press release, so it, take that for what it is. Yos today announced a new collaboration with NL Web and Open Framework developed by Microsoft that is designed to make the web readable and usable by AI systems. Through this integration, Yos will become the first, sorry, will become one of the first organizations to help, websites build on WordPress, built on WordPress, communicate directly with AI agents in a consistent privacy respecting way.

And then there's a quote from, CHAA Osterbrook who is the GM of Yost. Our goal has always been to keep the open, the keep the web open and accessible. This collaboration with Microsoft continues that mission by aligning the structure that powers SEO with standards driving AI comprehension, we're giving publishers, creators and SMBs confidence that their content will continue to be understood and trusted in the next generation of discovery.

curiously, the, I listen to quite a few podcasts that have got nothing to do with the WordPress space. The SEO benefits of AI is like unquestionable at this point. people are getting real traffic driven by AI agent, AI agents. They know that this is a thing and I presume it's only gonna go up.

And so having some standardized way of making it so that the content that you write on your website is discoverable by, ai. I dunno how they're gonna do that, what they're gonna do, but it seems like a, an interesting endeavor. Interesting that it's with Microsoft and not with Google. I wonder if it's 'cause Google just want to go their own way.

I don't know. So open to you again, panel if you wanna toss that one around or not. Oh, we've been experimenting with some, Some AI tools to help with our support. we've been using, doc Spot, which is Oh, yeah, from, oh, Aaron. Aaron Edwards. Yes. Aaron Edwards. and it's interesting to have that digest all your information and we've had, I've had to go back and update lots of our documentation to be very specific and clear about things.

[01:19:28] Steve Burge: for example, we sell 10 plugins and you would type into ai how many plugins does publish press offer? And it would get confused. we would have to go back and our documentation now says very specifically, published Press has 10 plugins. And I can see how that kind of applies to getting ready for chat GPT search or Gemini search as well.

You need to be, even though people think these AI things are quite smart. They're not really that smart in a lot of ways. And we've had to rewrite a lot of our stuff to be very literal, like A, B, C, D, based on the questions people are asking. and so I presume that probably a way to help you improve your ranking too, in, in chat GBT results, for example.

Good. You need to lean toward being literal with your answers. I wonder if that'll spoil the human readability of it, if you've got to, yeah. I'm not gonna say you have to dumb everything down, but If you have to go back with this, like microscope and rewrite different portions so that the AI cannot confuse things, I wonder if the human re reusability of that goes out the window a little bit in the process.

it's like the new version of the old SEO joke. Yeah. SEO person walks into a bar pub restaurant. SE o's been messing with human writing for a long time and now it's, yeah. AI to them. Yeah. cam webcam. So Cammy McNamara, says, I've received inquiries from folks that found me on chat.

[01:21:08] Nathan Wrigley: GPT. Yeah. Indeed. Yeah, I'm sure that's the case. I think this is only gonna be the pattern in the future. I think it's in sort of single digits of web traffic at the moment, like three, 4%, something like that. a couple of years ago it was zero and who expected anything apart from search engines to get that kind of measure of the traffic?

So that's interesting. Anyway, go check it out. No doubt, over time, the way that you'll do it, the Yoast plugin will become revealed. And maybe there's I don't know, flags that you can apply to certain bits of content to say, this is the bit that matters in this article or what have you. We will find out.

But staying with ai, I'm not gonna. Go through any of this. I'm just letting you know that if you are interested in this kind of stuff, there's a few nice articles that have come out in the recent past. So this one's a little bit older. It's September 29th, so a little bit old, but, WordPress Abilities API.

So there's a sort of plain guide to how all of that works. And this is something that I think a lot of people in the future are gonna be worrying about if you're a developer or something like that, telling AI what it is that your WordPress website can do. So creating posts, deleting posts, that kind of thing.

and then let's move away from AI for a moment. Because I mentioned earlier at the top that Steve has this plugin that, does absolutely loads of stuff. But I feel, Steve, that we don't know enough. we don't hear enough about published press. I'm giving you the platform that you didn't use at the beginning, 'cause you didn't have a very long bio.

Tell us about some of the bits and pieces that you've been doing over at Publish Press in the recent past and, just, I'm just, for those of you that can see this is what the Publish Press Block Suite can now do. Look at it all. Look how many blocks he's got. It's like all the full Monty, you're doing my marketing for me now.

[01:22:56] Steve Burge: I've failed. I need to do some, podcaster plus marketing. oh, nice. Okay. Yeah, I'll keep going. You should come on our podcast and, yeah. Okay. Give everyone a pitch for Podcaster Plus. Yeah. Thank you. go on. Tell us what's going on. What have you been up to recently? Oh, let me tie this into a bit of a story that, Around 6.9 that there's a new accordion block, I think dropping in 6.9. Yep. and I think 7.0 they're planning a tabs block. Yep. And so originally our published press blocks plugin had about 20, 25 blocks, including a accordion and tabs block, and they were popular. But, a, there are 101 plugins now that offer 20 blocks that do common things.

And also the two most popular blocks we offered accordion and tabs are being moved into core, or different versions are moving into core. So with this. Publish press blocks, plugin. We've basically pivoted to make basically all the tools you would need for your blocks, a search button to find where all the blocks are being used in different posts or Oh.

the ability to automatically insert a reusable block at certain points in your post. Yeah. So like an, I don't know, a sponsored section or an ad or something like that. You wanna put it at the fourth paragraph or something? E Exactly. Yeah. and then controls, so I don't want the authors to see these blocks so you can remove all the blocks for a certain role.

So basically we've pivoted from being a and other. Library of blocks to focusing on all the tools, a gen, a generic general set of tools to manage your WordPress blocks. That's absolutely fascinating. I'm, and I've been keeping tracks on everything that you've been doing in the recent past. And, I did think that you've been working at a clip basically.

[01:24:54] Nathan Wrigley: the Gutenberg market is difficult. you think of how many companies, how many successful, companies have been built around the block editor so far. You're talking maybe generate plus generate press. most people do other things like a forms plugin or an events plugin, and they have a block.

Yeah. actually making a business out of enhancing. Gutenberg is not easy. and on that basis, I will now shut down the podcaster plus plug, plug in because, we've got no future. Yeah, it definitely an interesting idea. I think. I think we had this sort of notion that everybody was using blocks all the time for everything and it's just not the case.

is it May, maybe 20% of our user base is fully in on the block editor. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. Okay. Okay, so we've got a, gonna have a fight ahead of us, that's for sure. All right. Here it is. Anyway, publish press, blocks. You can go and check it out on the wordpress.org repo. Go and see what it can do for you.

It's no longer just a suite of blocks. They've got loads of functionality wrapped around those blocks as well. We better be really quick 'cause we are running outta time. Just a quick plug to Elliot Richmond. He has, oh, I clicked on a link. he has got a block theme cheat sheet for WordPress in exchange for an email down here.

he will send that to you so it's not like a course or anything like that. It's just a cheat sheet for all of the different bits and pieces that you can do if you want it to get into, block theming. And it looks really amazing actually. I haven't actually downloaded it from everything I've read about it, it looks pretty amazing.

Adam Zelensky is saying that if you are using the WordPress importer. Let's say for example, I don't know, you wanna migrate a site from one URL to the other. That's the example that they use. In the past. URLs, would get broken all over the place, left, and center, meaning that a lot of the site was broken, and you would have to find them one at a time or figure that out in some other way.

They reckon that now the, that importer will figure out old URLs and make them into the new URLs, like with breathtaking accuracy. So now hopefully that problem is over for WordPress users, which is pretty cool. I'm not gonna mention that, but needless to say, WordPress is gonna be supporting the latest versions of PHP, which is 8.5, and lots of work is being done according to this, WordPress release candidate 6.9 version two.

So what shipping tomorrow should be good to go. There's very little in the way of errors and warnings, so that's good. And then the rest of the stuff, I don't think I've got time for, in all honesty, I had all these high aspirations for moaning about ai, but I'll, I'll do that on another episode instead.

So that's it, that's all we've got time for. I'm definitely gonna moan about ai some other future episode. I can't help myself. That's the way it goes. Gosh, where did that go? Like 19. What the, so quickly. I know and I still, no, you can eat the banana. I'm not feeling like it now. I'm gonna, I'm gonna do other things instead.

love the WordPress importer update. Said beer. It really cool to use it in the Playground Blueprint. Thank you beer. Thanks. So that's gonna be our final comment for today. All I have to do is go around the houses and say a great big thank you to Michelle Shep. Who was over there to say greatly thank you to Marcus Bonnet who was over there, and finally to, Steve Bge from Publish Press over there.

Yeah. Look at you all, you're all having a great time trying to figure out where which left is left and it's always wrong. It's a bit like when you plug SB the old picture is over here, so that's the direction I need to point. Yeah, exactly. It doesn't matter. It's still, and yet I'll still mess it up.

Yeah, there's a setting inside the settings for the platform where you can flip it, but that's even weirder because then all the intuitions go the, anyway. It just don't work. Yeah. so there we are. Thank you to them. Thank you to you if you came by and left us a comment. Really appreciate that as well.

We will be back next week, but before we go, it's time hand, the hand wave of joy. there we go. I think we've got it. Lovely. if you three wanna stick around another bit of a netta, that would be nice. But for the rest of you, take care. We'll see you on the next episode of this week, Chris. Bye. Sweet.

Bye-bye. Bye-Bye. Bye-Bye bye.