This Week in WordPress #372

[00:00:03] Nathan Wrigley: It is time for This Week in WordPress, episode number 372 entitled, Undoubtedly enjoying the mischief. It was recorded on Monday, the 4th of May, 2026.

My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I am joined by three fabulous guests. I'm joined by Michelle Frechette, but also by Cami MacNamara and Mayank Majeji.

And we talk about WordPress, you'd expect us to, it is a WordPress podcast. But we do go off in all sorts of different directions. And a bit of a warning, we go into lots of rabbit holes, and at the end we have loads of articles to cover in a tiny amount of time, and we don't really manage it.

But what do we get into?

we talk about a lot of security news. We talk about some of the features, shipping in WordPress seven.

We talk about lots of plugins that have been taken over by different developers and then have injected back doors and horrible things like that. That's really where the majority of this podcast lies.

And then we talk about things like some new meetups for students. Some community news. And some products and services launched by people who are often on this show like Marcus Burnette and Remkus de Vries.

There's a lot in it, and it's lovely sharing it with the guests and as always the people joining us in the comments. And it's all coming up next, and I hope that you enjoy it.

Hello there. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are in the world. We're on episode number 372 of this week in WordPress, which is rather a lot. thanks for joining us. If you are joining us live, please, feel free to make some comments. They really do drive.

The show forward. Oh, that was satisfying. Whoever just had a big glog of something. That was, a real, oh, sorry. That was me. No, that was great. I love, that sound. I shoulda have muted myself. No, it's fine. It's, I love that sound. so that was Michelle Ette. We'll get to her in a moment, but, yeah, if you fancy join in us live for the comments, we would love that.

the simplest place to do it. So we distribute this via this platform and it, it sends it out to all these different places like LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter and all of that. But unfortunately a lot of the platforms they don't allow comments to freely distribute themselves between us, the platform that we're using and the commenting system.

So occasionally I'll go in and I'll see that there's a comment, which we never got to see 'cause you did it on the platform. So anyway, that is a preamble to say the best thing to do would be to go here, which is wp builds.com/live on smore wp builds.com/live. So if you're watching it, about the time it's going live, just head there.

That way. There's a Google set of comments. So it's YouTube comments, which we embed. So if you've got a Google account, you can use those. that's on the side or underneath, depending on which sort of device you're looking at the screen on. But the other thing to say is if you don't want to have any kind of account whatsoever, there's a little, live chat button inside the video.

Top right. Use that. and then you don't have to be logged into any platform whatsoever. So all of that is a bit of a preamble. Wp builds.com/live. Go and get your friends, relatives, Guinea pigs, iguanas, polar bears, whatever you've, yeah. Whatever you've got lying around. Not a polar bear though. My kids constantly come out with interesting facts.

and I, this fact came out the other day. Apparently the only animal which, sees a human as prey is a polar bear. Every other animal like takes it or leaves it. Like it's a bit of a calculation. Am I hungry enough? The polar bear, every time apparently we'll go for the, human. So now you know, that's why you're here for useless miscellaneous like that.

Let's get on with the show, shall we? So you'll notice that I'm surrounded by lots of lovely people. First up, we have our co-host today, which is Michelle Coffee Drinker Fette. How you doing Michelle? That's me. I'm doing well. Thank you. Yeah. Nice to have you with us. Thank you. as is so often the case, she's, in the background tirelessly helping me put this show together, introducing me to new guests and things like that.

So a lot of thanks. Go to Michelle and if you don't know Michelle, my pleasure. This is her. So Michelle Fette is the Executive Director of Post Status. In addition to her work over there, Michelle is the podcast barista at WP Coffee Talk. Ha. There you go. Coffee Talk. Ideal. Co-founder of Underrepresented in Tech, creator of WP Speakers, WP Career pages as well.

And co-founder of Sponsor Me wp. She's also the co-founder of Speed Network Online. She is an author, influencer and frequent organiser and speaker at WordPress events. And she lives outside of Rochester, New York, where she likes to take photographs of nature, not polar bears. You can learn, if we had them, I'd take pictures of them.

Oh, you'd have to be from a very great distance arm. And Niles. That's really through the window lens. Through the window, right? Yeah. one, one U RL for Michelle would be meet Michelle online if you wanna catch up on all of the things that are going on in Michelle's life. And next up. Kami McNamara.

Hello, Camie. Morning. Good morning. Yeah, it is. It's very, it, very good morning. It's 6:08 AM for Kami. Is it six? Is it? It's six, yes. I woke up at five to do my homework and make sure I was awake and get a giant coffee. gosh, that really is. How much is that? It's as big as her head. It's a lot.

It's a lot. it's, just a lot. There's no, unit which matched a lot. I don't even know. It's half a gallon coffee, half a gallon of coffee, a litre of coffee. Good luck. More coffee. Even T-shirt says it. so Cammie's joining us, she's been on the show several times before and, this is the bio for Camie Cammy McNamara, also known as webcam, has been running webcam LLC for 24 years.

Bravo. Good stretch, isn't it? Wow. working with small businesses and nonprofits on WordPress and Squarespace websites in Seattle, Washington, after more than two decades in business, she shares what she's learned through the Web Designer Habits Newsletter, along with the webcam podcast and webcam YouTube channel.

Her content focuses on simple habits, better client processes, and the day-to-day reality of running a small web design business. There is a particular lack of a URL in there. where do we sign up for the web designer? Web designer habits.com. Perfect. That's. Yeah, easy to find com. And how often do you drop that?

Is that a weekly enterprise or every Monday? it just went out at, 5:42 AM Yes. Okay. Does it always go out at 5:42 AM that's, it does, That's supposed to be the best morning time. I write it every Sunday and it goes out every Monday morning. Yeah. Why is 5 42 of all the minutes? I don't know.

[00:07:24] Cami MacNamara: I don't know, but it tells me that's research the best time. Yeah. Like I guess the only, I suppose that stays true until everybody starts hitting 5 42 and then 5 41 is suddenly float. I know. Suddenly better. Maybe I should change it to 5 41 so I Yeah, do that. We went to the inbox. Actually no, I 5 43 would be better because then I higher up in your Exactly.

[00:07:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's true. Yeah. God, we could play this game all day. so there's Camie. Thank you for joining us. I appreciate you. No that to embarrass Cammy or myself 'cause we are of a certain age. I wanna know what UNK was doing 24 years ago. Okay. When Kami was starting her web business. Yeah. Oh wow. Perfect. He was probably on the playground or something, or, yeah.

[00:08:14] Mayank Majeji: I was 12 years old, 24 years ago when Kim started her. Wow. that's too young. Yeah. Yeah. So we have a new face on the podcast today. I'm really pleased to, invite a new guest. Michelle connected, so thank you for that, Michelle. Appreciate it. Sure. So we're joined by my Onk Maji. I hope I didn't butcher that name too badly.

[00:08:35] Nathan Wrigley: If I did, please tell me. and my on has a. Okay, I appreciate that. That's not, hopefully not too bad. but yeah, he's considerably younger than anybody else on the show. Hopefully we'll have a nice, fresh perspective. I'll just read through the bio. so my is a WordPress builder, product tinkerer, and community member of from, and I'm gonna try and get this right.

Here we go. Bengal ru. India ish. That is correct. Oh, great. Okay. Yeah, problem. he spent over a decade working with WordPress, usually somewhere between client work, unmask WP, and currently building plugin auditor and wrangling a steady stream of ideas that were supposed to be quick experiments. Ha. Yeah, I know this feeling when he's not building sites, he's usually reading books, watching anime, helping his wife with a spiritual wellness blog, or telling himself he'll finally clean up his Notion Workspace this weekend.

Oh, that's so weird. That is so weird. That's what I did this weekend. I didn't do it with Notion. I have literally got 15 years of Evernote. Like I have dumped everything into Evernote for 15 years, and when I started it was like 30 bucks a year. I got an email the other day saying it had gone up to something like, I don't know, like 250 bucks a year or something like that.

And I thought actually, time to look around. Don't do it, just stay with notion. It's just, it's not worth it. I just lost two entire days trying to wrangle it, but in the end I found a, perfect replacement if anybody's interested. It's called op note, and, they've always had a lifetime deal. It's $39 a year.

It's got no bells and whistles. It just does hiving away all of your content into one place. No ai, nothing like that, which is perfect for me. So I feel your pain, but don't do it. My on, it's not, honestly, it's not worth it. Anyway, I spent last two weeks to clean up my notes when I got from Ampia.

Oh. But I've spent like, it feels like it's never ending. Yeah. Yeah. my problem is I just got so used to dumping. Everything without really thinking it needed to go in there. So like things like bills would arrive and I'd rip them out the envelope, stick it on the counter and just take a photo of it, and then there it would be, but I wouldn't file it away necessarily.

And yeah, this curation experience was painful, but I am glad to be, to be now more curated. Anyway, there you go. That was, somebody in the comments would, wants you to rename the app that you got. Oh, okay. it was called op note and it's $2 a month or $39 for life. And I had a really good play around.

Basically it's a, Google fire base app, but they've got a web, they've got, they don't have a web version, so if you need web it doesn't do that. But they've got acro, sorry, they've got a Mac Os, Linux, windows, Android iOS app, and I've thrown about 15,000 different documents at it, and it just, it sucked them check and did exactly what it said it would do.

yeah, up. Note, it's definitely worth a look. Cheap as chips, so there you go. Anyway, that's our panel. thank you for joining us today. We're supposed to be talking about WordPress, so let's get into that. I fear that I've put too many things in the show today, so we'll definitely not go through. No, You never do that. No, when Paul Lacey used to do this show with me many, years ago, we always used to try and limit it to about six, and it was a really good idea. And then Paul left and I got lost. I got lost my way, and that's about 50,000 things trying to come in. So anyway, here we go.

[00:12:34] Michelle Frechette: That's why we put ours first. Yeah. And then yours last. Yeah. So yours are going in first. That's, the good news. The stuff that you wanna raise is coming in first. Okay. So here we go. This is our wp builds.com. If you like what we do, put your email in there and we'll send you two emails a week.

[00:12:47] Nathan Wrigley: There's not much to say beyond that. We'll send you one for the podcast episode and when this comes out, most recent podcast episodes, there's a few that we had recently, Brian Gardner. We've got, Jamie Marsland, and most recently I had James Welby on. As well. The CEO of Kinta, John Penland, that's our archive.

You can check it out here and, yeah, send us your email address and we'll send you information about when that comes out each week. We'll start off here. So myON, sent a few links which have made it into the top of the show today. So this is the first one. It's all about something called the presence API feature plugin.

My, if you are happy to run with this, I would like you to, are you able to tell us why you thought this was interesting? Sure. So recently I had a client who requested, so they were using LearnDash and WooCommerce and they wanted to know how many users are actually online using the system and running through the courses.

[00:13:48] Mayank Majeji: And then I came up with a dashboard that you, that internally used, heartbeats, API. but then, but, and we are competed with that, and then I leaned, ran across. This idea that Tre is introducing present CPI, which is pretty much doing the same thing, but in a more advanced way. so that's why I thought this, I don't know how many people are aware of this.

[00:14:18] Nathan Wrigley: I, yeah, I'd never heard of that. Or integrating maybe as. Yeah. Yeah. So that's why I thought it should be included in, in the WebPress we use. yeah, this is a really nifty idea. So if you're used to something, I dunno, I suppose the best example might be something like Google Docs, where, you've got, in the top corner, you've got a little icon showing that somebody's doing something in the doc.

So it, it's not really that, it's more like who's doing what now. as an example, if you can see the screen, we've got nothing inside a WordPress like this at the moment, but it might say, for example, who's logged in and it'll just list who's logged in in my use. I can't actually find a use for this.

'cause usually it's just me inside of a website. But obviously if you've got an editorial team or something like that, you can see who's editing a thing at this exact moment. Basically, you can surface who's doing what on the website at the moment, which for teams, especially, I don't know, collaborative teams and something like that is whe when we're entering a new era where hopefully collaborative editing will be a bit of a thing.

I don't know, knowing that a user is online at the minute, maybe we could surface a chat interface or something like that. Oh, I can see that you're logged on. Why don't we hop in this post? Needs polishing up, blah, blah, blah. So yeah, really neat. yeah. Anybody else got anything to add to that before we move on?

Okay. I think it's great, for the people who do work on teams and they're not just waiting for the takeover pop up when they hit a page to see that somebody else is working on it. Pretty neat. It kinda strikes me as the sort of thing which will be much more useful once people have come up.

With the first or first use cases of it at the moment, all I can think of is things like, who's editing something online, but if you've got a complicated website with, let's say you've got an LMS site or something like that, knowing which users are currently going through your course and which stage they're at.

That could be quite interesting or quite useful. So having a, having some kind of knowledge of where their presence is right now. Really useful. So this is, a feature plugin and the piece was written on the 27th of April, so it's pretty new. It's by John SCO and it's on make.wordpress.org as is always the case.

If we mention something in the show, it will be in the show notes, which will come out tomorrow when I release this as audio won't be in the order that it's in, in the show, but it'll be buried in there somewhere. Okay. Should we move on? That's neat. I'm glad that you surfaced that 'cause for some reason I never found that this week and I'm glad that you, you found it for me.

Okay. This I think is really interesting. both my and myself both found this independently. This was on the, repository, email. I'm gonna struggle to put this into words, but essentially what is happening here is that some of the automatic engineers. have been have, decided that for the next, I think there's 400 of them for the next month, they're gonna team up with one another and they are allowed, they're getting paid to just do blue sky thinking so they can work on whatever the heck they like for a month.

I dunno if this will be an annual thing or it's just a bit of a one-off to generate a tonne of ideas. and then hopefully some of those ideas will be worthwhile and sticky. And interesting enough, this certainly seems like it. So the repositories headline is, automatic Engineers reimagined WP Admin as a Desk desktop os, and Nick Hamey has already built an app store for it.

And so imagine that you could have WordPress as a sort of native. I don't know, windows application or or Mac OS or something like that. And I'm thinking to myself, when I started reading this, that's not that interesting 'cause I'll just have a Chrome tab that's just the same thing. But then you, start to get an impression of why this could be interesting when you watch this little video here.

And although it's almost nothing, like basically somebody just dragged an image from one window. Then chucked it in a post in another window, and they didn't have to open a separate interface. So just like you could with the Finder on a Mac or Windows Explorer, you can take an image and shove it somewhere else on your operating system.

You can do the same thing here. And I think this is really interesting, the idea of breaking up your WordPress website. So you could have different things going on in different places, and they're all interconnected, and you can drag one to the other kind of fairly profound, hard to imagine, again, how it would be used.

But anyway, yeah. Thank you Myong for, bringing this up. again, I'll stop talking there. If anybody else has any intuition, just type in and go for it. Sure. I, I, sorry, please go ahead. No, go ahead. I'll pick, Myong, why don't you go ahead this time and Michelle can. Okay. So I think this could, again, be implemented in the, web version as well.

[00:19:39] Mayank Majeji: Where, so nowadays we have split tabs in Chrome where we can open side by side tabs as a split tab. That's true. Yeah. And, so so we can have the same interface, maybe inside buttress, where we can open or maybe a button on the left side in the editor where we can click, A left panel will open, open the media library.

The right panel will shift the ator and we can just, search the image, pick it, and drag it in the post, just like we have in, in, two different windows. in the video, what do you think? Yeah, it's interesting. I, I, if I, so years ago I went from wanting everything to be a desktop app.

[00:20:29] Nathan Wrigley: When Chrome came around and Google started to dominate the web, the web browser space, I wanted to take everything to be off, to be a web app. I wanted absolutely everything to be available to me. So things like Evernote or Notion, I wanted it to all be available in that way. Now. I'm swinging in the other direction.

I want everything to be a desktop app because it's just basically quicker in every regard. It's quicker, and you've got a cached version of everything and what have you. I think this is really interesting. I would choose to use WordPress as a desktop app if it was fully featured, but had some interesting little, embellishments that made it possible as well.

Anyway, sorry Michelle. Your turn. Apologies. No, I was just gonna, no, it's fine. I was gonna say that, sorry I got a frog in my throat this morning. that, The more we move towards doing things the way that younger generations are expecting them to be done, the more opportunity we have to bring future generations into WordPress instead of watching WordPress get taken over by other CMSs going forward.

[00:21:35] Michelle Frechette: So the more that we can do things like drag and drops and things that people expect from modern day software, the more that we can actually continue to be modern day software. indeed. Kami, anything on this one before we move on? I think it's interesting, especially the example that you shared.

[00:21:57] Cami MacNamara: but I don't know that I wanna look at WordPress all day, every day. Or have that visual, because that's what I'm doing all day already. Yeah. yeah. Interesting. I guess it, it could be something that would help you be faster if, because that's the environment you're working in all the time and just your brain is working that way.

[00:22:22] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, I hadn't really thought about, MYOS point though, but I'm, I use a browser called Vivaldi, which is a chromium derivative, and in, in one of the latest releases, it started to do exactly this, it started to make it so that you can put concurrent windows next to each other inside the one window.

So you could have three, I don't know, you could have your email next to your task app, next to your whatever, notion or something like that. You can have them all aligned next to each other, and every time you open the browser, they all just pop up in a perfect simulation. It's a bit like that, but if you can see this screenshot, obviously it.

It has a slight difference in the screens that you can see. They're all within one screen. So you have, yeah, it would appear that you've got to have this chrome around the whole thing. And then each of these is a little separate window inside of it. I would like it if it were possible to have them all as separate window so that I can truly move them anywhere and resize them outside of the boundaries of this.

But I still think it's a neat idea and my, I think you're probably onto something. I'm imagining they're leveraging something like the Vivaldi technology that I'm describing there, where multiple windows can be put into the same space, but it just looks pretty neat to me. I like the idea of having different, so I'm always jumping from three or four interfaces, the post editor, the media library, and the list of the posts.

And to be able to interact with those three things at once would be, I think, pretty neat. Let's see. Anyway, the point being that this just came up. As an idea. And these guys have managed to throw it together in just a matter of days, I imagine, with the help of, an AI system. But, there are some comments on this one too, you might wanna pull up.

Thank you. I'll just quickly go through the PO comments. So what have we got? Firstly, nomad Skateboarding. really enjoying. Latest track not drains. You episode. Ah. Nice. Thank you. That one arrived. That one arrived this morning, I believe. Yeah. That's great. Yeah, that was the 5 42 drop. 5 42.

That's gonna be become, that's gonna be the title of this episode, 5 42. even though it's episode. I love it. 3 7 2. thank you, for joining us Nomad Skateboarding. hello from Rockville, says who, whatever that says. Jamie Query or something. Sorry, Jamie, I apologise. we're being joined by James.

He says hello. Good morning, mark. West Guard is joining us. from EST. He's also saying you can already drag images between browser tabs. Oh, I didn't realise that. Thank you, mark. I didn't realise that was an actual thing. I thought that was still in the realms of impossibility. So maybe that isn't a particular use case, but the over, but the idea of being able to see those three interfaces, I kinda split tabs apparently is what it's called.

Yeah. Lovely. Thank you so much. I would love said James. I would love a personal WP Journal app or desktop app. Ooh. You mean like day one or something? Day one. Day one. I don't think he's heard of it. Yeah. Day one is an automatic look up day one, and it's, I believe it's got the block editor. It looks a little bit like, I believe, so a slight variation on the block editor inside.

It's a paid service, so it's not free, but I see what you mean. There's a free version of it, I believe. Yeah. da What's this saying? There is one Ellie created called Block Notes. Now maybe we're talking about my Evernote journeys there. Okay. Okay. So I don't know about that one. And then finally James says, pair it with, say the Rabbit R one AI device.

I don't know what that means. neither do I. If you are clever enough to decipher that for us, James, that would be helpful. Thank you very much. I just wanna, whenever anybody refers to a rabbit, I always wanna say ask Alice. Okay. Very good. Nice. And, good afternoon, says, Imran Web Squadron. That's Imran.

It's Imran, I'm sure it is. Hello. Good afternoon. Nice to have you with us. Hello. Okay, so that was, that was the idea of it's just a pet project, right? We're saying it as if it's a feature which is being built. It's not, it's just a couple of mathematicians who've come up with this novel idea and in a couple of days seem to have made it a reality.

So anyway, there we go. Alright, moving on to this one quickly. we'll try and do a light touch on this one if that's all right. My, but my on's obviously thinking about AI here. This is over on our website I'd never heard of today, until today. It's called AI today.io. AI governance moves from theory to practise.

Do you wanna sum it up or do you want me to do that work for you? My on. Sure. Please go ahead. Okay. in this article, it'll be no surprise to anybody if you rewind the clock 10 years and ask a thousand people how much AI they were using. A thousand of them would shake their heads and go non, probably go back three years, ask the same question.

Pretty much the same, maybe a hand couple of people. Now it turns out that somewhere in the region of 750 out of a thousand, so 75 to 80% of people are using AI in their business, which then creates a landscape in which, if there's so much AI going on in the background of business, whether that's WordPress or any other business, Do we view that as a sensible thing to do from a governance point of view? In other words, we've introduced this massive systemic layer into all businesses. Seven out of 10 businesses now using significant amounts of ai. Do we need some sort of governance? I don't really know what that means. I don't know how you govern AI given that it seems to be the pet project of about seven different chaps in North America.

but anyway, that's the point in, that's the point of this article. It's just trying to sum up do we need some sort of governance, but I don't really know how we would actually manage that. over to you may, if there's anything you wanna add in then. So we have cloud code cloud, I think Cloud desktop where we are giving permissions, to cloud or the AI services or, chat GPD and I'm sure there may be other, AI services that are being running on.

[00:28:34] Mayank Majeji: On desktop apps that are getting more and more access to a user system. And it's not limited to user system. it's also more and more websites are getting integrated with ai, especially, we be seeing AI connectors coming in buttress websites and we already know 43% of, in internet is governing by word trust.

So it just, there's some sort of layer of rules which should have some restrictions, to at least to some extent, where AI cannot get the full access or have some rules, some, some kind of room where only in that room it can work on, if that makes sense. that's, I think there should be a general AI governance.

it's, dedicated to uk. I think this article is dedicated to UK government. Yeah. But I think there should be a global community that should come up and talk about the AI governance, how much, ai, how much, AI should get access to the websites or to user systems or, servers. I'm not sure how it's going to affect the whole ecosystem of the web.

But I'm definitely interesting to hear about, more about AI governance. I think, I think it's curious 'cause we're entering a phase where if, let's say 80% of businesses in the UK or otherwise are using AI in some way, shape or form inside their platform, inside their CRM, inside their website, and I am, let's say that I end up on their website and I sign up for a course.

[00:30:19] Nathan Wrigley: They've got a membership system or something like that, and I sign up and I give them my email and I give them my name. I wanna know. What a can an AI get hold of that? Do they have access to my name, my email address, my actual, my actual home address and things like that. So it's this sort of entanglement of AI being in the backend of almost everything it would appear nowadays.

And what is the relationship with me as a customer or me as one of your users with that? Because I don't want an AI to know that I've signed up to your website and to have my real name and to have my, email address and things. It's a trivial example, but I don't want an AI to know that kind of stuff.

And I suppose we need guardrails around that. So anyway. Anybody else?

[00:31:13] Cami MacNamara: I think it's a great point as a like small business owner, on my own to come up with your own. Gotta come up with SOPs for yourself in addition to something like this, because this is very top level. But, what are the clients expecting from you as a designer? And, are you gonna connect your own AI tokens?

No, you're not gonna do that. There's so much to think about. So I'm glad somebody is thinking about this top level because it's, we're in the pha, we're just starting this, it's gonna go crazy, this time goes on. So have you, have you all come across a service called Term Mageddon? yes.

[00:31:56] Nathan Wrigley: Term? Yeah. Yeah. So term mageddon is in effect. It's a little bit like what this feels like it could turn into, in other words, term mageddon will create a bespoke for you based upon where you are and the kind of business that you run. Terms and conditions and legal documentation, which you can then put into your website somewhere so that people are aware of, I don't know what you do with their data and things like that.

Maybe. Maybe we need something like that, some overarching thing which can insulate us and protect us. And if you are injecting clawed, let's say, into the backend of your website and letting it squirrel around all over the place and discover all the things you need to make that visible To people, at the very least to protect yourself. maybe that's not the future that we want anyway. Maybe it's more like guardrails to, so that we know that we have not allowed that to happen. But at the very least, maybe something like that would be in the offering you, we need to get in touch with, denar and, and Han.

probably they're on it already over there, I would've thought. Just one more thing for us to think about. Yeah. Yeah. Basically. Yeah. And a big thing as well, right? You can imagine at some point in the future. This is gonna go south for somebody in a fairly serious way, and let's pray.

It's not anybody, on this show. Imran raised a few comments. He says, a, he's a huge user of AI for helping to write code snippets, but not for content unless it's stemy content for his tutorial. doesn't use AI for images or creating videos as it would remove the me and my voice. that is ultimately my brand.

Imran has a, a successful YouTube channel, web Squadron. You can go and check it out. And so obviously that's an important caveat. It's, I, hope you, I say I hope, do you say that, Imran, do you actually have, wear that as a badge of honour? do you say these images are not ai, do you drill that home?

Because personally, I'm actually quite drawn to that. Anybody who's using less ai. Has some kudos in my book. I don't quite know where that comes from, but I do like the authenticity of knowing that a human did the labour and that it wasn't just a quick shortcut and final thing that was said by Imran.

I'm not a, I'm not on the Claude train yet, due to token usage and how you can get sucked into imitating others with no real gain. My tool of choice for coding and it carries on, is still chat. GPT, it knows me. I know it. Term again is great. He says term again. Oh, and Mark's Mark, west Guard is repeating that comment term again for the win.

Nice. Okay. there we go. All right. Anybody else on that one? The little. The little piece there about ai? Nope. Okay, great. In which case, we will move on to this piece. We're back at the repository. who put this one in? I think this might have been, myON again? Yes, it was. I think so. Oh, si. What can we say?

so Austin Grinder, this is the title. Austin, grinder. That's not what his name is it? That's. That's a whole different thing. Austin, shall we just pause there? More coffee? More coffee? Yeah, we'll just let that sink in for a moment. sorry Austin, I don't know you, but hopefully that makes us not enemies.

Austin. Ginder. Ginder. Anyway, reports Fourth bug, sorry. Reports. Fourth plugin backdoor in a month. Unveils WP Beacon. what can we say? this, it's now been revealed that there's a fourth, backdoor, which is discovered in a month. It's been discovered in a plugin called the Scroll to Top plugin, which has got 20,000 users and it's serving tampered code and it has been, for two years, which has been secretly, oh, you can't make this stuff up.

It's been secretly. Updating itself from their own servers. That's my understanding of the thing. and so he, Austin, I'm not gonna try his surname again, has developed WP Beacon, which is a, new tool which is hoping to detect things like back doors by analysing structural patterns. and yeah, it just, yet again, we seem to be in this landscape at the moment where lots and lots of plugins are being discovered to be doing nefarious stuff.

We'll come onto another one in a moment. may has you dropped this one in, was there anything additional you wanted to add? If not, I will move on. not exactly, but this is definitely one of the, one of the consults that I've been, coming across day by day. so we are, before, yeah, it was still kinda hard to or take, takes time to build plugins, but now.

[00:36:52] Mayank Majeji: That we have AI and people are building plugins in in, in like days or within a day or two and submitting it to Depot. And we have only one, one time, checking mechanism in place where they check about security and if the plugin is compatible with the terms and conditions. and you can literally update it unlimited times once the plugin is approved in the repo.

So I'm just concerned about how or what system should be in place to, have, repeated checks or timely checks. Maybe it could be a month or, bi bimonthly. but this is definitely a, and we are not even talking about the plugins that are in the client sites that are built by third party developers that are not living in the repo.

[00:37:55] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. How are we, there's no system in place inside buttress or inside repo, which can timely, checks the plugin again and again. Yeah. 'cause it's ultimately, affecting the, and the client sites, especially for the plugins that are not hosted inverters and built by third party developers.

yeah, I guess the, main cross, that's my only comment. Yeah. sorry, I crossed talk you, I think there's a little bit of lag and so I'm. Struggling to know when you've finished and whatnot. so the, sort of main story here really is that at some point, the, this plugin was sold and it was bought by a different individual, some point back in 2023.

And at that point in November, 2023, some new code was, included in the plugin. That code then pulls, a domain, which is listed somewhere on here. Anyway, I can't remember, but it's a domain which is not wordpress.org. So it's been taking its cues from this other domain ever since then. So every website that's had this on it, 20,000 installations, has been.

Oh, here we go. Here's the, here's the URL. It's cdn static sync.com, and this plugin has then been able to rewrite content on that WordPress website. But the point being, nobody would ever know if you installed this plugin prior to 2023. You were, you probably had exactly what you expected. Then that plugin was bought by somebody else.

The code was modified, but there's no checks and balances once it's in the repo. I say there's no checks and balances, like I'm confident about that. Maybe there is, maybe it is happening and I just don't know about it. But stuff like this is getting through. and therefore, websites are getting updated.

In this case, they're getting updated from some other third party server, which wordpress.org has nothing to do with. And obviously, the sky is the limit at that point. not good. Hopefully if this plugin rings any bells. What was it called again? Scroll to top again. Scroll to top. Yeah. Yeah, this was just the latest, so there was three more discovered by Austin in the recent past.

So yeah. Bad, if anybody wants to talk about that, go for it. If not, I'll move on to the next bad thing. Ray, I just wanna, I wanna personally thank Austin for doing this because, I have run to manage WP to do a bulk check of plugins and, found a couple of websites, not with this particular one, but some very old websites that I inherited from a designer that retired, had a previous one, which was Widget Logic, I think.

[00:40:54] Mayank Majeji: Oh. And, it just, I really appreciated, Him doing this work because Those of us that are doing client work, and we've been doing it for a long time, we don't remember all these plugins that were, a, website was launched 15 years ago and they've not updated. You just. Kind of panic when you think about stuff like that.

[00:41:17] Cami MacNamara: So yeah. Good work. Yeah, Really isn't that amazing that, I don't know if this person has used that plugin. Austin's been using that plugin, or if he's just been going out there trying to do some due diligence on the things that are already in the repo. But anyway, it certainly surfaces a vector of attack, which maybe has gone under the radar for a little while.

[00:41:38] Nathan Wrigley: I remember this was news a few years ago, but it wasn't a security thing. It was that somebody had bought a plugin and then just overnight totally changed what it did. It went from just being this plugin, which did this one tiny thing, and then everybody woke up in the morning with their site updated, and suddenly it was like, I don't know, it was like a full, LMS or something like that.

And so that was weird, and it just highlighted, oh, so plugin developers can do that, can they? They can just sell it. Somebody can buy it and then do what the heck they like with it. Yes, yeah. Is the, yeah, they really can. And so maybe we need a system more akin to, I don't know, the app store on app, the, Apple ecosystem or the iOS app store or the Google Play Store, where I presume every update is also given.

Some sort of check. I dunno if that's with a human or an automated thing. so WP Gav, sorry. Apologies for butchering your handle there. I think plugin review team is already shorthanded. that's a good point. Yeah, very much I feel there will be prominent report plugin options on the repo and a set of plugin authors, to mitigate such issues.

Beyond and then carried on beyond the scope of Plug, the Plugin Review team. We'll get to something in a minute written by Yost, the person, which might be of interest, to this. And, but before we do that, let's just list another horror show. So this one is coming from, the WP Content blog, and the title is Over 80 WP Factory Plugins closed on wordpress.org after suspected backdoor in premium plugin.

if it sounds like the same story, it's basically because it is the same story, but with a different plugin. So there's not a lot really to say here except, the, there's a security issue in the EU UK, VAT for WooCommerce plugin, pithy title there, does what it says on the tin, And, but the story here is just.

Forgive me if I've read this wrong, dear plugin developer. I apologise, but it seems to me like the plugin developer, if what is in this article is a verbatim transcription of what happened, it seems to me like this plugin developer knew exactly what they're doing and when they were caught red-handed, they bloated try to pretend that it was a non-issue.

The person who discovered the floor went back with more evidence to which they then did nothing again, and this back and forth happened loads of times, lots and lots of times, until eventually it sounds like they're now admitting that they've got a problem with their plugin, but it's not their fault.

Whereas it's definitely being painted in this article that right from the beginning. It was their fault. They knew what they were up to. They did what they did, they got caught, which for them is probably a shame. They were no doubt enjoying the mischief that they were getting up to, but they've been caught and, and seem unable to acknowledge it.

So go and read the article and check it out. But certainly if you have a copy of the, like I said, ly titled E-U-U-K-V-A-T for WooCommerce plugin, you certainly wanna be reading this article because it would appear that lots and lots of dodgy stuff is going on, in the background there. That's another good title for the episode.

Yeah. Undoubtedly Enjoying the mischief. Yes. Okay. Lemme just write that down. Undoubtedly enjoying the mischief. I like it. I can't write quickly enough. I wish I could write more quickly. Okay. I got that. but yeah, go and check it out. This is, a suspected backdoor. Honestly, I think the word suspected is probably overused there.

It seems like it is. it was initially reported on GitHub. There was some suspicious file which crept into the plugin at some point, and it attempted to download some external resources, which then modified core WordPress directories. Does it sound bad enough yet? Yeah, and although WP Factory did acknowledge the issue, the real story here is just how long they could get away with kind of acknowledging the issue, but pretending like nothing was going on.

There's no nothing to see here. It's a shame that we don't have a way of closing these people down more effectively, more quickly. There we go. That's my rant. Anybody want to comment on that? It's a dangerous world out there. It is. Yeah. No kidding. It's a dangerous world for real. My eyesight for sure.

My eyesight's so bad. I'm struggling to see these comments. is there anything that's common that's, I can't see anything which is relevant to this particular, piece, so I will just move on. Just one last memory. mention WP Content was where You can find that again. LinkedIn, the show notes.

It's Cammy's Turn. Camie, big Beaver Builder fan, have been for years, Iami, I'm guessing, since 2016. Okay. Yes. That's near the beginning. So 10 years A Beaver King. Yeah. They've been very. How to describe it? I think, it's fair to summarise the Beaver Builder crew as like quite a moral, crew.

a really nice bunch of human beings and and fairly cautious about the different things that they've put out. they don't just jump on something 'cause it's new and exciting. They wait a little while and check the landscape out and what have you. And I, Robbie, who, is one of the founders of Beaver Builder, was on a podcast with me the other day, just hinting that was the case and talking about his, his endeavours or the team's endeavours regarding ai.

They're about to drop it. But you've had a little bit of a play, but you're on the wraps, aren't you? Cam isn't there? There's only so much. yeah, I don't wanna reveal too much, but I have gotten a sneak peek at what they're working on and I'm so incredibly excited about it because they've really approached it in a thoughtful way for the designer and, I, it's gonna be a game changer for my business, and I just appreciate the amount of thought that they're putting into it, the way this is going to work. So it isn't just like it's being slapped together, just to respond to what people are looking for now. it's really going to be a helpful tool.

[00:48:28] Cami MacNamara: When you're using Beaver Builder to build client websites. I'm so excited for them. C can I just ask you a question? So I know you're obviously a fan, so there's that you're a big fan Yes. You've been using for years. do you genuinely detect that then? So now that you've had a little bit of a play around, do you see that there is some, how to describe it?

[00:48:50] Nathan Wrigley: The time has allowed their team to put something more polished together as opposed to jumping on at the beginning and then releasing like 17 overlapping products, which a lot of other teams in the WordPress space have done. right at the beginning they launched this product and then two months later they launched another one and then another, and then you get the point, Beva builder have done none of that. And it's, what, three years in the making? You are confident that's allowed them to produce something superior, right? I, believe so. I've been using AI in, in ways outside of building, so I'm going to chat GPT all the time and integrating it into what I'm doing.

[00:49:33] Cami MacNamara: This is gonna allow me to integrate that into the builder itself. And, the time savings is gonna be great. It's gonna be very helpful at starting your designs. I'm just am excited about it. And they are just such an ethical and good group of people. They're just good people. And the fact that they've reached out to a few designers and people to do some testing, I think is a testament to them caring about how people are going to use it.

So I am, I'm really pleased to hear you say that's, the way to build a business, isn't it, over time, is to have people say things like that about you. Yeah. And they have a lot of loyalty. we're the, folks that use it, we're all very loyal. So there's a reason for that, but it, takes a lot of business guts when you could see the landscape changing around you really quickly and everybody jumping on ai, it does take quite a lot of business guts to say.

[00:50:40] Nathan Wrigley: Just batten down the hatches. Let's give it, let's just see where the heck this goes. All the while you can see the press just fawning over this latest AI thing here, latest AI thing there, knowing that you are just biting your time, that in the end you'll get something polished. And I'm using Air quote superior off the bat.

I, think that's admirable and very brave given the deluge of AI stories that we've had recently. Yeah. Yep. Yeah, I think it's a good plan. I'm excited and I think everyone who uses Beaver Builders gonna really enjoy using this tool. Okay. So keep your eyes on the Beaver Builder socials and email lists and things like that.

We don't have any, we don't have any exact features that are coming. But it's coming. And, if you're a Beaver Builder user, or indeed a user of some rival product may be worth a look. And, maybe, Michelle, we've just had the, the episode title hijacked because. it's pretty good.

[00:51:48] Michelle Frechette: We'll talk after the show. I'm not gonna, I'm not even gonna say it out loud. Let's just leave it there. Let's just not use that as a title. It's a good, it's true though. It's exactly summing up, but out of context. weird. okay, so here we go. Another comment from the previous article. Nothing to do with Beaver Builder.

[00:52:08] Nathan Wrigley: so this is WP Gav. I'm so sorry if I'm getting that wrong. WP Factory, LTD Limited, I guess not Lifetime deal Limited, is notorious for hijacking your WordPress backend. I've not heard of them, so that's news to me. instal any of their plugins and the override featured plugins tab with their own, oh.

Okay. Gosh, if only it was all unicorns and rainbows all the way down. I feel like it used to be, it definitely used to be more unicorns and rainbows all the way back there. Cammie still, this is interesting and I'm gonna, if anybody's watching this, can anybody tell me what's wrong with that animation?

I know you all know 'cause I said at the beginning, can anybody tell me what's wrong with that animation? if, no prizes or anything, but it'd be interesting to see if anybody can spot what I think is wrong with that animation. So go on Spill the beans. What the heck is whisper flow.ai? Okay.

[00:53:05] Cami MacNamara: this has changed my life and I just wanted the opportunity to share it with other people. It is a tool that allows you to hold down two keys on your keyboard and talk into any, app, website, text field that appears on your computer and you can talk into. it will dictate your voice, but it also does a cleanup.

So if you're writing an email, it will do your grammar corrections, it will clean things up for you. it will, if you stutter when you talk, it's going to clean it up and it saves so much time. And I'm typing less my, no more like sore wrist at the end of the day. Yeah. And, not to offend any of the Star Wars fans out there, because it is May 4th, but it's like Star Trek.

It's yeah, Scotty going computer, do this. it's just, it's fantastic. as a somebody who works alone and does everything, on my own, it's just, it's revolutionised my workday. So is the gimmick here then? Gimmick? Forgive that word, but you hopefully, that it.

[00:54:23] Nathan Wrigley: It will inject itself wherever the heck your cursor is. So if you're in a Google doc, it'll work there. If you're in like, I don't know, you're in WhatsApp, Gmail, email. Yeah. Or even in WordPress or in ai in anything in where you're at. But also you can talk into the type, it will summarise what you are doing as well on the fly.

So by the time you've got to the sentence it's, sorry. By the time you've got to the end of a sentence, it's already done some work cleaning up. It's already doing cleanup, right? Yes. Like you can, say you, oh wait, I said that wrong. Do. And it'll, it'll listen to you and you don't have to go, it was really hard at first to, 'cause you would wanna put your punctuation in and you don't have to do that anymore.

[00:55:10] Cami MacNamara: Yeah. It just naturally does the punctuation for you. So was there a bit of a learning curve, like how to describe this? I, when I'm typing, I'll do a few words, pause, have a bit of a think, then carry on. usually go back, delete a bit, and carry on. And I think it would take a bit of training to get my brain into, okay, I need to be succinct and clear now.

[00:55:35] Nathan Wrigley: Basically. I don't know if I'm ready for this tool. I'm just not sure. I waffle a lot, essentially. But you are very happy with it. Oh yeah. I can't live without it now. Okay. yeah, it's definitely, something that I'm gonna pay for it forever. Yeah. Oh God, I wish they had lifetime. So it's 20 doll, it's $20 a month, but it's, there is, some.

[00:55:59] Cami MacNamara: It's so worth it. If you are interested, 'cause I got into this as soon as you put this into the show notes, the other day I got into the rabbit hole of this. There are a couple of rival services. There's one called Voice Dash, which is on a lifetime deal, I think, over on one of the marketplaces, like AppSumo or something, which purports to do the same thing.

[00:56:19] Nathan Wrigley: I don't know if it's as good as this, but there are, it's definitely a burgeoning, industry. I think Does it work on like your, I don't know, your phone as well? Yeah, I believe so. Oh yeah, right at the top it says flow for Android. Yeah. I hadn't started that. Okay. Yes, it does. I'm using it on both Mac and phone. So it does Okay. And the fact that you are using it means that you agree with Kami? I guess you are into all this talking to the Yeah, absolutely. Oh, interesting. bits of times it, kinda fumbles with when it does not have the exact words or it does not, listen to a word properly.

[00:57:07] Mayank Majeji: But we can add, more go personalised words in its dictionary so it has a dictionary as well. Okay. And next time it'll automatically understand that what exactly what word you said that it didn't catch last time, it's pretty awesome. You should definitely try, oh yeah. And definitely recommend this one as well.

[00:57:27] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. I'm, you have to be careful with names. Okay. Names are something you have to be careful with because if it's the name Lori, it will spelled with an o. Or in it's LAU and then you have to make sure that it corrects properly. So things like that. Okay. yeah, I would imagine when, for example, writing content for a WordPress podcast.

This, I dunno if I say rest, API, it's not gonna, it'll probably get the word rest. API it might get, probably won't capitalise it correctly and you'd have to teach it, those kind of things. Okay. So you've got a, there's a, difference of opinion here. Cabby. James says it's nice. mark, west Guard says, am I the only one that doesn't like talking to a device?

[00:58:13] Michelle Frechette: I don't either. Yeah, I, think I could do it in, I think I could do it in my own home, but if I, do quite a lot of work when I'm in cafes and things like that. Yeah, that would, be weird. Would it? Yeah. Would that be weird? yeah, because you'd just be sitting there talking nothing but don't, you don't like, okay.

[00:58:34] Nathan Wrigley: Seriously, everybody's talking to everybody like, ear pieces. Oh, true. You, when somebody's talking to themselves, now 10 years ago you would've thought that person is a lunatic. Whereas now you just think that person's on a mobile phone and with a little in-ear device or something like that.

So I think you probably could get away with it in a cover, but you'd have to have some sort of fake in your device just to indicate I'm not weird. okay, so James is back again. He says he likes flow, but it chunks everything into one gigantic paragraph. Okay. That's maybe a, maybe some work for the, I haven't had, I haven't had that experience.

[00:59:10] Cami MacNamara: Like for me writing emails, it will do paragraphs for me, so yeah, it'll make natural breaks. So maybe it's a setting that I have changed. I'm not sure. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. Imran, me too. I talk, think, talk, prefer to type I, my, okay. Maybe everybody's different. If, I wanna make something, IM, if I wanna remember something, this is the most effective technique I have.

[00:59:40] Nathan Wrigley: The pencil or pen. Yeah. That there is some, There is some connection between that process. The, physical drawing out of word by word second vest is typing. But it's, 20% of this in terms of memory and commitment and all of that kinda stuff. but I think if I was to start speaking, I would remember nothing.

It would all just be like this transitory thing. But I guess that's not the point. You are not doing it for content cammie, you are doing it to reply to an email or Yeah. It's mostly communication. Yeah. or it's also, I use it a lot in chat GPT when I'm trying to describe what I am trying to get AI to help me with or just so all of that.

[01:00:28] Cami MacNamara: Yeah. And, but when I've been doing this for 24 years and typing for 24 years is a long time and it is cutting down the amount of typing that I'm doing. Yeah. Okay. And that, to me, that is like the main, the big plus is that it, it helps with, just fatigue. In your hands from typing Every episode we have, one piece which gets more traction than everything else.

[01:00:56] Nathan Wrigley: And this is definitely the one. This is it? Yeah. Yeah, this is the one. we'll just go through a few. So Elliot sounds, hello Elliot. He's just down the road from me. he says Me too. So he is agreeing, he doesn't like, what did Mark say? He doesn't like Talking to devices. Devices. Yeah. There we go.

max. Hello, max. He says there were also open. Oh, apparently there's rival open source versions as well. That's good to know. Nice. Max, if you've got the names of any of those handy, that might be useful for other people. Iran's back, especially as I prompt. may form bit by bit during the days before I execute.

Okay. So that's, so it's like an evolutionary process going on. Yeah. Okay. That's how my writing process is too. Yeah. Okay. Okay. taco it never misspells. It understands taco. Yeah. Tacho, does it get Vaon shot, right? Or does it miss the, what is it? I always miss out the h or the CI always misspell Tacho surname for some reason.

Just hold up a phone to your ear and you can talk to your device all day. Yeah, that's true. Somebody forgive me. my, but one of the things that I noticed in my recent time in India is that there is a thing which folk in India do, which nobody in my country does. And I have the most ridiculous, tiny mobile phone, so you'll have to forgive this as a prop.

I see a lot of, saw a lot of people in India, so I'll take my headphones off walking around like this.

That's a thing, right? you just, it would appear like you plunk the phone next to your ear and I was thinking there's a product there. Somebody needs to invent a brace or some kind of headgear or hat, which you can just have the headphones slotted into the side, just like that.

Anyway, that was to say, exactly what Max was saying. Just hold it up to your ear and you can talk all day. That's right. It's an excuse just to, but you wouldn't even need to be a phone, even if you just painted a piece of wood black and just put it there. Everybody just think it's a phone. when people hear me call, sorry.

When people hear me call, this is taco again. They think I'm an idiot. No technology update can change that. I'm

Oh, tacho. And that's so not true, taco. No. Okay. That's not true. That's, it is not true. Correct. So there we go. There's one, there's a free one apparently it's called type whisper. T-Y-P-E-W-H-I-S-P-E-R type whisper, Iran's back. I need to get over my fear of recording in a cafe, even when it's just talking to your phone.

Big fear. Oh, I'm like you. I couldn't get over that hump. It would take me, basically, it, the cafe was empty. Maybe there's a chance that I'll talk to my computer, but in any other scenario, no, that's not happening. pencil. Nathan, what does that. Pen, pencil. I said pencil instead of pen, didn't I?

I've still got, doesn't anybody use pencils anymore? Is that not a thing? I've got loads around. I think I have one in a cabinet somewhere. I actually don't have one at my desk at this minute, but I have loads. Always do. Yeah. And then look, the pen's mightier than the Sword. James Loud dropping wisdom back from like Aristotle or something like that.

It sounds, chat. GPT has its own subscription with Whisper built into it. Okay. That's interesting. and just before we stop Cammie, I've got to ask you one question. What is different to this software and what's already built into the os? Because can't you just like on my, MacBook, if I press, I think it's the F five key, it's got the little microphone symbol on it and it just.

Doesn't it do that already? What's the difference? in the old days, well before this tool, you can u you can utilise, in, in every different platform they have something that does this. Like in Google Docs you can hit text to type, but you are saying period, comma, things like that.

[01:05:05] Cami MacNamara: Oh. Or at least I was back then. And it would just clump everything and all of your ums and, weird, cadence in your voice, would pick up. And this uses AI to do a cleanup. Got it. I see it's shaping what you're saying in, In a better way, Okay. So I'm sold, I'm gonna try that out.

That's it. Yeah. Yeah. I'm gonna try out, I wanna know how you like it, see if it can pass the cafe test. That's my gonna be my first time using it. You go to a really busy cafe and just, hello? Just, oh God. Shouting at the computer. See how long the people behind the counter can be like, oh God. Nathan's here again.

That's right. Yeah, that's right. okay, here we go. Next piece is very much to do with WordPress. okay. So WordPress seven factor WordPress things. WordPress seven got punted a few weeks ago. It was supposed to be dropped at WordCamp Asia. It didn't get punted and the reason it didn't get punted fairly technical, but it was all about the way that data, for real time, collaborative editing, which is dropping in seven was being stored.

[01:06:23] Nathan Wrigley: And it was decided that it was going to be more efficient to. Take stock, have a rethink, set up a dedicated table to handle that kind of stuff, in the WordPress database. Now, if you are in any way, shape, or form connected with a, hosting, the, team would love to hear your feedback about how this feature works on your platform.

So there'll be some work to be done, but they wanna see how it impacts, the big right to the smallest hosting solutions. And so this is what this is. It's a test for web hosts for collaborative editing. which basically ends today. As with all these things, I'm sure it won't end today if you've got actual telemetry that, is useful.

I'm sure that they'll be, willing to hear, but I certainly will be interesting to see what the, the, what drops out of that, because it's a feature, which sounds to me like not too many people are gonna use within WordPress. and so it'd be interesting to see how it responds on various different platforms.

Anything to do with that or should I just move on? We're running outta time. Okay, I will just move on in that case, this is nice. This is a nice community piece. in the spirit of trying to make WordPress last into the next decade or so, I think there's a widespread fear that, the age skews quite old in the WordPress community.

You go to WordPress events, you see a lot of, older people, not quite so many young people. So there's been a lot of, initiatives in the education space to get kids involved. One of them, has been something called Campus Connect, and that the idea of that is that you can go and, in an institution you can receive some training in WordPress, but the, those were one-off events.

And so this idea has been, raised called, WordPress Student Clubs. And the idea here is just like you remember when you were at school, you could attend the chess club or you could attend whatever the Debating Society or the hockey club or, whatever it may be. The idea is to have something much more frequent, so it's a touch point you can do weekly, monthly, or something like that.

There's not really much for me to add to that, just to say that, look, it's happening. You can see it. Happy, smiling faces, of many people sitting down in different parts of the world, receiving, look at those happy people. getting a bit of WordPress education on a much more kind of frequent basis. So I suppose a, an, an analogy might be a meet up, something like that.

It's little, but often, and I just thought I'd raise this, so that everybody could go and check it out. The, article was published a couple of days ago, 29th of April, and it's called WordPress Student Club Build Clubs, build Momentum. It's on wordpress.org/news. I think if we want the WordPress community to survive into the next decade, we need stuff like this to make Utes.

Interested in it, and I promise that I will never say the words Utes ever again. I wonder how your whisper flow would've coped with that. I can't wait. I can't wait. You have to tell me. They're gonna talk in street slang, to my, in my cafe and see how it copes. anybody mention anything there?

Or shall I just move on? I think this is great because, meetups were really affected by COVID and just anything to get people together again. Oh, and then, really quick, Nathan, I think we forgot Michelle's, share before we moved on to the general ones. Yeah, probably. We can work that in, huh?

[01:10:13] Michelle Frechette: Thank you, Kimmy. Where's it? You're welcome. Yeah, you are quite right. That got added and I was supposed to notice it when I know initial music was on, but I forgot about it. Yeah, I added it late. It's okay. It was my fault. No, it's, no, it's my fault for not checking. I'll, but we're talking about community.

[01:10:28] Cami MacNamara: It's the perfect lead into Michelle. Oh, great. Okay. In which case, yeah. Michelle, do you wanna mention anything about this one on the screen whilst I No, I just, I, also think it's great that we're having clubs, especially because it brings the next generation in. Yeah. And like I said, if we wanna keep using it, we gotta get younger people involved in having keep, morphing into.

[01:10:48] Michelle Frechette: The future of the web is, as opposed to what we're all comfortable with now. Yeah. I, think WordPress and education is just my happy place. I absolutely love those two, the collision of those two things. It's so interesting. Okay. And on that then, so this is coming to me. I'm cold to this. I don't know what we're gonna be looking at.

[01:11:08] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, of course. Yes. I've copied and pasted it without even reading what it Oh, brilliant. Here you go. I'll wind you up, Michelle. Off you go. Thank. go. Thank you. Tell us all about it. So this is my new venture online lunch and learn.com, where two things happen through this website. One, anybody can book me to come in and deliver an online, an hour, or more of online professional development for their team or individually, of course.

[01:11:36] Michelle Frechette: but the other thing is I have open sessions. So if you were to click online open sessions, register for open sessions, you'd be able to see, like this month I have two different open sessions running that's anybody can sign up to. come in. Those one is creating your, creating a link tree with your own domain.

And the other is, writing your bio to support career growth. And so those two are open. Anybody can attend those $35 to come in and just sit in for those sessions. But if you click the corporate sessions one, you'll be able to see there's a whole list of different things that off the top of my head, I made a humongous list that would be able to Oh yeah, deliver content.

and there's more for teams and leadership and things like that. And some of them of course go across the path. But, I could come in and deliver to your team. And then also if you're interested in having somebody do something for more than an hour, you can hit up that contact form and we can talk about what kind of training I can do with your worries.

With your teams. And so yeah, it's just an idea. last year I got laid off and I've still been trying to reinvent myself. a couple weeks ago I wrote an article called Back from Burnout and this was the idea that actually made me wanna sit at my desk again after being so burned out and sick for so long this year.

And so this is what I'm working on right now. And if I might just say, if you scroll down and you look at my picture there I am 60 pounds lighter than that girl was right there. hey, congrats. So my face is a little bit thinner now, so just wanted to mention that too. Yeah, nicely done. So thank you. It's called Lunch and learn to me that binds it in the middle of the day.

[01:13:09] Nathan Wrigley: is there a time. Is this something that you would try to fit in around your working day? In other words, is that the intention? So this would become part of my working day and let's say that, my ink wanted something in their time zone, I'll get up in the middle of the night and present something.

[01:13:24] Michelle Frechette: I that doesn't bother me. I've done that a million times before for other events. And yeah, so whatever it is that you're interested in learning, and if, as long as it isn't something like calculus, I will learn something to be able to teach something. I could understand OSHA and things like that.

If you have a team, and it's not specific to WordPress, but it is specific to being able to access, education that might not already be, within your own organisation. So when you wanna offer professional development to your team, this is something you can do, including books. if you have a book that you want your leadership team to read and somebody to run the conversation about that.

I'm your girl. I can do that. So nice. yeah, so there's all kinds of different possibilities and I would just love to see people starting to think about how to deliver that professional development. it's live, it's non ai, it's all me and I'm happy, to be able to do that. Talk about, just so can confirm that Michelle gets up.

Yeah. And hot hours to present. Michelle gets up at odd hours to participate in online events. This is true. that's so interesting. So it's a bit of blue sky thinking from you about what your calendar might look like in the future. And you are willing to get your hands mucky in things that you are as yet Yeah.

[01:14:45] Nathan Wrigley: Unfamiliar with. that's brilliant. one of the things that I take, one of the things for my life is that if I've learned something, it's my responsibility to share it with others so that they can learn it Nice and understand it too. And this is one way to be able to do that and monetize it. yeah.

[01:15:01] Michelle Frechette: So that I can have some, a bit of income coming in, going forward. Yeah, so I'll read into the record the URL. I'll pop it into the show notes as well. So it's online launch and learn, no hyphens or anything like that, all as one word online launch and learn.com. go and check it out and, yeah, see if there's anything which overlaps what it is that you wish to thank wish and what Michelle can provide for you.

[01:15:27] Nathan Wrigley: good educators are the difference between learning and not learning, I think, some people can learn despite their educators, but for me, the quality of the teaching was everything I could learn. Difficult concepts if taught well. Yeah. And yeah, and incorporating storytelling into teaching is what really helps cement that.

Yeah. And yeah, and I can make up any story. I'm kidding. I could tell stories all day long from experience. thank you. So there it is, online launch and learning. Thank you for including it. Yeah, sorry I missed it at the beginning, and thank you for mentioning it. That's, thanks, Kim. little comment here.

Marcus Burnett is joining us. yeah, he's, he says he keeps thinking the show starts an hour later than it currently does. Hi everyone. It always starts an hour later than you think it does. Whatever time you think it does start. Marcus, I'm gonna start texting him. Yeah. I'm gonna start texting.

[01:16:17] Michelle Frechette: Are you off the show starting? Do you know what, do you know what the answer is? Mr. Burnett? and subscribe or whatever it is that they say on YouTube. If you subscribe or set a personal alarm set that's right on your phone. Yeah. For this show along, come to my house, knock on the door and I'll, I'll gladly tell you when it is.

[01:16:34] Nathan Wrigley: Any of those things will work. But, yeah, if you subscribe on YouTube, I believe they send you an email when we go live. But, yeah. speaking of Mr. Bonnet, should we just segue straight into that? If we can find the tab? Oh, which is Marcus's tab, which is Marcus's tab. This one is Marcus's tab.

I've got so many tabs. just because he is in the comments, we might as well do this. Marcus has launched a new thing. It's called Played. wp, played WordPress plugins is actually what it says on the screen. But the URL is well played, WP and, the strap line is level up with the plugins you need.

And it would seem that Marcus is on a bit of a, bit of a journey to provide like a tonne of utility plugins all for one small subscription. It's a membership system. Currently there are 22 plugins in that, repository. you can get, if you, it's one of those systems where you sign up, you get all the plugins.

I'm guessing, I could be wrong, Marcus, but I'm guessing that you're gonna grow this, over time. actually, I'm not guessing. Look, it says. So in, orange and Black, new plugins added regularly, and I think it's fair to say that they're all kind of small. Does one thing, utility plugins as opposed to, an LMS or an e-commerce system or something like that.

So if you scroll down here, you can see the kind thing that you're getting into. So for example, gallery Grid, pro for elemental order, reply draughts for WooCommerce, landing page countdown, lots of elemental WooCommerce stuff, and you can browse the inventory by clicking here. And there you go. Fosh font icon, sorry, font or some dash icons.

Mark down Block Editor, short Code Galaxy multi email login. WP Lifelines a bunch here for elements, a bunch for WooCommerce. And it will expand over time and. It's a really nice website. Look at that. Oh, it's, so beautiful. You like that? It's really, I just love this website. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:18:43] Cami MacNamara: They're very well designed. if you want to get in now, you get 50% off annual plans, it says, for early adopters. So I don't know how long that will last. Maybe Marcus will drop as a comment or indeed, whether that will be, you'll be grandfathered into your 50% off into the future. but anyway, there you go.

[01:19:03] Nathan Wrigley: It's well played wp.com. should we call him the busiest man in WordPress? Oh, maybe. He's constantly turning stuff out, Yeah, he is. Yeah. He's got the WP world. He's got like a full-time job at Blue Host. And then, just on the side sponsoring WP with me. Yep. And he made the cards, remember the, yeah.

The ca Where are the cards? The Waffle game cards. The cards are there. There's the cards. Blue pack of cards right there. yeah, he's the Bob and I just. Bob and I just talked to him last week and there's another plugin in here since then, so Oh, is that okay? it's not so much time zones, he says, as the DST, I'll get my life together one of these days.

Oh, is it Daylight? DST Daylight saving? Yes. It could be. Yeah. We swapped and you didn't, or you swapped and we didn't daily, we swapped start time. Oh, I dunno. Yeah. I, dunno, I made that up. Daylight savings. I made that up. Yeah. but anyway, go check it out. thank you, Marcus for doing that.

Here we go. Here's the comment that we all needed to see officially. Early adopters sign up will be through the end of May, so you've got 20 odd 25 days or so. I'll probably let it roll into June. He didn't say that. Get it all in May quickly before it ends on May. does it renew at the full price or will you be 50% off for having signed up year after year?

If you've got an answer, that's the other question, answer it. If not, then just obfuscate and leave us guessing. Oh, what? Busiest man, WordPress. Boom right there. What the heck? You've done what you've all he, so he just handedly drops into the con. Yeah. He also released an iOS app, and an educator site launching this.

I'm, I don't feel adequate now. I don't know, but I want you to send me links to those things, Marcus. I can check them out. There are some people that are just too good at being busy, aren't they? They're very productive. oh, it renews at the 50% off. Now we know. Renews at, thank you, Marcus. Now my clicky thing won't work.

Yeah, there we go. Now it works. My clicky renews at 50% off. So get in there now and then download the iOS. What iOS app for what? What does that, is that some other industry that you are involved in moonlighting in kind of, I don't know, falconry or something. I dunno why I said the word falconry there, but that's what it came outta my mouth.

Anyway, there you go. That's, that. Another person who's often on this podcast. Is, Remus, Dre, and he's also launched something this week. He's quite busy too. And it's called The Guild. very different. It's not a suite of plugins. Remus is join, is making a membership site. Remus, you'll know is, in the weeds.

Very technical, very capable, especially in terms of things like performance and getting your website set up correctly so that its. Go on. Has no connection to Gilberg. No. Although I just think I just would The demise of Gil. Yeah. I wanted this picture. Yeah, the Guild, this is the blog post announcing it.

And, Remus in typical fashion says, how to describe the way he does it. he, just like really honest with what he says. it's this, it's not this, don't imagine that you're getting this, is what you're getting. It's that kind of thing. And so it's no fluff. That's his promise, really.

He doesn't want to create another social network where everybody goes and moans about this, that, and the other. The idea is it's very intentional, and what have you. There's a course in there already and the membership, this guild, I believe, will be launched when the second of two courses has been created, but you can get yourself, fired up about it and get the inside knowledge on what is happening.

by going over here, rem.com and it's called Announcing the Guild. And there is another post somewhere, I dunno if it's linked in here, which is actually the correct URL for it and I can't find it now. It's probably this one. yeah, here we go. if you go to within wp.com/. The Guild, then, there's a little bit more information as well.

Maybe this is the home of where it's actually going be, in the future. I think it was Guild within tres com. Oh, okay. I'm confused. I, don't really know, but when he finally launches it, I'll make sure that I give you the correct URL, but links in the show notes for what I've got, thus far. Thank you so much.

Marcus is back. What does it, okay, here we go. 'cause he's not busy enough. the iOS app allows people to direct message each other via, oh, you told me about this. This is a great idea. so it's got nothing to do with the WordPress. It's about cars because, direct message each other via licence plate code.

So if you are driving, and I don't know, maybe you quite like the way, you know somebody in that car over there, you think, they, you and I should get to meet each other. You can now do it, via, so instead of using a phone number, you use their licence plate number. So you know, but also maybe you can tell them they're not very good at driving and to slow down a bit or whatever it may be.

What was your thinking there? Why would you want to communicate with some stranger that you don't know the number of, but you do have their licence plate? Maybe. Maybe they are about to get a ticket because they're parking metre is about to expire. That's cool. Yeah, that's a good idea. I like it. Maybe you've seen damage to their vehicle, like somebody broke a window or something.

That's the perfect idea. My son's car was hit by a bus. The bus driver drove off, but some dog walker just left. Left a bit of paper. There was nobody in the car, nobody was injured, but Some passerby left a bit of paper, but it would be nice to, To I've, received that in a, in a, in a, a tech way as well.

And there you go. Yeah. tacho says, I'll have to instal that app to see what, to see what people want to send to my wife. That's not the point, I don't think, Tao, it's not to start walls. Don't, that's not the idea. but it's an interesting idea. you could probably sell that for a lot of money in the near future.

Do you know what we had like about 20 other art literally. About 20 other articles, which we were gonna go through, but we've completely run out time. I'll just give you a flavour. We were gonna talk about Yo DeVol, 'cause he was talking about why WordPress needs to match some of the features that M Dash has gone.

That would've been interesting, but we never got time for that. Here's another of those automatic experiments that's coming out. It's about helping you write stories and what have you. Lifter LMS has reached 10 years. That would've been nice to celebrate, but. We're celebrating now in just a few sentence.

Yay. Yeah, that's great. I love that they're really halfhearted. Hopefully, I think I can I get woo balloons? There we go. Oh. Oh, yeah, I've forgotten. Yeah, the do that, Michelle. Hang on. Yeah, do that more. That's brilliant. WooCommerce have built a tool to overcome the problem recently of, subscriptions disappearing in the WordPress backend.

So you can check now what's going on. We had a new rival to a CF called Modern Fields, which has been launched. We were gonna talk about that. Updating to the a to the Ally, a double one Y documentation. Ollie have add, added some AI to their plugins. This thing called. we managed to get to that one.

Well played wp, we did that. Craft forms is a block editor form solution and all it goes, there was loads, but we never got time for any of it. I'm sorry. Maybe some of it will be punted to next week and we'll do it that way. But there you go. 90 minutes is our allotted time goes by quickly. Does go quickly, isn't it?

Especially when we're Yeah. All chatty. so there we go. I have one point to add. If we can call Marcus. we call Marcus the busiest man in Tus. Then we can call Michelle the busy, busiest women in. The very, no, we can call Michelle the busiest person in WordPress. she gets, all the busyness for, yeah.

[01:27:38] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. Matt, mul Mullen called me the busiest woman in WordPress. He did, I was there, worked San Diego 2022. Yeah. Yeah, I remember that. okay, so there we go. We're gonna call it a date at that point, because that's as much time as we've got. So all that it remains for me to do is go round the house and say a big thank you.

[01:27:57] Nathan Wrigley: Let's go this way, the way we started. Michelle Ette, thank you so much for joining us. It's always a pleasure. Thank you. Initial wisdom. Thank you, Camie. I'm definitely gonna try that tool, or at least some rival thereof and see if it. Embarrasses me in public spaces. I'm gonna go into the library. Yeah.

[01:28:15] Cami MacNamara: Library. that overwhelm. See, no, that's not what I said. That's not back of, a church on a Sunday morning. Charlie. I rent library books in here. and also my for joining us for the first time. Hopefully, we'll have you back, when this episode ends. I'll get in touch to see if you want to do that as well.

[01:28:40] Nathan Wrigley: But, my, I'm sorry. There's this slightly humiliating thing that we do at the end of each episode for the album art, and that is we raise, we all raise our hands a bit like this. So if we can all Oh yeah. Everybody's doing it straight away. That's great. Thank you. And of course it goes without saying thank you to you.

The audience members who came by and dropped us a comment. let's just quickly go through the remaining few, if that's all right with you. So here we go. Here's a use case. Left light on in the parking lot. Window down, it's about to remain. Cars getting towed, hitting run, witness. Okay. Yeah, that's, yeah, that's it.

You know what's gonna happen though? It is gonna be people trying to get in touch with possible future husbands and wives. That is where it's going. I don't wish it to be true, but I think that's what's gonna happen. Licence plate bingo is, that's right. Is

Oh dear. thanks for the show. Lovely folks. Appreciate it. Thank you very much. And then one last one. Thanks for the mentions. I now go back and watch the rest of the show. You do, yes, you do. that is your task, We will be back next week with a different panel, but, until then, you stay safe.

Have a good week and we'll see you next week. So some more this week in Blood press. Take care. Bye. Thank you so much. Thank so much, Michelle for having me. Yay.