This Week in WordPress #361

[00:00:03] Nathan Wrigley: It is time for this week in WordPress, episode number 361 entitled a I.

It was recorded on Monday the 12th of Jan 2026. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I'm joined by cohost Michelle Frache, but also by Mark Zaca and by Anne Mika Boullet. It's a WordPress podcast, so we spend quite a lot of time talking about WordPress. We kicked things off, though with a conversation about.

Well, lots and lots of articles related to accessibility. Ann's expertise is in that area, and so we bring quite a few bits and pieces to bear in the accessibility space. I also mentioned a show that I did recently with Joe Dolson and promoted that a little bit as well. And then we get onto WordPress stuff, collaborative editing the fact.

Big Bite has joined WP Engine. We also talk about why in the era of AI it is still possible to be bullish about the opportunities for WordPresses. There's a few articles floating around about that, and then the plugin team seems to be deluged by AI plugin submissions. Which is good, but also has its drawbacks because of the toll on the humans trying to keep all of that thing going.

Then there's a whole new section, all about the different things that are coming in the WordPress space. So there's a few new projects. There's something called Phantom wp, Falcon, and Dave Gray has got a new product as well. There's loads more. We talk about WordPress events that are coming up in the next few weeks as well, and it's all coming up next on this week in WordPress.

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

Hello. Good morning. Good afternoon, good evening. What was going on there? Mark? You were, you were up. Something. good morning, good evening, good afternoon. Wherever you are in the world watching this, that's very, nice to have you with us. as I always say, this work, this whole show works really well when people drop comments in and, and Tacho has already put one in, thank you, tacho.

He's singing the theme tune. I have no words Tacho, that theme tune is the worst tune imaginable, and I just can't be bothered to change it. So anyway, there you are. He says hi. From a virtually snowless vegan again, after a week of beautiful white chaos. Yeah, our snow's all gone, sadly, now it rained. And yes, same here.

It's sad. It's a bit sad. but yeah. So we are gonna, I'm just gonna go through the sort of like the housekeeping bits and then I'll introduce our fabulous panel. So the first thing to say is that if you are watching this live and you would like, I don't know, like your friends, to join in, pause the video or just, open up a new tab, whatever it may be, and.

The best place to send them is right there, being supported by Anne. go to wp builds.com/live once more. Wp builds.com/live. If you go there on a desktop, you'll have the Google like YouTube comments on the right. and if you're on a mobile, it'll fall underneath the video. However, if you don't have a Google account or you don't like using a Google account, click on the video itself.

Top right is a little black button, which says live chat. You can click that and you don't need to be logged into anything at all. So yeah, wp builds.com. Forward slash live. So, so, so let's, let's go around the houses and say hi to our panelists. I'll start off with our co-host, our frequent co-host. I can't do it.

I, can't manage it. There is Michelle. Hello, Michelle. Hello. Hello. Michelle is, Michelle's got a little bit of a poorly voice at the moment, so she's gonna sound a little bit different, but I hope that you are, you're able to contribute if you need to, if you need to take five and go and get some Alka Ser or whatever it is, that you take, feel free.

You've shortened your bio, I think. Have you or did I shorten it? I can't remember. Anyway, I think I shortened it a bit. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Michelle Ette is the executive director of Post Status, and in addition to the work over there, Michelle is the podcast barista at WP Coffee Talk, co-founder of Underrepresented in Tech, creator of WP Speakers and WP Career pages.

She also co-founded sponsor me, WP Speed Network online. She writes books. She's an author, influencer and frequent organizer and speaker at WordPress and tech events living outside of Rochester, New York. She is an avid nature photographer and you can learn more about Michelle at Meet Michelle dot on line.

[00:04:56] Michelle Frechette: I, should add Speaker of the Year for Women Tech Global today. Oh, indeed. Yeah. That's, pretty cool. I, I, how long, when did you get that? Was that towards the end of last year, I think, wasn't it? It was, I also received Influential women, of 2025 award as well. So I'm looking at my new plaques. Oh, nice, Don't have 'em in the background. You're just keeping them in front of you. Are you okay? Yeah. yeah, they're all in front of me. They're there. that was the space. It inspires me to continue to do better. Yeah. Nice. Well, congratulations for all that and, let's hope that your voice holds out for the rest of the episode.

[00:05:30] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Well, it's so much better than it was. Yeah. Well, that's good. I'm pleased to hear that. Yeah, that's good. Over there is, mark. Mark Ben Skain. How you doing, mark? I'm doing fantastic. Mark always comes on at like three in the morning or something. I have no idea. It's, aic. It's a ridiculous time.

It's, I don't even, I have no words I like, but you're an early bird, right? Yeah. You just enjoy getting off. The older, I get, the less of an early bird. I'm becoming the feeling, I'm not gonna lie, I used to be an early bird, but yeah. Yeah. Yep. I became an early bird about 18 months ago. I was predictably not that early.

I could work late into the evening, and then about 18 months or so ago, I just, my body just said, no, that's it. You're gonna flip to the other side of the day. And now I'm mop at five, mostly every morning. Yeah. I think the exact opposite happened with me. Yeah. I've always been an early bird.

[00:06:24] Marc Benzakein: Then about a year ago, probably six months ago, it's been like, okay. I can't wake up at four in the morning like I used to. Okay. I think the trick is just stay in bed all day and work on the laptop. That's the, that's the way I, like where your head's at. I do. Okay. Alright. Thank you very much. that's pretty body mechanics when you do that.

[00:06:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Well there, there's Mark, mark Benca joining us once more from the other side of the pond, right on the west coast of the us. And last but by no means nice least is Ann Mika Boullet. How you doing Anne? I'm doing good, thank you. Nice. I'm glad the slippery slope outside is Randolph now and Yep. I can finally go for a walk again.

You are just like us. Yeah. I fell, I actually fell the other day. I got, I was carrying a car battery and I, as I fell, my legs went out from under me and I threw it up and I watched it in the air and I was thinking where this lands is really gonna change my life, potentially. My goodness. Luckily, goodness.

It landed on my chest. Oh my gosh. I was thinking if that is anyway, woo. so slippery slopes and all that. So, so no broken nose on today's show? No broken tray. I was carrying on a tray. The whole thing went up, the tray landed on me, then the battery landed on the tray, smashed the tray to bits. Wow. And luckily I'm here to tell the te it was a good story.

[00:07:40] Michelle Frechette: You're okay? Yeah. Yeah. It was. I was totally just a bit winded. But it was one of those moments where, you know, like, like when you step out into the road and the car honks and you think. That could have gone a different way, couldn't it? My life could have been very different. So anyway, there we go. Yeah. So Anne, joining Anne, have you been on this particular show before?

[00:07:58] Nathan Wrigley: I know that you've been on the podcast with me before. I don't think so. I don't think so. I think this is the first time actually. So let us, I sent her, the link. You are very good. You're a very good person. let's hope this is the first time of many. oh yeah. We're gonna lean into a, subject today quite a bit actually, that Anne's really into, and I'll start the bio and you'll get an impression of that.

So Anne is an accessibility strategist who knows that while empathy matters, nothing motivates the business. OO owner, like realizing they're quietly losing serious revenue and back sit by real world data and proven research. She mentors software companies, agencies, and e-commerce teams to build for everyone.

She is a loud advocate for the WordPress block editor because it actually works if you take the time to learn it properly. Whether she's on stage or mentoring a development team, her focus is the same, turning technical requirements into measurable business growth because accessibility is simply smart business.

So there you go. Thank you. Like it. Thank you. So there's our panel today. the way that this show works is we love it. If you put in comments, not all of them will I manage to get onto the screen 'cause I'm trying to juggle a few things, but I'll try to keep up with what you write and if I do and something is relevant to what we're talking about, I'll pop it on the screen.

So I would encourage you to write as many comments as you possibly can. so let's have a look here, a comment for you. Did you fix the settings on your DSLR? Nathan? I have no idea. So last week, the, camera just kept switching off. all I have to do is lean over and press a button like that, but if it switch, if it goes black, that's what's going on.

So apologies, uhl, if, that happens, we just have to cope. what does this one say? He's back. It's, does the power grid even work at 5:00 AM Yes. Just, the kettle certainly does. Honestly, it's the only way to get going. Patricia's here. Hello, Patricia. She says hello. Nice. Hey, Patricia. Hello? Oh, no again.

Oh, no. Okay. Wait. No, he is got his name right in it. Look, it says Gerard. Oh. Oh, great. Okay, great. That's good. Thank you, Gerard. Hello. You. I have no words. it's g Gerard. He says hi here. I, know you. I've got a total mental block with your name, Gerard. I have no idea why, but I'm extremely pleased that you meant you need, to learn to say that in Dutch though.

Go on. that was a word, which I don't think I'll ever get. Say it again. Hi Art. Hi. Yeah, well maybe if you try it and the way we speak Dutch in the south of the country below river, it's messed nest hard on your throat. You can say hi art. Okay. 'cause we don't have that sort of, whatever that sound was at the beginning where you that's only when you have a cold.

Oh. Oh. That is definitely not an American English sound that we make it on. No, that's right. We don't have that sound. and then James Lau is joining us and saying Good morning. Thank you very much. Tcho, very kindly glad you're okay, but a bit sad that you're not sharing video footage of your battery adventure.

[00:11:06] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. Did you get that on ring? Ah, no ring for camera, no ring camera footage or anything? No, I don't go into any of that. No. And Elliot, last comment for now. Elliot's joining us. He's just down the road from me. Hello Elliot. Nice to have you. Hello Elliot. So, like I said, please drop your comments in as we get going.

[00:11:21] Nathan Wrigley: We're WordPress, so the idea is to do as much possible about WordPress, but we, go off pieced a little bit as well. So here we go. We're gonna go off pieced a bit now. Bit of self-promotional stuff. We produce two episodes a week, basically on this podcast. If you wanna be kept updated via email, just put your email address into there, or go to your podcast player of choice, search for WP Builds and click follow, or whatever it might be.

That's probably the best way to do that. The latest episode of the podcast was with, I, called him Sir Dave Foy because I hold him in such high regard. Dave Foy, as he is done, like loads of courses about Elementor and bricks and things like that. He's releasing a lot of new materials, but he's got this whole different way of doing it.

Now. He's gonna be doing live cohort learning. So he's, instead of doing this like leviathan course, he's gonna be doing it per week and then getting, taking feedback from his, customers each week and then doing the next week on a rolling schedule. So he keeps up to date with 'em. Anyway, that's what that podcast episode there is all about is him.

Trying to figure that out. And, anyway, there, there is the episode that was number 400 and I think 51. So we're fast approaching. By the end of this year, I'll be on 500 of that, particular podcast. Speaking of witch, I'm gonna blow my own trumpet again. this week I'm releasing the 200th episode of the WP Tavern podcast.

[00:12:45] Michelle Frechette: Wow. Woo. I know it's got two zeroes. I feel like I should have a cake or something, but I'm, you feel like we shoulda have sound effects where like all of a sudden, like, insert a pause here. That's right. No, I'm not doing anything. I'm just releasing it as exactly the same as all the others. I don't even mention one of those.

[00:13:01] Nathan Wrigley: I recorded it, I recorded my intro earlier today and then I got to the end of it and thought I didn't mention that it was the second hundred one, but anyway, whatever. so anyway, there we go. That's the WP builds promotional stuff. Right. Each week the guests get to drop in a few links if they so choose.

And, they get featured toward the beginning of the show. That was Michelle's idea. Thank you for that. And, today, and Mika has dropped in this one, it's called, well, it's from the SE MRO or SEM R website. It's called y Accessibility Matters more than Ever for SEO purposes. I had a read through, but I wondered if, Anne, if you wanted to take the helm on this and tell us why you included it.

[00:13:38] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Yeah, the reason why I included it is because for years, especially for those who started with accessibility, even earlier in the, I did, our biggest frustration has always been, yeah, but where are the numbers? Give us the numbers, give us the data. And I'm like, yeah, sure. Throw your common sense out of the window and just wait for people to send you the data.

Right. So, and then I was, always talking about, and many of my colleagues as well about SEO is incredibly, highly connected to accessibility. And, something people tend to forget is that the main customer for Google is not the advertisers, it's the users. Right? So they will prioritize that.

And so they did this research with real numbers. If you go to this article, it will be in the show notes, I think. Yeah. It will. you can also link to the full research page, where they have everything and it just shows that traffic increases. When your compliance increases. And I'm really actually a bit sad that they use the word compliance, because I'm really like, go away with your compliance.

It should be part of your website or app hygiene. It's website hygiene. And the thing is, if you look at it being compliant, you'll never win. Because if your competitor is looking to be more accessible than you are, they are miles ahead of you. And then this research showed that 27% of more keywords ranked with accessibility improvements.

And this is also important, this is why I love this article, because it is about progress over perfection. People are like, oh, how am I gonna start? And then they don't start, they get totally, get paralyzed with where to start. And if they would just start with getting, heading order Okay. And getting color contrast done better and all of that.

Well, I'm gonna. How do you say that? I'm gonna segue too much, so forget about that. That's fine. You can ask me. Yeah. That is the word. And then one of the most important things here when it, when you look at SEO, is the incredible boost in authority score for compliance size. It's just, crazy.

[00:16:08] Nathan Wrigley: I'll read from the top of the article actually, because it gives it, so it, they try to establish the credentials of the people doing it, which are pretty Formidable actually. So, collaboration with accessibility checker.org built. Rush, 10, and this is an analysis of 10,000 websites.

And they were trying to figure out, and like you said, they used the word compliance where their accessibility compliance impacts online discoverability. In other words, if you put the effort in on the accessibility side, do you get more visitors? That's the bottom line. And the study revealed that the majority, I'm just reading this by the way.

off the site, the study revealed that the majority of websites still fail to meet accessibility standards. Yet across the fuller sample, higher accessibility scores correlated with stronger search outcomes, including increases in organic traffic, broader keyword visibility, and stronger authority scores.

Now, I'm no SEO expert, that is all a bit of a mystery to me, but I'm, not entirely surprised that this is true, that this has been written down, but I am glad that somebody wrote it down in black and white so that you can point to this forever more and say, okay, you now have yet another reason.

[00:17:20] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Exactly to this work and, I'm, going to take this one a notch further, because I'm sure that soon the next articles will come out because LLMs Yeah. Are not Google and they look at your website differently and they ev like once a week. I'm doing this deep search. It's becoming a bit of a costly Harvey these days.

Like are there new, studies out there? Why accessibility also influences how an LLM picks up on you. Because if you think. Structured data is everything. Well, bye-bye. okay, so the, URR for this will be in the show notes. So if you do subscribe, like I said earlier, or what have you, or you visit the website tomorrow episode, whatever this is, then go and check it out.

[00:18:12] Nathan Wrigley: You, it'll be under the community section, why accessibility matters more than ever, or SEO performance will be the link that you're looking for. Miguel, or Mark, anything to add to that or shall we move on? I don't think I could improve upon what Anika says. Yeah. Yeah. and I know we're gonna be talking more about accessibility.

We are, there's a few more accessibility pieces and it was pure coincidence that Anne was on today. But, yeah, there's more data at the bottom, which I didn't highlight, but you can see that there's a whole lot more if you are looking at the video for this, you can see there's all sorts of other stuff.

you can explore the, survey properly, but this is just a heads up that exists. So thank you for bringing that to our attention. That's a good one. so this next one also in the realm of accessibility. This is, on the accessible web design. It's what it's called, but it's joe dolson.com.

Joe Dolson is a friend of the podcast. In fact, I'll just get this one out the way quickly whilst we're here. It's another self-promotional bit, I'm afraid, but it matches very, closely. I did an episode of, with Joe Dolson, with our accessibility show. We're on number nine now, and he picked out this, this website which had been like pushed in socials by automatic and various other, various other things.

And, Joe was just saying, okay, it, this, was supposed to be, and I use air quotes, it was an example of the best in WordPress and Joe was just picking it apart from an accessibility point of view. And whilst he liked the website, he said, that there was definitely a lot of work to be done.

So if you enjoy that kind of content, and you enjoy looking at an expert, figure out where accessibility problems are and what to do about them, go and have a look at that. It's about 40 minutes left, right? I just. I just realized I should have given you another link as well. Ah, another time. That's a, there's a good reason to drag you back onto the show on another, occasion.

So the reason I've put this one in, on Joe's website is called Judging Severity and Accessibility Issues is because this is so obvious, but actually I never thought about it this way, which is ridiculous. Joe makes the point that when you are, so let's say you've inherited a website or something like that, and you're trying to make a judgment about what do we tackle first?

H his point is, well duh, tackle the stuff, which gives the biggest impact to the end user, to the people using the website. Don't go for the stuff which is necessarily easiest for you to fix. Which, I guess if you're a developer, that kind of makes common sense. You can go to your boss and say, look, here's all the things I ticked off, but his point is, and there's three points, look at the content.

If there's critical content that the users need to be able to see or gain access to. Do that first. yeah. Okay. That makes complete sense. Then his second metric is. How frequently does this thing occur? In other words, I don't know if there's a, if there's a very important button to download the PDF or whatever it may be, and that's on every page, but the button is not accessible, we'll do that because that's a frequently occurring thing on the website.

And then, is last one is, is just a challenge really about how easy it is to overcome. So that's the one that I imagine most developers tackle first. how easy is it for me to fix? I'll do that first. 'cause that's a nice easy one. his is, yeah, it, how, easy is it for the user to get around and make a sort of priority list of those kind of things.

So, anyway, great wisdom from Joe and Oh yeah, nice to be confronted by something that is now really obvious to me, but until I read it, wasn't all that obvious. So again, mark and Michelle, if anybody's got anything they wanna contribute, please feel free. I, just might share an experience I had with Joe once he sat down with me on a, definitely this was, I, have to say this was not Maine, wp, this was a different product that I sat down with him on.

[00:22:18] Marc Benzakein: This was like five or six years ago anyway, and, he went through, what I was showing him and oh my goodness, I had five pages of notes by the time I was done sitting down. Yeah. and it was awesome of him to take the time to just do that with me. I am not an accessibility expert, like other people on this show are, but I have learned so much over the last few years and Joe's been a big part of that.

So just wanted to shout out to Joe that, Yeah. There's something I'd like to know from you about that though. Mark. How, okay. Do you remember how you felt that first, in these first moments when you got this list? What, happened? In your head? Well, in my head, I will say that I was not shocked.

it was a little bit, embarrassing, I'd say. But the worst experience I had actually was about 10 years ago when I was, sitting down with someone. We actually had a word camp that I had organized. And this, woman, she was blind. She was one of the presenters. She was blind and she sat down with our software to show me the struggle she had to go with.

And that was my first exposure to like the true, not just hurdles that we needed to, Overcome, but the things that I had never thought of, because I'm not blind and I, I was not putting myself in their shoes. And, so that kind of opened the door for me to become a little bit more empathetic, towards it.

When Joe sat down with me, I already knew that he was gonna tear it apart because I already, I've known Joe for a long time and, have a, ton of respect for him. So, it was, one of those, I shook my head a little bit, but none of it was, I, wasn't surprised. I, don't know how to, I'm trying to think how my head, I maybe embarrassed a little.

Probably. I'm always asking because some people are like, it's like someone stole the air from their lungs, Or they got like, or I'm never gonna fix that. Yeah. That was the experience I had that first time when, the, this, woman was not just visually impaired, she was completely blind and Yeah.

And, an amazing person. And she was so patient with me. if I were her, I would've like smacked me upside the head five different ways. But she was so patient and so kind and so understanding and my whole thought the whole time is like, we are not servicing these people the way that we should be.

[00:25:07] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Well, one of the things that, that should also be part of your hygiene, when you are building a product is the actual user testing. Yeah. Every time I see that this process has been skipped and, just. Disregarded. in the end it's going to cost you so much. And I'm not talking only about people who have, who are blind, who are visually impaired.

A group that everybody seems to forget is the one that I am, part of is people with, cognitive issues like a DH, adhd. Autism. Yeah. I have a combination of that. Yeah. Sometimes I land on websites and I'm just like. Yeah. Yeah. Well, as, a fellow, a DH, ADHD or I, totally relate to that. And, I, going further, I, everyone here I think knows who Jen Harris is.

Yeah. And I did an interview with her a few months ago for Maine wp, which is up on YouTube. My little bit of self-promotion there. Oh, I'm gonna go to watch that. And, she opened my eyes, pardon the pun, in so many ways because what she ex, what she did so well at explaining. And I could, I, you need to watch it 'cause I can't explain it the way she did.

[00:26:35] Marc Benzakein: what she did very well was explain how accessibility. Isn't just for people with, disabilities or anything, it actually affects everybody. And examples she gave is like, what if you're on a train and you're, and, it's, vibrating and you're trying to read something and things like that.

And so, and what it helped me to understand is that we are losing a lot of business as developers and, product, producers just because we're not taking into consideration that, everybody needs accessibility, whether they realize it or not. And she was very good at like explaining that.

To like a third grader who didn't really grasp, any of these things until it was brought to my attention. So, yeah, it was, really, good. Yeah. there, there are a lot of politically very incorrect, examples that I always use when I do live talks on stage where I'm not getting filmed.

[00:27:41] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: But I'll, give you, two of the, not so, politically incorrect ones. one of them is a massive hangover. Oh. Going online shopping with a massive hangover because you forgot to go to the supermarket. And another one that people always forget is, Hey, fever. Okay. Suddenly your eyes. Yeah.

[00:28:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. you get fuzzy, you get dizzy. You, have trouble seeing and your patience is a lot less than, They're normally, yeah, people forget it. And I actually know about, I think it's Japanese Island. I still have some draft article about that lying around where, due to some genetic issue, the largest portion of the, population there has.

[00:28:39] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Hey, fever. You entire island. Okay. A whole island full of this. A specific island. I dunno which one it was. I will publish that article at some point. I just have to hit publish, I think. Yeah. That's curious. I wanna sell tissues on that island. Yeah. That's a great business, to be in.

[00:28:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. so, so Joe's piece here, judging severity and accessibility issues, it's really short. It'll take you five minutes to read. But it's a really, it It, was such an obvious thing, but such an a thing that I hadn't really thought about along in the short of it is basically tackle the things which help the most people first.

Don't do it from your point of view first, which makes, the thing I would add about accessibility also is that it is much easier to build an accessible site than to retrofit and accessible sites. Oh yeah. Yeah. So don't build a site thinking I'll add that later because you won't like yourself later. Yeah.

[00:29:32] Michelle Frechette: You'll, be like, yesterday Michelle was horrible because today Michelle has to retrofit something. So yeah, build, accessibly. Obviously we inherit sites that we have to do that. There's always going to be that, but don't plan accessibility as the second set of things you're going to do. Or step two, build with accessibility in mind.

[00:29:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Nice. So that is our second piece in terms of accessibility, and I think there is another one coming in a little while. So we'll come to that in a moment. There's a, a tool, a WordPress plugin, which we'll mention as well. But for now we're gonna segue. To this piece, which came directly from Mark.

Mark. I dunno if, because you dropped it in, do you wanna take the helm on this one? Well, this was, this was an article, actually Dennis shared it with us over the weekend, that Katie, Keith wrote. And, it's Katie being Katie, which is, what I like about Katie in general is that she is very data-driven.

[00:30:32] Marc Benzakein: So yeah, she will start out with a, a kind of a, she'll pause it something and then she'll get the data to back it up or, to, get the details. And, the, she starts out with at barn two, our new plugin sales were down to 17.8% in 2025. And the general idea is that plugin sales are down.

we're down in 2025. and, So then she followed up with a survey to say, to, find out how that broke down, and how the plug and roll relates to sales performance covers, like the new versus, versus, returning customers or renewals. And it seemed like renewals stayed pretty solid, but the new customers, are, the area that kind of dropped.

And I find that, not surprising. It goes to this whole idea that fewer and fewer new people are coming into WordPress and it might feed into that. Yep. but I also feel like, the niches have more people in the, playing field as well. So it's probably distributed a little bit more, among that.

so this goes into the thing that I found really interesting, which was. about Replaceability and what she found is that the plugins that Consi Con continue to have solid sales were the ones that people might consider to be irreplaceable. Yeah. and of course that, everybody wants their plugin to be irreplaceable and there's different things that can go into what, makes it irreplaceable?

I think. I have a whole bunch of thoughts on that in my, and I'm still thinking about this, question. as a marketer, you think about that constantly. what can we do to make our plugin more irreplaceable? I think to start with, you make a plugin that just works. Yeah. And I'm not talking about a plugin that works.

I'm talking about one that just works. Right? So you click a button and click a button at it just works. And I think that's where you start. and then there's different ways that you can make it irreplaceable. If you run a SaaS model, it's, a little bit easier maybe to make it irreplaceable because you're controlling the data and the, platform and, all of that.

but it also, I also feel like. The more, robust a plugin is, the more irreplaceable it can become because of the fact that it might, take a little bit more effort to switch from one to another. So that kind of can make it irreplaceable as well. So there's a whole bunch that goes into it. It's a really interesting article.

I, I, won't, I, won't go into all the details and like I said, my brain is still processing this. well, what, I found interesting was, firstly, Katie is probably the most. how to describe it, honest. Let's go with that. she's very honest to the point where even in failure, she'll tell everybody about the things that, that have failed for her, whereas I think I think that's not typical, in almost every part of life. when you ask people how they're doing and what have you, they'll gloss over that. Katie, not in a, kind of like, oh, poor me kind of way, but in a, oh, this happened to our business. Right? It's curious. Wow.

[00:34:12] Nathan Wrigley: How did that happen? So she comes from the point of view that their sales were down. And of course, I don't think, firstly that most companies would admit that you would never hear that, but This article is a completely voluntary offering of that. She's telling us. She doesn't have to tell us, but she tells us.

And then what kicks in for Katie isn't the normal cycle of the sky's falling in. It's okay. What the heck can we do about that? What, are the reasons that this might be? And so she went out onto Twitter, did a poll, found that this, broadly speaking, was the case across the board. we're not in that sort of barnstorming area that we might have been five years ago.

and then drew some inferences from some of the questions that she asked. And this whole thing about, irreplaceability seemed to be a central pillar of her argument. if, you've got a plugin which literally can't be swapped out for somebody else's, then you're onto solid ground.

That seems to be something which either flatlined or, improved sales, the numbers went up. so that whole replaceability thing was important. And then the other thing, which I thought was important, which came out was this, the third question was, Companies that partnered up with other people, and, obviously, there's a wide gamut of what that could mean.

But organic search didn't seem to help Freemium products in a marketplace like WordPress org didn't seem to help. There didn't seem to be a correlation in her data between making a free version and success in 2025, or organic search, SEO optimization and success. The real success seems to have come out with, partnering with people.

So like-minded companies, Maine, WP exemplify this. They're really good at partnering with other like-minded, but not overlapping businesses. Whi, which by the way, plug number two. Anybody who wants to, is interested in partnering with Maine WP, please contact me. Yeah, I am open and all ears.

Well, anyway, it's pre Yeah, no, but that's precisely, I remember I did a podcast episode with the, with the, analytics guys, the independent analytics. Yeah. It just felt like a perfect overlap and I think you've now ended up partnering with them, which is absolutely perfect. Yeah. But that's, that seems to be a real, successful way partnering with other people.

I dunno if that means like partnering with, like this kind of thing, this sort of show, whether you partner with media organizations or stuff like that. Dunno if that's rolled into it, but it certainly seems to have. yeah, you can see in this graph, the growth is the pink air and you can see really it's the one that sort of dominates.

There was no decline in sales if you were to be partnering with people. So that's the long and the short. So if you are looking at your numbers this year. or rather from last year, 2025 and you think, gosh, it's flatlined or it's gone down. Definitely have a look at this 'cause Katie's got some, some wisdom for you.

So I will link to that in the show notes. And Michelle, anything to add to that before we crack on? I, talked to a lot of people and I'm not gonna name names of course, but there are, all the plugin owners I have been speaking to lately are asking me, is it just me or are sales down everywhere? Yeah, it's everywhere.

[00:37:18] Michelle Frechette: And so it really is everywhere. And so if you are experiencing that sale down, don't lose heart. It's not you, it's the market right now. Yep, But it would appear that there are clever things that you can do. Yeah, that Katie is now obviously beginning to do or has already done that might mitigate that problem a little bit for you.

[00:37:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Sorry Anne. Yeah, I, yeah, no, go ahead. no, I was saying that. I think I interrupted you, so I was, yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I, just reminds me, I think I shared the link with you in hindsight. There is this great interview, on Open Channels fm, where they did a talk with, Tim Moner and Sandra Rson.

[00:38:03] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Sandra Kurton grade, and actually Great is doing the opposite. So they are showing growth and growth, but they're different. They're different from anyone. And I think they're also interesting to follow for anyone because they do talk about how they do that, where they go there. People, I remember people laughing.

At them three years or four years ago when they saw great pricing because they're not the typical WordPress pricing. And people were crying murder and saying, oh, they're way too expensive. They're going to die. They'll be off the grid within a year. They're not. But they're also very good at making these partnerships.

And, listening to Sandra Kurtz is really interesting. I can really recommend you do this. I learn from her all the time. I, am, advising them on accessibility and stuff. but there is, this is a great podcast that they did. Oh, you've got it on screen. Yeah, I've got it on the screen. So it's, yeah, it's on Open Channels fm Yeah, the episode that you're after, 18th of December 25, if that helps.

[00:39:09] Nathan Wrigley: So you could probably just google open web conversations, sorry, not Google. In your podcast player of choice. You could probably just type that in. Open web conversations and it was, yeah, episode 7 0 8. it's, it's a brilliant episode and it's. Probably also confronting for some people, but you can learn so much from it.

[00:39:27] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Nice. even I learned from it, yeah. Yeah. Yep. okay. So, and I'm not into that. Yep. We will, we will, I'll add that into the show notes as well. Delivering customer value through collaborative ecosystem partnerships. And interestingly, Jonathan Wal is on the, he's doing the interviewing and I know that's one of his, big things as well.

[00:39:46] Nathan Wrigley: He loves partnerships and all of that kind of stuff, so that's perfect. Right. So there we go. That was Katie Keith's article, which ultimately led to this secondary piece. Let's move it on slightly. Going to a social network. I'm not logged in, so it looks a bit empty. There are lots of comments on this, but you can't see them because I'm not logged in.

But, this is Steve Burge. This is. There isn't a story here. There's probably not much for us to discuss, but Steve by who is the, I dunno if he's the founder. He is certainly the owner, I think he's the founder of Publish Press and a variety of other WordPress plugins. He being with Publish Press, which enables you to do all sorts of things around hitting the publish bond in the WordPress editor, he's been very keen to, to keep track of the collaborative editing this sort of Google Docs style thing that we may or may not yet get at some point.

we've had various conversations about it and honestly the whole enterprise felt like it was miles away until fairly recently. And I just caught sight of this just the other day and I haven't got any, I haven't tested it or anything, but he's, not a man to throw incendiary stuff out there, so this is very positive.

He says, I've been testing collaborative editing experiments in WordPress for years. Those early versions never work smoothly now. And this was written, oh, I don't know, four or five days ago now with the Gutenberg plugin for the first time. It works great. Right out of the box. Google Doc style editing in WordPress is here.

Give it a try. So honestly, there's just news there. If you want to go and check it out, go and get the Gutenberg plugin, which adds like a beta version or a beta version, if you like, of features on top of your normal block editor. And, and it's in there and there's an image that's attached to it, which I apparently can't zoom.

There we go. where you check a box, collaboration, add real time editing, you just tick that box and yeah, there you go. So I don't know if anybody wants to add anything to that, but I just trust that Steve wouldn't have said that unless there was something worth looking at. So go and check that out. I think it's, really cool because if, agencies and anyone building websites would calculate through how much time they lose Yep.

[00:41:56] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: On, inefficient or efficient way of working. 12 times, five minutes is an hour. Yeah. People tend to forget that. Yep. I had to just do the maths then. And I was, thinking, is that right? That doesn't seem right. It's right. okay, so there's Steve, right? Let's move on then. this is a sort of community based piece, if you like.

[00:42:18] Nathan Wrigley: big Bite. It's an agency, an enterprise agency. I, confess, I don't know a lot about them, but I've heard the name Bandaid about Abound lots and lots of times. I think they had, like really large clients and things like that. They, they began 15 years ago in, T side, which is not that far from me, a little bit north of where I live.

they have now, joined forces with WP Engine. They've been consumed by WP Engine. and I'll just read out the important, This is a marketing piece just explaining what's going on and what have you. So it says, as we transition into WP Engine, we'll gradually shift from client services to product development.

We won't be taking on new projects, we'll be putting our experience to work on tools and solutions that can benefit teams and organizations on a much larger scale. So it's an interesting, it's an interesting one from the WP Engine side of things. Taking on, the, staff, I guess from a great big enterprise level agency.

I guess we'll wait and see where that goes. there's a lot more, but that was the most important paragraph I thought. Again, I dunno if anybody wants to comment on that, but. No. Okay. No, I've tried to quickly find out who they are, but I got this, yeah. Very, incredible agency.

I've heard about 'em lots and lots of times, but they, weren't one of those agencies I don't think, which did a, saw the importance in tons of marketing and things like that, promoting themselves In the, WordPress space. But I definitely heard of them lots and lots of times.

So, anyway, there we go. They're moving over with the WP Engine team, I guess effective immediately. They won't be taking on new clients, but they will instead be contributing to the endeavors at WP Engine. Right. Okay. Let's move over. So I've put this on here. This is actually on X. but I've had to put it on archive today because I was having problems getting it, getting it working.

This is, I dunno, 20 25, 20 26. It feels like the year where maybe the AI gremlins take a hold of your brain and make you worry that you have no job coming. the year is gonna be hard. It's gonna be difficult to justify using WordPress in the next years to come. not everybody thinks that.

And Nat, oh, help me with the surname, please, Anne. tic. Thank you. Tic na mil tic. There we go. There we go. he has listed out four reasons, and the more I read them, the more I took, the more I became sanguine. I'm, a bit of a worrier about AI in all honesty. And he's saying four reasons why he thinks he's bullish about WordPress in 2026.

The first one is all about market dominance and momentum. Bullet points underneath all of these, but I'll let you read those at your leisure. The next one is all about the economic ecosystem. The fact that WooCommerce and WordPress and wordpress.com are just these massive entities. The fact that you can have a load of technical flexibility, that's this third point.

if you're on something, that's not flexible, then you're gonna be, you're gonna have limitations. And also, developer opportunities. There's a constant, at least there has been a constant demand for WordPress developers and what have you. so I, I was just pleased to see somebody, couching the future as being bright for the WordPress space.

I know there are a few voices out there who do exactly that, but there's also seems to be a growing panic, if There seems to be a lot of people getting online talking about how AI is doing this thing in one third of a minute that used to take them three days and all of that kind of stuff.

So anyway, Nat, the voice of maybe reason, so again, I'm opening it up to the floor. If you've got anything you wanna say about. AI and WordPress, we've got more to come about that. So, you know what, I'm getting a little bit tired of all the, blah, blah, blah around AI and WordPress where the Doom messages are concerned.

[00:46:24] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: I, love that Nat is, doing this and whoever else is doing it. because it's like people are saying, buy an IKEA kitchen, and put it in your professional hotel. Yeah, that'll work. it's getting tiring. And then another thing that I'd like to say about ai, what is tiring that people are probably not even conscious of is every time you see an article about WordPress starting off, it's not this, it's that, yeah.

[00:47:00] Nathan Wrigley: The webinar and then 1, 2, 3 points. Yeah. It's just, I don't think, I don't think people realize. Well, I've been, listening to some interesting commentary about, how AI might be, might, it might be a difficult, a difficult thing to AI to propel itself in the way that it has been in the recent past just because of, financial constraints in the year 2026 about how, there's lots of venture capital that might need to be repaid and obviously the environmental cost and what have you.

And, and so it might be that we don't have this sort of like continually, it, it's getting better twice as good every month. That may be something that we don't experience anyway, so it, running away from us, if you like, might not be the case anyway. I think if people use it to, as an assistant to create great stuff.

[00:47:49] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: That's, what it's fantastic for. I was, do, you remember a minute ago I said I'm doing the 200th episode of the PO of the Tavern podcast? Which is getting released this week. I was editing it this morning and it's with, we all know Corey Mass. Yeah. And Corey, it was Corey and it was co about AI and about how, basically Corey loves it and he's using it where he can, but he's not using it where he can't.

[00:48:13] Nathan Wrigley: But he, one of the curious things that came out of what he's doing is he. He gets it to do unexpected things. Like he said he used to have this pack of cards. I can't remember. It was like a film director. No, it was Brian Eno. That was it. You know the song Rock, you know the, yeah. The music producer, Brian Eno produced this pack of cards for musicians in a studio who were getting a bit fed up.

they'd been sitting there playing the same old song and you'd take this Brian Eno pack of cards and you'd flick the top one over of the deck and it would have something weird like, play the song backwards. Or imagine that you are listening to this song and you're underwater. What would that be like?

And so Corey's been getting AI to do that with his projects. He's been asking it to deliberately do weird stuff. And I just thought, gosh, that's so interesting. And what, an interesting take that is. 'cause normally you think, get it to do the sensible stuff, but now he's mucking around with it and getting it to do things.

In other words. He's leveraging its creativity, which is curious. the webinar in the comments, by the way, is saying WordPress has a great future. He's not scared of AI, or they're not scared of ai. So there we go. and he's got another comment there. I, can't make it come up. I dunno why. Oh yeah, there we go.

The community is strong enough to develop it further without ai, it will assist us eventually, but far from replacing, is still, he says hallucinations are ways to frequently still something or other. And always remember that AI is taught by us. So it still has its limitations for how long that might be a question, but you still know your subject and use AI efficiently.

So there we go. Nice comments from Nat. Anybody else wanna talk about Nats Twitter feed or whatever that was? Well, all I can say is if you're not following the guy, just do, he's, He's. Sharing so much positive stuff. He's, and, another guy that he seemed, I always see him in tandem with Marco Dan.

Oh, okay. So Dan, some other people would say it's, they share so much information and I think they have this, community on X that has over a hundred thousand members, maybe 150,000. How good grief? the handle of Nat is Nat Miel and it's N-A-T-M-I-L-E-T-C with no, with no hyphens or dashes or anything like that in between.

and I will put that post into the show notes so that you can go and check it out. Are we staying on the AI thing? No. Yeah. Well, yes, we are actually, we're staying on the AI thing. This is, thi this is in equal measures, frustrating, and also where we're at in the year 2026. So this was from Reddit.

Again, you can see I've put it into archive, pH because for some reason the Reddit wouldn't allow, I dunno why, but I, had to do it to get it on the screen. Here we go. So this is somebody saying, I, I am a plugin team member. We don't use ai, and I'll just read a variety of the bits of it. It says, I'm writing this post for two reasons.

Number one. To dispel the myth that we use AI for all plugin reviews. I've seen a recent post about this. Number two, I'm tired of, I'm tired of reading AI generated email responses. Okay? They go on to say there is an exception. There's one place where they use ai, and that's to check with AI if you are in trademark violation with something.

So if you submit a plugin and there's some trademark violation, AI does that. However, the rest of the process for submitting a plugin is not, but caution. Every other part of our review uses a com combination of real person manual review and automated tooling. So that's not ai. That's automated tooling, like P-H-P-C-S and regex checks.

Today, whenever this post was written, it was two days ago, I think today we had the highest number of submissions in the history of the plugin directory. Most of those. Were written by AI tools. You can see where this is going. when an author consist, so you imagine you submit a plug into the, repo.

It's written by ai. You didn't do anything. You just, I don't know, made a prompt, got it submitted to the repository. You are now using humans time and they're checking it. And then if it gets declined, there's an actual process that you have to go to through, and it would seem that is not being followed up.

So it's an AI submission, it's reviewed, it's rejected, and then it just goes black. It's like a hole. 'cause you know it was an AI thing. Oh, I can't be bothered to reply to that. I'm just not gonna, I'll just submit another one. So it says, when the author consistently fails to implement our requirements, it's been a longrun policy since, as far since before AI to first issue a warning and then close submissions.

If your AI cannot keep up with our requirements, your plugin will not be approved. Same goes for a human developer and for the love of the Open web was a plea at the end. And for the love of the Open Web, please do please capital letters. Do not reply with an AI generated email. I personally. Don't even bother to read them anymore.

So what I'm trying to encapsulate here is this is a real human encountering what would appear to be a lot of AI generated stuff. And maybe in the next year or so this is gonna become a bit of a problem with plugins being submitted and there's just no human way of actually keeping on top of it. So I don't have a solution, but other than to say, stop it.

There you go. That's, yeah, I'd like to say something about that. Yeah. One of the things that worries me, it was already worrisome with the human developers, and I don't mean that in a negative sense, just in a general sense, is there's something AI can't do even when you try to instruct it to do so, it will not generate accessible accessibility ready code because it's learning from crap code online.

[00:54:21] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: And I am not saying that it's the developer's fault who put that code out there now, because this is just what happened through, component libraries and stuff that really need to be improved. but that is, is one of the things that worries me the most because people are building sites and they're following protocols and they're creating something accessible and suddenly they want something specific that they can't find, and then they run into one of these plugins.

They're like, oh yeah, this is doing what I want. Boom, boom, site rendered inaccessible right there. Because that's one thing you need to understand about accessibility. A site is not a little bit accessible. It either is accessible or it is not. Okay. Thank you. I'm just trying to, figure out what's going on in the comments.

[00:55:12] Nathan Wrigley: There seems to be some toing and froing between Tacho and some other, and I, there, I can't quite keep up with it and because I can't keep up with it, I can't figure out where it begins, so I can't quite put it on the screen. I can, I followed that too. oh, okay. Well, it started when, when we started talking about AI and, Jimmy also known as the webinar.

[00:55:33] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Yeah. mentioned that. Okay. we don't have to worry about ai. WordPress has a great future. I'm not scared of ai. And the community is strong enough to develop it further without ai, it will assist us eventually, but far from replacing it still, that's the one that you quoted? Yep. And then, the discussion went on and Taco said, I think you're very wrong.

And then, Jimmy's like, that's all right. We can share a different opinion. I love, that when people are good at having a dialogue. And so, yeah. And then Taco said something that I'm really interested to hear about. What's this? Is it this one about Google? This one? Yes. I don't know anything about this Sunday.

[00:56:15] Nathan Wrigley: So I'm reading, so that's in response to the, webinars comment. So Tacho responded this Sunday, there was already an announcement from Google that's, potentially problematic for Word. What? Does anybody know what that is? I literally don't. No. What is it? Da, will you share that with us? Yeah. If you're able to help us out, we'll, be able to get a handle on that.

I dunno what that was. I'm presuming it's related to search or ai. I'm not entirely sure. Let's find out. da duh. Anything else in, no. Anyway. The point of that article, the reason that I was raising that one is if you do have the capacity to generate, a plugin with AI and you submit it and you don't keep the whole process going, I'm, imagining this whole thing that we're looking at on the screen here is a bit of a plea for help.

please don't do that because it, you, are essentially using up humans time. It's not like you submit it an AI then inspects it and drops you, a yay or an nay. No, this is involving real people's time. And if they get deluged with an infinite number of plugins each day, then the whole system comes into question and collapses a little bit.

So, that's what I took from that anyway. dah Right. Okay. So in which case we will move on, and I'm gonna go to this one. I'm gonna miss one out. Now, tacho was on the show last week actually, and Tacho, helpfully gave me four, four, posts, which Yost like Yost, Devo, the person, not Yost, the company, had written.

And and I knew I wouldn't have time to do all four of them. So again, this is interesting and it goes to like the future of WordPress being bright or not bright, depending on where you sit in terms of ai. And I've picked this one out, which you wrote on December the 21st. It's a little bit older, but, basically what, Yost is saying, and there is a thread of comments in this six squarely, in this bigger thread.

So there's more to read. If you go to the bottom. of each of the posts. Then he links to the sort of following one or the preceding one or what have you. and he's saying that in the, like, those people that are concerned about ai, if you are a developer, it would appear, well, yos argument at least anyway, is that the cost of your line by line code that you used to write is going down and you, it's really unrealistic in the future.

If you are competing on lines of code written, you are in a losing battle. You are, you can't compete against the output of an ai. Forget whether it does good stuff, forget all of that. If it's just, a contest of who can write a plugin in a given space of time, it's highly likely that an AI will beat you to it.

Again, not saying it's secure, not saying it's perfect, it's just fast. Right. So his point is then in the future does this sort of trouble. Open source and he's thinking, no, because where we've gotta pivot to as expert, I'm not a developer, so this is not me where developers and such like need to pivot to is, and I've seen this word loads now.

I dunno if you are seeing it as well. This word architect that seems to be a real buzzword in the year 2020, latter part of 2025 and the early part of 2026, is you are gonna be able to pitch your skills. Not because you can write code quickly, but because you can architect the project. You are the one that knows what good looks like.

You are the one that knows what failure looks like. You are the one that knows what the whole thing looks like. And again, leaning into Nats piece where he's sanguine about the future. Yost seems to be sanguine, but just it's a slightly different future. You've gotta pivot, you've gotta offer a different skill.

You've got to be. The architect and there's more to it that you can see on the screen. But I just thought that was an interesting commentary. So more like managing the whole thing, explaining your whole project expertise. So again, I dunno if anybody, Michelle or Mark or anybody wants to jump in there if you want, go for it.

[01:00:35] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Well, this is, back go, ahead Mark. Let's go. I was just gonna say, going back to the A DH ADHD thing, we all, look at things from the big picture point of view. So this speaks to me, I, yeah, to me as well. I agree, largely with what, he's saying here. you can definitely there, there's, like I said, there's more to it.

[01:00:59] Nathan Wrigley: I can't remember the names of the articles, but there's three, maybe there sits in the middle and there's two before and one after. I can't remember, but go and click on the links in the show notes. And, Anne, sorry again. I, yeah, I think the main word here is, being the architect, I think I would put that as if you can give it context.

[01:01:17] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: An architect knows context. Yeah, And that's, basically it. If you can give it the context in, every possible way, and you work with others who can give context and then you work together, it's interesting. So I'm sure that Yos wasn't trying to be. Sary, but he used the, he used the analogy of being bricklayers about how like a modern WordPress build is.

[01:01:44] Nathan Wrigley: In fact, let's just read it out. He says, in the past, the developer was often a glorified brick layer. Success was found in the manual labor of laying down stable, reusable bricks of code. but when AI can manufacture and lay those bricks instantly, the value of the brick layer Yeah. Vanishes. So, so, but you still, you can't build the house without the brick layer.

But now the brick layer is an ai, but equally, you can't build the house without the plan, the plan supplied by the qualified architect and what have you. And so that is where, he's repositioning. So the value now, lies in, again, I'm quoting The value now lies in the architect. This architect, this new role isn't about syntax.

It's about providing the three things AI cannot yet originate. intent. The, why. direction steering the solution, and finally the logic, the structural how of doing things as well. And so, so there's a beachhead, he's painting, in the year 2026, the architect position whether or not the architect position is still here in 2027, or that's been slipped up by the AI as well.

[01:02:54] Marc Benzakein: Yeah, but this is, the area that I still have a, the, creativity side of things is where I have a hard time seeing AI ever catching up. But it has come so far in such a short time. I, would never say never, but, but you still have to feed into it, into ai, Hey, here's the problem. And you can discuss with AI what the solution might be.

But it's still, you are still the driver of all that, that solution. So it's a matter of, just. Taking, a, step back and, looking at it from a more, panoramic view rather than, at the micro level, so, syn and WP, thank you for your commentary.

[01:03:44] Nathan Wrigley: I see that you've written fair few things. Appreciate that. this one though, I think is in relation to what we've just been talking about. 100%. He says, I wrote, this two years ago, so I guess something else, AI age. AI age is a generalist age. If you can understand many complex concepts and how everything works around you, you will be the golden person to work and grow with ai.

and then there's something about, oh, it looks like comments that contain a URL. Don't make it. Oh, you mean into this platform? Yeah, maybe if you've got a URL, I don't know. I'm sorry about that. I'm not sure. Yeah, maybe it strips those out. Tco, but if you've got a follow up and you wanna give us the name of the article, maybe we could Google it.

and oh, we always get the fun twitch comment. There's no relation to what we're talking about at all. So thank you, whoever you are for, creating an AI bot, which drops a silly, pointless comment into, our show each week. Wonderful. So there we go. That's that one. I'm just seeing if those comments are catching up.

Okay. Something, it's on Yos blog says Tacho, so, but I dunno which one. Alright. Right, right, right, right. Okay, let's move on. So Dave Gray, he's often on the show. Dave's been fabulous actually at dropping in at the last minute. Very appreciative of Dave When gen have canceled and things like that. He's always been around.

He's in the UK so his time zone overlaps with mine, but he's also very gracious with his time. So thank you Dave. And, Dave has this, which I thought you might like to see, he's been on a bit of a clip, creating little utility plugins, for the WordPress backend. And this is a great one. It's called Media Library Essentials.

And, guess what it does, it adapts the media library so that you can do a whole bunch more stuff with it. I think in the near future, the media library's gonna get a bit of an overhaul, but for now, if you're dissatisfied with it, this is the sort of stuff it can do. You can view and set featured images.

You can bulk download media and images, add categories and tags to images. So in other words, if you want to. That for me is the big one. I can never find things 'cause I can't put them in particular silos, image usage counts and file sizes. You can get the image dimensions and also you can get a pop-up preview, which is demonstrated just there.

You can actually see what this is about. it's not a vast plugin that does a vast amount of stuff. And so Dave, as he is, want to do prices, it effect prices, it accordingly. You can get it for life one time price. It's $20 90, 99 or 19 euros, 99. And the number of sites goes up. You can buy one site for 20 bucks or you can buy 200 sites for, 99 bucks.

So maybe throw Dave a bone and go for the 200 site if that's your thing. There we go. Anything on that? I just wanted to give him a hat tip. Just, it's just a great guy. Yeah. I remember he started, I don't know if it was. Two years ago, maybe three even, I don't know. He, I met him on, X online uhhuh, and we were talking and he was just constantly, sharing his thoughts and ideas about the plugins he's developing and the services he was, offering to people.

[01:07:05] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: And this guy is so helpful. And he has these interesting ideas about yeah. The marketing. Yep. I don't know whose show he was on. He was invited. With a completely different view of marketing than everybody else has and, how he wanted to market. Oh yeah. I did a podcast with him. That was me.

Yeah, I think that was you. Yeah. Yeah, it was, yeah. I remember sitting driving the car from Munich all the way back up North Germany and, listening to that, was, it's, don't ever listen to my podcast whilst driving a car. Just so that, oh man, having so much, there's lots of, it brings on insomnia, it removes insomnia and brings on sleep.

[01:07:43] Nathan Wrigley: So, just be careful operating the wheel. It's fun. It's fun. Especially this is Dave's website, by the way, it's friendly web guide.co uk and in towards the latter part of 2025, you decided to, quit his sort of day job and get into making plugins and browser extensions and things like that.

His thing. So he's just beginning and obviously the more sales he gets, the more that he can do. things. Yeah, it was around the pricing of some of his products. He'd got this. Yeah. Interesting way of, pricing it and marketing it directly to hosting companies as opposed to individual sales.

[01:08:18] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: that was the tactics and just so Yes. Thought that we talked all we could about accessibility, but no, we haven't. This is the last one. this is, isn't it funny when you go around the web and you use a particular theme and you can spot it straight away, I am gonna bet that this site is built using Ollie.

[01:08:38] Nathan Wrigley: I have no idea if it is. Let's have a, just a quick scroll and see. I'm, I think so. I would bet my life. Yeah. That comment section is Ollie. Let's have a look. Hey. Hey. There you go. Look, it's, it's, a font. It's, yeah, it's a, it gives away font, the spacing and, yeah. Anything. Yeah. Anyway, rah. Go and check out Ollie.

It's a very good block-based theme. this is the Block Accessibility Checks website blocks, accessibility checks.com, and, Troy on the 1st of January release this Blocks Accessibility Checks 3.0, advanced Validation Control for WordPress. I confess, I had not really heard of this thing, so it was all a bit new to me.

And the first little section of the, post is, it's technical, so we won't go into it, but I didn't realize that this tool even existed. You throw it into your WordPress website and then helpfully in the same way that Yost got us all thinking about traffic lights and Oh, that's a failure.

'cause it's red. Go and have a look at that thing. It would appear, and, maybe you can speak to this or anybody else, in fact, it would appear that it offers like a similar functionality but on a block by block basis given the accessibility requirements of that block. So the button needs these things.

The paragraph needs these things. The link needs this thing. The, and on you go and, And so there's been an update to that. If you can see the screen, then we're looking at a screenshot of how the plugin will add a layer on top of what you're looking at to call out on the block itself.

Look, this button needs work. Or look, this table needs work and it's gets out the way, but is also in the way so that you can't really avoid it. And then helpfully in the sidebar on the right hand side, it it groups problems into categories like errors and warnings and what have you.

And then you just go through and fix 'em one at a time. So I'd not heard of this. They're on version 3.0. It just looked like a really cool project to give you a helping hand if accessibility is indeed not your thing. So it is. There we go. It is. So I started working with this on this I think only a few months ago.

Yep. I remember I saw him post something about it on LinkedIn. So. immediately I yelled like, Troy, I wanna try that. and I also love the philosophy behind it because there's a comparable plugin called the Accessibility Checker, by Equalized Digital. Yes. That's the one I'd heard about more.

[01:11:16] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Yeah. But, the background of this is that Troy and his team manage 800 university websites in a multi-site environment. Okay. Right. Yeah. So we're talking about an environment where everything else has been set, colors, branding, everything. So this is purely focused on content itself. People literally writing stuff.

They don't do anything in the design or anything else. So, I think originally he created that. For them. And then he decided to, remodel it into something that actually anyone can use. So, it's actually, a very lightweight, plugin, that, if you already are where you have to be with everything else in accessibility, you could use this, on your projects or you could use accessibility checker.

But I, this is where it came from and I absolutely adore it. Yeah, it looks really nice. we've got, we've got somebody in the comment, I can't remember who it was. I think it might have been Courtney. Yeah, there we go. Courtney Robertson, who's off, who's on the show last week actually, using Troy's plugin on my site.

[01:12:32] Nathan Wrigley: I've also have it in a testing environment to be sure what I create passes. would recommend hitting Troy op for ui ux brainstorming. Yeah, too. and then Tacho makes the point that, is it similar to the equal equalized digital accessibility checker? And from what Anne's saying, it sounds like it is fairly similar.

Maybe there's a, maybe there's some, clear blue sky between the two. But, anyway, there we go. but it was really that screenshot that made me pause and think even I can get that. and Mark was saying earlier, he's no accessibility expert. I hope you can join me in saying, yeah, I can, do that.

that looks like something I could get into. and there you go. So check it out. Do I think, I think, the, one of the, differences between Equalized digital is exactly this question. Does it only work with FSE? I think this is, a block plugin. Yes. Yeah. Okay. So this one that's on the screen now from Troy That's an FSE based solution, whereas the Equalized digital one stretches a little bit further. does it go out to Yeah, Digital works for everybody. Right. Okay, great. Anyway, go and check that out. I'll link to it in the show notes as I mentioned, and let me take that comment off. this is for the.

The people who love their headless stuff. I confess, I'm not an expert in any of this stuff, but I know that there are certain members of the audience who love all this. And it's a new tool. It's called Phantom wp, and it's SaaS meets, WordPress meets verse cell meets headless meets GitHub.

There's a lot of spinning wheels here. It's still in beta. And I think you have to, if you wanna jump on board, I think you've gotta submit an email and then, you'll get onboarded and you pay like a, like an opening price. they've got this pricing at the moment, which is gonna be different to the one that you'll eventually pay.

And essentially what it does is it allows you to have a headless WordPress backend, somewhere online. Then their software does all the managing of putting that into a GitHub repo, connecting it to Vercel, and then Vercel will then consume it and it will be. Published using Astro. So that's a lot of, that's a lot of moving parts, but if you're into all of that, this tool, I had a play, I managed to, and I really don't know what I'm doing.

And I managed to get a WordPress website up and running on Versal using Astro as the sort of theming layer. And, it worked exactly as, I expected it. It took minutes and Man Alive is that astro stuff fast. once it's actually published on the front end, that's obviously the, reason you're doing it is to make everything more or less static and fast and what have you.

Just explain h to your mouth. yeah. It's really brilliant. Anyway, so if, you're curious about that, it's called Phantom wp. What's the URL? Oh, it's exactly what you expect. Do com. Yeah. It's Phantom WP with a pH phantom wp.com. Like I said, I've had a play. I'm gonna try and get Vidoo, who's the developer behind this.

Onto the podcast so he can explain to me. Oh, that'd be nice actually, what's going on? Because I just clicked the next button in most situations. No, do this. No, do this. Oh, you've got a website? Yeah, sure enough. I do have a website. That's great. I'm not clever enough to know what's going on, but, go check it out.

Anybody on that? Okay. Right. Another tool very quickly, I have a variety of tools in my kit, which do what Falcon is doing. I've not heard of Falcon before. It's new. essentially it allows you to, well, the claim is faster, cleaner, more secure. it, you install this into your WordPress, website. It's a plugin, and then they say it brings 49 carefully crafted optimization modules into one place.

So it is things like you can see on the screen here, disabled and you won't be happy. disabled Gutenberg, that's one of the options that you can do. If you want to get rid of that, you can disable the heartbeat. Yeah, you can disable embeds. You can disable comments. Remove the website field. Comment form, disabled revisions, disabled self pings, disabled, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

all of that kind of stuff. but then there's a whole bunch of other things, improvements to the media library, a bit like the plugin we just mentioned. they'll do SMTP for you so that you don't have to have a third party plugin for that security. So presumably it's dealing with things like the rest API, switching that on and W-P-L-X-M-L and WPL, I can never say that the one ending, ah, XML rrp C, that's what's trying to come outta my mouth.

I've not used it. Caveat torso. There it is. WP Falcon, do pro. If you want to go check it. Again, I'm just very curious, whenever someone creates a plugin that is not niche, that is like there's somebody, like, what's the idea about it? I'd love to hear that from them. I have a different one called a SE, which is admin.

Oh yeah. Site enhancements, which I think I've heard about that. Which I think basically maps a lot of the functionality here. And I put it on everything now because it's just this one plugin, which does a lot of the things that I would normally maybe use a snippet for, like I don't want emojis in most of the sites that I'm touching.

I have no need for that, so I use it for that. Plus it's got the SMTP stuff, so I don't need a third party plugin for that. Oh yeah. all of that kind of stuff, so it's pretty neat. anyway, there we go. Falcon Do, what was it called? WP falcon.pro. Go check it out. All right. I'm not gonna, I wish I had time for this.

I might come back to this next week, but, I think both me and Michelle agreed. This is, a tasty looking website. Absolutely. Oh, it's called WordPress Security in Good Hands. And, it's really long. And I read it, but then this morning I realized I, I need to do a whole show on just this one.

'cause it's quite long, but man, look. Look how nice this is. Oh, look at it all. Michelle, you called it something really nice. I just forgot. I called it, Monty Pythonesque. Yeah, right. Oh yeah, that's a great expression. Definitely has the, the Monty Python feel. But it's long, very, long. But I love the aesthetic.

It just makes me feel like I'm doing some much. That's the one right? you're imagining me. If you can get past, if you can get past the, the killer rabbits at the very end, you get the Holy Grail. Oh. Oh, where? Hold on. No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I see. I just, I wanna see a joke. I wanna see the flying cow.

[01:19:22] Marc Benzakein: if you're gonna do all of it, you gotta do the Flying Cow. I'm just making a joke. I'm making a joke. I promise to do a deep dive into this. At some point we will definitely get it. But read it. It's definitely long and involved, which, yeah, I've got a lot out it. That's awesome. But, anyway, I'll come back to that another week.

[01:19:36] Nathan Wrigley: But because it was there and it was beautiful, I thought we'd, raise it on the screen. It's lovely security. Tacho actually put this in my path, I think towards the end of last week. fake WordPress domain renewal emails targeting admins to steal credit card data. So, we've been there before, but we've got a new round of it.

People sending out credible looking emails, purporting to come from wordpress.com, claiming that your WordPress website is about to expire, your.com renewal is coming up and what have you. And they look legit. Everything about them looks totally kosher. except of course when your bank account is emptied because you type in the details of your credit card number to a fake website.

So just be on the lookout and maybe warn your clients that this is doing the rounds. I dunno if it's been closed down now. 'cause this email, this post is like six days out of date now. I don't ever, it's a good reminder not, yeah. Not to click the link. If you, are getting a notification that you need to renew something, go log in.

Yeah. For your normal login and see if that's accurate or not. Any of you ever done it? Have any of you ever accidentally done, like have been the, not just the recipient of, but you've actually gone through all the steps and been defrauded? Thank God I haven't no, you're all too savvy for that. That's good.

[01:20:58] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: I smell those a mile away. Yeah, I'm suspicious of everything all the time anyway. Yeah. Yeah. Even the legit stuff. Yeah. if my kids, say good morning to me, I have to like verify Yeah. Two fa or it didn't happen. Oh, yeah. Right. And I love, getting these WhatsApp messages from, the 25 different kids that I never had.

[01:21:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. Yeah, that's right. They have a new phone number. Yeah. But it's really clever. they, look totally legitimate, they've got the correct logos and the fonts all correct and all that kind of stuff. So just beware. But I think the, central pillar of the argument is if you didn't ask for it, don't click it.

unless you literally said, I want an email from you. Then don't do it in the, well, many of them will spoof the email addresses, but yeah, most of them are from some weird Gmail account. Yeah. And I just, you have to know that PayPal, your hosting sites, everything is not coming from Gmail.

[01:21:58] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. Again, it's coming from Gmail. Just absolutely delete it right away. so syn, no, sorry, it's Taco. taco's actually had, he's been the victim of it. he, his card was skimmed at an ATM whilst Steve was Oh, using it. Oh, that's terrible. That's terrible. That whole thing where, they put like an extra layer of something.

[01:22:15] Nathan Wrigley: Outside of the A tm. But it looks like the bit where you put your card in and it passes through that before it gets to the actual card. Re gosh, money back, he says abroad. Broad progres that happened here in the United States. Yeah. I actually, have a solution for that, which is just have no money in your bank account.

Yeah. That's a great way of, it's never a problem. Yeah. and then Sinan says even when he is too drunk to read the emails, he wouldn't fall for those No. Good. But they obviously make an impression otherwise they wouldn't do it. I'm guessing, would they? Yeah. I'm sure Nom Mad Skateboarding says, gets a lot of Phish attempts for renewal from Myar profile.

Oh, that's interesting. Because it's so public, right? It's scrapable. Public data. There's a few times when I've definitely been the recipient and I've spotted it. So I always just open, I use Gmail and I dunno if you've ever noticed, there's a little, like a details block, in the header of your, Gmail account.

You can click it and it'll expose some limited but important data about who actually sent it. So it'll say what domain it came from. and if you read that line by line, you'll know, 'cause it's coming from google.com, not google.com or something, approximating it. And in that way you can see what's going on.

oh. He got his money back. Oh, that's all right. That's good. They blocked my card so I couldn't use the bank account for the next two weeks. oh no. That is something that I do recommend to people is, especially with credit cards, you can actually freeze them. Yeah. I keep all my credit cards frozen all the time, and only unfreeze them when I need to use them.

how does that work though, if you've got like subscriptions, like let's say for example, I dunno, Spotify or something like that. Uhhuh, do you use a separate one, which is always on frozen or something? Yeah. Well, what, what you can do is there's also these, one of the cards that I have actually allows for me to create a digital card specifically for a subscription.

[01:24:18] Marc Benzakein: Oh, okay. Yeah. That's neat. And, that, that also protects me. But, but I have gotten, the only problem is there'll be times when I go to a restaurant and I. Put it on a credit card and I forget to unfreeze it, and it gets declined, and then I have to pull out my phone and, add moment way.

[01:24:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah, and then look at this. This is, I'm sure I've seen this before, but I'd forgotten about it. webinar says, oh no. Yeah. That one where a phishing email combined an r and an n in a font, which collided them quite close together to make it look like the letter M Yeah.

[01:24:53] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: There's another one, where people use Relic characters. Yeah. Right. Or, a zero instead of an o. pretty common. Or a one instead of an I. Yeah. Like I think Citibank. Citibank, there was one where the people were using a one instead of an I for Citibank. And you've gotta think with the advent of like mobile banking, that it, this whole phishing thing has become a lot more difficult because in, in many situations now I'm getting a notification immediately on a phone.

[01:25:25] Nathan Wrigley: The minute anything is per, like anything is purchased. even if you spend a couple of pennies here, there and every, you get a notification to say that happened, which is obviously wasn't the case back in the day. And, and a lot of the, the confirmation steps, where you'll go through, you'll go through the cart, click purchase.

Yeah. And then the bank. Somehow gets in the way and says, right now, go to the app. Yeah, click in the app and you gotta think that's, helping. Well, but the thing that you have to also keep in mind is that this is like security. People have to react to whatever the scam is. Yeah. So it's always a reactionary thing.

[01:26:00] Marc Benzakein: So there's always gonna be like this sweet spot for the scammers before the security people come up with the solution for it. And then the scammers have moved on to the next. Yeah. They've got the next thing going on. Yeah. They've got the next thing going. So it's always, when you're reacting, rather, you can't always be proactive.

You can to a certain degree, but you can't always be proactive when you're, the guys designing the security. So there's always gonna be that person that comes up with the creative way to, I am not gonna endorse that lifestyle. It must be quite fun, if Being one of those people constantly trying to outthink these, I always, say, I'd rather get scammed by the person who back to the architect, the person who architected it, because at least they.

Take pride in their craft and I can at least respect that. Yeah. It's the people who just copy it. That, that I, it's like the smash and grabbers I have no respect for, but the people who actually put the thought into it, I can at least at that level respect, that they take pride in what they're doing even.

[01:27:01] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Yeah. It's awful stuff. Yeah. So, tacho says, tell tell me you have teenagers without saying you have teenagers. No notifications for every spend. Yeah, no, that's just the, that is the way this, the app works. You can't step, you can't turn it off. It's like that is how they, that's reger.

You have to have that enabled. And then Elliot says, if you have WordPress clients who are less tech savvy. Yeah, good point. One thing to worry about is them getting phishing email scam related to their website. So it's worth educating them about it. Absolutely. had a few clients as Elliot carrying on in the past, forward emails to me and ask to ask if it was legit.

Well, good for them that they actually did that as well. That's brilliant that they forwarded the things because they were concerned. Right. We're gonna round this show off with, a few word pressy events in that case. Let's do this. So here's the first one. So all of these are happening in the next month.

It's an international spread, but, here we go. First one is to say that if you fancy going to WordCamp Europe, which is in Krak of, in Poland, it's the fourth of the 6th of June. Tickets are now, available. you've got, the usual general admission ticket, 50 euros, or you've got a micro ponsor ticket.

When we, before we clicked go on this episode, somebody had something else to add to this one, I think. Seem to remember. Yeah. The cough Cougher speakers is open until the end of this month. Okay. Yeah. So if you wanna be part of the speaker, here we go. The open call section here is what you want to, so if you would like to speak at that event, you can, and Word Camp Nepal, if you're listening to us in that part of the world.

the, that's now officially got a scheduled date and it's coming up soon. It's gonna be the 23rd to the 24th of Jan. So if you're in that part of the world is happening soon. two more. Word Camp Zara Gosa, which we all agreed was a marvelous word. I can't read any of that because I don't speak whatever that is.

but I, it's happening in the, next, small amount of time. It's definitely happening. It says a day for learning, connecting and creating with WordPress. Oh, you're so good. Yeah. Thank you. I'm learning Spanish. And what are the dates? I can't remember, but it's happening 24th. let's imagine that 24th January is, 24th of January.

I don't know, but I know that it's very soon. So, workouts are ano Is January. Yeah. And by the way, quickly, circling back to Work Camp Europe, we have the webinar with us. He's just been commenting, we've been talking about that Uhhuh, and it's Jimmy Ava and he actually made a lovely video about.

[01:29:48] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Why you should go to work Camp Europe. Oh, okay. I'll share the link with you. Yeah, share the link and we'll stick that in the next show. That's great. It was great. It was such a lovely video. I'll share it with you. Yeah, thank you. I've managed to translate it using the, button in the browser.

[01:30:03] Nathan Wrigley: So yeah, there we go. 24th of January, word camps are gossa. And last, but by no means least on today's agenda, right at the end of the month, 31st, spanning into February 2nd, 1st of February 31st of Jan, 1st of February 26th is Word Camp Cole Hapo. Again, apologies if I've butchered the name of that. So they're the four international ones that I know about.

There may be some more that I've missed, but, apologies for that. But, anyway, there you go. That's your smorgasbord of WordPress events that you can take part in during the next few weeks. Right. Last few comments just to clean up. What did we got? BBBB, there's a few coming in. Pin B what. S Reese has dropped in word, camp, crack off pinball music.

There's a pinball museum in Krakoff, I think is what you're trying to say there, Reese. That sounds pretty cool. Yeah, that is a cool, I'm, up for that Reese, if I'm gonna go to that event, so if you want to go to the pinball museum, I will come and I will play you at pinball and I will lose because I, actually hope they also have some foosball tables around.

[01:31:06] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Oh, okay. Yes, I love those. Oh look, we've just organized the whole thing now. That's gonna be great. and then something about Stroop waffles. yeah, bring some stroop waffles to remind us of the good times. Oh, there's obviously a thing going on between Tacho and the webinar. That's really nice. And then there's a few other comments that have dropped in.

[01:31:24] Nathan Wrigley: Pinball museum. I'm game. da. I don't know why you have the numbers after your name either, maybe it's something to do with your age in weeks or something. Oh, I doubt it. Yeah. That would make you really old. I hope to meet you there, Nathan. Indeed. That would be nice. I will be there.

Bells on. I actually won't, I'm not gonna be taking any bells, but I, think you should wear bells. Okay. It's a thing. I'm gonna wear some bells. we'll see. but yeah. Okay. I'll be at Word Camp Asia as well, if anybody's going to that. I'm quite looking forward to that in the, in, the next few months as well.

So if you wanna hang out, I would love to hear from you. That's it. That's all we've got time for. It only remains for me to say firstly thank you. Go around the panel. Thank you to Mark Zaca who is, I don't know where he is, but it looks lovely and the sun hasn't moved in the hole. I out, I, don't know where I am either.

Yeah, but that sunset, it's cool. It goes on for hours. Michelle shirt down there, nice to have you with us as well. Thank you. Thank you. Obviously Anne Mika t as well. There she is. Hopefully you'll come back and join us for another show. That would be really nice. I'd love to. And of course it goes without saying that if you opened up your keyboard and mouse and you type something, we all love you very much.

You are brilliant and we appreciate you joining us on this particular episode. It'll come out as a podcast tomorrow morning. So look out for that. And Anne, I dunno if, we have this humiliating hand wave thing that we do. I know at the end of every single episode. Oh, you know about it. Okay, that's fine.

You're all prepared. Look at you. That's Oh, this makes my Oh yeah. I know. That is so weird. That's actually, oh, that's great. I love that. I'm gonna zoom into that, I think, in which case we'll see you next week. You have a good time. And if the three of you wanna hang out for a little bit, just stick around and we'll speak soon.

Okay. But the rest of you take care. Bye bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye bye.