This Week in WordPress #373

[00:00:03] Nathan Wrigley: It is time for This Week in WordPress. Episode number 373 entitled, licking and Rubbing. It was recorded on Monday, the 11th of May, 2026. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I'll be joined by Remus de Vries, by Steve Burge and by Rhys Wynne.

I would like to extend my thanks to Steve Burge for helping me during this weekend set up the show notes. Normally I do that myself, but he stepped in because I was unable to. And so a lot of what we're talking about today is because of him.

So what do we talk about?

to begin with, WordPress 7.0, it obviously had been delayed, and now the option of collaborative editing, that has been dropped until some undetermined future point. Maybe we'll see that during 7.1, but for now it has gone.

We also talk about a new whole raft of things which may drop in WordPress in the near future. Possibly custom post types, and if we have custom post types, should we have custom fields as well? There seems to be an awful lot of preparatory work dropping in the Gutenberg plugin and its latest update.

We get to talk about events.

We get to talk a lot about AI, and how AI is really shaping up to make WordPress extremely exciting in the near future.

We talk about Desktop Mode, which is a new idea. The idea of putting little windows inside your WordPress website so that in effect, it's like dragging windows on your operating system.

We talk about that and so much more, and it's all coming up next on This Week in WordPress.

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are in the world. This is WP Builds this week in WordPress show, episode number 373. We're doing this live, we always do. but the intention really is to get it shoved out into your podcast player of choice tomorrow morning. That's typically what we do, but, we welcome your comments.

The best way you're gonna be able to do that little bit of housekeeping at the beginning, is to go to the URL where we embed this. It looks like that wp builds.com/live. Once more, wp build.com/live. If you go there, there's a YouTube video embedded, and then next to it is, actually that's not true.

It's not a YouTube video that's embedded. I'll say more about that in a minute. But there is a YouTube embed of the comments. So if you've got a Google account, then you can comment over there like you would do on YouTube. But if you don't have a Google account and you still wanna comment, there's a black button top right of the player.

It says live chat, I believe. Click that. And you don't have to be logged into anything. You just type your name in and we can receive your comments that way. So there you go. Send your, send your colleagues and what have you to that page and hopefully, if you put a comment, we'll get it onto the screen.

That will be the idea anyway, in order to make this less boring, because if it was just me, it'd been pretty boring that I'm joined by a bunch of people who are much more exciting than I am. So let's go round the house and we'll start there. We'll start with Remus rem, because if I could only just slide my hand down there, I can just little bit of rubbing there.

how you doing mku?

[00:03:21] Remkus de Vries: That felt very inappropriate.

[00:03:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yes, it really did. In the audio though. Yeah. Oh no, it really did because eyes have gone really wide and

[00:03:32] Remkus de Vries: I'm, and I'm, really happy that this time I wasn't the one, yeah, that's right. That's right. how you doing anyway? You

alright? I'm well, thank

[00:03:42] Nathan Wrigley: you.

Yeah, good, We'll get onto some things. Remus has launched in the recent past in a moment, but, I'll just read the bio for Remus out. So there he is. Remus is a WordPress performance specialist. He co-founded Scam, which is a site health and performance monitoring tool, and he runs the, within WordPress, which is a podcast, but also it's now the Home to the Guild.

We'll look at that in just a minute. which alongside doing courses, they have a newsletter. There's 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 digital, sorry, the right technical and ecosystem decision.

So it's a pleasure having you on. Once more, Rimkus. Thank you so much.

[00:04:28] Remkus de Vries: Happy to be here.

[00:04:29] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Over there first time. Nice. is Reese, how you doing? Reese win.

[00:04:36] Rhys Wynne: I'm doing good. I'm doing good. Yes.

[00:04:38] Nathan Wrigley: I'm not gonna make any comments about robbing anything this day.

[00:04:41] Rhys Wynne: No. I've always gone like bright red already, just okay, I had to be

in the microphone for a few minutes,

[00:04:46] Nathan Wrigley: but I'm never gonna live it down.

Reese is joining us, I don't know, maybe the 10th time or something like that. It's been on the show many times before, so it's an absolute pleasure, having you back. Reese Winn is a Welsh freelance WordPress developer living in northwest England. He co-organized the Manchester WordPress user group, writes WordPress plugins and speaks at events.

His work tends to focus on performance, SEO and general backend WordPress and WooCommerce development for small and medium sized businesses and charities. You can find his WordPress services newsletter and plugin at, this is not easy to say. Will you say it?

[00:05:24] Rhys Wynne: sorry. Yeah. Dwe ris.com.

[00:05:26] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Dwe ris.com.

D-W-I-N-R-H-Y s.com. or find his less focused rumblings and links to whatever social profiles are popular at Reese Wales. So that's RHYS Wales. The name of the country, not the animal. I don't suppose there is a domain with W-H-A-L-E-S. There should be.

[00:05:48] Rhys Wynne: There probably is.

[00:05:49] Nathan Wrigley: You can get fish. I know that's been popular for some time.

Does anybody actually own a.fish? To me

[00:05:56] Rhys Wynne: Whale is not a fish.

[00:05:58] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, no. Okay.

[00:06:00] Rhys Wynne: Just to push the glasses up.

[00:06:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Just been productive. I was gonna say the

[00:06:04] Remkus de Vries: same thing, but

[00:06:06] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. but anyway, thank you for joining us, Reese. And, last but by no means least in the corner there we got Steve Birch.

Hello, Steve.

[00:06:16] Steve Burge: Hey,

[00:06:17] Nathan Wrigley: nice to have you. I would like,

[00:06:19] Steve Burge: I would like a dot penguin domain if anyone wants to make them

[00:06:22] Nathan Wrigley: available. Yeah, actually that would be a good, but especially given that your plugin, your business plugin, the, the publish press plugin, that's a penguin for the mascot, isn't it?

So that'd be quite nice. Yeah.

[00:06:34] Steve Burge: Oh,

[00:06:34] Nathan Wrigley: we love

Penguin

Publish Press dot Penguin. I've got to say a special thanks to Steve because for reasons I won't bore everybody with, I, I had to take a bit of time out this weekend and, Steve was a very gracious with his time. He stepped in and coordinated a bunch of the show notes that I would usually do over the weekend.

And, I'm very grateful for doing that. And, it's easy. It's, been a crazy week in WordPress

Yeah. To talk about today. we're about to find out. There really has been quite a lot going on and not going on as the case may be. So here's the bio for Steve. Steve is the founder of Publish Press. he's from England and Wales.

I, I, don't know that you get to be both, but there you go. Okay. How do you do?

[00:07:13] Steve Burge: Hey, I wanted to make Greece feel more home.

[00:07:14] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I see. Okay. Yeah, but he lives in Florida now. his old man yelling at Cloud opinion is that we should read one book for every new AI tool we adopt. Oh, I like that.

[00:07:28] Remkus de Vries: I like

[00:07:28] Nathan Wrigley: that too.

It's a good strategy. Every time we start something AI based, we should, read a book. Last week on the podcast, we had Kami McNamara and Kami McNamara put under our noses a tool called Whisper Flow. I dunno if you've come across this, have you come across Whisper Flow? have you tried it? Any of you?

[00:07:50] Steve Burge: I've seen it. It rings a bell. Remind me what it does.

[00:07:52] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so I'll tell you what it does. It, just sits on, in this case, on my Mac, but it'll do it. The same thing on your Android or your, iOS or Windows or Linux or whatever it may be. It sits there and you see nothing. There's nothing to see here.

See? But then you press a button on your keyboard and it listens to what you are saying. And Grammarly style corrects what you've said, and the minute you let go of the button, it drops it wherever your cursor is. And I thought to myself, I was fairly sceptical. I thought, yeah, that looks really interesting.

Oh man, I've one week in, I cannot imagine living without it now. It's utterly ridiculous how productive it is. You imagine the amount of times that you type, like you may be a quick typer. I'm reasonably quick, but you will see like whole minutes being shaved off in an hour. Like you might say, 10 minutes, an hour's more just from, that's simple's.

It's crazy.

[00:08:49] Remkus de Vries: It's more, I use Voice Inc. Which is a similar tool.

[00:08:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yep.

[00:08:53] Remkus de Vries: and it allows me to even add ai, stuff on top of it. So whatever I say gets cleaned up and.

[00:09:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:09:00] Remkus de Vries: Brought back to bullet points, whatever I have in my

[00:09:03] Nathan Wrigley: plan. Yeah. this, is the same in that you can, paraphrase things and you could say begin bullet points and end bullet points, and it will correct, it'll put commas in and question marks.

And if if there's a long pause with an or an R or clearly like garbled sentence structure, it just fixes all that right up. I was really sceptical. And Kami, all I can say is I'm, I was wrong. You were absolutely right. It is an absolutely brilliant tool. There's loads, I imagine we'll see a whole boatload of these coming out in the near future.

But anyway, I dunno where I got that. Oh yeah, I know. AI tool. So now I need to read a book, Steve. Yeah. okay. I'll read one of the books that you've sent me through the post Steve's re Whenever Steve's been on a podcast appearance with me, I receive a book, through the mail he sends.

[00:09:52] Steve Burge: it, we should read more books.

[00:09:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:09:53] Steve Burge: I love ai. I love AI tools, but to the same time, we're offloading our brain to these external servers, and we need to work on our own brains too.

[00:10:02] Nathan Wrigley: So I'm going to Word Camp Europe in a few weeks time, and I've decided that every time I go to one of those kind of events, the best way for me to find out about what the city or wherever it is like, is to get a book, an actual book.

I, I just somehow can't pause those websites, like TripAdvisor or whatever. So I've bought a little crack off book and it should be arriving in the next day, like a little lonely planet thin guide. if anybody's at Word Camp Europe and want some advice, come and take my book, yeah. I'm gonna trust a Polish person living in crack to

yeah, my

[00:10:38] Rhys Wynne: sister-in-law from crack off, okay.

[00:10:42] Nathan Wrigley: I've reli on her. This, is me though, wanting to get in front of, just, some ideas, idea generation, and I'll tell you, have you seen The Salt Mines Near Crack Off? Has anybody seen the pictures of those yet?

[00:10:56] Remkus de Vries: I've seen

[00:10:57] Nathan Wrigley: pictures.

[00:10:58] Rhys Wynne: I've

[00:10:58] Nathan Wrigley: been like, have you been?

[00:10:59] Rhys Wynne: Yeah,

[00:11:00] Remkus de Vries: it's just

[00:11:00] Nathan Wrigley: Salt

[00:11:00] Remkus de Vries: Man is

[00:11:01] Nathan Wrigley: as, yeah.

Is it as good as they look? Because to me it looks like Kadu out of, Lord of the Ring or something like

[00:11:06] Rhys Wynne: that. I, it's a small piece of advice if you do go on the tour. Yeah. they will ask you loads of questions. Okay. every single answer for every single question is salt.

[00:11:19] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. It's just,

[00:11:22] Rhys Wynne: but yeah, it's, they're, really, good.

[00:11:25] Nathan Wrigley: I'm really looking forward to that though. Anyway, hopefully the book will give me more ideas like that. Let's go through some of the comments just quickly to say hi. web Squadron. So that's Imran. Hello. Nice to have you with us. He's just saying Good afternoon. We're also joined by Matic. Hello, Elliot Sby down the road from me.

Oh, and here it comes, my humiliation again. Every time this chap joins the call, I can never remember his real name. And we go to Rad,

[00:11:54] Remkus de Vries: Inc.

[00:11:55] Nathan Wrigley: That's what I was gonna say. Yeah, that's exactly what Mkas just

[00:11:58] Remkus de Vries: said. Hello, rad.

[00:11:59] Nathan Wrigley: Is it Gerard? It's Gerard. I've remembered. It's Gerard now. It's

[00:12:02] Remkus de Vries: not Gerard. It's rad. Okay.

[00:12:04] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. In English speak, it's Gerard, but I remembered independently. I'm not as old and as frail as I thought. Marcus Burnett's joining us. Look, he says I'm here, right? Oh, good. Well done. He's subtracted an hour. He's been showing up late and now he's figured out the, the daylight saving.

Hello. Wonderful people. Hello. Oh, that's you Steve. Roy Tanks says Greetings. Who's this? Oh, that's rem. Patricia says hello. and maybe see you there, Nathan. Oh yeah. In the salt mines. Yeah. Let's go together and lick as much salt as we possibly can. That's, what you're supposed to do, right? Lick.

[00:12:41] Remkus de Vries: It's

[00:12:41] Nathan Wrigley: small.

[00:12:41] Remkus de Vries: That's, can we already, name this episode so inappropriate. Okay.

[00:12:46] Nathan Wrigley: Lick and Robb

[00:12:49] Remkus de Vries: rubbing inappropriately. Yeah.

[00:12:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. I'm gonna write that down, right? Let's begin. Okay. Lick and rubbing. That's the gonna be this episode, I think. Let me share my screen. Here we go. This is our WP builds.

If you fancy, keeping in touch with what we do, put your email address into that field and we'll send you two emails a week. One. When we spin this out tomorrow morning, I'll just pull the audio out of it basically and send it out as a podcast episode. so you can, hear us talking about licking and robbing, how many more times can I say that during this episode?

And we'll Google enjoy the transcript. but also we do a podcast episode every Thursday. We'll send you an email about that as well. And this week, I actually chalk talked with a chap called, Giles Beckley, who has a plugin, it's not really a plug, it is a plugin, but he's got an e-commerce platform called Goose Commerce.

But interestingly, it's built on top of Elementor and he's got a desktop app. So go and check that out. I'd never heard of it before. Goose Commerce, right? There we go. There's our episodes for this week. First up, I allow the guests to bring their own bits and pieces. Steve has got quite a lot that he wanted to share this week, and I was grateful for that.

But the first one is, Remus. There's no point in me doing this one. MCUs is there 'cause it's your thing and it's your brand new, exciting, shiny thing. Tell us about the guild.

[00:14:15] Remkus de Vries: it is my way of, fixing what I've seen as a gap in knowledge for a very, long time. ranging from best practises to just fully understanding the concept of, security performance, build, procedures, what have you.

and on the other end, there's stuff being shipped with new versions of WordPress all the time. And, It, for most people it's, a bit of a task to dive in and figure out what these changes are, what they mean, what, you can build with it, all that sort of stuff. And, the Guild is essentially my answer to this, where I will, provide a space or spaces I should actually say, to discuss these things.

And, with the ultimate goal of, becoming a better builder developer or however you wanna quantify yourself, within WordPress.

[00:15:18] Nathan Wrigley: So you are beginning, or I don't know quite how this binds into that, but I know that you've got a course which is out already. And I know that you are a long way through the, process of getting course number two.

[00:15:30] Remkus de Vries: Yes.

[00:15:31] Nathan Wrigley: out, is that, kind of the fulcrum around which this whole thing hands, is it primarily a course based system or is it gonna be more than that? No. Okay.

[00:15:38] Remkus de Vries: No, it's gonna be much more than that. the Guild will also give you access to all the courses that I'm releasing. So Make WordPress Fast is the first one.

And, CloudFlare for WordPress is the second one I'm working on. the third one will be a security related one, but the goal is for that to be part of the community of the, the space as a whole, the guild. but there'll be, there'll be workshops, there will be, mini courses for certain topics or what, have you.

but there's mostly a lot of, sharing of knowledge, right.

I have a dedicated space in there that is just about you sharing your wins. So what did you figure out? How did found a way out of the problem you had to solve? And please share that with you because that's how we learn.

And, my goal for this is especially, I, think I say it somewhere, but, this is channel or, or I, not a forum, not another Slack or discord, but, a place where we tune in to learn to become a better version of ourselves.

[00:16:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I remember reading, I dunno if it was this piece, but there was another piece which you put out perhaps after this one or perhaps before, I can't remember.

Before. Before this one. Yeah. The bit that stuck with that was the, if, mku, you'll know that he's like a no, how to describe you, like no fluff, basically. You want to get to the heart of the matter quickly and get on with things. And it felt like there was quite a lot of that coming through in the words that you wrote.

You, you don't want it to be like another Facebook group where it's just yada What's the favourite page builder sort of thing. It's much more. Yeah,

[00:17:19] Remkus de Vries: no. So my whole goal is for if you're, if you are building something, the best way you are going to build this, and I think that people in this space can confirm that currently, the better your product is based on the better you understand the tools you're working with, as well as the CMS and its options and all that.

So the better you understand that, the better the quality of your product is, the easier it is, to maintain it and to build upon it and et cetera, et cetera.

[00:17:47] Nathan Wrigley: and is it open now or, because I'm seeing the announcement post not

[00:17:51] Remkus de Vries: quite ready yet. I'm, announcing that I'm going to, I'm in the middle of building it out.

okay. But obviously I wanted to gauge some interest, which has been overwhelmingly positive. nice. I'm very happy with that.

[00:18:04] Nathan Wrigley: the piece that we're looking at on the screen, obviously if you're listening to the audio, it makes it somewhat harder, but it's remco of.com and then forward slash announcing the Guild.

And those words are hyphenated, so announcing hyphen, the Hyen Guild. And, on there, do we have a signup or an intake form where you can express Yeah,

[00:18:24] Remkus de Vries: the bottom, my link to, where you can, sign up or

[00:18:29] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:18:29] Remkus de Vries: Express your interest. Yes.

[00:18:31] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Alright. we go, announcing the Guild from Rimkus to race.

Very nice. Good luck.

[00:18:38] Remkus de Vries: Thank

[00:18:39] Nathan Wrigley: you. Good luck. Good luck. is it gonna be bound to the, if I, again, if I remember rightly, when course two drops, this opens or something? Yeah,

[00:18:46] Remkus de Vries: yeah.

[00:18:46] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So you want,

[00:18:50] Steve Burge: this has me really curious. We ran a training company for 10 years, and the first five years was in person.

We'd fly somewhere, be in someone's office for a week and physically have them in the room. And then that flipped to the traditional online video courses, and both of them ended up running their kind of running outta steam a little bit. the video course side was swamped with all the YouTube videos, and I've always been curious as to what the next generation of training would look like.

And this seems like a really interesting attempt to, to figure that out.

[00:19:32] Remkus de Vries: It is, that, so I've done the same thing. the first part that you just said. I've done training, before I did WordPress, I did a lot of, this is, I'm really dating myself, but this is 25 years ago. I did a lot of cohort training, I did a lot of in-company training, that sort of stuff.

but yeah, this is an attempt for me to bridge the continuous stuff constantly being thrown into our ecosystem. AI being the, hottest thing currently. But, related to that is the APIs that we have or the, new development tools over here and, all of that sort of stuff that just for most people is too much to keep up with.

So my goal is to digest that into. Here's what you just absolutely need to know in the context of understanding best practises. if a tool is, does something really nice and shiny, but it's, it's, promise is to be super performant, and it's not, I'm not gonna mention it. Like I, I keep a standard of this is what, this, these types of topics deserve some guidance.

And, there should be less about, it should be less about everybody independently having to figure out all the things. And for the record, I will be taking people, other people's content and put them in the guild, and pay them for it. So it's not just going to me, it'll start with just me. But, once this has been running for a year, I hope to at least have two other people's input in there as well, in whatever form that may look

[00:21:06] Nathan Wrigley: nice.

[00:21:07] Remkus de Vries: But I, I really want to grow this into, a top knowledge, best practises, understanding, no, no riffraff, no fluff, just straight to the point of this is what you need. And, with a strong focus on agency as well, right? So there'll be an agency tier, which as an agency you can subscribe to, and you, can have everybody in there learning and processing whatever there is new to process.

[00:21:33] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. That's really nice. so I think we've probably captured it by now, but just one more time. mku.com/announcing. The Guild, is the url. If like you, I don't know, you're listening to this in the car or something like that, and your memory won't capture that. The, if you search for this episode on WP Build, so 3 7 3, all the links that we discussed today will be in there somewhere.

So just go to that page and then, I don't know, search for Mku, R-E-M-K-U-S and it'll be in there, I'm sure. Okay, let's move on. So now we're gonna drop into a whole bunch of WordPress stuff. Normally I drop the links in, but as I said, Steve's kindly stepped in and helped me out. So I'm playing a bit of catch up this time around.

First one. Then, is all about the new date for WordPress seven. And we'll get onto the, the, fun stuff that's happening or not in seven, in a moment, but really Steve, I, think is this one just boiling down to where, the new dates land, which is basically the 20th of May with everything coming backwards a week at a time for that.

Is this all you were wanting to get out of this one? Just the dates?

[00:22:46] Steve Burge: Yeah, that was the first link I could find.

[00:22:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:22:49] Steve Burge: Shows the new date, which is in what do 10 days?

[00:22:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's not far away, is it? yeah, nine days actually. 20th of May. So it's coming fairly soon. And somewhat surprisingly during the course of this week, I've just changed the article over, we're gonna look at two pieces, but they basically tell the same story.

Bit of a shock. not, maybe not, I dunno. I know that you, particularly Steve, have been following this real time collaboration thing probably more closely than anybody else that I know. it sounded from the bits and pieces that you were putting on Twitter or wherever I was finding you, you were increasingly like amazed by what was possible.

I saw a few videos where you were fairly buoyant about it. and then closer to the time, obviously we had lots of problems brewing. The long and the short though is that in nine days time when WordPress seven, is released, this thing that we've been talking about for ages, this Google Docs style real, time editing, sorry, real time collaboration, RTC is pulled.

Matt Mullenweg, has personally made the decision to remove real time collaboration and he was citing concerns around surface area. I'm not entirely sure what that means. race conditions, server load memory efficiency and recurring bugs found through fuzz testing. and says still remains a real priority, but it's definitely not being worked on for 7.0.

Maybe 7.1. So Steve, I'm gonna drop you right into this one. To begin with, just tell us what your thoughts are, having watched this very, closely. Surprised or not

[00:24:35] Steve Burge: it, technically it's the most difficult thing I've ever seen. The WordPress project attempt, that sounds big. we've built Gutenberg, other people have built page edit page builders before, but something like this, I don't think has ever shipped in an open source project before.

The ability to update something in real time across multiple users has been done, I believe by CCK editor, the kind of the tiny MCE alternative. But they managed to solve it by having a central server that connected almost like. Google Docs does, there's basically a central server that, all the users connect to, and that's like the single source of truth.

But I guess that's where I thought WordPress would go. There might be a, central [email protected] or, say Jetpack or something like that.

[00:25:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:25:39] Steve Burge: But they've attempted to do it through, Web sockets and through, basically each site connecting to each other. And it's, I'm a mediocre developer and I know enough to know that it's a monumental challenge to get it in there.

I'm surprised they've got it this close, but am I surprised that it hasn't made 7.0? No.

[00:26:09] Nathan Wrigley: No. Okay. I suppose the only thing that's surprising is how close to the wire it got actually, in terms of dates and times. we were very close, at work Camp Asia. Everybody thought that was the moment seven was gonna drop and, full site editing made that be punted.

And then the date got moved forward a little bit and thought that there would be enough time to do the work and the hosts got involved with testing. And let's just move on quite quickly to, the same story only this time on, the repository. this one's called Matt Mullen, where pulls realtime collaborative editing from WordPress 7.0.

and then the title finishes off blames WP Engine Litigation. That's like a minor point in the story really, but same sort of thing. Matt says that he's gonna take the heat for this because it was basically his decision. He's decided, I'm gonna wear it. and now of course we've got the process of unpicking all of this and making the release of 7.0 not have the capability.

So removing any features that may be able to, I don't know, be invoked accidentally or otherwise. That might switch full site editing. on, and I'll just read a couple of bits here towards the middle of the article. real-time collaboration. The centrepiece of phase three of the Gutenberg roadmap has been dogged by performance and infrastructure challenges since it was first flagged for possible inclusion in WordPress 7.0 in November, 2025.

Moving on a little bit early testing by hosting providers re revealed the feature. Added too many requests per user. Polled too frequently created sig, creating significant object caching issues when built on post the post meta table. And then there was a little comment here from an anonymous hosting provider member of staff, so we dunno who they are or which host they work for, but an employee at a large hosting company who was asked, who asked not to be named, described months of scrambling to assess real time collaboration's impact on their platform.

And then to quote them, RTC is a cool feature, but it's quite a gift to, but it's quite a gift to get this reprieve from what, from worrying about its impact on hosting and all of this rushing The source said it was the wrong approach and it needed so much more time to bake, be tested, and get hosts involved in confirming what the impacts would be.

There's a lot more to be said, but anyway, the longer than the short of that is that it's not happening in seven. Reese Mku, if you've got anything you wanna add,

[00:28:39] Remkus de Vries: I think it's the right call.

[00:28:40] Rhys Wynne: Yeah.

[00:28:40] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:28:41] Remkus de Vries: Yeah. still think that's not necessarily the best thing to add toward PRIs, but that's debatable.

[00:28:51] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:28:51] Remkus de Vries: There's, plenty of use cases where it makes sense to have this. I think we touched this on the, 3 7 1, edition of this week in WordPress. This is just me just saying I would much rather have seen, this type of effort go into multilingualism.

[00:29:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. So swap those two around. Yeah. Real time, collaboration comes after. Okay. Interesting. Reese, anything on that?

[00:29:18] Rhys Wynne: I, think we're got to touch on something. I think, further to what Steve said, what this article talks about the meta table and I'll be honest, when I first read it, I was like, oh yeah, that too.

And I think there's, a lot of things in this where it's like, for Google Docs, which is probably where most of us are familiar with, real time edit, real time collaboration. It's for things like that. It, it, has the, it's just like a, a Word document or something of that nature.

Whereas there is so much that is editable and can be editable within WordPress that I just wouldn't know where to begin. Yeah. I can get so yeah. Completely the right call.

[00:30:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's interesting as well. The expectation would be Google Docs, right? Yeah. you'd always be drawing a parallel Yeah.

To whether it was as good as Google Docs. I think everybody would do that. And anything that wasn't as good as Google Docs, like that one change that never sync or that just locking up like one in a hundred times or whatever it may be there. The comparison would simply be with Google Docs all the time.

And, you can't live up to that, can you? Not realistically.

[00:30:36] Rhys Wynne: Yeah. And I suppose also this is like one of those things where it's like it could, work, but the second there's a problem, the problem is by the sounds of it, is with hosting. Yeah. Like, by and large it's, the, hosting systems.

WordPress will get the blame. Like the, blame will be, oh, what this feature's broken to WordPress when it's actually probably, it's because you need a hosting and I think definitely a feature plugin because I think the people who need it have the, the people who you know, will actually want this feature, have it, will have the infrastructure.

[00:31:16] Nathan Wrigley: Right.

[00:31:17] Rhys Wynne: and to set it up and to manage it and to, yeah.

Keep it as a feature plugin.

[00:31:22] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:31:22] Rhys Wynne: I,

[00:31:24] Nathan Wrigley: so toggle on, toggle off or indeed pay for some API that you can use to, to,

take the grunt out of this maybe,

[00:31:35] Rhys Wynne: may maybe, integrate it in with something like a jet pack.

Yeah. Just to say we're gonna use Jetpack service to, 'cause they've all set this up. I dunno. this is beyond what pay grade.

[00:31:45] Nathan Wrigley: One of the curious things for me is I genuinely don't know how many people need it. I know there's a lot of people out there talking about, 2% seems to be being mentioned quite a lot, two or 3%.

I know that a hundred percent of Google Doc users probably think it's pretty great. and presumably as soon as, WordPress masters this, and it's an actual thing and it works, maybe a hundred percent of WordPress users will think it's great as well. But I don't know how many people need all of this stuff in the background.

[00:32:20] Remkus de Vries: I think that's a good remark. 'cause I think it's, we, first of all, we're not tracking anything, so we have absolutely zero clue, and there's gonna be tonnes of agencies once this is released, go, none of my clients and use are using this. And then there's tonnes of agencies we never hear online and they're using it tonnes, right?

There's no way of telling what the actual percentage is. But

[00:32:40] Rhys Wynne: yeah,

[00:32:41] Remkus de Vries: I do think this is a, feature that once implemented and actually not bogging the system down, which it currently fully is doing. there's going to be so many potential uses of this particular feature that is, that are beyond our comprehension currently.

I do think that's the case.

[00:33:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. So once it's working and everybody's happy, then maybe we'll begin to invent ways to make it useful for now. Yeah. This is not,

[00:33:09] Remkus de Vries: this is not like post formats.

[00:33:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So anybody using those? Oh, Reese is using those. Okay. I have hand up in the corner there.

Yeah.

[00:33:21] Steve Burge: I've seen some talk of it, like collaboration, them being used inside the site editor so people will be able to work on a design together. Yeah. So you'd have comments on the header, comments on the footer, and then also perhaps ai you might have, yeah. Be able to collaborate with a, user or a bot that's logged in as a user who's working on something at the same time.

You

[00:33:45] Nathan Wrigley: know what I, imagine that's actually pro probably where it will be the most useful of all. a little, Grammarly bot is

Correcting or

[00:33:56] Steve Burge: spelling while you're there.

[00:33:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. You just want a little bit of data about what you're doing. does this, have you got any ways that you can figure out that block over there could be improved?

I, it was a terrible example, but when, I first heard that that character in the collaboration system didn't have to be a human, it did get the mind worrying a little bit. Oh, actually, okay. That's an interesting use case. Okay, let's move on a little bit. So that's, anyway, there you go.

7.0, real time, collaboration gone. Not shipping, maybe 7.1. We'll see it. But, now something, else that may need to, come into core or people have been talking about for absolute ages. I came from Drupal. When Drupal went from version seven to version eight. I don't know when that was. I think it was about.

I dunno, 2014 or 2015 or something like that. And at that point, Drupal for the longest period of time had custom post types. They weren't called that, but they were that, and, custom fields, they weren't called that, but they were that, was all in core. And when I came to WordPress for the first time, I was a bit surprised, frankly, that it wasn't there.

Quickly discovered, a bunch of free, incredibly useful plugins and a bunch of paid incredibly useful plugins that satisfied that. But there seems to be a move at the moment to, to get a lot of this stuff baked into core. Starting with, this, Steve, again, you dropped this one in. Do you wanna tell us, and we'll go through these articles that relate to custom post types and custom fields.

Should we start here? What's going on with this one?

[00:35:37] Steve Burge: Good question. A lot of this has moved fast. like we have a, a taxonomy plugin, it's called Taxo Press that allows you to, build taxonomies, and use AI to scan posts and automatically add the correct terms. So I follow a lot of this stuff, and all of this kind of bypassed me that, suddenly there was a Gutenberg release last week that has a full taxonomy creation screen inside there, and there's now content types, I think in the Gutenberg plugin, and I think Yost, you, used, used from Yost mentioned custom fields as an idea that's already there on the GitHub issue.

This thing is moving fast.

[00:36:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think I wasn't this two weeks in the making or something like that? more or less, two weeks ago nobody was really talking about this. And now, as you can see here in the, in, in a version of WordPress, presumably coming to you at some point in the near future, if you've downloaded any kind of, I don't know, plugin, which doesn't really hijack the UI too much, allowing you to create custom post types and taxonomies and things like that.

Here we are. We could see it, being, being put into the Gutenberg plugin and, Remus, you looks like you're ready to say something.

[00:37:08] Remkus de Vries: No, I was gonna say, I, think you're, I think you're highlighting, Yost his blog post as well, where he says, look, if we're doing this, please have custom fields here as well.

That is my, biggest remark. So I think, I, I've used C-M-B-C-M-B two, and for the most part, a CF for any and all of these types, functionalities, I've always felt that this needed to be core WordPress, but it needs to be somewhat, there needs to be some guardrail. So don't, people don't just, go wild on creating the content and we need to.

We need to solve that problem as we're, facilitating this functionality. but please, if we're doing this immediately, have custom fields in there as well. It just, it's just silly to not have this as one thing

[00:37:59] Nathan Wrigley: in a sense. I've never really understood why there's the separation of the two things. Yeah.

To me they like a cost. Like obviously in the language, they're separate things, but to me, I was even surprised by things like the, web dev studios custom post types ui. That was the first plugin I ever came across in WordPress that did custom po. And I remember thinking, okay, great. I've got a custom post app now I'll drop in a bunch of fields.

No, you won't. There aren't any available in that, plugin. You're gonna have to do it either programmatically or you're gonna have to go and find a different plugin and then found that plugin. But, so you've got this overlapping mesh of two different things and it all seems like just one thing, please.

Let's just have fields. And this is content

[00:38:46] Remkus de Vries: enrichment,

[00:38:47] Nathan Wrigley: right? There you go. Yeah. Let's call it that. Let's call it content enrichment. That's brilliant. And that's what we'll do. And so the piece that we're looking at here is Yost, the person, making the case for if we get custom post types. Can we also, he says need, we also need custom fields.

Yeah. It's a very well thought through piece actually. There's a lot of it. And he talks about, why, but then he gets into the sort of weeds of it a little bit. And I've only highlighted one little bit here. a custom post site without custom fields is just a renamed post.

which is sums it up perfectly.

And so can we make that plea? Can the four of us together make that plea? If we get custom post types? Can we have fields? Yeah. I don't know what fields. I'm not in charge of that.

[00:39:36] Remkus de Vries: Can we, also, while we're doing this, can we also stop calling them custom post types and just calling them content.

[00:39:43] Nathan Wrigley: Content?

[00:39:43] Steve Burge: What?

[00:39:44] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:39:44] Steve Burge: What did they call it back in Drupal? It was, content

construction

[00:39:49] Nathan Wrigley: Content kit. I think No, no content construction kit was the module that you had to use prior to it going into core?

[00:39:56] Steve Burge: Oh

[00:39:56] Nathan Wrigley: yes. Yes. They were called content types.

[00:39:59] Steve Burge: Content types. Find content

[00:40:01] Nathan Wrigley: types.

[00:40:02] Steve Burge: This was done 12 years ago in Dr.

Work.

[00:40:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Time for work Us It. Brilliant. Done. It's brilliantly obvious. And, what was interesting because it shipped with core. You never had to learn it, if It just, yeah. Became part of the onboarding process, oh, I've done, I've set up the name of the website and now the next screen's telling me to create some whatever we just called them.

I've already forgotten. And so you did, and then and then you filled those with a bunch of, different fields. They, took a different approach. Every single field was a different plugin. So if you wanted the text field, you needed a plugin. If you wanted a text area field, you needed a plugin.

If you wanted a date picker, you needed a plugin. So they, you built up exactly what you needed. I'm not sure about that, but I, and I certainly don't know what fields would be reger, but yeah, I think we've all settled on the fact that we, want these, all of these things all at Reese. I'm sorry, go on.

[00:40:59] Rhys Wynne: It should have been, this should have been done when custom post types were, pushed out.

I was thinking about this and it actually relates to, yo the person, yo the person was like, I remember being at a conference and yo the person talking about custom post types, and I think it was like, it was not a WordPress conference. It was an SEO conference, but it was in like 2011 or 20,

[00:41:30] Remkus de Vries: yeah, 2010. No, it was, it was a sask con. It was one in Manchester. it was a very short-lived one. The company I worked for at the time sponsored. So I go, I, just toddle along. But, yeah, he, spoke about it then, and that was like, oh, it's a job before the job that I had. So this has been part of WordPress for a very, long time now, professionally speaking, it's probably, I'm probably slightly grateful that it never was part of, oh, being publicly available.

[00:42:02] Rhys Wynne: because I've, a lot of my work has been building custom post types and putting in themes and making it look

[00:42:08] Nathan Wrigley: great. Okay. That's really interesting. so that little barrier made a career for you. The

[00:42:14] Rhys Wynne: fact that was, it, I, yeah, I don't know. Like I, I, don't know if it actually became a career, but there is friction there and yeah,

[00:42:23] Nathan Wrigley: that's interesting.

[00:42:24] Rhys Wynne: I haven't

[00:42:25] Nathan Wrigley: really thought

[00:42:25] Rhys Wynne: about that. What said is if you've got something there, I've logged into blogs and I've had blogs, news articles, all as three separate post types because somebody got a bit excited with the buttons and not really structuring it. Great.

Right, Okay.

[00:42:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:42:46] Rhys Wynne: But that exists. So obviously there is like the consultancy kind of level where I can say that, but there, there was friction and I don't know how many people who were, are clients of mine. wouldn't be if this was publicly available, but

[00:43:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. we want WordPress be easy, but not that

[00:43:08] Rhys Wynne: easy.

[00:43:09] Nathan Wrigley: I guess

[00:43:10] Remkus de Vries: we could, argue you'd have more clients.

[00:43:13] Rhys Wynne: yeah, exactly. you don't, you don't know. Like it's,

[00:43:18] Remkus de Vries: but, from, my perspective, this, if we're considering this finally and it maybe ends up in 7.1, I think it should have been in 3.1.

[00:43:26] Rhys Wynne: Yeah.

[00:43:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. let's

[00:43:28] Remkus de Vries: refined in 3.2.

[00:43:29] Nathan Wrigley: Let's take that trip down memory lane here, because we have the repository. Again, this article's called Gutenberg 23.1 ships custom post types UI prompting. Why now?

[00:43:39] Rhys Wynne: Yeah.

[00:43:40] Nathan Wrigley: from the community. So I'll just read this. Here's the memory lane bit. Custom post types have been a foundational part of WordPress since 3.0 in 2010, allowing developers to extend the CMS beyond standard posts and pages, but creating them was always required either a plugin or code that got that gap spawn.

Two well-known products, web dev studios, custom post types ui. That's the one I just mentioned, which has got currently over a million active installations. I bet that plugin is like much closer to 2 million. and WP Engine's advanced custom fields, which of course back in the day was when this was all happening, was Elliot, condo was the sole proprietor of that.

adding added custom post type and taxonomy registrations, tools to ACF 6.1 building on an already massive user base of more 2 million sites. yeah, let's do it. Let's get it into 7.1 and, yeah,

[00:44:34] Rhys Wynne: getting, working with real time collaboration.

[00:44:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. And then we'll just argue about which custom fields we want, we need, which are essential, like the slide, the, the date picker and the slider and the price thing that you'd be able to slide.

And what else do we need? We need an image uploader and an option go. It'll be never, it'll be never ending. but okay, go and check that out. So there was a few more pieces bound to that. And again, I'll put these in the show notes. Here's the GitHub issue. You can see that on the screen. And here is the actual Gutenberg 23.1 0.0, change log, which you can find on, the show notes, which I'll put into.

Yeah, I'll, make sure that's all linked. And there's yos piece. The yos piece was called if WordPress gets Custom Posts. So CPTs in core, we also need custom fields. I like his new site. I've gotta say I like his typography very, much. And the colours, I'm drawn to these al colours, right? Moving on, it's just the same thing.

Steve, I'm looking at 7 7, 6, 0 0. This content types tracking issue.

[00:45:44] Steve Burge: Yeah, that's the, key organising issue for post types, taxonomy creation fields. I think if you scroll down, they mentioned that Fields is absolutely on the roadmap.

[00:45:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. there's a few not dissenting voices, but there's, it's a big change, And we've got, Jonathan Osis here who asks, as I said, it was implied from something that we read earlier. Why is this being tackled to quote him? Why is this being tackled? I don't see any compelling discussions or reasoning as to why this is a problem that WordPress should tackle. How does this fit into the roadmap and the four phases?

I think he's actually done some work since then to actually make this more, more probable than possible. yeah. Anyway, there's a dis put it that way. Okay. Do you think we've touched on that one long enough? Probably we have. Let's move on to this one. So this is WP Beacon. I mispronounced Austin's name, last week to humorous effect.

I was actually almost in tears with how funny I thought it was. Turns out it wasn't very funny at all, but I thought it was hysterically funny. anyway, Austin, I'm gonna get it right. Ginder, there we go. Did it, has got this amazing new thing, WP Beacon. I've got a podcast episode of the Tavern coming out with pretty soon, but, this is to try and stop supply chain attacks.

So I, I guess the easiest way to describe it is, let's say you've had a plugin on your website for ages, unbeknownst to you in the background, that plugin gets bought by some other entity. They turn out to be, horrible people who have only bought the plugin so that they can do horrible things like deface to your website or any other thing you can imagine.

There really isn't a system at the moment to notify you that any of that's happened. And so that's what Austin's doing here. WP Beacon can, watching the WordPress plugin supply chain 113,006 plugins are currently being watched, 79,000, or just short of authors being tracked. It's covering 3337.2 million, instals of WordPress, and he's got 23 forensic audits.

They're not small numbers considering this project started a couple of weeks ago. But, yeah. Anybody want to comment on this, Steve, by the looks of it?

[00:48:15] Steve Burge: Yeah, he is. He's doing wonderful work. I'm a little sceptical sometimes about ai. we're using AI in our, processes at published press.

Absolutely not in creating content at the moment. but the work that Austin is doing is absolutely in the sweet spot of where AI can really help WordPress. but he's also just lead

[00:48:48] Nathan Wrigley: into that a little bit. Steve, why do you say that? I think I know why, but is it. just tell me why you say that.

he's,

[00:48:54] Steve Burge: he's basically downloading and scanning the entire WordPress plugin repo. There you go. Like 60,000 plugins. Yeah. and he's solving some interesting mysteries as well. Some of these are not just the case of some bad JavaScript inside the code. Some of these are some really like malicious, tricky hacks, through the update mechanism that he's, he is using ai, I think, to, route out on the obvious cases and then using it to help him track down some really, some really hard to solve hijacks that Austin is, I, take my head off to him.

I don't have a, I don't have a Nathan, you

[00:49:43] Nathan Wrigley: know, act, I'll take my hat slightly off, but I've got headphones on top.

Yeah,

One of the ones that was, at the time of recording, I think he'd found like four different, or six or something like that, different plugins, and they got a whole variety of different things going on.

But one of them was a plugin that had been bought and nothing had changed, I think for eight months, except this back door had been put in such that instead of updating from WordPress, excuse me, instead of updating from wordpress.org, the plugin would now start updating from this different location, which meant that wordpress.org had no insight into what was happening from that moment on.

And I can't actually remember, I think it was a defacing thing. I think they were trying to, maybe they had some sort of website that they wanted to promote or whatever, but the point is it sat there for eight months, nobody knew, because the, nobody needed to know about the change of plugin hands.

I think it was 23,000 instals or something like that. It's such a curious, strange little loophole. it wouldn't surprise me if this topic, this, thing that he's built gets taken up by, or maybe, a replica of it gets built in, I don't know, inside of automatic or wordpress.org or something like that.

But certainly

[00:50:59] Remkus de Vries: you, you could really argue that this needs to be part of the infrastructure of.org.

[00:51:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. presumably, you Automatic or WordPress org could roll their own, but as this is already up and running, it would certainly be worth getting in touch with Austin. I think he's in touch with, a variety of different people already.

I think he's managed to prick people's ears up. yeah. Anybody else wanna touch on that?

[00:51:30] Remkus de Vries: I'd like to, what's what Steve said. I think this is on what AI allows us to do. There's so much, crap coming out. Sorry. I need to look for a. A decent word there. That's

[00:51:47] Steve Burge: all right.

[00:51:47] Remkus de Vries: There's so much crap coming out of people just slapping AI onto anything and everything and just not really thinking it through.

because they just wanna have AI in there. I think this is what Steve said is I 100% agree with this is a wonderful, usage of what AI can do. It's bulk,

[00:52:08] Nathan Wrigley: right? It's

[00:52:08] Remkus de Vries: undoable.

[00:52:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:52:10] Remkus de Vries: For a person to do this as a reviewer,

[00:52:13] Nathan Wrigley: right.

[00:52:13] Remkus de Vries: However, it is perfectly scriptable and detectable and AI able for whatever, purpose that you may think of.

'cause this is just the base From here, you start thinking on more scenarios of what you'd actually wanna know about. I love this project.

[00:52:32] Rhys Wynne: Yeah.

[00:52:33] Nathan Wrigley: you've just coined a phrase. I think people should use that more often. AI able. I like that. That's, but this sort of sums it up perfectly, doesn't it?

Like a giant corpus of information Yeah. That no human can make any sense of. atomize it. The humans can make sense of all the little component bits one at a time. But at scale, what have we got? 33 point 337 million installations have been covered and this project is barely a few weeks old.

Yeah,

it's perfect for that kind of stuff, isn't it?

[00:53:05] Rhys Wynne: And just, to think as well as the plugins, see, like one of the things it does is like ownership transfer, it's looking probably

[00:53:15] Nathan Wrigley: right,

[00:53:15] Rhys Wynne: but who is committing, 'cause it is done by a line within the readme txt file who, which, accounts have access to a WordPress repository by and large.

So he's probably looking as, well as the plug is watch the entire commit history of all the plugin, all those plugins, Because that's when you can see, so it, yeah. it's impossible for a human to do like this. Yeah. Yeah, and I suppose the problem that we may face is that the, landscape might well become, one in which ai, the malicious use of ai, let's go with that.

[00:53:59] Nathan Wrigley: The malicious use of AI will make it so that humans really haven't got a chance. not just for retroactively coming up with interesting projects like this, but the landscape, all possible futures in the fu in the future. there's just gonna be so many attacks. AI really is the only thing that we'll be able to, to keep a track at Pace.

What a, what an interesting world we live in where that's a reality. Anyway, Austin. I appreciate the work that you've done, Steve obviously does, and it sounds Reese and Rimkus appreciate this as well. So thank you for building it, WP beacon.io and, keep your ears peeled for the Tavern podcast in a few weeks time when Austin will be on trying to explain it.

to me right now, this is very much related to it. not quite the same thing, but obviously the folk over at Gravity Kit have, spied this as a potential problem. I dunno if it was prompted by the work that Austin's been doing, but they have taken the responsibility for making sure that you know that their plugin is legit by themselves.

So this is a piece called by Vlad who is their head of development and it's called Gravity Kit. Product Products now give you a stronger reason to trust what you instal. Every Gravity Kit plugin update is now cryptographically verified before installation tampered packages are blocked before unpacking, protecting your site from supply chain attacks automatically.

Steve, I'll give this one to you as you dropped it in, is, was there anything specific you wanted to mention?

[00:55:38] Steve Burge: this is related to Austin's work that there've been some, some hijacks of plugins on wordpress.org, but there's also been a separate series of attacks on, premium plugin developers where people have got inside the developer's sites and, infested the actual code that people are downloading from their sites.

I think Gravity Forms was the first one, and they caught it before more than one or two people had downloaded it, but there were some other ones that were worse since, where I think one or two of them had been undetected for quite some time, where you, own the premium version of a plugin whenever you downloaded it directly from their website, you were taking a Trojan with the download.

[00:56:37] Nathan Wrigley: right. And Zach and his team who have done some really creative work, like they, they put out a, translation plugin recently to help you translate your plugins automatically with ai. I think Mka has some opinions on that, maybe, about the quality of it. But, Zach and his team do creative stuff and they're talking here about making 100% sure that what you download from Gravity Kit is verified.

[00:57:13] Steve Burge: Even if you're downloading automatically from your WordPress website, we've done something similar at published press. All of our downloads now are done directly from GitHub. They never actually touch our website. but we haven't written out that process in quite as detail and quite as helpfully as Zach has here.

[00:57:33] Remkus de Vries: Are you cryptographically, verifying your commits to GitHub?

[00:57:38] Steve Burge: That's, one reason that we haven't winded up is we've still got some things to do and that's on the, to, on the to-do list store.

[00:57:47] Remkus de Vries: Yeah, because that's the thing that I, when I read this one, like it's great that you're doing it at the delivery end, but if the code itself still is right in transit can be, I don't know, played around with, you, you, still need to solve the, from the, code lives on my machine and then goes to the repo.

You still need to take care of that. it's, essentially a vector that you need to mitigate.

[00:58:15] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just ask a question and it may, I suspect it's me not really understanding the process, but if, let's say for example, the Gravity kit, let's just use them as an example. Let's say that there was some mismatch between the download that you got and what you are anticipating.

So somewhere something's gone wrong, doesn't the fact that they are serving it up aren't all bets off. If they're serving up, something which is not cryptographically signed, wouldn't the signing of it be tamable with presumably if somebody can get in to put a payload on their website, wouldn't they equally be able to incorrectly sign it, if Or do the two things not follow, if I'm misunderstood the

[00:59:04] Remkus de Vries: theoretically. but you'd need to be deep on, in, on the system. Like

[00:59:09] Nathan Wrigley: deep in the os, deep in the, yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Okay.

[00:59:12] Remkus de Vries: Because you, generate essentially the, cryptographic, verification. You generate that based on what's on your machine,

[00:59:20] Nathan Wrigley: right.

[00:59:21] Remkus de Vries: which then get verified, then gets verified. Okay. there, what you're referring to, there's this, there's always a chance of the man in the middle attack. So whatever the middle is, if there is a middle, somebody can get in there,

[00:59:34] Nathan Wrigley: right?

[00:59:34] Remkus de Vries: Okay. if you're doing this, is great, but you still need to make sure your machine is safe and secure and, audited and all that sort of stuff.

Okay? If you take this to the max, there's a whole bunch of steps that you need to make sure that is, are not tampered with. So essentially you would have every single step of whatever the code goes through. To the end client. Every single build step in between needs to have these verifications in there as well.

[01:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. we just simply don't want to get to the point where we have to go and meet Vlad in a cafe and he hands us a pen drive because, there's no other way. It's if you wanna, sure. And even then Vlad could be an imposter. You never,

[01:00:16] Remkus de Vries: it's literally that.

[01:00:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:00:18] Remkus de Vries: So I've worked for, I've worked for a, large insurance company, which is part of a bank Yeah.

for many years. And you learn about all the things that can happen. and this is 20, more than 25 years ago, but the, problems of then are only bigger. Now. The principle is the same. There's so many layers where you need to cover your ass. It's just,

[01:00:41] Nathan Wrigley: I, I had a friend who was very senior in bt, and he worked with security and he, tells this story, he witnessed it.

He wasn't part of the unfolding drama, but they, brought this security researcher in who made the bold claim that he would be able to get access to any part of their system instantly. And the guy I knew that, who's the head of security was there and was no, that's not possible.

And he said, no, I'll do it. And he said, okay, just pick some terminal. We'll go over there and I'll get in immediately. and he said, but you've gotta be quiet. You're not allowed to interrupt me or anything like that. And so they wandered over to this terminal and the guy said to the guy at the terminal, I'd like you to gimme access to your terminal.

You can see I'm here with the head of security, if you just move over, I, and, it was like, yep. I'm in, got root access and all I had to do was show a picture of you, basically.

[01:01:34] Remkus de Vries: Yep. And, it's exactly that. It's, from the, person to the code and everything in between.

[01:01:42] Steve Burge: So maybe, maybe four years ago, we got caught in like a mild version of this, the Zach and Vlad are talking about here that, this was right around when the, Ukraine war started and we had this kind of, popup modal library inside one of our plugins that helped do the introductory tour.

And this plugin was in, or this JavaScript library, sorry, was in dozens of WordPress plugins, including ours. And there was an update that came out and we ran all our security checks and it passed, and we released the plugin, and suddenly people in Russia started complaining, what's going on? It, turns out that the JavaScript, pop-up developer had made it so that whenever anyone from Russia visited a website with this on, it would start playing the Ukrainian national anthem.

Really? L. that's a genius. I think what the, bottom line with security is it's a never ending challenge. And, and as we discover some low hanging, not a low hanging fruit, but it would appear that the WP Beacon man in the supply chain attack problem was always sitting there, but nobody really took any notice of it.

[01:03:01] Nathan Wrigley: This idea of plugin vendors taking things on, now that it's been highlighted, maybe more things like this gravity kit solution will come along. Is it bulletproof? No. Is it better? Yeah. and maybe that's the calculus that we've got to go with. yeah, I

[01:03:15] Remkus de Vries: don't know. I don't know if you saw, Matt Mullenweg retweeted something this morning or this night, whatever.

I saw it this morning

Where essentially in, in terms of security, they have, a particular type of server which has space and everything built so that no data can relieve this server. And they found, a low frequency magnetic pulse that does something to the CPU and, then data comes back.

It's just,

[01:03:46] Nathan Wrigley: yeah,

[01:03:46] Remkus de Vries: it's a never ending story of this.

[01:03:48] Nathan Wrigley: Oh. it's literally never ending. Have you heard of things like, when you hammer the, you hammer the heart, you're right and on right, and right and unright sectors of the hard disc. Yeah. And the idea is you do it so fast and so often you hit a sector near where the password for the o operating system is stored.

And eventually it just flips the bit, because the electron has a magnetic field, it flips the bit in the adjacent sector of the hard dis, if you do it like 10 billion times, you've got a one in 10 and it's all of a sudden you can't get access to the machine. 'cause your password no longer works. It's just not Oh,

[01:04:26] Steve Burge: books.

Books,

[01:04:29] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. I'll meet you on a bridge somewhere and you can, give me, you can give me your plugin in paper based text. I'll come back home and type it in.

[01:04:38] Rhys Wynne: Yeah, it'll go back to like punch cards. Yeah,

[01:04:42] Nathan Wrigley: punch

[01:04:42] Rhys Wynne: cards. Punch cards or, magazines where you have to type them in. But, no, I, it's scary.

There's, it is

[01:04:49] Nathan Wrigley: scary

[01:04:49] Rhys Wynne: during lockdown when we had we had Zoom meets, so a friend of mine was telling me about the DEFCON conferences. I think they're called in, America, where they just got given, it's just a security conference and it's terrifying because Yeah, at the time they were like, okay, we just got a bunch of voting machines.

like, the election. Go ahead and hack them.

[01:05:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. See

[01:05:19] Rhys Wynne: what you can do with them, kind of thing. And it's yeah, it's quite terrifying.

[01:05:23] Nathan Wrigley: Every year they do the, sort of the blackout. I forget it may be the one that you're talking about, but it's really interesting if you read the summation of it.

And, very often it's about, I don't know, escaping the sandbox of a thing like the Chrome browser or the OS or Android or iOS. And there's a lot of money attached to it, because Google and whoever else is involved in these, these bog bounties will happily stomp up a lot of cash. for an individual at least anyway.

And some of the people who are very successful, in two or three days, they're millionaires, and then they come back next year and they do it all again. and they come in teams typically, I think, and then they leverage one thing. Yeah. Which gives them a beachhead to do another thing. And then another little beachhead and 15 beachheads in, they've got control of iOS.

And apparently that's the goal. if you get full route access to iOS, that's where the money is. You get tonnes of cash for that. because that's apparently really, difficult. Whereas the Chrome browser is just a piece of cake if you're very good apparently. anyway, there, we, it's not a piece of cake.

It's, it just for these people. Let's move on. me find the thing. Okay. just a quick one. I know Mku was here a couple of weeks ago. I just thought we'd mention this. Steve brought it to our attention. Again, business bloomer, an open letter to the WooCommerce, and the WooCommerce community.

Basically Rodolfo who set up the event is, is I, think just trying to figure out what the heck WordPress and WooCommerce look like in the future. He's obviously run this event. I think Remus, you'd regard it as a success. You enjoyed it

[01:07:02] Remkus de Vries: brilliantly. I would say he's run this event brilliantly.

[01:07:05] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. As good as anything.

like really top notch here.

[01:07:09] Remkus de Vries: Topnotch. Top topnotch.

[01:07:10] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, great. Okay. thi this is like a summation of him and all the thoughts that have occurred to him in the week or so, or two weeks since then. and he's trying to just figure out what's going on in the ecosystem and what are we doing. I'm not gonna summarise it much more than that.

Steve, I don't know if you've got some in insight that you wanted to, give. If not, I'll just move on and let people read it on their own. But it's quite an

[01:07:33] Steve Burge: interesting, it struck me as basically five words. it's I, love you do better.

[01:07:42] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[01:07:43] Steve Burge: Yeah.

[01:07:43] Nathan Wrigley: Nicely

[01:07:43] Steve Burge: on. it's, it seemed a friendly kick up the butt that we had all these people in Palermo, I think KU in it.

[01:07:54] Remkus de Vries: Yep.

[01:07:55] Steve Burge: In, Palermo in Italy, and great conference. But what, what Rudolfo heard was that people are a little anxious. They want w WooCommerce to do better. They love the platform, they want to keep developing for it, but. People are nervous. They want, I think he was asking for Wko to come back.

He was asking for perhaps a clearer roadmap. it was an open letter in that sense that, here are, our concerns. We're putting them out in the open. let's see if we can do better.

[01:08:31] Nathan Wrigley: is it shaped by just fear of, I don't know, AI taking over or a dwindling in the community?

[01:08:38] Remkus de Vries: no, The, sentiment at the event was essentially, finally we were together in a room talking about the tool we love working with, and what, this post is, essentially, in some ways a summary of sentiments expressed by various members of the audience as well as people from WooCommerce themselves.

So they were very clear in stating, we hear you, we see you, on the woo side of things. And I think to, to me, rodolfo's post reads like just a transcript, almost a, confirmation of things and, emotions expressed in terms of just general, more visibility, more action into more listening, more helping along, that sort of approach.

I don't think we've heard many, ooh, now we're worried about what AI was going to

[01:09:42] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[01:09:43] Remkus de Vries: that wasn't the sentiment. The sentiment was that's a great tool. We love working with it. We love the community behind it. We love the systems and the, tools connected to it. However, and then there's stuff that needs to be,

[01:09:55] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

Okay. I, don't know if you've got a sense that like I do, but I think events are becoming a much more difficult proposition. I know that, Reese in Manchester there organising the bits that you organise my participation in the London, W-P-L-D-N down in London. I've got some news to share with you about that in a moment, but also this piece, and, Steve, I know you had something to say and we'll come back to it in just a second, but I'll, just segue it to this quickly.

I've just yeah. Okay. That's gonna work. I thought I'd popped the wrong browser tab. Open this one here. WordCamp us, which is due to take place in mid August, 2016. What are we, may, June, July, or three, three months, more or less to the day, until this event is happening. And, this, I could be wrong about this, but I think this is the first time that we're now on a call for sponsors, speakers, volunteers, and obviously attendees to come to this event.

I don't know. Particularly if this is normal, Remco being one of the founders of Word Camp Europe. I'm sure you've got thoughts on this, but seems like it's difficult to find people to do these things, to get excited about these things, to make these things happen. And yeah. Rudolfo pulling that off in Palermo.

Pretty cool. So

[01:11:22] Remkus de Vries: Rudolfo did that in nine months.

[01:11:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:11:26] Remkus de Vries: I've organised work camps in, work Camp Netherlands specifically in the span of three months, but that was when the momentum was high, when it was relatively easy just to say, Hey, we're doing this. get on board,

[01:11:40] Rhys Wynne: people

[01:11:40] Remkus de Vries: show up. Yeah. fi finding a favourable date, so not in the middle of a vacation period.

[01:11:47] Rhys Wynne: Yeah.

[01:11:49] Remkus de Vries: I think for a flagship event, three months is super short. If not, too short to do it all the way it should be done.

if they're still calling for organisers Getting them on board, getting them up to work, to speed and all that sort of stuff, we're a month in,

[01:12:11] Nathan Wrigley: so that

[01:12:12] Remkus de Vries: leaves two months and then we still have to organise the thing.

[01:12:14] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Yeah. Okay. So are you does then that give you a sense that this event

[01:12:21] Remkus de Vries: Yes.

[01:12:21] Nathan Wrigley: Is on the precipice Yes. Of being un organizable?

[01:12:27] Remkus de Vries: no, it's organizable, but

[01:12:30] Nathan Wrigley: tough

[01:12:31] Remkus de Vries: to do. part of this is also the amount of noise you're making and the amount of visibility and the people planning their lives ahead more than three months in a vacation period.

So there's a very high chance the attendance is not going to be where you would like it to be.

[01:12:49] Nathan Wrigley: Right.

[01:12:49] Remkus de Vries: Just for the simple reason, again, in the vacation period, in a very, hot part of the United States. and, it's three months and you have two and a half, two months of making noise and getting good speakers, and it's just really short.

[01:13:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I get the point. So basically it's a confection of like thousands, in theory, thousands of people trying to organise their calendars when it's the, event location is tricky 'cause of the heat and, that's just not words, is it? That it is really considerably hotter than

[01:13:26] Remkus de Vries: Oh, yeah.

[01:13:27] Nathan Wrigley: Like anywhere you can find in Europe, basically. Oh, yeah.

[01:13:30] Remkus de Vries: This is, in the, the Fahrenheit is, it's well above a hundred. And for those, who, who understand proper, it, it's, it's 40 plus Celsius.

[01:13:44] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. All right. It's brutal. Yeah. But then the point that you made the wider point though about organising your calendars if it's in the holiday, or maybe you could have done that, but you need to have planned that probably quite a long time.

But the,

[01:13:55] Remkus de Vries: the data's been known, so if, if the organising. organising team is lucky, then people have reserved that,

[01:14:03] Nathan Wrigley: right? Yeah, that's what I've done. I, put a, a mark in the calendar to,

[01:14:10] Remkus de Vries: and so have I, but it's, just the combination of things makes me go Ooh.

[01:14:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Interesting.

[01:14:16] Remkus de Vries: The last edition, I think barely got more than, than a thousand.

[01:14:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it was along those lines. I'd be surprised if we hit the prior year. The venue felt busy the second year. The venue felt not so busy and it was a big venue. I reckon you could,

[01:14:35] Remkus de Vries: yeah, Happily have got five, 6,000 in there,

so I'd be surprised if we hit that, or come even close to it.

I'm not trying to be a negative Nelly here. that's not my mo, but I, do see just a whole bunch of constraints in making this happen the way it should happen.

[01:14:50] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So maybe some of the bits that, Rodolfo was leaning into a little bit there, is his thoughts about how these things need to be scoped out and thought about and planned in advance and how they're gonna work.

Steve Reese, anything on that one before we move on?

[01:15:08] Rhys Wynne: No. No.

[01:15:10] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. In which case we'll just put that one to bed and we will move on to, I, I have no idea why I like this as much as I do. It makes no sense to me. I don't think anybody else has got any of the same vibes as I do. So this is, I, caught sight of this last week, but Steve's brought it up against, and there's a video this time, which sadly I can't really get to play.

It's incredibly jittery, so I'm not even gonna try. But it's, it's WordPress desktop mode and essentially it mimics in your browser the experience of a desktop in the, let me put the video, the bit that I can try to manage. It gives you the impression, so you can see we're in a browser.

It looks like it's Chrome or something like that. And you can see this tab is open. but what we've got here is something akin to a desktop. So WordPresses, ah, look, I press play and it just, it totally Bos. let me see if I can find a little bit, which is of use. there you go. There was a, just a brief moment there where it looked like you had two overlapping windows.

You could slide the windows around, you could make the two things, do things in tandem so you could drag images from one side to the other. We discussed all this last week, but now there's a video. I think it's great. I dunno why I really like this, but there are a few locations that I always want to have open.

And so they're basically open and they're open in different tabs. And usually I arrange those tabs in different places on my desktop. And I like that, like the idea of going full screen in the browser, having all those things lined up, and then when I close it, I've got everything shot. And then when I reopen it, maybe there's gonna be a way to reopen all those, tabs for want of a better word, at the same time.

Anyway. I think it's great. It's worth checking out. There is a demo video.

[01:16:59] Remkus de Vries: I think it's the bee's knees.

[01:17:01] Nathan Wrigley: You like it? So it wasn't just me.

[01:17:03] Remkus de Vries: Oh, no, So you are looking at this from a website perspective, but turn this into, WebPress being the data house. This is where your data lives Oh. For whatever that your data is.

And you have custom dashboards and all that sort of stuff.

[01:17:16] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, yeah.

[01:17:18] Remkus de Vries: If, you turn this into, more of an application approach and then you have it installed as an application, it looks like an application. It behaves like an application. You are going to make a lot of people happy.

[01:17:30] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So that's interesting.

So I use quite a lot of things. I don't know, to-do lists and those kind of things and calendar things. And, I often want the two things side by side. And very often that means opening up two tabs, splitting them out, locking them somewhere in the browser. Yeah. But like you say, oh, okay.

Yeah. I hadn't really thought about it like that, but displaying data, yeah. For me it's more utility. Like I want, the, 'cause I'm doing podcasting. I want the media library open over there. I want the current post. I want some, some sort of documentation that I'm cribbing from about that opening open there as well.

Yeah. I think this has got a lot of legs. I'm glad you thought that, that was

[01:18:08] Remkus de Vries: great. I genuinely see this. If you, if you don't get what this allows you to do, you haven't looked at it long enough.

[01:18:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Okay.

[01:18:16] Remkus de Vries: This should make you very excited. This is part of the future of WordPress.

[01:18:19] Nathan Wrigley: Nicely said.

Reese, Steve, are you as, I, no, I, no, I, did discover it. I discovered it this morning. it was, it's one of the, what were we talking about a few weeks ago? There was like the curated featured plugins

Yes.

[01:18:37] Rhys Wynne: List. This is one of the

[01:18:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yes.

[01:18:39] Rhys Wynne: Okay. That, is on there. so I was like, Ooh, that looks fun.

installed it locally, immediately stuck the Windows XP Bliss.

[01:18:48] Nathan Wrigley: Oh,

[01:18:49] Rhys Wynne: background. Not in the background. Just, to make it a happy place. But, no, it's, fun. Yeah. It's

[01:18:59] Nathan Wrigley: just neat. Let me just see if I can find a bit where it e see. There you go. There's, oh, and so what you can see here, dear listener, apologies for this, but what we're showing on the screen, I'm not gonna try and enlarge it or anything 'cause it'll baulk everything.

This is like the os this is like the settings panel for the desktop environment. So you can do things like set your, your background colour and all of that kind of stuff. and I, yeah, I think this has got a lot of legs

[01:19:29] Rhys Wynne: really where I can, going on from the app thing where I can see as being useful.

And I know that they've got like this timing widget. It's on mobile, I think mobile as well. And, iPads and, tablets. It could be really. Like

[01:19:46] Nathan Wrigley: one thing, one thing I would just say is if you think that you are getting yourself into something that you might regret, I haven't played with it, but the about, section in the GitHub repo is pretty clear.

It says it's opt-in per user, doesn't change core and fully reverts on deactivation. So I don't think it's messing with a, an awful lot. I, say that advisedly, I don't know what's going on, but, we'll see. So it says Desktop mode is a WordPress plugin that turns WP admin into a desktop style interface with movable windows and a dock menu.

What I wanna happen here in the same way that playground got picked up by automatic and they put, who was it who was doing playground at the beginning? Can anybody remember that guy's name? Oh, he's such a nice guy. I think he's from

[01:20:37] Remkus de Vries: Polish.

[01:20:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, he's Polish. Adam, Zelensky, Adam Zelensky. He, was immediately seconded to just crack on.

That's what you are doing from now on, and here's some other people to help you. Yeah, I want that to happen with this. I want this desktop mode to be picked up in that way.

[01:20:54] Steve Burge: Is this part of automatic already, like they're doing like a radical speed month or something like that?

[01:20:59] Nathan Wrigley: I don't know if it's that.

but it feels if it's not, I think it is, it's gone with exquisite timing. you think it is mku? Okay.

[01:21:09] Remkus de Vries: I think I, I believe it is, but I'm not,

[01:21:10] Nathan Wrigley: yeah,

[01:21:10] Remkus de Vries: I'm not 100% sure, but I think I saw it.

[01:21:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. I hope that this is one of those ones that rises to the surface and gets funded and all of the people involved get like fulltime to just mess around with this.

This seems like such a credible thing to do. I'm gonna quickly move on. I'll just go to this one quickly repository, Matt Mullenweg assembles trusted group to overhaul wordpress.org and five for the future. I think it's fair to say that Matt is, is a bit like in, in a space where he wants rapid change and he wants rapid change by pulling the rug out from processes and systems that have hit the tube.

Been as, I guess he would see it an impediment to things happening quickly. Steve, did you wanna say something? You looked like you were

[01:21:58] Steve Burge: raising? Yeah, I'm, quite often AI sceptical, but it seems like AI has been the best thing that's happened to WordPress in a long time. In the sense that it's really given the whole community a kick up the backside that we had that kind of, that massive stagnation after the first word, camp Portland and all the things that, that happened around that, like no releases for a year and then suddenly AI explodes on the scene and we as a community have remembered that.

We can get things done. Oh,

[01:22:40] Nathan Wrigley: okay.

[01:22:41] Steve Burge: The, taxonomies, I think in Ray's post about, we, this whole thing has basically been like a kind of a love letter to Ray's work. She's highly caffeinated the amount of work that she's putting out on the repository. But in her post on the taxonomies, she said it went from nothing to done in two weeks.

Two

[01:23:03] Steve Burge: weeks. Yeah. Cus custom post types, we were talking earlier, they should have been done 12 years ago. Something they've done. you can go down the, the line of things that, like the connectors plugin, to have AI connectors, inside the WordPress call went from an idea that met throughout on like Friday afternoon to actually being shipped seven days later.

And I think a lot of plugin developers as well are moving a lot more quickly. and there's just, a, sense of momentum that has come back to WordPress that we'd lost.

[01:23:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It's interesting. For

[01:23:50] Steve Burge: maybe 18 months.

[01:23:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. I'm with you. I

[01:23:52] Steve Burge: agree.

[01:23:53] Nathan Wrigley: This, this post though, I suppose what's happened here, it feels like the, and I'm gonna use the word disgruntled 'cause that's, the tenor of what I'm getting there.

Fe it feels like Matt was, beco was becoming disgruntled by atrophy, by how the processes that were in place, which appear to be, have been impediments to quick, move fast break things kind of mentality. And, and there seems go fast to be an unpicking of all of that and a licence to just go for it.

So wordpress.org you may, or may not be aware is actually the property of Mr. Map Mullenweg. It's his personal thing. some people have opinions on that, but like it, or lump it like it or hate it, that's his website. And so he's within his rights to say, Crack on. And that's basically what's happened.

He's given a, trusted using air quotes, a trusted, selection of people car blanche to do what they like. And the only impediment is they've got a report to him and I presume he has the, the final say Yes, no, and we'll see what goes on. So it's people like Anne McCarthy, it's Mary Hubbard, it's Noel Talk Western Router.

where else have we got, we've got Nick Hamey in the mix. There's a whole bunch of people and I think a few others have jumped in as well. So expect some rapid change. I would say. Let's see, what the heck happens in the days, weeks? I think it'll be days more than months, maybe weeks. and then something similar.

Four, five for the future because time's running out. I won't get into that. I'll just say go and have a look at the article yourself. But, similar things happening for the five for the future as well. Okay. Okay. I dunno how many of these we're gonna be able to get through because time is running out, so I'll just go through them quickly.

Joe Dawson has, written a piece about the accessibility ready requirements, which have been updated. They haven't been touched since, not say they haven't been touched, but they haven't been modified in whole, I think since 2012 or something like that. And obviously in the accessibility space, a lot has changed since then.

So he's written up why it's changed and what has changed. So go and check that out again. All the links, in the show notes. Oh, I would just mention this one. Good friend of mine, Dan maybe wrote this post on the W-P-L-D-N blog. I know the Reese has been there recently. I've been there recently. And, the project, W-P-L-D-N was on the, lookout for some sponsorships and a hat tip to the agency.

The filter agency who stepped up and, offered their, opened up their wallet basically to sponsor that event, at a high level. So enabling that event to go forward. I will, again, link in the show notes. What else have we got? I think that's probably all that we've got time for. there's a few other, oh, no, We'll just quickly do this one 'cause I know it's, it's re's favourite subject, CloudFlare this week. as, seems to be happening all over the place. CloudFlare, knocked I think 20% of their workforce. Maybe that's the wrong number. Certainly it's 1100 people have been let go. this doesn't feel, from what I'm reading, it doesn't feel like, we're suffering financially, so we're trying to cut some fat.

This feels like we're aligning ourselves with what we think the future's gonna look like, and that future doesn't involve lots of humans sitting in chairs. Remus, I know you know more and some of which you'd probably embargoed on saying, but tell us what your thoughts are.

[01:27:36] Remkus de Vries: yeah, not financially motivated, and AI related, not much to add there.

I think it's, I think the way you describe it is probably not entirely the way you should look at it, AI replacing, but it's more like how much can you make AI part of your work type of approach.

[01:27:59] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. obviously sad news for those people that have been affected, but, yeah, I imagine at some point all of us are using CloudFlare services these days.

If

[01:28:08] Remkus de Vries: you, if you just look at the stuff they've been pumping out over the last couple of months that have either, that are either servicing parts of AI or are leaning on ai. Or facilitating AI or built with ai,

[01:28:24] Nathan Wrigley: right.

[01:28:26] Remkus de Vries: It should be pretty clear where this company is headed.

[01:28:29] Nathan Wrigley: the only bits that I've really touched are the built with ai, different bits and pieces, Yeah. Things like M Dash and things like that. And they're on, but

[01:28:37] Remkus de Vries: the title, of this blog post is, Spot On

[01:28:41] Nathan Wrigley: Building for the Future, is what that is called. Yeah. Sadly, time has got the better of us. But, anyway, there we go. in which case we will knock it on the head just about there.

There we go. That wasn't, we didn't get through everything, but we got through the majority of it. Another quick thanks to Steve for knocking up what was probably the majority of those show notes. Fully appreciated that. Thank you.

[01:29:07] Steve Burge: Hey, I built on the work of Ray at the repository, basically. Hey,

[01:29:11] Nathan Wrigley: it is always, thus, this show always has, I basically, the way that this show notes get put together is I wait for Remus newsletter to drop, which is quite erratic at the minute.

I've never, I used to be solidly a Friday now, I'm now sometimes Monday, maybe just randomly a Sunday here and there. I never quite, yep. Yep. But it's always in time for me anyway, so I crib that crib what Ray's written as well. Yeah.

[01:29:37] Rhys Wynne: I much prefer it not being on a Friday because Ray's is on a Friday and they can only have so much in

[01:29:41] Nathan Wrigley: a day.

[01:29:42] Remkus de Vries: She, she alters it. It doesn't, it's, not always on the Friday, Yeah.

[01:29:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:29:47] Remkus de Vries: but we cover different things, so it,

[01:29:49] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

[01:29:50] Remkus de Vries: It shouldn't be too much overlap,

[01:29:51] Nathan Wrigley: but that's what I do as well. I, crib from Mku, I crib from Ray and various other places and just decide what I think is of the most interest. But anyway, Steve, it doesn't get away from the fact that you still did it.

So I'm very, grateful for you doing that. I'll have to send you a book or something. I'll send you a, I'll send you the copy at

[01:30:10] Remkus de Vries: least three.

[01:30:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. The Guttenberg Parenthesis by Jeff Jarvis. There we go. There you go. it only remains for me to say thank you to our guests. Let's go around. Oh yeah, we've gotta do the hands.

Let's do the hands now, Let's do the hands. There we go. Got the hands. Thank you. but thank you very much to Steve Birge from Publish Press. Thank you to Remus from within WP and also the Guild. Go and check that out. Links in the show notes, and also Reese win from unpronounceable.com. I can't, It'll be in the show. you win Reese. Yeah, I know. I just can't say it for some reason. It's, I dunno why. That's it. We will see you this time next week. One would hope. Take it easy. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Now. A question, can I find the right button? There it is. See you next week. Bye-Bye.