This Week in WordPress #366

[00:00:03] Nathan Wrigley: It is time for This Week in WordPress, episode number 366 entitled, you know what? There's no way that I can possibly say the name of this title. You just have to listen to the episode. It is inspired by a game that we were playing, and the title is extremely long and unpronounceable. Anyway, that is the name of this particular episode, and it was recorded on Monday, the 16th of February, 2026.

My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I am joined by Mark Westguard and also by Dan Knauss and Ahmed Kabir Chaion.

It is a WordPress podcast, and so we do talk a lot about WordPress. We talk about community. We talk about WordPress events. We talk about meetups. We talk about controversies. All sorts, but as always these days, what we mostly seem to talk about is brand new products and things in the WordPress AI space. So there's absolutely loads of that as well. It's a really interesting episode, and I hope that you enjoy it.

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

Hello. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are in the world. It's, episode number 366 of this week in WordPress. That's one more than 365, but one less than 368 oh It's never good maths. we're here to talk about WordPress again for been seven whole days. And guess what? Because AI is now in the WordPress space, that's like nine years, nine years of stuff has happened in the last seven days.

There's no way of keeping up. So we're gonna try, we're gonna try our best. but honestly, the whole AI stuff is absolutely breathtaking. I don't have a clue what it is, so I've got the clever people to join me, the people who can explain what the heck's going on and understand it more than I can. Now, let's go round the houses.

Let's start over there. Let's start with this chap. I really want my finger to come into one day. One day. An AI agent will figure that out, won't it? And I can just prob you in the head. And how you doing Mark? I'm good. How are you? Yeah, very good. Yeah. Good. how's life? I know you've been over in the UK recently.

[00:02:52] Mark Westguard: I have, yeah. Yeah. I missed you by one day. I, I was flying through London and I thought, wow, I could go to WP London, but just missed it. But no, it was good. Just, I just took a week off to, to relax. I needed some time away just to good, good. Not talk about ai, so, I'm sorry to, sorry to drag you back to that, if you dunno, mark, it says on his little bio thing there underneath his name that he's from Ws form and I'll read the bio.

[00:03:21] Nathan Wrigley: It says, mark is the founder of the WordPress form plugin, WPS form. I nearly got the wrong form. I nearly said the wrong one. Oh. He eventually lost and found to see if Bob Dunn has been found. He also hasn't changed, his WP Bio in about two years. That's true. Haven't It's just the same thing every time's.

[00:03:42] Mark Westguard: Reliable though. Nevermind. Nice to have you with us, mark. Appreciate it. Thanks, pat. Then we've got Dan. Dan? Yes. Now Dan, I confess, I don't actually know exactly how to pronounce your sermon. Can I try? Can I try? You may. Good. Good. Give it a try. I'm gonna go for a hard K sound. I'm gonna go for Aou. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:04:02] Dan Knauss: The family's never really softened that, so. Okay.

No, it's an old German name and, oh, okay. Yeah. Okay. I don't think Dan's been on the show before. If he has, I, I can't remember it. Amir's sorry. Ahmed's just cleared off. he's obviously had it off already. Let's hope he comes back, how that didn't go along. however, his, Dan Knaus is a generally useful human for motivated cross-functional teams.

[00:04:37] Nathan Wrigley: That's what it says. he lives in Edmonton, Alberta, where he helps lead the local WordPress meetup. Dan, how is it going over there? How are you with your numbers and everything? Is it a thriving thing or is it a hard It's good. Yeah, there's, several university, scenes that connect nicely, especially one, the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, Nate, I, they've got a lot of WordPress in their curriculum.

[00:05:03] Dan Knauss: I'm also trying, got me interested in the WP Credits program, so I've been trying to get in that we had a great, word camp. last year, 2025, in October. That was fantastic in Ottawa. And actually I've gotten some of the new local folks, students and, others coming in, and getting into that at that level too.

So it was really, fun to see that come alive. I got an email this morning from somebody that I haven't spoken to in a long time. Kathy, maybe you know, Kathy. She was talking about having a podcast interview about the next iteration of World Camp Canada, so that'll be quite nice.

[00:05:42] Nathan Wrigley: I dunno exactly when that's on the books. We, in the uk we fell off the wagon hard when COVID hit. And, getting, things up and running, again has been a struggle. Not only events, not up and running again, but I think it's fair to say that. people just shifted in their expectation of what they would do in the evening.

Like there was a lot more sitting around and watching TV and a lot less going out. Obviously that was enforced upon us, but getting that rejuvenated in the UK has been really hard. we're trying. It's a struggle, so I'm glad that it's going well over there. yeah, I think I see Elliot Richman sometimes mentioning it.

[00:06:23] Dan Knauss: yeah, Reese, yeah, so I like, Hey, good, someone's, got some things going there and yeah. Reese is trying to do the, he is doing a thing in Manchester and he was on last week actually, his is less of a formal thing. His, is more just a gathering in a pub kind of thing.

[00:06:39] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. but Elliot's, definitely putting the Cheltenham one on and and we have armored back. Woo. Just in time. Hey everyone. I dunno exactly what happened there, but nevermind. If it keeps, doing it, just be, be resolute and just keep coming back. Ahed is how it goes.

Sometimes we have technical gremlins. we just finished with Dan, so I'll introduce you. Ahmed, Ahed Kaar Chaon, is, and I'll just read from the bio, is the WordPress contributors [email protected] and rocket.net and serves as the Polyglots team rep, a core contributor. Since WordPress 5.6, he's been recognized as a noteworthy contributor across multiple releases.

He's the lead, lead organizer of Word Camp Dakar when it happened in 2025. also WordPress Campus Connect, Dakar and his organized WordCamp Santa Clarita in 2021 and various other WordPress events as well, including WordCamp Asia, right through 2023 to 2026. And we'll touch on that. at the very end of this show, he also contributes as a community event supporter and co organizes the Dakar WordPress meetup and beyond WordPress.

He mentors students through the Campus Connect WP Credits and other international programs, which is something that Dan just mentioned while you were away trying to do the same sort of thing over in Alberta. So it's an absolute pleasure to have you all on. Thank you very much indeed. right then, let me just get my bits in a row.

Okay. First of all, then just a few little bits of housekeeping, depending on where you're watching this. Various different platforms allow comments to percolate through to us, but most of them, these don't, they hide their commenting system behind some sort of API or paywall or something like that.

So the very, very safest thing to do is, if you're watching this somewhere, the best place to go is here. it's wp builds.com/live. What we've done there is we've embedded the platforms video player. and if you see it over there and you want to comment on that page, you can either use the box on the right, which is, Google, it's the YouTube commenting system 'cause it's going live over on that platform as well.

But also, if you don't have any of those pla, if you don't have a Google account or whatever, just click the live chat button inside the video player. And you can comment inside there as well, but that's the best place to go. I often look back and there's like comments inside of things like Twitter and we just can't see them and there's no way that I can keep up with like four or five different platforms.

So if you're watching it, that's the place to go. WP builds.com/live and I will punch my micro. And it hurts out. Okay. That's it. I think that's probably all I've got to say about that. In which case we'll just quickly go to the live chat. Just say hi. If you wanna make a comment, that would be lovely. This whole show is, it's carried forward basically by you people coming in and making comments.

It's really nice. So let's have a little look. Yeah, we've got a few, we've got Anne joining us saying hi. Hi guys. Hi Anne. Nice to have you with us. we've also got a good, actually Anne, you'll get a tiny, teeny, tiny mention right at the end, or at least you'll be on the screen. I dunno if you'll get a mention.

But anyway, Reese already had a mention, just a minute ago about WordPress stuff going on in Manchester. Patricia says, hi, and apparently Anne says, yeah, canals is very German. So there you go. And re back about the stuff we are sorting to. We are sorting to maybe do something regular Oh. Regarding Manchester relatively soon.

Oh. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. That is nice. If you do Reese, will you get, keep me in the loop on that. 'cause that would then become my closest thing. it's only about two hours or something from me. It's not that far. I'd, really be into that. That'd be great. And, web Scrub Squadron has a comment and it just says comment.

It's true. It is a comment. So thank you. I appreciate you commenting. Love it. okay. So let's raise the screen and talk about all the different bits and pieces that we've got this week. So first thing, bit of housekeeping, bit of self-promotion. I hope you don't mind. this is our website, wp build.com.

If you enjoy the stuff we do, just put your email address in there and we'll send you two emails a week. We'll send you on tomorrow when this podcast gets wrapped up and I send the audio out so that you can listen to it on your podcast Player of Choice. And then we do a podcast episode on a Thursday as well, which is how the whole thing got started, this whole thing.

And we're now on episode like that. 456 is the most recent one that we did. And that was with, this chap who is behind a website called, we Watch your websites. I, I. I think he's from Northern America. I can't remember which state he lives in, but it's Thomas Reef and it's really interesting all about how he's using AI to try and find the latest attacks and of course, exactly how AI is being used to perpetrate attacks.

And, if you listen to it and you ever sleep again, good luck with that because, turns out AI's quite good at coming up with malware, as you would expect. I go and check that out. And, yeah, the latest episode was, like I said, with Thomas Reef. Okay, that is it. with that, now I just wanna bring this to your attention because I sleeping.

Because of this. do you know Dan, maybe, I know Mark does, but I dunno if Dan does or Ahmed does. Dan maybe is, somebody that I do the meetup, W-P-L-D-N, with he, he wrote this, I don't know when he wrote it a few years back. And he told me about it the other day and, I cannot put the thing down.

So the way it works is it's like wordle, is that word? Is that a thing? wordle in that you get a new puzzle every day. And so you, if you load it, the URL is wordly, W-O-R-D-L y.dev. So let's see who can get the biggest score by the end of this episode. So Dev, y'all have the same puzzle as I do, and the idea is you've gotta go around and you can do adjacent letters to try and get a word.

And obviously that's not a word, so I'm gonna get told that's not a word, a word. So I'm, I got some copies of the letter of the word again. And we'll all be doing the same puzzle at the same time. So, like I said, if you want to not sleep, it's wordly dev. Dan's just on it 'cause he wanted to learn about React and so he learned about React by building this wordly dev.

Go and have a play. And I'm keen to know if anybody can beat my score off my court. My score is on my phone. Hold on. Let me just see what my score is. I currently have 22 points. if anybody can beat my 22 points by the end of the episode, I will. I will. I dunno what I'll do. Probably not anything in fact, but I'll just, I'll say well done.

wordly.dev, go and have a play. And I, all three of you, Dan, mark Ahmed, go on, get on with it. Get started. Let's see how far you can get in the, in the space. it's so annoying. It's so annoying because you can't go back to a letter. You can't return to a letter. You can do diagonals. but, some, days you get a new puzzle.

It resets at midnight in the UK every day. Some days you can get loads of words. There's absolutely loads of them, but today's a nasty one. There's only a few. I think you know who the master of this is. Michelle Ette is an absolute master at this. Oh, she plays it every day. Okay, Michelle, if you are here, then let's see what you can get as a score, but I'll return to this a little bit later.

So there's my first thing, word nev. What have you got? It's not, taking, it's not taking nada. no. I tried Nada like that. Like nada. Like no, it doesn't think that's a word. I dunno how big the, I think we can bring that name. I wanted nada to be a word as well. yeah, it's really right. Anyway, go check it out and I'll return to me later with your comments, about how well you have managed.

Right now we allow the guests to put content into the show. So right at the beginning we cover off some bits and pieces that the guests have put in. Mark has dropped in a piece on his WS form website, but I think you want us to come to this later, right? We can do. Yeah, this is, talking about the WP AI client, SDK, which is one of the AI building blocks, and that's coming, I believe in WordPress seven.

[00:15:04] Mark Westguard: So we can talk about that when we touch on WordPress seven. we can just do it now if you prefer, now that you've launched into it. Tell us what you've done then. Let's go through. Yeah, so well, so WordPress seven. I think in, WordPress seven, they're gonna be including the WP AI client, SDK.

And so there are three AI building blocks that are currently being developed by the WordPress AI team. they've done the abilities API, which very quickly just is a way of developers exposing abilities in their code. So it'd be something like add a post, update, a post, delete, a post, et cetera. then they have the MCP server, which extends that abilities API, and enables, AI products to talk to.

Your product through MCP. and then they've also got the WP AI client, SDK. And what that does is it enables developers to make calls to AI providers, such as creating text content, image content. using a single, method basically, rather than having to include all your own code to talk to things like open ai, Google and Anthropic and stuff like that.

so that is supposedly coming in WordPress seven. I've seen some talk about people not wanting it, some people saying they do want it. Yeah, I think it's coming. Uhhuh, from what I read this morning is the latest and, I've been in touch with James Page at the WordPress ai, team for quite a while about this.

But basically what it enables developers to do, and I think it should be in WordPress seven, because it's just gonna provide a unified experience for developers to talk to AI systems without having to worry about including all the libraries and stuff. It's just gotta be there in WordPress and you can just make those calls.

So what we've done with WS forum very quickly is you can. create forms using ai. but we had that before with open ai, but now you can do it with Anthropic and with Google as well because of this WordPress AI client, which is pretty cool. so I'm no longer gonna have to write code that does the, to these AI clients.

All I do is just say, Hey WordPress, I want to create some text content. Here's my prompt, and I get the data back and I can use it for whatever ever I like. and I think this is gonna be pretty big for WordPress 'cause it's that next step in making AI really accessible to Plugin and even, other developers that are developing stuff at WordPress.

So, with this coming in WordPress seven, it means that this will, this feature will just switch on magically, in NWS form and any of the developers that are using that a are a client. I see. So you've built it, shipped it, but as of now, before, prior to WordPress seven, it, nothing will be available in that regard.

[00:17:51] Nathan Wrigley: You won't to use Yeah. And you install. So there is a thing called the AI experiments plugin, which is another plugin that was developed by that team. And that basically, what it does is it just adds a setting. it does a lot of other stuff, but it adds a setting in WordPress where you type in your API keys for your different accounts that you have.

[00:18:08] Mark Westguard: You don't have to put all three of them in. If you've just got an account with Google, you can just put that in. If you've just got philanthropic, you can just put that key in. but it means the, whenever that AI client is present in WordPress, either through CORE or through the AI experiments, this feature will then come alive in WS form.

Got it. so you can create forms from AI prompts, but you can also. make requests within the form itself. So you could have a part on the form. Oh yeah, I just saw that. there was a thing here. Yeah, Just here. Yeah. So you can add a button to a form and you can say, generate some text for me.

And it'll actually go off behind the scenes, generate some text, and then inject that into the form. you can even create images as well. So you could say, make, be an image from this prompt, and it would then inject that into a file upload field. And then you could maybe use that for a, I dunno, post featured image or an avatar image for a user.

so what we're doing is we're exposing what these AI clients can do, these AI providers can do, and making those available to forms on your WordPress site. So what I'm looking at is the backend. I'm familiar with the backend of your plugin. Can it do that on the front end as well? So, for example, could you, yeah, I don't know, receive a response to a form that you've already created, let's say an image upload, I dunno why you would want a, want to do it, a text field that says.

[00:19:28] Nathan Wrigley: What animal do you want to see? And of course, everybody's gonna type the word cats because that's the only answer to that question. Do you think AI can do well? and yeah, and the AI could potentially do that on the backend. That's so interesting. That's right. Yeah. And they're expanding it as well.

[00:19:41] Mark Westguard: So as well as just doing text content and image content. the AI clients also gonna have the ability to do things such as text to speech to text, okay. And other things that AI providers can now do. Okay. So, yeah, it's, evolving and, growing. I think this is a great move by the WordPress team to put this into core.

I think it needs to be there in order to get some decent adoption. we're gonna, we're gonna cover a lot of AI related content, but, and also the WordPress seven release as well. Do either Dan or Ahed, do you have anything you wanna ask Mark about that before we move on? I was curious when I saw that, what models you're using with that or recommend, like what works really well.

[00:20:22] Dan Knauss: If you want to talk to S Forms and save. So yeah, the, the form creation, I forget which model it uses now, but I tried a lot of them in terms of cost and the reliability of the data that we were getting back. very briefly, the way it works is you type in a prompt, say, I want a mortgage calculator.

[00:20:42] Mark Westguard: It then tells the AI model that you want, that type of form, and here's how I want the data back. And it gives me basically a JSO. Version of a form, a dumb down version, which I then used to then build the form. and certain models did it, some models, it was very interesting actually trying different models.

Some of 'em just went absolutely crazy and gave me like a 15 tab form for mortgage calculator. Like that's a little bit too much. but within the software itself, you can actually choose which model you want to use. So the, AI client, SDK is quite cool because you can query it and say from the API keys that I've entered in, what models do I have available to me?

And then you can choose which models you want to use. You can actually prioritize models as well. So you could say, of the 20 odd models I've got available, I want to use this one primarily, this one secondary, this one third. So you can actually prioritize which models you're using, which means that you've got control over, how many tokens you're using, what the cost is gonna be of doing this.

But to create. A form with this, using the, what I chose, I think it costs about 2 cents or something ridiculously small. Yeah. Yeah. It's not a huge amount of data, but, that's nuts, isn't it? Can I ask you a question? does this implementation that we, you are imagining and is gonna drop in WordPress seven does it?

[00:22:04] Nathan Wrigley: In ev in any way, St. Your capacity to do things. Are there, things that you will be constrained doing with the implementation that WordPress is going to implement? Because obviously if you're, rolling your own code, that's a curse because everybody's rolling their own code. Yeah. But if we're all obeying the same set of code for the ai, the adapters and the MCP stuff and all of that.

Is there any, guardrails or limitations or things which you are suspecting actually that will limit what I can do? Not ex not, it's not, in other words, just a time saver. No. the. From what I've seen, there's, there was nothing that I was restricted by. In fact, it gave me Okay, some more features.

[00:22:49] Mark Westguard: like the prioritization of models was quite a nice feature, that I was able to add. The only thing at the time when I wrote it, I don't know if this is still the case, but the things like the text to speech to text capabilities weren't available yet. but I do know that they were working on those.

So it seems to me like the team behind it are really, they've really gone to town with making sure that everything is, ex exposed as much as possible. Okay. so yeah, I, found it really easy to work with. I was able to adopt the code that I had, 'cause I'd already written an open AI integration about a year ago.

so the idea was to migrate that to this so it could be used with open ai, but also other models as well. So, it was quite, quite a smooth process. Nice. Just so that you all know, we just all got collectively called beautiful. I'm feeling quite good about life now. this comment. Hey, beautiful people.

[00:23:45] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, there you go. I, it's been a long time since I've been called. Beautiful. So I, I'm enormously grateful. thank you very much. a bit late to the party. nevermind. Don't worry. Come here every week and call us. Beautiful. And then you can be as late as you like. Okay. Thank you for that, mark. I really appreciate that.

yeah. In which case we will move on and, Dan dropped a bunch of articles in here. We probably can't go into them in the same depth that we just did with Mark's one, but let's just go through them there very quickly. Dan's obviously been, keen on looking at AI as well, 'cause a lot of the content is related to ai.

So we'll do Dan's stuff, then we'll go back into WordPress for a bit, and then we'll go back into WordPress and AI again. So first stop Claude Code for designers. What's going on here, Dan? Yeah, this was, really a, great piece. I came across in the past week, for designers. I haven't, I don't, it's not mainly what I do.

[00:24:42] Dan Knauss: It's, off to the side, but this was really well written and starts off like a lot of people in the last few weeks. Wow. Claude is now suddenly at this level. Yeah. wow. I'm a believer now and I was working, on a project at the same time. Not very design intensive, but really related to this as, someone who definitely goes back maybe to the nineties, early two thousands when, full stack was a smaller thing there.

And, just that, barrier that a lot of, front end people may be of that age too, also, have in translating between intention and the actual implementation. So he found a lot of people are finding. Claude is a really good model for breaking through that barrier. And if you're a designer, especially, there's some really good, details here on how to, get in there.

It probably helps a lot of people, who aren't too confident with the command line to, to take that on and, yeah. Yeah. Abstract that away. it's a, it is a, it's a long article, but and a lot of it is like how to implement what he's talking about, but obviously, being in the design space.

[00:26:00] Nathan Wrigley: Is, is interesting. I haven't really turned my attentions to AI and design yet, but actually, curiously, there's a few things later which are to do with that. okay, so I'll drop that into the show notes. It's called Claude Code for Design is a practical guide and it really, it's really long. so it's a full on step by step of how to do it, including this little nugget here, this subheading.

I, want to install that in my life because I'm not getting enough done, and that will help clearly. And if you're not watching this, apologies, I'm not gonna sit in. Podcast, but, it's rude word. Oh, okay. So that was the first one. And then th this one I loved, I really loved this, resonated with me so well.

this is on medium. it's Steve and I dunno how you pronounce his surname, but it's, YYY Okay. And it's called the AI Vampire. Okay. Why did this hit the, hit the published button for you? what was curious about this one? reminded me of, about Steve Yagi. I don't usually follow interesting character, very kind of maverick opinions.

[00:27:06] Dan Knauss: And this, somehow came right into my, feed. I don't normally follow him, but, covered a lot of good ground and really, he's a good writer. got. Grabbed right in with this idea of like an energy vampire. Yeah. Where you have all this productivity you're getting, but from using really effective AI tools.

But this sense of, okay, I'm just being worn out now. Doing these kind of higher level, directive architectural things, and that's heavy work too, and there's all this value coming out of it, who gets it? So he gets into the labor economics a bit there that a lot of people, especially developers, are.

Concerned about, yeah, I love this sentence. This, is just, this sums me up perfectly. I've collected a number of data points. I haven't done that. But anyway, I've collected a number of data points and I have a theory. My belief is that this is all, that there is a very simple explanation. AI is starting to kill us all, which, and then he, but basically what he said, so this is the curious thing, right?

[00:28:19] Nathan Wrigley: If you try to keep up with ai, are you not just in this sort of seesaw problem where, okay, it's delivering loads and loads of, I don't know, like quality stuff on the other side, but aren't you just in like an arms race trying to keep up? And that arms race of trying to keep up is a massive productivity hit.

Because every minute you wake up thinking, okay, what do I need to follow next? What thing do I need to jettison this week because something superior arrived whilst I took a 24 minute nap. so, and what basically he's saying is a bit of that, but also he's saying that if you, fully lean into it and, go full on, your productivity might 10 x, but very likely you are giving that away to some other entity, probably your employer or something like that.

and he's basically saying, don't be a fool. Do a 10th of the work and then. And then have 90% of the time off and use your time that way, which I love that. Go down the line. Yeah. Yeah. Just kind sit in a chair and read a book and if it's all, if it's giving you 10% or For sure. Yeah. If it's giving you 10, 10 x productivity, don't lean into that and do 10 x productivity for the rest of your life because we're all gonna be left behind.

sorry, I hijacked that. Was there anything else you wanted to add, Dan? No, I thought that was really on point. I had a similar feeling 'cause I just jumped in and got a Claude going on a project to see who would break first. And, yeah, it's, it, can be exhausting in a really positive way. Yeah.

Yeah. any Mark or Ahmed? Anybody wanna comment on this one? If not, I'll just move on. Yeah, I'll be back in two minutes. Okay. That's fine. That was a good comment on this piece. That sort of does sum it up. I, just go off and have two minutes elsewhere. okay. in this case we'll move on. This is, a very colorful website.

Firstly, let's just take in the aesthetics of this, because it's quite nice. Look at the, it is. And, he, Nick says he doesn't do any coding at all, so I've been wondering how much human help. he's got a lot of machine help. yeah, I'm impressed if he, I actually did a podcast with Nick about, so this is a guy called Nick Hamey.

he's, in America. He runs a Pokemon card shop, and, he's very, blunt. He says he doesn't know how to write a single line of code, not one thing can he do. Yeah. but he's really leaning into AI and he's achieving as we're about to see a whole ton of stuff. but what's he saying in this article?

What we're doing, sorry, we're doing AI wrong. what's he on about? What's his point? what you, just said faster is, a treadmill, is one of the, one of the points he makes. And let's see. I'm trying to think back to this one. that's okay. yeah, he goes into, yeah, his own experience and how much value he's getting out of AI as a non coder who can suddenly be effective with it, but feels that inside WordPress, most of his stuff is really directed to, people who are focused in WordPress and that bubble that we're in.

[00:31:46] Dan Knauss: he's saying we're not as excited as everyone else, or we should, be. And, there's just a lot more that we can get out of it from people who maybe thought. They can't do this or they don't have permission to. Yeah. So I read into it that he was saying that AI is enabling us to do a lot of extra stuff, but it would be a crying shame if the stuff that ai, if we, if the stuff that we got AI to do was just a faster version of the stuff we've already been doing.

[00:32:20] Nathan Wrigley: Like, if the themes look the same in a year's time as they do now, but they're built with ai. Yeah, we did. We got a nice time trade off. But his whole point is doing, I'm gonna use his words here. He says, build something stupid. and he wants us to be creative and imaginative and the AI is empowering him to do stuff, which five years ago was.

Utterly off the table unless he spent tens of thousands of dollars getting it done. So I guess an example here might be this ridiculous and I'm going to say ridiculous 'cause it is quite ridiculous. This mouse interaction where everywhere the mouse moves, I dunno if you can see that little stars are dropping.

It's pink and Yeah, it's pink and, if yeah. And if you go here, the, it's hijacked, the goodness knows what that is. It's like a finger, but with like a yellow end to it. I dunno what that is. But the point is he's up to silly stuff and that's his shtick, I think is if the AI is saving you time.

Let's not just settle for the same stuff. Like, we'll reduce time, but produce the same old stuff. Let's just do crazy stuff instead. and I get it. I think he's onto something. good point. From Ann and though not, too hot on accessibility. Which actually you, can do the testing, you can set that up in your model and you can do excellent accessibility work.

[00:33:40] Dan Knauss: but yeah, maybe he hasn't quite gotten to that yet. Yeah. So, okay. Fair enough. Let me put that on there. so I'm just going to show the, comment it's got truncated Anne, sorry about that, but it says as follows, ham, he's generated so it's cool, but also quite inaccessible. you wouldn't, you I would've, anticipated that actually, I would've thought that the accessibility is not on his roadmap.

[00:34:04] Nathan Wrigley: both technically and in color contrast. And then it says, I'm sure a can, AI can do better if prompted for it, which in itself is a lot of work in the prompting. Yes. Good point. Ann, thank you. I dunno if there's any other comments that come in around that. this font is gold. which font?

the font on his website. I guess it on his website. Yeah. What is it? It looks like a type, like a typewriter font, doesn't it? Yeah. Yeah. I dunno what that font is, but it is, it's nice. I agree. and then James Loud, just saying Good morning. Hello. Hello James. Nice to have you with us. Hey James. Reese says, using AI to build trails for mouse pointers.

We're going, yeah, we're going back to the MySpace space. You know what, I think that's what this guy wants, I think. Nick wants the MySpace days. He wants that like, let's just all lean in and do stupid things and make mistakes and have fun. let's not have the cookie cutter, which I think is great.

And Elliot Sby says hello. So, there we go. That's nice. anyway, that's Nick Hamey and we've got a few other things. Nick. Nick, as we said, he's not a developer. Oh, he's very, open about that. He doesn't develop at all, but he is on a right old clip because the next few things, are from him as well.

You can see the same website here. This is, called Nobody Rips Out the Plumbing. And, and this is the debate of our time. I think if you're in the WordPress space, I think it's very easy to do the whole chicken little thing. AI is gonna eat your launch. Nobody's gonna want a CMS anymore. Why would you need a CMS?

Because, you just tell an AI to build you a CMS and ha build you a CMS. And Nick's point is no, you, that's not what's gonna happen because he makes the analogy when you buy a house, if you want to renovate the house, you rip out the kitchen. Chuck out the carpets, all of that, put a lick of paint on the wall.

But what you don't do is you don't rip the electrics out and the plumbing, and his analogy here is, WordPress is the plumbing, WordPress is the electrics. You don't change that. just so that Nick, if you do listen to this, he was in the comments the other week, if you do listen to this, when I moved into this house, I ripped out the plumbing and the electrics just saying, so you know, it, can be done.

but yeah, he's trying to be sanguine. He's saying, don't worry, the AI is not coming to eat your lunch. There's too much, there's too much heritage in the WordPress space. There's too much code there, there's too much dependency on it already. fear ye not. So even somebody like him who is massively leaning into making things with ai.

He's saying calm down. yeah. Yeah. And if you're, the operating system of the web, yeah, that's the analogy would be most people are working on the GUI layer and the kernel is not going to be suddenly obsolete and swapped out. Yeah. Yeah. so that's a good way of thinking about it. Yeah.

[00:37:05] Dan Knauss: I think, not to worry, hey, he's got another encouraging piece for plugin, folks too in, in the business. I less convinced by, but, reassuring or two. Okay. We'll come to that in a minute. And, James Lau slightly controversially says that everybody should, experience demolishing a house at least once in their life.

[00:37:29] Nathan Wrigley: I disagree. I disagree. I don't wanna historic. No. James, what, why did you demolish a house? Just that I think. James was just suggesting that we go and have some rage. Oh, those house go and, yep. Yeah. Chuck it all, Chuck it, throw it all up in the air as they say and see how it lands. Got it. I wonder if he actually did demolish a house.

James, come back to us. Tell us if you actually demolished a house. But no, I expect Ahmed's. It's probably more metaphor than it is reality. Okay then. So Nick Hamey, two outta three articles. and now look, here's another one. WP Pinch. I confess I didn't even get time really to look into this, Dan, so if, you can tell me what it is, that's great.

If not, we can just, this is gonna be a little safer than a molt bot, but it's, oh no. within that craze of, equip, WordPress, I've seen a couple other projects like this. At least I know who's behind this one. Some of them are a little scary 'cause I'm not sure what's going on in there, who's responsible.

[00:38:33] Dan Knauss: But this will, let you, Identify your WordPress a little more in terms of you can talk to it, tell it what to do. there are a lot of things coming out and doing that, but I'm not sure how autonomous this will make your WordPress site, which, might be interesting.

Especially I'm terrifying. Especially is also terrifying, federated, or, yeah. If Nick is not a developer, which he's very obviously is then yeah, I don't know. I don't know if we should be, granting all these powers to it. Can I just say though, Nick, if you are listening to this, site needs far more rainbows.

[00:39:13] Nathan Wrigley: There's not, there's no unicorns here. All right, so you got a little wibbly yo logo there, which is fun. Look at that. But, I think, It's stealing the Halifax, WaPo Canadian. Oh, is that what that is? Might be, no. lobster with, yeah, lobster. We've got a similar one for, okay.

So WP Pinch it's called, and it says WordPress in your pocket. Your AI system runs it from the chat. You never leave. Your site isn't another tab. It's in the same chat. Go and have a play. And, but be careful. Don't do it on your client website. Your credit card. Be my, yeah, that's right. Have your, credit card firmly hidden.

okay. And then this one, I dunno if this is, I think this No, this is you as well, Dan, isn't it? yeah. And that's like, I am, these are popping up and I don't, oh, I don't know who's behind these things. Nope. And then it's like this whole realm of that's a, that's cool advice to, try anything but.

[00:40:14] Dan Knauss: There. I think there's a limit there too. So encouraging people to go out and try something stupid. there's, there might be a real sharp line at, that point of, yeah, what do you give your wallet and credentials to a lot of, crazy and predictable security failures happening over things like that.

So, yeah. And, interesting that, like, it, I don't even know, I used to rely on the look and feel of a website to give me the sort of like the heebie-jeebies about whether or not something was legit or started yesterday or what have you. Now I'm imagining that an AI could throw this site together In a heartbeat, in a few milliseconds. their demo site is all these articles written in Chinese by, in a WordPress site. I was quickly like, can I find a person behind this? And now fairly anonymous, new GitHub repo. So that's, there is use your human critical capabilities and Okay.

Be careful. Okay. Yeah. Alright. And then we'll do, I think this is the da No, let's go to this one. This is you though, right? This is your AUB though. That's me. So, yeah. Yeah. And I, I think the, what ties things together, these things I've been reading this week, the Steve Yagi and, and Nick kinda slow down and think and, be creative and, insert your humanity into your work a little.

I decided to see who would break first, me or Claude Opus. working through several iterations of, a project I've had in mind for a couple of years and really started with, I think originally just some terrible little code gist here in, in GitHub. So I've had. Interesting discussions with different people in the security space and in WordPress and a lot of like, eh, you can't do this, or, that's crazy, or whatever.

Some encouraging things over the years about it. But this is a, ridiculous idea, project that, it's got a fun name, that's for sure. Pseudo, a pseudo what could possibly go wrong? Linux. this is a safety feature in, in Linux systems, as, you may know. Yeah. super user do.

So it's just gating everything. that requests to do a, dangerous action in WordPress. Pretty much anything privileged above a. an editor role, but it's not role based. It's just looking at those actions and whatever surface that comes in through, it's going to either block or challenge, depending on how you've set it up with some simple, oh, okay.

[00:42:57] Mark Westguard: Alright. Settings. Okay. And you just get a little re off. And maybe if you have two FA set up, two factor, authentication will happen. Tried to make the UX really simple, really clean inside just keyboard command. You can just start a session, get 5, 10, 15 minutes to do whatever your capabilities are, but you have to re-authenticate to do them.

[00:43:20] Dan Knauss: So it, it has some utility for stopping. Things like Tom Rafe would've told you about with, either someone internally has gone rogue or a session's been hijacked. Oh, that's interesting. Okay, so the about us on the side here, I'll just quickly read it so that people who are listening to this can't see the screen have got some idea what we're going on.

[00:43:40] Nathan Wrigley: on about, we're looking at Dan's GitHub repo. and so it's, github.com/d, Knaus, K-N-A-U-S-S, and then forward slash and the project is WP dash pseudo, SUDO, which by the way, Reese a very credible developer. he, you've just taught him what pseudo meant. yeah, I thought it was like a game where you threw Dyson had to move around.

Oh, no. Oh, that's, that's, anyway, so here we go. The about us from Dan says, pseudo for WordPress, dangerous actions, activating plugins, deleting users changing in critical settings are gated by a required re authentication step. Re, regardless of user role time bound sessions two FA support rate limiting and configurable policies for rest.

Ever say this? X-M-L-R-P-C? No role escalation, no new permissions, just a gate. That's a cool project. I like that. It's cool. perhaps the, yeah. John Blackburn for little quick discussion in, post data Slack this, or last week, about. Some of the fundamental ideas to it. So it's it's something, the idea is out there.

[00:44:56] Dan Knauss: I've lifted it from other people, but yeah, I need human testers. Try it out. Tell me why it's nuts. okay. See if you can, yeah. We will see what people say. It's just occurred to me that we've lost Ahmed again. I dunno when that happened. How long has Ahed been gone? About five minutes. Oh really?

[00:45:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. I've got my screen's overlapping, so I've got the screen with He's having trouble. Oh, bless him. Yeah, I've got no private chat or anything, so maybe Ahmed's called it a day. Maybe his tech has cap capsized and it's not working. So Ahmed, if you can hear this and you wanna just. Keep trying feel free, but also if, if you are, let's say internet connection or whatever it was that was causing problems there, if it's collapsed and you can't get in, I appreciate you coming.

and we'll make sure that you get a link to try again, a future date. But like I said, keep trying if you can. so links to that repo will be in the show notes, which will come out tomorrow. Damn. Quick question on the two factor support in that plugin. does it, work with certain two FA plugins?

[00:46:01] Mark Westguard: Because I know there's a lot of them out there, or is it they work in, they all use, they all hook in, in, in the same way to that process. I haven't tested it with anything except two factor, which is the community plugin that Okay. Everyone tends to use first. So there's a good solid free community plugin, two, two factor that totally works in there.

[00:46:22] Dan Knauss: Yeah. Others should, but that would be a good thing to test. Yeah. my only reason for asking that is that, in my plugin I have the ability for people to create custom login forms. And people have always asked about TFA support on those and it's always been difficult 'cause there's no standardized way of doing that.

[00:46:38] Mark Westguard: So I was just curious how you were implementing that.

[00:46:43] Nathan Wrigley: Okie dokie. There we go. So, Ahmed's joined us again. He's back. His technology is yay. Yeah. Thank you. And, coinciding with that is, is this repository story, which Ahmed dropped into the show notes, a little while ago. this fits in with, I, I'm gonna collide the word Camp Asia things altogether.

I had a few bits that I was leaving till the end, but I might as well do them at the same time. So, this is the repository, Ray at the repository. Please sign up to Ray's newsletter. It's ever so good. this is Inside Word Camp Asia 2026, planning for 3000 plus attendees and a live WordPress seven release.

Ahmed, anything you wanna draw out of this article particularly. Sure. So, apart from the fact that this is going to be one of the largest contributors day ever, we are planning to have a what, seven Zero release session. And, this is being all, collaborated with Jonathan Dero and the contributors day team for work Asia.

[00:47:45] Ahmed Kabir Chaion: Also, I happen to be juggling my role between the release lead as the release coordinator for 7.0 as well as the contributors to the team. So we hope everything goes well, but there's so many things that's gonna, res beside the fate of our expectations. So yeah, we are hoping for the best, 3000. If you think like with a couple hundred people and you try to explain them the WordPress release process, it becomes a daunting task.

But we're trying to do it done, get it done. Yeah. Is the idea. Now this may sound a bit like theater, which I think maybe there's a bit of theater to be done here is the idea to have a big red button or something like that, and all the people on the stage go and press the big red button. A bit like we had at State of the Word, where everybody leaned in and a bit of theater and a bit of all of that kind of stuff.

[00:48:38] Nathan Wrigley: Or is it, is your concern more about, look, we just have to have all the ducks in a row. 'cause one of, one of the things that I think is curious is that a lot of the people like Jonathan. Who are really pivotal to making this release happen in a timely way. They're all gonna be getting on airplanes. And so there'll be this whole period of time where some of the importance decisions that need to be made at the 11th hour, everybody's gonna be on airplanes coming to Mumbai.

So, so there's that as well. So, I dunno if, so we discussed that part as well. And, we curated the timing of the, there's actually no button that happens. It's more like testing and you, got, that very well, even in the, final release can candidate or 24 hours ahead of the release, there's a dryer.

[00:49:24] Ahmed Kabir Chaion: So that pretty much tells you the story. But yeah, it always gives the, an idea of that button and the theatrics behind, behind it to attract new people into the release squad or contributors. So that's always a good thing. And with, about 1000, of students joining that day, we need a little bit of theatrics and butter, I think so, I think that could be a real nice moment, couldn't it? the idea. And if, as Jonathan would like, the idea would be that these major, so the flagship events, like the word Camp Asia and Europe and us, if the, if it can be made so that the release schedule for major WordPress releases coincides with those, I think, that's quite fun.

[00:50:08] Nathan Wrigley: I think there's something quite cool to be done about that, the marketing around that could be pretty slick. definitely. Yeah. Yeah. I just wanna add that the release candidate four will be done at, we, I think it's a webcam in France, so j he's gonna be there. So we are gonna do like a rehearsal there and if everything works good, based on what we learned from state of the world, we want to get it done, in, work Asia.

nice, nice. speaking of Word Camp Asia, so I'll just mention again, so the article that you were looking at here was on the repository, it was called Inside Word Camp Asia 2026, planning for 3000 plus Attendees and a Live WordPress seven WordPress 7.0 release. And obviously the article paints the picture of how do you, put together an event where 3000 people show up from all over the globe, but then also, if you are if you're unsure as to whether that event is for you, maybe this is something that might be of interest to you.

So the release, of the speaker schedule, which is, a big part of why people show up, is that's now finalized. This is now finalized. so if you go to asia dot word camp.org/the numerals 2026 and then slash speakers links in the show notes tomorrow, then you can see who is speaking what they do.

And then obviously you can find out a little bit more. And it's, really, there's a lot, there's a lot of speakers going on, some very familiar faces. And there's the Jonathan that we've just been talking about, but also some faces that I have not come across before. So that'll be quite nice. I'm gonna go, I dunno if either Dan or Mark, I dunno if you are planning to attend, but I shall certainly be there.

along, along with many others. Hey, I'm, I'm gonna press comp this year. I was, got a commitment there, so unfortunately I can't do work and patient this year, but I did the last Oh, did they overlap, right? Yeah, The dates, yeah. Overlapped. But, I did the last three, I sponsored the last three and, they're absolutely brilliant.

[00:52:11] Mark Westguard: I love a work out 'cause you get to. Travel. Travel and see a different country. And, they are the, in terms of travel, the best ones you can go to. So, yeah. Yeah. I'm jealous. I'm jealous. We had a memorable trip up a river, didn't we? We did. Which never, as a matter of fact, I met Mark in person at work in 24, 20, 25.

[00:52:34] Ahmed Kabir Chaion: Yeah. Yeah. Isn't that nice? It's happening really soon. not very, soon, but it's happening fairly soon. April, can't remember the exact dates, but it's in April. and I don't know what the, I dunno what the visa restrictions are based upon where you are, but I think if you are thinking of coming, that is something that you definitely need to look at.

[00:52:53] Nathan Wrigley: Residents of the UK as an example, the part of the world where I come from, we, we do need a visa. So you need to have that, firmly in mind. And it's curious, the way that you've got to do it is you've got to apply within a 30 day window of when the event is so you can't apply, for the visa. 31 days before travel, you have to apply within this 30 day window.

So have that in the back of your mind. 'cause it's the sort of thing that, you've gotta do and then you forget to do it. And then of course you can't actually get on the plane. so anyway, there we go. And there are, as you can see, there are, sponsorship buttons and what have you if you are minded to help make that event happen.

speaking of events, the final link that came from, Ahmed was this one. This [email protected]. and it is something from the WPCC, how to create an event website for WPCC or WordCamp part one. Anything you wanna drop here. definitely. So this is basically, catered towards new organizers for any Word Camp or even, WordPress Campus Connect events.

[00:54:00] Ahmed Kabir Chaion: There's women in WordPress events that is happening. So anything related to events, this workshop is super useful. you can even check the recordings of the work, workshop. It's been hosted by Mohi, who's one of the training team rep, and Joe Simpson Jr. Was there as the co-host. So this helps the journey of new contributors who want to create the website for the first time.

So this is super handy, super useful. I definitely recommend it. It just happened, couple days ago. Okay. Thank you. Do you know there's a weird collision of acronyms here because we've got WPCC, and there's two things happening this month in the news about this. So, WPCC here stands for WordPress, campus Connect, which is an educational program, combining institutions and, like bricks and mortar places. But the other thing that we've got in the WordPress space is, now, let me get the right one. Is this one Oh yeah. Which is also the WPCC, but this one's the WP Community Collective. And so I think at some point we need to figure out who's gonna take that acronym and go with it, because, because it's vaguely confusing, but, we'll, get onto that in a minute.

[00:55:18] Nathan Wrigley: So again, the meet up link, I will paste this into the show notes tomorrow if you wanna catch up on the learning that happened, yesterday, Sunday the 15th. You wanna figure out how you might set up an event like that? A brilliant educational initiative. And I did an episode on the tavern. Probably about six months ago about this whole thing.

And it's, really interesting, and it, the TN episode was all about what was happening in India specifically, but, there's loads of other, initiatives all over the place. Okay. Let me see if I can catch up to where we got to. Da activity pub. Dan, did you wanna mention anything about this or should we move?

[00:55:58] Dan Knauss: Yeah, always. Glad to promote the, advance of WordPress in the fedi verse there. yeah, a little update for the 2026. roadmap. There's some features that are really welcome to if you're, new to Activity Pub, it's a plugin, community plugin supported by automatic developers, Constantine Open Land and Mattias Ley, principally who wrote this, but a whole bunch of people just jumping in as usual on GitHub to develop it further.

The activity pubs the protocol that, Mastodon uses probably the best known version of, but it's a microblogging, social, web, protocol that is implemented in this WordPress plugin. And there's a really nice, interface update for one sorely needed. Just giving you a good reading screen.

When you are using Activity Pub, you are in a more client server relationship with the rest of the WordPress world that, that is also doing the same thing. You can follow other people, un ma unmasted on any, other federated system, and your comments can flow back and forth, whether they're another WordPress site or something else, and organizing all of that can be.

Can be challenging. creating a, a feed with where you can repost and re blog things, leave comments across all of these different, identities. it just visually needs, this kind of upgrade. So that's, yeah, that's cool. That's in there. Yeah. It's hard to figure out why the fed averse is a great idea, but also I suppose we're so used to gated platform.

[00:57:52] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, gated, that's not really the right word, but, like a for-profit organization like x, where you log in, you've got username and password, you log in, they hold all the data. When you log in, they give you your data back. they present it like it's yours, but it's not really yours.

You can't really do anything with it. If you wanna move away, you're stuck. You have it, you've had it, the best that you can do is delete the account and try and start over. The photo verse is totally different in that your WordPress website can become your identity. So your actual website.

Becomes your identity. And I think that's perfectly encapsulated. So this is Activity Pub blog, so it's a WordPress website, but then if you sync to the bottom here in the usual section where you would typically see, I don't know, share on X or what have you, you get, you start to get an impression of how this all works.

Like these people have reposted this in probably something like Mastodon and it's surfacing it on the website because the website is the identity that you have. It's been liked 27 times. Again, most likely it's been liked by people just in their mastodon accounts, scrolling through their, timeline or what have you.

And, it, I, so want this to succeed. Yeah, but it just doesn't seem to be getting the, sort of takeoff trajectory does it? And it's, I think it's just because of that difficulty in understanding the fundamental concepts right at the beginning. But I, really want this to be the way that everybody does it.

And you can see, look, the WordPress liking system has nine. The reposting fedi verse system coming from the plugin 23, and the liking system coming through the fedi verse is 27. It's got three times the like of the, the WordPress system. And presumably lots of people subscribe to this blog anyway.

yeah, go check it out. Activity pop. I really hope it succeeds. I've got an account. I had a server for a little while, but I killed that when the costs started to ramp up. But, yeah. Thank you. Anything you wanna add? Did I cut you short there, Dan? But no, I completely agree. It is, a, conceptual hurdle to get over.

[01:00:09] Dan Knauss: 'cause we talk, we say Mastodon for convenience. People have heard the brand, but there's no Mastodon platform. No, there's all these instances. No. So I was at a Meke, local McKeen University talk with, faculty from, York University here in Canada, in over in Ontario. He was visiting to talk about his book, the.

really looking at social, change in, the fedi verse and the technology and some of the folks we had at Word Camp Canada were there. There's a local guy, Chad Oman, who runs the biggest Canadian instance, Mastodon instance, mst dn ca. And that's the big question. You get all of this capacity to run your own community platform, however you wanna use it.

Is it just gonna be for this city, for our region, for an affinity group? I think AI is gonna help. I think discoverability is a, is the next big focus there. And then just figuring out the interfaces and, ways to abstract the way some of those hurdles to understanding where am I, where is this coming from?

[01:01:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's hard 'cause you don't have that sort of like x.com/login. Which is, you just know where this is. It is just, there's just more moving parts, isn't it? But once you've got your head around it, especially if you own a WordPress website is such a great idea. but there is a, like I said, there's a few moving parts.

just in other news, because you know this, you can see my gigantic total. I've got eight points. what the heck? Michelle Ette. She's on 33 out of, she got 96 points. Oh, the world master. The word master. I got 22. You've already, you got 22. mind you, I've been busy talking. Well done though, Dan, you got 22.

I just ignored everything Mark was saying. Lovely. Michelle just ignored all of us. Michelle, can you gimme a, a heads up, like, honestly, what words are in there? One of the things that I just can't do it. I just can't see words backwards or left or right. So drop a few of the words in and I'll ask, Michelle sent me her word list and has she, one of them is, one of them is Goggling.

Hang on, G. Wait. GAR? No, just you gotta do another G, at the bottom. G down. Oh, yeah. But GA bottom, bottom right. Bottom. Yeah, but gag G. That's gag. Gag. Oh, I see it. Okay. GAR Start. Start with the G at the bottom right? Oh, G-A-R-G-L-I-N-N-G. Oh, that's genius. There you go. Look at that. I got 10 points.

I got 10 points. Oh yeah, I did that. keep 'em coming Michelle. And and I suppose that's armored is that you saying congratulations. Well done. keep 'em coming. I wanna do this every week. But really it's very annoying. Dan, maybe, what the heck? Putting this game together, Let's see. Where can we get back to, where were we?

Okay, I think we're here. Yeah, we're here. Here we are. Let's go from here. We mentioned a little while ago about WordPress 7.0. This is not new, this piece, but I just thought what, with everybody starting to talk about it much more now that this is the next thing coming. Might be a good idea just to take a quick look and see what's happening and when it's happening.

So, release lead for 7.0 is Mathias. That marks a change. Matt Mullen has been the release lead for several, more recently and we can see that where we've got up to. So up and coming soon is gonna be this beta release one followed by beta two, three, and four. Then we've got this release candidate, session where we go and then hopefully here we go.

This is the bit that Ahmed was just talking about, this 9th of April date or thereabouts, coinciding with Word Camp Asia, and Lots of the AI stuff and look at this. Release coordination. Look at this little per person's name here. Who's that? Who's that? Clever. Yay. Congratulations. Thank you. Yeah, that's good.

I love it when you see names like this, and we I tend to just scroll past them like that and, never really dwell on them. So having a opportunity for somebody on the show, it's really nice. No, I really appreciate that. So there is the release schedule and this is a bit, again, talking about word camps.

This I think is quite controversial. actually, because this has been verboten for as long as I've been in the WordPress space, it's always been the case that if you attend a Word camp and you are a sponsor, your sponsorship does not entitle you to any sort of special dispensation regarding, let's say, for example, having a presentation or a having a speaker slot.

that, that is now mooted to change. And I'll just read, we're in the repository again. Go sign up. I always say it. I'll just read the top, the top paragraph. It says, Matt Mullen word says, companies that pay for WordPress' global. Top tier sponsorship package should be allowed to give product specific talks at Word camps and meet ups a shift from longstanding community guidelines that discourage promotional content at these events.

And then there's more commentary. Matt says certain things, the sponsorship, here's an example of the numbers that you're talking about. It's $180,000 a year at the moment. So you know, it's serious money. probably be more in the future. It says in terms of the money. and so up until this point you've sponsored, you've got sponsor booths and all of that kind of stuff, and your logos went everywhere and yada, yada.

But it didn't entitle you to do talks. That seems to be changing. you can imagine that this hasn't gone down well with everybody. some people for example, got some names here, there's, what have we got? Juan Hernando, has said, has questioned what's happening when multiple competing sponsors in the same category all wanna do sponsorship talks, and then suddenly we've got four hosting companies on stage occupying, I don't know, a 10th of the schedule all talking about their hosting products.

It starts to become a little bit strange, isn't it? So anyway, this is what's going on. what do you all think? It seems like it's been smuggled in very, quickly and, but yeah, it seems to be a fairly seismic change. I'm going to leave it open to you to debate it. What do you think?

[01:06:48] Mark Westguard: I've come on the shelf with it on the fence. I know what you mean. You can't decide on the fence. Yeah, on the fence. I, would've thought that having a huge booth at an event would be enough to promote your product. And if people had a question about. Something you were doing, then the booth is there, you can go and visit 'em in the sponsor hall.

on the flip side, I mean if there, was capacity to have these companies talk about things, if people are interested and want to go and see that talk, then why not? Can I ask you, in all honesty, would you go and watch a sponsored session, where a company was talking about their own products?

[01:07:32] Nathan Wrigley: what's your gut reaction to that? It would depend on the topic. Okay. if it was, such and such a hosting company and here are our top 10 hosting packages, I wouldn't be interested. But if they could bring some value to the event, and talk about how their products could do that, then I'd be a little bit more inclined to use it.

[01:07:51] Mark Westguard: So, I don't know who are the top sponsors that are there. So, W WooCommerce are global sponsors, right? Yep. So if they could do a talk about. ways in which I could increase revenue or reduce, cart drop off and things like that, then I'd be interested to go and see that. just so that, the, sponsors at the moment on the global sponsorship page are, it's, the usual suspects actually, jet pack wordpress.com Woo.

[01:08:20] Nathan Wrigley: And they're all automatic owned. I dunno if that means that no non-automatic, entities are on there, or if they haven't yet arrived on there, or I, don't know, but it's curious. It's just they haven't been announced, so there we go. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I'm sure that they will, come.

Okay. So that's interesting. So, so the metric there then is if it was just a talk about their product and how great their product is and how much it costs and what you're gonna get, basically, if it's an advertising pitch You would not be interested. But if they could spin it some way, the way the value came back.

But aren't we then back to where we are? Isn't that exactly the sort of content that they'd be allowed to do already? No, because the difference is they can say their product name presumably in the slides. I think in's some ways that's already happening though, right? some of the talks are done by people that work for a certain company or they have an interest in that.

[01:09:14] Mark Westguard: and they will do a talk about a particular topic. And the reason they can talk confidently about it is 'cause it's their day-to-day job. so I dunno, I get where the kickback is, but I also feel like, for example, I, don't know, someone like Katie Keith with Barn two. Yeah. She's got so much knowledge, in the WooCommerce space and her products really do.

Solve a lot of problems in WooCommerce. There's some great stuff that her products do. Yeah. If she were to give a talk on how you could do that, I think that would be valuable to people. So Correct. If you are, in the sort of more commercial side of WordPress events. So I have run eight versions of this thing called the Page Builder Summit.

[01:09:59] Nathan Wrigley: And we've put it on, it's a, it's an, it's not an in-person event, it's a, it's an online event. And the, kind of, the way that we had to figure it out was, we need sponsors, but they need something in return. So we came up with this idea of, you get your logos on the website, blah, yada, yada.

But you can also have a three minute. Portion of your presentation as a pitch if you like. It has to be at the end after the content. So the content needs to be just divorced from your product, but pre probably in your wheelhouse of what you are enjoying. But then the expectation is that at the end you can then maybe tie that into what it is that you've got.

So there's this, 99, 90 5% of the content is nothing to do with promotion. Then you've got this literal three minute slot at the end, and that's all you get. That worked quite well. but that was what we understood. We were getting. If you signed up for that event, you knew you were getting that. But because this is in flux and it's changing from one thing to another.

We'll have to wait and see. Anyway, sorry, mark. Thank you. Zach has a great comment in the chat. So yeah, I think, thank you. where's z Zach? So is it this one sponsored? Yeah. Oh, okay. I think we done that in word camps already, like in Word Cam Asia. Sorry to interrupt, but what in, what can we share?

[01:11:22] Ahmed Kabir Chaion: 20 Mark was there in the sponsor, area. We had it separated and there was a stage with a little microphone where, certain sponsors could get slots. Now that was an add-on. We raised a little bit extra money, but it, aligns with what Zach is saying here. So a sponsor track. So you'd have like, I don't know, you'd have track one, track two, the usual presentations, and then there'd be the sponsor track.

[01:11:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. One of the curious things there, Zach, is the, there, there must be some. Bit of the organizing team who are thinking, what if nobody attends the sponsor track? What if literally come to that? Yeah. Yeah. What if nobody shows up? And then it's so, so obvious that nobody wanted that kind of content.

Whereas if, as Ahmed was just saying, if you mix it around a little bit and put it in areas where the people already are, maybe that's a more effective use of it. It should be high interest if it's done right. The people who are global sponsors like mark is saying people who are really been deep in, in the business and the community for a long time.

[01:12:34] Dan Knauss: They're interesting people doing interesting things and maybe a little UnMarketing approach. They don't have to take the head on to their, their latest and greatest, maybe slip that in at the end. I think people would love to hear things about how, they work, what you know. Get, behind the scenes a little.

There's so much creative stuff you could do. even I think if there's enough, value in the talk, then there's no need to, splurge the logo everywhere. And it, I you, could accompany the, talk with their logos as you're going through the talk if you wanna do that. But if there's enough value in that talk, the, any talk that's put forward from a sponsor need to be vetted like any other talk at the event.

[01:13:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. and here's an interesting, oh, sorry, Oh no, go ahead. I was just gonna say, Reese has got an interesting idea here. It's truncated slightly, so I'll have to read it out. But he said loop comp, which was a live event in London. last year, they did something similar where they did a short presentation between speakers.

it worked well and most of them were of the order of, we've got some swag that we don't wanna, don't want to take home. So in other words, the speaker finished and in that usual bit where the, slides go back to the word camp slide and, the AV people come on and adjust the mics and all of that.

Then the sponsor then comes on in that dead time. Does their, whatever it is that they wanna do. So in this case, giving away swag or what have you, that way you don't erode into the actual speaker bit, but also you are using up dead time, already. And and, I remember, I think it was at a Word, camp Asia, it might have been in Taipei where at the very end of the event, like the last possible thing in the event was where the sponsors who had done raffles and things like that, they, they were allowed that like last hour long slot after the final keynote speech had been done.

And it was a really good idea because anybody who'd been involved in putting the raffle in who wanted to win a MacBook, which is a pretty decent prize from X hosting company, they were sticking around and they got all of those messages from those people. So yeah, I think what I'm taking from this, there are, clever ways of doing this.

But I suppose the news here is that now it appears to be up for discussion as opposed to a blanket. No, that's not allowed. we appear to, I just add as work chem organizers, we already face the struggle to have people attending sessions. I'm sure Dan knows it very well. and with so much things happening at the same time, you have this sponsor things happening.

[01:15:22] Ahmed Kabir Chaion: There's, the sessions happening, there's multiple tracks, so it's not just one track. So you gotta juggle in one room to another to find your preferable speaker and then adding, one more. If it ever happens or sponsor talks, I think we need to figure it out. It's gonna take some time to actually Yeah.

Cater it to the people in a way it makes, Yeah, yeah. so Anne has made several comments. Thank you, Anne. it would depend, so this was going back quite a few minutes. It would depend on the topics, whether or not Anne wanted to watch the speakers from these, let's say, hosting companies or whatever it is, that they're, love to see WooCommerce talks though.

[01:15:58] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So, depending on the topic might work out for you. this is an interesting point, and maybe this is the point. There are now more WP business events emerging because of Word camp restrictions. So the word, because there is important, maybe these events wouldn't have occurred. So you mentioned Press Con that you are gonna go to.

Maybe that event would not have been even. Like a thing if the businesses had already had their toes in the door of word camps already. So for example, Anne mentions Cloud Fest, wp business agency. So, so wp business and Agency Summit. Yes. That's a good point. maybe we just all have to admit that the commercial aspect of WordPress is not some sort of dirty little secret pushed over there.

It's just how the ecosystem now functions. the days of the, the purely open source project are in the rear view mirror. Are these work accounts wouldn't exist if the sponsors weren't there. Yeah. But I, can, I completely agree. These events need to be educational and, people don't want these brands slapped in their face unless they, they want to go and see them.

Yeah. so I wonder if there's concern then, I wonder if this is now being raised. So we're back to this repository article. I wonder if this is being raised because there are. worries about the popularity of some of these other events or the launch of the events being eaten by some of these different things.

Time will tell. anyway, that article, which spurned lots of comments, thank you for that, is, on the repository and I will link to it in the show notes. This, by the way, is the best comment that we've ever had on this show ever. I have, there's your cheat sheet right there. There it is. I appreciate the no com. The, it's, camel case, which is helpful. so the words are, again, agar aging and Anil's, not a word. I don't think that will work, is that word. caging cane car, darling. And on it goes. And, I'm, and there are five, five other words that have yet to be found.

[01:18:13] Mark Westguard: In addition to that list, and these are being truncated by the system. I think we've not managed to get all the words on there. That's the best. That should be the name of this episode. Each week we name an episode by, from something that's happened during the show. I'm gonna quickly try and copy and paste that before I finish this show, otherwise the comments will disappear.

[01:18:33] Nathan Wrigley: but anyway, there we go. Lovely, lovely comment. Unreadable, but beautiful. Thank you, Michelle, for taking part in that. That's wonderful. Let me make that comment. Go away, right? There we go. Okay. Okay. Okay. Have we got time for any more? Maybe we can sneak another couple in very quickly. We're gonna miss loads of the AI stuff.

Woo-hoo. What a row. What a roll. so, so here's the first one that we can squeeze in. So this is our WPCC acronym Conflict. This is the WordPress Community Collective, and the WordPress Community Collective, collective, which was fa I'm gonna say founded, I'm not sure if that's the correct word, by Reed Courtney Robertson and Katie Adams.

Farrell. Apologies if you weren't in fact the, founders, but they were at the, like the helm. Katie has decided to step down. towards the end of the article, Katie goes to great pains to explain that Katie's sticking around. She just doesn't wanna do the one of the director roles anymore.

and. I think basically the feeling is it's difficult to do what needs to be done given the, how to say this, the proclivities, in the WordPress space, the WPC CC, I think was brought out. The whole point of it was to challenge the norms, to challenge the way things are being done in WordPress.

And, there was a fear from Katie that the, community norms was stifling. What, Katie could say. I'm just gonna say, go and read it on the repository. It's called the w the WP Community Collective President. There we go. President was the word, resigns. Overboards tolerance for risk and discomfort.

And I think the, one of the things that Katie wanted was for there to be an intolerance for risk and discomfort and to challenge some of the norms. you can dig into that, to your heart's content. Cut and paste for the wind, says Michelle. Thank you. Yeah, I will, try to cut and paste that.

Let's quickly move on. Oh, if you, very quickly, if you want to vote for the WP Community team reps for 2026, you've gotta act fairly quickly. voting's been open for a week now and it closes in about eight days time, so, Again, I'm not gonna dwell on that. Normally I would, but I'll post that into the show notes, but it's an important piece of work right here.

Here comes a caval. Okay? So you go to sleep, it's four in the afternoon, you have a quick dose, 20 past four, you wake up and 28 different WordPress products have been launched, in the WordPress space. That's now what we're living with. This is how it is, and here comes some of them. So these things occurred, during the last week.

Here we go. Shall we start here? So here's the first one. I don't, how do you say that? How does anybody read that word? Extract your, I think it is. Yeah. So this is AI powered WordPress patterns. All right? You want WordPress patterns to be generated with ai. You can do it now, you can purchase it, in fact, or try it for free.

And the idea is that you, want a particular pattern to satisfy a particular thing. You can lean into that with this. If you, can use their pre-made things, and I think you can then prompt it and modify the patterns. So, that's a thing. there's the first one. The next one, one I hope's not actually their pricing plans.

[01:21:57] Mark Westguard: There. There's a little screenshot. I think that's an example of how Oh yeah. Is this is actually their price. Yeah. But it looks like it's their pricing. Can I just say, can I just, maybe this is me and I apologize to the people who are behind structure. Is it me or does that seem like quite a lot of money?

[01:22:15] Ahmed Kabir Chaion: No, you're not the only one. It's $49 a month pattern. That's a lot of s to generate 200 patterns. Does that, is that the cost of ai? Is that the cost of the prompts, do you think going on there or is that, does that just seem like crazy money? I'm sorry, the people behind this product? I don't mean to be smirch because that's not what this show is all about, but it does seem quite a lot of money.

[01:22:36] Nathan Wrigley: $50 a month to create. Oh yeah. My first question is what are they doing that you won't be able to do if you connect your preferred ENG AI engine to your WordPress site or Yeah. Local development environment and, yep. Yeah, as always, I want to encourage people to be a successful business in the WordPress space.

So apologies if that, comment landed harshly, but it did seem, when I perused it did seem like quite a lot of money. So anyway, there we go. You can now create patterns, with the assistance of AI with that product. Here comes another one. This is Press me, GPT, it rhymes. Woo. and this is now the, they're self labeling it as the best ai, WordPress theme generator and website builder.

So now you know, your GPT can just create your theme for you. and I presume that they would have used that to create this thing. If we dig into the source code for this and it turns out they're using somebody else's theme, that'd be interesting. so anyway, that's a new thing that's come onto the horizon.

Here's another one. This is WP Vibe, a WordPress. So it says here, page builders give you blocks. Ai WordPress gives you boundless, but that's, more or less all they say. You've gotta sign up to the wait list. Anyway, it's a whole other thing. there we go. And what have we got here? So this is Ability Scout.

This is on GitHub, so there's no fee attached here. this is the first one where there's no actual website. It seems like an interesting idea. This, I like this. So this is a plugin which will scan your WordPress website and discover any abilities inside of plugins that you didn't necessarily know about.

So that seems quite a neat idea. So let's say you've, I dunno, 12 plugins on there. You've done no research into how they might bind to the abilities a p. This plugin will assist you with that. And therefore, maybe, open up Pandora's box for things that you can do with ai. new experiments in the AI field.

So we're on wordpress.org now. So this is no commercial product. This is stuff which is, did you mention this a minute ago? yeah. Somebody, this is the AI experiments plugin that you can download and install. I'll just summarize it very, quickly. none of this is gonna revolutionize your life.

You've seen it elsewhere before in commercial products and things like that, but you can now, in the experiment if you wish to, you can summarize content and that just drops in a bit like a head, a paragraph at the beginning. Just summarizing what the remainder of the article is about. So it can summarize a thousand words into 50 words or something like that.

featured image generation based upon the text that you've got inside the article, the whole text. alt text generation. And then there's a bunch of developer things as well. That's a nice, and I know we're running very, short of time, so I'll just point you to this. In the olden days, this would've occupied like half of our entire show.

The what's new for developers piece by Justin Tadlock, but with, AI flooding the landscape, unfortunately on this show it's got pushed. So maybe I'll push this to next week 'cause there's a lot of nice stuff in here. So I will, and then Andrew Palmer, who's a frequent viewer of this show, he had.

It turns out now, a product called Bertha, which was one of, I think the first AI thing in the WordPress space that I knew about. if you are a Bertha license holder, it's come to the end of the road and, Andrew here explains why that has happened and there he is. So, Bertha users go and check it out because it is, that product is going to, I think cease to exist is probably the right words, although they're not just cutting you off at the knees if you're an existing user.

There is a, sort of timeline mentioned in here as to what they're gonna do to make sure that, existing users are not left out to dry. Bertha came before Check, check GBT even existed. Yeah, Really goes back the first ever implementations of the open AI API and yeah. yep. I actually helped out Andrew with some of the stuff in Bertha, but it just got to a point.

[01:26:59] Mark Westguard: where it was, too much work to keep it going. he says that they, they launched this product, like you say before G Chat. GPT was in, in anybody's consciousness. Yeah. but then, what was it? Here, we go. This is what really stifled the product being successful. He says in 2019 right around the time that they're launched, chat, GPT opened access to its first thousand users.

[01:27:24] Nathan Wrigley: So this was all great. Everything was going great. And then here's the problem, chat. GPT later decided to give away tokens for free. Yeah. And so the product that they built suddenly became a freemium thing elsewhere. So, yeah. Anyway. Nice to, nice to announce the end of your product in this way.

yeah. Rather than just get quiet and, yeah. Just rather than go quiet and pretend it never happened. and then that's it. We've got one more here, which I'll probably push to next week. All about, mark down. It's more ai. More ai. So, so let's stop there. okay. Let's pull that off the screen. Let's see if any comments or comments since we last spoke.

Zach talking about the events, I guess there. If nobody challenges the norms, nothing will change. I dunno who Alexander is. Maybe that comment wasn't directed at us. The panelist, Simon, that's about the structure, developer. Yeah. He goes back a long way to, theme development way, way back.

[01:28:30] Dan Knauss: So I, and if you could connect me with him, I would be most grateful. 'cause I, I love stuff, like getting people who've got a new product on there. We could talk about pricing and things like that as well. So that would be good. Thank you. and Alexander Samin or Yeah. However you pronounce that.

[01:28:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So there we go. That would appear to be it for this week. It only remains for me to say an enormous thank you to Mark Westcot. There to Dan Kau over there and to Ahed Kir Cha. Thank you. You three Ahed. And Dan, what you don't realize is you now have to humiliate yourself by doing this stupid hand wavy thing that we do at the end of each episode.

Would you? Yeah. Would you mind raising your hands? And I use that as the feature. So everybody smile, there we go. And that's it. And I will release this as an audio episode tomorrow. I will let the three of you know that has happened. But thank you so much, the three of us, if we wanna have a chat after we press the stop button, feel free to stick around.

but thank you and thank you. If you stop with us till the very end and for all the lovely comments that you made. Appreciate it. See you next week. Take it easy. Thanks Nathan. Yeah, you're welcome.