This Week in WordPress #377

It's time for This Week in WordPress, episode number 377 entitled, Events. It was recorded on Monday, the 22nd of June, 2026. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I'm joined by three fabulous guests. My co-host is Taco Verdonschot, but also I am joined by Robert Abela and also Alex Standiford.

It's a WordPress podcast, so you know what? We talk mostly about WordPress. The roadmap to 7.1, and who's in charge of all of that? A lot of the conversation is spent on that. New features that are coming, why we like them, what we think is gonna be useful.

The WordPress community takes up a lot of the chat as well. We talk a great deal about events. How to make them better, how paid events are interesting in some ways. And also ways that the WordPress community can now contribute and talk to each other on Slack in a variety of different languages.

We spend a bit of time talking about WPLDN and the fact that is turning 150, not years, but events. They've done 150 of their WordPress meetups.

We also talk a lot towards the end about security, and Robert being an expert on that, chimes in an awful lot.

And right at the end, I plug my son's band somewhat unexpected, but you know what? It's a good thing to do, and their music is very fun.

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

[00:01:34] Nathan Wrigley: There. Hello, hello, Good morning. Good afternoon, good evening. Welcome, wp builds.com. That wasn't what I meant to say, so I'll just, I'll back out that and try again. this week in WordPress is what I meant to say. And we're on episode number 377. That's, quite a lot. That's more than one every day for a whole year.

I know, It's ridiculous. but the plan is to talk about WordPress. We might get diverted onto different, bits and pieces 'cause we often do, AI seems to be a thread that we pull from time to time. So no doubt we'll get into that a little bit as well introduce the panel in just a moment.

We'll get to know them and a little bit about them. But, just to say that if you have stumbled across us, or in fact you're a return visitor, you probably know the drill, but I'm gonna mention it anyway. the best URL to watch this is wp builds.com/live. That's the easiest one to remember. 'cause the YouTube URL is obviously just a series of random letters at the end.

So I've pasted it over there. you can use the YouTube comments. So you need a Google account. I've paste. I've put those next to the video as well. If you don't have a, a Google account and don't want a Google account, whatever the reason, then you can actually add the comments into the video itself.

There's a little live chat button, top right of the video. So it's actually inside the video. and that'll enable you to write something if you don't like that. Most people seem to give us their commentary over on YouTube. if you fancy doing that, please, don't be shy. It keeps this show going.

It's really great when people do that. I think that's probably all the housekeeping that I've got. Okay. In which case I will go round the houses and introduce the panel. Firstly there, I really wanna be able to just push that just to keep going. One day I will figure out a way to make that happen. It's tack o tack over.

Don shot. How you doing? You alright?

[00:03:29] Taco Verdonschot: I'm, yes, I'm good. Thank you. Thanks for having me again.

[00:03:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, No, you're oh, thank you for showing up. Tachos been great. he's, because I was pretty late to putting the show notes together 'cause I was doing some other stuff over the weekend. He pasted a load of links since I'm very appreciative for that.

So quite a lot of what we're gonna look at today is because of Tacho. tachos bio has changed recently. You may have noticed that, where it used, to say different things under his name. It's now saying something else and let's get into that. So after 11 years at Yost, then 18 months at Progress Planner Tacho is joining your online, the new Home of Progress planner after its acquisition earlier this month.

As always, his goal is to make the web a better place for everyone. He's also a longtime organiser of Word, the WordPress meetup in n Meghan outside of work, you could find this happily married father of two on his trails bike or on a golf course where he's training to get a golf licence. Do you need a licence?

[00:04:27] Taco Verdonschot: Yes, you do.

[00:04:28] Nathan Wrigley: You have the licence to play golf. Really?

[00:04:32] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah, you do.

[00:04:33] Nathan Wrigley: Is

[00:04:33] Rovert Abela: that, is it just in the Netherlands or

[00:04:35] Taco Verdonschot: No, it's worldwide.

[00:04:37] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:04:37] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. You need a registered handicap, which sounds way worse than it is. Yeah. In order to play, it's a number to play golf.

[00:04:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I did not know that. I thought you could just rock up and just play golf like you can tennis or anything like that.

[00:04:53] Taco Verdonschot: It's

[00:04:54] Nathan Wrigley: true

[00:04:54] Taco Verdonschot: for mini golf though. You can play that without

[00:04:56] Nathan Wrigley: a line. Yeah, I know that Alex plays a different kind of golf. You, throw his version of golf, is that right? I think yeah,

[00:05:04] Alex Standiford: I do. yep. And, it does not require a licence, although I'm not really bad at it, no, that's amazing. I genuinely didn't know that.

[00:05:11] Nathan Wrigley: But then again, I suppose that, we have a golf course in the town where I live, and, right alongside the golf course there's a thin road and then a bunch of houses. And I was chatting to one of the guys, 'cause I parked there 'cause it's nearest the beach. I parked there and, we got chatting and he said two or three times a year, one of his car windows will get smashed.

and, then very occasionally one of his house windows will get smashed. And he said basically somebody who doesn't know how to hit golf ball.

[00:05:36] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah,

[00:05:36] Nathan Wrigley: that

[00:05:36] Taco Verdonschot: would be me. Totally.

[00:05:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So we've got totally derailed already. we're talking about golf. Welcome. there we go.

but thank you Tacho for joining us today. Really appreciate that. you may have noticed that side, there we go. For years, the, WP Builds logo has been a hexagon. It still is. And I've got hexagons all over the place and I only noticed just now where is it? It's there. Look. Melore. Oh, we're all hexa.

It's there out. Everybody's got hexagons. This is great. What a random thing that is. I wonder the best guys. What is it? As it were, Teates beautifully, doesn't it? Teates beautifully. but this is Robert and you can see Robert is supporting the Mela Press logo, over there. So how you doing, Robert?

You're right.

[00:06:22] Rovert Abela: I'm good. Thanks for having me.

[00:06:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. coincidentally, tacho and Robert, oh, look at the way I've joined that. I know that wasn't easy. Liv both of them live in NMA and both apparently have wooden panelling, close

[00:06:37] Taco Verdonschot: to

[00:06:37] Rovert Abela: nme, close to, actually, I, I can, during this episode, I can walk to Taco within five minutes I'll be there.

[00:06:43] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Oh, there's, it's, we should, it's actually

[00:06:46] Alex Standiford: like one wall of panelling. Yeah.

[00:06:48] Nathan Wrigley: They're connection's. The same wall, the famous five kilometre panelling wall of nine. Megan obviously heard of that, right? Let me read the bio. Robert Abella is the CEO and founder of Melo Press. Developers of user visibility, security and management plugins for WordPress.

With one 20 years of experience in software development and cybersecurity, Robert has held r and d product management and leadership roles at security software companies, including ACU ticks. I dunno if I've said that right. Apologies if I haven't Acue.

It's,

thank you Acue, where he managed the development of a leading web vulnerability scanner.

So there's, Robert. I can't believe the hexagon thing. That's really blown me away. There's three out the people. Go and get a hexagon. Teco. Teco. What the heck are you know what's going, I don't

[00:07:34] Taco Verdonschot: Hexagon. Are you doing a guy?

[00:07:36] Nathan Wrigley: So yeah. He's like that non hexagon guy. and then finally joining us over

[00:07:42] Taco Verdonschot: there, before we move on, there's one thing that Robert forgot to add in his bio.

[00:07:46] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah.

[00:07:46] Taco Verdonschot: And that is the fact that he is the, latest addition to the WordPress meetup EG. And organising team.

[00:07:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. Oh. Nice. Thanks. thank you. That's brilliant. We're gonna talk about word precedence, large and small a little bit later, so stay tuned for that. And, over there in that corner, is Alex Standerford.

Hello. It's not easy, is it Robert? To get that right? I get it wrong. I used to get it wrong a hundred percent of the time.

[00:08:15] Alex Standiford: It's easy. What are you talking about? I'm not having any trouble here.

[00:08:19] Nathan Wrigley: Alex is pointing at his own head. so Alex, how are you doing?

[00:08:24] Alex Standiford: I'm doing great, man. It's been, it's been a crazy couple months.

I'm just, I'm, and thanks for having me. I'm excited to, always excited. Like I said, last time I was on, I was talking to you somewhere. I was, I was, I'm always excited to be on the show.

[00:08:37] Nathan Wrigley: I'm pleased about that. it's a fairly irreverent show. We try to inject it with a little bit of humour here and there.

Keep it as interesting as possible. And so here's Alex's bio. Alex is a software developer, long time entrepreneur, and the founder of Siren, that's the Hexagon logo that you can see there, which is a product built on WooCommerce over more than a decade of shipping software. He's become an established voice in the WordPress and WooCommerce communities.

Now he's teaching people without a coding background to build real working tools with ai, the kind of thing that used to require a whole development team. And in a minute, I'm gonna tell you about a podcast episode Alex and I recorded recently, which quite literally blew my mind. it was re I honestly, I left that and went down, and I never talk about my podcast to my wife, but I went down and said, I've just done this recording with this guy Alex, and he said this.

And she was like, oh, wow. so that's coming up in a moment, like I said about the comments. If you wanna make comments, we really appreciate that. We'll try to put some of them on the screen as often as we can. If I miss the boat and your comment gets, swept up and, it avoided. I'm not doing it on purpose, I apologise.

So here's James. He's, saying Greetings from Orlando, Florida, currently 26 degrees centigrade in a sensible unit. it will go up to 35 degrees centigrade today. Every day has been boiling hot dripping bacon juice. It's not that hot here, but it's definitely hot here. So appreciate that. Lana, Mera joining us saying good evening.

I dunno where you are in the world, but obviously she's my colleague. She's my colleague.

[00:10:12] Rovert Abela: Lana

[00:10:13] Nathan Wrigley: Oh's. Lana. Yeah, Okay. Okay. anyway, wherever it is, it's the evening. Courtney's joining us. Hello. Summer Winter across the hemispheres. Yeah, definitely the summer. We're in the middle of the summer.

Did you know it was the summer solstice yesterday?

[00:10:28] Alex Standiford: Yes.

[00:10:28] Nathan Wrigley: So in the Northern Hemisphere it was the longest day possible. And, I went to Stone Eng and hung out with the Druids and watched the sun come up and it was awfully fun. That was really good.

[00:10:39] Rovert Abela: Yeah. A friend of mine walked up, Ben nervous, the highest one Oh wow.

Up in the uk, to see the sunrise, but he

[00:10:46] Nathan Wrigley: close. Oh, that's great. He, oh, that was cloud.

[00:10:49] Rovert Abela: Yeah.

[00:10:51] Nathan Wrigley: Where, I was at Stonehenge. It was the most beautiful night. There was no cloud anywhere. So the minute the sun popped up, there was a little tiny wispy cloud, which made the sunrise even more magical.

'cause it of course, went behind the cloud for a moment of, it was absolutely breathtaking. It was really good. hello Tonne. Sorry, say again?

[00:11:09] Alex Standiford: I said, hi, cloud Fish. I

[00:11:11] Nathan Wrigley: didn't hear that. Do all

[00:11:12] Alex Standiford: these crazy You guys are do. Oh, you I said I caught a fish. You guys did all these amazing things.

Oh, that's good. I went to a league.

[00:11:17] Nathan Wrigley: No, that's, that's nice. Normally I'm just in bed, it's something Solstice, I wake up and think, oh yeah, that happened. Did it? Oh Cracked me up. Alright. I tried a bit harder this year. Howdy to Nathan, Robert, Alex, and Tako. Says, Imran web at AKA web squadron, Melo.

Press Rock. That's nice. Great team. Look at that. Look at that in the comments. He's absolutely

[00:11:39] Taco Verdonschot: right. Thanks.

[00:11:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Didn't that brilliant. Thanks though. When somebody just says that, that's lovely. finally booked on. Oh. So Web Squadron at Imran. In other words, he's going to WordCamp us. Yeah. Dunno about the World Cup Asia though.

Yeah. That's still to be decided, isn't it? And thank you for that. Marcus Bonnet. Welcome to Orlando James. Happy Monday everyone. And finally happy Bel latest Father's Day to any of the dads as well. Oh, so it was Father's Day in the UK as well. Normally they don't match up. Do they like the European version and the American version very often?

[00:12:13] Taco Verdonschot: I don't think it was the American version, was it? Oh yeah. That's why I caught a fish.

Ah, yeah.

[00:12:20] Nathan Wrigley: That's what you do on Father's Day. It's otherwise,

[00:12:21] Taco Verdonschot: yeah. So you go fishing, it's like catch day's. What's more dad coded than fishing? Yeah, exactly. Oh,

[00:12:25] Nathan Wrigley: I see. Does that mean then that you were given like time off, it's go and do whatever you

[00:12:30] Alex Standiford: wanted do?

Yeah. Literally. Literally. Yeah. We went to the, we went to our camper and my, we got a kayak and I just,

[00:12:35] Nathan Wrigley: yeah,

[00:12:35] Alex Standiford: that's all I did. I

[00:12:36] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Go fishing. Nice, Yeah, I,

[00:12:40] Taco Verdonschot: with my daughter's, first Horse riding competition. Cool. Which was fantastic. Yeah.

[00:12:47] Nathan Wrigley: Oh,

[00:12:48] Taco Verdonschot: so proud of her. She did really well, so that's

[00:12:50] Nathan Wrigley: awesome.

That is nice. Oh, that's lovely. My, my, I have two sons, both of whom entirely forgot that it was Father's Day, it's just, they're older now and things like that. Don't make it into the calendar. But anyway, let's get on the show.

[00:13:08] Alex Standiford: Yeah, go ahead.

[00:13:09] Nathan Wrigley: No, it's okay. all So the, plan is to talk about word pressy things, put things on the screen and, hopefully our panellist have got things to say and you join in the comments just in case you're interested.

this is our homepage, which is where we put our content. And if you're interested in being emailed about it, we'll send two emails a week, drop your email address in there. 'cause we basically do two shows every week. We do the podcast, which I'll mention in a moment. And then we do this show, which gets actually wrapped up as a podcast and comes out tomorrow morning.

And that's it. That's the only emails we send basically. this podcast episode, we'll have a bunch of links, like probably about three or four times as many as the things that we're gonna discuss about what's happened in the WordPress space. So stick your email in there and I promise I won't spam you.

this is the list of episodes that we've done more recently. So we did about, wordpress.com enabling you to sell things on YouTube. We had Miriam Schwab from Elementor, talking about Angie, and then this is the episode in question that I was talking with Alex about. Alex, I don't even know how to sum this up.

Alex. Alex has decided that AI is like everything.

Yeah.

[00:14:21] Nathan Wrigley: And so for the longest period of time, like way longer than anybody that I know, Alex has been pushing like daily, like how to describe it, if you did a journal. Journal Yeah. Like a journal of what's been going on in his life and his business at an ai.

And the curious thing for me is if you do that for three weeks and run outta steam, it's probably 'cause you didn't do what you've done, which is push through that barrier. And now your claim, at least I haven't done it, is that once you get a certain amount of context and enough data pushed in, it starts to give you some really meaningful stuff back.

Yeah. That's what I took out of it anyway, so

[00:15:03] Alex Standiford: Totally. Yeah. it's, I'm using it as a way to help me, make decisions in a lot of ways with, in, in my business and what I'm doing. Yeah. So it's not just, so a lot of people are talking about coding, using it for coding and automation and stuff like that, and I'm using it to help me, bounce ideas off.

The biggest thing that I mentioned in that podcast without getting too far into it that comes to mind is, I just think about how relieved my wife is about the fact that I'm finally not like blathering at her about every single thought that comes to my mind. So now I'm actually, so that's just an example, like one of those funny small things.

But the bigger impacts is just like you're saying, I just have better recall. I'll have a conversation with it and it'll say something like, Alex, you've said this four times and the last. Six months, either commit to it or, this is a pattern I'm seeing, you should probably be thinking about this a little bit more in some different way.

Now sometimes it gives terrible advice, that's,

[00:15:56] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. But I suppose it's not really advice, it's just here's an alert, you react to it or don't react to it. That's the bit that I found quite curious. Yeah. I have a prodigious bad memory.

[00:16:06] Alex Standiford: Yeah.

[00:16:06] Nathan Wrigley: So much so that, those things that I forget when I'm reminded about them, I'll forget that I even had that as a thought all those years ago.

Yeah. And I've never committed to a journal. I've tried a few times writing things down at the end of a day and, it lasts for maximum a couple of weeks. But it was just curious that you were providing something that you then didn't need to go back and look through. Yeah. it will keep that focus for you.

[00:16:32] Alex Standiford: Yep.

[00:16:32] Nathan Wrigley: Honestly, go and listen to the episode. My jaw hit the floor a couple of times. and it was the, amount that you were given up as well, which I thought was curious. you're, fully at the end of the spectrum of people who are like getting into AI as certainly that I've spoken to anyway, so very curious.

So go and check that out for sure. Okay. BB, but just looking if any other comments have come through. Not so far, not ones that

[00:17:00] Taco Verdonschot: are, yeah. Not conversational. I think a good one is what, and I didn't know is that we share Father's Day, but not Mothers Day with the us.

[00:17:08] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Maybe that's what it is.

yeah. Okay. yeah. All there you go. Not mother. Yeah. Things that you learned. Oh, you can't say that. Coming to this podcast didn't teach you one thing today. you can actually, if you are, if you are. Who said that was it? Elliot Sby. Yeah. He's learned nothing. 'cause he came, he already used that.

Okay. Let's press on. first bit is a bit of informational content brought to you via Robert. Robert is on the lookout, for recipients of his new survey. We mentioned it a couple of weeks ago, but as Robert is on, he's put it into the roster. What are you, what are you trying to do here?

What intel are you trying to gather, Robert?

[00:17:51] Rovert Abela: Thanks. so basically we run a survey every year. We've been doing it for the last three or four years, or five, I don't know. basically it's a very short survey, two minutes. We ask people what they are doing to keep their website secure, what methods they use, what practises they have, maybe policies.

And the idea is we gather all this information and in September we published the results. We also host, last year we hosted some sort of, four people. Last year we had Oliver Sill and a few other ones from security. And we discussed the results. The idea is, of course, for people to learn what tools are working, what tools are not working, what other people are doing that maybe didn't work for them, et cetera.

So it's, for everyone to learn more, on how to keep their website secure. And you can basically go to me press.com/survey and take the survey. It only takes just two minutes.

[00:18:44] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So mela press.com/survey. And just one quick question. You don't need to have a security background. You're not asking like deeply technical penetrating questions.

This is more if you've got a website, we wanna hear from you about what it is that you've done for your tech stack,

[00:18:59] Rovert Abela: correct? Yeah. In fact, most questions are yeah, if you use for example, to a fair or not, if you use okay. Backups for example, or if something happens, you call to et cetera. Yeah.

[00:19:08] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

Okay. once more, mal press.com/what did you say? Slash survey? Yeah,

[00:19:13] Rovert Abela: survey, correct?

[00:19:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. There you go. That's the measure of my memory. Robert said that about 12 seconds ago, and it's all Freddy already gone. okay, let's get into some of the bits and pieces that have been, brought to our attention.

Some of these have come from Tacho, some from me, and then I've got a bunch of security stuff, which Robert put in and we're gonna leave that till towards. I think

[00:19:34] Rovert Abela: Alex has put some as well.

[00:19:35] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, Alex has, if you've put some in Alex, I haven't had a chance to see that in all honesty. So shout that's okay at the end.

and we'll get to that, right? So few bits around WordPress 7.1 or Core you might say. So this is the first one. We now have a roadmap for 7.1. This is written by, Anne McCarthy. And actually we'll just flip for one second to a different article because I think this, these two things go hand in hand.

Anne, for the first time, is going to be a release lead. So for 7.1, from this moment on, Anne McCarthy will be the release lead for 7.1. Great responsibility, but given the amount of work that Anne has done towards other releases and the project in general, I am. I am very, confident that Anne is the right person for this role.

hat tip to Anne. So firstly, thank you for doing that. and I guess part of that is to, illustrate to people what the heck is going on with WordPress 7.1. So I've just highlighted a few bits. None of this is new. If you follow the project closely, you probably knew most of this, but nevertheless, here we go.

So the new notes f feature, which, so this is the kind of thing that is gonna come in 7.1. New notes, features including suggestion mode and emoji reactions, make asynchronous feedback more interactive in terms of real time collaboration. She says that's an exciting idea and there are strategic decisions still to be made.

So I guess punting that for the future are still a little bit new. Options for responsive styling and pseudo state styling. a new guidelines feature. This, I think is really interesting. adds a persistent structured way to encode editorial rules into your WordPress, helping you keep your voice and preferences when collaborating with ai.

So that's an AI feature where you can tell, whatever agent it is that you are using, what, how you wish things to be done. And that's gonna be baked into call, which is interesting. new freeform image cropper so that you can get your images right and it's gonna be, like a modal where you're at, that moment, which is nice.

there's gonna be unicode support, so for things like email addresses, SLS usernames, things like that. So you can have other curious characters as part of your URL string and, new on this day dashboard widget for those people who like to journal, looking at you, Alex, the idea being, I guess it'll surface stuff that you did in the past on your WordPress site.

12 years ago today you wrote this. And obviously if you've got a, I don't know, a big publication like TechCrunch or something, that kind of feature would probably surface rather a lot.

[00:22:20] Alex Standiford: It'd be really cool for like my personal blog, for example. I've got every tweet and everything I've ever posted.

So it, it would be great for that kind of thing too,

[00:22:28] Nathan Wrigley: right?

[00:22:28] Alex Standiford: I'm actually really excited about that.

[00:22:30] Nathan Wrigley: Almost every journal app that I've ever used and then thrown in the trash, 'cause I just can't keep it up is, but it ships with that feature. That's like a core thing, isn't it? You wish to, as part of your sort of meditation for want of a better word, on the stuff you wrote, you wanna be reminded like, this time last year you did this thing With your son, taco be reminded in year six years, whatever it may be, you went to the first pony, competition with your daughter. That sort of stuff's really great. so anyway, any commentary above and beyond that for the stuff that you can see highlighted or

[00:23:03] Alex Standiford: So I will add one thing.

I think that the, notes feature is a real sleeper here. Oh. In terms of what people are talking about. I know that, I've, seen some commentary on it where people, I don't, think that there's, I don't know, people have been a little underwhelmed maybe by it and thinking that it's not related to AI and, that, we need to be thinking about the future of WordPress and all this stuff.

And I, just, all I can ever think about is how relevant that is to that topic because

[00:23:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:23:33] Alex Standiford: Of, a note doesn't have to be written by a human, it can be written by an AI agent. It can be written by something reviewing this and adding comments. Or if an AI agent is writing your content, you can add a note to that content.

Describing things that need tweaked or need fixed or adjusted, and then have it asynchronously, go back and actually make the improvements on it. So I think that I just, I'm really excited about that feature. it reminds me of like how, even in code, like a pull request works where you're able to add comments in line into stuff and be able to collaborate with other people.

And I've been doing that with AI for a while with code, and I would love to be able to do it with more writing.

[00:24:14] Nathan Wrigley: It's interesting that it got shipped as notes. the naming of it feels like you are attaching a sticky note to something. In other words, it's a place to go and write a reminder.

I know come back and finesse this paragraph a bit later, but when I heard somebody mention that the person that you may app mention, for example, doesn't have to be a human, that's when it took off. but the fact that it's in like little discreet chunks as opposed to a sort of threaded, like just this long conversation which stretches up and up like you might do with a traditional, LLMI, I quite like that as well.

It's much more discreet. And, oh, one thing I didn't mention in 7.1, I think the idea would be a note at the minute is bound to a block. So if you hit return and you get a new paragraph, there's no way at the moment to attaching a note to those, contiguous paragraphs. I think this, it's gonna ship with more, I, I want this image and this paragraph but not this one and this one.

I want that to be in the context of what's going on. So you can select multiple things, That should be quite neat as well. yeah. And you're saying, Alex, that a lot of people seem underwhelmed by the feature. for me that is because I've been working in, the Google Suite, so Google Docs for the last, 12 years.

[00:25:36] Taco Verdonschot: And we've had this feature since forever.

[00:25:39] Alex Standiford: Yeah.

[00:25:40] Taco Verdonschot: Not at a block level, but at a, character level. yes, it's the perfect idea. Yes, it works really well with ai. No, it's not mature enough yet, To compete with the tool that we've been using for the longest time to write content.

[00:26:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's a good point.

Yeah. Very, good point. Google Docs is, I can't remember Google Docs ever being bad. It's always been brilliant from the moment it came out. It was stunning. so just another quick thing about this particular piece. I'll just say that I've only highlighted the bits at the beginning, in the beginning paragraph, which is Anne summing up what's gonna come.

There's a lot here. As so often is the case when Anne puts, pen to paper, she goes to town. So there's a, list of absolutely everything, including a load of stuff that I didn't mention there. So definitely go and check that out if you're interested in what's coming in WordPress. 7.1 there. Is that right?

Okay. Shall I move on? Yeah. Already? Yeah. Okay, great. speaking of 7.1, oh no, I've already done that one. Yeah, I've done that one. Forget that. so this is interesting one, this is from the repository, which I should say was, the Anne McCarthy piece was also from the repository. this is, entitled Core Committers Float, Chrome Style Canary Approach for WordPress.

Question whether RTC belongs in core. So the, a bunch of the core committers, there's a photo that you can see on the screen here. they were in attendance at Word Camp Europe, and so they took themselves off find, found themselves a space, and they just get into a, a deep conversation about what WordPress might do in the near future, them being core committers their, what their words carry weight.

And so they met up and, started throwing this idea around, which I'm not sure is entirely new, but certainly hasn't been talked about for a little while. And I'll just read what Ray wrote. Core committers discussed adopting a development approach similar to Chrome's the browser, where experimental features would be gated behind feature flags, allowing contributors to work faster on more features at once.

It would allow them to collect crash telemetry and request feedback earlier in the process. So at the moment, the, core commiters are saying it's very, hard to get Intel about new features they wish to ship to Core, because you've gotta go and set up a brand new version of WordPress, instal, like a beater release of WordPress, play with it, make it break, then go and write commentary.

Wouldn't it be a good idea if all of that stuff was in core, but switched it off? a bit like they do, over on the Canary Build for Chrome. So you would instal it, you would switch the bits and pieces on that you would need and it would already have the telemetry built in to feed back to the core team.

it strikes me as a reasonable idea. They,

[00:28:38] Rovert Abela: they have some similar, because there's the AI plugin and there's also the performance, which is a collection of plugins and, 'cause I was talking by coincidence at Computer as well with, Western Luter is a contributor that was saying like, to, test performance, they have this collection of plugins.

They are shipped first as plugins, experiment plugins. Some people test them and then based on those which are used most or get most feedback, then they're included in core. So yes, it is very difficult for, the core developers to get feedback of what's working and not, and what people actually are using and not.

[00:29:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So they're saying here that currently, pre-release versions of WordPress, so beta releases and what have you, the beta tester plugin usually gets something around the 3000 instal benchmark, which, which is still a thing, but it's probably that 3000 instals is probably a real subset of people using WordPress.

really, into the weeds of the project.

[00:29:37] Alex Standiford: Yeah.

[00:29:37] Nathan Wrigley: And it's nowhere near the amount that could be, if the telemetry, I suppose was built in and all you had to do was enable a flag to make a Is tech, sorry.

[00:29:49] Taco Verdonschot: Is it really, I mean for, the average WordPress user, they're able to instal a plugin, they're also able to switch a flag somewhere in a ui.

I don't think that if you really want to, there is that big a difference in how hard it is to do.

[00:30:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you are, you're actually, you are noting actually there, there's a bit in this piece which makes exactly that point. I can't locate it right now, but, I think the

[00:30:21] Rovert Abela: biggest, sorry.

[00:30:22] Nathan Wrigley: No, the biggest problems, yeah, you carry problem

[00:30:25] Rovert Abela: and even switches so is fine.

'cause we see it even with our, even other vendors is some people might enable something. Even though you tell them this is beta, be careful. Don't push it on live websites. They use these features on live websites, it creates problems and you get a pushback. So you need to find it. I agree with you Ko. just, you need to find the right balance between what we have the users.

[00:30:47] Taco Verdonschot: might the fact that we have the beta plugin installed on only three K sites not be an indication that people are not willing or able to test. the average WordPress user, doesn't have a staging site and the live website No. And the testing environment and yeah. and the failures are almost always silent on those sites.

[00:31:15] Alex Standiford: They'll have no idea that there's a problem that was caused by beta. It's too risky.

[00:31:19] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. I'll, just, I'm not sure if

[00:31:20] Alex Standiford: this is, the

[00:31:22] Taco Verdonschot: solution.

[00:31:23] Rovert Abela: yeah. Most probably those 2000 solutions are developers part, Core developers. Yeah. We're not exactly the, typical WebPress user.

[00:31:31] Alex Standiford: I find myself also wondering, and maybe this was taco's point, is how is this different than canonical plugins?

I guess I'm just trying to see, couldn't a lot of these beta features be put into a canonical plugin? And maybe that's it. It's just, it just feels like this is almost reinventing the wheel in a lot of ways. I think

[00:31:51] Nathan Wrigley: it'd be interesting to see how it was implemented. Like it, I don't know if you could flash up a toast warning or something like that, I dunno, do you fancy becoming a beta tester?

Toggle this thing on and you're done. Might, and it might be behind the scenes

[00:32:03] Alex Standiford: is just a canonical plugin or something. Maybe

[00:32:05] Nathan Wrigley: might, yeah. you could instal that with one click as well, presumably. What, yeah. Interesting. I, you KO's point is made here as well. So it said, the group discussed what can be only be described as a chronic issue with testing and feedback in the project.

And then it goes on, say the meeting also acknowledged there, there also can be a, someone on core committers to merge certain features because it's not clear what the desired level of testing is or if it's actually been achieved. I dunno if that touches specifically on your point, Tcho, but I think it's adjacent to it.

[00:32:38] Taco Verdonschot: yeah.

the, mostly the, chronic issue with testing, but also because. ideally we'd love to for every workplace site to have a testing environment where they can enable this. but that's not reality. So what is the actual group that we could reach for testing? Is that larger than those current 3000 instals?

[00:33:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Interesting. Okay. So we will, we'll park that for a moment, but just to say that if you're interested in following that up, that came on the repository website. and really I think it is just a bunch of people in the room having a bit of a chat at this point, just trying to figure out if there's a, there, and, and it sounds from the discussion as if there was uncertainty, there was pushback speaking.

[00:33:28] Alex Standiford: I would also be interested, sorry, real quick. I would be real interested to see if they're able to get any kind of real traction with the telemetry piece. I've had some conversations about that in the past too, and it's met with a lot of friction.

[00:33:41] Nathan Wrigley: I would, imagine that would be the hardest bit to push at all by far.

You'd have you, there'd have to be quite a lot of separate tick boxes. Yes, I agree to, yes, I know. I'm definitely certain that I want you to Yeah. Be receiving my telemetry. Yes. I realise what I'm doing and so on. Yeah, I can imagine there'd be a lot of pushback for that wasn't there and, no accidental way of enabling it.

But also the conversation, the people in the room were, it sounds like if you read towards the end of the article, trying to figure out what the heck we do with, RTC. realtime comments, this idea that notes is a sort of slim down version of being able to do Google Doc style actual collaboration and Although I thought that was a dumb deal. It seems that quite a few in the core committers group, were not entirely sure. It as a whole, belongs inside a WordPress core, perhaps like a subset of things that you would enable and then have to enable a, like a canonical plugin or something like that.

So, that piece touches on that story as well, okay. We will move on in that case, if unlike me, you speak, other languages, I only speak English, and so I'm in the very fortunate position that more or less wherever I go be that a WordPress event or, reading documentation or anything, everything's in English.

I don't have to really think about it, which I'm very grateful for, but obviously across the WordPress project that's highly undesirable. And one of the areas where that could be improved is the make WordPress slack. So the idea being from now it says following Mary's Post. Mary, the executive director of the WordPress project, Mary Hubbard, Mary's post on welcoming all languages and communities to the make WordPress Slack.

We're ready to start creating channels for local. So here's the list, local meetup groups, local communities, and flagship events. So if you've got one of those things, the conversation can begin and there's a set of instructions on how to do it. If you're concerned about your message history, that can be dealt with.

If you need more than one channel or if you need a separate channel for organisers, that involves a conversation with the people saying it up. But anyway, there's instructions on how to get involved in all of that on this page. I don't think there's anything much to say about that. Or is there Tacho?

[00:36:04] Taco Verdonschot: So the thing that, I find most interesting is that it means that we now allow non-English language in the make work for Slack. which may be interesting from a moderation perspective, especially given that, I'm not sure if you've heard of the term False Friends, but it's words that are written the same or sound the same in one language and the other, but have a completely different meaning.

your spam filter might pick up something thinking it is English, where it is a completely legitimate, normal word in another language. And so I'm really curious to see how that will go down and if there's gonna be any issues there in, in moderating the make WordPress slack.

[00:36:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's a good point.

I hadn't really thought about that because whenever, oh yeah, the devil is in the detail, isn't it? It'd be interesting. Who gets the responsibility for moderating that? And if that would then fall on the shoulders of the person, I don't know, in, in charge of that meetup or what have you. Alex, sorry.

[00:37:11] Alex Standiford: Do you mean do you mean like whenever, like a su like for example, southerner in the United States, they'll say something, this is totally gonna be lost in this group.

I just realised I'm the only American, that they'll say something like, oh, bless your heart. And like it, it reads as, something that's genuinely nice, but it is not nice and it is means a completely different thing in the context of a, of that person. Is that the kind of thing you're talk about?

[00:37:34] Taco Verdonschot: yes, but that's different meaning to the same words. but there's also a word in, English, that is spelled the same as a word in Dutch.

[00:37:46] Alex Standiford: Oh.

[00:37:46] Taco Verdonschot: But has

[00:37:47] Alex Standiford: I see

[00:37:47] Taco Verdonschot: a different, meaning. So it, might be bad language in English, but a completely normal word, in, in Dutch.

[00:37:58] Alex Standiford: Gotcha. Okay.

[00:37:59] Taco Verdonschot: I see what

[00:37:59] Alex Standiford: you mean.

Yeah.

[00:38:00] Rovert Abela: But these are about channels specifically per language slash meetup? No. So

[00:38:07] Taco Verdonschot: yes,

[00:38:07] Rovert Abela: it won't make it to the main channel,

[00:38:10] Taco Verdonschot: but I don't think that Slack has the option to moderate for different languages in specific channels.

[00:38:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it'd be interesting

[00:38:18] Taco Verdonschot: to see. So if you have a global, these are bad words list or, automatic moderation based on, sentences, then I'm, curious if it will pick up.

[00:38:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that will be interesting. Yeah. The last thing we want is, flame Wars in that group. But anyway, it's there. you've gotta make use of it by asking to be included in that. But if you've got one of those things, a meetup or what have you, and you would like it to be run inside the language of your choosing, makes sense, But yeah. Fair enough. tacho, that's a good point. okay, we'll move on. I've got another make wordpress.org one. and this is, so there's a few things. I might get them a bit out of order, but there's a few kind of local meet ups and meet UPS pieces, which we're gonna mention now. First one is from, pujari, which was produced just a couple of days ago, called How Effective are our Advertising efforts for Word Camp?

Now, I didn't actually know this was a thing, but if you're a Word Camp organiser, you can request 400 US dollars, which you would then spend in some way. It's earmarked for advertising and marketing. This comes through the global sponsorship grant, but apparently that $400, nobody has any track on how that is being spent or how effective that spend is, which yeah, is very nice.

Get $400 and spend it on a thing, but nobody, centrally. Has a way of figuring out if that money has done well. if you dump $400 on Google ads, did it get you new people to come through the door If you did the same thing through Facebook ads or you printed a bunch of leaflets, or whatever it may be.

So the idea here then is to make it more mandatory so that there's some kind of, reporting coming back. So a short, mandatory question included on the ticket, when you purchase. So on the screen there, there may be a question which you could ask, like, how did you hear about this event? Or something like that.

A question, a post event organiser. sorry, a question to the post event organiser survey for any Word Camp, that's another option. and the idea also of building some better tooling. I know it's nothing, $400 in most situations is not a great deal of money, especially in the context of a big word camp that'd get lost very quickly, but still it probably adds up to tens or, possibly 20 of thousands of dollars which the project is spending, which doesn't have a way of being tracked.

So there you go. Any thoughts on that? Probably not.

[00:40:52] Taco Verdonschot: So how do you track, usually track the efficiency of your marketing campaigns?

[00:40:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Attribution. Yeah. Yeah,

[00:41:02] Taco Verdonschot: yeah. Last click attribution.

[00:41:04] Alex Standiford: Hi,

[00:41:06] Taco Verdonschot: sorry.

[00:41:07] Nathan Wrigley: It's funny you should say that. Alex has got a, Alex has got a plugin.

[00:41:13] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah, I know. Can help. I know, but that is a fraction of what marketing is doing.

[00:41:18] Alex Standiford: Absolutely.

[00:41:20] Taco Verdonschot: And so we might be, and how do you do last click attribution for local prints in your local newspaper? yeah. Is it literally the people who type in the URL based on It's so hard.

[00:41:35] Alex Standiford: Yeah.

[00:41:36] Taco Verdonschot: so yes, you can measure some, but to a certain extent we just have to accept that we're spending money on hopefully getting the word out about our events, Yeah. for print and stuff like that, the key thing that I always recommend for stuff like that, if you're trying to, where you can't attribute it directly, you have to make it toward the act of filling out the form on a specific page is what attributes it. So you create a different page that's similar or identical to that form, or, some kind of, G TM tags and stuff like that have been around forever, but that doesn't work on a podcast or a thing where you gotta read and type it.

[00:42:13] Alex Standiford: Nobody's gonna type that. So you gotta send 'em to a different page that redirects and tracks and it's doable. It's just, it takes a little, a little, planning for sure.

[00:42:23] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. And we don't necessarily have very good options [email protected] to create decent landing pages that are potentially no indexed or what have you.

There's, none of that. We don't have an SEO plugin on workcamp.org. So you're gonna create duplicate content pages that are slightly different so that you can track how you're spending your $400, or we're adding friction by having everyone who has to, who buys a ticket, fill out, a questionnaire.

So we're adding a lot more friction for our end users so that we can justify $400. I don't know.

[00:43:14] Nathan Wrigley: Sorry, I just realised my mic was off. Yeah, good point. I wonder if this piece in the article, this last bullet point was here was something to do with what you were just saying, tacho that it's just paraphrased as better tooling over time to make this, easier to track consistently across events.

So perhaps different landing pages being an option or something like that. I think you're right. I, certainly about the, adding a form, which would be mandatory in order to get a ticket. That is the sort of thing, which probably in my case wouldn't bother me at a WordPress event, but oth other events where I'm not quite so wedded to the project.

If you stick a question in front of me before I can get access to the ticket, it definitely would make me think twice. I don't really know why that is, but there's something there.

[00:43:58] Alex Standiford: It's additional friction.

[00:44:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:44:02] Rovert Abela: Every, any type of question, any extra step, it's just extra friction. Yeah.

[00:44:06] Alex Standiford: I don't know if it's worse, but there's also an opportunity to capture it at registration whenever they're coming in too.

[00:44:13] Nathan Wrigley: Just

[00:44:13] Alex Standiford: thinking out loud.

[00:44:14] Nathan Wrigley: That's okay. Okay. anyway, there you go. So that is an endeavour to make that spend, more traceable and trying to figure out if it actually does what it's supposed to do. All right, let's move on. So the next one related to WordPress events, is Elliot Richmond in the uk. He, is making video content, for wordpress.com at the moment, amongst all of his other mini achievements, like having a fabulously successful pizza business on the side.

he makes the point that, his cheltham WordPress meetup, I'll paraphrase very quickly. it's very difficult now to get new speakers. You either are like recycling speakers who have been recycled many, times before. and, it's hard. And if the speakers don't come and they've not, and there's not a genuine interest in the subject matter that they're delivering, then the audience probably won't come.

And you get into this spiral of, no interesting new speakers. So less attendees because less attendees, less interested speakers and you know how it goes. And, so he's hoping to have an opportunity to try and fix this. I've struck up a conversation with him. We haven't got anywhere yet, but hopefully, because I'm involved in helping out with the, the W-P-L-D-N, the WordPress Meetup, which we do in London, hopefully there'll be some sort of shared wisdom or something, but it's hard, it's really, difficult.

And, I don't have an answer other than to say that if you are willing, please make yourself known to people like Elliot, or myself or Dan, maybe if you're in the, London area, especially because we would be love, we would be happy to, to have you and give you a voice and put you in front of those, attendees to the London one.

And I'm sure the same would be true for Elliot and Cheltham. So I don't have an answer to this. It seems attendance is dwindling. I don't know that the answer is gonna be immediately obvious, but any thoughts on that? If not, I will move on.

[00:46:26] Taco Verdonschot: I think Elliot is in the common quite often, isn't he?

[00:46:30] Nathan Wrigley: he's, yeah, he's often here. Yeah. I dunno if he's here today. I haven't seen him yet.

[00:46:33] Taco Verdonschot: It's, so the interesting thing is, we were at Work Camp Europe in Krakoff about, was it a half, a couple weeks ago? He, or two and half, he actually came up to me and said, Hey, I recognise you from the WP Built, podcast,

[00:46:48] Nathan Wrigley: internet fame taco.

[00:46:51] Taco Verdonschot: you're connecting people. but he is, he's really working hard to make his meetup a success. but I think that he's struggling with the same issues that we all do, all the Meetup organisers. like you said, we've, gone through the same speakers for a couple years and that makes sense because that's the people living close to your area and getting people from abroad to speak at your meetup is unusual.

[00:47:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:47:24] Taco Verdonschot: Like giving Robert to London.

[00:47:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Or Raquel.

[00:47:28] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah, exactly.

[00:47:30] Rovert Abela: no, he's right. I, do it because, yeah, it's. It's relatively easy and cheap. So it's like a day out for me at the end of the day, and meeting some new people. But yeah, you, cannot do it on a monthly basis or so 'cause it still has it.

Yeah. And as like I was saying, it's the numbers in general are going down, especially after Corona. I remember the first few meetups I've been to deny American one before Corona, there used to be much more people.

[00:47:56] Taco Verdonschot: Yep.

[00:47:57] Rovert Abela: After Corona, at least we went back in person. But still the numbers are much more, it's not just, by the way, it's not just the Netherlands or uk, whoever you speak to, it's a common problem everywhere.

And this ties in, I think with the whole idea of academy. we're joking about it with a few people at Amp Europe. It's always the same people. Unfor as in it's, we're not seeing too many new people, coming into this industry, Yeah. It's, it is difficult. One of the things that Elliot's suggesting, although he is not wetting himself to it, is this idea of workshops where people show up and rather than being spoken at, for want of a better word, it's more of an interactive thing.

[00:48:35] Nathan Wrigley: So it might be, I don't know how to build a block or something like that. it's an idea. I, don't know what we do to be honest with you. All I can say is that what used to work doesn't seem to have the same, impact that it used to have. I dunno why that is, but certainly Coronavirus didn't really help.

so anyway. Yeah, there you go. So James, in the comments, says speakers are harder and harder to find. some are burnt out whilst the reverses that some folks do not want to visit a meetup, let alone speak at one. Yeah. I think all of that is true. That's absolutely true. And Imran, you mentioned that you can't fill out a particular form.

Which one was that? The Melo press one or was it the one that I mentioned on my site? Whichever it is, just let us know. I'm sure either

[00:49:24] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. Or the WP speakers one that we mentioned in this piece, given the time of his comments.

[00:49:30] Alex Standiford: Yeah. Plot twist. Everybody wants to talk. The form just doesn't work.

[00:49:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's right.

Yeah. Oh, it's so brutal. I wish, Yeah, that's an easy form now. That's easy

[00:49:39] Alex Standiford: to fix.

[00:49:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And the form for speakers had six pre-questions. not filling that out. Yeah. Make it as easy as you can. so yeah, if you, if you've got any intuitions on that, I'm sure Elliot would love to hear from you.

Like I said, I'm gonna have a quick chat with Elliot, me and Dan and Elliot maybe knock our heads together and see if we can figure out a sustainable path forwards. Speaking of Dan, May in the uk, I penned a post the other day to say that W-P-L-D-N. It's turning 150 and by, you'll notice that's quite a lot older than the WordPress project as a whole, like some 128 years or something older.

no, it's 150 events old. So that's a lot. I don't know what that would be in years, but somebody could do the massive divide that by 12 and you'd be able to figure it out. I've not been

[00:50:32] Rovert Abela: 15 years because you don't do it

[00:50:33] Nathan Wrigley: 15 every,

[00:50:34] Rovert Abela: every month. No. Usually you might miss some, so

[00:50:36] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Yep. 14,

[00:50:37] Rovert Abela: 15 years. Yeah,

[00:50:38] Nathan Wrigley: it's an old one.

so it's been going for ages and this month we've got, Raquel, from press amongst other things. And we've also got Paul Halfpenny from the filter agency in the uk. And if you fancy come in and joining it is coming up this Thursday. So like in literally three days time. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.

Yes. Quick maths. Nathan, you can add three. and that, that's the plan. If you go to wpdn.uk, you'll be able to see, what and where. But it's in central London. It's not that far from the, the shard, and borough market and things like that. So if you've got any intuitions you wanna come and hang out, there'll be two sessions followed by, drinks just around the corner.

And, bring, I used to live in Edinburg in a mortgage is all I could say.

[00:51:32] Rovert Abela: When I used to live in Edinburgh, when we didn't find speakers, 'cause I used to help organise with that one as well. We used some, it's not the best solution, but we used to get online speakers. Someone goes in, used to have a screen, a monitor, someone from the US sometimes we had, and yeah, they just make a presentation and talk with us.

We do stuff. How did

[00:51:51] Nathan Wrigley: it go down? Was it well received or

[00:51:53] Rovert Abela: Okay, as in being there in person of course is much more different.

[00:51:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:51:58] Rovert Abela: But sometimes you're stuck. and people, yeah, it depends who as well. But yeah, we had people asking questions as well to the speaker, so it's better than nothing, you can try.

I also like the idea of workshops. talking about attracting new people to WordPress. Most probably if you run a number of workshops, which for us are simple things, how to build the website or how to market the website. You might attract some business owners in your area that, that don't know what's purpose or just try the name so then they might get involved in the meetup.

[00:52:26] Nathan Wrigley: I think one of the things as well is, difficult to, so we were talking about that $400 spend. It's difficult to know where to put your kind of marketing efforts. 'cause the London one, we have a list which we send out to, but also over the years, I've only been helping out for a couple of years.

Less, a couple of years. Dan maybe has been doing it for the, full whatever it is. I think it might be 17 years or 16 years or something like that. And I think Meetup was the pla is the platform that, that is used for that. But, W-P-L-D-N is not part of the chapter programme, so you have to pay for that.

And it's not cheap. It's really not cheap at that level, so it costs a few quid. and also you're not sure exactly how these people heard about You you could ask them, but you're probably gonna get a certain amount of people falling off. Anyway, the long and the short of that is if you've got any intuitions about how to help Elliot put on his Cheltenham Me top, I'm sure he'd love to hear from you, as would I and Dan maybe as well.

[00:53:28] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah, I would encourage everyone to just write a blog post and share it far and wide so that we can all learn from it.

[00:53:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. What you mean after the event? what happened at the, literally if you have ideas on how to attract new speakers.

Oh, thank you. Yeah. Good idea. Yeah, actually, yeah, that's a good idea.

Ta and then send me the where, wherever it is. That would be really helpful. Yeah, thank you. it was the WP speakers form. I will get in touch with Michelle, Imran. 'cause she's the custodian of that site. Actually, Marcus is in the comments. He, I think had some hand in that as well. Maybe I'm wrong about that.

Marcus. Apologies. That's the case, Marcus. but anyway, if, we'll get you sorted, I'm sure. Oh, and there's Elliot Richmond. you missed it. Elliot, we've been talking about you for the last five minutes. They just arrived. Go back, bless, replay or whatever and then come in and give us completely incongruous comment.

What was that? What were we talking about? okay, so there we go. Happy birthday if you like. Some bit of a milestone, isn't it? 150 events. It's coming up on Thursday. Speaking of which, I put this back up on the screen. We're still with events not WordPress me up, but, this is, Rodolfo who ran the highly successful by the sounds of it.

I did not go, did you go? I was

[00:54:50] Rovert Abela: there. It was, yes. It was really well organised. So everyone stayed at the hotel where the presentation was.

[00:54:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yep.

[00:54:57] Rovert Abela: So like it is just like you have breakfast, it's all the time together basically. And it was a small number. Hundred something.

[00:55:05] Alex Standiford: Yep.

[00:55:06] Rovert Abela: So it was much easier to connect.

Even the evening, just everyone stayed in this place. The evening there were I forgot what it was, but he organised Aquis I think one night. And so there was always something going on so you could Much easier connect in the evening. Everyone was in the hotel lobby, like a few beers, whatever, outside chatting.

Okay. Everyone was in one place and, but I think even with the number, in fact I spoke to him as well, you want it to grow 'cause it's so nice. There's a limit how much you want to grow. 'cause if it grows so much, you lose that sort of, of intimacy. Like very easy to connect, with people.

[00:55:40] Nathan Wrigley: I think from, so I interviewed Rodolfo before the event, like se several, I don't know, seven or eight months before the event when he, it would gone from the planning stages into the, I'm really doing this now stages.

And he was able to tell me about the venue. And I think the venue was such a remarkably cool idea. 'cause it's basically this, if, it was in fact at the place that I think it was, it's the kind of place you would go on holiday anyway, right? It really felt like an end destination. Yeah. there's the, there's where we're doing the conference, oh, there's the beach, two minutes

[00:56:10] Rovert Abela: walk.

yeah. In fact, every morning, I was running, and I saw other people from Cout Summit running as well. I was with Daniella from, WPOK every morning, went for a run, jumped in the sink, go for a swim, go for breakfast, and start the conference. And other people running, everyone from checkout summit.

So it was touristic area and yeah, everyone was in one place. And that's, I think made a big difference. the number of people and the location and everything.

[00:56:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So the fact that it's designed to be fairly small and probably stay fairly small, but also the fact that it, its in a niche which can justify that, the spend to go to a foreign destination and in a hotel and all of that kind of stuff.

I think well done Rodolfo for kind of figuring that out because there's a lot of jigsaw pieces where, or, there's a lot of versions of that event where it didn't work. And by hard work and careful thinking, it looks like Rodolfo's made that into an event which is gonna come back round. And, and so the piece on the screen, the point of raising all of this was that, Rodolfo, wishes to make it known that, it, you gotta pay the speakers, basically, which I think is probably one of the things which crops up fairly frequently on this show.

pay the speakers and you'll attract, I'm doing air quotes now, good speakers. and, people who are good at speaking, who've got a lot to say and wanna put time into it, would very much welcome being paid for it. I'm sure. he's

[00:57:41] Rovert Abela: also mentioning organisers as well, because organising, yeah.

[00:57:44] Nathan Wrigley: Sorry. You're quite right. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:57:46] Rovert Abela: it takes a lot of time as well. I yeah.

Go ahead.

[00:57:51] Taco Verdonschot: Go ahead.

[00:57:53] Rovert Abela: Oh, no. I will say I, I never, I, organised World Campaign, the brought wise, I was part of the organisation team, back in the years was much smaller. But even then it took, it used take a lot of time.

Lot. I wanted to, it's lot have a couple of times with, world Camp Netherlands. however, based on the fact that the last few months you have to have a weekly, there's so much going on. We also have a job, so it's, a bit difficult.

[00:58:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:58:19] Rovert Abela: so yeah, it does take a lot of, time and effort to, organise.

Maybe for me it doesn't, we can do it because we have a business, but for someone who's a freelance, most probably those hours are coming out from their salary, from their, they could potentially be working on a customer project, Yeah. Yeah.

It, is.

[00:58:38] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah, so the interesting thing is that I've found myself on both sides of this discussion.

So I've argued in the past as well that we should, reimburse speakers and that we should, do more for organisers and volunteers and what have you. and the more time I spend in the WordPress community, and looking at events overall also beyond WordPress, the less, I think it's true. I don't think that we should be paying organisers.

I'm not. So I'm gonna focus on organisers, for a bit because. Yes, work in Europe is a huge achievement to, put on, it's insane. I have been part of the organising team, for two years, a couple years ago, longer than I'm willing to admit by now. And, I'd say that as a team lead in the work Europe organising team, you spend around 300 hours a year, organising, excluding the week of the event itself.

So Wow. Before the event, you're, gonna be between two and 300 hours for sure that you've invested, and that's not as a lead organiser, because that will be even more.

so yes, it is a huge investment. however, we're, we have already have a situation where we try to keep ticket prices as low as we can.

We're squeezing sponsors to the max, to the point where it, ROI direct, ROI at events is hard, but we're getting to a point where it's no longer reasonable. the prices that we ask sponsors, and if we now have 80 organisers for work in Europe and we want to reimburse them for the hundreds of hours that they each spend, we're talking about thousands and thousands of hours that we need to pay for.

There is no way we can have sponsors have low ticket prices and pay everyone involved in a work camp at a reasonable rate.

[01:01:20] Alex Standiford: Pick two.

[01:01:21] Rovert Abela: Yeah. you, have, you cannot have both cheap prices, like most conferences have been to outside WordPress. They don't cost 50 euros. That's, yeah. That was the,

[01:01:29] Alex Standiford: that was the first thing I thought as well, taco whenever I was seeing this was like, you're gonna have to add a zero to the ticket cost then, of course.

Yeah. at least that's what's gonna have to happen. And I, don't know.

[01:01:38] Nathan Wrigley: Sorry. Yeah,

[01:01:40] Alex Standiford: I don't know if that's in line with. The core value of democratising publishing doesn't feel very

[01:01:45] Nathan Wrigley: well. It, what's interesting, I, actually don't know what Rodolfo's ticket cost, but

[01:01:50] Rovert Abela: it was 200 something, I think. 200.

[01:01:53] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Something

[01:01:53] Rovert Abela: along those lines.

[01:01:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Not, nothing, but not, that's quite of an interesting price, isn't it? Because that's halfway where I thought it would be. I thought it would be more like the five, four something hundreds, or maybe even stepping into the five hundreds. He's managed to find a way to make it work when it's small.

Because, if you read the article, he makes the point that, he deliberately kept it small, kept costs tight, and what have you. If he's planning to grow it, he'll have to have a bit of a rethink there. But if you're gonna do something on the scale of WordCamp Europe, like Tacho was suggesting two and a half thousand people showing up, I reckon, it's not even quick back of the, envelope calculation.

I'm just making up numbers, but hundreds of thousands of dollars if you're gonna be paying people. And presumably at that point, the, the calculus doesn't work. yeah, it's interesting. And meanwhile in the comments, on Amic Flat is, saying if organisers were paid to do this full time, we would not need, so many organisers.

[01:02:55] Taco Verdonschot: That's a good point.

[01:02:56] Rovert Abela: Very good points. Great

[01:02:57] Taco Verdonschot: point. Absolutely true. But

[01:02:59] Rovert Abela: Rod for, oh, sorry, go ahead.

[01:03:01] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah, there, there is a thing because, that means that you need people who organise events for a living.

[01:03:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, That's a whole industry, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

[01:03:13] Taco Verdonschot: if that's what we want, then we can hire an event organising company and have it organised work in Europe for us.

And I'm pretty sure it would not be, it would probably be very similar in terms of cost, compared to the way that we do it now. But part of the charm is that we're bringing together a community.

[01:03:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:03:40] Taco Verdonschot: This is not a commercial event where some unknown person is running the whole show and is making it their full-time job.

This is a community event, and that goes for all the work camps. These are community events. The idea is that we work together to build them and to put on something that we all learn from and that we can all enjoy.

[01:04:04] Nathan Wrigley: So maybe,

[01:04:04] Rovert Abela: yeah, Rodolfo built it on his own. He did it on his own. And on those two days, or two days, how long it was, he had two volunteers, but the rest is not on his own.

And what TA was saying, yeah, there's a difference. This one was, yeah, specifically targeted WooCommerce talking about checkout. So it was more like business oriented. It wasn't community oriented was so if you want to do business, that was a better place. But what TA was saying is different. There are different type of conferences.

If you go to Cloud Fest, it's not community, it's, business focused. So it depends what you want to do, basically,

[01:04:36] Taco Verdonschot: if you, yeah. And then sponsorships are at a completely different level, exactly. Yes.

if you're looking at Cloud Fest, I think the smaller sponsorships, except for the very small business that you can only do once.

but the smaller sponsorships start at 50 grand and the top sponsorships are close to half a million maybe.

[01:04:58] Alex Standiford: Wow. Oh wow.

[01:04:58] Rovert Abela: Yeah. Some of them. I used to go to RSA every year. It's you actually, you earn points every year you go. So you book your place before you pay even more. They can go, yeah. They can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Yeah. Wow.

[01:05:10] Alex Standiford: Okay.

[01:05:10] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. and that's a different beast. That's a different event. Yeah. Altogether.

[01:05:15] Alex Standiford: Yeah.

[01:05:16] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. And the, main difference for me, I've been to many word camps into a couple cloud fests and, one of those cloud fests, we, were a small time sponsor, was back at Jost still then.

And at a Word camp, when you meet someone, the question, the first question is, how are you doing? The first question at cloudfest is, how are we going to make money together?

[01:05:42] Rovert Abela: Yeah.

[01:05:43] Taco Verdonschot: It's a completely different vibe. It's a completely different kind of event, and it's no longer a community event. So I don't think that is the direction that we should take Word camps in.

if anything it, especially the local word camps, should be about bring together your local community. And yes, that's the volunteer job, and it's gotta be rewarding because you're seeing a hundred, 200, 300 people have an amazing event.

[01:06:20] Nathan Wrigley: just a couple of quick things on that. So this is an interesting idea, which I've heard before, and it's, Imran saying, what if the model were changed so that speakers could advertise their services?

I don't know, maybe wear a branded t-shirt or something where they, when they came on stage or have a one minute pitch deck or something.

[01:06:38] Rovert Abela: You can, already, and I

[01:06:39] Nathan Wrigley: No, I was meaning, sorry. I was, then I was gonna go and say, and then in the presentation, let's say you do a presentation, you've got like a, I don't know, 92nd promo slot at the end or something like that.

Anyway, you can see, where, Irans going with this. The idea of being definitely you trade your, yeah, Then my question is, how is it not, advertising your brand or your personal brand if you're putting on a good talk.

Okay. Yeah.

[01:07:10] Alex Standiford: I think you could take it in a slightly different route, though.

It doesn't have to be that the talk has to be about that and about advertising your product. It could be that they receive some kind of advertisement outside of the talk or something like that. so the, the actual, talk itself can remain pure. So it isn't just a pitch. It isn't like me going up there and saying, let's talk about how to start your first affiliate programme.

You know what I mean? It's not step one, use this thing in siren. that would obviously be an ad, but like something, but like I could actually have a useful conversation that has nothing to do with my product related to attribution models and stuff like what we were talking about earlier.

And then also have some kind of ad placement on the signs or on the website or something like that, in some kind of special dedicated place. Like I, I could see that being some kind of thing. There's other ways to, promote something in a less direct way.

[01:08:03] Nathan Wrigley: very complicated. Username says, this is, the message that needs to be conveyed about Word Camp Europe.

It's a community event. So

[01:08:11] Rovert Abela: he's, I think he's Louis. He's the I one, the, oh

[01:08:13] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, organise, sorry, Louis. I apologies. I wasn't even gonna try and read that. That's a, mouthful. the, I guess chiming into what, KO's saying, yeah, the, vibe is great and because of that, however, it does look like we're gonna have this two strands to WordPress events, aren't we?

We're gonna have Rodolfo's thing and, Raquel's thing, press conf, they're on the one hand and then these community events on the other. Anyway, Rodolfo's obviously carved out a niche for himself there and yeah, I imagine that in the future that will be successful. So go and check that out.

Anyway, that, that incurred quite a lot of chat, which was really good, right? So we'll quickly breeze through a couple of these things. We mentioned this the other day, and that is this desk desktop mode, which was one of the projects, and I can't remember who did it, but one of the projects in their automatic crazy month where they let their developers loose on pet projects.

this idea of desktop mode, now it appears to have been switched on, in wordpress.com. So you can now, invoke desktop mode. It's so hard to describe, but basically imagine that you are literally staring at a desktop and you've got a window over here with you, I dunno, your browser. And over here you've got Notion Open and what have you, lots of different windows all positioned where you like them.

That's what this is only, it's your WordPress website, one. WordPress website. I don't think the idea is that you could have multiple WordPress websites, so you could open the media manager and drop it into a blog post, which is sitting in a separate window over there, that kind of thing. I think it's profoundly cool and it's been switched.

I love

[01:09:48] Alex Standiford: it.

[01:09:49] Nathan Wrigley: Switched on in.com. Yeah, I love it. Love it.

[01:09:51] Alex Standiford: I was so sad when Windows Live writer was shut down like ever ago because I loved the process of publishing from my desktop to WordPress.

[01:10:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I think this is awesome.

so it just, mimics a desktop basically. There's nothing more to say about it.

I'm trying to make the video work and I can't. So anyway, go and check it out. If you haven't checked it out already, maybe go and experiment with it. I think it's got legs. I

[01:10:16] Taco Verdonschot: think it's other, than the coolness factor, what problem does it solve for you, Nathan?

[01:10:20] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so I, excuse me. I always have, and I don't know why, but I always have four or five bits of my WordPress website, which I once simultaneously opened.

So a perfect example would be like when this episode was first created, I had to learn that it was episode 3, 7 7, so I had to increment it by one. So I would just permanently like a list of my blog posts over there. I'm constantly on the go with two or three blog posts. So I'd like those permanently open.

I'd like the media library open somewhere else so that I can see what things I've uploaded and drag them into the appropriate posts. That's, so I probably have five or six things open, basically all at the same time. and then probably the analytics plugin that I've got as well, just to see how things are going.

So that's it really. there's nothing special about that, but I tend to spend quite a lot of time opening up a tab. Then at some point in the future, accidentally closing it and then having to reopen it. that's it. It's nothing more remarkable than that, but that I would definitely love.

[01:11:26] Alex Standiford: A few, things jump out to me.

the first one that comes to mind is native notifications on my desktop. So if we were using that notes feature or something like we were talking about before and somebody adds a comment and I have the desktop application open, I can receive a notification in the same way I do as using Slack or something like that.

another thing that comes to mind is access to the file systems. So maybe I am, maybe I wanted to create a little automation on my desktop that I write a file, in markdown and I put it into a folder. And instead of it having to go through this whole upload process and all this stuff because the desktop application's installed, maybe it can work with some kind of API to integrate with that.

those are the two that come to mind for me. It's just, like I said, access to the file system and, notification support. There's a lot of different things that could be done with WordPress that could be really cool.

[01:12:14] Nathan Wrigley: I've actually got the video to work now, and there's

[01:12:15] Taco Verdonschot: one

[01:12:16] Nathan Wrigley: screen.

[01:12:16] Taco Verdonschot: Sorry. Yeah. What you're describing, Alex feels different than what this is, right?

this is a desktop style within WordPress, but it's,

[01:12:27] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, it's just in a, it's in a tab it won't have access to Yeah. The underlying operating system. So it's not like a layer on top of Linux or,

I,

get that.

[01:12:36] Alex Standiford: I guess you're right. Maybe. I'm sorry. I jumped a step ahead. I'm already assuming that it is installed as such, so I'm assuming that this is going to, that this can be installed.

As a, like a electron app codes.

[01:12:48] Nathan Wrigley: Oh,

[01:12:48] Alex Standiford: yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. And then it on the desktop. Yeah. Sorry, I, forgot that part didn't happen right. So fast. Yeah, that's great. Maybe to lead it'll, yeah, that's, I'm already ahead.

[01:12:58] Nathan Wrigley: here's an example. You can see it on screen and apology. This is not the best version of it, but this is the sort of thing that I would have, I'd have it set up a bit like that where I'd have these four overlapping things, but also there's a sort of tabbed interface.

You can't see it on this screen, but in other screenshots you can see there's like tabs running across the top. So something that you accidentally closed, you can then just pop it back up again. So you can minimise it, if I think for me, it would work superbly well, but I'm in WordPress all the time.

I imagine for most casual users, probably not, but I'm, genuinely excited about it. Yeah. so there you go. I,

[01:13:34] Taco Verdonschot: yeah. So I haven't found a use case for my workflows that would. Make my workflows easier by having this. So that's why I was genuinely curious, what's it doing for you?

Because maybe that's the eureka moment for me as

[01:13:53] Nathan Wrigley: well. No, and sadly, I don't have anything groundbreaking there. It literally is a case of me wasting. I, really should just use bookmarks or something more effectively, but I don't. And so having everything open all at once would, excite me greatly.

Anyway, apologies. Time is running out very quickly. So I just want to go to a couple of things very fast. We did mention this last week, but just a quick hat tip to Simon, Harper from Yes. loop wp, his newsletter has come to an end, although he is still sending things out to subscribers on a sort of when he feels like it basis.

But, Tcho, was there anything more on that?

[01:14:36] Taco Verdonschot: No, mostly just a hat tip for Thank you. Doing 210, issues of a very useful newsletter.

[01:14:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, really nice. Yeah. Simon, thank you. I appreciate it. Really a lot. it sounds like empty words, doesn't it? Now that I'm saying it, but No, it's not right.

Okay. word Camp India, needs a home. So if you fulfil the criteria down, here, where you've got to, if you've got a host city that you're thinking of, I, I haven't got time now to go into it, but basically you've got until, the end of June, so not very long, before you can apply. But if you're in India and you would like to host the first flagship word, camp India, there's a whole tonne of criteria.

But if you meet those, then you could, you could, be the recipient of that. also the WP world, Marcus is in the comment, oh, I forgot to put Marcus's comment up. He did say that. where's it gone? Where's it gone? It gone. WP speakers is not his thing, so if the form is broken, we'll have to speak to Michelle on your behalf.

It was, sponsor me, WP that they worked on together, so there you go. Anyway, the WP world has put out a call, a small call for sponsors who care about the WordPress community. so if you've used the WP World in the past before, it is the resource. Bar none. I think really for finding other WordPresses, especially, the kind of events that they've been to where they are tagged within the world, what events are going on, and a tonne more, in order to keep going.

Marcus is seeking, sponsorship. There's loads of data here about the reach of it, and what you would receive in return. and they've only got three, I dunno if that's still the case, but they've got three spots available and you can see the process.

[01:16:31] Taco Verdonschot: At a discount. Yes.

[01:16:32] Nathan Wrigley: At a discount. Yeah. So go check it out.

You might be able to, to make use of that three spots available. the WP world slash these words are all hyphenated. Call for sponsors, go and check it out. Keep that valuable resource going. Thank you to anybody that does that. Okay. I'm not gonna do that or that, I'm gonna skip through all the AI stuff, if that's all right.

We talk enough about ai. Is that okay? good God,

[01:17:03] Alex Standiford: yes.

[01:17:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Oh, I'm so sorry, Alex. No, it's okay. It's AI stuff is genuinely really interesting.

[01:17:10] Alex Standiford: Please, anything but

[01:17:12] Nathan Wrigley: basically, I didn't know this was even a thing. And then all this news started to come in last week about the, EU withdrawal compliance, which apparently everybody had to have all in line.

This is, I think I'm summarising it correctly. Let's say for example, you go to a website and you, confirm a subscription, I don't know, it's a membership site or something like that. You now, if you're operating with people in the eu, you now need to make it so that withdrawing from, in this case a membership site is as simple as it was to instate it.

So basically, if you could click a button to start that membership, you need to be able to click a button to terminate that membership. And it needs to be like really transparent. and so obviously, if you're working within the eu, that's a hell of a lot of millions of people. I'm imagining this sort of thing is gonna be internationally applicable.

This is a fluent car article where they explain how they've done it for products that you buy through their platform. Obviously they've got a huge platform for buying products and memberships and, single digital goods or whatever it may be. And they've now built this and they go into how they do that.

But honestly, I didn't even know this was a thing and then all of a sudden it dropped. And now I think a lot of companies are scrambling around trying to figure out how they make themselves compliant. reminds me a bit like those GDPR days. anybody wanna add anything to that?

[01:18:41] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. So for us, Dutch cheese, this is nothing new.

We've had this for the longest time, but I think a new, European or, European Union guideline went into effect half June or something, which is why you're now seeing a lot more, around this.

[01:19:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, anyway, if you're selling into the EU marketplace or you've got EU customers, I, think this is something you are gonna have to take seriously because the, the ambulance chasing lawyers, they're getting ready.

if you make it really, difficult, I'm not looking at you plugin developer, but some of you are quite good at making it hard to unsubscribe. You know who you are. and, don't just make it, if, we could press a button to subscribe, we should be able to press a button to unsubscribe.

That's the idea anyway, right? No, we'll move on. I'm just trying to find the right one. And it begins here, right? We've got about 10 minutes or so said we'd put the security bits and pieces towards the end. So that's what we're gonna do. Robert, being a security expert, got a few bits and pieces. Do you wanna start us off with this one?

This is the opt-in monster page.

[01:20:01] Rovert Abela: Yes. so lately we've been seeing I the supply chain text, they're not exclusive to WebPress with open source. They're very common ish. The i, the concept is, so when you have a WebPress plug and sold on your website, it contacts org or the vendor, if it's premium, and it downloads the plugin from there and that supply chain is infected.

In this case, it's actually a very good example of how a simple, outdated. Plugin can lead to a big issue. Like in this case, what happened is, they had, I think it's, it was, it's mentioned in their article course, opt Monster published, an analysis of what happened. So basically they were running an outdated version of Updraft plus plugin, which was vulnerable.

Oh, someone hacked through it and by hacking through it, they got access to the website, Optum Monster. And by having access, they located the API key to their CDN, where they distribute all the files and they modified some of the files, which the clients received basically. And they had a template script.

And the script was basically checking, if the logged in user is that admin, and if they log in, user is that admin. It creates a head and admin account. It instals, a self hiding backdoor. It exposes an authenticated web shell, it allows code execution basically, and grabbing, it's really bad, right?

It's, but it is like when people change things. So by exploiting a w updraft, a simple thing, it led to all of this whole chain of events basically. And on 13 June, by 13 June, I think there were at least 1.2 million sites, which were hit by this issue of the most. There is a huge, plugin.

So

[01:21:44] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Okay. Big

[01:21:45] Rovert Abela: one.

[01:21:46] Nathan Wrigley: That is a, that's one of those ones where you've just got this chain of events and the one little thing, ah, updraft plus, it's fine, it's a bit outta date, but it's, yeah, it's a backup plugin. What could possibly go wrong? The, the vulnerability in that then led to a cascade of other dominoes falling.

Wow. Okay. And now,

[01:22:06] Rovert Abela: a few years ago, I remember I covered, I had written about every vulnerability, the same ap, the Observer, the foundation, they were running some vulnerable older version of buck tracking system. And someone posted this, ticket, I have this issue, please click this link.

Someone from the Apache Team Foundation clicked on it. Anyway, their account got hijacked and they managed, through a chain of events, they managed to get access to the root of the Apache servers. It's, just.

[01:22:35] Nathan Wrigley: I, keep saying it, but I'm gonna say it again. If you are a hacker, stop it. Just stop it. Go and have a sit on the bottom step and think about what you are doing.

[01:22:47] Rovert Abela: they're, fairness. They're brilliant people. They're very brilliant.

[01:22:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, Like the cleverest of the clever, so there lies the

[01:22:55] Alex Standiford: rub.

[01:22:56] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, they're so good. They're so good. And also the, I, know that's, I'm, obviously being silly when I tell them to stop it, like that's gonna do anything.

But the, that, you've gotta, in some small way, there's a, you've gotta admire like their capacities to be, novel, new thinkers, problem solvers and all of that kind of thing. Yeah. It's just, yeah. It's just a shame when other people who have no business being caught up in any of this get caught up in any of this because they happen to have an outdated plugin on their server and what have you.

[01:23:29] Alex Standiford: All I could ever think is where they could use that talent.

[01:23:31] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, yeah.

[01:23:33] Alex Standiford: Cancer would've been cured, Yeah, that's right. WordPress events. Just go and do that.

Yeah. but that's the thing that worries me most is that apparently, being a hacker. Pays more. Oh, yeah. And is worth the risk Yeah.

[01:23:49] Taco Verdonschot: Compared to being an ethical hacker.

[01:23:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yep.

[01:23:52] Taco Verdonschot: Yes. That is hired by companies to secure their systems.

[01:23:55] Alex Standiford: Totally.

[01:23:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:23:57] Taco Verdonschot: eh, maybe we need to fix that problem.

[01:24:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Honestly, yes. the, canvas for getting things, if you happen to stumble across one vulnerability, there's always that chance of the pot of gold isn't there, like life changing amounts of money in a couple of weeks because you discovered this one thing as opposed to a, oh, I'll get a regular paycheck for the rest of my life and it'll be this.

[01:24:23] Rovert Abela: It's, not as easy as easier. It's easier as said, than done to stop it. Oh, of course.

[01:24:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:24:27] Rovert Abela: When you look at the biggest buyers of zero day issues, they are governments

[01:24:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yep.

[01:24:32] Rovert Abela: From different countries. yeah. So stop that as well. That's not gonna happen. I remember once watching the reportage from, phone to Own where ethical hackers go and they try to break things like, I don't know, the Chrome Sandbox or Mac Os or iOS or whatever it may be.

[01:24:51] Nathan Wrigley: And just being in awe of the number of, things that they piggybacked off to get what they finally wanted. like seven or eight seriously gnarly problems that they had to solve in order to get the final thing, the one domino that they were trying to get to fall was because of seven or eight different things that they managed to pull out.

And it's just, it's a, it's nuts. Yeah. yeah. Anyway, Quickly moving on. Let's get through as many of these as we can. That's the same story. I'm guessing one. Yeah. So we can, put that one to one side. This one psa. This is a word fence one public supply chain com. Sorry. Public, doesn't say public supply chain compromise.

Targets shaped plugin backdoor. Pro plugins distributed via official channels. What's this one?

[01:25:40] Rovert Abela: yeah, this one is the same. And the supply chain attack, I forgot exactly how it happened, but what the attacker did, basically, they updated the files of the premium plugin. So when the customer has downloaded the updated the premium plugins, they got this, malicious version of the plugin and it was, sending credentials to a server and it was also sending to f fake key.

So it was looking for fine enough the to f fake, this. the secrets of users when you configure it to FA, yeah. The plugin store a secret or to user. It was looking for W2 FA or plugin was looking for two factor, the other plugin, Wordfence plugin and was looking for these keys of all the users and sending them to a server.

Basically. I would love for ex filtration of, credentials and Oh,

[01:26:29] Nathan Wrigley: that one thing that you hope is gonna be your kind of like final get outta jail free card. 'cause you've got two fa on the, on the

[01:26:35] Rovert Abela: website.

[01:26:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Oh, it's fine. We've lost

[01:26:37] Rovert Abela: the,

[01:26:37] Nathan Wrigley: but it doesn't matter.

[01:26:39] Rovert Abela: Yeah, it created a file on the website, on the, hack website, which, updated the plugin that exposes the WP conflict completely.

oh. And edited accounts as well. So it was, yeah, it was a bit of a, and also, yeah, 'cause I'm, it also published the list of WooCommerce orders for the last three months with payment methods on that website, oh Lord. Okay.

One big mess

[01:27:00] Nathan Wrigley: again. Stop it, please. I'm asking nicely. I said, he said, please.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. That's it. That's all they need. this one we covered last week actually, so I'm gonna ignore that. Okay. Not ignore, but yeah. Protect the shi, go and read it by Matt Mullenweg. It's a sort of an idea of, getting over this problem. Yeah. this is the trademark violation by the guy who's been talking about trademark violations for

What do you mean it's trademark violations?

What do you mean? Sorry?

[01:27:29] Taco Verdonschot: The Shire Gandalf, it's all trademark. Oh,

[01:27:32] Nathan Wrigley: I see. Yeah, the MER Wood thing. Oh yeah, I was, those words are trademarked. Are they?

[01:27:38] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah.

[01:27:39] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I didn't, true. Interesting. Yeah. Oh, there you go. the Tolkien family, I think, run all of that, don't they? They've got like the whole teeth into that every time.

[01:27:50] Rovert Abela: Yep.

[01:27:50] Nathan Wrigley: Somebody, yeah. Yeah. Okay. we'll actually wait and see if that ends up in court. and there are a couple of more, but, oh, the last one is nothing to do with security. This is just to say, speaking of events, I should have pushed it into the event bit earlier. if you want to volunteer as, Tacho was urging earlier, WordCamp us, is looking for volunteers for all manner of different things.

And yes, the website will say. What those things are. But if you go to

Yeah,

[01:28:21] Taco Verdonschot: This person, I'll say, if you've never been to a world camp and Word Camp US 26 is going to be your first work camp. Sign up as a volunteer. It is the best way to meet new people, for sure.

[01:28:34] Nathan Wrigley: Nice.

[01:28:35] Rovert Abela: Okay. I, volunteered to few world camps.

Yes. It's one of the best ways to meet.

[01:28:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That is nice.

[01:28:39] Rovert Abela: It's rewarding. Yeah.

[01:28:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Good idea. Yeah. You don't feel that kind of, I've not done it, so I'm speaking like I have, but I haven't. I guess you don't have that problem of walking into a room full of people and feeling like

[01:28:52] Taco Verdonschot: now

[01:28:52] Nathan Wrigley: there's nobody there for you.

Exactly.

[01:28:54] Taco Verdonschot: You, you are in a team, you're part of a team, you have a task, and you have a reason to interact with people. okay.

You have peers. It's, by far the best way to get into word camps.

[01:29:06] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, great. and Marcus says, thanks for mentioning the sponsorship. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. No. Goes without saying.

and Elliot's back, he says, he thought he recognised the accent. Robert, you come, I dunno how to say that word. Word.

[01:29:24] Rovert Abela: Sid. That's the

[01:29:25] Nathan Wrigley: village Sid. There's so many dots. I, all the cheese got the dot. you come from whatever he said, I used to live in Bur

[01:29:35] Rovert Abela: Berkeley

[01:29:37] Nathan Wrigley: that I'm so bad at reading all of

[01:29:41] Rovert Abela: a small tease.

[01:29:42] Nathan Wrigley: Father still lives in Malta and he says I'll be visiting in August. Okay. There you go. He got Malta

[01:29:48] Alex Standiford: though.

[01:29:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Woohoo. I, that one, that's right. Okay. Just before we go, this is a weird one. I've never done this, never done anything like this, so apologies. I'm gonna advertise something from a family member, which is my son.

my son writes music and I'm a proud father. I think he's quite good. I, and I'm trying to be as objective as possible. I think it's good. but if you fancy listening to it and spreading the word that would help him greatly in his, nascent music career, the band, he writes loads of music by himself, and that's really, I think probably where the main focus of his energies go.

But the band, is called Es that he's in. And if you wanna locate it, there's an obvious word, YouTube url. It's really hard to find. So I've made this short link. If you go to wp builds.com/link/groove, I should have put Limeys wp builds.com/link/groove. They made a video of four songs.

It's all live, so you know, if there's any mistakes, it's because it's live. And, there's four of them in it. And it's. It makes me proud. So apologies. What's your son play? Is your

[01:31:04] Alex Standiford: links

[01:31:05] Rovert Abela: working?

[01:31:06] Nathan Wrigley: It works. I

[01:31:07] Alex Standiford: validate it works. It

[01:31:08] Rovert Abela: works for me. Yeah, it works.

[01:31:09] Alex Standiford: What's,

[01:31:09] Nathan Wrigley: okay?

[01:31:09] Alex Standiford: What's the, what, what does your son play?

[01:31:14] Nathan Wrigley: a lot. Yes. Yeah, in this game it's actually just

[01:31:17] Alex Standiford: four of him in the video?

[01:31:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. No, In this it's piano and singing. So the cool, the kid that's playing the piano and doing the singing, that's him. And, in other things, he plays many, He's annoyingly talented and it's, none of it is like his

[01:31:33] Alex Standiford: father.

[01:31:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. No, Absolute no. I can, play the kazoo badly. You could

[01:31:39] Alex Standiford: certainly help him set up the audio equipment.

[01:31:41] Nathan Wrigley: I could plug things in. Yeah, really good at, plug in the things in. Anyway, there we go. Apologies about that. But, I thought it, why not? it's

[01:31:50] Taco Verdonschot: never apologise for being proud of your kids, Nathan.

[01:31:52] Nathan Wrigley: No, I'm not Apolo. No, I'm not. It's not that. It's just that this is certainly not a channel where typically that is what I do. So anyway, there we go. It's a bit weird. But, that's it. If you wanna find the show notes, we'll publish this in the morning, seven o'clock tomorrow morning. search for this week in WordPress, number 3, 7 7 on wordpress.com.

sorry, on wp build.com. if you wanna keep subscribe, go to that link, wp builds.com/subscribe or fill in that box on the homepage and we'll send you an email when that comes out. There'll be loads of stories that aren't covered by this as well. So just before we end, we have to do our humiliating hand wave or the hand wave of joy, depending on how you wanna see it.

Let's go for it. There we go. We've done that. All that it remains for me to do is say. Very Thanks. Thanks, thanks. Thanks. Lots of thanks to Ko over there. Thank you very much To Robert Abella down there. Thank you very much. And to where is he? He's there. And to Alex Standerford over there. Thank you very much.

We will be back next week. so yeah, we'll see you at some point in the near future. Thank you very much indeed. Take it easy. Thanks. And if the three of you wanna stick around for a little NATA after this, that would be lovely. So we'll see you in a bit. Cheers. Thanks. Bye bye. Bye bye.

[01:33:10] Alex Standiford: See you.