This Week in WordPress #381

[00:00:03] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for This Week in WordPress, episode number 381 entitled Fake Cat on a Fishing Rod. Go figure that out. It was recorded on Monday, the 27th of July, 2026. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I am joined by Michelle Frechette. I'm also joined by Marc Benzakein and by Zach Stepek. It's a WordPress podcast, but we get derailed as we always do initially by AI, later on by AI, and then towards the end again by AI, but we don't stay on AI forever.

For example, we look at WordPress 7.1. What is in, what do we think is cool and what is out? Interestingly, a few things have been dropped from that release.

We also talk about some of the new things coming into Gutenberg in the near future.

And there has been a sudden and unexpected update to WordPress 7.0.2, and it's very interesting to find out that AI was responsible for that. $25 is all it took for Fable to figure out how to jeopardise just about every WordPress website out there.

We also talk about the WPOCC, which used to be the WPCC, but they couldn't use that because there's already a WPCC and there's too many acronyms, so we find out about all of that.

We also talk about the WP World and some adaptations there to make it easier for you to friend people.

And then also Jamie Marsland has produced a new, really interesting editor for Gutenberg, but it's not Gutenberg. It's more like Canva. Anyway, it's very, beguiling.

Performance is under scrutiny. Some new WordPress plugins are under scrutiny, and a whole bunch more, and it's all coming up next on this week in WordPress.

I don't know if you, I've turned that video off because I dunno if you spotted what was going on there. 30 minutes. 30 minutes. Yeah. So I put what I thought was gonna be a 32nd video on it was actually 30 minutes.

[00:02:14] Michelle Frechette: Oh,

[00:02:16] Nathan Wrigley: we would've been here for a full 30 minutes waiting. I could have made coffee. Yeah. I, went to get breakfast.

[00:02:23] Marc Benzakein: I went

[00:02:23] Nathan Wrigley: to, actually, I'm sorry, This, this show is always entertaining when it starts. So we usually have like a, my two minute video, which is insufferable. we're probably better off kicking that out. But, I, for some reason it didn't appear in the platform this morning. And, and so I pressed what I thought was a sort of default 32nd video.

It was 30 minutes long, so apologies, panellists about that. There was nothing I could do, in order to stop that happening. Anyway, here we are. It's this week in WordPress number 3 8 1 381. And, you can see that I'm joined by three fabulous word pressy folk. And, yeah, I was not quite knowing which way to point there.

And we'll go around the houses in a second and, allow everybody to be introduced and what have you. But I'll just do the, the usual housekeeping if that's all right. the first thing to mention is that depending on how you're watching this, obviously if you're watching it after the fact, don't write a comment anywhere 'cause it just won't mean anything.

But if you are watching us live and you want to make a comment, that's lovely. the only place though, where it's really useful to us is in, YouTube or on the wp builds.com webpage. because a lot of the platforms like LinkedIn and X and all of those, they just don't allow comments to come out into other platforms.

And so the best place to go is wp builds.com/live. That URL on the screen, wp builds.com/live. If you head there, we've got the video running, and then we've got the sort of chat box on the right hand side. If you wanna fill that in, that's great. Or if you don't wanna be logged in, there's a live chat, widget in the video itself, like top right of the actual video player, you can use that instead.

And we'll definitely get both of those. So that's probably the best recommendation. So if you wanna mention that out on the Twitters or the Facebooks or whatever it is, that would be great. okay. Thank you. Let's go round the, the panel and say hi, first person. I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go there.

I'm gonna go to Michelle. hi. How you doing Michelle?

[00:04:32] Michelle Frechette: I'm good, how are you?

[00:04:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good. Thank you. yeah, actually good. The weather in the UK is fabulous. We don't have any of these like, dramatic fires. I don't know what it's like where you are, but in Europe at the minute we're having what feels like a Californian sort of thing.

I think Canada's got a lot of fires at the minute as well. Yeah. But in Europe and Spain and places, there's 205th quarter of a million people have been, evacuated. that's not a small amount, is it? In Spain and France and, we don't have any of that luckily, but blue skies and everything.

Anyway, Michelle Frache is the Executive Director of Post Status. In addition to the work over there, Michelle is the podcast barista at WP Coffee Talk. Co-founder of Underrepresented in Tech, creator of WP Speakers, WP Career Pages, and sponsor me wp. She's also the co-founder of Speed Network online. She likes to write, so she's an author, influencer, and frequent organiser and speaker at WordPress events, living outside of Rochester, New York.

She likes to take nature photography as well. I bet you and Zach have had chats, haven't you? you can learn more about her at Meet Michelle online. So hello again, Michelle. Nice. Have you.

[00:05:44] Michelle Frechette: Hello. So I hope to be someday the photographer that Zach is, he's pretty amazing.

[00:05:49] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, would you ever swap? we'll find out what kind of photography Zach does in a minute, and I'll be curious to know whether Zach does nature.

'cause the photographs that I've seen of zacker, how to describe it, they're not nature.

[00:06:01] Marc Benzakein: That's, they're absolutely nature.

[00:06:03] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. They're not birds and cats and bison and stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's true. all right, let's go over the, is that right? Have I gone right?

I dunno. Anyway, let's go over to Mark Zaca. How you doing, mark?

[00:06:17] Marc Benzakein: I am doing swell.

[00:06:19] Nathan Wrigley: Mark always joins us at ridiculous o'clock. I think it's just gone quarter past six in the morning or something like that, where he lives. mark is the partnerships manager at Main wp. Oh, new bio. Love it. What does that mean exactly?

Mostly it means finding good companies, doing useful things in the WordPress space and figuring out how Maine WP can work with them in ways that benefit everyone within the WordPress community. That can include integrations, promotions, events, content, or simply connecting the right people. Put another way.

Mark spends a lot of time having conversations, building relationships, and occasionally explaining that partnerships does not just mean asking companies for sponsorship money. Not that it'll ever turn that down. Can I have some sponsorship money? Mark? he also likes to spend time outdoors, often forgetting to put sunscreen on.

Is there a story there?

[00:07:09] Marc Benzakein: I spent yesterday, I was telling you before the show, walking around San Francisco, which happened to coincidentally be the day of the San Francisco Marathon. I had no idea until I planned the trip, and then I ended up walking around, all over San Francisco and we did half a marathon, 13 miles yesterday, and I got a little bit red.

Oh,

[00:07:32] Nathan Wrigley: did, oh, you don't

[00:07:32] Marc Benzakein: look it Well, it's the magic of camera filters and the fact that most people forget how white I normally am. I appreciate you coming on once again and getting up early and all of that. That's really, I'm so pleased. Thank you so much. okay.

[00:07:54] Nathan Wrigley: So last, but by no means least is Zach. Zach Steck, how are you doing, Zach?

[00:07:58] Zach Stepek: I'm good. Glad to be here.

[00:08:00] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. I dunno what time it is. Where, Zach, you're not on the West Coast, are you? You are. no. So it's not crazy o'clock where you are. That's good. I have two bios for Zach because I had to cancel the show last week for sort of family reasons and so there was the bio which carried over from last week, and then he wrote a new one for this week.

So should I just read out the most recent one that you wrote in? Would that be better? Yeah, let's go with that. Zach Steppe builds web native software, manages artists and shoots rock and metal shows sometimes in the same week. He co-hosts expanding the stack on Open Channels FM and is a returning organiser for WordCamp us.

You can find a list of his current [email protected], D-A-E-M-O-N work.com. your photographs are not of cows and bison and pigeons. No.

[00:08:57] Zach Stepek: No, I don't, don't photograph birds though. it's metal

could be used for some of the people

[00:09:04] Nathan Wrigley: metal bands is what I've seen of your photography in the past.

okay. thank you, all three of you for joining us today. I really appreciate it. I'll just go through, if there's any comments? There's a few, just a few. Hello. We've got Web Squadron joining us. How you doing? Imran, we've got Elliot just joining us from down the road. Roy Tanks joining us.

Hello. Good morning. Goby in Ga, Goby. Hello, Goby in ga. good morning. From another Bri Oh, in Georgia, but not Mark, Richard and freshly retired. Richard and Flesh Fresh. Oh, you're a retired. Anyway. Thank you,

[00:09:39] Michelle Frechette: Richard. Go. Yeah,

[00:09:41] Nathan Wrigley: I didn't quite pause that. If you've got any comments, keep 'em coming. But what the intention of the next, I don't know, 50 minutes or 60 minutes or whatever it turns out to be is just a stick word.

Pressy stuff under your nose and chat through it and see if we can come to any reasonable consensus about it. Typically we don't, but it's quite nice to have a go. so here we go. First off, this is us wp builds.com. If you like what we do, and you want to get an email from me twice a week, put your email address in there.

I'll send you when this show comes out. Once I've stripped out the audio from this, I'll put it out as a podcast episode tomorrow morning and you'd get an email saying that's arrived. Also, any links that we mention in this show will be in amongst loads of others. There's probably about, I don't know, typically in that newsletters probably about 30 links, something like that, all to do with WordPress.

So you'll get that, no affiliate links or anything like that. You'll get that tomorrow morning as well. Plus we do the podcast episode, which comes out on a Thursday, and that's what you're looking at here. Most recent episodes, we had tests from Automatic, we had Amber Hines, and then we had two Brits.

one of whom has the most fabulous name, Tommy Rocket. What about that for an actual real name? Doesn't that sound like somebody from the Hollywood movies? it sounds like somebody that Zach would photograph,

right? Tommy Rocket, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Somebody from a, a metal band perhaps or something. Yeah.

Anyway, I had a chat to them about their work. being an agent in what is, I think probably easy to describe as difficult times being, being an agency owner. So anyway, there was that, and then what I do is I allow the guests to drop in some links if they wish to. If they don't, that's completely fine, but if they wanna drop in some links, they sure can do.

and I see that Mark's dropped in a couple, so I'm letting Mark lead on this couple of AI ones. I think first one, Axios, is called China's Open Weight. Kimmy Model Stuns AI World with Frontier Level Results. Tell us more, mark.

[00:11:44] Marc Benzakein: I, to be honest, I am just reading about this and I find it really interesting.

so it's an open weight model, which means you can actually instal it on your own hardware, but it's not open source, which means you don't really know what's going on behind the scenes. But the in impressive thing is, so the first article that I shared is like what the leaked information was about it, and then the second article are the actual benchmarks.

And I haven't gone through all the benchmarks and all of that, yet, but it sounds like it's pretty impressive.

and it's, of course everything that comes out in AI these days is the such and such killer. So is this the Fable killer? Is this the whatever killer? Who knows? But, but I just, I, this is, most of this stuff technically is above my pay grade, and I don't necessarily, I haven't quite figured it all out, but one of the things that seemed to be pretty impressive is that it seems to do very well at, what they call, SWE, which is, what is it, software engineering bench marks.

and it's designed to test whether or not AI is able to go in and determine bugs in complex pieces of software and squash them. And apparently it is comparable to some of the others out there, that we currently have in the us. So what it basically boils down to is China's catching up to, the US and, Then there's a whole philosophical question of, okay, but we can't trust China and, all the spying and everything that goes on. But I think ultimately it boils down to people are gonna go with whatever's cheapest and they've gotten so used to ai, as part of their workflow that they, that I'm not sure people are gonna care, plus the rest of the world, I'm not sure, trust the United States and, their AI models.

[00:14:07] Nathan Wrigley: So,

what's really interesting is that in the uk I can only speak to UK journalism, but I'll just take that off the screen. Actually. In the uk the, discussion about ai, probably about a year ago, it was still really nerdy, it was tech press stuff, and now it's leached into regular news cycles, like normal newspapers talk about ai.

Because I think it's fair to say that if you are, if you're behind a computer, if you're a gardener or something, maybe AI's not part of the furniture, but if you're sat behind a computer, it's quite likely you've collided with it now. And so it's become part of the conversation.

and so anyway, the reason that I'm saying is this, this kind of news now is just leaking into normal newspapers. And the bit that I read in a British newspaper was that essentially you can measure now in, in a handful of weeks how far the Chinese are behind the us. and it used to be measured in years and I think the US went to great lengths to make the hardware unavailable and what have you.

It seems that despite all of that, the Chinese have figured out, ways to either streamline their systems or get the hardware. Anyway, I don't really know, but it's weeks, it's literal weeks. these AI companies in America that used to dominate, I think this time next year will be talking in the same breath About things like this Kimmy model as we have been doing about chat GPT and, open AI and anthropic and all of those kind of things. Because I think you're right, I'm not sure many people will care too much where the model comes from. Maybe they will care if legislation prevents them from using it.

But given the freedom to pick anything, I think they'll just go with whatever's cheapest. And I would imagine China will be pretty hawkish on being cheap.

[00:15:58] Marc Benzakein: Yeah.

[00:15:58] Nathan Wrigley: Anyway, that's my 2 cents. I dunno if Zach or Michelle have anything to add to that.

[00:16:04] Michelle Frechette: I don't,

[00:16:05] Nathan Wrigley: no. Okay. Zach, anything on that?

[00:16:08] Zach Stepek: No, I just, I think that, what we're going to continue to see is more and more, of these frontier capable models coming from everywhere.

[00:16:20] Nathan Wrigley: Everywhere.

[00:16:21] Zach Stepek: Yeah. it's not something that's going to be limited to the large players anymore. And, as I experiment with local ai, more and more, the capability of some of these open source models is really becoming pretty amazing. Yeah. And

with the right hardware and the right amount of ram.

That's the big limitation here. you can have quality that is approaching the frontier models, right from your own machine.

[00:16:55] Nathan Wrigley: It's a miracle. I, the really, I don't use a lot of ai. I know people that do, but the only real metric that I can bring to bear is translation, not translation transcriptions.

So for things like this podcast, I get it transcribed with AI and then, scan it and tighten it up a bit. But the, but a few years ago, let's say four years ago, that stuff was voodoo. it was really cutting edge. And now I have a Mac on my computer with some downloaded models.

It's called Mac Whisperer. I dunno if you've come across it. It's by a indie developer. I can't remember where he's from, but, and he, you download, whisper or whatever model you wanna do, and you drop it in and four minutes later, this basically perfect transcript comes out. And for a brief moment, your computer got a little bit warm.

But that was it. And just a few years ago, that was the domain of absolutely cutting edge sas. Yeah. And now it's just totally pedestrian and normal.

[00:17:58] Marc Benzakein: it's so normal that I think we've gotten to the point where if we find out someone's not using it, we ask why.

[00:18:04] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Interesting.

[00:18:06] Marc Benzakein: which, so it's like completely flipped.

It's like, why are you doing it the hard way?

[00:18:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:18:11] Marc Benzakein: Okay. and the thing that I find interesting, in fact, last week I just had, a, a zoom session with some people in France, and they're speaking English with French accents. And of course, to me it's like, I am, obviously a little bit of an idiot.

And I think how is it that it's able to transcribe English in a different ang in a different lang, a different accent, And yet it does it so well, it's like I can't even transcribe what they're saying. Yes. I have to go back and read it. Yes. In, in, in order to, make out what some of what was said.

And it's yes, this just blows my mind how good it's gotten.

[00:18:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So I interview people from all over the world. And sometimes I speak to these people and English is their second language and they are thick with accent. And sometimes when I'm listening back. The very quickest way to me to, for me to understand that particular sentence is to read what the transcript says.

Because it just knows that, let's say, I dunno, somebody from India is quite likely to pronounce that word in that way. We've heard it a thousand times. So we know it's that. Whereas I'm hearing it for the first time, I think, what is, that's curious. I can't get that word. And you read it. That is ridiculous.

Amazing. but with great power comes great responsibility. And with that, let's put this one on the screen. so this is where it all sort goes a bit backwards. So word. So this is on the repository as always. Thank you, Ray, for your outstanding contribution to journalism in the WordPress space.

WordPress 7.0 0.2, patch rare patches, rare pre authentication RCE as hosts, CDNs get 24 hour head start. So this is the slightly shocking news that a researcher armed with $25, managed to poke a hole into a vanilla version of WordPress. So there's two articles, and again, they'll both be linked in the show notes, but this again, is on the repository, but it's basically the same story in more detail.

security researcher uses open AI's so Ultra to find WordPress's worst vulnerability in years. the folks from Patch Stack, as soon as this vulnerability had been announced, the folks from Patch Stack apparently immediately said AI did that. But instantly, because it was far too complicated for a human being to have pulled off, it required three, three dominoes to fall, all of which were quirky and a little bit unusual.

But if you stack them in the right way, you could leverage an administrator account because you did something else and because you did something else. And it basically meant that WordPress 7.0 0.1 was vulnerable immediately. So it got pushed a, a new release, hopefully you got, it was automatically pushed out.

loads of the hosts were contacted because turns out there's a, I'm gonna say secret, that's the wrong word. There's like a private Slack channel for WordPress security researchers and WordPress hosts. And so there was this back channel going on 24 hours. A lot of the hosts managed to apply patches, companies in the security space, applied patches, CloudFlare applied patches.

So hopefully the problem didn't come and bite you, but if you haven't for some reason, updated 7.0 0.2, just know that it's out there, it's in the wild, and everybody knows how to basically, take control of your flight. I woke up in the morning and all my sites had slightly unexpectedly got updated because, I followed the WordPress news quite heavily and didn't know that was gonna happen.

And, so I was a bit surprised, but nevertheless, I thought, oh, that'll be one of those rare moments where something nasty has been averted. So anyway, there you go. there's ai. was it AI turned bad? I don't know. it wasn't really, it was a researcher doing actual research, but it was the fact it cost $25 on an evening's compute cycle.

[00:22:21] Marc Benzakein: It's AI doing ethical hacking. Isn't that what it is? Yeah. Yeah.

yeah.

[00:22:27] Nathan Wrigley: anyway, if any Michelle, mark or Zach, have you got anything on that? Obviously cloud, but good at the same time, Yeah, it was amazing to watch it happen so fast. The patches and everything come out. yeah. companies on the scale of CloudFlare, I dunno what the proportion of CloudFlare is, of WordPress, but I imagine it's a fairly large slice of the pie.

And so hopefully if you were behind CloudFlare, that would've been, all taken care of for you. But go and read these articles. The one of them explains how the, how the whole thing happened and the technicalities of it. And one of them just explains it from the WordPresses side of things and the fact that, there was this, release.

[00:23:08] Marc Benzakein: I guess the only thing that pops into my mind is. this was ethically hacked and reported. What about all this stuff that may be going on that we don't know about? there that people

[00:23:19] Nathan Wrigley: spend

[00:23:19] Marc Benzakein: $25 on.

[00:23:21] Nathan Wrigley: So there's that. And you got $50, you can do it twice.

[00:23:23] Marc Benzakein: Yeah, exactly.

[00:23:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:23:26] Marc Benzakein: for $25 and an AI model, you can hack your own WordPress website.

[00:23:32] Nathan Wrigley: so the curious thing about this, the, the nature of the attack seems to have been something along these lines. Here's a vanilla version of WordPress. And they did a couple of things. Like they, they removed its ability to, I think, talk to GitHub or something, I can't remember.

But basically it couldn't go out and find, prior art, if So here's a version of WordPress, which is completely vanilla. Go, just break the sandbox if you like. Go. And six hours later it had done it. And so it's, I wonder if there's lots of people doing that, because obviously of course there are one result.

Yeah. But what I'm saying is you would've thought that maybe, and I know that Austin Ginder ran another similar thing and found nothing. so I don't know that, I don't know that there's a whole cavalcade of things out there, but, give it $200. You never know. Get nice and show it the money maybe.

yeah. Anyway, there we go. So definitely go and, update if you haven't already. But, thank you Ray for reporting that. And then, slightly more pedestrian WordPress news. Let's get onto this. if you want to, you can check out the latest version. WordPress 7.1, beta three has now been dropped. The WordPress 7.1 beta channels and prior alpha channels are your way of going and testing things.

but there's a few changes. A few things have been punted is the word we use. one of them is, and I've been, I was talking about this for weeks, thinking it, what, why is this even a thing? Unicode email support has been dropped. So if that means nothing to you, it means that you could have an email address with, a variety of extended characters.

let's put it that way. So here's a perfect example on the screen. Ray's been kind enough to give us an email address and it looks like Rod at gra GR a.org. But if you look carefully, you'll notice that the o is a curious version of an o with a line through it. I don't quite know what you call that line, but anyway, it's got a line through it.

And the a has what I think is called, is that, what is that? I don't even know what that is. Like a circle above the A these are obviously characters used in a variety of languages that I do not speak. But, anyway, the reason it's been pulled is because it turns out it gave us problems elsewhere. So on the face of it, great idea.

Let's allow all of these languages to drop in their characters and will be good. But no, apparently like some unexpected things, like for example, password requests failed because of Uni Unicode characters. So that's one thing. comment, validation failed. So if you were writing a comment and that was the email that you chose that would fail, duplicate email checks produced PHP warnings.

Anyway, it's now gonna be developed as a community plugin. So the endeavor's not going away. It's just, it won't be, it won't be something that's gonna ship. That's that's, I dunno if that's even a story, but there you go. So sorry, rod dot [email protected] that you can't log in with that email address and nor will you be able to in the future, but maybe that'll change anybody on that.

No, unfortunately you can't use those rainbow icons or anything like that in your email address. No, I so wanted that. okay. Let's move on then. oh, just this one. I'm just gonna raise it for you. new in Gutenberg 23.6. I don't know if you like me, you follow on the WordPress project pretty closely.

This is some nice stuff, which is coming in the near future. so I'm an audio fan, love putting audio content out, podcasts and so on. Zach, obviously massive like music fan, dunno if this will be of any use to you, but there's now this playlist block where, it's like WordPress is always, it does a, it, it does an adequate job.

It's not gonna be the cutting edge. Somebody will probably have a plugin, which makes it far superior to this, but now you can drop in this playlist block and into that playlist, you can just add a bunch of tracks and they're like list items really? You just chuck 'em in as like children of the playlist block.

And then, I don't know, you've got a podcast with a series or a, or an album with a bunch of songs. It now configures it all and you can see it on the screen, but it creates a player with waveforms and you can select the track that you like. and there's a bunch of options for showing like the artist's name and stuff like that.

Nice. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah. so how

[00:28:21] Marc Benzakein: does that appear in the media library? I wonder,

[00:28:24] Nathan Wrigley: I'm guessing each of them is just a, an entry into the media library, as simple as that? Yeah. Yeah. I don't, I, so on the left we can see you've got this playlist and then you've got the tracks as sort of children of the place.

I'm imagining they're just entries in the media library. I dunno how you pick the next track.

yeah. That'd be my guess as well. I'm not sure. sorry Zach, did you say something?

[00:28:46] Zach Stepek: Yeah, I said that'd be my guess as well. Yeah, I think, You know that brings up an interesting question about how we start to manage media libraries that yeah.

These various media types in them, which we still haven't solved for.

[00:29:01] Nathan Wrigley: No.

That's why

[00:29:03] Zach Stepek: like

[00:29:03] Nathan Wrigley: party, let's

[00:29:04] Zach Stepek: just add one more complication in

[00:29:05] Nathan Wrigley: the media

[00:29:06] Zach Stepek: library,

[00:29:07] Nathan Wrigley: I dunno if you've come across this one, but the found, the maker of Bricks has a really nice plugin called Happy Scribe. he manages to keep the two things going.

No, not happy Scribe. It's called Happy Files I think it is. And Happy Files just introduces like a Mac finder or, windows. What's it called in Windows? the thing that you use to search your files. The

[00:29:30] Zach Stepek: explorer, the

[00:29:30] Nathan Wrigley: file Explorer. Yeah. The, anyway, the thing which you look for files.

[00:29:34] Michelle Frechette: Clippy.

[00:29:35] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, Clippy.

Yeah. Oh no,

[00:29:38] Zach Stepek: that's

[00:29:38] Nathan Wrigley: how

[00:29:38] Zach Stepek: I find my files.

[00:29:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. anyway, it introduces folders like that. So you just chuck everything to, album folders or use some folders of some folder. It's quite useful. Anyway, that is the thing. and the tabs block, is now got a bit of an update. So it lets you organise content into tab sections each.

I'm just reading off this post. Each panel accepts any blocks you like, so you can have tabs with literally anything you like underneath them, which is pretty cool. videos or even this, you could put this, this playlist block under there and you've got a bunch of new controls like spacing and what have you.

This is really cool. I dunno if anybody's actually using notes, but if you are notes is the endeavour in WordPress to have Google Doc style collaborative editing. Now you can actually highlight a single bit of a paragraph you used to have to just the whole paragraph or the whole block was it? So now for example, if you can see the screen, imagine a paragraph, a text with three people having left comments.

Each of their comments is just a collection of words, not the whole thing. And they get organised into the, or the comment in the right sidebar gets organised into the list. the, the order in which they appear in the text itself. And you can app mention people. again, really cool. And presumably you could add, mention an AI client or something like that as well and get it to do some work on your behalf.

So that's pretty cool. gallery, which always has been a static thing. I've used it a bunch of times. It's quite nice. It's had some recent updates with go left, go right in it and things like that. Now you can add dynamic data. So you could, for example, insert dynamically a bunch of images.

This is the sort of thing that blocks needed for ages. And then there's custom collections for, icons as well. I think I'll probably stop there. Was there anything else? There was a bunch of notable stuff, but I'll leave it there. So anyway, some nice improvements coming your way. Anybody on that?

No. Okay, in which case I will move on. I don't know anything about React, but apparently React 19 is better than 18. Who, who would've thunk it? and React 19 for reasons I don't really understand has been, 19 has been punted. I'll just read what it says on this make article React 19 upgrade won't be a part of WordPress 7.1.

After briefly enabling in Gutenberg, we discovered unexpected income compatibilities in how old and new versions of React interact with each other in and in the ways how plugins use React. We are, we were forced to reverse change. Not only can you have your Unicode emails, no React 19 for you either. I guess if it's breaking things, that's probably quite a good thing.

that's on make dot WordPress org as well. I'm gonna assume nobody's got anything to say about that one as well. 'cause it's, unless you are highly technical and wanna explain why to me. But anyway, I so not clever enough to understand this. Maybe you'll have something to say about this one though.

a little while ago, the new WPCC came along. it's called the WP or the WordPress. we will go with WP so as not to confuse things, WP Community Collective. and recently, like a couple of days ago, 23rd of July, they've changed their name because, say Reed, who is the, I think she's the cce.

Yeah, there you go. CEO of the, what was the WPCC Community Collective was poking around, I don't really know why, but was poking around and notice that the, I'm gonna say WordPress Foundation. Yes, I think it's WordPress Foundation had put in a, a trademark, for the, for that acronym, WPCC. They were gonna, they've put in a trademark application, which has been undecided as yet, but rather than, have two overlapping things.

The WPCC, this one that you're looking at on the screen. And this trademarked one, which I'll talk about in a second, say, and the open community collective have decided to add an O. So it's now the W-P-O-C-C, the O standing for Open. I don't think there's any sense here of like foul play or anything. At least it doesn't seem like that because there really has genuinely been an actual overlap because there's something called WP Campus Connect, which coincidentally has the exact same acronym.

And no sooner had WP Campus Connect been announced as a thing like a week later, the WordPress Foundation filed for the, the trademark on that acronym. So it doesn't really seem like it was, anybody trying to bite anybody else. It's more that this is probably the process that the foundation go through anyway.

If you're into the wp what was cc? It's now not the W It's so hard to get this outta my mouth. it's now o cc Open Community. Yes. Collective. so there you go. That's just something you gotta watch out for in the future. WPCC is C Now look, I've lost my thread. What is the original, campus Connect, W-P-O-C-C, open Community Collective.

There you go. Yes. I hope that's clear. I'll be doing a test, at the end. anything about that, anybody?

[00:35:31] Marc Benzakein: I think it's a smart move. Yeah. I think get outta the way. I think, just why bother with any confusion or any animosity if there's any of that or any type of conflict. just change it.

People know that are interested in the organisation, know it exists. People who aren't gonna notice that there's a difference in change. yeah, yeah. presumably the old website redirect to the new woman, things like that. So presumably it won't be too much of a, too much of a drama.

[00:36:03] Nathan Wrigley: Austin Ginder, who we were just talking about has just popped in and, can you help me out? My memory is like that of a fish. I'm trying to remember what I said about Austin a minute ago. But his reply was, it's the difference of deep audits versus broad audits. Was that me talking about throwing an ai, just a vanilla WordPress?

What do you think? Anybody got any? Austin, if you can elaborate

[00:36:26] Michelle Frechette: on, I think that might have been when it came in. yeah, for sure. Can elaborate on That that would be helpful. And then Iran, I have all the sympathy in the world, Iran. I get it. apropos of nothing that we've been talking about.

[00:36:39] Nathan Wrigley: He said, no one will care. But I just recorded a 55 minute video and realise that I forgot to hit record.

[00:36:45] Michelle Frechette: I've done that, I did that with guests two weeks ago.

[00:36:48] Nathan Wrigley: Oh,

[00:36:49] Michelle Frechette: on, on underrepresented in tech. We got five minutes in and I went, oh my goodness, gentlemen. Excuse me, but I forgot to press record.

We'll start again and it'll be even better.

[00:36:59] Nathan Wrigley: So five minutes is not too bad.

[00:37:01] Michelle Frechette: no. A

[00:37:03] Nathan Wrigley: whole

[00:37:03] Michelle Frechette: hour would

[00:37:03] Nathan Wrigley: be very

[00:37:03] Michelle Frechette: crushing.

[00:37:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's brutal.

[00:37:05] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. That, it's one of my nightmares is

[00:37:07] Nathan Wrigley: I've had interviews. Go on. Is doing

[00:37:09] Marc Benzakein: something like that. yeah. There's not much you can do after the fact. The, there's a load, there's a, so the platform, I shouldn't really say this.

[00:37:18] Nathan Wrigley: Hang on. I'm gonna find some wood. Get some wood. Touch it. There we go. the platform that we use does not have a backup apart from where it's going live. So it's going to four different places. So there's that. But if it crashes in the back end, I have to go to one of those four places and download it.

But now, like these streaming platforms, they're just so clever. they've got like multiple layers of redundancy. I recorded a podcast episode the other day, the platform, as soon as I clicked stop told me that it had failed. I got in touch with support. This is script by the way. Got in touch with support and they said, yeah, I don't worry about it.

We've got three or four copies of that all over the place. Don't, I was like, oh, phew. Thank you very much indeed. Yeah. But if you don't hit the record button, then then all bets are off.

[00:38:09] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:38:09] Nathan Wrigley: I'm afraid to say. There you go. Sorry, Imran. go and start again. Wait till the end of the show though.

okay. Let me take that comment off. Put that back on. Anyway, good luck. Say and open community collective people. I hope it continues to go well. So we seem to be talking a lot about things not happening, don't we at the minute. Like there's not unicode, there's not react 19. This is a bit like a knot, but a very different kind of knot.

This is about accessibility. so Joe Dolson wrote the other day that there are now accessibility theme, document documents that you must follow if you want your theme to be accessible, ready, and in the wordpress.org repository. The, the idea was to get a load of this work done, by May, but that now has been punted until the 30th of September.

I'll just read it. So Joe Dolson make wordpress.org. When we announced the new accessibility ready theme guidelines in May, the accessibility time set an ambitious timeline to re-review all themes and require action from theme authors by June the 30th of this year. Can you imagine that all themes reviewed.

Wow. that date fled by three weeks ago, and the team hasn't taken action to delist any themes yet. The team has found that we need more time to be able to reasonably go through all the themes and make progress. So we're extending this deadline until the 30th of September, 2026. by the way, this seems like deadly serious stuff.

If you are a theme author and you've got a theme in the repository, I could be reading this wrong, but I think you now have to go through this process. Otherwise, they're gonna delist you whether you have got the accessible ready tag or not. I think they're gonna delist you, whatever the state is.

If you haven't gone through these guidelines, you don't have to have completed that work. But you do have to have engaged with the accessibility team to say that work is in an ongoing state. There's a big button right at the bottom which says, read the requirements and request an accessibility review.

So basically you've got two months. If you've got a theme in the repository, if I've read it right, any theme has to go through this auditing process. Do you think that could be right? That seems like too many. how would they even do that? Ai?

[00:40:41] Marc Benzakein: I think if the accessibility team would just spend $25, they could probably,

[00:40:47] Nathan Wrigley: what are they doing this?

Not only could it they have found the problems, they could have fixed all the, I bet Joe's

[00:40:54] Marc Benzakein: earning and delisted anything that didn't comply. Yeah,

[00:40:58] Nathan Wrigley: that's right. so yeah, so it says here, as a theme author, we expect you to have contacted the accessibility ready team using our theme accessibility review request form.

That review indicates that you've taken steps to improve your theme and moved towards the new requirements and are engaging in the process. As long as you've submitted the form and begun the process of fixing your theme will not be de-listed from the directory, but if you don't do that, it will be de-listed.

Now, that doesn't mean that if you've got your theme out on a thousand sites, those sites are gonna have it sucked out of them. No, it'll still continue to work. If you push updates, those recipients will still get the updates, but you won't be discoverable. if you're on the.org to make, make a wave, you won't basically.

So it's quite a strong message they're sending. I think that it's needed though, because, how long have we been talking about accessibility and themes For a hundred years now.

Yep.

[00:42:03] Marc Benzakein: Yep. and at some point in time, it doesn't matter what it is, if it's something that you, everybody agrees needs to be part of something and nobody's.

Doing their part. At some point in time, somebody has to do a little bit of strong arming and actually, I don't know what other choice they have.

[00:42:24] Nathan Wrigley: No.

[00:42:25] Marc Benzakein: but to be a little bit, hey, get this done. And they're still being really flexible. They're saying, just contact us, let us know.

Communicate with us.

But

[00:42:34] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, there's a lot to go through. So I'll just look on the screen. I just click through onto the guidelines and you can see, a lot of work has been done. There's a handbook and then there's a whole bunch of, different guidelines about how you would tackle different things like skip two content links and labelled form fields and all of this.

But like Mark just said, you don't have to do the whole thing, you just have to engage with the process at this point. I guess engage with the process. Marcus Burnett is often on this podcast, or he has been Lots of times before. He's, he's also the custodian, the founder, the developer, of the WP world, which is a community which if you haven't joined it and you're in the WordPress space and you wanna know really the heartbeat of what's going on, in the WordPress space.

So events and other people and businesses and sponsors and all of that stuff, this is the place to go. And they've added this new layer in the background where they've got this, it's like a, it's like a social network, but not a social network. In other words, you can connect with fellow WordPresses.

Let's say for example, you're going I am, I'm off to WordCamp us in a few weeks time. I'll be able to log into the WP world. I'll be able to see who's tagged themselves with I'm attending WordCamp us. Obviously, you have to do that work. It's not like some automation goes on, but if I tag myself as attending Word camp us, then people could maybe, I don't know, say let's go hang out, let's have a coffee or what have you.

And, it's not intended as like a social network. It's just like this bi-directional, you confirm me, I confirm you. We can have a chat. I don't think there's a broader, let's post your stuff publicly From that moment on. It's just a, a way of connecting two people, mutual friends. Marcus says, but that functionality launched, I'm gonna say a week ago, something like that.

So if you've been in the WP world, but you've thought that would be a nice feature to have, they now do. and thank you Marcus for building that in. I've logged in, I've connected with Marcus on that. I confess I haven't gone any further than that, but I, will be. 'cause I think this is really cool and it's got nothing to do with Facebook.

I didn't actually say that. If the lawyers have got their AI tuned in to the transcript, I didn't. Facebook's great. I love it. anybody want, want add anything to that?

[00:45:08] Michelle Frechette: I just think it's pretty cool. I've seen a lot of people saying it's nice. I saw some negative comments. Like I, if I wanted to do that, I'd just go to Facebook or whatever.

Alright, so don't do it. nobody's forcing you to friend people on this network, no. Yeah. Do you know what I saw that was that on Twitter?

It was either Twitter or it was in one of the Facebook groups.

[00:45:28] Nathan Wrigley: Like I, I dunno who it was, I genuinely didn't take this out, but it was just like a really unnecessary agreed, unnecessary dig.

But Marcus just did this nice thing and then somebody felt that I had to put the boot in, oh, another social network. alright, don't do it. Just don't join. I just get it.

[00:45:46] Marc Benzakein: especially when you consider Marcus as, if Marcus, he wants to do everything he can to bring the community together.

And so why not? Why not? add this to something that you've already built.

[00:46:00] Nathan Wrigley: I just don't get, I genuinely don't get that mentality. oh, somebody made a nice thing. Same. Yeah. you know what, I think I'll just slag it off 'cause I didn't make it and, I can't see it. I'm gonna use it.

So let's destroy it. Anyway, there you go. I'm just gonna pivot slightly 'cause Zach, sorry, I only just saw your private comment in the platform, so we'll just go straight. That's okay. Actually, if this is, if that's all right. I, don't even know what this is, so I'll just pop it on the screen. GitHub, is this you Zach, or is this somebody else

[00:46:31] Zach Stepek: there?

No, so this is, Jake from, 10 Up and Field. Oh, Jake Goldman,

[00:46:38] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

[00:46:38] Zach Stepek: Has been working on a WordPress browser extension and the, it, it handles a lot of complaints that he had about working with WordPress, in general, like the fact that the admin bar is cool when you need it, but not when you don't.

so you can now use the browser extension to hide it. plugins can put their own items in the admin bar, obviously, so the admin bar can get a little crazy sometimes. so you can, use the plugin to go and edit a page directly from the front end. You can, really get to your WordPress admin.

so well, it opens the editor, right? So you just hit edit page. Oh, I see. It goes in, once you edit the page, the WordPress admin is available from there all the time. So you don't really need the admin bar to show up, all the time if you have the extension installed.

[00:47:41] Nathan Wrigley: So the extension that I'm guessing is just sitting in the background and when it detects some hand, some, there's some bit of a WordPress website, which gives it away, in the HTML or what have you.

It kind of intercepts that says, ah, this is a WordPress website. and it just takes you from there. and if you logged in, the buttons will do stuff. And if you're not logged in, presumably it won't do anything.

[00:48:05] Zach Stepek: Yeah, it uses, rest API links Generator tags, asset paths, body classes to detect whether or not the site is WordPress.

[00:48:13] Nathan Wrigley: That's super cool. So essentially it just means, it just gives you a bunch of options, but is out the way, tucked away in a, browser tab, sorry, in a sort of extensions tab as opposed to having to go for the full chrome around WordPress.

[00:48:30] Zach Stepek: Yeah. And the, the most recent release is a release candidate.

so this started as a product, a project that Jake wanted for himself, and, it ended up being adopted by WordPress as an organisation now. it will be released, to Chrome and Safari Extension stores in the near future. as a WordPress product.

[00:48:59] Nathan Wrigley: As an actual WordPress. So it's migrated from a GitHub project to an like fully supported, this is a WordPress thing officially.

[00:49:06] Zach Stepek: Correct.

[00:49:07] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, neat. That's really great. Okay. I'm gonna definitely, I'm gonna, I'll keep that one on the screen when we end the show and I'm gonna go and explore that. It's one of those kind of things that you don't know that you need it until you've used it and then you're like, Ooh,

[00:49:21] Michelle Frechette: how did I ever live without it?

[00:49:22] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, exactly. That's interesting. Oh, you can instal it directly from, from the GitHub page. I'm a brave at the minute, which is a chromium derivative and you can instal it directly from there. So I won't do it just now in case it kills the show. That's very cool. That's very cool. Nice one.

Thank you, Jake, for making that available for the rest of us. That's super cool. I'll add that to the show notes. I'll put it in the, I dunno where I'll put it in the plugins themes and code section or something like that so you can inspect it. anybody got anything else on that or shall I move? No, that's

[00:49:54] Michelle Frechette: pretty cool.

[00:49:55] Marc Benzakein: I think it's cool.

[00:49:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[00:49:56] Marc Benzakein: very

[00:49:57] Nathan Wrigley: cool. Yeah, I'm keen to see what options there are. 'cause I guarantee the things that I use won't be there. It's just I'm found to have some configuration of normal stuff that I do that, like the media library, I want the media library in it. By the way, the media library, we were talking about that a moment ago.

It's not the media library, but in the, in a near version of WordPress, when WordPress 7.1 comes out, there's gonna be a, a media modal, which means that if you're in a, let's say a post and you want to drop in, an image, you can just shock it into the edit the block editor, which you've been able to do.

But all that happened was it went in the media library. From now on, you're now gonna get a bunch of like slim, trimmed down Photoshop style editing options at that exact moment. So you'll be able to skew it, put a gradient over it, crop it, move it, put the focus in a different part, and that'll all happen at the instant.

You add your image. So no more uploading it, going back to, I don't know, Figma or whatever it is that you use, tweak it because it's not quite right. Hopefully most of those things will be available at the point that you, you open it. That's very cool. very cool. anyway, there we go.

Okay. We were talking, sorry, Michelle.

[00:51:24] Michelle Frechette: Nope, I'm good.

[00:51:27] Nathan Wrigley: it's that time of the show. It's about, it's 40 or so 50 minutes in where Mark's lights go. You've done well getting to 57 minutes Mark. To be honest, mark has a motion sensor, on the lights in the shared workspace. And at some point, usually earlier than that, he is nice guy needs to wander off and wave his hand at things.

How much, like next time bring a cat or something and just pop the down. I was saying next time, mark, bring a cat and just have it.

[00:52:00] Marc Benzakein: That's a fantastic yes. but we all know that the cat is just gonna lay around when you need to actually be active. So

[00:52:09] Nathan Wrigley: when I was at, at school, they, when I got to, I don't know, I was about 17 or something, that technology, that motion sensing technology came around for the first time.

Yeah. And they installed it across the entire school and, but nobody had done any kind of work on how do you configure this? And so we had that like for a full five or six weeks until the electricians came back. But it happened about every three minutes.

[00:52:36] Marc Benzakein: Oh, three minutes at least. This is, I don't know how, I don't know what the timer is on this, but, I've talked to the electrician like 50 times.

I'm like, this is ridiculous.

[00:52:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[00:52:46] Marc Benzakein: it's, this is the podcast room here at the Cowork. Okay. The podcast room. And yet there's like no motion sensor in here for the lights. when I was at school, the, can you imagine like a bunch of 17-year-old, there's no way they're sitting still.

[00:53:03] Nathan Wrigley: So we were all moving around the whole time, but they'd configured it so you basically had to be like in a disco or something so that the lights wouldn't go off. Yeah. And so the lights would go off and for this period of five or six weeks, the lights would go off and the teacher would just go on, and we'd all get off and, start doing this all at the same time and the lights would come back on looking back.

Oh, that's

[00:53:26] Michelle Frechette: funny.

[00:53:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it was genuinely really, you

[00:53:29] Marc Benzakein: know what, maybe I should get one of

[00:53:30] Nathan Wrigley: those,

[00:53:31] Marc Benzakein: I should get one of those laser pointers that just like random for cats and just set it on the floor or something and see if it could,

[00:53:40] Nathan Wrigley: can I suggest next time you come on the show have a fake cat, a model of a cat on a fishing rod or something like that.

I just swing it around. Oh fuck, that's gotta be the title of this show.

[00:53:52] Marc Benzakein: A I promise you that won't work. And b. I'm a little bit concerned at the, at, at, at the, the pushback you would get about having a cat on a spring.

[00:54:05] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

[00:54:06] Zach Stepek: and the, the weight attached to the term catfishing.

[00:54:11] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:54:13] Marc Benzakein: There's,

[00:54:15] Michelle Frechette: for Christmas. For Christmas. This

[00:54:16] Marc Benzakein: really, that derailed didn't it?

[00:54:18] Michelle Frechette: For Christmas, mark. West Guard gave me one of those people with the air in 'em and they dance. just put one of those in that room.

[00:54:27] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:54:28] Nathan Wrigley: I have no idea why those things are so funny, but they just are, when you are in proximity to something and you find it really fun and you look around and nobody is, those things do that to me.

I look at them and I wet myself just 'cause they're just so wild up. I wet myself. and nobody else knows.

[00:54:46] Marc Benzakein: I need to get a GoFundMe going for one of those. Yes. So that someone will, yeah. so

[00:54:50] Nathan Wrigley: this episode is, unless something else occurs is gonna be called Fake Cat on a fishing rod, that's gotta be the winner.

Like we ever, we're never gonna beat that. Are we might as well give up now. no, let's carry on. So back to this, we were talking about education earlier. We were talking about what is now the canonical WPCC, community credits. This is a little bit like that. So this is WP Credits. WP Credits is an educational initiative in the WordPress space whereby if an institution, buys in I'm doing air quotes, then they allow a, a proportion of the programme of study to be done under the auspices of WordPress, believe it or not.

for example, the University of Pisa allowed their students to opt in and do WordPress stuff in exchange for, I think it was a 12th or something like that, of their degree programme. And this is taken off and it's taken off in different parts of the world. And in order to make this grow the, I'm I wanna say foundation, let's go for foundation.

I'm sorry if that's not actually who is behind this. They're reaching out to other institutions and the most recent one is, they're not saying which one. It's a college in the US has expressed interest in the programme. And it says, but their students need a developer focused track. And it sounds like the, the team that are behind this programme don't have what they think it takes to help make that track and put that track together.

So if that hits your sweet spot, if you're a developer and you like education and you figure that, you could help come up with a, a community track for the WP Credits programme to help, university students or college students in this case, then then that might be, then that might be something you could do.

It says where we need your help. This is where a com, the community comes in. If you're a developer or a WP teacher, we'd love your input on what specific contributions could make up a dev track. What should students be working on to build, and I suppose this is the point, real job relevant skills. So I guess it's forward facing, the stuff that's coming in the future.

Taking it a step further, if we structure this as a two to three level path, beginner to advance, what contributions would you place in each tier? And we need at least the first tier defined by the end of August. So there's a month to go to stay on track for this pilot. So if you have any thoughts, please share them soon.

make.wordpress.org. Alan A. Warner, or Alana, I should say not Alan A. Warner. Apologies Alana. and it's called Help Shape, the next chapter of WP Credits. A developer track and pilot opportunity. It'll be in the show notes, but what great thing if you are a, if you're into those things, word pressing education.

Anybody wanna comment on that or

[00:57:52] Michelle Frechette: there's a comment in the chat. The latest one.

[00:57:56] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. The credits programme is under the Thank you. God. Isn't it amazing? how, I feel like I said that sentence asking whether it was under the foundation about eight seconds ago. That, but it can't have been Right. Because they replied to that.

The WP Credits programme is under the foundation. WordPress Community Support. P-L-C-W-P-C-S. Okay. And that is directly owned as a company by the WordPress Foundation. Okay. Thank you. Alright, so it's a company, is it a for-profit or a non, I'm guessing. I dunno how that works. anyway, there we go. That's what it is.

Thank you. If that is true. I appreciate it. James saying greetings from Ontario, Calen, Canada. I nearly said calendar. You live in the country calendar. and it's 23 degrees in a sensible unit and 74 in the other Rogue unit. Okay. Should we move on? Yes. Okay. this I feel is the piece of the week.

I love this. This is member press. Doism has been around in the WordPress space for several months now. And, member press, or particularly Kurt Noble, has taken a bit of a deep dive. We're gonna put on the screen a little bit later, a sort of more contrary opinion to this. But Kurt's opinion is that the WordPress market share data, which has been in decline, represents not a decline that we need to worry about, but a decline because Google or search engines, but substitute search engines for Google has very deliberately made the business model of thousands of WordPress websites utterly pointless.

And the story basically goes like this for years. And Kurt wraps himself up as one of these people for years. People have been creating WordPress websites and they, he says he reckons 90% of the wrongdoers. Let's go with that in air quotes, that's not the right word, but we'll go with that. Have been making WordPress websites in order to massage SEO for in one way or another.

And Google, in some recent updates, stretching from 2024 through 2025 and 2026 have basically figured this out. And because they figured it out, they've de-listed, de ranked catastrophically in some cases, these websites. Now, the contention here then is if that business model has gone, it's no surprise that millions of WordPress websites have just disappeared, because what's the point in having domains whose entire purpose was to help your SEO endeavour?

And it no longer helps your SEO endeavour. And he's backing it up with some data. He's saying that for the sites that matter, WordPress is still in the ascendancy. there's an awful lot in this piece. It's called WordPress loss Market share and got Stronger. Here's why I'm not paraphrasing it perfectly, 'cause I don't have time.

If you look, it is a full on essay, right? I've read it all and tried to understand it all, but it is a full on essay. But it to me is the most cogent version of why Not to, the sky is falling in chicken little, market share falling. And what I feel is a really credible explanation.

there's a bit at the end tagged on at the end about ai. But basically the point is the websites where people have got skin in the game and they've got a real business are sticking around the websites where in their millions, it was about SEO juicing things and using sort of somewhat shady tactics.

Google's figured it out, got rid of them out of their index, and so they've gone out of existence. So I don't know what you think about that. Was what was on offer. Any thoughts on that? Mark? Michelle, Zack.

[01:02:15] Zach Stepek: I find it really interesting. we talk a lot about the, the market share of WordPress, and it's been used as a metric for quite some time now, but really that's the market share of the top million sites.

I believe that's based on, I would argue that 43% or whatever it is today is actually low compared to how many sites are really built on top of WordPress. but honestly, I don't think that market share is the metric we should be looking at.

[01:02:57] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. Okay.

[01:02:59] Zach Stepek: I think that, it should be the, for lack of a better term, the gross domestic product of the WordPress industry, right?

So what are plugin companies making? What are agency's making? What are theme companies making? that's the economic indicator of the strength of the WordPress industry, not market share per se. and while market share is a, a good indicator, it's a lagging indicator of where we are as an industry.

[01:03:32] Nathan Wrigley: I'll just put on the screen actually, another interesting, again, I just don't know my way around SEO and, gathering this kind of data and interpreting this data to make, to make, to draw, conclusions which people should listen to. So I'm just gonna assume that what you're saying is, there's truth in it, but you can see this graph here.

US search interest in WordPress over five years, and that spike on the right is 2026. so you can see from here is the year 2026, and you can see that line has basically been more or less steady. it's gone up and down a little bit, but broadly speaking, it's not gone off or down in any given year, except as of beginning of January, it seems to have gone up.

And so the contention is, oh, and also a line to that is the fact that the kind of searches that people are doing, and again, I'm gonna trust Kurt on this, the kind of search and the words that are surrounding that search are very much like we want, we are serious, WordPress agency or how do I build a WordPress website?

you can imagine the kind of phrases that it's not just, how do ISEO juice a WordPress website, or whatever it may be. But I just find that curious because I'm, I've not heard this, it seems to be the exact opposite story being told everywhere, but I'm loving what's in this article.

obviously I've got skin in the game. It would be great for me if WordPress continued to, go up and up. It felt for a long period of time that the only commentary was that it was going down and down. But if the, if Google destroying these websites rankings and what he describes, I think as the AI hangover, I think it was, what did he say right at the end?

something about AI hangover, something like that. There we go. The vibe, coding, hangover. In other words, people have had a bit of a play realise that, okay, it did a certain number of things, but the security data surrounding vibe coded websites isn't impressive. So for example, the security data alone is sobering.

He says, Veracode's, ongoing testing of more than a hundred large language models found that roughly 45% of AI generated code samples introduce o wasp top 10 vulnerabilities. And that failure rates stayed flat from 2025 to 26, even as the model syntac correctness climbed past 95%. In other words, maybe people are waking up to the fact that you need something steady, tried and tested over time, not some sort of vibe coded hangover.

Anyway, loved that article. mark, Michelle, or Indeed, back to Zach, if you want.

[01:06:29] Zach Stepek: I'll happily jump back in. so I've been doing a lot of, a lot of AI assisted work lately. And one of the biggest things when you are doing that is that it is possible, as it mentions in the article, to introduce security risks without knowing it. Because the, the ai, coding models, the frontier harnesses really, they only know what the web teaches them, right?

they're not great at security yet, and there has to be a person monitoring that to make sure that, there, that there is a secure code base. And, a good example of that is I'm working on some software, that I'll be announcing hopefully in the next couple of months.

with Mark Atch.

And, we have, this. Set of features we needed. And one of them had personally identifiable information about people, and it included information about, allergies and, other personal data that should be encrypted at rest. And the, the coating harness told us, or told me that what it had built was encrypting it at rest and it was encrypting two of the data points at rest, but not the 12 or so that

[01:08:00] Marc Benzakein: Oh.

[01:08:01] Zach Stepek: Encrypt. but it took a, a human review to find that. And so we're, while we may have lost some market share to the fact that, anybody can prompt a, a coating harness to go out and build something, it really, to echo what Brad Williams has said about this, requires a human to make sure that the AI isn't introducing huge security risks.

And, until we get past that point, there's work for everyone.

[01:08:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And

[01:08:39] Zach Stepek: trying to find these, these errors, these problems, these giant security holes. So yeah, you can spend $25 and, force an update to WordPress across, millions of websites. but you can also spend $25 and build slop.

That is right. Yeah.

[01:09:00] Nathan Wrigley: I wonder what the, I wonder what humanities, as a collective, I wonder what our capacity is for checking ai. Like at what point does it just become so tedious to Okay, it's written me a 5,000 word article now I've got read it, like really read it carefully. Would I have been better off just writing a thousand words myself?

And also, isn't part, certainly the fun that I got out of WordPress was actually building

[01:09:35] Marc Benzakein: the doing

[01:09:36] Nathan Wrigley: the thing. Yeah. The figuring it out and putting the pixels on the page and moving them around and altering the font until I was happy with it and what have you. Yeah. It was that actual pleasure if the pleasurable bit has been removed and given over to an ai, and all I do is basically act as some kind of shepherd and go, I'm not that happy with that.

that could be better. where's the fun in that?

yeah. I, the analogy I can use is, as Nathan, I like to do woodworking. I just ordered a CI just ordered a c and C machine. Which is supposed to come today. And, so you can guess what I'll be doing this afternoon, but anyway,

I actually can't because I dunno what a c and c machine

[01:10:20] Marc Benzakein: is.

Okay. So basically, okay, so what a c and C machine is it basically uses a router bit and you can put in the Oh, the design of what you want.

[01:10:31] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, it just gets

[01:10:32] Marc Benzakein: on with it and it uses plotter coordinates. It's like a plotter with a router that goes in and cuts the wood out for you. And what I'm curious about is I really actually enjoy getting out the scroll saw and the saws and all that and doing the cutting, but the amount of time that the CNC is going to save me, is that going to be worth it?

Yeah. And that's what I think we're constantly balancing. I know that at first I'm gonna be like, wow, this is really cool.

[01:11:04] Nathan Wrigley: This

[01:11:04] Marc Benzakein: can do this thing. A

[01:11:05] Nathan Wrigley: funny mode of watching the machine do it

[01:11:07] Marc Benzakein: stuff, right?

[01:11:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:11:08] Marc Benzakein: But at some point in time do you get to where it's like, I really miss the doing part.

I really miss going and doing the work myself. And then of course we have to throw in the middle of all that mix of. Of, I need to make money at this too. And so it's like, at what point do you give up a little bit of that passion that you have and the fun part in order to be able to pay your bills?

And so that's always like this, this tug of war. It's like a three-way tug of war between efficiency and desire, and then the practicality of making the money. Yeah. And it's really, and then of course AI and everything is moving at such a breakneck pace. We've never seen anything, anything like grow as exponentially as, as this is growing and doing for us.

And things that we're talking about this week about human necessity is already the amount of human interaction that's needed to go through code is still less than it was six months ago.

[01:12:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It's not

[01:12:25] Marc Benzakein: so where's it going to be six months from now and six months after that? Because I don't need to define what exponential is, but Right.

Obviously, at some point in time it is going to happen. We just don't know when, because we've never seen anything like progress this fast

[01:12:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:12:44] Marc Benzakein: In the history of mankind as far as we know.

[01:12:48] Nathan Wrigley: it'll get to the point where even before you've thought about the chair, you're gonna make out of wood.

you'll wake up one morning and there'll be a chair and it's oh. And the AR will just say, yeah, you were definitely gonna want to make that chair. so we just got on and did with it. it just made you, we knew that you were likely to make that chair.

[01:13:10] Marc Benzakein: it's, I'm, I've been looking into these devices that, that listen for you and then create, so it basically for an A DHD or like me, it's gonna come in really handy because like anytime I say, yeah, I'll do that, and then I forget that what I said I was gonna do because it was in a casual conversation, it's gonna, put it in my task list and do all this stuff for me.

But they're already making them that are like, or they're already talking about, oh, this is just something that you just stick on the side of your head and it'll automatically, it's just crazy.

[01:13:42] Nathan Wrigley: can you imagine how many divorces are gonna occur because of that? Because you know that No, I definitely said that.

No, you didn't. I definitely said that. Yeah. Now

[01:13:51] Marc Benzakein: you able prove, I definitely

[01:13:53] Nathan Wrigley: said that

[01:13:54] Marc Benzakein: I would get it as a, as it can be a relationship saver though, too. Yeah. Because you actually do the things that you promised you were gonna do Yeah. That you forgot that you said you were gonna do. that's

[01:14:06] Nathan Wrigley: fascinating.

I don't think I'd ever get one of those machines. I think there's something

[01:14:10] Marc Benzakein: I'm gonna be experimenting with this one that I got because it's open source and I can go in and I can programme it to do what I want it to do.

[01:14:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:14:19] Marc Benzakein: And it's gonna be fascinating. So yeah, I think

[01:14:21] Nathan Wrigley: there's something about.

Not being perfect, which is quite nice. I've lived my life with not being perfect and, and I, it is quite nice, isn't it? Maybe that's part of the tapestry of the whole thing, is messing stuff up and having to apologise every once in a while and things not working out. And whereas always striving for this perfect version of reality and, basic, it's not basic, physics tells us entropy, Nathan, it's all tending towards chaos.

Maybe we, maybe that's, maybe that's what we need to lean into. But anyway, the point of that article, was that maybe AI is starting to have a, maybe there's a bit of a blowback. and

[01:15:07] Marc Benzakein: it's that pendulum swing.

[01:15:09] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. But we've got really beguiled by It, it really interesting, but maybe that isn't the end of that debate.

we'll talk from the opposite point of view in a few minutes time, but just, we're fast running outta time. So I'm just gonna nip through a couple of things very quickly, if that's all right. I've never come across this website, but it seems like some sort of clearing house for reviews or something like that.

It's called True Vora. you can go and find like CMSs and, oh, I don't know, CRMs, and they review it, they put a load of things together. They've got a page here about AI platforms that you can actually trust. So I just thought that was interesting in the, in the context of this conversation.

So I'll put that in the show notes. You can go and see, they do some due diligence and check the reliability. I don't really know how they do it, but I thought that was interesting. Speaking of ai, okay, so we, I've just been saying AI potentially is not all that great. This is so cool. So Jamie Marsland has built with AI Fable.

like a, canvas style swap out for the block editor complete with Grid. All I can do is say, go and watch this video. the editing interface, there's nothing there. you just, you, there's this tiny little panel where you add things and then you just click on things, drag them around, handles appear.

You make things bigger, you make things smaller. But in the background, it's, all of it is core blocks, with grid. And so it looks like you're in this totally different interface because you are. And then you click a button and oh, there it all is as blocks, but it's literally like Canva. you just, the, the editing gets out the way.

You just some, it's somehow into it. So he's launched it, it's called Fable. When I say launched it, he's put it out there. and it's obviously got lots, loads of comments. When do you see loads of comments on a WordPress website? Now this got loads of comments and you can go and check it out.

So it's on his website, which is called Poodle Press, and it's called Ibu, a Canva like page builder for WordPress with Fable. It's very much version 0.1 alpha. Just watch the video. It's three minutes long and it's blooming great. really great for e especially for somebody that just wants to knock out an idea quickly, there'll be all the wrangling of accessibility and all of that to come, no doubt.

But it's an interesting project, so go check that out. the part I found most interesting that you didn't mention is that there's a make freeform button that takes Gutenberg blocks and turns them into a canvas.

Oh, it's, go on. I didn't, so tell me more. 'cause I didn't capture that at all.

[01:17:58] Zach Stepek: if there's a section that was built in Gutenberg and you open it up in go, you can hit a button in the upper right corner of that section that says, make Freeform, and it converts it all to an, canvas editable section.

That's pixel Perfect. Wow.

[01:18:14] Nathan Wrigley: That's super cool. Yeah,

[01:18:15] Zach Stepek: that's probably the coolest part of the whole thing, is you can, take a block based layout and immediately turn it into a canvas ready? Things. yeah. And there we were just saying that ai, eh, and then there's Jamie just like doing the opposite, using Fable to create this, what looks like a really great tool.

[01:18:39] Nathan Wrigley: I'd be surprised if he didn't like keep iterating on this for a little while, at least. Anyway, thank you Jim. Definitely go check it out. It's so worth looking at the video 'cause you've never seen a less, a, a more minimal UI than that. It literally, there's nothing getting in the way.

It's just the canvas, tools like Canva and things like that. if you've written bad CSS before and you've broken your sight, I don't know. It's possible. this is an interesting idea. It's called CSS guardrails and it puts this layer between you and the save button. So let's say you're on a page and you are, so again, there's a tiny little video here.

It's 30 seconds long. basically if this, I'm gonna say plugin, I don't know if it's a plugin, I'm guessing it is, detects that something you're about to do is gonna break things. It will prevent you saving it and pop up a warning. I presume you can push through that if you want to. If you know that it's got it wrong, you can push through it.

But I've never seen anything quite like that. I've seen it in kind of code editors where I don't know, you've got the option to add in JavaScript or something, or, order a, a ultra template file or something. Often they'll step in, but I've never seen it for CSS. it is called CSS Guardrail.

It does exactly what I just described, so maybe worth checking out. Cool. Oh, and it's free. Totally free. I love free and I think it's free forever. nice. Oh, no, not this, no, there's pricing. I apologise at the bottom. No, I'm completely wrong. That was something else. So there is a price to this. So it's $29 a year.

[01:20:12] Marc Benzakein: It's free if you pay for a $99 lifetime.

[01:20:15] Nathan Wrigley: There you go. Yeah. Free after the, yeah, it's free after that. if you're working at speed and you make these mistakes and you've accidentally been clumsy from time to time, that might save you bacon a little bit. Again, I'm just on the sort of plugin hunt for the next couple of minutes.

this is Scru scope. it's a plugin on WordPress org. This is the free one. This is totally free. and it's a word, a WordPress performance profile. I really don't have the time to go into it, but, it's measuring things like server request duration, server attribution, sorry, source attribution, database queries, HT TP calls.

In other words, what it's trying to do is it's trying to figure out literally where the bottleneck is. So if you notice your WordPress website is becoming slow. This isn't just telling you it's slow. This is trying to figure out, okay, let's go backwards and figure it all out. Where do those bottlenecks lie?

And, let me just check that this one is actually free. Is it free? It's by Kurt Payne, by the way. Thank you Kurt. I'm sure this one is the free one. See real demo this, I dunno, I can't find it, but I'm sure that's the free one. so anyway, there we go. And. we haven't got time for this one now, but maybe I'll put this one into next week 'cause it's actually worth mentioning.

So I'll just move on from that one. And then we were talking about the, member press, thing a minute ago where Kurt was saying, don't worry about it. WordPress is just having a correction because of AI and Google deran a load of sites. this is Jean Zong, I'm not sure, Gleer. And, he is saying the exact opposite.

He's saying, the boom is over for WordPress. he works, I guess in some way at WP Mayor because he says at WP MA, we've been analysing the plugin ecosystem for over 15 years and we now run our own intelligence tool that tracks 48,000 plugins in the official directories daily. So instead of arguing from vibes, I track the same set of established plugins year after year and watch what their combined in store base actually did.

And in the early 2000 twenties, massive growth doubling was quite common. then maybe 10, 10 times, 10% after that and now over the last 12 months flat or going south. so it stands in stark contrast to what we were talking about a moment ago. So this is from the plugin side, which is different from the instal of WordPress side.

So definitely worth going and checking that out. Again, I'll link to it in the show notes, but sadly we don't have time for it. But 63 comments on LinkedIn. It's obviously gained. Okay. Some traction. I dunno if those comments are disagreeing or agreeing, but, I'll link to it in the show notes. just a quick security one.

This is sad news that 70% of WordPress websites apparently are still running on massively outdated versions of PHP. if you can do something about that in your host of choice, please do. And then just final bit, what a great idea this is by the way. I read it and I thought, oh, why didn't we do that before?

This is WordCamp US is introducing the Made on WordPress marketplace at WordCamp us. So they're hiving off. A bit of the sponsor area. I dunno why that is. Maybe the sponsors is down and they've got a bit of extra space. But the idea, it says here, I'll be honest with you, when we started brainstorming what could be the, what the sponsor hall could be like, my first thought was a farmer's market.

I'd have loved interacting with poultry, amongst the, WordPresses. But no, not literally the idea of walking down a row of tables, meeting the actual people behind actual things and leaving with something you didn't know you needed. That's the energy we're chasing. So that's what they're gonna do.

They're gonna open up this area to the sponsor of the sponsor booth. And I dunno if you're gonna just be able to rock up or if you've gotta be preselected, but it says a small curated corner of the sponsor hall will be built entirely around merchants, makers, and small businesses who run on WordPress, real people, real products.

So they'll be able to showcase their stuff. And I just think that's such a great idea. I, anyway, there you go. Yeah, that was really pretty cool though. Pretty cool. so go and read this because there's details about it and it says at the bottom, know someone who belongs at the table.

So there, there must be a, yeah, it looks like there's a form that you can fill out if you want to be part of that, but it feels like you're not a sponsor, but you still feel like you've got something to say. I'm guessing it's less driven by profit motives and more driven by, I did a thing, come and have a look at the thing that I did.

you might be able to gain some wisdom from the thing that I did, so we'll see how. See how that turned out. I think that's it.

[01:25:22] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. Pretty cool.

[01:25:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, pretty cool. I'm just looking at the comments. Anything on there? I got Imran saying, image ai restocking my Pepsi Max cans before I need it.

What does that mean? Do you mean

[01:25:36] Michelle Frechette: imagine you were saying how AI was going to have the chair built overnight?

[01:25:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. oh, I see. Yeah. Okay. Wake up in your favourite sandwiches in your fridge. Yeah, that would be lovely. Yes. Oh yeah, it's coming. Imran it's coming not too soon. yeah, it is great idea, right?

The word camp us thing. I think so. Does that mean Taylor Swift will be there?

[01:25:59] Michelle Frechette: I doubt it.

[01:26:00] Nathan Wrigley: I got fairly, maybe an AI version, maybe one of those things that mark, that Michelle's got. Yeah,

[01:26:06] Michelle Frechette: there

[01:26:06] Nathan Wrigley: you go. Taylor Swift's face seller tapes to it. But I doubt the, now there, there's a thought which has got Axe

Zach's head going.

[01:26:18] Zach Stepek: Yep.

[01:26:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I imagine that. Okay. That's it. That's what we got for you this week around, we should be back next week barring, calamities and things like that. But, it only remains for me to say thank you to Mark. Thank you for joining us. Go and get some rest, mark. It's still seven 30 where you are.

I think. thanks to Michelle and thank you to Zach as well. Where are you? You there? Somewhere down there. And, if you three fancy just hanging out for a minute when I press the stop button, we can do that. But also thank you to you, the commenters. If you made a comment or just hung out in any way, even if you were just lurking, we appreciate it.

There isn't gonna be a little slide at the end, so when this ends, it'll just instantly end. But Michelle, mark and Zach, I'll see you in a second, but the rest of you, bye-bye. Yeah. Oh, we haven't done the wavy hand thing. Let's quickly, oh God. Let's, can we just quickly do the wavy hand thing so that I've got a, a thumbnail for it?

Big smile there. Thank you. All right. We'll see you next week. Take it easy. Bye. Bye for now.