This Week in WordPress #376

Nathan Wrigley: It's time for This Week in WordPress, episode number 376 entitled, you've got to enjoy it. It was recorded on Monday the 15th of June, 2026. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I'm joined by Mark Westguard, by Marc Benzakein, that's always interesting when there's two people with the same name and also by Mark Nash. No, Tim Nash.

We talk about WordPress things because it's a WordPress podcast, but you know what? We get derailed quite a lot.

We spent quite a little bit of time at the beginning talking about grill brushes of all things. And then we spend a lot of time talking about why the latest models in the AI space are being banned by the US government. Lots of different reasons for that, but certainly a lot to talk about.

Then we get into a whole thing about social media and how harmful it is, and you'll notice we haven't touched WordPress at all yet, and then we do finally move into WordPress and we talk about the release of WordPress seven and the fact that we need helpers for that.

We talk about the CERN website and the fact that that has now moved over to WordPress from Drupal, and how complicated that is.

Did you know that there was a WordPress website called Mercantile where you can buy all of the swag? I'm sure you didn't, but now you do, and they've had a redesign, which you probably wouldn't have noticed anyway.

Five for the Future is up for debate. How on earth can we measure the things that people are doing in the WordPress space?

And then we talk about WordPress events, whether they should be serious or a lot more fun. There are two articles that have been produced this week, which take different positions on that.

And then a whole lot more as well, and it's all coming up next on This Week in WordPress.

Weird. That was really weird. Sometimes that music takes an absolute age, like two minutes is what it is and it really feels like it takes 10. I swear to God that was like eight seconds. That was like profoundly weird how time shifted for me in that two minutes. That's really odd. You

Mark Westguard: just blacked out.

Nathan Wrigley: No, have you ever had that? When you do the same, let's say you do the same journey to the supermarket or something like that, and then sometimes you'll just arrive and you'll think how, what, occurred between me getting in the car and getting here? No, clearly I'm the only one. You

Mark Westguard: fell asleep at the wheel.

I

Nathan Wrigley: fell asleep. anyway, this is off to a good start. It's this week in WordPress number 3 76. The reason I say that is 'cause normally I go off and do a couple of other things just to make sure the show's working and what have you. And, I come back and there's like a whole million jingle left. That time I got back and there was like four seconds left.

So it was all very strange. number 376 we're here to talk about WordPress stuff and no doubt some other stuff as well. we might even talk about brushes later. hold tight ladies and gentlemen. It doesn't get better than that, but in order for this stupidity to carry on for 90 minutes, I have to be joined by some other people.

Tim Nash: you don't

Nathan Wrigley: Okay, Could be stupid by yourself. Yeah. And on that, look, Okay. Fine. It's just me. It's just gonna be me. Let everybody thinks that's hysterically funny. I want all of the guests to be here. So anyway, the idea is to talk about WordPress stuff with a bit of humour and lightheartedness thrown in.

I think this is a good panel for lightheartedness because we've been on the call for about 10 minutes already in the background and we've had multiple giggles and, and I've let out a little bit of liquid. Let's just put it that way. I'll just let that sink in and then we'll move on. Okay. So who's joining me today?

you can see going around the screen. We have Mark Benzakein again. We've got Tim Nash and we've also got Mark with a K from WS form. Yeah, we are gonna have problems this week 'cause we've got two marks. How are we gonna solve it? What are we gonna do? Just

Mark Westguard: mark. Mark With a k. Mark. With a c.

Nathan Wrigley: Really? Okay. Or you could read those bios.

Yeah. Or what about Uriel and.

Marc Benzakein: Tim. Tim, obviously read my bio.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Okay. In which case, let's get to the bios. We'll solve that problem as we come to a Yeah. Mark's bio is, I've only just looked, it's a full on pass paragraph. It's like a small book, in which case we'll come to Mark with a K No, mark with a C at the end.

Let's do Mark West Guard first. Mark is the founder of the WordPress form plugin. Ws form. is that it? That's it. Anything else?

Mark Westguard: And I appreciate you saying that slowly. I was,

Nathan Wrigley: he's also jolly good company. If you go to a word camp, seek him out. I often do. This time we spent quite a lot of time doing all sorts of fun things, didn't we? We did indeed. I expect our most, enjoyable thing was mocking the wax museum in, crap. Which is what a place entertaining.

Yeah,

Mark Westguard: what a place. If you go to crack off, please go to the WEX Museum. It is entertainment on another level.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it really is. It's brilliance. Okay. And then Tim Nash is also joining us, and Tim's bio says, Tim does stuff with WordPress on the internet. Sometimes he scares people. That's nice and simple too.

Tim Nash: I saw Marks and I went, oh, we're going with

Mark Westguard: simple. Are we?

Nathan Wrigley: Oh, you

Tim Nash: mean Mark. I'm put in mine and then here comes a mark.

Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

Marc Benzakein: I, just wanna say there's an interesting thing that, that, Gina, my girlfriend taught me about chat. GPT. If you put in, add meat to like something, it adds meat to something and I write this big.

Yeah. okay.

Nathan Wrigley: So here we go. So this is the chat GPT iced version. I'm gonna read it very, quickly, because otherwise we'll be here for quite a long time. So here we go. Markman again, often referred to as Mark. Number two on this podcast is in the 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 long time WordPress Professional Mark is passionate about collaboration, community building, and finding practical ways for businesses to benefit from open source technology while maintaining open ownership and control of their website. So over the past couple of weeks and continuing over, the next several main, WP has been rolling out new third party integrations and add-ons through its partnership programme, helping users connect more, more of the tools they already rely on their main WP dashboards.

If you're building something in the WordPress space and you're curious about potential collaboration opportunities, mark is always happy to have a conversation. It can be reached through Maine. Wp, he's also a long time fan of the band Roche, and would like to offer congratulations on the Smashing Smashingly successful start to their new tour, providing that there's still plenty of life left to be lived, even for those of us older folks.

How did I do?

Tim Nash: However, you need to apologise to all of those who are listening on two times speed in the playback.

Marc Benzakein: yes. Yeah. Brutal. Even better.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

Marc Benzakein: But here's the thing, here's the thing I just learned about the Clangers and I've been like going on this deep dive about, it's like now I wish I had written something in my bio about the Klans, because this is must see TV right here.

Nathan Wrigley: So if you are, not based in the uk prior to the conversation, prior to me hitting record, we had a conversation and it ended up being about kids TV in the uk. we mentioned this thing called the Clangers Go, and you YouTube it, the Clangers. But seriously take some I don't know, some barbiturates before you do, because

Tim Nash: does not,

Nathan Wrigley: we need you to do

Tim Nash: some

Nathan Wrigley: more legal teas and tea condone the use of barbiturate.

Nobody said that, but only if

Tim Nash: they've been prescribed to you by a doctor.

Nathan Wrigley: That's right, yes. Okay.

Tim Nash: Also, if

Nathan Wrigley: you go to the doctors

Tim Nash: and say, I'm about toggs, is that what they're going to prescribe? You

Nathan Wrigley: can. Can I just say this show's never gonna finish, is it? We'll never get, it's never the list of things that we're supposed to do.

I'm not sure it's ever gonna start. Yeah, it's great. It's brilliant. So the normal, housekeeping stuff I'm gonna do, and say the following. If you are over on any of the YouTube or anything like that's great. But the easiest place to catch what we're doing is wp builds.com/subscribe.

There we go, wp builds.com/subscribe. you can go there and, find out what we're doing, and sign up to our email list and all of that kind of stuff. Probably the quickest way to do that kind of stuff is just to go to this page, wp builds.com, stick your email address into this form field and click subscribe.

And then it will be WS form, which will submit that to me and get you onto our email list. That's rather nice feature that they offer. what have we done this week? We chatted this week to Alex Standiford. Oh no, I need to refresh that. That hasn't been refreshed in a while. There we go. Miriam Schwab is who we talked to most recently.

Alex was the week before that, and we were talking about, Angie ai, which is, no, it's not really new anymore, but it's a feature if you're an elemental user or not an elemental user, which you can use to help assist with your WordPress website. So go and check that out and then derailing the show utterly and completely.

this has got nothing to do with WordPress, but I just found it hysterically funny. Just before Mark, joined the show. He sent me this picture, which I just thought was brilliant and worthy of showing on any podcast frankly. for those of you that can't, for those of you that can't see it, mark woke up this morning to this Get compensation for your injury Grill brush injury.

Oh. Have you ever had a grill brush injury panel? No, I don't.

Marc Benzakein: Oh, yes. Many times I think I have,

Mark Westguard: but I never

Marc Benzakein: thought to

Mark Westguard: sue anybody. No. Yeah. Who would you sue? My own silly thought.

Nathan Wrigley: Who would?

Marc Benzakein: grilling is generally associated with real men, right? Oh, so real men are gonna complain about a grill brush injury that just is a big contradiction right there, I think.

Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. I can

Tim Nash: confess. Gotta ask. How did you get targeted with it? maybe they just decided that Mark is a real man as you put it.

Marc Benzakein: I did put it in quotes by the way. There were air quotes for those of you who are not watching the video.

Nathan Wrigley: It's, reason, I have no idea. The reason he's been targeted was because of his previous lawsuit with a grill brush.

I must

Mark Westguard: just be suing everybody.

Nathan Wrigley: It's just, anyway, I just thought that was just, I dunno why I thought that was as funny as it was, but I thought it was funny.

That's

Mark Westguard: why

Nathan Wrigley: I sent

Mark Westguard: it to you. 'cause I thought

Nathan Wrigley: it was funny. Thank you. Yeah, I've air brushed, see what I did there? The, the name of the companies out, but whoever they are, oh yeah, good.

Please, stop with this silliness and nobody needs this. Will you say that? But

Tim Nash: there is somebody out there who's going. My grill brush and my injury and yeah.

Mark Westguard: But

Tim Nash: who could, who will, represent me?

Nathan Wrigley: Who, but how could you, possibly be injured by a grill brush unless you did it to yourself?

So it's a bit like suing yourself. 'cause you've, I don't know, you woke up in the morning with a dead arm and sued your own face. Don't have a good

Mark Westguard: enough

Marc Benzakein: imagination. this is the same, this is the same law firm, probably the same law firm that like sued McDonald's for the person who burned themselves with coffee.

Nathan Wrigley: oh gosh. yeah. That was high quality, wasn't it? I oddly I was in America when that happened. And I remember even the American media thought that was a curious example of the log gone a bit bizarre. And I think it was somebody who'd put the, bought a coffee, take it. Yeah. And put it in

Marc Benzakein: their lap.

Yeah.

Nathan Wrigley: Put it in their lap and then break or something, and squeezed the legs together and out pop the hot liquid. And so now, ever since then, even in the uk, the cops now all need to say, contains hot liquid. It is yeah. Really? It's a coffee. Okay. It's a coffee. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Okay.

Let us move on. So the next thing that we do on the show is we, we allow the guests to bring one or two of their bits and pieces that they wish to mention during the last week. And, Tim has brought three. so Tim, I'm gonna start us off with some AI news. I actually, I don't fully understand what this is.

I just saw that the, I guess it's the US government have banned certain brand new models. can you tell us why?

Tim Nash: I, if I that, let's do that question first. Let's go with the more simpler one of what's happened and then we can

Nathan Wrigley: Okay. What, okay. let me just replay that. Tim, can you tell us what's happened with this story without, is that?

Tim Nash: once upon a time there was a, AI company who put out a vast amount of marketing about their shiny new phos models, which were so powerful and so scary. They weren't going to launch them to the world. Unfortunately, they discovered that you don't make money on things that you don't launch to the world.

So they released Fable, which was like supposedly mythos, but with all the scary bits guard railed away. So you couldn't test them to see if it really was as scary as they thought it was. They launched it lots of hype. Most people said, wow, this is quite a good AI model on par with certainly better than quite a lot of the, philanthropic models, possibly better than the open AI models, certainly better than the general other model that rush up behind those two, like the heavyweights in many ways launches a after and after a couple of days of launching lots of people playing with it, all of a sudden and fro make a statement saying, we are pulling Fable five and mythos for everybody.

The, and then it, they, as part of that, the US government has put an export control ban on it. So basically the US government says, no non-US citizen can use this model that they've, they're banning it from being exported. IE used anywhere. Now the problem with that is that, most people who are working on this model are not US citizens.

Oh, vast majority of Philanthropics own staff are not US citizens.

Nathan Wrigley: So they just have to shut their eyes.

Tim Nash: whilst

Nathan Wrigley: working

Tim Nash: on it, yeah. So the result was they had to shut this down. Why is this interesting? this is the first time we've seen a, AI model being banned effectively for, to stop it being used by, supposedly the US' adversary adversaries.

and it was a blanket ban. It. you could argue that was because the, it was deemed that it, the reason for it was that it was somehow would allow you to create back doors and to do nasty things, and it's really bad for hacking. What it actually appeared to be is that, somebody asked it to do a code review and it did work.

Oh. Which every other model on the planet pretty much can do to vary degrees. But it was very interesting that this morning when I, went into, open AI's codex and typed in at Cyber to get my, get the, official plugin to do security review. It wasn't there this morning. I can't imagine why that was.

huh. We are in a position now where the US government has blocked this. Obviously Anthropic launched it, people bought plans to use it. They cannot use it, so they, they are stuck. You've got this group of where it's is this hubris, was this a, AI company or a hitting its own marketing hype and trying to pump it, pump the stock up?

Was this a really a marketing campaign that backfired? Was this a grudge match by the US government? Who, let's face it, is it we now at the moment for being the most just fair and impartial government in the world and does have a habit of, if it doesn't like you, tries to sue you and has found a new mechanism to maybe beat somebody with a stick

Marc Benzakein: Grail brushes are next, by the way, by

Tim Nash: the US

Marc Benzakein: government.

Tim Nash: Yeah. Oh yeah. you could be cynical and I say that the, allegedly the Trump family have shares in open AI and they don't in anthropic. That's one take. But the big problem here is, so there's like the problem, which is that these models are being banned, effectively being banned. They are technically under export control, but as IRO can't use it themselves, they can't exactly update it or manage it.

So they basically blanketly said, no. But weirdly, this is probably the best thing to happen potentially to AI models because all of a sudden, every company on the planet woke up this morning and went, huh? What happens when our model gets banned? What happens when the company we rely on gets banned? 'cause OpenAI might be the favour of the month for the US government at the moment.

These wax and wane over the time. We've seen it all the time that companies go in and out of favour. So what happens when their models get backed? All of a sudden those open source models, which are only a couple of tiers behind.

Nathan Wrigley: Oh, interesting.

Tim Nash: Suddenly we're looking at them and going, yeah, maybe, so our own sovereignty is important for countries like the UK where we have been sitting on the fence about data, AI sovereignty, and whether we should be man running our own large language models.

In turn, we, it turns out we actually do, but they just, nobody pays attention to them. But maybe that's something that individual countries should be thinking about. Certainly a lot more companies are gonna be going, actually we want to use these open source models. we're willing to put the hardware, so I would not be surprised if any, if anybody was buying, planning on buying a gaming PC or a graphics card, the prices were just dipping down.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

Tim Nash: They ain't dipping down no more. We're gonna just see, I suspect we're gonna see a massive spike in the hardware, costs, but yeah, it's, a real mess. That is one that could have been solved easily. But the really strange thing about this is that the per the company that supposedly reported it, 'cause Robic said basically a third party company had reported them.

The third party company was not open AI, as everybody automatically assumed it was Amazon.

Marc Benzakein: That's

Tim Nash: right. Was Anthropics biggest customer and has a large stake in anthropic. So it might have actually genuinely been a, that the person decided it really was a national security issue and took it forward.

Nathan Wrigley: So we don't have any intel in there. There isn't like a smoking gone, which is okay. This is the thing which stepped over some boundary that had never been like a Rubicon. This, the AI did something genuinely surprising and new and potentially harmful. We don't appear to have, as far

Tim Nash: as we know, no.

Nathan Wrigley: Okay. a comment came in from Wiki design, thank you, which said, this is all starting to sound like Mark a marketing campaign and stock manipulation. Nothing more. So you made that point. Okay. That's really interesting. and honestly, I haven't made the connection with the open source models and I wonder if that will now force people to, realise maybe that's somewhere they need to be.

that's really interesting.

Tim Nash: the downside to that is, of course the open source models in many ways need the frontier models. A, the, these closed source big ones, to use, not least if you are using accessible ones, which are obviously trading off the bigger source models, whether they're meant to or not.

Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

Tim Nash: So we are in a really weird scenario, but, There was an awful lot of hyping up of mythos,

Nathan Wrigley: okay.

Tim Nash: And tropic put this on a pedestal and somebody took a swipe at it. I, it's interesting to see the ramifications of that. I don't think anybody necessarily thought that this would be the ramification.

I think that what everybody expected was it to be knocked off the pedestal with people saying, yeah, it's not as good as it really is. It's bunch of marketing hype. And the weird thing I What those

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

Tim Nash: go ahead. Sorry. They've got the best marketing campaign ever because they've been banned by the US government.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I was just about to say, in the absence of an, actually a seismic leap in technology, this is probably the most effective way, if you wanna look at it from a conspiratorial point of view, this is a very effective way to get eyeballs, isn't it? Yeah,

Mark Westguard: it's So

Nathan Wrigley: somebody

Tim Nash: doing an advert from showing an advert from the, late nineties, early two thousands when, apple and released the, G four and it was subject to an export control briefly, and Apple turned that into the main ad that they used.

Nathan Wrigley: That's so good.

Tim Nash: We can't so, powerful it to be controlled.

Nathan Wrigley: That's right. Oh,

Tim Nash: I feel like Andro is gonna be doing this.

Nathan Wrigley: Maybe. Yeah. that's certainly an interesting story. So it is on the Anthropic, I'm guessing blog. It was, three days ago that this was announced. So we'll have, see what's going on. It is on

Tim Nash: every news website you will find.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. it's hot news, isn't it? Yeah. Let's, let's, see how that story develops. That's interesting. Thank you. So that was Tim's first piece and then there was, some, I've got another piece which kind of maps to this. So we'll do your piece and then we'll do my piece. 'cause curiously, they're both from The Guardian.

So this is UK News, social media if you like. Do you wanna just paraphrase this one quickly?

Tim Nash: Yeah. so this second one is breaking news, 'cause we went into breaking news in on a weekly show.

Nathan Wrigley: Thank

Tim Nash: you. But this is January breaking news. It only happened a few hours ago. and that is that social media firms are getting upset because our prime minister went out onto the world stage and said that we're gonna ban social media for under sixteens in a Australian Plus solution.

Because,

Nathan Wrigley: oh, it, oh,

Tim Nash: it's Australian, the Australians, and went,

Nathan Wrigley: yeah,

Tim Nash: no, we are Australian Plus.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Does that mean that when we don't win the ashes, we can at least say this. that's,

Tim Nash: yeah. You upstart colony. This is our Plus on

Nathan Wrigley: it. Yeah.

Tim Nash: But it, so the pa the basic premise is that somehow we are going to ban under sixteens from using harmful social media.

It is a typical politician's plan. It's words have been said, no of thought of them, have no real meaning. Most of them have no direction and the it almost certainly relies on technology that does not yet currently exist.

Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So brilliant. Okay. But the idea is solid

Tim Nash: pretty much where we normally go with these sort.

yeah. Whenever you legislate technology, if you are legislating technology. For a given moment. Almost certainly that moment has already passed. And this is a good example of this. You know

Nathan Wrigley: what's curious about this is if I was 13 years old or 14 years old and I was getting into this already deeply immersed in it, I would be so annoyed about this, but my coly 50 plus year old self is saying, yeah, I, this all adds off.

Tim Nash: see, I think I fully support this as long as we also ban over forties on Twitter.

Nathan Wrigley: Okay. okay, let's do it.

Tim Nash: I feel like if we just that, or if we could just ban over forties from social media and, sixteens, that seems like a good, happy medium you're allowed to have. It is

Nathan Wrigley: someone

Tim Nash: who is over 40.

Nathan Wrigley: There a short window of 24 years to be on social media. Yeah. And then yeah, you get this apocalyptic moment on your 39th birthday, the clock starts ticking. You've got 365 days of social media left. No, I'm with you. The next step

Marc Benzakein: is Logan's run. So we're all

Nathan Wrigley: there.

Marc Benzakein: I was, just gonna bring up Logan's run and I was like, does anybody even remember that?

Nathan Wrigley: He does,

Marc Benzakein: apparently.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. okay. Let's see how that goes. It'll be interesting to see how they managed to gate keep that and how they managed to stop the social media company circumventing what will obviously be a tricky moment when they beco. presumably the only way that you can do it is to enforce some sort of, recognition of government based ID to prove that you are of a certain age.

Tim Nash: Do, do not remember when we decided we were gonna ban porn and how we solve that solution, which was to go,

Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Cookies.

Tim Nash: Hey, let's pay some companies to hoard the data and then wonder why. That's right. The data breaches.

Nathan Wrigley: that's right. Yeah. And the claim that they, I'm taking a picture of your face, but we're not gonna use your picture of your face or keep in any way the picture of your face.

Yeah. But we're gonna take a picture of your face. Yeah.

Mark Westguard: VPNs became very popular

Nathan Wrigley: after Thatn.

Tim Nash: VPNs will continue to be popular.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

Tim Nash: The social media companies are understandably going, what now? I have a little bit of sympathy. I thought, YouTube, Google, but YouTube had adverts plastered all around Westminster, so around, near the government buildings in London that just showed you how to use your parental controls on YouTube.

Nathan Wrigley: Oh, wow.

Tim Nash: Which I thought was a very carefully and clever response to this. It is look, you are legislating for something that you don't really have you, we already have controls in place to do some of this.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Nash: so it is a hard one to crack though, and I've, whenever we get these sort of stories, it is always about think of the children and it's yeah.

I'm not sure this is true. I love the idea of we are thinking of the children, but are we really going to solve it?

Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I'm sure it's framed around like the children are the framing of it, aren't they? But there's probably a more, a wider, more I don't know, systemic problem, and I'll just put this one up.

So this isn't Tim's piece, but it's, again, it's in The Guardian, coincidentally, which by the way, if you don't know, is a fairly left-leaning publication in the uk. So that would maybe explain why it's raising these things. some, I'm gonna say the government, I, will prove to be wrong, I'm sure, but the UK have decided that they're gonna invest in, some research to see if exposure to things like TikTok or fast-paced content, is in fact creating a different sort of structure to the brain.

so let's say for example that you are my age, we, that's how we got onto the whole Clangers and the BBC TV programmes that were very slow when we were children. Television was, I'm guessing intentionally, perhaps not intentionally, but it was very slow paced. A children's programme had this feel of something at a quarter of the pace of an adult programme.

there was no flashing lights or anything like that, whether that was deliberate or, otherwise, I don't know. But I was brought up in an era where the television programmes for children were very, young. And now all those you like on TikTok and YouTube, so the government are gonna carry out some research with some fairly credible scientists, including this lady with a, a helmet that looks like she's come out of the film alien.

Mark Westguard: She's now a child.

Nathan Wrigley: yeah. No, she, no, that's right. I dunno what like these researchers are. I don't dunno what they, that's

Tim Nash: what happens when you have to watch

Nathan Wrigley: children tv. Yeah, this old age occurs very quickly. No, I presume she's the control. she is the UK control lady. She's everything that's not, anyway, so they're gonna carry out this research, and see if there is a, there if that the brain develops in a different way.

I'm fairly sure that if I watch fast-paced stuff, then I've definitely got a different approach to the next few hours, so there is some difference that occurs in my brain. whether or not that means that children are being wired differently. I don't quite know, but there's a few comments about this.

First one, web Squadrant. Hello. Hi there. Imran. I suspect that they're trying to force apps or something to, oh, they're going to try and force apps on the phones to be blocked. so I presume you mean by that things like getting the platforms like Apple and Google to block it as opposed to each app having to govern on its own.

Yeah, that'd be interesting.

Mark Westguard: I already, do that with my children. Do you? The thing is, I stop them from using Snapchat. Snapchat is the biggest waste of time. I'll tell you a quick thing about Snapchat. I found my children taking photographs of the ceiling and, posting it to Snapchat and then putting an s on it because that meant streak.

'cause you have to keep posting on Snapchat to get what's called a streak, right? A streak. Literally just pointing at the ceiling, taking a photo. And I was like, that's getting banned. And the kick kickback now you, it obviously the kickback from it was quite incredible.

Nathan Wrigley: I don't know. I think my ceiling's pretty cool.

It's true. You lots of pictures of my ceiling. it's pretty

Tim Nash: good. what is coming from that is that the, both Apple and Google via Android, and this has even turned up in Linux, circles recently, is age verification on the device and on the, at the operating system level is something that is being pushed for by multiple countries.

So actually,

Nathan Wrigley: okay,

Tim Nash: it is possibly the right route because you are verifying the device that you are on at that given moment. Not necessarily some Id you handed over six months ago. Apple claim that they can tell the age of somebody from a photo quite, very quickly and easily.

Nathan Wrigley: That's rubbish

Tim Nash: biometrics associated with that.

They're probably that rubish.

Nathan Wrigley: look at me. I look like 26 and I'm not 26. I'm not even 26. Yeah. 20. Thanks, mark. No, that's just garbage though, isn't it? The idea that a photo can d like obviously it can tell broad Swayze he's 50, she's probably in her thirties, but when you've got that like gap where being, being 16 and a half and being 15 and a half is the crucial difference.

Tim Nash: that's when you get your look 25 policy coming in.

Nathan Wrigley: That's right. You're just not allowed to buy your boots anymore, Nathan.

yeah. but any, anyway, I think all of this is absolutely fascinating and I think maybe we've lurched a lot in the wrong direction and so we're just trying to now figure out ways to, lift the, ladder final

Marc Benzakein: figure.

But the thing is trying to

Nathan Wrigley: out let's

Marc Benzakein: mark kids trying to outsmart kids is like an, these guys, they go to school every day and they were the original. we, when we were kids, things went viral before things went viral. one kid figures out how to do something and every kid in the whole school is gonna know by the end of the day.

Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

Marc Benzakein: So I don't, there's, there's, always a workaround for everything. I was just talking to a guy the other day and he asked about, Hey, can we put this thing into this project that we wanna do, and blah, blah, blah. And I said, sure. And that'll get rid of the low hanging fruit, but if anybody wants to know how to do something or they want to work around something, they're gonna figure it out.

Mark Westguard: Yeah.

Marc Benzakein: and then all they have to do is go to school. ki kids talk. It's Hey, look what I, they wanna brag about what they figured out.

Mark Westguard: Yeah.

Marc Benzakein: and before you to know. I can tell. Yeah, I can tell you that. Like having a house, full of eight kids. I had one kid who came to live with us for, unfortunately it was only two weeks because he caused issues that we couldn't overcome.

But that kid hacked into my wifi 18 different ways within the first 24 hours. And I had it secure, I thought, and one time, 18 different

Tim Nash: ways argues differently. You found the reset button.

Marc Benzakein: Okay. I'm exaggerating with the 18 different ways, but one time I couldn't figure out how he did it. The other times I was like, okay, I can see what he did here.

And I, and here's the thing. as a guy who's in technology, I'm like, half the time I'm like wanting to yell at him. And then the other half of me is wow, this, you are so smart. And it's I wanna praise him for being so smart.

Nathan Wrigley: That's right. Yeah.

Marc Benzakein: And it's, and then, I think this is where the phrase, why can't you use those powers for good comes in.

But the thing is, if your prefrontal cortex is not developed until you're 25, but you have the ability to do these highly critical thinking, problem solving skills before then, this is what you're gonna end up with. and I don't know how to work around that, honestly. No. Other than, teach your kids, it all boils well, they take a picture of their face.

It all boils down to the original. Just teach your kids. and hope that when they go through that, their teenage years and do all the things that you know that they're doing, but you don't want them to do. they're gonna do that. They just come out of the other end of the tunnel, fairly unscathed.

And then pay for the therapy to make up for the rest of it.

Nathan Wrigley: I, I read a piece again, I believe it was in The Guardian, caviar, mTOR, the, and it was a like a month in on the Australian regime when they'd obviously enforced it and they went round a bunch of people and asked the kids how's it been?

And I think in many cases it was like, oh yeah, it was really, it has been really weird. But also I think there was a recognition that the, people who they were questioning had found a significant proportion of free time available to them, which they really weren't aware was available to them, which was curious as well.

they were getting up to curious and interesting things that maybe they hadn't in the past. 'cause so much time was spent, doomed.

Tim Nash: The way you're saying that is slightly cryptic and I'm like, does he mean the birth rate in Australia is increasing? 'cause that's a very negative thing, potentially.

Nathan Wrigley: no. Oh no. Yeah. Not those kind of things. going out and playing baseball or something. oh yeah. So yeah. Yeah. Not the other. Can

Tim Nash: I loop it back to WordPress very quickly, just emphasis slightly, which is there is no definition of social media.

Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah, that's true.

Tim Nash: And in Australia they, they've been, they've defined social media very tightly and it's been, and it's really a certain company and certain platform ban rather than necessarily

Okay. A blanket ban on social media. If you try to define social media i'd, I think you would struggle not to include blogs. Oh. I think you'd struggle to not include

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

Tim Nash: Any commenting system that allowed You to comment, especially one that was distributed in any way.

Nathan Wrigley: also, it's the retention of that data, isn't it?

It's like, where does it sit and who governs it? And I would if legislation, which I don't know, which meant that I was responsible for the commentary inside a database on a WordPress site, and it's open to the public. gosh, you're gonna,

Tim Nash: let's take something. if you were to argue that Tumblr was social media, which I think a lot of people would go, what's Tumblr?

But those of them who do remember what Tumblr was

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

Tim Nash: And how much it cost to buy it. they would, you, I think most people would say that social media, but ultimately it was bought on the premise. It's just microblogging.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Nash: this is the sort of laws that will actually come to play in our play area quite quickly.

Yeah. And you can start to expect a lot more questioning on Do you want, I don't think very many sites really act as blogs these days. And most of the people who, are listed to the show, they might have a personal blog, but actually they're, not. If you are working inside WordPress, it's unlikely that you work on blogs, you work on larger things.

Yeah. But that even from a content perspective, from your content manager who writes blog posts for a corporate website, if it has a comment section, you might suddenly need to age verify everybody who comes to your website.

Nathan Wrigley: That's a

Tim Nash: good point. That's quite a crazy step. But it could be one, and if somebody, and this comes back to when you start legislating technology, you ha it's a very slippery slope as to what do you include in and what do you not include.

Nathan Wrigley: What's curious about all of these arguments though, when people talk about regulating technology is. There, there's never a recognition of how much we've allowed these platforms to get away with because we didn't know it was gonna work out this way. There's nev, there's always a kind of like looking over our shoulder and saying, oh, but we can't undo that thing.

And, this affects this human right and what have you, but at the same time, there's gotta be a recognition that some of this stuff is genuinely harmful, I don't want a 7-year-old in any way to be able to view certain types of content online. I genuinely don't care about the rights of the tech company in that regard.

In a broader debate. I just don't want that 7-year-old to be able to access that content. And unfortunately, it's hitting a ha like a walnut with a big hammer. There isn't fine grained control of this stuff is there. And but yet the tech companies are able to come and claim freedom of speech and all of these things, because 20 years have passed and we never spoke up.

'cause we all thought for the longest period of time that social media was gonna be the best thing that ever happened. In

Tim Nash: many ways, we're probably quite lucky that the government didn't ever discover PBS boards back in the eighties. Otherwise would've all been screened, would never have existed.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's true.

So just a couple of comments on this. web Squadron saying he thinks it's a good idea, Reese, hello Reese is saying, we've got a, there's an easy way to solve this. don't ban TikTok from the sixteens. Just force every 40, 40-year-old to post content to it every day. Watch the under sixteens, stop using it.

Mark Westguard: That's what happened with Facebook, right? Facebook has, yeah.

Marc Benzakein: that's

Mark Westguard: young audience because they just don't wanna be in that place.

Tim Nash: and WordPress for that matter, what's happened though is you've just found it even worse things. So if you drive them away from, and this is it, if you drive people away, they go somewhere else.

Mark Westguard: That's what's gonna happen. if they block Facebook and Snapchat and everything else, the kids will just go somewhere else.

Marc Benzakein: There's always one more out there. There's always one more social media

Tim Nash: platform out there. What was the Chinese one that did a rounds a few years ago that was like, read something that briefly popped up?

Was a, I dunno, scared America for a while and then it disappeared.

Nathan Wrigley: no, I'm not,

Tim Nash: I vaguely remember that. Addictive.

Marc Benzakein: Yeah.

Nathan Wrigley: Red.

Tim Nash: Yeah,

Nathan Wrigley: I know. No,

Tim Nash: it'll come to me in the middle of the night as these things often do.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. when you doom scrolling,

Marc Benzakein: my 16-year-old has banned me from TikTok, so That's true.

Oh,

Tim Nash: good on

Marc Benzakein: the

Tim Nash: 16-year-old.

Marc Benzakein: Yeah. She banned me from TikTok. She says, dad, and I'm like, I'm gonna post all the cringe worthy stuff I possibly can on TikTok and, and so this is a, this is actually a good plan. Forget about, let, us take control and just anytime the kids find something that's, cool.

All we have to do is go in and make the most cringeworthy stuff and say, look, what? I force them to

Nathan Wrigley: watch it.

Marc Benzakein: yeah. Force them to watch. Or

Tim Nash: we just scroll up a little bit, Nathan,

Nathan Wrigley: on this one.

Tim Nash: We issue out those hat those Yeah, you've

Nathan Wrigley: gotta wear

Tim Nash: that every 16-year-old and tell

Nathan Wrigley: them

Tim Nash: it's fine, but we're monitoring you.

Nathan Wrigley: That's right.

Mark Westguard: You the only input device you're allowed.

Nathan Wrigley: yeah. if you use it more touch, it's fine. You can use it as much as you like, but you have to wear that hat during the time that you're using it. They have to take it wherever you are. That's a great idea. Yeah. Let's humiliate everybody.

thank you to those of you that have commented. Appreciate it. So James, hello. And Elliot. Hello. And Marcus Spin. Hello. I'm just gonna move on very quickly, And then, this one, this isn't very much, we're back in the, the WordPress fold for this one, aren't we, Tim? This is a problem with a collection of plugins.

Tell us more.

Tim Nash: It's, it was a problem with a collection of problem plugins. Thank you. Which, if you happen to have any of these plugins, you should probably go and have a look at your website and make sure it is not currently, hacked. But yeah, the opt-in monster, I think is the big one that most people will have heard of.

but trust Pulse and push Engage by the same company are slightly small plugins. They, as part of their plugin setup, they host some JavaScript, which they put on A CDN to make it nice and fast. And so every time you load their pages into for certain things, it loads their CDN and pulls that JavaScript in that JavaScript endpoint got compromised.

Mark Westguard: Oh,

Tim Nash: now if you were just an everyday user going on the site, you didn't see anything. It just was the usual things. But if you happen to be a logged in user, then it tried to do nasty things effectively. It tried to put hidden back doors onto your website. So that's the first big public service announcement.

If you recognise any of these plugins, you should probably go and check along on there. It basically, all three plugins were, run by one company, which, was also motive. the two larger plugins was, the compromise was around, June 13th. so these are appearing now. Sorry, first one was June 12th, then it, the last one was seen on June the 14th, June the 13th was when most of them were compromised.

Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

Tim Nash: So if you've got any of these free plugins on there, look on your website, you're looking for dodgy extra users that have appeared. the 'cause it's JavaScript, it had to take an action on it co. It's not like it's executing code or doing an SQL injection. It had to take an action that the use on the user, it's almost certainly gonna be a dodgy user you're gonna find on there. what I found particularly interesting though, was how the attackers got in to modify the JavaScript in the first place. I think I might have been on the show when we c when it was covered. Updraft Plus had a spill problem Oh my gosh.

A few months ago. somebody didn't update their version of Updraft Plus, like good little boys and girls.

Nathan Wrigley: Oh my goodness. So it's, there's like a chain of WordPress vulnerabilities in this. Yeah. So Updraft Plus had a problem which led to this C dn. Yeah. Which

Tim Nash: led to the, which led them to be able to compromise the sites that they could then get to the CDN to compromise those, which would allow them to compromise a lot of people.

And obviously I didn't look at the stats, but I think Optum Monster is like nearly a million in site stores.

it's not a small amount.

Nathan Wrigley: No. No, it's not. it's a, it's very popular, isn't it? I imagine most people have heard of it.

Marc Benzakein: I think Opt-in Monster is like one of those that is automatically installed with one of the hosts out there.

So it okay. that million instals may or may not be,

Nathan Wrigley: as a result

Marc Benzakein: of that actually.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

Marc Benzakein: Yeah. It may be a result of that. which is why it is so popular and, so yeah. Yeah.

Mark Westguard: I guess this is why the plugin repo requires any libraries such as that to be loaded locally. And I believe they've got a rule now that says you can't CDM stuff

Nathan Wrigley: plug

Mark Westguard: Oh, like a J plug tile

Nathan Wrigley: plug.

Okay. Yeah. Okay. Oh, that's interesting. Okay. So that, that in effect would've mitigated this problem, but it, didn't, because this problem obviously occurred, and this is hot off the press. Sounds like Tim's been scouring the, the interwebs during the course of the weekend as well. So go and check that out for sure.

So you think it'll be dodgy users, so look for anything, I don't know, beginning with Mark or Tim or something like

Tim Nash: that. Yeah. so they, they actually do have the details of the users that you're looking for. okay. developer API one, with the amazing, with the amazing u email address of customer one us com.

Mark Westguard: Gosh,

Tim Nash: other ones are devco. Xxxxxx.

Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah, I see that at email. Okay. Giveaway. Yeah.

Tim Nash: Yeah. yeah, so they, those are the couple you'd probably be looking for. There are some other examples of what to look for in there. the really, the weird part of this, of course, is that, it, this isn't to do with plugin updating so that you don't need to, you're not gonna go and suddenly see that there's a new version of opt-in Monster, because this was being remotely pulled.

It just affected It, it's, so this is what, why remotely pulling on third party CDNs is not necessarily a great idea, which is part of the reason why we're best org says no. there, but, yeah, it's a fun one, partly because of that chain of events that happen.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that is interesting.

That adds a certain complexity to it, which is a bit sad really, isn't it? But there we go. So if update everything, always. And then maybe,

Tim Nash: and they've still been affected.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. there you go. Yeah. Stuff happens. And my, if the government are gonna ban, under sixteens from using social media, can they also, while they're at it, just ban hackers from just doing, oh, I thought you were gonna

Marc Benzakein: ban up draught plus and I was gonna

Nathan Wrigley: say no.

Just ban all hackers. Can we not just say any hackers? I

Marc Benzakein: think if you ban hackers though, then what are these under sixteens without their social

Nathan Wrigley: media gonna do? That's right. That's

Marc Benzakein: what's Tim gonna do?

Nathan Wrigley: no. We'll make, we'll re-enable TikTok for those users, obviously.

Marc Benzakein: Oh, obviously

Nathan Wrigley: it's fine.

That's your prize if you stop hacking. You can watch TikTok

Marc Benzakein: Now, I think you should reenable Snapchat so people can

Nathan Wrigley: take pictures of their ceilings. To be honest, I wanna see those pictures of Mark to

Tim Nash: be the TikTok taking pictures of ceilings. That sounds great.

Nathan Wrigley: It's the highest. It's what we evolved, excuse me a moment.

We came from, yeah, we started out as little singular organisms in the swamp, and we finally evolved to taking pictures of the ceiling, TikTok and things like that. Multicell

Marc Benzakein: organisms that act like single cell

Nathan Wrigley: organisms. That's right. That's even

Marc Benzakein: better.

Nathan Wrigley: Let us move on. Let us move on. Let me make sure I've got the right thing.

okay. Some WordPress specific stuff. I'll just, I'll go through these as quickly as I can. 'cause some of them, there's not really a story there as such. But this is just to say that if you are into the WordPress project and you quite fancy, assisting, there's a call for WordPress, 7.0 point x, so you know, in the near future people to be, release managers.

so I've put a piece, everything that we mentioned today that comes on the screen or you hear in your ear will, will be in the show notes. So if you're interested in that, there is a piece on make.wordpress.org. I don't really have anything additional to say to that. This is a nice story and a complex story as well.

It turns out. So cern. Which I think is rightly given the moniker of kind of the place where the internet was broadly invented, has decided that, oh, not the

Tim Nash: internet,

Nathan Wrigley: I'm sorry, the web, you're quite right. The whole linking thing. Thank you Tim and the other Tim, both Tims. Thank you both. you know the burners Lee one as well as the Nash one that i, wish I'd thought of that earlier.

the CERN millions of websites, I think it's 280 something like that, or no, sorry, 580 different, websites that they've got currently spanning some something over 500,000 pieces of content. And I think that's like published content. So how many assets they've got on media files and MP threes and images and all of that.

Goodness only knows, but they've made the decision to move away from Drupal. They were scanning around and looking for various different CMS that they could use, and they looks like they had a whole process where they put different CMSs up against each other, and WordPress in this case came out on top.

And then this is a story written on the repository about what that means and the fact that they were obviously very proud of the, difficult work, and then came to WordCamp Europe a couple of weeks ago and did the, basically did the keynote speech to announce how they'd done it. It, fit to me at least anyway.

I could be wrong about this. It sounds like one of the most complicated WordPress builds imaginable 500 and dif 580 different, websites as I described, with the ability for users, I think to spin up new websites on demand if they're at working at CERN and they've got a project that they want to suddenly air.

And it sounds like they've got a whole load of proprietary technology going on in the background. But, it's quite a nice news story. it's one of those ones where if you're a jobbing freelancer in the WordPress space, being able to say, oh yeah, cern, the birthplace of the web.

they have a WordPress website and yeah. Anybody wanna comment on that?

Tim Nash: It's a bit sad for Drupal.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It is a bit sad for Drupal. Yeah.

Tim Nash: Yeah,

Nathan Wrigley: I agree.

Tim Nash: Yeah. And they, as a project, they have made so much strides recently and they really did dominate that space, that sort of scientific and enterprise space.

And there's a little part of me that's feels wrong to be taking away from them at the same time I, people at CER who could now actually use their websites. 'cause presumably that was the reason they made the move in the first place.

Nathan Wrigley: I wonder if it's just one of those kind of things that happens when scale happens, if Like it's just, although Drupal did its thing and it sounds like it was a patchwork of different things on the Drupal side to it, it evolved over time. Whereas now they've got the capacity to build from scratch. Maybe it was a hard decision. Maybe Drupal came out second place. I don't really know. But it was a close run thing.

But they're obviously able to do everything all in one hit so the user interface for everybody will look further and what have you. But I, do know what you mean. I it's a shame, isn't it, because you don't want WordPress to kill Drupal off equally. You want WordPress to succeed. Yeah. I do know what you mean.

Marc Benzakein: But I also, wonder in the back of my mind a little bit, this was a decision that was made a couple years ago, right? Yeah, that's right.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

Marc Benzakein: I wonder if they would make the same decision today that they made a couple years ago.

Nathan Wrigley: Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good

Tim Nash: thought. A again, I go back to the Drupal has made such a massive quick progression recently.

Some of the Drupal projects are quite significantly further ahead technologically than we are with WordPress.

Now you can argue for what reasons, and you can argue they're backwards, combustible, blah, blah, blah. There's lots of reasons why they can do go and do that. We can't. But, yeah.

I'd be really fascinated to get those original decision makers back in the room, have them look at the WordPress landscape right now, and have them look at the Drupal landscape and say, would do you think you made the right decision?

Marc Benzakein: Yeah.

Tim Nash: it would be fascinating and I suspect, there would be a lot of squiring involved.

'cause they wouldn't.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Yeah, it's long decision. mark with a c said two years in the making, and I think they've had two, three, I think it said three full-time people on this for the last two years. Not only making those decisions, but then doing the implementation. And the implementation isn't quite over.

It seems like there's still a few months of, of rollout for various different things that have still got to be ticked over, but it's big. It must have

Mark Westguard: been something quite significant to make them move that amount of data from one platform to another.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

Mark Westguard: Yeah. this decision can't have been made lightly.

Nathan Wrigley: No,

Mark Westguard: but you know what Tim said, it's, what was wrong with the original? I, Hey, I welcome them to WordPress. A hundred percent. Yeah. but it's a significant amount of work to move platform to another.

Tim Nash: Can you imagine the person who just went into the room and said, yeah, I don't like Drupal.

I'm gonna use WordPress. And they were like,

Mark Westguard: that's probably what happened.

Tim Nash: Yeah. Yes.

Nathan Wrigley: Senior

Mark Westguard: person. I've seen that in many a web projects, Yeah. you get the new IT guy that comes in and says, Nope, I don't like it in green. I want it in blue. and that's it.

Nathan Wrigley: That's it. We're doing blue.

Mark Westguard: That's

Nathan Wrigley: right.

anyway, big kudos. And obviously it was, something that they wanted to shout about and came and did the, keynote at Word Camp Europe and, the keynote. I, don't really remember a, particular session being labelled a keynote other than the sessions from, for example, Mary Hubbard or Giphy was, or Matt.

But this obviously was determined to be significant enough and, yeah. Anyway, there we go. So that's on the repository. Mike Johnson and Ray Moray, wrote that one up on the 10th of June. And, yeah, let's move on. Some of these, I will get to some of them. I, oh, I dunno what to say about this one. so this is, so we've got a facelift.

I confess, I think I've been to this site once before. I genuinely have never bought anything from mercantile.wordpress.org. Maybe you haven't either. Maybe you didn't know that there was a place, a genuine official place to go and buy official WordPress swag, but that's what it is.

mercantile.wordpress.org. And they've had a facelift. Now, I'm not gonna go to the Wayback machine and look as to what it used to look like, but this is what it now looks like. The only thing which is jumping out at me, and I'm not gonna say too much about it, that is an interesting font, is all I'm gonna say.

And I'll pause and I'll let nobody Yeah. Anyway, there we go. An interesting, no,

Mark Westguard: we're not even going there. how strange. We all said they had a mute button.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's right. We said so much more before the show actually started about that font, didn't we? but anyway, we, there it is. Mercantile WordPress does.

Don't

Tim Nash: even know why it's called Mercantile and not merch or

Nathan Wrigley: swag. I'm gonna guess it was beer. It's probably beer. Somebody just had a few beers and, getting by to deciding what the subdomain was. Mercantile, let's go with that. That's a big word.

Mark Westguard: Is next to

Nathan Wrigley: the

Mark Westguard: WP Builds merch site.

Nathan Wrigley: No, I think I killed that a few years ago.

you were one of the few people that bought a mug. Yeah,

Mark Westguard: bought a mug.

Marc Benzakein: we have the font for you if you decide to resurrect

Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

Mark Westguard: Bring it back.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. anyway, there you go. Go and check out. Apparently James

Tim Nash: says it's called the, black Forest Fonts, which it's called, which clearly we got it wrong earlier.

Nathan Wrigley: No, I think we got it about right. It's about right.

But yeah. Anyway, there you go. this is, see, you see it's a whole thing. This is the first time hearing about Mercantile that was exactly the same for me. And I went this one time. And then the only reason I've gone back is to, is to, just talk about the fact that the, they've obviously changed it a little bit.

I think that's absolutely interesting. But this is the place you go. I don't know if it's where, for example, word Camp organisers go. Maybe Tim, you'll know more about that than I would. when they buy their official swag, which they bring and give away and what have you. I dunno if that's part of the process of it.

Tim Nash: no, because you can do that through Word Camp.

Nathan Wrigley: You do that through Word Camp. Okay. Yeah. okay. Anyway, you can obviously see, you can buy the usual arrangement of, t-shirts and wapos and, hoodies and WordPress mocks.

Tim Nash: Apparently we need to click on the product. The loading is amazing.

Nathan Wrigley: Okay, let me, let's all watch the loading.

So let's go for the, what should we go for what you want, everyone? Okay, let's go for, let's go for that one. Oh,

Marc Benzakein: the loading is,

Nathan Wrigley: oh, that was, that's nice. Okay. Alright. now worth it. All is given. All is given. We have a completely unnecessary loading WaPo. Here we go. Yeah, it's pretty nice. I do

Tim Nash: actually like that.

That's

Nathan Wrigley: a very nice, it's got an os aesthetic to it, hasn't it? To me that it feels like we're almost like in an operating system.

Tim Nash: Wow. Are they trying to like, make it look a little bit like the, WordPress backend with the media a bit. Library type Look.

Nathan Wrigley: May. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I'm liking it. Yeah.

Yeah. The more that I see, the more that I like it. So let's see what we can get. A few of these Add to cart. What does that? Ooh, that was nice. Yeah. These are all good, aren't they? I like these little transitions. What does that do? No, that, oh, okay. And

Mark Westguard: pro profits to the WordPress Foundation.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's right.

I'm not gonna buy a, I love women, I love WP Women's T-shirt, because it probably won't fit me, but they're about 27 pounds. anyway. There you go. Go and check it out. Mercantile dot WordPress. What was it? What? wordpress.org. I didn't realise you could get,

Tim Nash: and that's mercantile without a hatred in it, because that would be too obvious.

Nathan Wrigley: Meile. Yeah. Okay, now I need to go back to the way back machine and see what it's like. Yeah, I didn't do that, but it'll probably not have this font, I wouldn't have imagined the, black forest font. right, back to, the repository. This is Ray five for the future, gets its biggest overhaul in years with new pledge and profile pages.

I think one of the things about five for the future, so Five for the Future, is this endeavour to label 5% of what you do as a WordPress thing. And the idea being that if everybody put in 5% of their avail, if you make a living out of WordPress, wouldn't it be a good idea to give 5% of something back?

So that could be 5% of your, I don't know, revenue or 5% of your time or what have you. and then in that way you'd be able to keep the project going forwards. However, in the past, the way that, contributions to the WordPress PO project have been displayed has been perhaps less than desirable.

'cause it was, my understanding was in the past, you, the mere utterance of the words, I'm gonna contribute, I don't know, 5% of my time was enough to get you on that page, but there was no checks and balances to make sure that you did the thing that you had promised to do, nor indeed that the effect of the things that you did was profound or moderate or what have you.

And so that has now been brought to the fore. and so now there's gonna be an endeavour in the future to make sure that things are tracked. So the things that you said you were gonna do, that you did do, get tracked, but also to put like a value onto the things that you did. for example, I don't know, translating a single character in a string might not be the same as, I don't know, making a major security update to Core or something like that.

They're obviously poles apart, but you get the idea that certain things will have more weight. And in that way, perhaps people will be able to get some Q DDoS, whether they wish to have it or not out of it. And then those people can then display that on their wordpress.org profile. and presumably that will then help their future chances, I don't know, looking for employment or maybe employers just directly reaching out to people.

'cause they can see that this person over here is, I know a valued member of the community who in the past wouldn't have been recognised. So there we go. That's, that's been updated. dunno if anybody wants to contribute anything to that,

Tim Nash: who gets

Marc Benzakein: to, I'm a little, oh. Let's

Nathan Wrigley: go with, let's go with

Marc Benzakein: Mark.

No, go. Okay, let's go with Tim first. I, it doesn't matter 'cause Tim said what I was gonna say.

Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay.

Tim Nash: Yeah, it's like, who decides this Q because this is, you actually gave,

Marc Benzakein: and who assigns the score? what is, how do you score it?

Tim Nash: Because you, Nathan, sorry, said, that the changing a character in a string was somehow less important than the security update.

Now that may be how you view it, but if that character in the string meant that it, now that it became accessible, WordPress became accessible to an entire country, which one is more valuable?

Nathan Wrigley: I've got a solution to this. I know what we can do, and let's just put Tim Nash in charge. Tim, I, that's, can we all vote on that?

Can we? no, That's the point. Everybody on this panel. Why don't we,

Marc Benzakein: why don't we let Anthropic decide?

Nathan Wrigley: Okay, yeah, let's get that, that whatever

Marc Benzakein: use the latest.

Nathan Wrigley: No, I don't know. You're quite right, Tim. and that presumably would be a body of work and presumably that body of work would need to be made public, but it's bound to be fiddly, isn't it?

Especially when you get into the weeds of it. if you translated a sentence in a string or you translated 20 sentences, or I don't know, or you committed something crucial, like I said, in, in terms of security to court, I don't really know how none of it's gonna be fair. Is it? I suppose at some point you just have to say that's a good fit.

That, that kind of feels about right.

Tim Nash: But if you're gonna gamify this, and if it's gonna be a prestige thing that's going to go on resumes, then it has to be because of always you're lead.

Nathan Wrigley: Yes.

Tim Nash: Opening yourself up to both abuse, internal friction. It's go when you end up with a scenario where one company, all their commits are accepted and go into core, and therefore they've got shiny buttons while the other people have got full-time people doing triaging and are putting the commits in.

But then you've only got a small group of gatekeepers to look out. So it just, yeah,

Nathan Wrigley: I know

Tim Nash: you mean this is one of those times that you're like, this was a stupid system to start with. It would've probably been better to take it out back and just say, it's not come back. It's gone to, and, five, five for the future was a lovely concept.

We'd like you to keep it in your hearts. We think if you should be putting 5% of your time, money, or whatever into this, but we are not going to track it because if we track it, we have to track it properly and there ain't no way we can do that. And there's always gonna be somebody who's gonna complain about it.

Nathan Wrigley: So what I'm showing on the screen, sorry if you're listening to this, but we're showing, so for example, you can see that there are three people mentioned and they all have what has been termed high impact contributions. I presume that's a moniker which has been attached to the contributions, I dunno what the other layers are, if you like, you know what the other levels are, this, person AKI 81, high impact contributions, Ramon, 56 and leaner, 58 high impact contributions.

And then it lists out what the areas in which they contribute, so which of the teams they contribute to and so on. Yeah, the devil will be in the detail here and I, think Tim, you are certainly right to say that it'll never be perfect. and it will never be something that wouldn't be controversial.

if you've put a certain amount in and you believe your contributions are worth the same as somebody over there who did something entirely different and

Marc Benzakein: are they gonna redefine what counts as a contribution? Because in the past, things like Word camp organising and volunteering at Word camps and meetups and things like that didn't count for five for the future.

And yet those are a huge part of why WordPress is what it is. are they gonna redefine that as well? And I don't know that they're gonna do that. assigning a scoring system is great, I suppose if you can like actually quantify what you're scoring and then

Nathan Wrigley: make

Marc Benzakein: it there. Yeah. And

Nathan Wrigley: the ability to, for it not to be game, I suppose will be interesting as well.

if you're working in a corporate environment and your boss brings you in and you've been in the office for the last five years and they can track everything that you've done and they can see directly what you've done, that's one thing, which feels like what this is trying to be something like, what is it?

Continual professional development kind of consultation where we figured out what you did and what your value is to the company and so on. But this is not that, is it because we're relying on people to say that they did certain things and for somebody somewhere giving that a quota, a level, a value of worth and, yeah, that'll be

Mark Westguard: interesting.

So this table here we're looking at, which has the, this is just the, this is just contributors to core though, right? This is not I think

Nathan Wrigley: so, yeah. This

Mark Westguard: is the overall five. That's right. Future is a

Nathan Wrigley: subset.

Mark Westguard: yeah.

Tim Nash: but that mean that itself is an example where they've clearly, already you've highlighted they is this is for core, this is, we are showing core stuff.

Would accessibility team have, get any scoring, do team leads now get to choose and select the point? Do they get even point? The whole thing is just

Mark Westguard: all over the

Tim Nash: place. It's gonna be points for my mates and to make sure that certain companies never get to have those points.

Nathan Wrigley: so that's an interesting thing as well, could it be, gamed by companies in that way?

and Yeah, the fascinating.

Tim Nash: Anyway, we already have an issue where there are, certain particular universities, where they've seen it, where there's, universities have got classes, in, computer programming and then one of their assignments is go find bugs in WordPress.

Nathan Wrigley: Oh, nice. So

Tim Nash: you get a bunch of triage things into the, into bugzilla and you get a bunch of triage where it's like, why are you asked, talking about this bug that I've, these, we've already got 10 versions of this bug and bits.

I can so see certain universities and certain classes saying, you must get a certain number of points. Oh, and then we're gonna get this. I need this. I you must, you, need to sign this off for me. Okay. I need these points. I need these points, I need this. And I, and maybe that's gonna be start of the company saying, actually you can't just contribute the thing that we, you want to contribute to because you now have to have points quota to meet.

And the ultimate thing is, while this has clearly been designed for professional volunteers, which is a con contradiction in term, but we are talking more towards people who are sponsored for this. 'cause your person who wants to volunteer, wants to work on the thing that they're passionate about.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

Okay.

Tim Nash: And you are gonna, anybody who turns around to them and says, you are not valued because, or you worse, you are valued at

Nathan Wrigley: 1.0.

Tim Nash: how is that gonna get them to carry on volatility?

Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's interesting. I hadn't really thought about that. That's fascinating. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So there it is.

Anyway, let's just pop it back on the screen. So this is the, this is Ray from the repositories, summation of where we're at the moment. So the idea would be that there would be these pledges and it would make, it would be amended on your profile page and what have you. So if you've got any thoughts on that, please make a comment at the bottom of the,

Marc Benzakein: I will say that I like the fact that there, thinking that five for the future needs to be overhauled.

'cause I think we've all agreed with that for a long time. Yeah. I'm just not sure this is the right direction for it. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't wanna, and I don't actually want to like, criticise, the person, I forget the name. oh,

Nathan Wrigley: was it

Marc Benzakein: Jannis? Janni. Janni. Ilia, yeah. Yeah.

Nathan Wrigley: Thank you.

Marc Benzakein: I don't, I, I don't want to criticise.

At least there's an attempt there to do something.

And

Nathan Wrigley: right.

Marc Benzakein: And I just don't agree with the approach personally,

Nathan Wrigley: Okay. All right. There we go. You can check that out in the WP Builds newsletter, which will come out tomorrow. Or just go to the repository. It's called Five For The Future, gets its biggest overhauling years with new pledge and profile pages.

Okay. Speaking of things that you might get contribution, kudos for, one of them might be, I don't know, helping out at a WordPress event, and there's a couple of different takes there. It is interesting, a couple of different takes on WordPress events this year. On the one hand we have, friend of the show mka, he comes on the show quite a bit and he's been on the podcast lots of times.

He's produced an article, entitled the WordPress Conference We Need Next. You can find [email protected]. And then if you go to the blog, it was produced on the, 9th of June. And in that Remus is, talking about how as much as he loves Word camps and he's been involved in setting up Word Camp Europe and whatnot, he would like there to be, how to describe it in a very brief amount of time.

I suppose something a little bit more professional, something which rather than it being lots of, people who come and have things that they wish to say, maybe it's more like a screening process. And those talks are a little bit more deep diving into a particular topic. And one of the threads that he seems to talk about is having a theme, maybe a whole day where there's a theme running through that day.

And whilst that theme might not tightly bind to every subject, at least you can map it back. So that on the one hand is, Remus thoughts and you can go and read that and go and check it out. And then, it's almost like we're in a, like they, they couldn't be more polar opposite in a way.

Then you've got, Nick Hamey who has got this idea, he, the article is called WordPresses, the Doorway, not the Room. And Nick, I think just wants to have good fun. he wants WordPress events to be just, basically quite a lot of fun. And, and he's got a few ideas, which I think I'll share 'cause they tickled me.

I thought they were quite good. the, so his idea is that fun is injected in, it's not about professionalism necessarily. He's basically saying you don't remember the talks that you go to. You only remember the nice interactions that you had in the hall, the strange curious character that you met and so on.

So he, he says he's got eight ideas that could be presentations and he says something that isn't WordPress. So it, there'll be a whole track of people who teach things that have got nothing to do with WordPress. Five minutes, lightning book, one rule. It can't be to do with WordPress. It could be about your job or the tech stack that you use.

Anything like that.

Mark Westguard: Or

Nathan Wrigley: Sarah. Sarah

Mark Westguard: though, as he said,

Nathan Wrigley: yeah, sourdough. Yeah, that's right. Show us your setup. So again, just show us the way that you use WordPress, which I think is quite interesting. 'cause I bet all of us have got a different way of doing that. petty grievances, open mic. You just get up moan basically, which I think is quite good.

and nobody's allowed to shut you down.

Tim Nash: Isn't that this show?

Nathan Wrigley: that's exactly this show. Yeah. we've done that, but we don't have a stage, adopt a project. So the idea is, it's like a dating show. You show what you've got, other people show what they've got, and by the end of the session, hopefully some people have combined their projects, human library, but weirder.

Borrow a person for 15 minutes, then make a catalogue, far stranger than expert in X. That one speaks for itself. Bad ideas. Brainstorm. This is just totally for humour. you pitch something and then everybody has to design the worst possible solution to that idea. let me welcome you to my entire history of building WordPress websites.

That I

Tim Nash: was gonna say, I believe that's how WordPress has been built for the last years. I'm not sure we could change our minds on this.

Nathan Wrigley: Certainly the way I implement it, you bring this public, skills bartering called the swap meet, and then the hallway track on stage. So you literally get a bunch of people to come up and talk on stage.

I think they're quite interesting. It's obviously in stark contrast to what Remus is saying, although I'm not entirely sure that Remus wouldn't want a lot of that fun injecting as well. But, having just been to WordCamp Europe, it seemed like a really well run event to me. So I don't know. Yeah.

Maybe stuff will change. Maybe stuff won't change, but any thoughts on that before I move on? We're quickly running out of time.

Mark Westguard: I think his comments about, he, he's mentioned press comp and, other events there. I think those cater to some of those more corporate needs, and developer needs, Yeah. I've been, I went to press comp last year, not this year, but, I couldn't make it this year, but, that was, there was a lot of product developers there and things like that, that I found was that different audience was really great to be, to mingle around.

but I've always thought there's a gap in the market for more of a developer focused kind of work camp.

because yeah, yes, WordPress is used for blogs, but there, there's a huge community of people that are using it just to build websites in general. And there's some quite complex websites as well. And,

Tim Nash: KO filled that is meant to fill that. Yeah, that's what Loop comp, they really struggled with people that KO in the uk Yeah.

To just getting bums on seats was problematic for them.

Mark Westguard: Yeah.

Nathan Wrigley: it's coming back, isn't it? it's gonna be in, I think Michigan this year. I, want to say Ann Arbour or something, I don't know.

Mark Westguard: Yeah,

Nathan Wrigley: I heard something. Anyway, it's back.

Mark Westguard: yeah.

Nathan Wrigley: Later on during this year. Do you know what I do? You know what I think, for many pe like I'm, this idea just occurred to me, see if this lands with you.

See if this makes any sense. I think, do I actually think this, hold on, let me pause what I'm about to say. Yeah, I think this is true. I think that the majority of people, Hey,

Tim Nash: just so you know, you've been speaking through the whole of this period,

Nathan Wrigley: about Yeah, no, that's right. I do this out loud.

It's fine. the, I think that a significant proportion of the people who attend Word Camp, like the one we just been to Word Camp eu, I think they're going to socialise. Yeah. And it is framed around a conference, because that's a framing, which works. What I'm trying to say is, you put on some speakers that's enough to drag, let's say 70% of the people along and they'll be 30% of the people, whatever.

I'm just making up numbers, who do wish to attend those sessions, but they're really there just to hang out, socialise, maybe do a bit of networking, but just hanging out. And so just the, fact that there's an event. Seriously, I would turn up to a word camp with no presentations. I would totally turn up to that.

Marc Benzakein: but that's the thing is, I remember back whenever I started, the first word camp, or the second word camp I went to was 2000. 11 or something like that. I don't know. But those had, they had a developer track, they had a marketing track, they had a design track. Oh yeah. And you knew what you were getting.

And for people who have never been to a Word camp, and it's their first one, they're actually, they actually are going there to learn something they don't know about the hallway track. We go there to socialise because we've been to enough word camps that we know people, we see people that we wanna connect with or reconnect with or whatever.

you are in England, I'm in the United States. We have an opportunity to like, to see each other face to face and, but new people to it, they actually go there for information and maybe to meet people. But that's a secondary function. So I think it depends on where you are in your journey.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

Marc Benzakein: that's true. Within WordPress and for those of us, and on this show, we've been to enough word camps that it is about the socialisation and reconnecting and networking and all that. And not about the, presentations. I've gone to word camps where I haven't gone to a single presentation.

Mark Westguard: it has to cater to so many different types of people.

There will be beginners there, there will be developers there, there'll be people that blog, there will be sponsors there. There'll be the likes of us that, I spend most of my time saying hello to people and, stopping in the, hall and saying hello to people that I know. Yeah. it's, so yeah, but I spend most of

Nathan Wrigley: my time in the hallway trying to not bump into you.

So

Mark Westguard: that's say hello to, because I've been with you for four days and that's enough.

Nathan Wrigley: Sorry, carry on. That's five days too

Marc Benzakein: many.

Mark Westguard: You should see the photos.

Nathan Wrigley: yeah. no, we're not looking at the photos. No. Yeah, I've got, oh, there was one photo that I was gonna show and I forgot to bring it. Oh, I have a, great photo of Mark in an overall, let's just say that, you remember the video we let the mind one be? yeah. It was good. but I'm, I genuinely think that I would turn up to an event with not necessarily much in the way of organisation around like the presentation and as all that kind of stuff. However, I'd be curious because of my personality, I would be curious to play around with some of Nick's ideas and like that wackiness would appeal to me, but maybe it wouldn't appeal to, let's say mku given the article that you just said.

Marc Benzakein: So you have two tracks. You have the wackiness track, and then you have the serious track. And

Nathan Wrigley: I would love that

Marc Benzakein: personally. Yeah. People would still, and people would still end up in the hallway

Nathan Wrigley: in between Yeah. Doing, going to neither

Marc Benzakein: all day long and going to neither. So Yeah,

Nathan Wrigley: that's right.

Mark Westguard: The idea that Mark with a c said about a track for developers, a track for marketing, and that, that sounds like a great idea to start, like the way they used to

Nathan Wrigley: do it.

Marc Benzakein: that's, yeah. That's how they used to do it and Yeah.

Mark Westguard: Yeah.

Marc Benzakein: I remember the first one I went to, the developer track and I didn't understand a word of it, but I forced myself to sit through every single presentation that day.

I didn't know a single person,

Nathan Wrigley: so some comments on this. Iran agrees with Remus, so that sort of more professional side of things would appeal to, to him. speaking of Loop Conf, grand Rapids, there you go. Grand Rapids, Michigan. And the dates are September, late September 23rd to 24th.

So it's coming up. I think you can now buy tickets. I saw the new website is available. I think. I really want WordPress says Daniel, to push to activity pubs for social media functions alongside blog functions.

Tim Nash: I feel Daniel wasn't here earlier when we were talking about the, social media ban.

Nathan Wrigley: yeah, that's right.

yeah. Who would run a masteron instal in that scenario would be the question I certainly wouldn't, that'd be interesting, right? There's a few people coming in, da dah, watch the replay, da. It was just people saying sa saying various things. The webinar. Sorry. Missed Mark. And you I knew Nathan.

Yeah, sorry. Yeah, we, I was locked away in a couple time. Missed

Mark Westguard: so many people. It was, I was sad actually, after the event, I was like, oh, didn't see them. Didn't see them. And I saw these posts on social media that currently is a banter.

Nathan Wrigley: yeah, that's right. Yeah. That's the one allowed use of it. Elliot, who lives just down the road from me, I always say that, first word camp.

He didn't know what to expect. I ended up spending most of the time walking around and talking. Yeah. Rather than attending. Good to see you talks. Only went to a couple. initially thought I would go to more talks and I read somewhere, Elliot, I think it was on a blog you put out or a social media post or something like that, that you are inclined to go again.

So it was obviously an experience that you, on some level enjoyed. whether or not you'd wanna

Tim Nash: go just for Elliot, you're not alone. This is what most people do that they will find themselves going, oh, I'm gonna go to this talk. And then

Mark Westguard: you

Tim Nash: miss it. They just end up singing the it just to go swing it back.

You can have these two things separated as well. We can go back to having bar camp style unconferences. We can have. beginner word camp days. But these all require organising.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Nash: And the reason that you found that the multiple tracks don't work as well as you hoped they would, is that you have to then pivot to a track to multiple audiences.

You need to get multiple different sponsors and you have to get the people to speak. So many Word camp talks are rubbish in the nicest possible way to volunteers who are giving their time. So they, and they're often very personalised, very great, but they're also rubbish talks for a beginner.

Mark Westguard: Yeah.

Tim Nash: And for someone who is, more in the middle, range, they provide some limited value.

And then for people who, most people who are there just to socialise, they're not going to the talks. So we have a problem that what we're trying to teach and what we're educating with is the wrong thing for the target of the people in the room. The people in the room want something that is different and don't come back.

We are not yet, and we have organisers who want them to organise events. They don't necessarily want to organise a beginner's little friend, little camp for beginners. And that makes it really difficult. And one of the things we struggled massively with in the UK is right down to the meetup level, who do you pitch a meetup to?

Do you if you want. Because if you want to have a word camp or you want to have conferences, you really do have to show that there is a community existing or speaking

Nathan Wrigley: of which

Tim Nash: go outside of the community. And we spend so much time pitching inside our own community, through our own, through our meetups and things and saying, Nope, we are the community.

We are doing this, that maybe we should actually just blanketly go, Nope. If you want to have a nice community event, come to the, barbecue in July, WordPress London. If you want to come to a professional conference. Cool. That's what Press Con WordCamp Europe and US are and Asia are, because those are not real word camps.

They're just ridiculous amounts of money flown around, et cetera. Word camps. Maybe we have to redefine what they are, but they can be the new gateway. They can, where we can have a little bit of fun, but we could have these separate things. But only if people are willing to volunteer and do it.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

Tim Nash: And to do that, they have to believe people will come. And at the moment we are struggling to even get local user groups up and going. Certainly in the UK we are finding it difficult to get attendance to these events. And when people are coming, we are often mixing groups of people together and hoping it's gonna work.

And sometimes it does and sometimes people leave Disappointed. I haven't seen it recently, but there was a statistics knocking around on number of repeat visitors to Word camps and it was shockingly low.

Nathan Wrigley: Oh gosh.

Tim Nash: People came to one word camp in one in the city one year that didn't come back.

Which says we a problem keeping people on those word camps.

Nathan Wrigley: Speaking of, meet ups, I'm just gonna quickly mention that if you are in the uk, this is very London specific I suppose, but, WPL, the end's June meet up, is free. it's ready for anybody. It is happening. It's always the last Thursday of the month. And you can see here it's happening on June 25th.

So basically 10 days from now. Gosh, that's quick. and there's a couple of speakers. There's, Raquel, and who is actually the organiser of, press Conf. So talking about things associated with that. Owning, in this case it's owning, sorry. Owning your why. The only content, the only constant in a World of Change.

And then we've also got Paul half Penny, from Filter who will be further down. I can't see where his, oh, there we go. Speaker. There we go. abilities not chatbots, how WordPress Seven changes everything. So if you fancy coming along, it's totally free. June 25th. Okay. just a quick one loop, wp, which is a newsletter which has been going under the auspices of Simon Harper for many years, is I think, it's fair to, unless something dramatic changes, it's gonna close down.

It looks like this was the last issue. Obviously if it's been going weekly, for 210 articles, I dunno if there were hiatus along the road or anything, but that's four years right there. he's now decided that the calculus of worth time and money versus what he gets out of it, I suppose is no longer worth it.

So there's another sort of story which maps a little bit to what you were saying, Tim, about struggling to get people involved in the community. Anyway, I would just like to say that quite a lot of the content that's gone into this show has been taken from that newsletter. So thank you. Years of hard work.

It's been Yeah. To

Mark Westguard: see that one go

Nathan Wrigley: labour of love sometimes, isn't it? Yeah. And then at some point the labour becomes a little bit more difficult to justify as is the case there.

Tim Nash: I think he quoted some sort of how much it time it takes him and what that would be. Yeah. An hourly wage. Yep.

And it was just like, yeah. And he was putting it out for free. Yep. It was a great newsletter. But there, there comes a point where people have to say. I'm not getting what I want out of this. I'm not getting the enjoyment outta this. Yeah. And when you volunteer to do things, you've got to enjoy it. Yeah. And I think that might be a good summary for a lot of the stories today.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

Tim Nash: That's, you've gotta enjoy your volunteering. I've always Why do it?

Nathan Wrigley: I'm gonna write that one down as today's title. You've gotta enjoy it. You've got to enjoy it. I can't write that quickly, but there we go. There's some rough scribbling, which equates to that. So thank you Simon. Basically is what I'm saying there.

I appreciate it over the, years, right? We are, we're basically out of time, so I'll just quickly rip through these, see if there's anything which I think we should dwell on. No, not really. We've done that one. No, I think, maybe this one quickly. You wanted to bring this one up? Did you Mark, was there a thing, was that connected to another

Mark Westguard: thing?

Yeah, it was related to another one, but it was, very quickly, if you're using the new WordPress seven connectors for connecting to anything ai, then have a look at this article and it'll tell you some better ways of storing your API keys securely.

Nathan Wrigley: Oh, so it's not WS form specific, but it's

Mark Westguard: WS

Nathan Wrigley: form website safely

Mark Westguard: using.

I, I just saw, I saw a lot of talk online about the fact that they were storing API keys in the WP options table. And this gives you some, guidance on how to do that in other ways, but also how to lock down your keys in, these providers to make sure that you don't get a runaway of huge amounts of use of tokens.

because maybe you put this stuff live, somebody could come to your site and just start chewing up your API usage.

Nathan Wrigley: we had a piece that was gonna be related to that, but we never, we basically run out time. We ended up talking about, things like grill brushes, didn't we?

That'll rob you of whole hours, it turns out. So That's right. Yeah. More so

Mark Westguard: than

Nathan Wrigley: AI injuries. It's nothing to do with me. So that's it, I think, sorry that we've not managing to get to all those bits and pieces, but hopefully that's been, that's been All right. So there we go. it only remains for me to say a big thank you to the guests.

So we've got Mark over there, mark C with a C at the end. We've got Mark with a K at the end. And then we've got Tim with a, normal spelling of Tim's. Nothing curious about that at all. It's just Tim and then me as well. I was here apparently. I don't know if that counts, but I never mentioned myself.

Anyway, here I am. maybe this will be the last one. I'm gonna follow Simon Harpers Lee. This is gonna be the last episode of wp. I

Tim Nash: don't say things like that until Monday, until

Nathan Wrigley: go into, it'll go into the AI and no. Neil read into the transcription.

Tim Nash: 2026. Oh

Nathan Wrigley: yeah, it is gonna be the last episode.

Until next Monday. See what I did there. So we will be back in a week's time. We always are. I really enjoy doing the show and it's very nice when I get a panel of people like you who are fun and humorous and interesting and willing to just shoot the breeze with me for 90 minutes. It's very good.

And he not

Marc Benzakein: use the word smart in any of that, just

Nathan Wrigley: in case no one noticed.

Marc Benzakein: Yeah.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I appreciate that. I'm gonna say, yeah, that's gonna be the title of the show.

Marc Benzakein: I

Nathan Wrigley: caught that. It's smart five times. Yeah. Thank you. you're all very smart. I love you all. and of obviously if you've come in and made some comments, I appreciate that as well.

Thank you very much. Joining. He also loves you.

Tim Nash: If you commented and commented including what we had a comment about, they wanted to promote ed work. So

Nathan Wrigley: what's that?

Tim Nash: Reese wanted to remind people that they could go to Ed Work Coworking if you wanted to go and hang out to me.

Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Thank you.

Read that into the record. Yeah, I'll do that one quickly. 'cause Reese is nice. I can't, it's gone. There it is. Manchester WordPress user group pitches it as WordPress and co-working. We have 10% off of folks who just come for the co-working element. Okay, thank you. what's the plan for W-P-N-W-P LDNs?

Do you go for a meal? we go to the bar. There's a bar literally I don't know, like eight seconds walk round the ba it's next door basically. so you go there afterwards and just hang out and people usually are there for an hour or two, something like that. At this time of year. It'd be lovely 'cause it's have a beer

Mark Westguard: or a lemonade.

Nathan Wrigley: That's right. it cost is,

all I can say is Imran bring your mortgage, for the bar. it's just insane. But that, it's the same wherever you go in Central London. It's absolutely nuts. So there we go. We just need to do the hand wave of joy, which is now what I've called it, the hand wave of joy. There we go. The hand wave of joy.

That's lovely. Thank you so much. We'll be back next week if you three want to hang around and shoot the breeze for 10 minutes or so, that'd be lovely as well. And, we'll see you next week for the next episode. Take it easy. Bye-bye. Bye. Bye bye.