[00:00:20] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 450 entitled What Just Happened? Episode five. WordPress in Transition 6.9, trademark battles, and AI. And surely you won't find a more pithy title anywhere online. It was published on Thursday, the 18th of December, 2025.
My name's Nathan Wrigley and a few bits of housekeeping just before we begin.
The first thing to say is this is the last episode of the year 2025. I am taking a couple of weeks off to spend some time with the family. If having holidays is your thing in your part of the world as well, I hope that you have a nice break. If not, I hope that you have a productive time.
We'll be back in early January with some more podcast episodes, and This Week in wordPress shows. They'll be available on the usual schedule. We'll drop things on a Tuesday, on a Thursday for the podcast and This Week in WordPress live, every Monday as well.
I guess it would be wise for me to say that if you've still got money burning a hole in your pocket, WP Builds has our Black Friday page, and believe it or not, there's still loads of deals on there. I'll just say it once. Head to wpbuilds.com/black to find out more.
Now this is a bit of a plea if you would like to help keep the lights on over at WP Builds, we are actively looking for some sponsors. I would deeply appreciate anybody representing a company in the WordPress space. Doesn't really matter what you do, you know, it could be blocks, themes, plugins, hosting, whatever. I'd love to have a chat. If you email me at [email protected], we can get into a chat of how we can put you in front of a WordPress specific audience. We really do have a fairly large audience, and it's one of the best ways to represent your brand, gain notoriety, align yourself with WP Builds and so on. So yeah, [email protected]. Send us an email and we'll get into a conversation about that. We'd love to help you with your product or service in the year 2026.
Okay, what have we got for you today? Well, today I am chatting with Rae Moray. Rae Moray has the email newsletter called The Repository. I'm gonna put some links into the show notes, but we link to many of her articles.
The intention, when we started this show, which we're calling, What Just Happened was to do an episode about every three months. But we got derailed. There was loads of stuff happening in the summer. And so we sort of missed a few months out there, but we're back. We recorded this just a few days ago, and so we're trying to sum up what's happened in the last three, maybe four or five months in the WordPress space. And honestly, there really is an awful lot to cover.
So apart from the usual introductions, we talk about WordPress 6.9 and the forthcoming 7.0.
We talk about real time collaboration and the notes feature, which has just dropped.
The hot topic of 2025, of course, was ai, and we get into that. Things like the Abilities API, how collaborative editing might be managed. How AI models might be managed in the future. The AI experiments plugin.
And then we talk about block themes, the partnership program in the WordPress space. There's of course the ongoing legal dispute. We get into that a little bit. And then some community stories, things like WordCamps.
And then towards the end we have a few lighthearted stories about the UK budget leak, which was a curious story which happened in the UK recently.
So all of that is coming up next. If you don't hear from me soon, have a lovely holiday season, again if that's your thing, and I hope you enjoy the podcast.
Hello Rae. How you doing?
[00:04:02] Rae Morey: I'm good. Nathan, how are you?
[00:04:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you weren't expecting quite such a cavalier approach to the beginning of this episode, were you?
[00:04:10] Rae Morey: I was not. I was not.
[00:04:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I'm good. this is episode five of What Just Happened. So Rae Morey is joining me as she has done for four previous episodes, and we're gonna try and sum up what's been happening in the WordPress space.
The intention was to do this kind of every three months, but we, we fell off the wagon a little bit, so there's more to
Nevermind. That's all good. Yeah. So just for context, we're recording this in the middle of December, 2025. So depending on when this drops, there may have been some, who knows, life changing seismic event that we miss out entirely.
But, history shows, that's unlikely.
[00:04:47] Rae Morey: you never know certain person took to Reddit on the Christmas Eve last year, so you never know what's going to happen in the
[00:04:54] Nathan Wrigley: Things can in that case. Rae, just in case anybody hasn't listened to this, our audience sort of is a bit in flux. some people join, other people leave and so on. There may be people who don't know what you do. Just tell us a little bit about the repository or really anything you like to do with, yourself.
[00:05:12] Rae Morey: my favorite color, no. so my
[00:05:15] Nathan Wrigley: born on.
[00:05:18] Rae Morey: I, publish the repository. It's a, new site dedicated to covering what's happening in the WordPress ecosystem. Yeah, that's pretty much it. I just write news stories about what's happening and also publish, a weekly newsletter every Friday, subscribe, like all that
[00:05:37] Nathan Wrigley: I can subscribe,
[00:05:38] Rae Morey: like a subscribe.
And I don't use, I don't use YouTube so much.
[00:05:43] Nathan Wrigley: out, dear listener, how to get the repository email into your newsletter
[00:05:48] Rae Morey: the repository email is my annoying URL,
[00:05:53] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, no, I think that's great. I
[00:05:54] Rae Morey: I never fixed it.
[00:05:55] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Do would, what would you do? Would you drop the at the beginning or would you change the.email?
[00:06:01] Rae Morey: I love to have.com, but, it's, I've got repository news as a domain and I've just never, I've never got around to fixing it because it was a newsletter for five years before it came. A new became a, a publication its own right. yep. It's just one of those annoying SEO things that I'm just gonna have to live with.
[00:06:22] Nathan Wrigley: got. Yeah. You've now built up an audience. Anyway, needless to say, go check it out. Pause this right now. Pause it. You haven't have you, you haven't paused it. Now go pause it right away. the repository that those words, the repository, all is one word. Email. Go check it out and subscribe.
I can more or less guarantee it is the best source of WordPress news out there. It's, proper journalism written up just for you. so yeah, go and check that out. Anyway, Rae is here. So that we can talk about the last few months, and we have this giant spreadsheet where we drop in a bunch of stories that have happened since we last spoke, and then we cull them a little bit.
We've probably been on the call for about an hour at this point, culling different things and we've decided what we, think is probably the most important stuff. There's a lot that we've left on the editing room floor, but nevertheless, let's make a start with, with something, and we'll go. I guess let's start with the WordPress project itself.
So we just had 6.9 drop that, that actually happened really recently by PCO coincidence. we're gonna talk about the different features in there. is there anything that jumped out for you? we could just rehash all of the things that have happened that's probably not of great interest.
what were some of the headline things that you liked?
[00:07:37] Rae Morey: it was big release because it's been, it was eight months since WordPress 6.8. So I think one of the things about 6.8 was that there wasn't a lot in it. It felt let's get it out.
[00:07:54] Nathan Wrigley: maintenance kind of steady away release. yeah,
[00:07:57] Rae Morey: it was. And I remember listening on a podcast or an interview somewhere where Matt Mullenweg said he was really disappointed, or, I can't remember his exact words, but he was disappointed that there wasn't much in the release.
And, I think that's. That might've spurred, automatic to unpause its contributions to WordPress. But anyway, 6.9 has a lot. I think, the, headline features were, notes. Notes is a big one. and, previously called block commenting. So that's I guess the first step towards, real time collaboration.
we're now seeing the command palette right across the WordPress dashboard, which is, great for power users. there's also lots of improvements and enhancements to, editing tools, in the block editor for people, for everyone who uses the block editor. yeah, I really enjoy using the block
[00:09:04] Nathan Wrigley: I do too.
[00:09:06] Rae Morey: and.
It's also great to see features like, block visibility in the block editor too. that's, a great one. And that's, leading into work that will come in 7.0 around, responsive controls. something that, I preview this week on the repository. other things drag and drop,
[00:09:35] Nathan Wrigley: That's actually really cool. I love
a obvious thing, but you can now pick things up and you see them as they go to the place where they're going to go, as opposed to clicking some arrows and it slides into view. Yeah. It's nothing but it's a, something kind of makes it feel
[00:09:52] Rae Morey: There's lots of things and also it's, definitely worth pointing out, all of the performance stuff that Western Route has been working on. Yeah. Hats off to him. He put a lot of work into that. lots of things that are making WordPress faster. Oh God, what else? Stretchy text. I haven't played with that yet.
[00:10:15] Nathan Wrigley: text I can't quite ever see myself using, but a nice idea if you've got that gap at
[00:10:19] Rae Morey: it's a nice
[00:10:20] Nathan Wrigley: page where you just gotta fill it up with text,
text is your best friend.
[00:10:25] Rae Morey: Yeah, definitely.
[00:10:26] Nathan Wrigley: I didn't know what it was for a long time and I was imagining all sorts of. elongate it almost elasticated text that got pulled out.
But, I'm, pleased to say that I now understand it. I think the, most interesting stuff in there for me is the, notes thing. I, probably, given the way that I use WordPress, I, don't know if it's the same with you at the repository, but it's a, basically it's a site of one user WP builds, and so I will, won't really, unless I really get quite nerdy and leave notes for myself, which actually, now that I'm saying those words, I probably will now, that those words have just come into my head.
But for teams, I think this will be really great. It's, like a. It's like preparing the groundwork for something much better to come in seven and beyond. Because all that you can do really at the moment is pick a block comment on the block. It's not like Google Docs where you can highlight a couple of words and say These words, change these.
No, you'd have to describe that. So if it's an image block, you can comment on the image. If it's a text block, you can comment on that and so on. But still pretty cool.
[00:11:30] Rae Morey: I have to digress for a minute. I, I've seen a lot of commentary, from, I guess an agency community from people who are like, so many sites are run by one person who's going to use notes, who's gonna use real time collaboration. But then, this week I dug into the results of the, state of enterprise WordPress survey that was released last week.
And one of the findings from the survey was that, there a lot of the respondents to the survey, Have, teams of 50 plus people who work on one WordPress site. so there are these huge teams at enterprise companies that are using WordPress, and they, want these collaboration tools. What they're using at the moment, I don't know, I guess they're using Google Docs and lots of other tools, but, for those kinds of WordPress users,
[00:12:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess the
[00:12:29] Rae Morey: and even notes is gonna be life changing.
Yeah.
[00:12:32] Nathan Wrigley: don't really know until that feature drops, whether or not it's gonna be of utility to people. And it, I, imagine it will become quite interesting for teams 'cause they won't have to have that, I don't know, let's, talk about this over on Slack or Discord or where, wherever it is.
and when it, when we get the next version in seven. Whereby the intention is to make it more granular so that you might be able to pick up just individual portions of a block or what have you, or even like multiple blocks at the same time. So you might want to highlight three paragraph blocks or something like that.
I think people will grow into it. And if they're in WordPress all the time and that really is their editorial workflow, why would you need to go somewhere else? So I, this is the kind of thing I think nobody knows how useful it will be until they suddenly discover its utility and then it probably will be something that you'll lean into.
There's the, the whole thing with it at the moment. It doesn't really require a great deal of server power. The, next iteration that's gonna be curious to see how that works and whether or not we end up with, I don't know, SaaS services or wordpress.com integrations, or, I don't know, jet pack or something like that, which binds into it to make that possible.
They're, even talking, aren't they, at the moment, in the 7.0 documentation of limiting it to just two concurrent users or something like that. So that'll be curious to
[00:13:53] Rae Morey: Yeah, I saw that Matisse Ventura raised that in the 7.0 planning blog post that was published, last week around, what, is the baseline ex? He, wanted to start a conversation around what are the baseline, expectations, sorry, of, what real time collaboration's gonna offer.
there are a lot of, technical challenges around delivering real time collaboration. It'd be interesting to see what's
[00:14:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it was interesting how that conversation has pivoted now to making it more of a hosting feature. So in other words, let's say you go to hosting company X and you have an account over there, it would be up to them to facilitate the, grunt if you like, whatever the server needs to make that possible.
And it might be, I can imagine that would be like a, check mark on a form where you're buying your hosting and you might say, okay, yeah, that's a feature I would like. Add in a couple of dollars a month or whatever it may be. And that will be something that the host might take care of. So that's
[00:14:58] Rae Morey: Hmm.
[00:14:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the drag and drop stuff was interesting. All of the, obviously we'll get into the AI stuff later, but there was an awful lot of groundwork, being done that's been just drip feeding more or less constantly. So we'll put that one to one side. So yeah, there's absolutely loads in 6.9.
It did feel like a fairly hefty release. And, yeah, I think that's probably covered that, isn't it?
[00:15:23] Rae Morey: Yeah. I get, I could talk about the release a bit more, but let's talk about that when we cover the state of the word.
[00:15:30] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. in which case we will segue a little bit into ai, in that case at the moment. Now I've gotta confess the AI stuff for me personally, because I'm a team of one and I just write the content myself and what have you. I'm curious about it. But I don't find myself in the weeds of it, so I have to look at it from a sort of an academic point of view.
So forgive me, dear listener, if I kinda misstep or misstate, whatever we're about to talk about. But the, first one, is by the way, I'm gonna put links into the show notes for all of the bits and pieces that we're talking. Largely, it will end up on the repository website. Many of the links will end up there because raised on reporting about it.
But in some cases, we'll end up on, I don't know, the mate.wordpress.org website or something like that. So if we're talking about it, there'll be a link if you go to wp builds.com and search for, I dunno, episode five with Rae spelled RAE by the way. Then you'll be able to find these. So yeah, the next one, introducing the WordPress abilities.
API, shall I describe what I think that is, or do you wanna do it?
[00:16:35] Rae Morey: Yeah, take a stab.
[00:16:36] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, I'll take a stab. So I imagine in a WordPress website it can do all these things. So it can publish posts. You can create users. You can delete posts. You can just imagine there's like a many, different things that a WordPress site can do.
And if you want it to bind an AI to a WordPress site to achieve things, not just write content or make images or what have you. Let's say you want an AI to create a post, write it, then publish it. You need it to know how to publish things. It needs to have the ability to publish things. And this WordPress, API is this kind of abstracted layer where all of the things that a WordPress website can do can be understood by an ai, and thereby it can be achieved by an ai.
My understanding also is it's extensible. So a third party plugin developer, for example, would be able to introduce their own abilities because they have, I don't know, courses or something like that. And you want to. Be able to publish courses instead of posts. And so all of that becomes available and, in this way, WordPress is aligning itself in a future of AI where it is not the AI agent, but it's just this in-between layer where you use WordPress as the place to do all of your ai, but it's not actually doing, it's going off to some third party thing like chat GPT or Gemini or what have you.
And so that's what I think the abilities API is. Do you think I've got that about right, or have I missed the mark
[00:18:03] Rae Morey: Yeah, I think so. It's, basically a central registry of what a, a WordPress of abilities that a WordPress site can, do that allows AI to understand what, it can actually carry out on a site. I don't know. I guess it's, we've heard a lot about the abilities API in, at State of the Word and, on, all of these blog posts and things coming outta AI team.
But it is quite a developer thing that's hard to succinctly, briefly, captured in a couple of sentences so people haven't really understood what it's all about.
[00:18:46] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, I guess it's one of those things that once people start using it, it'll become much more obvious. But if you've got an AI that can only create content or improve content or summarize content or whatever it may be, then that's the end of the road. Whereas this feels, I, could be wrong about this, but it does feel like it's fairly industry leading.
in the content creation space, this kind of, this ability, sorry, forgive me. This ability to have an API, which sits between the, AI agent and you the user, is, I think it's a really forward, think forward thinking way of deploying it. So WordPress itself can't be accused of, I don't know, deploying AI directly.
It's not like automatic a behind the AI agent itself. It's just this layer in the middle which exposes everything that a WordPress website can do so that the AI can do it. Now, whether or not that's desirable for you and the stuff that you produce and the websites that you make, maybe not, but it's gonna be capable of doing those things in the future.
And I imagine there was quite a lot of work trying to figure out, what is it that WordPress website can do When you get into the weeds, I expect you can do a heck of a lot more than you, would imagine.
[00:20:03] Rae Morey: I think, the, I think the person really driving this has been James LaPage and I think the abilities API is something that he wished was in WordPress years ago. And now that he's leading AI at Automatic and also a co-req of the WordPress eight AI team, he's been able to drive this and actually get it into WordPress.
it was interesting at the state of the word when he said, sorry, overflowing into the next
[00:20:28] Nathan Wrigley: it's all
[00:20:29] Rae Morey: but,
[00:20:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:20:30] Rae Morey: it was interesting when he said that if you'd asked him, like this time last year, if WordPress would be, where it is with AI today, he was like, probably not.
but he's now leading a lot of that work together with, other members of the AI team.
And so it's interesting to see where WordPress is. And also what's planned for 7.0 as far as, the, workflow, a workflow's API goes, and possible, integration with the, WP AI client, all of these very AI things that, the team's gonna have to explain really well to the community to get people to actually use it.
it was interesting this week or last week when, the team published, a series of three posts, I, I guess appealing the, to the community to start exploring these ai, APIs and, also interestingly, asking hosts to con, to consider, including AI models with their hosting packages.
Did you, see that
[00:21:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I did. That is curious, isn't it? Yep.
[00:21:48] Rae Morey: Yeah, I've seen, I, I've been following the WordPress AI team's, regular meetings and, figuring out how to, provide AI models to, users has, been something that they've been trying to work through. how do they, bridge that gap as far as, providing the interface for people to use AI with WordPress, but then connect to these models and they hadn't quite figured it out yet.
But then I guess this is, the solution that they're coming up with,
[00:22:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, because it is interesting.
[00:22:25] Rae Morey: to, to step in.
[00:22:27] Nathan Wrigley: So somebody like you or I who are in the tech world probably fully understand that there's all these AI models. You go and you get an account with, open AI or what have you, and then somewhere buried in the settings is this little API key. And you can pop that into any app.
But for the, I imagine for the typical, and I'm doing air quotes, the typical user that genuinely might be a step too far, they don't wanna do that that's slightly confusing. And if there's just a checkbox inside of your hosted WordPress website, again you're with hosting Company X, they've provided something inside the admin area which says, yes, I authorize you to send my content to the, AI model that you've got.
You just tick a box, press save, and it's already done. That feels like a really sensible way of getting traction for it. 'cause I think despite the fact that, you and I are into text, so that just seems like such a small hurdle, honestly, I think a lot of people that's. more of a hurdle than they want.
they don't wanna give a credit card detail to some other third party website that they've never heard of. Just, I'm already paying for my hosting. I'll just add another few dollars and I'll get the AI capabilities that way. Curious, isn't it that it, it's everybody's talking about ai, like it's already embedded.
I don't think it's already embedded for most people on planet Earth. It's just the, the sort of more nerdy side of people at the moment, I think.
[00:23:53] Rae Morey: Yeah. I am really fascinated to see how, this hosting, hosting conversation goes. 'cause there are already people, a few people in the comments of the AO teams post that were like, oh, we are not really sure about this. There needs to be more public and community discussion around. this, conversation around how are we embedding ai, but also why are we doing it?
And somebody asked about, policies around ethics, and there's just still a lot that needs to be discussed and debated.
[00:24:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah,
[00:24:28] Rae Morey: that's all gonna be happening next year.
[00:24:31] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, I think it's an in, it is gonna be an interesting year, 2026. 2025 kind of feels like it couldn't be more ai, but maybe 2026 really will be more ai. And then of course, there's this whole ANGs of people who thinks the whole, thing is a house of cards and is going to collapse because the venture capital money isn't gonna be repaid and yada, yada So certainly, whichever way it flips or flops, 2026 will be an interesting year. But I, feel really happy with the way that the. The AI team have pivoted in that they've made it so that they are agnostic to whichever AI company client, API, whatever you wanna call it, is they're just building the infrastructure and there's loads more.
There's like all this MCP stuff, I'll link to raise posts and you can go and check out more. and then the next one, I don't really know much about this plugin. It is the AI experiments plugin. Looks like it's in an early version at the moment. I don't honestly even know what that's purporting to do.
I'm hoping that you do.
[00:25:34] Rae Morey: I wrote a story about it, but gonna have to quickly scan it to
[00:25:38] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.
[00:25:38] Rae Morey: myself because I wrote so many stories.
[00:25:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,
[00:25:41] Rae Morey: so the, AI experiments plugin is basically one of the AI teams for building blocks. So there was the abilities, API, the W, the WordPress AI client, SDK, the MCP adapter and this AI experiments plugin.
Basically it's a new canonical plugin that gives contributors a space to test experimental AI powered features in WordPress, similar to the Gutenberg plugin. and the. AI team had promised these building blocks and they all were all released by the time that 6.9 came out. with this plugin, this was the last of the four building blocks.
And, this has really been spearheaded, by Jeffrey Paul. He's a really long time core contributor. And, interestingly, he, he works for Fueled, which is, the company's, the, he works for 10 up fuel's WordPress practice. I have to keep remembering how to explain that. but at, as part of 10 Up, he led, his team led the work on the classifier plugin, and I dunno if you've heard about that, but Classifier is a plugin that TenUp created for their enterprise publishing clients.
And it allows features like, AI powered, it's, an AI. power plugin that allows features like, title generation excerpt, generation, creating images, all these kinds of things which have also been proposed for the AI experiments plugin. So the first feature of this plugin has been title Generation.
And, from what I've heard, the, classify the team that's worked on Classify It Fueled, and 10 Up has been, advising the developers who've been working on this AI experiments plugin. So a lot of the features that, we're seeing in classify a, there's gonna be some form of those in the AI experiments plugin.
I actually use Classify on the repository website and I love it. it makes, I don't use all of the features, but one of my favorites is, if I upload an image to the media library in WordPress, it automatically, classify automatically writes,
[00:28:14] Nathan Wrigley: alt
[00:28:14] Rae Morey: description. Image Description, yeah.
Old text. you can tweak, in the settings. It classify, the settings for that, and it just automates the whole process. It makes it so easy to, makes it easier to, make your site, more accessible. I love that feature. So I hope that comes to the AI experiments plugin.
[00:28:37] Nathan Wrigley: I'm hoping that's where AI takes us is it gets us somewhere where it gets rid of repetitive tasks that you need to do, but with the best will in the world time, the constraints of time mean that they often don't get done. as an example, alt text on images, it easily forgotten.
But if you know that it's gonna be, doing that for you, I guess you can browse and have a look and see whether it's accurate or not. That's where I hope AI lands not, entirely sure that I want it to be creating all the content and writing things for us, and then we just go back and check that it's actually accurate.
That doesn't, for me at least anyway, that doesn't seem like a particularly bright future, but the idea of automating a lot of those kind of things seems. It seems really useful. and you can imagine, I don't know, the editorial team, it would automate the process of contacting people to say, raise written a post.
Go and check it out. It needs to be checked for before publishing and things like that. All of that seems like a really good use of ai. But anyway, 2026, we'll find out if, there is a 2027, we'll know it wasn't, cataclysmic.
[00:29:42] Rae Morey: Oh, geez. Yeah, we'll see. but I also wanna give a shout out to Tammy Lister. She,
um, created a plugin that, is called the Abilities Explorer, and that's going to be in, an upcoming version of the AI Experiments plugin. It basically allow, it provides an interface where you can see all of the abilities that are on a website, abilities that you've cur, you've, added to the registry via the abilities API.
[00:30:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:30:15] Rae Morey: yeah, she contributed
[00:30:16] Nathan Wrigley: that's a great idea, isn't it? Because then it puts it into a human readable format as opposed to it just being something ephemeral somewhere that you don't really know how to access. If you can see all of the different bits and pieces, you'll probably get some intuition as, oh, I could do that.
Never thought of that. Because now it's exposed in, some sort of interface. Yeah. Thank you. Tammy's been a great proponent for ai. She's constantly trying to, to persuade, me that the sky is not falling in. And, she succeeds and then, I go and read something else and the sky's suddenly falling in
[00:30:50] Rae Morey: the problem. You're reading too much.
[00:30:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:30:53] Rae Morey: but I should mention the, there's, the AI team has a really great roadmap on GitHub for the AI experiments plugin. So they've already, planned out a lot of what they wanna release over the next year. not in great detail, but they've already flagged features that are coming up, which, is definitely worth a look at for anyone who's interested in seeing what they're working on.
[00:31:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so we will link to, there's a couple of places there. We'll link to a make wordpress.org, but also a repository article about that. So that, that on our show notes here, Rae, that was line seven, I feel like, right? Line eight, which is about phase three. I feel like we've done that. We could
[00:31:30] Rae Morey: We have, and I'm looking at the time, we're already like halfway through the episode and we've covered
[00:31:34] Nathan Wrigley: We're all good. yeah, and we've made it, we've made it to line seven of about 30. Okay. Let's speed it up a little bit. The next one, is we're moving into the themes, territory, block-based themes, and, dunno if you've been keeping an idea listener.
There's, there doesn't seem to have been the great amount of traction in terms of block-based themes that it was hoped there would be. I think a lot of people are still using classic themes with absolutely no intention of moving over. However, in the, theming space, there does seem to be one.
Character zooming ahead. Like I obviously can't speak for everything, but one seems to be making a lot of headway, doing all the marketing right. Building a fantastic product, and, so much so that you, you wrote a whole article about it and, this is Ollie. However, the point in question here is not just Ollie the theme, it's about some of the bits and pieces that Mike McAllister is doing around the Ollie theme.
as an example, he's got this, menu designer, which allows you to use, the WordPress block editor, create your mobile menu or, I don't know, mega menu or whatever it is that you want to build. I've used it, I think it's absolutely great, but he's also building things like he's just released his, CSS editor. Which enables you to take care of all the CSS. Now, I know that you can do that in a myriad of ways, but if you just want one interface, you can do that inside of his nice shiny new C-S-C-S-S editor. And it's got some bells and whistles, which make it fairly compelling. you are obviously a fan, I'm guessing.
[00:33:11] Rae Morey: I am a fan. The repository runs on Ollie.
[00:33:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yay.
[00:33:18] Rae Morey: I think what, Mike is doing is fantastic. He's a really great, spokesperson for WordPress and the block editor in a lot of ways. he's great with, marketing and I guess a lot of people think, and this is something I covered on another podcast, but, marketing and telling your brand story isn't, shouldn't be something that's a lot of work for people like Mike.
It's just being yourself on social media and recording fun videos and, he makes it look so effortless. I'm sure he puts a lot of work into it, but he's very good at making it look effortless. Anyway, so he's, created this, he created a premium version, or not premium, but a menu designer that was included for, Ollie, customers.
[00:34:11] Nathan Wrigley: Pro, I think. I think it's,
[00:34:13] Rae Morey: Yeah, for Oli Pro users, and he's basically contributed the menu designer to WordPress. And what's happened is, Mike met with, a bunch of core committers and people from Automatic, and it's been the menu designer's been flagged for core. and Mike's talking to, developers at Automatic and gonna help shepherd it into core.
so hats off, to Mike, but also hats off to automatic for putting up developers to help do that work because as Mike has said, it can take years. Like what, he's done is the easy part, creating the feature. And it's gonna tell you he's going to take years probably to get this feature into core.
If, if a past precedents anything to go by, hopefully it doesn't take that long. It'd be great if we could get in sooner.
[00:35:08] Nathan Wrigley: interesting. he's just been his authentic self and I think I've gotta confess that at the beginning when he launched Ollie, I was kinda curious, how do you, sell a, a WordPress theme in the era of full sight editing or site editing? Because really. Like the thing that theme shipped with was features.
So it did archives and it handled those well and all of those kind of little bits and pieces, it handled menus and things like that. Whereas in the, a block based theme, all of that stuff is laid bare. You can build that yourself. You don't need to have an IDE or understand PHP or any of that.
And yet by just keeping on shipping a bunch of really beautiful designs and now these new features like the CSS editor and the, menu designer, that's how you do it, it turns out. And and so my, not skepticism, I was always hopeful that he'd succeed, but it wasn't always obvious that he would.
And I bet if he's being honest, there's probably been times when he's looked at himself in the mirror and thought, what, is this ever gonna take off? I feel maybe 2026 is the year in which it. It really does. It's the only block-based theme where I'm sitting, at least anyway, that anybody's talking about, anybody is talking about.
Maybe there's other ones, but I don't hear anything about it. and getting that shipped
[00:36:31] Rae Morey: blocked them all out.
[00:36:33] Nathan Wrigley: What's that?
[00:36:34] Rae Morey: You've blocked all the other ones
[00:36:36] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. Yeah, that's probably it. Yeah.
[00:36:38] Rae Morey: Ollie just makes things easy, but, yeah, look good on him. I think it's, I think it's great and I, it'd be great to see the menu designer in call. I think it's about time. WordPress has some, had some,
[00:36:50] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, there's so many
[00:36:52] Rae Morey: some way to do it.
[00:36:53] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, so many things which a typical user would still cherish being in core. And this is just one of them. And honestly, when, did, full site editing land a long time ago and having basic menus is, interesting. Okay. All right. Next one then.
Line 12 is a global partner program announcement. Again, it's gonna be linked to from the repository. I didn't pause this story. there was some more recent change, I think in terms of the pricing or the way that you could become a global partner. So global partners are the big hitters, the people that have got deep pockets enough to spend lots of dollars on having their product or service.
Out in front of the entire WordPress community. There's some caveats around that, but they get to be, call themselves a global partner. They get featured at lots of WordPress events By default, by paying that money, they're already inserted as a kind of top tier on many of the, meet ups and the flagship events.
Actually, I'm not sure that some of those things are included, but anyway, so what's happened? What's happened recently with this?
[00:38:01] Rae Morey: I'm just trying to remember who was a global partner last year. I feel like a lot of them were automatic brands, probably wordpress.com
[00:38:13] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. At Word Camp US that
[00:38:15] Rae Morey: and all of
[00:38:15] Nathan Wrigley: thing felt like an automatic thing. There was a lot of automatic, you're right.
[00:38:19] Rae Morey: And I think from memory there would've been WP Beginner, anyway, definitely. they definitely spent their money. because I remember all of them.
anyway, so last year, last year, WordPress charged a flat fee of 160 grand for sponsorship packages. But this year, the program has reintroduced a tiered, a breakdown of fees. So now at the top end, companies can pay 180 k for, visibility everywhere. And then the, second tier is 110 grand, and then, at the lower end, there's 60 grand for, visibility at, education events like WordPress Campus Connect.
yeah, it's, interesting to see this change, especially the lower end being 60 grand after last year, the fee being 160 and I messaged, I reached out to Harmony Romo who does, he's, she's a finance wrangler for Automatic and the WordPress Foundation. And she said that, the, goal is to open up opportunities for more companies to join the global partner program.
and she said, we feel that folks get a lot of value in each tier for the cost. so they're, looking to appeal to more companies. And I, just wonder in this. the landscape we're in at the moment, if they're struggling to find sponsors, especially after all the hoo-ha with all the trademarks over the past year and asking companies, like there was a lot of, it was a big deal after Patch Stack was rejected last year to sponsor, was it Word Camp Europe or Word Camp?
word Camp Europe, I
[00:40:20] Nathan Wrigley: think you're right. I can't re quite recall. I remember that it was a thing, but I don't remember which event
[00:40:25] Rae Morey: And also I think companies have been asked about their, fight for the future contributions as well. So, yeah, I, yeah, there were questions there around, companies has, WordPress struggled to get more sponsorship this year,
[00:40:47] Nathan Wrigley: I think 2026 and sponsorship in the WordPress space is gonna be really interesting. so I know that you have sponsors. I have sponsors. I also am involved in an event in London, which has sponsors and, it's definitely tighter than it has been in the more recent past. I feel like we were riding this wave of, constant growth, constant innovation, constant chatter sponsors, the companies were doing well, and so the money was sloshing around and what have you.
I feel like the. Maybe, the revenue for these companies haven't dried up, but it, looking into the future, the crystal ball gazing, it feels like 2026 could be an interesting year. And I feel like the wallets are closing a little bit and maybe this is a consequence of that. They're just trying to figure out where, offering a cheaper price point might encourage some people to come in.
I feel like the AI thing is sucking so much oxygen out of the room that nobody knows how that's gonna land. And that's a, an interesting piece of the puzzle. And obviously you've got, just sort of geopolitics and all of that fun stuff. getting into the mix as well. So it feels like that ebullient phase that we had from, I don't know, 20 22, 20 23, 20 24 and five feels like maybe that's a little bit more under question and companies are being a little bit more introspective and, making sure that every penny that they spend counts.
[00:42:22] Rae Morey: Yeah, definitely. And I guess, in, not even in recent months, throughout this year, we've seen, layoffs at various companies. I won't dig into all the details, but it'd be interesting to see how that plays out as well. In the coming months as we get into 2026. anyway, yeah.
[00:42:46] Nathan Wrigley: I think you're right. I've spoken
[00:42:48] Rae Morey: next update.
[00:42:49] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, I've spoken to quite a few people in the recent past who have definitely got intuitions that their company is having thoughts about. Things like layoffs and e even if that turns out not to be true, the sort of the psychological impact of that gets spelt, doesn't it?
you question whether or not your job is safe, and so you question whether or not you need to be looking for a new job. And, and I guess that moves into the partnership sponsorship arena as well. Maybe we're just entering a different phase. I'm sure these things go in cycles, so if we do have a bit of a downturn, I'm sure that we'll have a, an upturn at some point in the future.
But yeah, certainly that's the case for now, All right. Let's pivot a little bit. We're gonna go into some of the legal stuff. I gotta say, I, I read the bits and the pieces that you put together, and I, often click on the link to some of the things, and I can't remember the properties, but it's thing, I think it's things like Court Listener, which is a website of incredible, oh, I don't know what the word is.
You've gotta be a certain character to be able to enjoy that website, put it that way. but you do, you get into it and you pull out all the details. And so I dunno if you enjoy that or not, but I commend you for actually taking the time to
[00:44:04] Rae Morey: Court listeners great because it provides a free portal for people to read, documents that are filed with the courts in the us.
[00:44:12] Nathan Wrigley: The thing for me though is the language. I'm just, it's amazing. I guess your familiarity with it and just keeping going back, maybe it makes it more easy to read, but I just get stuck on the language and I can't pause the sentences and so I give up.
[00:44:28] Rae Morey: I think it helps. I used to do court reporting in a previous life as journalist.
[00:44:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:44:34] Rae Morey: but also I think because I've read so, so many documents in the, WP Engine versus automatic case this year, I'm just so familiar with it. And it also depends on the, the law firm that's, writing the documents.
They all have, they have different styles. Quinn Emanuel that's representing WP Engine, I quite enjoy reading their documents. They're good. And also, Gibson Dunn that's now representing Automatic and Matt Malig, they, they're quite good too. I think it was Hogan Levels who was representing Automatic previously.
They were awful. They were so boring to read. There was just no life. I hated every time they filed something, I was, I just dreaded having to read through the documents 'cause I was so dry and boring. But now it feels Gibson Dunn and, quit Emanuel, like, a really well matched to fight this out.
Just going off the, just going off
[00:45:33] Nathan Wrigley: fascinating insight though. do you, okay, so I'm just gonna completely segue for a minute. Is there like a PR angle for writing that stuff then? In other words, if tech journalists are reading it, the easier it is to read, the more likely their version of the event is going to get taken up.
And so making engaging and interesting whilst not strictly necessary is helpful for the PR battle, if not the actual legal battle in court. That's
[00:46:01] Rae Morey: Yeah, a hundred percent. Because if they, you're just not gonna win the side. You're not gonna win over journalists or just the general public if you, nobody can decipher what you're writing. But, it's sometimes when I read through the documents, I'm like, oh yeah, that was a really, that was really good phrasing. I'm definitely gonna quote, I'm definitely gonna quote that because as journalists, you're constantly looking for something that's quotable, that something's gonna jump out in a story.
[00:46:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:46:31] Rae Morey: yeah,
[00:46:32] Nathan Wrigley: That certainly delving into your inner nerd, and I can say fairly categorically, I'm assuming this is true, we are very grateful that you enjoy that content because I suspect that 99.9% of the listeners to this will not be able to gain much satisfaction from it. And if me, if you're me, I don't even understand it.
So give us the
[00:46:54] Rae Morey: Oh geez.
[00:46:54] Nathan Wrigley: what are we like six, seven months since we last spoke? What's happened in the last three months? Let's go for something
[00:47:01] Rae Morey: a lot and not a lot. so to recap, recent months, I've just written a bit of a list here so I don't miss anything. So I guess the, headline, story would be that the WordPress Foundation and WooCommerce have been pulled in to join Automatic and Matt Mullenweg in their countersuit against, WP Engine.
So this all comes down to the trademark stuff. yeah, I don't really wanna delve into that too
[00:47:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It's okay.
[00:47:32] Rae Morey: read
[00:47:33] Nathan Wrigley: we
[00:47:33] Rae Morey: my story.
[00:47:34] Nathan Wrigley: a light coating of the, yeah. Okay.
[00:47:37] Rae Morey: so basically, yeah, it's, interesting now that the foundation has been, and WooCommerce have been named in the case now all, WP Engine is trying to, have. I think word, I can't remember all the details exactly, but, anyway, WP Engine is, has filed to dismiss automatic's.
Counterclaim, surprise, And then on the flip side, automatic and co have filed to dismiss WP Engine's antitrust claim. So currently, now that the, the government shutdown has finished in the us, there was a bit of a pause in, proceedings. I guess once the government shutdown happened, the, court didn't have the resources to carry on the case, so they shut things down for a few weeks.
but as, the, day that the government reopened, both sides filed documents, they did not waste a second. that's, this is all very much in play now. So they're both like countering in each other. but the la the latest news, is that the deadline for discovery has been pushed out to March, 2026.
So both sides are, digging into each other's documents and emails and doing depositions. and the jury trial was originally scheduled for February, 2027, but now that's been pushed back to June, 2027. I don't, Ima I don't imagine I'm not, I'm not super familiar. I haven't reported a lot on US Court cases, but, I don't imagine this will be the last time that the schedule changes.
Imagine if this goes into 2028.
[00:49:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. it to, me, the whole, process seems so. drawn out, but maybe this, is presumably just how the legal system works, and it's complicated and you need to have both sides. Plenty of time to weigh these things up. I can only imagine how expensive this is now becoming and, yeah.
Extremely Okay. So we'll wait. We've gotta wait until at least March next year before anything substantive happens when the deadline for discovery has
[00:49:57] Rae Morey: I think there's a, there might be hearing in January. there's definitely one scheduled for March, but yeah, we'll guess we'll have to wait and see what happens next.
[00:50:07] Nathan Wrigley: It's interesting as well because I imagine most people have lost sight of what is even being argued about now, because obviously the catalyst for that thing in WordCamp US 2020.
[00:50:19] Rae Morey: Four.
[00:50:22] Nathan Wrigley: was the moment where most people engaged with it, I suspect. And they formed their opinions around, around that time.
And obviously a lot has changed since then. And thankfully people like you are keeping your, your eye on the ball. But, yeah. Okay. More waiting to be done. Let's see exactly what happens. And then there's another legal story. This time though, all to do with, the use of things like the words managed WordPress and hosted WordPress.
This is a US thing. I, dunno if it's global or not. I dunno how this works.
[00:50:54] Rae Morey: it is, so for anyone who hasn't been following this as closely as me, the WordPress Foundation filed to trademark hosted WordPress and managed WordPress to those two phrases in July, 2024. and this kind of came out, I guess more publicly around the time of, all the hoo-ha that was happening around, that followed Word Camp US 2024.
But anyway, so what happened was they were, the foundation filed for those phrases in, in several jurisdictions around the world. the us, the eu, the uk, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, yeah, those were the main areas. And The foundation has successfully registered those trademarks in the uk, Australia.
the eu, has current is currently, those trademark applications are still currently underway in the us, Canada, and New Zealand. so at the moment there's been, in, the US the, trademark applications have been published. So what happens with trademarks is that, once, the, The, what are they called?
The trademark reviewer? I can't remember their proper role. Once, the trademark has been reviewed and it's, determined that it's not a clashing with another trademark or there aren't any issues that should prevent it from being registered. It's published in the this Trademark Gazette, and that kicks off a 30 day period.
This is in the US a 30 day period where anyone who doesn't believe that the trademark should be registered can, oppose it. before that was even published, there were pe, there were three organizations or individuals that oppose those trademarks in the us. so those were taken into consideration and the trademark reviewer decided, no big deal.
Moved on. But in the meantime, WP Engine has stepped into, seek extra time to oppose these applications in the past two, three weeks, that extension was granted by the, trademark trial and appeal board and Quinn Emanuel, that name again, is representing, WP Engine. and I imagine that they're gonna lodge a formal opposition pretty soon.
so I dug into this a little bit, opposition proceedings in the US when a company opposes a trademark, they, this usually runs for one to three years or more. So there's no guarantee that, hosted WordPress and managed WordPress are gonna be, filed any anytime soon. And, seeing some of the, not the stalling tactics, but seeing what the, tactics that are happening in the US District Court with, how can manual has been approaching the, legal proceedings there, seeing how they, operate there and how this could happen.
this will work out in the trademark arena. I don't imagine anything's gonna be tied up within one year. It's gonna take a while. so the, WP Engine interesting, interestingly, is also challenging the trademark applications in New Zealand. so they did that back in June this year, and that's ongoing.
And, I can't find out anymore publicly about that one because that's all. Done behind closed doors, but yeah, so we'll see. And also in Canada, the trademarks are, currently being, I think they've been approved and they're about to be published for opposition, so I imagine, I wouldn't be surprised if WP Engine also challenged them there as well, but I don't know why it hasn't, why it didn't happen in the EU or uk, Australia.
So anyway.
[00:55:02] Nathan Wrigley: not an expert. Maybe there's something more ironclad about the, the decision that's been
[00:55:07] Rae Morey: Who knows. Yeah.
[00:55:08] Nathan Wrigley: sure. Anyway, I'm very glad. That you take an interest in this because
then, people like me don't have to wade through all of that sort of stuff. Two links. Then, both going to the repository will be in the show notes outlining both of those bits and pieces.
Okay. So we'll put the legal stuff behind us. Then we're onto our little final section, which we're calling community. There's quite a few bits in here. the first one I suppose we probably should have done with ai, but we've put it in the community section anyway, this is, this is telex.
This just dropped out the blue. I was, I was at Word camp US and right at the end in the sort of final address, Matt mentioned Telex and I, confess I'd not heard of it until that point. It was obviously
[00:55:55] Rae Morey: he launched it there.
[00:55:56] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Oh, was that the official launch? Yeah. 'cause
[00:55:58] Rae Morey: That was the first time he's mentioned
[00:55:59] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, he did it in a very, When you go to, when you watch like an Apple event, when they launch something, they really launch something. You're on the no, you're on the no illusions that, oh, this is new and exciting and the best thing that's ever happened, ever. And that was not this, it was very much, oh, we got this thing and it's telex and you can go and check it out and play with it.
And so I assumed that other people maybe already knew about it, but it's this, It's, getting better and better. better and better in the sense that it's becoming more usable and useful. So it's this AI agent currently hosted at automatic ai. I think it's telex, do automatic ai. It's a chat interface, but you prompt it and then it will build the thing and then it will launch play.
I think this is the secret fun bit. It will then launch an instance of playground and put the block that it's created. 'cause it's for creating blocks. it will put the block in it so that you can inspect it right off the bat and you can, use the WordPress back end. You can look at the code that it's created and yada, yada, We actually used it last week, at the, event in London. So W-P-L-D-N. We used that as the mechanism for our festive. Festive is a special festive edition. And we had a team of developers, so a team versus a solo developer. So we had Mark West Guard from WS form, he was the solo, and then we had the filter team and they were building silly festive blocks.
Man, it was fascinating because it is powerful. like all ai, you can clumsily, stumble across the perfect prompt, or you can try really hard and get, and get absolutely diabolical results. It's a bit of a lottery, but I, don't know what the utility of it is. I don't really know how people are gonna, make hay out of this.
But it's certainly a curious experiment. If nothing else, it's free at the moment as well, so there's no kind of inhibition to trying it out. I dunno if you've got anything you wanna add, but
[00:58:06] Rae Morey: Yeah. No, I just, I've. A couple of things. It's interesting to see how, it's been picked up by new sites like TechCrunch.
[00:58:17] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah.
[00:58:18] Rae Morey: they, when Matt originally announced it at Word Camp us, they immediately picked it up as a story. And then, it was also written about, following state of the word, rather than write about state of the word TechCrunch, wrote about telex being mentioned at State of the Word.
So there was like a little bit of word, bit about WordPress and state of the word, but mostly they report on telex. I just wonder, part of the cynical part of me is oh, is, automatic getting ahead and contacting journalists about telex and trying to really drum it up?
[00:58:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Or
[00:58:56] Rae Morey: is TechCrunch looking out or, sorry.
No. Or is TechCrunch looking out for this kind of tech? I'm probably gonna think the former, but, Yeah, I think it's really fascinating to see how it's being covered by the media and, the, marketing around it from that sense. But, but also it's just a fun tool. I've, played with it, not a lot, but just to see what, I'm not a developer.
I've, we've done some development in the past, but not anymore. I'm so out of it. But, it's in, it's interesting what you can build with it with a few prompts and how annoying it can be to try and find the right prompt. but when you do land on something, yeah, it's interesting. And I thought it was really cool that Tammy did block Tober as well, and, came up with something every day.
I imagine she must have banged her head on the wall quite a lot of times, trying to
[00:59:56] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, can you imagine? Yeah. How much hit the
[00:59:59] Rae Morey: prompts.
[01:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But it really fascinating and I can tell you that if you know what you're doing, a few minutes, like our little rounds in this thing that we did, they were 10 minutes long. That was from the moment we told them what they needed to build to the moment they were gonna show off the final results.
And in some cases it was, a bit of a miss. But in many cases it was a total hit, and it was, it, was what probably would've been days and days of developer work done in four minutes
[01:00:30] Rae Morey: So what did they
[01:00:32] Nathan Wrigley: oh, so it was festive. So it was things like build an advent calendar. So the prompt might have been build an advent calendar.
We did build a, a, Christmas builder so that you could build like a snowman or build a Santa Claus or build a whatever, all within a block and with configuration options. for example, Marx, you could change the shape of the nose of the snowman or you could change the width of the body and just did it all.
and it was incredible. So it was all gimmicky, fun stuff like that. But nevertheless, it served to, to demonstrate what was. Possible and you can see the code being generated, this little panel at the bottom where you see the code rolling by and it's a lot, it's absolutely loads and the intuitions that it gets right are pretty phenomenal.
Like I said, I dunno if you'd be able to actually reliably ship them, but it certainly gives you an idea of what's, possible. sadly, we didn't video it. It would've been fun if
[01:01:31] Rae Morey: Oh, that would've been fun.
[01:01:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. We were all tied up doing other things and because it was the Chris Christmas one and didn't really have any, what's the word?
Normally there's an educational spin on it so you can learn how to do something. This would've just been. watching people type things into telex, not a lot of learning there. So we decided not to video, but it was a heck of a lot of fun, I can tell you that. okay, let's move on. tacho von Shot wrote a piece which he entitled word WordPresses, flagship word Camp strategy is a mess and 2026 will be Hell.
I think the takeaway from this, yeah, he wasn't mincing his
words
[01:02:12] Rae Morey: yeah, it was not. Tell us how you feel Tucker.
[01:02:13] Nathan Wrigley: I think his takeaway from this was that everything's been constrained in time. So typically, flagship events, so Word Camp Asia, word Camp Europe, WordCamp US are spread out over the year. And if memory serves, I haven't read that art article since he wrote it.
But if memory serves in the year 2026, I think they've all been truncated into this four month period. And his central argument I think was that if you are, let's say for example that you are paid by your company to go, that's one thing. you'll have your stuff paid for, you'll show up.
It'll be a constraint on time, but it will be only that. Whereas if you are organizing yourself to go, then that's a lot to take care of in, a small amount of time. it might be that funds don't allow, and really it's just a lot happening. So I think his, the thrust of his argument was maybe there needs to be a, more cohesive strategy, spread out over the year.
The events talk to each other and make sure, but I suspect they're all autonomous and they just do what they want. I don't really know, but that was the central thrust of it. There's not really much more to develop on that one unless you've got something you want to say.
[01:03:22] Rae Morey: No, it'd be interesting to see. I don't know. I don't, I, I don't know if the events talk to each other much.
[01:03:29] Nathan Wrigley: Mm.
[01:03:32] Rae Morey: there's definitely, it's definitely hard for events to, to find the right date. And I think whatever date they pick, there's gonna be an issue. So every each, every event has an issue. Yeah. All of the events have had issues.
don't wanna say it's unlucky that the events have been squished together. I, don't know if it's four month, I think it might be five month
[01:03:58] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, you
[01:03:59] Rae Morey: but
[01:04:00] Nathan Wrigley: of
[01:04:00] Rae Morey: there's definitely a lot of issues around. I think, as, you were talking about, as we talked about before with sponsorship, there's definitely, purses being, tightened in 2026.
And that definitely was a reason behind why Word Camp US is in Phoenix of all places in August. I don't think they would've, if the money was there, they, it would've been held at a different time for sure.
[01:04:31] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, what is the intuition there that, that time of year in, that, in that location, is a more affordable time of year
[01:04:37] Rae Morey: Oh, absolutely. No one's organizing events in 40 plus degree. Oh, I'm talking in Centre. No one's organizing events in August, in, in Phoenix, the hottest time of year. because it's, it's, yeah, it's definitely a cost saving. And if you look at, I'm totally digressing, but if you look at how many people, how many companies sponsored, word Camp US this year compared to last year, you can see that word camp us this year was definitely a money loser.
So I reckon there would've been, yeah, won't go into it too much, but that definitely would've been a consideration for, booking, Phoenix in August next year, saving money.
[01:05:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. again, links in the show notes. Go check it out. You can see what, tacho he was, he's representing, it's on the Progress Plano website, which is who he now works with. So go check that out. And then, WordCamp Canada. I, did you attend that? Were you there for
[01:05:44] Rae Morey: No, I didn't, I don't know if we could go into this too much, but, really just wanted to mention, give it a shout out because it seemed like such a great event. They really did something different around, I loved how the, organizers, really created this event that catered to, the old schoolers like, Dave Weer, who, invented creative of the r of the RSS, but also they held it at a university and really opened their doors to, to, students and created this fantastic multi, multigenerational about, say multicultural multi-generational event where they had.
People who are new to WordPress, that they invited along, who were able to learn from people who've been in the industry for decades. yeah, I think
[01:06:37] Nathan Wrigley: I felt that when the first iteration of Word Camp Canada had finished, I felt like maybe that event was gonna be in trouble for following events, because it looked like the attendance was quite poor. forgive me if you were in any way connected with that, but that's just the optics from the outside.
However, this, it's a lesson in just keeping on, this following one the following year, 2025. It seems like a bit of a barnstormer. It seems like they just got so many things right. Lots of favorable coverage, lots of people tweeting out and pictures and just a general sense of excitement about this one.
So hopefully that momentum will carry on in 2026. They'll have something similar.
[01:07:20] Rae Morey: Absolutely.
[01:07:21] Nathan Wrigley: The next one is just, I'm gonna do this really quickly. It's just a bit of fun and it only applies to people in the uk. Only people in
[01:07:28] Rae Morey: bit of fun.
[01:07:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. it's actually not fun, but it's fun. We have this thing in the UK called the Budget, and it happens twice a year and it's when the, politicians make the big decisions about the next six months money, and it happens in parliament.
And the chancellor of the exec stands up in front of parliament and delivers what is hoped to be a secret. And all of this stuff just flows out of their mouth. And then we know what the next six months hold in terms of taxation, business rates, pensions, the lot, and. People obsess about it, and it's normally very, secretive.
However, this year, about two hours before the announcement, the document which contained all of the details, which should have gone live at the exact moment, the Chancellor stood up, it leaked, it came out two hours early. And so for two hours, the money markets had advanced knowledge of what this was.
And it turns out it was a WordPress website, and the person who had uploaded the document had just assumed that if you uploaded, I think in this case it was a PDF of, a breakdown of all of this information, that if you uploaded A PDF and it was bound to a scheduled post, that document would be invisible to the public until it was scheduled.
But that's not how the WordPress Media Library works. If you can guess, the URL, if it's uploaded, then it's available. And so what they'd done was they'd. Created an identical document to the march version of the budget. But in November and in the URL in the title of the document, they'd simply substituted the word march, sorry, November for March.
Therefore journalists could guess it, and they did. And the sky fell in like major
[01:09:19] Rae Morey: this story.
[01:09:20] Nathan Wrigley: in the, uk space resigned as a result of this, heads actually rolled seriously. Important people, were forced to resign. And, so a bit of a storm in a teacup. Certainly quite interesting if you're in the uk.
WordPress was responsible, but not really. It was a misunderstanding of how WordPress works. So WordPress behaved as it should.
[01:09:43] Rae Morey: This story's crazy. I love it because it was just such a simple thing that we've all probably tried. You've, we, all know how the URLs work, right? But, that this mis mistake was responsible for all of this happening on the, the share market and everything in the
[01:10:05] Nathan Wrigley: I would imagine that, people armed with this knowledge, you, know how the money markets work, milliseconds count. I would imagine people that caught sight of this a few moments before other people did, were probably able to sh, do really well for themselves financially. I, had a look through the, so we're gonna cover this quickly, but anyway, I had a look through the, in, the, there was a report investigating what happened, and I had a, had to read through it. They said by, so what time was the budget?
I think it's supposed to be one o'clock, or maybe it was 11 and it leaked at nine, or it was at one and it leaked at 11.
[01:10:46] Rae Morey: I can't remember.
the first successful download came at 1135 of this particular document. That's when somebody gets the Euro L and then within six minutes, Reuters had published a news alert. I love that. And then in total, the document was accessed 43 times from 32 different devices before the file was finally taken down at, I think within half an hour.
[01:11:16] Nathan Wrigley: But presumably it was spread in multiple different ways. The minute it reached the Reuters computer, for example, then it was on everybody's computer from that moment on. Yeah, it's so quickly.
really curious. Like you imagine that six minutes before Reuters got it. If you had it, you could react in really interesting ways, I would've thought.
Anyway, just a fascinating, curious thing. Next time, office of Budget responsibility. the document and then rename the funnel and get a cat to walk across the keyboard. and that nobody will be,
[01:11:51] Rae Morey: Do all the things,
[01:11:52] Nathan Wrigley: nobody. That's right. But we got a cat. We did the cat thing and it was still discovered. That's what they'll say next time.
Okay. State the word very quickly. Anything you wanna add about
[01:12:04] Rae Morey: state of the word.
[01:12:05] Nathan Wrigley: it was very, recently.
[01:12:07] Rae Morey: it was very recent. I was not anticipating seeing. Matt Mullen wig. Bring out a big button to
[01:12:18] Nathan Wrigley: No.
[01:12:18] Rae Morey: 6.9.
[01:12:19] Nathan Wrigley: actually, did you get to see Matt Mullen pull out a big button or like me? Was the entire stream completely frozen?
[01:12:27] Rae Morey: I was watching, I was watching, I got up early. I got up at six 30 in the morning to watch the stream at seven, seven o'clock
[01:12:35] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, Rae,
[01:12:36] Rae Morey: in
[01:12:36] Nathan Wrigley: so much about you.
[01:12:40] Rae Morey: I went and got my, I made my coffee, got my breakfast. I was sitting down to watch it and it didn't work. Didn't work. no. got to spend more time with my son in the morning before we went off to kinder anyway. And then, I hopped back on later on in the afternoon and watched all two hours of a stream.
so yeah, I did see the button, but not in real time.
[01:13:02] Nathan Wrigley: I wonder if the button actually did, do what it purported to do. did actually pressing that red button, release WordPress 6.9 or was it a button made out of, it was funny because later in the stream, or not in the stream, in the video recording that I saw Matt, holds a button and he, pretends to click it and he's oh, I'm not actually launching it again. Didn't do anything. I would love it. I think it would be so cool if that button literally did what it was supposed to do. I'm guessing it was not in any way connected to anything, but, oh,
[01:13:43] Rae Morey: did you watch the video recording? Did you see what happened? So they had all of the, for those who didn't see, they had a bunch of call contributors and release leads, core committers on stage, and they all leaned over together. when you put your hands together and you go, team, they all, they, all hit the button at the same time and it was all very cute.
I listened to, the, Luke Carbu and Jonathan Roll's episode of, crossword afterwards, and Jonathan described it as Delightfully awkward, which I think sums it up. It was, all very cute. I think it, was, a bit of fun.
[01:14:20] Nathan Wrigley: It was a nice gimmick.
[01:14:22] Rae Morey: but it was the state of the word. It was jam packed.
It was two hours long. There was, a lot happening, launching 6.9, the AI panel where they talked about all the building blocks and, looking ahead to next year, there was, and all of the education in initiatives that, Mary talk Hubbard talked about. It's been a lot in that area this year, but also the crossover with the TBPN podcast.
Hope I got that that was interesting to see, that 10 minute crossover with that, tech podcast. it was a lot. Yeah. But, if you want a quicker, faster recap, rather than watching two hours, just read my reporting. let me watch the two hour recording and summarize it for you.
[01:15:14] Nathan Wrigley: There was a lot in there, but it was, a nice event. It was a shame that the tech failed. What, I found curious about the tech failing was that there was so little, drama about that there was, people seemed to just move on with their lives, and yet, I imagine quite a lot of people actually were gathered in rooms.
'cause especially in different parts of the world, people tend to make more of a, of an evening of it, if you like. And, and everybody seemed to be quite sanguine about the fact that it wasn't working. I imagine, let's say, I don't know, the prime minister of the UK was gonna deliver an address and it failed in that way that it'd be so much recrimination.
But no, the WordPress community seems to be quite forgiving of tech failures. So there we go. That was, nice. Two more to go. Penultimate one is WordPress. There's not really a lot to say here, but here we go. WordPress returns to three major releases in 2026, with the first of which will be WordPress 7.0.
is there anything in that? Is it just back to normal, Yeah, I guess it's back to normal after the, interruptions this year. yeah, back to three releases. it was originally at the start of this year after, automatic pause, con, contributions. WordPress leadership said that there'd only be one, release of WordPress every year for the next three years and tied it to the WP engine legal battle.
[01:16:45] Rae Morey: but, Matt has said in podcasts throughout the year that he was really sad that WordPress had scaled right back and there weren't cool new features coming and, he missed contributing to WordPress and being involved. yeah, legal battle be damned. Here we are.
[01:17:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah, if WordPress is, going ahead and I guess, it would've been really hard.
[01:17:11] Rae Morey: Can you imagine for him, it would've been hard to just sit back and watch all these things happening in AI and not be able to get into, it. so yeah, three
[01:17:22] Nathan Wrigley: So maybe it's a, sorry. Apologies. Carry on.
[01:17:26] Rae Morey: oh no, I was about to say 7.0 is planned for March or April. And, we'll see. We'll see a release soon.
[01:17:33] Nathan Wrigley: So maybe there's, I don't know, maybe people are more sanguine about the future and they're not quite so concerned about it. So this affords this to happen. When it was decided that we were gonna go to just one release a year, maybe there was just that trepidation of what will the future look like?
And now that the future is what it now is. Maybe there's more of a, okay, this is possible. But also I think you're right. Getting AI and not having people steal the march on you in terms of AI probably means that this stuff needs to be iterated much more rapidly. So anyway, the long and the short is we're back to.
7.0 and we are back to the last one, line 30 and who thought we would've been talking about Jet Pack in the year 2025? But here we are. Jet Pack was is still, I think it's kinda one of those things that it divides people. They either think it's great or they think no, don't wanna go near it.
Devin Walker, who was one of the founders of Give WP and has done a whole bunch of things, since then I did a podcast episode with him on the Tavern. Maybe I'll link to that. he has now become the artistic director. I love that title. I
[01:18:49] Rae Morey: Yeah.
[01:18:50] Nathan Wrigley: go Curious. He's the artistic director for Jet Pack, and it seems like his role is to really go in and shake the tree a bit.
And see if they can turn what is, in terms of features, a really nice product, but in terms of UI and UX could be described as, difficult to get around, let's put it that way. Overlapping menus, things you can get to the same thing in multiple different ways. You've got log into.com for some things and not for others.
It, can be confusing. I think his job is to go and shake it all so that the UI is much more straightforward. The product offering has some nice new features, but also that it's just straightforward to navigate and work your way around it and,
feels like it could be red hot still. I, have no reason to believe that feature set is of no, no interest to anybody, but it does seem like it's become a little bit of a leviathan and, needs, needs, sorting out.
So Devin is now doing that. I think I've said everything there. Sorry.
[01:19:52] Rae Morey: Yeah, no, I would just add that, Devon posted a, an update on his, he's been on a bit of a one man campaign to promote jet pack in recent weeks since joining Automatic, and it was interesting to see these. It's refreshing to see him being very upfront about jet pack's problems. He's also being a bit defensive around some of what he's called, like legacy, criticisms of, the plugin.
he's def he's identified that the, marketing and comms lacks and there's, definitely a lot of room for improving the product and, I'm really interested to see how we, how he tackles it. There's a lot
[01:20:38] Nathan Wrigley: he already released a video, didn't he? Where he showed some of the new thoughts in to, I think, I can't remember what it was. Was it AI creating titles or something like that? I can't actually remember, but I remember just looking at it and thinking, okay, great. We're getting, we're now getting demos of what might be that we can look at and commentate on.
I haven't seen that in the longest time, jet Pack kind of felt like it was a thing that just existed in with nobody really to steer that ship. I also think it could be a really profitable product if done right. you only have, if you think about the feature set that's in there, it really just by itself, it has the capacity to take on something like Substack, but it doesn't take on Substack because it just hasn't been aligned in that way.
And now that we know that market for Substack is massive, it'd be interesting to see if it pivots into something a little bit more like that. So a whole ecosystem of itself. We'll, see. There we go. I think we've done it, Rae. We've missed about half of it out, but, an hour and 20 odd minutes, I think.
I think we
[01:21:48] Rae Morey: WordPress moves so
[01:21:50] Nathan Wrigley: Oh
[01:21:52] Rae Morey: you covering three months is like covering three years in WordPress.
[01:21:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah, it's a lot. And no doubt if we do this again and we have an episode six, no doubt there'll be more to say. Actually. I think there will be a lot to say at that point. We'll have seven shipped by then and it'll be, there'll be a lot to talk about. So thank you, Rae. Thanks for chatting to me today.
I realize that I've, I've, kept you from your family and all of those kind of things, and
[01:22:16] Rae Morey: They're all asleep now.
[01:22:18] Nathan Wrigley: it.
[01:22:20] Rae Morey: no. It's been absolute pleasure chatting. I'm glad we, were able to, fit this in before the end of the year.
[01:22:27] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. get in, get back on the wagon. alright, we'll, we'll join again in a few months time. I will put all of the links into the show notes so that you can check them out and make sure, go to the repository, email and sign up there as well. Thanks so much, Rae.
[01:22:44] Rae Morey: Thank you.
[01:22:45] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that's all we got time for this week. Hope that you have a fabulous holiday period, if that is what you are doing. If not, I hope that you enjoy the period between now and when we're next on the air. We'll be back in January 2026, to bring you more regular podcast episodes. And of course This Week in WordPress.
Once more a request from me. If you are in the WordPress space, and you would like to get your product or service out in front of a pretty large WordPress specific audience, drop me an email [email protected], and we'll see how we can shape your product or services' future in the year 2026.
Okay, I'm gonna fade in some cheesy music. Say stay safe. See you in a couple of weeks. Bye-bye for now.
