This Week in WordPress #378

It's time for This Week in WordPress, episode number 378 entitled, how the sausage was made. It was recorded on Monday the 29th of June, 2026. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I am joined by Michelle Frechette, by Robert Jacobi and Marc Benzakein. It is a WordPress podcast, and so guess what? We talk a little bit about WordPress.

We get derailed at the beginning though, talking about all sorts of other bits and pieces, but bear with us. Then we get onto WordPress 7.1 and the idea of hiding the Classic Editor Block, not the Classic Editor, Block in future versions of WordPress.

We talk an awful lot about the WordPress community and how it may or may not be in decline. What do we think as a panel about all of that?

And then we also talk about contributor dashboards.

We talk a little bit about some of the new bits and pieces happening in the AI space, particularly OllieWP, education, and then themes, market share, the decline in the community word camps.

And then right at the end, a few silly bits and pieces, most notably Hyperblam.

It's all coming up next on This Week in WordPress.

[00:01:21] Nathan Wrigley: Hello. Good morning. Good afternoon, good evening. Welcome. Wherever you are in the world. It's number 378 of the show. Wow. this, I know. Where does time go? that's a lot, isn't it? When you actually think about it. That's many, hours droning on about WordPress

[00:01:42] Michelle Frechette: and then, editing the

[00:01:43] Nathan Wrigley: journey on

[00:01:43] Michelle Frechette: about the

[00:01:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

It's not so bad. 'cause in a live show, when you record a live show like this, I just top and tail it. When it's the podcast, there's a lot more editing work. 'cause I offer that as a thing. It's yeah, up. I'll just cut the bits out. But this is whatever you say is going out. So That's true. True. If you burp or anything like that, it's staying in.

[00:02:03] Marc Benzakein: wait, this is live?

[00:02:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, very live. It's ish. Ish. Oh,

[00:02:07] Marc Benzakein: I'm outta here. I'm

[00:02:08] Nathan Wrigley: outta here.

[00:02:10] Michelle Frechette: I just wanna know how your, software interprets a burp, though. does it say burp on the,

[00:02:16] Nathan Wrigley: I did say I, it end with the transcript mean like the transcription? No, it just, doesn't ellipsis, it just does three little dots, the whole thing.

[00:02:25] Michelle Frechette: now we know, we see an ellipsis, we know somebody's making weird noises.

[00:02:28] Nathan Wrigley: Never happens. It

[00:02:28] Marc Benzakein: should automatically apologise for you in there to just say ex, excuse me.

[00:02:34] Nathan Wrigley: There's, no doubt. Software ready for just that. anyway, we always go button 3 78 this week in WordPress. So we're here to talk about WordPress for the next 90 minutes or so, as you can see, and we'll go round the houses in a minute and introduce everybody.

But we've got a fine panel. they're all in North America, so it's, like Europe versus North America. Three one, I think, I guess

[00:02:56] Michelle Frechette: we win,

[00:02:57] Nathan Wrigley: which is

[00:02:58] Robert Jacobi: gonna be the fi That's what the USA is gonna win, the World Cup Championship with,

[00:03:02] Nathan Wrigley: I won against, don't get me started on the World Cup. I, don't really like football, but some, for some reason, I get drawn into that and end up watching I don't know, Paraguay versus Cure Sound.

I've got no interest in at all, but just watch it. And then Wimbledon starts today, oh, that's a big, that's

[00:03:21] Marc Benzakein: entertaining.

[00:03:22] Nathan Wrigley: That's actually, that's, I love it. And it's in full swing at the minute. They've been playing for the last few hours and I've had it on in the background. Just, full swing.

It's, yeah, Full. Oh, we'll get onto the word Pressy stuff, but just a few bits of housekeeping, this week

in Wimbledon. Yeah, this, yeah. thank you. yeah, that's, I'm

[00:03:43] Robert Jacobi: sure trademarked, expect that the

[00:03:45] Nathan Wrigley: letter from legal

[00:03:46] Robert Jacobi: shortly.

[00:03:47] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:03:48] Nathan Wrigley: Trademark on that.

[00:03:49] Marc Benzakein: You can say WD or something like that instead, but

[00:03:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yes, We can wd I'm not gonna mention the from the, show notes. The, the idea though is that if you're watching this live, please come and join us in the comments. That's really, helpful. just above, well below Mark's Chin is, is the URL, which is most helpful. It's wp builds.com/live.

'cause if you go there, we've got the comments from YouTube embedded next to the player. And if you've got a YouTube account but you don't like to use it, or I don't know, you're opposed to Google or something like that, there's a little button inside the video player. You can click that and chat without being logged into anything whatsoever.

wp builds.com/live, if you wanna share that, that would be great. Go and share it with your friends. And honestly, the show is so much more interesting when you provide commentary, as the show goes on.

[00:04:40] Robert Jacobi: It's,

[00:04:41] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. So all of that being said, we, we'll go around the house and introduce the panel. So we'll start over there.

The, hey, look at that. WP Jill of all trades is Michelle Frache, co-host of today. How you doing, Michelle?

[00:04:54] Michelle Frechette: I am doing well. Thank you. How are you?

[00:04:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good. Yeah, good. I'm, I sort, I'm trying not to look at the Wimbledon. I've got it on over there. I'm just, hang on, wait. Let me just close it now. Just turn off the TV Can do this for our audience.

[00:05:07] Michelle Frechette: It wasn't a tv, it was an external monitor. We all know it.

[00:05:12] Nathan Wrigley: TV the whole time. You guys, carry on. Michelle Frache is over there and she is, when he finds the bio, is the executive director, of wor of post status. And in addition to the work over there, Michelle is the podcast barista at WP Coffee Talk, co-founder of underrepresented in Tech, creator of WP Speakers and WP Career.

Paige is the co-founder of Sponsor me, WP and Speed Network Online. She writes is an influencer and is a frequent organiser and speaker at WordPress Tech events and other tech events. I should say. She lives outside of Rochester, New York, where she's an avid photographer of nature. And if you want the one you URL to sum the whole thing up, meet Michelle.

Online summed it up perfectly. So happy to have you with us again, Michelle. Lovely. Thank you so much.

[00:06:00] Robert Jacobi: Lovely to be here.

[00:06:00] Nathan Wrigley: And down there, is Mark Zaca. How are you doing, mark?

[00:06:05] Marc Benzakein: I am just spiffy

[00:06:07] Nathan Wrigley: spiff. Oh, we had a conversation about like British, accents and things just before we started. Johnny. Good.

Mark. It was very nice to, very nice to have you with us. mark Zaca is the manager of partnerships for Maine. Wp he is also known to write long-winded introductions. Ala not this one. How you doing, mark?

[00:06:32] Marc Benzakein: I'm doing, pretty good. How are you?

[00:06:34] Nathan Wrigley: That's the impression that everybody has of the

[00:06:37] Marc Benzakein: uk.

last when I was on a couple weeks ago You got you. you had to make a comment about how long my introduction was, so I decided I'd counter balance it.

[00:06:46] Nathan Wrigley: That's it.

[00:06:47] Marc Benzakein: And now we have an average of a regular length introduction.

[00:06:51] Nathan Wrigley: winning the, winning the introduction length competence. Because Robert Jacobi, there's, I was like,

[00:06:57] Robert Jacobi: now that I know this is a

[00:06:58] Nathan Wrigley: thing, oh, I'm

[00:06:59] Robert Jacobi: like, oh.

[00:06:59] Marc Benzakein: It just became a,

[00:07:01] Nathan Wrigley: it just became a thing. That's, it's only just now you can just

[00:07:03] Robert Jacobi: read the first paragraph.

[00:07:05] Nathan Wrigley: That's it. Okay. If you wish, I will just read the first paragraph. Yes, that's it was over there. used to run 3.5% of the internet today as Chief Experience Officer or CXO for Blackwall. Robert connects Blackwall security message and solutions with partners, customers, investors, as well as the greater security open source and online industries.

And boy, with the advent of ai, do we ever need online security? If,

[00:07:34] Michelle Frechette: if you'd like the rest of Robert's bio, you can go to Amazon for Robert, which will be the bio available starting next week.

[00:07:44] Nathan Wrigley: Small, handy leaflet. It's not that long. It's really, it. It's

[00:07:47] Robert Jacobi: a great read at night. the first 50 pages will put you to sleep

[00:07:51] Nathan Wrigley: right away.

That's right. Yeah. when I was three,

[00:07:57] Michelle Frechette: it's really not, I was born in

[00:07:58] Nathan Wrigley: a cabin. Yeah, that's right. but as I said, if you wanna join in, we would absolutely love that. So a few people have done so already, so I'll just,

[00:08:06] Michelle Frechette: Robert knows I adore him. commenting system. So the webinar is joining us. Hello. it says hi, beautiful people finally on time after missing it so many times these last weeks.

[00:08:15] Nathan Wrigley: Hope you're all doing great. Yeah, great. I'm glad that you've managed to make it right at the beginning. That's brilliant.

[00:08:19] Michelle Frechette: Who's behind the webinar? I don't remember. Do you? We

[00:08:21] Nathan Wrigley: know who's behind it. You know what? I have the memory of a Who are you, by the way? Yes. I have the memory of a That's

[00:08:26] Michelle Frechette: right. A goldfish.

[00:08:28] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Webinar. Not please,

[00:08:30] Michelle Frechette: please announce yourself so we don't

[00:08:31] Nathan Wrigley: who Please announce yourself. Yeah. Say who you're, I wasn't sure

[00:08:34] Robert Jacobi: if that's 'cause webinar not was on time or we were on time.

[00:08:37] Nathan Wrigley: No, we're always on time. So webinar.

[00:08:40] Michelle Frechette: Oh, are

[00:08:40] Nathan Wrigley: we?

[00:08:41] Michelle Frechette: I wish.

[00:08:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. we're on time somewhere. Yeah. This show's never gonna get started, is it?

We're we never gonna get to the first stuff? I can tell it's, been

[00:08:51] Robert Jacobi: started for nine minutes. Whatcha

[00:08:52] Nathan Wrigley: talking about this is just the warmup. Okay. Courtney Robinson says, hi friends. That's really nice. Reese joining us from not far from where I'm Hello. Re this afternoon folks. Hope you're all doing well.

Andrew Palmer. Good afternoon, lovely people. Andrew. Andrew, thank you, Andrew on skateboarding. Good day, Courtney. Good people. The webinar is a great name. It isn't it? Tammy. Hello Andrew. Yeah. Tammy's not joined us for a while, so that's really nice. Excellent. Jimmy. Jimmy Tav. Jimmy. Hi,

[00:09:21] Michelle Frechette: Jimmy.

[00:09:21] Nathan Wrigley: T is the right pronunciation, but there you go.

I'm gonna guess

[00:09:25] Michelle Frechette: Ava, but I could be right. That's,

[00:09:26] Marc Benzakein: that

[00:09:26] Nathan Wrigley: would've been Tamara. Okay. TAVs.

[00:09:28] Michelle Frechette: Now Jimmy, tell us who's right. is it Nathan or me? And, okay. Nathan, I'll be quiet now.

[00:09:33] Nathan Wrigley: No, It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. It's good. I actually do you know what the, internet is boring enough without, commentary and silliness.

So I actually, I love it when this show gets a little bit silly, but sometimes

[00:09:45] Michelle Frechette: that's why I do WordPress so that I could bring the comic effect.

[00:09:49] Nathan Wrigley: Good. Good. we need, we're gonna be the Nick Hamey of, of WordPress podcast, okay. Let me pop on the screen what it is that we're gonna talk about today.

So I've, put a bunch of links, I, I just wanna say after 378 episodes, it's great that you finally found your identity.

Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, the Joker on the internet. so here's our, website WP Builds. If you like what we do, put your email address into there and we'll send you two emails a week one when we repackage this show as a podcast episode tomorrow morning.

And then on a Thursday, every Thursday we produce a podcast episode, and you can see the most recent three there chatted to Miriam Schwab. I also chatted to, this chap from Automatic all about selling stuff inside of your WordPress, sorry, your YouTube videos. That's so interesting, by the way. That's genuinely interesting.

And then I chatted about, something called shorthand. I dunno if you've noticed online, when you read news articles, occasionally when the subject matter is, really complicated. Let's say they're trying to, I don't know, describe the, or something like that. And so they draw maps, and then they draw little bits of the maps and you zoom around, up and down and it zooms in, and then charts appear and the charts fill up as you zoom up and down.

That's what shorthand does. Pretty cool. I don't know where it stands on an accessibility front, but it's really interesting. So if you're producing kind of long form content that's complicated and you wanna make it more interactive and visual, go check that out. It's really interesting. And

[00:11:19] Robert Jacobi: we just got an

[00:11:19] Nathan Wrigley: AI

[00:11:20] Robert Jacobi: summary of those articles and not really worry about any of this really

[00:11:23] Nathan Wrigley: complicated.

Yeah, that's where we're all going, right? That's right. Yeah.

[00:11:27] Michelle Frechette: I've noticed that my

[00:11:27] Nathan Wrigley: phone

[00:11:28] Michelle Frechette: does that. Now. What, if I get a text message, it'll summarise the text message for me so I know really they're

[00:11:34] Nathan Wrigley: enough.

[00:11:37] Michelle Frechette: some people message our attendances are not short at all. Wow. But a longer one, it'll mu it'll summarise it for me.

[00:11:43] Nathan Wrigley: I am so not sure that the AI future that we're all heralding in is gonna be all that great for us. I think our attention spans are gonna be, interesting. Marcus Burnett. Now, I don't know about you, that word frigging Monday, that word where I live is unspeakable. I'm not allowed to say that word, so I shouldn't Well,

[00:12:01] Michelle Frechette: we say that you're not allowed to

[00:12:03] Robert Jacobi: stay Monday.

[00:12:03] Nathan Wrigley: The one in the middle. the one the middle. He is not allowed to be

[00:12:07] Michelle Frechette: happy.

[00:12:08] Nathan Wrigley: It's got it. It's definitely not Well, happy here.

[00:12:12] Robert Jacobi: Yeah. So that middle word is used to avoid the bad word.

[00:12:16] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. which in England they use all the time. It's equally bad word.

[00:12:22] Marc Benzakein: No.

[00:12:23] Michelle Frechette: Marcus, you have completely ruined this podcast hack.

That's fine. Never go. It's totally

[00:12:28] Robert Jacobi: fine. It's,

[00:12:29] Marc Benzakein: it's being taken off of. It's being taken off of, YouTube, England or whatever uk. That's right.

[00:12:34] Robert Jacobi: Just

[00:12:34] Michelle Frechette: gonna say fudging happy fudging Monday.

[00:12:37] Robert Jacobi: No, you just need to be, adult verified to be able to watch this podcast in the UK now.

[00:12:43] Michelle Frechette: Oh, there you go.

[00:12:43] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. It's

[00:12:44] Marc Benzakein: no longer a family show.

[00:12:46] Nathan Wrigley: No, I'm gonna rest. You've control

[00:12:48] Michelle Frechette: Nathan.

[00:12:49] Nathan Wrigley: I'm No, it's okay. Honestly, it's fine. I'm just gonna keep drawing right. Here we go. WordPress 7.1. I, dunno if you're a classic editor user, this has got actually nothing to do with the classic editor, but there's been a recent announcement that, classic block, the classic block is gonna be deprecated in future versions of WordPress.

I'm, guessing that we could count on a few hands the amount of people that use this block, but apparently not. So it's a block that you, that allows you to pop it into the, block editor and then use features of the old classic editor. So it's not if you've used the, classic editor plugin, which disables Gutenberg in effect.

But anyway, so this has been announced 7.1, it's probably gonna go away. classic editor should still work. So if that's your thing, it's fine. And if you've been using the classic editor block, it's fine as well. It just means you won't be able to use it going forward. But any content that you've previously made with it will still be the same.

I dunno what it'll mean if you want to go back and make amendments to that. But, anyway, so there's a move. I wonder if it heralds in a day when the classic editor actually itself, becomes deprecated and, I don't know, probably ends up being a third party plugin or something like that. Not a lot to say about that.

And if you've got anything you wanna add, feel free chip in now, but

[00:14:08] Robert Jacobi: I, why is this taking so long?

[00:14:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Yep, I'm

just, yeah, it's interesting.

[00:14:13] Robert Jacobi: I've, been a Gutenberg fan from day one, even though it wasn't, a hundred percent day one, but Technology moves on. Let's, yeah, me too.

[00:14:23] Nathan Wrigley: I'm, the same as you. I, immediately started using it for text-based content, which is primarily what I do. And so I had no need for any of these things. But it says here, the classic block, by the way, this is coming from the repository. This is Rays reporting on it. the classic block, is the only block in core that doesn't behave like a standard block.

It's an opaque chunk of HT ML rendered through a separate embedded editor rather than a node in the block tree. So technically, I suppose it's a good idea to get rid of that and who, whoever's using it just be just beyond guard that starts

[00:14:55] Marc Benzakein: well, as one who never uses it. I'm deeply offended that they're,

[00:14:59] Nathan Wrigley: I know it's annoying, right?

Yeah, that's right. No doubt. Somewhere there's somebody who's absolutely wedded to it though, who's probably who's gonna have a real nightmare, with all of that. But anyway, that's the thing.

[00:15:10] Robert Jacobi: Every time I hear adding HTML directly into anything, I'm just like, okay, security, Pass out, freak out.

[00:15:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yep, That's a good point. Where do you work for

[00:15:20] Michelle Frechette: again, Robert?

[00:15:22] Robert Jacobi: That's even before where I work from. That is just good old fashioned paranoia.

[00:15:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Good to have.

[00:15:27] Michelle Frechette: Come on. I threw you a bow and you were supposed to say the name.

[00:15:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, black. I'm going,

if everybody could just comment the word black Wall, then Robert would be really happy. Just write Black Wall. Always one word.

[00:15:40] Michelle Frechette: Boss. His bosses would be like whoever got him on that show. She deserves a raise.

[00:15:44] Nathan Wrigley: Genius. Genius. She definitely deserves a

[00:15:46] Robert Jacobi: raise.

[00:15:46] Michelle Frechette: She's self-employed, so that's beside the point, but yeah.

[00:15:50] Nathan Wrigley: okay, let's move on. So the next one is a bit of self-promotion, but also not, it's a piece that I did with, three wonderful individuals. It's Destiny Carno, and, a Padia and Match Check Pulaski. And they chatted with me at, it was supposed to be at WordCamp Asia, but unfortunately we weren't able to get, together in the room.

So we did it post WordCamp Asia and we were chatting about the WordPress education initiatives. And, I dunno if you've noticed, but WordPress, there's some data on this in a minute, we'll get to it in a minute. But basically the WordPress, demographic in terms of age is definitely skewing older. I got into using WordPress in, I don't know, late twenties, something like that.

And it was really cool. I'm not sure it has that sort of cool kudos anymore. So basically what I'm trying to say is that pipeline of funnelling younger people in, it's drying up a little bit and you go to WordPress events and you can just see, you look around the room and it's largely older people, whatever that means.

And so there's been quite a lot of work going on in the background, which is song I think, trying to get, educational initiatives in all sorts of different ways going and destiny and, match check talk about this. And there are three things. There's the WP Credits programme, which is literally like bricks and mortar universities who are enabling credits for their programme.

Let's say you're on a, I don't know, a history honours pro, not history, like a technology honours programme. You could maybe get a aquar, like a 12th or something. You get one module and you can make that a word pressy thing. Then there's things like student camps and campus connect, which were much more community driven and less institution driven.

Anyway, the point being there is loads of hard work going on by individuals like these three, mostly on song, but they're, doing a boat load of actual work. And, it's pretty impressive really. And like I said, I think most people in the community probably don't know about it, but they're shoring up the viability of the platform.

making sure that there's a throughput of, younger people. So that's my piece. I dunno if anybody wants to put the, put their 2 cents in.

[00:18:07] Robert Jacobi: It ties into one of my links later actually

[00:18:10] Nathan Wrigley: Uhhuh,

[00:18:10] Robert Jacobi: so that's like perfect.

[00:18:12] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, in which case I will try to grab that and shall I grab it just now?

Let me see if I can find, is this the Luma one that I can see?

[00:18:20] Robert Jacobi: Yes. Yep.

[00:18:21] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, let me pop that in. I'll do it now. Might as well. This is a calendar link, I'm guessing if it's Luma. Oh, okay. No, it's the actual

[00:18:30] Robert Jacobi: event page.

[00:18:31] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So the AI leaders micro credential tell, tell, do you know much about this or do you just wanna raise it as a thing?

[00:18:39] Robert Jacobi: so I actually, this was an event last Tuesday, in Chicago and it is exactly around students and getting credentialed using ai specifically with WordPress. Okay. it was an automatic slash WordPress event, here in Chicago and students from, Louisiana and University of Illinois, Chicago, were intended, getting the, it's the first cohort of graduates with, this kind of credential.

So it, it is tied into all that

[00:19:08] Nathan Wrigley: and they've now graduated. That's, they've gone

[00:19:11] Robert Jacobi: through that and

[00:19:11] Nathan Wrigley: they've come out the other end. Wow.

[00:19:13] Robert Jacobi: Correct. So last Tuesday was the graduation ceremony.

[00:19:16] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. That's great. And presumably it makes up a smaller part of a bigger, correct. History pro, sorry.

I dunno why I keep saying history. It's 'cause what my is, what my degree is. So when I say degree history pops into my head. like their, degree programme, this is, that the AI bit is just one small part of that.

[00:19:33] Robert Jacobi: So I don't know if they get like university credit for this uhhuh or this is just a separate credential.

my understanding is it's a separate credential, recognised somehow by the university involved.

[00:19:44] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting. Okay. Yes. Okay. Yeah. Okay. That's brilliant. So ho hopefully that's the sort of initiative I imagine that Anand and Destiny and Match Check are getting themselves involved in, but this AI leaders micro credential that sounds interesting.

Yeah. So this is the, might have some,

[00:19:59] Robert Jacobi: the first of, I assume many to come.

[00:20:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, but there we go. Go and have a, listen, it's a podcast episode, but as always there's a full transcript if you wanna break it down for your ai, you'd get the, you get the bullet points and what have you from that, as well.

So go and check it out. It really, genuinely inspirational. I, have Yeah, for sure. Pinch myself a few times and say, this is so amazing, so many people giving up so much time. It's, brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. let's go for this one. Next plugin developers and site maintainers are pushing back.

This is again on the repository on WordPress dot org's. 24 hour update delay if you saw the news. But let's say it was like three weeks ago or four weeks ago, something like that. Oh, here we go. launched June the fifth. Matt Mullenweg decided that, I think probably in the face of ai, the, ability for AI to, to take hold of, we got a lot of man in the middle attacks and things like that, that were going on in the WordPress space at the time.

The idea being to enable a 24 hour window from the time in which a plugin update is submitted until it goes live. it sounds on the face of it like a really reasonable proposition. Yeah, let's just wait 24 hours. That will put some breaks on from the wordpress.org side. It might discourage people from submitting, I don't know, fake plugins or what have you.

They can be inspected. However, some unexpected consequences. So there's now, it now been determined that there are problems with things like auto well automatic updates or updating in the dashboard. So it will appear as a, an update that's available. But you, when you click the bottom to update in the dashboard, apparently nothing happens.

You've gotta wait for 24 hours. So that's weird if I've got that right. But also, translations, the translation for the plug, if there's, at the same time, the translation will try to automatically update itself or, say I'm here to be updated. But then when you try to update the translation, even though that's totally legit and ready, it can't, because it hasn't got a binding to the newly updated version of the plugin.

Anyway. Basically, some unexpected consequences from what on the face of it, felt like a really easy, good idea at the time. So the debate has begun, what should we do to solve this? So anyway, open to you lot. If you've got any commentary on that,

[00:22:26] Robert Jacobi: the, I'm sure that process will tighten up as. Gets, there's the, you the experience stuff that's happening obviously with people not being able to download it with a button showing that's, okay, that can get fixed.

there's just a lot of junk, easily dumped everywhere all the time. Yeah. yeah. Apple's not gonna let you, update an app in, 24 hours. as far as I know, there's always some kinda review process, and I know Matt wants to get as much AI automation into that workflow. 24 hours is in my mind, wholly reasonable.

Yeah. For something like that to happen. And the, and then, and they talk about some security issues where folks, might have a, a chance to exploit that in that period. I foresee something where there's, immediate security upgrade as opposed to anything else that's going on again, being managed by the, the team, at wordpress.org.

It's just one of those things we just gotta get through. It's not gonna necessarily be pretty, but you can imagine that now this has been identified. It'll be a, an easy fix, won't you, just remove the update button for 24 hours. But my understanding is Matt's intention is to get this 24 hours down to hours and then miss.

[00:23:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yes.

[00:23:50] Robert Jacobi: Yes.

[00:23:51] Nathan Wrigley: so in theory, in the future that we're all staring at, it'll maybe be 24 minutes or eight minutes or something whilst that process clicks on in the background, but at the minute it's providing them a window to go and check those things. And anyway. Some unexpected.

[00:24:05] Robert Jacobi: and also just check the process of workflow internally as well.

It's not just to check the plugin, it's to check how well, dot org can actually evaluate those plugins

[00:24:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:24:13] Robert Jacobi: As quickly as possible.

[00:24:15] Michelle Frechette: We've had some bad actors too, as far as people who submit a plugin and then change it radically. And so I, I don't think this is a bad thing. I think we just definitely need to be careful that we're not leaving sites open for, for hacking and things like that.

For sure.

[00:24:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Watch this space. I guess it was a fairly, what's the word? It was an arbitrary decision, which obviously is gonna lead to some pushback. So anyway, the article is on the repository, it's called Plugin Developers and Site Maintainers Pushback on WordPress dot orgs, 24 hour update delay as, is always the case.

If it's shown on the screen, there'll be a link in the show notes which come with this. I

[00:24:52] Michelle Frechette: was just gonna say, let's give a shout out again to Ray because she does such Oh yeah. A good job. The best. Yeah, Ray, definitely. Yeah.

[00:24:58] Nathan Wrigley: She's the best. Hands down.

[00:25:01] Michelle Frechette: True journalism, in WordPress. Yep.

[00:25:02] Robert Jacobi: And I will definitely recommend people become a member.

whatever the monthly is more than worth it. Just 'cause she really gets stuff out the door in, in like valuable form, not just yeah. A

tweet.

[00:25:17] Marc Benzakein: And she's so accessible too. She's so easy to just like ping and she responds right away. yeah. So hat tip to the repository and Ray Moray for doing all that.

[00:25:28] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. Absolutely. Yeah, that's great. I've got a big plane driving, going, driving, going past my window, so if you can hear that. I apologise about this, This, next piece is gonna open up a few of the following pieces. So there's a few bits which sort cascade, so I'll do 'em one at a time.

So this is WP Mayor, and they've got an article, it's, I guess it's fairly clickbaity, but nevertheless, the article is actually really interesting. There's a lot of it. I'm scrolling through it on the screen now for those of you listening on the audio. so the article entitled, who's Left? To build WordPress.

And I've highlighted just in the beginning sort of paragraph or so core users, so this is what I was talking about earlier. Core users are ageing whilst newer generations move towards simpler AI driven solutions. And basically that is the premise of the article. There's, an absolute load of data here to back that up.

WordPress being in slight decline. the last six months, the stats every month have been in slight decline. I don't want to put the cat amongst the pigeons and alarm anybody, there's a trend and talking about whether or not it's exciting for younger users, that educational piece hopefully will make it exciting 'cause you get some university credit out of it or things like that.

But, basically, aware of a generation when that, it probably was one of the more exciting things to do when I started doing web development and was looking at different CMSs. That was the hot stuff, it was genuinely the most interesting stuff out there. And maybe it's not anymore. AI is so intriguing itself.

We've got a piece which I'll put on the screen a little bit later with somebody installing via the CLI and having a website ready in 45 seconds. it's pretty compelling. And whilst the WP Mayor article doesn't build a, solution and they're not saying, this is what we've gotta do, it's just raising that flag and, and a point of concern and, I share that concern because I'm tied up with all of this project.

I don't want WordPress to fail. That would be demonstratively bad for what I do, but I don't know. I don't know how we, how we accommodate things like this. anyway, if there's anybody wanting to commentate on that, go for

[00:27:52] Michelle Frechette: it. can I jump in first? I know Robert Chomp at the bit there, but, I could see you like I've been talking to other people and I know that we're gonna also talk about the decline of plugins and things like that.

I think that's one of the articles we have today. sales, I should say. I think that the perfect storm happened in a certain way. We had a pandemic, which. Made all of our sales go up because everything went to online. And then we saw, this plateau that was so much higher than anything we've ever seen, and yet so many businesses expected it to stay there in instead of expecting the market to correct itself after we were then allowed to go back out at about and do our own thing.

And so I think a lot of those that sought reasons to have to be online aren't there anymore or are just maintaining what they had. And so there's no new sales that way and that kind of thing. I really think that we have just a situation like that where all of this is happening, all of these new products are coming into the market.

We're ageing as a, community, and getting those younger people in is only way to ha Robert's Nope, this, I'm like, I'm not growing

[00:28:59] Robert Jacobi: up. No. And younger,

[00:29:01] Michelle Frechette: oh, I thought you meant, I thought you meant my, theory was wrong. But I think that so many of us did not expect a course correction after the pandemic boom that was there.

Or Boone that was there. Yeah.

[00:29:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. That's interesting. Robert.

[00:29:17] Robert Jacobi: I'm with Boone and Boone, and Stella who decided to show up for the podcast.

That's it. WordPress has been around for a while. We're at, a, a state of certainly saturation, if not even more. when you're looking at 40 plus percent of the internet, it's unavoidable.

This is the Microsoft problem in the, mid to late nineties. And, guess what? A lot of people still got Microsoft certificates still learned how to do everything on Windows and Office and Visual Basic and SQL Server and all, name your Microsoft tool. And they weren't necessarily like gung-ho Microsofty.

They were getting jobs. And I, given the, expanse of WordPress, it's hard not to think that people will still just want to get a, if they like coding, if they wanna be in this kind of, ecosystem, that they will go get a job. They're not gonna be community members. They're not gonna be jumping on, sorry, WP builds every week.

Yeah. just, they're, gonna have a job and a life, which gosh, I would love to have a life. it's just one. But yes. a as early adopters of, these things, you get very passionate about it. Other people won't be passionate. They'll see the tool for what it is and what benefits they can get out of it.

And we can look at the, the educational stuff, campus Connect, or, WordPress Connect, WordPress campus. I'm messing that up somehow. Yeah. All the things,

[00:30:51] Nathan Wrigley: that's not easy, to remember those

[00:30:53] Michelle Frechette: names. All the things,

[00:30:55] Robert Jacobi: all the things, the AI cohorts and whatnot. now you need to find ways to build and support folks who are not gonna be crazy passionate, who just want to enjoy their lives and have a career in WordPress.

I don't.

I don't think we're ageing out. We're just the ones that happen to be there early. it's,

[00:31:14] Michelle Frechette: but some of us are burning out, some people are burning out. Totally different

[00:31:18] Robert Jacobi: conversation. Completely agree. But totally different conversation. But it kind convers with the ageing out too, right?

[00:31:22] Michelle Frechette: Because if all of us have been in, since early adopters, a bunch of us are burning out on, the community specifically, and especially in the United States where we see almost no word camps this year until Phoenix.

[00:31:33] Robert Jacobi: Yep.

[00:31:35] Michelle Frechette: there's, they're going gangbusters outside of the United States, but here we seem to have either an apathy problem or, as Courtney says, it's a, an impact from the lawsuit that's going on.

I think that's affecting a lot of core users. it's, like I said, the perfect storm is all these things. Not any one thing is necessarily impact the whole thing, but when you put all of these little orbs together, they make a bagel circle of influence. I,

[00:32:01] Robert Jacobi: I, I think for better or worse, we need to look back towards Microsoft.

How many times did Microsoft sue and get sued? They're doing fine. How many times? and it's not WordPress getting sued, it's automatic and WP Engine, two companies that are having this, disagreement and, but

[00:32:19] Marc Benzakein: optically, but optically from the outside. People don't know that.

[00:32:23] Robert Jacobi: They don't know. For us,

[00:32:25] Marc Benzakein: for

[00:32:25] Robert Jacobi: us, we pay attention. We

[00:32:26] Marc Benzakein: know the difference. Yeah. I,

[00:32:29] Robert Jacobi: I guarantee I, if agency owners paying all of their customers, you'd probably get like maybe five or less percent who actually. Are even aware of the lawsuits, let alone give a hoo. the i,

[00:32:43] Michelle Frechette: the community, I'm talking that they know that there's sites even on WordPress.

[00:32:47] Robert Jacobi: I, mean, but I'm talking about the community involvement. Exactly. Core, right? So like you talk about the community, these people know, these people have been to Con I'm not talking about the community of users that have no clue that there's even a community. I'm talking about the, root group of people here in the United States.

[00:33:02] Michelle Frechette: We've seen some leave automatic, we've seen some leave other places. We've seen companies completely take out Stellar wp there, their software division. And sorry, that was just a little dig. I take that on it.

[00:33:16] Marc Benzakein: I caught it. Okay.

[00:33:17] Nathan Wrigley: I that, I hear

[00:33:19] Michelle Frechette: you. But yeah, and Amber says most site owners have no idea that's true.

But the agencies that built their sites do, or the cousin or the nephew or whatever knows what they built it with back in the day. but you're right. But most of the site owners are not part of the community because they didn't build the site and they don't know. And I don't know that our community was ever supposed to be made up or expected to be made up of all site users.

'cause that doesn't make any sense that somebody who's, whose business is painting, is gonna go to a WordPress convention instead of a paint convention if they're taking time away from their business. So I just think that there's all these things that are at play in it. I don't think we can blame any one thing.

[00:33:54] Nathan Wrigley: So just, but

[00:33:55] Marc Benzakein: I also think that, oh, go ahead.

[00:33:57] Nathan Wrigley: Nope. No, please, I, was just gonna say, I also think that, the other thing that the pandemic did though was it ended Word camps. And so now there is this, there's this gap between the people who always went to Word Camps. Then you had two years of absolutely no Word camps.

[00:34:14] Marc Benzakein: And then you ha and then you're trying to bring new people in. And then the people that had been going to Word Camps forever had that taken away. and there's this gap of the people who, the old school and the new school. And there's been no, shepherding in the new school, which is what I think these educational initiatives are all about,

[00:34:35] Nathan Wrigley: right?

[00:34:35] Marc Benzakein: Is we haven't really had any kind of like mentorship that happened during that two years to keep the momentum going in any way, shape or form. because trying to do it online as we saw it was a stop gap. But it wasn't a great one.

[00:34:50] Nathan Wrigley: It will be really interesting to see how this goes. w let's give it another year or two years or what have you.

But it's, really worth reading. And the, author of this piece, which is, Jean or I guess, or Jean, galley, Gallia, sorry if I butchered your name. they, make several of the points that we've made about COVID, about the, just the like, whether or not WordPress is fun or interesting anymore about the age demographic and about whether or not people even care about owning your stack anymore.

Whether that's just even a, part of the core philosophy. And, I think that's, I think it's probably fair to say that a lot of people have given up on that argument. I don't mean they've given up on it, they've just grown up in an era where it was never a thing. they've always used a silo to, to post their stuff, Instagram and YouTube and whatever it may be.

So that never shaped their, their requirements. Whereas for us, that was very important. but we'll come to some things. Go on Robert.

[00:35:54] Robert Jacobi: I was gonna say, you bring up the, thing that I think is the most relevant aspect of this conversation, because it's gonna affect multiple communities, multiple projects, what's the point of o open source and owning.

what you do outright and building your own stack if you want it, or, deploying it somewhere else. And then being able to, redeploy it, whatever, have that kind of control, have that kind of privacy, have that kind of security. Whatever you wanna do with that. do we really want, Google and Anthropic and, I don't know, name another company, Yeah. Owning your entire life. Facebook. Facebook, yeah.

[00:36:33] Nathan Wrigley: That's it. Yeah.

[00:36:33] Robert Jacobi: And, do you really want those three companies controlling everything you do digitally? And, yeah. It is

[00:36:39] Nathan Wrigley: such an interesting calculus, isn't it? Because whilst they've, most of those platforms have never failed.

to the point of going bankrupt and have gone out of business, a few of them have. Yeah. But, and there's a part of me which wants some of them really big players to just brutally fail. And, for a lot of people just suddenly face up to the reality of, oh, it's gone. All of that stuff's gone. Oh, darn.

And, but it's so easy to, make the counter argument, oh, it's fine. Facebook will be there forever. They're very profitable. Don't worry about it.

[00:37:10] Robert Jacobi: Yeah. ex exactly. just like Friendster and MySpace.

[00:37:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:37:13] Robert Jacobi: Still around. Yeah,

yeah. Fantastic.

[00:37:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But again,

[00:37:15] Robert Jacobi: geo cities, all these Too

[00:37:17] Nathan Wrigley: old.

Yeah. For,

[00:37:18] Robert Jacobi: it's too old. But doesn't mean it doesn't happen. that's the whole point. these were gigantic, content silos that no longer exist.

[00:37:27] Nathan Wrigley: Let's go back. Oh, Michelle.

[00:37:29] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. I think also the fact for the United States, I'm only speaking for the United States 'cause I see ADIs. 5% of the people using WordPress are building websites, are even aware of automatic.

I think one of the reasons that things are going so well in other areas of the world, like India for example, and, Asia and, Spain has had a lot this year, I think too, is that, they don't have the same political situation that we do here in the United States right now. It was difficult for people to fly in last year.

A lot of people don't wanna fly in because even if they can get a visa, they're worried about getting stopped at the border. Have it get turned back, especially if you see everything that's happened with FIFA and all of those kinds of fifa, say fifa. World Cup. You can tell I'm really into sports.

but, to run a word camp here in Rochester this fall, it would be very difficult to raise the amount of money I would need to raise because the cost of foods, the cost of rent, the cost of advertising, the cost of everything,

[00:38:25] Robert Jacobi: yeah.

[00:38:25] Michelle Frechette: swag, all of that has gone up so exponentially here because of the tariffs that we've been paying.

eggs haven't gotten, no, nothing's gone down as promised. So just to put on an event is more costly than it ever has been before.

[00:38:38] Marc Benzakein: and you have to also keep in mind that central or whatever they're called these days,

[00:38:43] Nathan Wrigley: what comes sent.

[00:38:43] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. Yeah. They used to put a lot more money into the word camps.

I remember when I organised a couple word camps, you could pick up the phone pretty much and they'd write you a check. yeah. and now it's, gotten to be really, restrictive. And it's all expected to be in sponsorship dollars and sponsorships. it used to sponsorships, used to do it for the community, and now they really have to take a good, hard look at ROI because the sponsorships cost so much.

[00:39:15] Michelle Frechette: and I've said this before, when you look at a Word camp and you see what the sponsorships cost, and then you see what the, what we have to put in a sponsorships. So let's say that, a BC hosting company is a gold sponsor and they tell me I have to put it in the gold sponsor spot. And on my site, gold Sponsor is a thousand dollars sponsorship, but I only got 1500 total from all the sponsors at Central, that I really didn't get a thousand from that one.

And so when people are looking to see what you might need, they're looking and they're saying, you have all these thousands of dollars, why do you need more sponsorship? I think those should be put in a different category and not be called the Gold sponsor and the Silver sponsor, because now you're showing people that we actually made more money at a work cap that we really do.

[00:39:57] Nathan Wrigley: I got an email this week from a guest that was gonna be on the podcast and, they were, I won't name names, but they were organising, helping to organise one of the organisers of a word camp in the US And, they've pulled it because they just can't get rid of any tickets. So it's a bit of a shame really.

those Yeah. I'm not surprised. Seen days. Yeah. I'm just gonna go through a few comments, if that's all right. So the first thing is, Marcus is just apologising for using that word. It's fine. it doesn't matter. You didn't know. And also it's a pre, how would you know? but it, yeah. Marcus d

[00:40:32] Robert Jacobi: is a square word, so

[00:40:33] Nathan Wrigley: you screwed up voice long.

Let's just put it that way. So, is

[00:40:37] Marc Benzakein: d nbb and, you can't

[00:40:40] Robert Jacobi: say stupid. Gosh darn it.

oh. You, you could not say stupid in my house growing up that's on page 33 of Yeah,

[00:40:47] Marc Benzakein: for sure. Really?

[00:40:48] Robert Jacobi: It's 33 of my bio. Yeah. Shut up. Did not say stupid.

[00:40:51] Marc Benzakein: Not say shut up or stupid. Those are the two in

[00:40:53] Robert Jacobi: our Yes.

Yes.

[00:40:53] Marc Benzakein: It, yeah.

[00:40:55] Michelle Frechette: It made such an impact that it's on page 33 of your bio. That's pretty early in that tone.

[00:41:02] Robert Jacobi: The first three years were, filled. So I'm, but no, I'm with Mark. Exactly. Stupid and shut up. Were literally, those were like, that's the baseline of words

[00:41:13] Michelle Frechette: that were thrown. Yeah, that's your mouth. That is, so you got your mouth washed out for those when you were a kid.

[00:41:16] Nathan Wrigley: I can totally see it with shut up because it's basically an order, isn't it? But the, stupid is a no scenario in which stupid is a good idea. okay. No, my mother would always say in a stupid way, because you are performing a comedy routine that's not allowed. Her

[00:41:30] Robert Jacobi: gripe was Nothing is stupid. You can explain that better.

[00:41:34] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, interesting. 'cause I think the point of comedy is to be on some level stupid, if It's

[00:41:41] Robert Jacobi: silly, funny, ironic,

[00:41:43] Nathan Wrigley: not stupid. Okay. There's a weight that you are applying to it that I do not have. That's no, and that's, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's fascinating.

Okay, so in the same way that we had that word earlier, which I'm not gonna say stupid, A applies there. Okay.

[00:41:57] Marc Benzakein: We were also not allowed to swear unless we were working on cars then, it was, okay. I'm not kidding. I. I am not, the first time I heard my dad swear we were underneath replacing transmission on a car.

I heard him swear. And then he looked at me and said, it's okay to swear if you're working on cars.

[00:42:15] Nathan Wrigley: That's great. That's brilliant. That's such an interesting one. Did you have the swear money pot in your house where you No, we did not because nobody swore

[00:42:23] Marc Benzakein: in our house

[00:42:24] Nathan Wrigley: unless we were working near the car.

Just stick it near the car. That's such an interesting way of describing it. I love that. webcam is joining us. Hello Camie. Nice to have you with us. does this affect any page builders in any way? What would be the context of that? What were we talking about? We

[00:42:39] Michelle Frechette: were talking about the, exit of the, the block.

The,

[00:42:43] Nathan Wrigley: oh, no, Basically. Yeah. I can't, good

[00:42:45] Michelle Frechette: of it.

[00:42:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you'll see my answer next. Unless somehow you've managed to crowbar that block into a page, builder page or something like that. But I, think the answer is basically, I think I, yeah. who else have we got? We've got another, oh, there's quite a few comments I can't really keep up today.

there's a few people saying hi, like James Lau. That's our fault's new, that's lovely.

in addition to the market correction, so this is Courtney. We, I put this on the screen earlier. Yeah. In addition to the market correction, I think the WPE WP Engine, lawsuit is also impacting two in terms of the people who actually contribute.

Actually Courtney, if you read that article, if you scroll to the bottom, a whole like quarter of it is about that. So that, was not missed in that article at all. yeah. And there's also a lot, so there's Nomad skateboarding, there's also a large number of younger folks who are completely against AI and the third party capitalist chains that entails, do you know what, nomad Skateboarding?

I, all I can say is the, young adults who I am in proximity to. All of them have a real chip on their shoulder about AI and it's intelligent chip on their shoulder. It is not like a knee jerk reaction on being, they've all got that it's gonna rob our future. It's taking the environment from us, what are you people who are coming towards retirement setting up for us to deal with when we're open source?

Yeah. but what I'm saying is I think that's a strong point. It would not surprise me if there was some kind of tsunami in that direction. We will see, from the inside of the inside, I know many contributors who stopped, so that's related to the word WP engine thing again, right?

[00:44:27] Marc Benzakein: Yeah,

[00:44:27] Nathan Wrigley: that for sure.

Amber, by the way, stick around. Amber, we've got some of your stuff coming up a little bit later. da. what did you miss as, Nigel Rogers?

[00:44:40] Michelle Frechette: Oh, so much. Nigel.

[00:44:41] Nathan Wrigley: So much. just go back, start again. Yeah, you can do it on, you'll

[00:44:46] Michelle Frechette: have to listen tomorrow. Yeah.

[00:44:47] Nathan Wrigley: Elliot Richmond, it's a bit's in Robert Shift, but it is one that could heavily impact the future uptake of WordPress.

Thank you very much. Oh gosh. I honestly can't keep up. I'm sorry. that's okay. Apologies. We had a

[00:45:00] Robert Jacobi: winner chicken dinner. yeah,

WP builds today.

[00:45:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's a good, it's a good one. The can I ask you to put is great, but if you, three, if you see a comment like, like you have been doing, if you see one which like fits right in somewhere, just shout.

[00:45:14] Michelle Frechette: Can you pull up Amber's that talks about, we're having a hard time finding sponsors. Was it 9:40 AM If that helps you find it.

[00:45:22] Nathan Wrigley: Where's that? Is that towards the bottom or, yeah,

[00:45:25] Michelle Frechette: it's 10 up. Maybe it's at nine 40.

[00:45:28] Nathan Wrigley: If you go, if have the

[00:45:28] Michelle Frechette: timestamps

[00:45:29] Nathan Wrigley: go. we're having a hard time finding sponsors this year for WP Accessibility Day.

Do you know what Amber, you, do an incredible job with that. You terms of the forward marketing that you do, you are like six months out the gate, aren't you? And you are already telling people about it. We've mentioned it quite a few times on this show. right now we can't even cover our co Ooh, WP accessibility.day, I think is the URL.

If you would like to help Amber out, if

[00:45:57] Michelle Frechette: it shows up, I just put it in the stream. So maybe it'll show up. Sometimes they don't when I put it. Oh,

[00:46:02] Nathan Wrigley: okay. yeah. Okay.

[00:46:03] Robert Jacobi: it's, a great conference. I've been there, I think this is what year? Three or four of it. I've, lost track at least

[00:46:09] Michelle Frechette: three more than that.

It started I think in 2018 was the first one. Yeah. 18 or 2019. Yeah.

[00:46:16] Robert Jacobi: Oh, wow. It's been around for quite a while, so I'm only aware of it for the last three years then, yeah. Yeah. I, I think of, the problems is do people really, it's virtual conferences are a problem. I stare at this, camera and screen 20 and.

Okay.

[00:46:34] Michelle Frechette: Sorry.

[00:46:34] Robert Jacobi: Sponsor. Yeah. and that's a hard one for spon, sponsors to get behind of, 'cause they're like, the metrics aren't good, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So is it, it's a hard one.

[00:46:45] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. I

[00:46:45] Michelle Frechette: get it. It's, but Veto does a same, similar type of event and gets that sponsorship from a lot of different places.

[00:46:51] Robert Jacobi: Yeah. That's not happening ever again. That, was the last one.

[00:46:55] Michelle Frechette: Oh, it was

[00:46:56] Nathan Wrigley: WP Agency Summit.

[00:46:57] Robert Jacobi: Yeah. I don't, think that's any big secret. I, he's been saying it for the last couple months. I hadn't heard that yet. it just takes rum, three to four months of full time to actually get that going.

And they're like, we're not a conference company and this is brutal. And, so yeah. From multiple, angles, it's, hard, to do and do well. And then. Still not hit markers.

[00:47:25] Nathan Wrigley: So that, I'm just, sorry, Michelle. I'm, that's okay. I'm just gonna, yeah, thank you. I'm just gonna say that, that article is obviously provoked quite a lot of interest, isn't it?

who's left to build WordPress, but there's a few related things which sort of chime into that. So this is, a post on X, and it's, it's by somebody who, I don't know, called Paval, I can't pronounce that. So Chi chichi or something like that. And, if you just look at this, it's, instal growth.

This is, for example, they've got two screenshots. One is of WP Forms down 16%, I don't know, over what period. And then there's another image, which is another company called Start, sorry, another plugin I'm guessing called starter templates down 50%. obviously, there's a couple of screenshots, what does that mean?

But it's more fuel on the fire and this sort of stuff appearing on social media eventually. Does this sort of stuff become a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, if And, somebody, made that comment a minute ago, do we do this to ourselves? Perhaps we do. But, anyway, there you go.

that's that little bit. Let's move on and talk about this. WordPress Community dashboards. I'm just do this really quickly. Integrated

[00:48:42] Robert Jacobi: dashboard.

[00:48:43] Nathan Wrigley: the, sorry. Thank you. Yeah, the WordPress contributor dashboard. This is some way of giving people who contribute to the project. Some, I guess kudos, some sort of badge to be able to say, look, this, it's provable, that kind of thing.

You can then, you could just use it for your own kudos, but also, I presume, take it to future employee, employers and things like that and demonstrate your commitment to things like open source and what you did in the WordPress Open Source project. They've now added what's called the ladder, or at least added some features to the ladder so that you can get an idea of who's doing what over time.

I think I clicked on it somewhere. I can't, I don't know if I've got it open somewhere else. No, I can't. no. There it is. There you go. So you can get an idea if you click on con, if you go to wp contributor dashboard.org and then you click on this ladder feature, you can start to hone down, who's doing what.

This strikes me as a really interesting tool to people, companies both large and small in the WordPress space who want to commit their money. They're like sponsor money for want of a better word, to people who are, actually doing meaningful, impactful work. so you can click on, for example, I don't know, you might click on, this inform, I can't remember how I did it.

There we go. Seven active, and then you can find out who they are by clicking on these sort of user IDs. It doesn't actually show their names, but if you click on them, you discover who they are. nice little update there. but that's that. And then I'm just gonna quickly move on 'cause time is already getting the better of us.

[00:50:12] Michelle Frechette: No, not

[00:50:13] Nathan Wrigley: here. Yeah, who would've known, just love this. I love this approach. Mike McAllister, has been creating the Ollie theme for, several years now. I don't know quite how he's managed to make it the only horse in town, if But really, I don't know of many other themes that are getting talked about in the block-based theme space.

Ollie seems to have all the oxygen in the room. I could be wrong about that, but that's the way I'm seeing it. And they've added in an AI layer, and I really like the way that they've done it. So you can watch the videos, the articles called Design, write, and Edit with ai, right inside a WordPress, what they've done is they've added a little model, which you can invoke wherever you are.

And for example, there's a writing prompt block where you can tell it what text you would like to come out and the usual input output paradigm that you've gotta go through. And the better your prompt, the better it will be. But I dunno if you can see it on the video there. That's what it looks like.

It just pops up and you type in what you want to do and it will help you do that. But then that's interesting. You can then use it to edit. So stuff that it's already made, you can then go back and say, refine it in the usual way. But then they've also got the design prompt block. Same idea, but this time for, I don't know, gimme a, Row that represents this, that, and the other thing.

And I watched the little video and it's great. it's so compelling. So basically just go and check it out. If you're in the, if you're into AI and you, think themes is an interesting place to have that go check it out. the Ollie Pro, I think it's pro. I'm guessing you need the pro version of the theme.

I'm not a hundred percent sure about that, but, yeah, there you go. anything to add about that? Or shall I move on? I will move on in that case. so here's the, I won't be able to do this justice, but basically, dunno if you can see that this is a short little video. I'll just give you the, the, rundown.

and I'll click go on this video so that you can see what's going on. It says, remember the five minute instal, the WordPress five minute instal, meet the WordPress 10 minute ready site, designed, built, run locally from one ca command. Try it. And then there's a command, which is, I don't know, 20 words in length.

It says build a pet website called My Pet with similar colours and design to that domain. Whatever that is. Keep it small, two to three pages and, and o off we go. So you can see that they're obviously using WordPress Studio. I'm not gonna bore you, but basically you get a sort of boilerplate web back video is 58 seconds long.

Now there's gonna be a little bit of installing things from now and again, but man, what? Heck, that's amazing. Heck, it's just crazy, isn't it? So very, cool. Go and check it out and maybe run that command stuff like I,

[00:53:12] Michelle Frechette: I love studio, by the way. Studio is such, such a great place to just open it up and test a few things.

I've got it installed on my, laptop.

[00:53:20] Nathan Wrigley: It's so great, isn't it? But it's not gonna, it's not gonna win any design contests, but it's still pretty credible from one command. Just goes to show how far we've come. I'm

a

[00:53:33] Michelle Frechette: brilliant designer and I haven't won any either, Yeah, I can't say.

[00:53:40] Nathan Wrigley: Okay,

[00:53:40] Michelle Frechette: brilliant. My is in my own head. I, don't know if other people say that, but,

[00:53:44] Nathan Wrigley: Michelle,

[00:53:44] Robert Jacobi: you are definitely brilliant.

[00:53:46] Michelle Frechette: Oh, thank you. Thank you.

[00:53:47] Nathan Wrigley: The webinar in, in, presumably in response to what I was showing with, Ollie there says, problem is that AI got pushed into our hands when nobody wanted becomes the thing that higher.

Oh no, he's talking about the stuff from a few minutes ago. Yeah. It becomes a thing that higher up people think is the future, but, and it got truncated, the danger impact is big for future generations. Yeah, it's, it is interesting. I look at anything with AI now and, honestly the first question that comes into my head is not what are they showing me?

It's who are want to know who they are, what their interest is, where is their stock portfolio and all of that kind of stuff because it's, I don't know. I'm not sure it's in the best interest for everybody. Anyway. There you go. That was, an interesting AI piece. Is there another AI piece?

Yeah. Okay. This is WordPress core sort of stuff. Oh, I've managed to pop that video out. There we go. Let me take that off. So this is, again, at the repository for the, I think third time on this show. WordPress AI team proposes adding knowledge post type and guidelines to dunno when that happened last, like the time and a new sort of custom post type that got added.

I'll just read it out. Greg Koski, sorry. Greg, has published a proposal bringing a new koski yous,

[00:55:15] Robert Jacobi: excuse me, Koski. Wow.

[00:55:18] Nathan Wrigley: Whatever's a hard

[00:55:19] Robert Jacobi: one.

[00:55:20] Nathan Wrigley: Greg, whatever. Just Greg. Yeah, Greg. Just Greg. Greg published a proposal to bring a new custom post hike and the teams work on guidelines into WordPress core for the 7.1 release.

So not long out, giving sites a built in place to store editorial standards, content rules, and other sites knowledge. The proposal published on Make WordPress core blog introduces WP Knowledge, a general purpose storage primitive designed for author facing and agent facing site knowledge, and guidelines for the first feature bill on top of it.

most sites says Greg, already have content standards, but they live outside WordPress in, Google Docs and wikis and institutional knowledge and things like that. Guidelines within WordPress give them a canonical home available where they matter during writing and editing. So it can feels like a bit of a, I don't know, you go to a setting somewhere, you can see a page here of what it might look like.

You go into a setting, it all lives there. It's not like a thing which you can invoke at the, in the metadata of each co, of each post and what have you. But it just gives the AI that might be interacting with your site some permanent basis of, okay, this is our tone, this is the kind of content that we want to create and so on.

So anyway, dunno if anybody wants to comment on that. If not, I'll move on. No. Okay. Interesting. Ha, this I thought was fascinating. So this is Gravity Kits, WordPress page, build a market share for 2026. I dunno if the three, oh no, it says it in the title. Darn. I was gonna say, I dunno if any of you had a chance to read it, but what did you think would be the proportion, of page builder sites?

What would be the percentage for any of them? And, I would've put Elementor in the lead, but there's no way I would've given them a third of WordPress websites on page builders.

[00:57:15] Robert Jacobi: Yeah, it's huge. Yeah. If you've see if you've seen any of the Miriam sessions or other elementary folk sessions, they have 15% of the web.

[00:57:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yep, yep. It's insane. I dunno what the number is exactly. And also, I presume this is by page builders, so let's presume that 32% is by page builder, but I don't know if that's true because the next column is WordPress block editor, which kind of makes you think, okay, it's all WordPress instals anyway.

Look at that word element or massively out in front 30, let's call it 33%, let's call it a third. The next one down is the block editor. And obviously that's, that's everybody that hasn't used anything. I suppose that's 20% or 20, 20.5, let's call it like that. Like that. And in third percent a surprise to me, I wouldn't have nominated them in third place, but here you go.

agree bakery.

[00:58:12] Marc Benzakein: Yeah,

[00:58:12] Nathan Wrigley: I agree. Interesting. Divvy 5.7, that would've been way up higher, in recent years. WordPress site editor, I presume that's full site editing themes. 1.7, call it that Beaver builder, 1.1 site origin, nor 0.7. And basically from there they go into nor point less than N 0.5.

So I won't mention those ones, but you can see them on the screen and I will provide links, but although Elementor is no longer maybe growing in the way that it was, I don't suppose anything could have grown in the way it was without getting to a hundred percent. It still demonstrates that they are so mild in that landscape.

So anyway, Bravo to them. They're obviously doing something right, continuing to have sites added. Then numbers of the number of sites that they, put out each year apparently is still on a massive rise. It may be that they're not acquiring new licences, but the number of sites that are going online each year come from an elemental background is just on the rise each and every year.

gosh. Interesting. Anybody on that?

[00:59:23] Michelle Frechette: I was a little surprised not to see Cadence in there, Yeah.

Assuming this was done before everything, assuming this was done before everything blew up before. Before

[00:59:33] Marc Benzakein: a month ago. yeah, yeah. That's a good point, Michelle. 'cause even if

[00:59:38] Michelle Frechette: a lot of people were using Cadence, although something don't consider cadence for.

Page builder. Some people don't consider, cadence a page builder, but then neither is the block editor a page.

[00:59:49] Nathan Wrigley: I was gonna say that's

[00:59:50] Marc Benzakein: interesting. Yeah.

[00:59:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. There's, I think, in this scenario it feels like Page builder is something which totally takes over the ui, which is maybe why they've got a little asterisk next to block editor and WordPress site editor because they, they're obviously building. But, elements, yeah. It says Give Not Installed separately. Yeah. They're all something extra, aren't they? Which sort of adds a different layer. Anyway, impressive numbers. and yeah. Wow. So that was on the Gravity Kit website.

Again, links coming in the show notes tomorrow morning. Alright. Okay, here we go. So I was, we got Amber in the comments. Amber's written a, we were talking about Robert writing a book. Amber wrote a book, like a real book. Look at it. Look it, look, I'm scroll and scroll and scroll.

[01:00:39] Michelle Frechette: And I bet she didn't use AI either.

[01:00:41] Nathan Wrigley: No, I bet. She, look, I'm still, I'm on the comments now. it's, I read every word. It's, it is basically gonna be impossible for me to summarise this. But let's, take apart the, main takeaway, and this is what we were talking about earlier, decline of the, WordPress ecosystem, decline of the plugin marketplace and what have you.

not for Amber. look at that chart. so this is the, this is the accessibility checker, active instals. And you can see that, steady, from sort of 20 20, 20 21, steady in incline and up it goes. And then suddenly there's this inflexion point here. We'll talk about that in a minute maybe, but you can more recently, since, I don't know, partway through 2025, it suddenly took a bit of a rocket ship.

but the magic formula here in order to be successful is there's no magic formula. The magic formula is work really hard. That's the basic magic formula. Turn up at events, put things on real and online, in person and online, write loads of content, make your thing, visible absolutely everywhere.

I can only imagine how many hours Amber sleeps at night. But that's the takeaway basically is just do an awful, lot of hard work. And reading this Amber, look at it. there's just these bullet pointed lists of the kind of marketing that they did each, year. And then the sort of, I don't know, the online events and the other things they've been involved in.

Show up, be a good custodian, make a lot of noise, be on socials.

[01:02:28] Michelle Frechette: You

[01:02:28] Nathan Wrigley: should get her

[01:02:29] Michelle Frechette: on

your,

Thursday podcast or you on podcast.

[01:02:31] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, this is so interesting. Yeah. Genuinely really interesting. And Amber

[01:02:35] Michelle Frechette: hit him up to be on the podcast.

[01:02:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. If you want to Amber, that would be lovely. Yeah. if you want to, I've forgotten what the inflexion point is, to be honest.

There was a moment where we saw it on that chart that was a moment where you wrote an article, which obviously turbocharged your endeavours. And I think it was about this subject, I think about a post writing about how hard it is to be discovered as a plugin company. And the quality of that post ironically did the exact thing which you'd hope it would do.

It skyrocketed. And so basically Amber, well done, an incredible 10,000 instals. That's amazing.

[01:03:13] Michelle Frechette: She says she'll contact you. I definitely wanna listen to that episode and hear.

[01:03:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But all of her insights, you'd really do get an impression of a lot of hard work. And, absolutely.

They took out a lot of bank loans and things like that, so there was no guarantees here. There was definite uncertainty. Yeah. I don't know, I don't know exactly how it's all worked out in the end, but looks pretty good from this side.

[01:03:32] Michelle Frechette: It makes me wonder though, some of the bigger companies have laid off so many marketers, how do they expect to sell anything if they don't have anybody doing all the things that Amber's talking about?

[01:03:41] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know? That is another right. I'm go, I'm gonna get on a bit of a high horse here. I go what I say.

[01:03:48] Michelle Frechette: Right?

[01:03:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, I, would dearly love for that to be, I'm not right about it. 'cause I don't write my own content. I interview other people and we do this show, I, I never write original content, but that, that I think is a bit of a thing.

It seems like a lot of companies have stepped away from, sponsoring events. I've got direct evidence of that from W-P-L-D-N, and also sponsoring things like podcasts and stuff like that. And, I can tell that there's a lot of anxiety and worry in the WordPress ecosystem. So that all checks out.

You go to the CEO and he says, what's the ROI? We don't really know. It's hard to, figure it out, but some point you switch off all those channels. Where's your, where's the way to market Now, Amber's figured out a way to do that directly. she's put in a tonne of work so she can open up her WordPress website, publish a blog, and it's gonna be read by a bunch of people.

However, a very quick way to get stuff in front of thousands of people, for example, would be to be on a podcast like this, or on the one that maybe Amber and I'll do in the future, or to be written by, written about by Ray, or be on the WP Minute, or whatever it may be. open channels, all of those things.

It's such a quick win. And yet I think we are, these media outlets are in a bit of a systemic moment as well, where it's very, tight in terms of sponsorship and things like that. And it remains to be seen how long these kind of enterprises can go on. we will, we'll,

[01:05:25] Michelle Frechette: this could be an opportunity for smaller companies to lean into some advertising on their own, right?

Whether they hire somebody contract work, I don't know me, or, they, yeah, they, or they hire somebody part-time or they hire an outside firm. Like you can outsource your marketing, especially to somebody who understands the economy and the community, right? So I wouldn't outsource WordPress marketing to somebody who sells horse, feed, right?

Because that's not the same thing. I'm a seminar, but I don't know why I, my,

[01:05:59] Nathan Wrigley: that's

[01:06:00] Robert Jacobi: also, that's also a swear word in the uk.

[01:06:03] Nathan Wrigley: That's, my favourite line ever altered on this podcast, ever. Don't sell your marketing to somebody selling horse manure. I love that. No.

[01:06:13] Michelle Frechette: Is that the title? Is that the title of this episode?

Was

[01:06:15] Nathan Wrigley: thinking about doing that? You're stupid,

[01:06:17] Michelle Frechette: don't do it. No, but, seriously, some if, the bigger companies are doing layoffs, I see that. Elementor just announced 30% layoffs, which looks like a hundred jobs lost according to Andrew Palmer. so if you are reducing your marketing staff, I don't know if elementary did that or not, but if you're reducing your marketing staff because of the cost of overhead to pay somebody to be on your team, right?

Because it's more than salary. It's all the other things that you have to pay to make somebody a full-time person, outsource it. See what happens. Find somebody, if they don't work, find somebody else. Because this is an opportunity for young companies or smaller companies to really put some money in.

Without hiring somebody full-time and then perhaps see a little bit of a boost in their sales.

[01:07:02] Nathan Wrigley: It's so interesting. I wonder if there'll be a turn back round to it, whereas as a lot of these companies kind of figure, yeah, we do need to spend a bit of money. We can't just tighten the belt infinitely.

if, Amber, you've managed to shore up those channels for yourself, you're probably fair, aren't you? You can just set fair and do it yourself. But if also

[01:07:21] Michelle Frechette: say probably, I

[01:07:21] Nathan Wrigley: always say, yeah,

[01:07:22] Michelle Frechette: if you've seen the movie, I can't remember what it's called though, but I know that Robert will remember this, but if you build it, he will come.

We always used to say, if you build it, they will come. It's not true for web field of thank you. Thank you. It's also site of dreams. They're not coming to your website if you're not telling people about it. They're not buying your product if you're not telling people about it. So reducing your marketing team doesn't seem real smart at this structure.

[01:07:46] Nathan Wrigley: C, can I also just make a plea? Everybody who's got a plugin, right? However I got on your email list, it's not to me an ai obviously AI written email. I honestly, I get about 20 of these a week an AI written email saying, Hey, and then in a different font, WP builds not even Nathan. It's like WP builds, we've been checking out your website and we see so many great posts.

I don't write posts, I don't do it. I make a podcast and it's just horrible. Yeah. And, oh, I have people constantly asking to add to the different podcasts. I do. I'm like, we've, read some great articles of show me one, I just replied and say which articles?

I've now got a copy and paste, response to these people.

Yeah. But it's very polite. I say something like, look, yeah, it may feel like you've got a bit of a quick win by sending me an AI driven email, but honestly, just write it yourself. It'll take you three minutes and it,

[01:08:44] Michelle Frechette: oh, NPI hit unsubscribe before I replied.

[01:08:47] Marc Benzakein: You guys put way more effort into, you put way more effort into it than I just put a filter up on my email straight to trash and I never see it.

[01:08:55] Nathan Wrigley: The thing, okay, so here's the sad thing. Right behind every one of those automated emails is genuinely, in many cases, a plugin, which I really like the look of. Like sometimes I will click the link and I'll go to it. I'll think That's so cool. Look what that person built. But they obviously have no time for marketing, no, no budget for marketing.

So they're trying the quickest, most effective strategy, they think Generate in a AI email, send it to some list that they've acquired from somewhere. And, it on three minutes, write the actual email and send it to 10 of us instead of a hundred of us, and you'll probably

[01:09:32] Marc Benzakein: But marketing is, so tricky anyway, because what it really boils down to is just.

Be out there everywhere that you possibly can. And sometimes that's really hard to quantify.

[01:09:48] Robert Jacobi: Yeah. '

[01:09:49] Marc Benzakein: cause if, I tell you, oh yeah, I spent my day in 5,000 Slack channels and 2000 Twitter conversations, and you have somebody, fortunately I'm not in that position with Main a vp, but you, if you have somebody saying, okay, where's the ROI from that, it's some of this stuff can take two or three years before Yeah.

Before the thing actually happens. And, I can tell you that unless I had other hobbies where I could actually see and feel the work that I'm doing, I can go home at the end of the day sometimes and go, what did I do today? because it's I talked to people and okay. I talked to people.

I, I massaged relationships. I, I looked for opportunities, but there aren't always those opportunities there. And what Amber is basically saying here is, I didn't read the whole article, but it's try everything and anything. Yeah. Because you never know what's gonna hit.

[01:10:52] Michelle Frechette: Yeah.

[01:10:53] Marc Benzakein: and I can give you a perfect example.

My brother and his wife, they run a, floral farm. they grow flowers in Washington and they were struggling, And they kept hitting the Instagram with pictures that my brother, who's an excellent photographer, would take. And he took this one picture of his truck, it was an old beat up Toyota pickup truck full of flowers.

Mariah Carey, of all people saw this on Instagram and re-posted it. And now Martha Stewart living wants them. They have, a documentary on, chip and Joanna Gaines channel that, that's now two years called, growing Floret. they have all these things, and it's not because they, spent the money in the right places.

It's because they tried everything and anything, and they just consistently kept doing it, and doing it, until something hit. So it's like that, mentality of, in a way, getting luck, Yeah. Some people say, oh, you got lucky that Mariah Carey did it. But no, they just kept doing it consistently, until something hit.

[01:12:07] Robert Jacobi: Mark, literally my personal website, top of the page says, always be there because if you're not there, you, again, if you're not on that roadside, Mariah Carey's not gonna see you. If you're not at that conference, if you're not online, and again, how spend money on those resources to be in those places, okay.

That's one thing. But you, just need to be out there. You need to connect with people. Yeah. And that's what, that's what Makes things happen.

[01:12:34] Marc Benzakein: And Jen, you have to make yourself accessible. I used to not give anyone my phone back in the old days of the internet, 1990s. I wouldn't give anyone my phone number, anything.

it's I had gatekeepers. I don't have gatekeepers now. Anybody can reach me any way that they want and I'm gonna respond, same as quickly as I possibly can. And that's just the speed of business in today's world.

[01:12:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:12:58] Robert Jacobi: I literally post my mobile number at the end of my slides.

And you know what? It's never been specifically abused, knock on wood. People a lot of times are just afraid to do that. They're like, is he kidding? But also the ones who really are serious about it will reach out and that is fine. Yeah. Interesting. And there's also something called, decline and ignore, so that also works as well.

[01:13:22] Marc Benzakein: Oh, is that what that's for?

[01:13:24] Nathan Wrigley: That's what, that is. or in the email, world Marcus Spam and Block, says Amber. Yeah, no, I'm gonna, good point. I'm gonna have a different approach. I'm gonna communicate with these people and try to educate them to my way of thinking. Don't write an AI email.

That's gonna be my way of thinking. So we have two possible titles for this episode. Is either gonna be Mariah Carey or Horse Manure trademark? I think. I think, oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay. horse manure is, I'll say that those

[01:13:51] Marc Benzakein: flowers are so beautiful because of the horse manure,

[01:13:54] Nathan Wrigley: right.

[01:13:55] Michelle Frechette: that's right. You go, there you

[01:13:56] Nathan Wrigley: go.

There you go. so go and read, Amber's article. Basically what you'll see is a lot of, very, hard work. And I, Amber, it would be great if we could, ha hang out and, and have a chat about that. That would be lovely. I, would genuinely love to know which of those were dead ends for you.

all the different things that you tried and which I like. I also just, which ones just kill you in terms of time and morale, because some of those it works, but

[01:14:23] Michelle Frechette: I hate it.

[01:14:24] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, yeah. But some of the things that, you have to do, you hate doing and some of the things, you have to do, you love doing and, it's exactly a different d difficult calculus, isn't it?

[01:14:33] Robert Jacobi: Yeah.

[01:14:34] Nathan Wrigley: in terms of all of this, relationships are super important. I guess that's chiming into What Mark was saying just there.

[01:14:39] Robert Jacobi: Yeah.

[01:14:39] Nathan Wrigley: And, Matic says, need to invest time in building relationships with the media. Here we are. We're here. I'm here.

[01:14:47] Robert Jacobi: Yep.

[01:14:47] Nathan Wrigley: have a chat. You, I'm, I've got a website with a form.

Go and fill it out. let's move on. Do we want to, yeah, we'll do this one quickly, very, quickly. Go, and check this out. This is, this is Anchor, so this is Austin Ginder. He's He's just like on a race to make as much interesting stuff as he can. It's pretty impressive what he's doing.

He's the tool that you want, which is basically the tool to figure out how annoying ads are in the WordPress admin. so there was no way of doing this apart from just like installing plugins and looking at the resultant, notices or ads or whatever it may be. And that works for 10 plugins.

But what if you wanna do it at scale? he is now built an AI engine that does that. It will go through, I don't know how many thousands of websites, but lots and lots of websites. 2000, not websites plugins. 2023 is in fact the number at the moment. And it will then automate the process of installing those, checking out what kind of thing they put, where they put it, what kind of impact it has.

And, it's, and the results are over here. It's called Dismissed, FYI, it looks like he's, he's added a few. It's 2065 plugins at the moment. And you can, you can see data on it. But what's interesting, if I just go a little bit further down, let me see if I can find it. There we go. This little chart here, the majority of the things which are annoying is upsells.

So 328 were doing upsells. 223, were doing WordPress nag update. Now, I don't see that, that one doesn't annoy me, that there's no bit of me that gets annoyed by being told to update a plugin. I feel that's like totally fine. review beg. Nope. That's not, good. Don't like that one. licence nag.

Yeah. Quite like that one. Happy to be La nagged about a licence telemetry. Optin to tracking. Nope. Don't like that one. Remote promo server control. No, don't like that one. So a few of these, if you me update the plugin or notifies me about, I don't know, a licence that's expiring or something, I like those.

But the ones where there's like unwanted sales or ads or upsells, I, don't like those. And, clearly a lot of other people don't as well. So do you

[01:17:09] Michelle Frechette: know, do you know why they don't bother me? Because I do a lot of reading on my phone and I have to push past all the ads Oh. To get to anything I wanna read.

So I'm just used to, I think, yeah, we're becoming a, generation that's just used to dismissing ads right off the top.

[01:17:24] Nathan Wrigley: what's interesting there is, I have to say, I, I was overdoing it there. Not much of this really annoys me. If I go into my course not website, I will just search for that little cross in the top And I'll just dismiss 'em. it's not that.

[01:17:37] Marc Benzakein: But if there's five or six, I think that the thing that started this, oh, it gets ridiculous. Chandler's, there's five up there and Yeah. Yeah. Just, and and that's just the beginning. if it doesn't get curtailed, it's gonna be like, there's just gonna be a page of admin notices and you have to, it's like a big long landing page, it's like, where's my dashboard?

[01:17:58] Nathan Wrigley: But

[01:17:59] Marc Benzakein: also, depending on, I stay to the left of all that. So I don't pay attention to anything that's in front of me. I always stay to the left. But a lot of people, here's the question though. I'm gonna interrupt you, Nathan, because I wanna know, do you remember it was either 2018 or 2019 when Yost put an ad right across the top During Black Friday?

[01:18:15] Michelle Frechette: Yeah.

[01:18:15] Marc Benzakein: Oh,

[01:18:15] Michelle Frechette: I bet that I'm gonna bet that at least 75% of the people who are doing that complained when Yost did it the first time and are now doing it themselves. Yeah. 'cause yeah, I saw the latest one, I saw a tweet the other day. People are now putting ads in the admin bar at the top next to ad new posts.

[01:18:35] Nathan Wrigley: There's now little ads going in there. Oh God. which, inside like a red background and things like that. But the, the thing like, because I'm immune to it a bit, I, like I said, I click the buttons and make them go away.

Same. But it's more the, the people who have got, I don't know, like they're, they're not an administrator.

They're just the user site, which somebody else looks at, and then they see these things and they think, oh, it's broken. oh no, I've got what grade, what's going on here? I'm panicking. Or

[01:19:02] Michelle Frechette: your client. Calls you because they see something on the website that isn't upgraded, right? Yeah,

[01:19:07] Nathan Wrigley: exactly. Yeah.

[01:19:07] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. And they wonder about, now you're, as a designer, you're like, it didn't matter, but now I've gotta answer this instead of doing what I have to do. yeah. But Michelle, to your point, I, oh, go ahead Robert.

[01:19:18] Robert Jacobi: I wanna raise my hand on this. everyone is, missing out on the greatest opportunity in WordPress ever

[01:19:24] Michelle Frechette: tell

[01:19:25] Robert Jacobi: highly customised WP admins.

Oh, yeah. Agencies should have their own don't, that's true. Yeah, that's true. this is, talk about block editors and page builders and all that kind of stuff. Forget that. let's, have a framework or something where you can control all that noise. especially as an agency owner, to your point, Michelle, where, the editor comes in, or, the content creator comes in, is blasted with this garbage well.

that's now a value add for the agency. if you're worried about AI start building stuff for your customers that they really want, like not being, spammed, in the middle of an open source project because of the plugins you've decided that work well, but are still gonna do that.

it's a, I think it's a huge completely untapped, economy.

[01:20:17] Marc Benzakein: You, you're absolutely right, and I will tell you, I, I've only got a very, small handful of clients that I do any type of client work for, and we have always done customised admins, always the admin has always been customised because we do have editors and all of that stuff that come in and, we don't, everything that we do, the first question we ever ask is what kind of customer service issue is this going to create?

And that includes the admin, what because the less that you have to give as far as like unexpected customer service, the more time it takes, as Michelle said, away from what It is that you're trying to work on. and,

[01:21:01] Robert Jacobi: and as you get into bigger projects, think enterprise stuff that like, typo three has been doing, site, oh my God, all, the other sort of more enterprise aware, not that you can't use WordPress for enterprise at all, don't misunderstand me in the slightest.

It's just that there are other CMSs that seem, that have marketed themselves as enterprise. you get to do this workflow stuff and you have to, and as a former and still current jula geek, we would do that for our customers because we don't want them to see all the, how the sausage is made, Because there's a lot of stuff in a default admin that needs to be there, but definitely doesn't need to be there for most of the people using the product.

[01:21:47] Michelle Frechette: Correct. Yeah.

[01:21:47] Nathan Wrigley: towards the end.

[01:21:48] Michelle Frechette: my makes a good

[01:21:49] Nathan Wrigley: Jacob, sorry, just quickly, Michelle Jacoby swoops in with definitely the title of the episode, how the Sausage Is Made.

There's gotta be that, it's gotta be You that there absolutely flopping that. So many things going on in my head now. Michelle, sorry. Carry on

[01:22:05] Michelle Frechette: the, last two comments. if you can bring up Myka, then Amber's I think are

[01:22:08] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[01:22:08] Michelle Frechette: Germane to

[01:22:09] Nathan Wrigley: this. There we go. So first one, we should have not a notifications menu where all the admin notices can live instead of popping on dashboards and all the admin pages from third party plugins.

And then Amber says, if you build mostly with premium plugins, thought themes and so on, you really don't see much of this. Good point. yep.

And there was work on around an admin. Elliot

[01:22:28] Michelle Frechette: chimed in and likes that idea too.

[01:22:30] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. custom dashboard, landing page. That's a super interesting idea. For sure.

Go build it, Elliot. Go build it. it's worked. There's loads of solutions out there. There's loads of plugins that have already tackled that problem, but yeah. Good. Point.

[01:22:43] Michelle Frechette: Yep.

[01:22:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yep. And, yeah, I'm not gonna be able to move on from how the sausage is made. That is not a phrase we have either. At least it isn't how

[01:22:51] Michelle Frechette: the manure is made.

[01:22:53] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. Sausage.

[01:22:56] Michelle Frechette: How

[01:22:57] Marc Benzakein: the horse mere

[01:22:57] Nathan Wrigley: made.

[01:22:58] Marc Benzakein: Isn't that what sausage is made from?

[01:23:00] Nathan Wrigley: I dunno what the equivalent phrase would be, but it's not.

[01:23:02] Robert Jacobi: No, but that's, the auto fund Bismarck, is phrase about, PR, politics, okay, Pols, it's, I'm gonna horribly screw it up. But something like politics is great, but no one wants to see how the sausage is made.

Something like that, Yeah, yeah, A

[01:23:17] Michelle Frechette: hundred percent.

[01:23:17] Nathan Wrigley: It's such a, fun episode. Thank you. I'm gonna move it on very quickly 'cause we've got a few things that I would love to get through. This is the first one. This is, Hamza, who was obviously, oh, I love this in, attendance of Zia, who's got a bunch of plugins.

mail Stu being one of them. he he made a website and he put 10,000 plugins on it. they were not really doing anything to be fair. They were just 10,000 plugins, but he was making the point. How long did that take? I presume with a bit of code, probably a few minutes in all honesty.

Oh, probably

[01:23:50] Michelle Frechette: true.

[01:23:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. but the point was that if 10,000 plugins are built and don't do anything when they shouldn't be doing anything, then it's fine. It's like you have no plugins installed.

and so he was able to demonstrate that essentially, 10,000 plugins if they're built correctly and they don't demand to do things when they shouldn't be doing things.

I don't know, like inserting CSS on every page refresh or something like that. Then, then it, and, I just thought that was curious. Never seen a site with actually got 10,000 plugin instals. And look, there you go. And you can see

[01:24:27] Robert Jacobi: Rem MCUs, MKU, Drees talked about this many a time. It's, not about the plugins, it's, there's so much more to performance.

[01:24:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:24:36] Robert Jacobi: I'm freaking out because you've got 10,000 plugins, that means that's 10,000 more extra bits to your, sur surface area for security.

[01:24:44] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, you can see in this case I'm showing on the screen what he's actually installed. And look, you can clearly tell they're not real. 'cause they're called plugin 0 0 0 0 0 1 and two and three and so on.

So they're probably very benign. Probably don't have a lot in, but I think he was just trying to bust out in that thing.

[01:25:00] Michelle Frechette: 10,000 versions of Hello Dolly coming

[01:25:03] Nathan Wrigley: right up. That's right. Yeah, that's right.

[01:25:06] Robert Jacobi: you know what, depending on your hosting plan, having 10,000 may actually have a performance hit because.

just you don't have the storage.

[01:25:18] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's an interesting point. I actually now can't shrink that. I dunno what's going on, but it's decided to, to be

[01:25:24] Robert Jacobi: Oh, command zero.

[01:25:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. anyway, there you go. I just thought that was quite an interesting little anecdote. Let's move on. I'm gonna miss that one out and I'm, oh, let's do some events very quickly.

Upcoming events, firstly word camp us. tickets are now on sale, 16th, the 19th of August, coming up soon. apparently it gets fairly warm in Arizona, so just watch out for that. But, warm I think is an understatement. You can fry eggs on the pavement, is what I've heard. but anyway, there you go.

There's the dates. It's a very curious one. It's Sunday through Wednesday, which is not, an event I've come across before. It normally leads into the weekend with Sunday, often being the last day. This begins on Sunday and ends on a Wednesday. So peculiar. I'm

[01:26:10] Robert Jacobi: actually. Bigger fan of the ones during the week because it's work and it's nice for it to be treated as work.

[01:26:19] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Interesting. I suspect we'd have some pushback on that with people saying it's not, it's like my holiday time or whatever it

[01:26:27] Robert Jacobi: may be. it may be, but for, and I enjoy them one way or the other, but I'm still working so that turns, if it's Yeah. Over the weekend, then turns a five day week into a seven day week.

[01:26:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yep. Yep. So here we go. So that was the first one. Next one is WordCamp Manheim 2026. That's coming up, pretty soon, actually, third to the 4th of July. So in a few days time, I actually can't read these words because they're in what I presume is

[01:26:53] Robert Jacobi: two days networking, inspiration about WordPress, an event for the community, for all work.

People who are interested in WordPress.

[01:27:02] Nathan Wrigley: See, he's a genius. That man, he's a genius. He is. Next time you come on the show, I'm gonna arrange of pre, just like a load of languages and we'll see how Robert does,

I dunno what he just said, but it sounded good. and then lastly, this one. Oh, is that right? Yeah, This one, this is word Cam Ma

[01:27:27] Michelle Frechette: ma Moka,

[01:27:27] Nathan Wrigley: which I believe Uganda is Uganda. There we go. 4th of July. So if you're in that part of the world, you can, you can attend that. I

[01:27:35] Michelle Frechette: did just throw another one in the, chat, which did in the private chat.

Okay. Yeah.

[01:27:39] Nathan Wrigley: lemme see if

[01:27:39] Michelle Frechette: I got

[01:27:40] Nathan Wrigley: that one.

[01:27:40] Michelle Frechette: Oh, so did Robert. So there's Cloud Fest America's coming up in November.

[01:27:44] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Let me see if I can grab that copy. That's gonna be,

[01:27:47] Michelle Frechette: that'll be a blast. That'll be in Miami. I'm gonna go to that one for sure, Robert. So we'll get coffee there for sure too.

[01:27:54] Nathan Wrigley: we do

[01:27:54] Michelle Frechette: coffee now, that's thing.

[01:27:56] Nathan Wrigley: Get your passes. obviously not like a Word Camp pass, but it's a different kind of an event. 6, 650 bucks. Cloud

[01:28:04] Robert Jacobi: America. Cost, There are usually a number of very reduced passes for the standard pass.

[01:28:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:28:10] Robert Jacobi: That

[01:28:10] Nathan Wrigley: coupon code

[01:28:11] Robert Jacobi: comes, goes

[01:28:12] Nathan Wrigley: rounds, doesn't it?

[01:28:13] Robert Jacobi: You just have to look around. Yeah. In fact, they're usually posted on Twitter at some point and LinkedIn.

[01:28:19] Michelle Frechette: So it's, and if you have a, if you have a hosting company with fewer than five, five or fewer employees, you get five, passes to be able to attend as well.

[01:28:27] Robert Jacobi: Yeah,

[01:28:27] Nathan Wrigley: no, I,

[01:28:28] Michelle Frechette: so there's from Cloudfest. Yeah.

[01:28:31] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so there's the events, bits and pieces, okay. Bit of community news. I, don't sad this person, but I read a lot of their commentary and, articles over the years.

But I know just because of the amount of stuff in my Twitter feed, there's obviously a person of great importance to a lot of people's lives. Yes. On Malick or o Malick, depending on how you print that. Booker, he did Gigger on and various other things, but was also instrumental right at the start of WordPress, was one of the early kind of adopters and I think promoted it and was a, very dear friend by all accounts to, to Matt Mullen.

I, think that's probably understating it from what I've heard. they were very, tight. but lots of people pouring out a lot of love, for OMS passing, earlier in the week. It was 59 years old. And, suffering from a, long journey with heart problems is my understanding. But, anyway, I, I have no experience with on.

But, obviously sad when something like that happens.

[01:29:35] Robert Jacobi: you probably have, 'cause you probably read stuff over the last

[01:29:37] Nathan Wrigley: 30

[01:29:38] Robert Jacobi: years from him.

[01:29:38] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, loads of stuff that I read. Exactly. Back day. Exactly. There's your

[01:29:41] Robert Jacobi: experience

[01:29:42] Nathan Wrigley: bigger on and things just Yeah. Yep. Loads of his, and he was just one of those guys that just caught through.

I don't know why I ended up on his stuff, but he was one of those websites, I don't know, 10, 15 years ago that I would religiously refresh. just 'cause he seemed to have the right measure as far as my mind took it anyway. So anyway, there that and just great content, current content, fast content, but not garbage content.

[01:30:04] Robert Jacobi: so that's, and that's hard. Really?

[01:30:06] Nathan Wrigley: That's really hard. Yeah. You've gotta be dedicated, haven't you? So there's a couple of things here that this we're overrunning very slightly, but given that we were talking about decoupling from like major platforms and things like that, this is an interesting one.

It's called Digital Dog nad, I dunno quite what you make of that word. but it's a Norwegian word and the word is a gem of a word and tradition. It says it's about coming together when a task feels too big to get it done alone. So dog nag it, dog n it means let's all get together and figure out the problem collectively.

Norwegian, there you go.

[01:30:40] Michelle Frechette: And backwards. It's dang good.

[01:30:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Oh, dang. Dang. Yeah. That's dang good. That's great. I hadn't spotted that. and this is a, an endeavour started by Vivaldi who make the browser that I'm currently using. and Oh wow. Proton, they Oh, the email folk. Yeah. Get people, yeah. They're trying to get people to decouple from big digital platforms.

I, I wanted to spend more time on that, but we've run out of time, so I'll just put it there. It's called Digital dag nad eu. Even though the URL is the, it's got an E in it. No, it hasn't. It's got an A in it. I apologise. Doug nad.com. That, and then the last one, what the heck? So I don't even know how to describe this.

I'm just gonna, I was always gonna mention this just because of the name of the URL, it's called Hyper bla, which is about the best URL I've ever heard of. Hyper bla.com, what they've managed to do, dot.how they've managed to create music in HTML. It's literal music and it's rendered entirely inside of HTML.

Now, unfortunately, my, the way this platform works, it's impossible for me to share my audio, but if you go to hyperland.how, scroll down a little bit and you'll get to a bunch of, where was it? Oh, examples. Here you go. Click on examples and you can just, click on one, I don't know. This one, you won't be able to hear it.

It's installing it. You press go. And if you click but even dances for

you,

can actually see how they've built it. All the HTML that you, God, that's almost unlistenable. Sorry. I'm gonna have to cut. We're good. Yeah.

[01:32:30] Marc Benzakein: It's literally unlistenable for us.

[01:32:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, Yes. But man, how interesting. That's all I have to say about that.

Go and have a play. I love these stu, sorry, not allowed to say that word. these silly projects, on the internet, which, are not stupid. No, they're brilliant. And so go and check it out. Hype hyper bla. How, maybe that's what I should call this episode. How Hyper bl No, I'm gonna stick with how the sausage is made.

I think. That's it. That's the episode. Thank you so much. I apologise for the people whose comments never got shown. There was quite a few this week. Or anybody we

[01:33:07] Michelle Frechette: irritated with our unintentional swearing.

[01:33:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. you never know. Hey, Nathan? Yeah.

[01:33:16] Marc Benzakein: nomad, skate did buy you a cup of coffee, so you

[01:33:20] Nathan Wrigley: should Oh, look at that.

Yeah. Look, you get the, you get the, oh, he's so good that he, can, I just say nomad skateboarding? What? Can you write me an email or something? Do you have any idea how I would get to that? 'cause I have literally no idea. oh,

[01:33:36] Michelle Frechette: it's three. It's through your YouTube.

[01:33:37] Nathan Wrigley: They could look at, you've been very generously donating to me all these years and I have no idea how, to get it out of YouTube.

You probably

[01:33:45] Marc Benzakein: got an account with a thousand bucks

[01:33:47] Nathan Wrigley: in. No, I really don't. But, but I'm very, grateful, to you for, for that. I appreciate that. Thank you very much. And for anybody who just showed up, made a comment, it makes this show tick along beautifully. So there we go.

it's the hand wave of joy coming up. We all need to do the hand wave of joy, if you don't mind. There we go. That's all. Good spirit fingers. That's it. We've done it. Yeah, that's right. these aren't spirit figures. These are spirit figures and That's right. These are gold.

What's that? Do you remember that?

[01:34:18] Robert Jacobi: Yes, I do.

[01:34:19] Nathan Wrigley: What? What's that? Is that a film

[01:34:22] Michelle Frechette: that's It's from a film. Yeah. Dusty Pulaski. Okay.

No, I

[01:34:26] Nathan Wrigley: don't remember that. but that's it. That's always got time for this week. Appreciate it. It's Bring it

[01:34:30] Michelle Frechette: on the movies. Bring it on.

[01:34:31] Nathan Wrigley: Bring it. Yes. So that's Michelle Ette over there. Thank you to Michelle Ette.

Thank you so much. Pleasure for joining us. That is Mark Zaca over there. Thank you very much to Mark for joining us. And that is Robert Jacoby over there. Thank you very much to Robert Coby for joining us. I got stuck there. and I've been Nathan Wrigley and we will be back this time next week for more silliness and stupid and more silliness.

[01:34:56] Robert Jacobi: No, Stupid.

[01:34:57] Nathan Wrigley: No, none of that. Then we'll, be back in a week's time. Take it easy. Bye bye. Bye. Bye bye. And if you three wanna hang around and have a nat at, that would be nice. See in a bit. Bye. Bye.