This Week in WordPress #380

[00:00:03] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress, episode number 380 entitled A bug up your Mötley Crüe. It could have been a lot worse, honestly. It was recorded on Monday, the 13th of July, 2026. My name's Nathan Wrigley and today I am joined by Sé Reed, by Marc Benzakein and by Alex Standiford.

We really do get railed at the beginning. We spend about the first 15 minutes just going off piste in all sorts of different directions, talking about all sorts of things.

But then when we finally get it back, we do get onto the WordPress thread. And we talk about the Classic Block and the fact that that has been reinstated.

We talk about the fact that there's a new documentary produced by Automattic All about open source.

We have differing opinions on that. We then get into a whole long conversation about the decline, not decline, maybe decline, definitely not decline of the WordPress community, and how is it affecting not only participation in the community, but people working in the community, so plugin developers and so on. And that is a very large proportion of what we talk about.

There's the usual smattering of AI. We talk about Meetup being replaced by GatherPress.

We talk about the Yoast Community Fund and a whole bunch of other things as well.

It was a bit of a riot, and I hope that you enjoy it.

Hello, Alex. this episode's gonna be called Hello, Alex. That's the, that's the best title. That was great. Good timing. Alex has just managed to get it under the wire. I'm very appreciative. Alex, thank you for

[00:01:44] Alex Standiford: Yeah, when you got a talent

[00:01:47] Nathan Wrigley: that's right, use it. I thought I was there Episode three 80 of this week in WordPress.

That means we've done 379 others in the past, and goodness knows how many we'll do in the future, but we're here to drone on about WordPress until there's nothing left to say. It usually takes about 90 minutes. and in order to make that happen, I'm joined by three other drones. Sorry, that's not, it's

[00:02:12] Sé Reed: not inaccurate.

[00:02:13] Nathan Wrigley: I apologise. I'm joined by three other fabulous people, and they're gonna help us chat through all of the bits and pieces that I've discovered over the last week in the WordPress space. if we go off piece as we always do, usually with ai, then forgive us. But, I'll do a few bits of housekeeping.

Are we

[00:02:30] Sé Reed: ai?

[00:02:31] Nathan Wrigley: We're not ai. Oh, we're always droning on about AI and it's, never good.

[00:02:35] Sé Reed: I think I'm real.

[00:02:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you are real. But the, I'm real. Yeah. The conversations may not be, I'll introduce the guests in just a minute, but, I'll do the normal housekeeping. So if you, are joining us and you wanna comment live, that's lovely.

That kind of makes the show go forwards. Pop. The best place to send you for that is this little URL. Where's it gone? Here it is. say is sporting it under her chin. it's, that's, oh, what a pro. What pro. Look at that. It's

[00:03:05] Marc Benzakein: like you've been on a podcast before. It's

[00:03:08] Nathan Wrigley: you've done this before. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:03:09] Sé Reed: I gotta get the reverse thing happening. I'm like, what direction is this in?

[00:03:13] Nathan Wrigley: I know. Everybody gets it wrong. First time. There's the url. Anyway, wp builds.com/live. We embed the platforms video and that means that there's a little like chat widget inside the video. So if you don't wanna be using YouTube comments or Google accounts or anything like that, which I'm increasingly stopping doing.

we've got a story about that later actually. then go to that URL and just hit the live chat button inside the player and say, avoid it. I'm gonna get rid of it. Now look dead weird. Go to there and you'll be able to chat without a, Google account or anything like that. However, if you're on that page and you do have a Google account, you can use the YouTube comments.

They should in theory, come into this platform. Last week they didn't, but this week it looks like they did. So here we go. Like this. good evening from a Chili's, Victor Harbour in Australia. It's Cameron Jones. How you Cameron, how you doing? Good evening. Indeed. Evening, good afternoon. Says Reese. Reese Wind just down the road from me, from a sweltering Newton.

The Willows Reese. I was just saying to Mark, it's actually really nice here today. It's I don't know, 18 degrees or something. That heat wave is gone and we're firmly in the nice weather again. We're not dealing with any of that, which is quite nice. Justin, hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. So it's Justin. good.

[00:04:36] Sé Reed: Hi, Justin.

[00:04:36] Nathan Wrigley: To be live with you. I love the show. Justin Williams Swan Pay. Does that mean you love the show, which is called Justin Williams Swan Pay, or does that mean that you love this show and your name is Justin Williams and you, I presume, have a product called On Pay? I overcomplicated that, didn't I?

and that's quite a false dichotomy, both, oh, hey, it's a bunch of cool people on today. Oh, and Nathan is here too. You see what I have to put up with? Geez. See,

[00:05:05] Marc Benzakein: you're not wrong.

[00:05:07] Nathan Wrigley: You'd have to say out loud

[00:05:09] Sé Reed: the disrespect I tell you.

[00:05:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Disrespect is good. No, keep it coming. The more humiliating it is for me, the better.

I have broad shoulders, Elliot and he's

[00:05:19] Sé Reed: British. So

[00:05:20] Nathan Wrigley: British I could take, yep. Stiff up a lip. Elliot saying hi, he's just down the, road from me. what a motley crew. We watch your website. nice to have you with us. I saw you posted something. I

[00:05:37] Sé Reed: wish I knew a Motley Crew song so I could sing it just like right now.

Oh

[00:05:40] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. That would've been a good segue, wouldn't it? Of

[00:05:42] Alex Standiford: all the time for me to come up with one from I came up with one in my head right away, but it was like one of their newer ones for some reason, which applies. I listen to Mo Cruz, newer Mot Cruise

[00:05:51] Sé Reed: song.

[00:05:51] Alex Standiford: Yeah, New, oh my God. I said newer, but from like 2007.

So it's not newer at all. Relatively speaking. Mo Cruz song. Everybody,

[00:06:01] Nathan Wrigley: everybody Apart From Say, has been on this podcast before, and you see what happens. We always end up like, we're never talking about WordPress. It's always about minute 20 that the first WordPress, vague, wordy thing starts, but that's why it's, oh

[00:06:14] Sé Reed: wait, I have, I can help with that.

[00:06:16] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:06:17] Sé Reed: What you want is Motley Cruise. Is Motley Cruise website on WordPress.

[00:06:20] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I didn't know. Is it?

[00:06:21] Alex Standiford: I don't know. Do they have one?

[00:06:23] Sé Reed: I don't know. But Taylor Swift's is. Gotcha. I know that because the, lemme down check the account. The, whatever you wanna call it, the official press account said that the other day that Taylor Swift's WordPress was on website.

No.

[00:06:39] Nathan Wrigley: Oh,

[00:06:39] Sé Reed: Tyler Swift website was on WordPress. There we go.

[00:06:42] Marc Benzakein: I'm actually old enough, I'm actually old enough to remember when Motley Cruz started and I might have bought one or two of their albums.

[00:06:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, they were popular.

[00:06:53] Sé Reed: When you say album Mark?

[00:06:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, album.

[00:06:56] Marc Benzakein: That's okay. I bought one or two of their eight tracks.

All right. Oh, so

[00:07:01] Sé Reed: wait, really?

[00:07:02] Marc Benzakein: No, I did not.

[00:07:04] Sé Reed: Oh, okay. I was

[00:07:04] Marc Benzakein: like

[00:07:04] Sé Reed: that.

[00:07:05] Marc Benzakein: I was never into eight tracks. no.

[00:07:07] Sé Reed: How old are you, mark?

[00:07:09] Marc Benzakein: I'm old enough that we had an eight track player in the house and in one of our cars. But tell me, you

[00:07:14] Sé Reed: brought a cassette.

[00:07:16] Marc Benzakein: What's that?

[00:07:16] Nathan Wrigley: I had cassette players,

[00:07:17] Marc Benzakein: loads of, I made so many mix tapes.

It was ridiculous. Yeah,

[00:07:23] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Friends.

[00:07:26] Sé Reed: Motley Crewe is on Squarespace. Squarespace.

[00:07:28] Alex Standiford: I know, I was just figuring it out too.

[00:07:30] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, there we go. Oh, nevermind. They had to be on something.

[00:07:36] Marc Benzakein: I actually ran into, what's his face? The lead singer for Motley Crue, Nicky six at a, no, the lead singer was his name.

It wasn't a Brett something, I don't remember. Anyway, I, he was like giving away motorcycles at a casino in the middle of the hard rock casino in Oklahoma City or something like that. Yeah.

[00:07:58] Alex Standiford: He won

[00:07:58] Marc Benzakein: back and, and my daughter was with me and, I was like, oh my goodness. I like, I was such a big fan of theirs back in high school.

And she's oh, you, should go meet him. You should go. So she, was seven years old and she literally grabbed me by the hand and walked me around the hotel until we found the guy.

[00:08:18] Sé Reed: Wow.

[00:08:19] Marc Benzakein: I love it. She was like, apparently. And then she's I'm gonna tell him that you were a big fan of his during high school.

I said, just gonna make him feel old. Vince Neil,

[00:08:27] Alex Standiford: Yeah, apparently.

[00:08:27] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. Vince Neil, that's his name. Yeah. Apparently Vince's

[00:08:29] Sé Reed: such a big fan. You thought his name was something else?

[00:08:33] Marc Benzakein: No. I'm thinking of some other eighties big hair band. Okay.

[00:08:36] Alex Standiford: Big head.

[00:08:36] Sé Reed: You know what I realised y'all is the reason that Motley Crewe doesn't have a new album is because they're on Squarespace.

[00:08:43] Alex Standiford: That's the only conclusion I could draw. It's, a 4 0

[00:08:45] Marc Benzakein: 4. and they also, sound, terrible now, but

[00:08:51] Alex Standiford: Aw.

[00:08:51] Sé Reed: Yeah, you before they were so good.

[00:08:53] Marc Benzakein: They really were. They really were.

[00:08:56] Nathan Wrigley: No, you,

[00:08:57] Marc Benzakein: I can't put on like Dr. Feel good and not feel good listening to it.

[00:09:04] Nathan Wrigley: I'm gonna, I'm gonna rest.

I dunno how that goes. Nathan's please, no, I love all this stuff, but I am gonna wrestle back. so who came Only minute 12 called the dinosaurs, says Cameron, I have an interesting history fact for you, which my son, oh, this is why he wanted to change. This is so cool. This is a who came first thing.

Did you know that we are you know the great pyramids in Cairo that I've heard of them, I've heard of. Of them too. Yeah. and have you heard of Cleopatra?

[00:09:35] Marc Benzakein: I've

[00:09:35] Nathan Wrigley: heard of her. She was an Egyptian ruler during the sort of Roman period. So we are closer to Cleopatra than Cleopatra was to the building of the pyramids.

[00:09:49] Alex Standiford: Holy crap.

[00:09:50] Nathan Wrigley: That's how long I have readies were around. Isn't that mental that those pyramids were finished and the spark unknown time between that and her and also

[00:10:01] Sé Reed: mysterious. Isn't

[00:10:02] Nathan Wrigley: that

[00:10:02] Sé Reed: weird? They didn't know why they were there still.

[00:10:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. No, the aliens. Yeah. How? We're getting on. okay, so let's go round the houses and I introduce people's

[00:10:13] Sé Reed: wait, I can tie it back in again.

[00:10:15] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:10:15] Sé Reed: It's who built the pyramids? Who has commit access? They're very

[00:10:20] Nathan Wrigley: Oh,

very good

[00:10:24] Alex Standiford: buddy.

[00:10:25] Nathan Wrigley: I'm gonna go round the houses and introduce you one at a time. let's start with Mark. Oh, we haven't even

[00:10:29] Sé Reed: done that yet.

[00:10:30] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, wow. No, we haven't. Mark is the partnership manager for Maine, wp, amongst other things, his hobbies include, I nearly read that word wrong.

Photography, woodworking, car detail, detailing. Is that what it's called? Is that what you thought? That's

[00:10:44] Marc Benzakein: what, that's what, yeah. Okay.

[00:10:46] Nathan Wrigley: and

[00:10:46] Marc Benzakein: only 'cause I spent all day yesterday doing it.

[00:10:48] Nathan Wrigley: Doing it. Okay. So that's your hobby now? Yeah. he likes waking up at four in the morning for podcasts and repairing things with duct tape and chicken wire.

I appreciate it. thank you. And so that's our first guest. There's Mark. Thank you for joining us. And then, yay.

[00:11:02] Sé Reed: Mark.

[00:11:03] Nathan Wrigley: Here we have, say Reed, who's not been on the show before and say is the CEO and co-founder of the WP Open Community Collective, a member based organisation supporting open source contribu contributors through fellowships governance, infrastructure, and ecosystem advocacy.

She also founded in managers a web development consultant. He specialising in data and content management and brings deep roots in technology, civic and community engagement, journalism, and a small and small business and nonprofit development to her work building sustainable systems with clients and communities.

Lovely. And, the, bio that was sent to me by Alex Standerford over there, it goes as follows, honestly, use what we had last time. That'd be perfectly fine.

[00:11:48] Alex Standiford: For what it's worth. For what it's worth. I want you to know I jumped into this call and as, the counter was going down, I literally went into the last Google Doc and I pasted my note in just in case.

Oh. So

[00:11:58] Nathan Wrigley: Don, anyway, there we go. Alex, tell us about yourself. Just g go for it. you do your own bio. That Sure.

[00:12:04] Sé Reed: Who are you, Alex?

[00:12:06] Alex Standiford: Oh, crap. Now I gotta open the doc. no, I, my name's Alex. I've been in the WordPress by, Wait, who am I? I'm a WordPress developer, programmer in general.

I've been to the WordPress space for a while. mostly just lately, been working on, building, growing, and developing, hiring affiliates, which is my partnership management tool and plugin for WordPress. And yeah, so I'm mostly just here to talk about WordPress, talk about. Everything related to that.

[00:12:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:12:35] Sé Reed: What's the other part? If you're mostly here to talk about WordPress? It's

[00:12:38] Nathan Wrigley: gotta be Cleopatra look.

[00:12:39] Alex Standiford: Oh, it's got, it's always ai.

[00:12:41] Nathan Wrigley: Ai. Oh,

[00:12:41] Alex Standiford: okay. it's, always the AI room. Like it or not, it always comes up.

[00:12:46] Nathan Wrigley: I love this comment though. I think I dated Cleopatra back in the day. I think somebody's trying to, age themselves even more than you and me.

Mark, amazing. That,

[00:12:54] Alex Standiford: that, then they'll know when he, then maybe they can name a song by Melley Crewe.

[00:12:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so let's get the show. Shall we? Let's begin. I told you say 20 minutes. We're not quite as bad today. It's about 16 minutes in. We've not done too badly. so this is the website that we run, or that's the state that I run.

Wp builds.com. We push out content like this a couple of times a week, do a podcast episode on a Thursday, and then this thing, this week in watch press show. We do it live. And then I put it out as a podcast episode tomorrow. If you're interested in that and you wanna hear more from me, two emails a week, therefore will come your way.

That's it. I dunno. Anything else. And if you put your email address into this little box, that'll start happening and you can unsubscribe, if you like. So anyway, put, your, email address in there and get to issue. You're

[00:13:41] Sé Reed: over it. This subscribe,

[00:13:42] Nathan Wrigley: go over it. Yeah, that's right. this is the most recent set of episodes that we did actually.

And look, oh, it's this cheeky chap down here. There's, he's, it's

[00:13:53] Alex Standiford: like a bad penny.

[00:13:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. No, Good penny. But the most recent episode I did was with an magician who I met whilst I was at Word Camp age route. She's called Tess. And and we did a thing about ai. We really didn't talk much about WordPress, but the last couple of episodes have been about WordPress.

And so I did one with Katie Keith where she talked about her kids having a real scepticism about ai. And my kids are very similar to that. So we got into that whole subject. And then Tess is really interested in where AI meets the creative landscape. 'cause that's her whole thing, creativity, publishing, all of that.

And so it was a very interesting conversation. Got really, didn't stick to WordPress at all, but if you fancy listening to that, certainly go check it out. And, yeah, like I said, if you put your email in there, we will automatically send you those bits and pieces once a week.

[00:14:46] Sé Reed: Bibs and Bobs.

[00:14:48] Nathan Wrigley: Bibs and Bobs.

That's it, right? So here we go. Keep the comments coming. If I don't get to them, I apologise, but hopefully when these people start talking, I'll have a chance to look over them. So, there's a few bits of community news. There's like event news. There's the inevitable AI news and bits and pieces like that.

So let's start off here. This is a bit of a backpedal. last week or a couple of weeks ago, I can't remember. There was talk about phasing out, the sort of classic block. So it's not like you couldn't do anything with word pressing like legacy mode if you like. Like the classic editor wasn't the thing.

It was the idea of dropping the classic block. So you'd drop in the classic block and then you could do classic things inside the classic block. It would appear that. But that kind of got decided. I don't know if it was arbitrarily or what have you, but there was a load of community pushback. People said, Nope, we want it still.

In fact, one guy, chimed in and said something like, they've got thousands of websites with tens of thousands of different bits and pieces going on, and so they need it anyway. It's staying with no commitment to get rid of it in the near future. So if that troubled you, you can, you can rest easy.

That was reported.

[00:16:00] Sé Reed: there are so many websites that have updated their. their, their version and have not updated their content. I have many of them. it would take so much effort to go back. I know it wasn't gonna, it wasn't gonna get rid of it so that it would like, depreciate it.

It was just gonna take it out of the new, like a you couldn't add it anymore.

[00:16:24] Alex Standiford: Yeah.

[00:16:24] Sé Reed: But it's so wild that like, why wouldn't you just, you could just hide it, you know what I mean? You could make it less accessible without removing it, because there's so many, clients and users who are still using it.

It just seems so silly. I really like that quote that, Ray and the repository had pulled up there that, which was, make it obsolete by choice, I think not by force. Yeah.

[00:16:51] Nathan Wrigley: Something like that. yeah,

[00:16:53] Sé Reed: yeah. Just let it, it's not hurting anybody. Just let it die out slowly.

[00:16:57] Nathan Wrigley: that is basically where it's landed, I think. Yeah, exactly that. Yeah. Now if you are using it, you can carry on using it. And I can't actually find the bit of the article now. There was a bit where somebody had chimed in, in whatever space they were discussing it and, really painted a picture of this would be a real calamity for me.

they client websites all over the place. Da dah. Where is it? Where is it? Oh, here we go. Ja. Jason Lao, a senior web application specialist at the University of Wisconsin Madison, runs multiple WordPress multi-sites with hundreds of sites and thousands of classic editor blocks. for people like them at a university, obviously a lot of that stuff may be something that their, editors and their, all of the people that are contributing that, that's just their workflow, so they don't want it interrupting or messing with.

So anyway, that seems like a good call to me.

[00:17:51] Sé Reed: Stop messing with the workflow, please. That's,

[00:17:54] Alex Standiford: that's, I think

[00:17:55] Sé Reed: I do Enough going on.

[00:17:57] Alex Standiford: Yeah. My big, exactly. That's my big thing is here we are with everything happening and how much WordPress is, how much the web is shifting right now as a result of everything going on.

And I just can't help but wonder why are we, I, don't know why like this, why this, is the thing that, it just feels like a distraction almost.

[00:18:18] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.

[00:18:19] Alex Standiford: I, haven't thought about the class. I'm, a big Gutenberg proponent, big proponent of the guten. I have been for a long time, don't get me wrong, but I haven't even noticed that it exists.

I've completely forgotten that specific block exists. Yeah. And if it's that invisible to me already, I just feel like it's solved already.

[00:18:37] Nathan Wrigley: Why?

[00:18:38] Alex Standiford: Why bother?

[00:18:39] Nathan Wrigley: We like

[00:18:40] Sé Reed: to invent problems here.

[00:18:42] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah. we're gonna move it on a little bit, unless Mark's got anything to answer that manufac factual problems.

Do you have anything add?

[00:18:49] Marc Benzakein: No, I, agree with what Alex just said. I don't understand why someone got a bug up their butt to suddenly, remove it, but whatever.

[00:18:59] Nathan Wrigley: I've never heard that phrase. I'm gonna start using that all the time. There you go. Yeah. I love that. You're

[00:19:04] Marc Benzakein: welcome.

[00:19:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, thanks. Yeah, that's great.

I love what American contribute. In fact, I'm writing that down. That is the episode title. there

[00:19:13] Marc Benzakein: you go.

[00:19:17] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. With two T's. But, there's another phrase, maybe I'll ell it. I don't advance.

[00:19:27] Sé Reed: It's your show, man.

[00:19:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I, can, do what I like. the, repository features pretty heavily this week actually.

say obviously, sorry, not say, Ray Easy to We rhyme model. Yeah, you do rhyme. We do, obviously usually features heavily on this show, but. This is a particularly heavy way. I think we've got three or four pieces she wrote about Does so much.

[00:19:48] Sé Reed: She's such

[00:19:49] Alex Standiford: a fantastic curator.

[00:19:50] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, it, she brilliant. So good.

And honestly

[00:19:52] Sé Reed: on it,

[00:19:53] Nathan Wrigley: the amount of work which goes into a lot of those posts, you read them, but then if you, sometimes if you read them for a second time and you figure what, like how, many things did you have to read just to collect and coalesce that one sentence? We're very lucky to have her, right?

[00:20:09] Alex Standiford: Yeah. It's not just gathering. She's curating. Yeah, she's, it's she's so she's,

[00:20:13] Marc Benzakein: what's amazing? You know what's amazing about her is that you can like ping her in Slack and she responds like, it's like how does she have time to write these 14 page articles that are really detailed and really smart and you learn a tonne and still be able to interact with people.

I don't know how she does

[00:20:31] Nathan Wrigley: it. I bet she welcomes the procrastination. You're like, oh, thank goodness I can step away.

[00:20:35] Marc Benzakein: Maybe,

[00:20:36] Nathan Wrigley: she reads all like the court listener articles for the, whole WP engine and that must be like walking through molasses.

[00:20:44] Alex Standiford: Yeah.

[00:20:45] Nathan Wrigley: bless it.

[00:20:45] Sé Reed: Does the hard work for

[00:20:46] Nathan Wrigley: us.

Lemme

[00:20:48] Sé Reed: Yeah, exactly. exactly. Because I don't wanna read those.

[00:20:50] Nathan Wrigley: here she's, this time though talking about something, which release. So it's a film, it's a documentary, which is

[00:20:57] Sé Reed: wait. I really wanna make this segue. We can segue right into the code for the people by saying we've got speaking of bugs in our butts.

[00:21:07] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. There is the segue

[00:21:11] Marc Benzakein: people. I actually thought the, I actually thought the same thing. Say so I'm glad you said it.

[00:21:16] Nathan Wrigley: so, I haven't seen it yet. I'll give you, I'll be on it. I think it's, what is it, 19 minutes long and, tacho and I had a little toing and froing about it. and I, just literally haven't had a chance to watch it, but I know that, literally I went, like clicked onto minute six and minute eight and just see.

And I know that, I know that Anne McCarthy's in it. I know that Mathias is in it. Mary Hubbard is in it. Matt Mullenweg is in it. There's maybe some more people. It more, is there more than that? But, oh yeah,

[00:21:51] Sé Reed: there's a couple other folks in there. Yeah.

[00:21:53] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. but I haven't seen it yet. But it's like championing the idea of open source and this sort of thing that you see in the wider sort of landscape.

not connected with WordPress people champion, championing open source. And one of those things like you won't miss it until it's gone. And when it's finally gone and the, giant corporate entities have taken over the internet, it's only at that point that you will realise what was the folly of letting all of that go.

apparently the project, if you scroll right to the bottom of this piece, apparently it was, it, began like the production of it began three years ago or something. So it's been in going for a long, time. And in the article somewhere, I dunno who it was, but somebody, maybe it was Matt said that a few of the bits are now in it, that they're not quite as up to date.

So I think Matt was complaining about AI being closed source and since then some, of the AI models have become, open source and what have you. But, not having seen it, I can't really comment on it, but I don't know if you, any of you three saw it or had any thoughts if you did drop

[00:22:58] Sé Reed: them out.

I'm gonna need, I'm gonna need to sit down, like I'm gonna need to make that a thing. if I'm gonna watch that I need like maybe a tranquilliser or two. Yeah. Okay. I think

[00:23:09] Marc Benzakein: I thought you

[00:23:09] Sé Reed: were gonna say have a watch. It's gonna be party. I dunno if I can do it a watch

[00:23:13] Marc Benzakein: party.

[00:23:13] Alex Standiford: Yeah. We

[00:23:14] Sé Reed: should have a watch party so that I can get it all out while it's happening.

I think

[00:23:20] Alex Standiford: in a safe

[00:23:20] Marc Benzakein: space, I think we could totally, we could have a watch party and totally Ms P three K, it, which would be kind,

[00:23:27] Sé Reed: that would be

[00:23:27] Alex Standiford: so fun. That would be

[00:23:29] Marc Benzakein: so

[00:23:29] Sé Reed: fun. We that with water cooler. I think that would be,

[00:23:32] Marc Benzakein: be

[00:23:33] Nathan Wrigley: that whole thing. The whole thing would be over during less time than it took us to get in the introduction for this podcast.

I

[00:23:40] Marc Benzakein: mean, it might get us all banned from WordPress, but I don't think any of us are. Oh, wait, say has that happened to you? Do you know anyone?

[00:23:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's, you can't have it twice. that's great. Oh, you

[00:23:53] Sé Reed: can, oh,

[00:23:53] Nathan Wrigley: you can, no. at time it's called the same.

[00:23:58] Marc Benzakein: yeah,

[00:23:58] Nathan Wrigley: it's pointing to this website, by the way.

it's called code for the people.com and, it's on YouTube, and it's, it, here it is, going, is it

[00:24:10] Alex Standiford: being distributed anywhere else other than YouTube? Do we know?

[00:24:13] Nathan Wrigley: I don't know.

[00:24:14] Alex Standiford: I was,

[00:24:14] Nathan Wrigley: they did it, okay. There's a bit of context. It was released, obviously the, person that made it, the director that made it is obviously, proud of their work and all of that kind of stuff, and they got a, I don't know if it was done in the automatic offices.

I know they have an automatic office in New York, and it was done in New York, so I wondered if it was maybe the same place, but, it got like a, an official announcement. And I think a few of the journalists outside of the WordPress space, I think a few of those sort of people were invited.

And there was a few sort of celebrities and things like that, that came. it's that

[00:24:49] Sé Reed: the premier was at the automatic space? Yes.

[00:24:51] Nathan Wrigley: Was it? Okay. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. So there was that beyond, whether it's appearing in, as like a preamble to, I don't know, films in theatres and things. I genuinely don't know.

Yeah. and

[00:25:03] Sé Reed: Neil Dash was at the, I was at the premier.

[00:25:06] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, there you go. that calibre.

[00:25:08] Sé Reed: Yeah. on the panel, which I thought was really interesting.

[00:25:10] Nathan Wrigley: Oh,

[00:25:10] Sé Reed: interesting. I don't, I'm trying not to be, judge it, ahead of time because I obviously, maybe not obviously, but I care deeply about the open web and, open source in general.

So it's so funny with all of the various issues that we've had, it's like we're aligned and then except not, Uhhuh. So I don't, I'm, I want this to be. Like what it could be. I worry that it is a bid to, has, shifted or morphed, let's say into something that is more of a propaganda piece, but

[00:25:47] Nathan Wrigley: propaganda.

yeah, I suppose maybe that's why Ray put that bit in at the very end, about the fact that it had been in the making since before all of that stuff had started. And with the bit that you just said there, say it's totally all right, isn't it? in the same sense that you and I can agree that we ought to have democracy, but we don't have to agree on every single bit of the dim the democratic process.

You might be on the left, I might be on the right, I might be in the middle. You might be on the right. We, we can all agree that open source is a thing and then totally vehemently disagree about the bits and pieces in, in, in a smaller community. so I

[00:26:27] Marc Benzakein: think, that's what democracy is, right?

[00:26:29] Nathan Wrigley: Right,

[00:26:30] Marc Benzakein: that's, the definition. So

[00:26:32] Sé Reed: yeah. It only becomes a problem when the power imbalance skews that because, not a democracy. Yeah. So that's the real problem, right? Like we're all expecting the democracy, we're all making analogies about a democracy. Yet that's not what we're actually working within in our WordPress world.

It's not actually a democracy, has, as has been noted many times by project leadership. So that means that if you do disagree, you are, subject to. Punishment.

[00:27:08] Alex Standiford: however,

[00:27:08] Marc Benzakein: consequences.

[00:27:09] Alex Standiford: Consequences.

[00:27:10] Sé Reed: Consequences. Consequences. Yeah. That's the word I was looking for. Yeah.

[00:27:14] Marc Benzakein: Consequences. it's, early there.

[00:27:16] Alex Standiford: for me though, the big it's early there. The big thing for me though is regardless of what it is, the open web is still really important. It's been, it's constantly under pressure to be closed up more and more, by people with a lot of resources and a lot of things. And regardless of my opinion of, the dynamics behind WordPress and things like that, somebody who's even remotely in my corner to try to help and make sure that the web does stay as open as possible, I'm going to take that until the very fact that is not the case.

so I'm just taking what I can get when I can get it with that, I

[00:27:52] Sé Reed: support that.

[00:27:53] Nathan Wrigley: I am, I think it, okay, so if, all something like my does is alert people of my kids' generation that there is such a thing as open source, that's a bit of a win. Yeah, exactly. I, think that when you and I started on the web, I'm gonna sweep us all up in that, but but that was a real thing.

there was just loads of openness. Like all the les were open, HS didn't exist yet, It defaulted to really

[00:28:19] Sé Reed: open.

[00:28:19] Nathan Wrigley: And then now so open we've collapsed into convenience. everything's convenient and done for us, but entirely closed. Yeah. I think my kids don't have even a clue that at some point they might need to own their data at some point they might make, they might regret having for 20 years put all of their stuff into this silos, assuming it would be there forever and ever are men and then it just goes away because I don't know, some stock market crashes.

So

[00:28:48] Sé Reed: those people, those young kids have not, don't know what it feels like to lose your MySpace account.

[00:28:53] Alex Standiford: They

[00:28:54] Sé Reed: don't know that pain.

[00:28:55] Marc Benzakein: That's true.

[00:28:56] Alex Standiford: And I'll have, you

[00:28:57] Sé Reed: know, and they probably haven't had their Facebooks hacked and lost all their pictures in their trip to Africa in 2008.

[00:29:02] Alex Standiford: right,

[00:29:04] Sé Reed: and

[00:29:05] Alex Standiford: I back up everything. Those

[00:29:06] Marc Benzakein: are, those are oddly specific examples. Yeah.

[00:29:08] Sé Reed: No dunno.

[00:29:09] Alex Standiford: No kidding.

[00:29:10] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, Mark's lights always go out.

[00:29:11] Marc Benzakein: Look, I, gotta go dance.

[00:29:14] Nathan Wrigley: We get this ghostly mark for a few moments when he goes and waves his hand at the light sensor and then comes back. It's brilliant. we've got a few comments, so let's talk about that.

firstly, Cameron is saying, didn't somebody do a talk about this at W-P-L-D-N recently, Cameron did a talk at W-P-L-D-N recently, so I apologise, Cameron, I wasn't there. I missed that one. So I apologise. You missed

[00:29:35] Alex Standiford: London.

[00:29:36] Nathan Wrigley: I, I, so I normally go, I've been like, for more or less every single one. And I, didn't make it to that one.

It's just I ran it because

[00:29:42] Alex Standiford: it

[00:29:42] Sé Reed: was hot

[00:29:43] Alex Standiford: of all, the ones to miss. It's just,

[00:29:45] Nathan Wrigley: we had to cancel the most recent one because of how it was Yeah, it was hot. The triple really public transport network. It was the public transport networks were basically reporting that a lot of stuff wouldn't work and it turned out to be the right decision.

A lot of people could have made it in, but a lot of people wouldn't have got home. Which would've been a bit of a nightmare. Anyway. A party. Thank you. Party. We're a party. Party. Yeah. That's depending how you look at it.

[00:30:08] Alex Standiford: Oh, darn. I'm stuck

[00:30:09] Nathan Wrigley: with

[00:30:09] Alex Standiford: my WordPress

for an extra day.

[00:30:11] Nathan Wrigley: Andrew Palmer is joining us and he says, according to WP Umbrella, so this is back to the classic editor, examination of sites 23%. Still use the classic editor, so the classic editor, I'm guessing, as opposed to the classic block, which is similar, but not quite the same. I'm guessing. This is Kyle. Hello Kyle. good morning. From a humid Richmond, Virginia. Wouldn't it be great if your town was actually called Humid Virginia?

I think that would be, I think that would be, there's a

[00:30:40] Alex Standiford: town in Michigan called Hell.

[00:30:41] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, is there? Yeah, there's a town in, in, I think it's Somerset, here called Chip Shop, which I think is great.

[00:30:49] Sé Reed: Oh, Patricia's on

[00:30:50] Nathan Wrigley: Hi. Oh, I hope. Yeah. Patricia, I forgot to say hello. She's up there somewhere. There's, Phillip as well has joined us.

Thank you. and Andrew says, I guess talking about the video, the code for the people video says basically it's all mathematicians, which is a misstep for sure. I'm

[00:31:09] Alex Standiford: curious. Yeah. For what it's worth, like people outside of WordPress won't even know that or wouldn't necessarily care. We care because we know they're like,

[00:31:16] Sé Reed: it's the open web and you should, but a person who make sure that everyone's involved.

[00:31:20] Alex Standiford: And

[00:31:20] Sé Reed: then they're like, here's our closed network.

[00:31:23] Alex Standiford: Sure. But we're literally introducing to a lot like that video. I, imagine think of about the broader audience. They don't even know about the concept of what an open web even is. Like they probably don't,

[00:31:33] Marc Benzakein: and they don't know about the politics.

this is definitely us, shooting the messenger when the

[00:31:38] Sé Reed: message may be actually good, that if they don't know about the politics, they don't know about the dimensions, and that part is, none of that is disclosed. Then they're like, oh, Matt Mullenweg is such a cool dude. Yeah, but he's saving the open web.

Oh look, he must not do anything problematic whatsoever.

[00:31:54] Alex Standiford: Yeah, I get that. I get that.

[00:31:58] Sé Reed: it's alright. It's fine. I don't care.

[00:32:00] Nathan Wrigley: Jimmy.

[00:32:01] Sé Reed: I'm over it.

[00:32:02] Nathan Wrigley: He's

[00:32:03] Marc Benzakein: yeah.

[00:32:04] Nathan Wrigley: hello Jimmy.

[00:32:04] Sé Reed: Totally over it.

[00:32:06] Nathan Wrigley: Who else have we got? All of Arizona has towns called named Hot. Really? Is that a thing? nomad Skateboarding says back to the video, my only real critique of code for the poetry is the emphasis on open source AI when a HC automatic perhaps has been pushing open ai, et cetera.

Okay. So

[00:32:28] Sé Reed: open AI as opposed to open source ai.

[00:32:31] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So like the message for a long time has been just get the ai, or at least it felt get the AI wherever you can find it and bind it into WordPress. And now maybe we've reached a mo a moment where we're rethinking that as well, I know Alex is a big proponent of ai, so maybe, you're not bothered about that. Not, to being open, source.

[00:32:54] Alex Standiford: I just think that you gotta use whatever's available to you at the time. The best thing and open source.

[00:32:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:32:58] Alex Standiford: Yeah. And open source is a little behind.

[00:33:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay.

[00:33:01] Alex Standiford: it's, it'll catch up eventually.

there's a reason I think that the way that they built the AI integration into WordPress is really wise, because we will be able to now start setting up generic models that are open source, that are controlled, but we gotta use what's accessible to most of the people right now, which isn't necessarily a custom AI model.

hosting companies and stuff like that, I'm sure are, all eating that stuff up. You know what I mean? They're trying to figure out ways to run local model, run these open source models on their hosting platforms. It won't be long before I, I half expect that in not too, not too distant of a future.

There's gonna be a world where WordPress hosting literally just includes an AI model and you just, you're, you know what I mean? And it's a light enough model that it can do most of the stuff that you need it to do. And then if you need something higher end, you're paying for per token.

[00:33:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:33:48] Alex Standiford: it's, coming.

It's just not there yet.

[00:33:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Okay. so let's pivot a little bit. We're still on, on the repository actually, but not Ray, what the heck? this is Matt Cromwell.

[00:34:00] Alex Standiford: oh,

[00:34:01] Nathan Wrigley: Matt's been on this show and podcast that I do and things like, lovely person. So he's, he's been, allowed, what's he put, I can't remember what she calls it when she allows somebody else to write

[00:34:15] Sé Reed: guest opinion, something like

[00:34:16] Nathan Wrigley: that.

Yeah. Opinion. Something like, like that. I can't remember. But

[00:34:19] Sé Reed: anyway, he did a very similar talk to this at Press Comp. This is the, the topic of his

[00:34:28] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. it's certainly in his wheelhouse. So he's got his, what's it called? Roots and Roots. Roots.

[00:34:34] Alex Standiford: Yeah.

[00:34:34] Nathan Wrigley: Roots and, oh, I'm so sorry, Matt.

It's gone out. Roots and

[00:34:37] Alex Standiford: Fruits.

[00:34:38] Nathan Wrigley: There you go. Roots and fruits. Gotcha. which is a bit like a consult, a consultancy service, trying to help WordPress businesses weather the storm And Co did it,

[00:34:48] Alex Standiford: by the way.

[00:34:49] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, did you, Yeah.

[00:34:50] Alex Standiford: Yeah. I was one of his, I was one of the original ones. It was awesome.

Okay. Highly recommend it.

[00:34:54] Nathan Wrigley: Alright,

[00:34:55] Sé Reed: Matt Cromwell has a lot of WordPress experience, but specifically, like you said, this is in his wheelhouse. He has been literally not just his own plugin, but, at Liquid Web, like his own plugin with Forever with wp, but at Liquid Web, they managed a lot of

Different plugins, but also he's just been paying attention for a long time, and talking to people. So he's bringing his own experience, but also the, I guess the lived experience of the WordPress, Tail The tale of WordPress. yeah. The WordPress history, Yeah. He's really been around and really been, paying attention.

So I think he's definitely,

[00:35:35] Alex Standiford: yeah,

[00:35:36] Sé Reed: he's the right person to listen to.

[00:35:38] Alex Standiford: Yeah. We talked about this topic a lot. What?

[00:35:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. it's, the topic of our time, isn't it really? so this is on the repository, but Matt wrote it, it's called our declining plugin cells. The canary in WordPress is coal mines.

I hope we all understand what that means, and, paint AI into the mix and all of that and market share declining and things like that. Basically, does everybody need to worry? And I, don't think Matt's whole argument is no, nobody, everybody can just stop worrying. Everything's gonna be fine.

No, that's really not what he's saying. it's more that just stop, have a look at your business and think about it. And, it felt like the thrust of his argument is if you have a, let's say you've got a plugin business and your plugin business does this tiny thing. Yep. let's say, oh, I don't know, it connects, it

[00:36:26] Alex Standiford: adds a date to your footer.

[00:36:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. something like that. Some teeny tiny little thing. Then yes, you are probably gonna have to have a bit of a rethink. Whereas if you've got something which is a little bit more encompassing, all surrounding I don't know, an LLLM plugin Or a form plugin or something where there's real value, people can't just swap it out with a bit of vibe, coding in a heartbeat.

[00:36:50] Alex Standiford: Yeah.

[00:36:50] Nathan Wrigley: Building what you've built and provided for them is really essential to their business, essentially. I think that's what he's saying you need to be doing. and, and that. Sorry, I'll just finish off. Quickly. Go. no, please. I'm sorry. Then leans into a few of the bits and pieces we'll discover later.

Not everybody I think will agree with Matt because they've voted with their plugin business and shot it down, but we'll come back to that a little bit later. Alex, I think you were chiming in. Y

[00:37:17] Alex Standiford: yeah, sorry, I kept trying to mess off there. Okay. this is something that's particularly close to me 'cause I launched Siren, right as AI was coming in.

I came into full swing as I was, launching the free version on the.org repository, which, literally just came out last month. So like, all of this is relevant to me. and the biggest thing that I've noticed in my own usage, that I'm attributing for the plugin sales, it is AI just because it's, tearing down a lot of those walls, like what you're talking about with simpler, simpler plugins can just be put together with an agent.

and then also I find in my own personal workflows, I am choosing WordPress more for more specific things. Like before a, before I, whenever I was actually writing the code myself, I was, I leaned pretty heavily on WordPress 'cause it already had a lot of stuff in place that just kinda gave me shortcuts, to be able to produce and develop things faster that isn't really the case anymore.

Okay. with, Because AI allows me to do that. So now the question becomes does it actually make sense to belong in WordPress? So because of that, I find my relationship in working with WordPress a lot more fluid than it used to be. And I think that the walled garden of WordPress being this one single thing where you're in WordPress, where you're not working in WordPress is gone.

And we're just trying to understand what that means. So that's, my, my, the biggest thing that I wanted to say related to this is like all of the consequences of that is a lot of the products that we see where it's like solution specifically for WordPress, in some cases are gonna probably be feeling the effects of that.

For example, with Siren, one of the big things that I ended up doing, and I had been doing, I've been working on since the beginning, I always wanted to do it, but I really aggressively did it faster, is I started working on creating a SaaS version, A self-hosted, a hosted version that isn't on WordPress by design.

Now the WordPress version still exists in the same way, but the non WordPress version can now run on its own server so that it can connect to other things. And it's just generally trying to be built to be a little more AI friendly. Okay. so that's just my example of what I mean on I think to put some application to what Matt's talking about in, there, it's I looked at my business, I thought about it, I saw where AI is impacting things. I saw how it's impacting WordPress, and I didn't say no to WordPress. I still think WordPress is an excellent distribution channel. I just don't think it can be my whole business anymore.

[00:39:48] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you, Alex. That was brilliant. That was really interesting. The, I'm gonna summarise with Matt's own summary. He's basically saying that if you are in the WordPress business and everything is not going gangbusters, here's his sort of four top tips, I guess to, to right the ship, or what he would do if you wanna survive and thrive.

Number one, own more of your own customer and get closer to their revenue. Number two, focus your marketing efforts on discoverability. number three, double down on what isn't a commodity, and fix your pricing. And obviously it goes without saying. If you are able to see the screen, there's more information about that.

But the blog post is on the repository and it's called R Declining Plugin Sales, the Canary in WordPresses Coal Mine. as always, every link that we mentioned today, I'll get put into that show notes thing tomorrow. So if you wanna quick and easy, just go to the repository, email and you'll be able to click on that link there.

Anybody else before we press

[00:40:48] Sé Reed: on? Yeah. I wanted to say one thing about this is that I've, obviously I've, been using WordPress for a long time. I know about, all the various plugins. I've also, used to build my own things back before all the plugins were a thing. and I've been experimenting with AI and, WordPress sites, and I was asking it for solutions and it's hold on, let me build you, this whole thing.

Let's get into your command line. And it's like taking it to this level. And I was like, whoa, Can't you just tell me to instal a plugin? Like, why? It was like literally like building its own stuff. Which I know there were, plugins for. So it's the. What I've encountered is that it makes things, sure you're vibe coding stuff and you're popping things in there, but it makes things way more complicated for a

[00:41:37] Nathan Wrigley: Okay,

[00:41:38] Sé Reed: a user as opposed they're like, now they're like, building code and doing all this stuff, which seems a lot, which is and seems to them, I'm sure a lot more intimidating than just saying, Hey, go get, go download this plugin and then fill out some fields.

so almost it, seems to me that almost that ai, especially people are asking AI questions about WordPress, the answers that they're gonna get are not the easier answers. They are the, the legacy of WordPress on the web, right? So there's all the questions about, security that's existed for, two decades or whatever.

There's, everyone's always putting all their problems with WordPress on the internet and there's, a million stack exchanges about how to solve things with code that are plugins. So I feel like the AI is really skewed towards being a developer and not being a user. And I think that is complicated for pe general users who are trying to use WordPress.

Might be turned off by that because the easy part of plugins is not really discussed. It didn't really talk about it unless you're asking, tell me about some plugins. So you just ask it to solve a problem. It's gonna just solve it with code as opposed to solving it with a plugin.

[00:43:00] Alex Standiford: right. Unless the problem is, I wanna have a blog.

Because in that case, it'll say, oh, just use WordPress. That and I

[00:43:07] Sé Reed: Yeah. Who's saying?

[00:43:07] Alex Standiford: That's the side effect of it, though.

[00:43:09] Nathan Wrigley: I, I have a, query about that then. So that's an interesting insight that I've never had before. So let's say in, let's imagine a future in which, so let me rewind, start again.

the reason I think WordPress, one of the reasons, how many times can I start this, by the way, the, one of the reasons WordPress is popular, your show. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Ai, how many times did Nathan start this sentence? The, one of the reasons WordPress is popular is because this, we have this plugin architecture where anybody who was inexperience could go and Google, I need the answer.

I need a solution for that tiny thing. And, I've got the confidence to instal that because I know that it's this tiny thing and it's not gonna really disrupt too much of my website. Now, if we map into the future that all of those things go out of existence, these utility plugins disappear, then we are we are making it incumbent upon everybody to, if it's simple, use AI for it.

If it's not simple, buy it like an LMS or whatever Matt's proposing. But that's a funny ground because if we, obliterate that bit where you can just go and find the prebuilt solution by somebody, and they've all gone out of business, I'm doing air quotes, then we out a part of the community, which I think is the very reason it, it took off so well.

I

[00:44:29] Sé Reed: agree.

[00:44:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Interesting. Okay.

[00:44:32] Alex Standiford: Yeah, I just, I don't know. I just wonder, I think a lot about. Tooling that could exist to better direct AI is probably gonna be something that replaces a lot of it. Oh, okay. Okay. So something that comes to mind for me a lot is Ollie, they just released a really cool, set of AI tooling.

[00:44:50] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that

[00:44:50] Alex Standiford: is cool. yeah, I ac I have something in Siren that allows you to be able to have a conversation with the AI agent on WordPress. Okay. To figure out what kind of affiliate programme you wanna run.

[00:44:59] Nathan Wrigley: So it's a user interface problem at the minute because we don't have tools which make it drop dead.

Okay.

[00:45:05] Alex Standiford: There's entire swats of UI and UX that just disappears because the chat box can replace it.

[00:45:11] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:45:11] Alex Standiford: And we're just still figuring out what that is.

[00:45:13] Nathan Wrigley: There's a few comments to do with somebody called Alex and I don't, I can't see an Alex in the comment. So who's, Alex that maybe that'll be what this episode is called.

oh. You Alex, I was looking in the comment, it must be an Alex in the comment, of course it's you. Of course it's you. so here we go. So a comment then directed at you, Alex. Gosh, that's so silly of me. Respectfully disagree, Alex. I dunno what he was disagreeing about. It's probably about five minutes ago this dropped in.

We don't have to use the closed big tech tools. That's how we got here in the first place. I can't think what you said that

[00:45:47] Sé Reed: Alex was saying. Use what you got.

[00:45:50] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. Interesting. and great perspective Alex as Oh, so commentary, but lovely bit of backslapping there. That's very nice indeed.

Okay. So with all of that said, so Matt is cautioning, have a look at everything. Retool your business. Start to think the landscape is changing. If you don't move with the way the landscape is changing, you probably are gonna be in trouble. here's somebody calling it a day. this is DLX plugins, sorry, DLX plugins.

I don't, I've not used any of your plugins speak for any of that, but, they have a blog post entitled Moving Forwards, the Closure of DLX Plugins and why I'm open sourcing the code. So I'll just read a little bit at the beginning. For context, effective October the first 2026 D-D-D-L-X plugins will close its shop ending, its commercial operations.

As this chapter ends, I'm taking steps to ensure that users are fully supported and the software can live on. So first of all, I should encourage users of their plugins to scroll down because they go into all of the things that they're doing to make sure that they're what a good custodian of these projects, basically.

Yeah. Making sure that they're open source as opposed to just going, that's the end of that close off shop. I'm gonna open something else.

[00:47:05] Alex Standiford: one of, one of their tools is called Hey to-dos, which is a Todoist Yeah. Integration with Gravity Forms. Yeah. And I'm a huge fan of both of those tools, I'm excited that it's being open sourced, but this is an example of of what I was talking about.

If you look at some of his tools, moderate and clean up comments directly on the front end. Creating a specific styled block quote. These are very, hyper specific solutions.

[00:47:30] Nathan Wrigley: Right.

[00:47:31] Alex Standiford: To a problem that if you're working with an AI agent to build your theme or something on WordPress even, it would just do it.

[00:47:39] Nathan Wrigley: It's such a change in landscape, isn't it? Because

[00:47:42] Alex Standiford: Yeah.

[00:47:42] Nathan Wrigley: That genuinely was the work of a developer.

[00:47:45] Alex Standiford: Yeah.

[00:47:45] Nathan Wrigley: And now it's the work of a sentence

[00:47:47] Alex Standiford: Yeah, exactly.

[00:47:47] Nathan Wrigley: Spoken into Exactly. Into a microphone. Exactly. It seems insane.

[00:47:50] Alex Standiford: I want my blog quote to look exactly like

[00:47:51] Nathan Wrigley: this. so I'll just, the sort of sad story goes a bit like this.

WordPress plugin building WordPress plugins has been the joy of my life. I hope that I can continue to do it in some form. The ecosystem around plugins like mine has shifted considerably over the years. Many extensions have seen declines in their instal base and sales. And this is the bit, as an indie developer, running a standalone plugin shop is very expensive to maintain.

And I've been operating in the red now for some time, to better align my resources. I've made strategic decision to close DLX plugins entirely whilst focusing on full-time employment consulting and enterprise WordPress engineering solutions. So this is the exact person I think that Matt in this article was saying was in danger.

Matt, pretty perfectly to that. Ronald is the author of this Ronald, who, I don't know how to say that. Ika. Sorry, Ronald. it like, you don't need this coming outta my mouth, but here it comes. Anyway, I hope it goes well. I hope whatever the pivot is gonna work for you. but it's sad.

I suspect we're gonna get a lot more of this.

[00:49:00] Marc Benzakein: and, for those who do have to go through this, and I've been through it myself, and I think he's handling it exactly the right way.

[00:49:08] Nathan Wrigley: Nice.

[00:49:09] Marc Benzakein: By, I, can tell you from our experience, we were very transparent when we shut down Server press. We offered support for everybody, that had licences, even a year later, if they had just bought it yesterday, we offered support all the way through the end of their term, or we offered refunds if they wanted them.

and that's, he's doing everything that he can within his power, and he is being very transparent. And I can tell you that when we shut down, the community was largely, we didn't have any complaints actually. So it was like unanimously supportive and, and I feel like he's handling it exactly the right way.

And I think people will be supportive, but it is going to get frustrating for the community because I do think that more and more of this type of thing is going to happen.

[00:49:55] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, there's another thing that I never even thought about Mark. Like, how does that impact all of us? Like, how angry as a collective community do we start to become when Oh, that's gone now, has it?

Oh, that's gone.

[00:50:09] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. So going back to the, going back to the previous article, which I'm not sure that Matt really answered the question of if it's the canary in the coal mine.

[00:50:18] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:50:19] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. but, his, points are valid, but I think it's, it may become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don't think it's the canary in the, coal mine.

But once it starts happening more and more, I do think that the faith and, Belief that people have in WordPress is going to wane just because they're gonna get tired of the plugin that they had before going away.

[00:50:48] Nathan Wrigley: Oh,

[00:50:48] Marc Benzakein: yeah. that,

[00:50:49] Nathan Wrigley: that'll really annoy people.

[00:50:51] Marc Benzakein: Yeah, I think, yeah.

[00:50:52] Alex Standiford: But I also think that, on the topic of what, what say was talking about a lack of recommend, like it didn't recommend a plugin or anything like that, is a discoverability problem.

That's a discovery problem. Like, she was saying. right now we have a search engine that is searching the open plugins on wordpress.org. What we don't have is a way for an AI agent to query that using like an MCP server or something more modern or, and they're eventually, hopefully sometime not too distant, the future, we'll have a more open web friendly way to connect dynamically to websites to be able to get information from them agently.

But those things are still early and I'm just hoping that as we figure out that transition, that stuff survives, Okay. Do you know what I mean?

[00:51:41] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, yeah.

[00:51:41] Alex Standiford: Because there is a scenario where let's say, is talking about where it does say, oh, hey, yeah, you can do, we can build this code. But if you're, I know you're not a developer 'cause I have history on you 'cause we've had several conversations in the past and I know that you've used WordPress.

I'm gonna go ahead and look and see if there's any WordPress solutions to see if we can just stack on top of your current stack. and I will say

[00:52:04] Sé Reed: it doesn say that it's crazy.

[00:52:06] Alex Standiford: yeah, but I'm wondering, but I think it would eventually like, it, 'cause Azure you're working with an agent.

I don't know how long you've worked with it, so I could be wrong and I apologise if I'm making assumptions here, but

[00:52:17] Sé Reed: since it started, I'm a, I was

[00:52:19] Alex Standiford: first, okay. Okay. I'm sorry. I've

[00:52:21] Sé Reed: signing up.

[00:52:21] Alex Standiford: I've

[00:52:22] Sé Reed: signing up since the beginning.

[00:52:24] Alex Standiford: I, I'm sorry. What I mean is I guess in my case, my experience with it has been, it learns my history.

It has some context on previous conversations with that memory and it is making recommendations that are tailored to me. But the question, maybe that's

[00:52:38] Sé Reed: why it told me to code it. Maybe because I don't ask it for plugins or Oh, interesting. Yeah. I do ask it for code. Yeah. I do coding with it.

So maybe it's here's some more code.

[00:52:47] Alex Standiford: Yeah. Which is still problematic, but, it's like we've created, anyway, that's a whole tangent, but I don't know. I think that plugin discoverability is an important aspect of all of this though, is what I'm

[00:52:59] Sé Reed: trying. I think plugin discoverability has been a ongoing problem right now.

There's, now there's just, another layer in between that person and the plugins that, there were already layers of, the repo itself and what's featured versus, even that search in the repo has been. Less than ideal for a very long time. so you're gonna get things that people have pulled up because they wrote that in their content versus, or it's only in the title.

Like it's, not been easy,

[00:53:32] Alex Standiford: or your plugin doesn't show up in a search result because you have good documentation and therefore you don't get support tickets. Support tickets are a factor to, in, in search, right? Number of support tickets is a factor in search. So like Siren, which I just added, had zero support tickets because everybody just goes to siren.com and opens up the chat bubble there to talk to me instead, which I'm fine with.

It's a good experience for them, but it does penalise me indirectly from a

[00:53:58] Sé Reed: search

[00:53:58] Alex Standiford: perspective.

[00:53:59] Sé Reed: Wait, so you need to just tell your AI to log every single one of those as a an FAQ post. Here's the problem. Here was the solution. That's right.

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

[00:54:09] Sé Reed: Every single one of its conversations is being published onto the web.

Then you're creating that trail.

[00:54:14] Alex Standiford: I have. You're welcome.

[00:54:16] Sé Reed: Got, yeah.

[00:54:17] Alex Standiford: I'm still, Thank you. I'm thinking about solutions to that problem, but, yeah, that is, but it's, just I don't know. It's crazy, but, I know that's put

[00:54:27] Nathan Wrigley: up. Sorry.

[00:54:28] Alex Standiford: Let's move on. Sorry.

[00:54:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, no, it's okay. It's okay.

what is I, Jimmy's comment? Jimmy, is that Jimmy? That's Jimmy. Jimmy. the DLX plugins decision reminds him a bit that, core Framework has been doing not so long ago. Let's hope not everyone take the same decision. He says it would be sad for the, and it's truncated WP Community and World.

although,

[00:54:51] Sé Reed: I'm confused

[00:54:52] Nathan Wrigley: by. By that comment.

[00:54:56] Sé Reed: Yeah. Because, DLX plugins closed, right? Did the core framework, are we talking about the core framework of WordPress, or are we talking about is core

[00:55:05] Nathan Wrigley: framework? Yeah, I'm not entirely

[00:55:06] Sé Reed: sure. Framework.

[00:55:07] Nathan Wrigley: If you've got more help, help say out, say what?

[00:55:10] Sé Reed: Help me out because I was like, the core framework hasn't closed.

[00:55:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:55:13] Sé Reed: If we're talking about, core WordPress

[00:55:15] Nathan Wrigley: and then here we go. I think many people are also creating their own plugins that are hyperfocused on just what they need. Yeah. That I think is what we've come to here as well.

This is the result of vi this is the result of vibe coding plugins. Maybe that's set to, continue and then we're back with Jimmy. And to be honest, doing it this way by being so open deserves a lot of respect. We're talking about DLX, the way it's closing there, I'm guessing. And then final comment at the moment is Andrew again.

Andrew Palmer, elegant marketplace, which you, Andrew, I know used to be the owner of, but I no longer is also closing down in September as well in motion. Just do not think it's worth having a plugin store. Interesting. I think you meant,

[00:55:58] Sé Reed: in fact, I did not remember that. In motion owned. Elegant. Oh,

[00:56:02] Nathan Wrigley: no.

In motion. Oh, okay.

[00:56:03] Sé Reed: I do not remember that at all.

[00:56:05] Nathan Wrigley: So

[00:56:05] Marc Benzakein: this actually didn't we have, last time I was on the show, we talked about whether or not web hosting companies should own plugins and Yeah. Here's an example.

[00:56:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:56:15] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.

[00:56:16] Nathan Wrigley: Core framework. Oh, okay. Core framework. The company has made it open source now for almost the same.

got it. Can, I can't believe we're still on the repository. I don't think, have we done apart from the D LX one? We haven't done anything outside of the repository. Like I said's I back to the repository. It's all back.

[00:56:40] Sé Reed: Just repository. Fan show.

[00:56:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's it. She's so good. so the way

[00:56:44] Alex Standiford: $15 a month and you get an you assay

[00:56:47] Nathan Wrigley: to the repository.

[00:56:49] Sé Reed: I would like to point out that this is what most of the major news media in, in America at least does also. They're like, what did the headlines say? Yeah, today we're gonna read those to you. She just sums it

[00:57:00] Nathan Wrigley: up ly. It's great. and hopefully we send a bit of traffic her way as well, so that's good.

inside, so this one new one, this is a community thing inside WordCamp US 2026 lead, lead organisers on hitting, reset, adding a new beginner track and beating the Phoenix heat. So there's a sort of like compounding effect here of things going on. So there's the whole landscape of politics in the US which may not, people not want to get on a plane.

There's the, whole WP Engine automatic thing, which may make people not want to go to Phoenix. There's the heat and there's the fact that in the past the, word camps in the US have been in decline. There's some store, I think it was in this piece where I think in the US there were four word camps in 2025, or 2024.

And then in the, most recent year, there's been only two, I think ticket sales for the previous versions of, word Camp US was in the region of 2000. And then it dropped, and now it's in the region of I think something like 600 people. 264 tickets have been sold for WordCamp US so far.

[00:58:13] Sé Reed: That's not a lot of

[00:58:13] Nathan Wrigley: tickets. No, we're, and we're very, close. We're basically a month away. Oh. And the fact that it's, a really interesting collection of days. It's Sunday through Wednesday. Yeah. There's, and I believe with like public school holidays or something like that in the us. So anyway, all of this means that the organisers are, hoping to come up with ways to salvage the situation and make the event as good as it can be.

and so one of the ideas that they've got, which I think is really interesting, is there's a nearby university, I guess I'm gonna say it's the work University of Phoenix. Forgive me, university of whatever it actually is. bar

[00:58:51] Sé Reed: Arizona.

[00:58:52] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. It's the University of Paris. Thank you. Yeah. That was gonna be my second choice.

I went with Phoenix.

[00:58:59] Marc Benzakein: University of Phoenix is an online only university.

[00:59:02] Sé Reed: Yeah.

[00:59:02] Nathan Wrigley: I think the world that would fit, that would be great. and so what they're gonna try and do is are they encourage some of the people from that university to show up. I don't know if the tickets are gonna be like heavily subsidised or free or what have you, but it would just be nice to have, do you know what, it'd be just nice to have some young people, in the room and not old homogeny folk like.

Me,

[00:59:23] Sé Reed: I just checked the ticket thing, so just so we have a little bit of updated reporting. Yeah, thanks. There are, 292 tickets have been sold

[00:59:31] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:59:32] Sé Reed: As of now. And, 110 have been claimed with no sale. Okay. So I'm assuming those are, probably some student giveaway tickets? Yeah. Which is my guess because that's not an, they just released the, The, speakers. So I don't think 110 of them have already claimed it. Or maybe that's volunteers, who knows. But they've sold 292.

[00:59:54] Nathan Wrigley: okay.

[00:59:54] Sé Reed: With the total ticket tickets out of 402.

[00:59:59] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So what's interesting, and we might come to an article which says this in a minute, but certainly I saw it somewhere recently, is that if you were to take the entire planet and events, attendance is, although this is the words as they come out my mouth seem like they can't be true.

Apparently attendance is up, but it feels like certainly in the US it's dropped off A cliff Word camp was just great. It was full up. it was like the room, that whole big event space just felt busy, It was really great. Word. Camp Asia, the same thing. I, would imagine a lot of the growth, if you were to literally put pins in the map as of as to where the growth is, it would be India and that neck of the woods.

I mean it, the, numbers there I think are just, and obviously the, organisers know this kind of thing 'cause we've now got a flagship event called Word Camp India starting next year. I dunno what the, I dunno what the, collective set of problems are, which conspire to make this event a difficult thing to manage.

It'll be interesting to see if, it continues on that level, whether or not it carries on, I dunno,

[01:01:11] Alex Standiford: there are things,

[01:01:11] Sé Reed: I could make a whole list if you want, but Yeah.

You could just go ahead with we don't know what the problem is.

[01:01:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, No, but you can anecdotally identify oh yeah.

A million things which which you think other thing, whether or not we could ever get to what the actual thing is

[01:01:27] Alex Standiford: every year. Word camp us. I don't think there's ever anything.

[01:01:32] Nathan Wrigley: No. Okay. Yeah. Okay.

[01:01:33] Alex Standiford: Every year Word camp US is literally on the first week of school public. Oh

[01:01:37] Nathan Wrigley: really?

Every

[01:01:38] Alex Standiford: impact.

Public school, every

[01:01:39] Sé Reed: time. also because the school year keeps moving up for so much of, so moving of the US they've been doing a lot of playing around with the school year. And so it, it used to start, after Labour Day.

[01:01:49] Alex Standiford: Yeah.

[01:01:49] Sé Reed: Which is at the beginning of September now. my nephews are going back to school the second week of August.

[01:01:55] Alex Standiford: Yeah.

[01:01:55] Sé Reed: Which is exactly, when this is happening.

[01:01:57] Alex Standiford: Yeah.

[01:01:57] Sé Reed: which is, that's a problem because especially as we know, we're all ageing. And there aren't as many young, we all have

[01:02:04] Alex Standiford: kids.

[01:02:05] Sé Reed: We have kids.

[01:02:06] Alex Standiford: Yes, exactly. Speak

[01:02:07] Marc Benzakein: for yourself. Say,

[01:02:09] Nathan Wrigley: I'm not ageing how

[01:02:10] Sé Reed: you have kids.

[01:02:12] Marc Benzakein: I have Nathan, I'm not ageing

[01:02:15] Nathan Wrigley: 28 for almost 40 years now.

Nathan.

[01:02:18] Alex Standiford: I'll say Nathan, you've got a kid who's literally in a band publishing YouTube videos.

[01:02:22] Nathan Wrigley: No,

[01:02:23] Alex Standiford: Oh, okay. Band called Motley

[01:02:25] Nathan Wrigley: Crew.

[01:02:25] Alex Standiford: Yeah.

but.

[01:02:29] Nathan Wrigley: So

[01:02:29] Alex Standiford: that's been the biggest, sorry, go ahead.

[01:02:31] Nathan Wrigley: No, I'll just segue into some comments here. Cameron Jones, who is considerably younger than me, by the way.

he says he is been in the WordPress space for 12 years. He's still the youngest person at every event that I attend. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. a big, oh, and I forgot to mention, yeah, part of the, part of that article that, that Ray wrote wasn't just about the, free bit for the students at the University of, Phoenix, but it was also a, beginner's track, which I love.

I think that's such an interesting idea, whether it'll attract people to actually come through the door, who knows? Let's wait and see. But a beginner's track. So you, the idea being that you can go and you walk out at the end, I think with a website. So I just, maybe there's enough people in the Phoenix community that need that kind of help.

I don't know. Let's wait and see.

[01:03:18] Alex Standiford: I just think that the younger community's gonna have to have a real pain to make them want to come to Word prosecutors. Yeah. Until that happens, they just won't care.

[01:03:27] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Okay. So we need more. We

[01:03:28] Alex Standiford: have, we have real pain, you know what mean

[01:03:30] Nathan Wrigley: for real reason be free pizzas.

That's,

[01:03:32] Alex Standiford: yeah. That

[01:03:33] Nathan Wrigley: is not

[01:03:33] Alex Standiford: pain, that's incentive. Which

[01:03:34] Nathan Wrigley: I'm big on, but

[01:03:35] Alex Standiford: that's a

[01:03:36] Nathan Wrigley: different thing. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. A lot of growth in Africa too, I believe. Thank you. That's great. Yeah, you are quite right Cameron. so I always mention India just 'cause that always seems to get the attention, but I think you're right.

You

[01:03:46] Sé Reed: know, this is also, I think it's a result of, the places that it's growing are places that people are not being served. the prepackaged, they don't necessarily have the same access to ai. They don't have, all of the sort of prepackaged things coming to them. So I think a lot of it has to do with like they're wanting to, these different areas are really wanting to do their own thing.

It's I don't wanna say it's 10 years behind in terms of anything other than corporate servicing, right? Like corporate servicing has been very focused on the US and putting things into packages and there's that, everything's pre-made, pre served here in the US and probably more so also in Europe.

And I think that. We are not like our people are, even our clients, the students, they're looking for the prepackaged to just gimme the thing. Oh, okay. Yeah, Versus let me build my own. Yeah. We've I think it might have something to do too with the tech bro idea that's like a whole other thing.

The idea that you can see yourself in the web, which we used to be able to do that you could be a part of something. I feel like that's really changed because it feels very much like the sort of tech bro, tech ocracy, tech oligarchy has, made it more closed. It feels more close, honestly. And so I don't know that people are looking to build and whereas that hope of, oh, I can build my own thing, that sort of entrepreneurial spirit even Yeah.

Is more prevalent in those cultures that haven't been quite as commodified. That's my take.

[01:05:31] Marc Benzakein: that ma makes sense. I was just gonna say the, comment you had, by Philip just now. Oh yeah. Hi Philip. How are

[01:05:38] Nathan Wrigley: you?

[01:05:38] Marc Benzakein: I think

[01:05:38] Nathan Wrigley: Seth, thank you Philip for that comment. I'll just read it. I think the regional camps not happening, has hurt as, I think there's, that's where the end users went, where at Word Camp US was more agency owners.

Thank you for

[01:05:49] Marc Benzakein: that. Yeah. and I just want to hit on that, which is I agree with what he's saying. A lot. And yeah, and the problem is that it costs so much to put on local word camps. And I'm not just talking about, of course monetarily, but then voluntarily and all these things that it requires all the resources that it required, finding the venues which are expensive, and then getting the sponsors and all that.

It's really, become, prohibitive in the United States to put on Word camps, especially if we're thinking in terms of the way that we did five or six years ago. yeah. Where it was like, oh, we wanna have 300 people at our Word camp, or something like that. the idea. And I know that originally the idea of Word camps was they'd be very small.

They'd be very regional. we're not even doing any of that. and I think that does feed into Word camp us. if nobody's talking about it outside of the month or two prior to Word Camp, us, people aren't going to show up and there is no new blood coming in and there is no, from, around the country.

And so it's starting to feel, even like Word Camp us this year is still going to be more of a regional word camp than it's going to be people coming from all around the world, and showing up. I think Philip brings up a really interesting point.

[01:07:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Thank

[01:07:25] Sé Reed: you. I think, too that the organising thing we hear in the us we really were, I think we got the news more, even if it's just 'cause it's in English language that when we're volunteering to organise, I don't know if post economic translates to every other language, but I know A lot of English speaking people were pretty pissed off when someone when to, be volunteering and putting out all of this effort. When we found out that we're, what really what we're doing is just supporting someone who is post economic before we were putting our efforts into something that we all were a part of that we all owned.

And since it became, no, it's just one guy's thing, I think in the US we're really aware of that. And even just organising, it's like, why would we do that for this person? And last year's Word camp us and this year's Word camp us, other than Raquel, who is, just a, Arizona, amazing, Arizonan in general, herself, pro Phoenix, like it's been for the last year, especially mathematicians who are being paid to organise and.

The, that's better because at least someone's being paid. But it changes the whole nature of the event, right? Not every, all the organisers aren't there, evangelising it because the politicians are just doing it. So you lose the organising team, you lose that comradery. And I think that, a lot of us have just questioned why would, is it even legal for us to volunteer for a for-profit company, which is WPCS, WordPress Community Support, as opposed to the WordPress Foundation, which is a 5 0 1 C3.

So we, here in the US realised because of the court case and all the stuff that happened, and the stuff that Matt said, that we were not volunteering for the, foundation. And I think that is not a differentiation that is being made in other countries because of other countries have really different nonprofit structures, but here in the us it feels really bad to be volunteering for a for-profit company, which WordPress Community Services is.

And, whether or not it's illegal, I think people just are like, I don't wanna give my free time and my energy and, prioritise something that is literally just making some dude richer.

[01:09:49] Alex Standiford: Yeah. I guess I, I guess

[01:09:51] Sé Reed: he's being, platform also At these things. So it's problematic.

Again,

[01:09:57] Alex Standiford: I just don't think about automatic as much as that. Like I just, I'm always thinking about the community and the people that I'm, that are, but you're going, yeah, sure. But I have, you're

[01:10:05] Sé Reed: not the person who's making that choice. You're like, I don't care. I'm gonna go anyway.

[01:10:09] Alex Standiford: Sure. But

[01:10:10] Sé Reed: I'm talking about the people who aren't going.

[01:10:12] Alex Standiford: Yeah, that's true. and

I,

[01:10:14] Marc Benzakein: and I think that, I think the other thing that Ha Oh, sorry Alex, go ahead. I'm sorry.

[01:10:17] Alex Standiford: I interrupted you. Oh, that's okay. I was just gonna say, the big thing for me is it just comes back to the pain point again. every time I go to a conference, any kind of conference ever, including war camps, it has always been to solve a problem.

I have a problem and I need it solved. I need a job. I need to know more about WordPress. I need to find some leads. I need to understand this community. I need to see what's going on. There was always a practical reason for me to go, a strategic reason,

[01:10:40] Sé Reed: not

[01:10:40] Alex Standiford: just fun. And, fun was always the fun side effect.

And, I can't just go be off label because it's fun, right? Yeah. I can't just go because it's fun.

[01:10:51] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.

[01:10:52] Alex Standiford: and the strategic reason for me to go, or the pain points that I have with WordPress at this point have been pretty thoroughly solved, aren't being solved by going under those conferences anymore, even if they were bustling and busy.

just because I'm pretty much connecting with the same people at this point. I'm seeing the same people, I'm talking to the same people. I'm having largely the same conversations. so for me specifically, it doesn't really solve a problem. So I don't even know if the local. Take, I think that I missed the locals and I think that was also really awesome.

But I'm not even sure if having more local events would cause me to be more likely to go to them. 'cause I still just don't have a strong enough reason. And if, WordPress, if these word camps could find that, or come up or solve that in some way, that would change it. I don't have an answer to that, but that is just where I'm at mentally with it.

[01:11:45] Nathan Wrigley: I'm gonna, I'm gonna, we've got so many comments. I can't, do anything.

[01:11:49] Alex Standiford: We all have opinions.

[01:11:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I, I've got, I, there's no way I can get through them all. But thank you for all the people that have said things in the comments. I don't know, there's 15 or something and I, I just can't get through them all.

But there's loads of things that are raised. like the age group, the Africa thing, the fact that word camps went from 38 in 2019 down to two in 2025. COVID gets a bit of a mention as well. and so on and so forth. maybe we should make it more educational, says Andrew, do something a little bit more like Cloud Fest.

Do, you know what? I think we need gimmicks. I think the more gimmicks, I don't know actual bands like that you've heard of or, or I don't know, a, a. Custard Pie contest. A

[01:12:34] Sé Reed: keynote, speaker that is really, might have a take. Like at cloudfest, Miami, which is now, or Cloudfest, USA, which is now called Cloudfest Americas last year, they had some keynote speakers that were,

[01:12:46] Nathan Wrigley: outside

[01:12:47] Sé Reed: of what

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

[01:12:48] Sé Reed: yeah.

Outside of they're, not, they were not about WordPress. So that makes it really interesting. I know, I think a couple years ago, word Camp us, Danny Sullivan, there was the NASA thing that people were super into that makes it, the

[01:13:01] Alex Standiford: Disney keynote was great, for example,

[01:13:03] Sé Reed: another

[01:13:03] Alex Standiford: one. Yeah.

[01:13:05] Sé Reed: That's, like looking at the future, that's like getting perspective that you can't get that's a tailored, like connect, like not a connection, but getting input and information from outside, from someone who has, that big picture and is able to bring it in that is valuable.

Just hearing the same person.

[01:13:25] Nathan Wrigley: We're all blowing hot air. Cameron's got it. It's Motley Crew. we just, yeah.

[01:13:31] Marc Benzakein: That's, that was my

[01:13:32] Nathan Wrigley: first thought. I'm there

[01:13:33] Marc Benzakein: Moley, I hear they're

[01:13:34] Nathan Wrigley: outta work. I care how much I, they might come

[01:13:37] Marc Benzakein: cheap and, give away a motorcycle,

[01:13:41] Sé Reed: they would definitely come cheap.

[01:13:43] Nathan Wrigley: Do you

imagine,

you've got some sort of like has been rock band from the, Hey,

[01:13:47] Marc Benzakein: we could have we could have a hackathon where we build a Motley Crewe website on WordPress.

[01:13:54] Sé Reed: Yes. How we could, it could be one of those like speed builds who can make Motley Crewe's Squarespace website in WordPress faster and the winner gets a motorcycle

[01:14:05] Marc Benzakein: and the winner gets a Harley-Davidson brand

[01:14:07] Sé Reed: new

[01:14:07] Marc Benzakein: Harley Davidson motorcycle and

[01:14:09] Sé Reed: Motley Crewe perform headlining at Word Camp Us in Phoenix in the hot Now that is just

[01:14:16] Marc Benzakein: yeah,

[01:14:17] Sé Reed: that is good.

[01:14:17] Nathan Wrigley: Cameron, you've all it took was four words and you That's right. That's right. Listen, we get through, I'm quite a bit of the stuff that I've got. You could, I dunno if you have a look, but I've basically got a stack of tabs and you can see that we've got almost nowhere through them. So we'll miss a bunch out, but we'll get a few done.

I'll just, run through a few quickly. This is just a nice piece. So the Yost Care Fund every year is given out to some, contributor in the WordPress space. Somebody does a nomination, the nominations get expected, and then some, somebody that is deserving, gets the Care Fund package, which is really nice.

And if memory serves the Care Fund package, does it allow them to attend a Word camp? where before they perhaps were unable to attend for, let's say financial reasons, something like that. Anyway, the recipient this time around is, and I'm sorry for the name pronunciation, I'm gonna go for Foti Ruis or Russ or something along those lines.

nominated by Lena Stir, GAU. Again, sorry for that, but, I won't really dwell on it. It was just to say that it's lovely that we have a recipient. It's also very nice that Yost, continues to do this and Finds that there's, merits in doing something good. So the community isn't just about showing up to events.

It's also little things like this, albeit that this seems to be bound to events. Speaking of events, apparently, the, community as a whole spends something in the region of, I don't know, $250,000, a month on meetup.com, a platform, which in some respects, I guess is useful, but in other respects is I think hatred is the wrong word, but I think a lot of people have a very big axe to grind about word, meat up, and the fact that you can't get in your list out and things like that, there's a whole load of things.

It's, it's, a lot. So the Gather Press plugin has been building ahead of steam for many years. Patricia, who's in the comments, is one of the people that's been, organising it a amongst a bunch of other people that you can see in the comments here. and it has been, I, it's an official decision, but it says here, and it's on make.wordpress.org.

Wanted to give everyone heads up where we're at with moving away from.com. It's something that the community has talked about for years, as it comes with a cost of a quarter of a million dollars a year. so the idea really is to get all the eyes focused on the Gather Press plugin, which is free open source, and hopefully by the time it is, implemented, we'll do all of the heavy lifting that you've been used to on me top.com.

[01:16:56] Alex Standiford: This is

[01:16:57] Sé Reed: by far the easiest press.

[01:16:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:16:59] Sé Reed: Oh, yeah,

[01:17:00] Alex Standiford: go ahead.

[01:17:01] Sé Reed: I, so gather press this will be hosted on, obviously you can host Gather Plus Press on any site, but the official sort of migration of the meetup communities will be too. wordpress.org.

[01:17:16] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I just had an assumption that it would be everybody would own their, like instal their own little vo No, of course.

That doesn't make sense, does it? For some reason I

[01:17:26] Sé Reed: had it in my head is the word of the day.

[01:17:29] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. That's right. I'm always,

[01:17:30] Sé Reed: so I guess everybody gets to go onto that one website.

[01:17:33] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[01:17:35] Sé Reed: That would be my guess. It doesn't say, but I feel like that's like where, it makes sense that's where that would be, right?

Yeah. You instal, gather press on wordpress.org and then everyone organises there.

[01:17:46] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. unless you can, let's wait and see. Let, yeah, I, I just got the wrong intuitions about that. I just, so I forgot that the meet up commu, sorry, that the, word camps and, WordPress meet ups and what have you would obviously be going through a.org account, which would then bind presumably to some gather press, backend.

I'm not sure. I, dunno why. I thought, I just thought everybody would do their own, but that wouldn't make sense, would it? There'd be no cross promotion in that scenario. Patricia, if you've got anything you want us to say, then just drop it into the comments. If you're still around, that would be lovely.

Alex,

[01:18:20] Alex Standiford: I just got one thing to say on it. This is a, this to me is a no brainer. We're talking about building a more open web, creating things in a more open web, and at minimum using an open source tool that other people have access to is the bare minimum you can do to make the web more open. I think. Yeah, that's about all I got.

[01:18:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Thank you. Okay. So anyway, that's happening. It would appear that is now a go. Speaking of go, Mark's lights have gone and, you're gonna have to do this. I'm gonna get

[01:18:50] Alex Standiford: him an automated, I'm gonna get him an automated clapper that

[01:18:52] Nathan Wrigley: just claps every five seconds.

It's gonna sound like a, we have this moment, mark full car

[01:18:57] Sé Reed: that you can drive around.

[01:18:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Just keeps moving in the background. We have this moment, mark where your screen, it goes entirely black. 'cause your camera, oh, he's not listening. We were just saying, mark, that your, your, it's really funny 'cause your screen goes entirely black.

'cause your camera's gone from Fulbright and it can't figure out. And then slowly this ghostly figure of you appears as the camera sort of starts to figure out, it's like

[01:19:20] Alex Standiford: I'm waking up from a coma.

[01:19:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's right.

[01:19:22] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. that's how I feel every time I'm on the show is

[01:19:28] Nathan Wrigley: that's about it.

There you go. Perfect. Lovely. so on the same thing back onto the repository, WordPress community support recorded. So this was the piece I was referring to earlier. I think that's interesting. Three $72,000 deficit in 2025, even as attendance rose by 27%. So this was the bit where I was saying attendance is up.

but in the US attendance is massively down in other parts of the world it's up. And apparently there is a deficit in the pot of money, which used to be a surplus. last year, I think it was a 350 thou. Yeah, it's here. $350,000 surplus, is now a $372,000 deficit.

[01:20:13] Sé Reed: you, oh, sorry, go ahead.

[01:20:15] Nathan Wrigley: No, I was just gonna say, I don't really, I, Ray obviously follows the financials of this and figures it all out, but, I, I don't know why that is.

I don't know whether it's just like sponsorship of not dropping or what, I don't really know, but go for it. say if you've got something,

[01:20:30] Sé Reed: oh, I just, at the bottom here, there's a note, about, it's like all the way, it's like it literally in the last paragraph. the in kind, there it is, buried in the WPCS financials, so not the WordPress Foundation Financials.

The WordPress Community Support Financials, again, a for-profit company owned by the foundation has a separate line item for $2.63 million in donated salary services. So there are $2.63 million of salaries donated to a for-profit company in kind, and it doesn't show up. I genuinely don't understand any

[01:21:10] Nathan Wrigley: of that.

What does it mean?

[01:21:11] Sé Reed: Basically, a bunch of Ians were paid to work on WordPress community Services Oh,

[01:21:16] Nathan Wrigley: okay.

[01:21:16] Sé Reed: Is what that means. And then they donated those salaries. But it's, an expense, so it's cancelled out. So it basically zeroes itself out, so they didn't Okay. Receive a donation. But the crazy part to me is I don't know how you're donating anything to a for-profit company.

'cause you can't, but, that's not my problem. I'm not a lawyer. I can't take it anywhere. So if you're a lawyer or you no one

[01:21:40] Nathan Wrigley: on that stuff. so 2.63 million donated, and then it says in kind in bracket salary services. Okay?

Okay.

[01:21:49] Sé Reed: So that's basically the people who have, like last year, ran Word camp us, right?

Because there were no or no vol, very few anyway, volunteer organisers. That would be the folks who ran Word Camp us who ran the different other projects. And I would assume, I, it's hard to say, but for example, the Long Now defunct or not defunct marketing team has two full-time automations that work there.

So it's basically just aian salaries.

[01:22:22] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So maybe that's two thing. Is it, is that I

[01:22:26] Sé Reed: No, that has been there before. It has not been so big.

[01:22:30] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So it has

[01:22:31] Sé Reed: been a question every year, but it has never been $2.63 million.

[01:22:35] Nathan Wrigley: So the influence being that there's been a need to plug a hole with that line item.

In the past, that line item probably wasn't as big. And obviously this bit here, this deficit of three seven $2,000, is a, is obviously what Ray decided would be the, sort of lead item there anyway, given what we were saying earlier about Word Camp US and all that kind of stuff, it, paints into that sort of picture, doesn't it?

Of things being certainly in the US at least anyway, in decline and, we'll, let's see how that writes itself. anybody else on that or can I quickly move on?

[01:23:09] Sé Reed: Go on.

[01:23:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. So this is more or less the same thing. So I'll just very, quickly, it says here, we were talking about this AI was supposed to kill ai.

The trend line disagrees. Apparently you'd have to read this. Apparently Google searches for word pressy things is, has actually taken a bit of a swing up.

[01:23:30] Alex Standiford: I have anecdotal evidence on this too that I'll share.

[01:23:32] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So it, there was a chart and I, think it was Brad Williams from Web Dev Studios, he posted something on Twitter, and I'm, if memory serves, it was like the volume of Google searches related to the, word WordPress.

And it, it was just this slow but steady decline. And then really recently it just went whoop and it kind of hockey sticked. So I don't know why that is. I have no in intuitions about that. but, I also have thoughts that maybe people are getting a bit bored of ai. Maybe people have discovered that ai, actually, you do need the CMS in the background to do things.

Okay, let's go back to WordPress, shall we? Who knows? But yeah,

[01:24:15] Alex Standiford: I have a feeling if you took all of search in general and you put it into one giant line cart, it would look very similar. Okay. I think that, I, this is, I don't know this for sure, but I also saw a response to that earlier where it was showing other tech stacks and they were seeing a very similar curve.

Okay. and I wonder if it's because Google is starting to show search results that their AI agent is doing on your behalf, on, behalf of you, whatever you search in Google, because Gemini and all those other tools, they do what they call fanout queries. So it does, so you say conversationally, I need to know about this.

And it literally goes and it does 15 searches. Oh, I

[01:24:54] Nathan Wrigley: see. yeah,

[01:24:55] Alex Standiford: yeah.

[01:24:55] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[01:24:56] Alex Standiford: the result of that is a lot more. So the value of a search, a hit from a search result isn't what it used to be because the robot is basically collecting all that information and it may not even show it to the person who's making the final decision.

[01:25:09] Nathan Wrigley: No. Okay. Okay.

[01:25:10] Alex Standiford: So there is that, being said, I have some analytics on Siren, and one of the things that we've built was a, me and Chris Badgett, we did this whole thing around, using Siren with Lifter LMS and Ninja forms together to basically create a clone of Udemy. So you could have, multiple course creators and all this stuff.

Literally, you could replace Udemy with that whole setup, right? and we, Chris and I did this whole thing around that, right? Did a video and all this stuff. And I'm starting to see that people are actually asking ai, I want to create my own Udemy. How do I do that?

[01:25:48] Nathan Wrigley: Oh,

[01:25:48] Alex Standiford: and AI is literally saying in that conversation, oh, you could totally do this with Siren Lifter, LMS and Ninja Forms.

There's this video that literally teaches you how to do this.

[01:25:57] Nathan Wrigley: That's

[01:25:58] Alex Standiford: so neat.

[01:25:58] Nathan Wrigley: So QA

[01:26:00] Alex Standiford: yeah. So those things are definitely still happening, but I just, I thought that was interesting. Yeah. That, to highlight like. WordPress is still being talked about even in ai Okay. in some contexts,

[01:26:12] Nathan Wrigley: right? I'm gonna race through some of this.

[01:26:14] Alex Standiford: Yeah, please continue. Sorry.

[01:26:15] Nathan Wrigley: no, Sorry, So first one is this, speaking of ai, again, this is some new things that's coming in WordPress. WordPress is AI 1.1, 0.0. The only thing I'm gonna really mention is this. I'm gonna click the play button and see what you make of it. So basically this is called, type ahead text.

And what it does is you drop the cursor in somewhere and you've obviously got to have some stuff in there already. And then it will figure out what could the next sentence be? And it seems to be doing on a whole sentence basis. So you probably didn't see that. But if I just skip back, look, somebody drops the cursor in and it just boom, says, this is another possible next sentence.

And here's another one, and here's another one. And whilst I think it's technically clever, a bit of me slowly dies when I, see that, because I just want the human to do that bit. But I realise I'm living in the Dickensian period of the, internet. So anyway, there you go. I it's a lovely implementation.

I'm sure for loads of people this will be really useful. There was other, another new thing, and it was all about encryption keys, but we don't have enough time. I would like to point out that I'm a lovely human being. I, talked about it earlier. This is the podcast episode that I did with Tess. The reason I put it there, 'cause it, it was such an interesting conversation about, I'm saying I, a bit of me dies.

Tess is like the antidote to that. She is very bullish on ai, but also very creative. And so she manages to steer that ship beautifully. go and listen to that. Do you know

[01:27:46] Sé Reed: when Tess joined Automatic?

[01:27:48] Nathan Wrigley: No, I don't actually. No. no. I was trying to use my brain to, summon up a date, but realise I don't have much of a brain.

There's nothing

[01:27:58] Sé Reed: there.

[01:27:58] Nathan Wrigley: No, it's, but it's prodigious empty up there. nothing there

[01:28:03] Sé Reed: about the dates specifically is what I meant. Not

[01:28:05] Nathan Wrigley: goldfish. Swimming around is fluid. That's about all there, or

[01:28:10] Alex Standiford: whatever it is. It makes for a good host,

[01:28:13] Nathan Wrigley: it turns out you don't have to think very much. okay. A new product on the scene.

Fluent have got all the products in all the WordPress space. They've come up with a new one. It's called Fluent Player. It's a video player for WordPress with loads of bells and whistles. So

[01:28:27] Sé Reed: y'all, their CMS is pretty good. It

[01:28:29] Nathan Wrigley: is pretty good. It's pretty good.

[01:28:31] Sé Reed: I'm like, I don't know where these folks came from or popped out of, but, I, and it's all vibe coded probably, but it's well done.

no, it's,

[01:28:40] Nathan Wrigley: they're amazing. They build it before they've been around for a while.

[01:28:42] Sé Reed: Good. Yeah. They've been around

[01:28:43] Marc Benzakein: for a long time.

[01:28:45] Sé Reed: Yeah. Okay. I missed it, but they're doing great. I was like, okay, cool. We're actually using the, I just adopted the affluent CMS for, you mean

[01:28:54] Nathan Wrigley: CRM,

[01:28:54] Sé Reed: the WP CRM, what was I saying?

C

[01:28:58] Nathan Wrigley: Cms.

[01:28:58] Alex Standiford: CMS.

[01:28:59] Sé Reed: Oh, I meant cm. Yeah. Yeah. That would be weird if we were talking about another CI

[01:29:03] Nathan Wrigley: was, it's like a whole CRM built, sorry.

CMS

[01:29:05] Sé Reed: built on

[01:29:06] Nathan Wrigley: cms. Yeah,

[01:29:07] Sé Reed: that's just called a

[01:29:08] Alex Standiford: page builder

[01:29:08] Nathan Wrigley: that's called Meta.

[01:29:10] Sé Reed: We're using the CRM on, the WP Community Collective site, Oh,

[01:29:15] Nathan Wrigley: neat. Okay.

[01:29:16] Sé Reed: Yeah. Yeah. I, and I was like, oh, this is pretty good.

I'm not mad at it. all of the, I don't wanna buy code anything. All of their products,

[01:29:22] Nathan Wrigley: if you look at their whole products, it, all relies, like they all lean in on each other. if you've got, a community like let's say Chris Badgett and the siren thing, an LMS thing, drop this in and you can do loads of things within that community with the video.

I don't know, you can put interstitials in and ads for things and it's just like YouTube on steroids, the sort of control you never had. So it definitely worth looking at brand new. their stuff I think is great. in the European Union, we smuggled through some, I'm not in the European Union currently, but, in the European Union, this kind of got past this sort of this mass surveillance thing.

It turns out that, by some crazy procedural hijacking, they were able to pass a law, which on undo a lot of the privacy project, protections. And it would appear that if that stays on the books, it's gonna be illegal to encrypt things. on the face of it, it's all about, child protecting things like that.

But it does mean that things like your WhatsApp and your signal is gonna be under scrutiny. But in order to get this to work, they had to do this incredibly weird bit of chess where they managed to get it passed on a day when almost nobody was present. And it was the last day of the Parliament. And if nobody shows up, it's counted as a yes vote on that day.

And so a load of people didn't show up because they were on their holidays and all of their votes counted as a yes. And so it got through, I'm not an expert, but it read like something out of a Hollywood script for, see, that's called

[01:30:58] Marc Benzakein: every piece of legislation in the United States.

[01:31:00] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[01:31:01] Marc Benzakein: I

[01:31:05] Nathan Wrigley: that's, yeah,

[01:31:07] Alex Standiford: that's, Nathan. Nathan is that sounds like it comes out of a Hollywood movie. We're

[01:31:09] Nathan Wrigley: like, that's okay. That's, no, that's

[01:31:13] Sé Reed: just how we work here. That's

[01:31:14] Nathan Wrigley: just how work here. getting caught up in the dragnet of weird stuff as well is meta decided, oh, just stop. Would you just stop and think meta?

Please have a thought. So they launched a product which they, were gonna let everybody have a go. And it allowed you to make AI images out of anybody else's photos on their platform, what could possibly go wrong. People were

[01:31:39] Sé Reed: gonna targeted ads with their girlfriends after all the, kids are doing the things like that information is already out there about what kids are doing with the notify apps and all that stuff.

And then to put this, I'm like, where,

[01:31:54] Nathan Wrigley: no,

[01:31:54] Alex Standiford: this is the stuff that the younger generation is seeing as opposed to the stuff that we're talking about.

So this is why you're seeing so much scepticism around ai, around people outside of tech circles because they're seeing the horrific, awful ways that they're being.

that they're getting bad experiences. Imagine how horrible it would be to be just scrolling on Facebook and get an ad that's targeted at you, that is representing a picture of your now ex-girlfriend, but the ad doesn't know it's your ex. And that would be horrible. You know what I mean? Yeah.

It's, just think for a

[01:32:25] Nathan Wrigley: second. The, thing about stuff like this though, is that you get the feeling that you that, okay, I could be completely wrong about this, but you get the feeling that they're clever. they're not stupid, right? You get the feeling they're clever enough and the calculation goes a bit like this.

Is this gonna cause a bruhaha Probably. Do you think we'll get away with it? Probably. Probably, yeah. Should we just go for it? Yeah. Heck yeah. And, if we get going,

[01:32:47] Sé Reed: that sounds a lot like, WordPress if you're asking.

[01:32:49] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah. basically they've pulled this feature after what the BBC describe as a blowback.

and I'm, glad that there was a blowback. We need to stand up to this nonsense. That's just ridiculous. anyway, there we go. there's my standing on a stool. I haven't got time for that, but basically, it's, called once Unimaginable. No, let's do it quickly. Are you all right for another couple of minutes?

[01:33:15] Alex Standiford: I'm good,

[01:33:15] Nathan Wrigley: everybody.

yeah, sure. So this is to say that some of the big brands, probably all American brands, I would've thought judging by the size of them, they're now using their leverage to block Google, thinking that Google needs their stuff in order to surface it in the ai. So why don't they flex their muscles?

Oh my God. And so that appears to be what's going on. A few of the big, brands are doing exactly that, and I can't remember what they were, but it's a direct play for, you are coming for our content, and you are no longer sending us traffic, so why don't we just cut you off at the knees and stop giving you content.

[01:33:56] Alex Standiford: Yep.

[01:33:57] Nathan Wrigley: Which seems like that could quickly go wrong for Google. we'll wait and see.

[01:34:03] Sé Reed: Or really, For all of the tiny publications that are like Yeah. not have, yeah. Do not have journalistic ethics. Yeah. Do not have, journalistic processes in checking the editorial. What could go wrong.

[01:34:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So I, summarised it earlier. I says, publishers are increasingly cons, considering opting out of Google search to protest. The company's use dual use of crawlers for both search indexing and AI without compensation. This reflects a bit of a bargaining strategy where media companies, including USA today, I guess that's a big thing, I don't know, are preparing to risk losing traffic to protect their content being scraped for generative ai.

[01:34:46] Alex Standiford: what's interesting to me about this is, just, to me, this just raises a tell that for the first time ever, these companies are starting to feel like they have a little bit of leverage on the, not ever Yeah. But for the first time since Google became what Google is, right? Google became alphabet,

[01:35:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

yeah.

[01:35:01] Alex Standiford: This, is the, to me, the first tell that they. Feel that they have their own ways to distribute and aren't relying on Google as much as they used to.

[01:35:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:35:10] Alex Standiford: Which has gotta be keeping Google up.

[01:35:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. You gotta think some dominoes are beginning to fall.

[01:35:15] Alex Standiford: Yeah. For,

[01:35:15] Nathan Wrigley: that's for interesting.

And then, this will be the last one for today. I came across this, I haven't used it, dunno anything about it. But if, you enjoy talking to your computer, like I really, I've got into the habit of pressing the function key and I use like whisper flow or some alternative and I, it just literally types out in front of me what I'm saying.

And I always like the idea of doing things locally. So I came across this, it's called Fluid Voice. It's for Mac only at the moment. No it isn't. iOS, windows and Mac. It says, so there you go. I'm wrong about that. you go and have a play, it's a local thing, which I also appreciate the idea being that you could speak and only your own Mac would actually know what's going on.

So there you go. They're

[01:35:56] Alex Standiford: great. I use 'em a lot.

[01:35:57] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah.

[01:35:58] Alex Standiford: Like the whole time.

[01:35:58] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, it's, amazing. It's, totally brilliant. I, use one at the moment. I actually can't remember 'cause I flipped between them so often.

[01:36:05] Alex Standiford: Yeah.

[01:36:05] Nathan Wrigley: But I can pretty much type what I want at the speed at which I can talk and I can talk pretty quick.

[01:36:11] Alex Standiford: My hands have stopped getting sore from typing so much. Nice. But I'm sorry. Nice. Use my voice. That's how much I

[01:36:15] Nathan Wrigley: was gonna say. Now you've voice like

[01:36:16] Alex Standiford: literally it's, distress has transitioned.

[01:36:19] Nathan Wrigley: I dunno. Which is better.

[01:36:20] Sé Reed: Wow.

[01:36:20] Nathan Wrigley: So is it

[01:36:21] Sé Reed: carpal tunnel for the vocal chords?

[01:36:23] Alex Standiford: Yeah.

Like,

an abscess or

[01:36:25] Nathan Wrigley: something?

Yeah, nos. It's called nodes. I have nodes. Nodes on my, yeah nodes. On your vocal cord. I have them because I used to shout

[01:36:31] Sé Reed: Not node js.

[01:36:33] Nathan Wrigley: Just node Basically Node s So here's the only bit of medicine I'm gonna ever say on this show. Your vocal chords slap together and the slapping together produces the sounds.

And I have little call it watts, but they're called nodes and because they prevent them like making a perfect slap together. 'cause the little nodes get in the way. I have to try much harder to speak. And so I lose my voice really quickly. And there you go. Now that whole shell

[01:37:02] Alex Standiford: drop. I, just, to, follow up there.

It makes for a great speaker.

[01:37:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Oh yeah. That's, they run out voice after 15 minutes. I'll keep going.

[01:37:14] Alex Standiford: You were always gonna be a podcaster you never had.

[01:37:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's weird isn't it? that's it. We did it. We got through

[01:37:20] Sé Reed: it. Wait, I have, I wanna plug something.

[01:37:22] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, plug something. Sorry.

[01:37:24] Sé Reed: Hey, you haven't taken this state of the community survey yet from WP Community Collective.

Get on over there 'cause it closes July 17th. And we need your input, we need your perspective, we need to know what's happening. So please take the survey. Please share the survey. It is gonna be published publicly. It's, we're gonna put all the data out there. So aggregated clearly. We, but survey, you actually mentioned it

[01:37:49] Nathan Wrigley: last week.

Survey. Yeah, we mentioned it last week. Oh good. Yeah, no, you welcome. And, what I'll do is if anybody listening to this, because we don't have the URL prepared on the screen or anything, I'll dig it out. Do you wanna just say it on onto the, into the podcast in case somebody's listens and never reads?

[01:38:04] Sé Reed: it's so long.

It's the wp community collective.com/state-of dash, the dash community.

[01:38:10] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's not too bad.

[01:38:11] Sé Reed: Just Google it. It actually will come up. Google state of the community survey. It'll come up.

[01:38:16] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. You haven't opt out

[01:38:17] Marc Benzakein: of being on

[01:38:18] Nathan Wrigley: Google. Yeah, I was gonna say, yeah, I haven't opt out very.

[01:38:22] Sé Reed: The AI is gonna be like, are you sure you wanna do that?

Do you know you?

[01:38:26] Nathan Wrigley: No. The AI will be like, can I fill it out for you? I think I know what you would put in that form. I'm pretty sure I'd know what You're

[01:38:32] Sé Reed: absolutely right.

[01:38:34] Nathan Wrigley: Just fill it out for you. Yeah, so there's a bunch of comments that we never got to. Very sure. Ross, you've, it's a you is a wrong moment to arrive.

Alright. but really appreciate you joining us, Nathan, than you lie like a rug. I don't know whether that's good or bad. I'm pretty sure it's good. I'm going with good. Let's go with that. I think it's bad. Yeah. It's, yeah.

[01:38:53] Sé Reed: I dunno, the lying

[01:38:54] Nathan Wrigley: really bad, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah.

[01:38:56] Sé Reed: Drew, next time I, I like you do, nomad skateboarding.

There's a, I think that's really fast. That's something that I think is really important that the, there, the fact is not everyone can afford the AI subscriptions. Yeah. Let alone the usage tiers. and not everyone works for that. So that there's a reason that there is a split. It's like not everyone knows, not everyone is able to use the AI the way that we've been talking about it.

[01:39:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. You were saying you were alluding to that in your country like that. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Okay. Sorry. And you

[01:39:27] Sé Reed: just came out and said it so I thought

[01:39:29] Nathan Wrigley: we should. Yeah, he just came out and said it. So there we go. I think I'm gonna call this episode a, yeah, maybe I'll just call it, Motley Crew.

Actually, the, bots comment maybe is a bug up your motley. Definitely a moley crew. No, I'm going with that. A bug up your motley crew. Let's go with that. There you go. There you

[01:39:47] Marc Benzakein: go.

[01:39:48] Nathan Wrigley: That's what we're gonna have. so before the show ends, say you don't know this, we do this sort of slightly humiliating Oh, I know.

Oh, Okay. So would you mind all of you raising? There you go. Just give us a smile. Everybody smile. Everybody smile. There we go. That's all we need. Thank you so much to our panellists. Here they are, mark and say's, doing all the fun things. And Alex, really appreciate you joining us. Thank you.

Genuinely. Like I know it, like the words just come outta my mouth and it sounds so insincere, but I actually genuine. That's

[01:40:20] Marc Benzakein: just 'cause you're British.

[01:40:22] Nathan Wrigley: Oh really? It's not.

[01:40:23] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. That's why. That's why. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:40:26] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, wait,

[01:40:26] Alex Standiford: no. Are we,

[01:40:27] Nathan Wrigley: are we considered to be insincere? Seriously? That's, because I

[01:40:31] Marc Benzakein: he's

[01:40:31] Alex Standiford: asking sincerely.

[01:40:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I am. You're Oh, you're punch punchline.

okay.

[01:40:38] Marc Benzakein: I

[01:40:38] Nathan Wrigley: don't

[01:40:38] Marc Benzakein: know. I'm just making stuff up. Don't you know me anyway, there we go.

[01:40:42] Nathan Wrigley: With me. Thank you to you three. But also thank you for the wealth of comments that have come in. I really appreciate it. If you three wanna hang out for a bit, we'll end the call and mooch about for a bit.

That would be nice. But, the rest of you take care. We will see you next week. Take it easy. Thanks Nathan. Appreciate buddy. Bye bye. Yeah, no worries. Take it easy. Bye. Bye. Bye.