This Week in WordPress #368

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It is time for This Week in WordPress, episode number 368 entitled Never Arrive on Time. It was recorded on Monday, the 9th of March, 2026. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today, periodically and at different times, I'm joined by four other guests, usually it's three, but we had a little bit more on display this week. We had Taco Verdonschot, we had Bud Kraus, we had Dan Knauss, and we had Steve Burge.

It's a WordPress podcast, so we do spend quite a bit of time talking about WordPress, but we get into all sorts of other things as well.

So, for example, we talk about the generous offer that Claude is offering OSS maintainers, you can get six months of their top tier account.

We also talk about speed on your WordPress website.

We talk about the things dropping in WordPress 7.0, and Gutenberg 22.6, and that really does dominate the conversation, and we're pretty impressed by all of the things going on.

We talk about the fact that there are now plugins being featured in the wordpress.org repo, and the effect that may have on the, well sale is the wrong word, but the reach and discoverability of those particular plugins.

We talk about the fact that Joost de Valk, and Karim Marucci have stepped away from the FAIR project.

And then we get into my tiny new phone, and how neural networks made of literal human neurons are playing, wait for it Doom.

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.

Oh, that's the wrong view. Let's take that away. hello. Hello. As it always never begins smoothly, never. hello. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whatever. the time of day is wherever your part, wherever you are in whatever part of the world you're in. This is episode number 368 of this week in WordPress.

That two minute music that we have just then sometimes that seems to take a literal hour. Like it's the most tedious, annoying piece of music ever. And sometimes I almost fell asleep. Almost. Good lord. Well, you just get on with it. that one for some reason took about four seconds. That was so weird that would you ever get that?

Where like the same thing that you do day in, day out suddenly is like there's a time shift going on. very strange. we're gonna be joined by. Maybe a couple more people than we've got on the screen at the moment. It remains to be seen, but, there's a, very high chance that some people who are currently in meetings and things like that will be joining us, and if they do, we'll just drop 'em in.

But, but for now, I will welcome the guests that have made it, at the, at the allotted time. And I will, I'll start right over there. I'll start with Bud. How are you doing Bud? Bud, Kraus, how's it going? okay. Nathan, how are you? I wanted to say in that green room music that you referred to. I almost fell asleep.

[00:03:30] Bud Kraus: Atic. It's so bad. Bad, so bad. You're gonna catch me taking a nap here.

[00:03:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, So, so Bud's joining us and I'm thankful we can get all the tech Kremlins worked out. We're very appreciative of you showing up a little bit before and working all the bits and pieces out. I'll just do, I'll just do Bob's quick bio 'cause it is quite a quick one.

sorry. That's good. I like it. Says again, I gotta do this again. Yeah, sorry. podcast Kraus creates WordPress content for WordPress businesses and is the host of the Wild. This is great. I love this host of the wildly popular podcast. Seriously. Pod. I'm gonna add a little bit. It's way better than any other WordPress podcast out there.

Go, Listen.

[00:04:17] Bud Kraus: You're right.

[00:04:19] Nathan Wrigley: So good. So there he is, bud. Joining us from the, I forget whereabouts you are in the us Whereabouts?

[00:04:25] Bud Kraus: Well, I moved recently to Somerville, New Jersey from Did you not? Lee, New Jersey. So I'm an hour south of where I was. Okay.

[00:04:33] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, was there a reason for the move? You just

[00:04:35] Bud Kraus: Yeah, because we have, children and grandchildren that live in this general area, so my wife wanted to be with them.

Oh,

[00:04:41] Nathan Wrigley: that's lovely. What a good reason to move. Loving it.

[00:04:44] Bud Kraus: Yeah, Okay. And we're also joined by Steve Birge, who's there? Hello, Steve. Hey, nice to have you with us. Steve's joining us, I think I'm gonna say Florida and actually Bud said where it was in Florida and I've now forgotten, and I know it begins with an ness, but I've forgotten where

[00:05:02] Steve Burge: Sarasota, I'm

[00:05:03] Nathan Wrigley: on the

[00:05:03] Steve Burge: non, I'm on the non Sharky side.

[00:05:06] Nathan Wrigley: Is that the Panhandle side? Right.

[00:05:09] Steve Burge: Yes.

[00:05:10] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah,

[00:05:10] Steve Burge: the Gulf, Gulf of Mexico slash Gulf of Me, Gulf

[00:05:12] Nathan Wrigley: of Mexico, depending on your political beliefs. very nice. Oh, lovely. Yeah. Yeah. Many less alligators over on our side of things. Steve Birge has been on this show many, times before, and you may know him, but if you don't, he is the founder of Publish Press, which is a suite of plugins, which enable you to do tonnes more in your WordPress block editor than you would ever imagine.

Especially around the sort of whole editing workflows. You've got teams and things like that. It's, definitely worth a look. Publish press go, Google it. and the bio goes as follows. I've spent more on books on than AI so far in 2026. I know that needs to change, and I'm not an AI hater. But my brain already feels somewhat fried by the internet.

You know what? I think we all need to wear the AI hater badge with pride. starting to think it's not the best thing that we as a species invented. so yeah, that's our panel thus far. I've got Tacho vaon Shot is joining us. I can see that he's in the, studio now, but it looks like he hasn't been able to enable his camera.

So Tacho, I dunno if you wanna, oh, and as he, as I say that things seem to be changing, I'll drop you in Tacho. just

[00:06:28] Bud Kraus: leave him there.

[00:06:29] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Oh, roasting. Well just leave them. I love him. Let's, let's put him on the screen and see if he comes. So, tacho, apparently perfect actual black line. Oh, here.

if it's not working Tao, go in, refresh the chrome. Just the, actual Chrome browser seems to have the least problem. So if you wanna, try that, you may already be in that. And just make sure you got permission set. But actually, you know what, I'll introduce Tao. Oh, there, he is.

It's randomly. Pick that camera. Yes, it's supposed to go over

[00:07:04] Taco Verdonschot: there. I'm not sure what's happening, but

[00:07:06] Nathan Wrigley: it doesn't matter. Lemme see if I can fix that. Doesn't matter. We got You, you fix it up whilst I introduce you. So there's our third. panellists, we may be joined by a fourth in a little while.

We'll have to see. But Tacho down there, as you can see, is Tacho. Tacho is be better known as Tacho Verdo Online. He's the CCO at Progress Planner, the plugin that helps you stay active on your WordPress website through smart advice and gamification outside of work, you can find him organising stuff like WP Meetups and land parties playing with his kids, walking or riding his trail bike.

As of late, he's been screaming, oh dear, he's been screaming a lot. his computer, thanks to his new Hobby Vi vibe coding. Not sure if that's a hobby or just like a, death wish, but, have you, you've been getting into it. You've been trying

[00:07:56] Taco Verdonschot: Yes. Trying

[00:07:56] Nathan Wrigley: things out. Oh,

[00:07:58] Taco Verdonschot: yeah. At, some point my colleague said, I'm done with you looking at us building stuff.

It's time that you build your own stuff.

[00:08:06] Nathan Wrigley: Right.

[00:08:07] Taco Verdonschot: here's a claw account. Go play.

[00:08:09] Bud Kraus: Okay.

[00:08:10] Taco Verdonschot: And, oh. I've seen my wife since. I think. no, it's been a lot of fun. so I built a little planning tool, that helps you schedule meetings across time zones and with different people and all of that.

[00:08:28] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, neat.

[00:08:29] Taco Verdonschot: Okay. And a little, it's a lot of fun that you

[00:08:30] Nathan Wrigley: wanna see through. That's, the best way to do it, I think. Yeah. That's nice.

[00:08:34] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah.

[00:08:35] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I appreciate you joining us, and thank you for coming out of your meeting early, if that's indeed what you did. But we're gonna talk a little bit about WordPress. I'll share things on the screen in a moment, but a few bits of housekeeping before we begin.

Sorry. We, we had to pull the show last week. I, had some, I had some medical stuff, which I'm still dealing with. Actually. I'll just say this, everything on my screen is on font size. Whatever the biggest I can get. it's on super big font size because I've got problems in my eyes, so, so we'll, see how we manage.

If, if I struggle and click the wrong buttons, I, forgive me, I do apologise, but I'll try to click the right buttons. We'll see how we go. Welcome

[00:09:17] Bud Kraus: to my world.

[00:09:18] Nathan Wrigley: I was gonna say, but I didn't wanna drop that in, but it's okay. We'll

[00:09:21] Bud Kraus: talk about it later. Yeah.

[00:09:22] Nathan Wrigley: I have a full and different appreciation now

Of visual impairment. I've got t carefully around this because I've got this feeling that whatever I'm going through is, a, slow but inexorable, imp, improvable thing. In other words, it will probably return to what it was, right,

[00:09:42] Steve Burge: right, right.

[00:09:43] Nathan Wrigley: but for this period of time, I'm struggling with all the usual things and it was a, moment in time.

It happened, it was an hour, one hour after this thing. I was unable to use the internet and it's been. It's been interesting, let's put it that way. Yeah. Really, interesting. Yeah. weren't you telling me you just got a phone There was like two inches tall.

So, okay. I'll show you that in a minute and then I'll tell you that I ordered that two weeks before the surgery, so I didn't know it was gonna happen.

But yeah, I'll show you that in a minute and then we'll have a laugh about that. But, just to say that if you're joining us and you wish to contribute into the, the conversation, we love it. We absolutely love it. When people do that, it makes the show a whole lot more interesting. Firstly, let's drop in the URL where you're best to go.

And that's that one, which Steve is now putting his chin on. oh, yes. Over there, TECO. Good job. yeah, look everywhere and point in any direct you like. it's wp builds.com/live. If you go there, then you've got a couple of choices for comments. There's a Google like YouTube comment box, which is separate from the video, but then also if you don't have a Google account, you click on the, it just says live chat or something like that.

There's a little button in there and you can click on that and, it should invoke you. Just type your name in and what have you, and we can get your comments in there. That's really nice. So wp builds.com/live. send your friends, colleagues, relations enemies, Guinea pigs, bald eagles, monkeys, whatever you got going on, send them there.

And hopefully they'll make some comments now. Then in terms of actual comments, I've got a few that have come in. That's really nice. Marcus Burnett says hello. Good morning, gentlemen. Can't wait to see how this goes. Yeah, we'll see how this goes. See if I can read the UI of this, platform correctly.

So far so good. Do you know what? It's by muscle memory alone. I know that red button in the top corner is the one I had to click to go live, but I can't see the text. So it was a bit of a gamble, actually clicked, this one. Good morning. I feel like I should be there. Oh, you should. Michelle, next time you want.

Yes. And then Patricia. Hello. Nice people. She said that's really,

[00:11:58] Taco Verdonschot: yeah, especially given, yesterday was International Women's Day. I an all mill panel. I'm sorry.

[00:12:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. Yeah. Oh dear. Yeah, that's what can I say? I blame the booking system. So that's the thing. okay, let's put on the screen what we're gonna be talking about.

So as always, it's a WordPress podcast, so, we're gonna be talking a lot about WordPress. The, the first thing to mention is just a few bits of housekeeping, just trying to keep the lights on over here. WP Builds is the website that we've got. If you wanna put your email address into this little form, we'll send you two emails a week.

The first one will be tomorrow, actually, when we wrap this thing up as a podcast episode. most, of the time this, content is consumed via audio. Very few sort of people watching it. We get quite a few watching it live, but most people are consuming it as audio, so that'll happen tomorrow, but then we'll also send you a podcast reminder on Thursday when we produce our like, typical regular podcast.

Here's a list of the most recent ones. I had it because I was off, I haven't mentioned this one before, but I had Ian sbo on who's got a really cool block called the Content Area Block, and it enables you to have a second content area in your post or page content, which sounds like nothing. But it's actually really cool.

Yes, because normally you've got one piece of content, right? And that's it. That's all you can do. So everything has to go in there. Not anymore, not with what Ian SBO built. And, it turns out it was way harder than he thought, but it'd just be, oh, I'll just knock this thing up over the weekend. no, It was a little bit of a game changer for him. And then last week, I had Ben Pines on. Ben used to be the CMO Elementor right at the beginning when it went from no instals to like four gazillion. Ben was the CMO over there, and now he's moved on. He's now, doing his own sort of freelance services, offering marketing services, and, and trying to, alert people to the dangers of AI amongst other things.

And how, being the authentic you, thinks is gonna be important in the future. In other words, show up as you, rather than showing up as content written by ai. Nathan,

[00:14:18] Steve Burge: I go there. I got a bone to pick with you,

[00:14:20] Nathan Wrigley: please.

[00:14:21] Steve Burge: What do you notice about all these people on the podcast for this too?

[00:14:25] Nathan Wrigley: They are men.

Is that what you're saying? yeah,

yeah. Look, we have to go all the way down until we get to Ray and then, we had, Anne. So it's, a while. Yeah. It's a, fair point. It is a fair point. Can I say in my defence, it's not much of a defence, but it's the defence I've got. If you reach out to me and I think you've got something worth talking about, I will put you on the podcast.

There's absolutely no gatekeeping there whatsoever. But it just, so, it just so happens that a lot of people that I get contacted with, are the people who are on the podcast. And so that's the way it goes. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

[00:15:05] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. So I think there's a job for us to do, Steve, is that if we have amazing, Non men around us is that we send them to Nathan,

[00:15:17] Nathan Wrigley: send them to me. That's it. I will welcome everybody in and put them on the podcast. But yeah, fair, point. I get this quite a lot actually. I get quite a few emails saying the same thing. this show gets called out quite a bit for that.

Michelle Ette has been a godsend 'cause she's organised loads of the, the wrangling of the guests in the past, and she's made a, made great inroads in making that more, more distributed, for want of a better word, more diverse, but, fair point, anyway, that's the list of the most recent ones.

And then just to say also, I did a, podcast episode over at Tavern with a, lovely chap called Rob Ruez, who has a product that I didn't know about. It's called WP Rig, and it's a WordPress theme development framework. He inherited it from, Morton Rand Hendrickson when he stepped away from the WordPress space, I'm gonna say like four years ago or something like that.

And, he's taken it on. He's improved it a lot, so. Go and have a look. I, we haven't got time to delve into what a theme development framework is, but if you're interested, it's brilliant. It is very lightweight, and he's a very thoughtful individual. So I highly recommend listening to that. and then what we do each week, we ask the guests if they wish to contribute something, no compulsion, but if they wish to contribute something, I'm more than happy to raise it onto the screen.

And so the first couple come from Tacho. this is an AI related one. I guess it's all about Claude Code. What's this one? Tacho? Yes.

[00:16:51] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. So, CLO code is one of the, big AI programming tools. it's the thing that I've been using and Cloud Max is their, upper tier. so a lot of tokens, AKA, you can build more and do more, programme, and they're offering it up.

For free for people who are active open source maintainers. now if you're using dark mode on, or if you're on the site, you can see that accessibility wise, they have a thing or two to learn because it's great text on the black background. but you can sign up if you are an active contributor, a code contributor to an open source project, and they will give you six months of their top tier, subscription for free.

So.

Nathan, I think your audio isn't working

[00:17:54] Nathan Wrigley: because Yeah. Apologies. No, it's me. I, accidentally clicked a This is perfect. This is comedy gold. This is gonna happen. Technical

[00:18:02] Taco Verdonschot: ramblings.

[00:18:03] Steve Burge: No, it's not. It's, I can't see the correct box stick.

[00:18:08] Nathan Wrigley: And I was gonna say, there are some caveats around it. So you can't just rock up with a GitHub queue and say, oh look, I just invented a project on the open source sort of ethos.

I think it's gotta have 500 or more, maintainers, 5,000, 5,000

[00:18:24] Taco Verdonschot: stars on the, on GitHub.

[00:18:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yes.

[00:18:27] Taco Verdonschot: Bots. but WordPress is

[00:18:29] Nathan Wrigley: that

[00:18:30] Taco Verdonschot: Yes, exactly. So everyone working actively on WordPress, should probably qualify. Okay. That is interesting and it's completely free, and it sounds like it's the top tier. I, as, anybody listening to the show, knows I'm, I don't really use AI in any way, shape, or form, but my understanding from all the people out there is everybody's talking about Claude as the most credible offering out there at the minute.

[00:18:56] Nathan Wrigley: So,

[00:18:57] Taco Verdonschot: yeah,

[00:18:57] Nathan Wrigley: amazing. I would

[00:18:57] Taco Verdonschot: say it. Changes by the week, but they're definitely in top three.

[00:19:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay.

[00:19:03] Taco Verdonschot: Yes.

[00:19:03] Nathan Wrigley: Right, right, right. Okay. Well certainly worth looking at a nice six month booth to your, your productivity on the AI side of things. But just to let you know, we can, we can hear a lot of your breathing.

I don't know if me but e actually just

[00:19:18] Bud Kraus: start breathing. Okay.

[00:19:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But if you wouldn't mind just, we're only 90 minutes bud, for

[00:19:24] Bud Kraus: I was

[00:19:25] Nathan Wrigley: my,

[00:19:26] Bud Kraus: that was my contribution to your show.

[00:19:31] Nathan Wrigley: It's fine. It's, sorry. No, it's totally fine. Now it's just that you've leaned right into your mic, I think. All right. We were enjoying the, the full depth of your breathing.

[00:19:40] Bud Kraus: I'm sorry. Just cut it out in the editing room.

[00:19:42] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. yeah. Will do. okay. So that's the first one and the second one.

Again, from Tacho is, this one John o Alderson?

[00:19:51] Taco Verdonschot: Yes.

[00:19:52] Nathan Wrigley: Former of Yost, I think, but no longer with Yost. Yeah.

[00:19:55] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. and I consider him a very good friend and he has sensible things to say about the web. He's probably, the most technical SEO out there. insanely smart. And he wrote a piece about, how building a fast website should be well, is the first thing that you should think of when you're building a website nowadays.

[00:20:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:20:28] Taco Verdonschot: and he's, calling it is the first competency test. So if you can't build a fast website, you can build a website. It's basically what he's saying. but then in a very. I'd say well-written article. Definitely worth a read and

[00:20:44] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

[00:20:45] Taco Verdonschot: If you are a developer or employee developers, make sure they read them too.

[00:20:51] Nathan Wrigley: I was, I was lucky enough to catch, John o at, word Camp Whitley Bay about, probably about two years ago now. And Jo Jono adopts this in all aspects of his life. I think speed is like something which Jono is good at in, in everything. He, speaks at a pace as well, doesn't he? It's quite, it quite fast.

It's quite interesting. Quite fast. Yeah. Yeah. But man, he was really interesting. Like, you know, when you just are engaged by somebody, even if the content, 'cause I confess the content wasn't exactly me, it was more sort of SEO related. So I was tuning in a bit, in, in and Out a little bit.

But he's one of those people, like comedians or something, they get on the stage and they begin and you're like, whoa. Oh, he's a, he's an interesting guy and I was captivated by his delivery.

[00:21:41] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. So he, he's, a little bit of a, hero to me as well, and that is because every presentation that he gives is so well prepared.

[00:21:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Nice.

[00:21:57] Taco Verdonschot: It's hundreds of hours of work going into a half an hour, 45 minutes presentation.

[00:22:04] Nathan Wrigley: Wow.

[00:22:05] Taco Verdonschot: And, I think that he showed on several occasions that this is the bar that we should be hitting at work camps. And we're still not

[00:22:17] Nathan Wrigley: okay. Okay. In terms of his delivery and his preparedness and Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Interesting. There are a few people out there like that, aren't they? they just have something about them and he's definitely one of them. So, this is john o alderson.com. Like everything that we put on the screen today, it'll be linked in the show notes. it, I can't tell you exactly where in the show notes, but it'll be, but it'll be somewhere, one of the headings that we get.

But there we go. There's John O's piece all about speeding up, being the first thing that you need to worry about on a website. And then we move over to contributions, which came from Steve. This is gonna step a little bit maybe on some of the content that we've got later, but here's the first one.

What's new in Gutenberg? 22.6. Do you wanna take the helm on this, Steve?

[00:23:03] Steve Burge: Yeah. it's bowing the lead a little bit. It has a. A very bland, anonymous release number.

[00:23:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, This is Gutenberg 22.6, but the amount of stuff in this, it's basically WordPress 7.0.

Yeah. Yep.

[00:23:24] Steve Burge: I honestly cannot remember anything like this in the WordPress space in many years.

Just look at the table of content on that post. yeah, let's go back to that quickly. Let me find it again. I've just clicked away from it. And, yeah, there we go. There's the table of contents. There's like, what, 10 things there, each of which is actually pretty significant. Do you know what's interesting, Steven?

[00:23:47] Nathan Wrigley: I think I said this before, we click record very often, that table of contents may well be as big, but like, I don't know, eight out of the 10 items will probably be something a bit, unusual that don't affect me, whereas so many of these are gonna affect just regular. Editors and people just cr logging into their WordPress website, creating a piece of content, hitting, publish, and getting out.

Not that, not necessarily the developer side of things. And so it's gonna be, this, one will be really impactful for just normal users. A WordPress using it as a sort of blogging platform for one of a better word. So were there some items on here that you wanted to mention in particular? I've highlighted a few.

if you don't,

[00:24:30] Steve Burge: oh, where do we start? probably we can go around the group and each one of us could pick out a

[00:24:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:24:35] Steve Burge: A major feature here. I, guess my hot take on this is that I think AI came along at a perfect time for WordPress. 'cause we had, obviously after Portland, we had like a year of no releases and things were stagnant.

And AI seems to have given everyone enormous. Kick up the butt in terms of productivity, in terms of maybe increased competition in terms of increased excitement, people getting really interested in coding again after, perhaps have lost some of the passion for it. And you can see WordPress accelerating again after that kind of lost year.

for me personally, I'd probably choose revisions. the visual, version of bit a tongue twister, the visual version of revisions. but there's so much in here. This is basically WordPress 7.0 disguised as a point release for Gutenberg.

[00:25:43] Nathan Wrigley: Can I, actually just call out, and this is a bit of a thank thanks to you if you follow Steve.

On, I follow Steve most likely. Blue Sky, I think is where your stuff comes to me. I'm trying to use other platforms a little bit less, but, Steve does a really great job of writing up what's happening in the WordPress space and I think filters out all the noise. So whenever I see a post that you've written, I, I delve into it and you, managed to get the stuff somehow that I'm genuinely really interested in it largely is to do with, the publishing workflow, given what you do, But, go and follow Steve on. Blue sky or wherever he, he can be found. And, and there's three or four things a week, but they're totally worth reading every single time. So,

[00:26:30] Steve Burge: well, I haven't done that for the last two or three years, but, yeah.

What's coming outta WordPress core recently is got me excited again.

[00:26:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, Well, and I'm chuffed a bits, it's really great. The, I'll just mention the few things that I'd highlighted. So here's the first one, in editor revisions for visual. Sort of change tracking and, you, you can imagine what this is. It says browser post revisions in the editor shows a colour coded visual diff between the selected revision and its predecessor.

Now, what's curious about this is it's not just revisions based upon like, oh, this bit of text changed. It's things like, this block was removed, or this block was updated, or this block was moved or deleted, and there's colour coding for it. And it feels like the sort of thing that once you've been in there for three minutes and had a bit of a poke around, you'll get it.

and it largely, you're on the lookout for either green or red. Bits poking into the ui. It's very hard to see on this post actually, but you can see there's a hint of maybe here, something changed and you can see there's a little border around this, image, which is green.

So something about that changed. the icon block is now, you've now got an icon block and you can, there's a curated library. I don't think you can use your own SVGs, but there's a curated library that you can use. There's a navigation overlay coming, which I think is based off the Ollie. menu, I think it's called the Ollie Menu Navigation Plugin.

and I've used it and I really like it. It, basically, you create the navigation that you want inside of Gutenberg, and then you assign it to the, the hamburger icon or something. And then from that moment on, when somebody presses that icon, this overlay comes up and it doesn't have to look like an overlay.

It could just almost look like a fresh page or, the UI hass been taken over. So that's really cool. client side media processing, meaning that you, upload a, I don't know, PNG, but you want to make it smaller. It's all done by the browser now as opposed to going to some server and that dealing with it and then sending it back, which is really great.

And obviously real time. Collaboration, which is something that Steve's very keen on learning about the gallery. If you use the WordPress regular gallery, it's, feature p shall we say. but now it's got, now you can navigate with it. Now you can go left and right and things like that, which is quite nice.

And that's where I ended that, where they were the highlights for me. So, tacho or, Bob, anything you wanna say on that one?

[00:29:12] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah, I, think some of these already made it in the seven oh release or all of them. I'm not entirely sure, but I, saw some of it, and especially navigation, overlays is something I'm looking for, forward to.

[00:29:26] Nathan Wrigley: It's really great. It's really, lovely. it turns it into this visual design. You just design it somewhere with blocks, buttons, links, whatever you like, however you like, and then you just assign it. And it works. And little dingdong in my, ears tells me that we're gonna be joined by our fifth guest.

So let's, first of all, before we go anywhere else, let's just introduce, let's introduce Dan. Where's Dan? Dan's all the way over there. Woo. There's like two people I've gotta go through. Some people to, to get to Dan. How are you doing, Dan?

[00:29:57] Dan Knauss: Good. How are y'all?

[00:29:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good, Nice. That your, nice that your tech setup works out the box, which is, really great.

It was troubled

[00:30:04] Dan Knauss: this morning.

[00:30:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Don't worry. Don't worry. Really pleased that you can make it. I'll just interrupt the programme to give Dan his bio. He was on a couple of weeks ago, but we'll do it again. well. Oh, okay. When. Excuse me, I'm eating raisins. When Dan Knaus is not wasting ministry time and paper, he is likely practising heating engineering without a licence, tampering with supply docs and recklessly creating suspicion in the greater public.

Nothing to do with WordPress there.

[00:30:31] Dan Knauss: Absolutely no,

[00:30:33] Nathan Wrigley: just

[00:30:33] Dan Knauss: open source hacking. Yeah.

[00:30:35] Nathan Wrigley: Well, we appreciate you dropping in. I know that you had overlapping things that you needed to get on with. I'm very grateful for you. you comment on. That's brilliant.

[00:30:43] Dan Knauss: Thanks.

[00:30:44] Nathan Wrigley: we've just got through a couple of the top line items from the, From the show notes, so we'll just crack on. But I will mention a couple of comments, which is really nice. Firstly hat it to Michelle Frache, she was saying that, she did a seven hour live stream with women from all over the world yesterday for the underrepresented in tech project that she's involved in and said it was amazing.

tacho replied, that sounds amazing. and then, hello folks from James. Hi James. Nice to have you with us. Patricia is joining us. I, think we've mentioned Patricia already actually, but the 7.0 B to three was released on the 3rd of March. We'll come to that in a minute. and we're at WP wc niece's contributor day.

Oh, what now? Is that where you are now? That's great. Stick it. We,

[00:31:31] Taco Verdonschot: so I think

[00:31:32] Nathan Wrigley: last

[00:31:32] Taco Verdonschot: weekend,

[00:31:33] Nathan Wrigley: oh,

[00:31:33] Taco Verdonschot: or

[00:31:34] Nathan Wrigley: last week, I was gonna say stick it on the big screen. Go to the main stage and put this on, see how that goes down. and she says, and it was wonderful, to do it with JB Res who's a call committer in person.

Oh, that's lovely. That's really nice. Did I record a nice show for wc? Nice. No I didn't. yeah, no, that's a good idea. I like it. Such

[00:31:58] Taco Verdonschot: a missed opportunity,

[00:31:59] Nathan Wrigley: Nathan. I really was see missed opportunity. Some guy called Tacho wrote that. I know. Okay, so, okay, let's move on. So that's what's new in Guttenberg, 22.6, but Steve, stuff keeps coming.

You wanted to mention this one, Steve, which is coming on the screen now. There we go. Advanced professional WordPress Developer Certification out of VIP by the looks of things no less. What did you want here?

[00:32:26] Steve Burge: Oh, I didn't so much have particular feedback on this so much as to throw it out to the group that, automatic seems to be moving towards some kind of official certification and under this can be controversial.

we went through this, I used to do Drupal say eight, 10 years ago, and they did a similar thing at the time Acquia had a certification programme and

[00:32:58] Dan Knauss: yeah, too.

[00:32:59] Steve Burge: We, we were training for it. We did a lot of, classes, helping people train for the exam. And I don't think it has a lot of benefit for people like us who are in the community.

but it tends to work out nicely for. Big companies that want to adopt the platform. I think it helped build, bring on like companies like Accenture into the Drupal world. And I, my guess is that's probably what Automatic is hoping for that. Say you have some massive agency that doesn't really know what they're doing in the WordPress world.

If they can suddenly find 30 people who are WordPress certified, it makes it much easier to bring them on board to maybe sell an RFP. yeah, it,

it seems mostly well out. I know some people will love it, some people hate it. but. I'm probably glad, I guess that automatic at taking charge of it and running it. Yeah. At least it's officially it's a,

[00:34:05] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Yeah. I'll, just read out the URL 'cause it's pithy enough to get into the record.

It is learn Do wp vip.com for stuff certifications for. Go on, Steve.

[00:34:18] Dan Knauss: There's a whole LMS in there. oh. Sorry. They've developed a, they've developed a pretty nice, LMS and there's a lot of, they've got great docs. There's, I think anyone can get in there and go through some of the free training. It covers a lot of ground.

There's not, there's developer stuff. There's some really good security things and things that are less developer too, so. Okay. There's really a lot of good stuff hidden back there.

[00:34:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. For those,

[00:34:44] Bud Kraus: what is the, go on, sorry, but go

on. What is, yeah, what is the downside of this kind of certification?

Is there

[00:34:54] Nathan Wrigley: Not that I can think of.

[00:34:56] Bud Kraus: Well, I'm just, Steve said something that made me ask that question.

[00:35:02] Steve Burge: th this is trying to think of other people's criticism of this. I think it'd be. Some, a little bit of gatekeeping, perhaps like the cost, it's 250 bucks or more. some thoughts of who gets to control, who's officially WordPress certified.

[00:35:22] Bud Kraus: Right.

[00:35:23] Nathan Wrigley: okay. Yeah. Okay.

[00:35:24] Steve Burge: Yeah.

[00:35:25] Bud Kraus: What it means and, right.

[00:35:26] Steve Burge: Yeah. okay. But it's mostly upside, more upside than down, from what I can tell.

I

[00:35:34] Bud Kraus: mean, there's more benefit to it than, yeah.

[00:35:37] Steve Burge: I, think so. I think that probably 90% of the WordPress community can just go along its way and completely ignore these exams, but in the enterprise space.

Right. This may come in handy. Yeah, I saw a lot of on posts on LinkedIn from agency people who are having their teams take this test.

[00:35:55] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Oh, that's interesting. Okay. So it does have some buy-in from those larger agencies. Okay. there's, yeah, work

[00:36:02] Dan Knauss: with, there,

if you work with VIP, it makes sense.

they have their own coding standards, which are, great, but they're different. some agencies have their own riff on that. so yeah, sometimes people get, Have different opinions on, the importance of a particular standard. And, I don't know. I think it's good that we have, them, period.

And that, that is becoming a little bit more clarified and certainly to get things in the repo, now we're. There's, a minimum standard for that. So this is, a similar, process there, and I think that's always a good thing.

[00:36:47] Nathan Wrigley: It really seems like in the WordPress space, there's a lot of attention on education in, all levels at the minute.

And some of it's a bit overlapping and confusing to me, especially on the community side. I'm sometimes a little bit confused by which, acronym stands for which bit and how does it fit in? is that in person? Is that like a after work kind of event? But yeah, here's another piece, adding into that jigsaw, so, okay.

[00:37:13] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. Right. And I think what, Steve said is, the same that I saw as the biggest criticism that I've seen is that it's more gatekeeping by automatic, Automatic controlling yet another piece of, who can be. WordPress, who can tell, say that they're good at WordPress? who I'm not sure if, that's a thing.

I think the parallel was drawn to PHP, where Zen has their own certification for PHP, where the biggest difference is that they actually call it the Zen certification instead of a more general PhD HP certification.

[00:38:02] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:38:03] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah, yeah,

And, automatic decided, or VIP decided, I'm not sure which company of automatic, but decided not to do that and to just make it advanced WordPress.

So I think that's the biggest thing that I've heard online. I've yet to see if that's really a problem.

[00:38:26] Nathan Wrigley: Does, have you, you've encountered that little bit of pushback against those kind of things then the, naming of it and the fact that it, it's obviously using that trademark in a way, which presumably, they're entitled to do, but obviously people are not entitled to use it in that way.

So yeah, I can see why. Yeah, I can see why you would raise that. Yeah. Okay.

[00:38:47] Taco Verdonschot: I think there's some sensitivity around, Matt drawing more power towards himself, given everything that's been going on for the last couple of years, so, I think that's mainly the, cause if this had come out four or five years ago, I think response would've been overwhelmingly positive.

[00:39:08] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. I'll link to it again. I'll just pop it on the screen quickly. you can see the URL there if you're able to. It's learn dot wp vip.com. you can go and check it out. And, Steve, thank you for raising that. And there's one more which comes from Steve, I believe. this is so interesting.

Like this whole story is interesting to me. so I had Nick Hansey on the podcast a little while ago. Nick is wild. Nick is such an interesting character. If you've ever met Nick, I've never met him, I've met him for an hour and a quarter or whatever whilst we recorded, but he's, he is a out and out character, he is really interesting.

And, he was playing with AI a lot and making a lot of projects. That's why we haven't had him on the, podcast. But he did make the point that he's, quite close with Matt, Matt Mullenweg. He's quite close with Matt. And, and it would appear that he's, had a conversation with Matt saying.

Look, the wordpress.org repository is not servicing the community in a way that it might do. Will you? I'm imagining this conversation, by the way, no knowledge as to what happened, but it feels like it might have gone something like this. Can I put a, can I put together something whereby we feature plugins in the repository to gain some notoriety for ones, for plugins that are slipping under the radar, so not the familiar ones that we're all familiar with.

You log into wordpress.org and Jet Pack and Yost and the, all the ones that you normally see, but there's thousands that just sit under the radar, never get mentioned. And, Matt, by all accounts, has given the nod, to this, and this project has launched. There's now gonna be a featured plugin section.

It's already going. I understand. And. There are some caveats around it. The first thing is, which we scroll right to the bottom. it's being curated entirely by Nick. So Nick is deciding which of the plugins he wishes to, to build up. gotta start somewhere, maybe that'll change in the future.

We'll see. Oh, here it is, this bit here. Plugin selection is currently handled by Nick. The process and governance around selections will be reassessed as the experiment develops, but the criteria are as follows. If you want to be discovered in this way, you must abide by the certain, these certain things have less than 10,000 active instals.

you need to have been listing directory for less than a year, so less than 12 months. No open security stuff. Vulnerabilities and what have you, compatible with the latest major release of WordPress and to have been updated at some point within the last, six months. Then you'll be categorising one of three ways, technical standards, ecosystem fit, developer engagement.

That's another thing they're gonna push you through to figure out who's where. And then if you qualify and Nick picks you, then you'll get featured. Now Ray, at the repository, sign up for the repository, by the way, cracking newsletter. the, she did a bit of a deeper dive and, and talked to some people who have already been the recipients of this first round.

And one of them, let me just pick out the ones, see if I can find 'em. I thought I had them somewhere highlighted. Yeah, these are the ones that got the first nod. These are the ones that are gonna go for the first two weeks. Ollie Menu Designer. Internet Archive. Way Back Machine Link Fixer. Gosh, that's a mouthful.

mailer Press Gallery, Berg Gallery Block, opt-in Craft Block, responsive Easy tabs, block, and Make it Easy Slider. she s she then draws the, conclusion that this is a cracking experiment because the Ollie menu designer, seems to have had a big spike in their active instal base mo doubling basically.

so maybe this is working. So, okay. First of all, do you think it's a neat idea? And second of all, well, I don't really have a second of all. That'll do. Let's go with that. Any, any thoughts on this?

[00:43:19] Steve Burge: It seems very helpful that the guidelines are so clear. I think you might have to hit the back button to show the guidelines again, but, let me go back.

[00:43:27] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, there, these bits here.

[00:43:32] Steve Burge: Yeah. Under, 10,000. So it's gotta be an up and coming plugin. less than 12 months old. updated regularly. bang. That should clear a lot of the noise around. I just joined the Slack channel. While you're doing that, the Slack channel in the, WordPress call, there's a featured plugin Slack channel.

[00:43:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:43:53] Steve Burge: And there's a few people in there suggesting, can you put my plugin on there?

[00:43:57] Nathan Wrigley: This is what's, this is Nick's new life

[00:44:00] Steve Burge: probably. but because the criteria are clear, and I think they were block based as well, from what I can see.

[00:44:10] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:44:11] Steve Burge: So far block

[00:44:12] Nathan Wrigley: based. Is that coincidence, do you think, as opposed to anything else?

I know that it's Nick's thing. I know that Nick enjoys playing with blocks, so it may be that there's a, thing there. I'm not sure.

but yeah, it would appear. The only, slightly strange bit is the, is the fact that Nick has the ultimate criteria. he gets the nod, but you gotta start somewhere.

if you have to build this entire edifice of scaffolding and public accountability, that's the whole thing. Whereas you could just say, Nick, will you just decide for the next few months? And Nick goes, yeah, all right, I'll do it. if we trust Nick, this is a gonna be a good experiment. I hope Nick doesn't, isn't on the receiving end of people saying, why haven't you picked me for the last six months?

Come on, it's my turn. And hope it doesn't, turn out badly for him. I'm sure it won't,

[00:45:01] Steve Burge: and of it's only two weeks per plugin.

[00:45:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[00:45:03] Steve Burge: no big deal. So he chooses an incorrect plugin once it rotates off in two weeks.

[00:45:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yep. Yep, Yeah, it's a great idea as far as I can see. And obviously if you are Mike McAllister.

Who runs Ollie. This first experiment has proven that it's great. I do wonder, just one little caveat. I wonder if the reason it's been successful is because it's new and talked about, or whether it will continue to have that sort of lasting effectiveness when the press coverage is gone, if because I, wonder if at the minute everybody's going, oh, look, new tab. I'll go and have a look at that. in the same way that I'm now immune, if I go to do a Google search and I see any, I basically don't see the ads. I just scroll past them. I've learned the muscle memory of scrolling past 'em.

I wonder if the same may happen over there or whether people are actually go actively looking for it. So anyway, tacho Bo, Dan, if you've got anything to add on that,

[00:45:59] Bud Kraus: I love it. I think it's a great, I think it's a great idea because for one thing, you're probably opening up, You're probably making this, you providing more opportunity for new developers too.

people that have just never done anything in the WordPress community, I think this is probably a good way to get them into it. Yeah.

[00:46:19] Dan Knauss: Yeah. It's a good tie in for, students and meetups and Sure. Yeah. Some of those kind of, entry points to get people new. Yeah, absolutely. show them a pathway to getting involved, getting something in there and that it won't just be a drop in the bucket necessarily.

[00:46:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:46:42] Dan Knauss: You think, oh, sorry, So,

[00:46:46] Taco Verdonschot: yeah. I, think because the featured plugins is usually, I think the first screen you see when you click on, add plugin, in WordPress. So it definitely is visible and so I'm not surprised that it has a positive effect. I'm not so sure if, It's enough to surface and it's a great start.

He wrote a post about it. He did? Yeah. I think three months ago, four months ago. Yeah. And I'm very happy to see that he was allowed to implement this and actually do it. I think he's, good enough a judge to, say this is a plugin that we should be promoting. So, I'm quite happy that he's doing it, that he's taking on this.

I'm curious why the less than 12 months? Because that's quite short. If you realise that at this moment we have over 400 plugins in the queue waiting for a review. now there's eight or 10 plugins in the, featured plugins. I think, Times, 26 periods of two weeks a year means that we can highlight about, a few hundred a year.

Yeah.

[00:48:22] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's an

[00:48:22] Taco Verdonschot: interesting point. And we add so many more new plugins, so it's always going to be a fraction. but it's better than nothing and it's better than what we had where, featured was a fixed list. I think

[00:48:36] Nathan Wrigley: it'll be, that's a really interesting point, like the calculus of how many, so I wonder if that number will go up like, to 12 or 16 or something like that.

But the, also, I've, it's just occurred to me that is quite a strange criteria. Like under 12 months, like let's say for example, I've got a really underwhelming installed plugin and, but I know it's really credible and, but I've been hacking away at it for the last 18 months. I'm out the picture, aren't I for this?

Which it, yes. That hadn't really occurred to me, but that makes sense. Yeah. So Featured is actually newly featured. yeah, it's basically new plugins.

It isn't it? Okay. That's interesting. I wonder if that needs a bit of a name change or something. Yeah, that, okay. Well, spotted Taco,

[00:49:22] Taco Verdonschot: you featured by Nick, so

it's a legit name.

[00:49:27] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, And so would you,

[00:49:28] Bud Kraus: would you make it for 18 months, two years?

[00:49:31] Nathan Wrigley: You know what my, gut reaction will have limit. It's the instal base. Really, that's the point. It's the quality of it and the instal base if it's good. But the, marketing has been poor, but it deserves attention. That's really the only criteria. It's like it, if you can detect that it doesn't have what it could have, because maybe their marketing budget is minimal. Yeah, I don't think age matters, actually. That's, yeah. Well I think it would

[00:50:00] Dan Knauss: be nice if,

[00:50:01] Taco Verdonschot: yeah. you want to make sure it's maintained.

[00:50:04] Nathan Wrigley: That's,

a good point. Yeah. Important. Yeah.

[00:50:06] Dan Knauss: Yeah.

[00:50:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Go down.

[00:50:09] Dan Knauss: You could, do something like, have a, if there was a major release in the last year, but I'm thinking of the stuff I like to find surface more would be community plugins that kind of, that classification of, there's not really a commercial model.

Maybe it's like a really simple single use thing. Maybe it's been around a long time and it's not, they're not adding like a whole kitchen sink level of features. But, deser what's really deserving sometimes, fits into that category or even more interesting is someone reviving an older code base.

I, there's a lot of interesting opportunity now. Oh, yes.

Yeah. to go back and bring something back or modernise someone's work. that's maybe been abandoned or obsolete. So there's someone doing that. I think that's a really good project. There

[00:50:59] Bud Kraus: is. I'm actually supposed to meet him today.

Yes, I know you're

[00:51:02] Nathan Wrigley: doing. Oh

[00:51:03] Dan Knauss: good. I was just chatting with him. Yeah, mostly.

[00:51:05] Bud Kraus: Oh, you too. yes.

[00:51:07] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, there you go. That's nice. So I think reading the room, what we're saying is great idea. It'd be interesting to see where it goes. Let, we've made a start. This is fascinating. Let's see where we go. just one thought to add in.

I don't know if Nick is gonna be guided by this philosophy, but when I spoke to him, he was very much into quirky stuff. his whole thing was like, really wacky for want of a better word, leaning into the wacky side. I wonder. If that's gonna be a part of his process filtering through this, given the list that we saw on the repository, it doesn't feel like that's a prism that he's adopting.

'cause the, none of the, I don't know many of those, but the ones that I do know about, they don't come into the wacky bucket. they come into the actually really useful bucket. Yeah. So maybe that's gonna be more of the, the criteria, I

[00:51:58] Taco Verdonschot: think. Yeah. And I think that would be the biggest win for WordPress if it's, the useful stuff that people need that they don't know exists.

[00:52:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. Well, thank

[00:52:12] Dan Knauss: you Nick. I'd just be, I'd be a little concerned that what might get overlooked then are those really good classic single use things that

[00:52:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:52:21] Dan Knauss: That transform how the admin works that have more of an architectural. Value to them that sometimes people overlook.

[00:52:28] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, I'm

[00:52:29] Dan Knauss: those, I'm those are,

[00:52:30] Nathan Wrigley: go on. Sorry Dan. Apologies.

[00:52:31] Dan Knauss: No, yeah, go ahead.

[00:52:33] Nathan Wrigley: I was just gonna say, I hope that Nick, can carry on in the way that he's obviously got fired up to carry on. Let's, see if it keeps going and that it bears fruit, obviously Nick, you're gonna be disappointing some people, but making other people incredibly happy and I suppose there has to be some, some balance of that.

And, but it looks like the experiment's working. If we just take the Ollie metric, that's, you've doubled their instal base in, One fell swoop, although as we might come to later, maybe there's another reason for that. Oh no, we did come to it. The Ollie menu designer is what's coming into seven anyway, so maybe that's part of the whole piece.

Right. Okay. All right. Let's just press on with a few other pieces. First one is just to say if you didn't know already, WordPress seven is just around the corner, and if you are minded to do it, now is the time to, to test what is probably the last few iterations of the software. 7.0 B to three is available.

And, go and check it out. ba Here we go. The release date is scheduled for the ninth of, April, so exactly one month away. and if you're not sure how to test your WordPress instal, there's always extensive notes. It's dead easy nowadays. It's seriously simple to, to test the latest version of WordPress.

And you too can be looking at the features that Steve brought to our attention. Okay. Right. Then the, this is just another article. I won't dwell on it because we mentioned it already, but, this is about that CUSTOMABLE navigation that Steve mentioned earlier. if you want to understand how it works from like a technical point of view, and you, if you're looking at this, broadcast, you can see I'm showing code on the screen, so there's no way we're gonna be able to get into it.

But if you want to understand how it works and how you can implement it and modify it and make it so that you can do more than just click buttons in the UI and whatever the UI allows is the limitations on it. This is the piece for u, it's on make.wordpress.org. It's by Dave Smith, and it's called Customizable Navigation Overlays in WordPress 7.0.

So you can go and check that out. I'm guessing nobody's got anything to add to that, so I shall just move on. Yep. Okay, good. this is Nomad blog, so it's Anne McCarthy's blog where she has spent a little bit of time talking about some of the things that, have come in terms of notes. So notes is now really the word for, oh, I don't know, Google doc style, collaborative editing.

That seems to be the word that we've gone with. Whether it'll stay that way, I'm not entirely sure, but Anne, has. She shows a few pieces that never made it, into 7.0, which she thought was, a bit of a shame. Well, not a bit of a shame. She doesn't say that it, is a bit of a shame, but there's just a few things that never made it in.

But, so she's basically showing in these little videos that you can click into some of the, new bits and pieces that you might see in a future version of WordPress, all around collaborative editing and how the UI works and how you can make things visible or invisible, how you can filter on things and what have you.

And we are basically getting to Google Docs. That seems to be where we're heading at a very rapid rate and a much faster rate than I thought we were going to. and so anyway, she shows how to filter options in the notes panel, so resolved, unresolved, all that kind of thing. how to show or hide the notes canvas so you can see a list of everything, which means you've got scroll, scroll, scroll, or you can just hover on the bits that are visible for the block that you are actually currently working on and stuff like that.

So anyway, Steve, maybe I'll go to you first if this is anything of interest to you. If not, I'll maybe just move on.

[00:56:20] Steve Burge: Yeah, I hadn't seen this actually. It's, I, think they have a tonne of ideas for improving the notes comments feature. the GitHub repo for Gutenberg is full of them. yeah, it's awesome to see.

I, honestly never thought, never, that's wrong. I. I was for, I've been following the real time collaborative editing for probably six years now. Yeah. And there were definitely a lot of points when I thought there was too much of a technical challenge to get it done where you can run this stuff on like Blue Host, no, edit that part out.

cheap Posting. Host. Any

[00:57:00] Nathan Wrigley: host. Any host, yeah. Affordable

[00:57:02] Steve Burge: hosting.

[00:57:03] Nathan Wrigley: Carry

[00:57:04] Steve Burge: that. Yes. Low, cheap hosting, under shared hosting is what I should say. it's just such an incredible technical challenge, to. Provide collaborative editing on shared hosting, and I'm in awe of the fact that they seem to have got it done.

[00:57:24] Nathan Wrigley: What's interesting, that didn't really occur to me, 'cause I'm very rarely in a Google Doc where more than one or two people will be contributing. So that little panel on the right hand side, which you know, the little sidebar for one of a better word, which consumes the comments usually that never fill up more than space available.

But what this demonstration shows, because this obviously, maybe Anna's deliberately just overfed it with comments, is what the heck happens when you've got like eight collaborators each creating like four comments. How that UI suddenly becomes a dreadful mess because you are no longer looking, you're no longer at the thing.

That you are looking at, you've, on collapsed. All the comments you've had to scroll right to the bottom and suddenly the piece of content that you want it to be associated with is right out of the viewport. So it's, just figuring out ways to deal with things like that. Like, I dunno if you can see the screen here.

We've got this little collapsed menu where it's, 27 more replies and you can click on it and open it up. You can actually invoke a little, if I go to this video here, I think it's this one, you can invoke a, a UI element, which kind of just, there we go. You enable all notes. And this little kind of overlay appears and they're all just gathered in that one handy interface.

It's just really nice. It's really well thought through, I think.

[00:58:41] Steve Burge: If you're in there with multiple people, it will actually show your face bobbing around on the note. So,

[00:58:48] Nathan Wrigley: oh,

[00:58:48] Steve Burge: that's whatever it wants. So if I'm editing a, document with say, Nathan and, Bird and, Tacho and Dan, I can see like a little Nathan Head on the line.

[00:58:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yep.

[00:59:00] Steve Burge: And a little taco head. the UI is very nicely done.

[00:59:05] Nathan Wrigley: it's definitely better. It's leaning into a lot of the Gutenberg, sorry, the Google Doc stuff. And actually, if you go to the bottom, you can see right here that there's, that they're referencing how Google does it in Google Docs.

they've obviously got Google as the Google docs, as the, the sort of poster child of this kind of scenario, and they're aiming at it. I'm sorry, Bob, I interrupted.

[00:59:26] Bud Kraus: Yeah, I'm just gonna ask a question, which is maybe I don't know what it is, but I'm gonna ask it anyway. how, and it's being the skunk at the party, but how much of the world really needs this feature, this collaborative notes and real time and all that?

Don't major agencies already have this kind of stuff worked into their systems? And I understand the why of this from the WordPress standpoint, but I'm just thinking like, isn't this kind of late to the world?

[00:59:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I do know what you mean. can I drop my pennies within that is please, that's why I'm asking.

I, I can't, in my WordPress setup, I don't suppose I'll ever use it because typically it's me going in.

[01:00:12] Bud Kraus: Sure.

[01:00:12] Nathan Wrigley: However, I think you, you can't have an, in a modern interface without this stack in it if you are wanting to make the, thing available to a modern audience, like, my kids have grown up in it.

I remember the first time I saw a Google Doc with somebody else's, icon moving around. And I literally like, this is sound nerdy. I literally was like, whoa. I spa out liquid. That's the sort of level I was at. It was like, what the heck is going on? This is so unreal. That's the minimum amount that you have to have for my kids.

It's like, what do you mean we can't both edit? What, why not?

[01:00:55] Bud Kraus: Okay. So I

[01:00:56] Nathan Wrigley: think just through that

[01:00:56] Bud Kraus: point of view, that's the, but that's the coolness factor. if somebody, I don't know what the percentage of like solopreneurs or singletons or whatever, like people like y like me, Nathan, others that we really don't need the collaborative part of WordPress.

[01:01:12] Nathan Wrigley: but

[01:01:12] Bud Kraus: I don't know how big Steve

[01:01:13] Nathan Wrigley: has an entire business. So Steve has an entire business built on top of exactly. People who do need collaborative sort of complicated editing scenario. So I'm gonna hand this to Steve. Yeah,

[01:01:25] Steve Burge: well, I'd admit that what we do is niche and Dan, you've also worked. In a company that sells a collaborative editing tool as well.

yeah.

[01:01:36] Dan Knauss: Right.

[01:01:38] Steve Burge: Honestly, bud, I'd probably admit that it is, somewhat not niche. I'm, really struggling for words today. I'm trying not to offend someone.

[01:01:48] Dan Knauss: It's an, enterprise feature, but this is better than Google Docs comments. Like for people who do use it, there's all kind, this opens doors.

And with, AI more and more coming into the picture, how many people are really gonna be the single author, single admin of a site when you bring in agents in there?

[01:02:09] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah.

[01:02:09] Dan Knauss: So this isn't just people, you want, it's an audit trail of whatever user agent has gone in and done something.

[01:02:17] Bud Kraus: Yeah. Okay.

So am I gonna use, can I do AI prompts with this?

[01:02:21] Taco Verdonschot: Not yet.

[01:02:23] Bud Kraus: I know, but it's not gonna take

[01:02:24] Taco Verdonschot: long. No.

[01:02:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:02:26] Taco Verdonschot: Well, so what I would imagine is that you have something like, a, Grammarly or another tool that would check your writing.

And instead of giving you some generic feedback at the bottom, it will tell you in this paragraph,

[01:02:42] Bud Kraus: right,

[01:02:43] Taco Verdonschot: this is what you need to change.

And you can do that for text, for images, for, Hey, you've used this image on four other pages. Are you aware? A little note. stuff like that. I think,

[01:02:57] Nathan Wrigley: can I, in a, sorry, TECO, in a breathtaking example of like. Like getting ahead of what we're gonna talk about here is Jeffrey Paul's article from this week, with exactly the feature you've just described.

So this is the AI experiments 0.4 0.0, so it's 5th of March, few days ago. That exact thing is there. Generate review notes. So you get the ai, okay? And you just click a single button and it goes through Grammarly style if you want it to be the Grammarly style kind of thing. And it will paragraph by paragraph give you improvements and it will do it in the notes ui.

So I should probably, run this video for you. Oh. So I'll just go towards the end here. Basically what happens in this video is he's dropped in a load of, let's call it rum text. and then he is gone to the menu and he's clicked, generate note, review notes. And click the button.

Then you wait a little while, most of this video is actually just waiting for the, little progress bar to update itself. And then, right towards the end it says there are three suggestions added. So it's for the whole article, it's suggested three things, and then you can see it's put them, I've just gone past that bit in the video.

there they are, they've dropped inside the notes ui.

[01:04:22] Bud Kraus: Very

[01:04:22] Nathan Wrigley: cool. And it says grammar.

[01:04:24] Bud Kraus: Yeah.

[01:04:24] Nathan Wrigley: So we know this is a grammar related piece of AI updating, but it could have been anything, it could have been rewrite required, or, I don't know, change the, I, don't honestly know. Presumably, given that this article also talks about images being generated in the media library and in the editor.

Maybe there's gonna be options for that as well, but, so Tacho, I don't know if you'd read that or

[01:04:49] Taco Verdonschot: No,

[01:04:50] Nathan Wrigley: sorry, I'm sorry to

[01:04:50] Taco Verdonschot: interrupt. So, no, that, that's absolutely fine. this is AI based, heuristics based. This is what we've built in progress planner already. So it will show you little to do notes on, specific paragraphs Exactly, to get you to work on your site and to better help you, do the things that make a difference.

[01:05:15] Bud Kraus: So what I missed, I'm sorry, Tako. But what I missed and all, what I didn't understand was that this new feature is, not just for humans collaboration, but it's for AI collaboration with a human. Yeah.

[01:05:31] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. And any plugin or tool, that's what I missed. Can annotate. A paragraph now.

[01:05:38] Bud Kraus: Okay.

[01:05:38] Dan Knauss: So yeah, think, of the usefulness of just getting, an audit periodically accessibility or your code samples are using deprecated functions or, you, you need to update this documentation and this is, I've already done it.

[01:05:55] Bud Kraus: Okay.

[01:05:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But, really interesting that it's it's in the, it's just in a new spot in the ui.

It's this floating spot in the ui, which binds itself to the content. if you've got a paragraph here, the little piece of commentary about it will be bound to it in space. Yeah. And that, I just think that's, it's really interesting. So, as an example, the, Yo SEO plugin with its traffic lights.

The traffic lights are just there, they're just in this little part of the UI somewhere, but it's not about that particular paragraph or this particular paragraph. And it sounds like Progress Planner is taking that work on and giving you helps at the point that you might need it. And so it's that, but also.

The curious thing from my point of view is you get a default, don't you? in a workflow, you get a default workflow and you stick with it when you realise it's working. And so let's pick a, let's pick a publication, which has got a very large circulation in the tech space. Let's go with TechCrunch.

Huge publication built on WordPress. I imagine at the moment their editorial workflow is fairly clumsy and probably something along the lines of Google Docs. And then finally, once we've got that all perfectly tied off and we know that article is right, somebody's job is to copy and paste that in to the WordPress block editor and then finally, give it a once over and then click publish.

I can see a publishing house like that fully adopting Gutenberg and cutting out the Google Doc style thing in a heartbeat. Once everybody's on board and, they realise it's, it's shippable and it works. 'cause then, one tool is better than two tools.

[01:07:33] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. I manage the website for my sports club and I work with.

How do I put this nicely, slightly less tech savvy people like

[01:07:47] Bud Kraus: me.

[01:07:48] Taco Verdonschot: No, but you are, you'd be their hero. Absolutely. no, it they really struggle to either get to Google Docs or get to the website, so, and then they don't understand the relation and someone says, I'm going to write a news post and is doing in docs, and someone else is writing it in words and sending around a file and that.

[01:08:13] Nathan Wrigley: Right, right.

[01:08:14] Taco Verdonschot: it's a mess. If I can consolidate all of that conversation into a single tool and they only have one place to go, that would make my life so much easier.

[01:08:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:08:26] Steve Burge: There, there is a plan, I believe, to put this into the, theme editor as well, so. It'd be a kind of, oh, an Atri style.

yeah, you're designing the site. You leave comments like this is the wrong colour for the header. so I believe this comment system will break outside of the post editor and go elsewhere in WordPress too.

[01:08:54] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So not just for like semi published, half published, pre-published workflows could be part of the design workflow of building out.

That's really interesting. That makes

[01:09:06] Taco Verdonschot: sense. Since everything is block editor.

[01:09:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:09:09] Taco Verdonschot: Basically.

[01:09:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That

[01:09:11] Taco Verdonschot: makes sense. Yeah.

[01:09:12] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. Wow. anyway, it's, growing, it's getting robust and, and it's, there's certainly a lot to look at. I, as always, I will link in the show notes to both the pieces that I just showed, the Jeffrey Paul one and the Nomad blog on the Anne McCarthy one.

But there's a lot to look at and, this collaborative editing thing is coming on, a much faster rip than I thought it was going to. Right. Okay. Couple of, actually four, I think pieces now coming from, first one is on the repository website. I'm gonna say like. I'm gonna say like a year ago, maybe it was slightly more than a year ago.

I can't exactly remember the fair. So the, federated and independent repositories, that's the acronym, project was launched. in fact, look, there's, is that, are you there? Is that you Taka?

[01:10:04] Taco Verdonschot: Yes,

[01:10:05] Nathan Wrigley: that's me In the picture on the repository site, the fair, project was launched and the idea was that it would be a swap out, a direct swap out for wordpress.org.

You'd be able to instal a plugin in your WordPress repository and wordpress.org would no longer be, let's go with the word necessary. You could use a different repository, built on top of Aspire Press, if my understanding is correct.

[01:10:32] Taco Verdonschot: Yes.

[01:10:32] Nathan Wrigley: And, there were some heavy hitters in the WordPress community associated with the project, which gave it a lot of, a lot clout when it began.

However, during the course of the last week, two of those heavy hitters, have decided to step away. that would be the ones in question are Yos, Devo, the person, not the company, and Kari Marucci. And, but the project goes on. But first of all, your thoughts on the main piece in question Tako?

[01:11:05] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah, so I'm slightly, biassed here because I'm basically on both sides.

So Yost of all is my direct colleague and I've seen how much time, energy, and money he spent on, on Fair and, I, and I'm part of the technical steering committee for fair, so I'm involved myself as well. And it hurts to see that we have a. Ecosystem, a community that is so big and where we see, companies spend insane amount of money, to sponsor work camps.

And that it, because it, apparently they're not willing to spend that money on the WordPress project itself, whether it be WordPress, which is what Matt has been saying for quite a while. hey, we need companies to invest more, otherwise we're not gonna make it. but also not in a project that would future proof parts of WordPress, make it compliant with GDPR, and on, upcoming legislation.

and I am, heavily disappointed that. Companies in our ecosystem. which typically are the companies with the deepest pockets, let's be fair, is that they're not willing to step up and give this a, proper shot, by funding the initiative. Luckily, we're used to, not being funded for the open source work that we do in WordPress.

And so the project itself isn't gone. the technical project exists, stays around. but it's taking a little bit of a shift at cloudfest in two weeks from now, just over two weeks. there will be a hackathon project to bring fair to type of three, which is another open source, CMS. And the type of three community has been looking at what we were building for WordPress and said, this is what we want for type of three.

And so we're going to it was always meant to grow beyond WordPress itself. but right now it means that the focus is entirely shifting from WordPress and the WordPress community to, the type of three community. And I hope that we can onboard many type of three developers 'cause they also have an amazing developer community.

and that fair has a very long and prosper future and will hopefully at some point also be seen by the workplace community and, the companies with deep pockets, as valuable. And we might return and, f. Get that funding and get a board and not an explanation.

[01:14:33] Nathan Wrigley: So ta what you the piece, sorry, bot.

I'll just say a couple of things. Yeah, go ahead please. Thank you. So the thank you. no problem. the piece was, it does mention hosting quite a lot and it, and I, if I'm paraphrasing this correctly, step in Tcho and save me from myself, but it feels that's the fulcrum of the, reason why Yost, the person and Kari have, stepped away.

They didn't feel that there was buy-in, literally buy-in from, hosting companies in particular because it was felt that they were really the, crucial part of the success of that. yes. 'cause obviously if let's say that there was a giant hosting company X who has billions of dollars in revenue a year and all of that.

If they were to put fare in. That would obviously be a bit of a game changer, but that did not happen. So questions then, I suppose from Karen m Yost about, well, why didn't that happen? What's the, what, was the hold up? And then eventually, I guess some, degree of exasperation, as Tacho was pains to point out it.

The project isn't just about those two individuals, although they were very crucial at getting it off the ground and making it popular. And there are three articles which Tcho brought to bear from people who are still involved and I presume have the intention to maintain their involvement.

And they are as follows. We got this first one, which is, I believe this is Mika Epstein's blog. Is that right? Yes. Have I got that right? So,

[01:16:11] Taco Verdonschot: yeah. So all three, the blogs are from the current, leads of the technical project.

[01:16:16] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so

[01:16:17] Taco Verdonschot: this is, Mika Epstein. Yeah.

[01:16:19] Nathan Wrigley: So we've got Mika Epstein, she's written up, she's called her Fair.

colon Successes, lessons, and what's next? And again, a long detailed write up of what's going on. The next one, Carrie Dills, building fair and letting go of what could have been. So again, similar, but different slightly. And then finally, I've actually forgotten who this one was. I Apologies.

Ryan. Ryan McCue. Thank you. Of course. Yeah. Ryan McCue, the, I guess you might label him as the Chief Technical architect of the project. I'm not sure if that's entirely true, but, yeah,

[01:16:53] Taco Verdonschot: he's one of the, technical masterminds,

[01:16:56] Nathan Wrigley: one of the technical people again. So there we go. So Ryan's, mo shorter take on that piece.

So all of those will be linked, in the show notes if you want to go and have a read. Tacho, anything you want to add on that before we let the others in on it?

[01:17:12] Taco Verdonschot: yeah, I just hope that at some point, the workplace community at large is going to realise that this is what's needed for the upcoming legislation in Europe.

and that there might be more attention for fair again. But meanwhile, I know that we have some dedicated people who continue to build an awesome project.

[01:17:39] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you. and the focus for now moving over in the next couple of weeks at cloudfest to, to typo three. So obviously what happens over there?

So bod Steve, Dan, anything? Maybe Bob first, and I think you had something to say and I interrupted. Sorry.

[01:17:53] Bud Kraus: Well, I'm just wondering how you could characterise the, how would you characterise or could you generalise the, the non. Participation of these major hosting companies in the fair initiative? did Yost and did they meet, stiff Resistance?

Hey, we don't wanna upset the Apple cart. can you characterise some of that? So, because I, this is a, this is a game changing, upset the Apple cart, to the, ecosystem.

[01:18:27] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. so everything I'll say about it is hearsay. So the best thing I can probably do is send you to, the blog posts that Yost and Kareem wrote about it.

Yeah. We should probably add them to the show notes as well.

[01:18:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yep, yep.

[01:18:48] Taco Verdonschot: they explained a little bit more in detail. The, responses they got. But in very short, as Nathan summarised, they were not willing to commit financially and well politically. that's

if you will.

[01:19:08] Bud Kraus: Yeah.

[01:19:08] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah.

[01:19:09] Bud Kraus: Okay. It's more, it's not a matter of they don't have the money, it's the politics. They don't wanna. Yeah, they don't wanna go in that direction. Well,

[01:19:17] Taco Verdonschot: probably

[01:19:17] Dan Knauss: they don't. There's a, there's an unwillingness to invest in infrastructure from hosts, including their own that is problematic. and I, I, maybe if there's a silver lining here, that's one of them.

That, that's everyone's problem. yeah. Matt's been on that other, Jesse Friedman, they're advocates for solid hosting. Quality infrastructure for WordPress really matters. and the community needs to look at that. There's security angle. You have a patch stack talking to and involved in this and addressing more than GDPR, but, basic, fundamental needs that are not gonna go away.

They're, in the future.

[01:20:03] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Just because time is short, I'm gonna. Put a lid on that one. But, I will, I believe I already did link to the Yost piece last, maybe two weeks ago, but I will link to it again for an added context. And the Karen one as well. Tako, if you wouldn't mind sending me those links, then.

Will do. I will do. I'll have more of a memory then, then, 'cause when this call typically ends, most of what I said just evaporates, from my head. but we've got a few bits to get through, so I'll just make some expedite ex expediting, decisions about what we can and can't follow. We did those ones.

Just a quick one. so this is interesting, following on from the work of, people like Courtney Robertson, who was trying to get a sort of site, a contributor health dashboard set up and running. We now have this, which is the contributor dashboard. it is literally what it says on the tin. No time to add context to this, but all I'll do is again, for a good, decent coverage of this.

Head to the repository. There's an article there, WordPress Conti contributor dashboard Pilot. Now live team proposes next phase. Maybe I'll come back to this next week because it's actually worth looking at and it will, the idea being that if you are a contributor to the WordPress project, it's been very difficult to track what everybody's up to and what, does your contribution mean?

How can you accrue credit, if you like? And so this is an endeavour to make that publicly available so that people can see, what's going on. But I'll just drop that in and then, move on. Very quickly, we were talking about education earlier. This is so interesting, right? This is the WordPress Campus Connect, so it's on make dot WordPress, dot org.

The piece is called, bringing WordPress Campus Connect to Malaysia, a milestone for open source education at University Technology Malaysia. Apologies if I've mispronounced that. And it's by Nasim Mia, published on the 2nd of March, and we have mentioned on this show before what WordPress Campus Connect is.

So I wrote really dwell on that. But this article, man Alive, if you wanna put on one of these events, there is a lot of moving parts. And I don't mean that in a negative way. I don't mean that to say, gosh, how complicated this is. What I'm saying is hats off to the people who put this stuff together because there's a boatload.

And typically when you see an article like this, it's like a one line, like, oh, we did this thing. Then somebody writes an article like this where you, then get to see all the different things that make something like this happen. and it's pretty incredible. And the idea really with WP Camp WordPress Campus Connect is that this is gonna roll out globally.

So templates like this are gonna be really helpful for other people putting on hopefully events like this and getting, a younger generation, interested in WordPress. So I, just learned a lot. I glibly thought that these things fell out of the ether and you put them on and it's a piece of cake.

no, There's a lot of hard work and so congratulations to everybody connected with this.

[01:23:23] Taco Verdonschot: weren't you involved in Wamp Whitley Bays organisation?

[01:23:27] Nathan Wrigley: No, I was not. No, Which is probably why I'm not knowledgeable about it. I haven't really been involved on that side. I'm involved in meetups and things like that, but.

It, was, I was, and obviously when you get into real world institutions, I imagine you are, adding bureaucracy layers, hither to as yet unimagined. paperwork that needs to be filled in risk assessment. I dunno what it's like over in Malaysia, but I know that in the UK just putting your foot through the door, you've got the mountain of paperwork and insurance policies and all of that nonsense to fill in.

So, yeah. amazing. So hats off to anybody that's been involved with that. I'm really impressed. Right. Very, quickly then we've done that one. That's handy. We mentioned the, article by Jeffrey Paul. We'll come back to that at the end. if you're a divvy user, if you're a divvy user. I don't know how long you've waited for this, but it feels like it could have been like since 20.

Oh, I don't know when, but it's divvy five. It's a thing. Divvy five is finally here. It feels like people have been talking about this for a long time. It has finally been released. I have never used divvy. I'm not making casting any aspersions, I just don't know anything about it, but I, so I dunno how seismic this update is.

But anyway, congratulations to the crowd over at Divvy four. Shipped

[01:24:52] Taco Verdonschot: looks big. I think Divvy four was 2019, so,

[01:24:56] Nathan Wrigley: okay. It's a while. It's

[01:24:57] Taco Verdonschot: been a few years in the making

[01:24:58] Nathan Wrigley: seven years and I think this beta release was like a full 12 months or something like that. So now either that speaks to their incredible finessing the details or maybe it's just been a slow slog trying to update everything.

But man Divvy is used. A lot. there is a tonne of people using diviv and for some reason it never quite gets on my radar. I dunno why that is. Just that usage of it never quite connects. But when you see the data and you see the lines of the different. Building technologies in WordPress Divvy is always crazy high up on that list.

So anyway, there you go. Go and instal your website up to that. I'm not gonna mention that quickly. Just three events to mention very quickly. if you still haven't decided about it, now's the time, make your decision. WordCamp Asia is coming up very soon. April the ninth to April the 11th.

I should, I would like to go, but my visa was declined. I dunno why my visa was declined, but got, got an, email the other day saying, you're not allowed. You're security risk.

[01:26:02] Taco Verdonschot: You're in good company. Though I've heard more, European Visa applications being. Yeah, declined.

[01:26:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Well, mine was declined and I've got to apply in a different way anyway.

Well, I'm sure I'll figure it out. but yeah, it was, it was, interesting. Let's just put it that way. So I'm gonna have to figure that out. But I would like to go. But anyway, just to let you know, it is happening the 11th, sorry, ninth of the 11th of April, coming up soon. Also, beer, gi beer, gi p hack put together a, a list of selected sessions.

So I thought I'd mention that as well. You can tell I'm in a bit of a rush. Call for photographers if you're heading to crack off and you want to be a part of the, photography team. they're looking for photographers right now. So, if you like cables, apparently then, looks like this lot. Love a good cable.

so many cables. Look at that. then you, are you

[01:26:55] Steve Burge: rushing. Are you rushing to talk about the, that doom story or

[01:26:59] Nathan Wrigley: about Yes. I wanna get back to the Doom. I wanna get back to the Doom story. Exactly. Oh, and here we go. For Dan, maybe, word Camp Canada. shifting locations going from where it has been to the right on the other side of Canada.

So it's moving to, yeah. To Vancouver. I dunno what the dates are, but, look at that lovely Vancouver.

[01:27:20] Dan Knauss: A little later in November. Yeah,

[01:27:22] Nathan Wrigley: November this

[01:27:22] Dan Knauss: time,

[01:27:23] Nathan Wrigley: man. It'll be like, does Vancouver not get quite as cold as the Oh, no parts. Okay. Yeah.

[01:27:31] Dan Knauss: Might, might be a little damp. Might be rainy,

[01:27:33] Nathan Wrigley: but little temp.

It's nice. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, world Camp Canada, is happening in Vancouver. That's, really all I've got to say about that. And the last one on the event side of things is WP Accessibility Day 2026 is now open for sponsors. So if you would like to be, part of that, then go to WP Accessibility Day forward slash 2026.

Yes. Forward slash call for sponsors

[01:27:59] Taco Verdonschot: and if you care about accessibility. the WP Accessibility Day team has also opened a fundraiser Yes. To get an accessibility booth at W Camp Europe. Yes. Yes. And we still need funding. So if you care about accessibility and you want to spread it at probably the biggest WordPress event in 2026, then make sure to head over to, Accessibility today and find that, crowdfunding

[01:28:33] Nathan Wrigley: and, no doubt there'll be links on this. We definitely mentioned it when it came out. It's like a, almost like a crowdfunding kind of thing that's going on. It's, it's like a give, give WP sort of campaign or something like that. So definitely go and check that out and we will end the shows.

Two things that I want to mention, but I've somehow managed to make all of my screens disappear.

I'm hanging by a thread. Dan, I was saying at the beginning, I've had, things going on with my eyes and so just clicking the buttons is Tom. so where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Right. Okay. Imagine the scenario. Whereby, I've stopped sharing my screen, haven't I? I wonder how I did that.

Yes. Lemme put my screen back on quickly. this, you need it for this. Imagine a scenario where you get a load of brain cells, like actual brain cells, neurons, and you, put them, you take them out of a brain. Dunno how you do that, but you do. And then you put 'em in a Petri dish and then you basically attach electrodes.

You get really clever. You get some really clever, credible neuroscientists, and you wanna make them into like a circuit, like a microchip. Well, what is the certified test for whether or not you've succeeded? Well, it might be, can it play pong? Well, apparently it can. It did p like a whole year ago it figured out pong.

So next step. Doom. So they've got, literal neurons in a Petri dish playing doom. Now, I've gotta say, if you watch the video, the word playing is a little bit of a misnomer and not really playing doom the but, what they've done is they've managed to isolate so that when certain things happen on the screen, the neurons react in this certain way.

Their technology kind of reads that reaction and then interprets that as a do this thing. So it could be move left, could be move right, could be fire the gun, but. What the heck? Yes.

[01:30:43] Dan Knauss: There was another one. Did you, see the one where the, guy, set up a system for his dog to vibe code. it's, so, it's,

[01:30:55] Nathan Wrigley: that's insane.

literally insane. And all I can say is they all seem to be Australian. Every single person on every video seems to be, on Australian. So, but it is amazing. Yeah. I think that's where

[01:31:08] Taco Verdonschot: Cortical Labs is based. So

[01:31:10] Nathan Wrigley: Cor Cortical Labs, which is who are doing it. I make it sound like it's literally Petri dishes.

It's not, it's when you watch the videos, it's this like highly secure, clever technology. They've obviously got the, neurons in this, some kind of substrate where they're attaching it, it doesn't look like a petrol edition. Then they drop that into some other device, which looks like a little computer and so it goes, but fact is.

It's playing doom. And, it won't, don't, it'll be too long before excuse. We'll be,

[01:31:45] Steve Burge: we'll be in trouble when they can. we'll be in trouble when they can podcast. If fast forward five years, it'll have Nathan, a Petri dish, a dog, and maybe Taco and Dan.

[01:31:57] Nathan Wrigley: At this point, you don't need, I'm not sure if you're

[01:31:58] Steve Burge: comparing me to the Petri

[01:32:00] Taco Verdonschot: dish or the dog at this point.

[01:32:04] Nathan Wrigley: It's coming. It's, I'm telling you. But then you're the other. It's coming. A Petri dish will do all the things right? Okay, so that's insane. But I just want to, this is the last piece for today. I'm sorry I'm keeping you all a bit longer than usual, but this is my new greatest thing. I love this more than I can say.

You are gonna think I'm an idiot. I think it's wonderful. That's a phone, right? There's a phone. Everybody knows what that looks like. I hate these things. So badly. There's so much wrong with these things. So what you, need. Yes.

[01:32:37] Taco Verdonschot: Yours is missing glitter.

[01:32:38] Nathan Wrigley: No. What you need. No, It's got them there.

but very good. What you need is this. Oh. Oh, that's another phone. This is my new phone. This is, that's a

[01:32:52] Taco Verdonschot: pager.

[01:32:53] Nathan Wrigley: It's not, it's a full on Android 16 phone. That's that big. The keyboard is impossible to use. The letters are just like this microscope. Let me see if I can put it on the screen and show you what the

keyboard

[01:33:11] Nathan Wrigley: Don't need a keyboard.

There's the keyboard.

[01:33:13] Bud Kraus: Yeah.

[01:33:13] Nathan Wrigley: Can you see the keyboard at the model? It's probably outta focus, but there's my finger. Compare.

[01:33:19] Taco Verdonschot: Aren't you the one who just told us that you have problem with your site at

[01:33:23] Nathan Wrigley: the moment? Okay, so, so what can you do? Basically nothing. This is the goal. The whole goal is if it doesn't have big icons like the music app, you can't use it.

And so now I found myself this perfect phone that does the minimum that I need, which is sat nav handles it like a champ. As soon as it's plugged into the car, I go to the phone, you know the screen in the car, don't need to worry about the phone anymore. And it'll play songs on my music app of choice.

'cause they're all big fat icons and it will play podcasts 'cause they're all big fat icons. But anything to do with typing cannot do it. And it's the best thing in the world and I'm absolutely loving it and it's got the best name. it, oh by the way, you have to have a strap 'cause it's so small. You drop it all the time.

So you just attach it to your wrist. It's called, wait for it. The Jelly Star and there it is. In all its wonderful glory. It's got NFT, so not N-F-T-N-F-C. So I can do the Google payments. Yeah, it's like the size of your headphone box.

[01:34:32] Taco Verdonschot: Exactly.

[01:34:33] Nathan Wrigley: Anyway, go check it out. If you two are trying to DD phone your life.

This is the antidote. It's absolutely brilliant and I'm loving having no interactions.

[01:34:44] Taco Verdonschot: I'm pretty sure if someone has a latest generation smartwatch, it's bigger than your phone.

[01:34:50] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, yeah, Well, I know. Let's pop it on the wrist and see what we've, that's, it's

[01:34:55] Taco Verdonschot: almost, see if you turn it 90 degrees, it actually fits.

So

[01:35:02] Nathan Wrigley: it's, so, okay, let me open it up and I'll open up the ize quickly. Do the, podcast app. 'cause that's something that we can all get our heads around. So that's what it looks like, right? It's just a bunch of. Bunch of icons. I can click those. That's the size of my finger. That's all I need.

[01:35:19] Dan Knauss: pH.

[01:35:20] Nathan Wrigley: There you go. And on that bombshell, we'll wrap it up. Yeah, I know To. Makes no sense. Makes no sense. We're so on the

[01:35:26] Taco Verdonschot: opposite sides

[01:35:27] Nathan Wrigley: of the universe on this. Oh, it's so good. My life is quiet. There's no bing bong or any of that nonsense anymore. No browser, no nothing. No email, no social networks, no nothing.

Just, okay. So

[01:35:40] Taco Verdonschot: there's one thing I have to ask Nathan.

[01:35:41] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah.

[01:35:43] Taco Verdonschot: How long does it run on a single charge?

[01:35:46] Nathan Wrigley: About a day and a half. Yeah. Longer than your phone? Way longer than your phone. Yeah.

[01:35:53] Taco Verdonschot: Well, no, mine does actually a day in a half.

[01:35:56] Nathan Wrigley: so, because it's, you'll notice it's way thicker than my old phone.

So there's the old phone, right. And it's basically because most you can't build that kind of technology and put a battery in it without increasing its width. 'cause usually a significant proportion of the actual phone is, the, battery maybe as much as half of it or something like that. So it's a bit chunkier.

So they've got a fairly decent sized battery in, you're not, it's not gonna win any awards I don't think on that. Oh, and the camera's diabolical. Like, oh, actually, I dunno if the camera's, I'm looking at pictures with my new eyes and maybe the pictures are great, but I just can't see them.

So anyway, there we go. Jelly Star. Go get 'em everybody before they run out, I'm sure. Yeah, probably

[01:36:40] Taco Verdonschot: not, but thanks. Yeah,

[01:36:42] Nathan Wrigley: when I see you in person, I'll show it to you and, I'll, have to remove the crumb from on top of it first so that you can see it. Right. There we go. That's it. Thank you. Thank you to my guests.

So we've got Bud, crowds. Thank you. We've got Steve. We do this now. Yeah, we're gonna do the hands in a minute. Tako Don Shop. And Bob, sorry, Dan Canal's over there somewhere. He's over there somewhere. I dunno where he is, but he's over there. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for joining us. If you put a comment in, really appreciate it.

I did. I, to be honest with you, I have, if there's been any comments, I haven't really been able to read them, so I'm sorry about that. They're a bit small in the UX here, so sorry. I got a few on, but that was as much as I could manage. Right. If you don't mind, can we do the, the hand waver Jo? What we did?

The

[01:37:28] Bud Kraus: hand.

[01:37:29] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. The hand. That's it. Everybody get the hands. That's it. Tech i's given us a good grin. There we go. I will see you next week. All things be an equal. And, if you guys wanna stick around for a minute afterwards and have a chat, that'd be nice. But, see you next week. Take it easy. Bye bye. Bye.

Bye Bye.

[01:37:45] Taco Verdonschot: Bye bye.