This Week in WordPress #358

[00:00:03] Nathan Wrigley: It is time for This Week in WordPress, episode number 358, recorded on Monday the 8th of December, 2025. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I'm joined by co-host Michelle echette. I'm also joined by Davinder Singh Kainth and by Marc Benzakein. Thank you to Mark and Davinder for stepping in at the 11th hour.

It is a WordPress podcast. And so what do we talk about? this week, a lot about WordPress. Apart from talking about the weather at the beginning, we then get stuck into oodles of content about WordPress 6.9.

This is the latest version of WordPress, which has dropped recently, and there's bags to talk about. Not only are there loads of articles out there on the web instructing you of all the different bits and pieces that have been included in this update, but there was lots of commentary around The State of the Word address given by Matt Mullenweg recently as well.

After that, we get into some other different bits and pieces, some community news. We talk about Black Friday deals.

There's some brand new plugins out there in the WordPress space, which I think you might like to look at.

And obviously we get into a conversation about AI. It's the year 2025, so we always do.

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.

Every week I say, I'm gonna change that music. And every week I completely fail to do it. and as soon as it became, I just wrote, the lyrics though. Have you WordPress talking about WordPress anyway? No, that can be next time. Okay. I'm glad of that. No, it needs to change and I always forget to do it.

It's like bottom of the laundry, To do coming. Here we are. We're episode 3 58 of this week in WordPress. That's, one more than last week and one less than next week. There we go. We're gonna be having, a little bit of a break over the, that is how numbers work. I know. Yeah. Add one, take away one.

We're gonna be having a little break, so we've got a couple more episodes I think before the Christmas break, something like that. And, quite a lot's happened this week, so usually this podcast runs a load of topics. We go through lots of different things. I've put quite a few things on the show notes just in case we don't have enough to say about WordPress 6.9, but I think it's quite likely that we'll dwell on WordPress 6.9 quite a lot.

I'll first of all introduce co-host for today. That is Michelle Frechette over there. How you doing, Michelle? I am quite well, thank you. Good, Even though it's only seven degrees Fahrenheit here today. Yes. And and I have to say a great big thanks to Michelle, which is negative numbers for y'all.

[00:03:11] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. I don't even know what that means, but it sounds like a bad amount of degrees. yeah, it's, Michelle isn't supposed to be here. I say that in the nice nicet possible way. and that is because we, had an alternative arrangement of guests and two of them, today have had to cancel.

[00:03:29] Nathan Wrigley: So two of these guests, I'm incredibly grateful for stepping in at the last minute and Michelle was one of them. Jess Frick was gonna be joining us, but she's unable to at the last minute. So Michelle is joining us instead, and I'm really grateful for you stepping in at the last minute, I'll just go through Michelle's bio.

She is the executive director of Post Status and in addition to her work there, she is also the podcast barista at WP Coffee Talk. Co-founder of Underrepresented in Tech and WP Speakers, creator of WP Career Pages. Also involved in sponsor me, WP co-founder of Speed Network Online. She writes, so she's an author, an influencer, and a frequent organizer and speaker at WordPress and wider tech events.

She lives near Rochester, New York and she likes to take photographs of nature. If you want to go to the one website to find out more, it's Meet Michelle online and yeah. Thank you once more for joining us. Appreciate it. It's my pleasure. The other person who stepped in at the last minute is dda. Dda.

Thank you, dda. Appreciate it. You're welcome. DDA was is, Tim West. Tim West. I don't even know who that is. Who is that? But Tim. Tim Nash. Apologies. Tim. Tim Nash was supposed to be joining us, but he's not feeling quite right. He's under the weather and again, Davinder stepped in at the 11th hour, and I'm incredibly grateful, for that.

And here's Tim. oh dear. I'm really struggling with names today. Here's Davinder's bio. a digital creative who loves to create online spaces powered by WordPress. He's been in the ecosystem for more than 18 years, and he's focusing on creating websites, digital product, of course, his coaching and consulting.

He is the founder of the wp weekly.com, which is a quick simple newsletter for WordPress users. there's a few newsletters that I subscribe to in the WordPress space to crib content for this show. And the WP Weekly is one of those. I think that's a, that's, a good thing, right? Yeah. Amazing compliment.

Yeah. it comes out on a Monday just before this show comes out, so it's ideally. Ideally time. I live in India. If I was living in UK then it would have been a problem because Yeah, It come at the same time. it's, the perfect way to start my week. I just read it, first thing in the morning with my mug of coffee, how it comes, and, I'm off to the races and so yeah, I appreciate all that you do.

I know that stuff like that, it's like a labor of love a bit, but also I guess it's, helping your business out and things, but it's really credible. You should go and check it out. Like we said, the URL is the, so you have to put the, in the wp weekly.com, no hyphens or anything weird like that, the wp weekly.com.

Go check it out. Subscribe and, that over there, the person coughing. That's Mark. That's Mark Zaca. How you doing, mark? I am peachy. How are you? Yeah. Good. mark is not living in a box. This is just how he appears every time he's on the show. Something weird. I spent a good 35 seconds last week trying to get rid of that box, and this still isn't working.

[00:06:41] Marc Benzakein: Give it up. I, looked at ai. I have done all the research and. It says, oh yeah, this'll work. Nah, doesn't matter. Embrace the box. Go with the box. I think what it boils down to is I just should buy a new camera. Yeah, camera. Yeah. The aspect ratio is wrong. Mark. Mark is the only guest who I was predicting when I woke up this morning.

[00:07:01] Nathan Wrigley: thank you Mark for joining us. and ironically, I'm on the list of backups in case you need a backup. So I could do both right now. Yeah. Okay. So that would be his. Hysterical. If you wear two different hats, you could be the backup guest. One minute. Yeah, swap it out for the other one. So let's read Mark's bio.

Mark Zaca has been around the WordPress world long enough to remember when everybody thought a custom post type was of wizardry. I still think it's, he's a marketing lead and partnership manager at Main WP, where he wrangles newsletters, partnerships, and the occasional existential crisis about plugin change logs.

Before that, he ran Word camps, helped grow server press tenfold and even survive government tech support proving that he can debug both websites and bureaucracies. That's no mean fee these days. If he's not connected to the main WP community, you'll find him riding his e-bike to work, which he insists is both eco-friendly and a perfectly valid excuse for being late to Zoom calls.

Did you ride it this morning? I did not. And it was funny because last night Gina said to me, are you riding your bike in tomorrow? I said, are you crazy? Yeah. It's like crazy temperature. And what time is it where you live? It's five 30 in the morning or something? at, the moment it's 6:09 AM So I'm normally up around.

[00:08:17] Marc Benzakein: Four or four 30, but I'm not awake at four or four 30, Okay. Staggering around until, are you drinking coffee? Like I'm drinking coffee. You're, I've already had coffee. This is just plain vodka. water. So love it. Okay. And that is the nature of this, podcast. It's all about being a bit silly, having a good time and, and reading the comments that drop in.

[00:08:39] Nathan Wrigley: If you do feel like adding some comments, we would love that. Honestly, it really keeps this whole show going. It's most commendable. Anybody that does, I'll just give you the, skinny on how that works. the best place to go if you want to comment on this is probably here if you're confused. 'cause this is going out.

It goes out into a variety of different platforms. I think LinkedIn has failed. I got a little warning in the dialogue that said LinkedIn has failed at this point. There's nothing I can do to amend that. So it's if you're on LinkedIn, you're not even gonna hear this. But there you go. It failed. But it usually goes out on LinkedIn and Facebook.

X and places like that. So if you're watching this, if you comment in any place apart from YouTube, we don't get them because the platforms increasingly lock that stuff down. So the, comments will just be stuck in that platform and we won't see them. So if you head here, wp build.com/live, we've embedded the YouTube comments and we will get those.

So we can put those on the screen and what have you. Or you could just go to the WP Builds YouTube channel. But, wp builds.com/live. If you're logged into Google, that's great. We'll get the comment. However, if you don't have a Google account or mistrust Google for some reason, there's a little button inside the video.

Top it says live chat. If you click on that, you don't need to be logged into anything. You can just comment and we'll get that as well. Okay. So that's probably the best way to do that. There's a couple of people that have done that already. That's really nice. Thank you very much. James Lao says hello and good morning.

Very nice to have you with us. That's really nice. Hello says Anne, and thank you very much for joining us. Hello again, says G. Sorry, is all I could say. I, don't know how to phonetically pronounce your name if you want to write it phonetically for me. Thank you. Wasn't it Gerald or Gerard last week? It's okay.

[00:10:29] Michelle Frechette: It probably was, but I have the memory of I think a cushion. you can remind us. Yeah. Thank you. Hello Gerard? Or Yeah, let us know your name and apologies. I think it was Gerard. Yeah. Getting it wrong. And this is Bernet. I do know Marcus, so that's all right. he's running out of Mondays in 2025.

[00:10:46] Nathan Wrigley: So are we, but happy for this one. I can, and that he can see us all. That's really nice. We've got Jonathan overall WP plugins A to Z. Good morning from a wet and dreary Vancouver Island. Oh no. Where it is also six o'clock in the morning. Yeah. Here's a blast from the past. We used to do the weather sort of stuff on this show every time that kind of died to death a little bit.

But Michelle's telling us, here we go. It's seven degrees Fahrenheit. Minus what? It's that minus 14 Centigrade. God, that's brutal, Michelle. Yes. Don't go out. Stay where you are. I went out, I didn't trust my brain, so I did the calculation online to figure out what the conversion was. Oh, that's horrible.

That's, and I've already been out and come back today, so I might just, and alive God in the UK, because we have like fairly temperate weather, it never gets hot and it never gets really, cold. If we get that kind of a cold spell like it, which might happen like once every three or four years, everything collapses.

Like the whole, everything just shuts down 'cause nothing's built with that kind of tolerance in mind when you live. When you live in the Great Lakes region like I do Yeah. We can get upwards of a hundred degrees Fahrenheit in the summer. Yeah. And below zero Fahrenheit in the winter. So it's been as, as cold here as minus 20, which is probably like minus 40 Yeah.

[00:12:04] Michelle Frechette: Where you are. Yeah. and, so yeah, we get the very big rate. People used to say to me, you can't complain about the winter if you also complain about the summer. No, that's true. True. And I say, I have a body that could complain about any extreme. I don't like lava or dry ice. It's okay. Okay, I think we can all agree on that. But it's a dry cold. It doesn't matter. It's just cold. It doesn't matter whether it's dry or not. It's true because your hands crack. It's just terrible. Yeah. I watched a video of somebody in your neck of the woods who took like a, mug of coffee. Took it outside and then started at the ground and poured it out whilst lifting the coffee.

[00:12:46] Nathan Wrigley: My up it just made this arc of coffee, which froze in Yes. that's which crystallizes almost immediately. Yeah, that's like half out of Star Wars. That's not happening on earth. That's happening on some other planet. That's amazing. Anyway, I bought the, bubbles, like the kids blow bubbles. Yeah.

[00:13:03] Michelle Frechette: I bought bubbles to photograph when they freeze. 'cause bubbles will freeze outside. Do they go like ping pong balls in midair? Do they? Oh that's cool. No, they just, they crystallized and then, yeah, it's really cool. Anyway, here we go. We're not supposed to be talking about the weather and it, we, it is Gerard.

I remember. It's, Gerard Look there. Look it is Gerard. Hello. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Gava. Your, name is actually Gerard. I'm so sorry. I get extra points this week. Yeah, you do. You do. You get extra points. There you go. Look Ann and loves DDAs newsletter as well. DDAs WP Weekly is one of my favorites too.

[00:13:35] Nathan Wrigley: Says and that's really nice. Thank you Ann. somebo. Sorry. Dda. Go. Yes. I also do this stuff. Yeah, that's nice. my full, oh, okay. Here we go. My full name is Gerard Van e and g is my default. Okay, got it. Got it, That makes sense. Very good. That's the, use. It's good to see you back again, Gerard.

Yeah. Thank you. Please keep coming each Monday. We love it. And make loads of comments. Send all of your friends and relations here. Tell us, so what are we up to? Tell us your weather in? Yeah, no, we're not doing more weather. in theory we're supposed to talk about WordPress, so we will get onto that. Just a few bits of self-promotional stuff, if that's okay.

This is our website, wp builds.com. Put your email into that little box and we'll send you two emails a week. One when we parcel this up as a podcast on a Tuesday. And then we'll send you one on a Thursday. Our Thursday podcast. Oh, wrong one. Our Thursday podcast is on episode number 448 and the most recent one was, a chat with Dave Gray, who's often on this show, so you can go and check that out.

He's got this really curious marketing initiative for one of his most recent plugins. He's got this really interesting idea of instead of selling it to end users, he's gonna sell it directly to hosts and, so that they can implement it on behalf of their customers, which I thought was a really interesting idea.

We still have a Black Friday page, despite the fact that Black Friday itself has gone, increasingly Black Friday deals don't just stop at the end of Black Friday. I remember when I was a kid, black Friday wasn't even a thing and now it just goes on and on and loads of the deals are still going.

So if you go to wp builders.com/black and you scroll down, every deal that's on the page is still. Alive, they go off the page as they become inactive. if you search and filter for things, there's still quite a lot. I don't know, maybe there's a hundred or something still there.

So go and have a poke around if that's your thing. And one last bit of self-promotion is I had a chat with the lovely Tofa Deha on the WP Tavern podcast this week, and we talked about how he, over many years in the WordPress space, has been like laying the groundwork for the bits and pieces that he's now doing.

And by that I mean he's been building things in the open with no expectation of anything in return. And then curiously, something will come his way that he didn't anticipate. And so it's a, real, community story about doing things with no expectation of having your pockets lined or anything like that.

So there we go. 1, 9, 6, 4 episodes to number 200. What should I do on episode 200? That's a bit different. You got any ideas? And would you do anything at all or, Hey, travel to Canada minus interview. Hang on, let's go with DDA first. Go on. Dda. What did you say? I'm sorry. Travel to Canada, minus 20 degrees Celsius is very,

[00:16:28] Davinder Singh Kainth: I'm joined on the podcast and Michelle will give you tips on how to deal with it. Okay. that's not what we're gonna do. it's a nice idea. What were you gonna say, mark? I was gonna say, someone interview you. Oh, no. Nobody wants to hear that. Flip. Flip the script. no, I'll, interview you on your podcast.

[00:16:48] Michelle Frechette: There you go. No, There you go. Nobody wants to hear that. Talk later. Talk later. No, no bad idea. okay, moving on. That, that didn't know how I expected. Me neither. Me neither. I thought you'd embrace it, anyway, there it is. 1, 9, 6. Go check it out. A couple of, During the notes, during the notes stage of the show, when we set the show up, I, issue some show notes and I offer the, guests an opportunity to mention something that they wish to mention.

[00:17:15] Nathan Wrigley: And, it's awards this time around. the first one is an award to one of our panelists, and then the next one is DDAs, WP Awards page. Let's have a look at that in a minute. First of all, we mentioned this a few weeks ago when you were on the show. We did. Michelle was up for an award. We did. I think it was last week.

[00:17:31] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. Didn't know that you were gonna win it and you only went and won it. Well done. You know that phrase, always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Yeah. up to this point, I've always been nominated, but never won, and I can't say that anymore. Yeah, so very exciting. I, looked over the roster of the women who are also nominated in this, and I thought, oh, there's no chance that I'll be winning this award at all.

They're so accomplished. But I still was ready to take a screenshot just in case I came in bronze or something. Imagine the tears that streamed down my face when I saw my face. Nice and Niles. Yeah. and so was this like, it was very exciting, an online vote kind of thing. Is this something that people voted for?

it was, that was one component of it, but then it was also juried by about 30 people. Nice. yeah. Oh, congratulations. So I was just blown away. Thank you. Yeah. And, one of the nicest things is it wasn't WordPress, so it's like people outside of WordPress know who I am, which made me very happy.

So Yeah. Yeah. That, I honestly, massive congratulations. What I'll do is I'll link you in the show notes when you, when you receive the, sort of newsletter, the summary of all of these different bits and pieces. I'll put that in the community section and you can go and check it out. Thank you.

[00:18:42] Nathan Wrigley: But, Michelle is the woman Women tech global award winner for the year 20. 25. Very, cool. so obviously that was like a wider awards thing, I'm guessing there was more than the category that you won. and we have, a correct few of those in the WordPress space, and DDA runs one of them.

When did, when did you start this whole process this year? When did dda, when did you start the, like the onboarding of the different people that were gonna be featured in it and the different companies and plugins and things? it's, you open the nominations like in September, right? Yeah.

[00:19:18] Davinder Singh Kainth: I usually keep nomination for two, two months and two months for voting and then bam results. And I was working like 6:00 AM to 11:00 PM yesterday to finish calculation of this. A lot of work. But yeah, it's been like, this is like fifth year running, so I've learned a lot of things while running this, and especially how to combat spam voting.

Oh. yeah. People post things, so I'm, adding one layer after another every year. But yeah, spams are very smart these days. so be, so it's a form, it's an online form. And so how, like obviously without revealing anything. What is the kind of ratio of spam to regular voting? Is it like one for one?

[00:20:02] Nathan Wrigley: is, half the voting spam or do you think it's less than that? Or one, like this year it was like almost 1500 or so votes that I did not count, or they were like thrown out of the, like it's showing 5, 9, 7, 5 as total votes. But total votes were exceeding 7,000. Yeah, but you have to take them out. So first year I started I didn't have any, clue whether anyone would vote, like I'm talking about five years back.

[00:20:26] Davinder Singh Kainth: It was party for everyone, right? So yeah, the next year I realized, there has to be some checks and balances. So next year it was like not just, you have to have a unique email address. Your IP address will also be checked, and if you're, again, voting with different email address, but from same IP address, you won't be allowed to vote.

So this year I actually ran the whole email, submitted emails via a spam filter, and Took out all the votes that were there and there were quite a few, related to certain brands. I would not name them, but obviously it's not their problem. Maybe there is a problem, but yeah, slowly, step by step, I'm trying to figure out how to make it bulletproof.

security is never a hundred percent. So yeah, learning step by step, honestly, I can only say it. I tried really hard, those 1500 votes that I put in, damn is all I can say it, it never worked. and you're still placed. You still placed, yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah. That's good. and so any top line items?

[00:21:27] Nathan Wrigley: Obviously, you know the, voting's. Oh, so there was this whole phase of onboarding who you could vote for, and then that then moves onto the step where everybody gets a chance to vote, which is what we've just been talking about, where the spam can potentially creep in. And then yesterday you figured out what the final results were and what have you.

And these are the top, I guess we are looking at five things there. What are these that we can see there? These are the. 1, 2, 3, 4. see I still made a mistake there. Ran match should be five and it's same four now. Oh yeah, I see that too. You weren't tired were you? Der check that. Oh yes. I still fixed few mistakes.

[00:22:03] Davinder Singh Kainth: Some people actually DM me today in the morning like, oh, this link is not working, that link is not working. I'll do that. I'll fix this. But, so this is like top five among the total votes to a specific brand or product. And then if you scroll down there, top three. For every category. Like when I first started running, I used to write, exact number of words for every nominee, but then few people reached out to me and said that we love to participate, but we don't feel, we feel really embarrassed or bad when you put zero one and gay star.

number of words. Okay. So I switched the whole thing. I said, I will only put first six, vote, voted, nominees under every category. I guess that gives a little better view, at least because participation is more important than winning. Obviously winning is. The thing. But again, so a lot of people submit it just to be participant.

And the funny thing, the feedback I get from people who are subscribed to the newsletter, obviously voting is thing, but the thing they say that, oh, I discovered a new tool or a service in this category, I didn't even know it existed. Yeah. So that's fun. Yeah, I hadn't really thought about it.

[00:23:10] Nathan Wrigley: So that's like indirect marketing I guess. Yeah. Do you, exclude anybody at the point where the nominations for the things to be voted on dropping, do you ever get the impression that somebody is using this as a marketing channel or is that all fine? The only thing I exclude is if some service or product is not related to WordPress.

[00:23:31] Davinder Singh Kainth: Okay. Like a lot of SaaS tools get submitted even for Black Friday deeds. I never add them. Because again, if you're sticking with WordPress, you stick with WordPress. Yeah. I get the same thing, Dinda. So I put that Black Friday deal page together and I get loads, like the weirdest one this year was a company that was selling socks.

[00:23:48] Nathan Wrigley: just socks. And I don't even know why they, like, why fill out the form? Yeah. Why you even fill out the form. I know it's probably a robot, right? But nevertheless, I had one at post status for cruise, get a discount cruise. And I was like, I don't, see the WordPress part of this, so no. Sorry, but No, I. I had several for mobile phone companies. You list a lot of mobile phones. Yeah. I don't know where it came from. Adding to the weirdness. I got it for toys as well. Toys. Toys, okay. Yeah. Not meant for in the hope, that people will, will, actually include it. So these are the things that, that, the top ones that we're looking at here.

1, 2, 3, 4 and four. A k, A five. Yeah. these are the ones I guess that received the overall most votes. So in first place, the thing that got more votes than any other thing was, a CF Pro. The in second place was WooCommerce. Ah, fascinating. The third place was the WordPress community, the admin bar. The fourth was Elementor and then Num, sorry.

Yeah. Yeah. That is the fourth. And then the, fifth. was the second, fourth? Yeah, the second, fourth was, was rank math, SEO. And then if you want more intel on all of the other bits and pieces, then you have to scroll down and it's done by, category. So for example, at the minute we're looking at gold, silver, bronze for WordPress themes, and it goes, Astra, hello the Elementor theme, cadence, and then page builders.

And then block builders that such things for Gutenberg form plugins and so on. And, and the list goes on and on. So I would recommend that you go, and check it out. Scroll around. And I think, at this point the most interesting thing if you haven't cast a vote, would be exactly what Dinda said would just be to go and poke around and see what other curious new things you can find and do, all of these things here.

So for example, if I hover over, I don't know, one of these here, will that link out to the item in question there? Homely page? Absolutely. Yep. great. You gonna run it again? You, should, scroll down to the agency tools and see who took silver. Oh, okay. Let me just barely agency.

[00:25:57] Marc Benzakein: Let's go. For agency, we, although now I demand a recount, I think you should go and look at all those boxes. That's right. It's demand to recount. I demand you demand a recount means, you won't be on the list next year. That's right. That nomination got lost. Take it back. I take it back.

Yeah. Take, it back. so yeah, look, there it is. In second place Main WP or in Silver Place, I guess we should say is W Yeah. Silver. Yeah. Yeah. it's, not a, its own url. So it's at the WP Weekly, website. So it's wp weekly.com/awards, slash 2025. you're gonna run it in 2026. Do you think.

[00:26:41] Nathan Wrigley: Absolutely. And the URL is also the wp awards.com, so Oh, is it? Okay. Apologies. Clever redirection. Yes. Ah, lovely. Okay. So it does in fact work. This is amazing. I not just running the words, the interaction that you have in the background with people. Yeah. That is the most useful part of running this whole thing.

[00:27:00] Davinder Singh Kainth: Obviously they are this like SHA voting and all that. Let me tell you, in which country do we have fair voting? None. yeah, true. You expect to be fair voting in WordPress. The, the curious thing is I can predict I think what next year's URL will be. It will be the wp weekly.com/awards/ 2026. And the reason I say that is 'cause I have a bit of a segue, which I wasn't expecting to have, and let me see if I can find it.

[00:27:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, here we go. So this is a little segue. I've just dropped this in. I wasn't expecting to do this, but I just saw that Ray had posted this, And the reason there's a connection there is because we mentioned it last week in the uk, a misconfigured WordPress site led to this whole political bruhaha.

I'll just very quickly summarize. We have this thing called the OBR, the Office for budget. I've forgotten actually what it stands for. I've actually forgotten the acronym. That's really, oh, review o, office for Budget Responsibility. There we go. And it is responsible for this biannual thing where they drop all the information about like tax and pensions and rules around money.

And it's a big deal. Lots of people stop what they're doing and pay attention 'cause it really matters. Unfortunately. the document outlining all of that, which is supposed to be like really top secret, it leaked three hours before the actual announcement. And it turns out it was a WordPress website where somebody had used a plugin and misconfigured it.

So that you could guess the URL and it was what I've just done with Davinder's website. I changed the URL to 2026, and I'm anticipating that it'll be there next year. that's exactly what somebody did. They, as they took what was available in March, took the word March out of the URL, replaced it with November hit return.

And to their surprise, they got the information anyway. this is, WordPress is like not, the best hour and it's nothing to do with WordPress, which is the annoying thing. it's now led to the, head of that organization in the UK resigning and it's led to unfortunately a lot of press coverage with the word WordPress in it.

That feels like WordPress is insecure. And I don't really know how we recover from that in, in the real world. 'cause obviously, you know the organizations like this and the repository in your newsletter, dda, we are right inside the baseball. But this is now in the UK normal press and they're having a bit of a go at WordPress.

They're not. They're just explaining it's a misconfigured WordPress website, but the optics look really bad. I dunno if anybody has anything to add to that, but what a shame that's a, that has in fact happened. I, it's the issue with the person who was managing the website or the department who was managing not the WordPress.

[00:29:56] Davinder Singh Kainth: Now if you, encounter a car crash, you don't blame the company who made the car, right? Yeah. Yep, I guess if it's self-driving, yeah, maybe not. no, but, I, would agree. but you know how, government works? The guy at the top, and it was a guy in this case, the guy at the top, he, quit.

[00:30:17] Nathan Wrigley: He said, the box stops with me. I, it happened under my watch. So it has led to a major political sort of realignment in that department. So it's interesting. Anybody wanna say anything about that one before I just say a few comments? Okay. the first one is, well done.

Marcus Burnett for spotting my hth comment. Nobody spotted that except you. and he says, HTH. fun fact. A reference a hth reference on a Monday means it's going to be an amazing week. If you don't know what H is. It's the really cold planet on star. Where Luke Skywalker is on that like weird horse, slight creature.

and now that I've established my nerd credentials, I'm gonna keep going. Here's another comment. Hello from us all in WP Bakery. Hello. Hello. Very nice to have you with us. especially Miss Michelle. Congrats on your award. What else? Thank you. Have you got, oh, so this is the idea for episode number 200.

Is it a roundup recap? Talk about how it started, how it evolved today and other things. Thank you. These are all good ideas. and oh, Courtney, bless you. I hope it's nothing bad she's in, do chiropractors, do they do. Do they do? No, I'm thinking of Carist. Chiropractors don't do feet, do they?

Chiropractors do oh, bones and backs and stuff like that. anyway. sometimes feet, but not exclusively feet. Okay. Yeah. anyway, good luck, Courtney, with whatever it is. I hope that you're all right. And I expect it's time to put the phone down now, Courtney and concentrate on the chiropractor.

[00:31:54] Michelle Frechette: she's, still in the chat though, so Yeah, she's, still there. She says that URL thing can happen without any plugins. That's right. A default version of WordPress will deliver exactly that. 'cause once it goes into uploads, then it's available publicly. It's social engineering, guessing the PDF link, Ryan.

[00:32:09] Nathan Wrigley: Ew. Yes, he did. Ryan McCue had a post on it, from a Al Altis atlas. I can never pronounce that word. so I'll p put that into the show notes as well. Umt to Very good, Marcus. Okay. We'd need to do a whole pod. Can you come on My tavern podcast, episode 200 and we'll talk about Star Wars. Just talk. Oh, star Wars.

Yeah. That'll be great. I know Ewok, and that's where it's, yeah, everybody does, but be beyond that. Anyway, there we go. That was the, that was the bits and pieces that our guests have brought. Let's get into the main, WordPress 6.9 stuff. So boatloads here. WordPress 6.9 dropped. I expect if you're watching the show, you've probably got, some kind of update mechanism.

If you've got a bunch of client websites and they are not yet updated, go hit the update button. Back up before you do. but yeah, go and hit the update button 'cause we have a new version. It's been long in the making. A lot longer than normal. What with all the, the, legal things happening in the WordPress space And so 6.9 gene, I think that's how you pronounce it.

He was an American jazz pianist. Gene Harris. I wonder if we'll ever run out of jazz musicians. It'll ever be like a moment where it's, ah. We've now gotta be something else. I, suspect we should go to Star Wars creatures or something like that. That would be good. anyway, it's come out and there's absolutely loads for us to talk about.

I've got many articles stacked up on my browser here. And we'll just take one at a time and as the bits and pieces scroll past the screen, we'll maybe get into a chat about those kind of things. So it's dropped. The first thing, dunno if this is of interest to any of you three, but the first item of mention is some things which have updated in, actual core of WordPress.

So new features that you can play with inside your WordPress site. We've talked about this be before, but here we go. block level collaboration. So this is the idea that if you're inside a block, like a paragraph or a. Or an image or whatever it may be. You can now click a little button and you can add a, comment, think Google Docs where you add comments.

It's bound to the particular block, so you can't highlight a bit of a paragraph or anything like that. But you can comment and act, mention somebody who's a WordPress user on your website and they can get an email and reply and all that kind of stuff. I don't, I, I will never use this in my current cell because on none of the WordPress websites that I use, is there another individual basically.

So this won't be of any use to me, but I can see this being important. Do any of you three have any intuitions about whether this is useful thing? Yeah, this can be really useful. if two or three people are running a web agency and they're using Google Docs collaboration feature, they can just install WordPress on a subdomain and start using it and everything remains within WordPress.

[00:34:57] Davinder Singh Kainth: They don't have to log in their Google account. freedom, right? Freedom and ownership of all the data within one space. Because when agency, people within the agency talk, it's all like private things, right? They, you don't need to share that with a client or end result. Nice. Yeah, indeed. you've summed it up perfectly there.

[00:35:17] Nathan Wrigley: if you've, if you've, got a, an intranet, basically if you were to use it like that, like a Google Docs kind of thing, it would work really well. it is at the minute part of a wider project, which is, The, third phase of the Gutenberg project, if you like. And this is the idea of collaboration.

We'll return to this a bit later, but anyway, that was one feature. Very useful. The next one, again, a feature that just for historic reasons I don't really use inside a WordPress, is the command palette. So you, if you're looking at the screen, you can see a screenshot, you invoke it, a little panel comes up in the middle of your screen and it's like a, universal search bar.

And it used to be available in some places on your WordPress website. And now it's basically available everywhere, WP admin, front end, backend, the lot. And obviously, as WordPress matures, you'll be able to do, or more or less everything inside of there. There's a bunch of commercial products which do this and do it, do the full Monty.

this is building up to that, again, opening it up to the panel. Do you think you'll actually use anything like this or see utility in it? I like it, as long as it doesn't slow things down in the back end. Yeah, But I actually do like it. I would use that if it was, quick and responsive.

Do you use stuff like that on your, I don't know, your Mac or whatever it is that you've got, do you use Spotlight and things? I, do a little bit, yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yep. as much as possible, any anyway that I can do a shortcut and type in something and pull it up. I prefer keyboard anything, so Do you?

Yeah. I've never really taught my, I'm just trying to think if there's many things that I'm keyboard first on. And I think the answer's no. I've got into a habit in more or less everything that I use of clicking around the interface to get there. Yeah. And in a modern WordPress website with the old admin UI and the new admin UI overlapping, I think you are probably onto the right.

Thing I, I spend more time complaining about the fact that I have to take my hand off the keyboard in order to press the mouse than it would take to actually press the mouse button. Okay. So yeah. So you invoke this start typing and whatever you want will come up, Start, typing the word add and add, post, add, whatever will come up, and then you can crack on with that task.

So that seems like a really useful thing to have. The next one, again, it's like interesting, I, can't see myself using this, but I can see that it has real utility. It's called Fit Text to container. And it literally does what it says on the tin. You just type a word or a sentence in and it will, whatever screen you're on, it will shrink the text to maximize the, text size so that it fills that available spot.

I guess it's good for opinionated design if you want to adjust something so that it looks that way. But, I don't see myself using that particularly much, but. Again, out to you three if you wanna comment. I think it could be a really cool design function. Yeah. I'm interested to play with it and see how it looks.

[00:38:23] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. I wonder if it ever overlaps though, like there's this like extremely long word in Welsh, which is this name of this town, and it's just I don't know, like 300 characters or something like that. Do what it do. I wonder if it ever does text wrap. The question is does it also shrink? Yeah. To fit it well, so in theory, in which case, yes.

It would be so tiny. All you'd see is these little dots in that. Yeah. They just like a series of dots. I don't, I think there's ants crawling on my screen. Yeah. I'm not sure. But, we'll return to some more things in a minute once we've exhausted this article. But that's the sort of features that you can use in the, front end.

[00:39:01] Nathan Wrigley: sorry, in the back end. And then we're onto some slightly more technical things. And again, we'll be coming backwards and forwards from this AI whole topic thing. For now, I'm just gonna say them by name and kind of move on. So the first one is the accessibility API. We'll talk about that more in a minute.

That has dropped the abilities. Yeah, sorry, I apologize. I'm looking at the word accessibility at the bottom of the screen. Yeah. Abilities. The abilities. API will come to that later when we talk more about, a ER. Let me interrupt for just a second. Yeah. To say that Tammy said that, the expand, the, one of the previous one is a very requested, feature for design.

[00:39:35] Michelle Frechette: So there you go. Isn't not curious with the text one. Yeah. So it's not curious if you are a designer. It is only a curious if that's not something that you focus on. yeah. Quite right. Thank you. Yeah. And Tammy, thanks for mentioning that, Tammy. big part of the, 6.9 release. it was curious, we'll get onto it in a minute.

[00:39:53] Nathan Wrigley: The, the state of the word, the more or less, the only bit that I saw was Tammy's face. there was a bit of Mary Hubbard on repeat, but Tammy was also a bit that just kept, repeating to me, so that was interesting. okay. Back to the article. yeah. abilities API, and then we probably won't return to this, so I'll mention it in full now.

Accessibility improvements, the, more than 30 accessibility. Accessibility fixes, sharpen the WordPress core experience updates, improve screen reader announcements, hide unnecessary CSS generated content from assistive tech, fix cursor placement issues and make sure typing focus stays put even when users click and auto complete suggestion.

So that's the accessibility. I'm always happy to see accessibility improving across, especially since so many people don't focus on it for their own sites. And it would be so helpful if they did. But the more we can build in and bake in, I think is so much better for the, whole internet. I know that in the comments we've got Anne, who is big into the accessibility side of things.

So maybe if Anne, if you wanna drop a comment about the most exciting accessibility piece in there, that would be interesting and then on the performance let's a ette for people who are wondering. Yes, sorry. Apologies. Thank you. okay. And then I'll just read this out as well. Performance enhancements.

Who doesn't love this? Although in most cases I think it just goes completely on notice 'cause we don't. we don't actually have much going on. It just WordPress just gets faster, but there's a lot of work going on in the background. 6.9 Bos, an improved, largest Contentful paint through on demand block styles for classic themes, minifying block theme styles, and increasing the limit for inline styles, which is removing blockages to page rendering and clearing the rendering path by deprioritizing non-critical scripts.

Also optimized database queries. Refined caching, improving spawning of. WP Cron and a new template enhancement outer output buffer that opens the door for more future optimizations. Almost none of that did. I understand, but I've read it out loud and so, there you go. I don't understand it, but I read it out loud for y'all.

[00:42:07] Michelle Frechette: Yeah, that's right. So you heard it here first. I, can only be thankful. Do you know what though? It's the same on the accessibility side, right? I read these things and they're beautiful and I, get some of them 'cause they're a little bit more understandable, but I'm just so appreciative that some, cohort of people make it their raison detra to just do that stuff and it gets taken care of on the steady cadence.

[00:42:33] Nathan Wrigley: do I feel guilt when I hear, look in Slack and I see all the accessibility bug scrubs going on and things like that? Yeah, a bit. Because I, you can't put yourself everywhere all at once, but I'm really careful and you can just summarize this as this means faster WordPress. Yeah.

Lovely. That's right. Yeah. Great. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. Woo. We'll go with that. That I should have, I should've just said that. Shouldn't I have been, that would've been lows. Better. TLDR. Faster. Faster. Yeah. And this bit I always miss and somebody always picks me up on it in the comments. We need to mention the release squad, don't we?

That's important. so the release squad, there they are on the screen. So we have map. So these are the people, if you like, who get the named credit at the top. And then we'll see the great big list of contributors in a moment. release Lead was Matt, Mullenweg. Coordination was Act, Shire Rain, and Amy Kamala.

Tech leads were David Baal. Ella Van Durp, I dunno how to pronounce all these names, I'm sorry. Hector pto, design Lead was Francisco Vera Triage leads Aki Harmon and Ryan Welcher. And then the test leads were Jonathan Boser and Crew Fernanda. And then I'm not even gonna try to read out this great long list, but look at it.

loads and loads and loads of contributors. Over 900 people, made this project possible, delivering 340 enhancement and fixes. And, let's just scroll through it and get some idea of what makes a WordPress near you. Tick. So every time you click update these human beings did stuff, every one of them, a human just like you doing stuff to make the project better.

How cool is that? there we go. Amazing. Yeah. Isn't that amazing? Isn't that And that, isn't that the bit, that's the glue. That's the ho. In fact, more or less, that's the whole thing, right? That list, the names right there sums up. Why we do it, why we're into it, and all of that. It's just this brilliant community going on in the background.

So thank you to all of you. Each one of you gets a mention, but not out loud, I'm afraid. So there we go. That was the first piece. Anything about that last little bit my going on about the community there? Oh, just so grateful for all the people that contribute. Indeed. Yeah, yeah, What have we got?

I'm just looking through the comments. we've got a few fair few comments about Star Wars. I feel like I've opened up a can of worms there. I'm gonna pass five. it's, mostly Marcus, Okay, good. Good. He, if it was okay, I'll do one just 'cause it's funny. WordPress 7.0 banter. I'm down for it.

Marcus, if you can make that happen, I'll vote for that. Yeah. Star Wars creatures. That's good. Seven point. Okay. One more. 7.1 min not Okay. da Any other comments that have come through that are worth mentioning? As long as it's not 7.2 jar I'm good with it. Okay. Yeah, I'm with you.

Okay. Here's Anne. Then we just mentioned Dan and, the accessibility, enhancements. There are many fixes that I'm happy about, both in the editor and the frontend fixes in the navigation. Then accessibility. Ready, accordion. Woo-hoo. Great. Thank you. I would ask if you were having an interview with me at this point, I'd ask what those fixes were, but hopefully, somebody can, maybe you can link to an article or something.

There we go. Moving on. We, alluded to this earlier, state of the word happened. technically if you were not in the room. What words shall we use to describe the live streaming? If you were not in the room, you were definitely in the dark. Yeah, but it wasn't dark. It was in the loop. It was, yeah.

[00:46:24] Davinder Singh Kainth: It really was. I had Mary husband, I was running. I was running an online, no viewing party host, state of the word, with about 20 people in a Zoom room. And of course, assuming it was my internet that was glitching. And then other people were saying, no, I'm having the same problem. And I would keep refreshing.

[00:46:43] Michelle Frechette: And it finally, we said, all right guys, you'll have to watch this on your own. It's, not going to happen. So just like WordPress got blamed in uk Hey, Michelle is the blame person. I su DI, honestly, I've been suspecting as much. I thought it was Michelle. It had Michelle's stamp all over.

[00:47:02] Nathan Wrigley: the, what can I say? I can't, program, but I can hack. I don't, understand that. she got her award and now she's showing her two colors. Yeah, that's right. you can't program, but you can break things. How about that? We'll go with that. Apparently. Apparently, yeah. So if you, joined state of the word, the idea was that there was, and honestly, I, think for this particular one, there'd been quite a lot of, PR around state of the word, like I'd never seen before. there was this whole like four days to go, they were putting things out on Twitter and things, and three days to go. And then it came to the time and I, clicked on the appropriate link and it was broadcast to several platforms so you could watch it on X so you could watch it on YouTube and no doubt other places as well.

But it quickly became obvious that the tech, was entirely broken. You could see that it, it was there, there were cameras in the room, but I got this like 15 second or something. Cycle of Mary Hubbard. Just repeating the same words. and then I got a bit of Tammy sitting in the audience right at the front, and then it was back to Mary Hobar again.

And and so my first thought was, oh, this is bad. this is bad optics. It doesn't look good for WordPress, and what have you. And it's, and then I thought, this is really bad for those people who've actually booked a space and have got together in like a cafe or something like that, and are just hanging out.

And then, like the more sanguine part of me got hold and gave, I gave myself a bit of a talking to and I thought, it doesn't matter. what's fine, who cares? and so I, I hope that's what everybody else got out of it as well. the tech fails all the time, right? And there's not much you can do about it.

And even in the after reporting. I've noticed that there, there's no sort of nobody's prostrating themselves and apologizing and, gnashing of clothes and rendering of teeth or any of that. They're just it, didn't work. let's move on and talk about the, more important things, which was the content of it.

And I, think that's where I've landed as well, although it was a bit of a frustration at the time. So what, we move on. But Michelle, I hope for your sake, it wasn't too awkward having put all those people in a Zoom room or anything like that. Ah, I didn't spend any money to do it, it wasn't terrible.

Yeah. But I guess it was slightly embarrassing, but once I realized it wasn't me, we, what could you do? We just had a little networking time and went about our day. Yeah, indeed. okay, so it happened state, the word happened and one of the curious things, I didn't see it obviously, but it looks like from this, lemme see if I can find the picture.

Yeah, it, look, I'm showing you a picture of, four, what is it, four, eight people standing around. Something like, obviously leaning in, I'm guessing it's a big red button or something like that. And, it would've, I, dunno how real this was. Like, there was a button and all the people on stage at that moment leaned in and pushed the button.

And the idea being that WordPress 6.9, released at that point, what I'm guessing actually happened is that somebody at the back of the room was logged into some part of wordpress.org and clicked a button rather than that. if that button did do the thing, great, but I somehow doubt it. But what it's great, what a, lot of fun that was.

And the idea, first time ever, the release came out at the same time as this sort of live. Event. And yeah, Tammy said it was a button, but it was not read. Oh, okay. Tammy, honestly, do you think, the button actually did it? In other words, if somebody had run onto the stage like 10 minutes before I just struck the button, do you think WordPress 6.9 would've come out like 10 minutes early?

And would the office of the OBS or whatever it is in the UK reside, as a result? I think that somebody would have pushed the button because buttons are made to be pressed. That's right. And if anybody saw it, they would've pushed it. Yeah. Remember back in the day, look at, we're a community of nerds.

[00:51:06] Marc Benzakein: We push buttons. That's what we do. Yeah. Do you remember back in the day, that was a real way to get people to do stuff online, wouldn't it? You'd make a big red button and say, do not push this button. Everybody, would irresistibly. Click the button. Tammy says. Do not break the illusion. Okay.

[00:51:24] Nathan Wrigley: Sorry Tammy, for anybody here who still thinks that S center, Hey, my kids are watching. don't, yeah, I'm gonna stop, I'm gonna stop there. Okay. So anyway, that happened, but there was a lot more in it that wasn't mentioned previously. So we're back to sort of WordPress content again here. And I thought this was interesting.

So during the keynote that a few people came onto the stage and, Mullen, Matt Mullenweg spent a, fair bit of time talking about WordPress as a project during the last year, which has obviously. I imagine for him being a very curious year. I imagine it's been a year of ups and downs for him on so many levels, but he talked about, what's coming in WordPress in the near future, concentrating on a lot of the AI stuff.

Talked about telex. I think a year ago probably nobody had any idea that Telex was coming around. Tammy got a mention, along with Nick Hamey for their use of telex and just curious things that they've been doing. Talked about the AI team and got them on stage to talk about various different pieces.

Had Mary Hubbard on stage as well talking about the project as well. and we'll get into the AI stuff. this is a fascinating bit. I love this bit. This is the education side of WordPress. Easy to forget, right? I think ba basically, I view. WordPress is a publishing platform, but I forget the profound effect often that it has in different sectors and different parts of the world.

And thankfully Mary Hubbard hasn't, and I'll quote in 2025, there were 81 word camps in 39 countries organized by more than 5,200 volunteers attending over, attended by over a hundred thousand people. And here's the education bit, the learn WordPress platform served. This is eye watering. just take this in.

Like really think about it for a minute. 1.5 million users. Like what? That's just an indescribably large number of people. and the engagement jumped 32% after Word camp us. I think it was touted a little bit at that point. there was a real mention of Word Camp WordPress Campus Connect, which, got its debut in AMA in India.

And the idea of that program is to connect kind of real world, people with free training materials and free sessions. It's got a bit bigger, it's spread out since then. and is being used in that platform is sorry that Campus Connect idea is being used in different parts of the world as well.

WordPress credits was also given a mention. This is the idea that if you're a bricks and mortar university, you can, you can offset some of your scholarly program. you can say, I'm gonna do WordPress stuff. And if you're at the University of Pisa. That's possible. And if you're at the university, it's called the University dad, Fidel, I'm sorry if I've got that wrong.

In Costa Rica, you can also do the same thing. I love listening to you pronounce words from other language. I know it's, it's bad, let's just say that. But you can, you can offset actual real world credits. So that's a whole other thing as well. And I do you know what? Those are the bits that it is an amazing program.

[00:54:50] Michelle Frechette: Keep me interested. Don't you think? That's just amazing. The one and a half million. It's fascinating. I love it. Yeah, Really. And it's a great way to introduce WordPress to the younger generation because we already have a lot of not so young people in the WordPress space. So getting new people is the key thing.

[00:55:08] Davinder Singh Kainth: I saying. Whatcha saying? I have no words. yeah, I feel dda. I could be wrong about this, but it feels like you are like the, part of the world where you are, based in India, OB obviously I obsess about WordPress and talk to a lot of people. It does feel like it's, it's more hot.

[00:55:32] Nathan Wrigley: Let's go with that definition in your neck of the woods than it is here. Like events everywhere. There seems to be a lot of youth in it. I'm fascinated to see how Word Camp Asia goes in Mumbai, whether that's gonna be the first, like 4, 5, 6, 7,000 attendee Word camp. Oh, yes. It's gonna be the biggest one, yeah, at least for flagship word camps, because I, because again, a lot of people want to attend flagship word camps, but there's the factor of money and, feasibility of, taking leave from job. There's a lot of things, but when you, it's happening in your own country, then you can travel locally and, attend it and get the feel of it.

[00:56:13] Davinder Singh Kainth: Because a flagship Word camp has an altogether different vibe compared to a local word camp of 200 or 300 people. And yes, there is more. Why? Because here youngsters are actually interested in, technology and all that, and WordPress is one of the big foundation, because. So normally if you talk to someone, Hey, do you wanna build a website and say, oh, WordPress website or a Wix?

They already know what Wix is, what Squarespace is, what WordPress is. So it's not like you're gonna try to explain what the difference, obviously you gotta explain the difference between WordPress org and wordpress.com. Go step by step, but they are already familiar with these things. They know what plugins is, what themes are.

and plus we have lot of local word camps, so that is like the first, step of introducing people to WordPress. So plus they see people making money. And money is a big motivator, let me tell you. Yeah, It, feels like, like it, obviously I'm not in India, so I can't really make the comparison directly, but it feels like it was here like 12 years ago or something.

[00:57:19] Nathan Wrigley: that kind of level of excitement over there. Yeah. Now you can even compare now the plugins ecosystem, like If, when I started in WordPress space, if you say first five or 10 years in WordPress space, most of the plugin companies came from uk, us or maybe Australia, these countries.

[00:57:36] Davinder Singh Kainth: But now if you see the dominance, it's like India, Bangladesh, and like Bangladesh has come out of nowhere, right? And they are making really good products, right? it affects like, if someone's living next to me is making amazing product, I will also get that vibe, why can't I do that?

[00:57:53] Nathan Wrigley: So really related to that, right? Going back to Matt's, speech at State of the Word, here's some, interesting data around that and some of it's really curious. so for example, I had this intuition based upon nothing that WordPress had flatlined a little bit and, and it would appear that is in fact the case, 43% of the web.

I think we were probably talking about the same number this time last year. There was a bit of me, which was also fearful that would gone down, that might have gone down. I dunno why that would cause fear in me, but obviously nobody likes to see the thing that they're doing with their life going down, but steady away 43% of the web.

but here's an interesting point that Matt made that I hadn't really given any thought to. He was saying that imagine keeping it like that. In an era where companies like Shopify have a massive marketing budget, where they can advertise on television. In the uk they're advertising on the tube network, on bus, on the tele, all of that kind of stuff.

WordPress doesn't do anything like that. So even just staying at 43%. fairly remarkable. And then, this is curious. So we're back into Asia, not India, specifically Japan country that I haven't really given, much time to on this show in the past, Japan, it says, remains a standout market, 59%. Let's go with that.

Slightly under, but 59% of all Ja all Japanese websites are running on WordPress as their platform of choice. The CMS market share for WordPress is 83%, which is pretty phenomenal. And Japan is now the second most used language, outside of English. also curiously English, which I think until this year was always the, language that was dominant in terms of like percentages that's now flipped.

it's now no longer the dominant one because 56% of WordPress installs are now using a non. English language. So I guess Japan might be, Japanese might be a big part of that, and whatever variant of language you're using if you're in India or Bangladesh or what have you. So that, I think, probably signals a shift, not just for Matt's thinking in terms of WordPress, generally, more specifically I imagine there's gonna be a more of an effort to get into those communities, help those communities and all of that kind of stuff.

the usual things about themes and plugins and what have you. And here's another eye watering number, if you didn't, if you want another one. WordPress, during the last year up until the date of the, of the event had been downloaded 79.5 million times. It's boggling, isn't it? Isn't it just, but so it would appear that WordPress is, demographics are definitely changing.

it's, it feels like it's skewing much more towards. Asia and that part of the world, which I think is obviously quite exciting if you are in that part of the world. Anybody wanna add anything to those bits and pieces? I feel there was a lot to unpack there. I think the flexibility WordPress gives, it's still gonna grow.

[01:01:14] Davinder Singh Kainth: Yes, there was a chatter that the, like you said, like the growth of the WordPress has stalled or paused or platitude, but I think the flexibility part, the freedom part, will always make WordPress grow and plus the community this year. Yes. Prior to LA this year, there was little bit of negativity in the community.

We all know why, but this year things have been positive and people are doing positive things. yeah. Yeah. I agree. I think that once we got back to just keeping our eyes forward and focusing on what was important, it's, it, the, power of what WordPress offers is still unprecedented and, unmatchable.

[01:01:56] Marc Benzakein: So we just need to keep our eyes looking at what's important and, stick with that. Indeed, there will be more bits and pieces linked to all of these different things, in the show notes, but I think one of the areas, like if you ignore the geography, whether it's growing in, India or the uk or Australia or wherever it may be, I think undeniably one of the areas of growth in terms of the tech is this bit.

[01:02:25] Nathan Wrigley: So this is James LePage's website, by the way, James, what the heck? James snagged a one letter domain name. he's got the domain JJ cv, so the entire domain is three letters. That's well done. James LaPage is the head, I think head, I wanna say head. I dunno if he's like the co-lead or, but I think head of the AI endeavors over automatic.

It was one of the people on stage, if you're looking at the screen, you'll be able to see there's a photo of him on stage with Matt and Mary and, Felix Anson, is that Jeffrey Paul I think as well. And, they were on stage talking about AI and. AI and I, sorry, Tammy. we have this sort of strange kind of relationship, but I am definitely in the minority.

Everybody seems to be absolutely bowled over by AI and all the different things it can do. And James has produced an article where he lays out what they're doing are automatic. And one of the things which I think is curious that comes out of this article, and he's, and he goes, he really does drill this down.

He makes the point and then amplifies it. He said, what would usually be a year's worth of development takes place in a month now? What the heck? How, do you keep up with that? So he gives an example that, they'd done the prep work for the presentation at State of the Word, and then the day before that presentation, deep seek drop this new ai, which was like equivalent to chat GPT five.

And all of a sudden you've gotta go back to the drawing board and realign all the different bits and pieces or what have you. Anyway, the AI endeavors in WordPress can be thought of in four stages. The abilities, API, the WP AI client, the MCP adapter and the AI experiments plugin. And it would appear that WordPress, rather than try to be an AI client, rather than have an account with wordpress.com, where you go and get your ai, the idea is that WordPress is gonna build solutions at this other abstracted layer so that you can do all the things in WordPress by binding it to some other ai.

And, and in that way they, feel that they're gonna futureproof themselves because the AI itself, the, engine that's driving the actual interactions going backwards and forwards is not gonna be a WordPress thing. It's gonna be something else. fascinating, scary, and interesting at the same time, I don't know what your thoughts are on ai, but I'm gonna let you have some, if you wish.

[01:05:09] Davinder Singh Kainth: Yeah, it's good. They're working on the foundation part of it. The usable features are slowly creeping in. if you see SEO plugins, generate title meta text, and they have actually included this feature in that AI experiments plugin. Yep. You generate the title and all that, but other third party plugins are already doing that by connecting to, or ai, other AI models and all that.

So AI is gonna be big, but not now. But the good part is they're doing a kind of a head start in building the foundation part of it so that others can come in and use that foundation to build something useful. Yeah, that's right. James is a great pains to say that this is like a foundational layer.

[01:05:49] Nathan Wrigley: I, I, yeah, I, don't know, I'm, curious to see how this goes. I, Tammy, you, I know you wanna hit me over the head at this point, but we'll see, how it all goes, but, certainly a lot of work being done. Yeah, I, my concern I think is. With AI in general, this is just a gen, is, that we try to do too much too fast.

[01:06:13] Marc Benzakein: And when that happens, then you know how, what happens if somebody puts something out and WordPress that breaks everything because, and you have to go back and figure it out because there's 5 million new things WordPress as opposed to two or three new things, WordPress and, so I think that the, as with everything with technology is I always have concerns about our discipline more than I actually have about the technology itself.

[01:06:46] Nathan Wrigley: I'm with you, Tammy. Hopefully though, said she's not gonna hit me over the head with a bat because she's too jet lagged. That's good. I have you remain jet, but next week watch out. Yeah, do you know what though? the, bit that kind of I wonder is with, the AI stuff creeping into the editor, so it can do your meta tags and it can do your descriptions and Davinder said, it can do your SEO stuff.

where, does all the human time come to read all of this stuff? I, guess that's the bit that I, that sort of concerns me a little bit is that in, in an effort to produce more and more content, I just don't know who the audience, is for more and more of this content. it's not just about content.

[01:07:28] Davinder Singh Kainth: the other day I was reading a, following a conversation where someone said we don't need to buy plugins anymore. We, I can just use AI to spin up a plugin. And I'm done with it. And I thought, we don't buy a plugin for the code. We buy it for support and updates. How is your AI generated plugin gonna update for a security issue?

Yeah. So this is yeah. It's not a That's Yeah. Go ahead, mark. Yeah. Oh, I was just gonna say, that's what I've heard. I've heard people say, yeah, it's great to spin up a plugin, but what happens next week when you have to update it or anything like that. If you don't, if you know how to vibe code, but you don't know how to do anything beyond that, you still need to have somebody that's able to, go in and, Either fix things or change things or upgrade things. And I think that's where AI right now falls short. I think it will eventually get there where there may be no human interaction. Yeah. But who knows? I just feel like I'm a bit discombobulated by it all. 'cause it's all coming so thick and so fast.

[01:08:31] Nathan Wrigley: And the, horizon is so broad. And, it, was a long way away and now it's suddenly rushing towards us and there's so many different things that it can do, and I don't really know that, we've figured out where we sit inside of that relationship to it yet and maybe, give it another year, another two years we'll have figured out, okay, it's useful for that, but it's not useful for that.

And it, we thought it'd be fun to do that kind of thing. And it turns out nobody wants to read that kind of thing, Okay. But Tammy makes the point that, the way that WordPress is approaching it is that they're doing tools inside of core, so that you can Yeah, I'll read what she says rather than trying to interpret it.

Tammy says, which is why we're doing tools approach in core. There is the discipline. Yeah. Okay. Thank you Tammy. I appreciate it. Conversation is not gonna end. I'm sure we'll figure it out, but we do have, It is a big part of WordPress's Future in the year 2026. there is a lot coming. I would highly recommend that you read, James LePage's article.

I'll put it into the show notes so that you can have a little look. There's a few more bits and pieces. I'll just mention these briefly. These are a few things which have dropped in WordPress 6.9 that you may not. I've noticed, but there's a few articles which help us to do that. So this is Aki. This is nice.

It's like a tiny little thing, but it's a big thing. At the same time, you can now hide and show blocks on the, the front end. there's a little video here, I won't play it, but essentially there's a menu item. Now if you write, click on a block, or use the little, the little panel above the block.

When you interact with it, you can hide a block and it will just disappear off the front end. Obviously, it's still visible in the inserter or, the panel on the left hand side. So you can still see that it's there. I don't know, you may want to just take a paragraph away or something like that briefly, or an image or something like that.

You can now do that. That's built in to WordPress 6.9. there's a couple of other things as well. What did we mention? Yeah, there's the hide show blocks. We just talked about that. This is lovely. Like this I love. this is visual, drag and drop. I'm such, such a page builder, lover. I think it goes to my core.

so this is the ability to pick stuff up on the canvas of the Gutenberg editor, if you like. Instead of using little arrows to move things around, like a paragraph up and a paragraph down, you now just grab the paragraph with the mouse. Just move it where you want it to go, and, let go. And there it now lives.

I can't believe that. Wasn't a thing, actually. I've never missed it. Now it's there. I'll be, I think I'll be using it all the time. I wonder how many times I'll get things wrong and publish an article where the paragraphs are all in the wrong place. 'cause I've accidentally picked something up and dropped it.

I do that with blocks quite a lot. what else have we got? UI workflows, the accordion block we mentioned before. You've got the ability, term query and companion blocks. Time to read, block, everybody's favorite. The maths block that's gonna be used by everybody all the time. I love your sarcasm. Yeah.

Yeah. Does that, when will we ever use math in real life? Does it satisfy the 80 20 rule in WordPress, though? That's what I wanna know. the funny thing is out of all the features listed here, I'm, I will be using, and the most excited thing for me is the hide in display block.

[01:12:04] Davinder Singh Kainth: Yeah. I know some people call it like it's a dumb feature, but you know what, that's great. A lot of people gonna use this feature. Yeah, I saw that and I fell in love with it immediately. Same thing, just it's that kind of like in the past, if you really wanted to make major amendments to an article, you had to publish it in, you have to unpublish it or put it back into draft or something like that.

[01:12:26] Nathan Wrigley: Whereas now you get it and yeah. You could just rewrite entire sections of it. Just hide, And then just, come back to it. It's still published. You're not gonna use lose the SEO juice. I think actually Davinder, it's gonna become really powerful. And I, get what you mean.

When we look at these things, it's easy to make fun. And so say, oh, the maths block, somebody's gonna love that. Normal users, they, want to use simple features. They don't know what abilities API is. So yeah. Exactly. So anyway, there it is. The hide block though, for people who have a DHD like me will be like, I swear I put it in there.

[01:13:06] Michelle Frechette: Why isn't it showing up? So in the better, why, does this site, why is this site using of so many resources? I don't see anything. It's all those giant photos you've hidden. Lemme see if I can see it. I don't think it shows on this particular ui, but I think you get, you know that icon there it is.

[01:13:25] Nathan Wrigley: the, the icon that's taken over. It's the little eye icon. You either get a little closed eye or an open eye icon. So in that way you can tell, but you only see. If you pop open that left menu, you're right about that. Yeah. Alright. Michelle, you need to put a post-it note check for the hidden blocks and just stick it on your computer post-it notes all over my monitor.

[01:13:46] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. Actually, I don't know what the UX is gonna be for that, so I'm hovering my mouse over the inserter it. I don't know if the little eye icon, if the paragraph will, I'm presuming it'll stay in this panel here, but have the icon next to it. But it might be quite nice, a bit like when you edit, I don't know, a template part or something like that.

[01:14:05] Nathan Wrigley: It's in a different color. Might be quite nice to have a different colored, the paragraph, instead of it being in black text, it suddenly goes to red or something like that. It's kind of Photoshop. Photoshop does the same thing. You can just click the eye on, but it doesn't change the color.

[01:14:20] Marc Benzakein: I like that idea for sure. Yeah. You see that's, that is my good idea for 2025. That's your good idea right there. You got it. Finally. I've only got just under the wire. So left. That's my good idea. I do joke, I joke about it, but I think it's a great feature. Podcast. Yeah, indeed. Then we got a few curious things like the time to read blog.

[01:14:40] Nathan Wrigley: you can imagine that would be useful if you're, doing blog articles. you've got the capacity. Now if you drop in a one of these blocks, which is the comment count and comment links block, I know that. I imagine it's quite hard these days, what with Facebook and Twitter and everything to get comments.

But I know that some properties still get lots of that. You can show the number of comments, like we've got 15 comments over here or something like that. and then there's a whole bunch of other stuff, gallery aspect, ratios, yada. Lots and lots of stuff. okay. I think we're probably done.

I think we should bring back a. A site counter, like you had back in the nineties. Oh yeah. So like a, for retro blogs, it could be like how many times the site's been viewed? Day were the day and I would like to get rid, I'd like to get rid of the time to read anything because I either feel inadequate or like I'm competing with somebody.

What you should get write a Chrome extension which identifies if there's a time to read, thing on any website and then it multiplies it by 15 or something like that. There you go. Time to read 8,000 minutes. It only took me a week. I can do that. Yeah, I can do that. okay, so that's good. Okay.

I think that's WordPress 8.9 dom. Very quickly then we don't have much time left. I saw this piece, I think this came in D'S newsletter. I think I cribbed this from his newsletter this morning. it's over on LinkedIn. and it was ad AK AD is a, developer who has a plugin called Translate Press, which is a bit like a kind of page builder for doing your translations.

He's been looking carefully at Black Friday deal promotions in the WordPress space and he's drawn a couple of conclusions from them. I dunno how obsessed you got about this, but obviously if you're a developer like he is and your livelihood is wrapped around Black Friday and things like that, then it's important to know what everybody else is doing drawn a couple of conclusions.

The first one is he's noticed a strong push to increase the average order value and lifetime value, and he's saying that more companies are structuring their. Black Friday deals to nudge customers into higher tiers. I think if we cast our mind back just a few years ago, the Black Friday thing was all about getting new users to sign up, not to push existing users onto the next higher tier.

So that's the curious observation. The second observation that you noticed was, this thing which I've, I, confess, I've seen this a lot this year, higher renewal prices. So the idea that you deeply discount this one year package and then you offer it at, some sort of usual rate next year. So you might offer, I don't know, 70, 80% in some cases I saw this year.

And then you just return them to the normal pricing. the hope is that they, I dunno, just either make use of it or dare I say it, forget to cancel or something like that. Any does it, I'm guessing dda, if you included it in your newsletter, you must have thought this was interesting.

[01:17:42] Davinder Singh Kainth: Because, these trends are on point. The other thing that probably he missed is like companies that have multiple products, they're actually promoting their bundle so that people buy whole bookie of their plugins. They get more revenue from one transaction. Because if you buy 10 plugins in a bundle, you're not gonna use all those 10 plugins, so you're not expecting 10 x support requests.

Yeah. So that's there. And this renewal thing, like higher renewal and, 50% discount on first year, this has been there for a few years now and, I think awesome automotive products have championed this and now everyone is following it. And it does make sense because it basically gives a user to.

A chance to try the product at a very discounted, price. And obviously if it's working, the person will renew it at a higher rate. Yeah. I, saw, Katie, Keith put a post out on X where she was sort, did you see that one where she was saying she's very candid, Katie, isn't she? Yeah, she saying I saw that one too.

[01:18:41] Marc Benzakein: I talking about, she was saying that she does this whole awesome motive dance where like right before Black Friday, she goes through and cancels all the awesome motive products and then signs up again for Black Friday. because she knows she's gonna get this one. I, dunno how that works, but she has to supply a new email address or something.

[01:19:00] Nathan Wrigley: And there was, broad appreciation I think for that. But also some people are, why don't you just. Pay them, you know what it is. But it was interesting that people do that dance in the expectation that, that's what's happening every Black Friday. I can pick up everything cheap.

[01:19:15] Davinder Singh Kainth: Yeah. Once they've figured out how to attach a license to a specific domain, this dance is gonna stop. yeah, Okay. Okay. Okay. You've just provided the answer. and the final thing, which ad figured out, which is very much, is in his own wheelhouse is that there were no, almost nobody in the translation press space was doing a Black Friday deal.

[01:19:39] Nathan Wrigley: So I'm guessing he's thinking about things like We Lot and companies like that. Apparently they on Mass had all opted out of, doing Black Friday deals. I dunno how long the Black Friday thing last will last, but it seems super popular everywhere. Did you do one at Main, WP. we did, we are on, we're on your page.

[01:19:59] Marc Benzakein: we, and it's 25% off. And, it, the renewal, the way that we do it is that's lifetime. So every single year at renewal, you buy the annual and you get, $50 off. Oh, okay. And next year you would get $50 off and the year after that you get $50 off. And, nice. And the way that we look at it as a, we don't need people doing the dance.

B the longer people use our product, the less they're gonna need support. And so, it, ends up being a longer lifetime value to us. Actually. We've discovered by just renewing at the Black Friday price. the thing that I noticed, which I found interesting, this year is I remember when Black Friday was, Friday through Monday.

Oh, and now, it starts in on November 1st. I'm surprised it doesn't start on July 5th or something. Oh no. January the first will be the next, iteration. Yeah. And it, I, what I found interesting was, when we, have a roundup similar to yours, Nathan, and I think we got over 225 offers or something.

And, what I found interesting was that this year people. Were willing to announce what their Black Friday special was ahead of time, far ahead of when it actually went active. Whereas last year, anyone, if they said that there's, that their special started on say, November 24th, they wouldn't want it actually listed until November 24th.

[01:21:43] Davinder Singh Kainth: Yeah. This year they were willing to list it like way ahead of time so people would know what was coming. And I found that can be an interesting trend. don't you think that's curious that so when you submit it to my page I make it really clear on the intake form that the minute I publish it, or rather the minute that you send it to me, I'm gonna put it on the website.

[01:22:04] Nathan Wrigley: So in some cases I'm getting those in late September. So their, decreased pricing is fully available for two months. That is to say people know that it's going to be decreased. In two months. And I, find the psychology of that. So curious, like what, it'd be a bit like going into a clothes store and saying, we've got a sale in six weeks, but we've still got things at full price now if you want them.

And I, I guess it's, I guess it just comes down to desperation is not really the right word, but something akin to that, that they know that there's just gonna be this melee. For a period of time, everybody's only got a certain amount of money in their wallet. So they're trying to position themselves so that, okay, we've got 80% off over here and you know about it long in advance.

Yeah. You're gonna earmark your $50 for our thing, not their thing. But boy, it gets messy. I don't, yeah. But on the other hand, I just had a project in fact, that I, just started, two months ago. I knew that a couple of the plugins that I was gonna need were gonna have Black Fridays, but I needed the plugin then because So you did it.

[01:23:13] Marc Benzakein: I needed to get on the project. Interesting. And, of course these are all smaller people anyway, and, I wanna support them, so it doesn't bother me that much. Good, I'm pleased to hear about it. mark, I even ran a, I'm sorry, I even ran a, Black Friday special on my small little marketing boutique, and I had two people make purchases.

[01:23:33] Michelle Frechette: Who knew? Something special and opted not to use the discount code so that I would get the full value of their post. That's awesome. That's really awesome. Oh, that is, that's awesome. Yeah. There's an interesting idea, the idea of opting out of the Black Friday, just 'cause you want to do the full Monty. Yeah.

[01:23:48] Nathan Wrigley: That's curious. Yeah. And I did get two submissions which had in capital letters, do not publish this till the date it starts. And I was like, really? it's actually, a question on our form. And so when I go through and approve the, listing. if they say that they don't wanna listen until such and such a date, then I just set the publish date as that date.

[01:24:10] Marc Benzakein: yeah. And it's still, automated to a degree. I have to prove everything anyway, Yep. Yep. same. who is this? Mark? Mark, mark in the uk. Hello, mark. Mark Wilkinson. He says he really doesn't get Black Friday deals. Mark's got a few plugins out there. so I'm guessing, mark, that you don't participate in that there wouldn't be a dance.

[01:24:29] Nathan Wrigley: He said if you value your product and always sell it at that price. Yeah. That's the other curious thing, isn't it? I suppose is that whole kind of weird thing from the end user, but we so used to it everywhere, aren't we? It's just everybody, gets on board and is dealing cheaper deals. Mark says, sorry, this is Marcus Bonnet.

I share my deal a month ahead on your list, but I wouldn't advertise that on my own site until the deal starts. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. So you advertise it on these third party places, these sort of aggregated places, but not on your own website actually, along those lines, I noticed, I think Gravity Forms was one of the ones that said our Black Friday special starts and they had a countdown timer on when they're Black Friday, like three days or five days or whatever.

[01:25:15] Marc Benzakein: Okay. Ahead. So that was interesting too. Yeah. So they actually did advertise on their site that it was coming. I wonder how many people shelled out for stuff that they didn't need. This Black Friday, I make it a bit of a point on Black Friday to try to stay away from all that chaos because I, I find it very easy to spend money that shouldn't. I bought this little plugin called Podcaster Plus. Oh, what the heck?

[01:25:42] Michelle Frechette: But I got this lifetime deal, so I think it was worth it. Yeah, Hopefully. Hopefully, Michelle, it's, yeah, we can mention that another time. it's not about that here right now. what does Patricia say? Patricia says, so she's responding to Mark, who, is obviously not in favor of those deals.

[01:26:01] Nathan Wrigley: I like deals as a buyer, but I don't understand from a seller point of view, like not valuing your customers from other months. Interesting. Anyway, that, that was the piece by ad. It's on LinkedIn again. Links in the show notes, right? Very quickly because time is running short. I'm gonna miss that. I'm also gonna miss that I mentioned it already.

Just a couple of things which came into my world this week. In many cases, just new plugins that I thought you might like to check out. I've not heard of them before. If you have apologies, they may not be brand new. So this is the first one. It's called Opinion Camp, and it's gonna be a, free poll plugin, or at least they've got a free option.

So if you wanna do polls on your WordPress website, this is an option. Honestly, I'm gonna give each one that amount of time we could have delved into them, but I've run out of time. So here we go. The next one is as long as, ebook crafter, which enables you to turn a WordPress post into an ebook.

Basically you click a button and it becomes an ebook. Start a free trial. So I'm guessing they've got a pro version as well. Dunno whether it's in, I pur I purchased this. Yeah, you like it? Prior to, yeah, I still working out some of the, the glitches in it. I don't wanna say glitches, but he's, making it better.

[01:27:10] Michelle Frechette: He's absolutely making it better as he goes with a lot of feedback. So I, was an early purchaser. He gave it to me for free. I went back and purchased it. Nice to support, To support him, but also it's a great idea and because I have taken a blog and turned it into a book, I wanted to be able to, to experiment with it.

[01:27:27] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. At the moment it's touting PDFs, but I dunno if that's gonna be more formats in the future, Kindle compatible things, stuff like that. Okay. The next one, loving this one. This is so great. this is called Neurogenesis Styler, and what it's doing is injecting into core blocks more style CSS options.

Nothing more. That's it. you know how there's loads of things that you wish to do that you have to open up a, I don't know, a text editor or an IDE or have a plugin, which will enable you to have CSS somewhere on your site. This will do that for core block, so it adds options for typography, background, border radius spacing, visual effects, block sizing and more.

And there's a lovely picture down here, which kind of sums up the entire plugin, just what you'd expect. Really, I love this sort of stuff. makes WordPress call seem so cool and third party people come along and do stuff like that. this one I got got caught out here. I just assumed that the fluent people, WP Manage and Ninja were behind this and I don't think DI vendor, that's not true, right?

This is not a fluent. No, this is a third party product. I think it's by Spencer Form. Oh, that's it. Yeah. Spencer Form. Thank you. and it's, if you've got the fluent suite, they're taking over the world, aren't they? It's like they're doing everything so well. if you've got their, one of their suites, like fluent Forms, fluent CRM, fluent Cart and all the other ones, you might wanna connect it to some kind of AI and fluent, MCP is a third party solution, which will help you to do that.

Links in the show notes. These are plugins which used to cost money, but have now been made free, WP Roadmap. like Kanban boards for roadmaps, for products, that kind of thing. You get the idea. I'm sure you've seen things like that before. And by the same developer. YouTube for WordPress, which enables you to put on your website, YouTube videos and playlists and all the kind of stuff that you might see on the actual wor, YouTube website.

You can do that inside of WordPress. They used to be paid and now they're free. I don't know if the, developer has found other things to do or if it's gonna be maintained, but anyway, there we go. penultimate one is this one. It's over on GitHub. It's a virtual media folder plugin. And this, I'm just gonna read it out from the about section here.

Virtual media folders brings virtual folder organization to your WordPress media library. Organize your media files into hierarchical folders without actually moving anything on the disk. Your folders are virtual, so the URLs of your bits and pieces never change. I'm sure that there are third party plugins that you can pay for that do this already.

I know that there are, but this one, yeah. Anyway, there it is. It's on GitHub, so you can check it out. And no, this is the penultimate one. if you attended last year, I know Anne did, the Cloud first hackathon is coming back in the year 2026. It's gonna be on March the 20th through the 22nd. You have to apply, to be in the room.

And so hit this button here, links in the show notes, but the URL is hackathon.cloud fest.com. I've got an episode on the WP Bills podcast coming out with Anne in the near future where we talk a little bit about last year's event. So maybe go and check that website out. And the last one, I'm not gonna reveal until the very last moment.

I'm just gonna ask Michelle what she'd been up to with Mark West Guard. so Mark and I have decided this year, 'cause he's one of my WordPress besties that we exchange gifts for Christmas every year. And this year we get, because of just, budget and things like that, we set a $25 limit and decided it had to make the other person laugh.

[01:31:19] Michelle Frechette: Now my gift to him is not arrived yet, so I can't tell you all publicly what it is because he hasn't seen it yet. But his gift to me arrived on Saturday and I did post it on Twitter and all of the socials. so you're welcome to share that now on screen. I love stuff like this. I have no idea like, what even is that?

[01:31:42] Nathan Wrigley: It's like a giant sock that just whales around. It's just one of those dancing, like you see them often at like car dealerships. The note said not only was it for Christmas, but it was for the grand opening of my. Online business. Can you, imagine the day that, because I'm guessing, I'm guessing that this product was probably a kid in a room somewhere with a vacuum cleaner who turned it onto blow instead of sock, somehow connected it to some sort of fabric.

And this happened and they immediately wet themselves laughing, put some eyes on it, and we were like, oh, oh, we've got a product. I love stuff like this. I don't believe that Twitter, and I didn't check, but I don't believe that Twitter lets you put alt text for video yet. So I did include an alt description, which just says, A video is an inflatable tube man powered by a fan.

[01:32:34] Michelle Frechette: It's red, about six feet tall, and it's dancing in my living room in front of anybody who doesn't. You know what? You know what's great about that? What's great about that is it will always make you laugh. Yeah. It's not just gonna make you laugh once, it's gonna make you laugh every time you see it. It's in my living room, so now when I know people are coming over and I want to really welcome them, I turn it on before they arrive and they walk in and I'm like, just for you.

[01:32:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yes for you, Michelle. Next time you're on this show. It's gotta be, where those guitars are. I want it in the background. I want it the whole time. It's so loud. Oh, is it? It has such a fan, like the fan noise in it. I could mute myself and let you see it briefly. Yeah. But yeah. But it's very loud.

Yeah. Yep, Okay. There we go. anyway, I wanted to share that. It was fun. No, that's good. Love it. Great. A couple of comments just before we go. Courtney says, I've long loved press books. I guess that's the plugin that we were looking at for self. Oh, no, This is something else for self-hosting.

Ebook was the other one. Yeah. UB Creation uses multi-site. That's a different solution. Thank you very much. and who I just mentioned said that the Cloudfest hackathon is so worthwhile applying for. Anne has won it two years in a row, you've got to upend her. She's on for the trifecta, this year.

So go and stop Anne in her tracks. There we go. That's it. That is all we've got time for. Appreciate. Firstly, I'm gonna big shout out to Michelle and to Davinder who stepped in at the 11th hour. however, mark does is not immune to thanks because he was off at like stupid o'clock. It wasn't the 11th hour, it was the 5:00 AM hour.

that's right. And and I really appreciate that as well. So thank you to you three. Really appreciate it. But also thanks to anybody that dropped by and left a comment. That's lovely too. It keeps the show going and driving it forward. There's only one last humiliating thing for the three of us, four of us to do.

There's, my inability to count again, is to give us the hands, give us the slight, handy, wavy thing. And there we go. And I will publish that and we will see you next week for another episode of this week in WordPress featuring who knows who. Bye everybody. Take care. Take care. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.