This Week in WordPress #379

It's time for this week in WordPress, episode number 379 entitled, is there anything but AI these days? It was recorded on Monday, the 6th of July, 2026. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I'm joined by Mike Johnston and by Simon Pollard.

It's a WordPress podcast and we spend quite a lot of time talking about WordPress, and we spend quite a lot of time talking about AI.

We start off by talking about the different approaches that different age groups seem to have with AI. Is it true to say that the younger generation seem to be opposed to it more than the older generation?

The CERN website is a really, interesting study in how to put together something incredibly complicated. It's not just one website, it's thousands, and Mike guides us through that topic.

We also talk about the cohort of new graduates who've come through the Automattic AI program, what it is that they did, and how it is that they've graduated, and that gets us then into the conversation about AI and how it is viewed through different age groups.

And then we talk about Core, the need for testing of 7.1, especially some styling features.

We talk about the decline of WP Beginner in the search engine results.

We talk about the fact that Elementor seem to be shedding some jobs.

WordPress Credit and WordPress education.

The decline in market share in the WordPress space.

Automattic have got a shiny new domain, and there's a bunch of miscellaneous at the end, including Google Maps for the Roman Empire.

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

[00:01:41] Nathan Wrigley: Hello. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, depending on where you are in the world. This is WP Build. We're on episode number 3 7 9 379 of this week in WordPress. And, the idea of this show is that for about 90 minutes, we talk about stuff that's happened in the WordPress space, largely during the last seven days.

But quite often we end up doing something that's a little bit longer than that because, I don't know, something important got missed or something like that. And in order to make this show happen, I'm very graciously joined by, I am very graciously it's me being gracious. I think I worded that incorrectly.

I am joined by people who are being very gracious. There we go. Let's go with that, to make that happen. I'll get to the introductions in a moment, but just before I do that, if you would like to join in the comments and help this show just go forwards. It's really, nice when people do that.

We love it. if you are subscribed to us on YouTube, you've probably already had an email If did the like and subscribe thing, saying that we're here. But if you want to share the show, I've put the, I've put the link, down next to Simon over there, wp builds.com. It's so easy to get that wrong, guaranteed Ryan, hundred percent of the time.

Simon just pointed in the wrong direction, as did I. Yeah, always do that. wp build.com/live. Once more, wp build.com/live. Go share it. If you're over there, then, the video itself is embedded from the platform that we use and there's a button if you want to use the chat in there that enables you to not be logged into anything like a Google or a Facebook or anything.

but if you go to that page and you see the chat box on the right, that's YouTube comment. So you'd need a Google account for that just to say that if you put a comment on something like, I dunno, another platform like Facebook or LinkedIn or X, we don't get any of them. And, each week I see that people have commented over there and I feel a little bit sad, because I say it every time.

so don't bother commenting over there. Just go to that URL and leave us a comment. That would be nice. Very, nice indeed. Thank you so much. the, the panel then today we're, joined by two other people. We were expecting a third. And if that third person manages to show up, then we'll just drop 'em into the show as and when they come, but they're not here at present, so we'll maybe just assume that they've, forgotten or something's come up.

So let's deal with who we've got. So let me look, I've got the finger in the right direction. it's Mike Johnston. How are you doing, Mike?

[00:04:20] Mike Johnston: I'm well this morning. Nathan, how are you?

[00:04:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I'm good. Mike is on the other side of the globe and I'm gonna guess six o'clock where you are.

[00:04:30] Mike Johnston: Six o'clock and there's a litre of coffee right here,

[00:04:35] Nathan Wrigley: so that's very good.

[00:04:36] Mike Johnston: I'll be awake by the time the show's over.

[00:04:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's great. This is how I feel sometimes the show feels a little bit like that sometimes. so yeah. So there's Mike, joining us and I'll read Mike's bio. So Mike Johnston is an experienced technical manager, coach, and business leader, having spent over 40 years managing people, projects, budgets and businesses.

He's been working with WordPress since 2018 and he considers himself to be an enthusiast. He build websites for his own use for experimentation with new features, and for the occasional client. He currently lives in Lewiston, which is in Idaho, the USA, and he owns a small consulting firm, which is called Third Act Partners, where he builds websites and does business development work for small businesses.

He is also the proof reader for the repository email newsletter, which we feature heavily every single week. No, no, no difference. This week. He's gonna be featuring heavily during the course of this week too. so thank you, Mike for joining us. I appreciate it.

[00:05:41] Mike Johnston: Happy to be here.

[00:05:43] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. And also by Simon Pollard.

There's Simon. Just there is he? There he is. How you doing Simon?

[00:05:49] Simon Pollard: I am very well, thank you.

[00:05:51] Nathan Wrigley: Good, Very nice to have you with us. So have you been on this show before, Simon? I know you've on the podcast before.

[00:05:56] Simon Pollard: we've been on the podcast. We've talked before, but I've not been on this particular one, so I thought I try a different flavour.

[00:06:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, hopefully it won't be as, as, as bad as some people think it's gonna be. It always turns out to be fairly, enjoyable. The best bit is getting to meet new people. The amount of times that I've, I've, I don't know, met somebody at a Word camp or something, and it turns out that this was the way that I got to know them.

It's quite nice, like a really nice light way of getting to know people. and I'll read, Simon's, bio WordPress Developer and Client Solutions lead at Soto. Have I pronounced that correctly? Is it it's, an abbreviation. Can I, certainly plug it with a card?

Yeah, of course you can.

There you go. Look, there

[00:06:41] Simon Pollard: you go. Colours. So business cards for the first time in years, I very important. so yeah, it's, in a, it's software on Toast. it was the original name. Oh, I see.

[00:06:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay.

[00:06:54] Simon Pollard: I, say Soto, I don't dunno what the desk.

[00:06:56] Nathan Wrigley: Soto, right?

[00:06:57] Simon Pollard: Soto. It just, yeah. I think that's how I like it.

But, fair

[00:07:00] Nathan Wrigley: enough. I'll start that again then. WordPress developer and client Solutions leader, Soto Digital in Bristol. He's been working with WordPress for 18 years. That makes you one of the old school, I think, and has helped to organise local meetups and a word camp in Bristol. Very much a part of the community out there.

something about the platform that we're using is slightly broken today and I can see there's a bunch of comments and, but they're not coming through to our platform. I've no idea why that is. That is the first time that I can remember that not happening. I certainly can't see them, but I can see the, different bits and pieces that you've, that you are putting into the comments over there.

So for example, happy Mondays coming from, Marcus Burnett, the webinar. So saying hi, beautiful people. Thanks. that's probably the last time everybody will say that about me. You were speaking about these two, weren't you? That was what it was. How's everybody doing? Patricia Saying hello. what else have we got?

Lots of greetings of people. da Just people saying hello and what have you. Elliot Sby just down the road from me in Briton, he's joining us. We're also joined by, web Squadron amea. He's saying hi as well and Elliot Richmond is saying Hi Simon and Mike. Normally we'd be able to pop those on the screen 'cause they appear in the little UI of the panel that I've got here, but nothing's coming through, so I dunno why that is.

But keep the comments coming. I'll read them into the record. I dunno if you guys want to go to it, it might help. If you go to wp builds.com/live and then above the little box on the side where the comments are coming in, you can click the red button, I think it's red, and you can just pop the comments out in a separate window and that way you might be able to keep track of them.

Now that, then leads me to say that I will only be able to see YouTube comments. I don't think I'll be able to see comments from within the platform. So go to wp build.com. Comment over there. Anyway, there we go. There was all the introductions. So let's get stuck into the, reason that we're here, which is to talk about word pressy, bits and pieces.

Firstly, a little bit of self-promotion. Apologies about that. This is our website, wp builds.com. If you want to keep up to date, as if few did this week, pop your email address into this form and we'll send you two emails a week. When this gets put out tomorrow morning, I'll repackage it as a podcast audio episode.

And also we do an, an audio podcast, which is what Simon was on. every Thursday we have an archive of those, which lives here. And, you can see that, in the more recent past we've been talking about WooCommerce, about plugins. But the most recent episode, which is gonna kickstart us today, was about, ai.

So I did a piece, did a podcast episode with Katie, Keith. Katie. Keith is the, founding partner of Barn two plugins, a plugin suite, which leverages WooCommerce, makes all sorts of adaptions to WooCommerce. But, the conversation had nothing to do with that. Curiously, it was about something that I'd seen that she tweeted, her children, were beginning to, they were old enough to have their own mind, let's put it that way.

They're now old enough to be independent thinkers and that kind of thing. And what she was noticing is that they were, starting to have really strong negative opinions about ai. And I thought, that's curious because my kids are the same. They either don't use it or they make very strong messages about how it's stealing their future.

the job market is gonna be hollowed out potentially by the time that they arrive into it. It's bad for the environment, which we'll get onto a little bit later as well. So we did this whole podcast episode about that, and it got, I think it got a fair bit of traction. There was a few tweets that came off the back of it, so definitely go and listen to that.

But then there's a few bits follow up. This was the first one. And this is a website I've never used before. So honestly, I don't know, the, credentials of this website, but it's a website called Science says.com, and they've put a piece out in the recent past in the last six or so days, saying, made with AI gets lower engagement.

There was this, this idea that if you are honest about your use of AI and say, this post was, created with a little bit of AI sprinkling in the background. I don't know how much that might be, but basically this seems to point to the fact that if you do that, if you make that declaration, you are gonna lose visitors, which kind of then begs the question, everybody will just stop making that declaration.

They'll just not mention that anything is made with ai. I'm gonna keep going for a bit, Simon and Mike, because there's a few bits that I wanna tie together, which then curiously led to this piece, which Mike brought to my attention on the repository, maybe proofread by him first. AI leaders, cohort graduates as automatic pledges, $500 million in hosting for open source education.

And Mike, do you wanna just lean into why you brought this one out?

[00:12:27] Mike Johnston: Certainly this, this actually got brought up by Robert Jacoby in last week's, yes. Session. And, you all talked about, the group graduating, the piece that, really caught my eye, if you've, if you scroll down a little bit and, there were some links in there, Nathan, you had one up the other a little while ago.

The, graduates of this programme all produced, a WordPress project as, part of their work. And several of them included, pages or statements in their project site, with titles like AI ethics or AI ethics code. and, I was really interested to look at that because I think it's the, it's the flip side of the, people won't go to a site that your earlier article, people won't go to a site that says it's AI generated.

And yet, to some degree most of us are using AI at some level. Mine's very small. Other people, it's a whole lot. But being transparent about the AI, I think is important. And the piece that ran through the, at least the three of the statements that I looked at, came down to. the person saying, yes, I use ai.

Here's what I use it for. I use it for brainstorming, for proofreading, for, problem solving, et cetera. But it's always on the left side of the workflow,

[00:14:20] Nathan Wrigley: right?

[00:14:20] Mike Johnston: And anything created by AI is my responsibility to understand, to analyse, to correct. And so whatever gets published is my work and I'm responsible for it.

it's not, it's not let's generate something with AI and push it out on the web, right? So I thought it was, I, thought it was, just worth taking a look at and really subscribing to. it's, I'm gonna steal it.

[00:14:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I think it's a really good idea because it, it leans into what Katie was saying.

Let me rephrase that. When I was having a chat with Katie, we were largely trying to guess what young people might think. I only have to lift my hat and show you my grey hair to make it pretty evident that I no longer am young. so I'm making a lot of assumptions. But her youngsters, let's go for that.

Her young adults and my young adults in my family definitely have this, predilection. But it's really interesting to see that these graduates, and I guess that they're gonna be young. If you look at the picture here of the graduates, they all look significantly younger than I do. There's a picture of, in a, I think that's New York, perhaps somewhere of, I'm reading this in Chicago.

Chicago. So for the accessibility side of things. So there's a bunch of people standing on a balcony, who are probably the graduates I'm imagining, and they're these cohort of AI leaders. They're young. And so maybe that's a part of the makeup now is that you need some sort of intellectual position to have, which hopefully you are being honest about, that you are then gonna say, this is how I am as of now, gonna deal with the ai.

And because it's an infographic, again, with accessibility in mind, I'm gonna just read some of the bits of it. So I'm looking at Raheem Harris blog, which I presume is the website project made by that individual. and it's got an, infographic which says, my ethics code a AI accelerates the work. I own the impact.

And then there's four steps. AI suggests is step one, human reviews is step two. Number three is context and ethics checks. And number four is publish and improve. And married to each of those is, a phrase. The first one, I use AI to generate ideas, draughts, and options. Number two, I review for accuracy, tone, clarity, and alignment with my goals.

Number three, I asked the question, does this serve the audience responsibly? Check for bias, fairness, privacy, and the real world impact? And finally, I publish with purpose measure results learn. And improve continuously. I think this is a good idea. I suppose my only fear is that anybody could create that infographic with AI and then entirely lie about the output of their own content.

But, that's always gonna be the case, any thoughts on that, Mike, or, Simon.

[00:17:27] Simon Pollard: I, I think that may come into place possibly on sites moving forward, just to be aware of how much content has been generated using ai, for example. I think people might almost like that kind of stamp or almost at the bottom of an article, it might say this or articles was or wasn't generated with AI or what kind of level it was potentially almost to give a kind of a human factor of it.

[00:17:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Would you, okay, let's imagine that you are browsing the web and you are, I don't know, you're, looking for something that is of interest to you. You don't necessarily have to be knowledgeable in that, sphere. Would that signal, let's say that you caught sight of that signal somewhere you landed on a blog post, you caught sight of something akin to that.

would it do anything to your brain? Would the wiring in your brain go, okay, press on as opposed to, I don't see that, let's, like, I don't know, just back out of this website because I don't see it, in other words, does it, affirm something in your mind that you would like to continue because they've at least tried to be honest about it?

[00:18:39] Simon Pollard: Possibly. I think a lot of the AI created content that's quite easy to tell from the get go.

[00:18:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yep.

[00:18:45] Simon Pollard: And then the bulk of the click bait stuff where they give you the teaser headline and you have to view the article to see what it's actually talking about. Yeah.

[00:18:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:18:52] Simon Pollard: And the way it's structured and the way it's written, it's obviously quite, sometimes it's very clear that it's not written by a human.

It's just auto generated. So that I often puts me off anyway, but then if I saw someone saying, actually someone has at least looked at it, it might make me want to engage it a bit more possibly.

[00:19:09] Nathan Wrigley: I'm gonna quickly go back to the piece that I very quickly glossed over this piece was basically trying to make the point that why don't you literally write out what you did to make the blog post?

So you might, for example, say, I used AI to help me make this image, and then I put it into Photoshop and spent 20 minutes adapting it so that you've got some kind of context. I, don't know. And the, text itself took me an hour and 40 minutes to write or, whatever, So you're putting some badge of hard work or, yeah.

You, you're, basically proof of work. again, what's to stop? Anybody lying? Absolutely nothing. But it, its at least something. And I think it's a bit sad that we live in a world where we've got to think about these things, but nevertheless, those potentially are the kinds of things.

Mike, was there anything you wanted to add into that? I think if I, approached a website and saw the ethics statement

Yep.

[00:20:15] Mike Johnston: I'd probably have two reactions. One would be great. I'm glad to see that, there's some transparency there. The second is I might also. Be looking very carefully trying to discern what pieces of it came from AI and what came from the human.

Now, if the human did a good job of, editing and refining, that might not be visible. And, to Simon's point, the AI generated stuff is pretty easy to see.

[00:20:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:20:47] Mike Johnston: But I, so I, think the, first reaction, good on you for doing that, I think would be my initial reaction.

[00:20:57] Nathan Wrigley: I wonder if we ought to get something.

More automated. So in this, I know there's like LL LM text, which is an endeavour to open up to LLMs the enterprise of reading that site and discovering what's important over there. But I wonder if something akin to robots text or something like that where you assert in a text document somewhere buried away from the site what your posture is.

So I don't know, it might be that exactly what's written on that thing. We use AI to assist with the creation, but we publish and read and make sure that everything has been, reviewed by a human being. I wonder if something like that, the, problem with all of this is the peop the very people who you don't want to read the content thereof are going to be the people that abuse that, whatever system you create, which would you get like an AI score.

[00:21:52] Simon Pollard: So you can currently get like your c you get your CC O2 scores, the evolution of things. so when you start, you used to have your page count. Everyone used to be proud and say, I've had a hundred views and that was amazing and it keeps progressing to the little counters. So on our current site, we've got the CO2 count to say how much is emitted?

So would you have an AI count? And it would say, we've estimated that 50% of this page was generated using ai. Something like that could possibly go on to prove the validity of it.

[00:22:21] Nathan Wrigley: Would you trust a third?

[00:22:24] Simon Pollard: Yeah. Where would that come from?

[00:22:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, but would you trust that? let's say for example, I use Bit Warden right to, to secure my passwords.

I've done my research on Bit Warden and I totally trust them. there is so much in there that if that, organisation wanted to, get into that. hopefully the technology is such that they cannot, and I'm assuming that their proof of concept is true. But the point is I trust them to manage that bit of my web-based life.

What if there was an organisation that had let's say a browser extension or dare I say it built into the browser, please? No, not Google. Not Google. that, that could make that claim for you that could do some sort. I don't know. You land on a webpage, the browser extension does some sort of thing in the background and it says with a 70% certainty, we think that there's 50% of this content is AI generated, it has all the hallmarks and here's the reasons why that, that would work for me.

I think I'd be inclined to instal that and give that a whirl. But who the heck would do?

[00:23:30] Simon Pollard: Yeah, who, do you trust?

[00:23:32] Nathan Wrigley: Who would we trust? Yeah, that's right. Open ai.

[00:23:38] Mike Johnston: Would you give that automatically generated score more credence than a statement from the author of the website saying, I used AI to do these particular things?

[00:23:50] Simon Pollard: It depends how that statement's written, If that statement's presented in a very bad cartoony style graphic. Then I'm going to instantly ignore that because that's the current state of my LinkedIn feeders, these cartoon generated graphical things.

And if I saw that, I instantly dismiss it. And I think, yeah, that's it. I think people are beginning to. the initial phase is gone where people have been suckered in and they realise you can't buy that cat sofa. That's not real. That isn't actually generated, sorry to my wife who wanted it,

[00:24:23] Nathan Wrigley: that

[00:24:23] Simon Pollard: I

[00:24:23] Nathan Wrigley: wanted that so bad.

[00:24:25] Simon Pollard: But like we're beginning to now a lot quicker than we were initially deciphering. I think people are dismissing quickly. And what interested me, you said back earlier was that it was a younger generation are also beginning to jump on that, but also dismiss with a sense of annoyance as well of it coming in.

'cause it annoys me and I thought, it seems a young thing that, which bits of it do end. I'm trying to read through the comments 'cause it seems there's quite a mixture there. People

[00:24:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I'll, get to some of the comments in a moment. Okay. okay. Let's say the EFF put together the EFF being an acronym for the Electronic Frontier Foundation or Mozilla.

Let's go with them. fair, fairly open, standard or Anyway, the point being, pick if you could, capture a company who you thought had the same ethics and wouldn't be out to get you the problem with the one asserted by the character on the website. So the one that we've just had on the screen, let's just pop that back on the screen.

That one is the trust is hard to build because all it takes for me is to create an infographic, or in fact just to take one from another website and pretend it's mine. Whereas the trust of something like Mozilla or the a FF has been built up over many years. anyway, I, don't have enough, but I think that's so interesting.

let's go to some of the comments then. Okay. So what have we got? a lot of youngsters, so this is, a mere web squadrant. A lot of youngsters thrill feel threatened that AI will record or remember what they do. Hence why a lot of them, to set their WhatsApp to auto delete messages or with short lifespan messages on Insta.

I can a hundred percent, Imran tell you that there have been moments where I have deliberately and completely out of context started talking about something in my house, that nobody has talked about before. And then I have seen the impact in the real world of that. I cannot explain it because I, have a battery of apps on my phone, I have a bunch of speakers in my house.

All of them have got the settings to not allow that to happen. And yet it happens, I don't know, I'll talk, start talking about Tom and Jerry cartoons or something like that, just something I never mention. And lo and behold it pops up. So I think that's real. I think those a, I think the companies have probably sowed the seeds of their own demise there.

were there any other comments that you, two spied that you thought were worthy of popping up there? I haven't had a chance to read. it looks yeah, the kind of on again, young it, anyone who's creative obviously takes particular dislike to AI generated

Yeah.

[00:27:13] Simon Pollard: Content.

[00:27:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:27:14] Simon Pollard: I think, on the creative side, I see that a lot because you can easily now generate these images, these kind of, but to me they almost all, we can tell straight away.

if someone's generated a, let's say, a poster for a gig. And I've seen certain, venues won't accept AI generated posters anymore 'cause they know that there's an industry for generating gig posters and things, That's slowly filtering its way through. Or you can't just knock something up in five minutes.

'cause people can see that and you might get dismissed for it as well.

[00:27:47] Nathan Wrigley: I'm gonna read, another one of, in Rams, he says, I say it's quite promising for the future, having so much content made with AI will only create a sloppier internet. yeah, that's, that's in reply to Patricia, I think. And then there's a bunch more comments, but yeah.

okay. So I think probably we've done the round on that one, but nevertheless, I still think that's a good idea. And in the context of the people that are doing this, these are people that have just graduated from this automatic AI programme. They've gotta be scrappy and they've gotta invent their own systems because there isn't a system.

So this I think is as credible as anything we've got. so good luck to you. I hope that works out and, if you stick to that and you can prove it, then I am very, happy to, to read your content. Okay. Another piece that Mike brought to our attention, I'm showing it on the screen now, is a repository piece.

It's, again, we mentioned it a couple of weeks ago, but I don't think we did it justice because Mike wanted to surface a few more things. This is, the repository piece entitled CERN Moves the Birthplace of the Web to WordPress. We touched on it very briefly saying, hooray, CERN have got a WordPress website, but it turns out that there was a lot of depth to this article that we never mentioned, which Mike is about to uncover.

So go for it, Mike.

[00:29:07] Mike Johnston: So first off, let me address the fact that my name shows up as a co-author, which was very generous on Raise part. I was at WordCamp Europe, I attended the keynote, I interviewed the speakers and provided her with transcripts. So the, article is her work. but I'm a contributor to it.

Yeah,

[00:29:33] Nathan Wrigley: you're akin to the AI thing that we

[00:29:35] Mike Johnston: Yeah, I'm the AI in the background. yeah, I wanted to highlight a few pieces that came out of this because this was a, truly jaw dropping kind of presentation for me. there, there were several things that, that came out of it.

And, Nathan, if you include the link in the video, in the show notes to the video and, the slides, I if, folks weren't there, it's worth spending 28 minutes to go watch the keynote presentation, that the two guys did. it was, JOM and Francisco Jom is the web manager at cern, and Francisco is the WordPress infrastructure guy.

And they walked us through their project to migrate from legacy systems. Many of their websites were built on Drupal, but they said they had, websites built with every platform imaginable. They mentioned at one point that they had, they started with tens of thousands of websites and good grief.

Yeah. The scale of this thing is, massive, but they, ran a very structured process to select a new CMS and Drupal was one of the contenders. They had five, five systems that they looked at very closely. WordPress came out on top, but the, and. The, really significant part, parts for me were the approach they took.

and having worked in enterprise systems for a while, I thought this was a, just a great case study for how you go about building something at scale. they spent time first, analysing their top 800 sites, deciding what was, looking at what was there, and, then test building some sites as they evaluated the different CMSs.

So could they recreate the kind of sites that people were building? and it's worth noting, they said anybody at CERN can create a website for practically any purpose. So they mentioned the Kayaking Club has it, the mechanical engineering people have it. The, some buildings have websites. Some of them are external facing, and they're, busy sharing information with scientists around the world.

Some of them are internal, when does the Bridge Club meet? That sort of thing. So they, have this huge diverse, set of sites that they need to migrate and they built, so they evaluated all this. They built, a, an automated process to, extract the, content and the primitives out of different sites.

mapped them to WordPress blocks, publish them on a site, and make the site available for the site owners to evaluate that automated workflow, was, could be, initiated with one command. And it took in some site for small sites. It took about a minute. He said for larger sites it took more.

And they had, half a million pieces of content out there, to work with. So just the, you sit there and go, okay, wait a minute. you didn't have to touch this site to get it moved from old platform, whatever it was to WordPress. So there's one piece of it. The other piece was for new sites that needed to be generated, they created a web portal.

the new site owner could enter three pieces of information, a URL. So something, cern, the. let's see, what were they? the, did it need to be public facing or was it internal? And did it need to be tied to their single sign on?

[00:34:00] Nathan Wrigley: Wow.

[00:34:00] Mike Johnston: And with that information, their WordPress operator programme within a minute could spin up a new site.

[00:34:09] Nathan Wrigley: That's so neat.

[00:34:11] Mike Johnston: Now, so, all of that is stunningly impressive, for an organisation this size.

[00:34:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:34:20] Mike Johnston: they, said they had built already 500 sites using that, 500 new sites, building that process. and later in the day, one of their, this lady was actually a technical intern who had been building sites for one of their technical groups.

She did a presentation on how the whole thing worked and, just, super. But, Anyway, the and, the LA two other pieces about this that, that I thought were worth noting. after they described all of this, they said, oh, by the way, we're going to open source this.

[00:34:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's so neat.

[00:35:00] Mike Johnston: Yeah. this is, tooling that I'll never use, it's so far beyond the scope of any, anything I build.

But I think for companies and agencies in the WordPress space that are looking at, more large scale implementation, large scale migrations, I think there's gonna be some huge benefit here. The last thing I'll say is that in, in, this context of this show, and in lots of other places, we bemoan the fact that the population is ageing.

And, I'm part of that problem, but, the two guys, Joki and Francisco, and then the young lady, Akia, and the other members of their team who were there were all young, not as young as the, cohort graduates, these are folks a little, further along in their career, but these were young, smart, energetic people who were doing just fabulous work.

And I, just felt like it, was worth bringing this back up to the surface and encouraging people to go out, look at the, video, look through the slide deck, and, cheer 'em on. It's, great work they're doing.

[00:36:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. there's an awful lot in there, isn't there?

You, said right at the beginning you said they picked their top 800 websites. Okay. Yeah. That's, they're the one that's our playground. We're gonna play with those 800 just as a, that short list of 800.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right. But then also, can you imagine in the, so obviously incredibly clever, engineers, web engineers, but can you imagine, if you're at cer, those incredibly clever engineers meet the mechanical engineers of the Large Hadron Collider and the Large Hadron Collider.

People just go, just hold my beer. have you seen what we've got over here? You think your web stuff's very clever. We've got the Large Hadron Collider, but it, what an impressive project. And it, you're right, it was the, we are gonna open source this bit at the end, which was so interesting.

Absolutely ing fascinating. Yeah. Go on, Simon. Sorry.

[00:37:26] Simon Pollard: Yeah. I have, having been in the industry for many years, I've migrated many a site from many SCMS, and every single instance has been a pain.

[00:37:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:37:35] Simon Pollard: So any tool, and there aren't any tools, and I'm happy to be corrected wrong by the comments or anywhere. But since WordPress moved to a block-based architecture, there aren't any

[00:37:46] Nathan Wrigley: easy

[00:37:47] Simon Pollard: migrational tools.

I've had to do it all manually. some reason than others say Drupal for example, because you get a nice feed, but then I've had to do site call, which is probably the worst site to migrate because it exports its data in CSV files, so you can't even do, so you've got to, you've got to programmatically loop for a CSV file to extract the data to them.

Like anything that helps on that. And that's one of the key things at the minute and that's where AI may step into ease that. But for, me at the moment, that's one of the few things where it needs a human touch. Because even if you did do it for ar, you've still gotta check everything. So would you be a hundred percent happy migrating that many pages, that much content and going, AI's done it.

I won't double check it. I'm sure it's fine. It'd be interesting, which want something to go through and Yeah. Check it to make sure it's not done. Something weird, like on the pictorial sensor, it's added a fifth arm.

How do you know that the textural content

[00:38:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:38:44] Simon Pollard: Has not been possibly altered or put in the wrong place or the wrong tags gone to the wrong image.

How can you validate that?

[00:38:51] Nathan Wrigley: I guess that the, body of work that CERN had to go through with their many thousands of websites is, was probably a really good testing ground for that. I imagine there was a heck of a lot of manual inspection at the end, but may maybe there was, be curious to see whether they did get to the end and think, okay, that one command genuinely will do it within an inch of its life.

we can trust it with a 99.5% accuracy and if that is the case. Yeah. And that does get open sourced. Wow. All bets are off, aren't they? For migrating from I'm all

[00:39:25] Simon Pollard: over

[00:39:26] Nathan Wrigley: it. If

[00:39:27] Simon Pollard: it's open source.

[00:39:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[00:39:28] Simon Pollard: I'm having a piece of that.

[00:39:29] Nathan Wrigley: Definitely that, yeah. With your 800 shortlisted, I haven't

[00:39:34] Simon Pollard: got 800 shortlisted sites,

just, one or two is fine.

But

[00:39:37] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. that'll do. Yeah. absolutely fascinating. again, I'll just pop that on the screen. What an interesting subject that was CERN moves the birthplace of the web to WordPress. That was on the repository. It was the 10th of June. So as I said at the beginning, it was a little bit older, but fascinating.

Okay. So they were a few bits and pieces that I sprinkled in, but also a few bits and pieces that Mike sprinkled in. Simon brought one, piece this week and it's entitled Test for Accessibility. It's the WP accessibility.org knowledge base. What's going on here? Simon, do

[00:40:15] Simon Pollard: you remember? Yeah, I just, it just came through LinkedIn.

It was liked by a friend of mine. When it came up. the original poster, and I'm probably gonna say her name, horrendously wrong, is Fel. Yeah,

[00:40:27] Nathan Wrigley: Ian Reve. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:40:28] Simon Pollard: Yeah. So they posted it. and basically it sounds like the documents have all been either updated or changed, which is the links underneath.

Basically just guiding you through all the means and abilities and tools to check everything for accessibility.

[00:40:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:40:42] Simon Pollard: and there are lots of nice automated tools in there as well, but I think it's good to see that's still. Being flagged because not too recently, the accessibility kind of team were shot down quite a bit and all reduced, or even removed at one point.

and all the accessibility stuff went off some of the, key sites that were pressed was being useful, certain sites in America. So it's nice to see that it isn't being forgotten that accessibility is still on, on the forefront and still being used.

[00:41:11] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. Yeah. And I think I'll just read it out a again, trying to be a good custodian of the web, trying to read everything into the record, if I can.

WP accessibility.org. And then we are looking at forward slash docs slash testing, which is a laundry list of maybe, I don't know, maybe there's 20 or so links on that page. For example. It's things like the complete wagg checklist, automated testing links, content checks, design checks, front and code checks, and on, on, it goes.

and that's just on this one page. So yeah. Thank you. Thank you.

[00:41:45] Simon Pollard: It was also tying in with ai 'cause you could use AI to start doing, to automate some of those checks.

But then that also led me back to the initial point. 'cause obviously you've got things like qag, aa, those are established. Kind of scores, ratings.

[00:42:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:42:03] Simon Pollard: So could there be a panel formed to do the equivalent? Yeah. You, respect a WA rating or you expect if someone says they're AA or aa, you don't tend to doubt that you,

So would, you have a panel formed to do something?

[00:42:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. That's very interesting. Again, everything in the show notes, that's mentioned today, it'll be there unless you know there's a good reason not to put it in there.

but this one will certainly make it test for accessibility on wp accessibility.org. Thank you for bringing that to our attention, Simon. That's great. Okay. Then we'll just get into the usual, bits and pieces that we mentioned on the show from time to time. the first one is this contributors, are wanted to in the call for testing, but this in particular is around, responsive styling ahead of the 7.1 release.

this is Ray's piece. Ray makes the point that, page builders and things like that have had a lot of these options for the longest time. But, catching up, here we come and we would like it. So that, there is an option to have these inside the block editor. If you can see the screen, you can see there's like an animated, I presume it's an animated gif.

There's no movies playing on this. There's an animated gif, which shows what this might look like. the current implementation. Basically, if you've been in the block editor recently, you'll know that, for example, when you click the preview icon, it looks, usually, it looks like a desktop icon, like a little, computer icon in the top right of the screen, near the publish button.

you've got an option to switch over to different, views. So you can, for example, view it on a mobile, view it on, now that will, cascade and change the settings that you are looking at as well. So rather than it just being a view of what's going on, so for example, the font sizes settings will be different because you're now in the mobile view.

That seems to me a dead sensible way of doing it. Leverage what's already there rather than inventing some kind of ui. Basically everything that we look looking at on the screen looks like what we've already got. nothing about that looks new at all, except when you notice that there's a little purple icon just here, which demonstrates that this group blocks settings are now configured for desktop and what have you.

So anyway, if you would like to, help the, testing on that, as I'm sure some of you would then yeah, they, people are looking for testing. Go to Ray's article and, you can volunteer yourself if you're interested in that. Mike Simon, anything to add to that

[00:44:50] Simon Pollard: before I move on? Not 'cause I'm a backend, I'm a backend dev.

Yeah,

[00:44:56] Nathan Wrigley: fair enough. Yeah. Yeah. really it's been sorely lacking. So the quicker we can shape this, the, the, the, better it'll be, and just leveraging what we've already got seems like a really good idea. Okay, great. I think, I can't actually remember some articles. I look at them and I think, did we do this before?

And I'm not sure if we did, but I, but this is just interesting to me. I'll just mention it. We don't need to talk about it particularly, but I'll just mention it and move on. WP Beginner, which I'm gonna say is owned by, maybe that's the wrong word. Maybe it's run by, or I, don't know. by Awesome Motive, it's a blog, which o up until fairly recently, if you did a, Google search for more or less anything, in the WordPress space, WP Beginner would've completely dominated that.

That is to say that, the first article was very often a WP beginner article, and there was a lot of, finger pointing and, dislike of, the way that had been done, and there was a lot of, self-promotional stuff. Forget all of that. the point is that they did it and it was highly successful.

However, apparently in the more recent past, that has all gone there. there, if, you now Google almost anything, apparently the, chances that you'll see a WP Beginner article have pretty much evaporated. And this is a YouTube video about why that happened. And it's really interesting just to study that.

If you stand still in the search space, eventually at some point your lock will run out. And that appears to be, what's the case here? For years and years WP beginner fine tuned everything so that it was very successful. Built up a lot of success in the plugin marketplace because of that. No doubt.

and now whatever algorithm changes occurred in Google, be it overnight or be it over many months, it sounds like months and years rather than just overnight, that has now gone. but WP Beginner apparently hasn't adapted. So no doubt, that's probably gonna be a enterprise of work over there to, make sure that the blog posts are, configured to, match the, latest generation of what Google doing.

But I just thought that was really interesting and it's a deep dive into the SEO of why this person, believes their website now no longer gives them the results. And, basically what they're saying is they've got a cull, most of their content, they've just gotta delete it from the web, and then adapt the ones that they really want to, to stick around.

Okay. Mike, Simon, anything on that? Possibly not. If not, I will just move on. No. Okay. I'll just say, the webinar, a couple of comments here. it, says it's true, about searches in the past, a lot of time. Google pointed me to WP Beginner first. Now, rarely. Yeah. I hadn't really noticed that it had gone until it was said to me in this YouTube video.

didn't see the video, but we'll definitely have a look. Yeah, I'll drop the links in the show notes. 'cause YouTube videos are very hard. It was by a guy called Lars. No, it wasn't. It was be guy by a guy called Edward Stern. and it's called Google took beginner from 2.6 million clicks to 27,000.

Here's why. God, that's a, that is a Titanic drop. the, and fair enough, the important there is importance in not being dependent on Google for all of the content we create too. I've given up on Google, I now use, cgi, I dunno if you've come across cgi. Yeah. Any of you have either of you used CAG E before?

[00:48:45] Simon Pollard: Not

[00:48:46] Nathan Wrigley: yet. It's a paid for search engine. You have to give them $108 a year, but in return for the $108, there's no tracking. There's no ads, and you can tell it the websites that you like more. So you can, for example, say WP Beginner when a search comes up in which that features, please push them to the top.

So in that way you can surface stuff. It was, it's been the, spearhead, the guy behind the whole project, was the guy that, started manage WP back in the day, and when he sold it to GoDaddy, he was looking for something else to do. So he started building this search engine, kgi, KAGI.

Whenever I get into this conversation, nobody's ever heard of it, but it's lightning fast. The results are brilliant, it's great. and they have a browser called Orion, which is based off WebKit and allows you to instal Firefox and Chrome extensions with limited success, I might add. But they get in there.

and so yeah, they've got this whole wraparound, thing. Anyway, there you go. let's move. This is a shock. So Elementor, we've all heard of them doing very successfully. I was interviewing Miriam not that long ago, Miriam Schwab from Elementor, and we did talk about the numbers of staff that they had, and I can't remember what the number was.

Anyway, it's now, oh, I guess it's 300 because they've cut 30% of their workforce. and that number is a hundred. Elementor have decided to cut a hundred jobs. but wait for it. It's AI again, not because they need to cut the jobs, given the profitability of Elementor. This is a realignment, assuming that in the future they need to be in a, in, ship shape for the a, the AI based website builder future.

So they've shared 30% of the workforce. So roughly a hundred jobs. It says they're going for a more flat infrastructure. So it sounds like they're more back to, they were back in the day when they started. So less managerial positions, more flat, authority structure. And, anyway, this is the tide that we've been talking about that those of us that are a bit AI dory like I am, this is the very sort of thing that we've been fearing.

it must hurt if you are an element or employee to be told that your company's still profitable, but in order to continue to be profitable, you are out on your ear. I don't mean that came out much more snarly than it was meant to. I do apologise. Element mentor. I know that you don't have, I know that this is the world in which we all occupy, but it that it's brutal.

I, if you're one of those a hundred people, I'm, sorry, I wish I had a magic bullet for you that would, give you a new job pack. So anyway, Mike, Simon, anything about that?

[00:51:58] Mike Johnston: I, spent 30 years in a Fortune 500 company, and this, sort of thing happens. it never, it, it, never feels good, whether regardless of what side of the, the firing decision you're on.

it, though, and, I have seen, actions taken. With similar kind of rationale. Hey, we're profitable, we wanna remain profitable, but we're going to let you know, we're gonna let some people go so we can be prepared for the next thing.

[00:52:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:52:40] Mike Johnston: And my, question was always, wait a minute. If you've got these people and they're, they have done valuable work for you, how could we adjust what they do or retrain them or reskill them to, be, to help with that preparation because they've got some institutional knowledge that is going to be, is going to be lost when they walk out the door.

I, don't, I certainly don't know the rationale in this particular case, but, it, it's just, it's, never, a good thing to go through, regardless. I said, regardless of which side of the desk you're on,

[00:53:24] Nathan Wrigley: I, I fear that my cross hairs there ended up sounding like they were having a go at Elementor, which it would be, would've been an obvious thing to, to hear when I said those words.

It's more really the whole AI thing. And this, I believe that this thing will happen over and over again. And to be fair to Elementor, I did see a post on LinkedIn from the co-founder, I've forgotten the chap's name, but one of the co-founders of Elementor going out of his way to try to, make sure that people have other work, basically saying, I will act on your behalf, or I will, respond to if somebody wants a resume or whatever it may be, those kind of things.

So it, no blame, it is, it's the reality of what we're living in. Yeah. Elementals jump first. they've got a history of doing things cleverly and therefore aligning themselves so that their business in the future is profitable. This is probably a bit of that. And so my snarkiness earlier really is just a slight concern that we're gonna see this over and over again.

And if a third of everybody disappears from the WordPress space, then oh, that feels not good. But anyway, there we go. just a quick comment from Nomad skateboarding. Apologies if you've just joined us. The, I can't put the comments on the screen. For some reason that feature isn't working in the platform that we use for videos.

Nomad Skateboarding, going back to CGI says he was onboard until they abandoned it and went with the other browser. So the Orion browser that they're shipping at the moment, it is. Great. I love it. Especially the way they handle, tabs. And they've also decided that in the future, if you switch a toggle on every single tab is gonna be in its own container.

So there'll be no cross leakage or, I don't know, Google leaking its stuff out to anybody else, which is pretty amazing as far as I know. No browser's doing that in the future. Check it out again. maybe they launched a browser and then abandoned it, but this one certainly seems to be kind. It's, a, it's mac os iOS windows at the minute.

There's no Android variant, but it's, I love it. I really like it. I'm not using it for this because curiously, one of the things that it doesn't seem to be able to do is engage with platforms that do video. So I'm on Vivaldi. no, I'm not. I'm on brave right now in order to make this happen.

Anyway, blah, blah, let's move on. sorry, Simon, was there anything on the element or thing before we move on?

[00:56:03] Simon Pollard: No. Yeah, I've probably

[00:56:04] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:56:05] Simon Pollard: Bit, too cynical on the, the AI. Quick to jump sacking so that

[00:56:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[00:56:10] Simon Pollard: I'm not on board.

[00:56:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Similar, in similar intuitions to me. What follows then is a few bits and pieces to do with, WordPress education.

I couldn't decide whether to sneak it in straight after we did the bit about the, the graduates because it felt like it would slot in beautifully there, but I didn't. So we've had a little bit of a diversion in towards ai, but now we're coming back to education in the WordPress space. This is Otter Pra on Make wordpress.org.

Again, links in the show notes. This piece is called WordPress Credit Updates, sorry. WordPress Credits Update and WordPress credits is one of, a set of, initiatives in the WordPress space to try and get, I'm gonna use the word youngsters, let's go for young adults, but also young people. Some, in some respects, it really is youngsters 'cause it's school children as well, actual, people that don't use the word adult.

and it would appear that it's a bit of a barnstormer. This programme was set up a while ago and they had some targets which they wanted to, get. one of them was that they would be able to, I think, get in front of something like six institutions. Is that right? I can't remember what the real, the number that they wanted.

But they've now partnered with over 20 real institutions throughout the world, which they want to grow, I think, into 35 institutions in the next year. They're based all over the place, all over the planet. And you can swap, your time for credits at the institution. So let's say you're doing a degree, if you've got a partnership here, you might be able to get some credit at that institution, which is cool.

and then Word Camp eu. There was an effect of that because apparently quite a lot of the student one a lot is, I don't know what the number is, but some of the students, actually took a step into the real world. So they went from doing this academic thing from their home in the In Education Institute.

They turned up and volunteered at the event. some of the key partners spoke on stage about their, commitment to the programme and what have you. And so I just think that's wonderful. so yeah, the idea is in the future, they're gonna get to 35 partnerships by the end of the year, and that's really all that I have to say about that.

yeah. All right. Oh, no it

[00:58:38] Mike Johnston: isn't. There was a,

[00:58:40] Nathan Wrigley: sorry, go on, Mike. I'll do my bit in a minute.

[00:58:43] Mike Johnston: I was gonna say at WCEU there was a session, I believe it was on Saturday, where a group of students from local universities got up at local universities, and I believe also a high school got up and did presentations about projects they had done.

And, they got a, very warm reception from the, folks attending, and it was, some really good work. yep. Yep. It's really nice to see some of this paying off and although a lot of these educational initiatives, if you're a developer and you're not really following this sort of stuff, it, gets lost.

[00:59:20] Nathan Wrigley: But the groundwork is being laid by a lot of very committed people who are doing actual hard work. Can you imagine how hard it is to go to a university and convince them that what you are offering on a voluntary basis is actually worth credit in their prestigious university's programme? Can you imagine the red tape that with that?

okay, what the heck? You're gonna give us something for nothing and you want us to, let's say, offer that as a 12th of a university programme. really. And they've managed to convince loads of these organisations through just bashing on the door and being, just being relentless. and so I applaud these people and, they do it for, the good of doing it and for making sure that the project keeps going into the days, weeks, years.

And Monster Comm speaking of which, I spoke to a load of them. the first one is on the WP Tavern website. I did two podcasts, one with these three characters, destiny Carno and Andel Padia and Match Pulaski. They spoke to me at length about what's going on in the WordPress space in terms of education, and it's so interesting.

It is so interesting. If all you do is write code all day and you're just happy to go to wordpress.org and download the repo and, instal plugins and what have you, just know that there's this whole other bit massive piece of the WordPress community going on in the background that you may be blissfully aware of, and it's enormous.

So that was the first one. And then I did another one here, with Ivana Kovich. and this was all about the WordPress credits that we've just been talking about. so if you want the skinny on both of those things, go and, Go and check them out. I think that's it. Simon, anything to add?

[01:01:17] Simon Pollard: No.

[01:01:18] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. In which case, we will move on to the, so I was feeling all buoyant. I was feeling all happy. and then this straw, actually, it's maybe we really need to get a grip on this and stop panicking. I feel like a bit like chicken little, the sky's falling in. So this is, Ray on the repository.

WordPress drops to 41.5% market share, but three data sets tell different stories about what's going on. I cannot possibly summarise this article in a few minutes, but basically Ray, it looks like she's gone out and downloaded and inspected a bunch of data from three very credible sources. One is probably the most widely used source, which is, W three texts.

One is scrolling, scrolling, One is the HTTP archive and one is built with, and I think there was a fourth one as well at the bottom. But those are the three that I read most about. and the story is, yes, it's in decline, but each of the different, data centres, if like W three techs or the HDTP archive tell a slightly different story.

And the, big takeaway that I got from it is that the CMS that's eating WordPress. Doesn't exist. There is no CMS eating WordPress. It would appear that the category, which is swelling, we're back to AI again, is no CMS. And I presume that's because people are doing things with, vibe coding, and knocking up a page 3, 4, 5 page website in a, with an agency's help or a freelancer's help, but just doing it with a bit of vibe code in here and there.

So anyway, the sky doesn't appear to be falling whilst the numbers are dropping. It's not really like those people are going elsewhere. and I think it was, who was it? There was somebody in here said, okay, even with the drop, it's still like something like 595 million websites using, WordPress.

It's not a bad number. so anyway going. I,

[01:03:41] Mike Johnston: think that was, yeah, I think that was no talk at Human Made.

[01:03:43] Nathan Wrigley: Maybe It was, yeah, a lot.

[01:03:46] Mike Johnston: He and Juice were both quoted in the article

[01:03:48] Nathan Wrigley: a lot. Yeah, it's a lot, but basically what Ray on is she's got all the data out, all these different places. Like I said, I can't summarise it in the amount of time we've got.

You may assume that, I don't know, it's Squarespace or it's M Dash or whatever it is that's eating that market share. But it would appear, no, it would appear that it's just the, the nothing category, which is which is eating it. Simon, just a quick question to you. Do you play with this stuff or are you, are you fully word, if there's a website to be built, do you just do it with WordPress 'cause that's what you do?

Or do you play and dabble with these No CMS vibe coding style options as well?

[01:04:29] Simon Pollard: Yeah. I had an interesting chat the other day. So I'm a networking thing. So I'm a WordPress developer. That's solely what I do at a minute. But I was chatting to someone who did a performance review and basically slated everything because it wasn't high scoring.

And they created their tiering and things and said, oh, what you want to do is use this AI driven thing that I'm doing where I build everything for you. And I created a super fast, super shiny website. If you need any content change, you'd just simply come to me and I will do it for you.

[01:04:56] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[01:04:57] Simon Pollard: And then even the website kind of explains it out.

I was like, wait a minute. You've, taken a step backwards to where we were in the past where you became fully dependent upon the person who's built your site. And you can't make any changes yourself. You have to go to them and say, I need to make an alteration.

It seems to be it's, yes, it's speeded things up.

And I would do, yeah. I could do that for you no problem. I could build it static and whatever, and that, but if you wanna make a change, and that's what people I work with want to do because the websites aren't static, then it's a very niche case that works for.

[01:05:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:05:33] Simon Pollard: And that's where it would come in handy if you're gonna build something flat that is literally just some data and that's all it's ever gonna be.

And it's gonna very rarely, if ever update, then WordPress wouldn't be the go-to anyway.

[01:05:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yes.

[01:05:44] Simon Pollard: It doesn't make sense. You would build it static and be that AI or whatever. Fair enough. And that will score high in all the ratings and everything, and well done. But it doesn't mean it's better because you've built it that way.

It's just needs for different things. And I think still think

there's still a need for the content to be editable and you need a content editor to do that. Yes. And you don't want that to be a developer who might be on holiday when you suddenly need to make your, and it goes back to how it had been in the past.

[01:06:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:06:12] Simon Pollard: And a lot of, I'm sure a lot of people have taken on work from clients. Oh yeah. The developers who did this didn't let us make it editable. They disappeared, we couldn't make any changes, or we had to pay money and it took a week. And it goes back to those horror stories. It's more like it's a step forward, but then the massive step backwards at the same time, which, very, unusual.

[01:06:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. James Lows in the comments. He says, my company off offers WP as the primary tool, but will also work with whatever platforms they currently have. It's like a local auto shop that isn't specialised with one particular car model. Okay. That's interesting. Yeah. yeah, that, I, I've always, that was the point of having a CMS is that you could kinda log in, and do the stuff and then click the button in that interface.

That doesn't mean that you've gotta have a degree in design and all of that to understand what's going on. You wanna update that blog post or the homepage, just amend the text here, click save, and you're done. Yeah. Only time will tell, Anyway, the point is a very, thorough, explanation of where the trend is going.

There's no doubt the trend is down, but it's maybe a little bit more nuanced. And that 41, 40 3% number that we were talking about, it turns out, is only one of three or four different places where you can get data like this. maybe it, was never quite that high. Anyway, Mike, anything to add on that before I move on?

[01:07:43] Mike Johnston: When, I read this article the other day, I, came away with some of the same conclusions. this is, it's really well done. lots of data to chew on there. And I, also remembered the, guidance that my high school debate team coach gave me years ago when he said, you can prove anything with statistics and scripture.

So I, think, when, we, look at these things, we have to, pay attention to the nuance. I'm looking forward, this is the first of three parts that Ray's gonna do. I'm looking forward to seeing the next two where she, gets a little closer to how, agencies are, reacting to this shift on the ground.

[01:08:34] Nathan Wrigley: There's a really interesting comment here by, I'm gonna say Daniel t I'm guessing that's your name. your, handle has got a load of numbers in it as well. But he said, what is strange is I don't see AI changing socials like Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. They all still look the same. That's interesting.

they're just such juggernauts, aren't they? Why would they change, yeah, that's fascinating. yeah. Okay. That's interesting. and then, Elliot Richmond jumps in and says, flat static. Flat static or vibe coded site all comes back to ownership. Yeah. Do you know what Elliot, I wonder if we're at a moment where we've really gotta start banging that, that gong again.

because I think it's the sort of thing that got lost, WordPress became a profitable thing. And so we started to talk about all of the ways that you could make money inside a WordPress and how easy it was to use. And you got this page builder, it makes easy, and I think at some point we dropped that Batam and we stopped mentioning, you own this.

it's yours. If, the chips, when the chips are down and the proverbial hits the fan, it's yours. you're not incumbent upon anybody. No company's owning that. So long as you you own it, you can do what you like with it. So I think maybe we need to get back into that. And then, tacho tack.

Hello. Tcho says there are three kinds of lies. Lies, damn lies and statistics. Israeli, said that. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. So in which case we will move along, but go and check it out. Links in the show notes. As always. This is curious, ought to make this obviously automatic, can spend their money however they wish, and they've, I dunno what they've spent on this.

Let's imagine it's a very large amount of money, though. I don't know what it would've been. but web hosting.com has been acquired by automatic, Maybe it'll be a, just a generic site where they're just gonna show off the, people in the WordPress space who do hosting. I don't know. maybe it'll be preferables new URLI don't know.

but they've obviously decided to spend a fair amount of money, acquiring that domain. But what they do with it, who knows? So it's, miscellaneous. Let's file that under miscellaneous. It's apropos of absolutely nothing. By the way. I was listening to a, this is going back a few months ago. there's a guy, I don't, this is such great, good luck a guy, and I'm gonna call him Adam Erol, but I've made up his name, right?

You can maybe see where this is going. Adam Ingersol, who, whatever his actual name is, years and years ago, years and years ago, bought the domain name ai.com because it was the, initials of his name, Adam Ingersol, whatever his real name is. and I was listening to the podcast 'cause he, he was selling it.

He was, it was on the market for something like a hundred million dollars. I dunno if he actually sold it in the end, but, I want a bit of that. Can, I'd love to have done that. Lucky, man. Imagine if your entire livelihood you, but not just that you are, really being enormously wealthy is based upon the decision to buy a two letter domain name back in the day.

[01:12:10] Mike Johnston: Nathan, you should go buy nw.com and hope for the best

[01:12:15] Nathan Wrigley: nw I bet you is taken by Northwest Airlines. I bet you Northwest Airlines have got that, Let's see what else we've got. people saying hello to Taco and what have you, and then Simon's made a comment. okay, I'll leave all of those for now.

Let's just press on. Anyway, they've bought that and that's the thing. Okay. he's been on the show before. Jamie Marsland. He's written, he, let, it's all ai. It's all ai. Jamie decided to unleash Claude into a WordPress website to see what it made of it. Basically do an audit of WordPress, not this particular site built on WordPress.

Do an audit, of WordPress itself. And, yeah, let's just say, let's just say it didn't come out all that great. but what a great idea, Jamie, full of these good ideas. And, and so basically the AI goes pokes around and comes back with some interesting things. for example, it likes some things.

It liked the fact that there's the site editor and it liked the fact that you can do this and that other feature. But as you read through, you'll be able to see the cognitive dissonance of WordPress, which you've experienced before. Like, why is there no onboarding when you launch it for the first time?

What the heck are you supposed to do when you try to edit different aspects like your theme? why is that different? Why does that look different when you try to create some navigation? Why is that incredibly difficult to do anyway? It goes on and on Some of it. Good. There you go. Navigation is entitled A genuine mess.

Yeah. it thinks templates are the strongest section. patterns are pretty good, but they're buried. You get the idea, go and read it. But basically, some of it does quite well, global styles and things like that. Get an eight out of 10. Navigation gets three out of 10. Save on undo revisions.

It's four out 10 overall. Claude k, WordPress, 5.6 outta 10.

[01:14:35] Simon Pollard: It's, not bad. It's on the better, side. Yeah. Okay. That's class half full, isn't it?

Yeah, exactly.

[01:14:43] Nathan Wrigley: It's over 50. it's over 50%. But if you were dealing with that and in an exam situation, imagine that was 56%. That's

[01:14:51] Simon Pollard: a pass.

[01:14:52] Nathan Wrigley: Is that, is It's borderline pass.

Okay.

[01:14:56] Simon Pollard: since I was at uni, but I'm pretty certain some of my, amazing essays got 56% on that.

[01:15:00] Nathan Wrigley: 56 you're saying? Yeah. I'm proud of

[01:15:04] Simon Pollard: 56%.

[01:15:06] Nathan Wrigley: Go and have a look though. it's really interesting. I'm sure some of that stuff will jibe with you. Jamie's got a lot of clout. So when he writes something like this, I think it, carries weight.

And so maybe somebody somewhere will pick up on this and, take the bits and pieces that everybody's been banging on about for ages. Essentially it boils down to it's fractured, there's just many ways of doing the same thing. It's a strength and a weakness. But Claude, gave it a, Claude gave it a 5.6 outta 10, go and check it out, right?

As if there wasn't enough AI really need to rename this podcast. It's got nothing to do with WordPress really anymore. It's the WordPress and ai. Austin Ginder, who has WP Beacon, he is been doing really interesting work over on the WordPress security side of things. He decided to, to sharpen his, claws on something else he said.

Is it, is Claude Design and Fable good enough to create a WP admin replacement? Let's see. Here's my starting prompt, follow along to see what happens. Now I'm not logged into X, so you can't see the thread, but I'll post it into the, show notes. And he went through a process over two hours and, and the, at the end of it, he's the answer's yes.

he's launched. He's launched min admin.com and Min is an unusual spelling. It's min with two Ns, so it's MINN admin.com and he's entitled it The WordPress Admin you'll actually want to open. it's what you'd imagine it is. You go inside the WP admin, it looks the way it looks and has always looked.

Austin decided, can I make it look different? Loads of people have tried this in the past, but this is, I wonder if there's a light and dark toggle. Oh yeah, there is. There you go. That's probably gonna be a lot easier to see. I want to toggle this picture. Does it work? No. that would be great. Austin, can you fix that?

but yeah, so if you fancy going and playing, it is a plugin. it's available on GitHub, I believe. Did I just see that somewhere? Yeah. View it on GitHub or you can download it. He's on v no 0.7 already. So that's how quick Claude moves. But if you, if you fancy it, I know that some of the other stuff that he's done in the WordPress space has caught a lot of attention, so I thought maybe this was worth, maybe this was worth mentioning as well.

Okay. anybody wanna get into that? Probably not.

[01:17:42] Simon Pollard: Yeah, it's lovely. I dunno what anyone wanna change.

[01:17:46] Nathan Wrigley: Do, you, like the WP admin?

[01:17:47] Simon Pollard: No, but what I did note on seven is that it's only become very quick. It might just be, 'cause I'm, on new builds. But it's lightning quick.

[01:17:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yep. I'm with you.

[01:18:00] Simon Pollard: I'm very much appreciating. Yeah. I didn't like the initial theme. It loads with that was horrendous. But as soon as you swap out from the shocking blue to a nice and blue, that was a thing. But now I've, been like jumping between and I'm just doing a very lightweight site. But it is, it's crazy quick.

[01:18:13] Nathan Wrigley: I've stuck on shocking blue to see if I can eventually find it less shocking. And the answer is no.

[01:18:20] Simon Pollard: I, asked it about five minutes till I, I remembered, oh yeah, you can change the colour can.

[01:18:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. no. forced on it.

No, I'm sticking with it and seeing if there's a point where my brain just goes, no, it's fine now.

but I haven't arrived at that yet. Anyway, go and check out Austin's project. If you fancy it, you can get it at min double n admin.com. Bless you, Austin. That's a, great idea. Again. So we were talking about raise post earlier about, the decline or otherwise of the WordPress market share. This is similar in scope.

this is a fairly long piece. It's not quite as long as Ray, but they're going through, it's on WP md. Good. URL by the way. acquired, WP Do md, it's called the State of WordPress Themes, an analysis of the 14,800 wordpress.org themes. I dunno if that's actually the full number, but it's roughly that.

and essentially the takeaway from this is developers have embraced full site editing and they seem to have shifted into that mindset, creating those new themes with full site editing capabilities, block-based themes, that kind of thing. But the, population at large have not, the, instal base for the classic themes is still the big part of the WordPress space by a long way.

for example, I've, I'll just read from the blurb at the top 'cause it summarises it nicely of nearly 15,000 themes in the wordpress.org directory, only five non-default block themes across the a hundred thousand active instal mark. The top 20 themes account for 61.7% of all active instals across the entire ecosystem.

Roughly six and a half thousand themes of not received an update in two or two or more years. This is what the WordPress ecosystem theme ecosystem looks like in the year, in June, 2026. Denser, more concentrated and more divided over the future of theme architecture, than the popularity the popular popularity chart suggest.

So yeah, go check it out. we're running out of time, so I'm gonna move on unless you've got something that you want to say about that.

[01:20:40] Simon Pollard: Yes.

[01:20:41] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. In which case we try, we f of late, we failed to get to the three or four bits at the end that I just want to bang on about. Oh, hang on a minute. We've still got one more.

Yes. Sorry. Quickly before we get to that, friend of the show, Dave Grey has a new product like Hot Off the Press. it's called Website Toolkit. So website toolkit, I'll just read you the blurb. It says own website, dot own website toolkit for life at a price that won't exist. Again, website Toolkit is a site auditing, and monitoring tool built for people who launch and maintain client sites.

I'm opening a small founding cohort before the price goes up, goes per domain forever. So at the moment he's got these sort of four pricing tiers and as he runs out of some, so he is gonna shift 10 licences at this early bird pricing. Then it's go to founding pricing. I think they're all the same product, it's just, it gets more expensive as he sells more.

it's like I say, it's hot off the presses. but hopefully you'll get the idea for what that product is. You can find [email protected] uk. and I will link to this blog post, but if you go to the blog here, you'll be able to see it for yourself. He's, obviously trying to launch it in not stealth mode anymore, but if you're interested in finding out what it did, does.

And getting it at that early bird pricing you can. Alright, sorry, that was my last word, Pressy thing. now I know what you want in the year 2026. You want to know how to get around the Roman Empire, don't you? That's what you want to know. luck of. Luckily somebody's, I love the web. This is why I love the web stuff like this.

It's cat pictures and Google Maps for the Roman Empire. so what I bless them, somebody has obviously got an absolute passion for, open street maps in this case API and the Roman and Roman history. But look, you can browse around the entire Roman Empire and see how you would get from place to place.

Now, don't try to do street view or anything like that because that's not happening. and if it's, if, it's there, it's definitely AI generated. But look, you can see how far the Romans penetrated up into the uk. This is roughly where I am, I'm situated about here. there was no, Romans here apparently, although there were, but look at this.

I didn't realise this. If you zoom out, did you know, that the Romans got into India? I, knew the Greeks did with Alexander the great, but I didn't know the Romans had their tendrils right on the, East coast of India. Anyway, this is called, I can't even say that, whatever that URL is, omni.org O-M-N-E-S-V-I-A-E is, maybe it means something like, means Google Maps for Romans or something in Latin, I dunno.

But, yeah. If you're a nerd like me and you love your history and you like your tech, this is literally man from heaven. I'm not gonna come up for air. Oh, actually that's not true. Wimbledon's on. I'm gonna spend no time on this. Gonna watch Wimbledon. Instead, I'll bookmark list and come back later. I love stuff like this PET projects.

Isn't that brilliant? Any thoughts? And if not, I will move on to the next one. Nothing can penetrate Nathan's druid fortress. I dunno, what that means, but I, love the comment. Thank you very much. Ah, love all this. I went to, I went to Stonehenge for the summer solstice 'cause I love all this sort of, ancient history and stuff like that.

Boy, that was a site to behold, you get the most interesting arrangement of human beings. It's possible to have standing inside like a 300 square metre thing. it was very interesting, let's put it that way. There were a lot of people just asleep. Just got there, got absolutely wasted, just falling asleep on the ground.

Okay. Moving on, let's go to this one. If you are a hacker and you like sports or you like music or festivals and things like that, surely this is, the story for you. Apparently with the help of Claude, a hacker recently found their way into the ticketing system, of a company, and I've actually forgotten their name now.

What's it called? it's a US based, ticketing system, which is widely used for things like festivals and what have you. And they managed to get in and made it so that they could print tickets for literally any music festival that was on their platform. I've gotta say, I'm gonna say this and then regret saying it immediately.

If I'd created that hack, I was keeping that to myself, just, I'd be printing, I'd be printing all the tickets and having a great summer, I wouldn't just so that, I actually wouldn't do that. But, can you see the name of the site? What was it called?

[01:26:15] Mike Johnston: is it Live Nation

[01:26:17] Nathan Wrigley: maybe? is it Bonnaroo?

Does that ring a bell? vip,

[01:26:23] Mike Johnston: that's one of the, that's one of the Oh, that's

[01:26:24] Simon Pollard: one of the festivals.

[01:26:25] Mike Johnston: that's a festival, yeah.

[01:26:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Oh, okay. So that was a particular festival that they managed to get access to. Yeah. Anyway, there you go. but I just thought that was an interesting story as well. So go check that out.

And very last, but by no means least dunno if you've heard of this organisation. Have you either of you heard of Whole Grain Digital? I imagine Simon you have.

[01:26:47] Simon Pollard: Yeah. So they're a development agency in the uk. Yeah. Yeah. Very strong in the kind of green side of we're building. Yeah. Very strong in the, basically they're the first.

[01:27:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. First and more or less the only people who seem to keep banging this gong. Honestly, I don't know how they continue to, bang that gong in the era of ai. I felt like they had a bit of purchase on the landscape. there were a lot of people talking about the environment and then AI came along and everybody was like, eh, let's just throw loads of CPU cycles at creating images.

who cares? Anyway, whole Grain Digital are back, Tim Greenwood, sorry, Tom Greenwood, 25th of June. Yeah. Tom Greenwood, with an article entitled One Small Step for Web Kind and basically nothing new here. They're making the argument that essentially we are all responsible for the, stuff that we consume, the things that we make, the websites that we build, and it's incumbent upon all of us.

If we actually wanna take this thing seriously and we have some, and we have some basis in reality that things like global warming are real, then you have to start with yourself. And so if you're building websites, see what you can do to mitigate the impact of that. If you're using ai, try to mitigate the impact of that.

[01:28:19] Simon Pollard: Yeah, there's quite a big movement on this actually happening. I'm beginning to delve into it now 'cause I'm keen Interesting. and yeah, so there was a talk actually through Smashing Mag, which is the one that's linked in there. Which is the, smashing Mag beats sustainability, which is where he did a talk, which is available to view online if you want to view that.

But there's also a lot of kind of stuff going on. I'm going to something on Thursday to talk about Yeah. Sustainability and the, usage of ai, which I think people, they don't realise quite how bad

[01:28:52] Nathan Wrigley: Oh,

[01:28:54] Simon Pollard: AI is and the usage. So

[01:28:57] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, the

[01:28:57] Simon Pollard: statistically there's a lot, there's a lot going on.

[01:29:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:29:00] Simon Pollard: The, one that scares me is the amount, not the actual number is, but the amount of electricity used by people thanking, chat GBT oh

[01:29:10] Mike Johnston: my Lord,

[01:29:10] Simon Pollard: is astounding. How much kind of carbon that, that's just by people saying thank you alone. So I don't think people are aware, and I think that needs to be brought to attention, especially with everyone being very Pro-Green, B Corp, et cetera.

But it's all well and good. If you're doing green hosting, you're building sites that are low carbon, but if you're building using AI on any context, you might be completely. destroying all the good that you're doing.

[01:29:34] Nathan Wrigley: a few years ago I did a podcast interview with Hannah Smith. I dunno if Hannah.

She was,

[01:29:39] Simon Pollard: that's, who I'm going to see actually.

[01:29:40] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, perfect. Yeah. and we got into this conversation and it's the weirdest thing, like the computer, my Mac and I don't have a, an iPhone. I've got an Android phone, but the computer and a Mac are about the cleanest things I possess.

You open them up, they're shiny, they're literally shiny. And, so I view them as this utterly benign object. But if I go to the back of my car and I say to somebody, just put your mouth around the exhaust of that for 10 minutes, nobody's gonna do it because it's so self-evident.

The crap that comes out the back of the car. It's so obvious. 'cause it's crap. Literally, you can see it and if you breathed it in, you'd immediately feel the result. But my computer, none of it comes out the back. It happens in some other place, some other power station or some other nuclear reactor or, whatever.

Yeah. Whatever it may be. It, I, it's completely invisible to me. and because of that, connecting the dots with every time I leave the computer on when I'm not using It, it in, in, I think in everybody's head, it doesn't do anything. It's just sitting there doing nothing. Don't worry about it. But of course, if we all think that, then we're in for a lot more trouble than we apparently are already in.

So I think enterprises like this go and read this blog post, which is like a ion, a clarion call for start yourself, begin do the things that you can do within the, confines of your own.

[01:31:21] Simon Pollard: They also do a very good newsletter, whole Grain, which you can find on their site.

[01:31:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And I think they've got like some platform which is, email platform, which is carbon neutral.

I dunno how they pulled that off, but I'll probably try to investigate that at some point. so go and check that out. Whole grain digital one, one small step for web kind. there we go. let's just see if there's any comments. The average, we've got a temperature thing. 50. Okay, so this is Tacho, saying the average, I guess you're connecting this to the environment.

The average temperature in Debil, the main Dutch weather station today is what the average temperature was in Paris 60 years ago. Okay. That's a big difference, isn't it? What are you a hundred miles north? And presumably the statistics would be a lot less than that. We are experiencing something of a heat wave in the uk, and yet we, and, we seem to be breaking records in the UK every year, like it's nothing every year.

every year we hit a new high. and then, the webinar is talking to you. Simon says it's very true. I dig into, dug into that subject a while back and it's crazy to see that just one word can be so impactful on our planet. This is the thanking chat EPT thing. Okay?

[01:32:39] Simon Pollard: Yeah, it's definitely worth you looking into it.

If you considering using ai, ai.

[01:32:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. but don't Google it 'cause that's probably just as bad. We're doomed. Captain Maning

[01:32:51] Simon Pollard: can't, you can't do anything, man.

[01:32:52] Nathan Wrigley: No, I know. Okay, there we go. I think that's it. I think we've managed to reach the end. we weren't joined by our fourth guest. I did get a message from them.

I won't say who they are, but halfway through saying, sorry. things I believe are probably cropped top, but maybe they'll come back and join us another day. But all that I've got to do, first of all, is thank the panellists. So we've got Mike over there and we've got Simon over there, and I've got the fingers pointing in the correct direction.

Mike and Simon. Simon, you may not know this. Mike, you've been, humiliated with this once before. Yes. I always ask the panellists to put their hands. I've, seen the pictures.

Oh, no. Easy. I'm so sorry. would you mind just giving us your hands at the same time? Will do. That's all we need. I just need a single frame of it.

so firstly, thank you to those two, but also thank you to you. We had a fair smorgasbord of comments there. That was lovely. sad we couldn't put 'em on the screen. Hopefully the platform will be fixed by next week, but we will be back next week for another episode with some different panellists. So join us then.

We will see you soon. And if you two wanna stick around for a little chat for a moment afterwards, feel free to do that. All right, we will see you next time on this week in WordPress. Bye-bye for now.