This Week in WordPress #362

[00:00:03] Nathan Wrigley: It is time for This Week in WordPress, episode number 362, entitled Faustian Bargain. It was recorded on Monday, the 19th of January, 2026. My name is Nathan Wrigley, and today I am joined by co-host Michelle Frechette, but also by Andrew Palmer and Marcus Burnette.

Today we're talking about lots of AI. We get really into a whole load of different aspects of AI, whether or not it's a good thing, whether or not it's a bad thing.

I talk about the fact that, I'm on to episode number 200 of the WP Tavern Podcast.

We talk about things dropping in WordPress 7.0, and things being taken away in terms of PHP in the near future.

We also talk about the teams, about Guildenberg going away, about the plugin review team, and its AI deluge, and a whole lot more.

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.

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whatever it is, wherever you are. This is the week where there's been no news of any kind, on the international stage. So, so we're gonna do WordPress news instead. So I would take this as a bal, have this as like your 90 minutes where you can calm down about the furious stuff that's going on internationally and let's just talk about your favorite CMS platform instead.

In that way you will feel much calmer. I've always joined by some fabulous people. Today is no different, over, I dunno if it's on my right or left, but over there is, is Michelle Ette? There you are. Thanks Marcus. You're a gold set. thank you so much for joining me, Michelle. How are you doing? It's my pleasure.

[00:02:16] Michelle Frechette: I'm doing well. Thank you. How are you? Good. Yeah. Good. Michelle has like a massive, like, pint-sized jar of throat lozenges just to get her through this show. I think last time you were on a couple of weeks ago, maybe even last week, you went through like 20. I was, it was last week. Yeah. Yeah, I think I did.

Yes. I'll give you a bio. It's minus eight degrees. It's minus eight degrees centigrade here today. So you've gotta do what you've gotta do. Yeah. So Michelle Fiche is the executive director at Post Status and in addition to her work at Post Status, Michelle is the podcast barista at WP Coffee Talk, co-founder of Underrepresented in Tech, creator of WP Speakers and WP Career pages.

[00:02:52] Nathan Wrigley: She also co-founded sponsor me, WP, and Speed Network Online. She is an author, influencer, frequent organizer, and speaker at WordPress Tech events. And she lives outside of Rochester, New York. She takes nature photographs, and if you wanna learn more about her, meet Michelle. Online is the URL. Yeah. Thank you Michelle, for joining us.

[00:03:15] Michelle Frechette: My pleasure. Thanks. I'm very grateful. I'll go for Andrew next. 'cause I can see on the Google doc that Marcus is updating his bio in real time. So there's Andrew Palmer. Hi Andrew. How are you doing? Hello? Hello? Hello? Yes, I'm just getting over the flu Christmas day. I was, from and from Christmas day to the 2nd of January, I couldn't actually get out of bed.

[00:03:39] Nathan Wrigley: Oh no. Some would say that's ideal, but it doesn't sound ideal was, and, some lovely friends bought me chicken noodle soup and some wine cord deal and stuff, but my voice is still a bit iffy, but, well, we will you go, we will, nevermind if it breaks down, you can, you can do sign and see how that goes.

For, as Andrew's, bio, Andrew Palmer is the hosting and Customer success lead at Terim Collaboration with ai. He's also the co-host of the Web Agency Summit, which is happening again this year. I think it's, is it number six of that? I think I saw a six. It's number six. And I've done, this will be my fourth one, so, okay.

Yeah. But now I've got no choice. Okay. as we ramp up to that, I will, definitely be making, putting it into this podcast and what have you, but put it in your diary now. It's happening from the 27th to the 30th of April. and you are gonna be sharing responsibilities with Veto, PAG and Stephanie Hodson over there as well.

Indeed. And also written on here is you are gonna be going into cloudfest in a couple of months time in March as well, which you're excited about. I'm indeed. Okay, great. So there's Andrew and Marcus, if you finished, have you updated your bio? Well, yeah. Thumbs off from Marcus. Oh, good. There's Marcus can point to himself, maybe he's been pointing to everybody else.

Yay. Marcus works at Blue House in Professional Services. He's also the other half, we should have mentioned it earlier, actually, of the sponsor. Me, WP. And is the founder of the WP world. If you want to go and if you in any way, shape, or form connected with the WordPress community, go to the wp. So that's a five letter thing.

And then.world, it's an unusual, URL. I've never seen a.world before, but there you go. The WP world. I was very excited to find that one. Yeah. Yeah, that is a good one. Yeah. Especially considering that's exactly what you wanted. Yeah, that's perfect. Well, the WP world.com will get you there as well, but it's exciting to have a world domain.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a great, it's a great website. Good one. and if you're in any way, shape, or form connected with the WordPress community, whether you attend events or you just, just wanna hang out with other like-minded people, it's the place to go. It's, it's been a lot of work, a bit of a labor of love, I imagine, Marcus.

[00:06:03] Marcus Burnette: It has, but very excited to continue doing it. I think it's just rounded. Its second year of existence. Nice. put it together a couple years ago, got a little antsy over the, holiday break and redesigned the homepage and a few other things and just continuing to work on, adding more features and more things that'll help connect the community.

[00:06:27] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Well, we need community more than ever in these fairly interesting times. Let's put it that way. Speaking of community, if you want to make the show more interesting, you can certainly do that. Not that the three panelists won't be fabulously interested. We're so boring. I just realized that's my, as those words came out of my mouth and my foot firmly planted itself in it, I thought to myself, oh, but the idea really is if you wanna make some comments, it kind of keeps the show going.

if you've got an opinion on something that we talk about, the best way to do that is to head here. Let me just get the right URL. There we go. oh, that's ugly. That's not working. There we go. There you go. Sorry. It should be, go to wp builds.com/live. If you head there, then you've got two options.

There's the Google comments over at the right, the YouTube comments. So you need to be logged into a. Google account, or click the little live chat button in the video if you haven't got a Google account or what have you. So wp builds.com/live. If you're watching this on Twitch or. various other platforms, Twitch.

Actually, the comments come through, but we never get sensible comments from Twitch. It's always just some robot. but if you're on Facebook or X or any of those, the comments don't make it back to us. Those platforms have siloed that stuff, so head to that page. it's gonna be the best way and then we can actually Whoops.

Hit my mic and then we can actually see what you're saying, which is really nice. And a couple of people have joined us already, so Courtney, hello Courtney. She's saying, well, she's hand waving, cup of coffee and a scarf. I think it must be cold. It's colder in Pennsylvania as well. Okay. Yeah. Fair enough.

Yeah. and Lana Miro joining us. Good evening. Good evening. Okay. Alright. You must be much further. I get it right. Wrigley East than I am. must be. She has a, Lana has a new gig recently too, so congratulations to her. Very job. Oh, well on Lana. I don't actually know about that, but, that's good.

Well done. Bravo. what is this background? Marcus, you are being asked by Courtney, is that where you actually live? Actually, yes. It's my room. it's real. That's not a fake background. Yeah. The AI's getting very clever. That could, I think the window is, I think you're, you don't usually have the window in the background, so I think it just looks different.

Yeah. A little quiet. It's slightly. Is that better? So, yeah, we got, there you go. A different insight there. The window's throwing too many people off. a, well, anyway, it doesn't look messy to me as far as I can see. Thank you. And then there's a back and forth between those two about that. Wrapping up my day already.

Good grief. And then Tammy list joining us. We're gonna talk about you a little bit, tabby and new pastors, new for you and what have you in a moment as well. Anyway, there's the comments so far. Please feel free. Drop them in if I miss something because some topics get more traction than others and the comments move a bit quickly, I apologize.

I, I don't mean to do that, but it's just the way things go. So let's kick in. So this is us wp builds.com. If you unsee, keeping in touch with what we're doing, write on our homepage, put your email address in there, click subscribe, and you know how the whole thing goes. Confirm your email address and we'll send you two emails a week.

This thing, we record, we're recording it now, and then I will spin it out as a podcast episode in the morning at seven o'clock. So you'll get an email about that. But then on a Thursday as well, we release a podcast episode every Thursday and we have an archive for that. which is here, and you can see the most three recent episodes was Ray Maray, sir Dave Foy, as I kept talking about him, and also Michael Campanella.

And, the most recent one is all about a plugin called Folio Blocks. he's a sort of pro photographer and he fancied, spicing up the way that you can show your photos inside of a WordPress gallery. So it's worth checking out if you wanna put images on your website. So that's that. And then the only other bit of self-promotion from me is to say that in.

In a couple of weeks time, so not quite in about 10 days time. So a week on Thursday, W-P-L-D-N will be picking up its first, slot for 2026. And, if you go to wpdn.uk then you can find out what it's all about. the quickest thing really all that we do is say the date and the title and what have you, and then if you click the get the tickets link, then we link out to meet up who apparently have an enormous thing that I need to accept.

There we go. and then it tells you who's gonna be on this time around. And this time around we've got Marcel Boatman from Kinta and also Austin Meakin from Amnesty International. So if you've fancy to join in that, it's an in-person event, Thursday 29th of Jan in London, central London starting at 6:00 PM Andrew as a frequent attendee, I'm, and it's well worth going if you are around that.

[00:11:22] Andrew Palmer: I would, Batter against Central London, but it's kind of Central London, but it's, yeah. Oh, to me it's Central London venue and they work very hard and the people, and we had an excellent Christmas one where a filter agency got beaten by my mate. Yeah. And Michelle's mate, which was very good.

Mark. Yeah, mark we took on our whole agency and beat them with the AI game. It was very good. Really entertaining. Really great. Yeah, it's right, it's near the shard. So anything which has got tall buildings, I kind of regard as sort of Central London, it's in zone one, it's. Fairly near the river.

[00:11:56] Nathan Wrigley: It's a nice location, when it finishes at sort of 8 39 or drinks afterwards. And if you if you're curious about being in the middle of London, it's really nice. It's a good spot. So come and join us. details. Wpl dn.uk. Right? Okay, there we go. The next thing to say then is that every week we offer up the opportunity for the guests to bring their own links if they wanna mention a few things, and Andrew's taken us up on that offer.

so here's the first one of a couple. First one is WP Align. Now I don't know anything about this, Andrew, so you're gonna have to fill us in. Well, I don't really wanna bring it down, but, there was, there's a great guys, if you go to the About page are about us. Okay. a couple of great guys in the industry, they set up this little hosting company for agencies, really, to help 'em, and Tom debell.

[00:12:43] Andrew Palmer: I think Marcus knows him and maybe Michelle would know of him as well, unfortunately, passed away through a brain tumor. So I just wanted to give a little tribute to him. Worked very hard. WP Align kind of, they, worked for grid pain at one stage and everything, and moved away from that. And Bobby Brown's a good guy.

So Bobby's now on his own, I dunno. Doing with, with the business, but I'm sure that he's struggling on with without Tom. But it's just basically a shout out to Tom Ello, who's a very brave chap, very, funny guy. I spoke with him a couple, literally a couple of months ago. and he struggled a lot along with his illness, very well.

And, just a little shout out, really, he's, yeah, he can be missed. And he was a very good contributor to WordPress as well and all that kind of stuff. So, yeah. Thank you. Andrew. I unexpectedly that's what that one was about. Okay. Thank you. So, yeah, sorry about that. I did put that in the notes.

[00:13:35] Nathan Wrigley: No, I realize that until that point I didn't quite realize it, but, yeah, there we go. So, WP aligned and, Tom, so support, I'll be hoping the business keeps coming and see, have a look, see what they're doing. Yeah. Okay. Alright, there we go. And then we will move on and, go to this next one again.

Brought by Andrew. This is over on, open Channels formally, kind of do the, woo, there's a whole thing about that, revitalizing it all. But this is a, this is an episode of their, podcast with Matt Mullenweg. the title is Matt Mullenweg's, WooCommerce Future and Competitive Strengths in Online Commerce.

What did you want to mention about this? Well, I was surprised by, Katie's comments on that, and she's very good and everything like that. And, James, who's product owner of, or a product owner of WooCommerce as well, we're kind of talking about WooCommerce and Katie was complaining about the fact she can't, she said it to Matt and she's very brave to say stuff to Matt, like, I just can't get to talk about WooCommerce and products and all that kind of stuff.

[00:14:40] Andrew Palmer: And I was surprised at effectively the naivety of that because WooCom WooCommerce, let's remember, is a product. and if. We are allowed to talk about WooCommerce as a product in a talk, then that opens the floodgates to everybody else talking about their products as well. You're meaning at live events?

[00:15:00] Nathan Wrigley: Like, yeah, like, like, like WordPress, word for WordPress. I wanna talk about WooCommerce as a product and all that kind of stuff. But the, problem is, that, and this is the confusion that we have with WordPress and Word camps, I've always been, an advocate of having a business section of Word, word camps, of being able to talk about products, not necessarily promoting them, but saying what you are doing with your products, and how you're utilizing WordPress and WooCommerce.

[00:15:31] Andrew Palmer: Because WooCommerce, if you think about it, although it is a product, it's still free, and then you get, you, you have to pay for add-ons through the WooCommerce store and all things like that. But it's also a platform for e-commerce for product owners. So we've got to start thinking about WordPress more in more commercial terms.

we can talk about, sponsorships and we can talk about, going to the hallways and seeing all the sponsors and everything, but there is no real, advocacy for products, commercial products at Word Camps. And I want that to change. So I was glad that Katie said about WooCommerce, but she did get some pushback from, Matt, and that's not all they talked about, but that's what I'm, I, wanted to talk about is she got some pushback from Matt saying, well, WooCommerce is a product, so where do we go from there?

because Word camps don't want to be too product oriented. Now Cloudfest have addressed this perfectly. It's product led, so yeah, that, and you get a couple of days of that. And now what? Now, cloudfest on the Monday for instance, is. All about WordPress and you can be commercial, you can be non-commercial, you can have a developer's day, they've got a developer's day or they've got a hacker's day and everything's really well organized.

And I think that word camps, I would love to see word camps. Be slightly more commercial. and that even if speakers have to pay to appear, rather than speakers being paid. But, it's just something that keeps on coming up and it happened to come up, with one of the co-founders of WordPress and basically has to be addressed.

And I, I think yeah, ignore it any longer, it's just pointless. We need to move forward on it really, and make so, essentially a conversation in which one of the parts was commercializing WordPress and how at the moment you can't do that, but your opinion is that in the future it might be nice to explore those options.

[00:17:30] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Exactly. Have a business track basically. Yeah. And I think it's been muted, I think it's worth talking about for Okay, capturing it around. That word kind of says it all though, doesn't it? if you're on the business track and that's the room that you walk into, you kind of know what you're getting, right.

Which is kind of, that's, yeah. Okay. That's interesting. anybody else, either of the other two got anything to say on that or shall I press. I will take that as a press on. In that case, we will go here. which one of you dropped this in? Was this again? You, Andrew was this one? Yeah. Sorry. this is, no.

I love it. I love it. I love it. Keep going. And was a mate of mine. He basically, we, I was used to be an SEO chap. that's how I did my business. I was, and that's why my email address is Andrew Palmer SEO 3 6 5 at something. because it's just, that's what I've always had. he taught me, the value of backlinks, the value of internal links, the value of technical SEO.

[00:18:29] Andrew Palmer: and I love him and I miss it, and lots of people are gonna do that. But what struck me is, if you read this, is that he was also a lovely community minded chap and we, he used to have, up in, up in north of England, a meetup and it was a good old beer fest as well as, learning about CO so it was great, Do you want a beer, Andy? can I buy you a beer, Andy? And you can tell me all about backlinks? Yes, mate, no problem. that's the kind of attitude and it gives, he's a great guy and, again, he'll be sorely missed, but it was just, oh, sorely missed. The fact that he made it onto search engine round table, kind of says what type of guy he was.

And, again, cheers to Andy and thanks a lot for every, all the advice and all the help and the friendship. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Sorry to bring it down. no. It's these people part of the rich tapestry of life, isn't it? And we have to mention, but I'm also afraid of what the next tab might be.

[00:19:32] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Right. Here we go. I don't, oh, I'm not sure. Did you drop one in Michelle? 'cause if you did, no. I did that. No. Okay. Oh, I see. No, the ne the next tab is firmly on, is kind of WordPress grounds. So here we go. We're, I think that's the bits and pieces that the host dropped in. Let me just check that.

That's true. Yes, it is. Okay. There we go. So, let's just begin on our sort of word pressy stuff. We're gonna group it into different sections. We've got bits about events. Towards the end, we've got this little bit of WordPress in general. There's a bit about ai, which we'll drop in the middle as well. But just another quick reminder, if you're watching this and you fancy getting other people involved, send them here, wp builds.com/live, and then they can join in the comments as some of you had already done.

Right? Okay. So what's this one all about? So this is the repository, Ray Moray, who I mentioned earlier, she'd been on the podcast recently talking about the fact that WordPress 7.0, believe it or not, is coming around very soon. April, this year is the date mooted for, I think. I've highlighted a few bits, which I'll just go through.

Jonathan Roia called for volunteers to join the WordPress 7.0 release schedule. This represents the sort of normal release cadence, which we stepped away from for a little while. There we're back to hopefully three major releases each year. remains on track and for April the ninth. Obviously subject to change, but it's gonna coincide, hopefully.

With contributor day at Word Cam Asia, hopefully there'll be a massive red button, which people can press in some sort of, fun way of launching it. smaller release squad, which has been the case in more recent times. This streamlined approach was hoped to make it easier to coordinate between the different teams.

However, Ray is at pains to point out that it's not to, everybody's liking that reduction in the teams, because the documentation team, hasn't been, a part of those release squads. And a few people are pushing back saying that without the documentation team, it's not great. but otherwise if you, if you wanna be a part of this, you've now at least got some dates.

If you click on the links in here, you'll be able to find out dates for beta and alpha releases and things like that. But, at least at this point, we know kind of where we're headed. April the ninth, anybody got anything on that before I press on? If you have any inkling of being part of a release squad, go for it.

[00:21:53] Michelle Frechette: Yeah, I've done it I think three times now, and it's been very rewarding every time. Yeah. Nice. Thank you. okay. I find just, I do have a little comment. I find it amusing that am News site announces WordPress seven, and yes, there is a blog, post about it on wordpress.org, I think, or Make Ward WordPress.

[00:22:15] Andrew Palmer: but there's no tweets, there's no other social media, there's no other kind of publication of, we're looking for, people and there is in make WordPress do, on Slack. But, this is a, he's, as I say, Jonathan der his WordPress seven call for volunteers on the make. Blog, but that should be up until such time as those applications close that should be featured, I think.

[00:22:44] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting. Yeah. I wonder if, no real, yeah, I wonder if that role was something that the WP Tavern, so Caviar mTOR, I do the podcast for the Tavern, which you'll find out about in a minute. but that used, I, I don't do any writing really. I write up the show notes and things for the podcast episodes.

But back in the day when Jo and, Sarah Gooding were writing, it felt like that was a, like a really credible place that you could go reliably and RSS feed it into your RS. consuming software of choice and that was a good way of doing it. But now the, that hasn't been written on for a little while.

Well, a very long while actually. And, and I think what you are saying, Andrew, is it'd be nice if somewhere on the official channels the WordPress make do wordpress.org channels or something like that. People were banging the drum about it a bit more. Yeah. It was more than just a blog post that disappears amongst all the other blog posts.

Yeah. My understanding is that the WP Tavern is not, is still like, I don't, honestly, I'm gonna say this in pure ignorance, but I don't think anything's changed in that. I think the intention is still to get people back onto that, but I don't know how that process would happen, but if you, if you are curious about writing for the seven and you can commit to that, it might be worth dropping Matt a, a tweet or something like that.

I think the plan is to get it back, but obviously, fairly busy schedule. anyway, there we go. That's that. We've got a couple of comments that have dropped in. Oh, that's nice. Courtney's just saying, oh, sorry. Marcus, I've removed your head. can't wait to see what Cloud Firstt, Andrew.

This year's hackathon does not overlap with WP Agency, which is quite nice. and then in response to this. Piece that we've just done, Tammy List is saying there's a doc role that is permanent through all releases, like many new, like many roles now just to surface. So Docs is getting done. yeah. Okay.

Thank you Tammy. That's helpful to know. There was a, who was it? There was somebody mentioned in here who you know, can't find it. Can we also not forget big WordPress is how many people do contribute if you've. Non knowledge. Go to make wordpress.org or join the Slack channel of Make WordPress.

[00:25:09] Andrew Palmer: You will see it's my morning reading to be able to catch up. I know it's boring. It's like reading a dictionary, but honestly the updates are amazing. yeah. So many people are involved and so many people are just so busy with it. It's crazy. So it's insane. It's really insane that any of it hangs together.

[00:25:28] Nathan Wrigley: It's insane. I know it's not. okay. Thank you for the correction though, Tommy. That's great. and oh no again. Oh, I'm gonna say Gerard. Is it Gerard? Please tell me. It's Gerard. Is it Gerard? It is. Yay Gerard. I got it right for the first time. he's a bit late to the party. Hello? From Amsterdam. Well, hello Indeed.

And I got your name right. Tammy's back. Many people contribute to the release without having a role, which bolsters your point, Andrew. Yeah. Thank you Tammy. Okay, then we will move on to the next piece. introducing. So we'll do this very quickly. Lemme just pop it on the screen. introducing new theme team representatives.

There's not a lot to say here, apart from the fact that we have these three people who have now put themselves forward and been successful in acquiring that role. And they are for, forgive me if I butcher your name. So it's BJ Yadav, Faheem Merced and Justin Tadlock, who I just mentioned in terms of the WP Tavern website.

so well done for your success. They'll be leading the, the themes team during the, 2026 period. I don't have anything to add apart from, you can go and see their little bios and their experience and what have you. So hopefully we're in good hands there. Anything. No. No. But again, another, thing that WordPress to do.

[00:26:56] Andrew Palmer: Yeah. Yeah. There's loads of these little things. Another thing, Yeah. You can never stop the conversation on what's happening in WordPress. It's crazy. It's just like, I'd be really interested to see the analytics on the, maybe it's publicly available, I don't know, but it, I'd be really interested to see what the analytics were for make wordpress.org.

[00:27:16] Nathan Wrigley: which pages get as well. It's just like, get hot. Yeah. So many. But little things like this drop and I, I'm obsessive about it. I know that the three of you are fairly obsessive about it, Andrew, more so as he reads it all in the morning. but the fact is, I consume all this stuff.

I think it's terribly important. I raise it on the show, but loads of posts like this, I just can't put in because, there's just too many things to mention. Yes. So many. So. Many. but a few make it. So, anyway, well done to you three. and then this is important, I guess if you're a developer or in some way, connected with client websites or something like that.

Important to note that, John Blackburn said, last week at some point 10 days ago, it was Now, WordPress core is gonna be dropping support for PHP 7.2 and 7.3. The hope would be by now, if this is your job working in the WordPress world, that you've probably migrated over to eight already in some way, shape or form.

If not you you probably need to do that fairly quickly. It'll be dropped in, well on April the ninth. So, so yeah, the minimum version of PHP will still remain at 8.3, but the new minimum supported version. Will be PHP 7.4. So you can get away with 7.4, but nothing earlier.

But ideally you wanna be up to kind of eight point something. 8.3 is the sort of the bleeding edge at the moment, even though 8.4 and five are actually available. and the threshold for that is 5%. the statistics are gathered. I don't know where the statistics are gathered, but they are gathered. And if a PHP version climbs underneath the 5% version, sorry, 5%, consumption target, then they are retired and 7.2 and 7.3 combined.

so not individually combined, got 4%. So it's time for them to, to say goodbye. If you wanna push to the bleeding edge of PHP, you, you can, but it's a bit caveat EOR, because really it's only beta compatibility with 8.4 and five. You're still looking at eight through 8.3 really. And, if you're worried about security.

Sites running 7.2 and three will remain on the 6.99 branch of WordPress once 7.0 is released. So you know, you just won't get the latest greatest of all of the do dads and wi whatnots that WordPress can bring. So that's all I have. Oh, there's the numbers by the way, if you're interested. And it just shows that, yeah, 7.3 and 7.4 are kind of right down in the 4% area.

The most popular version is 8.2, kind of where you'd hope it to be. Really 8.3 and then a few dangerous souls going out on 8.5. But yeah, time to update again, panelists, anything on that? Yes, I was curious if that is that 4% of like. The 43% of the internet. 'cause that's still a lot of websites. Yeah. Yeah.

It is. A lot of, there's still a lot of people that need to get them, get themselves up, upgrade, updated. It looks like the numbers are there to support doing this. Yeah. I just know that when we, yeah, so click on this link. Yeah. when we moved from PHP five, whatever, I think 7.2 was one of the first ones, so I could imagine a lot of people, jumped straight to 7.2 and hopefully have, continued to update since then.

[00:30:47] Marcus Burnette: Yeah. I think the fact that PPHP made such a performance jump from five point whatever to seven, that people got excited about the performance gains every time and continued to update. Like, I think PHP has continued to get faster, basically every PHP updates. Yeah. so that's kept everybody on the train of updating hopefully.

[00:31:11] Nathan Wrigley: If you are a real nerd, you can bookmark this url, it's wordpress.org/about/stats. And on a daily basis, if you like, you could go in and see, where everything is at. I'm not recommending it, it's probably not good for your health, but, you could if you wanted to. And here we can see the latest PHP versions, no telemetry here.

It doesn't say, there's no sort of opening paragraph about how this data is gathered. So I'm still curious as to how that is gathered. But you can see the PHP version in that pie chart. I guess that sort of spells it out a little bit more, doesn't it? And it says here, it's a callback. It must be a callback, Nathan.

Yeah. It must be. Right, right. There's no other way that they, there's a callback, but I'm curious as to whether or not it's every single site, maybe not. I'm not sure. I'm not sure if they aggregate it or, take the, I don't know. I do have one other comment, bringing my commercial mind into this.

[00:32:03] Andrew Palmer: The update, PHP, any updating WordPress, any updating PHP is. Quoted profit opportunity, and especially in January, February, people struggle for work. So get your emails out there, advise your clients that they need updating and charge 10 bucks for it or 20 bucks or something. it's an qued profit opportunity, so you know, every time we have those little things, it's it's a chance to get your face in front of your customers as on that basis, I think the PHP foundation should issue like.

[00:32:35] Nathan Wrigley: Maybe twice a day updates, like tiny little updates to PHP. Don't forget PHP 8.4 0.0 0 0 0 0 3. It's very important that you keep up to date. There's another tenor. So, anyway, there we go. there was the stats. If you wanna bookmark that, you can. and then this is, honestly, this is a bit nerdy, but I think this is kind of cool.

This screen in particular, I'm not gonna ask you to read it, but this is the only place that I could demonstrate, can't be a yellow highlighter. I did actually highlight with yellow. Yeah, that is me. so this is to say that view transitions, hopefully will be coming inside of a WordPress admin near you.

And honestly, I was trying to figure out how I could best, show or describe view transitions. And I thought probably the best way to do it is just to go to my own personal website. I've got this thing, and if I click on something like a, I don't know, the latest post or something. I dunno if you could see that.

Rather than it be like a fresh page load. There was like this so smooth, baby. So smooth. Yeah. You kind of feed in, but watch this one. This is so not, by the way, this is the default behavior of that plugin. I've literally installed the plugin. Activated it and changed nothing. But then if I click the sort of home bond link, if you like, at the top, just watch, I dunno if you saw that.

It kind of, the title crept back to where it started. If I go to this one, yeah. Click on that. Can you see it? build that nice. Yeah. And the idea really of view transitions then is to make any interface. This is the front end of the website obviously, is to make it feel a bit more app-like, feel like you've not really gone from one place to another.

You've traveled into the next thing without it being a hard reload and it really does work. your brain goes somewhere else. It's like this much smoother process. Anyway. The idea of that it will be inside the admin. So this, I'll just read, it says here, add view transitions throughout WP admin.

This change set enables smooth transitions between different admin screens for the admin menu items, distinct view transition names are used to facilitate a simple visual slide effect like you've just seen, when the active menu changes between scenes and it just makes it feel a bit more like a desktop app or a, something that you might have on your phone.

Sorry, say again, Andrew. Is it preloading it to be able to transition? No, I don't believe it is preload. So that's a different, notion. That's a sort of browser technology. Yeah. so no, I don't believe it is. you can preload things. There are ways of doing that and I've actually forgotten the name of that, API in the browser.

But, no, I don't believe it is. I think it's doing things after you've clicked, but it certainly looks great, doesn't it? it's got a real different flavor to it, so it'll be a small thing, but kind of nice. I think the, you can see that it's not preloading on your website because when you click through to the page, it's not.

[00:35:34] Marcus Burnette: Animating there, but when you click back because Yep, that's already cached it, it's able to work that out and slide the title back into place. Yeah. I have forgotten the name of the API. So, so there is this browser, API, which is getting broad adoption chrome certainly. And it enables you to do things like when you hover over a link, for example, it could prefetch or preload the next page.

[00:35:59] Nathan Wrigley: And, and again, there's a WordPress performance team plugin for that. you drop it into WordPress. Oh, I think I actually have dropped it into that site. But it's an, it's a click event. It's not like a hover event. 'cause I think that's a bit of a wasteful load. every time somebody hovered it would prefetch the things in the background, which is a bit of a, it's not great for the environment if I'm just loading everything when a mouse goes anywhere near everything.

But anyway, it's, it's a nothing. But also it'll probably look really nice and make WordPress feel a bit revolutionary, and a bit different when you finally get that dropping in seven, hopefully. So there we go. Nerd out time, right? oh, sorry. This is more self-promotion, but actually not.

200. Yeah. WP Tavern. Look at that. Yeah. WP Tavern website, the, podcast I've been doing for a few years now has finally reached episode number 200. It's got two zeros after it, so I Yay. Woo-hoo. Yeah. And I, I didn't intend for it to be Corey Mass. That is to say I didn't set out for it to be, I recorded a bunch and Corey's dropped in as the 200th one, which is really nice.

And it kind of drops in because what we're talking about. But if you, if you haven't been to the tavern in a while, then just know that the podcast is still going. I transcribe everything I lit. I can guarantee you that this transcript is what everybody said. I go through every single word and oh, you type these out yourself.

Yeah, well I get an AI to make a first pass, but the AI only gets, what, 95% And there's no quick way to spot that 5%. That's wrong. You have to do it line by line. So I do every single word, put the commas in, correct the grammar. And actually I did a podcast episode back maybe a couple of years ago with somebody who was bla sorry, who was deaf.

And they informed me that sometimes this perfectly accurate transcription is not what you want, which was curious. Maybe sometimes you actually want a sort of summary and if somebody goes off in a random direction and says, ah, yeah, maybe a lot, you probably don't want all of that. So there is a little bit of editing that I do to get rid of that.

But essentially it's line by line, word by word. exactly. Perfect. So if you, If you fancy, just checking out our back catalog. We've got 200 episodes and there'll be more to come. 201 drop in this week. Anyway, the reason I mentioned it is because Corey was talking to me about how he is starting to use ai.

He's a developer. And he's been starting to use ai, in his workflow. I guess at some point. If, if we're all honest, we've all touched AI at some point. I know in our WordPress space there's an awful lot of people who are getting deeply into it. There's a lot of people who are very skeptical. So this podcast episode was a bit of a launch tab for launchpad, I should say, for three pieces, which follow.

The first one comes from James Jeru, who's an magician, and he's got this piece with a curious title when N equals one, the WordPress Economy in the Age of ai. And James's contention here is that we're entering a phase where not just WordPress, but he leans into WordPress, but more broadly, we're gonna be, instead of building stuff for like.

I don't know. You build a product to plug in because you wanna sell it to the masses. We're entering a period more where you build something for yourself and only you, and it will never be used by anybody else. It will just be for you because I don't know, you've got a particular thing that you need to achieve on your WordPress website.

and that's it. You'll just have it. Maybe you'll get rid of it after a period of time. 'cause I don't know, maybe you wanna show off your Black Friday sale. And rather than go for a plugin, which does something like what you wanna do, you build one yourself with ai, and then when the Black Friday thing is over, you get rid of it.

Delete it, and what have you. So thought that was kind of an interesting idea. He's not saying that's the only way it can go, because he says that there's definitely a future for people who build, especially build in things which rely on other things. So for example, like a membership website. You're not gonna build that for yourself, are you?

That just doesn't make any sense. Or an LMS, you're not gonna build that for yourself. So he thinks that the strongest path for survival in the near future of WordPress is companies who build stuff which bind into other people's broader platforms, that kind of thing. So anyway, there's the first piece, and before you, all jump in.

Then I saw this morning actually, and I thought this is the perfect rebuttal. Ross, Wintel, who's a UK developer, works for WP Engine in the uk. he, I dunno if he read well, I know that he did read James' piece 'cause he mentioned it at some point. He's saying no, no. Please don't do this.

he leans into the fact that he's got years of experience building with ai. He's tried this sort of stuff before and he's basically not entirely skeptical, but he's saying, no, please don't build stuff for yourself. because you just really, you're asking for trouble and you can read his article to, to see what you think.

So my question then, to you. Is, what's your opinion on this? Do you think we're entering an era where you build stuff for yourself or is that, so that's James's contention, or do you more subscribe to Ross? Like, no, that's insane. Buy stuff from people who know what they're doing and use what they've made.

So, on that bombshell, I'll leave it open to you to, discuss. Well, I, think it depends on who's doing the building and the buying, because you will never find me building a plugin or anything, using AI because I'm, I don't have any developer chops. I mean, I know some CSS, I know some HTML just enough to be dangerous.

[00:42:03] Michelle Frechette: But, I'm always going to turn to other people and purchase what I need, to make sure that my sites are working and doing what they are intended to do, especially since I don't know how, if even if I were to get chat GPT to write something for me or clot or whatever. I wouldn't know how then to go in and update it, right.

For newer versions. And so I would be absolutely, cutting myself out the knee off at the knees going forward. Now that said, I'm sure there are audience members who would be writing things for themselves and coming up with little, fixes here and there. I'm not one of those people, so it depends on the audience.

[00:42:38] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay, Andrew, Marcus, any thoughts? Marcus first. I've got some comments. Yeah, because Marcus, oh, Andrew has thoughts. I'm just kidding. Of course Andrew has some thoughts on this. That's brutal. True. No, I appreciate Andrew's thoughts. I'm excited to hear Andrew's thoughts, but I'll go. Okay. no, I think the answer is, it depends as well for me, because I have done some of this and seen some success with it, however Nice.

[00:43:09] Marcus Burnette: So here are the two, kind of caveats for me. One, I think it depends on who you are. I think if you have, like I, I know what I'm asking AI platforms to do and kind of, I've thought through the structure and some of the scaffolding of what needs to happen because I am a little bit of a developer.

I'm not a professional developer. I don't put myself in the bracket of some, really great of, plugin authors that we know, but. I know enough development that I know which direction that I kind of need to lead Claude or Chachi or whatever through, and I know where it has the potential to go off the rails and how I can kind of steer it back onto the rails at those times where I don't think if you're my 15-year-old daughter, that you're going to be able to have the same experience.

I mean, you might be able to put something in and get something back, but there are so many ways that could go wrong. And then if you're gonna try and share that with, anybody, which I don't think the. The argument is that you're building these for yourself, right? So, Maybe she would have success if it was something simple enough that she could ask for it and get something worthwhile back it, knowing that's just gonna get scrapped.

It's not gonna be sold or shared with, the, greater population. so I think it's kind of both, but I think the other half of that is mission criticality. Criticality. I think if you're building something that it really doesn't affect a whole lot mission critical wise. Build it for yourself, use it.

maybe you're, you need a calculator that helps you with, you know how you should price your contract or whatever for your proposal and you have your own formula and you know how you wanna do it, and you wanna feed it, 50 proposals that you've had in the past because it provides some context for how you do things and you're not sharing that with anybody else and you just want a little tool for yourself.

Great. Go for it. I think you could probably build that yourself. And then if it goes in the trash, it goes in the trash. But I think if you're building something really mission critical that's gonna go out there, that really needs to think about performance, accessibility, security, especially, yeah, then that's where I think you'll run into issues.

Even if you're just building for yourself, even if you just build a, something for your own site. But there's some piece of security to that needs to be thought through, then you might run into some issues there. And that's where, again, who you are helps, right? If you're Tim Nash and you know where all the security problems are and you can steer the AI to kind of help prevent some of those things, and I think you have a better chance.

But I think it's both of those. I think it depends on who you are and the mission criticality of what you're building. And if you can kind of, reconcile those two, then I say go for it. But if you don't, I would say hire somebody who knows what they're doing. just before we hand it over to Andrew, I think that's really interesting.

[00:46:06] Nathan Wrigley: Probably about 12 seconds. Yeah. Oh, sorry. Ross makes the point. I'll just pop his website up. I'm not gonna get, he's, he makes a very long argument, but there's a bit in here somewhere where he talks about the kind of, it doesn't really matter what it is that you're building, there's this entire stack of stuff which you are building it on top of, even if you are kind of blind to that.

So obviously WordPress has got PHP and a database and all of these kind of things, and so there's more tendrils and there's more updating. And if it's not a disposable thing and it's something that you want to use over a longer period of time, you have to know. How it's broken. When it breaks you either rebuild it from scratch, but if it's gonna become a public facing thing, and well here we go.

We talked about PHP updating, right? If that breaks something, then you gotta figure out what that is. And so I do wonder if we're heading into an era where lots and lots of software breaks because inexperience people built it for just now. Sorry, Marcus. No, it's definitely possible I kind of push back on the maintenance piece just a tiny bit because I think LLMs are so good that I could feed it a change log and be like, here, figure out where the issues are and it, right.

[00:47:15] Marcus Burnette: It would do a pretty good job of going through and figuring out, this is not gonna work anymore. Let's fix this. So I think to some degree you can feed it information from the updated thing and say, Hey, find where the issues are and fix it. Is it gonna work a hundred percent of the time? Every time?

Probably not. But is it gonna do a pretty good job most of the time? I think so. It'd be interesting to see how people can get out in front of that. 'cause obviously the retro cre, the retro fixing of a security problem is not as ideal as the prefix. Yeah. Agreed. For a security problem. So if you know that PHP four point, sorry, four, 8.5 or 8.6 is gonna be updated in this particular way, and you get ahead of that.

[00:47:58] Nathan Wrigley: Well that's great, but if it breaks because you go to PHP 8.5 and then you've gotta fix it and blah, blah blah, then that's obviously, this cycle of breaking and that's kind of, most of us are probably not following PHP changes so closely quite we're getting. But I guess with AI, that could be a part of it, right?

You're just instructed to always keep an eye on PHP changes and then if anything gets flagged that, the AI thinks you need to be mindful of this. Yeah. Anyway. sorry Andrew, you've been, locked out until now. Carry on. No, not at all. Marcus. Marcus this. See, this is we, Marcus and I work together and this is why I pick his brains occasion.

[00:48:35] Andrew Palmer: 'cause he's just like, God, he's got it sussed. My comment is basically more generic. This is one step further from code snippets, right? So we used to make code snippets. We used to make them all and throw them in a code snippet plugin, whichever one you choose. Google search, copy, paste, sprinting out there.

and then again, it's another step from the, abilities API, because with the abilities API, we can plug into plugins. So we've got the ability to, say to a plugin, I don't want you to do that. I want you to do this because I like your layout, or I like the way you do that. That kind of thing.

And then when we have MCP talking about updating security protocols, you'll be able to do that on the fly. You'll just say you have an instruction in your l then. Check, PHP version, check security, check this, check that. And it will just update it on the fly. Yeah. As long as your ai, LLM payments are up to date.

That sort of thing. So, I think we're, we are looking at this to con, James looks at it in two, two, simplified way, I think, and the other chat, what's his name, looks at it Complicated way. yeah. What we're looking for always as WordPress users is solutions that are quick, easy, effective, and secure.

That's all we're looking for. And as long as we can ensure that's gonna happen with the abilities API, whatever the core AI team are doing with MTPs and all of this kind of stuff, I think that we shouldn't discount what James is saying and we shouldn't discount what the other chap is saying because.

We are in innovative, right? we are looking at WordPress and we're saying How do we improve it? This is how we improve it with AI and updating it and doing our own thing. 'cause there are some unique, use cases. Some of 'em I can't explain now 'cause it's too long, but I think both arguments wind frankly.

[00:50:32] Nathan Wrigley: I dunno if you saw just related to that, somebody mentioned copy and pasting and what have you from, Google, you find a snippet, I dunno if anybody's caught site. I caught site in the last week of a usage of stack overflow charts. It was like a line graph and it kind of starts in whatever year it was and it goes up and up and up and then it plateaued for a long time.

It had obviously reached peak stack overflow. This was the amount of people who were actually interested and then since 2023, it's just fallen off a cliff. Yeah. so whilst that website is still probably frequented by, I imagine the traffic is still very high. It's nowhere near where it used to be and the obvious.

The obvious answer to that is, well, it's ai. People don't want to go, well, we've had someone making people redundant because of ai. the last couple weeks maybe you spoke about that, this, but it's just AI is, going to affect us all, either positively, negatively, or neutrally. and we just have to embrace it and make sure that whatever we are doing, we are using AI to the best effect for us.

[00:51:37] Andrew Palmer: And I think that's what James is talking about. More than anything else. Marcus, sorry. Yeah, I think the only slightly scary part of that for me is that. Obviously these LLMs, were all trained on Stack Overflow, and we need that content to continue for us to be able to continue to, feed accurate information to any of these models.

[00:52:03] Marcus Burnette: so I do hope that there are still some really great developers out there that are, doing their thing and checking on places like Stack Overflow and answering questions because that content is super valuable. Yeah. Red. It's moved to red. Yeah. Ready? And then now digs back as well. I dunno if you've seen Dig is now revived and, apparently you can get, f follow links, on dig.

[00:52:27] Nathan Wrigley: So you know, it's gonna become the SEO trough pretty quickly. I dunno how quickly they'll turn those off. But apparently you've got a clamor of people who are just trying to grab, handles, username handles, which has got something to do with their field, like SEO expert. And then, because it's follow links like they can, anyway.

Dig, come on, let's make 'em no follow. Shall we, webcam Says hello. Good morning. Nice to have you, back from your walk in Seattle. Very nice to see you. Courtney saying she's very interested to observe the thoughts. I hope it went well with you. there. you were mentioning similar things the last time that you were on the show, and then Tammy says, word precipice book was built with this tinker build it mentality though.

So yeah, it'll be just interesting. I'm just so not convinced that AI is gonna be this thing that we all think it is. I, my personal opinion is that we're gonna a, reach the capacity of VC money to keep it going in the free way that we're all getting used to. I dunno if you saw this week chat, GPT announced that they're gonna start injecting ads.

Into what it gives back. So, not only will you get the in, the fun stuff that it gives you back, but have you thought about, I don't know, getting a pizza or surprised that happened? Nobody. Was anybody surprised when you read that? No, not at all. But, it's, but also it's kind of not where we've been and so it is a bit of a shock.

But so I'm concerned that we've got ourselves to the point where we've become so, curious and interested, and then when the fort of money finally dries up, it'd be interesting to see where we're left with, what kind of feed does AI actually cost to get what you are now getting less millions of broken WordPress websites?

Well, that, interesting. Right. So anyway, I don't, I'm not an expert on this, but I'm curious to see in the next few years what happens with all of that. And if we're left with, a poorer version of AI because the, the environment can't take it or the VC money runs out, we'll certainly find out.

Right. Okay, let's move on. The next one then is, is Yost. So every time I say Yost for the next five minutes or anybody says Yost, it's not the company, it's the person. Go buy the premium subscription to the estimate. yeah. There you go. We got that bit out. you just did the chat, GPT ad. That was brilliant.

so, so Yost DeVol, the person, has an article on his personal blog. The Science Is, sorry, the Silence is Deafening. Google's age, agentic Future Leaves the WordPress Economy behind. And, I'll summarize very quickly. I didn't know anything about this, but apparently in the background, Google. have Google as a search engine.

Not really it's Gemini or AI or anything like that. It's been working towards this thing called Universal Commerce Protocol or UCP. And it's a, and I'll just read 'cause Yo's done a much better job than I have. it's a suite of agentic commerce tools in plain English. They are building a standard language for AI agents to browse, negotiate, and buy products on behalf of humans.

and so the people who've been in the room with that are obviously Google, they're one half of that whole equation, but also Shopify, BigCommerce, Etsy, Wayfair, Walmart, target and Financial Giant Stripe, visa, and some something called Aiden, a d we YEN, which I confess I've never heard of. and the, problem that Yost is trying to, highlight here is that WordPress and WooCommerce are nowhere.

To be found. And he's saying that, he thinks that in the future, I'm guessing that he thinks that in the future we're gonna be more relying on AI to do purchasing for us. And honestly, I was sitting there thinking to myself, there's no way I'm gonna be letting an AI buy stuff on me. But then I thought, we've got these websites in the uk.

I bet you've got them in North America as well. We've got this one called money supermarket.com. Right? And you go there if you wanna buy, let's say home insurance, and it sucks in all the data from all the home insurance providers. You tell it what you want and then it gives you a list of like the top five 20, whatever it may be, companies that, that fit your criteria.

And I thought, I'm already doing it. I'm already letting AI massively influence my, I mean, not ai, but a computer system, a website. And so I thought, well, it's not that much of a stretch, is it? if I went to an AI and said, I need copper piping, I'm repairing my bathroom. Source me the, this type of copper piping and find the best price for me, and then just buy it and get it shipped to my home address.

What's the difference really? Well, you can do it with a, you can do it with Alexa already. Okay. You can see, you can ask Alexa to actually buy from Amazon. Okay. You have to set it up with all the permissions and all that kind of stuff. And that's not ai. I'm, I can't wait till Alexa does get ai, but, I don't think it's a stretch, but I also think Yost is, is.

[00:57:37] Andrew Palmer: Kind of exaggerating the point. Really, it doesn't matter that WooCommerce is involved. Let's think about what WordPress is and what WooCommerce is. It's open source. So that gives everybody an opportunity within the open source market to say, let's have a look at this, UPC, whatever it's called, and let's produce the best plugin for that.

Or let's produce the best canonical plugin or whatever. it doesn't need to be in the core of WooCommerce. They've got enough things to worry about with, changing permalinks and making sure that other things are working, and all that kind of stuff without having to invest time, money, and effort into.

Developing a UCP system when you guarantee that once it's out and people figure it out, there'll be a plugin for that. just like we used to say back in the day when we weren't used to phone apps. Oh, I've got an app for that. Because then that's what will happen with the plugin market.

I'm not, I think you used to slightly, and he probably punch me when he sees me at Cloud Fisher. I think he's slightly overstating the fact, and he is bigger than me. Can I get that on video? You can be there and watch him punch me straight away. But, it's, I think he's slightly overstating the fact, but, in a good way because he's saying, come on WooCommerce, let's catch up, or Come on WordPress, let's catch up and let's be in the room.

At least be in the room. but I don't think they need to necessarily be in the room as WooCommerce per se. Okay. There's plenty of businesses out there that will take this on for sure. Yeah. Interesting. Michelle, have you got something interesting? So I stumbled upon something new, at least I think it's new with, with Google this weekend I went to Google to search for Mahjong sets that I could buy locally.

[00:59:29] Michelle Frechette: And so I was searching for them and Google popped up and said, would you like me to call the local places to see if they have any in store and send you an email with the results? So I said, sure, yes, please. And that, and they did. they, I don't know if it's how they do it, how I don't, i's not a human being as some kind of automated something.

But I got an email with the results of the fact that there was really no Mahjong sets that you could buy locally. So, Google io about three years ago, Google demonstrated. Now, I dunno if this is what actually happened at the end of that, but three years ago they had this technology ready to roll, but then there were all these concerns about, if you phone up and you fake like you're a human.

[01:00:16] Nathan Wrigley: Because when you listen to Theran, they basically, in the demo, they phoned up a restaurant and booked a table and the AI was really masquerading as a human being because they had all these fake breaths that they injected. And and so basically it was simulating a human being. And so lots of, I think lots of people at that point turned around and said, no, that's just weird.

you're not a human being. So maybe they've moved more now towards announcing this is an AI call, but we're trying to book your restaurant. Yeah. Is it possible for us to take this conversation forwards, but maybe they've started shipping it? This is the sort of stuff that, I mean the you'll never get This past the EU was, I was so surprised, quite honestly.

[01:00:55] Michelle Frechette: I was, but that's why I was like, I mean, it didn't say there was a fee involved. There was nothing and like that, no money was exchanged for me to have it do that. So I wanted to see what happened and certain or nothing. No, but can you imagine the, can you imagine how much the data people in Google are robbing their hands together?

[01:01:09] Nathan Wrigley: Like we're sitting in the middle of your transactions now, how, oh, this is great. We're enabling your purchasing and so. how do they decide which company to go for and all of that. And you can imagine Google selling off. We will make your phone ring if somebody does an AI search and all of that kind of stuff.

[01:01:28] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. Anyway, I was just shocked. Yeah. The point I take your point, Andrew, that, I think taco's got a put up taco's comment. Taco's comment, what's he said? typing in my reply. Okay. So here we go. Tacho, who obviously works with Yos over at Progress Planner, he says that's not entirely the point.

[01:01:48] Nathan Wrigley: AP Andrew Palmer. Of course, we can integrate with UCP, however, not having a seat at the table determining the standard means woo and there's more, means woo is always. Behind. okay. Which I think I said not having a seat at the table. So Tacho my friend, I think I said not having a seat at the table is more what Yost is talking about rather than I think there's gonna be some more fights, but basically, yeah, I mean, he's bigger than me as well.

[01:02:15] Andrew Palmer: Comes by Taco too. The point that Yost is making, woo, not having a seat at the table is an error in judgment. there's Facebook w has a CEO and a marketing manager and a product manager. So what are they doing? Are they talking to Google? Do they know Google? Are they have they got a relationship with them or what?

[01:02:34] Nathan Wrigley: That's kind of an interesting thought, isn't it? I wonder if this was an invite only thing and this press announcement comes out and it's like, well we woo never even got mentioned in that like, catalog of people who got invited. That would be interesting. that's a different problem though.

It is a very, an easy as well that you would've thought, I suppose I can understand a little bit of what you're saying, Andrew, in that the plugin ecosystem, I mean, we move at a much slower pace in the WordPress space, don't we, than a lot of other, SAS industry, let's say, where they can, the CEO can make a decision and then all the different trickle effects happen and the thing changes in the way the CEO desires.

We just don't have that open source. But it'd be interesting to see, but if this concerns you. I dunno, like I said, it kind of surprised me that people would volunteer to do AI purchasing, but there we go. Michelle's done it. I've basically told you that I probably do something like that with these aggregating websites.

I don't know if I could cut out the searching if it was something utilitarian like copper piping. I don't care how it arrives at my door really, but What was that, g? Groceries? Groceries. I would probably, yeah, it'll, yeah, it'll continue to learn more and more about you. So if I only buy this kind of eggs, but figure out which store nearby has the cheapest.

[01:03:54] Marcus Burnette: Cost, if your groceries are coming from five different stores, but you're getting the cheapest of each thing. Right. Oh, that would be great. Like a having a work virtual warehouse, isn't it, mark? Right, right. Yeah, it's kind of exciting. It's very scary at the same time. 'cause obviously you give up that, but, there's always the refund kind of option.

[01:04:13] Nathan Wrigley: but for stuff that I care about, stuff that I, want to look nice in my home, like a lamp or something like that. I'm never gonna let Google make those decisions. But for the utilitarian stuff, I think this will be maybe not for you, but let it do the search and then Yes. Okay. Gimme the results.

Okay. Okay. That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Aggregate all of that. Okay, that's fine. Thank you. That's interesting. You can search a whole lot more sites than you can in less time, right? yeah. Although I am pretty good, I have to say. Very fast searching lot. Very good at lamp searches. The other thing is when if I were to call the seven or eight stores that showed up in the list it, I would have to call them sequentially.

[01:04:54] Michelle Frechette: Google can do them all at once, so your response time is much faster. Do you think Google called several? I was assuming it just found the one and gave you the output of that you think it did most and picked the. No, it did, it iter, it gave me all seven and said, this does not have it. This does not have it.

This likely has it, this does not have it. can you imagine the telephone being operated by an AI as well? And those two just get into a chat. It's like, have you got a table? Oh, off they go. Up on the other end. But I'll tell you. And that's how, so, so that's how the world is destroyed.

But it's an interesting tool because, I have anxiety as a lot of, and one of my biggest anxieties is picking up the phone and talking to strangers on the phone. I overcome it all the time. I have to do it. But if it says to me, do you want me to call these seven stores and see if this is in stock?

Heck yeah. Make those seven calls so I'm not over here having a stress mess. Talking to 17 year olds who are looking to see what's Mahjong. Then you've gotta explain the game first. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so here's another curious, here's another curious side effect though of ai, which has just occurred to me.

[01:06:07] Nathan Wrigley: I don't want that future where six out of seven phone calls are just wasting people's time. I don't want it to be that we can phone a hundred people in simultaneously, and 99 of them were in some way. Wasting time, because then we're all just gonna be picking up the phone all the time because, Google's phoning or whatever it may be.

So this ucp the point here, they'll be answered by ai, so Well, but also this UCP speaks to it, right? Because there's a protocol where you don't need to make the phone call, you can just go to the protocol and you know that thing is this cost, and that there's a sale on and whatever it may be. So maybe that sort of sidesteps that problem.

by the way, just for the record, tacho says that he would never punch the Associated Press. He's lying. He's lying. Associated press. He's associated. Andrew missed that entirely, but it doesn't matter. Let that go over his head. But no, he's much bigger. Stay away from Tacho. he's vast. And for what it's worth, for what it's worth, Andrew, you're much taller than I am.

Yeah. I'm just seeing if there's any other comments. Do you know what, do you know what's curious? It's always the AI conversation, which gets the comments. Always That seems to be everybody's got, isn't it in it's in our lives daily. Have you ever known a subject that has been, so insidiously injected into our conversations other than that?

[01:07:36] Andrew Palmer: Football. Yeah, football. I used to ban, when I had a printing company, you couldn't talk about football at nine o'clock in Monday morning because they, people would fight in the print machine room, they'd fight and I'd it's, no, it's football or ai. Yeah. But it's genuinely, everybody's so curious about it.

[01:07:55] Nathan Wrigley: Nobody knows what's going on. And it's such an interesting, the, possible future horizons are so intriguing. It's absolutely fascinating. Is that the fear factor, do you think? Yeah. maybe, yeah, some of that I'd say it's much broader than just WordPress too. Yep. there's so many parts and nooks and crannies of everyday life that people have worked at, worked AI into as well.

[01:08:18] Marcus Burnette: That, we all kinda have a stake in it one way or another. I mean, I could ask the rest of my family who are not tech people, but they've, my wife has worked using chat GPT into her teaching, and my daughters both use AI to do research and get help with, some school stuff, but also just random whatever curiosities they have.

[01:08:42] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Which I'm a little nervous about to be honest. But, IED on Marcus far outside the WordPress space, but at, we have a Slack chat, an actual Slack channel, which is use AI daily. We are instructed to use AI daily to really learn it deeply because we've obviously integrated AI in it with the agen stuff that's going on with it.

[01:09:03] Andrew Palmer: So we need to know what's going on with ai, as well. So we've here's a curious thing, right? I've never done this before, but I subscribe to this, this, search engine called cgi. So I've ditched Google, I pay for CGI and it's $108 a year or something like that. And one of the features that CGI has, much like Google I'm sure is this summarize.

[01:09:25] Nathan Wrigley: So you go to this page and it has nothing but this one field where you paste the URL and it will summarize the content of that. And for the first time this week, I thought to myself, I should use that. I'll summarize what each of the articles that I've decided we're gonna look at is, and I'll paste it into the show notes.

I couldn't read it. It made no sense to me. It was like this perfect little paragraph, but when I read it, all the context had gone all of the sort of humanity of like, the bits that Yost wanted to point out, all of it got lost somehow. It was just this little paragraph of Yeah, the nuance, nuance goes.

The nuance goes. And also just the styling, the presentation, the layout, the bullet points. And I pasted in two of them, read them and then thought, well, I'm never doing that again. And that is not about the, CGI summarizer. That's just me and summaries. I, it turns out can't, I can't make head nor tail of summaries.

I have to read the original thing. That's just the way my brain, well, this is really sad. I wrote an email to a client and, he wrote back and said, did you use AI to write this email? And it was a proposal, and I really did not use AI to write this. So I turned into an ai. Yeah. And I put it through, I did put it through an AI checker and it came out as human, but he just said it just read as ai, which, so I've Now did you use an M dash?

[01:10:54] Andrew Palmer: I didn't, gosh, no. I think it was just the formality of it. I was very, it's a very, when there's money involved, you have to be very formal in your In your language because you've gotta have that nuance, or take nuance out basically. So yeah, it was ambiguity free and I think that's why he thought it was, and I've written to Marcus before, he knows that I write in a, in contractual terms, I write in a very formal way because it's just, 'cause you can get involved in Faustian contracts and stuff, and you don't really want to get involved in all that nonsense, with your little nuances.

But yeah, I was accused of being an AI myself. Well, that's gonna be the title of this episode, Faustian Contracts. That's for sure. Any of those going around. I'll tell you, I don't even know what a Faustian contract is, so I'm it to a deal with the devil, isn't it? It's Oh, is it? Oh, Faust, of course. Right?

[01:11:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That makes sense. A deal with the devil, right? Right. But anyway, so that was curious for me that I used a summarizer and it just didn't stick the content whilst. Much more straightforward and simple for me to read and quicker, it just didn't work. So I'm putting that one in the bin. right.

Okay. Let's move on slightly. We're not finished with ai, but we're, we'll come back to it maybe in a minute or two. So this is to say, Tammy, who is in the comments? Tammy is a co-founder, along with Jonathan Wald and Luke Carbu, I think was one of the founders as well, of Denberg, which is a project that they've been running for four years now.

They've had various iterations and different directions, but this is just to say that as of, it's either happened or it's going to happen very soon. Yes, it says it's now official. it has happened that is being, put on ice. Denberg will be no more. And, congratulations to Tammy and to Jonathan Wald, who have been taken on by, Conveo.

Jonathan will be the, chief Business Development Officer. Tammy will be the Chief Product Officer and Luke Kabi. it doesn't look like he's joining Conveo. It says that he will continue his role as a full-time contributor to WordPress. Oh, maybe he will. Maybe that's a role under the Conveo stewardship.

So Tammy, clarity on that would be interesting to know. So maybe it's all three of them that have been taken on and not just two of them. So anyway, congratulations. Bravo. Nice to, yeah, nice to hear that you've got yourself a full-time, gig going into the year 2026. That's excellent news. Well done.

Okay. Right. The next one, we're back to the repository. and this is a sort of AI related thing. we had something like this the other day. This is to say that the plugin review team, are getting kind of deluged. Let's go with that. The word is doubled. WordPress plugin team reviewed record 12,713 plugins in 2025.

As submissions doubled, it, well not quite doubled. It says here further in the article, a 40.6% increase in the previous year, presumably. AI is the culprit of this, and I don't really have anything to add to it. You can see that I've highlighted various bits and pieces, but, obviously this is a problem that we are gonna have to deal with as a community.

If that trajectory keeps doubling at some point, we'll have like a million submissions a year. And we do like to, manually check them. And although there's lots of technology in the background to make sure those checks are as efficient as possible, at the end of the day, we have humans in that loop.

And if the, if that just continues slightly gallingly, there's this whole thing and I think it's something like 30. Here we go. This is one thing that I want to mention. One ongoing on, one ongoing challenge remains. So if your plugin is declined, they will send you an email which you then respond to.

38.7% of plugins receive no formal reply from the authors. And that is a bit of a danger. If we get to the point where 40% of the submissions, it's so self-evidently they're not really that bothered. They just clicked a button in the ai, it submitted, it wasn't accepted. Move on. Don't even reply to the email that really is, 40% of these people's time seemingly.

Wasted, which is, I don't know. You need to get tough. Yeah, you need to get tough with them. You just say straight away you are not, after a period of time, because I used to have a commercial plugin, marketplace as you're probably aware. And if a developer didn't reply within three working days, they were rejected and couldn't submit again.

I suppose the, issue though isn't that, it's that if it, if the trajectory is 40%, let's say that into the fu let's say that next year we get the same doubling and we get 24,000 plugin submissions, roughly 40% of which we know won't get responses to. that's like, that's 10,000 plugin submissions that are just consuming oxygen time for no reason.

So, I dunno what you do about that. Whether there's got to be some sort of process, I don't know, deeper process of setting up an account which can submit a plugin or I don't know in all, but you do have an account, don't you use your, it's your wordpress.org account. Yes. But how hard would it be to, let's say spoof that, or, recycle somebody's old account or having had an account, but then you've moved into the AI sphere and you're recycling it, but you're no longer the sort of, I don't know, the back and forth human that you were a few years ago.

I don't know. I don't have an answer, but it's, it's not great. And there we go. 40%. Wow. Indeed. Right. So that was that next one. Oh, playground. Okay. Lots of, lots of playground. I dunno if any of you use playground, but playground has gone from this fairly, kind of did one thing and did it. It was an amazing technology at the time.

It's becoming more and more useful. I've got two pieces that I'm gonna link to in the show notes. This is the first one. It's [email protected]. It's a news piece. And then there's this one, three new updates to WordPress Playground from December, 2025. So this isn't brand new, but I missed it last week, so I thought I'd mention it.

and this is just UI stuff, really. If you're using playground, you might be, you might have seen these and if you haven't used playground, maybe it's a good excuse to go back if it fell short for you. There's there's now this sort of dedicated panel, this sort of like home screen dashboard kind of thing.

If, if you haven't used it for a while, this is now available, you can also now save, well you get a nag if you are thinking you're gonna close the tab or something. In the past there was nothing to stop that happening. And you do lose all your work. In most cases, there's now this sort of nag to stop you doing it.

And now you've got this what feels a little bit like, what's it called, command palette or something like that. There's a faster navigation with these quick access links. So a few nice little improvements from the team over there. And then this article just talks about. It's in a little more depth, how it's faster, how it combines with other tools and what's coming in the future.

But I, I don't understand why every WordPress developer doesn't use this. It's great, isn't it? Yeah. I love it. I love playground. Yeah. The, compatibility Also, there was something that, if you're a plugin developer and you've got a plugin on the wordpress.org repo, you can obviously now have the button where somebody can start a playground instance.

There was quite a lot of edge cases where that just. Failed and something went wrong. They've now got, its, that's what you're having. If you've got a call back in it and you are, if you've satisfied your plugin, it won't work because normally you, you have to go through an a, a secure connection and playground is secure, but it might not feel that you wants to link to your particular situation because it's browser based.

[01:18:41] Andrew Palmer: Right. So, so here we go. So this is the figure, 99% of the top 1000 plugins. So that's the claim that they're making. Perfect. can be installed and activated successfully. So I dunno how that spreads to the best two, the most popular 2000 or 10,000 or whatever. But, progress is being made on that front.

[01:18:58] Nathan Wrigley: So, yeah. That's nice. It's all good. Okie doke. Anything on that before I move on? Just well done. Playground people. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Who would've thought a, when Adam Zelensky first kind of amazing entered the idea. Yeah. Really amazing. Like, just so clever. I think I remember thinking about it the time when it came out.

[01:19:16] Andrew Palmer: Mark, as that was announced at a work camp, wasn't it, playground? I believe so. Yeah. A couple years ago. was it a hack, a hackathon? Can't remember. I don't remember which one. But it wasn't long ago, was it? No, it was a guy, it was a guy. He's a Polish guy. I think he's Polish.

[01:19:33] Nathan Wrigley: He's called Adam Zelensky and he just turned his attention to it. I think it was during a Christmas holiday a few years ago. He just thought is this, can this be Don? Can we run it in the browser? Yeah. And then just did it. and Surp within a surprisingly short amount of time, got some basic functionality together.

And I think whoever is in charge of the automatic hiring process, he was obviously an aian already just said, right, stop what you're doing. Get on with this. 'cause we can say this has got a great future. So that's exactly what they did. And as of last time I spoke to Adam, there was a team of five working on it.

I don't dunno if that's expanded by now. Possibly has, but, there are, lots of bodies on the ground making it work as you can see better. and everybody will have their own opinion of course. But I feel like the progress that's been made on it has been. Very logical steps.

[01:20:22] Marcus Burnette: Yeah. From, let's just get this thing working to now you can save blueprints to now you can save your own instances. Yeah. Like all very logical progression, which isn't always the case. I dunno. Back in October, Tammy, who was in the comments earlier, Tammy did this project called Block October, where she released a block each, Each day of the, month of October. And she leveraged playground so that, you basically click a button and you would get a WordPress on. See that block? Yeah. Yeah, the playground telex was a, that was the combination. It was really ideal. Yeah, it was perfect. Okay, so there's that, right? Next one then.

[01:21:01] Nathan Wrigley: we don't need to go into the weeds of this just to say that Justin Tadlock, is very frequently producing these what's new for developers articles and indeed that's the case here. So he covers literally what's new for developers. So I'll just go through a few things, few Highline items, the highlights as he calls them.

responsive grid block with set columns. I'm not gonna go into the text. A dedicated font library admin screen looks fairly nice. build blocks with PHP, new image, a package, that's a big deal. You'll just got your skirt and I'm 'cause of time where, just time. That's a big, that is a big deal. Yeah, because you don't have to learn, react now you, you don't have to learn another language.

Yes. Thank you. You are right to pull me up. It's just, we got seven minutes left and there's so much Well, get on with it. More to cover. Yeah, I know. Get on with it. basically if you're a developer, sign up to this, get the RSS feed and consume these as, and when they come up, there's the, if you're watching this and you wanna have a quick look, there's the, there's the highlights of that particular post.

I should have put that one up further in the list. I think you're right. I, Andrew, sorry about that. That's the way it goes. Just as long as you're broken. Okay. Missing a few out. Here we go. This is another one. If you're a WooCommerce user, be wary. it may affect your SEO, I guess the permanent structure is about to change.

It's pretty simple. If you had a product featured in two different categories in the past, it would go to the parent category. So if you had it in, well, you can see there was a perfect example somewhere. Here you go. Perfect. If there were two categories. Like electronics, phones or electronics product name.

It would pick the, it would just pick one of them. Now it's gonna go to the longest one. Basically the one with the most parent items. And that obviously may affect, if you've got a very big store and you've got multiple products you might need to, to figure out what's going on there, it will, it will make sensible choices for you, but you need to know what those sensible choices are.

And you need to obviously, update URLs in various different places if you're featuring those kind of things. what else have we got? Quick note there that it looked like there was also a filter to. Reverse that if you did not like that change. Yes. Yeah. So that's always important. Thank you.

This rolled out. well this piece, is saying that it's coming in six point, sorry, 10.5 version of WooCommerce. I dunno when that actually is dropping or if it has indeed dropped already. But anyway, just stop me as fairly, substantially important. If you've got a massive catalog of products and you wanna know exactly where they're to be found in the near future.

Right. events. Here we go. a few, we've mentioned these before, but nice to know. Call for speakers if you're thinking of going to crack off later in the year. WordPress, Europe, Poland, you can speak there. There's an application button on the website. Next one is you can buy tickets for that event as well.

Now they're selling in batches. Looks like, the current batch. Oh, no. So there's still quite a lot available. $50, no, 50 euros. Is the, cost of that at the moment, if you go for the general admission ticket. So get your ticket. And, also just to mention that this isn't, this isn't like a regular word camp.

This is a, an event, run by, Rudolfo Maloley, it's called Checkout Summit. I mentioned it a few weeks ago, it's being held at what can only described as like a holiday resort. So, pack your swimmers. and it's happening between April the 23rd and the 24th. And beautiful Polaro, Italy are busy.

Yeah. Sorry about that. Well, they're announcing their. First tranche of speakers. It's in Palermo. It's a great place, pal. Yeah, Palermo's beautiful. There was a, here we go. Let's click on the when and wear tab. I mean, that's literally where it is. Look at that. It's gorgeous. Yeah. Beautiful. I wonder where the speaking's gonna happen.

Presumably inside, but it'd be kind of nice to do it by the pool. In the pool. Yeah. In the pool. Pool. Yeah, that'd be great. Bring out the whiteboard. anyway, so that's, if you wish to be a part of that. I was mentioning it because now you've got a first, glimpse of who it is that's gonna be speaking.

But obviously, networking and all of that in the WooCommerce space would be highly interesting. But there's some of the speakers happening and the tickets are still available. I dunno where, oh yeah, tickets. There's a big orange button just there. How much do they cost? Let's have a quick look.

They are obviously more expensive than the chapter program. Things. $279 for a standard ticket. And if you wanna be a micro ponsor, it's 497, but you'd obviously have to get yourself to, where did I say Palermo? In Italy. In the month of April. Okay. Right. We've got very little time. So I'm just gonna drop this one in because I think it's curious.

I love space. Who doesn't love space? Let's be honest. But I really do enjoy looking at space, but I've never seen this website before. If you wanna look at what the hobble space Telescope is looking at right now. And the same with the James Web Space Telescope. If you fancy looking at what they're doing at this exact moment, you can do that.

You can just click on the button and you usually. It's it's not that interesting. It's just like a bunch of dots, but occasionally you need a screenshot of a starfield. Exactly. It's like, there we go. But you can go back in time as well if you're fancy looking at, what has happened in the past.

And sometimes you'll go there, refresh the page, and it's just looking at something just crazily interesting. the James Webb telescope's sort of like a slightly different thing 'cause it's working in a, it's not working on, visual, what's the word? A bandwidth. It's working on, infra red as far as I know.

But anyway, there you go. If you wanna go and stare into space, it's cool. Like your high school teachers were always accusing you of now you can, actually go do that. Nice. Do it. Yeah. And the very last one just before we go is, although it's a rival, we all love. Drupal, it's got the same intentions as WordPress and, start somewhere.

Yeah. Dre, bike tar. Who is the founder? I don't think he's a co-founder. I think he is the founder, Dr. He, he released a, it's older than WordPress, it's 25. It's already made that leap. And, and so he's put together a list of 25 things that he's learned from being, the custodian of that project and leading that project.

And all I can say is he is remarkably cool. if you read it, like he's just a solid, really decent human being. That's the, that's what I get out of it anyway, very thoughtful. Lots of mistakes. Made lots of things that went right, lots of things that went wrong. Very frank, very honest. And, I can't imagine exactly the pressures that you get from running something like that.

So there you go. Go check it out. I will link to that in the show notes, and in answer to your private chat. Yes, I think we are, Andrew gonna miss that one out because Tom has beaten us, I'm afraid. And I'm a coward. Let's just leave it that way. So that's it. Be fine. Yeah. Thank you. yeah, any that, story could come back any week, couldn't it?

Everybody's curious. but that's it. That's all we've got time for. We've reached our allotted 90 minutes. I hope that you enjoyed it. Thank you for, dropping in. If you did, if you put a comment in there, thank you very much. I will owe you something next time I see you. but yeah, thank you for all of the people that have made comments.

Love it. And then some people are just joining us. Okay. Yeah. We're just about to finish. Sorry about that. And, yeah, that's it. So thank you to Michelle. Thank you to Andrew Palmer and thank you to Marcus Spin. I can never do it. There we go. Mark. Yeah. Thanks, Marcus. You got it. Thanks to Marcus. Spin. Yeah.

Yeah. Yes, every time. So when you put the USB cable in, you do it three times every time. You know the old ones, the rectangle ones, yes. First time, right? But you can't get it in second time. Wrong. Only three times. Third time, right. Again, but it goes in this time. Yeah. Yeah. right. In which case we've gotta do the stupid hand wave thing that we do every week.

If that's all right with the three of you. Gives a smile, gives us a wave. Oh, thank you Michelle. Oh, she's going heart. Yeah, she do. Oh, and it does the heart. That's pretty cool. Yeah, I'm gonna try that. I think I've got it switched off in Mac os mine. No, we obviously don't have as much love as Michelle.

We'll be back this time next week. But thanks for joining us. Oh, showing off now. Know we'll see you next time. Take it easy. Bye.