This Week in WordPress #371

[00:00:03] Nathan Wrigley: It is time for This Week in WordPress, episode number 371 entitled, clients don't actually care. It was recorded on Monday, the 27th of April, 2026. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I am joined by three fabulous guests. I'm joined by Remkus de Vries, by Tim Nash and by Marc Benzakein.

Apologies for the extended lapse in producing episodes of This Week in WordPress. I've been a little bit poorly, but then after that I had a little bit of holiday time around WordCamp Asia. So we are back though, and hopefully you will enjoy this.

It's a WordPress podcast. So guess what? We talk a lot about WordPress.

In summary, we talk about WordPress 7.0 and the fact that it was punted and it wasn't released at WordCamp Asia. Why was that? We have a lengthy chat about that.

We talk about a new tool which purports to make it easy to contribute at WordCamps, if you attend WordCamp contributor day. Tim Nash has thoughts on that as well.

There's a new team which is going to be helping launch the 2027 theme. We touched briefly on that.

And then the majority of today's episode is all about the Admin Bar survey. It's called the State of WordPress Agency, and we get into a conversation which goes off in all sorts of different directions, and really uses a lot of the podcast.

We talk about a new initiative at Automattic giving their employees, or some of their employees, a whole month to pursue projects of their own choosing. That's really interesting.

And then very much towards the end, we talk about a new theme that has launched, and we also get into the news that WooCommerce Subscriptions has been turning off auto renewals. That could have affected many people's bottom lines.

It is all coming up next on This Week in WordPress.

Hello. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are in the world. It is number 371. That's what it says, so I'll believe it of this week in WordPress. we're here to drone on about WordPress with the four of us I think are quite good at droning on about WordPress. A apologies panel that wasn't supposed to be insulting, but it came, came across like that, didn't it?

I'm very sorry. it was supposed self-deprecating. that's it. I'm

[00:02:22] Marc Benzakein: outta

[00:02:22] Nathan Wrigley: here. Outta here. Gone. Yeah, it's Totting. so yeah, that's the plan. We talk about WordPress rather a lot. I don't think we're gonna stray too much into other subjects, but we've got the usual smorgasbord of plugins and themes and all of that kind of thing.

if you would like to, join us in this, feel free to do that. after the fact, you, obviously can't comment live, but you can comment on the blog post on wp builds.com. But if you happen to get a notification through your email and you are watching this live, the best place to go is. Is this one URL, and it's wp builds.com/live.

Like that wp builds.com/live. If you go there, then you've got two options. If you're logged into a Google account, you can use the comment box, on the right, on desktop or underneath on mobile. But if you don't wanna be logged into a Google account, there's a little black box on the player itself.

Something like live chat is what it says. Click on that. And that's, that's the chat that comes through the platform. feel free to click that. that would be great. So who have we got today? you can see, let's go round the houses. Let's go this way. it's Mark Ben again. First, how you doing, mark?

[00:03:34] Marc Benzakein: I am doing fantastic. Amazing.

[00:03:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. He's

[00:03:40] Marc Benzakein: so good.

[00:03:41] Nathan Wrigley: So good. Good. It's two in the morning or something where Mark lives, so he's pushing through, what time is it?

[00:03:49] Marc Benzakein: It is, it's, 6:04 AM. yeah,

[00:03:54] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, yeah,

Thank you. I have no words. I'm very appreciative. Let's go with that. So I'll read the bio, so that we, and you can have a small break, have a coffee.

Mark Zaca is the partnerships and community lead of Maine wp, where he spends his time working with plugin developers, agencies, and service providers across the WordPress ecosystem. He's been involved with WordPress for many years and is particularly interested in helping site owners keep control of their own infrastructure while still benefiting from the broader plugin and hosting landscape.

At Main wp, he focuses on partnerships, community management, and using those partnerships to help unlock and extend what's possible with the open source ecosystem. Outside of work, mark keeps busy by drinking coffee, creating hands-on projects. He's usually tinkering with a new idea, building something in the workshop, experimenting with design and graphics, or finding excuses to get outside on his bike.

Now that the weather, yes, now that the weather supports those excuses, he also spends lots of time writing and generally. Exploring whatever interesting project happens to grab his attention this week. I have rediscovered my bike as well this week, which has been quite nice over the last couple of days.

So thank you for joining us, mark. Really

[00:05:03] Marc Benzakein: appreciate it. thank you for, having me.

[00:05:05] Nathan Wrigley: You are very welcome. Always

[00:05:07] Marc Benzakein: appreciate it.

[00:05:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. likewise. Really appreciate it. Thank you. And let's go clockwise, is that, and we'll get to Mku. Hello Mku.

[00:05:16] Remkus de Vries: Hello, Nathan. Mark.

[00:05:18] Nathan Wrigley: It's been a while.

[00:05:19] Remkus de Vries: It has.

[00:05:19] Nathan Wrigley: How are you doing?

[00:05:20] Remkus de Vries: it, it, there's a reason for why it's been a while. 'cause, I was being, picked on in the one, four or five years ago, so I was like, yeah, we're not doing that.

[00:05:31] Nathan Wrigley: But I, can only apologise if it was me. What did I do? but, no, it, it really, I, it has been a while, I think probably several months since you've been on and,

[00:05:41] Remkus de Vries: yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I've been busy. I've been, very, busy. Not, that I'm not busy right now, but. Yeah, just lots, lots of moving parts, lots of stuff going on. Okay.

[00:05:50] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, I think we're gonna find out more about that next week. I, I failed to spot something that Remus was doing. no, no.

anyway, here we go. Here's the Remus bio. Remus is a WordPress performance specialist. He co-founded LY a site health and performance monitoring tool and runs within WordPress home to the Guild, alongside courses, a newsletter, and a podcast for those serious about building better WordPress sites. He also runs truer than North, which is a strategic guidance service for companies in the WordPress world for making the right technical and ecosystem decisions.

So that's REMCOs. And on the screen, if you can see it, you can see the URL for the scan, fully product scan fully.com. Thank you for joining us. Appreciate that. How, and lastly. Tim Nash, who always leaves his bio to the last minute. So I don't have a chance to practise it. And here it goes. How you doing first, Tim?

You all right?

[00:06:47] Tim Nash: I'm fine. I, today it was unusual. I don't normally leave it to the last, second, No, that's true. Apologies for the mid mediocre bio. And, I, think, Rikus may have been referring to our attempt to get him to do a rap battle with somebody else. I've forgotten who

[00:07:04] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah.

That had totally gone

[00:07:10] Tim Nash: that via Twitter. It was, sounded like Cromwell, wasn't it?

[00:07:13] Marc Benzakein: Cromwell, wasn't it Cromwell? We wanted you to get it. yeah, yeah, And I say if you hadn't weren't watching the episode, that could have looked much worse than if you'd actually watched it.

[00:07:25] Nathan Wrigley: One of the nice things about my brain, and it is a nice thing, but it's also a terrible thing, is my capacity to forget things is truly profound.

And I'd completely forgotten about that. I really hadn't all comes flooding back. That was so much fun. I'm so sorry. Yeah,

[00:07:46] Tim Nash: you were threatening, trying to get him violence. And there's me going, oh, I meant. Singing, I want them to

[00:07:51] Nathan Wrigley: sing. Was I was, trying to get remco to, to beat up macro or wasn't I If memory serve.

Yeah. That

[00:07:58] Marc Benzakein: was, that was the goal was I think it was a, two men enter one man leaves kind of thing.

[00:08:04] Nathan Wrigley: I think, truly, I think we know the outcome of that battle, but let's not. Let's not revive that whole thing. I'm only gonna make it worse. so it says, oh, this isn't gonna go well, is it? here we go.

Tim Nash's biography cap. Oh, I see Star Trek, Here we go. Captain's log star. Date 4 7 2 9 1 0.6. Discovered lifeform. Tim Nash, a security consultant specialising WordPress. He seems to be some sort of educator while observing him. He seems to help developers, site owners, and businesses navigate the hostile sectors of the website, of website security, practical risk and modern web infrastructure.

First contact protocols engaged. Visit his [email protected]. That's not bad for just throwing it together at the last minute. I quite like that. Star Trek funds will get it anyway.

[00:08:56] Tim Nash: Yes.

[00:08:58] Nathan Wrigley: Where did you, where

[00:08:59] Marc Benzakein: did you come up with the start date?

[00:09:02] Tim Nash: when I said to, my, my favourite local ai, Hey, come up with a Star Trek themed based on a star on a captain's log entry for me.

it came up with the star date.

[00:09:15] Nathan Wrigley: There you go. It came up with the star date. Okay, lovely. So there's our panel. we'll be chatting about WordPress e bits and pieces. Like I said, if you wanna join us, feel free to do that. Drop a comment in, oh, there's a few people that have put a comment in, so here we go.

One's from Tim Nash. So I'll ignore that one. One's from Remus Dere. is that rude? Is it rude to ignore your comments 'cause you're on the show? No, it isn't it? Hi folks. Hope you're having a good week. Says Tim Nash and Reka says This week is awesome so far, but probably have better gauge of things after this podcast.

Yeah, could easily. I think we know already how it's gonna go. Elliot Sours be just down the road from me. Hello. Hope all is well, Reese win. Afternoon folks and welcome back and, Elliot Richmond. Good. A WP builds and panel seems. We have a panel of cyclists. Oh, nice. That's good to know. I should explain why we've been away from the interwebs.

Firstly, I went into hospital and had some eye things, Don, so that knocked me out for a few weeks and then I went to, I went to Word Camp Asia in India, and listeners to the podcast from many years back will know that when I started the podcast, I did every episode with a chap called David Worsley.

Really lovely guy, but I don't know, two years ago or something, he moved on from WordPress. So we stopped doing the podcast together, but we very much kept in touch and started another podcast called the No Script Show. and he lives in India. And so after Word Camp Asia, I spent a couple of weeks, basically abusing his hospitality.

and as him and his wife took me around India and I've had a absolutely fabulous time. no regrets there. And then I landed with a bump on Saturday, and this show has brought me back to reality. okay, there we go. That's why the show hasn't been going on, but that's why we are back, right?

Let's share the screen and get stuck into it. Here we go. Oh, let's forget the promotional stuff. Put your name, put your email in. That thing put. Press go, we'll send you email. Yeah. How's that? And then I did an episode with, how

[00:11:16] Tim Nash: many emails will you send Nathan?

[00:11:18] Nathan Wrigley: I'll send two a week. Two a week.

There's a strict no spam guarantee apart from the spammy ones. They'll be full of spam. but the nons spammy ones of any spammy. It's all, but yeah, two emails a week, something like that. And there's our archive. They're the episodes that we've done recently. A few of these went out whilst I was in Asia.

I scheduled them all. So I did one with Jamie Marsland, where I debated him about the usefulness of ai and frankly. It wasn't worth it. he's not a, he's not a rival. I absolutely wiped the floor with him. He's gonna hate me for saying that. He's gonna absolutely hate me for saying, we spent a lot of time in Asia and carried on the debate endlessly, and both of us claim victory, but I'm certain that I was the winner.

I also did an episode with Jonathan Jernigan, with Brian Gardner, and then recently, with this chap here who's got this plugin called Buchi. So go and check those episodes out. And that's it really. Let's get stuck into the content itself. I was very excited heading to Word Camp Asia, 'cause Jonathan Roia, and I did an episode where we talked about, the fact that WordPress seven was gonna be released with all this fanfare.

contributor day word, cam Asia, like this big red button kind of event, where all the people gather around. A big button is hit and WordPress gets released. it's a gimmick, but it, I think it's quite a good gimmick. Quite like the idea of mixing live events with releases and things like that.

However. It got pulled, at the last minute because of, we'll get into why in a moment. But we have a new release date. Hopefully this woman will be stopped to, it's about, I don't know, three weeks from now, something like that. May the 20th Is the, is the upcoming release date? there isn't really much to say about that, just that is the date, the new date.

But, I dunno if any of you have got more wisdom than I have about why it was pulled. I just know it had something to do with collaborative editing and the fact that the, I, guess the way that it was being handled wasn't performant. I think it was all handled as metadata. Whereas now I think the move is to push it into a specialised table for this collaborating ev collaborative editing experience.

So I'm gonna hand it over. If any of you can explain what the heck that was, I would be most grateful. over to you if you feel you can do that. And there's total silence. Nobody knows. Okay, fine. in which case, I'll just read it from the screen. I'll read the bits that I've highlighted. Apparently it was, let's have a look here, we go.

The release was originally scheduled for April the ninth during contributor today at Word Camp Asia, but was paused in late March after WordPress co-founder Matt Mullen. We called for a return to the beta phase, to allow more time to address, and I guess this is the thing, a cash invalidation issue found in real time collaboration.

ba blah, And there's some more bits and pieces here, but it basically seems that there was a bit of a snafu and if we had have gone into live production, it wouldn't have been all that performant. And anyway, now the idea really is that, there's been a call for some of the big hosts to get involved in testing this because unlike other releases.

Where it's just a release of WordPress, things have changed. This one really could impact you. I suppose if you're a smaller host on budget

[00:14:39] Tim Nash: hosting, not if you're a smaller host. If you're, any, if you're a bigger host, it's gonna have a fundamental screw effect on you. If you're running shared hosting and you're running on a five 10% CPU margin and or, and you are already running with a overstuff in your memory supply, which is like every host outside of a few of the very expensive ones, that you are all gonna suddenly discover that every single WordPress website's gonna have a certain massive impact performance if it's on by default, which.

It is something that has been told repeatedly all the way through that one thing you can't do is have a performance impact on this, and you, can't, you don't want to centralise things into a central server that's owned by one company and you don't want to have performance impacts at the host level because they won't be able to do their margins and everybody's hosting is gonna go up for a feature that's gonna be used by literally no one.

And it does feel very much like we haven't done any testing across the board. And when they started to do the testing, it all went horribly wrong, right? Ran over.

[00:15:51] Nathan Wrigley: So is it purely of the nature of, so in, in a previous iteration of WordPress, 6.9 and before, when you start to edit a post or a page, you, load up the experience of the editor, whichever editor you're using, then you do your stuff.

Not much is happening. Click. Save or publish or what have you, or update and then information flies back between the host and you and that's the moment where things start to, use workers and what have you. Whereas in this collaborative editing experience is, it just more or less a constant stream?

A trickle of things backwards and forwards? 'cause on the screen here it says awareness is the data that tracks who else is currently edit, editing the post. So awareness is the name that is being given to this sort of feature, it's tracking their presence, cursor position and selection. And it's re, and it's read and written on every poll cycle.

Now I dunno what that poll cycle means, which is why it's become central. As a performance question for the next release candidate. so if you imagine you, were you sitting by yourself, you would write your document and you would hit save.

Yep.

[00:16:56] Tim Nash: That would send a single HTP request. Now, secretly actually behind the scenes, the editor was sending other HTP requests, especially with Gutenberg, with the blocks.

Every time you drugged a block on it was making an HTP request. But generally the big component was hit the save button. HTP request over heartbeat was going in the background that was making some requests back. But you could be doing most of this in isolation and you'd be having very little impact.

now, every time you move the mouse, it's sending data back to the server. So the server has, and then, but, and if there's two of you on the post, it's now repeating that information back out. So it's got to relay it to however many people are looking. So let's get into a wonderful world where we are collaborating.

Let's say all four of us are collaborating and each one of us is moving our mouse, our mice, me a lets go with mice.

[00:17:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:17:54] Tim Nash: Yeah. Our mice around the screen and editing things. Now think about that. How, just how many requests are suddenly hitting this server? That's absolutely fine on your VPS running on a managed host.

I, I, don't imagine your DP engines, sters of this world are gonna have any problems for most people. Now imagine your, 1 99 a year host.

[00:18:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:18:22] Tim Nash: Which is not atypical of what the vast majority of people run on. If you think about those shared host boxes, they are gonna have so many problems if right, not even if they, do get brown over the CPU and RAM constraints.

They might even hit the sheer, just the sheer number of connections that are connecting up, depending on what's happening at any given point. And the, you're gonna, if you end up in a scenario where you are maxing out the transit to the server, then nothing you can do about that. Of if you, either have to split the, split that outta the boxes, which is gonna cost you more money or say No, we have to turn that feature off.

and I'm imagining a lot of hosts are gonna just disable this until because, not because it's wrong or not, and not even, and this is no reflection on whether it's even the right tool or the right thing, or if it should exist in the first place. It is simply a case of a reactionary knee jerk reaction will be to turn it off and investigate later.

cause that's how hosts work and that's how they have to work because they work at scales that are scary. so yeah. I, this, I really, I was so surprised when this turned up in seven. Okay. Having gone from a, yeah, we would like to do this. Yeah. We're gonna experiment on this too. Oh, it's in seven now and there just seems to have been very little.

Hang on. Can we do real world te you take something like Gutenberg that took several years of real world tests before it even got in to the five editor. And this feels like it's accelerated at such a rate and it, the result was it gets pulled. Which is,

[00:20:11] Nathan Wrigley: and I suppose the curious, yeah, the curious thing here as well is that it's not users that needed to do the tech.

they did, it's more the hosting companies, right? 'cause they're the points of failure. Yeah. And from this article, not, I don't know that I've highlighted these bits, but this, is also a clarion call for hosting companies to get involved as well. And I know they've had feedback from some of the usual suspects.

but

[00:20:36] Tim Nash: it's unfortunately not gonna be the usual suspects. The usual suspects. Suspects are gonna be going, yeah, we can do that. 'cause we're the good guys in this scenario. It's the generic unwashed hosts. Okay? You the smaller hosts who are gonna also be utterly unprepared. Because no one's telling them this.

There's not a big campaign to let hosts know. A call by a by Matt in one corner of the internet hiding in a, make post somewhere is not, and a message in the, hosts and or make slack in the host section does not constitute a campaign to, to tell hosts that, oh, by the way, we might be turning on a feature that might impact you.

it's just

[00:21:21] Remkus de Vries: will impact.

[00:21:22] Tim Nash: Yeah. Yes. That's a better way. Yeah.

[00:21:24] Remkus de Vries: Yeah.

[00:21:25] Tim Nash: I guess the could argue might in that the vast majority of sites still only have a single user, so while they will be exponentially increasing the amount of course that one user makes,

[00:21:36] Remkus de Vries: but that, that is, still gonna scale mass horribly.

Yeah. I think the, If you look at the feature itself, and I've had hundreds maybe up into thousands of clients and, bill sites for, I have maybe a handful for whom this would be fully practical. that said, Matt Mullin, we highlighted a case, I think it was on X somewhere at some point, where he essentially said, this is a feature that is particularly, suited for AI to be the collaborative, second person.

That's right.

[00:22:16] Nathan Wrigley: I remember that. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:22:18] Remkus de Vries: And I hadn't considered that position. So if we take that in and the rise of AI as we see it, it, will be used more than the three 4%, that it's currently claimed. But, your recap and as to the, whole impact, Tim, that is very spot on. It's just. We're going to hear the most amount of shit from the most amount of shitty hosting companies when this is going to be pushed as is.

[00:22:46] Tim Nash: on, on the plus side, where it was before, I think that last paragraph that you is, that's not highlighted, but it's on the screen. the pre-release implementation generated close to 4,000 SQL queries in a two minute collaborative window.

Yeah,

no. Databases don't like that?

[00:23:05] Remkus de Vries: No.

[00:23:06] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:23:07] Remkus de Vries: I would go as far as saying they hate it.

[00:23:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Okay, so this, then, this then raises a question of, and to, to Tim's point earlier, I obviously I do this show weekly. This has been coming and coming but for the longest period of time everybody was talking about it as a nice to have oh, it's off in the distance somewhere.

And then I think you are right, Tim. It suddenly. Was gonna be in core like two months ago or something like that. It suddenly got parcelled up as a, yeah, We're going to, we're gonna run this as part of core. And it is surprising in a way, isn't it, that it never, that this particular aspect of it, that the burden on the server, which I think everybody that, probably has dealt with this probably knew in the background that somehow it didn't get surfaced and punted.

I

[00:23:56] Tim Nash: think every single naysayer of this pro would, was, would. Pointing it out.

[00:24:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:24:04] Tim Nash: E we are talking like years ago when this was first mentioned, it was like, no, 'cause the only way you can do this is centralising it. Or burning. Or burn a server. Running it.

[00:24:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:24:13] Tim Nash: And it seems like they fixed a lot of it to get it somewhere performant, but that's still not the same as performant.

[00:24:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:24:20] Tim Nash: But, what's really, I, this, will be a rant is 12 months ago we were all talking about canonical plugins and how canonical plugins were the future. And we should definitely talk about canonical plugins and canonical plugin. where'd that go?

[00:24:34] Nathan Wrigley: You are you meaning this feature as a canonical plugin?

[00:24:38] Tim Nash: the idea was that if we were gonna have that, we were gonna have WordPress call was gonna be really lean and light and, there were certain features that we might need that we should that, but they should be, given as a canonical plugin. So they're still owned by WordPress. They're still maintained to the same high standards, the same release cadence.

Wouldn't, take up space in the very lean and light WordPress for the future. And, roll on nine months. And we've got an what, an MCP servery thing coming in. an agent, a whole new AI agent set thing that's in there with meaning for the first time ever, we're gonna have credentials now in databases and this all in one release.

Okay. It feels like who, where at some point that idea of canonical plugin just got thrown out the window.

[00:25:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Or at least

[00:25:30] Tim Nash: forgotten. That's not even a criticism of whether it's good or bad, it's just We didn't even last nine months. Yeah. Since that because that announce, I think that announcement might have been in Asia when they were talking about canonical floodings last year, but it, really was.

So it might be 12 months, it might not be nine months since they were talking about the future is all canonical.

[00:25:52] Nathan Wrigley: that's right. And this, now that you've mentioned it, it dredged up my memory, which is exactly that. That this would be, the canonical plugins would be like this repository of things, which could have been in core would get the same treatment as if it were core in terms of security updates and things like that.

But it was more a tolerable set of things if you like. I don't need collaborative editing, so we'll switch that off, or at least never instal it. that's, yeah, that's interesting. And I dunno if it was you, Tim, or Mku. In, their little bit said that nobody will ever use it. I only really interact with WordPress websites, which I run nowadays.

So I obviously that tells you everything. I will never use collaborative editing in WordPress in the, with how I've got it set up at the moment. But I'm imagining that some of the bigger players out there, the tech crunches and the, the, some of the big publishing houses that are using it, maybe that would be a nice feature for them to have because, their editorial team is messily trying to figure things out on Google Docs and then copy and paste whatever that workflow looks like.

but yeah, it ev everybody else gets to be the collateral damage because those small amount of websites use it. yeah. Okay. Straw poll, the four of us who will use collaborative editing. The minute it becomes part of core. Stands up, no hands. Interesting. Okay.

[00:27:20] Tim Nash: And the, idea of it maybe being used for, with an AI attached to, it's interesting, but you.

If you are use, if your AI is having to use the gut, the direct post editor interface to drive everything, then this, that's probably not the right approach. So really what you're saying is that the collaborative ai, the collaborative component would be to render what the AI is managing to get in from an external endpoint coming in.

yeah,

[00:27:50] Nathan Wrigley: I think that was tied up with notes, wasn't it? This the sort of sidebar of, like we have in Google Docs with comments, I think they're called notes in the new, the latest iterations of

[00:28:00] Remkus de Vries: Yep.

[00:28:00] Nathan Wrigley: WordPress. And you would interact in that sidebar on the right, if you like, and then the output would then get put into the, block editor, which then obviously in real time you could adapt and amend as it was typing it out.

gosh, okay. Anyway, the, story there was that WordPress seven got punted. and obviously that is a fairly big. Punt. Matt Mullenweg made the decision to punt it. And it sounds, Tim, from everything that you've said, as if that was the right decision. 'cause there could have been some sort of systemic collapse on day one.

[00:28:30] Tim Nash: I wouldn't, I'm not gonna say that I would, put money on it, but I wouldn't be shocked if on the there come the next release. It actually does get that this gets ejected out and that they go, actually we've talked to people, we're gonna save face. We're gonna throw this as a collab.

We're gonna put this in a plugin territory for a little bit. Okay. Get more feedback, get it running probably. And that's absolutely fine thing to do. And I think I would be. Much more, on board with it coming into core once it's been through that sort of release phase. And also I think I'd have a lot more respect for people who are brave enough to say, actually, yeah, we need to punt this.

And we, can't, we shouldn't be slowing things down. We need to punt this and get this. We can come back to it. Load of respect for people doing that because it's not easy to do, especially when your boss has made it the most important thing ever for him.

[00:29:29] Nathan Wrigley: The, the other thing I suppose is the canvas that you're working on, like Google Docs.

It's, a plain white. Sheet, isn't it? And and you've got various functions and you can bold things and italicise things and what have you, but it's really constrained. And if you open up one of their spreadsheets, again, it's fairly constrained in what you can do. WordPress has this aspiration, there's just like a trillion different things that you can do with WordPress.

does, the, does this collaborative layer start to be involved in theming? can you, collaborate on the, theming side of WordPress and things like that? I dunno. you already can. Yeah. But that then of course, makes it all the more complicated. Whereas the Google, gods God knows how much money Google spend on their servers each year.

[00:30:17] Tim Nash: Can you imagine getting two people and they're collaboratively? We can edit the pallet section. I wanna, agree. I wanna pick,

[00:30:25] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. This font. No, we're not having that font. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. So there we go. There's some, there's some thoughts on that. We've had a few comments come in. glad to have you back, says, Kev Clark.

Hello Kev. Nice to have you with us. REM has made a comment, we were talking about. Bikes. There you go. Yeah, I was talking about a push bike, which I presumed is what they were talking about. Patricia says hello. I'm guessing this is Matt. Matt Madeiros. Oh, you got a nice new icon, Matt. how many speed limits did Rem Reka break to get back to do this podcast?

I don't know. Where was he if you Oh, in, in cloud, press conference? Is that what you're talking

[00:31:03] Remkus de Vries: about? On Saturday morning, I was a checkout summit in Palermo, Sicily, Italy.

[00:31:08] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Driving,

[00:31:11] Remkus de Vries: driving.

[00:31:12] Nathan Wrigley: When, was that you were in Palermo?

[00:31:14] Remkus de Vries: Saturday morning.

[00:31:15] Nathan Wrigley: And how many miles is that you had to achieve to get back to the Netherlands?

[00:31:18] Remkus de Vries: I don't know about freedom units, but it's 2,600 kilometres.

[00:31:22] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah. That, Yeah. Was there any speeding? Oh no, you were in, there's quite a lot in Germany. I guess you can actually,

[00:31:30] Remkus de Vries: so let's just say I really behaved in Switzerland, which is what?

[00:31:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:31:34] Remkus de Vries: Which, which is what one does, which is why

[00:31:36] Tim Nash: he's on the podcast today.

[00:31:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. and Elliot's rebutted with, at least Italy has a majority of straight roads. It was,

[00:31:45] Remkus de Vries: it Italy was, very smooth. I would, I'll have to say, oh, I love driving around in Italy, especially coastal roads. There's so much fun. Oh, boy.

I didn't know much of that, but I did still have fun. yeah.

Can you

[00:31:58] Nathan Wrigley: just tell us, Reka, I know that this isn't in the, show notes or anything like that, but you've been to two events recently, haven't you? You went to press comp. I want to say Phoenix, but it's not Phoenix, is it? It's 10 10

in

[00:32:10] Remkus de Vries: the

[00:32:10] Nathan Wrigley: greater

[00:32:11] Remkus de Vries: Phoenix area. Yes.

[00:32:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And also, the one that you just mentioned, checkout Summit.

Do you, do you feel willing to just give us a quick yeah. Appraisal of what the heck that was and what they were like, and what you enjoyed and whatnot.

[00:32:23] Remkus de Vries: So both are not work camps, but WordPress centric events. press Con is a gathering of people, more on the executive slash makers and movers type, corner of, WordPress people, I would say Uhhuh.

very different types of conversations and, presentations. but incredibly valuable for, anyone really vested and interested in the workplace and the state of it and the future of it to be, To be at that event, press conference. I highly recommend anyone who's serious about WordPress to at least visit once.

It'll make you want to visit a second time. 'cause

[00:33:10] Tim Nash: Nice,

[00:33:11] Remkus de Vries: not just the presentations, but or the vibe of the event itself, but just the conversations and who are there. it's, it's a good place to have those types of conversations, which you may occasionally have at a work camp, but, it's quite different if the whole event is around those types of conversations, which I mean, you know, how it is, the, there's an environment that, but there's, there, there are particular environments that open up different types of conversations that are good to have.

So that's Press conf.

[00:33:42] Marc Benzakein: Okay.

[00:33:44] Remkus de Vries: checkout Summit is, WooCommerce related, WooCommerce centric, and it's, roughly the same type of crowd, but then WooCommerce, it's also different conversations. It's also. Incredibly good to have Woo. People in the room. most notably, James Kemp and Brian kz.

Okay. three things I think have been mentioned are, woo, should really fix this. And on the go, James is processing them. So we were jokingly saying there's going to be three, hot fixes being released, on Woo. But the whole point is, it's good to understand there's many players, Very active in the WooCommerce ecosphere that are not doing more than talking via text essentially.

So when you meet in person, you have longer and better and deeper conversations. And it's the type of conversations we need to have if we're, to move this community to the next level. whether that's where or WooCommerce both, apply. checkout Summit was, it's in Italy, it's in Sicily specifically.

[00:34:57] Nathan Wrigley: Palermo, right?

[00:34:58] Remkus de Vries: Yeah, Palermo

[00:34:58] Nathan Wrigley: right on the beach. More or less.

[00:35:00] Remkus de Vries: no. Literally on the beach. Yeah. Yeah. It's a Stone's throwaway. We're looking out at, over the, Sea as we're having, breakfast and dinner. Rodolfo did a wonderful job as a single organiser organising that event and, He just brought the right type of crowd in one room.

[00:35:25] Tim Nash: yeah,

[00:35:25] Remkus de Vries: and again, it's Italy. I, this is not an exaggeration. We had a, just, essentially dinner at a pizzeria nearby, like literally nearby between us and the beach. So super close. and I, have had the best pizza in my life.

[00:35:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yes.

[00:35:46] Remkus de Vries: Randomly.

[00:35:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:35:48] Remkus de Vries: And I wasn't the only one.

[00:35:49] Nathan Wrigley: Italians don't do bad food.

That's not an option, is it? No, they just do not allow it.

[00:35:54] Remkus de Vries: And the, vibe of the event matched that, feeling of the best pizza. there's a lot of, lots of things came together. conversations were good. Spinoffs for, sorry, presentations were good. Spinoffs for conversations, all that sort of stuff.

Yeah. if you haven't been, you, should feel fomo. This is the, there, there were both were really good events and we should have many more of these non-work camp types of events.

[00:36:24] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know if Rodolfo's planning on doing checkout Summit again?

[00:36:27] Remkus de Vries: He will. In fact, the first version of what he's done just now is, check out some of it Reloaded, which is an offline version of this.

check out. Check out summit.com and there's more information on that. but yes, all, signs are pointing into the direction that this will be a repeat.

[00:36:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I had quite a few conversations with him in the run-up to it, and the bit that I took away from it was how incredibly seriously he was taking it all.

I don't mean that in a negative, I just meant that he was, he appeared to be sweating every detail, and being concerned in the knots and the bolts of it all, as opposed to being hands off and paying for people to organise everything. It felt like he was the decision maker here, there, and everywhere, which,

[00:37:08] Remkus de Vries: yep.

Yep.

[00:37:09] Nathan Wrigley: which could be a heartache, but he seemed to be embracing it.

[00:37:12] Remkus de Vries: Yeah.

can I comment on Elliot's, comment?

[00:37:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, Okay. Best, oh, sorry. Sorry, Elliot. There's, it's second I, one coming second pizza in,

[00:37:23] Remkus de Vries: Elliot, you're gonna have to believe me as a connoisseur of Pizzas and Italians literally saying the same thing.

That this was absolutely the best pizza I've ever had and they have ever had.

[00:37:34] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know about Elliot's side gig?

[00:37:37] Remkus de Vries: Yeah, yeah, We

[00:37:37] Nathan Wrigley: talked about it. Everyth, E Elliot, I feel like a trip to, to check out Summit next year is gonna, you can have some sort of pizza bakeoff.

[00:37:46] Tim Nash: So now Yeah, I was gonna say now we need two events.

[00:37:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. We could do some sort of collaborative. Experience.

[00:37:55] Tim Nash: Forget rap battles. Were reus. This is, we were onto pizza wars with Elliot. This is,

[00:38:00] Nathan Wrigley: this is

[00:38:00] Tim Nash: so much so

[00:38:00] Remkus de Vries: for the

[00:38:01] Tim Nash: record, I'm

[00:38:01] Remkus de Vries: not

[00:38:01] Tim Nash: about

[00:38:02] Remkus de Vries: wars and fighting. Tim. Yeah. I'm a lover, not a fighter.

[00:38:05] Tim Nash: no, Fight. I'll fight. I think food wars is about the point where I'm quite, keen that's

[00:38:11] Nathan Wrigley: it.

that one,

[00:38:12] Marc Benzakein: that's until someone mentions pineapple and then that's

[00:38:15] Nathan Wrigley: a whole nother thing.

[00:38:16] Tim Nash: You had to ruin

[00:38:17] Remkus de Vries: things.

[00:38:18] Nathan Wrigley: Mark,

[00:38:18] Remkus de Vries: go.

[00:38:20] Nathan Wrigley: okay, so we now want to know what the restaurant's called.

[00:38:23] Remkus de Vries: I can find it somewhere.

[00:38:24] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. He's gonna Google it for you and have a little look, Elliot. That's, great. so there we go.

We have a battle set up 12 months from now in Palermo. Elliot's gonna rock up with all of his gear. We can see who does in fact do, the best pizza. That's brilliant. That's so much less aggressive than the, the previous thing between Matt and Mku. Okay. Alright. Thank you for that. There are two. Two sort of events that we haven't really mentioned much on the show.

yeah, there you go. I see a pizza speed builder coming along. Pizza Press. W Okay, so the comments are just gonna be about pizzas from now on, I can tell. Let's put this screen back up and see where we got to next. okay. This is a sort of word camp sort of thing. It may have, may not be of interest to you, but I dunno if you, I can't say that I've experienced this because I'm not a developer, but if you have shown up to a WordPress event, in the past, and let's say this was your first time and you don't have your machine set up, perhaps you have this idea that you turn up to Contra day and just get stuck right in.

And 10 minutes from sitting down, you'd be fruitfully engaged in, part of the WordPress project? not apparently, that's not how it works because, a allegedly, one mark is saying a lot of people get lost at WordPress, contributor today. So much so that people actually just leave halfway through the setup of their machines, because they're just, just a bit weary of it.

They figure out that they're not gonna achieve anything just because the whole process of getting your Mac or Windows machine or whatever it is, setup's a bit of, an ache. And, so Juanmar has decided to take this on and he has built the core dev environment toolkit, which is, let's just call it a one click instal of everything that you need in order to be up and running.

I'm not sure, how effective it is. One more. Maybe I'll grab them on a podcast or something like that, but I just thought this was quite an interesting little project. There's some, There's some videos about how it all works and Matt jumped into the comments and said, awesome. He'd like to see if he can get it torrented around the room so that if one person's got it correctly set up, everybody in the room can just leach off their correct setup and get going.

not really a story there, but I'll drop that one in if anybody wants to comment. Now is the moment, but if not,

it's,

[00:40:45] Tim Nash: we already have. WordPress core environment they've set up.

[00:40:51] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, I didn't know that.

[00:40:53] Tim Nash: so you've got things like JP p hyphen EMV, which is the worst name possible for a local development environment agency.

But it's basically a one click you get going and you can have either it, you can go, you can drop it into any, if you into a folder that has a plugin or a theme and you can just literally type DP dash e mv, start think it start and it will load up a web, load up that plugin before you set up.

But if you just want to do something in CO with core, you just literally, I think it's DPMV core and off it goes and it gets you all the latest core setups. It was built originally for working with the, Gutenberg stuff. So it's, it was managed, I think, initially by the theme team. So this feels like we're,

[00:41:39] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

[00:41:40] Tim Nash: Just doing something again, this just is, looks more like it's just a wrapper for playground. Yeah. Which is a terrible place to be doing core tickets, I would've thought because

tell

[00:41:50] Nathan Wrigley: me why.

[00:41:51] Tim Nash: Playground's awesome. Playground's amazing Playground is not a p proper PHP instal of your WordPress sites. Okay.

Playground has interesting bugs.

[00:42:00] Nathan Wrigley: okay. '

[00:42:00] Tim Nash: cause it doesn't behave quite the same. It behaves mostly the same. it,

[00:42:04] Nathan Wrigley: so I wonder why, Juan Miles' done it. That's a, that's definitely

[00:42:07] Tim Nash: a reason. Simplicity, 'cause one of the key things he has on there is it doesn't have git. It doesn't have MPM and it doesn't have Docker.

And, the problem with this is that to do serious core development, sadly you need to have some sort of git, SVN access. You unfortunately need to have NPM because we've become a JavaScript first CMS for a humongous part of it. so you need all the things he doesn't want you to have. But they are all utter barriers.

[00:42:41] Nathan Wrigley: So interestingly in the post, he does reference core committers, doesn't he? So he says here, before writing a single line of code, a first time WordPress core contributor typically, and then on and on. Yeah. so would there be any utility in this for somebody that was, I don't know, just dabbling around and wanting to see what a contributor day felt like?

Probably not. Okay. I'm possibly, I'm puzzle now.

[00:43:03] Tim Nash: Possibly. Yeah. it's, basically he's wrapped playground, which is great. If you wanna have a not quite like for but close to like setup. But then that's exactly what you could do. If you're gonna do that, you could argue, shouldn't you use, is it studio by wordpress.com that uses playground?

Yeah.

[00:43:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Studio

[00:43:25] Tim Nash: by or, playground. they're all available to you. So it feels like we've built yet never tool. No, I feel like I'm, being really mean on people. I don't mean it. I, no, it's, people are doing things like this.

[00:43:40] Nathan Wrigley: No, I think it's interesting also at the same time feels left, right hand, left and right hand.

[00:43:44] Tim Nash: What would be awesome is that we saw development along the lines of day PEMV with a pretty interface on it.

[00:43:51] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:43:51] Tim Nash: For people who might be, scared of using the terminal. That would be awesome. That doesn't seem to be what this is. I will get in touch with one more, and see. if he's willing to come on a podcast and explain what the, what the, core focus of that was.

[00:44:07] Nathan Wrigley: 'cause that does seem curious, doesn't it? if you're lurking anywhere, juanmar, let us know. one click. Are you sure? No. I'm not sure. mark, sorry. Mark. is that Mark Wilkinson? I think it is. also, just as an aside, it, even though it says it doesn't use NPM, it literally says, as a second figure on its figures, what does it do?

[00:44:31] Tim Nash: It clones a clones, it's using Git and then runs npm. So at a minimum, it seems to have be installing both, Git and NPM onto your server, which means it's putting node on to your computer. At this point, if you've got a previous copy of Node, you're probably having conflicts. It's probably all gonna break.

And now you've got a bunch of people getting angry at poor one for, breaking their computers set up.

[00:44:59] Nathan Wrigley: So Mark, I was just taking that from this line here where it says you instal it, choose a directory for WordPress, hyphen develop, click a button, and you have. So that was why I went for that. I,

[00:45:09] Tim Nash: I reckon local setup.

Tools is one of the hardest things to get right.

[00:45:16] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, yeah.

[00:45:18] Tim Nash: I basically, when we, had Z Wamp and Zap and all Z and all of those, they might have been the pinnacle of usability sheerly because they did, they isolated enough of it away, but just seemed to work.

[00:45:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:45:33] Tim Nash: And yeah, getting local dev tools to.

To consistently work and not be a tech fort nightmare. I have so much respect for people who try to do this. so I have respect for the project. Just think it would be great if we could, if it was a bit more coordinated.

[00:45:50] Nathan Wrigley: And also not an overlapping Yeah, That's an

[00:45:52] Tim Nash: we can overlap. It just needs to overlap in a way that is complimentary.

[00:45:56] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, like I said, I'll get in touch with one more and we'll see if we can get him on the show. Cameron. Cameron Jones. He's in the uk. Good afternoon from a surprisingly Sonny Brighton. It is always Sonny in Brighton. Cameron. I lived there for many years and it never stopped. It was relentless.

And, w WP Isa, I a, I'll just move on. it wasn't that for me, but thank you Mark West Guard. I guess that was you. I appreciate it. Okay. We've done two of the myriad articles, so we need to burn through the next one. I'm gonna miss that one out 'cause we just have type it. Nah. Maybe I won't. Just very quickly, this, appeared on Word, the make wordpress.org.

It's related to what One MA was talking about. Contributing is hard, especially if you are new. And so there's a piece written by Veda, which was, came out a couple of days ago, 23rd of April. It's called Help Others Contribute to WordPress. And it's, not the technical side of getting set up, it's more the sort of, how do we make it accessible to other people, in terms of walking things through and giving people issues that they can immediately grab hold of like a menu if you like, of here's a bunch of stuff which can be achieved in a day.

Here's what you need to do, here's how to do it, blah, blah, blah, that kind of thing. So go and have a quick look at that one as well. And there's this idea of pathways as well, which is scaffolding your contribution during those days. It feels those contributor days. I don't know. They're getting thin on the ground in places like WordCamp US and WordCamp, EU Word, camp Europe.

But man, there were so many people at the contributor day at WordCamp Asia. I'm gonna say plural, thousands. I don't know if it was that many, but that there were

[00:47:43] Remkus de Vries: 2200 in total at

[00:47:44] Nathan Wrigley: the entire event. In the, contra day?

[00:47:47] Remkus de Vries: No, at the event in total.

[00:47:48] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And I reckon most of them were at the contra day.

It certainly felt that way. The biggest room I've ever been in my life. it was truly enormous. That room, it was like honestly the size of a football pitch. and it was basically full of people contributing. So that excitement is definitely still, in that part of the world, which was interesting.

I don't know, maybe these things are not so much of an issue over there, but there's a piece that you can read. just a bit of a hat tip really to, Anne McCarthy. She wrote this piece. it really, it's just spelling who's gonna be on the 2027 theme team. So that's all there is there, really, but I just thought I'd mention it.

and then where did we go to next? Kyle. Kyle from the admin bar. Every year does this state of the WordPress agency report, or at least he's been doing it, I don't know, three, four years, something like that? where he goes into what it's like basically to be somebody that's employed building websites, plugin developer, agency owner, I think more agency owner, freelancer kind of thing.

in a normal world, we probably would've spent, quite a while going through all of this. But really I think what I'm just gonna say is go and check it out. it's the admin bar.com/ 2026 hyphen survey. and what the takeaway is really, I suppose if you were to distil it into one line. It's getting harder to make a living using WordPress.

Not impossible. Certainly not impossible, but harder. And it seems like people that have been doing it for a while seem to do better than people that are coming into it for the first time, which, did anybody have a comment on that? Did anybody read a bit which they thought was worth drilling down into?

[00:49:45] Marc Benzakein: I, read, through it and I found it actually a pretty fascinating article. Yeah. and it's, interesting, I, it's interesting that, personal burnout ended up as high as it did. I didn't expect it quite up as high as it is, but it's number three on the reasons that, that the agencies are being held back.

And then the, client management and scope is at the very bottom, which also surprised me. but of course I don't do. A tonne of agency work. So what do I know? But, it, is different than I would've expected it to be. I, and of course he attributes the burnout to basically underpricing, your product, which makes perfect sense.

If you're not making, if you're working extra hard and you're making less money, then, obviously you're gonna get burned out. If you're working 24 hours a day and making two bucks a week, you're gonna get burned out. Do

[00:50:45] Nathan Wrigley: I know that you collaborate with a lot of people over at Main, wp Do you collaborate quite a bit with the admin bar?

'cause it feels like the stuff that they're doing over there, or at least particularly this really fits well with what you do as a business. the data that they're drawing out here would be really interesting to your, audience, I'm guessing. Mark,

[00:51:04] Marc Benzakein: I, I definitely, read. Pretty much everything that they put out at the admin bar.

and I think, Kyle has some, really good insights. We have interacted, but we haven't really done a lot of collaboration now. I, wouldn't say that, but, okay.

But I really did appreciate this article though.

[00:51:31] Nathan Wrigley: it's basically, it's like lots of charts. If you can't, if you're not, watching this and you're listening to it, it's, it's an, you've gotta read it.

There's lots of different charts drilling down into different bits of business, like burnout, like how much do people make, how big are teams? what kind of things do they sell? How much do they charge for things, and all of that. And, there's a, I don't know, 30 something data points here. Yeah. you can go and draw your own conclusions.

[00:51:58] Marc Benzakein: Some of the things you have to take with a grain of salt is like how much money they're making because different parts of the world, obviously, A dollar or whatever is gonna go a lot further than others. certain things you can only take into consideration so much. But, but it is really fascinating data.

[00:52:18] Nathan Wrigley: And beautifully presented like every,

[00:52:20] Marc Benzakein: purely and very beautifully, presented. Yeah.

[00:52:24] Tim Nash: Tim? I say purely anecdotally from my own cl 'cause most, a lot of my clients are agencies, so I, get to Chat through them. And the shift over the last couple of years has very much been the middle has been gutted.

So if you are a mid-size agency, you are finding that the larger agencies, or the more, which would've traditionally been the more expensive agencies are now coming down at one level to come and try and poach your top end of your client base.

[00:52:55] Remkus de Vries: Oh,

[00:52:55] Tim Nash: meanwhile, the lower level, the agencies that are tending to be much cheaper are coming up and taking your lower level, leaving you with very few pickings left.

And so you end up in a scenario where you feel like you have to compete with one or the other, which then shifts you one way or the other. And too many people seem to not recognise their own value and therefore seem to be shifting downwards instead of upwards that chain. So they'll reduce their prices or they'll try and compete with those lower value oppositions, which.

I dunno. I feel like I, I, vaguely remember a business course where they told me not to do that.

[00:53:38] Remkus de Vries: I'd like to add something to that because I think in, in, for the most part, you're spot on, Tim. but what I also see as a mix into that is we've had a very, long period where any type of relatively serious agency could get work.

There was plenty of work to go around, right? we have entered a phase where what you are saying is happening as well as specific, agency that specialise in, let's call it two or three things are doing much better than those who've never, absolutely went in and said, look, we, we're not just treating this as work, but we're treating this as a.

an opportunity to shine in certain areas of the development thing. So whether that is WooCommerce and LMSs and I don't know something else, or whether, that's a particular market they're focusing on. We've entered the phase where this is absolutely a necessity. 'cause there's plenty of agencies that I talk to on, on very different levels, quite similarly, to yours, Tim, where, most of the connections that I have are with agencies.

They're finding it very difficult to understand where the thing went wrong. But the thing went wrong three, four years ago when you weren't specialising and telling people you are specialising. I see. I've seen so many agency sites over the, I don't know, past six months, just people reaching out to me, asking questions and asking for help or a small analysis or whatever.

and I look at their website and it's I'm aware of what you do, 'cause I've seen some of your work, but I don't see it on your site. There's no specification of a niche or a particular skill that sets you apart from anybody else. So if a client is looking, they're gonna see the same thing. They're going to go, I recognise that this particular agency is very specialised in X, Y, Z, I need Y and Z.

So that's good enough. That's what I'll go for. that whole and, I hinted at that at my latest, one of my latest blogs. I think, we, as a community and, players in that community, we need to level up in our entire thinking, in our entire skillset and in our, entire integrations of all the tools that we use, we need to understand what's out there, what's in there.

In order to become the best type of, development party as well as understand that we need to brand ourselves, we need to be out there. It's a different world. We can't go on how, we can't go on how we've been doing for, I don't know, for, I saw something like the median age of, of that survey.

Yeah, 11 h 11 years or so. But in those 11 years, eight of them have been relatively easy. So if you don't recognise that, if you don't, if you're not aware that this is a, this is in part also a very large thing about branding. a large thing about visibility, a large thing about. understanding what your skill sets are and not afraid to use them as a, thing that sets you apart.

It's very difficult to find continuous growth in a period where the level of, skills needed to get the base, projects done is going down. That is AI and on the complex end of things. Yeah. If an agency has a really good profile on, on large, complex projects, then it's very logical they're going to get those projects.

if a, small in between agency is never, every now and then touches the larger project, but hasn't turned that into a skill that is sellable and presentable and all that sort of stuff, how, is the market going to react there? It's going to react, pleasantly to those who have put in the work of marketing, of presenting, of case studies, all that sort of stuff.

It's inevitable. Every single industry outside of our industry goes through these levels of, there's growth and then, you hit a plateau. Something needs to change at when you hit that plateau and the thing that needs to change is very much something that you need to see coming instead of.

Alright, now I have to do something. You are already two years too late. If now is the time that you think I, I need to change something. It's too late. So the only thing you can do is radically improve all every single thing that you do. That is sales, that is marketing, that is development, that is understanding all the things that set you apart from a technical skill.

It's everything.

[00:58:40] Tim Nash: It's so hard to niche down in a drought when you, when, the pipeline is feeling good. that, that feeling of oh, I can, we can afford to niche down. Now we can become that specialist, whether that's a niche subject or a niche tool set. But when there's a drought, as someone who's been there, been in that, place.

You The panic mode that comes onto every business owner is 'cause they've gotta sit there and ultimately business owners are, they're going, I have to make payroll this month, so I'm willing to take things to make payroll to, even if it makes my life a hundred times worse down the line. They, there comes a point where you have to do that just to scrap through and survive.

But I agree. I think if you don't, if you weren't in a niche, if you're not in a niche now, you probably need to be in a niche really quickly. I think the only bit where I'm like, is I'm not necessarily, the niche has to be tools. I don't think you need to be a niche WooCommerce developer or even eco.

But I, I think you, can niche out in a different way. You could maybe there's, various

ways an audience,

[00:59:48] Remkus de Vries: there's, various ways to do it. It can be topical, it can be it, can be skillset set, it can be, many things, but you need to specialise in a way that is presentable, marketable, all those things.

'cause how, is your next client going to know? How are they going to know they're gonna look at a generic site where you present your skills? As we build themes, we build plugins. We're good at it. Yay. yeah. that's the thing is when you're in a, when you're in a boomer bust industry, which is what we are, either you can do no wrong, right?

[01:00:22] Marc Benzakein: Which is when you're in the boom, you can do no wrong, you're growing and, everything. And then it becomes, I think it feels risky when you're in that boom to say, what do I specifically want to pick here when I can do no wrong?

[01:00:39] Remkus de Vries: Yeah.

[01:00:40] Marc Benzakein: And, that's where the people succeed when there's the bust.

And, are the people who look down the road and they can see it coming and they can choose wisely or they just plain get lucky. there's, sometimes just plain. Dumb luck. You look at the oil booms and all that stuff. It's just sometimes it's that people pick the land that happen to have the oil.

Yep. so it's the same type of thing.

[01:01:07] Tim Nash: Wait, you mean my two sticks are not gonna get me oil because sadly it's just dousing along for my No,

[01:01:12] Marc Benzakein: no.

[01:01:13] Remkus de Vries: Maybe sticks won't work.

[01:01:15] Nathan Wrigley: I've got 20 years of the two sticks thing and I've never, no, just grass. Why doesn't that,

[01:01:21] Tim Nash: why doesn't that surprise me?

[01:01:22] Nathan Wrigley: Every evening I'm out with the dowsing rods. so it's a fairly, so the, report that we had on the screen from Kyle, it doesn't paint this sort of picture of, there's no sense of doom there or anything like that. But it, but this is a, this is the tenor. Of what is coming out of WordPress publishing houses at the moment, life podcasts and blogs and what have you.

There's this sort of, how the heck do we navigate this thing? And so

obviously,

[01:01:50] Remkus de Vries: it started with any problem. You are, you recognise that it's a problem. So if you haven't identified it as a problem just yet, now is the time to level up. Yeah.

[01:01:58] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And

[01:01:59] Remkus de Vries: pick a direction. And it can be multiple directions.

Like it's not a, it's not a binary thing, but I'll give you, I'll give you one good example. We all know AI has taken over some version of search, how much we don't know, but it's certainly quantifiable Now, if you have an agency and you haven't, optimised your site in terms of this is what I do and, all the things I just said, I'm not gonna repeat all that.

But you haven't made that available for the AI to do in the most, smoothest way.

[01:02:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:02:36] Remkus de Vries: That's an indication of you're running behind. There's a CloudFlare, released a website last week, I think, or the week before. Is my, site agentic? What is it? Yeah. Oh, okay. Is it agent ready.com.

[01:02:54] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[01:02:55] Remkus de Vries: So for starters, add your site in there just to have you be aware of what, what your site needs to qualify for nowadays.

Okay. Just to be visible on the AI side of things, like all of these things matter now.

[01:03:10] Nathan Wrigley: God. and that's just one piece of the jigsaw puzzle. So AI feels like a giant piece of that jigsaw puzzle, but it's also possible shrinking market share. it can

[01:03:19] Remkus de Vries: be all of the things, but you need to, get off your ass and be proactive.

You, there's no time for reactiveness now.

[01:03:25] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that's it. We're gonna wrap this show up and I'm gonna go and, yeah, I'm, outta here. all the things that need doing. there's a few comments around this. This seems to be the piece today that's got the, got the comments. firstly, mark in the uk, Mark Wilkinson said, getting harder.

I would agree with that for sure. Seems to be no doubt about that. And then Mark made a few, complimentary comments about what Tim was saying. I can't remember the context because it's several minutes ago now. also, James Lau said he totally forgot about this show. I dunno what to make of that, James, that betrayal.

no, I'm joking. it's, I know

[01:04:06] Tim Nash: it's a good demonstration of promotion and branding being important and your brand clearly failed 'cause it didn't last even three weeks.

[01:04:14] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Damn it. Okay. My brand as if I have a brand. but appreciate that, Tim. That's very kind of you. and then getting back to the real stuff, he says, I will be asking the state of the WordPress, sorry.

I'll be asking about the state of WordPress from Mary Hubbard during tonight's Boston WordPress meetup. Okay. That's interesting. Thank you. James. Tim has a great point, a small as a small new agency owner. I'm seeing this change my niche. This is James commenting again. My niche has been, eaten up by Squarespace, Webflow, et cetera.

WP is still top, but people are asking for other options. It's truncated, so I'll read it. These platforms offer other integrated options, but I have to relearn my brain. And then an agreement. That last

[01:05:02] Remkus de Vries: sentence is spot on.

[01:05:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. You have to

[01:05:05] Remkus de Vries: relearn your brain. Have

[01:05:06] Marc Benzakein: to

[01:05:06] Nathan Wrigley: relearn your brain. Relearn your brain,

[01:05:07] Marc Benzakein: absolutely.

[01:05:08] Nathan Wrigley: And then he is agreeing with you. MKU need, you need to see what's coming. That it depends on the niche or the client.

[01:05:15] Remkus de Vries: And for the record, I don't mean like you need to have the, glass ball, Nobody has that, that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is there's, changes in our industry and you need to embrace them instead of, I'll look at it when I am forced to or when the project asks for it.

That, you don't have that luxury anymore.

[01:05:34] Nathan Wrigley: And then this sort of speaks into that a little bit. again, James, I've accepted work from my niche that isn't only WordPress work. It's just the point we're at right now. Okay. So the niche is the thing, not WordPress being the thing, but

[01:05:46] Tim Nash: that's fine because again, if you, one of the things that we've got coming is that, and this has always been the case, but nobody's believed that clients don't actually care.

They don't care. For example, they don't really truly care if you built their work, their site on WordPress, as long as it meets the feature set that they wanted at the time. This can lead them down into terrible paths when this is how, dev shops that build custom CMSs still exist and shouldn't, but they still exist.

But that's because clients don't actually care about that. they care about the functionality and if you give them what they wanted in terms of functionality, they don't care about what it was behind the scenes. In the same way that clients don't care if you manually update a site every day and keep it, they, care about will you keep it up to date and will you keep it secure?

How you do that? Irrelevant to them as long as you're doing it. They couldn't

[01:06:41] Remkus de Vries: give a flying. Yeah. It's

[01:06:43] Nathan Wrigley: monkey They couldn't give a flying monkey.

[01:06:47] Tim Nash: If your, niche doesn't, if you, your niche no longer has WordPress as a feature in part of, its about, part of thing it cares about, then you don't need to use Word.

I know that's a al on a WordPress podcast, but you don't need to use WordPress in that scenario.

[01:07:05] Nathan Wrigley: I'm gonna mute him so badly.

[01:07:07] Tim Nash: I know you, you're gonna, if you are someone who is now sitting and you write all your blog posts, or rather, Claude writes all your blog posts, you might, and you are never going to review them.

You are never gonna do any formatting on it. You are never gonna log in. You probably don't want WordPress anymore. Yeah. And that's the thing we have to accept is that is okay. That's always been okay,

[01:07:31] Nathan Wrigley: I'm having heart palpitations. We've

[01:07:32] Tim Nash: never had to come

[01:07:33] Nathan Wrigley: down,

[01:07:33] Tim Nash: shoulda have had to force them to do this.

[01:07:35] Remkus de Vries: Nathan's what is my podcast going to be

[01:07:37] Nathan Wrigley: about next week? This week in talking,

[01:07:43] Marc Benzakein: he's gonna change the name from WP builds to, build, Yeah,

[01:07:50] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, But I agree, Tim, that makes perfect sense and I'm sure that on many levels, many of us have. Got it. You have also spawned this week's titles episode Without a doubt.

Tim Nash says, clients don't actually care. That's gonna, I might miss the Tim Nash out at the beginning, but that I think will be the episode. So some more comments about that. just to keep this going for a little while. ba Where were we? Nomad Skateboarding. Hello. some also choose to run their own way so they can't be left behind in the popular one.

Oh,

[01:08:20] Tim Nash: interesting.

[01:08:21] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah. So forge your own path, make, your own way and be the trailblazer and everybody follows you. So this is definitely Steve Burg's picture, but I don't recognise the handle there. So normally it says something different. but there we go. Ali Deer. So Steve Burg, the flat cap and headphones are a brand.

I'd recognise Nathan's silhouette anywhere. That's very kind. I appreciate that. Oh, I've just put the same comment up twice. What scares me now says, James, is when a client comes to you with a solution based on what AI told them. Oh,

[01:08:56] Remkus de Vries: so I,

[01:08:56] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Okay.

[01:08:57] Remkus de Vries: Can I, say it shouldn't scare you,

[01:09:00] Marc Benzakein: right?

[01:09:01] Remkus de Vries: You should have an a ready right type of approach.

Answer

[01:09:04] Marc Benzakein: right

[01:09:05] Remkus de Vries: in how you deal with this, because this is the new reality. I have clients as well who are paying me handsomely every month for X, Y, Z. There's a, a variety of things that I do every now and then. Someone now says, Hey, I've seen this and AI said I can do this. Why don't you, integrate this for me?

And then I explain them why this is or isn't a good idea,

right?

[01:09:28] Remkus de Vries: In detail. You have, you need to have these answers ready now.

[01:09:32] Tim Nash: That's a great start. Should be your, should be your exactly. Luhan for any statement when it

clearly

[01:09:39] Remkus de Vries: Absolutely. That sentence.

[01:09:41] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. Wonderful. that's a great's.

[01:09:43] Remkus de Vries: That means you've had a conversation where you hashed out what you want and you, we have a direction.

[01:09:48] Marc Benzakein: It's no different than, back in the days. I remember doctors hated when you'd go to WebMD and bring in a diagnosis.

[01:09:55] Remkus de Vries: Yeah.

[01:09:56] Marc Benzakein: And, those doctors have fallen by the wayside. Now, when you go to the doctor, have you Google, you go in and you say, and you've Googled it.

They're like, oh, we really appreciate the fact that you've gone and done all the work because we only have 15 minutes to talk to you anyway. And it's best, And, I will tell you why this is wrong, but I will also tell you why this is right. And if you're going to an expert, that's what an expert does.

An expert says, Hey, thanks for doing the research before you came here. It means you're serious about your project. And. Here is, like you said, this is a great start and this is how we can expound upon it and this is how we can build on it. And if we, the reality is there are gonna be people who embrace a AI and there are people who don't, and the get off my lawn people, I'm sorry, they're going to have to find another industry because AI is here.

You're gonna have to deal with it, and you're gonna have to deal with everything that entails.

[01:10:51] Tim Nash: Correct.

[01:10:52] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So all of that was spawned by the, we went off in myriad directions there, but that was really nice. they're the best bits of this part. Do you

[01:11:01] Tim Nash: mind if I add one last bit about Oh yeah.

The article? Of course not. No, Which is, and I think it was you who said it, but the, I think they've had far less responses this year. I was gonna

[01:11:13] Nathan Wrigley: bring that up. Thank you, Tim. The survey, let's just put it back on the screen. So the survey had 622. I can't for certain say that's down, but I, some reason, I think it was, oh, presumably if you put the word five there, let's try 25.

Yeah, let's try that. Good point. I dunno if it'll surface it in the same way. Da, Yeah. Half two. Literally half. Yeah, half.

[01:11:35] Remkus de Vries: Okay. 20, 24.

[01:11:37] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Let's see what we got with that.

similar 1200 ish,

[01:11:44] Tim Nash: but I feel like that in itself is indicative of something, whether that is something,

[01:11:49] Marc Benzakein: yeah.

[01:11:50] Tim Nash: whether that is business owners who are going, actually I'm in a really negative place, and especially if they, I suspect that when it got to the financials in the questionnaire, that's where a lot of the cutoff came.

Where people went. Yeah, we've had a bad year and, that, just was where they turned off and stopped putting in, or whether it is an indication that we really have just lost half an industry, which I don't believe is the case. But I, found that to be possibly the biggest statistic of all because I don't think the admin bar has lost.

Half its readership. I don't think it's lost its, impact to reach its audience by half in a year. Which means there must be another reason that it,

[01:12:38] Marc Benzakein: I think there might also be survey fatigue. Just people are tired of filling out surveys.

[01:12:43] Tim Nash: That could be it.

[01:12:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. So it's spawned a lot. there's so much data in that.

and it is literally just presented as data with Kyle, dropping in some thoughts about, what that data might mean. but no sort of overall, conclusions, but we definitely tossed that around a little bit. That was fascinating. I, so we've got very little time there, so we'll just whip through a few of these.

So this is an interesting one. It's by Mattias Rein Holtz. And, I dunno if this kind of speaks to what we've just been talking about, this fear out there of our industry shrinking or what have you. Yeah, But there seems to be a lot of. Trying out new things, let's put it that way, out there in the wild.

And so lots of things about setting up dev environments for contributors at Word Camps, lots of, educational initiatives in the WordPress space that didn't exist before. And now we have this switch, I think is so interesting. So Mathias is obviously an automation because this post is Kickstarting a radical month or automatic.

Now, Remus, I think, knows more about this in terms of who's in and who's out, but, this person along with a companion inside a WordPress, has been authorised for one month. And I'll just read it. Today is the first day of radical speed month at automatic. For one month, I get to pair up with a colleague and build something real.

No design reviews, no product signups, no marketing sign off. I'm curious to see what a pair can ship in a month without the usual approval chain in place. And, so they have decided to do a particular thing. You can find out more on the website, but I don't, first of all, I don't know, like I. I don't know if everybody gets to do this.

If you're a developer automatic, in other words, has automatic more or less shot down for a month, or is it just like a cherry picked, five or six, seven or eight people? Which one Mku

[01:14:36] Remkus de Vries: cherry picked and it's not five Cherry picked five. There, there's, quite a number. our friend Jamie Marsland is one of them.

[01:14:43] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[01:14:45] Remkus de Vries: it's best I have gathered that it, this is a, this is an, a, mechanism to spark creativity and productivity and just.

[01:14:57] Nathan Wrigley: Blue sky thinking unconstrained.

[01:14:59] Remkus de Vries: It's a, hackathon type of approach. right. But it's a month of a hackathon. yeah. it, it reminds me of those days when Google gave all of their dev employee.

[01:15:08] Nathan Wrigley: In fact, I think everybody, I'm not sure, like a Friday of every week. It was 20% time and you could do whatever you liked. And loads of stuff came out of Google because of that 20% time. I'm sure there was a hell of a lot of waste, but,

[01:15:23] Remkus de Vries: and that, that's how I see this.

[01:15:25] Nathan Wrigley: So it's like the 20% time but a month, Gosh, I'm imagining these people are bright individuals, they've got loads of history doing things. I'm very curious to see what the heck comes out of a month of. So per

[01:15:39] Remkus de Vries: month is essentially saying, don't, think too small.

[01:15:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Exactly that, yeah.

[01:15:45] Remkus de Vries: Which is, what we're inclined to do anyway.

'cause, a PR what is that? you, research a particular bug or a small feature, this and that, and here's you, here's my PR and, voila. But if you have a month, you get to think about it. You get to experiment, you get to play, you get, you have your buddy that you are back and forthing with, I like this.

I like this a lot actually.

[01:16:08] Nathan Wrigley: It's a very confident step financially as well. that's not a cheap gesture.

[01:16:15] Remkus de Vries: No.

[01:16:15] Nathan Wrigley: It's gonna cost millions of dollars, presumably,

[01:16:19] Remkus de Vries: but it might, reward them with millions as well, right?

[01:16:21] Marc Benzakein: Yeah, Imagine if one, one of the ideas turns into, I don't know, the next SAS app.

[01:16:25] Nathan Wrigley: Obviously automatic. We, align it very much with WordPress, don't we? But they also have ions in many fires. They've got podcasting things, there's all sorts. So they've got like day one, haven't they, like a journaling app and things like that. So perhaps it, the gamut is not gonna be limited around WordPress, but, I just thought that was really curious.

let's see what these folk do. Sorry, Tim, I think you might have been trying to say something.

[01:16:50] Tim Nash: No, I though I have, I was sitting here going, what if I could just have a month? I could do so much cool stuff.

[01:16:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:16:57] Tim Nash: I didn't have to do anything else for that month.

[01:16:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:17:00] Tim Nash: Right now, I think anybody who's got that time, this is the, possibly the fastest point for, to be able to go from idea.

To implementation.

[01:17:12] Nathan Wrigley: Right.

[01:17:13] Tim Nash: Ever that we've ever had.

[01:17:14] Remkus de Vries: It's

[01:17:14] Tim Nash: so

[01:17:15] Remkus de Vries: wild.

[01:17:16] Tim Nash: Yeah. James, hold,

[01:17:18] Nathan Wrigley: sorry, it's not James, sorry. Nomad Skateboarding. I presume, let's just assume that this is research and it's true. 400 plus teams doing that. So by that do you mean 800 individuals or there's 400 different, paired people.

Either way that's not nothing. Wow. Gosh, that's gonna be so interesting. Let watch this space. Let's see what comes back in a month's time. It wouldn't be surprising if there was one or two. That's absolute.

[01:17:45] Marc Benzakein: That's 30 days of shower thoughts, which is when all the good ideas happen, yeah, I wonder what these individuals will do with themselves. yeah, I wonder what their day will look like. whether they'll just, I don't know, go and sit on the beach and enjoy themselves whilst doing it, as opposed to stuck in slack meetings at home and things like that. Anyway, fascinating and.

[01:18:07] Nathan Wrigley: Automatic, which is definitely trying out some new things. So let's see where that goes. Any, anybody else on that? Oh, it came from an automatic post on the Facebook page that gives you an insight into the whole programme. So it is 800 people, man, alive. That is not a cheap thing to have offered for free.

Wow. Okay. Okay. There we go. That's that one. lemme just get that comment off the screen. We really are running out of time. Where did we get to? No, there's no time for that. There probably isn't time for that. No, let's just go straight to this one. I, I,

[01:18:45] Remkus de Vries: the, agent one. Oh,

[01:18:47] Nathan Wrigley: okay. Do you want to go for this one?

[01:18:50] Remkus de Vries: I, think this is an interesting, take, that sort of has been forming as we were seeing 7.0 come to be. Coinciding with quite a few things happening on, the AI side of things. I think, first of all, this is, published on automatic.com so it is in some way promotional. It is in some way positioning.

Sure. But WebPress does have the opportunity with the market share that we have. And with 7.0 being first step into integrating AI on a few different levels, it does have to, the absolute perfect position to turn into the operating system of the agent web. There is, it's more than just branding the thing.

I think this is actually something that's starting to happen. it is an entirely new argument as to why you should want to use WordPress. 'cause Yes, why open source is the choice and the MCP is the thing and but. There's already a lot of stuff going on inside and, outside of WebPress, but connecting to WebPress, that really makes WebPress a fine candidate for this.

this concept, the operating system of the Ag Agentic web,

[01:20:18] Nathan Wrigley: it's so interesting this debate. So I'll just read into the record the name of this piece. So it is on automatic.com, and the piece is called WordPress Colon, the operating system of the Ag Agentic Web. And it's James g Gron, I think you would pronounce his name as, and he is, running through the, you've probably thought of most of these thoughts if you're into WordPress.

I would've thought, how, WordPress could easily serve as the foundational layer. Of future initiatives on the web, like, it says, the operating system of the web. And as you would imagine, the things that are brought to bear in this argument are things like the scale of WordPress. So 43% and all of the community that brings, the 61,000 plus pro, paid for plugins, which probably take it well over a hundred thousand, I would've thought, maybe more like 200,000.

Don't know. And, and the fact that open source, the nature of WordPress being open source is, that the, AI know exactly what to do, with WordPress because everything's freely available. So if you want to do a thing, the AI knows already how to do that thing because all of the documentation and what have you has been out there for many, years.

And that's the context of his argument. He goes into the pros and the cons. I, There's a, little bit of me when I hear this argument, where I think I wonder in 10 years time what we'll think about arguments like this, whether it will have been a case of, okay, that was very optimistic.

We were desperately clinging for WordPress to be the thing. And the reason I say all of that is because I don't even know what's gonna happen in two weeks time in ai. It just seems to be happening at such a breathtaking pace. I

[01:22:04] Remkus de Vries: it is, but if, the foundation of that is WordPress and WordPress makes all, the new things, that are, there to settle down as permanent things.

it facilitates that. It operates with that. It integrates with that. It talks with it in a low effort manner, which is what 7.0 will be the first step towards. I, don't see any other solution than, sorry, outcome than yes, to some degree will, the same. It's a

[01:22:33] Nathan Wrigley: strong argument, isn't it?

I

[01:22:34] Remkus de Vries: agree. The same can be said when custom post types and taxonomies were introduced. Like people said, oh, now you can build everything with WordPress and it'll be the future. And some people were like, nah. come on. It's a blog. we're not gonna, we're not gonna use a blog and to get outta here.

And yet those who were building understood what that unlocked. I, see this the same way, if I'm being really honest.

[01:23:03] Tim Nash: There is also the advantage that, people know WordPress. If you, were to ask an AI right now to spin you up a website, it would go and get you tell, it would tell, start telling you to write some content into markdown files, and then it would load up a next JS app, which it would then spin up a bunch of crap into, it would then do a bunch of stuff, and then it would tell you, I have a website.

And that's great until you need to fix something and then you need to trust the ai.

[01:23:32] Nathan Wrigley: That's

[01:23:32] Tim Nash: the, it is like you have locked yourself back in.

[01:23:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:23:36] Tim Nash: To those commercial developers, we were dumping on ages who were building their own CMS down WordPress. Is something that is known by everybody that you can, that is universal and that it could be deployed onto pretty much any hosting company you ever can think of.

You can have it working very quickly, very easily. You can pay someone to maintain it. You can. And alongside this, if we make it easier and easier for AI to operate and use it and successfully, we have the best of both. Yeah, we can. We ca we maintain ownership, which is something that at the moment, people who are just flinging sites up with AI have actually losing and they don't even realise they're losing that really vital part, which is true ownership, which is portability.

'cause they're stuck in a scenario where they're gonna have to have somebody or something debug every time. Now, I'm not saying that every person who has a WordPress site should. Should be doing development on a WordPress site. But they have that option and they have the ability to go to a gamut of people from really cheap companies to ginormous big VIP agencies to help them alongside ai, which is a really powerful tool in its own right.

[01:24:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It feels to me as if the direction of travel is a little bit more like the, editing of already AI generated stuff is a big win for WordPress. So in other words, you've told some, AI to build you a webpage. Now what, like, how do you go and amend it? How do you, do you have to have a conversation?

No, not that bit. The, other cat, that kind of thing. And so having it dumped into a, an, interface that you are familiar with. It'll be really interesting to see in the future how much creation is done by the ai. And then the human in the loop bit is the, okay, now we need to amend it because it's Christmas and we want it to look Christmasy and yada that'll be, I think that, and

[01:25:46] Tim Nash: yeah, we've real time collaboration. When you amend it, it will go, no, I didn't tell you to do that.

[01:25:53] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, wheels Within Wheels. go and check out the piece though. It's on Automatics blog. it's by James Gris and it's called WordPress Operating System for the Agen Web. I, gotta say, I'm convinced that I think it's, that's the, that is the, that is how it'll turn out, How are we doing for time?

Not a lot of time. And have we got any new comments come in? Yes, a couple. James, again, James is being a truly amazing commenter. Thank you. off topic. He watched Dre. From the Drupal project at Drupal Con in 2026, the keynote. And they, oh yeah, I remember this. Yeah, I remember seeing this too. They've got, AI built directly into their dashboard.

It's called Drupal Canvas. And you just basically start out a Drupal site now, don't you? Or at least you can. and it's all baked in right at the very beginning. and he makes the point that DRIs made a good point, that even with all these agent platforms, a scaffold, to the front end of the site is nice.

You still need governance humans in the loop really to, to help operate the nuances of the, nuances of the backend. So there we go. Okay. Anything on that? I think we need to rush. We will rush. Here we go. a little while ago, a plugin came out as a suite of blocks, which I thought was quite nice. It, enabled you to do a little bit more with core blocks.

It extended the features. It was called 20. But if anybody played with it, it, was pretty lightweight in that it didn't try to launch new blocks, it just added menus to existing blocks. They've decided to jump in the, the theming space as well. So I just thought I'd mention that it's called 21.

Haven't tried it. I've no idea. What it's like, as far as I can tell, it's free. just like their blocks were. But anyway, there's that and, yeah, we'll just raise that on the screen very quickly and several of the panel can, grimace and did they grimace sufficiently is all I was moving on. Okay.

this was supposed to be the thing that we talked about most this week, and yet we got totally derailed by the admin bars article. So I'll

[01:28:11] Tim Nash: just, if you want to do that, you need to a, tell the panellists that this is the thing you want to focus on B but at the beginning I,

[01:28:17] Nathan Wrigley: I, yeah. that was, he did, he did.

[01:28:20] Tim Nash: hint at it. Actually,

[01:28:21] Nathan Wrigley: I did it.

[01:28:22] Remkus de Vries: But Hint hinting is not being very

[01:28:24] Tim Nash: clear

[01:28:24] Remkus de Vries: in your communication. Just,

[01:28:25] Nathan Wrigley: I good at this. I've never been good at this thing. Doing a live show. It's, oh. but anyway. This is a bit of a big deal, and if you guys have got a couple of minutes, let's just explore it a little bit.

this news dropped, this is the repositories version of it, but essentially if you have WooCommerce subscriptions, there is a chance and you have to have the docs incorrectly lined up in a row for this to matter to you. But there is a chance that you will have had subscriptions which your customers had set to Autorenew WooCommerce subscriptions might have switched them off without alerting you or alerting your customers.

And so basically they just went into this completely silent fail state Now. I don't have any of this, so it's just a news story to me and it's, it's wow, that's a shame. But it would appear that out there in the wild, there are people that are claiming that this has really cost them quite a lot of money.

And, and now we're in that phase where, patches are trying to be put together. My understanding is much of it has already been patched. but it's quite a big story that if you've got it set up and the intention was to set it up so that, things would tick over next year, the subscription would happen again.

If it utterly, silently failed, that's really, bad from a business point of view. And it doesn't help WooCommerce, out there in the public sphere. I wouldn't have thought anything to add to that.

[01:30:02] Tim Nash: A good example of where monitoring Co comes into its own.

[01:30:06] Nathan Wrigley: yes. But who does, obviously the, sites that say that this hasn't happened, sorry.

That this has happened to them. Presumably they weren't doing that. Yeah. Fair enough. I don't, not, to, that sounds like I don't care about the people who do, who it has happened to. But, if you're running a subscription, whether it's a membership site or you are running a subscriptions of any sort.

[01:30:29] Tim Nash: And this surely affected a churn. maybe they're making enough that it doesn't affect the churn rate and the, percentages were small enough, but even just your churn rate would have a noticeable change.

[01:30:42] Nathan Wrigley: But what does it look like though, if you're a WooCommerce store owner? That from what?

From everything I've read. It looked to them as if their customers had switched it off because I, don't know what the logs looked like and what it actually looked like in the database and yada, yada, yada. But my assumption, as a store owner would be, okay, I can see that is now not set to autorenew.

I would just be thinking there's a dissatisfied customer. Okay, we lost them. Let's concentrate on next year getting a load of new people through the door. Do you know what I mean? I can see how this would slip through the

[01:31:14] Tim Nash: cracks. Yeah. But, presumably one is that whole one, one is unfortunate, two is a coincidence.

Three is starting to be, again, it does depend on scale. 'cause if this is only affecting four out of a thousand customers a month,

[01:31:29] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

[01:31:29] Tim Nash: You're not likely. No amount of monitoring is likely to pick that up. Yeah. But if it was, if all of your subscriptions are suddenly having this problem, then that's.

Gonna be, you're gonna notice hopefully, and, people seemingly dead.

[01:31:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So the, person who figured this all out, I'm not even gonna try and pronounce their name correctly. There you go. It sound, look as if it might be Dutch. what Remus just said, they, they, got into all of this, found a bog, and then penetrated deeper over the course of the next few days and found four, three more total of four, and discovered that.

121 subscriptions in theirs had been affected and they lost 40. Oh. it's not nothing, is it $43,000 in potential revenue now? You can't be certain that they were gonna renew anyway, but nevertheless.

[01:32:19] Marc Benzakein: yeah. then would,

wouldn't the subscriber also notice that their subscription is not active or,

[01:32:26] Nathan Wrigley: that's the only way that this would be alerted is that the subscriber noticed and got back to the website and says, something's gone wrong.

We wanted access to whatever it is in this case. Presumably a plugin. I,

[01:32:38] Tim Nash: I guess though we are sorry to see you go email that you just, that you absolutely hate when pe, when you're cancelling subscriptions and your inbox fills in with, somebody to see you go here, have 10% off. If you click this button that you know, 90% of us will probably immediately bin, might have, in this one case, this case possibly have saved.

No, I'd have just been it. I'd have been

[01:33:01] Nathan Wrigley: all also. Wasn't it a total silent failed? Did it didn't trigger any emails or anything like that. I think as well, that's my understanding is it just failed utterly silently. So none of the usual cavalcade of emails that might have.

[01:33:16] Marc Benzakein: Yeah, that's how I took it.

That's how I took it to mean that it was completely just under the radar

[01:33:21] Nathan Wrigley: o page.

[01:33:21] Tim Nash: Maybe this is a an example of where using your, having your email marketing and email transactional system tied tightly into your WooCommerce,

[01:33:31] Nathan Wrigley: right? Essentially. Okay. So you could have

mitigated this on your own.

Yeah. That's

[01:33:35] Tim Nash: interesting. Possibly. the thing is you can't, you ultimately, you can't mitigate for a bunch of series of ca of cascading failures. You can mitigate against lots of things. And we can be sitting here afterwards going, if you've done this and you put it like this

[01:33:49] Nathan Wrigley: and you could have done this m and would all be perfectly fine.

[01:33:51] Tim Nash: But the reality is stuff like this happens and it's part of the cost of anything. This is the equivalent of somebody in the shop going and, closing the front door and locking it by accident for 20 minutes at the start of the day.

[01:34:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. Yeah, that's right. Go and sack the employee. anyway, WooCommerce are on it.

My understanding is, and they're also trying to figure out if there's a way of. an automated tool for want of a better word, Mark's just turned into he's gone to Hades. Oh, there you go. if there's a way of figuring out who these affected people are and then going back to them capping hand, basically saying, look, we messed up the system, messed up, what have you.

So anyway, that was fairly big story. What else have we got? Nothing. Oh, couple of events. I'll just mention these quickly before we end. web Aid Ency Summit is around the corner, 27th of April IE today it started. if you go to terim.io for which try Summit, you can get involved in that. And because time is short, there, this'll be the last one.

if you are thinking about going to WordCamp eu, which is happening in June. Then the schedule has been announced in a lovely table with a lovely feature. You can actually highlight with this little star the bits that you like and send yourself an email because, we're all lazy. And that's helpful.

That's it. That's all we've got time for. Take a breath, Mr. Wrigley. It is a lot, it's a lot cooler here than it is in India. That's why I'm gonna definitely say that I've got the, even though I've got the window open, at least I'm not pouring, with sweat, right? There we go. We will be back, hopefully, this time next week.

All that it remains for me to do is say thank you to our three panellists, mark Zaca. Thank you. Mark. Remus. Somewhere there. Re thank you. He says he's got some news next week. I don't know what that, I want him to tell me now. It's, he's not going to look, he's got that face of, I'm not saying you

[01:35:58] Remkus de Vries: could do, some investigating and it's not

[01:36:00] Nathan Wrigley: on my main site.

I'll do some. Okay. I'll do some investigating when we finish this show. You can tell me then, and Tim, Nash down there as well. thank you very much. We will push this out as a podcast audio episode, which is how most people consume it. That'll happen tomorrow at seven 30 or seven in the morning.

And we'll be back, like I said, next week for some more this week in WordPress. Take it easy. Thank you. oh. Gotta do the handy thing, quick. The hand wavy thing. If you don't mind. Only, one hand from Tim. The one. There we go. That'll do. That's great. See you all next week. Take it easy. Bye

[01:36:36] Remkus de Vries: CIA for now.

[01:36:37] Nathan Wrigley: CIA for now. Indeed.