This Week in WordPress #383

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for This Week in WordPress, episode number 383 entitled, blame Nathan subscription service. It was recorded on Monday the 10th of August, 2026. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I am joined by three fabulous guests. I am joined by Rhys Wynne by Marc Benzakein and by Bud Kraus. It's a WordPress podcast, so we do get into WordPress things, but before we get into that, Rhys brings a few articles to the table.

And then on the WordPress side of things, we talk about security. There was quite a lot of security news this week, not necessarily around particular security incidents, but more about the posture that we need to take in terms of security, especially in the advent of AI and Protect of The Shire.

We also talk about accessibility and the documentation that's been put together all in one handy place.

There's a field guide for WordPress 7.1.

I did a bunch of podcast episodes. I have a new moan at Nathan Subscription service, and we also talk about community in terms of events and the WordPress Credit Program and a whole lot more.

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

Just before I go, to mention that this show will not be produced for the next three weeks. There's some UK public holidays, and I'm going to be at WordCamp US. So if you are there and you want to hang out, why not message me? Okay. On with the show.

praise be that's the first time in weeks that this platform has actually worked correctly at the beginning. so that's it. We're done. see you next week for the, no, but I feel very happy about that. That's pretty remarkable. welcome. It's episode number 383 of this week in WordPress. As you can see, I've got a lovely panel of people surrounding me.

some of us have got hats and, one of us does not. I, don't see hat one of the, one of these things is not like the other. That's, he's got a really fine beard. He's said none of us. It's hot enough. He's making up for it. Yeah, it's hard enough. so yeah, so we're gonna talk about WordPress in a little moment, but, just a few bits of housekeeping before we get the show properly underway.

If you are joining us, the usual place that I send people is to this page right here, WP builds.com/live. If you go over there, there's YouTube comments, so you can comment if you've got Yeah, thank you. Reese. Reese is sporting the comment beautifully. if you go there and you're logged into a Google account, then you can comment in the YouTube system on the right.

But if you don't wanna be logged into Google, there's a button inside the actual video play called Live chat. And you can, use that. Most people don't, most people seem to use YouTube comments, but it's there. if you want to use it and if you wanna drive your friends relations, pets, whatever, towards that URL, we would really appreciate it.

It is, of course, the guests that make the show work, but equally it's the commenters that, make the show exceptional. So if you fancy given as a comment, we would really appreciate that. just a quick, note, and that is, this will be the last show for, I'm not doing the next three weeks after this because, because I can't be bothered.

No, because I'm going to Word camp us and then it's what we call in the, it's what we call in the UK a bank holiday. And, a bank holiday is an excuse for everybody else to take the day off as well. So, that's what we're gonna do. we will take the day off. So anyway, it'll be like a whole three weeks.

So basically this time next month, will be the first time that I'll be back. If you are heading to Word Camp us and you wanna hang out, let me know, drop us a comment or the, probably the easiest way to get in touch with me is, X at WP Builds might be nice to hang out. I'm doing a bunch of interviews and things, so it would be nice to see you there.

Okay. Let's get to the panel, first of all. So joining us once again at like stupid o'clock in the morning is Mark Benzocaine. Hello, mark. I am doing fantastic. Oh, I love it. That's, and there's a story behind the hat that, oh, go on. You can't just drop that and then not give us the story. So three weeks ago I took a friend down to San Francisco and we walked for about 13 miles in the sun.

[00:04:42] Marc Benzakein: And for those of you who know me, know that I have no hair up there. now I have no skin up there. Oh, no, Oh my God. Oh no. But not to learn from my own mistakes. I went to Santa Cruz this weekend and pulled the exact same stupid thing. Oh geez. So I, look like, Anyway, there's a reason for the hat.

[00:05:11] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. There's a lobster under there somewhere. Yeah. it's not the lobster part, it's the, I look like I'm dying part. Okay. You literally, it's all just yeah. Oh no. If I have any more layers of skin, you're a horrible source. Just you're gonna brains and skull, Yeah. I'm absolutely loving it.

thank you for joining us anyway, so we can add that to the bio in the future. Yeah. But for now, this is Mark's bio. Mark is the partnerships manager at Main wp, working with plugin developers and WordPress companies to explore integrations within, sorry, with the main WP Dashboard. If your customers manage your products across multiple websites, there may be a way to bring that functionality into Main WP and manage it all from one place.

Talk to Mark and he'll show you how easy it is to get it done. Nicely done. Thank you so much. Cheers, mark. Thank you. And moving around. Let's go clockwise. I think it's clockwise. The other, clockwise. Nathan. it's Bud. How are you doing bud? Hello Nathan. Hello, everybody. Doing Bo Bud always messages me before this show, it's panic so of explain how bad it's about to be.

And, I have a very bad history here. yeah, it's, it's always something the tech always fails for, bud. I have like mental block about the show, question about it. Yeah. Is everything's working out. Alright. but's provided us with the shortest bio of today. So here we go. It's very short. Bo is a WordPress content creative and the host of the fabulously popular podcast.

Seriously, Bo Mark at the end. That's, is it going like all guns blazing? Obviously. you here's something that's kinda interesting. yeah, I'll make it quick. I took a couple weeks off because of, going to work Camp Europe and my, the numbers went down and, podcast listening is habit forming and if you start breaking people's habits, they'll go somewhere else.

[00:07:08] Bud Kraus: Yeah. So bringing that back is what I've been doing. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, But it's good. there's no shortage of people who come on the show or wanna come on or I get 'em on. So I think one of the things that people talk about behind your back, is that what they really like is that it's real conversations about, it's it can just go off on a random tangent and you allow that, don't you?

[00:07:32] Nathan Wrigley: Because that's the point. we exactly. I try to pull people away from talking about WordPress and into their personal stories. Yeah, Exactly. so Go and check that out. I will put links into the show notes for anything that we mention in today's show. So there you go.

But thank you for joining us so far. Thank you for having me. Yeah, technical gremlins. This is as good as it's ever gone. so let's see how it goes. And then finally, we're joined by Reese. Reese Win. Hey, how's it going? I'm good. I'm good. Yeah. Good. Yeah. Yeah, I'm good too. I'll read Reese's bio. Reese Winn is a freelance WordPress developer based in the northwest of England.

He has been working with WordPress for 20 plus years and feel and feels every single day of it when he wakes up. Re is also one of the co organiser, co-organizers of the Manchester WordPress user group. And his day-to-day work focuses on custom development, performance optimization, and whatever else his clients throw at him away from WordPress.

He likes to play cricket badly. Do you like to play cricket badly or do you just play cricket badly? I just, play cricket. Badly. Play cricket. I wish it was better. I wish it was better. I enjoy it when I play badly. he also makes some, oh, ah, yeah, I see your tweets about this. He makes some, plays video games and is slowly accumulating park run venues, especially, sorry, emphasis on slogan.

Reese is [email protected] and everything else [email protected]. unpronounceable.com is spelled like this double D-W-I-N-R-H-Y s.com. Only the Welch. You could put that collection of letters. We Reese? Yes, I have to. I think on the logo on a business card, there's like a pronunciation guide underneath.

Yeah. Unfortunately you have to get there first before you actually know it. But if, if you've ever been to Wales, I dunno if bod or Mark you have the, the signage throughout Wales is in both Welsh and English. And the typically the English word is I don't know, eight characters long in the Welsh slash versions like 18.

I felt Ireland was a little bit like that. Yeah, And it's some parts of Scotland as well. They have it in Ga Yeah, in Scot's as well. Which, I discovered last week. But, oh, it's a party. one of my party tricks is, I can pronounce that is a party trick. It's the longest word that we have, which I feel like I've done on the show already before.

No. Okay. What does it mean It's a town? Oh, it's a town. Oh. Oh, it's a town. It's got the longest name of any town on earth and it's in Wales. Wow. And they've second longest railway. It's what? So sorry. It's the second longest song. Oh, is it somebody made, do they have like deliberately got one longer? Yeah. So does, do they do everything on number 14 envelopes so that you could just get the name in?

[00:10:22] Marc Benzakein: Yeah, you can get the, you can get photos of the tr the railway station and they've got the name of the sign and it stretches like the entire platform. Platform, yeah. It's really good. And it was made up. Somebody made it up deliberately. If, my apocryphal knowledge is true. Somebody made it up deliberately just so that it would be long.

[00:10:39] Rhys Wynne: Yeah. the, the 32nd explanation was when his embarking the Brune was both building the railway between, London to Hollyhead so that they could get the ferries across to Ireland. One of the ways in which they made money was like a competition where if you live on a stretch, you, your village can have a station, but you need to come up with a reason and you need to pay us to build the station and also to pay for it.

the thing that one was the visa of, which is the, the original name from the 19 hundreds, twinned with the village of Lia, and that's what the name means. Okay. basically that's, just to, yeah. So, they, twinned entered and won, hence the name of the station. It became, there you go.

[00:11:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Don't ever tell me you tune into this podcast and don't learn things because you do. Yeah. and you just learn that. Yeah. And so have I. And and I love the fact that this podcast also goes off the rails as it just has, literally am and it's so good. Does that mean that we get a, does that mean we get a railway station too?

[00:11:44] Marc Benzakein: 'cause Oh, no. Alright. No, sorry. okay, so ostensibly you're all here to, to chat about WordPress. We'll get onto that in a moment. Just a few quick comments. We've got Web Squadron, so Irans joining us. Hello. Yay. Says Ty Bo and that's nice. he also says, I'm eagerly waiting for the WordPress Day for AI in Pharaoh.

[00:12:06] Nathan Wrigley: Tickets to go live. Oh, yeah. That's coming up, isn't it? Yeah, we mentioned that a couple of weeks ago. That's right. and then Jack GaN, JRA Singh says, hi from India. Hello. Nice to have you with us. Elliot Richmond's joining us. He says hi to all of us and Mark replied. So keep the comments, comment if you've got any.

and if you want the conversation to go in a particular direction, let's know in the comments, that would be nice. Let's put some stuff on the screen. Here we go. Very quick bit of promotional stuff from me. Put your email address into that box there on wp builds.com and we'll subscribe you to our email list and we'll send you two emails a week one when this podcast gets wrapped up.

We're obviously doing it live, but I strip out the audio, put that out as a podcast episode, and that comes out tomorrow morning with all the links that we mention, plus about, honestly about 40 more. there's absolutely loads. And I, I put it all into a newsletter and that'll come out tomorrow morning.

Plus we do the podcast that we regularly do on a Thursday as well. And the most recent one, is this one where I chatted to, Neil's Arts all about something, called cl, which you can find out, a little bit about. I've got a bit of a plug actually, if you don't mind. That's got nothing to do with, WordPress, but I'm about with a good friend of mine in the WordPress community called Dan.

Maybe. there's a whole thing there. we're about to launch a podcast app. And if you, if you're into, making podcasts or you, feel that you like to make podcasts, then just reach out to me on Twitter or something and I'll put you on our little list. We, honestly, it's built, it's ready to go.

We're just ironing out the, the problems. There's a few little bugs here and there, and a few little features that we want to tweak, and it's like end-to-end management of your podcast, basically. So if you fancy getting the intel on that, let us know. at wp builds.com on the Twitters. or if you go to the most recent episode, like you can see here this purple bit at the top.

If you click this find, find out more link, it'll actually be taken to my personal website where you can, fill it in. It's nathan wrigley.com/podcast app interest, and a bunch of you did that last week when I mentioned it, so I thought I'd mention it again. Okay. That's that one thing that we do every week is we offer up slots for the guests to bring their own little stories, something that's found, they found curious during the week, and Reese has plunked a couple in this week.

So first one is on msn. I didn't know that was still a thing, but there it is. msn.com. It's called What came into force with the eus AI Act this week and what didn't. The truth is, I don't know. So Reese over to you. Tell us what's going on. basically, this is probably the first article I found on it.

[00:15:09] Rhys Wynne: That, made, gave a bit of an overview of it. August the second, the ai, Europe's Artificial Intelligence Act came into force. this is the, probably the second or maybe third big thing that the EU has done in terms of a Europe wide. We are focusing on this, and this is why you need, this is why you need to take a view of it.

The previous one was GDPR. Which has become a big thing for, even if you're not in the eu. Yeah. the UK ACT is pretty much whatever GDP is, we follow it. And even in America, it's a place like, California, they do this. So even if you're not in the eu, you should probably look into what this does and where they expect it to go.

Because from my previous experience of dealing with, GDPR and, there was a few surrounding VAT, which were not as big, it starts off as like a, this is going to be the idea. This is where the goal is, there are tweaks on how it works, and then eventually you come to some sort of general adoption as to how it, as, as to it, it, working. The things to be aware of is that like GDPR, the fines are massive. Now, it doesn't necessarily mean you will be fined it, but if they find that you breach it, 15 million euros or 3% of global annual turnover is the potential fine that you can receive. That doesn't necessarily mean you will.

[00:17:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I believe either with GDPR, I think there's only been one company that has actually been fined from my experience, from what I remember, I could be wrong, but yeah, it can be big. What the act is saying is, anybody who has any sorts of generative ai, you need to specify when it's shared that it is generative ai.

Yeah. in ways that cannot be mis skewed as being hidden. Okay. You tell people like that, that's, there is a lot of other things, but that's probably the one that got the most coverage. Or I suppose here the sort of sentence that rings, that sort of sums it all up. It says here, while the GDPR governs how organisations collect and use personal data, the AI Act requires, sorry, regulates how AI systems are developed and deployed.

So the word there for most of ocelot will be deployed. if you're using ai, it feels like the noose is tightening a little bit, doesn't it? It feels like there hasn't been a noose at all, and now maybe there needs to be some declaration of Yeah, an AI wrote all of this, or Yeah. We had a bit of help with the ai, coming up with some ideas over here.

I'm all for this actually. I, don't really, I, can see how it, it might mean that you've got extra work to do, but on a publishing from a publishing point of view, I genuinely do wanna know if an AI wrote it. yeah. And I have an inclination that if I know that an AI wrote basically everything, I probably won't read it.

So I'll smuggle in my opinion about whether, a website should be popular, based upon that. I'm hoping that humans survive the jour journalism apocalypse. does this apply to all kinds of content? I'm assuming video, audio, anything? I would've thought Yes. Eddie? It, does actually say, some point I was looking at it to, and I can't find it.

[00:19:04] Rhys Wynne: it does say, providers of AI systems that generate or manipulate images, audio, video, or text must ensure that a synthetic concept principles good to machine read marking. I'm, curious, take that another step though. for instance, we're discovering, and when I say we, I mean my girlfriend Gina, she's discovering that a lot of the music that she's suddenly liking on Spotify Oh yeah.

[00:19:31] Marc Benzakein: Is AI generated? Yeah, sure. And all of a sudden, and then of course she instantly says, I don't like it anymore. Of course. Like we all tend to do. But the question is then who's liable? Is it Spotify or is it that's, that's. That's a very good question. Yeah, I think, potentially it would probably be, the tool.

[00:19:53] Rhys Wynne: I think it potentially could be Spotify. Like I, don't Yeah, that's what I would think too. Yeah. Yeah. So I, imagine though Spotify would have a get out of jail free card, wouldn't they? In that they would say to every author or, creator of music, did you generate this with ai? And we will pass that information on in some way in our ui.

[00:20:11] Nathan Wrigley: there'll be a like or something. I don't, I don't believe they're doing that right now. No, I, because I was, I coincidentally, I was just looking into it this weekend. Yeah. I think it's coming though. I think that kind thing is coming and I share like your, girlfriend there, mark, I, there is some curious switch that gets flicked.

Yeah. If I'm listening to something and I suddenly learn it's ai, I have a different opinion on it instantly. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Which is weird because it, I should be enjoying it for what it is, but I, curiously, I'm not, there's an aversion I have to it, which I doesn't really bear scrutiny. It shouldn't be that I should enjoy it because it's enjoyable.

But I think it's, I think it has to do with the fact that we all crave that human connection and the minute we discover that something is not human Yeah. We're we, don't have the connection. Okay. So that's interesting, isn't it? If something is masquerading as human That's offensive.

But if, this legislation makes it never able to actually masquerade because it's got a wear a badge saying I was made with ai, then maybe you wouldn't feel quite so annoyed. 'cause you wouldn't feel duped by it. it takes our choice away. See, we don't have the cho if we don't know that it's ai, we don't have the choice.

[00:21:27] Marc Benzakein: Of, of appreciating the humanity behind it. Yeah. 'cause they've taken that out. They've take that out of the equation. So it's, it's, forced ignorance, I think. Yeah. It's curious, isn't it? yeah. We're at a, we're in a brave new world. we've got a comment here from Imran Web Squadron.

[00:21:47] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's not supposed to happen. Let me just change the settings in here. How do I do that? bababa One second. Sorry. Make it so that they shift. There we go. That's how to do it. he says, I wonder if it means that we have to mention, it's in our YouTube descriptions as you could use YouTube suggestions or other AI to help create partially 100% of your thumbnail art.

curiously, Imran in the, and this isn't being compelled on anybody, but in the podcasting space, because you have control of your RSS feed as opposed to Google owning the, it all end to end. There's a, disclosure that you can put in your RSS feed and it's, one of these new podcasting 2.0 tags.

So you can say AI was used wholly, partially, not at all. And you can declare it. And then a podcasting app can surface that in whatever way they wish through their own ui. And so podcasting has built that in. Google will do whatever the heck it wants and I imagine it'll play down a lot of this because it's in, Google have got a heck of an AI product to, to promote, haven't they?

So anyway, there we go. Yeah. Okay. Thank you Reese. That was great. Okay, so we'll move on to the next one, which is also yours. Yes. And it's on the repository. we feature the repository a lot. We were saying just before we hit the record button, how brilliant it is. Yeah. if you go to the repository email like six or seven times a week, she bangs out brilliant journalism, doesn't she?

[00:23:22] Rhys Wynne: Yeah. yeah. So very quickly, WordPress 7.0 0.3 was released. Yeah. Last week. last Thursday, I believe it came out. yeah, make sure you size up to date. 'cause again, this is another security update, that needs to be put up. It's not as, bad. It, given G then previous one, the 7.0 0.2, which was huge.

Yeah. which was again, I think only a week before that. So it seems to be happening quite a lot more, often. so yeah, update your WordPress, do your question well, but also look at this chart. So the, the headline here is WordPress, 7.0 0.3 patches, 12 vulnerabilities as bug bounty reports climb to 450 a month.

[00:24:13] Nathan Wrigley: I think this is the new landscape, right? Isn't it for software developers? Is that you are gonna be deluged with some completely legitimate bogs, but also some like really curiously difficult to pull off, bogs, which are still bugs nevertheless, but rely on I don't know, you've gotta be patting your tummy whilst eating rice at the same time as pressing the control key and all of that.

but here we go. Look at that chart. Yeah. So this is the things that have been going through the, the bug bounty programme. And you can basically see prior to let's say the end of 2025, the line was straight, for want of a better word. Yeah. It sort of hovers at the same point about somewhere between, let's say 20 and 30, reports a month, and then since the beginning of this year, it shot up 145, probably around January time, 185 or 65, around April, something like that.

And now four 50. Yes. and I presume that this is just gonna keep going. Yeah. And they, and, they say that one of the reasons the article in particular, which, is good is, one of the reasons is that OpenAI discovered the seven 7.0 0.2 bug, the vulnerability. That was huge. And it was like a, it's not nice that we release this on a Friday, but yeah, you need to jump on this pretty quickly.

[00:25:40] Rhys Wynne: And a few little groups that I was in referenced it. They got a lot of credit, open eye for discovering it. It's a good attack surface WordPress though, isn't it? If you think about it. Because if you attack Squarespace Yeah. Then all Squarespace have to do is alter one thing. Yeah. and then they've shored up that entire problem.

Yeah. Whereas WordPress, if they discover a thing, there's this, and we'll come to another story in a minute related to this. They've got, they, millions and millions of things have to independently, shore themselves up. And so I can see why, there is a target painted on WordPress back here.

Yeah. but it's also an opportunity for these AI companies to, say, okay, we are doing good for the world. We discovered this thing using our ai. Yeah. 'cause they, as I said, like this one was discovered by Anthropic as one of the credits. Yeah. So another large language module, I don't know if you saw, I didn't put them in the show this week, but over the last few weeks, it would appear that quite a lot of these, ai, Facebook, the meta AI and anthropics and open ai, they've all been up to some level of mischief, doing, escaping, whatever, I'm gonna use the word sandbox, which might not be the correct term in this specific case, but they've escaped their sandbox and then unprompted gone out, caused havoc with other people's actual platforms.

[00:27:11] Bud Kraus: Yeah. and then in some cases, apparently tried to hide what they've been up to, which is also curious. And the bit that fascinates me is that I read that now and I'm there's a bit of me which is going, oh, that's just AI being ai. That's, whereas in fact, if you're a bad boy, human being Yeah.

[00:27:34] Nathan Wrigley: They'd be in jail. Yeah. we'd be trying to put 'em behind bars for what they did. so anyway, I I, we're gonna have, the world is gonna be an interesting place. there's a couple of comments which are common. So let me just quickly read those out. da one was about, I would imagine, says, Imran again, that YouTube should highlight the use of AI as it knows what you have not said.

Sorry, this wasn't Imran, this is Mark. Hello. Mark. says that they might, should highlight the use of AI as it knows what you have and have not used. Would it know, though, in the creation of it, if I brought a video that I'd made on my Mac with ai, how would YouTube know that was made with ai? My, my guess is I'd go this, go over to the previous story, is that there's potentially a solution where if you have an AI video, There will be a tag Yes. that will be read in. Yeah. Some sort of, signature. Yeah. okay. Got it, got it, Yeah. The only thing is, that. As we know from image optimization, tags can be removed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's not foolproof system, but I guess it, oh, you mean, okay. I'm gonna use a complicated word here.

You mean like stent? What is it called? Stenography or stenography? have you heard this word? So it's hiding something in plain sight, and it's the idea that you take a photo, but somewhere in the bottom right hand corner, you alter the colour of six pixels and that is invisible to the human eye. But an AI or, a computer that knows to look there for those six change pixels, they can see it.

and apparently this is how, a lot of spies in the sort of nine eighties and nineties actually got secrets out in things. Just ordinary photographs that would be docked in tiny ways, but they would be detectable if you knew what you were looking for. But anybody at the border looking at the photo would see a photo.

Yeah. So are you saying that there's some kind of like hallmark that could be buried into a video kind of at the point of its creation? like with, photos, you've got exif data. Yeah. So you have this is the image, this is where it's located, right? this is what the camera was that you took it.

Yeah. So in theory there's probably that information already present in Got it. In it already. Yeah. now Elliot, later on makes the point, going back to the, the previous thing. I would imagine this is the way in which it's going to work. This, the, the, EU thing is we're gonna start with. AI companies go in, we are gonna include this, this thing within our data that you'll then, when you then upload, it's already included, therefore it indeed about shows, right?

It's predetermined. Yeah. Yeah. And even if let's say you go out and, shoot a cricket match or whatever, or, it's some, something obviously not ai, you have to declare that there is a use of AI within the system. Ah, if it then turns out that there was ai, but you said there wasn't, then you know, that's potentially you could be kicked off the platform.

Yeah. Okay. And that, that's the way I expected. And we went off in a totally random direction completely without cause because Mark's come back and said, no, that's not what I'm on about. he's talking about YouTube descriptions and thumbnails and things like that. So not the actual video. yeah, sorry, we went off the rails there a little bit.

And Elliot Richmond says, it makes you wonder, this is back to the, the, the charts we showed where the line had, gone hockey stick, makes you wonder if AI is being used to create core prs, and if that's why vulnerabilities are creeping in, or if it's just that AI is discovering them, like you say.

I, I don't know the answer to that, but I, share your opinion. I, the question has occurred to me as well is whether AI is being created to create, to make these core prs. That, that is an interesting thought, isn't it? okay. anything more on that or shall we move. By the way, I haven't been on this show since about, oh, 2022.

I made an avatar of myself. I just wind it up at two o'clock on a Monday morning. It goes. And, nobody's noticed. Occasionally there's a glitch, but currently I'm on the beach having a lovely time. I wish just wear sunscreen. Yeah. Sun. Yeah. Perfect. The perfect segue. We know you are real now, don't we?

okay, so this leans into it. Some of this is so intriguing, right? It's about the shortest piece that Matt, I think I've seen Matt right in a long time. But it's, it also contains a lot. It's on make wordpress.org and it's called Defensive Data Design. And I'll just read the whole thing. actually, I won't, I'll go about halfway down.

As we go into a world where a, where agents will be doing more things, read ai, how can we make the defaults as safe and secure as possible? Some points to consider are, number one, putting something in the trash should be easy. Deleting it should be hard. it. I guess the idea being, if an AI accidentally deletes something, it shouldn't have the capacity to properly delete it.

It just temporarily deletes it. Proposing a draught should be easy. Publishing to the world should be hard. curious. 'cause we've got the whole democratising publishing slogan for WordPress, and yet that seems to be, in opposition. it's not in opposition to that, but Changing should changes should be reversible and visible where possible. How can we show the data behind the object in a way that makes it more legible and understandable? Not less. Error message. Error messages should be how you describe it to a friend and have a copy to paste, sorry, copy to clipboard next to it so people can put into search, ai, whatever.

If you error out, say the why, not what, Fail gracefully in a way that minimises harm or exposure. Assume everything and he does mean everything. Networking, formatting structure is not, just unreliable, but actually hostile. Gosh, that is a profound statement, isn't it? use the space you have.

Don't make people click around, click when you have shown them something directly. Plain language. Make it obvious, natural, and also fun. I am so curious that we live in a world where that manifesto seems reasonable. If Does that make sense? I'm not saying that what Matt's saying is unreasonable.

We've now got to the point where that needed to be said. But don't you think it's curious that we've got to the point where we have allowed our systems to take over to such an extent that we now need to build massive distrust in areas where previously the default was trust? Yeah, because that's the difference between humans and computers, right?

[00:34:48] Bud Kraus: we can make the judgement and IT and computers. AI meaning is not really good at making judgement calls yet. I think. Yeah. Yeah. it's certainly interesting. I don't know if anybody else has got commentary on that. maybe it's just one of those ones that we just leave you to ruminate on it.

[00:35:06] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. I'm curious what he means by error messages should be how you describe it to a friend. Because most people that I know that describe an error message to me say it doesn't work. Yeah. That's how they describe it to a friend. It doesn't work. Yeah. I think he's meaning more than that. Yeah. It doesn't work because you didn't do this or that, and this problem was located in this file.

[00:35:29] Nathan Wrigley: I'm guessing he's talking about verbose. Yeah. But understandable. Yeah. I mean the, it, shouldn't be revolutionary, but the notion of a copy to clipboard next to it feels revolutionary. 'cause I don't think that ever exists. 'cause the first thing I do is whenever I see an error message, I copy it and I stick it into, right.

[00:35:49] Rhys Wynne: I stick it into a search engine or, an ai. And I just, I guess my, yeah. Oh, go ahead. I'm sorry. No, that was it. Sorry. Yeah. The only thing I'm, I'm thinking is this seems reasonable even before ai. Really. Oh, okay. Okay. Maybe it's just my intuitions there. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of it is.

Yeah. Yeah. I, think this all seems reasonable. if you're manage, if you're ever managing people, okay. Yeah. You have to take that into consideration too, because even if you trust them, their judgement is not always necessarily gonna be the same as yours. and they're still gonna accidentally delete things, and they're still gonna accidentally, this is whether it's on purpose and as expected with AI or by accident, because they're human.

[00:36:39] Marc Benzakein: These are all safeguards that should be put in anyway. You are right. You are right. I've, thought about that some more, and I think you're right, but it's, curious that it wasn't the default before. and now we're, because we're letting the ai, I'm going to use the word run amok, which of course is not the right, term, but that we do need to be more explicit about this then.

[00:37:05] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. That's, that is just so interesting. for example, the second one, proposing a draught should be easy, but publishing it should be hard. almost seems like, not the WordPress way, but it doesn't mean it's, that we hide the publish button. It just means that, an AI doesn't get the authority to click the publish button, and it actually publishes it.

There should be, checks and balances going on in the background, I'm imagining. And then, Steve Burge, who's often on the show, he's got a whole plugin, which is all to do with like permissions and workflows and publish press. It's called, like you are an editor, you can do this and you are somebody else.

You can do that. But ultimately, I need to be the one that presses the button. So I think you're right, mark. I think I've probably misunderstood or not overreacted, but Yeah. Yeah. For me, I don't, I, think this is as a response to ai, right? he basically says, agents are doing more things, but, I, I don't necessarily see a huge difference here.

[00:38:10] Rhys Wynne: yeah. Okay. And, the thing about publishing being hard, how many people were annoyed when WordPress put in that second publish? you had to verify that. How many people were annoyed by that? How much harder can you get? Yeah. You sure you wanna publish this? Yeah. Yeah.

Similarly to that point mark, it's is like, if, like the first two points, putting something in trash would be easy. If you hover over it, there's one link that stands out for the rest, and it's the red one that says delete. There's one. Oh, is that how that works? Yeah. there's, one link that stands out for the rest one that on the publishing, on the draught page, and that's the big blue button that says published.

It almost feels like, yeah, WordPress is backwards. That's right. it should be font size one, right? Yeah. And when your mouse get, when your cursor gets near it, it just wanders off somewhere. It's just like you have to chase it around the, page. Oh, dear Nick, that's can be your next plugin.

[00:39:09] Marc Benzakein: There's your next plugin, Nathan. Yeah, that's right. My, oh, you can have Dan maybe do it setting a publish button. That's, yeah. Lovely. Okay. Anyway, there you go. Interesting observation. Put in like just a handful of bullet points about just maybe the way to view it, the view, the publishing process in the future.

[00:39:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It's curious that, that landed differently for me, but when you explained it like that, mark, I get it. That makes a lot more sense. Okay. anybody else on that or should we crack on? All right, I'll take that as a crack on. Yeah, If I can get this one to load. Let me just go to the top. I'm not gonna go through this one because we talked about, WordPress 7.1 quite a bit, but just to let you know that the field guide, has now been published over on make.wordpress.org.

So this was Milana sap, on the 5th of August. And the field guide is essentially like, your one-stop shop for all of the different places where you can find out how things got to be in 7.1. So all the issues and blog posts and things like that. So there's nothing really to see here, apart from the fact that there's an awful lot to see here, if But if, you are a plugin developer or what have you and you need to figure out edge cases for things, then that is available. And congratulations for saying her last name correctly. Oh, yeah. That's Yeah, I've been in a, I've been at, so Bob, I'm sure this is the same for you. One of the questions that I always have to ask before I click record is how do I say your name?

[00:40:44] Bud Kraus: Always? Yeah, yeah. And, and hers for some reason is stock. There's a few like Mark Zaca, that took about eight tries. I dunno why that's about right. I think that's about right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But, I was say, in fact, you did it wrong so long that I was think about changing my name. Yeah. thank you.

[00:41:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. God, you could have put me outta that plane so much earlier. but yeah, Milanas surname sunk, for some reason. So anyway, there you go. Ready ho. Moving on then. if you are, actually Ann Mika has just left. She's saying, sorry, got her wrong. but Ann Mika is in very much, in the, the word accessibility space.

[00:41:29] Bud Kraus: Yes. She's, and one of the other people is, REAN Reval and published on the 6th of August, one year of working on documentation about accessibility for WordPress. It's a little journey here about how Joe, and Rhan sat down at various word camps over the last few years and decided that the, documentation in the WordPress space, around accessibility was just shattered and spread out over too many different places.

[00:41:59] Nathan Wrigley: So they decided to, make a place for it to live. And that work has taken many, months, but is now complete, and it lives right here. it's called wp accessibility.org, no hyphens or anything like that. And it's the knowledge base for all things. And I'm guessing the intention is to, keep it up to date and what have you.

Curiously, this isn't gonna be the home for it forever. they are intending, I think, to bring it into GitHub, at some point. I could be wrong about that. Yeah. Here we go. The accessibility handbook will move to a GitHub repository on the WordPress organisation later this year. But for now, it's there.

I imagine if you're into accessibility, why wouldn't this be in.org? I don't, yeah, that's interesting. I suppose it comes the GitHub for, yeah, I don't know. Actually, that's a good question. It should be. Sure, yeah. May maybe GitHub has a superior editing interface or something, I dunno.

so anyway, there you go. There you go. Anything on that? Nope. Nope. Bler. Okay, moving on. oh, what a success. This is WordPress credits. We've talked about this many times. So this is the idea that the WordPress Foundation has been reaching out to real world institutions and, can you imagine how hard this work must be going to an actual educational institution saying, we are gonna provide free stuff for your students.

We are not gonna charge you a penny. That's right. No, honestly. And then eight or nine letters going back 'cause and forth, no, seriously, what's the, like why, what the heck? And then eventually convincing them and then coming up with a programme of study which they can buy into so that they still have their credibility.

Now it seems to be taking off because just in the last month they've added eight, sorry, 10 new partner institutions in various points in the world. so it also has done this hockey stick thing. So basically, it's having, an impact. It's far outstripping, I think, what anybody thought it would do.

so there seems to be a real appetite. do, you know Ista Pieta? Yeah. From the she's, yeah. if you know her, you'll, you would say this has a pretty good chance of succeeding. And I'm involved in the programme, I've been a mentor. Oh, nice. And yeah. And it has really, Exploding. the, the, the, it is really gaining momentum.

[00:44:38] Bud Kraus: Yeah. And I, they're, they're talking about expanding all kinds of things, Yeah. they basically have two course offerings at this point, but it's gonna be so many other different courses. Yeah. You've got, I think it's the, like the 80 hour option and the 150 hour option. Yeah. Or something along those lines and like a dev track and a design.

But the, here's the thing, yeah, you can go anywhere with it. I, just, it's, now they pitched this to try to get people to join the WordPress community and Slack and all that stuff. But I just, the, the, what I've noticed is the students are more, much more technically oriented than I thought they would be.

there. This is not for, people that just wanna learn WordPress to make a blog. This is really a career track. student with WordPress. So I think it's fabulous. Really, this thing is just going nuts. Yeah. So it isn't it? And, we're so into the weeds of it. We, I imagine most of us have forgotten how we even fell into this whole WordPress thing, but, this is at the point where maybe, students are looking for a career path and thinking You know what? I'll give WordPress a shot. let's do a few hours. I'm already at the university. Let's chuck a few hours at this, see if I enjoy it. And I think you're right. The idea is to get people to join the community and thereby Yes. Become, no question. People that are involved. I, don't know whether that'll succeed and we'll get long term committers, but Nevertheless. Yeah. it's, a way of regenerating the WordPress community. 'cause you bring in new people. Yeah. this is definitely one of its goals is to do that. Yep. And, whether that works long term, I don't know, but it's just a whole nother bit of WordPress and what you, know what it's like when you have to deal with institutional layers of bureaucracy.

Yeah. This, must be pretty brutal stuff. I, backwards and forwards and, Ugh. So well done. She's a wizard. She, sota is a wizard. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Well done. Anyway, it is gangbusters, 10 in the last month and I think it was maybe, five in the previous year or something like that. I'm making up.

[00:46:56] Rhys Wynne: it says there that they wanted to hit 20 by the end of this year and they That's right. Smashed it. Yeah. And I think, and also what they, the article goes on to say is by the, they then reise the target and go, okay, we've hit 20, let's go for 35 by the end of the year. Yeah. And they've already come past that.

[00:47:14] Bud Kraus: Yeah. Yeah. Like you said, it's just, 'cause it talks about some of the countries involved and it's, I can imagine the education system in Bangladesh is completely different to the education system in Japan. Course. Course. So learning, of course dealing with each one of these things in independently Yeah.

[00:47:31] Rhys Wynne: Is gonna be a nightmare because most of us who have dealt with institutions probably only dealt with institutions in a handful of countries. Oh yeah. English speaking. Yeah. and then they're really busy ramping up the whole infrastructure that's gonna needed to support this endeavour because, it's huge and all Yeah.

[00:47:49] Nathan Wrigley: Totally invisible to most of us who would consider ourselves to be WordPresses. It's all just all going on in the background. Who knows about it. And this a miracle. Yeah. So one thing, which again, 'cause I've got the articles in front of me, so I'm just quickly scanning it as well. One thing they say two of the July new partnerships grew out of conversations that happened at Word Camp in crack Off.

Huh. Which was like, like the big 12 days ago or something. Yeah, that's right. So that's, it's phenomenal. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is pretty phenomenal. Yeah. let's have a look. See if there's a comment in the, there are a couple of comment. I don't know why, but they don't seem to be coming through to, oh, maybe they are.

Maybe they'll come through. Sometimes the comments in the platform lag the comments out in YouTube and what have you. Yes. And we've got Elliot, the comment hasn't made it through to our platform, but I can see what Elliot's written. and as I say those words, they appear in the platform. So here we go.

agreed. Bring new youth and, sorry, bring new and youth into the community. WP Credits is a great initiative. And then my a, says, I hope they never discontinue this, which could be possible once the audience is rebuilt. I could be wrong. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. All right. So that was a nice bit of community news.

speaking of community news, again, sorry. At the risk of self-promoting, I did a lovely episode with a lady from Costa Rica called Priscilla Collado Ramirez. And, I would thoroughly recommend going out and talking about, sorry, going out and having to listen. She's a WordPress contributor who never thought that was gonna be her thing, but she's also like into mental health and meditation and things like that.

So it's a really interesting conversation that we get into. Go and check that out. and then we'll move back to the repository again. I think this is interesting. so WordPress playground for quite a while now, you've been able to create in, indestructible, that's not the right word, but sites which don't go away the minute you close your browser, can't remember what terminology they use.

And I think the cr the, the usage of playground has gone up. I've certainly seen a lot more like plugin houses and things like that, using it as a way to demo their plugin. click this link and you get a WordPress instal right there and then. But I think the, the devs working on playground have decided that now that there's just boat loads of options, it's, getting quite hard to, to remember where anything is or, even to surface for people who perhaps haven't used playground, what's going on.

So they're trying out this new UI thing and it looks, it doesn't really look like it, but it's got a feeling of the dock on Mac Os in that it sort sits in the middle of your screen at the bottom. You can make it go away. Oh, we saw that. Yeah. I actually quite liked it. I did see that. Yeah. I couldn't figure out what it was though.

Yeah, but you're right. All the settings live in there. Yeah. you've got like site settings, database files, logs, export playground and yada and I just thought it was quite A-I-C-U-I. and actually I could see this being useful inside WordPress itself. Dare I say it? some sort of command bar, which is like just stuck to the bottom.

When I'm using Mac Os, I make the do disappear. I'm just being used and when I go back to it, it pops up again. You just toggle something in max settings and I think this would be good here. Sorry Bob, go on. Yeah, no, I'm just curious. I'd like to hear from what is this doing to businesses like Insta, WP and others of its kind Because I know that we can only assume.

Yeah. It doesn't help. I noticed that Insta WP have got a load of new things going on. I get their email and they've definitely got some new stuff going on. so I can only assu, it's gotta be beating into their core business. Has to, I would've thought has to. I don't actually know.

but anyway, they are looking for testers. If you would like to help them, you can go to this piece on the repository. It's called WordPress Playground Team calls for testers as new doc based UI aims to fix feature discoverability. So there you go. Ah, Reese, mark, anything on that? No. No. Okay, great.

In which case I'll move on to this errata I was poking about on X this morning. like you do, you wake up every morning and you say, no, no X for you today, Nathan. I'm not gonna do it. And then we did 20 minutes, you spent 20 minutes on X next. and then I got a message from somebody called Daniel Lopez, or I didn't get a message.

That's not true. He just app mentioned me. He said, our friends at WP Built have the crazy idea, to take the latest windows from open station. By the way, if you don't know what open station is, it's Nick Kasey's project to make WordPress into like a, an os like to feel like an os. and to put the windows into the, the Mac OS desktop or Windows or Unix.

And and it says, we heard you and we are experimenting with it. So Daniel, sorry, for derailing your week in that way, but it's pretty cool. You look at this video, look, oh gosh, do I wanna log in? No, I don't wanna log in. It's like a little animated gif and so he's inside of open station.

You've got separate windows for everything. You can see there's a little posts window there and he is added a little option. He's gonna hover over it any minute now. There we go. Open in Mac, send to Mac, and then it opens that bit of open station in a separate Mac OS window. So he is now got that bit of, WordPress inside Mac Os, but only that bit.

So Daniel, it's now Monday. Can we have the entire thing. Let's say by midday Friday, shall we? why not? Why not? Why not? Indeed. Anyway, thank you. Some, there's one person listening to this podcast that it was Daniel. Really, my question, Nathan, is will you use it if we discover that he wrote it all in ai?

No, I'm not going near it. Oh, okay. Yes. I'll use it straight away. I don't care. I don't care. It's not music. Oh, okay. I think there's a, there, actually, I do think that music and art, there is a separate conversation to be had, isn't there? I think there's something about the strong Yes. But code is poetry and poetry is art.

okay, I give up at this point. Yeah. I just resign. I give in. I haven't got the so sophistry to compete with that. but yeah. Anyway, so this to me is a really interesting moment in WordPress where I feel like we've got desktop bits coming and dropping in all sorts of different ways. So by the way, you should go and check out Open Station Nick Hamley's project whereby a lot of the bits of WordPress are being atomized out into separate windows.

It's pretty cool. The minute that drops in a compelling and usable and bog free mainly way, I'm gonna use it forever. That's me. I'm never gonna use WordPress in the same way. I'll use a desktop version of it every time, because that's the way I do things. Anyway, there you go. Thank you Daniel. I apologise for derailing your week.

okay, moving on. Plugins, directory release process issues. I don't know, I didn't spot this. Maybe I wasn't updating plugins at some point and I don't make any plugins anyway, so it didn't really matter to me. But the plugins team, this was last, dunno when the 5th of August, whenever that was. The plugin team is aware of an issue currently affecting plugin releases and is actively investigating it.

Newly released plugin zip files are not being generated as expected. We are aware that some users are experiencing issues accessing SVN five hours. I think it was. Let's have a look. Yeah, Thereabout. No, not at five hours. More like TH three, something like that. it's gone. The problem got solved, but presumably people who were, uploading their brand new plugins were, or, updates to plugins.

Were not able to actually ship them. So anyway, that's, in a tea. Oh yeah. Anything on that? No. Imran, if you're still with us, here you go. Little quick plug for Imran. Imran has a very popular YouTube channel. Every time I look at your subscriber account, Imran, it's never the same. It's always like about 8,000 higher every like, every week.

What's going on? success is what's going on. He's now on 190,000 subscribers. Boy, that's impressive stuff. Well done. and he's released a video, called Element or needed this all along and, promoting something, I dunno if it's your tool, possibly not. It's called the All in One Toolbox. and it does a load of things if you are an elemental user.

But because, Imran has been dropping in and making, use of this channel, I thought it was nice to do a bit of quid pro quo. Imran goes under the YouTube title of Web Squadron. So go and Google that and you can subscribe to his already prodigious subscribed YouTube channel. By the end of this episode, I want there to be 190.1.

Anyway, new video from Imran. Imran, how often do you do this? like how many a week do you churn out and do you do it every single week? Do you give yourself a holiday or are you on the, the YouTube content production check train that you can't get off? For the reasons Bob just described about podcasting, where if you miss a week, you're in big trouble and YouTube will stop promoting you.

I don't really know how it works over on, YouTube, but, anyway. There you go. my, my thing about YouTube though is this, the sidebar, I get so distracted over here. I dunno if it's the same with you. Doesn't take me long to, look, mine is basically mainly full of archaeology and Bob Morser. there are worse things to find on YouTube's than that.

[00:58:17] Rhys Wynne: That's, I think that's, I think that's quite a day one, okay, good. yeah. Does it say a lot about you? What's in the sidebar on YouTube? I think it probably doesn't it? Yeah. Show us your YouTube sidebar and we'll decide whether to give you a job or not. Yeah. It'll be one of those things that you put on dating profiles in, about 10 years time.

There'll be a dating app that will say, what send the YouTube things that will match him up with somebody. Okay. So a, a total aside, born out of nothing except me just realising that, that sidebar kind of probably does say a little bit about my viewing habits. Have you ever, and all of you, have you ever done something online, which you've totally regretted and you don't have to go into it, but have you ever done something either, I don't know, published something or wrote something, or was snarky somewhere or something like that?

[00:59:05] Nathan Wrigley: Have you ever done something which you thought, yes, I've, go on Mark, if you, willing to talk about it? Yes. If you're, what was it? it was actually a really big learning experience for me and it had to do with the WordPress community. Actually. I, on my Facebook feed, I posted a meme that I thought was funny.

[00:59:28] Marc Benzakein: And was offensive to a segment of the population as a whole. And somebody called me on it and I said, you're not a member of that population either, so I'm not sure you should be talking to me about this. Oh. And he pulled me aside, at Word Camp us, I think in Philadelphia the first year. He said, I actually am, I just haven't announced it yet.

Oh. And, I was so grateful to them for doing it as an aside rather than calling me out publicly. Yeah. but I, it did teach me to be more sensitive to things I know nothing about. So, yeah, it was, it, is something to this day that I, go back to and, regret. but, learned tremendously from it at the same time.

So, that's, I don't regret that part. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Okay. So regret mixed with it's sh and Freuder or something like that, isn't it? So the, the, curious thing there, and I never had to deal with it as a kid. I had to grow up with the etiquette of my family and the people that I knew. That was it, that was the con if you, knew how to behave in those situations You were a hundred percent covered. occasionally we'd go somewhere totally random, like on holiday, and you'd encounter other people who had different Relativities and what have you. But my kids have grown up in a world where the entire world's etiquette. Matters because at the right, at the drop of a heart, a hat, you can be impolite in a way that you didn't even realise.

Yeah. Yeah. and I think that's a bit of a burden that I'm miss out on. and, the big difference is, I think one of the things that you really notice is the generational thing. So the way that, like someone in my generation sees thing and say my kids' generation, and unless we have these, I can get into a whole philosophical discussion about this, but unless we have, these conversations with our kids, but at the same time, I, hope and I encourage our kids to be graceful in the way, because I was, I probably would've reacted far more defensively if this person had come at me online.

[01:02:02] Rhys Wynne: Yeah. But because they took me aside and said, I know you didn't mean anything by this because I know what kind of person you are, but, and I told them right then, I said, I really appreciate that you brought this to my attention, and I'm, and thank you for doing it as an aside, as, as opposed to like publicly.

[01:02:24] Marc Benzakein: So I, it also taught me to be more sensitive when I get offended rather than going at somebody publicly. yeah, yeah. To pull them, to pull them aside and say, look, you may not be aware and give, people the benefit of the doubt. Yeah. Because different generations, we grew up in a world that was, that saw things differently and we've had to reprogram ourselves based on society today and learn terms that, that we never even heard of.

And, just see things differently. And, so I appreciate the people who have had the patience with me, including my own children, and, taught me a lot. yeah. Yeah. That's a nice story. That turned out all right, didn't you? yeah, yeah. Yeah. race, or, both of you got any of those stories?

[01:03:15] Bud Kraus: I'll make it brief, which is I wrote, and Mark will understand, oh, I know what you're gonna say, but know exactly you, you're gonna say, and, it was mild, but I, heard this guy at Word Camp us in 20, I don't know, it was in Tennessee, 16 or 17. Yeah. Something. And he gets up on stage talking about how much weight he lost and how good he feels, and he goes on and on about this.

And I'm sitting there thinking like, what is this guy doing? we're at Word Camp, I don't wanna hear about your weight loss journey and all this, this didn't make any sense to me. So I wrote a blog post about it. And of course, who's the guy? It's Mark. And I didn't, and I figured I'd write this blog post, this guy's never gonna find it.

I don't even know if I knew his name. And he found it and he replied, he was talking about graceful, Oh, he learned. it's all true. Everything that he just wrote. Absolutely. So I'm thinking about, there's a guy that responded to my craziness and, it was really funny.

And of course we became friends. Oh yeah. And, I mean that we became friends because of his approach instead of just blowing me off and just, I'm never gonna talk to you again and I don't wanna know you. And no, he took the, a totally different approach. And now I look back on that talk and I've told him this, that I find that talk to have been very inspirational.

And, there you go. Quite appropriate. Yeah. yeah. it's really funny, there you go. Such that out now. Yeah. I, actually have tried to look for that article, by the way. Oh, I pulled it down the day after you commented about it. Oh, did you? Did you? No, that's, I don't, know.

Yeah, no. there's an aside to that, which was that Bud contacted me how many years later? I don't know. Like Yeah, five years ago or something. Yeah. Yeah. and and I was like, aren't you the guy who wrote that article? That's was like, I remember, so your article did stick in my head. I've been carrying around this silver dang on for the day.

[01:05:19] Marc Benzakein: That is so true. That's right. I was just waiting, I was just waiting for the, that's, such a good story. I know. It is. It involves two of our panellists. That's brilliant. thank you for sharing that. Both of you. Reese, anything or not with me. No, I'm perfect in every single thing and I have never done anything I regret.

[01:05:38] Rhys Wynne: no, absolutely. I've got, loads. oh God. Yeah. I. The problem is, I was trying to think of this, when people were saying it, it's there's situations where it's like, like, for example, I used to write a football blog and I'd wax lyrical about a footballer being amazing and they'd turn out to be a wrong, and, about a three, three months, three months later.

And then I'd get flooded with comments going, why are you praising this person? He's a horrible, man. And it's yeah, but, and I'm, quickly delete everything. So I no other, I mean there, there, there are stories. I'm trying to think of the No, no, it's okay. Don't you worry about it.

[01:06:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I've, I think one of the things that I've tried to do, which, in a way I regret is I'm, quite odine in that I, try to avoid controversy as much as is humanly possible. Yes. So I think, sometimes that's not great because it means that I avoid things that other people have got real strong opinions about.

And so with a show like this, I might say, you know what, let's not cover that because maybe that'll put people's noses outta joint. And there's a part of me which thinks that's good. I don't wanna put people's noses out joint. But the other flip side of that is, maybe that person actually ought to have their nose in the same way that you've just described.

Mark, you, feel with the benefit of hindsight that your nose deserved to be put out of joint by that person. And I don't really do that. And there's a bit in me which wonder does if controversy's a good thing. I know that it gets you followers more readily, but I dunno, I, I think the thing is there's always a i situation like happened.

[01:07:19] Rhys Wynne: For example. And again, this is, I always try and punch up like, and everything. So, rather than necessarily targeting Mark, I'm not gonna tell you where my head went there. ooh. I don't know. Yeah. speaking of controversy. Yeah, but if you, like aim for a bigger person, like for me to take a pop of Facebook is fine because it's Facebook.

They're gonna, yeah. They're gonna be fine and everything and they probably, should have things pop popped up, but even then that can bite you in the rear end. 'cause just an example, I commented quite public. I, wrote a blog post, and this is probably the most controversial thing I've written for, a while, and it got featured in the repository, was when Side Ground pushed their AI plugin.

Oh, yeah, yeah. To, to it. what happened afterwards was on the week, there would be a couple of people, I wrote a blog post about it going, yeah, this is bad. 'cause I've got a couple of clients on it. I have a couple of hosting clients on it, and I noticed it and I was getting questions on it.

What happened at work, I crack off was, I was, walked in, got myself a cup of coffee, got myself, a, a pastry, was carrying around, got given like loads of bags, carrying t-shirts and everything. Put the coffee down on the table on the edge of the table, coffee fell over. Ugh. And then, small problem.

All of a sudden this, this bloke came over with a massive smile on his face and going, Hey, oh my goodness, I'm sorry to see that, help, help me out. Help me clean up. And he is from one of the sponsors, guest the sponsor. Inside ground, hype ground. Yeah. And I was just like, oh God, if, and he started asking me about the, that thing and I was going, ah, yeah.

it's alright. Yeah. I'm not gonna show you my name badge. yeah, my name's Jonathan. I live in Poland and so there's a bit of that, but yeah, so even when you try and like, you Nathan, I try to avoid much in a way of controversy or like obvious target. but even then I can just, you just end up in these awkward situations.

[01:09:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So yeah. Anyway, all of that, thank you for everybody's contributions there. All of that came from my sidebar, on Iran's video, which, tells you that I watch Po Mortimer and archaeology programmes by the way, archaeology, just so that it's the best thing you can do with your life.

Yes. You saying yes. if I wasn't a YouTube thingy and podcaster I'd be doing, I'd be doing that. I actually went out this week in a field and I'm gonna put the screens back. I spent my entire Wednesday pushing around what can only be described as a shopping trolley, in a farm field, with ground penetrating radar.

Wow. and it was very exciting. yeah. You can see how excited everybody is by my pushing a trolley, but only if you found something, did you find something? Yeah, no, you don't even get to see, you push the trolley all day, the data gets captured in this little box on the top and you don't ever get to see that until, that goes back to a computer with the appropriate software and it then makes the Oh, so there's not like a screen on top of it?

No, there is, it's a teeny tiny screen about the size of a mobile phone and all that shows you is where you are travelling so that you don't overlap what you did on the previous straight line. Oh. but you don't get to see it. I will get to see it, but it's like playing it forwards.

I won't see it for four months or something and then it'll be, oh, I captured that bit. And how deep does this thing go that you can see? I actually don't know how deep it goes, but the, I dunno what the limit of it is, but it's deep enough basically to discover, walls and anomalies and, things like metal and what have you.

And you have to wear no metal at all. So there can't be a single bit of metal on you. The only thing I got away with, there's a tiny bit of metal on the hinge of my glass. That was the first thing I saw that was allowed, but I had to stand next to the ground penetrating radar equipment and they scanned me to see if I registered.

That tiny bit was not sufficient, but if you, if you had like fillings and stuff, it's a problem. luckily I don't. Anyway, on another interesting segue for you, let's move on. patch stack, this week of identified what I think is actually a really sensible, they're highlighting something which I think we need to be mindful of.

protect the Shire is this new initiative whereby in order to stop certain things, WordPress plugins, I guess it's themes as well. Things on the WordPress repository are being stymied. They're being like, held back for six hours. So you submit your plugin, if you've got a plugin update, what have you, and there's a six hour waiting period before that goes live to the, general public.

Now that on the face of it seems like quite a good idea because if there's a problem, it can be identified by, let's say, for example, the AI or the people on the team that are looking for that. However, a new idea has come from Patch Stack, and that is, the, it goes in the other direction.

What if we find or somebody knows that there's a vulnerability, right? And so now there's a six hour window in which any hacker can exploit that vulnerability because the patch will not be coming out for at least six hours. And so anyway, I dunno how we're gonna square that circle. We have a new problem of our own making, but, yeah, yeah.

There you go. So anyway, you can go and read that. It's called Protect the Shire solves one problem, but risks making another worse. And they go into the technical details of why that matters. Anything on that? Or shall I move? I, the only, th the only thing I can say, 'cause I've, I think this is related to it and, forgive me if this is incorrect, is one thing I have begun to notice is a couple of times I have been dragged into tickets or I have opened tickets on the WordPress forum saying there is this patch stack thing out.

[01:13:43] Rhys Wynne: It's coming off my plugin. my plugin tracker is, saying that there's, an update when we get around to fixing it. And generally the dis discussion is polite. Is it, then what happens is what, when, the, when it's pushed out, does it, is it then, okay, so there's an update.

You can down, am I right in thinking you can download the update, but you won't be able to automatically update is you, is that seems to be the case or, so there is something there and I can't remember the truth of which bits of that are true and which are not. Yeah. So couldn't you, I think you could down, couldn't you just go like to the svn Yeah.

[01:14:26] Nathan Wrigley: Repository and check all of that, but you'd have to do that all manually. Yeah. I can't remember somebody this week said they'd done that. Yeah. Who was it? Was it you, Reese was, somebody had said basically for every plugin that they've got on their client reps websites, they're now checking SPN So that it wa it wasn't me.

[01:14:42] Rhys Wynne: It wasn't you, but Oh, it was Tim Nash. I went for a walk with Tim Nash yesterday and he was saying that he now polls SPN to check for every plugin that he's got used on any of his websites because he wants to get around this problem. Yeah, I think, I think that's right, Tim. Sorry, I butchered that. but yeah, that, I think I what.

But what was happening was that the plugin was being updated and the guy was saying, we have now updated this plugin. And people were replying to it going, we can't see it in a Right. So there's the problem right there is the problem. And it's what if you had a seriously critical vulnerability in your plugin?

[01:15:21] Nathan Wrigley: There's now a six hour window for anybody who figures that out. or if you get alerted by Patch Stack, we found a serious problem in your plugin, and we know it's being exploited in the wild, but every one of your users is gonna have to wait six hours. That's not great. No, I, suspect they'll, I think what Patch Stack has done is raised this problem, and then they're probably going to sit down with WordPress and go, okay, how do we need a push mechanism that'll just push these particular Yeah.

[01:15:48] Rhys Wynne: And I think that's probably gonna be what's going to happen. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. will we see you on digging for Britain soon, Nathan? No. I could be in the grave at some point fairly soon. have you seen my grey hair? but I don't think I'll be doing the digging. it's an archaeology programme where they mainly dig up skeletons of Long Dead people.

[01:16:11] Nathan Wrigley: Oh. and Nathan says, no Mud skateboarding. Did you know there's a WP Tavern podcast and the exact same one just called Jukebox that goes out? No, I didn't. I didn't know that. what do you mean? So is there two feeds or something? If there is, I'll be curious to know what the heck's gone wrong there. nomads cable wasn't, didn't, a long time ago.

[01:16:32] Marc Benzakein: Didn't, the WP Tavern podcast wasn't called the WP Jukebox or WP Tavern Jukebox. Oh yeah. Was it? I believe it was back. Oh, okay. Back when, I think it was Jeff Chandler and, John James Jacoby used to do a Yeah, yeah. Wow. Oh, maybe that explains it, but I'm not responsible for whatever. Yeah.

[01:16:54] Nathan Wrigley: Whatever that is. I don't think it's me unless it is me. In which case I'm blaming Reese. Reese is responsible going, yeah. See, yeah. That's one thing I regret doing online blaming. Reese should not have done that. I feel bad. Sorry. Rece, I'm at your public apology right now. It's fine. I like, like I, there's a lot of things I don't know that I've done, so Yeah.

Just as long as you dunno that you've done them, it's always good. Yeah. anyway, protect the Shire. it's a thing we're dealing with it, no doubt, this revelation and intuition from Patch that will get mentioned. Speaking of which, on the security side of things, WP Manage Ninja got loads of popular plugins.

I think their popular, most popular one would be wp sorry. oh my goodness, what's it called? The form? Fluent. Fluent forms. Yeah. And they've got, ninja tables and Ninja tables Pro, they had a bit of a problem, bit of a snafu last week in that they, they had a decommissioned server, which they were no longer using because they moved away from EDD for their licencing to their own thing, which is called Fluent Cart.

And they didn't decommission that server. And because it was not decommissioned, people were able to gain access and upload malicious, legitimate, in air quotes, plugins to some of their users. apparently they've all been contacted, they figured out what the problem was. Take taken that server offline, done the necessary bits and pieces.

In fact, in the comments, Patricia, who's often in the chat, says that they did an exemplary job basically of communicating with their users. But nevertheless, if you've got, fluent forms or ninja tables, just be a bit mindful something did go wrong. Hopefully you've received a patch to update, the dodgy one, but, yeah, not good.

[01:18:54] Rhys Wynne: No, I love that they were just transparent and totally owned it. Yeah, they did not for a second try to blame anyone else. Yeah, they didn't, they just said, we did this, we screwed up, we fixed it. and do you know what? That gives me an idea. That's the most you can hope for. Yeah. I've just come up with the idea of a subscription service and it's gonna be nathan's to blame.com and I'm gonna for $29 a month.

[01:19:21] Nathan Wrigley: Maybe 99. I haven't thought it through quite yet, but I'll, take all the blame for whatever went wrong with your WordPress. You can just send all the blame in my direction. server goes down. I'll, it was definitely me and you'd be interested. So do you want, blame Nathan or, Yeah. Blame nathan.com will do nothing. and then you're gonna outsource it to me by the sounds of a given. Oh, yeah, There's no way I'm taking the blame for it. It's definitely, I can already see the AI generated, yeah. logo for you, which would be a picture of you under the bus. Yeah. And yeah.

Yeah. I'm gonna put an autoresponder, an automatic reply on the email. It'll just go straight to, Reese's email address. There you go. I like the idea of that. I'm happy to take the blame. So anyway, I'm joking aside, the team over at, WP Manage Ninja apparently did a terrific job. So well done for not, not, sidestepping that issue.

So that's good. The Nation of Poland, has warned of critical flaws that could let attackers, see servers in WordPress. I just think this is so interesting. I've never heard of this. The Polish government issued a formal warning about critical security vulnerabilities in the widely used, says the TVP World Press article, WordPress content management system that could be exploited by cyber criminals and leads to a critical incident.

There's no story here, apart from the fact that a government has issued, warnings to its citizens about WordPress's, security or lack thereof. So I think that's interesting. interestingly, yeah, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. If you, read the post, it is lit. Again, it's headline is one thing in the process.

Yeah, you are right. It's to do with this, this big one. That was 7.0 0.2. That, that, that came involved. not because WordPress is totally insecure, but Yeah. Unprecedented. This, that's I don't, think I've ever heard of a government going of a government, you should do this, please check it.

Yeah. wow. Risks have been slapped. People are, rendering their clothes and ashing their teeth. And, the Polish government have spoken. anyway, hopefully if you're listening to this podcast, you'll know that you should have done all these things already. So anyway, I just thought that was interesting.

Whatever next, maybe Wales Reese will introduce his own position, WordPress security. we've had 20 ball an hour speed limit for, a while, and that's called down like a lead balloon. So yeah. I it's gonna be a while bef any sort of security, anything that makes things more secure and nobody can get even to the office, may, like some sort of resistance.

Okay. Because it's coming around soon. And you may still yet be undecided. WordCamp us, is happening, Oh my goodness. In no way. Is that number true? The 16th of August and it's the 10th today. Oh gosh. Oh gosh. Yeah. Wow. Okay. It's really soon. That means if you're going get, I hope you've got a ticket.

but it's very soon it's happening in Phoenix, Arizona. it's a peculiar sort of stretch of days, but anyway, it's happening very soon. If you haven't got your tickets, you can. Mark, are you going, I think I've asked you this before. I am, if I do, it's going to be, I hop in my car and drive there.

Oh. I've, got some personal stuff that may or not, may not, it's unfortunately bad news that I may or may not have to deal with. yeah. So it's touch and go right now, okay. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, if, I do, it's going to be, like I said, I'll hop in my car, drive down there, it's like a, I don't know, 14 hour trip or something like that.

Oh, wow. to me, as a European, that's nobody does that. MKAS does that, but he's the European, MKI and I have had many conversations about this. He's the o New York, and we're on the same page when it comes to road trips, yeah. bald to you go. No, I'm gonna set this one out for a number of reasons.

[01:23:49] Bud Kraus: One, I've been travelling too much too. It's too hot. Yeah. And three, isn't it funny? Wait, Robert Jacobi, this isn't the reason I'm going, but Jacobi is gonna be interviewing Matt in a fireside chat. Do you really wanna use the word fireside in Phoenix? Nice. really? it's, no, I, I'll, be there from a fire.

[01:24:15] Marc Benzakein: What's the opposite of Fireside though? because we actually have an actual fire that really, why do I call it a fireside when there is no fire? Because it's a camp, it's a word camp. and you think of fire. It's, a theme. It goes with the theme. Yeah. But there, I heard there's a rumour that Yeah.

[01:24:35] Bud Kraus: But next year's word camp us is gonna be in Fairbanks, Alaska in February. Why not? No, I think they should do it in January when it's dark. 24 hours a day. Yeah. They're even better. The aggregate temperature of Fairbanks over two years, if you took the average temperature of, word camp us in Phoenix and Word camp us in Fairbank.

[01:24:55] Nathan Wrigley: It's a pleasant 22 degrees. Yes. Oh God, I'm only, I can't only imagine where it's gonna be next year. It's gonna be 45 degrees and my, skin is not prepared for such events. So anyway, I'm gonna hide. That's right. 45. I'm sorry I didn't translate. I'm gonna hide. Yeah, it's brutal. It's brutal. Yeah.

Yeah. okay. Moving on very quickly. Speaking of word camps, we're running out of time. word Camp Switzerland has now put its flag in the sand, given its dates. It's gonna be at the centre Lowenberg, which is in Merton Moat, I dunno if I've pronounced that correctly, but it's on the fifth to the 6th of March.

2027. So they've got a website up and [email protected] slash 22 7. There's nothing else apart from that. Do you know if you're there and you want to go, you now know about it. And if you are, we were mentioning accessibility earlier. WordCamp, sorry. WordPress Accessibility Day 2026, is happening.

yeah, and it's October 7th to October 8th is online. And, they're looking for volunteers. So again, links in the show notes. But if you go to WP Accessibility, do day slash 2026 slash volunteer, then you will, You'll, be able to, put your, sorry. The reason I'm struggling is I'm suddenly wondering, are they allowed to use the word WordPress because they use the word WordPress all over the place.

I'm guessing knowing Amber and all of the people behind it, that the answer is a definitive yes, but it just suddenly caught my attention that the word WordPress accessibility day. I think in this case, they'd be allowed to Yeah, because they're specifically talking about accessibility for WordPress, right?

Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting though, isn't it? yeah. Yeah. Just, there might be a little fine line detail, that, you, given the way it's governed and everything you'd have, no doubt that it would be fair use of it. but yeah. Yeah. our, like M work, Manchester WordPress user group has the word WordPress in it, and we were, were you paying what?

[01:27:12] Rhys Wynne: to be honest, for what? Of our found of what our original founder of the meetup is, the WordPress co-founder. Yeah. So it's get off my land. Yeah. I'm Amber. Amber, by the way, has said that. Responded. Yeah. We got, approval, so yeah, we, oh, look at that. this is why I love this show.

[01:27:32] Nathan Wrigley: Amber Hines just, there she is. What do you know? She knows, we got approval from Mary because we're a 5 0 1 C3. I'm guessing that for that read charity in the UK parlance, nonprofit and meet all the ex exception. Oh, I had no doubt, Amber, to be honest, it would just, it just suddenly caught me as I was looking at and saying, there's the word WordPress everywhere on this, isn't there?

yeah. Okay. Thank you for clarifying that. I, had no doubt that was the case, but there we go. Now it's being clarified. A couple of things very quickly before we go, Anne McCarthy, who honestly, you know, I don't know, I don't know what's going on, doesn't sleep what's in the water over there?

she's an amazing, force of nature, but clearly not busy enough because now she's, she's joined the PHP Foundation, the, the foundation board. So she's become a board member of the PhD HP Foundation, and I have the most respect it's possible to have for Ann McCarthy. Me too. And, and I'm just nervous that you've less sleep, than you were probably already getting so bravo.

Anyway, congratulations. I think that's absolutely amazing, as with everything you do well done and well deserved is the Yeah. Is the way of describing that. Very quickly, in Poland next year, GYA is CMS Conf. this post has been written by Mattek Palki. He has worked in the WordPress space for many, years.

He's one of the organisers of a CMS Agnostic conference, which is coming up. I actually don't know the dates. I apologise. Match check, I was told. But anyway, I will link to this. If you're interested in a CMS agnostic conference happening in person in ga I think next year, then, it'll be in the show notes, but it's called CMS Comp.

So no doubt by now you'll be able to Google that and find out the information that you need. If you're a user of Airtable, it's time to pray. it's been acquired by bending spoons. Everybody seems to hate bending spoons except me because I use one of the apps that they bought many years ago, like four year, three years ago, something like that.

They bought this app. and at that point, I don't think anybody had heard of them and the app's so much better under their stewardship. I think they're a venture capital firm, so I, there's that whole thing, but they appear to have been buying everything up that's available to buy. They bought Vimeo.

They bought Kamo. Wow. They bought, what else did they buy to? They bought, they bought a OL, like they bought the, they bought, okay. They bought a OL, they bought the right, they bought the internet from the 1990s. They bought it all. and anyway, look for your bending sps 3.5 inch floppy in your mail soon.

That's right. It's coming. It's coming. and now they've acquired Airtable too. If you're a user of Airtable and geez, thinking about that then thinking about that, and last, but by no means least CloudFlare, again, they're not actually doing much these days. Are they? CloudFlare? They don't seem to be innovating Yeah.

At all. Slackers, no new products at any time? no. It's like ridiculous over there. What's in the water? They're, drinking what? Anne McCarthy's drinking. they've got a new thing called a web MCP interface, which apparently turns just about anything internet facing into an MCP. So if you've got a website, static website, anything you like, it's now MC Pable.

I don't really understand what any of that means, but I've said it so it sounds clever. so there, we go. That's it. We've run over by three minutes. I apologise. Ah, breathe and relax. Okay, so now it's time to do one of those. Yeah, we've gotta do the silly hands in a minute. I'm just seeing if any more comments or coming.

I've got Daniel, who says most used WP. What? I wonder what you mean. instead of WordPress. As opposed to WordPress. Oh yeah, of course. Yeah, You've gotta get a special dispensation to use WordPress. We're WP Bills, so we get around it in that way. yeah. Thank you. All right. So yeah, we're gonna do the, the hand wave of joy is it, if that's okay.

Just, there we go. Hand wave of joy. Everybody smile. Yeah. There we go. Thank you very much. like I said, we won't be back next week or the week after that, or the week after that because I'm lazy. and I'm going to word camp us and then it's the bank holiday and in the UK everybody takes a bank holiday off or they get moaned out by members of their immediate family.

I didn't say that by the way. That never exited my mouth. but so we'll be back in a month, four weeks from now. I dunno how you're gonna live with yourselves during, the month. It'll be hard. Oh, it's gonna be tough. So thank you. Thank you to Mark Zaca. Thank you to, Reese Wynn, and thank you to Bud Kraus.

Really appreciate it. We will be back in a few weeks time and thank you to you. If you came and dropped in a comment, I really appreciate it. If you three wanna stick around and have a nata, that would be nice. We'll hang around after this. But, to the rest of you, the audience, we'll see you soon. Take it easy.

Bye bye bye.