This Week in WordPress #360

[00:00:03] Nathan Wrigley: time for this week in WordPress, episode number 360 entitled We, I failed to create an AI title for this episode. It was recorded on Monday, the 5th of January, 2026, and a happy New Year to you. I'm joined this week by Taco Verdonschot by Courtney Robertson and Mike Johnston.

It is a WordPress podcast, but we talk a lot more than. Just WordPress in this episode. There's lots about ai. There's lots about New Year's resolutions. There's loads about the last year in WordPress. We talk about the release schedule for the upcoming versions in the year 2026 and a whole lot more. I really hope that you enjoy it.

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.

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome. Happy New Year, happy holidays and all of that kind of stuff. Hopefully you are, you are joining us. Revitalized and had a little bit of a break. I promised faithfully that I would change that music, however, I just didn't. That music still as dreadful as ever.

[00:01:36] Courtney Robertson: you're breaking resolutions already. I know, Oh God. We'll get into that in a minute. Absolutely. We'll get into that. we're brand new, 20, 26 New Year. Hopefully it'll be a great year in the WordPress space. I have high confidence. We're gonna talk a lot today about the future of WordPress release cycles, ai, that kind of thing as well.

[00:01:56] Nathan Wrigley: And in order to make it not a monologue, I, I'm joined each week by a bunch of fabulous WordPresses and you can see them joining me today. We've got one new face, but we've got two returning faces. Let's go round. let's go. I'll do them in the order that they're in our show notes. Let's go for that.

How about that? So first off, then down there is Tacho Verdon Shop. Hello Tacho. How you doing? Hi. All good? Yeah. Nice to, nice to have you with us. Did you have a nice break? Yes. I had two full weeks off, which was the first time in about 15 years. Oh, okay. So that was really nice. Yeah, and I think I'm used to it now.

Yeah. This is what every year is gonna good. Yeah. Yeah. You're in retirement. Actually, two weeks is long enough that you forget what you're doing, if Yes. You come back to it and you feel like, oh, where was I? yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. Luckily we picked up and then something new about Tacho.

'cause he's put something in the bio, his bio that I didn't know about him. So here it comes, tacho Von Shot. It's pretty exceptional that Tacho Von Shot is joining us today. He's usually unavailable during the first two weeks of January whilst he's following the Dakar rally. What, these weeks he sees tracking dakar.com more than he sees his family.

And I'm gonna read the quote. It says, A challenge for those who go a dream. For those who stay behind Tieri, Sabine said, whoever Tieri Sabine. And while Tacho completely lacks the talent, skills, and financial position to participate in the rally, he's still dreaming. Okay. Not the entire day. He also shows up at the progress planner.

Plug in to build the best tool to help website owners work on their website. He's also involved in the fair project. We might get to that a little bit, translates bits and pieces of WordPress and co-organized his local WordPress Meet Up. All of that's fantastic, but I wanna know more about this Dakar thing.

What the heck, even in, yeah. ages ago, in, previous century even, there was a guy named Cherry Sabine Okay. Who, invented the world's hardest rally. it was as such, and, it went from Paris to Dakar. over time it's seen different continents. The majority was in Africa, but since I think 2007, they were racing in, south America and a couple years ago they, started racing in Saudi Arabia.

[00:04:46] Taco Verdonschot: Huh. But concept is still the same. it's about two weeks long, about 8,000 kilometers of driving on a motorcycle side-by-side vehicle, challenger class, car or in a truck. And, basically it is the world's hardest rally. yeah, a lot of people don't ever make the finish. So you also said in, when we were talking before, earlier today, you said that some people don't, not just don't make the finish.

[00:05:26] Nathan Wrigley: They don't make it. Yes. They don't even get through the whole event. They, it ends their life, which is, yeah. Unfortunately we've seen quite a few debts over the year. usually that's in the motorcycle category. they have the nastiest crashes and are the most vulnerable. but yeah, it happens.

This is a side of you that I knew nothing about and, that's curious that you would normally, this is your normal two weeks off. You take two weeks off to watch. no, I don't take time off. But even now on the left, I have tracking the car open to see what's happening, with the trucks because they haven't finished the stage for today yet.

You're an absolute addict. I can firmly tell you that this, unfortunately, tacho, you're not gonna get me watching it. I'm just like motor cars and me. So long as I have a car that goes forwards and backwards and can go round corners, that's as much as I care about in terms of cars. But I'm glad that, I'm glad that you, interested in that.

Go and check it out. So the, URL is tracking Dakar, DEAK. ar.com and yeah, you too could lose your life to tracking dakar.com. Oh, that. that is the absolute nerd website. Yeah. If you, want to have the more Okay, engaging stuff, go to dakar.com. Okay. Alright. So we've learned a lot about, DACO.

Let's learn a little bit about Courtney. There's Courtney. Hello Courtney. Courtney's, oh, and Mike, this is gonna happen. I have muted myself. This is, and in unmuting me, I muted Nathan's camera because I have that power. You didn't my so this is what happens, right? No, I'll tell you what happens. I have an SLR camera, which I've got fixed to a tripod behind my desk and every sort of holiday time.

Decouple it and take it out and do you know, family photos and things like that. And it doesn't matter how many times I put it back on the tripod, I never remember the specific configuration to make it so that it doesn't turn off every 15 minutes. So during this episode, it's gonna turn off about every 15 or 20 minutes or something like that.

Oh. So it's not my power. It's not you, it's your memory. No, but honestly, I swear there's only about eight things that I need to do, and I'm sure I've done them all. I've even made like a to-do list of do this, And I followed it all perfectly, but it's, anyway, it's not working. So it's gonna go off periodically and it's my fault.

So here we go. Courtney Robinson is an accomplished open source developer advocate at GoDaddy, a dedicated WordPress training team, faculty member, co-founder of the, sorry. And a co-founding board member of the WP Community Collective effortlessly engaging audiences with her relatable insights on getting involved in supporting contributors the open source community, staying true to her roots as a professional educator.

She seamlessly merges her teaching expertise with a passion for technology, both on and off the stage, serving developers, website creators, and open source enthusiast. Courtney delivers immense value by drawing from her rich background as a computer science educator and full stack developer. She's driven by a strong commitment to onboarding the next generation of contributors and advocating for sustainable funding solutions for open source developers.

There's another paragraph, but may I stop there? Yeah, no, we're gonna skip it. I don't need that. I need to give you a shortened version just for the show. No, it's okay. You've got the like up with ai. To paraphrase, you got the version that's like my WordPress profile with the keywords. I don't know.

[00:08:54] Courtney Robertson: Yeah. Sorry. that's what I received. We'll figure it out. No, it's fine. And you'll notice that Courtney's favorite color is purple today. Clearly in life it actually is. so what's kinda curious, Courtney, is you've got purple behind you. You're wearing purple. Yeah. You've got purple headphones. But also the reflection in your glasses is telling me that something in front of you is also purple.

look at that. It's like purple. no, that's actually the color changing. Oh, okay. protection kind of stuff. When I go out in the sun, these turn into sunglasses and when they are in sunglass mode, they also look. Purple. Okay. for the listener only crowd on the audio podcast, I do also have rotating colors of blue happening behind me is stripes.

Have you? Yeah, this is a dark blue. This is a dark navy kind of stripe. And this is a light blue. Oh, I thought you meant they were like changing over time. I thought you meant that. No. Okay. No, he some incredible wallpaper. lemme get that wallpaper. Yes. No, just stripes. Okay. So There's, there's Tacho, there's Courtney.

[00:10:02] Nathan Wrigley: Let's go to Mike. So Mike's new to this show. There's Mike and, but he's not new to the WordPress community. Mike and I go back several years. I think the first time I met Mike, was at Word Camp Europe. He had the unenviable position of sitting in whilst I did some interviews for the WP Tavern, to make sure that the code of conduct was not violated.

So he had to listen to me for about eight hours straight talking to people. And, we've stayed in touch on and off ever since then. And just before, I don't know when it was, it latter part of last year, Mike reached out and, and we, got an offer of, an opportunity to come onto the show to Mike.

I'm so glad that you've come on, Mike. How are you doing? I'm doing well, ma. Nathan, thanks very much. I'm delighted to be here. I think I told you in my notes, I've listened to the podcast and watched it occasionally. Ever since I got started in WordPress, this was the first podcast I ever listened to, and it's still the first one I turned to.

[00:11:00] Mike Johnston: So I'm delighted to be here and, in such good company. I'm, I'm delighted to, to get to. To get to know Taco and Courtney just a little bit. That's so kind. Followed their work I appreciate, but we not had a chance to meet before, so yeah, I really appreciate that. That's really nice.

[00:11:18] Nathan Wrigley: And hopefully your, banking details are correct and I'll wire you the money, slightly later. we'll get it updated for sure. Digital Euros and then whichever Kevin you like. We'll get to that later. Yeah. okay, so here's Mike's bio. bio. Mike Johnson is an experienced technical manager, coach, and business leader, having spent over 40 years managing people, projects, budgets in businesses.

Mike's WordPress journey began in 2018 when he started the cook and the writer.com, a food and travel blog. He co-authors with his wife Mary. What a fun. Astic use of the platform. That is, he considers himself a WordPress enthusiast. He builds websites for his own use for experimentation with new features and for the occasional client while living in Portugal for three and a half years.

Mike was an organizer for Word Camp Europe, which was in Porto. There's also been ones in Athens and Torino, which he's been involved in, and he is also participated in meetup groups in Porto and Lisbon currently lives in Newton, which is in Idaho, in the USA. And he owns a small consulting firm, and you can see the name of that under his name there.

Third party partners builds websites, does business development work for his small business clients, and he's a proof reader for the repository email, which we're gonna mention extensively. He likes to tinker with code, and after years of practice, he can create simple plugins and has learned to spell PHP and CSS.

Excellent. You're on my level, Mike. That's, my goal. My goal for 26 is to learn to spell HTML. Yeah, I've given up on that. Yeah. JavaScript is well beyond me. better yet, maybe it should be to define PHP. oh, no. Deep cut. Deep cut. Nicely done. this show works really well when people, contribute. I really appreciate anybody who shows up.

Thank you for that. I've just a few bits of advice if you've not seen the show before, we put it out onto all the platforms that we can manage to do. For example, it goes out onto Facebook and LinkedIn and X and what have you. However, most of those platforms don't allow us to ingest your comment.

So if you make a comment, it just gets lost there. So if you're listening to this on something other than our website or YouTube, can I recommend that you Probably the easiest thing is to go here. Courtney's Sporting the, the URL there, wp, but thank you. Wp builds.com/live. If you go to that page, you'll see YouTube comments on the right hand side if you're on a desktop.

And, if you're logged into a Google account, you can make commentary there. However, if you don't have a Google account, there's a little black button top right of the video player. It says live chat, and you can comment in there and you don't need to be logged into anything. So there we got. Yeah. Oh, he is trying to be the top.

That was great. I appreciate that, Tcho. Thank you. And and we have a few comments coming in from a few different people. Firstly, this person, online media crew. Hello. I don't know that we've met, but they're obviously from Prague and they're wishing us happy 2026. Thank you very much indeed. Oh no.

To my eternal shame, I've completely off, what is it, Gerard or Joe? I'm so sorry. Who is it? Thank you. Thank you. I feel a little bit, you definitely need the Dutch man to pronounce that for you. Yeah, every single week recently he's popped his head up, with a comment and every single week, to my eternal shame, I've forgotten the name.

so thank you, TKO and welcome 2026. Thank you very much, Elliot. Down the road from me. Happy New Year, Elliot. Is it shocking it down with snow where you are? We've got about a foot of it. I've got a window there just covered in snow. It's coming down like a blizzard here at the minute and it's completely upended my life.

And then we've got some unpronounceable Welsh thing, for anybody wanna have a go at that? No, I, think he just says, happy New Year and hope you're all well, or something like that. That's my guess. I'm good with that little, oh, the next comment, you cheat. Oh, that's great. Happy New Year. Hope you're all well.

Thank you. I did not see that. That's great. Oh, taco. And if you've ever been to Wales, it's really fascinating. So much like in Canada, where you've got French and English as the compulsory languages, if you go through Wales, everything has to be in both Welsh and English. And you, go, road signs and it'll say the name of the town, then the Welsh equivalent underneath the Welsh language.

They use so many letters for little words, a little word can be this really long thing, but, then the Germans use really lots of letters in a single word. Yeah, that's, that, so that's in place Wolf of a sentence. Yeah, the words are longer. But look, I was saying that because look. That Welsh version seems to be a lot smaller than the, the English version.

They're quite considerably smaller anyway, thank you, Reese. But it also doesn't have 2026 in the Welsh version, so his translation is off by a little bit. maybe they use like Welsh numbers, which your characters, who knows? we've gone so off piece. I apologize. hello or hello from Triste Italy.

It's snowing here. Very nice to have you with us. Thank you so much, Marcus Burnett, happy 2026 to some of my favorite people both on screen and in the chat. That's really nice as well. Lifestyle change up project. Hi, all Dnda saying Happy New Year. Hope the WordPress world continues to flourish with new things and positive community engagements.

I hope. That too. And, nomad Skateboarding. Thank you very much. Sending good thoughts and energy for everyone. And he's, he, I'm I, thank you. He's donated some. That's unusual. Thank you so much. He often does and I'm very grateful. Clive from cl. Kyle. Kyle, I want him to be Clive Van Dusen from now on.

I'm so sorry, Kyle. Hey, Kyle. Oh, can it be, can I say Clive Van Dusen for the rest of this episode? Hello? WP Builds, haven't you? Yeah, from Richmond. Is that Virginia? I think it is. That's lovely. Yes. Sorry, Kyle, I apologize. Not terribly far from me. Okay. Oh, okay. That's nice. Kyle, I'm near Gettysburg. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Happy New Year. Says Adam, who's also at GoDaddy. Hello, Patricia. Hello. I love it. I love when friends will all in the screen. That's really nice. I will show up here until you get my name right. In that case, I will never get it right. so you keep coming back. This is how I keep my audience.

I just screw everything up for me. Happy New Year, says Yash. Nice to have you with us. Elliot's confirming the weather. Yeah, lots of snow here too. lovely, lovely. And Clive is Clive's given us a, funny face. so there we go. And we also, whenever we get a comment from the Twitch platform, it's always junk.

There you go. Whatever the heck that is. Let's take that away. Twitch is not to be trusted. Okay, so we've done the preamble. Let's get into the bits and pieces that we're supposed to be doing here. first up, this is our website, wp builders.com. If you like what we're doing, put your name, sorry, your email address into that box, and we'll send you a couple of emails each week.

One, when we repackage this, what we're recording now as a podcast episode comes out Tuesday. And then we do, an episode on a Thursday as well, which is like an interview. So it's prerecorded. This is our archive of all of those, we're on 450. So this week's episode will be 451. And, you can see, we've got absolutely loads of content stretching back over nearly a decade now.

Almost been doing this for a decade. anyway, there you go. That's what we have got for you, right? So some content I have to, firstly, I have to say a great big thank you for reasons I won't go into. I was really bad at putting the show notes together this week. Had a few bits and pieces that kind of just got in the way suddenly.

And, and I've just gotta say a big thank you to Mike Courtney and Tacho for helping me out. they populated the show notes with lots and lots of things and, and here are many of them. So here we go. The year in review, according to the repository as proofread by Mike. so this is the stories that were most read in 2025.

So I'm not saying that they're necessarily the most popular. I don't know what the metric for that is that Ray would have, but, these are the ones that were most read. So let's just quickly go through them and if you wanna pause me at any point while I'm reading the, the titles of those ones, just yell and we'll dig into it a little bit.

So here they are, the first one. so I'm guessing this is in the order of the most popular. I don't know if it's like this is the number one one or whether it's just. That's what the first line says. Our most one this year. Yeah. Okay. yeah. There you go. That's right. Yeah. okay. Matt Mullen, we shut down WordPress sustainability team.

Igniting backlash. I can remember that story. Nobody's interrupting, so I shall move on. The second one was all about the fair project, which got mentioned in Courtney's bio. What was it? Taco's Bio or Taco? Taco. Yeah. The new Fair project aims to decentralize wordpress.org services backed by Linux Foundation and hundreds of contributors.

[00:20:36] Taco Verdonschot: Yes, this was the big announcement last, June. and yeah, I think that project is gonna get a little bit of a mention. I seem to remember it comes up later in the show, in which case I'll just move on. number three was the story about automatic getting hit with a class action lawsuit over WP engine dispute.

[00:21:00] Nathan Wrigley: They were accused of anti-competitive tactics. Yeah. As the title says. Yeah, right by now. That's. Class action has been dismissed. Yeah. So that's an update that's already in the article as well. Yeah. Thank you so much. Matt Mullen, we settles caregiver lawsuits days before trial, if it's all right with you.

I'm just gonna move on from that one. 'cause that's a kind of personal one. That was obviously very, this is a positive one. Yeah. this is a nicer one, isn't it? Yeah. Ollie's menu designer flagged for core with automatic developers set to help shepherd it. This was really recent actually, wasn't it?

It feels like it was a couple of months ago. Only. Yes. the menu designer, which is actually really, great, it's a block based menu designer. I dunno if it's bound to the Ollie theme currently. I've used it with the Ollie theme just because that's where I have used it and it's a really nice, credible way of building a menu.

But, the idea will be that it will be shipped into cover at some point soon. Making your I am using and loving that one. And also because some of our earlier stories reminded me of shows gone by where we needed puppies, kittens, and sheep. my cat just decided to join us right at that moment. Would you all are he is a tuxedo cat, black and white for the listening audience, I think we go, we could end the show here.

[00:22:17] Courtney Robertson: Weve reached the peak. We had cuddles of, yeah, that's it. It's getting no better, than that. So a black and white cat came. I should go and get my cat. But, I don't think it would like me very much if I removed it from its perch on the sofa. so that was a nice one. The Ollie theme and the menu designer.

[00:22:35] Nathan Wrigley: Honestly, it's really good. Go check it out. and curiously, since that announcement, I've seen a few other projects which are purporting to do a very similar thing, not in the exact same way, but there seems to be a lot of, attention dropping into navigation in WordPress sites, particularly mobile and mega menus and things like that.

another piece of sad news, this was automatic cutting, 16% of its workforce. That was number seven. then we got this one. Say Reed accuses Matt Mullenweg of retaliation after the wordpress.org ban. There was a lot swirling around there. S so yos the human, the person, not the company, banned from WordCamp Asia's, Matt Mullen.

We brands in persona. Persona, is that how you say that? Persona. Non grata. and number nine, four core fiction WordPress co-founder bans, governance advocate in latest disputes. And number 10 word Camp Asia 2026. Handover sparks tensions between organizers and Word Camp Central. I think this was this something about, wasn't it supposed to go to Japan or something like that.

And then suddenly it ended up at India. I can't remember how the story landed. rough, roughly, and AKA may also have ideas on that one. I think that the issue is that. There is quite a bit of offboarding from one year to the next and, training to onboard the incoming crowd. And that was roughly thrown out the window this time to my understanding.

[00:24:06] Taco Verdonschot: it was cut short, right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. and we've ended up in, Mumbai in April this year. I believe it's April the 16th or the ninth or something like that. Can't exactly remember ninth. Yep. any of you guys go into that? I've decided to go now. I'm gonna be there. So I'm quite looking forward to that.

[00:24:25] Courtney Robertson: I believe I, I'd love to go back to Mumbai. Yeah. Oh, you've been before? I've never been. I've been before. Yeah. I would love to go. I just have to find a business reason to, yeah. Okay. Yeah. I think that it's also going to be for folks like Taco and myself. it is at the same time as press conf. And Oh yeah, that was, press comp was announced.

Press comp checked on the Word Camp Asia dates and scheduled to not conflict. And then the word Camp Asia dates changed. and so there's a bit of tension turmoil happening there. But the audience for Press Conf is not the same necessarily as the audience for WordCamp Asia, for the audience, for Press Conf it is ideal for those that are, it is an evolution out of Pressonomics, which is the business of running your WordPress adjacent company.

And if it is to continue that evolution from what PressNomics. Run by page Lee. used to be, and Raquel may take this in a different direction entirely, and that's fine. But if it is the continuation or evolution of that, the business audiences are different except in cases where it's people like Taco and myself.

Because we have a need to do both. And only one part of the globe. Like they're halfway around the world. Yeah. They're literally on opposite sides. They couldn't be further apart really, could they? So that's curious. And I didn't know. I knew that there was a conflict of date.

[00:26:08] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. So I knew that they collided, but I didn't know that piece that you just said about the fact that the word Camp Asia date may be moved. Maybe it was part of that story there about the, the one that we have on the screen now. I wonder if the, the organization for what was going to be a Japanese word, camp Asia.

had it at a different time and then, venues and what have you moved it. okay. That's curious. Anyway, there you go. There were the 10 things on the repository this year. If you've not signed up to the repository, go do it. It's the repository email. It's the most credible source of news in the WordPress space as far as I'm concerned.

written by Ray Moray, who, I dunno if you noticed, was the most, recent episode that we had on WP Build. So the circle of virtue completes itself. That's quite nice. Yeah. Anyway, they were the most popular things. There's one thing, yeah, one thing I wanted to say off the back of this, Roundup article and, the top 10 articles from 20 25, 8 out of 10.

[00:27:11] Taco Verdonschot: Our negative news. Yeah, that was my, that was where I was gonna go just before we segued. That's fascinating, isn't it? Yeah. I just hope that we have a better year in 2026 and that next year we'll have at least eight out of 10 top stories being achievements and new products and innovation and things where the WordPress community excelled because that is what we need and we don't need.

The drama like we had last year. Do you know what's curious is? I've been doing this live show where we sum up the news, not quite a decade, but I don't know, maybe it's seven, seven and a half something years, and I don't remember a new site. Basically for that seven and a half years, the whole enterprise positive stuff, it's been just a catalog of, oh look, this curious thing happened, this interesting thing, and oh, wasn't that nice.

[00:28:06] Nathan Wrigley: That's really punctuated every so often, once in a blue moon by something a bit weird and unusual. And it does seem as if 2025, the latter park 2024, for reasons we all know that we don't need to go into. we've been, clouded with a little bit of that, haven't we? There's lawsuits going on, there's, disagreements in the community about the direction of the project and so on and so forth.

And I, I share that, Tcho. I would love to put that sort of dark cloud behind us and get onto something where it's, relentlessly positive. I would love, oh, Mike, go. Let's go Mike. Sure. I, if you look at that list, so many of them were early in the year and as I think about the kind of stories that got published and the things we've talked about in their, in the latter half of the year, they have been more predominantly positive, lots of positive things happening and the, while I'm not sure the metrics behind this either, how Ray.

[00:29:04] Mike Johnston: Brought it up. But her note said these were the most read stories. it reflects the fact that we as humans gravitate toward bad news or controversial things. yeah, that's right. hope. but my hope would be when we get to this point at the end of 2026, early 2027, we look at the list and it's flipped that there's eight out of 10 that are really positive and, uplifting kind of stories.

[00:29:33] Nathan Wrigley: I agree. And the reason I made my commentary was that over those seven and a half, eight years, whatever it's been, you literally couldn't find the bad news. It just, it couldn't be surfaced 'cause it wasn't there. apart from the occasional, like I said, strange thing, but now we've had a year of that.

I. We'll just have to wait and see how that comes. But I share, Mike, I share your thoughts. I share Tachos thoughts. And, Adam in the comment, Adam Warner says, said. my hope is that for any of these pieces that were not, that there isn't an update, we saw an update for a few of them, but I would love to see a continuation of what happened too, because as we look at this project being now 22 or 23 years old, there is a historical tendency when things are going well to feel like those issues that are left unresolved are no longer an issue.

[00:30:30] Courtney Robertson: And I would like to see that. Things that need to be addressed are addressed well. but my cat has been convinced that this is the end of focusing on bad news in this episode because he just left your cat's got all the right intuition. it's all good from here. In fact, I'm gonna say that's the last bit of weird stuff of the year 2026 on this show.

[00:30:52] Nathan Wrigley: It gets good for the remaining 11 and three quarter months. speaking of which, speaking of cats, this is not a segue. It's got nothing to do with cats, but I thought I'd say it, Marcus has said that number 11 had 11 would've been about the creation of a new WaPo card game. but Atlas, it was just the top 10 list.

And there it is. There's the, oh, it's still our focus. There is the card game. Yeah. So mine is in arm, almost arm's reach. I, was lucky enough to, get two card games from Marcus to give away at our local meetup Oh, nice. In December. Yeah. and so I did, which means that I end up with none. So you need a each other, someone bring the game because I wanna play it.

Yeah. It's a good, it's a good game. I've actually done it with my kids and it kept us entertained. It was really, it's really great. It's back in the box now, but, we'll be gonna be talk, we don't often talk about WaPo, but we're gonna be mentioning it again a little bit later. Something Nick Kasey mentioned.

thanks for the comments coming in. We've got people saying they'd love to go. Reese in this case only to go to Word Cam Asia, but watching the Indian Premier Cricket League that is happening at the same time is not a justifiable business reason. He says. Okay. Fair enough. I think it is.

Yeah, I think so. I think your accountant could swing that with a bit of invention. always pick up one client risk. Come on, you can do That's right. Or just go and say the words WordPress while you are watching. Exactly. Whilst you're watching the cricket. ya, she's saying that you'd love to see all SA in Word Camp Asia in Mumbai.

[00:32:30] Courtney Robertson: Yeah. Yeah. You got it. And I'll also see you at team meeting later today or tomorrow. Oh, nice, Yash is on my team. Yeah. And yes, that's right. Yeah, I've, met Matt Yash. That's, lovely. Okay. Let's move on. let's go to the next piece, which is actually curiously something that Courtney has been working on and, I could try to Preem.

Yeah. I needed to check on how link's previewed for something before I shared it on the web. And I wanted to see, there are a number of tools out there that already do this, where you just. Pick whatever website you are, Ellen. You wanna make sure that if you share it on Twitter or Facebook or what have you, that it's going to look right.

So you fill in, your link there, you can put in just to the top level domain or down to a specific article, hit Analyze, and it's going to tell you on more platforms what this will look like. we get some of the normal ones and they all link out to where the docs are when appropriate. so if you need to go read more and things like that, you could see how things will appear.

And this actually really helped me with getting some of the, there was one Nathan that had a little postage stamp thumbnail preview there. Yeah. Where was that? Was it this one here? Slack? yeah, slack. Yeah. That's a weird one. Yeah. Yeah. So thinking about, do I wanna optimize for the weird thumbnails on some of the platforms, like some of the places where the text goes off the screen or not?

May or may not matter to you. I'm not saying that anyone should do that, but if you feel like that would be helpful to you, this will give you a quick way to preview through some of that. Discord is about the same, but they just mirror it there. Yeah. so you can find all the debug logs that are there.

And the reason that I built this is actually because I was going to a little bit of self-promotion in here for GoDaddy. I was going to show off the, GoDaddy app builder that is announced in beta, but I wanted to see how a preview before I shared it. For the audience's benefit. This is similar to other platforms like Lovable or rept or a few others.

And with it, you dump in your prompt, it can build an app for you. And with GoDaddy you could get the hosting. And just to test things a little bit, Nathan, I don't know if you wanna grab that. there's a prompt at the end of our show notes. Oh, okay. Okay. So I don't dunno if you wanna, I just wanna in a very clear, so drop it in and test it.

[00:34:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I'm just gonna be clear so that everybody knows what's going on. So firstly, this one, is called og preview lab.com. Links will be in the show notes, I mean you can see it there. It's this word all as one word.com. And, you can see that it reveals basically where you've fallen short on your so social previews and things.

in most situations the square or the rectangle seems to work, but in some situations, like this one TikTok, it's were all tway. the nice thing is, the nice thing is the only place you see those go on, it doesn't actually preview the link and it tells you that down below, like Yeah, tiktoks not a platform.

[00:35:39] Courtney Robertson: You might see it in DMS or something. Okay, got it. not on the, yeah, not on the, yeah. Okay. So that's that. but Courtney was then making the point that she built this over the holidays using the GoDaddy, arrow, system. And the URL for that is Arrow, but it's maybe not how you'd imagine. It's A-I-R-O-A-I-R-O builder.godaddy.com.

[00:36:05] Nathan Wrigley: And then the idea is that you can like trial out a, a SAS app. Yeah. And right, so I'm looking at the bottom of the show notes. Where's the prompt? Is it the very last page? Yes. Is it all of that I'm highlighting now? Or do I Yes, you, if you would like to deviate, you may. I just wanted one that I felt would be very show appropriate.

[00:36:27] Courtney Robertson: So the prompt while Nathan is considering his options that I gave it is yeah. To build an app for Nathan to generate show titles. Okay. 'cause some show titles can have catchier names than others. Courtney, the bit that I'm highlighting in the Google Doc, would you just go for the first line or is it more like the whole thing?

I, you could dump the whole thing if you wanted to build it. Okay. That's, so to be clear, people can come in and describe the app idea. You could also partner with other AI systems like I did to give it, the more that you talk to AI to get the prompts refined, the less tokens you're gonna spend on the one that's actually doing the heavy lifting.

And so this might just be a little bit, oh, I'm so sorry. Okay. If Nathan doesn't wish to log in right now, it's fine. I might be able to log in, but I don't. Okay. My password manager's not loaded up, so I'd have to go through That's whole preamble. That's fine. yep. however, I can promote you in a minute.

[00:37:22] Nathan Wrigley: If you wanna put the same prompt into your screen, I can promote you whilst we're talking about something else, and you can then share your own screen in a moment. How about we do that? So the idea here then is, Courtney decided that she would love for me to get something where I can generate podcast show titles and build the app.

Obviously in this situation where we account with this slight problem, because I'm not logged into GoDaddy in any way, shape, or form. So let's go with that. Let's, in a minute I'll promote you on this platform and you can show it to me. So we'll move on. Whilst that's going on in the background, you've, you'll copy and paste.

Nathan, we've, lemme interject just a second. Why don't we transition. this is Lily. She's an eight month old Boston Terrier, and she had to come in and just say, Hey, equal time for puppies. Look at that. Okay. And her tongue is just perfect there. Oh, her, tongue is like a lizard. Yeah. Oh, she's on the way to the vet this morning, so she's on her way out right now.

But thanks. Have you, ever noticed what happens to people's faces in the proximity of animals? Like I was just looking at all four of you. All four of you had a great big grin on your face, and all it took was for Mike to bring a dog onto the screen and Courtney's cat, and we're all like. oh, exactly.

It's lovely. Okay. I be fair. My initial thought was that's a strange cat. Yeah, that is a strange cat. That makes them strange cat. Yeah. okay, so whilst Arrow, the, app builder is chugging away in the background on Courtney's room, we'll come back to that. Courtney thought that five minutes something in that, it's actually, I did a version in one of my test accounts for you ahead of time.

[00:39:03] Courtney Robertson: Oh, okay. To be sure that my prompt would be tolerable. Okay. In which case, let me change your permissions. You, no, I've got it sharing to you. Have you. Yes. How does that work? What do you, what have, how have you made it, how have you shared it to me? What have you done at the bottom of the screen?

the share that's there besides slides? I don't see it. Oh, yes, I do. Oh, it's because it's because there's two rows of the shares. I didn't see it. Okay. Lovely. Go. Oh, there we go. Right there you go. Tell us, show us what's going on then. Yeah, so I, thought that for Nathan we should have, a, podcast title generator for all of the many podcast episodes that he does, and gave it three options, knowing Nathan's humor, entirely over the top.

Think Mr. Bean level, bombastic, right? Oh, moved it. That sounds about right. Yeah. Middle of the road, which is, could be useful. Yeah. And then useful and practical, which might not actually get people's attention. Okay. so I gave it just a prompt. You could see here is the prompt that I gave to Nathan.

Oh, back in the near the top and it, understood. Here is my big long prompt and it was about 500 words, but it was, all very like on message, wasn't it? Every part of the prompt was what you'd expect. Yeah. It will come back and say what kind of, I told it to use, color schemes that are inspired by the British Isles.

So there you go. Great. It's all great. And it looks, if it looks as it does, this is no commentary on me. It is a commentary on what partnering with chat GPT thought that would be a very appropriate option there. so I go back and forth with it just a few times. and this again, all free if you have a login, which is free to godaddy.com.

you could come in, test it all out. There are a certain number of prompts that you could get through in a day. This is. Beta at this time. And then if you would like to actually go and ship it, you can test it out in a new tab, but also you have a published option. There is a published link that you could get, but also conveniently, when you work with GoDaddy, we have domains and hosting available, so this can just gracefully migrate to that.

this is something that I'll be focusing on with the GoDaddy app builder experience, the Arrow builder experience, over the next year, really. And I'm thinking through some of the logistics of what's the use case for a lot of these things? Who, is most excited by these? And so hobby projects that I've come across are like.

Oh, it's really great to set up a link preview, like I demonstrated, Nathan May want something that is a podcast title generator that maybe he could load his show notes up to it. Oh, yeah. And it would come back with yeah, make the podcast titles for us, or something like that. And you could, that's at the end of each episode, we try to come up.

[00:42:00] Nathan Wrigley: I tried to come up with a, something that happened in the show, which is a bit lighthearted usually and a bit silly. So how does it work then? What do I have to just do I just type in who was on it or just some sort of generic thing about what this show was about? yeah.

[00:42:15] Courtney Robertson: let's give one a quick test. So I did this within five minutes before our today's episode began. Okay. Okay. what might be, what should I put in for the topic? Okay. So as a test on this one New Year's episode featuring three guests. Dogs and Cats and WordPress News. Let's go with that. Three guests.

[00:42:35] Nathan Wrigley: That's actually not a bad title. Let's go with that one. And word Much better than, tacos, rally situations. Okay. Then it's gonna generate over Generat, the top generated titles. some of them are quite lengthy. Yeah. On the Moral Imperative of New Year's episode. Oh yeah. Oh my. Deconstructing New Year's episodes featuring those things.

[00:43:00] Courtney Robertson: Do you know, it's interesting. I, have used AI to do this kind of thing before just to see what it would come up with. And it, it, generally does go a bit more verbose. It doesn't seem to have that sort of pithy nature to it, that sort of curtailing it, fascinating. I could go back and say same prompt and useful and practical.

Okay. And let's see what we get. And I'm thinking too, that if you don't like the options that this made for you, you just go back to the chat and say Oh, could you custom tailor it to do this or that a little bit more for me? put in the topic. Put in the topic and say, yeah, under a hundred words and see, sorry, not a hundred words, under a hundred characters.

[00:43:38] Nathan Wrigley: See if it can, see if it can match that. That's sometimes something that I think is quite useful to do. Let's see what we get. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, no, they're all the same. They're all fairly, yeah, they boring. It's and practical. Let's go back. this is where we've got to in the year 2026 with ai.

[00:43:57] Courtney Robertson: But the, idea here though is that, if you don't like what the app currently already does, then you just chat its way through to do more and more. So I might have tried to dial up the bombastic nature and it may or may not have gotten that. So I might then expand it into things like giving it, Words that I wanted to use if we're going for the over the top, I wanted, do you know what's very interesting? It feels like the, so just to, so obviously we've got Arrow, you've built a little app and I guess the idea with this app is that really it would be something that I would use, it would be something that just for me, basically in this scenario, it's a title generator.

[00:44:36] Nathan Wrigley: It feels like a lot of the conversation about AI is moving in that way during latter part of 2025 is these little, almost like disposable apps that are just something personal to You some workflow that you've got that probably nobody else will ever use of look latest. Yeah, sorry, tacho. Say again.

[00:44:52] Taco Verdonschot: Look at the latest comment coming in. That's exactly that. Yeah. so what have we got? We got here, Adam. Adam is, with Courtney at GoDaddy. He said, I've literally, I've never used this feature before. I presume he's talking about the Arrow, app builder. No, he's not. no. He's used that. He, yeah, he's talking about, donating money.

[00:45:12] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, give you money. oh, I see. Oh, I see. Oh, thank you. Oh, Adam. gosh, thanks. Okay. This is the year of giving it routine. Oh, I feel somewhat humble. Thank you so much. what's he saying though? Noting that a free GoDaddy account is all that's needed to use the arrow beta builder. I don't know who this is, this one, this is Maya World.

Is this Maya who's written this? Yes. Is that her handle? Yes. so Maya Longcar, who also is with GoDaddy, created a maths game for a 6-year-old in 30, I guess minutes or something. my friend Sammy was happy with it. That's nice. Okay. Yeah. So I didn't put in a whole lot of time on the link preview one. I did say, here is a color palette.

[00:45:54] Courtney Robertson: I went off to a color palette generator website and picked out the colors I wanted and told Arrow, here's what I want. I went and looked up. I am not a designer. I think that Tammy Lister is phenomenal. she knows terms like maximalist or minimalist or there's a couple of other art. Novo, tho those kind of terms.

If design terms, you could tell it. I want it styled after this kind of a design term. I just gave it the British Isles for inspiration. Yeah, it's not a good prompt. No, I'm with Mike. I'm still struggling to spell CSS, it's a long way away. This title generator says, Marcus, needs to know that it should be British humor and have 10 pre have about 10 previous examples of each style.

[00:46:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. That would help it. Yep. You give it some context. So I would probably go to chat GBT then and say, here are show titles Nathan has used. Write them in the tone of Mr. Bean. Oh, okay. Okay. Let's, and then say, here's the examples. Now build from that. If we remember at the end of this episode, Courtney, if we remember at the end of this episode, let's try and when we press stop, let's try and use that to come up with this.

Yeah. Sweet title. Let's see if that's possible. I'm gonna hide that one from the screen. Now. How do I do? Can I ask a quick question? Of course you can. Courtney, if, Nathan's using this and wants to reuse it again next week, does he have to regenerate it or is it saved somewhere? Nope, it's saved in your account.

[00:47:25] Courtney Robertson: Oh, I see. Okay. Okay. So you can build on this. Yeah, so there's been projects that I've started, I'm working on one, I don't know if I wanna tell people the hilarious one that, that it will be, but I am working on one that does something not terribly different for podcast generator, but going for the over the top kind of an option.

And it's just sitting there for the last week or so. There is an expiration I think of if you haven't touched it. More than a week, then it may auto delete. So you're encouraged come back and test it at least once a week. Or if you works for me, buy the domain and get the hosting, then it stays. yeah.

[00:48:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. so just to let you know, again, currently in beta, arrow builder.godaddy.com, I'll put that into the show notes and it, says Share your idea and we'll handle the rest. We'll build it for you. Yeah. from concept to live web app. So it is a bright, a brave new world and we'll get onto loads of AI starting in just a minute.

'cause there's another lot. I am eager to hear from people too on the pros and cons of these kind of tools and how might you use them. Like I could think of a lot of use cases for personal little side project kind of things. Yep. but I'm interested to hear if people have something that is a lot bigger than that or a whole different direction than that, or.

[00:48:42] Courtney Robertson: Your favorite gripes and complaints about when these kinds of tools are the ones that are building websites. 'cause hey, we're in the business of WordPress right now. I want, I want AI to be more that than this big. Giant monolith thing. I would like it to be more kind of bespoke personal stuff rather than, something which we're all co-opted into the same exact thing as everybody else.

[00:49:04] Nathan Wrigley: I don't, I can't quite encapsulate what I'm trying to say there, but I do like the idea of a little thing, which only you use because it's, it perfectly maps onto what it is that you are trying to, achieve in that week or what have you. Yeah. So for example, something to do with accountancy.

you've got to file your taxes, but there's some little thing that you can't quite work out. you build up a little app, which will help you get over that bridge and then you collapse it the next week. You don't need it anymore in a way it goes. Those kind of things seem, yeah, really, really useful.

So we're joined by Anne. Hello Anne. she says she missed the start. Yeah, I don't worry, Ann. Oh, we'll go back. Don't worry. Yeah, we can start again if you like. Yeah. Shall we? We're cats and dog. We'll go back to that two minutes. Oh, we can, the puppies off to the fat. I'm sorry. You'll have to watch replay.

Also, oh, look, Marcus is trying to really leverage this. Now. Look, he says, gimme a transcript instead of a one sentence description, would also provide better results. I can do that. I Yep. Provide a transcript. That's great. da, right? Yeah. Here we go. Pro productivity con equals large wasteland of abandoned Yes.

On the internet. Yeah, indeed. There's so much AI stuff. Courtney, I'm gonna have to rip through because of the time. No, do, you're gonna have to rip through a bunch of these bits and Different bits and pieces. So if it's all right with you, Courtney's built something else. And I'm just gonna, I'm gonna put them on the screen and then we're gonna have to quickly move on.

But Courtney has also built the WordPress meta track MCP server, very briefly. Tell us what this is. So I will give credit first to James LaPage at Automatic for creating the WordPress M track MCP server. So if you want to work with, Claude or chat GPT or the others, and you want it to look at where the actual tickets are in WordPress about bugs, James came out first with the WordPress track MCP server, and that is reflected in my GitHub profile about these things.

[00:51:03] Courtney Robertson: I basically just said, let's fork this and include all of the track. So before GitHub. We had track and we still use track as the definitive source for core. If you go log a bug or something like that, it's core.track.wordpress.org. So that's more the definitive source of bugs or features or what have you that's coming that is related to anything that's, basically not Gutenberg.

and so there are other teams in WordPress besides core, that use track. This is what the meta team uses to handle. We need to tweak something on a bit of the website or the plugins repo. They maintain the tickets for how the, not the plugins being reviewed. How the plugin directory functions is one of the track systems that we have.

And what if I wanted to contribute to that? How would I query specific issues and find them and know and use that in a research model. So you can add MCP servers. To many of the AI systems that are out there. And this one will give you access to all of the wordpress.org tracks that exist all in one batch.

When I originally rolled it out yesterday, I just named it medic. I was aiming for the meta team, but then I, it was really easy to say, go find the others and add them too. Oh, neat. So there they're, yeah. So this was again, a vibe coded project. This is me working with Claude CLO code and forking what James actually made.

[00:52:27] Nathan Wrigley: So I've got no hope of reading the URL out, but I have copied and pasted it into the, I've copied and pasted it. Show notes. That's fine. Show notes. So it'll be there. 'cause it's, yeah, it's too long to basically read out as a lot of these things are. also, I'm just gonna, so this was the, that's the GitHub for it.

Yeah, I was gonna say this is the GitHub for it. Again, links in the show notes. There's the MCP server, LinkedIn. A different one. Yeah. Not all are MCB server are equal. Nathan? Yeah. I don't know. I don't know anything about M CCP server really. So I'll move on. This is the next set of, so the next thing, next story is, agent skills automatic rolled this one out over holiday break.

[00:53:10] Courtney Robertson: I think I saw again, this was, I think James May have shared it. So if you are digging into tools like Claude, they use different agents. You could say this agent is amazing at running code sniffer tests. That agent is good at product. Ideation, this agent is good for this thing or that thing. And so what this one is, it tells you we've got an agent now.

So a figurative ai, we'll call it a person, it's not a person, a person that is skilled in specifically knowing everything there is to know about WordPress playground that's included. There are other agents that are here as well. So Debs would be really interested in knowing what some of these agents are and saying, ah, I'm working with Claude Code, or I'm working with whatever AI tool and I want it to have personas.

And those personas are going to understand certain skill sets and this is what those skill sets are and what they mean. Yeah. Yeah. So this just gives you a library of those descriptions ready to go. And, finally, I presume this is bound to that as well. no, not quite. No. Okay. before I go onto that one, in that case, I'll just say a couple of things about what you are saying here.

[00:54:23] Nathan Wrigley: What, I find really curious is that at some point in the year 2025, then, I'm gonna use a long word, the nomenclature of AI started to get away from me, and I don't know if Mike and Tacho are feeling the same way if like me and you haven't really invested a ton of time into ai. We are now at the point where a lot of it.

Starting to be acronyms and phrases and words, which kind of, I can keep a bit of purchase on it, but we're now at the point where a lot of it to me is just I don't even know what that means anymore. and so we've moved so far away from like the WordPress that I knew on understood. And had a real, understanding of the whole thing now to, okay, now we've got WordPress over there and all this AI stuff, which binds to it, and all of the vernacular that goes around that, that, that chasm is widening for me.

And I've got a choice, haven't I? I can either learn or turn my back on it and say, that's not really for me. I'm 50 something, so maybe that's not for me and what have you. But I dunno if Mike or Tacho you've noticed the same thing if whether it's escaping from you a little bit at a growing rate.

[00:55:38] Mike Johnston: Yes. Yeah. and I think the word chasm. Is probably a good one. and I think back to the story that came out right before the end of the year at outta state of the word, where there were, several different articles published by one of the a IT members about here's, how we need to incorporate AI into core WordPress.

And that generated some controversy, along the lines of, some people saying, yeah, this would be a great thing, and others saying, wait a minute, why would we do this? and I come down on the why would we do it side of the thing, because it introduces a whole level of complexity. To your point, Nathan, just the naming of things.

Not to mention how they work. And for many of us who are building small sites and running very small agencies, the, that, that is complete overkill for kind of what we do. And for the folks who need it, go with God, have it, have at it, make it work. But for a whole, bunch of folks in the ecosystem, it's capability that we may never understand, let alone use.

[00:57:05] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Thank you Mike. that was insightful. What do you think, tacho, same sort of thing for you or are you in the AI camp? A bit more than I'm, perhaps? Oh, it depends. so if I am around the WordPress people, the, James LaPage, Felix Orange, Courtney, people who are using ai, who are using cloud code all day long, I very much feel like I'm falling behind to a point where I'm not sure I'll be able to, keep.

[00:57:44] Taco Verdonschot: At some point, Then when I talk to my wife, my in-laws Okay. A completely different business. Yeah. It's quite apparent that I'm still at the forefront Yes. Of using AI and understanding what's happening. I'm just not the person to build the next thing, but Okay. I love that pedal. Tested it. Yeah. I'll happily use it and make the most out of it and teach others.

[00:58:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I, love that. I, because that gives me some sort of purchase, so I'm not alone in that. and also you've got your wife and family. I think I'm only use my cat as the, that, that's the foil translation. My cat, the translation machine you're gonna build. It would, there's another three letter, AC three letter acronym we need for these scenarios, which is the ccp, the Conversation Context Protocol.

[00:58:39] Mike Johnston: So know who you're talking to and where you stand in relation to them. That's right. Yeah. You were gonna say WTF, but that too. Yeah. I wouldn't dare say Nathan, that I am somewhere between I feel like a lot of my work is to bridge something like what we see Felix and James and others that are really pioneering this area.

[00:59:08] Courtney Robertson: I'm just forking what they're doing sometimes, but literally. Yeah. but I think, or integrating it into my stuff. Yeah. And then turning around and explaining, okay, taco. Here's how this could help you with your role at Progress Planner. What if you had an agent at Progress Planner that was specifically had all of the knowledge that comes with WP Product talk?

That agent has all of those skills, and then you add another agent that was good at social media marketing and you add this, it's agents are like a way of breaking that down. yeah. And I find that my role is to be that connection or that bridge between devs. Who speak more code than human and humans that are at least aware code exists.

[00:59:51] Nathan Wrigley: I think it's gonna be a really interesting year though, the year 2026. Yeah, because there, there's gonna be, I feel like we've had a fairly big tidal wave of the AI start. I feel 2026 is maybe that tidal wave's gonna be even bigger. And it will be interesting to see how everybody stays afloat in, in amongst all of that.

So there's people like me who I'm fascinated by it. I'm not particularly minded to play with it on a sort of foundational level like you appear to be Courtney. But I'm very happy to mess around with the product that's produced by people and to get into conversations. But it will be interesting to see how well people like me.

Can keep up or whether it just becomes like a, oh, I don't really get it anymore, but I'm happy to just play with what you are playing with. So that'll be interesting. so Ann, she says, wow, what for this one, is it me or is a bazooka not some kind of massive weapon that you fire like canon.

She's gonna the rally. Yeah. How is she going to the rally? need, she's obviously upset by something. I love it. she's built a lot. So Anne, in the comments has said that she built a lot of bazookas during the, holiday. I hope nobody was hurt during, the year. A lady of many talents. Yes, that's right.

Yeah, that's right. Anyway, so that was my kind of interesting point. 2026. It'll be, it will be interesting to see how far that conversation stretches. People like me and whether or not I can even communicate on any level. and so that was prompted a little bit by the, bits and the pieces that Courtney was raising there.

I'm gonna skip over the rich thing, if that's all right, because the time Courtney. Yep. That's just how Rich writes his blog posts. Yeah. I'll link to it in the show notes there. there it is. It's about technical writing and how you can get AI to help you with that. I didn't put this in, this is the first time anybody's ever put in any of my content without me doing it, so I'm delighted.

Mike decided that he wanted to, to mention a WP Tavern episode that I did in the latter part of 19, sorry, 1996. No, 2025 with Tofa. Any reason you picked this one out, Mike? yeah. I wanted to suck up to the host. Oh, love it. Honesty. That's the best comment I've had.

[01:02:20] Mike Johnston: No, it, there was. I listen to podcasts while I'm doing other things, right? and this is one that, this is one I listened to as I was doing some work around the house the other day. and I've known of Topher, for a while, but have never really read or watched any of his stuff.

And listening to the interview, it just struck me, that this was, the kind of guy that. I wanted to interact with in the community. I felt like he was, just very genuine, had a very, philanthropic outlook. he is doing a lot of, a lot of volunteer work. and, I liked the approach he talked about where he said, I didn't set out to be well known.

I set out to do good work. Yeah. And it just was a. it just was a, an excellent opportunity to learn about another human being. that I walked away going, gee, I'd like to know that guy more. And Oh, and I'm now a subscriber to his YouTube channel and we're chatting on Mastodon.

and so it made, it, made a worthwhile connection. So I appreciate, you know what, I appreciate you doing that interview. Yeah, I appreciate that. And that, actually did make me choke. I had to switch my microphone off. That was genuinely hysterically funny. I love that. But, I, this is why I love podcasts.

[01:04:00] Nathan Wrigley: I love that kind of, I'm doing the chores around the house. I'm vacuuming, I'm, I'm out in the garden digging out the weeds or whatever I am doing. And, I've got this thing going on in the background and it's, it may not be what I'm giving a hundred percent of my attention to, but I'm getting something from it.

And, I've always loved that about audio content. My, my personal impression, and I know that this is not shared by the majority of people out there, my personal impression is that I love audio way more than video. because of that capacity to be getting on with other things. At the same time, I've always loved it as a medium.

Always listened to radio over telly and those kind of things. And, and, he is and so the other thing that I was gonna say, get yourself on a podcast. If you've got a message like Tofa has put yourself on a podcast and it has this serendipitous, wonderful effect that people like Mike will listen to it.

It may not be thousands, it may be a couple of dozen or whatever it is, but the message. Drops, the penny drops for some people, whether you've got a product or a service or you're just community related content, there's a massive audience out there for podcast listeners and, and I appreciate you Mike, saying that's absolutely lovely and that, that's why I began that whole thing to so that encounters like that would happen.

And I'm pleased that you've found Tofa and are enjoying what he's doing. That's absolutely lovely. and Nomad Skateboarding has a comment. You're saying Tofa is. Lovely. He's awesome. That's really nice. Fully agree. Yeah. Yeah. Really nice. okay. Thank you. I don't wanna steal your shine, now, Nathan, because I do agree that episode is fantastic.

[01:05:41] Taco Verdonschot: and if you like that sort of deep dive into who is the per this person in the WordPress community, I can also recommend a podcast by Bud Kraus. Oh, yeah. and he also has an episode with Doer. Yeah. definitely. Can recommend. Yeah. he's got the seriously bod podcast. I think I've tried to Google that before and he immediately dominates the number one spot.

[01:06:09] Nathan Wrigley: So you can just Google seriously bod. and you'll get to his website and he holds, epi. He's, such a, he's such a raconteur as Bob, he is got the gift of the gab in spades and he's, yeah, he's been, we've had a conversation today actually. He's been trying out the podcast, the plus, plugin, which Dan and I have been building and can't quite make it work to his specific needs.

But it's been interesting seeing what he wants out of his podcast and things like that. So yeah. Thank you. That's another good podcast recommendation. okay, so that was the tavern episode. Appreciate that, Mike. That's lovely. Moving on, very quickly, breaking around this one. Where was this one? Who dropped this one in?

This was the, oh, this was Mike's. Yeah. So this isn't related to WordPress. This say, I don't think it is. you wanted to drop in this one about New Year's resolutions and things like that. I confess, I couldn't read it until just now, because it was behind a paywall. So we've gone to the archive.org, or archive.ph.

Why did you drop this one in? what was the message in this? it's partly time. Part of it is it's timely, it's the time of year where lots of folks are thinking about New Year's resolutions, what they want to do differently in the year. and this one was interesting because it's, it basically was saying the way we think about and structure our New Year's resolution sets us up for failing.

[01:07:39] Mike Johnston: because we tend to do it in a binary kind of way. It's either, we're either successful at it or we fail. Because we set them up as, results oriented. I'm going to lose 20 pounds, I'm going to run a marathon, whatever. And if you step off that track for whatever reason, which most of us do, then by February, your resolution's falling apart and you're probably gonna drop it and you're not gonna get that benefit that you were looking for.

and, that, so they propose an approach in here, and I won't go through the steps, but it boils down to thinking about, changing your behavior or changing yourself in an iterative, kind of way. Instead of measuring your progress over a year, measure it over a week and say, I have this long-term goal that I'd like to, I'd like to, become a person who eats better or something.

And I'm gonna set a small goal for the next week and I'm gonna work on that. And if I make it great, if I don't, the end, the world hasn't ended, I'll start over next week and set a new goal. And particularly for those of us who've done software development, thinking in iterative terms is a natural way for us to think, things don't spring forward fully.

Fully developed. that's why we have betas and alphas, et cetera. So thinking about it this way, it really comes down to just saying, let's pick one small habit. Pick something that can be done in the next week. Measure it, put it on the calendar, and then next week, pick the next thing. And so over time, the cumulative benefit gets you closer and closer to that ultimate goal you set.

Yeah, I like that. I'm, and I had to, sit and think about it yesterday for a while and go, okay, I don't usually set New Year's resolutions No. Because of the problem. Yep. But I've set what I'm calling a New Year's intention and I'm gonna follow it and I'll. Come back at some point and tell you how I've done.

But, it just was a useful, a useful way to think about something we all try to do and generally all fail at. So hopefully this will give people a way to make some progress. Yeah, it's curious how we all have this, not all of us, but many of us have this kind of holiday period all at the same time, and any amount of d downtime for me, my brain starts wandering into the parts of my life that I.

[01:10:27] Nathan Wrigley: Generally don't have time for more expansive thoughts when I'm not working, oh, this thing could happen or I could do this. And and so that kind of maps onto the New Year's resolution. This bold, big new thing that you're gonna do. Yeah. And then as soon as the Monday back New Year's, new Year's Day passes, the, first Monday everybody's back to work, then the walls come in, don't they?

And the, sort of reality of life drops and you're back to not achieving that thing. I should have written about 48 books by now. but it's never got to page one. Yeah. So this is actually interesting because, my wife decided that she wanted to pick up running. I dunno why we have a car, but she wants to pick up running.

[01:11:16] Taco Verdonschot: And, the method that she found that the first step is to schedule a time in your calendar. When you'll start running, then when that time comes, you don't go out and run. You look at your calendar and go, look, I scheduled this. That's fantastic. Yeah. Done for this week. And then the next time you even put on your running gear, you don't go out for a run, you just do that achievement of putting on your running gear.

And that's the 1% better every time. 1% better every day. Yeah. that will get you towards actually being able to complete the run. I, I think the running thing is such a great idea. 'cause it's such an atomic task, isn't it, in that you can achieve the wrong. In the space of, let's say 20 minutes, it could be begun and ended.

[01:12:11] Nathan Wrigley: And although the broader notion of getting fit via running is the, is probably the end goal. The, it can be atomized into 500 different small runs this year, each of which is over and finished and done with in a very small space of time. And I never atomize the task in that way. I always just have this, oh, I'm gonna write a book.

And it's yeah, but how do I write a book? What are the processes that are required to write a book? I don't care. I'm gonna write a book. and that therefore I fail. But I like the idea of that, get, and part E even a part of the success is just getting the stuff ready. So for me, maybe, if I do actually wish to write a book, part of the thing would be find the right software.

That would be January's task. Learn to use the software, might be February's tasks and so on. Or get yourself a decent notebook or get you, get myself that. It's a very nice notebook. I especially like the p the purple accents on it. This thing I could get. 25 books in this, but so never, quite happened.

oh, okay. So there we go. Thank you, Mike. I appreciate that. And then just one, one footnote, Nathan, because you, mentioned you weren't able to read it. I think for folks who go to look at that article and follow the link, you'll probably have to create a free account on Fast Company. Okay. Yeah. Over this neck of the woods, I've either consumed too many free articles and they blocked me out.

Or, you are a bunch of web developers who listen to this. You'll figure out clever ways. Yeah. Making it so you can read that wherever the heck it is. however, in what is a first for this podcast, I'm gonna say the word Snoop Dog. That's never happened before. Reese Winn, is a high performers are people like Snoop Dogg, allegedly.

He says, high performers according to Tofa. It's Tofa. Tofa is here. check it out, Mike. Your dream has come true. high performers are just highwire acrobats. That was really nice. You been summoned a comment earlier. He says it's tofa. This Tofa sense is tingling. I'm guessing that somebody alerted Tofa to the fact that his name was mentioned on this podcast.

I certainly hope that was the case. If not, he, I would love to know if he actually has Tofa senses. If so, I want to hear more about that. Okay, so there we go. That was the New Year's resolution thing. We've got about 15 minutes left and we're nowhere near through what we were gonna do. So I'm really gonna race through these.

Forgive me. First one, the release schedule, the proposed release schedule for 2026 for WordPress. seven 7.1 has been announced. The, if I'm right in, I'm think I'm still writing in saying that it is going to be each of the releases. So we're going back to three yes rather than two. And each of them is going to coincide with one of the flagship events.

So Word Camp Asia. Sorry, Tcho. Say again? Yeah, almost, fortunately because Wamp Asia, WAMP Europe, and Wamp US are way too close to each other. we're skipping Wamp Europe, so instead of having a release at Wamp Europe, that will be at the end of the year. Oh, okay. Thank you. I'd missed that piece of news.

That's great because I remember you wrote a. Piece on the progress planner blog, all about how that was gonna be constrained in time. Okay. but three schedules, seven, 7.1, and so on. and you can see the dates. I'll link to this in the show notes. You can see the dates, the release candidate dates and what have you.

Yes. I think the best news is that we're back to three releases in a year. from the two that we had in 2025. Yeah. really nice. Yeah. It feels like we're back on firm ground, which is lovely. Okay. Tcho, you dropped this one in, it was the plugin team 2020 2nd of December there anything?

Yeah, I was looking at what was published, over the holidays basically. And this is one of the team updates that was posted to the Make Work Fast blog. and what stood out for me is that, we have a ginormous number of plugins that have been submit, have been reviewed by the team. Have been replied to by our plugins team and are now waiting for a reply from the plugin, submitter, plugin builder, plugin owner, developer, whatever you want to call it.

[01:16:36] Taco Verdonschot: Gosh, that's a turnaround, isn't it? there's also plugins in the queue still. that's the 344, number that you see. Yeah. But about 10 times that has been waiting for a response. From the plugin submitter for over seven days, and that means that our plugins team did the work, did the review, gave some feedback, and then didn't hear back for at least seven days.

[01:17:09] Nathan Wrigley: how do you pause that? Are you thinking AI submitted stuff or are you thinking holidays, that kind of thing? No, so this was posted on the 22nd of December. Oh, okay. And it for the, so basically the first three weeks of December. as I understood it, I'm afraid that a lot of this is AI generated plugins where the review team pointed out some improvements that need to be made and people didn't even bother to respond.

[01:17:44] Taco Verdonschot: Ooh. Yeah. I'm wondering if they even are paying attention to what email they get. And in addition to that, I've actually helped, I think it's, I think Dion does this with me on several of the releases. I have helped. No. Scott Riley, long time contributor to Meta. Both of them are amazing folks to work with.

[01:18:06] Courtney Robertson: each time that we have a major release in WordPress, they send out the email, go do your plugin bump test, and there's a link coming up that if we've got time to share, the NPM link will help people that need to do what's called the bump test. Make sure that your plugin works with all of the new changes in the next release.

and What's happening is that a lot of people don't respond to those things. And after so many times of getting not responses from those as well, your plugin could be at risk. okay, check your emails when the plugin team emails you, if you submit something to them, watch your emails and make sure that you don't have that particular address automatically going into spam trash, what have you.

[01:18:51] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. so Troy in the comments is saying, that's crazy. Feel bad for the review team. Maybe that's slightly massaged by what we just said, but Philip, hello Philip. I, maybe there's more to come to this comment. It just says, being a plugin developer with the help of Google Gemini.

There's more, I'll have to hide that one first. I love the responses from the plugin team, but as you said, many people ignore the emails. The plugin team is very in capital. That is helpful. That's good to know. Yeah. so there's somebody who's creating plugins by the sounds of it, with the help of ai who's also checking their emails, which is quite nice.

Which is, do you suppose that some number of these folks who haven't replied are people who have somehow vibe coded a plugin and they get some feedback on it and they don't know what to do about it? Oh, that's, an interesting thought. Yeah. Hundred percent. Absolutely. Yes. Yeah. it's like a one shot thing.

If it didn't work the first time, then it's not, that's, that was it. That's not what, yeah. Or, it could be, nevermind. I'll just use this for myself and not publish it. Yeah, that's fine as well. Something like that. We need guardrails for that though, don't we? Because if that statistic is gonna, so let's imagine that I, don't know.

Let's imagine that statistic that we're looking at on the page, so somewhere in the region approximating 4,000 plugins and now in a sort of holding pattern where the review team has done its work, if that continues to grow throughout the year 2026, then that's needless work by. Yes. By the sounds of it, it seems like the plug and review team are being tasked with things which probably, never, gonna get built or never gonna get shipped because the developer's never re gonna respond to the email.

So that's definitely a new kind of horizon that we need to worry about. And it, the one thing that every open source project lacks. Is volunteer hours. And if we're burning them on people who are not serious about maintaining a plugin, that's a waste. And Yeah. And I hope we can do better this year.

[01:21:00] Mike Johnston: Yeah. That's beautifully said. this is, the group that, isn't this, the group that a year ago plowed through their backlog and got it down to nearly nothing now. yeah. Now because of some other factor, they're back underwater again. Yeah. curiously, the seesaw is tipped in the other direction, hasn't it?

[01:21:20] Nathan Wrigley: The plugin review team have obviously done their work, but maybe they'll be that sort of disgruntled, feeling if you're a plugin review team member that this was all for n I've spent my, yeah. Valuable time for something which nobody ever really intended to, to ship. So maybe there's gotta be some thought put into that and guardrails built into the process of submitting much as that by many.

[01:21:44] Taco Verdonschot: so the good thing is that. Us talking about it here has already, led to one reply. Yeah, there you go, Marcus. Thank you, Marcus. Forgotten. Sounds like maybe you using a disposal email address or so, yeah. Okay, so there we go. and now we finally set reminders, folks. Yeah, set reminders. We finally, after many deep breaths, we finally have some clarity on the whole bazooka gate.

[01:22:14] Nathan Wrigley: here we go. where's it gone? more people building bazookas to kill mosquitoes. So it's a mosquito killing thing. I think we're, We're probably all, yeah, that was the comment you made earlier. The one you skipped. Where you, oh, did I miss one over Engineering is what? She's, she not literal.

[01:22:33] Courtney Robertson: Bazookas. sadly. Okay. I want to see anime a do bazookas one day. I, the problem with doing this show is, there's many things. I, there's lots of moving parts in the background here and I'm trying to click buttons. I can never keep track of the whole comment thing, not quite. Anyway, so apologies, Anne, that I, messed that up.

[01:22:52] Nathan Wrigley: The plugin check plugin says Elliot, who, as I said is not far from me. The plugin check plugin was a great addition to help the process, but I assume some people still skip using that before submitting the plugin. Good point. Elliot. When I vibe coded through, last time that I was on, I shared about the XFN plugin that I built.

[01:23:12] Courtney Robertson: Yes. And also the yes. Post formats one. Both of those were good vibe coding projects, but one's designed to bring back features that have long lurked around in core. So I vibe coded through that, so I'm just as guilty as the rest of them. and when I submitted it, it actually gives you a sandbox, using playground to go test it in that has plugin check plugin already active while you're still in that waiting review process.

And while you're doing that, you could see here's all the errors. If you're vibe coating through this, take that list of errors back to where you were vibe coating. Say, help me with this stuff. Get it fixed up. You could still keep resubmitting uploading that same zip file again and again until they start that review process.

so that they've got the most current thing. So if you see pl, please use Plugin Checker plugin ahead. And also I got this tip off of Amber Hines from Equalize Digital, test any plugin that you go to install on your website. Also with plugin Checker plugin. Ooh, excellent. Because you want to make sure right, that your things are compliant and going to get along together and the plugin checker plugin will at least identify, it's not as robust as saying let me read all the code and understand it, but it will certainly flag.

Things that you are unaware of, like this is using deprecated functions that are no longer maintained. And you might rethink using that plugin because of it. Yeah. Mark Wilkinson in the uk. Crikey, the comments are coming thicker than faster than I can keep up with 'em. so Mark says, is the plugin check plugin available?

[01:24:48] Nathan Wrigley: No. on the submission interface, to which Elliot helpfully said yes, there's a checkbox to confirm that. and then following on, I know the plugin team can't provide, more guidance than they already do, but is there a place a developer can get more feedback? Maybe that has just helped, Troy, that plugin.

Troy, you and I can talk and I can wrangle in a plugin review team member. Okay. I'll just, I told them, oh, in that direction. This podcast, real Life Help there. There we go. Troy? Yeah. Couldn't Courtney me? Troy is one of the organizers for Word Camp Canada, so I've gotten to Troy over some years.

[01:25:23] Courtney Robertson: Yeah. That's great. So he says, this is now I've struggled with and I want to build for the masses, but end up building what I want, in the end and hope others like it. Yeah. Troy built the one that checks for accessibility. Yeah. Recently and it's been. Doing some of those updates. Sorry, I was crosstalk.

[01:25:40] Nathan Wrigley: You there? Courtney. Philip also says, P-P-H-P-C-S. There's another thing we've gotta learn to spell Mike. I can say it but I won't be able to spell it. 2027. Yeah. to code. Sometimes there are false positives. And finally, last little comment. I wonder if it could be automated. When the plugin is submitted is, it is run through the plugin, check plugin, maybe using playground.

If it fails, the submission doesn't go through. Okay. That was, I think they're doing that, but after the submission phase, so they're running it through the plugin checker and using that output as part of the email that you'll get with improvements. So I don't even know what to say at this point.

We've got two minutes left of the show. Normally we get right the way through the list of things that we've got to get through, but we're not even halfway. but I have to end it on tape. Let tomorrow, I think Nathan, there are, I'll just do another show tomorrow. That's right. Yeah. but I have to end, do a sh a shout out very quickly to Zeal.

[01:26:45] Courtney Robertson: And also I would like to acknowledge and honor that, yesterday marked 11 years since Kim Parcell passed and Kim Parcell is, was. Known in the WordPress community as WP mom was very near and dear to some folks. There is an episode on Tavern that goes into some of this, back in the archives. Yeah. And Kim Parcell was probably the first loss that our community deeply felt. Zeal is among our most recent members that have passed. Yeah. Okay. You're absolutely right to bring this one up before we finally end the call. what I'm gonna say is all of the stuff that didn't make it into this particular show, there was, four, for example, from Yost, the person, I'm so sorry, Tcho, we're just not gonna get to them this week.

[01:27:33] Nathan Wrigley: I, yeah. Hey, I didn't do the writing. That's all it. Okay. I'm pleased that you are so sangu good about it. so this is, a piece I don't need to reiterate. we did, coverage of Zeal, earlier in, sorry, towards the end of 2025, sadly passed away. but there is, I don't know this is the wrong phrase to use, but every cloud and all that, there is some.

Chin of light a little bit here, which is to say that, there is the Zeal Memorial Scholarship, which is going to be awarded. It is being, fronted and I think paid for Tacho, correct me if I'm wrong, by the, I don't know how to pronounce that. Ur Word Camp. and the intention is to provide 10 complimentary tickets, and I'll just read what it says here.

10 complimentary tickets to girls and women who are unable to attend, word Camp. Cole. Yeah. What? Yeah, in 2026 due to financial constraints. So if that fits the bill for you, if you would like to attend that and you satisfy those conditions. there is a scholarship, which, is now called the Zeal Memorial Scholarship.

And by the looks of it, it looks like the applications for that are about, about a month away. You've gotta submit that application by the first of Feb. yeah, either that or the event is the first of Feb. I'm not sure. Yeah, you could be right about that. Let me read a little bit more application process.

No, there we go. Here we go. Yeah. 15. So actually you've got 10 days. So if you're listening to this and that fits the bill, I know that we have quite a lot of people listening in that neck of the woods, so it might be that they would welcome that. 15th of January is the date at which you have to submit, and you will find out by the 22nd of January whether or not you have been successful.

so apologies for the people that have, in the panel that submitted stuff that we never got to. Largely that would be Mike and, and Tacho, because we just did it in the order and Courtney's stuff came first and we got, I'm so sorry. No, it's not your fault. It's the way it goes. No worries.

I, I, yeah, it was fun. I've enjoyed this episode very much and please get re dosed. Yeah. again, the links are in the show notes, so everything that we talked about plus a whole bunch of stuff that was supposed to be talked about, it has ended up in the show notes. Like I said, at the top of the show, I'll just go here, wp builds.com.

If you stick your email address into that little box, we will send you. Honestly, there's no. No weirdness. We're not trying to like pitch anything, it's just we're just linking out with no affiliate links or anything like that just to the content itself. So you click on the links and it'll take you directly to the content and we don't gain anything from that.

So I'll put all of the links that we've talked about plus the ones that we sadly didn't get to as well. And I'm not gonna ask you for your episode titles 'cause we're gonna do that afterwards when, when Courtney's AI gets to work and hopefully comes up with something and if it fails I'll just have to make one up.

No, in that case it will just be square bracket to say that's title. Yeah, I think Dev, I think I'll take a riff and instead of Mr being in the middle of the road, option will be Wallace and Grommet. Let's, which basically you with a bunch of farm animals sounds. Yes. I love it. I actually watched a Wallace and Grommet film over the Christmas period.

It was a very nice, I really enjoyed it. Lovely. oh, Marcus, you're very kind, Marcus. But I can't, I've actually got errands that I have to run snow to remove. Oh. And pronunciation. Yeah. I've snow to remove. Cole. Cole. Cole Hapo. Thank you. Y that's, thank you. Yash helpful. And Zeal was a true inspiration. For many and inspired many.

That's so nice to hear. Thank you very much. Okay. That's what we've got time for first. Little thanks. I guess from me to everybody who made a comment, thank you very much. Keeps the show going, keeps it, keeps it rocking forwards and also goes without saying thanks to. Let me see if I can get this in the right order.

There's Mike Johnson over there. Hopefully he will come back and the experience wasn't too painful. back over on shot. There he is down there. And Courtney who is down there. Yeah. Mike, you are experiencing firsthand. It's certainly discombobulating. Yeah. That just point everywhere. I like it's a good stripe for somewhere.

Yeah. Never works as you expect. Mike. Yeah, I know you don't watch this very much. You tend to listen to it, but we have this sort of slightly humiliating hand wave thing that we do. Yeah. Every single episode. So if you don't Yeah, that's perfect. Yeah. yeah. There we go. That'll do it. That's our deal.

Thank you very much. We'll be back next week. If the three of you wanna hang around for a few minutes and have a little bit of chat, that'd be really nice. But, take care. We will see you next week. Bye. Bye. Bye.