This Week in WordPress #359

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It is time for This Week in WordPress, episode number 359, entitled Lover. It was recorded on Monday the 15th of December, 2025. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I am joined by three guests. They come and go as the tech fails sporadically, but I am joined today by Michelle Frechette, by Courtney Robertson, and by Jesse Friedman.

We are a WordPress podcast, so we get into lots of WordPressy things. In this case, right off the bat, really.

We talk about the fact that WordPress 7.0 is very much in the planning. What has happened since WordPress 6.9 dropped?

We also talk about some events that have happened and also will be happening, and in this case, not necessarily to do with WordPress. So there are more open web events, but also some events around CMSs, which are happening in the near future as well.

We talk about some of the Black Friday things that people bought.

We also talk about the global partnership program and whether or not that is confusing.

There are some team reps that are needed into the year 2026.

There's loads of developer things.

And a few new plugins, two of which have come from Courtney herself.

All of that is coming up next on This Week in WordPress. And just to say we are gonna be away for a couple of weeks for the holiday period, so we'll be back in early January, so two weeks from today.

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

Hello. Hello. Good morning. Good afternoon, good evening. Welcome, wherever you may be in the world. Very nice to have you. You can see we've got a panel. I'm surrounded by fabulous people. much is my Mondays at 2:00 PM UK time. I love this. This is my highlight of my week. I, hope my family are not listening to any of this, but, I absolutely love doing this because I get to hang out with these wonderful people.

And also in the comments, typically there's lots of people hanging out as well, so that's really nice. we're on episode number 359. I'm gonna introduce the panel in just a minute, but I'm gonna do all the laundry list of ordinary stuff that I normally do just to establish the ground rules. I suppose the first thing to say is if you are watching this on a variety of different platforms, let's say for example, you're watching it on X, Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook or wherever, you may be catching it, we don't get the comments, none of your comments come through, to our platform.

And honestly, there's no way I'm gonna have eight screens open seeing what's going on. So the best thing that you can do, if you want to comment, is just stop watching it wherever you're watching it, and go here. Michelle is sporting the link. it's wp. Thank you, Michelle. That's perfect. WP builds.com/live.

Once more. WP build.com/live. If you go there, then if you're on a desktop, there's a chat box on the right hand side that, that is a YouTube thing. So you have to be logged into Google. And I know that some people don't like using Google stuff, so we have an alternative. If you actually click into the video, then there's a little button top right?

Says live chat. That's a platform thing, so you don't need to be logged in at all to anything. You just type your name in and put us a comment in there and, we're off to the races. So feel free to do that. That honestly that whole thing keeps the, show ticking over and I can see that a few people are doing that already and I'm grateful for you to, for doing that.

But we'll get to those comments in a moment. Let's go round the houses. Let's start off by going to Michelle Frechette. that is not name, I dunno what happened. I've never got your name wrong. It's Michelle Fette. How are you doing, Michelle?

[00:04:13] Michelle Frechette: I'm good. I'm a little cold, but I'm good.

[00:04:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

Michelle lives in a part of the world where it's actually really cold. I live in a part of the world where it's actually really cold normally, but at the moment it's beautiful. It's 14 degrees centigrade or something here. It's lovely. But, Michelle Frechette is the executive director of Post Status and in addition to the work there, she's also the podcast barista at WP Coffee Talk.

Co-founder of Underrepresented in Tech, creator of WP Speakers and WP Career pages, and also a co-founder of Sponsor Me, WP Speed Network Online. She writes books, is an influencer and a frequent organizer and speaker at WordPress and tech events. She lives in Rochester or just outside Rochester, New York, and she likes to take photos of Nature.

One URI gonna update. Gone.

[00:04:58] Michelle Frechette: Yep. I was gonna say, I'm gonna be updating that bio soon to say that I've,

[00:05:02] Nathan Wrigley: oh, speaker

[00:05:02] Michelle Frechette: of the year. Oh yeah. The winner of

[00:05:04] Nathan Wrigley: the prestigious stuff. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. You must do that global. Yeah, in 2026 we can, mention

[00:05:10] Michelle Frechette: that, have a little bit of a different bio.

[00:05:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's nice.

the one URL to capture it all though is meet michelle.online so you can find most of the bits and pieces there. So let's continue round. Let's go next to Courtney Robertson, there, there's Courtney. Hello Courtney. How are you doing?

[00:05:26] Courtney Robertson: I'm well this morning, Nathan. I'm drinking for the audio listeners.

Before we do my actual intro, not sponsored by the WP World. Hey Marcus. Oh, I'm drinking coffee out of my capital p dangit mug that you Oh,

[00:05:42] Nathan Wrigley: nice, Might be a, depends of the

[00:05:43] Courtney Robertson: dishwasher.

[00:05:47] Nathan Wrigley: that's that. Nice to see you. Unfortunately. I dunno if it's the Vervid. I think the ve I'm really struggling today.

the video's reversed. Video is flipped, so all the words were the other way around, which is fine. There is a setting inside. I think you can toggle something. You can figure it out. Play, yeah, I'll

[00:06:02] Courtney Robertson: go looking.

[00:06:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. anyway, here we go. Courtney Robertson, a developer advocate at GoDaddy and former computer science public school educator Contributes as well to fair, which is an acronym, FAIR and the WP Community Collective.

You can Google both of those after being a WordPress user. Since 2.2, Courtney has released two plugins. We're gonna see those, in the past two weeks. All. During, sorry. All the holiday hob. Bob hobo, I suppose we should say. Oh, we'll get to those plugins in a moment. That's exciting. Very cool. Very cool.

Kind of making, WordPress cool again. Is the, is the, mnemonic there. Oh, you flipped. You're the other way around now. That was clever. And

[00:06:45] Courtney Robertson: is it, correct for you now?

[00:06:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, Put them, pull the mug up and let's have a look again.

[00:06:49] Courtney Robertson: Alright. It is a capital. Yeah, we got it. Dang it. Mug. We got it mug right.

There you go. So you know, if you two want to have a capital P Dang it. Reminder [email protected] can help you with that.

[00:07:05] Nathan Wrigley: He's here, actually, he's already written a comment, so I'll put his comment up in a minute. But we'll go around the houses and finish off our, our bio. So next one, last one today.

Jesse Friedman. How you doing, Jesse? Doing great. Very nice to have you with us to be here. I really, I always am in awe of Jesse's background and he explained last time, what the heck? All of that was impressive. But there's pictures of like jet pack man, and like a man with a, like a squid and they all look like they're exquisitely drawn by hand.

it's beautiful. Loving that. It's actually a

[00:07:36] Jesse Friedman: local, artist here in Rhode Island. Yeah.

[00:07:39] Nathan Wrigley: Did all these, yeah, actual art. I suppose we're worried about people like that doing actual art and whether or not they can compete with their AI overlords in the near future. It'd be an interesting experience, says on his, on his picture, he is the head of WP Cloud Automatic, and that's what it says in the bio as well.

However, I don't I'm gonna read it out 'cause it is what you wrote. this is the bio that I got from Jesse. It says, hasn't. Oh no.

[00:08:08] Jesse Friedman: Wait,

[00:08:11] Nathan Wrigley: What did I write?

Truncated? It's rather

[00:08:16] Michelle Frechette: brief. Honestly. I don't think

[00:08:18] Nathan Wrigley: AI could be that short. You probably wrote something else and it just got truncated. 'cause it says this. It's lovely. It says head of WP Cloud. Lover. That's all. That's all we, that is not untrue. So yeah,

[00:08:34] Jesse Friedman: I leave at that. Got a feeling. I'm pretty sure it goes on to say lover of WordPress and, something

[00:08:40] Nathan Wrigley: else.

I don't know. Technology,

[00:08:42] Jesse Friedman: open source or all the things.

[00:08:43] Nathan Wrigley: No, but when I saw that I was copying and pasting everything into the bio the other day and I saw that, I thought, no, that's going in. That's quality. I love it. Yeah. No, that's good. Just leave it right there. It's so good. Okay, so let's go to the comments.

That's what keeps this whole thing going. Obviously got comments from. People, in the, panel it probably won't show those ones 'cause they're saying hi and things like that. But we are getting a hello from, you Michelle, help me out because I, she corrected me, Anna, about your name. It's Anne.

If it's Anne and it's Anna. Yes. If it's Anna Boler. Is that right?

[00:09:19] Michelle Frechette: Mika Anna. Anna Mika Ika.

[00:09:20] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, even with instructor or Anne, I asked her last

[00:09:24] Michelle Frechette: week so that I understood better. I'm gonna go with Anne. Hello.

[00:09:27] Nathan Wrigley: She says, let's stick it at that. Jonathan Overalls joining us. WP Plugins A to ZZ If you're an American morning from the damp, wet coast of Vancouver Island.

Yeah, I get this. Get this thing. oh. Every week. Do you

[00:09:40] Michelle Frechette: remember?

[00:09:41] Nathan Wrigley: No. 'cause I have the memory of a goldfish, Michelle. It's ridiculous. What's Gerald? Gerald? Yes, of course. And we did

[00:09:49] Courtney Robertson: breakfast with Gerald at Luko. Nathan I

[00:09:51] Nathan Wrigley: know. And every sinew of me feels terrible, but. I have every week. He's who's GoBank again?

Remind me. Who's

[00:09:58] Michelle Frechette: GoBank?

[00:09:59] Nathan Wrigley: Do you have? okay, let's, just segue for a bit, right? Do you have anything like, I do like this. Is there a black hole in any part of your life Where for, me it's names. You could tell me your name 50 times over and it's a total lottery. whether it will land, sometimes it'll be first time.

Mostly it's hardly ever. But I will remember like everything about spaces I've walked through, so I could tell you about the word Camp EU 2019 building. I could tell you everything about where the doors were, how long the corridors were, all of that. But if you, ask me the person that I met six seconds ago, I'll be like, Nope, I don't remember their name at all.

It's ridiculous. Do you have anything? There's Neil.

[00:10:46] Jesse Friedman: it's, it's, it know it.

[00:10:52] Courtney Robertson: it took him a moment to notice that, Jesse?

[00:10:55] Jesse Friedman: No. I definitely have that black hole. One thing that I've really, it's funny because if I don't do this and I don't look you in the eye and repeat your name back in my head when I first meet you.

[00:11:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:11:08] Jesse Friedman: it's a bigger struggle to remember, but if, I do that

[00:11:11] Nathan Wrigley: for

[00:11:11] Jesse Friedman: sure, it, it tends to be okay.

The problem that I have is, that I can recognize everybody's face. So I always have this moment of, yep. I know exactly. I know who you are. I probably know who you work for.

[00:11:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yep.

[00:11:22] Jesse Friedman: And, I think I, I'm pretty recognizable as well, just. Me, my, my facial features, whatever. So I tend to, garnish. I don't know a lot of people like remembering who I am and it's not going both ways.

And it's, it's super tough when that happens. Yeah. Yeah. Try

[00:11:39] Michelle Frechette: and they always know when you look down at their name tag, it's

[00:11:43] Jesse Friedman: Yeah, you

[00:11:44] Michelle Frechette: can't do that, sir. You gotta wait

[00:11:45] Jesse Friedman: for their eyes to go off onto something else. Hey, look at that. Oh, okay.

[00:11:50] Nathan Wrigley: What we, need is, I'm usually, I need the knife here, just like right next to the eyes,

[00:11:55] Courtney Robertson: say, floating beside your face all the time.

I'm usually pretty good with names, but finding my keys is a different story.

[00:12:02] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. So it's not just me. We all have a black hole somewhere. I am Jesse, I just gonna say next time I meet you, I'm just gonna remember you as the lover. That's all. I hole what I need to know for now more than this is gonna go horribly wrong.

Sorry, IR I'll stop doing that whole thing.

[00:12:22] Courtney Robertson: I verify. That's fine.

[00:12:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Good, okay. So I apologize to anybody whose name I have forgotten, including Gerard. I'm sorry. Marcus ett, though he's landed, he's got himself into my head somehow. Good morning. He says Everyone I've got more WordPress Star Wars release code names this week.

Oh, okay. So on last week's show. Yeah. We got into jazz musicians and why WordPress was jazz musicians. And I flippantly said, I think it should be Star Wars characters. And then Marcus Burnett posted that the following day on Oh, no, Then we got into that in the comment It was during

[00:12:55] Michelle Frechette: the show.

[00:12:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.

And then, it whole got into this whole Twitter thing. So yeah, put 'em in if you want. I'm going for Bobette. That's what I think the next version WordPress seven should be Bobette. That's just what I think.

[00:13:09] Courtney Robertson: I think Marcus landed on the jazz performer. that was, that's added in the first re-release where the CGI characters and Yeah, the blue lady with the microphone and the, yeah, I think she was, I don't know if it was the lead.

[00:13:25] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so we could do 2026 and we could transition away from jazz musicians into Star Wars characters during 2026 with those I play Jazz a. Yeah, the jazz musicians and Star Wars. And then we can leave that all behind. And get on with all the,

[00:13:39] Michelle Frechette: all from the cantina, right? From that, yeah. Yeah, exactly

[00:13:47] Nathan Wrigley: that one. okay.

[00:13:49] Michelle Frechette: I think you'll, have to pry the jazz musician thing from Matt's cold dead hands at some point because Yeah. You're right's not gonna happen until that It's his thing.

[00:13:56] Nathan Wrigley: You're absolutely right. He loves it. It's fair enough. good morning. There is a name for that music.

[00:14:01] Jesse Friedman: it's, it's a form of jazz.

The Star Wars. I don't know if I wanna say, 'cause it's, Kind weird, but it's, you replace the A with an I, that's the name of the Star Wars music. Okay. Okay. Oh, okay. Okay. Thank you. Alright. It's a little,

[00:14:16] Nathan Wrigley: it's a little, yeah. Means say means the same thing here as it does there. So yeah. let just leave that in everybody's minds.

They can figure that out for themselves. Moving on. Yeah, moving on. the lover?

[00:14:27] Jesse Friedman: I don't, I'm not sure.

[00:14:30] Nathan Wrigley: Let go. No, this show quickly out. Let's go. Everybody stop now. says it's cold here. it's, here's the sunny cold in Germany. Okay. That's a bit like kind of what we've got, although it's not that cold.

Yeah. This will go, Tammy says she's got fresh tea, fresh green tea and yuzu, so she's settling in. Oh, nice. Nice, Reese is saying good afternoon. Anne's back three lovely people I met in one live show and would love to meet one date. I am guessing that excludes me. I'm just saying, I'm not, we hung out.

Wait. And

[00:15:10] Michelle Frechette: one, one she would love to meet one day. I'm guessing that Anne has not met Jesse.

[00:15:15] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. There you go. Alright. I took it, to heart and I didn't need to, da Adam Warner saying hello. Nice to have you. Good morning. Yes. Gosh, there's so many comments. I'm very bad at names myself. I'm so sorry.

That was, it was all you that got that whole thing started. I apologize about it. Nathan. It's okay. I've got his

[00:15:34] Michelle Frechette: back.

[00:15:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. something about Nathan baiting, I dunno what I've done. What, what is being done to me? Oh.

[00:15:41] Courtney Robertson: Jesse was calling you, a different name and you

[00:15:44] Jesse Friedman: said

[00:15:44] Nathan Wrigley: you didn't know

[00:15:45] Jesse Friedman: you couldn't remember names.

I said, Hey Neil, listen. Oh,

[00:15:48] Nathan Wrigley: I, didn't hear that. I'm so sorry. Oh, I love that kind of thing as well. Rest of us did. That's right on my screen. Yeah. The best part is

[00:15:55] Michelle Frechette: it was lost on you, which was the funniest part of all. Yeah.

[00:15:59] Nathan Wrigley: okay. Something about AI glasses. Maybe we have to use AR glasses after all.

Okay. And then I'd love to see Nathan try AR glasses. I. I don't think I'd augmented

[00:16:09] Courtney Robertson: reality show

[00:16:11] Nathan Wrigley: it.

[00:16:11] Courtney Robertson: Show you needs how much money Meta

[00:16:13] Nathan Wrigley: burn on that whole thing. I don't know. what is this one? Is this a real one? Face blindness Sagia. So Pro Sofa Agnosia. Is common in autism, making it hard to recognize fa okay.

Yeah. Making it hard to recognize faces, even loved ones pronounced, not just poor vision, but difficulty remembering and processing facial details. Oh, that's fascinating. There's a whole word for that. Wow. give all, give them all nicknames and tell, and get them all to agree to call them. Yeah. Okay. So I could just call everybody like Roy or something.

Everybody gets the one name and then I can't go wrong. da Is that it? Have we got quite a few more comments? But I think I'll just leave those. I think we

[00:16:59] Michelle Frechette: got it. Yeah. Yeah,

[00:17:00] Nathan Wrigley: we got it. Okay. thank you. Keep those coming. Have a chat amongst yourselves. It's good fun. Let's get on with the WordPress e bits and pieces for today's show.

Okay. First up, self-promotion. Here we go. Wp builds.com. If you fancy, checking out what we're doing. We've got all the episodes and everything there. Usually they're in this sort of like archive link. WP Builds podcast is the thing we do on a Thursday. It's an interview. I actually had Anne on in the, I'll show you that in a second.

And then this. This podcast episode that we're recording now comes into this little archive here and. Put your name into this email, field here, and we'll send you emails twice a week when that has happened. believe it or not, the Black Friday deals are still going. It is certainly less than it was, but anything that's still on this page is still available.

I think some of them stretch into January, so goodness knows if you've still got a few dollars burning a hole in your pocket. WP builds.com/black and they're there, there's no affiliate links or anything like that, so you know, you'll, yeah. Anyway, there we go. The next thing then is here's our archive.

And this is the episode that I did this week with Anika. and it was all about Cloud Fest, the hackathon that her and the team that she is been the sort of chief of, if they're like the leader of, won two times in a row, the most recent one, which I attended, and was creating, a, plugin which enabled you to turn infographics, so images into descriptive texts so that you could read out the data held in charts and things like that.

It was really profound, and Anna talks to me about the hackathon and about the longevity of those projects, whether or not they die in the water after the hackathon is over and what have you. And coincidentally, actually not coincidentally, it was very much done by intent. I released that episode to align with this, which is the cloudfest hackathon is back 2026, March the 20th through to the 22nd.

you have to apply, so you can now do that. Basically, if you want to submit the letter

[00:19:00] Courtney Robertson: t is on my face in this image. Oh, what, where are you? right there? Yes. That's, the GoDaddy. Oh, I see. Yes. That's

[00:19:13] Jesse Friedman: I the screen a little bit.

[00:19:15] Courtney Robertson: We need, the, new, what's the stretchy? Yeah.

Text the stretch. Yeah, that's, That doesn't, you're,

[00:19:24] Nathan Wrigley: that's so good. I would highly write the screen.

[00:19:26] Jesse Friedman: Does a text

[00:19:27] Nathan Wrigley: model when you do that? the problem is if I reduce the screen size, I have this tool with which I highlight everything and it binds to the dimensions of the screen. So it will mess up everything that we do.

But, needless to say, that she's

[00:19:41] Courtney Robertson: so good. Yeah. And I hope that I get to see some of you guys there. Yeah. As well. Next year, I think that it would be, there's quite a few folks that are in the chat today, like Tammy and others that were also there with Anique and I, it was an amazing opportunity and I'm looking forward to going again for this coming year.

So the way that, the hackathon generally works so that folks don't get discouraged by this, is that, Companies like My Own I work at GoDaddy will sponsor staff to attend. And for every staff number that gets to go on company money, it also sponsors folks to go that are not employed at an organization that is sponsoring them to attend.

it is an application only event and there's some amazing folks behind it. A lot of us know Elaine and Carol. So Alan is going to be the one that, helps with a lot of the tech direction of what projects come in and does so in conjunction with a few other folks, that also help review what the different projects are that are pitched.

This one is a three day one, unlike the, first ever Cloud Fest. USA one we just had about a month ago, that was a one day and it was the first time we had ever had it, the one in Europe. This is now a refined event. Carol has shepherded this thing into something really amazing. People are dialed in at this, Yeah. People are, really excited about the various projects. And last year while there, I saw the one table working on MCP and I only vaguely understood what MCP meant, and now it's everywhere. Yeah. And folks like Milana and Felix and Yost were all over there working on, no, not Felix. another one of the Googlers Pascal books, whatever it was they were, yeah, They were all working through on that particular project. And now we turn around and see in the news this week that MCP, which Philanthropic started, has been giving to the Linux Foundation, for stewardship and safeguarding of it being an open source protocol initiative. Cloudfest hackathon, amazing time to see what's coming together, what's new?

It is not solely WordPress focused. A lot of things may be WordPress adjacent. I worked on a project that was, related to SBOs, which is if you're in a GitHub repo and you go look at the settings and the dependency graph, it tells you everything that project's depended upon. It's really helpful to be able to identify that some little rogue obscure library that WordPress calls upon may need some help.

yep. Alan Lucas and Simone

[00:22:22] Nathan Wrigley: are amazing mentors, and I get you right. The, I was, I'd never been to an event like it. I had a kind of like a vague notion of what it would be like. And when we arrived, when I arrived and it all began on the, first day and the tables were all set out so everybody knew what was going to be on offer as some something, they would sit down.

For the next two, three days and work on, I assumed that some of them would be really hot and others would be less popular, but by pure coincidence. But it can't be coincidence 'cause it happens each year. a, similar number sat down on each table. I think there was a little bit of moving around just to make sure that every project had a similar sort of, A number of people sitting at the table. So they had a similar amount of opportunity to succeed at it. But, you have to apply. This is not a thing where you can just show up like a, word camp. You pay for your ticket and you just attend. You have to apply to this and be accepted. And if you're accepted, then that's one thing.

You can be an attendee and sit on a particular table. And they are really looking for the smorgasbord, the whole gamut of different types of people out there. So it's not just for developers. When I heard the word hackathon, that was again, what I thought it would be just a room full of developers. It's not because they wanna have intuitions about the, whole product life cycle.

If something takes off, they want to, give it legs and give it the opportunity to, grow. Have a listen to the podcast with Anna Mika, on WP Build. You can hear about how it works and the, knots and the bolts of it, but I dunno if Michelle or Jesse have got any commentary on this one.

[00:23:56] Michelle Frechette: I just wanna say that I think. I'll

[00:23:59] Nathan Wrigley: go, Michelle first and then we'll go Jesse. Sorry,

[00:24:01] Michelle Frechette: I just wanna say, I think that this event fits Courtney to a t

[00:24:07] Nathan Wrigley: yeah,

[00:24:08] Courtney Robertson: Little dev, a little bit of other stuff. Yeah. I was the one that explained SBOs last time, and that was a lot of fun because we had people doing all sorts of wild theatrical, things on stage during the presentation at the end of it.

And there may have been whipped cream that would've been exploded. Yeah, I remember

[00:24:25] Nathan Wrigley: that. Yeah, that's good. Jesse, sorry.

[00:24:28] Jesse Friedman: No, I was just gonna say, I've been gonna Cloud Fest for years. I'm just curious, how does everybody get there? Because, it's a fun Oh, great difficulty, honestly, thing about, it's that you can get intentionally lost.

You can see a lot of Europe by, going to Cloud Fest because it's not, it's not like in a major city. It's often in the middle of nowhere Western.

[00:24:47] Courtney Robertson: there's a big, not Disneyland there called Europa Park. And so it is a destination and now. I believe that the park is now open year round as opposed to in the past, the catch there was an epic tale that involved Shanta Ani, if Shanta in Canada.

Hanta joined up with myself and some of our coworkers. We all, being in North America, wanted to get there with the day to time zone adjust before we had to show up and use our brains. So we were coming in extra early, which means that the shuttles weren't running yet for the hackathon people even.

And then in flight, the trains announced that there striking. And so not all of the connections that we had counted on were going, you could still do it, but instead of one or two transfers, there's now five or six. And you're coming early and it, was a thing. Mike demo is far more the expert on knowing.

Oh. So if anyone has questions, Mike, is totally to, to Mike demo about all of the options on how to get there. but also if you're going in around the same time as other coworkers and stuff, try and get to the airport together and just join forces on getting a van or something to take you all.

Because if you're not, accustomed to the German rails, I would just say that it's gonna be easier if you're going to Frankfurt and taking a van.

[00:26:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Tell me my favorite thing is, so Tammy's in the comments. Tammy and I got the train. We got the Eurostar. From London King's, no. Anyway, north London, whatever percent pancreas, I think.

And it took us all the way to Strasbourg. Which then we got a, an Uber from Strasbourg and between the two of us it was pretty good. and, but yeah, it's a full thing. Like you gotta do the planning, you have to plan for the travel 'cause it's not get off a plane, hop in a quick Uber ride. It's I don't know, 80 miles or something.

but well worth it, really worth it. It's a unique experience and the, whole theme park is available, it's there and you can go on a selection of the rides and it's totally free. You don't have to worry about that. It's really great. so go and apply. Let's put that back on the screen.

Actually. The hackathon thing, the, I dunno the exact dates when all of this is gonna shut off, but applications are open Three types of application. You can become an applicant to just be there and be part of a team. You can obviously apply, for submitting one of the projects. Last year there were 10, maybe that's gonna be the same number and a partner, I guess is, sponsors who wanna, make sure that their messages get out in front of those audiences.

It was really good fun. Okay, here we go. attendees, you got until the 11th of January. So opens today. Finishes in more or less 28 days, six, four weeks, something like that. Okay. Anything else about hackathon or shall we move on? Oh, here we go. Here's another one from Anne-Marie. if my application is accepted project or a regular applicant, I can pick up two folks from Frankfurt Airport or even Dusseldorf.

You heard it here first, or even from Orenburg. I don't know where any of those places are, but they sound important. they're German. There you go. The free ride. That's great. How cool is that? German railway says Reese is equally efficient and inefficient at the same time. does everything leave on time?

The fact

[00:28:20] Courtney Robertson: there is mass transport shocks this American, first of all, so

[00:28:24] Nathan Wrigley: that it exists. The, the Germans are notorious for being extremely efficient. I'm surprised that their rail network doesn't live up to that. I didn't get a train, so I don't know. But, they're

[00:28:33] Jesse Friedman: so efficient that, they run into issues like last year, they, weren't gonna make it on time, so they decided to stop the rail together.

Oh. To keep their numbers accurate. Oh, okay. Got everybody off is sufficient. And, yeah. Not accurate, but, it's a lot like when you're in line at the fast food place where they tell you to pull up to. Yep. So that they're, you're not delaying the, the, time, for, delivering that order.

It was the same thing. Everybody had to get off. Take the next train.

[00:29:01] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. that is kind of efficiency. Gone, man. I told a story, I think I told it into this show not that long ago, that in Japan, the National Rail Network, whatever that is, took out a full page ad in the biggest selling newspaper because one train departed and it was literally like five seconds late and they took out this national apology.

headline grabbing page because they, and it really was something jaw droppingly funny, like five seconds. in the UK if it's there within 10 minutes, the one is supposed to leave. You're oh, thank the Lord. That's worked out well, but no. Anyway. There you go. anyway, they're

[00:29:43] Jesse Friedman: spoiled.

[00:29:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. We they really are. You're like

[00:29:45] Jesse Friedman: in Boston trains don't even Yeah. You like even shows up.

[00:29:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. okay, so there we go. That's the hackathon. Let me put bits back on the screen. Here we go. Let's move on to the next piece. what is this one? Was this one of you?

[00:30:02] Jesse Friedman: this is a conference I actually just got back from.

[00:30:04] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, sorry. Yeah, so just so the viewers who know what's going on, Jesse dropped a few links, into the show notes and I put them on the screen, but didn't get a chance to read them just now. So tell us about this. What was it, like?

[00:30:16] Jesse Friedman: It was actually a really interesting conference. So it was a, conglomeration of, companies from all around the globe.

That came together to talk about open source, from an IT and services perspective. These were all people who were offering cloud services and the like, competing with Apple, Google, Microsoft. and, they were all open source companies. so it was really awesome to see these companies come together.

The conference itself, left a few things to be desired, but for the networking opportunity and the vendors and everybody else who was there was, it was amazing. it was interesting though because it was a higher level above what we're used to seeing with WordPress, right? Like it was abstracted one layer because it was all the underlying technological underpinnings of that, that make things work.

So the company's behind those services that

[00:31:06] Nathan Wrigley: there, was there like a thread running through it? would a word presser, let's say you've got a plugin company or something like that. Would there be any point in attending an event like this? Or is it more for the work that you do with, the work you do spans open source more generally, doesn't it?

[00:31:24] Jesse Friedman: Yeah, I'm, on this like path right now to really focus on how, the work that I'm doing and then in my personal life, how it can really help to protect the, open web more. things like, joining the I two coalition has really opened my eyes around that as well. from that perspective, I think it's incredibly valuable.

So if you're a plugin developer or you're, you run a company around WordPress, one of the things that you're gonna learn heavily about is like how these companies are making money and introducing their services in an open source environment. how they're combating the, the myths and the, issue.

[00:32:04] Nathan Wrigley: Did Jesse just freeze for you as well as for me?

[00:32:07] Michelle Frechette: Yeah.

[00:32:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. Okay, let's, let's pray that he comes back. apologies, dear listener, Jesse appears to be frozen. we

[00:32:13] Michelle Frechette: haven't said the actual title of the event though, so let's make sure we get that. Yeah. Okay. So thank you

[00:32:17] Nathan Wrigley: Michelle. Yeah, so it's called Open Source Experience, is just dropped out the call, so hopefully he'll come back in a moment.

and you can find the url, it's open source experience.com and an EN has got appended to the end of the Uur l obviously for the English translation because it's, I would imagine the original site is in French. I'm curious about this kind stuff because I'm gonna just race ahead and show something, which I wasn't intending to show until right at the end if there was time, because this thing came up on my radar, I dunno where from this week.

It's called the CMS Conf. It's happening, it's like being advertised like a whole year in advance, which is interesting. So not quite. Open source, all the open source things that Jesse was talking about. But this is a, conference where it's CMS agnostic, it's taking place in Poland next year, and the URL is cms conf, CON f.com.

And, and they're billing it as where code meets creativity. And I'm fascinated what the overlap with these things is. why would a WordPress or attend an open source conference? Why would a WordPress or attend CMS conference? And I can see so many reasons why. especially in a landscape where things like open source, it feels like we're in a bit of a fight to, to keep ourselves relevant and what have you.

Courtney, sorry, were you about to say something?

[00:33:38] Courtney Robertson: No, these are the definitely the kind of conferences that are high on my radar, because I look at open source. Not just in the context of WordPress itself, but other things that GoDaddy has going on. we have been longtime sponsors of open js. PHP Foundation was added last year, W three C, looking at how GoDaddy takes part in the rest of the open source story.

But from a WordPress individual perspective, I would say, I think that, if you happen to live nearby and this isn't a massive travel budget for you, I think get to it and start just experiencing and learning from other open source communities as to how they do things. Learn the good and the bad from it.

learn what has worked, what hasn't worked in those spaces. And then within that too, I'm inspired sometimes by watching what Katie, Keith is doing with Barn two entering into Shopify. But I think what about the e-commerce offerings in other open source projects? What could we learn from some of them?

And are those people also going to be at places like this? Because I feel like. the more that we can learn from how others have approached things and the, challenges and the wins that they have experienced, that could spark some ideas for us too.

[00:34:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So this one is held in Poland next year.

Like I said, it looks like the beginning of this event, I can't see any history to it. So 12th to the 14th of November. go and have a look at that. But the, obviously the one that we were just talking about, was open source experience. And then obviously prior to that was Cloud Fest we were on about the Hackathon Cloud Fest, which more generally is, anything that touches the cloud.

[00:35:24] Courtney Robertson: Yeah, that one we're seeing a lot more for Cloud Fest that is broadly open source and also, a big push on having a WordPress and CMS focused day. when you get to Cloud Fest Europe, especially being that the event is located in Germany, a lot of the type of three community is there, which is. in my mind kind of a niche thing, however, in a German's mind, most of the government runs on that open source CMS.

Yeah. And so it's interesting to meet folks from those spaces and rub shoulders.

[00:35:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. so just segue in slightly this, I'm reading into the record something which most people don't wish to hear, but here we go. Jesse, if you can hear me, I can tell that you're trying to get back into the platform.

'cause I keep getting this noise in my ears, which is usually the confirmation that somebody has arrived in the room, but you never appear in the room. So I'm gonna suggest a quick reboot of the machine. Try in the latest version of Chrome. At the actual Chrome, if you've got it. And, hopefully we'll get you back in soon.

If not, we're just gonna keep going anyway. here we go. Anne saying, Ooh, CMS conf. She wants to go there. So there we go. And, a story about trains from, from Reese. It got a story from when he went to Amsterdam in and to Berlin where they kicked everybody off the train, but then let everybody back on.

It was something to do with reducing the weight. It just, they needed it off for a little while and then they got everybody back on. okay. Yeah, it's kind weird,

[00:37:01] Michelle Frechette: Jesse's in the comment saying he can't seem to get back in.

[00:37:04] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, Jesse, clear the caches, do all the usual, and, try a different browser.

I'm on Brave, which is a chromium derivative and it's never failed for me. so hopefully I'd love to have you back. Obviously that would be nice to round out show with you in it. Yes, please, Okay, let's move on. So we've done that. We've done that. No, we haven't. Here we go. This actually, let's go to this one first.

This is what got me first, so that's the one I

[00:37:28] Courtney Robertson: released first actually.

[00:37:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Courtney's been busy. I don't know Courtney as a, plugin developer on.org, but here we are two offerings coming out in close succession. The first one, a plugin called Post Formats for Block Themes. What's going on?

what's this?

[00:37:43] Courtney Robertson: Yeah. So 2025 introduced the, putting post formats back in and the history. The story is that, I actually like the idea of post formats back in the day, and then I decided, because I like this edge case thing. I was at a, contributor day for work camp New York City in 2014 when I met the training and marketing teams.

they had two tables sitting beside each other. And I am a former high school business education and computer science teacher, meaning I could teach marketing. I know how to teach WordPress. So I didn't know which table to sit at and I thought I'll just join the training team and write lesson plans about post formats because nobody else is going to pick that one.

in 2013, we had a great theme that really supported as the default theme, the post format experience, and Matt still uses, I believe, a variation of that on his site. I see a lot of post formats. Goodbye. so it's something that I also actually really liked and I thought, there are a lot of themes out there.

The one that I'm using included Ollie, that don't come with that baked in, even though 2025 does now. And for people to get all of that functionality set up, it's a bit of a tangled web. So the way that I, have this plugin created and please be gentle. This is my first plugin that I have ever put in the repo, and I am ironing out bugs.

Poll requests are incredibly welcome. GitHub repo is open for you. I wanted to put post formats on my site, scratch and itch, as we say in open source. And so I thought, what's the sequence or the process that I would go with? And so when you go to create a new post, you'll get a popup modal right away that says, which post format do you wanna pick from?

Standard or the other nine? Yeah. So you pick the one and it will auto assign from there what the format is. Give you a pattern that puts the block of that format first. It includes a chat block that if you copy paste from Slack or Discord or something, it will format it into a pretty way for you. and then it will, Lay it out in, you have a couple of toggle options. So the chat log is the one block that doesn't have a comparable format, right? Because a status or an aside is just a paragraph block, a link you just throw the embed in there. But the chat block itself was the challenge for me to wrap my head around.

And then what I also wanted it to do was to apply some of the visual design pieces that we saw with the 2013 theme. Now, I probably should have a proper chat with Tammy when the holiday season really kicks in and we're both busy with our personal projects and not busy with work projects. because Tammy may have had a hand in 2013, but I'm not positive.

I like having a template to style things visually. The way that 2013 did. So if you select a format, it auto selects the template that matches the design. The template then lets you change some of the like background color or what have you using the site editor experience. And I am trying to get things ironed out right now.

The area where I know I've got bugs, there are bugs is when you're toggling between different formats, if you select the run that you want and you stick to it, it's great. But I'm off into testing what happens if I accidentally pick one and switch it midway and go back to my standards. So folks like Reese whole requests welcome, really would appreciate it.

[00:41:19] Nathan Wrigley: absolutely, by the way, has put a comment in all caps. He's a fan. Yes.

[00:41:24] Courtney Robertson: Post, yes

[00:41:25] Nathan Wrigley: Post formats. He says he obviously Alex, Jennifer, obviously something he's been missing. Alex

[00:41:28] Courtney Robertson: Cosper are also my other cohorts in crime that love post formats.

[00:41:34] Nathan Wrigley: and Anna as well. Woo, way to go.

[00:41:38] Courtney Robertson: I, I, my goal here is to bring it to a block theme experience that if you're using a default theme that already supports it, amazing.

If you, and if you are not, that it would auto detect that your theme needs to apply these settings. Nathan, down on the screenshots there, if you Yeah, there's the modal that will let you select which one. That's nice. Got it. Yeah. And then the middle screenshot, just below this one, below the big image, we'll show you what the chat log block does.

[00:42:09] Nathan Wrigley: He's

[00:42:10] Courtney Robertson: back. Jesse's back. Yeah, you're back, Jesse. Hey.

[00:42:13] Nathan Wrigley: Or is it,

[00:42:13] Courtney Robertson: Nathan, could you select the one that is slightly below this? Yeah. Down. You mean which one? Yes, that one. That one. This is how the chat log block will end up being styled. So you copy paste your stuff and there you get a pretty little chat log on the screen.

So this is so nice. I'm so pleased for you. it's getting there. There'll be bugs. I appreciate knowing what the bugs are and coming up with ideas on how to, address them if you have them. And related to that, so Jesse was talking about the open web earlier. Also, a passion of mine chatted at length with Dave Weiner during a hockey game about this that were Camp Canada.

I saw pictures of

[00:42:54] Nathan Wrigley: that. Yeah, that looked good. Yeah.

[00:42:56] Courtney Robertson: Yeah. Dave always should say the web, not the open web, because the web is designed to always be open and Dave's. And related to that, the other reason for post formats and XFN, which is the other one that I introduced,

[00:43:11] Nathan Wrigley: which I'm about to put on the screen.

There it is. There you go. This one.

[00:43:14] Courtney Robertson: yeah, so XFN, both of these things are, things that I could see being related to the FEDI verse and indie web and all of the fun things. XFN, basically, will identify for folks on the screen, there's a quick little screenshot there of if the text is linking to Matt's site down below.

I said I have met Matt. Matt is an acquaintance of mine. We have physically met in person and you could go on for more for there. The fun story of XFN is that this was all built into WordPress core. and we have long forgotten these settings. Back when you would make the menu in. The, in the normal WordPress admin settings, not inside of site editor, that's still inside of this, but we didn't have a clean way for links anywhere on our site to also have the fields for XFN.

And so that's now back and restored as well. The one people have gotten familiar with because of Fedi verse is the rail equals me. Yeah. Yeah. So if you wanted to claim your, your Mastodon presence or some of those things on your site, you needed to have in a link somewhere to yourself about yourself that this is me with the rail equal me, and in XFN there are other options besides just, Hey, this is me, this is my sibling, this is my friend, this is an acquaintance, whatever.

so I tried to bring a block editor approach to doing those. And I don't have a Grand Master plan quite yet, but I could see how these things will become important to the Fed verse. So that's why I started here with two obscure parts of WordPress history that are fun little projects for me to just kick out there.

[00:44:58] Nathan Wrigley: I'm gonna link to these in the show notes, but congratulations for getting 'em over the line. That's amazing. The first one, you can just go Google it. It's called, link extension for XFN, and it's on WordPress org. And Matt

[00:45:08] Courtney Robertson: helped make that protocol, the XFN protocol. Oh, nice. Okay. Like it might, I don't know if he was working on it after WordPress launched or before, but Matt's part of the crew that created that protocol.

Okay.

[00:45:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I did not know that. And then. The other one, which we mentioned a moment ago, is post formats for block themes. Again, both of them by Courtney, both of them are available on WordPress org. They will be in the show notes. if you subscribe to this, you'll get an email newsletter. They'll come under the plugins code theme sort of section.

So hunt for them there in the morning when the email, good grief, I dunno what that noise was. Did anybody else hear that? Was that a really bad I heard it noise. I think it, I don't know if it's Jesse or if it might be Courtney. I'm not sure. but somebody's making a little bit of a noise.

dunno. Yeah. That, whatever that was. gosh, that's loud. Okay. Let's hope that maybe could I just ask that if you're not speaking, that you mute from now on, just so that we can eliminate whoever that might be. That would be really helpful. Thank you. But don't forget to unmute when you come back on.

Okay. Let's move on. Oh, wow. Is all I can say. So 6.9 just dropped. obviously as we always do, it's this. Inexorable train. It never arrives at the destination. It's always a journey. WordPress 7.0 is in the planning. this is an enormous blog post and honestly, there's no way that we're gonna be able to cover off even a quarter of it.

So I've just highlighted some of the bits. This is what I was saying, earlier, Jesse, if I reshape the browser in any way, all of the, all of those highlights just end up in completely the wrong place, which is hysterical. so here we go. da dah A little chat was had between core contributors along with Matt and Mary.

They had a, discussion and here is summation of some of the different pieces here. This is very much a, an ID ideation thing, and the intention is that you come in here and you collaborate and comment on all of this. And this is not like what's happening. It's here's the beginning, volley. Of a discussion.

So we all know that notes dropped into 6.9, or at least maybe you did. you can now comment on a block level in notes, but collaboration phase three is gonna be given a bit more impetus. So real time collaboration. and so the idea being, what does that look like? What will those features be? What's important for the baseline experience for shipping that?

Do we need things like, oh, I don't know, to be able to comment on a certain aspect of a particular paragraph like you do in Google Docs, highlight a bit and comment just on that, or a particular image or a particular, I don't know, a particular portion of an image or something like that. So defining the ui, figuring out what the diff mechanism is.

To reconcile changes all of that. So there's a lot of foundational work's gone in, but that's important. That's what needs to be done. Notes, like I said, we've just got it. the idea of partial notes has been mooted, so you'll have the ability to, I don't know, just have a, bit of a note for just one part of a, paragraph say, or maybe you could span two paragraphs.

So instead of just being bound to one block, you might wanna go over several blocks. Multi block support. I dunno why you would want this, but it's an interesting idea. Rich text formatting for commenting. I don't even think Google Docs has got that, to be honest. I think it's just plain text. And then on the admin side, improving screens across the WP admin.

I think at the minute you could fairly say that the WP admin is in a state of flock. It's some, in some places it looks like this, and in other places it looks like that. So trying to figure out what all that looks like. Data views a design system. Yes, please. Can I just say that one? font library, admin section.

And then in terms of APIs, lots of work will need to be done on the abilities and workflows. API, we'll come to that in a minute. creating blocks and patterns on the server side, which is interesting. We've had to do that for the podcaster plus blocks thing because the, client side didn't work for us.

And then. What they're now calling short blocks, which is block bits. So the ability to, I don't know, in one block drop in multiple bits of content. So I don't know, it might be first name, last name as two separate entities, that kind of thing. and what that would look like. What would the syntax for that look like?

I know generate press use like two square, two curly braces on either side to define that. But how would all get that all get done And navigation block? Yes, please. Can we have more of that? just loads of more. You can see that I've highlighted Absolutely. Loads more tons. So I've just witted on for ages.

Does anybody else wanna comment on that? Is there anything of excitement in there for you people? The answer's no. So we will move on. oh. Courtney, you forgot to unmute if you, if you were you. No, I was gonna

[00:50:00] Courtney Robertson: call out that Jesse was the one. Oh, Jesse.

[00:50:03] Nathan Wrigley: Jesse, then. Yeah. Go for it. Jesse.

[00:50:05] Jesse Friedman: I, I was, I'm not sure if you're gonna bring it up separately, but if you scroll down just a little bit, you'll see the, responsive.

Block editing, which is super exciting.

[00:50:14] Nathan Wrigley: there was, there, was there? Oh yes. I am gonna mention it separately actually, but yeah. Okay.

[00:50:19] Jesse Friedman: Yeah, we can talk about it separately.

[00:50:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, we'll talk about that in a minute. 'cause there was a whole other article. So in fact, let's click into that now. If I can just find the right one.

Not that one. Is it this one? Yeah. Okay. This is what you meant, Jesse. I think.

[00:50:32] Jesse Friedman: Yeah. This is it. This is super exciting. I was talking to Mathias about this 'cause I had a plugin years ago called WP Mobile Detect, which used a PHP class to detect your device and allow you to wrap, content in a short code so you could have something that might be visible on desktop, but not on mobile.

Because, sometimes you make the assumption that mobile has lower bandwidth or, less functionality or it can't fit in the window or whatever it might be. but this is an exploration into how blocks will become visible or hidden based on the device. so you can see in that screenshot there, you could put something in and then hide it on desktop.

So then based on media queries, it would, either hide or show the content, which is super exciting because if you get past this, then you get into, The ability to format, blocks, margins, padding, things like that around, mobile devices as well, which will make responsive, site designs so much easier.

[00:51:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, in fact, I assumed that was where this article would basically end, but it goes on to explain all of the different bits and pieces. So for example, if you are in a view, so let's say you're in the block editor and you are viewing it as a mobile device, but it's hidden on mobile, you'll get some sort of indication that there's a thing here, but you can't see it.

So it's not 'cause that some of the solutions at the moment make that really difficult. You hide something and it just goes out the UI completely. And you have to, know that you put it in there and obviously if you're inheriting a site, you don't really know it's there unless you go through the tree and just look for it.

so that's interesting. And then you get this responsive toggle. Which will, tell you if things, let me just read it 'cause it's, easier to explain that way. The preview dropdown in the editor, in the editor header includes a responsive editing toggle. You can see that on the screen.

Hopefully I've explained that well enough. When enabled the toggle activates responsive editing mode across the editor, including a purple highlight, which you can see here. That's stands out nicely. I think this mode changes how visibility controls behave, the setting. The settings, menu displays.

Oh. And then we get into the sort of technicalities of how it works. But anyway, you can see there how they're planning on implementing that. And then you get this modal where you can say hide everything, but then if you, uncheck the hide everything option, you can see again on the screen you've got the three options.

So you can do it in one ui. You don't have to go into the mobile view, then on check it and then go into the tablet view, then on check it. You can do it all from this one place. So what a great idea. It will just make it, again, curious that it took somebody like Jesse to build a plugin for that.

You, I really do wish looking back that this had all been back in the 2018 version of Gutenberg, but there we are. That's what we got. the plug I built was,

[00:53:28] Jesse Friedman: way before even responsive web design was a thing. Yeah. Nice. Wrote that plugin like 2010 or 2008 or something like that.

[00:53:36] Nathan Wrigley: Do you still maintain that plugin or is it, presumably it's got utility still.

[00:53:41] Jesse Friedman: it still technically works. Yeah. the PHP class still works as well. but the, thing is, that it's really better for you to use responsive design, techniques, to properly hide if you're gonna go through the effort of creating short codes and. Wrapping content and stuff like that.

I'd rather see us use this than, my old plugin. Yeah. Which hasn't been updated in many, years.

[00:54:05] Nathan Wrigley: a couple of comments related to Elementor about some of the things we've just talked about. Philip 2, 9, 8, 1, hello. wonders if the collaborative editing will work with other page builders like Elementor.

I'm guessing the answer to that will be. No, but I don't know. I, yeah, maybe there's some way that those two things could be bound together. I don't know. And then another thing, Elementor has this today, so we're talking about this responsive, editing options and yeah, I think all the page builders have had this more or less since day one, haven't they?

So it's, that's the kind of curious, missing piece that Gutenberg has yet to overcome. I will link to this, but it's, WordPress, so it's at github.com/wordpress/gutenberg. And then pull and the pull request number 7 3 8 8 8. Listen to me reading pull requests into the record. Oh, gosh. okay.

There we go. Just click on the link in the show notes. It'll be a lot easier. And did we miss something out along the way? Yes, we did. We missed this one. Oh, sorry. But firstly, did Courtney or Michelle have anything they wanted to add about this 7.0?

[00:55:19] Courtney Robertson: I have been encouraging some of my coworkers related to some of the collaborative pieces of this, especially to look at what this does for performance in hosting environments.

Okay. Whether that be shared, managed or enterprise grade or, if you're on VPS, you, run your own show. But, I just have thoughts that we should be very intentionally testing along the way, especially if you're in a, economically priced shared hosting environment. to see what the performance loads will do.

I think we need to test early and test often throughout that process, because that is a big pivot. a lot of these features, I'm like, yay, we're finally getting there. I would still like. The Polyglots community to be really happy with multilingual. here we are. And so these are exciting things.

I, I,

[00:56:19] Nathan Wrigley: test, I'm with you. I've got this feeling that it might be like some sort of point in a pricing table on a hosting company's website, full support for collaborative editing. a hundred percent guaranteed that'll all work on this tier. But if you go for the, I don't know, super affordable plan, maybe that tick isn't there and you run it at your own risk, it may work it very well, may not.

I, can't see how you pull this off without a significant amount of server resources. One of the things that was mentioned is what if it was just so in the piece that Mathias wrote is what if it was just constrained at the outset to two editors? Just two people can do that collaborative editing, and then presumably you get some sort of lockout when the third person shows up and needs to be asked to go in.

It's curious, isn. Michelle's become a circle. I dunno if anybody else has got that. Hopefully you're all right, Michelle. okay. Anything else, Courtney? Anything Michelle? If not, I will move on.

[00:57:18] Michelle Frechette: I have no idea why I am. A circle. I know is

[00:57:22] Nathan Wrigley: it's, the show before Christmas. oh my goodness know, my goodness.

The cat stepped on

[00:57:26] Michelle Frechette: something. I'll

[00:57:27] Nathan Wrigley: see what I can. Santa is offering up all sorts of fun with the, with the pub, with the app.

[00:57:32] Courtney Robertson: while Michelle's figuring her thing out, I'll note, two, two Christmas things that I'm doing. my ugly Christmas sweater says, tech support. I'm here to delete your cookies.

That is good for those that can't see it. and also in my earrings, I have. Cats in Christmas trees, and maybe that's what Michelle has going on. I don't know if Michelle has any cats that stepped on buttons, but it's that time of year where they step on random. It's

[00:57:59] Nathan Wrigley: a cat that's so good. If the cat, cat, stepped

[00:58:02] Michelle Frechette: on something and I cannot get it back.

[00:58:07] Nathan Wrigley: I love it. Definitely blame the cat on all technical gremlins. That's brilliant. But very frequently we see Michelle's cat wandering about and some days it just goes over the keyboard and hits the keystroke. There is underneath the screen, Michelle, there's the video icon and in such, just next to it, a little arrow and you can often fiddle in there and see if it's, I dunno, see if it's gone to the wrong camera or something like that.

Okay. In which case we will move on. Let me put that back on the screen so that we can see where we get to. So we did that. Okay, just a bit of fun really. black Friday, we mentioned there's a Black Friday deals page still live. David McCann from web TNG. he polled his, very large Facebook group about what it is that they went out and bought in the WordPress space during the last few weeks.

And, let's just go through them. interesting. So number 10, and these were not what I expected. It just in a way it shows that I'm a little bit out of touch with the, the product marketplace. So here we go. Number 10, core framework. That was the 10th most popular advanced theme for bricks was number nine, the Ever Popular Bricks Bit Flows, which is like an automation tool.

So think Zapier or something like that. Number seven, mailer press. I think that was popular 'cause they had a real giveaway lifetime deal for $99. So that was probably why that happened. Green shift and green light came in at number six s stigmatize, number five X Cloud hosting, number four. Number three, independent analytics.

Number two, WP Vivid Pro. And number one, the most popular plugin was the bought nothing plugin, which I confess I've never tried. apparently it's really good. but no, apparently most people didn't actually buy anything. I fell into that camp this year actually, because I decided I wanted that money from, I know Christmas presents and stuff like that, so I didn't get carried away this year.

But did you, any three of you get like totally carried away with all that? You

[01:00:07] Jesse Friedman: have a lot more money to spend on, Christmas sweaters.

[01:00:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, I didn't, I kept my wallet firmly shop this year around, I think I've reached Plugin Nirvana for me, mostly what I want.

I've already got and, very happy with it. And I'm, not in that kind of curious mode. I haven't really been this year in that curious try new things out mode. yeah. Okay. Alrighty. There we go. Thank you for that, David doing that research. This is the 2026 Global Partner Program announcement.

So I'm guessing this really only is of interest to people who are working in the marketing departments of large companies, because the global partner program for WordPress is not cheap. Mich? No, it wasn't Michelle. It was Courtney was saying that these price points got added in at some later date, but you can see that the, yeah, that the cheapest option is $60,000.

It goes to 110. And then the global leader, the one, if you attend a Word camp or something, that's the one that's got the big logos, that's $180,000. What, did you have to say about this, Courtney? What was the change? Can you remember? Yeah.

[01:01:17] Courtney Robertson: I remember reading in the post status community channel, there was a thread about the, Companies that are sponsoring and the KPIs that they need from it. And oh, by the way, global sponsorship is not part of flagship camps. It is primarily the city level and the meetups. And is that

[01:01:37] Nathan Wrigley: new? Did it used to be? No. Oh, okay. Now

[01:01:40] Courtney Robertson: it's, yeah, they've, had it that way for a bit, but there was some chatter, in post status regarding some of this as well as how the page was updated, this week.

And they brought back different sponsorship tiers. So I think when they launched it was one flat sponsorship and then it's been revised to include the multiple tiers that you see now. Okay. I will say that, it's, a big savings in being able to have a tier if city levels are, a lot of paperwork for some individuals to process.

Think of p about people like. Adam Warner is in the comments. He handles them here at GoDaddy. Miriam was sharing, she's the one that gets to do paperwork. We call it paperwork these days, all being electronic, but still there's for every event, if you're individually sponsoring for every event, that means that there is an entire process of going through your organization to secure the funds, get the contract signed, blah, blah, blah on the internal side.

And that stuff takes time and not just from one individual's schedule, but that stuff takes time from all of these departments and getting it through once could be advantageous. However, folks are indicating, that they prefer to have that connection or relationship with the individuals at the, city level.

And so they'll take on handling it manually as well. There's a lot of different ideas around this. Brett at, a. Dream Host had shared how initially he helped Pioneer getting this thing through because it just made the paperwork part so much easier.

[01:03:24] Nathan Wrigley: can I just say, I just scroll down to the bottom of this wordpress.org page.

Can I just say if, if anybody wants to substitute this, if anybody's at.org and wants to, substitute this podcast for a, an actual podcast, which is still going, there's a couple that I could recommend just saying, it's been a little while since

[01:03:44] Courtney Robertson: that one

[01:03:45] Nathan Wrigley: was up to you. Yeah, it's, one of those things that you discover online, isn't it?

That's, somebody. forgot about there.

[01:03:51] Courtney Robertson: There should be a meta track ticket to swap that one out. Alright. Alright. We from that, after the show,

[01:03:56] Nathan Wrigley: just thank you. hello and good morning. Says, says James. Nice to have James. It's been a bit, hello James? yeah, and then Tammy list is replying.

I think that the answer depends, this is talking about, so probably in response to that element or will the element or thing work with, notes and blocks and all of that kind of stuff? Probably not. Or depends. Okay. There we go. Anybody got anything on that one? The global sponsor thing

[01:04:22] Michelle Frechette: I think I've, me, I might have mentioned this before, but one of the things that I think is misleading about global sponsorships is that every local camp gets to set what gold sponsorship looks like and what silver sponsorship or whatever they're calling those different levels.

So for example, at Word Camp Rochester, gold might be a thousand dollars at Word Camp Miami Gold might be $5,000 and. We get some amount of money from the global sponsorships and then you have to raise some on your own. I think it's misleading. When somebody looks at a sponsorship page like Word Camp Rochester and they see that we've got five global sponsors, four of them are gold and one of them is silver and they think that means we have $4,500 coming in from the global sponsorships.

[01:05:09] Nathan Wrigley: Oh,

[01:05:09] Michelle Frechette: when in reality I might only have 1500 coming in. It makes it look like we are over like Overfunding a camp. So local sponsors are don't understand why we need so much money. If they know that I'm hosting it at a high school and I'm having sub sandwiches for lunch and it doesn't look like it should take that, I'm asking for $5,000 more to raise.

Why do we need $10,000 for a local in Rochester when it only costs me $4,000 to run that camp? Because it's misleading. I think what we should have is we should have list global sponsors. And then not necessarily put a dollar amount with those and just list that they are global sponsors as opposed to saying.

You have to say that these ones are gold sponsorship. 'cause gold sponsorship does not mean the same in every, at every camp, and I'll die on that hill. That's interesting. It's very difficult to get local funding and, even if it's not local, but to get more funding for a word camp, especially once somebody sees that it looks like you're already funded to, extreme amounts.

[01:06:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, Is there a, language tweak which would fix that? if they just use different language? Is that what you're saying?

[01:06:14] Michelle Frechette: That's exactly what I'm saying, yeah. Okay. Is it to say, global sponsors are these global sponsors and I could, and I should be able to say, which at this camp represents $1,500.

[01:06:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it'd be interesting to see in the, in the, year 2026, I, have this impression that that whole sponsorship thing is becoming a bit tighter. 'cause the economic forecasts are absolutely, are not quite as rosy as they were, I don't know, 18 months ago or something like that. So it'd be interesting to see how all that tightens up.

[01:06:42] Courtney Robertson: I think too that it comes back to, and taco's a good one to chat with about this. On the, side where sponsoring these events is not seen as a contribution, therefore it is marketing budget. And if it is marketing budget, then organizations are going to be looking for pretty important outcomes from that sponsorship.

[01:07:10] Nathan Wrigley: And

[01:07:10] Courtney Robertson: there's a lot of conversation that could be had in parsing through what I just said, but I'll leave it pretty high level.

[01:07:17] Nathan Wrigley: Okay?

[01:07:18] Courtney Robertson: Okay.

[01:07:20] Nathan Wrigley: Alright. Okay. Yeah, I feel there's more to explore there, but not now, is not the time. Jesse, anything on that before we move on?

[01:07:28] Jesse Friedman: No, I, agree Michelle. I think you're right.

I think, also, I think anytime somebody sponsors any kind of an event, the return on investment's gonna be important. Courtney, so yeah. These are all valid points.

[01:07:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yep. kind of segue in a little bit, but related is, whoa, that came and went. this piece, community rep nominations for 2026.

it says it's November, but it is definitely December. we're looking for new community team representatives for next year. Really, I'm just because of time, I'm not gonna delve into this too much, but there's information here. If that is your bag or maybe you're just exploring this and you think I would like to step up and try that kind of thing out.

There's a whole post here about what the responsibilities are and yada, And I suppose most importantly, the dates. So the nominations opened a few days ago, and you've got until the 9th of January. extremely important role. And then voting will begin on that from the 12th to the 30th, and then the results will be known at some point in February.

the community team, like I said, you can read all about what they do and. Tremendously important. Okay. So I will link to that into the show notes as well. I didn't know that this thing was still going. This is classic press. Classic press began, as a, a kind of, I'm gonna use the word rebellion.

That's entirely the wrong word, but, alternative. Yeah. There you. Thank you. That's much, much less I century. and probably closer to what the people at CLA Classic Press actually think. So when Gutenberg launched, there was a bunch of people who really didn't want anything to do with it, and were quite happy to have a version of WordPress that would never, come close to the block editor at all.

And you could do that with plugins and things like that, but a more long-term solution. For some folk was to fork the project and begin classic press. And it had a, lot of groundswell of support and then everything went really quiet. And so my assumption was that maybe that whole project had gone away, but I'm wrong.

It hasn't, it's actually still going. Dunno how thriving it is, but, I just thought I'd mention it given its kind of, WordPress route. 2.6 is their current version and there's a few technical things here about support for PHP 8.5 and a strategy parameter for WPNQ script, yada, yada.

Anyway, the point is, it's still going if you don't like the block editor and don't want anything to do with it. here it is. I'm guessing the, more days that go between WordPress with the block editor and classic press the day that they fought, I'm, guessing the two are Becoming farther and farther apart and whether or not things are gonna break in significant ways, I don't really know, but

[01:10:15] Courtney Robertson: I would lean in on John overall if he's still in the comments for some of that.

To date, he is the biggest proponent of classic press that I have known. I will confess, John, it's been a while since I've heard you share about Classic Press, but I remember many an episode about it.

[01:10:33] Nathan Wrigley: So yeah. Anyway, there you go. I'm sure that they're welcome contributors and things like that, but, classic press.net is the URL and this is up about version 2.6.

Okay. Let's go to here. I always mention these, and I always have this sort of intention that we get into the bits and the pieces, but really we can't. So it's, Justin Tadlock who does tremendous work over, at Automatic. But in terms of this, it's the WordPress developer blog and it's the What's new for developers.

It comes out every month. And it's a really long piece with a table of contents about all the different bits and pieces that have launched for developers. It, almost, it's like the laundry list. It's got everything in. I'm not gonna go through all the bits and pieces just 'cause of the constraints of time.

But, yeah, he's done his work linking to every single thing that a developer might be interested in. maybe he's missed a few things here and there, but, the top level items really, I suppose though he groups things into plugins, themes, playground resources, and, yeah, concentrates on 6.9 a lot.

So I know this is probably Courtney's wheelhouse a little bit more, but, Props to Justin for doing this. Thank you. Anybody wanna comment on that? Probably not too lengthy if you do. Okay. In which case we shall move along swiftly. Okay. So this is this, is really curious and I think this is hot enough to be something which could be brilliant, but also potentially maybe a bit divisive.

Let's see how the year 2026 pans out here. So we're reading from, Ray's repository. If you haven't signed up, it's the best place I think to get WordPress news. Really credible, really well researched, brilliantly done. Congratulations for Ray for, everything that she does over there. This one is entitled WordPress AI Team outlines vision for AI as a fundamental part of WordPress.

And again. Not gonna have time to read it all, but I'll just read a few salient bits in a new post on the Make WordPress core blog. Jason Adams, an automatic AI contributor, argues, here we go. Ready? That AI should be treated as a core part of how WordPress operates, similar to databases. I'll let that sink in.

not as a feature, okay. Take a, take away the database. You really don't have a WordPress. I think what he's trying to say is that in the future, AI is gonna become so pivotal that it needs to be baked into core, so that without it core would feel entirely different. So I'll quote what he says.

What if from an end user to the plug to plugin developer, they could take for granted that there's an AI model accessible to me by virtue of being in WordPress, what kind of things would be poss would PO people use it for? What amazing things would people create that are built on the reliable presence of a capable LLM to get end quote, to get there, Adam says, developers need to embrace the abilities, A-P-I-W-P-A-I client and the upcoming workflows, API, which is expected to land in seven.

He also argues that hosts, here's an intriguing moment as well. He also argues that hosts should provide access to AI models as part of their plans. There's a real change of landscape going on here if. This comes to pass a significant shift in how hosting currently works. There's more down in the article, including pushback from other people in the community who say, not on my WordPress, keep AI out.

Opt, opt in only kind of thing. and I'll just read one of those Core committer, JB Rass, I dunno if I've got the name right there. I'm sorry. I've read your name so many times, but dunno how to say it. Question whether AI should be integrated into WordPress at all. I quote, I, think this AI thingy is going to be a massive disaster for our ecosystem and, our economy.

Plus this is more and more looking like a.com bubble, which is going to explode due to the same old factors as the previous bubble. He also raised concerns about sustainability, the environment, of AI in a world of limited resources. There's more. So we've got this polemic going on here.

AI in core. Utterly crucial to WordPress's future. And then obviously no, make it a toggle. Boom. What, where do we, land on this? what do you think? I have no intuitions as to what anybody's gonna say. I don't wanna put words into anybody's mouths, so I'll just let you, whoever wants to interrupt first, go for it.

I'm curious as to what you think. Yeah,

[01:15:12] Courtney Robertson: there is a post also on the make.wordpress.org/ai team site, asking hosts for feedback about being the provider of the ai. Because the point of friction is if you have to go get your own chat PT account or clawed or this or that for the average person using their websites, I could see some validity to that, but that's a big ask on the ecosystem to incorporate.

What do we do if people try to bypass, if they're, if they are gaming their AI and trying to get around the safeguards, then who's responsible? and that not being necessarily part of the business model that hosts were considering, we'll say. So encouraging feedback on that post, and I'll get the link for Nathan to put into the show notes as well.

Yeah.

[01:16:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yes, please.

[01:16:10] Courtney Robertson: I think that there's a lot of, it's important that we remain, remember this is all still wildly new and I think there's a lot to gain from having civil discourse. That means that we are discussing the ideas. And not the humans. I think that it matters that we talk through a lot of these ideas and say, have we considered this?

Have we considered that? And not have a gut check response to just oppose things, but also not a flippant idea that we're just gonna shove it all in either. We have to meet somewhere in the middle and have those conversations. And I think that we need to stay really attuned to actual WordPress users that aren't in the bubble of contributing or listening to all the WordPress news or reading WordPress news, right?

[01:17:04] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

[01:17:04] Courtney Robertson: Users of this.

[01:17:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. What's

[01:17:06] Courtney Robertson: going to help them the best. And I think that's where we need to really focus on that experience.

[01:17:12] Nathan Wrigley: So it's curious, isn't it, that a, as an example, a really kind of core component of any website these days would be, I don't know, let's pluck something out. Thin air a form, right?

E everybody usually needs some kind of form. Not everybody, but it's fairly significant. Yet we don't have that in core because it's, it's a feature that you can find elsewhere. and Tammy's saying why, so in the comment to Tammy Lister, why is it a change of landscape from what is happening outside of WordPress already?

I suppose that would be the thing, wouldn't it? People would say, why is this all a given? why is it like Durer that everybody's gonna need ai? When in fact it would appear, certainly from where I'm sitting, it would appear. There, there is a growing vocal minority of people who are really concerned about it.

And I don't know whether that groundswell of, vocal minority is gonna get louder, but obviously you don't really want to get into a debate about that if it's a core feature of WordPress and you can't opt out of it, or, I, just don't know. essentially I

[01:18:16] Jesse Friedman: don't, think it's gonna operate that way.

I've had a few conversations about this now, and the thing that looks like the path that WordPress core is gonna take is number one, building the scaffolding right? And the tools needed for AI to operate as a layer on top of it. you mentioned, forms. One thing that's really interesting is, that, and Courtney, what you mentioned about end users and the fact that they're not community.

Not always in the community, not always right into everything. So, important to point that out to people. 'cause I think that we tend to forget that. but, email is an interesting thing because it's been something that every single website needs email, from one layer or another, right? but email's expensive.

And so WordPress, the community driven software, is not gonna pay for email for millions and millions of users across the internet. the same thing goes with ai. I don't believe that. what we'll see is that there is an ai, engine paid for and built by the WordPress. Community directly integrated into core.

I think what we'll see is that the abilities API is gonna have a lot of work put into it so that we can use that to deliver what functionality you have throughout your site. And then we'll use the, that ability to layer in API. and I think that, one thing that's really interesting is to think about different agents performing different tasks.

So your SEO plugin could pull in an AI agent that is, specifically built around, doing SEO stuff. or you could have a, Elementor could bring in its Angie to, help you with site building or, jet Pack could do it for, helping you write content, whatever it might be.

but I don't think that we're gonna see, any kind of, AI fully baked into WordPress, the software that is going to be a requirement for you to use.

[01:20:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That came across strongly, didn't it? In the, state of the word address. All of the, AI people who came up, and Tammy, who's in our comments, she was right there in the front of the audience.

It, definitely came across as that layer, didn't it? Like we're providing the, we're providing all of the things that WordPress does, and then you, go out and find the other ai the chat GPT or Gemini or whatever, and bind it inside a WordPress. And, apparently I've, got it completely wrong.

Tammy says, I've got the, just the exact opposite of what she went, I am sorry, Tammy. sometimes I just, I'm just not clever enough basically to keep up with all this sort of stuff. Philip says that whilst he agrees, I'm saying he, he says, whilst hi, why start? Whilst I agree that ai, it was very beneficial.

However you need to know how to use it, prompted. Additionally, I found that the more. I'm gonna have to read it off the thing here. The more complex, with the ai, the more it struggles. Yep. Okay. Zach says, everything's a toggle when you have the code. And then Tammy, I think in response to that says, this isn't about toggles, this is about tools.

And Tammy back again says, I've heard some great conversations within the core AI team and others. Core sustainable ai lowest model. First thinking, the presumption of admiring large models, is also wrong. the human user is at the heart of this. Do you know what, Tammy? I think that is the central part of my concern is that.

There's bit bits of this, which feel very dehumanizing. it feels like a lot of the AI stuff is, said Atos. and, that, I think is the part that concerns me. And I'm sure as an, as a, I know that you have many aspects of your life which are very artistic and creative and all of that.

I'm sure maybe you understand a bit of that, even if you don't necessarily agree with it. it's so again, in re My thing won't work now. I can't put Oh, yes it will. this isn't about being clever. This is Tammy again. it's about us all being human with each other. Okay. Interesting. Michelle?

[01:22:28] Michelle Frechette: No.

Yeah. So one of the things, and I think I mentioned this in a previous AI conversation about WordPress, is that we want to continue to bring in the next generation of WordPress users and they are all in on AI in a lot of the ways. So if you look at Wix, if you look at Squarespace, some of our competitors, they are already implementing AI much more than we are.

And if we want to stay competitive with the next generation of users and not have, WordPress die with those of us who've been using it for 15 years or more,

[01:22:57] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, we

[01:22:58] Michelle Frechette: need to continue to implement and we need to continue to grow and we need to continue to, include this, the technologies that the next generation of users are already using.

[01:23:09] Nathan Wrigley: It's a good point and well made. And, yeah, so the article in question, which prompted all of that, AI always gets the conversation going, doesn't it? It seems to be the

[01:23:18] Michelle Frechette: It sure does of

[01:23:19] Nathan Wrigley: everything at the moment, doesn't it? Repository. WordPress AI team outlines vision for AI as a fundamental part of WordPress.

Go check it out. And and I think it's fair to say Tammy is probably available to have conversations around this if you wish to reach out. And she's very, also, it's

[01:23:37] Michelle Frechette: important to remember that AI isn't about taking over. AI isn't supposed to take over your website. Yeah. It's a tool. It's a tool.

And Tammy said that earlier. It's a tool that we use. And that's what Zach is also saying.

[01:23:47] Nathan Wrigley: Zach's saying here, MCP is about empowering people to use these models to accomplish tasks within environments they control. and then, James just sums it up beautifully in three words. Time for robots. I like the robots

[01:24:02] Michelle Frechette: that, that clean my floor.

I like the robots. there's definitely a use case for robots.

[01:24:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think it's Jesse. Jesse, who's on the show says, I'm for robots too. Assuming that, they are listening, they're

[01:24:16] Michelle Frechette: listening. Good answer, good question.

[01:24:18] Nathan Wrigley: and I dunno what's going on.

I, I, the UI is freaking out for me. And local models that don't feed an AI beast are awesome. Do you know what that whole local model thing. Like for me it is almost the panacea actually, because I feel like there's a, there, there's something about having it on my machine. There's something about my psychology, which when something grows extremely large like Google, there's some part of me that begins to rebel against it or distrust it or I, dunno what that is, but I've had that since I was a kid.

The bigger it gets, the more I'm thinking I'm not really aligned with that anymore. And the idea of local models maybe really is the panacea for that. If I know it's on my machine and I've interacted with that and I'm making air quotes, educated it in the way I would like it to behave.

Maybe that's it. Maybe there's something there. And also maybe I should just grow up.

[01:25:18] Jesse Friedman: Nathan, you, I think it also depends

[01:25:20] Nathan Wrigley: on

[01:25:20] Jesse Friedman: whether or not it communicates from your computer. Yeah. To it source. Because if it's not, if it's not walled off, then it doesn't really matter. Yeah. Okay. Good

[01:25:28] Nathan Wrigley: point. Thank you.

[01:25:29] Jesse Friedman: Yeah.

[01:25:29] Courtney Robertson: You're also talking to Americans right now that are on the show and, the likes of, the owner of Grok having access to our social security information and everything. It changes the perspective when you're like, my data's already out there. Yeah, and the government's using it this way.

[01:25:49] Nathan Wrigley: You know what I think it is that it's this landscape of all possible futures. There are a few scenarios which are not good. I'm sure that there are many in which it's entirely beneficial, but I think there are some scenarios in which things don't work out. Particularly well and and they're not beyond the realms of possibility.

And I think, Courtney, you've just described one which is not necessarily that desirable and yet we, yeah. Anyway. Yeah, let's put that genie back in the bottle, shall we? Tammy's saying that she's available. No, she's not. She's saying I can't get robots to clean my floor. Clicked on the wrong link. she's saying she's available if people wanna talk about this.

I think Tammy is right at the vanguard of all of this, so if you've got commentary, Tammy's available to, to hear it. Now, back to this one. I can't get robots to clean my floor. They don't work well in cottages. Okay, that's a good point. Roomba's filing for bankruptcy. Okay. There you go, Hoover.

Just because everybody else is, while you can.

[01:26:44] Michelle Frechette: Everybody else has copied them and much cheaper probably.

[01:26:50] Nathan Wrigley: da dah, Okay. There's a few more comments, but I think we can probably just quickly move on. Okay. We've got very, little time left. So just a couple of hats tips really. Here's the first one.

Dave Gray, who's often on the show. What a nice little plugin. This is great. $19 at the moment for life, for an infinite number of sites that offer. I dunno when that offer runs out. Oh dunno. But the idea of this is it will remind you when plugin renewals are coming up. So let's say for example, you happen to buy a company, buy a plugin from dodgy company.com, and they cost you a thousand dollars a year and they never send you an email reminder.

And the minute that you, renew your license, inadvertently you are, you, that's it, you're done. he's built a plugin, which will just remind you, you set a date and it will say, look, here comes, the plugin, update. You know it's gonna happen. And you set all of that stuff up and hopefully that nonsense never comes, to your way again.

So it's called remind me friendly web guy.co uk slash remind dash me. I think that's a cracking idea. I have so many subscriptions that renew and, I'm just so laissez-faire about it. I just see it and go, I'll do that next year. When what I should do is do it right now for next year and then it happens again and again.

Anyway, there we go. Thank you Dave Gray for building that. we had things about playground. Just go read this WordPress 2025 review. Just go read it. Yeah, I'm so sorry. We haven't got time for that one 'cause it's a long one. Ollie, Mike McAllister's Ollie feels like it's doing really well in the block editor space.

I feel like he's on the. The precipice, that's the wrong word. Anyway, he's, it feels like he's winning the game here. in the block editor space, he's got Ollie free and Ollie Pro paid. And in the Ollie Pro, he's just launched what he's calling, class Manager, which, as you'd imagine is a, the capacity for you to wrangle your CSS inside of the inside of WordPress.

and it's really nice, it reminds me of it is like something like Tailwind where you assign a bunch of classes and you can toggle 'em on. So red button round, and then you can stack those three things with a checkbox and you'll get around cornered, red button, that kind of thing. And, it's just really, nicely done.

So firstly, congratulations to, the Ollie team, but also definitely go check it out. when it was still

[01:29:23] Courtney Robertson: in beta, I put it on my site and Uhhuh, was working on embedding. A short code for a newsletter

[01:29:32] Jesse Friedman: form. Yeah. Yep. And,

[01:29:33] Courtney Robertson: styling on those can be the bane of every WordPress person's existence.

Yeah. they, they do not style nicely. And so I was testing it out and Mike jumped in. I enjoyed what I was experiencing, but I was still slightly stuck just a smidge. I gave Mike a video recording of my issues and, Mike corrected a couple things before the final release was shipped, made it nice and speedy, and I so appreciate this because hunting around for, where did I make that one custom CSS thing.

Can be really hard. Yeah. And with this, you get one view that shows you all of the places where you did that thing.

[01:30:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, for custom css. So you've got what is called block styles, global styles and compiled CSS. And you can see that you're dealing with one, you're dealing with one class at a time.

So for example, on the screen here with dot card and this, is the CSS for card, but it's got the base, the hover, the focus, the active, the disabled. you've seen this everywhere before. It's nothing like transformational or new, it's CSS, but it's just a nice implementation inside of the block editor.

And it may, just remove that confusion about where is it? and I, I just the capacity to stack things with, toggles and add different classes and things like that. And

[01:30:52] Courtney Robertson: I, appreciate that so much of Ollie. Leverages native core in its approach to things. Yeah.

[01:30:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:30:58] Courtney Robertson: It, for the end users, I feel like it just gives more continuity to the experience they're having, rather than a very disjointed, now I'm in WordPress, now I'm in this form builder, and now I'm in that page builder, and.

[01:31:11] Nathan Wrigley: I have a feeling that the Ollie team are gonna have a very good 2026. I hope so anyway. and Zach? Hello Zach. again, Ollie is a phenomenally well-built foundation to build from too, right? And, the block editor is not always easy. Full site editing is not always easy, and he's made it as easy as possible, so that's great.

Okay, very quick race to the end. call for speakers. WordCamp Europe is now open. You can send in your application. I think you've got until, let scroll right to the bottom. You have until January 31st if you wish to be a speaker. it's taking place in Poland later this year. So that's opened. And just a quick hat tip.

I saw this. This is just a nice reminder that even though there's a lot of stuff going on in the WordPress space, the sky is not always falling in. Word, camp Malaysia 2025. this is a writeup of that and, but the takeaway item that I wanted to mention was the organizer said it was the biggest attended event that they have had.

And, it felt like 20, 25 parts of 2024 felt like the direction of travel had gone the other way. But, certainly in other parts of the world from where I live, it's definitely popular things, so that's quite nice. We touched that. so I'll just quickly mention this. If you like CSS as Mike McAllister obviously does, this is Google's where it's chrome.dev, it's their CSS wrapped and it's showing some of the new things, new-ish things that CSS can do.

And you just click buttons basically and then steal the CSS. But some of it is like. Almost like the days of flash, some of the stuff that's coming inside the browser or is now available. look at this. Look at these lovely, look at these lovely like dropdowns. Aren't they nice?

Like what I mean? Dropdowns are so boring. And now browsers will handle, all of this natively. There's loads to get into, including native sliders and stuff like that. So go check that out. And do we have time? Probably not. No, Oh, Matt had a fight with, DHH let's say, let's just leave it at that show.

You can know more to say. And this chap, I feel very sorry for, he had his life upended this week when his license for Apple, all Apple things. and he's a Apple dev went away, go and read this harrowing story. I don't think it's resolved yet. This only happened two days ago and it's basically ruined his life.

Paul, so many

[01:33:37] Jesse Friedman: examples of that. I know we don't have time, but it's not just in the app development world, but it's in social media too. Build people, build their, businesses on top of closed. Walled garden networks like this, and then the algorithms or whatever can rip it all out from under them in a second.

[01:33:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yep. Yep, in this case, this guy really is all in on Apple. he writes books about Apple software and how to write Apple software. He's got all of his photos, two terabytes of photos, with no other backup mechanism and his account has been shut down. Nobody will talk to him, and it's very frustrating.

And by the sounds of it, he did nothing wrong. He bought a $499 gift card. From a reputable store, like a big store. He said, if you're an American, think Walmart like on that level. I think he's Australian. So equivalent to that and it didn't work. And it, and it feels like the angle that he's being told is there was something dodgy about the code you were using.

So they suspect him of fraud, it would seem, and you are talking to a brick wall, which is a shame, somebody, especially if you've written a bunch of books about developing for Apple products and he reckons he is, $30,000 in products he's bought over the years and so on and so forth.

So come on. It'll be

[01:34:56] Jesse Friedman: interesting to read his next book.

[01:34:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, It'll be very thin. It'll be a pamphlet, endorsing Android. Yeah. Anyway, there we go. That's it. That's all. We've got time for this week. Sorry it was a bit of a rush at the end. I'm sorry. We had technical gremlins. we're taking a break.

Because of, the holidays. So when this is finished, I'm gonna go and don my son to c and, become family man for a couple of weeks. So we'll be back, in January. But, hopefully you, can cope until then. I'm sure that you can, but it only remains for me to say thank you to our panelists.

So let's go round that. We're in a different order now. Aren't we've all got disrupted? let's go to Jesse. Thank you very much for joining us, Jesse. Appreciate it. Hope you'll come back, Michelle Ette. I hope you will too. I'm pretty sure that you will. And, Courtney as well. Thank you for joining us and making the effort.

You're the only one with the Christmas attire. I know. Good for you.

[01:35:53] Courtney Robertson: and, to spoil the cat earrings, you know the one side's, the cat face. Yeah. The other side though. Let me see if I can. How do I move to, no, this one I can just saw a

[01:36:01] Nathan Wrigley: tree. Oh, it's

[01:36:02] Courtney Robertson: a little, it's the kitty butt.

[01:36:04] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, Ty

[01:36:06] Courtney Robertson: Kitty. But in the tree.

[01:36:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, There.

[01:36:08] Courtney Robertson: This is for my children last year, and I have to wear it proudly.

[01:36:11] Nathan Wrigley: I was, love it. Have enormous head. enormous earrings under this, but I don's just, okay. We just need to do the hand wave thing, if that's all right. Just before we end. Get the picture. Ah, good. Good. That's so good. I love it.

I love it. Thank you Jesse. Jesse's got a stick in his hand. It says love

[01:36:31] Michelle Frechette: That is, the title. That has to be the title of the episode. It's gotta be just lovely. It's not

[01:36:35] Courtney Robertson: a Valentines show. It's the wizard I love. We

[01:36:38] Nathan Wrigley: don't care. We don't care. It's perfect. Love is year round. Yeah. Thank you so much. If you put any comments in the last few moments, I apologize.

We don't have time for those, but, thanks so much. I'll chat to you three in a moment once the last credit has come. But see you in the new year. Ha. Have a happy holiday. Take it easy. Bye-Bye.