This Week in WordPress #375

[00:00:03] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for This Week in WordPress, episode number 375 entitled, it's all up and down. It was recorded on Monday the 9th of June, 2026. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I'm joined by co-host Michelle Frechette, but also by Steve Burge and Marc Benzakein.

It is a WordPress podcast, but we talk a lot about other things as well.

Quite a lot of chatter about AI, quite a lot of chatter about some security things and the problems that AI introduce into the security landscape. Some of the things that Wordfence and Patchstack are doing are having to be upended because AI slop in the security space is causing a problem.

We talk about the recent WordCamp Europe. What was it like?

We talk about the new Contributor Dashboard and whether that's signals a bit of a downturn in contributions in the WordPress space over the last five years or so.

And then some plugins and different things in the WordPress space seem to have caused ire amongst WordPress users. So things being repriced, things being resold, things being repackaged, things using the dashboard in unintended ways. It's all a little bit annoying, let's put it that way.

And then towards the end, a few community bits and pieces as well, including a survey for the WP Community Collective.

It's all coming up next on this week in WordPress.

Good evening, good afternoon. Hello. Wherever you are on Planet Earth, I imagine nobody else is watching this. Outside of that introduction, a friend of mine was, I'm gonna go on a total segue. I told this story and it so it's fresh in my mind. A friend of mine when I was about 20 years old, got a record deal.

and that was a really big deal, and it turned out it didn't actually go anywhere. But in the contract that he signed, their music could be distributed. And this was literally in black and white in the earth and its solar system. Isn't that weird that the record label would like, think, okay, this is gonna be a hit on Mars or horse Jupiter or whatever.

Anyway, that was, they're

[00:02:23] Michelle Frechette: just hedging their, they're hedging their butts just in case, right?

[00:02:26] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. 'cause imagine if the next Beatles came along where there's I don't know, a thousand years of playing it. It wasn't the next Beatles, it turns out. Anyway, there we go. thank you for joining us.

It's number 375 of this week in WordPress. We're gonna talk a lot about WordPress, the community, and all the other bits and pieces that we usually do. We'll be here for about 90 minutes. If you fancy getting your friends, colleagues, relations and all of that involved, we'd love that. the simple URL to send people to would be this one, which is being, modelled by the wonderful Steve Burge.

at the moment. It's wp builds.com/live on small wp builds.com/live. Go and stick that into the socials of your choice. And if you go over there, then, you've got a couple of choices in terms of comments if you're on desktop. Over on the right is YouTube comments. So if you logged into Google, you can make comments over there.

one or two people have already done that. However, if you don't have a Google account or a YouTube account, there's an option buried inside the player itself. Top it says live chat. I believe you can use that. You don't need to be logged into anything whatsoever. So let's go around the, the panel and get some introductions.

we're joined. Let's go in the corner, bottom corner there. We're joined by Michelle Frache. How are you doing?

[00:03:46] Michelle Frechette: I am good. I just had a week of vacation.

[00:03:49] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, did you? Oh, lovely. Yes. Couldn't, I've just seen your little I couldn't go. Sorry. Carry on.

[00:03:54] Michelle Frechette: I couldn't go to Word Camp Europe, so instead my boyfriend and I took a, vacation down the New England coast.

[00:04:01] Nathan Wrigley: Oh. Oh, lovely. That sounds really nice. Boston. Yeah. Boston, Connecticut

[00:04:07] Michelle Frechette: and New York City. It was awesome. Oh,

[00:04:08] Nathan Wrigley: lovely stuff. I've just noticed your moniker. You know where mine says way where mine says WP builds like that and Steve says, publish press. Yours says, WP Jill of all trades. I like that.

[00:04:19] Michelle Frechette: I have so many things going on.

I couldn't pick one.

[00:04:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's a good, that's a good idea. I'll read your, your bio. Yeah. And we'll get some idea of that. So Michelle Frache there she is the Executive director of Post Status. And in addition to the work over there, Michelle is the podcast briefer at WP Coffee Talk. Co-founder of Underrepresented in Tech and WP Speakers, also involved in WP Career pages.

Co-founder of Sponsor me, WP Speed Network online. She likes to write and so therefore is an author influencer and a frequent organiser and speaker at WordPress and tech events living outside of Rochester, New York. She is an avid nature photographer and if you want to check out the whole thing in one URL Meet Michelle online is the way to do it.

That is to say Meet michelle.online is the way to,

[00:05:10] Michelle Frechette: you gotta put the.in the right place.

[00:05:12] Nathan Wrigley: Gotta put the.in the right place. Yeah, indeed. It's curious, that's still a, there must be a better way than having dots in URL. Is there no way that we could get rid of the dots at some point? Would it be possible?

Just I think

[00:05:24] Michelle Frechette: we could have

[00:05:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Until

[00:05:25] Michelle Frechette: they added all of the different various extensions. Now you have to have it because people won't know.

[00:05:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's a good point. We could, yeah. Okay. All right. It's not a bad idea otherwise. My favourite is they'd be fish. I don't, know. the, dots up there with the Oxford comma, you'll pry it from my Cold Dead hand.

Okay. Okay.

[00:05:44] Steve Burge: So I heard the, I heard the.online extension twice in one day now after Never having heard of it before. Oh, because Oh, didn't, Yost joined your dot. Your

[00:05:59] Nathan Wrigley: do

[00:06:00] Steve Burge: Yeah. Which made my grammatical head hurt a little bit.

[00:06:03] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Yost, Marika, and I believe Tacho and a bunch of other people have got into that.

I'm gonna feature that a little bit later. I haven't got enough intel on that just yet, so it hasn't really featured in this week's show, but at some point in the near future, I'll do a podcast recording, hopefully with one of them and get the skinny on that. Okay. So there's Michelle, but also we're joined by Marc .

Marc is, Marc our bl it's 4:00 AM or something over there at the minute. And so I love how you exaggerate how early it is here. What time is it, if it, Gets any sympathy then? Yeah. It's four in the morning, right? No, it's six. Six.

[00:06:43] Michelle Frechette: It's still six. I was sound asleep at

[00:06:45] Nathan Wrigley: 6:00 AM ah, it's still pretty early.

I, don't like seeing six o'clock ever. Here we go though. Marc Zaine or Zaca I should say. Sorry about that. Marc is the, that's all right. Partnerships and community lead at Main WP, where he works with plugin developers, agencies, hosts, and service providers to help expand what's possible within the WordPress open source ecosystem.

A longtime WordPress professional Marc is passionate about collaboration, community building, and finding practical ways for businesses to help benefit from open source technology while maintaining ownership and control of their websites. Okie dokie. Thanks for joining us, Marc . And finally, thanks for having me down there.

Steve Burge, I've already said his name out loud. How you doing, Steve? You all right? Yeah. Doing good, thanks. Good, Steve is the founder of Publish Press. If you go and Google that, you'll be able to see all of the wonderful things they do, and publish press, help make plugins to improve your WordPress publishing.

He's from England. I don't need to say anymore. It's as good as it gets. And he lives in Florida. Check has an extra friend with him on the podcast today. Oh, you do? Who's your ex phone? I do.

[00:07:55] Steve Burge: So it's the summer vacation here, like I know for people in England, this is a little weird, but school basically

[00:08:03] Nathan Wrigley: is out already.

Yeah.

[00:08:05] Steve Burge: And so lots of my kids' friends have gone off on vacation. They're in, okay. We're in Florida. They've gone to people basically go to the mountains from Florida. They go to North Carolina, Colorado, anywhere where it's cooler. So my kids have basically accumulated a tonne of animals, other people's pets.

Oh, I see. We're, basically animals sitting a tonne. So one of them has taken a particular liking to my office.

[00:08:33] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, this is an iguana or something. I really want to see what this is. What have you got?

[00:08:40] Steve Burge: oh,

[00:08:41] Nathan Wrigley: stop the hold the phone. We just end it there. This is the highlight already. And

[00:08:50] Steve Burge: he's been hanging out with me for a whole week now in the office.

[00:08:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. the fact that you've brought, what's his name? The fact that you've brought this glorious, fairly large rabbit Yes. onto the show tells me that not only has the rabbit taken a liking to you, Steve, but I think that's it reciprocal, isn't it? You seem to quite like the rabbit.

[00:09:11] Steve Burge: I never really liked rabbits before, but this one has been great.

this one, it's potty trained different.

[00:09:16] Nathan Wrigley: It

[00:09:16] Steve Burge: just takes one, it's potty trained rabbit,

[00:09:18] Nathan Wrigley: so that's the best I can let it go

[00:09:20] Steve Burge: around the office.

[00:09:22] Nathan Wrigley: Michelle has a cat, which I'm expecting to wander in at some point. If you leave the rabbit on your keyboard, we could see what fun that would have to during course of show.

how long did you get through it before your screen went dark? There is our panel though. we're joined by three people and a rabbit and maybe a cat in just a moment. We'll see how that goes. Oh, she's,

[00:09:44] Michelle Frechette: I think she's sleeping behind the screen right now, Oh

[00:09:46] Nathan Wrigley: dear. Oh dear. Cancel. Oh, no,

[00:09:51] Michelle Frechette: what? Come back.

Really? oh.

[00:09:54] Nathan Wrigley: oh.

[00:09:57] Michelle Frechette: oh, so how you guys doing?

[00:09:59] Steve Burge: Good. The, the rabbit's name is apparently fluffy, but in Russian.

[00:10:05] Michelle Frechette: Oh, can you say, I'm not sure how, what? It's in Russian. Okay. I wouldn't know either

[00:10:10] Nathan Wrigley: that, that was fun. this is an example. This is a situation where Nathan needs to take care of which red button he's about to press.

[00:10:25] Steve Burge: you didn't have a cat walk across the keyboard or anything?

[00:10:27] Nathan Wrigley: No, I've got no excuses. Oh my goodness. So many times. Oh, dear listener, if you were, just listening to that, basically what I did was I booted myself out of the call, which is hysterical. anyway, there we go. We found out it was amazing how much we got to talk to you behind your Yes.

So we'll knock it on the head there. You got, yeah, we'll call it a day. we found out the rabbit's

[00:10:50] Michelle Frechette: name while you were gone.

[00:10:51] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. And

[00:10:53] Michelle Frechette: it's fluffy. Fluffy, but in, in

[00:10:55] Nathan Wrigley: Russian. But it's in Russian,

[00:10:56] Michelle Frechette: oh,

[00:10:57] Nathan Wrigley: which is what, how do you say that in, in English? We dunno. What's the,

[00:11:01] Steve Burge: my, my daughter just calls it Fluffy in Russian.

Oh,

[00:11:04] Nathan Wrigley: that'll

[00:11:04] Steve Burge: do. That's

[00:11:05] Nathan Wrigley: the rabbit's new name. That'll do. There you go. Okay. Anyway, I was trying to say at that point that there is our panel. This is the, the, Motley crew that we've assembled for today's show. So hopefully if you've got any comments, let us know. What I was trying to do was I was trying to click the live chat button so that I could view some of the comments and the live chat button is dangerous and close to the drop yourself out of the call button it would appear.

But here we go. We've got a few little comments coming up. So the rabbit needs to be added to your puppies kittens lambs loop. That's a good point. I should add that. And you mean this.

I'll add some rabbits to it. thank you very much. We'll do that. what else have we got? Thank you for joining us by the way now, Gerard. Yes, Gerard. Get in. I got your name first time with, that's the first time. Hello. Nice to have you with us. Oh, alright. Got me. Got there first. Fine. That's okay. Did press, I did press all the red buttons.

this is, web Squadron. I am sorry about this. Yeah, it seems like our past did not cross at Word Camp Eu. I responded to that by saying that I usually go to these events and end up in a closet with a mic. And that's exactly what happened this time. There was media rooms and they're always out on the far periphery of everything.

Yeah, I was basically in there. So sorry, I didn't see you. That would've been nice. shall I get the first weather report in says full works plugins? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. Good afternoon from a grey woken near London, intermittent showers, 14 degrees centigrade, Alan. Now, I dunno what kind of weather Alan is, but it's looking in a bit Alan out there today, but

[00:12:50] Michelle Frechette: I'm Ching.

[00:12:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's true. Dad joke. thank you Alan for joining us. Really appreciate it. I'm self debating, says Web Squadron again. If I should attend Word Camp Us The flight times doesn't feel appealing, so as regards word camp us. it's gonna be hot and I don't think it's gonna be hot like in a way that you and I, from the UK can, can really understand.

I think it's like 45, 6 7 degrees centigrade. yeah, give it some thought, but it's a dry heat. Okay. does that help? that's what they say. Yeah. And actually dehydrates you it. Yeah, but it does help in that, you know how, when it gets really hot and humid, you feel like you can't breathe, at least in a dry heat.

It's a little bit more tolerable, but honestly it's gonna be hot. Okay. yeah. That you have to hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. And I'm from California and it's gonna be hot, Yeah. it's in the desert. All I'm gonna say is that if you are, I checked it out. The Grand Canyon is 333 odd miles drive away.

So if you do go there, is that like spectacle that might be worth dropping into your calendar? It's like a five

[00:14:04] Michelle Frechette: hour drive.

[00:14:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It's not too bad, is it? for, Brits, that's like the entire country, but if you look on the map of Arizona, it's like Italian, a little bit of it. so that's maybe worth thinking about.

And he says he carries on if things align and may go to Word Camp Asia and the proposed new flagship word Camp India. It'll be like a grand slam of wcs. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. Reese win. Hello folks. Good seeing you at Word Camp eu. Yeah, it was nice to see you as well, Reese. Lovely, lovely. And then we got a bunch of emojis, people saying hi, dah.

Let's have a look. Surreal episode. it's often fairly surreal. I mean it never goes that weird, but it sometimes is a little bit weird. Two,

[00:14:48] Michelle Frechette: two comments above that one though is my favourite.

[00:14:50] Nathan Wrigley: Fluky.

[00:14:52] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. For the rabbits. Fluff,

[00:14:53] Nathan Wrigley: fluky. Okay. For the, what's that? Is that the rabbit or is that the weather?

I'm confused.

[00:14:59] Michelle Frechette: No, that, that's the Russian name for Fluffy. That's the Russian fluffy is that's not actually, that's so great. no. Re Reese made it up and that's what's

[00:15:08] Nathan Wrigley: great. Oh, Reese, I was hoping that was true. That sounded too good. anything over 22 degrees normally kills me. Yeah, it's gonna be a lot over 22.

double it and then add a little bit more. and then the soles of your shoes can literally melt to the pavement if you walk too long sometimes. Where Word Camp Europe. Sorry, word Camp US is being held. Yes. Yeah. So look, a smattering of lovely comments already. Keep 'em coming. It makes the show, really very interesting when we get loads of comments.

The idea though is to talk about word pressy things. So let's begin that process. but first before that very short promotional stuff. If you like what we're doing, put your email address into this box and we'll send you a couple of emails each week about the content we create. The most recent podcast episode that I did, can I urge you if you are into ai, like I'm into ai, but I don't really spend a lot of time thinking about it or implementing it.

Go and listen to this episode with Alex Standiford, Alex. By the end of it, I think Alex was a bit concerned that he'd said too much. and it he was a bit worried that he came across as a bit weird because he's, given over so much of his life to ai. He started this process years ago where he kind of journals absolutely everything towards in ai and he said it's now got to the point where it's really adding up and adding value.

He's able, 'cause it knows what he's like, it knows what his incentives are, it knows what drives him forward. He's got his entire plugin repository or multiple repositories in there and he said the dots now really are adding up for him. and I found that really interesting because I'm a bit of a Luddite when it comes to ai.

So meeting somebody who's been so bullish and so gone home about doing it, you might find that conversation really fascinating. but if you find it to be weird like Alex thought it was gonna be, let me know as well. But I thought it was fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. The other thing I'm just gonna quickly mention, this is also AI related Austin Ginder, I noticed earlier, Steve, before we hit record, I think you pronounced his surname differently to me, so maybe I've got that wrong.

but Austin did an episode with me, about how AI is really, making it possible for companies to get in front of things like man in the middle attacks and things like that. He has to put together a website called WP Beacon because he was on just nosing around and noticed that a few of the plugins on some of his client, I'm doing air quotes there, client websites seem to have been taken over by a malicious actor.

Turns out they were sold to a malicious actor who then baked into the code, back doors and malware and things like that. And so he's made it his life's mission. It would seem to use AI to weed this stuff out. and so that's all very interesting as well. Go and check it out. I dunno if anybody wants to comment on any of that before I move into the news art items this week.

If you do, pipe up now. If not, I'll just move on. Okay, in which case I will just move on. So usually on the show, it was Michelle's idea actually many years ago, is to let the guests pop their favourite bits of the week at the beginning of the show. And so Steve's popped a few in this week, so I'm gonna hand it over to Steve 'cause they're the ones that he mentioned.

The first one is over on wordpress.org/news. It was written by Matt Mullenweg about three days ago, and it's called Protect the Shire. What did you, what did you have in mind when you added this, Steve?

[00:18:56] Steve Burge: this links directly to Austin's work you were talking about in the podcast. Yep. And it may even be a 100% direct reaction to it, that at the moment if you release a WordPress plugin, they're going to wait 24 hours before it actually releases so they can run security scans on it.

It maybe, it's a slightly different problem to the one Austin started off and got some publicity for talking about, but it's all part of the same core issue that basically AI is making security so much more difficult now, I, I think Austin has been saying that February of this year was a complete, 180 degree turn for him with security suddenly vulnerabilities that had never been found before were getting found and exploited.

and so Matt's response has been to lock down the WordPress repo for 24 hours after every release now.

[00:19:58] Nathan Wrigley: So kinda curious, I dunno if you saw this bit, I don't know if this number seems to be a big number or not, but he says right at the top of the article, he's trying to paint the picture of how AI is made most software probably more vulnerable to things because what used to take a human researcher many hours to figure out now point an AI at the code base and perhaps you can find them in minutes and things like Chrome, which is mentioned here, the Chrome browser is obviously open source.

You can download that. 429 security fixes were patched, just very recently in the latest release. So I'm guessing that's an extraordinarily high number that Chrome have had to release. and yeah, so the idea being that from now on we're gonna give, plugin developers when you update your plugin 24 hours until that is then available on the.org repo.

The idea I think is to figure out how it all works out. Like figure out if they can turn the AI around to reduce that time down into hours and minutes, possibly in the future. But for now, they're gonna point the AI at updates to, to your plugin repository and hopefully find the bits and pieces that may or may not be lurking in there.

yeah, that's, it's quite a change isn't it, I dunno how this will work with critical security patches. So let's say for example, Steve, your plugin has a critical vulnerability in it and it's widely known out in the wild that there's a critical vulnerability in it. Do we still wait for 24 hours or does that get a pass?

I don't know how that'll all kind of work, but,

[00:21:36] Steve Burge: yeah. Yeah. You may have to write into the plugins team for an exception. It, we, maybe five, six years ago, we've been on the other end of this with a, a massive security problem with one of our plugins and the WordPress plugins team were awesome.

And they did a force push of the fix to Oh yeah. To everyone who had the plugin installed. And that was super useful. And I'm pretty sure the WordPress plugin team would be flexible enough to, fix something like that if it happened again.

[00:22:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. maybe you can be bumped to the top of the, the AI or human review q so that it becomes a matter of hours.

yeah. Anyway, that was an interesting piece, written by Matt himself. Michelle or Marc , if you've got anything to add, do it now. Otherwise, I will just move along gently. Before I do that, I'll just raise a couple of these comments. So the first one is this one, from Full Works plugins. Alex and I are of the same cloth, so referring to Alex Standerford earlier, I have built, I have building retained knowledge about my personal goals and aligned to business strategy.

Yeah, that's basically what he's been doing, and it's been giving him some profound insights. I can see the positives in them using AI to secure websites. I do wonder though, how accurate the AI will be. This is always my concern, as well and how they handle zero. Oh, okay. There you go. You've literally written what I just suggested as well.

Zero days within 24 hours. That's a very good point. it would be nice if they could open source their prompts so that we can run the same tests ourselves, like they do with the plugin check plug. Oh, that's interesting. that's a good idea. I like that. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder if there's some secret sauce there that they don't wish to Delo di excuse me.

Disclose. I can't see. I'm, thinking about that for a moment. I, think the answer's no. I, yeah, good suggestion. I like that. Yeah. and then carries on with, of course, we, speaking for us already. Use AI to, yeah, to do extra security checks. Okay. Thank you. Keep the comments coming. That's great. Let's put the slides back up or the share the bits and pieces on the screen.

And then again, this is a slight segue, but we, we've got a new WaPo related to, is this new? Is this Gap on WaPo new? But it was certainly called out in that article.

[00:24:01] Steve Burge: created June 5th, 2026.

[00:24:03] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So it is new. This is the new, yeah, this is the New Gap by Matt. Oh, is it? Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay.

So it is Matt. So this is the ai, WaPo, I guess that's gonna be overlooking your code. the new WaPo for that. I, actually have a, I have a strong, for that one, I'm a big fan, a lot of the rings, and so I'm drawn to that. But let's move on. Next one is over on the Wordfence, blog.

I'm just gonna say at the outset that Wordfence do this quarterly report, and, I'll just skim quickly and you'll get an idea why we can't really cover all of it. It's, there's a lot basically is one way to summarise it. But Steve, was there anything you wanted to draw out of this in particular?

[00:24:50] Steve Burge: I put in the link to Matt's post plus this one, which says that basically, Vulnerability reports are going way, up this year. Yeah. According to Wordfence. And also one about patch deck, which said that they are getting lots and lots of fake AI reports and they've started to ban people from their bug bounty problems because people are sending in hallucinated reports.

Yeah. And it's all part of the same topic, basically. But yeah,

[00:25:23] Nathan Wrigley: it, AI and security, it's a bit of a, it's a bit of a nightmare, isn't it? So in this one, the word fence report, I dunno if you can, if you're listening to this, apologies, it's gonna be hard for me to summarise it, but basically on the, sort of m the UVP, if you like, the sort of hero item of this is that most things are up in terms of security problems.

Everything seems to have gone up by a significant amount. They're claiming, during the previous quarter, a 23.7% rise in total vulnerabilities published. This is of course word fences, own data, 20.6% increase in high threat vulnerabilities. Now up to 158. Common and dangerous vulnerabilities. a 98% increase, but the number is 198.

So it's not like this 48,000 or anything. So maybe that's a little bit sanguine. WAF attacks blocked is now down by a small amount, 3%, but still interesting that figure you would want to go up rather than down. a brute force attacks up 15% at 16 billion, and then sites infected 1.4% rise up to 700.

Sorry, 474,000. There's a lot in this article.

[00:26:43] Steve Burge: so we started to get a whole new category of email from, word fence. I think mainly it used to be like once a month because we've got like 20 plus plugins. Once a month we'd get an email from Wordfence to say, Hey, you have a security issue in this plugin.

It's minor, medium, very occasionally serious. We haven't been getting those lately. Word friends have been sending this us these emails saying We had a report about your plugin, but we realised it was nonsense and we cancelled it. huh, okay. this like almost every week they're saying, we got a hallucinated report about your plugin and we blocked it and we're just letting you know that we investigated and found it to be nothing.

[00:27:30] Nathan Wrigley: That's really interesting. And that links perfectly to this Patch Stack piece. Patch Stack have what's called a bug bounty programme, whereby if you discover something of worth, which will help, drive the WordPress security landscape forwards, you can submit it to them and depending on the criteria that it falls under.

And I won't bore you with all that, but you can be rewarded for that. And obviously if you tie it's, it was guaranteed to happen really, wasn't it? If you can exchange money for knowledge about a security, problem, point AI at that and come up with a load of problems that maybe are not that significant and hope to be paid out.

That's exactly basically what Patch Stack have discovered. And they've had to tighten up the rigging, of their Bug bounty programme. And now the top line item basically is that if you submit AI slop reports, you are gonna be banned for a week, which actually to me seemed quite lenient. yeah, a week.

I was thinking it'd be more like a year or something like that, to really dissuade people from doing it. But they've got some new, so there's a lot of data about how they've established that this is happening and, asking people to honour some new criteria. But yeah, temporary ban is basically the, bottom line item and they've got some new criteria for what now will qualify.

So they've basically tightening the whole thing up. So it's gonna be more difficult to qualify, therefore, hopefully will be more meaningful in the future. So again, anybody wanna add anything to those or should we press on. Alright. Okay. In which case we will press on, just a little thing. I don't really have anything to say about this other than the WordCamp Europe happened.

as always a very big thank you to anybody who touched that entire process. if you were on the organising team or a volunteer at the event or whatever your point of reference was, that was an incredible event. The venue was lovely, which always helps, but it obviously, the people really make the whole thing tick.

And it was incredibly well done as far as I could see. I, I had an absolutely lovely time. I hope that you did too. And if you were involved in the, the organisation of that, I hope that you're having a bit of a well earned, rest at this point. None of, I don't think any of you three were there, were you?

no, unfortunately not. Not okay. No, it was really good. The venue was great and a bit of a hat tip. If you've ever thought about, sorry. If you've never thought about going to the city of Krakow, wow. that was the one of the most sublimely cool bits. Krakow is utterly stunning. and quite compact.

So if you land in Krakow, a lot of the things that you would like to see are within easy walking distance, 15 minutes here, 10 minutes there, three minutes there. And, it was absolutely marvellous. So definitely get on a plane to Krakow. If you are short of holiday ideas, three or four days, there is gonna be time well spent.

And yeah, the organisers help us did great. Indeed. I'm always amazed by how an event like that can basically be run by volunteers. It's a miracle that does happen. you can read this article, I'm, I've got something on the screen entitled What Happened at WordCamp Europe 2026. It was written just a couple of days ago after the whole thing had wrapped up.

So if you want to go and check it out, you can. yeah, they had, the, sort of top line item, I suppose the keynote, if you like, was, was the focus at cern. who of course were the, that was the sort of founding place where the web actually began. So I didn't actually manage to make that talk, but I'd be interested to watch it back.

which you can do here. Two worlds collide, WordPress at cern. Go and check that out if you wish. All righty. ba again, I'll just pause in case anybody wants to jump in. Nope. Alright.

[00:31:40] Steve Burge: Right there. you, got all the Americans on the podcast this time round.

[00:31:44] Nathan Wrigley: I know. Yeah, but usually, yeah, no European usually word Europe is about 50% Americans as far as I can work out.

And that, I think that was definitely the case this time. There was a lot of people from all over the world. There's, the usual kind of hosting companies bring in their North American teams and things like that. So there was definitely a, definitely a lot of people from all over. And the numbers felt good to me.

I know that we're trying to like, make ourselves feel good about the community and things like that, but I think there was 2,600 and it was something like 37, tickets. Turned into actual people showing up. So I think 2,600 plus people actually, attended the event, and it certainly felt like that it was one of those events.

that's pre COVID numbers, isn't it? yeah, I think there's this idea that one day it'll get back to 3000 or something. Perhaps that's unrealistic. But what was really nice was instead of it being one of those great big single floor event spaces, this was stacked over four floors basically.

So each floor was not that big. and so it felt busy no matter where you stood, if that, does that make sense? Is that, do you understand what I mean? It just felt like it was happening and busy. And I would imagine that most sponsors, not every sponsor, but I imagine that most sponsors got a good deal from it because like I said, everywhere felt busy.

There was not really too many parts that felt like they were the far-flung corner that nobody actually ended up walking to. So that was good. and I've got Reese here saying that all the Europeans are recovering from Word Camp Europe with the exception of Nathan. No, I'm totally recovering, but I've, I've had a couple of coffees, Reese and I'll flop when this is done.

[00:33:34] Steve Burge: weren't you telling us before we got on that, you were just doing your old man thing and not going to any of the parties?

[00:33:41] Nathan Wrigley: there was a lot of that recovery. I have to, I definitely have to protect myself a little bit. I'm, of a certain age, let's put it that way. And if I go into some of these, go into some of these, I don't know, like the after parties and things and people driving around it, it's not, I can't do that anymore.

It's all a bit embarrassing,

[00:34:03] Steve Burge: simply using the word jive, the young kids. Okay. That put you in old man category right there.

[00:34:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. and, but also crack of was such a revelation that I really wanted to spend. I get a lot out of walking around places like that. I dunno if you are like me, but I really enjoy stuff like that, wandering around and sitting and having coffees and meals and stuff.

And so that to me represented a fantastic use of my time. So I did that. I did turn up to a few things, but I didn't go to as many as I often would. Okay. Let's move on to this one then. So this is very much in the domain of word pressy stuff now. So on the repository website, Gutenberg 23.3 ships with experimental customizable WordPress dashboard.

I am not quite sure what's going on here. when you log into a WordPress, website, typically you'll end up at the dashboard. And for the longest time, certainly as long as I've been using WordPress, there's these been little widgets that you can drag around and pop them into different places and hide them and show them and what have you.

but we now have this, I'll pop it on the screen for you to see. There's only a little screenshot there. I dunno if that's of any help. But I'm not entirely sure how much of a difference that feels to me to what we've already got. Am I missing something or does it just seem like it's the same thing?

Yeah. Is it built with blocks? I don't know. That's an interesting point. Now the thing is, what you can do is there is like a masonry layout. So if I just slide down here and give you a little bit more of an insight into it, can you see there's options to make it a little bit more you can customise the number of grids, you can customise the width of the tiles.

You can make it masonry and standard grid, and maybe you are right. Maybe there's gonna be an option to build your own blocks now that, perhaps without code or something like that. Now that we've got the, this approach, I'm not entirely sure, but, anyway, that is coming. If you want to make use of it, you can do that.

If you, go and instal the Gutenberg plugin, 23.3 will give you the option to do that. it says here, Gutenberg 23.3 has shipped with an experimental customizable dashboard that let's use as add, move resize. Okay. Maybe resize is new.

[00:36:30] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. And a

[00:36:31] Nathan Wrigley: range widgets on the WP Admin's home screen, it's the first testable preview of a long discussed overhaul.

Okay. That's the bit that I missed. This isn't a this, we're not trying to build something here, which is finished. This is just the framework by the sounds of it. It's just the initial bones of what it's gonna be like. the new dashboard is built on a drag and drop layout and ships with a full set of widgets out the box, the usual welcome quick draught site health and so on.

Each widget automatically adapts to the different tile sizes and individuals can, sorry, and users can choose which ones to display, adjust the number of columns and resize individual widgets to suit their workflow. Again, all of that sort of seems similar to what we've got already. But anyway, there you go.

anybody on that one? Probably not. I,

[00:37:21] Michelle Frechette: when you first log in that screen that comes up that you're looking at there. How many of us actually pay a lot of attention to that screen? I'm usually on a mission to do something else. I bypass it all together. Yeah. If I wanna know what's going on with one of my plugins, I go to the plugin.

all of those kinds of things. I don't use this as the tool and I'm wondering if I should or if I'm like, most of us

[00:37:44] Nathan Wrigley: do, what's really curious is I'm exactly like you, I actually disable them all. I go into the options for that. And I turn them all off so that basically I've got a blank page.

And I, I try as often as possible never to go there, but I'm betting that Steve could make some use of this because Couldn't you like to create, maybe you have this already, I don't know, like a widget to say things that are, I don't know, in a pending status and need to be looked at by an editor or something like that.

[00:38:15] Steve Burge: You could, we've had some people use it, but it's fairly limited in terms of. I dunno what exactly. It's limited in terms of, but people don't seem to use it. Yeah,

[00:38:29] Nathan Wrigley: that's, yeah, I'm with you there. when you log into like your CRM or your, I don't know, your project management tool, the dashboard is about the most useful part of the tool in my estimation.

if you build it correctly and you can get that summary of everything that's going on. CRM wise or project management-wise, I don't know. there's 12 things that you need to achieve by the end of the week or something like that. And here they are in priority order and things. I it, I'm struggling to see how WordPress adapts to that, but your publish press plugin, it felt like there was a way to perhaps leverage that, but I don't know.

if you look at, yeah, Main WP is all about that overview page. Oh, you look at that overview page and you see everything you need to see right there. And, I'm wondering if something like this is useful for, if you have various levels of users within the site and you set up their dashboards the way they need to see it.

okay. but I'm like, Michelle, I go and straight to whatever I need to go to and I look mostly at the sidebar. Then I, and don't even pay attention to what's going on in the dashboard. But if I have an editor or something like that, someone with an editor role or something like that, I could see the use of setting up their dashboards or letting them set up their dashboards the way that they want to with just the, overview there.

Yeah, that's interesting. I use main WP on a more or less daily basis, and you You land on your proprietary sort of dashboard, don't you? Yeah. you're separated out. It's like a SaaS view. It's like, a, you've got a SAS app built inside a WordPress, if but without the sas.

and, I use that all the time and it, it's exactly that. It gives me the top level items of what needs updating, how many plugins, how many themes, how many core updates, and all the other myriad things that you can do with it or whatever else you wanna add to it or change to customise it.

Okay. we've got some thoughts coming in. sorry. So there is a,

[00:40:38] Steve Burge: an offshoot of real time collaboration, which is called Presence Some, the name has presence somewhere. Presence

[00:40:46] Nathan Wrigley: API.

[00:40:47] Steve Burge: Yes. So I've seen dashboard mockups where you'd log into the new version of this WordPress dashboard and you would see everyone else who's logged into the site normally with a little smiley avatar next to it.

Yeah. And you see what they're doing. So I think the new idea of the dashboard is something like that, that you would log in and say, Hey, Marc is editing this page. Michelle is editing this post. Nathan is doing, updating an event. the. Perhaps by the time WordPress 7.1 comes around, this would be more dynamic, more live.

Yeah. Showing you what's literally happening on the site right now.

[00:41:29] Nathan Wrigley: What's curious for me is that basically most of my endeavours in the WordPress space have been solo things. So it's been me logging into a website. So it's hard to see the utility 'cause I know why I'm logging in, so I can avoid that dashboard.

But that's a really good point. And I use the example of TechCrunch a lot because I can only imagine how many people are logged into the TechCrunch WordPress instance at one time. 'cause I don't know how many pieces they write a day. Maybe it's 10 pieces a day. And so all of that, there will be multiple people logging in and, WordPress could literally become their kind of intranet really, couldn't it?

And so having that intel about, I don't know who's doing what at this time and notes about what they did and achieved and what needs to be handed off is really interesting. I'll put a few little notes up. We've got a few bits of commentary about this. Alan again? Yeah, sorry Alan. I keep saying, full works plugins.

Thank you. it says personally I thought there was no real change either. So Yeah, it looks broadly similar, doesn't it? But maybe, nomad Skateboarding says maybe the end goal would be to have all of your data points end up there on the home screen. Yeah. Okay. That's a good point. And as you've said, this is just the direction that they're going in, the widgets they shipped will be added to shortly.

Great. Thank you. back to Alan, you really need to look at desktop mode. It is exactly what you're asking. An, what you're asking an automatic are involved. Thank you very much. and I guess this may be a conversation between Alan and Noad Nomad Skateboarding fully checked out the last episode from a coup couple of weeks ago, dashboard was talked about.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you. In which case, if we've got that, we will move on. There was something else in there, but I'll leave you to read that, article. There's a few bits buried. I wish

[00:43:17] Michelle Frechette: you could colour code them. Oh, that a nice idea. Yeah. because right now it's just all this data in your face, which is probably why I don't care for it.

It's a lot of overstimulation with a lot of information. I feel like health cell site health status. But what if Critical updates. Were in a red box. So you log in and you're like, this plugin has a critical update, as opposed to seeing, I got five plugins, update, I'll get to them later.

things like that. Things that were super helpful. Yeah, that's an interesting idea. 'cause of a colour coded system.

[00:43:49] Nathan Wrigley: I love a good dashboard. I can waste a whole half day configuring a dashboard with, meaningless things, yeah. Okay. Interesting. and now I'm trying to zoom away so I can scroll to the next thing.

Right? There we go. Anyway, that was on, the repository. Gutenberg 23.3, ships experimental, customizable WordPress dashboard. We'll be coming back to the repository a little bit, however, this is gonna start. This piece that you're looking at now is gonna start, a conversation about community. There's gonna be a few pieces that I've put together in a row that are all to do with community.

Courtney, who was on the call a bit ago, dunno if she's still with us, but she was on the call a little while ago. Courtney has been talking about, contributor dashboards for a very long time. She's been wanting to get this launched, I think, to raise the awareness of what people are doing out in the WordPress space.

I don't know, Courtney, if you've got any commentary that you want to add into this, but here we are. If you go to wp contributor dashboard.org, I don't know the status of this. I'm not sure who's in charge of it. It, I'm not sure who put this out there, whether it's an automatic thing or not, I genuinely don't know.

But it will give a summary of a few things. There's a couple of menu items on the left. There's this lad of view, there's the cohorts view, which is like this waterfall effect. And if you don't understand any of it, if you just go to the about tab, then that'll explain everything that's going on, like how it works and what the different views are.

But if we just go back to the wrapped one, I poked around in this for about 10 minutes earlier today, and I, found something quite interesting, which I wanna share with you. So what we're looking at now is the last 12 months and it says that there were 486,771 contributions. Let's assume that data is accurate and that represents a, a decent summation of it.

1,333 contri contributions on average per day. That equates to, and then there's a month by month chart and unique contributors per month and slight and more. And then I'm gonna click on some different years, which will filter by year. and I just want you to watch as things happen. So if you go to 2019, I'm just gonna co get you to concentrate on this top number.

So this is the story for 2019, 1,155,000 contributions skip to 2020 1,441,000 contributions, 2021, 1,214,000. So that's taken a little bit of a swing south at that point. Skip to 2022. Takes a bit of a swing down at this point, we're down to 1 million and, and 31,000. Now 2023, watch what happens. Starts to go down.

964,000, 20 24, 800, 9,000, 20 25, 590 2000 contributions. And the last 12 months, 486. So compare and contrast, let's go to, let's go to the most optimistic month, which I think, sorry, year, which I think was that 1 20, 21 0.4 million. The last 12 months, 486,000. Now, I'll let you, let you pontificate what that means, but if this data is true, it seems to show a decline in contributions to the project.

And I dunno if anybody's got anything they want to add. I think the bigger interesting thing is the number under that, which is the number of computers. Yeah, if you look at the number of contributors, it's basic. This one here, it's basically half. Yeah. that's interesting. I didn't look at that.

Do you mind if I just spend a moment just looking through that? Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. So directly underneath that number that I was reading out loud is a much smaller, number representing the number of individuals involved. So 200 and 200,000 in 2019, 240,000 in 2020 205,000, twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two, a hundred and seventy six, 7,000 twenty twenty three, a hundred and sixty 6,000, twenty twenty four a hundred and forty 2000 119,000 in 2025.

And in the last 12 months, 102,000. So let's see. Yeah, it's down by roughly 50% from 2022 or 2021. Okay. That is interesting. So there's no surprise that the, the number of contributions are down because it would appear that the number of contributors are down. but the data's there. The reason, oh, I was gonna say, the reason I find that interesting is because that kind of does feed to the narrative of people leaving WordPress, or it could, I'm not, saying it does.

it's one data point. That's all it is. But but it's, it certainly is an interesting number to me.

[00:48:53] Steve Burge: Yeah. If you go to, oh, we have the cat.

[00:48:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there's the cat, there's cat,

Michelle's cat. Let's just spend a moment admiring Mc cat, the joy. This is

[00:49:09] Michelle Frechette: Stella. Her name is easy to pronounce in any language.

[00:49:13] Nathan Wrigley: What's her name? And I was gone for

[00:49:14] Michelle Frechette: a whole Stella.

[00:49:16] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's easy. Yeah. Nice.

[00:49:18] Michelle Frechette: And she she's, she was mad 'cause I was gone for a whole week, but she seems to have forgiven me since I gave her treats this morning. So

[00:49:25] Nathan Wrigley: if I can possibly find it, I'm gonna get a screenshot of when she just turned and showed us her rear end.

Rear end. Yeah. That was great. Cats are very proud of their rear end. Oh, they love put it in your face as often as possible. Sorry, I apologise. Whoever I just interrupted with the cat thing. Steve, was it, you, were talking.

[00:49:44] Steve Burge: So if you go to drupal.org/metrics, they have something similar and their data goes back to all the way back to 2005, I think.

And they break it down in different ways than, the con WordPress contributor dashboard does. But you can tell pretty clearly that the Drupal Project peaked in like 2012. Yeah. And it's been a yeah. A slow and steady decline since then. so I think obviously the solution is never to publish any metrics or statistics.

[00:50:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's right. Unless, you can clearly, yeah. Do you know what though? What's curious is that I can, I dunno if it's just me, but I can really pause that chart. I can take in the information from that really straightforwardly. Whereas when we were back on the WordPress one, let me see if I can find it.

Has it gone? It was this one, clicking through and trying to remember what I just saw, I find that more difficult. But the problem with that is the graph wouldn't look very good. It would definitely be trending south to smaller bars. We've got a few comments coming in about this.

Courtney. first of all, back to the dashboards, Courtney says, colour coding that ship accessible, defaults for the dashboard that we were talking about just a moment ago. Would be a bit of a dream. So that's good. And then back probably now to the, contributor dashboard as opposed to the WordPress dashboard.

Unfortunately, I've not had time to contribute much to the contributes to contributor sustainability efforts. Slightly that, yeah. But I know that was a big thing of yours, wasn't it? It was something you were very, keen on. please don't take this the wrong way. It says Web Squadron, but I see less younger than 30 years attending WordCamp or participating in Contribute Today.

And that makes you wonder about the future contributions. Yeah. I don't think anybody can doubt that at all. Iran, I've been calling you web squash the entire time 'cause it's written in front of me. Imran, I think you're absolutely right. If you go to WordPress events, then the age demographic skews older, not younger.

Although Imran, I had this conversation sitting on a balcony like three days ago looking down on Word Camp Europe, and I was with a friend and we tried to have this conversation, like we said, how many 20 somethings do we think we can see? And then we did 30 somethings and 40 something. And obviously, we were guessing how old people were, but we were actually quite surprised in a good way, how many people in their twenties we thought we saw.

Because I, my assumption was it would've been very few. And I was pretty surprised. Now, I couldn't tell you why they were there. Maybe they were there because they were, compelled to go on behalf of a company or what have you. Not really sure. But, I share your concern, but WordCamp Europe did make me feel a little bit more, sanguine.

Yeah, of course. 2020 was the COVID year. That's a good point. And Laus, I think is the name. Hello. I dunno if we've met before. however, when you are new to the WordPress ecosystem, it's anything but obvious where and how to contribute. Okay, good point. Yeah, if you can't get involved, then that's gonna make it difficult.

Oh gosh. There's quite a few comments, Patricia, in replying to Imran says, oh, like just what I said. I saw new and young faces at Word Camp EU and the WP Credits and Campus Connect initiatives are precisely there for onboarding a new generation. and then Imran comes back with me and other influence did notice the lessening numbers for contributions.

And we do wonder what state WP will be in, in five years time. okay, I'm just raising a few comments. da. The contributed dashboards are constantly being improved and finesse us, added to weighted contributions, especially less visible such as WP WC organisers and so on and so forth.

Okay. Yeah. We literally were up high, so we were looking down in the most literal sense of the word not. That's brilliant. I love that. You should quote that by the way. I, had that exact, I had that exact same thought when he said, oh no. Oh. So there were 4, 3, 4 stories and we were sitting on the top one, and so we could see all the other three beneath us, but, my name is Christina, we have not met before.

Oh. Hello. Nice to meet you, Christina. Stay with us and make more comments. We love it when you do. Okay. Anything else? I've

[00:54:36] Michelle Frechette: als I've often thought about that problem or challenge of how do people learn to contribute? How do you know where to go to do anything other than download? the, when you first land on wordpress.org, and I had the idea to create a website that was like a mall kiosk where it's you are here if you wanna do this, go this way.

If you wanna do this, go this way. Kind. Nice idea. Kinda plan your adventure. Yeah. It was just a lot more than I was able to pull together. So yeah, I let that domain expire.

[00:55:11] Nathan Wrigley: if I go back to, sorry. You go Steve.

[00:55:15] Steve Burge: There's a on the contributor dashboard. Did I notice there's a ladder?

[00:55:20] Nathan Wrigley: There is a ladder.

Let me pop it on the screen quickly. and it's right there, which I

[00:55:25] Steve Burge: is one way to, I'm not sure exactly how they define these tasks, but people can get started by simply posting on the forum and then maybe it, I think this is meant to track What, how many people just enter the ecosystem at a basic level and then move on to more advanced tasks.

contributing, releasing plugins, for example. I think elsewhere there's, on the side, there's some definitions of exactly what they're tracking here.

[00:55:59] Nathan Wrigley: the nice thing about this is at some point in the near future, when this is when the, when the data has been fully explained, but also when there's more data and maybe the dash, the contributed dashboard is more fully fleshed out, by the way, we've got filtering and things on the right hand side.

maybe there'll be some utility in that and it will give us a nice target of initiatives that we need to start creating in order to make the project successful in the future. But I would just like to very quickly go back to, and I can't find it now. Yeah, here we go. Patricia's comment about, WP Credits and Campus Connect initiatives 'cause that, as far as I can see, they are at the min, at the minute, at the most credible way of getting young folk, into, WordPress.

Not only are they combining with real world institutions like, the University of Pisa, for example, but they're also finding homes in places where people already are and putting on events where people can come along and try WordPress out and things like that. just meetup feel to it, if you like, but with, a more educational bent to it.

so yeah, there we go. And then Patricia is back, saying to learn how to start contributing, there was the contributor mentorship programme. We should restart it. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Anything on that, or shall we move on? I think it's time to move on. Yeah, let me just make that comment. Go away. Okay, we're back to the, WordPress, sorry, the repository.

And this is something which has come back after a few years of hiatus. so Kevin o Hashi, I want to say that's how you say it, I could be wrong. had been publishing an annual kind of hosting review. It was called Review Signal, I believe the ben, the hosting benchmark in the WordPress space. My estimation from looking back over the previous years is that it was one of the most, credible ways of finding out whether or not a hosting company, I don't know, met up to the claims that they would have on their homepage, things like that.

And it's had to take a bit of a hiatus because essentially the tooling that, Kevin was using, instead of it being something that he could plunder freely, it then became pay walled. And so the, way that he was using it was probably gonna give him a quarter of a million dollar a year bill. okay.

Yeah, I get it. And Kevin did what all open source folk do. He went away and he built his own version of the same thing, and it's called Orderly Ape and his open source, so you can test it out. And, basically has launched the same survey. The top line items are the pressable and, what was the other one?

Big Scoop seem to do really well, but that, honestly, don't take my word for it, or the repositories word for it. If you were to go to the actual report, so it's wp hosting benchmarks.com, and then you'll be able to go to the latest one, which is the 2026 survey. it's all broken down by firstly WordPress as a whole, and then you can click on the cost of the hosting.

So less than $25, 25 to 50, and various different price points. Then you can look at WooCommerce, where far less companies came in. I think these companies volunteer themselves into this survey, so I don't think he, Kevin goes out and finds them randomly. I think it's more they say they want to be a part of it.

and you can see the ones with a star, seem to do well in some way, half a star, obviously it's going well in some respects, but the full star, so we got, I don't know, what have we got? 34 sp Green geeks, lightning Base, GoDaddy, pressable, WP Buzz, who I confess I've not heard of. and WPX. They all do.

and then if you click on each one of these cards, let's for example, oh, I don't know, go with, I mentioned it a minute ago. Let's go with Pressable. Then you drill down into a, what can only be described as a wealth of data. look, I love what even is that what is that chart? and it goes on and on.

And, Kevin, remarkable, you've obviously addicted to this kinda stuff and I'm glad that you are 'cause somebody, needs to do it. So there you go. Anybody wanna add anything to that?

no, Okay. In which case, that will just say, go say the URL again, wp hosting benchmarks com. go check it out and you can check out Ray's piece about it. Last one from the repository this week, actually, do you know what I'm not sure I'm gonna dwell on this one unless one of you wishes to dwell on it.

It's called Contributors launch, FSE. So full site editing style outreach programme to get real time collaboration ready for WordPress 7.1. I know that in the past, Steve, this has been very much something that you are interested in. so I don't know if this carries any interest for you, this particular piece, but the idea being that in order to get 7.1 fully fitted out with real time collaboration, there's now a, an outreach programme which you can, make yourself available for, in order to help test it out.

Perhaps hosting companies would be the best people or individuals highly interested in it. Steve, yeah, I don't think

[01:01:37] Steve Burge: they have much time to, to get all the hosting companies involved for the 7.0 release and for, for real time collaboration is something that really it can I impact the load on a site.

It needs to be done very carefully. I think this time. They're doing a full testing process with all the hosting partners and trying to, get a lot more real world usage before they consider whether it's ready for 7.1.

[01:02:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And, the, headline on this really, I'll just read the, sort of short excerpt, which Ray has put together, just says, A new outreach programme modelled on the FSE experiment wants early adopters testing, collaborative editing across hosting environments before beta one on the 15th of July.

And so I'm reading from that they want the experimentation to be done by the 15th of July, not they want you to express an interest, in participating by the 15th of July. So again, go and check out Race Peace, if that feels like you, if you wish to be a part of that, you can, you can get involved.

And again, I'll just quickly move on if nobody's got anything to add to that. Okay. I've not, okay. I was just about to say, I haven't seen too many calamities in the WordPress space, but we're gonna feature two of them, this week. I don't, honestly, I don't I never like to call people out for doing things that were obviously a little bit silly.

But I am gonna mention this 'cause I think this was, with hindsight a little bit silly. So if you are one of site ground's users, site Ground is a hosting company. I forget where they're based out of, but I think it might be Serbia, if that's wrong. Apologies. So they've been in business for many, years and slowly but surely gaining a, good reputation, I would say, Think many people have heard of them, and a lot of people seem to have good things to say about them, but a lot of that goodwill drained extremely quickly. So something that was very hard to create goodwill in the hosting space, it turns out, can be decimated in a moment they installed last week and at the AI agent by site ground plugin on over 1 million websites without any kind of consultation.

This piece says, so Caveat mTOR, this is on the WP Mayo website. and when contacted about it, the, defence basically seems to have been something along the lines of, it, it's okay. It didn't do anything. It was preparing for the WordPress 7.1, AI things that are gonna come along. And so we're just getting people familiar with the interface.

That didn't seem to go down too well because people said, that's a bit tone deaf. We don't want people going in and installing things on our website. We've got clients that we now have to explain where this came from. Maybe clients will start using it and misusing it, misunderstanding what it's for and what have you.

And they very quickly gained. look at that chart. it's pretty bad. one five star review. I wonder who did that one by the way. That'd be curious to see. But 35 1 star reviews. I dunno if the situation has changed. I imagine it has since then. But, anyway, they tried to defend themselves and the, author of this article was a pains to point out, good on 'em.

At least they stepped up and didn't just try to ignore the problem. But I think what we've learned from this is don't instal plugins on people's websites unless you get a permission. 'cause it'll be a bit of a PR disaster and it might start to hurt your bottom line because people didn't just seem to equate this with, oh, they've installed a plugin, they equated it with, I am never using SiteGround again.

That's how bad it got. very quickly. So any thoughts on this?

[01:05:54] Michelle Frechette: Reese has a comment that says they did send out an email beforehand, but it was sent mid-afternoon on a Friday in EU time. Oh,

[01:06:02] Nathan Wrigley: interesting. Thank you Reese. Appreciate that. Are you one of their customers? Just out of interest, because the article does make the, so thank you, Reese, that's well pointed out, and I should have said that the article makes the point that SiteGround claimed to have sent out an email and the author of this article made the point that they don't think they got it.

And maybe like you Reese, they just didn't get a chance to open it up. I don't really know, but, if they did Bulgaria, he says, Reese says, thank you. what's your opinion on it though, Reese? I'm curious to know if you are one of their customers, would that be something that you would not, wish for them to have done?

And maybe they could have marketed that through a series of emails with a button saying, here's where to instal it from as opposed to, them, actually just pulling it into your website without, without you getting permission. Elliot joining us. Hello Elliot. Elliot and I hung out at Word Camp Europe.

That was nice. Nice to meet you Elliot. he says get permission, particularly if it's related to ai. Yeah. and then Reese, I presume in the, in reply to me saying, are you a customer? He says, I am for now. Oh, that's mess. I wonder. I still

[01:07:18] Michelle Frechette: have a few sites over there. And I just went through my email, trash because I just delete a lot of things all the time, as we all do.

Probably, I don't see an email from them. It may have gone to spam, in which case I cleared it probably at some point, but, I did not receive an email in my inbox from them about that. Although I do have several emails about other things. Interesting.

[01:07:41] Nathan Wrigley: I think one of the things you have to consider is your demographic here, people.

Instal WordPress as a self-hosted solution because they wanna have control of everything. And so anytime you're reminded that you don't, it doesn't land. true. And I think that's what's happening here Is, is, and then of course you add the AI element into it, which is a, you can probably split it down the middle with people who like pineapple on pizza, and, don't, some people are all for ai, some people aren't.

And so you add that to the mix and it, I think that it probably was not well thought out as far as how they rolled it out. They could have done a better job ahead of time with recognising who their demographic was and Yep. And marketing to that. We're a curious bunch, aren't we? Because if I'm subscribing to, let's say a SaaS platform, let's go with CRM again, 'cause we were talking about that earlier.

If they roll out a new feature and they switch it on, I don't care. that's the deal. I want all the new features, but there is something fairly special about my WordPress website, and I think you summed it up there perfectly, Marc . It's mine. And when you notice, suddenly for a moment, actually, it isn't mine.

Is it? It's not entirely mine. Look, somebody was able to do a thing and it's not mine. it makes, I don't know, there's some intuition which sort of, not sure about that. Iran says he, one of their customers, I'm one of their customers. It didn't bother me hugely as I got an email two weeks ago.

Imran, if you can locate that email, I'm curious to ask to see it. Does that email ask your permission? Or does it just tell you that's what you're gonna, that they're gonna do? And if they just tell you what they're gonna do? Did you get an opt-out option? Or is there a way of saying, no, don't do this for me.

because I think that's where this, the line is drawn here. Reese says, you're not a fan. We've also got clients, and I had a few question. Oh, so you had to actually field client questions about it. That's not great. Is it suddenly wasting your time on something you didn't need to? Didn't need to bother with.

agreed totally with Marc says, Reese, if this was a free product, you can't complain, but I pay 500 pounds per year, with an account with them. if I'm not going over certain limits, leave me be. and then finally, site ground, have a speed security plugin in the repo and and they were opt in for old accounts.

Yeah. Yeah. and Imran says he's deleted the email. Yeah, don't recall it. Asking for permission or giving an opt out. I think that's maybe the bit, isn't it Imran? Maybe that's the bit people are concerned about is that agency left you and you just woke up in the morning and it was there.

Steve, I think you're trying to say something.

[01:10:45] Steve Burge: Yeah. I wonder if there's a through line between the last article on real time collaboration and this site ground issue. And I think the next one, which you have teed up, which is Cadence maybe.

[01:10:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. You got there. Yeah.

[01:11:02] Steve Burge: We're living in a world where I think Automatic is doing, they call it like a radical speed month.

Maybe they just finished. Yep. That people are using ai. Everything is so fast. But what we've seen in all three cases from foresight editing to this site, ground issue to cadence, was they all tried to push it through so fast. Like the cadence thing, just. A lot of the affiliates were complaining. There was no kind of preparation of them.

There was no kind of advanced warning. It just happened and happened overnight. And the site ground users are complaining that it just happened. And, foresight editing really just needed more time to mature and was, there was a rush to get it in the call when it wasn't quite ready. Yeah. But these things take time.

If even if, even if you can do something in a month, doesn't mean you should. That in site grounds, case in retrospect, maybe they should have started rolling it out on an opt-in basis and got some, build up some good reviews in the repository before launching it. And, cadence, said, Hey, build in public, I think is the phrase people have been using for a long time.

yeah. Hey, we have all these brands. This is what we're thinking of doing. it, we can have room speed, but yeah, things just take time to do. And so there's a bit of a through is,

[01:12:36] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Sorry, Steve. I was just gonna say, there is a bit of a through line here, and let me just put a few bits on the screen.

So the first one was obviously that, no, where's it gone? The one that we were just talking about? I can't find it now. You were mentioning it anyway. but now we're onto, we, we've got onto the site ground, installing a thing, which seems to be a bit of a pr, nightmare. But then I'm gonna highlight this one, which is Cadence, which has now become Liquid Web in the most extraordinary fashion.

I, I have yet to see a story like this in the WordPress space. This is self emulation done in real time. I don't really understand what was going, I can only imagine the people who've made these decisions probably are. Attending WordPress events or don't have a history with the WordPress. I could be wrong.

I dunno. I don't really get it. Anyway, the WordPress, brand cadence, has now been hijacked and made into a liquid web product, but it all seems to have been done in a very rushed fashion. there was poor communication. This article, by the way, is on the diy dream site.com, and I believe that the author Katie Boykin is, an employee of Liquid Web, which is no longer, okay.

No longer, right? So maybe, so there was

[01:13:57] Michelle Frechette: massive, there were massive layoffs recently and she decided to leave on her own accord, right? she was in charge, she was the product owner for Right, Cadence.

[01:14:07] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. This is a very thorough, you can see, it really is a long piece about what happened, but it does seem to be from Katie's point of view at least, just one thing after another of missteps and misunderstanding the kind of community and the marketing.

And then finally the pricing about the fact that the pricing seems to have gone through the roof. If you have multiple sites like five, 10 x kind of the pricing. So let's just link these two things together. Over here we had site ground, installing a plugin without really consulting the community or seeming to understand the impact of that.

Over here we have liquid web doing something, which with hindsight probably didn't serve their community all that well. And then over here we've got another one. This is, Marco Almeida calling out Yost for inserting their own. And you can really not really see it. Yost have inserted their own filter inside the double, inside the WordPress, admin, near where you instal plugins so that you can filter for Yoast based things.

And on the surface it seems fairly benign, but he's then made this lovely screenshot of what will happen in two months time if everybody suddenly gets the intuition, oh, we could also insert our own little filter. And you've got awesome motive, gravity form, jet pack, main WP trust path.

This is what it would look like if everybody inserted their own filter. And again, just is this what we want? Is this the sort of way that this, that we're heading? So there's a bit of a line going through these of, companies obviously trying to make a difference, companies trying to be noticed, companies trying to change things up a little bit, but some of it not quite seeming to meet the desires, of the community.

And I don't really have an opinion on too much of it. But anyway, there you go. I've introduced it for your. Your dilatation so that you can, enjoy that. And it does seem that the Yost logo seems to vibrate. Look at that. That's interesting. Okay. any comments on that?

[01:16:24] Michelle Frechette: I was an employee of, stellar WPN Liquid Web for quite a while actually.

and it was one of the first layoffs last year. You might recall the day after I returned from Board Camp Asia. And at that point, I couldn't really say anything. I was, I received, it's been over a year now, so I can say whatever I want, but, because of, severances and things like that anyway.

[01:16:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[01:16:50] Michelle Frechette: I had my own concerns back then because when we first started Stellar WP and we had one marketing group, I was part of that marketing group for all of that we oversaw all of the stellar, each brand had its own marketing person that would contribute, et cetera. And then all of a sudden it was the split and there was this marketing group over these ones and this marketing group over these ones.

And what I felt was a bit of an unhealthy competition to see who could outmarket and do better than the others. Oh, interesting. Instead of trying to really help all, I'll, what do they say, rising tide raises all boats or something like that. Yeah. So instead of that kind of an a, a address for marketing.

When you look now what they've done is they've taken all of the different brands. I think we had 11 brands at one point underneath the Stellar WP Stellar, WP doesn't exist anymore. They've removed it from Liquid Web altogether. And there are now four brands and several of the other brands were rolled into Cadence.

So for example, the solid WP doesn't exist anymore. Their answer to security is part of Cadence now. And so all of those things that you used to see and be able to purchase separately. The other thing they've done is no longer have developer licences or multi-site licences. So multiple li site licences, I should say, as opposed to multi-site.

The, if you look at, give WP for example, it used to be $360, and then there was for, for the, top of the line. And I understand that prices go up and I haven't worked there in a while, but they used to also have a five site developer licence that you could put on five sites. They don't have that anymore.

So now if you want to have five site licences, you have to purchase 5, 390 $9 site licences as opposed to a $560, whatever it was. And, that is now the case with all of the plugins that I've seen under Liquid Web. I do believe, and this is just my own interpretation, that, because LiquidWeb has changed funding sources and therefore some ownerships over the years that they are no longer WordPress focused, that they are only looking at bottom lines.

And in doing so, got rid of a lot of, give, we used to bring in millions of dollars a year, and I don't see how that could happen anymore when Give is no longer offering, agencies multiple licences for, for a larger fee as opposed to having to purchase, each one individually.

And so I wonder what's going to happen. I grieved it. I'm, gonna be honest, like I put my heart and soul into Give For a long time I wrote articles. I was out there, for lack of a better word, shilling, if you will, at Word camps and things like that and trying to demonstrate et cetera.

and I no longer have given on any of my sites, and I have all my sites built in Cadence, and I am slowly moving them all over to Beaver Builder who offered me a licence, which was very gracious of them. And so now I'm going to be switching everything over because I can't trust Cadence because I can't trust Liquid Web any longer.

And I no longer host with them. I, so I'm just,

[01:19:59] Nathan Wrigley: here's a stat to demonstrate what you were talking about. here we go. Under the new pricing structure, each site requires its own licence. The previous Ultimate Plan covered up to 25 sites for $299 a year at the Pro tier Today, 25 sites wait for it, $7,475 per year.

you get a 15% volume discount. That's something, I suppose brings it down to $6,353. the kind of money which we're really not used to talking in the WordPress space. And the kind of money, which I would imagine will never, ever be paid. I could be wrong. Maybe people are just willing to open up their wallets like that, but I have a prediction that kind of money will never get spent on 25 websites for a, collection of plugins.

That just seems like that's not gonna happen.

[01:20:56] Michelle Frechette: Michelle, I think, you could look at all of my public, everything. Over the last 10 years, I have never said anything negative about a company or about a plugin or about anything publicly. I have my own opinions. Of course, this one has pushed me to the point where I felt the need to say something, if that tells you the severity of it.

[01:21:16] Steve Burge: Yeah.

[01:21:16] Michelle Frechette: I'm sorry, Steve, what were you gonna say?

[01:21:18] Steve Burge: Oh, I was gonna say you have a, sorry if it's a weird question, but you have a give tattoo.

[01:21:25] Michelle Frechette: I do actually. I have a give tattoo here on my arm and, yeah, just

[01:21:30] Steve Burge: that you give a crap about this. You really,

[01:21:33] Michelle Frechette: I really do, care about what happens. Product three of us got the give tattoo in Nashville together the first year that we were in Nashville.

And, we did it because being able to work at give changed the three of our lives in such a positive way. And I still see that, right? So working at Give put me into the community where I am now. I put me on the stage where I am today sitting, here in front of all of you. and so I have very deep love for give in my heart, and that's why it just breaks your heart in some ways.

I'm planning to add to this tattoo flowers and things around it so it isn't just give, but it's more about my whole life. I won't cover it because it really does still mean something for me. But it really was sad for me.

[01:22:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So anyway, there we go. So there was a little bit of a through line there of WordPress companies seeming to gain the ire of parts of the community, let's put it that way.

And, and in some cases it's pretty easy to understand why that IA has been gained. just I, because time is not, a

[01:22:39] Michelle Frechette: single comment by the way, not a single comment about this entire conversation.

[01:22:42] Nathan Wrigley: The AI stuff always gets the comments very much, and so does the community stuff, but everybody's staying away from that one.

Yeah. That's interesting. we'll just move on very quickly. Time is short. We had a few articles that I wanted to flesh out a little bit, but we'll just skirt over them if you're interested in a non WordPress site, but a site which sometimes covers WordPress stuff, talking about market share and declining in that market share.

This is an interesting read. It's over on the search engine journal. and they're making the point that the stats for WordPress have been in decline now for six months in a row. And the, author of this Roger, Monty, makes the point that when you've got six, six consecutive months where the same thing happens, then there's something more than a, blip.

There's a bit of a, pattern going on. So you can read and you can see that there's data. You can see the screen certainly worth looking at. next stop. Oh, I wanted to mention this one. I think probably the quickest way for me to do this is just to read it into the record, but the URL for this is the wp community collective.com and it says, the state of the, state of the community survey aims to understand the current perspectives of the people in and around the WordPress Open Source project community.

The survey is open for responses from the 27th of May through to the 28th of June, so full 20 days to fill it out, take the survey below. and it, just to summarise, the state of the community survey is an open survey from the WP Community Collective, and it's really open for anybody who works with, builds on, contributes to or cares about the WordPress open source project.

And, and it's right there. There's like probably 10 minutes work in this. I would've thought by the time that you've filled it out and given it some thought and whatnot. And they're very much keen to to hear your things. Maybe some of the bits that we mentioned so far, would crop up some of the community bits around things like cadence and what have you.

Go and check it out, links in the show notes. As always. It'll be probably in the community section, that one, and then we're running very much low on time, so I'll, drop this one maybe as our last one. If you are interested in the accessibility day coming up in October, it's a way off. I know, but they're, being good custodians of that project and they're now on the lookout, for speakers.

So it's the 7th of October when the actual event takes place, but they're looking for some speakers and there's information here about the kind thing. If you

[01:25:19] Michelle Frechette: scroll down, could you see the deadline?

[01:25:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Where is it? There we go. seventh June 9th. Oh, tomorrow. Wait, did I get this wrong? Sorry. Yeah, I knew it was tight, but I didn't realise it was that tight.

Oh, I know. Tomorrow I bookmarked this about Yeah, I bookmarked this when I was in Poland and I thought, oh, that's quite a while. But no. So you'd have to submit this by tomorrow.

[01:25:43] Michelle Frechette: Tomorrow, yep. The

[01:25:44] Nathan Wrigley: ninth of ju Yeah, tomorrow. There we go.

[01:25:46] Michelle Frechette: Unless they accept it, which I have no idea if they will or not. Yeah,

[01:25:49] Nathan Wrigley: maybe they will.

Maybe they will. But anyway, go and if that's your thing, go and check it out. yeah, I think that's it. There's a couple of pieces that I did want to mention, but we're probably not gonna have time for them. I'll just go through them ever so quick. This is an interesting piece by DRIs, and it seems to reflect what's going on with Automatic and WP Engine.

It seems like a similar story unfolded on the Drupal side with a company, in the well Drupal and WordPress space. And it's interesting. RIS obviously wants people to be nice to one another and, grow the ecosystem, not just their own products and services. And also, speaking of Drupal, a Kismet, which is a longstanding plan, the millions of people I'm sure have got on their WordPress websites, anti-spam plugin by automatic, is now apparently available as a Drupal.

We don't say mod, plugin, we say module. yeah, you can get that over there. And that, as they say, is it, that is everything. I have got time for. Any final comments? No. A lot

[01:26:56] Michelle Frechette: of good stuff today.

[01:26:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Iran said he is got a Oh, he's gone. He's just saying Thanks for the fun podcast. Have a pet Max on me.

I will. Thank you. That's great. I'll do that. But not actually on you as you point out the Ai A that's easy to say. The, that is actually hard to say. The AI angle, that's not easy. should be opt in. So we're talking, we're going back to the plugin here, aren't we? From site ground? if WP sorry. WP seven.

Enable it if you want it with experiments. If you don't want it, don't enable it. And can I

[01:27:26] Michelle Frechette: interrupt and just say, if you're not following Elliot Richmond in place where those videos you should be. He is an amazing videographer and his TikTok channel and his YouTube channel are so well done.

[01:27:40] Nathan Wrigley: And he's very nice man as well.

Yes. And does a cracking pizza. I think he had to do, I could be wrong, Elliot, but I think you had something like 70 to do last night or something, didn't you? It was some bizarre amount. Or maybe that's this coming weekend. Anyway, good luck with that if it hasn't already happened. And then finally, the webinar Thai Beautiful People, it's been a while.

I didn't get to tune into your show, Nathan, but I hope you are good. I am good. Thank you. nice to see you guys. And as we as, the webinar introduces himself, will knock it on the head and say it's time to go. so you'll have to watch it on replay, if that's all right with you. So there is only time for the sort of hand wave of joy.

I'm gonna call it that, the hand wave of joy there. We all are. So quick. Thanks from me, thanks to Michelle. Oh, look, I can't do it. Now that I'm on the other side. I've memorised That's muscle memory only. I can't do it. There's Michelle there. I'm, there's Marc , there's Steve. Okay. I can lock that bit in.

That's fine. We will be back next week. We'll publish this tomorrow, as a podcast episode, but we'll be back next week. Join us then. But thank you, Steve. Thank you, Michelle. Thank you, Marc . Appreciate it. We'll see you next week. Thank you. Take care. Bye-bye. Bye.