This Week in WordPress #384

[00:00:03] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress, episode number 384 entitled Steve Licked A Hammer, sponsored by show fm. It was recorded on Monday, the 5th of October, 2026. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I am joined by three guests. I'm joined by Rhys Wynne, Raquel Manriquez and Steve Burge. It's a WordPress podcast, so we definitely talk about WordPress, but we also get into all sorts of other things like events and drinks and AI, and really getting off the rails in various different places.

But on the WordPress side of things, we talk about the roadmap to 7.2. We talk about Press Conf, about Manchester, the resurrection of the WordCamp over there, a podcast, which Steve did. We get into the Interactivity API, and all the different bits and pieces happening around that. We talk about a new WordPress theme called Delta.

We also talk about the presence, API, something I had not heard of is the WordPress plugin repo getting deluge. The answer in short is yes, and as I said, we go off the rails a lot of times, and it's all coming up for your dilatation on this week in WordPress.

I, for one, had forgotten how annoying that music is. That music's really annoying. I gotta change that music. I've had it for about eight years now, and every week it's the same. Just change the music. Wrigley and I never do. we're back. It's been ages. I decided to take a load of time off for the summer and then launched a SaaS app and just got busy basically.

And, decided I'd put this on hold so I could concentrate on that. But we're back. And the intention is to do every single Monday from now till WordPress is no more new

[00:01:55] Raquel Manriquez: eternity.

[00:01:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. So, for ages. but it's this week in WordPress, we're on number 384, and, if you are joining us live, appreciate it.

Drop us a comment that's really nice. The best way to do that is to go to our live page, wp builds.com/live. It's got YouTube comments embedded, on the right hand side of the player if you're on a desktop. But there is a little widget inside the actual video player. it says live chat. And if you don't wanna be on a Google account or anything like that, you can just use that.

If you prefer that, that's nice. Come and give us a comment, send people in our direction. I can see a few people have already done that. Before I introduce our guests, let's say hello to some of our commenters. Hello, Patricia. Nice to have you with us. Thank you. Thank you, Courtney. Hello. Courtney's gonna be on next week, I think.

very nice to have you with us as well. Steve. Steve Woody. Hello. Hello, Steve. we've all set. N ne Nis nis. I'm gonna

[00:02:58] Raquel Manriquez: calling out your music.

[00:02:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, Oh yeah. You, you see we're in agreement. Yeah, I know. It's terrible. basically what's the problem here, ne Rose, is that I'm just lazy. That's the truth of it.

It would take me eight minutes to change that music, wouldn't it? But I seemingly can never be bothered. Patricia's back missed you and the show. Thank you. That's very kind of you. Webcam e happy to see you all. This is lovely. And WP Bakery, welcome back. That's lovely. Lovely. Okay, so the idea is to talk about WordPress e bits and pieces.

And in order to do that, we always have a panel of different people joining us. And you can see I've got three people joining me today. I'll start, where will I start? I'll start with Raquel. Hello, Raquel.

[00:03:43] Raquel Manriquez: Hi.

[00:03:44] Nathan Wrigley: Very nice to have you with us to, see you. Yeah. It's four in the morning or so. What time did she say it was?

It's not quite that bad.

[00:03:51] Raquel Manriquez: it was 5 45 when, yeah. I'm West Coast,

[00:03:55] Nathan Wrigley: okay. yeah, Raquel's gonna be making no sense, during the course of this podcast. It's a little bit, it's too early, but no, I really appreciate that. if you don't know Raquel, Raquel is the founder of Wonderland Curious, a tech event consultancy focused on creating innovative people, first experiences, longtime leader in the WordPress ecosystem.

She previously founded the WooCommerce agency Mode Effect, which she led for a decade before exiting in 2020. Today, she channels her community experience into press conf, which we'll talk about in a minute. Actually, a conference designed to foster candid unrecorded conversations among the leaders, shaping the word press ecosystem, a perpetually curious soul.

Raquel believes deeply in the power of meaningful connection wherever her feet land outside of work. She's a recent graduate of Full-Time Parenthood. You call that graduation. I seemingly never Ends for me, parenthood and enjoys music. The undergrad. Yeah. Yeah. I'm still an undergrad. Yeah. and she likes to spend time with her big indigenous family.

we're gonna show the website in a minute, but should you wish to see it, it is Press Conf events. You can go and check that out as well. So thank you, Raquel. I really appreciate it. thank you. Okay. Next we'll go to Reese. Who is, where is Reese? I, did I get that right? Yeah, you are right. according to my

[00:05:20] Rhys Wynne: screen.

You're

[00:05:21] Nathan Wrigley: all right. Yeah.

[00:05:22] Rhys Wynne: To the right.

[00:05:22] Nathan Wrigley: Reese is also putting on an event, we'll find out about that in a minute. but Reese is a freelance WordPress developer based in the northeast of England and has been working on WordPress for 20 plus years and feels every single day of it when he wakes up. He also is one of the co-organizers here.

It comes of the Manchester WordPress user group. No, that's not what I was expecting. And his day-to-day work focuses on custom development, performance optimization, and whatever else his clients throw at him away from WordPress. He plays cricket back, makes and plays video games, and is slowly accumulating park run venues.

You do loads of that.

[00:06:00] Rhys Wynne: Yeah. I'm trying to,

[00:06:01] Nathan Wrigley: trying,

[00:06:02] Rhys Wynne: yeah, there you're, I'm trying to get to 50 by the end of the year. Saturday was 45th, okay. I should. unless I'd do something horrible, I should be able to get Yeah, that's,

[00:06:18] Nathan Wrigley: that's pretty impressive. What, I typically see on a Sunday morning.

I open up the phone on my laptop or something and I'm just getting up and there's a picture of you having finished at a really difficult rod. And I think I need,

[00:06:33] Rhys Wynne: I usually finish last, I, there's not that many people who are, slower than me who don't walk it like I, me

[00:06:42] Nathan Wrigley: and running.

we're vowed enemies for life. I'm not, I don't have it in me, I just don't have the, seminar or anything

[00:06:50] Rhys Wynne: like that. it's when you, it's when you get an 80-year-old pushing, pushing their grandchildren around, overtaking you. You just feel

[00:06:58] Nathan Wrigley: okay.

[00:06:58] Rhys Wynne: Oh, you

[00:06:59] Nathan Wrigley: can, yeah. Okay.

[00:06:59] Rhys Wynne: Yeah.

[00:07:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. This would be me.

Yeah. I'm gonna read your URLs out, professionally. Reese [email protected].

[00:07:08] Rhys Wynne: Yeah.

[00:07:08] Nathan Wrigley: Or Restock Wales, which is a little bit easier. okay. There we go. Anyway, thank you for joining us. Re welcome. Appreciate it. And finally, Steve Burge, who's gone to town with his, with his bio. It's gonna be a little bit lengthy there, so take a deep breath.

Nathan, here we go. Publish Press Founder.

[00:07:27] Steve Burge: I, thought I would go back and fill him more later, but I just ran outta

[00:07:29] Nathan Wrigley: time. no, it's all right. It's good. he is in fact the founder of Published Press, which we will also be talking about in a minute. But, thank you Steve for joining us as well. Do you wanna add anything before we kick it off?

[00:07:40] Steve Burge: Oh, no, I had one of those kid graduating moments this morning. I woke up, they were about to go to high school and in the US they leave for high school at six in the morning, which I'm British. Normally high school would start eight at a reasonable time. Us high schools always started unreasonable times.

So this morning they were out there, their car wouldn't start. I was running around with jumper cables trying to get the battery. started trying to teach them how to, I remember

[00:08:09] Raquel Manriquez: that.

[00:08:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[00:08:10] Steve Burge: it so that, that's my reasoning for why it this morning was a little chaotic.

[00:08:15] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I, kids. Appreciate you making it in and appreciate these other people who've dropped into the comments as well.

So we've got, Jackson saying chow is, how do you say that? Amichi is that like friend or something like that? I dunno what that word means. Anyway, there we go. hello, says Elliot from down the road for me and we've got a clinking of beers by that person. Whoever that handle is. Matic. Hello Barcelona.

We're from all over the jama.

You know about your event already. Okay. Yeah. everyone's here. Awesome. Says no mud skateboarding. Great to have the show back. Thanks Elliot. Appreciate it. Webcam. It's really, yeah, you are even more on the coast than Raquel. It must be. Yes, she is.

Brutal o'clock where you are. it's the same

[00:09:05] Raquel Manriquez: time, but

[00:09:06] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Alright. Yeah, but she is closer if Raquel can do it. Cammy you. Yeah. and finally Reese, I love the raccoon. Mario behind you. I

[00:09:18] Raquel Manriquez: know. Thank

[00:09:19] Rhys Wynne: You're very welcome. Courtney, I'm trying to point you. Yeah, we go.

[00:09:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[00:09:22] Rhys Wynne: you're very welcome, Courtney.

[00:09:24] Nathan Wrigley: Hey,

[00:09:24] Rhys Wynne: I'll tell you about the story about getting it at some point, but we call before everybody

[00:09:29] Nathan Wrigley: and then Steve says hello. Good afternoon.

[00:09:30] Rhys Wynne: Hi, Steve.

[00:09:32] Nathan Wrigley: Nice, Happy with us. Anyway, there we go. So if anything that we mention, if you want to just interrupt us in the comments, that's great.

Equally, if anybody on our panel wants to interrupt, please do. Otherwise I just end up talking, which is no good for anybody. but the intention is for about, I don't know, 45 minutes or so, sorry, more like, an hour and a quarter, something like that. Batter around some things that have happened in the WordPress space because this show hasn't happened for quite a while.

Some of this might feel like it's happened a little while ago, maybe two or three weeks. And that's obviously because we haven't talked about it on this show before. But here's the website that we do, wp builds.com. If you wanna keep up to date, just put your email address into there and we'll send you two emails a week.

One for the podcast, which comes out on a Thursday, and then for this episode as well. And here we go. Let's get stuck into it. The first piece is all about the roadmap for 7.2. this is featured on the repository. If you haven't signed up for the repository, please do so. It is, in my opinion, the best journalism that there is in the WordPress space these days.

And, radars a fantastic job of keeping us all up to date with all of, like professional grade journalism basically. And she's talking in this particular case about WordPress 7.2, some new security features, suggestion mode for notes. And then there's a new default theme perhaps called Ipsum.

Anne McCarthy basically, has written a bunch of things about what's coming, real time editing, which has been something which has been punted again and again and we've had like little bits nibbling away at realtime editing. It has again been edit, been punted for the third time, but this time long before the release.

So in other words, it's not going in. We know it's not going in, whereas before it was going in and then it got dragged out at the, the last minute. So that's not happening. However, there's gonna be what's called a suggestion mode, which will be added. So it's a little bit like, I don't know, Google Docs commenting where you can suggest something and that can then be ticked and that edit can take place, on a security footing.

There's something called the secrets API, which is really interesting, which would give WordPress a first class way to store credentials, which we've never had before. That's cool. And another thing called pseudo mode, which I think is curious, which highly privileged admin access, but would need re authentication at the point of view.

So hopefully it wouldn't be something that could be abused. 'cause pseudo mode sounds like seriously dangerous. application passwords are getting a bit of hardening as well. And also responsive styling is set to get a public API, so that you can do things programmatically, set global styles for this, that, and the other thing.

There's a bunch of other small fixes as well, but that's basically it. That's what I took from that. If anybody wants to comment on that, I will throw the doors open so you can go for it or not, as the case may be.

[00:12:33] Rhys Wynne: I think Steve had something to say, so that's why. Yeah.

[00:12:38] Nathan Wrigley: Steve.

[00:12:40] Steve Burge: Oh, I, was raising my hand,

[00:12:43] Nathan Wrigley: oh, I'm sorry. So the way I run the show is Oh, great old

[00:12:46] Steve Burge: fashioned. Did

[00:12:46] Nathan Wrigley: I? Yeah, I'll, because I've got my, 'cause I'm reading stuff on one screen, I often can't see the screen that we're in, so if you, me, I probably won't see it.

So just, bot in. It's fine.

[00:12:58] Steve Burge: thinking back, my original point was, I think you mentioned repository being like the best WordPress journalism. I don't think there's anything else like it in open source.

[00:13:06] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, is that case? Gosh,

[00:13:07] Steve Burge: I've got my feet in a few communities and

yeah. In Drupal and Laravel and some, some others.

I don't see anything of this quality anywhere else in the open source world. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I've missed it, but, the bar, she's setting the bar like

[00:13:24] Rhys Wynne: 100%. Yeah.

[00:13:26] Steve Burge: Way, way high.

[00:13:28] Nathan Wrigley: I, speak to Ray, not, particularly often, but there was a period of time where I did speak to her quite a lot and man, she like for every hour that you, that it takes, so let's say it takes you four minutes to read that thing that was just written, I reckon there's probably a full day, and a half, two days of solid work that's gone into that thing.

It is not by accident. This doesn't trip off the tongue. Stuff like that is probably easy to track down. But when you're dealing with the conflict between Automatic and and WP Engine, you have to read like pages and pages of so much court documents and it's brutal and she does it on our behalf.

So go and sponsor her if you're not already and read her stuff and shout from the rooftop. Sorry, Steve. Sorry, come on.

[00:14:14] Steve Burge: Oh, yeah.

Oh, I dunno if he froze are for you and then the other

[00:14:22] Raquel Manriquez: he Yes

[00:14:24] Steve Burge: he is. There's, oh, am I freezing? Yes,

[00:14:29] Nathan Wrigley: you are a little bit. You might be better off Steve, if you, if you refresh and we'll drag you back in, in the meantime, I'll go to Reese if you, Steve, if you just wanna refresh, make sure that all the bits and pieces are aligned and then I'll go to Reese and then we'll just drop you straight in when you get back.

So Reese over to you.

[00:14:45] Rhys Wynne: Okay. things I like about this, I think the suggestion mode for notes I just feel like is going to be, as a freelancer, this is very interesting for me. I get feedback from clients in every single form from Word documents to, I think I had one who actually printed something out and scribbled oh, and sent me, I, and came I'd, asked for my postal address to go, here's a, you know, here's a, here's a load of documents.

So to have something where it's within the WordPress system and we can, this is where I would like the notes to go. just, a way that whilst we can't get the real time collaboration, which I think. In a way is almost like a blessing in disguise because for a suggestion, I'd probably, there'd be a client, it would just be like playing tennis, and it'll be like, it'll be just like everything would come back and forth.

And even when there's like clients that have send over like Google Docs, there are times when I'm starting at the top and they're just adding things to the bottom, and by the time they get to the bottom, they're at the top and it's can we just have like a, a day please so I can catch up? that's interesting.

I'm going to lament the loss of the 2020 themes because I can't like them. Oh. But I think it's, I think it's probably sensible. They went for a default theme, which, first one since, Kubrick, if you remember that. Back in,

[00:16:27] Nathan Wrigley: that's got a name. That's got an actual name. Yeah. Yeah. I do remember Cubic, the big blue kind of rounded banner at the top.

Yeah.

[00:16:34] Rhys Wynne: Yeah. There's a few, of the old sites I manage still have Kubrick installed.

[00:16:40] Nathan Wrigley: Really?

[00:16:41] Rhys Wynne: Yeah. And I

[00:16:42] Nathan Wrigley: What, are you managing over there? That's Oh,

[00:16:45] Rhys Wynne: very old websites. Yeah. like some, some of them have been going, one of them is my own.

[00:16:52] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. I have

[00:16:53] Rhys Wynne: 2006 and it's just, again, later vintage.

[00:16:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Vintage website. I like that.

[00:17:00] Rhys Wynne: I'm also curious about the security mode as well. Yeah. I'd, I wanna, I, apologise. I, haven't really read too much into this, but having a pseudo mode for privileged users, I. Would be very interesting.

[00:17:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I'm sure that, yeah, a

[00:17:20] Rhys Wynne: developer

[00:17:20] Nathan Wrigley: like you probably would make use of that.

I think the, I think the, suggested bit where you get to say, yeah, let's do that. I'd be interested to see how far that stretches into WordPress. So for example, if it could stretch into, yeah, let's go with that font as the default font, or yeah, let's go with that colour palette as opposed to, let's go with that paragraph in that post.

It would be interesting if it stretches into like the theming layer and things like that. anyway, Steve, you've rejoined us any joy? Are you able to speak?

[00:17:53] Steve Burge: I hope so.

[00:17:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. We got you. We got you.

[00:17:55] Steve Burge: Yeah. These things work inside the site editor. You'll be able to leave notes inside the

[00:17:59] Nathan Wrigley: right

[00:18:00] Steve Burge: when you're working on themes.

[00:18:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So do you want to carry on where you left off or, or have you, has that moment passed now?

[00:18:09] Steve Burge: Oh, you're making me constantly think back to a few moments, a few minutes before.

[00:18:13] Nathan Wrigley: Sorry.

[00:18:16] Steve Burge: I guess collaborative editing. I've been on episodes of WP Build before we've talked about it, and I said I think it's the most difficult thing people have ever tried to do in WordPress.

And I think that's proven true. It's got punted early. It's a long way from being, even attempted to be merged again. they're working on something called the, the presence API instead, I think,

[00:18:45] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, we're gonna come to that towards the end, so lock that one away. We'll come to the presence API at the end.

But, yeah, I'd given my use case for WordPress, which is usually just me, I would never make use of collaborative editing. I could imagine a team like TechCrunch or the BB, I know BBC don't use WordPress, but I know TechCrunch do big team like that. I'm sure they could make use of it, but maybe, where we're getting with these notes and comments and things like that.

Maybe that's as far as we probably need to go. anyway, 7.2, just around the corner. You can go check it out in the repository. Raquel, anything on that? Or should we press on?

[00:19:24] Raquel Manriquez: I would love collaborative editing that would work for my world.

[00:19:28] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, would it? Okay. Yes. It just goes to show we're all different.

I just, I'm always in WordPress by myself. But I guess if you're running events and things and you're trying to manage a team Yeah. Having it all in one

[00:19:40] Raquel Manriquez: place. Exactly.

[00:19:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:19:42] Rhys Wynne: It, would even, like I have a freelancer and I, my clients are quite small. just like the time between go to log into a post, somebody else is in the post, emailing them to go, oh, you're already in the post.

Can I take over? Yeah. They read again coming back. Okay. Just things like that, it would just save so much time.

[00:20:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:20:08] Rhys Wynne: but yeah, whether that's. Would that be worth all the headaches? That by the sounds of it, collaborative other thing seems to, be, I don't know.

[00:20:19] Nathan Wrigley: So we have, we have a few comments.

So Mr. Pollard, I'm guessing, or Mrs. Pollard maybe. I don't know. It's got a capital s Let's go with Mr. Pollard. don't give clients pseudo. Okay. I won't do that. and that makes sense. I get it. Steve needs to, Steve needs his jump lead. Oh, it's Mr. Poll. Yeah. No coffee. Oh, Mr. S Simon. Okay, got it.

Yeah. Sorry, Simon. Steve needs his jump leads from this morning. Okay. Hello? Says I'm Hines. hello Seth. It's

[00:20:53] Raquel Manriquez: Brian.

[00:20:54] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. You, that's

[00:20:55] Raquel Manriquez: Brian.

[00:20:55] Nathan Wrigley: Brian Richards. Thank you. Thank You I'm not very good with the handles. I know names, but I don't know handles, Jack, all the event

[00:21:02] Steve Burge: organisers are here today.

[00:21:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yes. Sorry. Exactly. Steve, we've knocked out most of your face. let me make that on happen. There we go. so Jackson says, yeah, but the problem is, the notes is in the admin on the editor page. We need to have notes available on the kind of front end login, just like every other feedback system.

If it's, gonna be used for clients, Simon says agreed notes on the front end would be good. You can do that with third party services. But built in would be nice. And then I guess they're having a little bit of a back and forth here. Most client feedback is before they would ever get access to the admin.

And then Elliot. Elliot, Richard, hello Elliot. he agrees with Jackson. It would be nice to see notes brought to the front end where clients expect to mark things up on a lifestyle. I feel that's a whole, we should do an episode just on this.

[00:21:53] Rhys Wynne: Yeah,

[00:21:53] Nathan Wrigley: another one. 'cause it feels like there's a lot of people who've got comments on that.

[00:21:57] Rhys Wynne: I, agree with it. all of that 100%, that's, the way it would, I'd like to see it go maybe as like you send a client a URL that allows 'em to look at the page and, by having this combination of a URL with an encoded string or whatever they can

[00:22:19] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, they can then, can

[00:22:20] Rhys Wynne: then, yeah.

Maybe have like a, a WordPress, user level where it's a feedback,

[00:22:30] Nathan Wrigley: commenter,

[00:22:32] Rhys Wynne: not

[00:22:32] Nathan Wrigley: commenter in that sense of the word,

[00:22:33] Rhys Wynne: but, that's interesting. That's the way I, would potentially see it going.

[00:22:39] Nathan Wrigley: do you do something like that, Steve, with your published press suite? Do you have anything like Reese has just described where you can have like a, something embedded in a string so that you become like a temporary day long commenter on a, on the structure of a site or something?

[00:22:54] Steve Burge: No, we've been building fairly carefully around the notes feature. 'cause we've known it's been coming to the core. So we've added things like notifications when you get notes, but not, not features. 'cause it is actually quite inspiring to see how many people are interested in this feature.

[00:23:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

It's like, it's quite a few comments. There's a few more dropped in. Yeah. So am behind is saying, be careful about putting things into core that are not needed for the lifecycle, for the life of a site. That's a good point. you basically wanna pull that out the minute the site's gone live.

[00:23:26] Raquel Manriquez: Yeah.

[00:23:27] Nathan Wrigley: Client review is really helpful during, a new build, but far less after launch. Good point. it feels like canonical plugin territory to me. Where did they go? where did canonical plugins go? They met their, met an early grave at some point, didn't they? The groundwork for notes is a really positive feature.

Building on that is always going to be a progression. and then Simon says yes to Reese, when users are logged in.

Late to the party. hello, Imran, we're gonna talk about you I think later. Imran. Yeah. Not about you. Probably about the content of something you put online, it's Stephanie, you that wrote it, I think.

so anyway, there we go. There's the few bits and pieces that came outta that. So 7.2, let me just put that back on the page. Go and check it out on the repository. The piece is called WordPress 7.2. Roadmap includes new security features, suggestion mode for notes and ipsum default theme. Keep the comments coming.

It's lovely. Really nice. Let's move on. this is just to say we're gonna segue into events for maybe 20 minutes or so, because two of the people on the panel have got an event coming up and we want to hear all about it. So we'll just segue gently into that subject. This is just to say that, again, Anne McCarthy, in the past few releases of WordPress for a couple of years, there's been this effort to try and do a live event where somebody pushes a big red button and a version of WordPress, is released.

Nice idea. Really nice idea, but it turned out to be really difficult to pull off. So it's things like, how do you ensure that the people that have, been part of that release are in the room to make them feel valued? As a part of that, how do you actually make sure that, the event actually happens at the right time for the release and, so that if the release comes out two weeks later, it doesn't feel like a damp squid anyway, that whole thing has now gone away.

What's gonna happen now is it's gonna be a kind of Zoom event, so there will be some kind of live event, but it won't be in person. good idea, good gimmick, I guess would be the way to describe that, but it didn't really, pan out as expected. any, I don't suppose any of you have got anything to say about that.

If you do say it and I'll, I'll wait, but if not, I'll move on.

[00:25:51] Raquel Manriquez: It's a bummer. I got to be backstage and work camp us while this was supposed to happen. So yeah, I gotta see the d the get difficulty of, making it happen live, but I personally love the idea, so it's a bummer.

[00:26:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So what, was the difficult stuff that was go?

Is it just like making sure that everybody's actually there and they know what to do at the right time and what's,

[00:26:13] Raquel Manriquez: and remembering, from, the top down, making sure that everyone knows like this is what we're doing right. And then you get up on stage and then all of a sudden you realise, oh wait, I think they forgot.

It's just a little bit of human, human error really. But

[00:26:30] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, there was that big red button wasn't there at Word camp us.

[00:26:33] Raquel Manriquez: Yeah.

[00:26:33] Nathan Wrigley: and it, you're right, it got lost amongst all the other bits and pieces. And then I could be wrong, Raquel, it felt to me like, when Anne finally did Anne McCarthy, when she did finally hit the button, it felt like there was supposed to be a sound effect and the sound effect like was about 15 seconds after she hit the button or something like that.

So

[00:26:52] Raquel Manriquez: yeah, it was yeah, it was definitely not according to the plan.

[00:26:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. No, never.

[00:26:57] Raquel Manriquez: The timing of it,

[00:26:58] Nathan Wrigley: it was a good idea.

[00:26:59] Raquel Manriquez: It happens. Yeah.

[00:26:59] Nathan Wrigley: It a good idea.

[00:27:01] Steve Burge: I've got a memory of, maybe when Gutenberg dropped for the first time, they did a kind of drawing word camp us maybe in Philadelphia, I wanna say.

[00:27:11] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:27:12] Steve Burge: And I remember everyone scrambling suddenly, the new version of WordPress went live and suddenly bunches of people were having to spend their conference in hotel rooms dealing with person client sites all for

[00:27:27] Nathan Wrigley: quite long.

[00:27:28] Raquel Manriquez: It was not, no. 'cause I think he announced it 2018. Which that was Nashville.

Yeah. And then,

[00:27:34] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

[00:27:34] Raquel Manriquez: Yeah. So it was, it might have been St. Louis when it actually, or maybe Nashville when it went live. Yeah. But yeah,

[00:27:40] Nathan Wrigley: it was a good idea though. I like the idea of gimmicks. I think we need, honestly, this is gonna sound really shallow and a bit silly, but I think we need gimmicks, like loads of gimmicks.

I, she genuinely don't know what that means, but I just love the stupid stuff, the silly gimmicks.

[00:28:01] Raquel Manriquez: I do too. I love my boo. I love silly.

[00:28:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, Oh, she says leaning into the accent. Very good. That do. but I think loads of silly stuff like that is really good. I think Nick Hamey is doing a load of air quotes, silly stuff in the word press space, and it's got my attention every time.

It's brilliant. yeah. Anyway, so here we go. Gutenberg says, Courtney, that was Gutenberg's Infas launch. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, Okay, let's move on. Let's move on. So speaking of events, Raquel is like, I wanna say this is the third iteration of Press Conf. I could be wrong about that. but I've just put on the screen word, sorry.

Press con events. Barcelona 2026. Tell us more. Raquel. I'll just leave it open like that, if that's all right.

[00:28:58] Raquel Manriquez: yeah. This is the expanded version of press comp. And I wasn't thinking it would come to Europe this year. I was thinking next year, but the beginning of this year, I just had this feeling inside of me.

I'm like, it's gotta go. It's gotta go now. So here we are. it's just like press comp. I doesn't look like anyone here has been, but in the comments, Kami has been Steve Woody, and, a lot of the team is here. There's, Anna. Oh, nice. And Jama. Oh yeah. And Brian, welcome

[00:29:32] Nathan Wrigley: to

[00:29:32] Raquel Manriquez: you. I Richard's in there.

Yeah.

[00:29:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:29:34] Raquel Manriquez: But it, is it is truly, yes. It's for anybody who makes money on WordPress and that is the target. It really would love to see more and more agencies come out. I get it. It's hard for agencies to come because, all of our time is billable, or not. but it's, really truly a gathering of, minds, people who can be in the trenches together.

'cause we're in this WordPress world trying to make money, trying to make our businesses lost. the talks are like Ted talks, so they go deep,

[00:30:07] Nathan Wrigley: okay.

[00:30:08] Raquel Manriquez: They go really deep. it's not a how to, you're not gonna go learn how to business. You're gonna go like, get your cup filled from the inside.

That's my favourite part about it. not to reveal too much. We don't record the sessions. And that is, I think sometimes people misunderstand why we don't. We really don't because we want the speakers to just let it all out. We want them to be raw, vulnerable, and to share numbers, to share a lot of things that maybe they wouldn't necessarily share.

so there's that little bit of you don't mind, it's like what you don't mind sharing with people one-on-one, but we, you wouldn't necessarily go tweet it out, That's the kind of the idea behind it. And, but it's like such a, honestly, I'm gonna say adjectives, like it's a sweet time of, like-minded business owners who are just trying to make this happen and work.

So yes, Barcelona or I have to do it with the lan. Yeah,

[00:31:06] Rhys Wynne: I can.

[00:31:10] Raquel Manriquez: I know, I'm like, I'm half Mexican, so I'm like, oh, getting that lis spin is hard for me. but I'm really looking forward to it. Everybody loves Spain, and then coincidentally, yes, we're camp, Europe is in Spain, but that's main, the very, very, yeah, that's a whale.

So there's lots of time.

[00:31:27] Rhys Wynne: Yeah.

[00:31:27] Raquel Manriquez: Yeah.

[00:31:27] Steve Burge: Raquel, I've got a,

[00:31:28] Raquel Manriquez: yeah.

[00:31:29] Steve Burge: A, a practical question. How are you organising the event from. The western side of the us. So you got a, a team member in Barcelona or how

[00:31:40] Raquel Manriquez: Yeah, JAMA, he's right, he's here, in comments. so that was new. I've just been doing it. I was in the UK all summer and so I actually did go do a site visit in, Barcelona and, yeah, it's just not been necessarily the easiest, but now that JAMA is on the team, that's really helped a lot.

So I would say that has been the biggest game changer is having the local there. That's how,

[00:32:06] Nathan Wrigley: so can, I ask why? So firstly, why, yeah, Spain, and Barcelona in particular, is that like a, is that a you thing? Did you fancy that personally or was that, I don't know, just something that the community said.

Do you know what, if you had to go in Europe, Barcelona feels like a good

[00:32:21] Raquel Manriquez: spot. yeah. I think it was also time of year because it's at the end of October. So at that point I actually considered the uk but weather could have not been great.

[00:32:34] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, wisely avoided. I'd say that. Attendance numbers one.

[00:32:43] Raquel Manriquez: Yeah. Yeah. So, that, that was part of it. And I, you have your advisors, and there was a lot of my European advisors were like, you gotta be in South Europe. Yeah. At that time of year, you gotta be in South Europe at that time of year. So I was like, okay. and I do love Spain. So I settled from that point.

I was either Barcelona, Madrid, or like Lisbon. Okay. Somewhere in Portugal or even Porto. And, just out of, oh, my gosh, like 25 hotels I was reaching out to, this one made the cut and it seemed like the most reasonable 'cause some of them were just like the, the quotes they were giving me at the beginning.

I'm like, what?

[00:33:23] Nathan Wrigley: okay.

[00:33:24] Raquel Manriquez: Yeah. Yeah. So that's why,

[00:33:27] Nathan Wrigley: so it all takes place in the one building, does it? So is everybody encouraged to stay, I'm gonna use the words on site, if Is that the plan? Yeah, it's like a little campus for a few days.

[00:33:39] Raquel Manriquez: Yeah. No, it is, it's, the whole event is arranged around everyone being there together.

And that is what we get feedback all the time that people love so much is that, you, yes, you can like a word camp, a lot of us are all over the place, but we have like our kind of central hangouts and then we camp us is more so this way where there's usually an official hotel.

And so ev even if you're not staying at the official hotel, you're all hanging out in the lobby at the end. and so this one, it, the idea is that like everyone can be there in the hotel together. So when you get up, you're doing breakfast with each other. When you are going to the sessions and you're hanging out, you're together at night.

When you're walking around, you're together. and even if you don't wanna be together, you can't escape each other because you just run into each other.

[00:34:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It's right. Yeah. Yeah. That's nice.

[00:34:27] Raquel Manriquez: And that's what people like actually.

[00:34:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Barcelona is super well connected as well. Yeah. In terms of, so like affordable flights from the uk, Barcelona's one of those ones that ticks the box for affordable, it's really, cheap from where I am at least anyway.

I expect in the rest of the UK it's the same, I dunno about the rest of Europe, but it's like really, affordable compared to a lot of other destinations.

[00:34:50] Rhys Wynne: Yeah.

[00:34:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:34:51] Raquel Manriquez: I saw like a Ryanair 25 euro

[00:34:55] Nathan Wrigley: from your UK to Yeah. Like that kind of level, not right. Yeah. Hell,

[00:35:00] Rhys Wynne: I, believe, and again, I don't quote me on this, I believe it's a hub for Southern Europe.

[00:35:05] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:35:06] Rhys Wynne: so like, Amsterdam and Heathrow are round, I think for Barcelona

[00:35:11] Raquel Manriquez: is the one. Yeah, that makes sense. Even I could get there pretty easily. Yeah. I can't do a straight shot from Phoenix to, Barcelona, but I could do Phoenix to whatever, Atlanta and then Yeah. As a next step one stop. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:35:25] Nathan Wrigley: so a few comments about that, but first of all, we should probably just say the date. So it's actually happening later this month. So if you are, if you're, free between the 27th or the 30th to the 30th of October, that's when it's gonna be the, the URL is press conf, so P-R-E-S-S-C-O-N-F events, plural events, go and check it out.

tickets available still. I'm guessing there's a purple but button on the website there. You still got some seats?

[00:35:57] Raquel Manriquez: Yeah, tickets are available if you're going in a team. Take advantage of the squad goals pricing 'cause it is a significant discount.

[00:36:05] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay.

[00:36:06] Raquel Manriquez: So DM e if you have, any questions?

[00:36:08] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:36:08] Raquel Manriquez: Yeah. Three or more. It is a significant discount,

[00:36:12] Nathan Wrigley: okay.

[00:36:13] Raquel Manriquez: Yeah. There's lots of ways. It's, and it is my business. I know, like I've been dmd like, and people compare it to Word Camp. It really is not comparable to Word Camp because, word camps are ran by, WPCS and so this is Wonderland Curious that runs this event.

So they're, nobody's getting rich, but we definitely have expenses. So it's the reason why things are priced at what they are, but it really does, if you talk to people, it's, a very different, very like, worthwhile event.

[00:36:44] Nathan Wrigley: I've lost count of the comments now. There's quite a lot going on about here.

wow. There really is, I haven't looked for the last couple of minutes, so let's see if we can pick a few off. it's an amazing, it's an amazing conference. Oh yeah. Everyone should go, says Cammi. That's nice. I, let me just take that screen away so we can see the comments fully. Steve says, it was the first time I saw the WordPress community rather than software.

That's nice too, isn't it? just wondering if a video marketer will be, will it be useful for me? So that's a question for you, I guess Raquel.

[00:37:20] Raquel Manriquez: Yeah, actually Christian now Koa Christian was Christian Taylor like, and him and Mark Zamanski came. It really for, what they told me, it was like getting a fast track into going deep with the community.

'cause that is the hard part with video marketing, especially from the YouTube side. 'cause there's that like little bit of a bridge of like getting to be in the trenches with the community. So this is like, a really good opportunity to jump into the deep end because these end up being the leaders of WordPress, like the who's who of the community, end up coming up, showing up.

So then you're like rubbing shoulders with the people who like, who you really wanna get to know and,

[00:38:01] Nathan Wrigley: Imran.

[00:38:01] Raquel Manriquez: Yeah.

[00:38:01] Nathan Wrigley: So,

look, he's that close Raquel, he's, he is almost got the flights about five times this week. But each time I pause, grab a Pepsi Max and then close it down. It would be nice.

[00:38:12] Raquel Manriquez: That is

[00:38:12] Nathan Wrigley: so Iran, if we got to the end of this episode and Yeah. Just saying, do

[00:38:18] Raquel Manriquez: d do Yeah. Reach out in wrong? We'll, see what we can do to

[00:38:22] Nathan Wrigley: push

[00:38:22] Raquel Manriquez: you

[00:38:22] Nathan Wrigley: over. Oh great. Okay, great. In a

[00:38:23] Raquel Manriquez: good way.

[00:38:23] Nathan Wrigley: Great. Yeah, that's nice. Simon wants to go. He says, will somebody pay for him to go? That'd be nice.

And then, what, who is this again? I, oh,

[00:38:35] Raquel Manriquez: Brian answered.

[00:38:37] Nathan Wrigley: Sorry. Brian

[00:38:37] Raquel Manriquez: Iran. Yeah.

[00:38:38] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, you are Brian, do you know Brian? Sorry, I don't dunno your hand. Also, you have to know Brian, so apologies. So you've answered that question. That's great.

[00:38:44] Raquel Manriquez: Lu Comp Brian is Luko,

[00:38:46] Nathan Wrigley: that's right. Yeah. Oh yeah. I actually went to Loop Comp last year, so I don't know Brian.

I've seen Brian, but I've met him for three minutes I think one time. what else have we got? Barcelona is the best city for skateboarding. Okay. Yeah. of course Nomad skateboarding every week that he shows up, but there's, there

[00:39:03] Raquel Manriquez: you go. There's dog poop everywhere. That's my only complaint is that they don't clean up after their doggies.

Oh,

[00:39:08] Nathan Wrigley: really? Barcelona. Wow. Okay.

[00:39:10] Raquel Manriquez: Do

[00:39:10] Nathan Wrigley: not, you don't want

[00:39:11] Raquel Manriquez: everywhere.

[00:39:12] Nathan Wrigley: You don't want dog poop on your skates, that's for sure. as a video marketer, Steve says, maybe not for content, but for connections. A hundred percent. There we go.

[00:39:23] Raquel Manriquez: but really for content too, you could do a whole lot. In fact, we allow recording just not once a speaker hits the podium.

[00:39:30] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So you can do all of it. No recording. You can use the event venue for recording, but Yes. All of it. Yeah. Okay.

All

[00:39:35] Raquel Manriquez: of it.

[00:39:35] Nathan Wrigley: That's great.

[00:39:36] Raquel Manriquez: Yeah.

[00:39:37] Nathan Wrigley: Marcus Burnett, he says he's coming in late, but Nice. The show is back. Thank you. We're glad that it's back as well. and then there's a few comments. flight from the uk, 25 quid.

20. That's insane. It costs me more to go to York on the trader. That's 40 minutes away. That's absolutely insane.

[00:39:57] Raquel Manriquez: Yeah. That is so weird to me.

[00:39:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[00:39:58] Raquel Manriquez: but trains are sometimes more expensive than flights. Yeah. It doesn't weird. Make sense?

[00:40:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:40:04] Steve Burge: I've, not lived in England for 20 years, but it seems like it's now 500 pounds to go from like London to Birmingham train.

That's right. But it's 10 bucks it 10 quid to fly to Barcelona.

[00:40:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:40:17] Rhys Wynne: There, there are, stories at least one a year and it'll be like somebody wants to meet his friend in Newcastle and rather than go to Newcastle from London, they'll fly to Berlin.

[00:40:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Because

[00:40:29] Rhys Wynne: it's cheaper and meet up there.

[00:40:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:40:32] Rhys Wynne: And it's probably quicker as well. You go for the day, so

[00:40:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. so there's lots of conversation about like the price of flights and things like that. So thank you for that. And then you are alive, Nathan? I am. I have been alive all this time. I've just not been making video content, which has been quite nice for the SAS app, which I should mention at some point actually.

gaudy architecture, of course. Very famous for the, they've just finished it. Famis just finished so, so fami,

[00:41:03] Raquel Manriquez: but according to jama, there's still a little bit that they're working on still. Oh,

[00:41:07] Nathan Wrigley: really? Are in this case, gonna be like that, but,

[00:41:09] Raquel Manriquez: but at least the cranes are gone.

[00:41:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. lots of comments about flights and, da not, enough cats in Catalonia.

That's my only gripe. Okay.

[00:41:21] Raquel Manriquez: me too. I, agree. I agree. I'm a cat girl, so I agree with that. Yeah.

[00:41:28] Nathan Wrigley: and then if flights from flights in Barcelona airport to expensive, maybe go Jerome. Oh, so alternatives. That's interesting. You go via Gerona, one hour drive from Barcelona, you rent a car or something like that, especially from the uk.

Wow. Let's put the website back up. There it is. Press con events happening in a couple of weeks. That's an exaggeration. It's more three weeks, but, it's very soon anyway, go check it out. Thank you. Three weeks for sharing. Yeah,

[00:41:59] Rhys Wynne: I was like, it's not soon. It's sued. It's

[00:42:02] Nathan Wrigley: really soon.

Yeah. It's really

[00:42:04] Rhys Wynne: organising committee. Yeah. it's,

[00:42:07] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

[00:42:08] Raquel Manriquez: Yeah.

[00:42:09] Nathan Wrigley: speaking of organising committee, one of our other guests, Mr. Reese Wynn is also organising something in the WordPress space. Is this?

[00:42:18] Rhys Wynne: Yes.

[00:42:19] Nathan Wrigley: word Camp Manchester 2026. So little bit later, just it's still not that far away. It's,

[00:42:26] Rhys Wynne: soon.

[00:42:27] Nathan Wrigley: It's really, seems it's soon. This is on a very different, like there's a chalk and cheese kind of events. These though, aren't they? for a start it's in Manchester in November, take that. Yeah. There won't be any sitting by the beach or any, any other,

[00:42:41] Rhys Wynne: any sitting by the beach.

[00:42:43] Nathan Wrigley: But tell us what's going on.

This is great. I'm so pleased you've done this. Thank you. Tell us about,

[00:42:47] Rhys Wynne: we, I have been to Word camps in Europe. I've been to press con, not press comp. I went to lube com flash year. And the amount of people who said we need a word camp back in the uk, it has always been a bit of a stumbling block, based on effort and based on, cost and getting it off the ground.

we have found a way to, run one in Manchester. Oh,

[00:43:24] Raquel Manriquez: wow.

[00:43:28] Rhys Wynne: it, is a coworking space. we discovered it purely by accident. somebody was walking around the coworking space 'cause they were using it for their wedding, which is the week after. which is why we are not clashing with press comp as well. but yeah, they were coming around and they were, They said, oh, we can rent this venue. Cool. Sent a few emails out and we have, we have put together a WordCamp. It's very different. If you've been to a Word camp before, this is not going to be like it. why is that?

[00:44:10] Nathan Wrigley: What's the difference?

[00:44:11] Rhys Wynne: We are a bar camp. There is one keynote event, not a speaker.

It's an event. and that's it. So

[00:44:26] Nathan Wrigley: it's more of a gathering than

[00:44:27] Rhys Wynne: a It's more of a gathering. Yeah. Okay. And it will be in a bar camp format. So the idea is, that on the day we, I and the organising team are just facilitating, what, we just say, what do you wanna talk about? they're the last session before lunch is,

[00:44:50] Nathan Wrigley: what do you want to talk about?

[00:44:51] Rhys Wynne: What do you wanna talk about? Okay. And the idea is the afternoon session is going to be just people going off into groups and talking about it. we have done it in a way that we don't even have. We have to have the global sponsors. we are all, we don't have sponsors. Like we have micro sponsors, which is a little bit more expensive ticket.

So these wonderful people that, Nathan's got on the screen have, have, and companies have, paid more for tickets. And, yeah, it's very much just come along.

[00:45:35] Steve Burge: Okay.

[00:45:36] Rhys Wynne: in a, the only thing we're gonna promise, and there is a lot of this, 'cause I'm like the lead organiser of the three people who are organising it, Steve, who is sometimes who was in the commerce before Steve Mosby, also talked about it, was, is one of the co-organizers all with facilitating, is come for a conversation, come to meet people, come and discuss.

And let's see what comes out of it.

[00:46:06] Nathan Wrigley: So I, firstly thank you for putting it on and actually there's a few people who are congratulating you on that score. Yeah. Simon Paul, yes. Re thank you and the team for doing this. Nathan and I were talking about all the word camps, et cetera, the other month.

Yes, we were.

[00:46:20] Rhys Wynne: Yeah.

[00:46:21] Nathan Wrigley: and also, Dave Den who attends, W-P-L-D-N in London, word Camp back in the uk. He's obviously heavily involved in, accessibility Day as well.

[00:46:31] Rhys Wynne: Yeah.

[00:46:32] Nathan Wrigley: And, Courtney, back to the roots of where Word, word camps began. Yeah. So it's a show up. See what happens. Social event as much as anything else and just, yeah, let's just hang out and chat sort of thing.

Yes, I think you'll, I'll be joining you, for the bar camp. Me how

[00:46:52] Rhys Wynne: Mecca Modzilla.

[00:46:53] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Thank you. Yeah, that was easy for you to say, but not me apparently. thank you. it's Jake from Play Expo. Okay.

[00:47:01] Rhys Wynne: Yeah. I, was, at an event at the weekend and Jake was there and we ended up talking about nothing to do with WordPress, but we found out we,

[00:47:09] Nathan Wrigley: yeah,

[00:47:10] Rhys Wynne: since found out we work in exactly the same field, which is lovely.

[00:47:13] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's nice. Yeah.

[00:47:14] Rhys Wynne: Yeah.

[00:47:15] Nathan Wrigley: More or less. Every time I do one of these episodes, this person shows up G and every week, I could never remember their name. I'm so sorry. I have the memory of a goldfish. A really forgetful goldfish. Anyway, gink, your name is escaped me again. I'm really sorry. But, he says he loves the idea of a bar camp.

Word camp. You can come Manchester, look, there's the date, sixth of, November, 2026. Come along, grab a coffee, says Steve Mosley or Tea and Chat about WordPress in the community. and then we've got the, the guaranteed spam comment from twe, which we get every week as well. There it is. I'm not gonna read it out.

and I also love the start of the website. Yeah, nice. Yeah. Very

[00:47:59] Rhys Wynne: good.

[00:47:59] Steve Burge: It's Reese, pardon my ignorance. What is the, graphic design for the site coming from?

[00:48:06] Rhys Wynne: it was originally done for by Tammy Lister. she, knocked it together amazingly, within about, just incredible what she does.

This

[00:48:22] Raquel Manriquez: is so perfectly

[00:48:23] Rhys Wynne: a it. yeah. Yes. So perfectly it, we, it was decided because I quite like video games, as you could probably tell. like one of the other co-organized, say, if Reese is the word cup organiser, we're gonna do it in that style. the only person who doesn't seem to be, Carrying on with that style team is myself, purely because I just stick in band references.

Okay. So it, the posts, yeah, the t yeah, the 24 hour word Camp people. it's, it's a reference to 24 hour party people and things like that. But everybody else, some Manchester

[00:49:04] Nathan Wrigley: thing. Yeah.

[00:49:05] Rhys Wynne: Yeah. The, we've got a post coming out also explaining about the, computer history in Manchester.

It was where Alan Tiering came, on board, but also there was a lot of video game developers in the micro eight bits, based in Manchester Ocean Software.

[00:49:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:49:25] Rhys Wynne: was quite a big one. What

[00:49:28] Raquel Manriquez: re what is the All right, our Kid Is that, a British that,

[00:49:33] Rhys Wynne: yeah, so, All right. Our kid is a way to say hello?

[00:49:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:49:39] Rhys Wynne: Basically. You're right. Our kid. Okay.

[00:49:40] Raquel Manriquez: Yeah. Yeah. Because I do Now that you are right, because I was there. Exactly. Everybody's like, you're right. And I'm like, yeah, I'm okay. Then I realised that's just how you guys say hi.

[00:49:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:49:49] Raquel Manriquez: But I haven't heard the, our kid added to it.

[00:49:52] Nathan Wrigley: That's the Manchester. So you just bolted onto the end, don't you?

And it basically mean, it's like more how to describe, it's like more we are more friends than if you just say, you all right.

[00:50:01] Raquel Manriquez: Oh, okay.

[00:50:02] Nathan Wrigley: There's some depth to your relationship. You're right. A kid kind of thing. Yeah. I guess a bit more to it than that.

[00:50:07] Raquel Manriquez: It is so funny as an American to hear somebody be like, you are right.

You're like, yeah, you think something's wrong.

[00:50:14] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's interesting. 'cause that's such a, that's basically Hello, it has no

[00:50:18] Raquel Manriquez: more to Yeah, I know that now.

[00:50:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. But I,

[00:50:21] Raquel Manriquez: the first I'm hearing that, I'm like, what do you mean? Am I all right? Of course.

[00:50:23] Nathan Wrigley: I'm all right. Is there something wrong? And can I just say, Courtney spotted it?

Mike Little co-founder of WordPress Yeah. Is a micro sponsor I saw, That's very cool.

[00:50:32] Rhys Wynne: He's, he's, is

[00:50:34] Nathan Wrigley: he still, is he still Manchester way? He's still

[00:50:37] Rhys Wynne: Manchester Way. Yeah. for various reasons. He,

[00:50:42] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

[00:50:42] Rhys Wynne: Tends to not come to, I think he's with Human Made at the minute. Not entirely to, he tends to not come to, events.

Yeah. as much as he used to. Yeah. but hopefully, he will be, but he's supporting, which is wonderful.

[00:50:54] Nathan Wrigley: Nice.

[00:50:56] Rhys Wynne: Yeah.

[00:50:57] Nathan Wrigley: okay, so there you've got two events. There's a third event that we should mention and Amber Hines correctly spots the next thing that's coming up, which is to say WordPress Accessibility Day.

So I'll just pop the screen up because that's actually happening. That's the soonest of everything really. so there we go. Amber's in the comments if you have any questions about WordPress accessibility today. So's David actually, Dave Dun, is also in the comments if you've got any questions about that.

But, here it is. So this is happening, I think it's this week. da dah da. Please, if anybody can see the dates before me. Our events. I'm so sorry. Oh, yeah, there we go. Yeah, right at the top seventh. So basically, oh, couple days starting on Wednesday. WordPress, the WP Accessibility Day.

This is a, an online event. It's been going for many, years. It, I don't need to tell you what it's about, but it is obviously about WordPress. Another accessibility and talks by many the great and the good in the accessibility space, put it that way. So if you've got anything that you would, you would like to check out, you can go and look at this.

The URL is really great WP accessibility.day, so dead easy to remember. And, like I said, it's coming up on Wednesday. You can register now by clicking on this link, and if you want to hear more, you can drop your email into the little box there. Amber did reach out and we were gonna do a podcast episode, but then we realised that my kind of holiday period didn't coincide well, so it would never have landed as an episode before the actual event.

sorry about that, Amber. It just, it never quite worked out, did it? But, okay. Here we go again. my ink, it's a great idea to revive word camps. It's becoming hard to maintain it for years, at least from what I'm seeing across the world. More cities are getting added and old word camps are dying.

I like Reese's idea if you are gonna do a word camp though. 'cause I'm guessing that the burden on Reese is significantly less than if you were doing a normal, word camp with speakers and all that. So that's a really interesting,

[00:53:05] Rhys Wynne: thing. Yeah, yeah, it's, it, the burden is as somebody who has done like the more traditional, stand, organising of WordPress, I couldn't organise a, a, a standard one, really time-wise, but, Yeah. this is a very low light touch, low organising. for example, I was just, talking about we are not doing a lunch. like we're just saying

[00:53:38] Nathan Wrigley: BYO, bring

[00:53:39] Rhys Wynne: your

[00:53:39] Nathan Wrigley: own

[00:53:39] Rhys Wynne: lunch, bring, well. Don't bring your own lunch because there's a cafe on site.

[00:53:45] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Don't bring your own

lunch.

[00:53:46] Rhys Wynne: Don't bring your own lunch.

[00:53:47] Nathan Wrigley: Lunch from the cafe.

[00:53:47] Rhys Wynne: That's, yeah. At the very least, there's lunch, a cafe, there's a Tesco. You can get a meal deal, but there will be, I think this is, I shouldn't have to I don't think I'm saying anything. I shouldn't, if I am sorry Jenny, that we are doing a Lunch with Future friends event where Okay.

Somebody is going to be a, if you don't know anybody, we are going to somewhere, we're going to book a restaurant and it will be show up.

[00:54:19] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And,

[00:54:21] Rhys Wynne: you can come and you can come and have a natter. It'll probably be in the cafe next door to be perfectly honest.

[00:54:26] Nathan Wrigley: And then, we get into all the mancunian stuff.

Look Elliot's leaning in, cup of tea, a kid, and then, press forward. normally followed by a Do you want a brew? That's true. That is true. Yeah. Yeah. Wanda Brew is a cup of tea. in case Raquel was wondering, I'm sure she figured that out. Yeah. Yes, I

[00:54:45] Raquel Manriquez: know that

[00:54:46] Nathan Wrigley: now knew that, yeah. Raquel's threatened to do loads of, English accent.

and she's only given us one example of that so far. So we're hoping that's

[00:54:55] Raquel Manriquez: gonna I always told, I always say at the beginning, I'm like, I promise not taking the piss outta you. Yeah. Speaking like this. There you go. 'cause Brits think that I'm doing that, like that when Americans speak the Brit that we're making fun, and I'm like, no, I love it.

You

[00:55:08] Nathan Wrigley: do varied English accents or British accents. So all

[00:55:11] Raquel Manriquez: over

[00:55:11] Nathan Wrigley: You do that one, or you do others as well? Because we've got so many accents considering how big the country is. It so many, And some of them are just incomprehensible for me. Like I, I spent some time in Newcastle this weekend, and I really genuinely did have to say, I'm sorry, you're gonna have to say that again.

I'm really sorry to quite a few people. you,

[00:55:31] Rhys Wynne: you drive 30 miles and then, and a name for a bread roll has changed.

[00:55:34] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. You can tell where you are by asking what the bread is called.

[00:55:41] Steve Burge: Cockney is the impersonation. Everyone can do a cockney, And then you go up and maybe the, might be the hardest.

And there's levels to this.

[00:55:50] Nathan Wrigley: There is lots of levels to it. so Simon on, on the back of this conversation, maybe he's already thinking about it, but he's thinking of doing the same thing in Bristol, have a recollection that was something he was gonna,

[00:56:01] Rhys Wynne: if Simon and I know. you, if you just wanna reach out and just ask questions.

Okay. I'm happy to talk off the record on things we've found out.

[00:56:14] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

it's great. I love this show for this. Yeah. This is the best bit about this show is all these interconnecting bits. So many interesting, serendipitous things happened because of meeting as guests. So the three of you were on this show, and so many interesting things have happened that I found out about when after people had met on this show.

And I think that's absolutely lovely. like the, South Iner. Okay. Philly says, Seth. Yeah.

[00:56:40] Raquel Manriquez: Cajun,

[00:56:41] Nathan Wrigley: he can't understand Louisiana people, no in the South when he's in the south of America. and then he is given us some examples. Listen, we really should get back to some word resolution.

We've totally gone off the rails, which is great. I love it. but here we go. The, so let's go back, and in this case, let's talk about Steve's podcast. Steve has published press, which is a suite of plugins, which enabled you to do a whole load of extra stuff around, workflows in publishing things on your WordPress site.

But, this week on the podcast you had Jason Cohen and JI don't, I don't know if you've been following this. Jason Cohen has been, producing a podcast for not that long and, and it's got really, it's really great. We listened to, so Dan and I, who've been working on this, show FM app. Dan and I listened to one that he did a few weeks ago in the podcasting space, and then, he did one with Carl, from emea.

I dunno if anybody saw that one. And then to flip it round, instead of him doing the podcast, Steve, you had him on your podcast. what did you talk about? What was going on there?

[00:57:52] Steve Burge: We book, but he's got a, he is been writing for years. He's writes like the, if you've come across Paul Graham, who is a British guy, lives in Silicon Valley.

he tends to blog in like full length essays, which are carefully thought out. And Jason's been doing that for years and He's turned a lot of it into a book. so I had him on the podcast to talk about the book, but yeah, he's spun out his own podcast too, which is, has an interesting. Twist and that it's much more confrontational, I would say.

[00:58:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yep.

[00:58:34] Steve Burge: Like the episode with Carl. Yep. He's like, Carl, you are failing the, you are doing badly. This is not working. Let's give you a very polite, wake up slap and let's see if you can do better.

[00:58:51] Nathan Wrigley: Did you see Carl's email after that episode?

[00:58:55] Steve Burge: I didn't.

[00:58:56] Nathan Wrigley: So, Carl has a, an app called, like it's this, really technical thing.

I'm not even gonna try and describe it, but he's got this incredibly technical, product called emea, YMIR. And, I think his attention has been fairly shattered trying to get it out amongst all the other myriad different things that he does. And it's flatlined. He went on that podcast just being on that podcast.

Jason's obviously got a big, following. You see the line of his podcast and the day, and then it just goes, boom, it just goes right off. I

[00:59:30] Raquel Manriquez: saw that.

[00:59:32] Nathan Wrigley: and it was merely as far as I can work out. It was merely the appearance on the podcast. There was a bunch of people who he could never reach, who totally got what he was building.

So whatever Jason said, and however Carl responded, it really resonated with a bunch of people. So I'm really happy for Carl out of that. Anyway, I'm so sorry I interrupted you were saying.

[00:59:52] Steve Burge: Oh, no, so there's, Jason has a book out and there's the podcast too. And the podcast. Normally a lot of these podcasts are just people like BSing, like back and forth, like happy questions.

Oh, you're doing so well. You're doing so great. Congrats on this, That, and Jason's podcast is the opposite. It's like, okay, you are failing. This isn't working. Your business growth is stuck. Your business is declining. XX, Y, Z problem is happening. And he asks tough questions and often the answer from the person on the other end of the podcast is.

[01:00:34] Nathan Wrigley: Dunno. Yeah,

[01:00:35] Steve Burge: I love it.

[01:00:36] Nathan Wrigley: It's interesting seeing actually the reaction to that because I've watched a couple of the episodes and it was clear that some, some people, their personality type gets in the way of that, in that they, see that as an a bit of an assault, whereas other people are bit like, yeah.

Yeah. I don't know the answer to that. That's not good, is it? it really does depend on how you frame your own response to that, what you're gonna get out of it. 'cause it does, did feel like a bit of an assault and the, the Brit in me was watching it through my fingers, it's really hard to watch.

Yeah. Because they're getting a pound. It's a bit like watching Dragons Den, or what's it called? Shark Tank in the US or something, but it's very effective, and he's, he is serial successful entrepreneur, isn't he? So he is not like speaking from, a, a place of emptiness.

He definitely knows what he's talking about. Yeah. the, I only have one thing to say, Steve, and that is on your, website. Here it is. I think I've, got an idea of how we could improve this podcast player. I've got the,

[01:01:43] Steve Burge: we've got to this point in the podcast and we haven't mentioned the thing you've been working on for

[01:01:48] Nathan Wrigley: never three

[01:01:49] Steve Burge: years.

And I just

[01:01:50] Nathan Wrigley: launched. I'm too shy.

[01:01:51] Steve Burge: Yeah.

[01:01:51] Nathan Wrigley: I'm too shy. We'll do that. Maybe we'll squeeze that in at the end or

[01:01:54] Steve Burge: something. You, need to go on Jason's podcast and he'll give you a. a roasting you should be mentioning show film at any point.

[01:02:02] Nathan Wrigley: Absolutely pasted. Yeah, you're absolutely right. okay, so anyway, if you want to hear Jason from, WP Engine amongst other places, I've forgotten what the other one's called.

Is it Tiny Something or other? He's got another product. I've forgotten what it is. anyway, serial entrepreneur and Steve spoke to him in depth on the press, published press podcast. So go and check that out. and then we've got some inevitable comments about how you might order things in the UK down here in the Cotswolds.

We can order a Henry at the bar. I have no idea what that

[01:02:37] Rhys Wynne: would

[01:02:38] Nathan Wrigley: get you. Oh,

[01:02:38] Rhys Wynne: no idea

[01:02:39] Nathan Wrigley: that, is that gonna be a pint or a pizza? Maybe it's a pizza. A Hoover, a Henry, where Yeah, if you ordered that here, everybody's gonna go. No, you want can't have Henry, you want vacuum

[01:02:49] Rhys Wynne: cleaner. I dunno,

[01:02:50] Nathan Wrigley: dunno what that is.

Tell us. But that was our misery. Misery Elliot. Okay, moving on. Anne McCarthy is auctioning things. turns out that if you are somebody, I dunno what level of contribution you have to do in a release, but if you are significant, let's go with that. In a release lead capacity or something like that of a WordPress point release, then you get sent a, a record, like Anne McCarthy has done o over many years.

So she's received from Matt Mullenweg a record like that. So it comes in a frame, you get the record, you get the album, it's all behind glass. And I guess the idea is you stick it on the wall. Anne, however, had a different intuition. She put 'em in a cupboard, where they've remained gathering dust for several years, but instead of them being thrown into a skip, she's decided to auction them off for a good cause.

And, so you can find out more about that. I'm looking at the repository website, but also in tomorrow's show notes I'll link to, release auction blog. She got a domain for it, which is really great. and she's auctioning them off. So if you want a, to get a little bit of, history in the WordPress space, you can go and bid and take these off Anne's hands.

And she's not trying to create the money for herself, she's doing it for an, organisation I had never heard of before. It's called Stim Punk, I think I'm probably saying that correctly. S-T-I-M-P-U-N-K-S Stim Punks. And they are in the business of, I say business, I'm guessing it's a nonprofit or a charity, supporting neurodivergent and disabled people, through mutual aid, microgrants and openly shared resources.

looks like this. It's

[01:04:37] Raquel Manriquez: a cute name.

[01:04:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it isn't, it, isn't it?

[01:04:39] Raquel Manriquez: clever 'cause well, STEM punk, 'cause Neurodivergence tend to STEM son who Yeah. Does. And so STEM instead of, steampunk Stim punk. That's clever.

[01:04:50] Nathan Wrigley: Got it, Nice.

[01:04:52] Rhys Wynne: My understanding was, Ryan Boen, who contributed quite a lot in the early days of WordPress.

[01:04:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yes.

[01:05:00] Rhys Wynne: Seth Set Upim Punk. yeah, this, is, this is great. I never,

[01:05:06] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

[01:05:06] Rhys Wynne: Isn't it like, like you, I never knew. I believe sometimes there's this parish, Michelle Ette, she's got one, but I could, she's got one of these wrong, so I don't think I'm not entirely sure if it's like lead organiser or a bunch of, or lower.

[01:05:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Maybe you were the, maybe

[01:05:24] Rhys Wynne: you were lower

[01:05:24] Nathan Wrigley: part, don't wanna team or something like that. Here you can see Anne, she's got quite a few look and, you don't actually get to keep Anne, by the way, you're not actually bidding for Ann. You're just gonna get the record. But I love that. Look at the different, pitches.

Didn't know what to do with herself with this one. well done Anne. Nice. she

[01:05:42] Rhys Wynne: teacher have got bored by the

[01:05:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's right. Just

[01:05:46] Rhys Wynne: what? That's just,

[01:05:47] Nathan Wrigley: that's right. Yeah.

[01:05:49] Rhys Wynne: But

[01:05:49] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. But seriously, that's a cool thing to have. genuinely, I think that's a really nice bit of memorabilia.

and I, if you're into WordPress, that's a significant thing we could stick. Yeah.

[01:06:00] Steve Burge: And Anne is one of the, the nicest people in the WordPress world.

[01:06:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, she is.

[01:06:05] Raquel Manriquez: We were saying that earlier. Yeah.

[01:06:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. She really is. She's a lovely human being. I was lucky enough to spend quite a little bit of time with her in, in our, in Phoenix, just that, recently.

And, Always a pleasure. So Stim punks is awesome. okay. Oh, we'll get to the drink in a minute. Henry is a drink, by the way. stim Punks was founded by co-founded by Boron, one of the earliest. WP Committers, core committers people with keys to merge code that gets released, was rather active before I braved my way into code before Slack.

Yeah, I think he almost hand wrote a lot of the key features that are in WordPress now. could have been things like the plugin architecture and hooks and things like that. I'm not entirely sure, but Okay. I'm gonna put you out of your misery. A Henry is. It's orange juice and lemonade.

Half and half.

[01:06:56] Rhys Wynne: Wow.

[01:06:57] Nathan Wrigley: There you go. Now, you can, go and order, I don't know what the geographical limits are when you order that. Like maybe it's like within half a mile of Elliot's house, but if you ordered that here, you'd get one of those little Hoovers, the Henry Hoovers.

Moving on. okay. WordPress contributor toolkit. This is just something I'm gonna let you know about. I don't know that there's much for us to discuss about it, but if you, if you're a contributor or rather if you would like to contribute to the WordPress project and you've always found it a little bit daunting, getting the tools set up that you need in order to do that.

And I think there's probably a lot of people who would like to contribute but don't have the necessary tooling. Now that has been made relatively straightforward with a thing called the WordPress contributor Toolkit, and it's, it's gone out up to version 1.2. It really wasn't that long ago that it launched as version one.

but now it's version 1.2. I won't, go into all the details of it, but basically it makes the process of having all the tools or an increasingly large suite of tools, available at your disposal in a very simple, straightforward way to download and get going. you can go and check it out, make wordpress.org.

I'll link to it in the show notes tomorrow. Anybody w wanna comment on that? I didn't think anybody would, but,

[01:08:15] Rhys Wynne: oh, the only thing I'd probably want to say is this sounds good. Purely because I know that when I, whenever I've done like contributor days and Oh, I'm gonna contribute a core and things, I'd spent half of it setting up a pc.

[01:08:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay. Exactly. Exactly.

[01:08:31] Rhys Wynne: So I think to make it quicker.

[01:08:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Oh, so there's a perfect use case for it. If you turn up to a word camp and you wanna do contributor day, you could click a few buttons and you'd be ready to go. Whereas actually a lot of people spend half of contributor day setting up the tools 'cause they've never done it before.

Yeah. That's just dead time.

[01:08:48] Rhys Wynne: Yeah.

[01:08:49] Nathan Wrigley: more importantly though, back to drinks, this is, an Arnold Palmer apparently is iced tea and lemonade. we've got Henry and we've got an Arnold Palmer keep them coming. this is now what this show has become. It's, tell us about your recipes and what they're called.

And if they're named after a human, all the better. I, don't know if this is worthy of mention. I, genuinely don't. But I saw this, I think I saw this in Remus newsletter. I think it was REM within WordPress newsletter. And I just thought I'd mention it to amplify it a little bit. I've not used it.

I know nothing about it. I'm not really a big aficionado of AI in any way, so I can't really speak to it. But this feels like the sort of way things are probably gonna start going in the future. 'cause this is something called Delta. It's billing itself as the agent first theme with a built-in MCP, and I'll just read the headline.

Your agent builds the whole site in a unified theme surface in plain H-T-M-L-C-S-S and JavaScript using the block editor just for content, which I think is the bit that captured my attention. No widget collection, no wrapper markup, no builder interface works with any MCP client, and then it goes on to describe how it works and so on and so forth.

They've got lifetime pricing at the moment. If you are into AI and still want to use WordPress as the content piece of that jigsaw puzzle, I don't know. Maybe this is something worthy of looking at. That's all I've got to say. So Steve, Raquel, Reese, if you have fine. If not, I'll move on. That'll be a no then.

Okay. That's fine. Righty ho. Steve, we're back to this bit. you mentioned in your, when we were talking about collaborative editing and what have you, mentioned this thing called the presence, API, which I confess I had, I don't think I'd ever even heard of. you've raised this. Do you want to lean into this for a few minutes?

Tell us what is and how it works?

[01:10:48] Steve Burge: Oh, I guess this is kinda where the actual impact of the collaboration work has ended up moving much more quickly, together with the notes feature as well. we're gonna start to see this kind of stuff landing in core pretty soon. if you scroll down, I think

[01:11:09] Nathan Wrigley: Uhhuh,

[01:11:09] Steve Burge: maybe they have a dashboard view here, maybe.

[01:11:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there was

[01:11:13] Steve Burge: some. I

[01:11:13] Nathan Wrigley: think. There you go.

[01:11:14] Steve Burge: you can see who is logged into the site. You can see what they're doing. It, works on multisite as well. So if you're on the main dashboard of a multisite, you can see who's logged into each subsite and what they're doing.

[01:11:28] Nathan Wrigley: So is this about who's doing what right this moment?

So is it, is approximating real time. okay, John's over, he's editing that post. Suzanne's over there, she's modifying a theme file, blah, blah, blah. That kind of thing.

[01:11:41] Steve Burge: Exactly.

[01:11:42] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. Yeah, I guess in the era of full sight editing, it would be nice to know what, but even in a Google Docs sort of interface, you don't really have that.

Or maybe you do. I don't know. I've never lurked into that kind of interface. Maybe the admins do, I don't know.

[01:11:55] Steve Burge: Yeah, you do have a little toolbar across the top of Google Docs. Okay. That shows you who's looking at it right now.

[01:12:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

But only the one that you're in. Whereas this is site wide, so you get to see what everybody's doing on your entire site all at once.

so

[01:12:08] Steve Burge: I, I think it was a building block that collaborative editing was going to be built on top of.

[01:12:14] Nathan Wrigley: Got it.

[01:12:15] Steve Burge: But it's proved to be somewhat useful by itself. And so this is coming to WordPress along with the, all the improvements to the note features.

[01:12:23] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Interesting. it's, these things are just so counterintuitive to me 'cause I'm never in the environment where they'd be useful to me.

but like I said, if you've got a team like TechCrunch or something where you're producing 15 articles a day, knowing who's doing what I suppose is, is quite useful. anything else on that? Or is that Oh,

[01:12:43] Steve Burge: yes. if you go down there on that part there, there's quite a bit of talk with this about having a user type called agents.

So you'll be able to see not just which human beings are on the site at the same time as you, but also which, which AI agents are in, the site doing things as well.

[01:13:07] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you. again, back to the important stuff. drinks, Is that American lemonade or soda? Like lemonade?

Americans just use sugary lemon juice. But British, yeah, we no lemonade's lemonade. Seven op is not lemonade, it's seven op. We don't, if you ask for a lemonade, you typically won't get a seven op Courtney, just so that we can clear that important point up. and then something called a mimosa, I dunno what that is either.

And, it's half,

[01:13:39] Raquel Manriquez: it's half, orange juice, half, supposed to be champagne, but a lot of times it's Prosecco.

[01:13:45] Nathan Wrigley: It's when my kids a breakfast. Are you doing that call on a Monday? It's very difficult for me to summarise what this call is. This is a perfect example. Yeah, we talked about drinks.

and

[01:13:57] Steve Burge: mimosa is like the, all

[01:13:59] Raquel Manriquez: types

[01:13:59] Steve Burge: 10 o'clock in the morning.

Alcohol.

[01:14:01] Nathan Wrigley: That's right.

[01:14:02] Raquel Manriquez: Yeah.

[01:14:02] Nathan Wrigley: I hope nobody is, you haven't

[01:14:03] Raquel Manriquez: from

[01:14:03] Nathan Wrigley: brunch preaching at 10 o'clock in the morning. by the way, Seth says, this is so cool. I think you must be talking about the whole thing, right Seth? This whole episode is so cool. I appreciate that. okay, back to the actual code again. Oh no, he must be talking about the presentation.

I think he's

[01:14:20] Raquel Manriquez: talking about present the presence.

[01:14:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Ah, damn. could be handy for keep, to keep track of your agents. I was wondering if it was going to end up being used to keep track of your employees, which there was a little bit of me, which was a bit saddened when I thought about that. when COVID came around and all of a sudden all the employers when they'd got staff working at home wanting to keep a track on exactly who was doing what.

I was wondering if the TechCrunch staff, for example, might use this to figure out how many posts have you been in today? Have we seen you actually lurking around in the WordPress website? and yeah.

[01:14:57] Rhys Wynne: Yeah. Okay. I think this is cool. Good. I, think this is, I mean I've been quite positive for me today, but Yeah.

I think this like the AI agency Yeah, fair enough. Is what it is. They, there was a thing we're talking about post locking, so there was

[01:15:17] Nathan Wrigley: something Yeah. Slightly

[01:15:18] Rhys Wynne: further here. Yeah. If I was like, so this is probably where. Like the, example I gave before of somebody's in the post, could you lock this?

Almost like saying, you could choose if you want to lock the post and you could then just take over. so it's rather than just being a always on an always off, it's a let the user decide. So I think that could work well. Yeah.

[01:15:47] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

[01:15:48] Rhys Wynne: Yeah. I, this, could be interesting. So

[01:15:52] Nathan Wrigley: many things inside of the WordPress ecosystem, little things like this, which I'd never heard of before, which is really fascinating.

[01:15:59] Rhys Wynne: Yeah.

[01:16:00] Nathan Wrigley: but, because we started the whole thing. Now we have to go back to the drinks. Iron Brew is a thing if you live in Scott.

[01:16:09] Rhys Wynne: Yeah.

[01:16:09] Nathan Wrigley: I gonna do, I gonna do my own Scottish accent impression. You're gonna hear it once and then I'll never do Scottish again. And it goes like this. Oh no, I can't bring myself to do it now.

Do it. No, I can't. I'm smiling, please. I can't do it when I'm smiling. Okay, here we go. So it's an advert for Iron Brew and it goes, do you remember the Iron Brew advert, Steve and, Reese that used to go bars, iron Brew made in Scotland from ERs. Do you remember that? Yeah. There we go. Love it. BFA is another Scottish drink, but I wonder if Nathan's heard of a Bloody Mary.

Yes. That's tomato juice, With Worcester sauce in it and things like that. and there we go. Let's move on. Oh, I'm all embarrassed now. good. So Steve, your thing, this is the deluge, I'm presuming because of ai, in the plugin. the, the repository, you've actually got the numbers written in the show notes.

I dunno if you can see those, but they were the, I suppose they were the, the, the bit which gave away what's going on. Do you wanna tell us a little bit about this?

[01:17:18] Steve Burge: Yeah, so this was inspired by, IM RM I think, who's in the comments. I saw a, a post he put out about how weird things are getting with the, the plugin repo right now.

That the number of submissions is just skyrocketing. just we're talking like multiples of previous years, like 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 times previous years in terms of submissions. But also a lot of the submissions are just not getting followed up on. Yeah. People will vibe code something, they'll submit it to the repo, they'll get pushed back and they'll be like, I got bored.

I moved on. so the, the numbers are crazy and we've been filling the impact of this. We've been putting a few plugins through the submission process lately, and it's interesting times right now to, to try and get a, a plugin on the repo. They're using a lot of AI tools to give feedback now. And for those of you guys that have been around for a while, used to take often, oh, used to take months to get feedback from the, even, like a year or so ago.

It used to be that let's say you, you might have to wait 16 weeks to get feedback on your plugin for the first time. I show one last week,

[01:18:54] Nathan Wrigley: go,

[01:18:55] Steve Burge: sorry,

[01:18:56] Nathan Wrigley: fi Whoa. Okay.

[01:18:57] Steve Burge: Five minutes.

[01:18:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:18:58] Steve Burge: we submitted a plugin and there was a big AI report in our inbox. Five minutes later.

[01:19:04] Nathan Wrigley: but did you, man, okay, let's do the numbers first.

'cause I think this is really interesting. So 2020, 2022, this is per month, right? Is that right? Are these numbers per month? Yeah, so in 2022 there were 129 submissions to the WordPress plugin repo per month by 2023, more or less the same, a hundred and something, 107, start to see a little bit of a rise, twenty, twenty four, a hundred forty five.

then along come the AI agents, I'm guessing, and we start to see a bit of an incline 254 last year. Now this year, currently that's not 1021. I just don't know how the humans are supposed to keep up with that. I guess the answer is they're not, we are in the era of doing things with AI like you've just described, but, that's, that is a lot of things for people to manage and I just don't know how we keep up with that basically.

yeah,

[01:20:02] Rhys Wynne: I, if you look at the numbers in there, the p the plugin queue stats, and granted, this is just a snapshot. you're looking at it and going 4,598 in the queue of those, the pending waiting for author is three is 3,860, which is like, wow, okay. So that is what Steve is saying is that of the queue, the people are who are ICO it, have a go, can't get on and go onto the next thing.

[01:20:36] Nathan Wrigley: Don't even reply to the email kind of coming back. Just

[01:20:39] Rhys Wynne: drop

[01:20:39] Nathan Wrigley: it. Yeah. Yeah. So that's just wasted effort on everybody's behalf, isn't it?

[01:20:43] Rhys Wynne: Yeah, it, I mean it, yes, but again, if what Steve is saying is, and there's no reason for it to not be true, because he does it more often, but it five minutes it gets to send and it's an ai.

So I think there's almost like a little bit of saying, if you've got an AI to code your bot, we are going to respond to it with, ai. So to, and then once and it filters out the, the, ai, the VI codes and everything that don't wanna say low effort, but almost like the low efforts people who have, vico things, and then people who go through that one step like Steve, like myself and when I put a code, when I put code on the repository, like, most of the people, in chat, 'cause I know a few people have got code, then yeah, then you get, the more you know, the, the feedback that kind of makes sense and everything.

Yeah. And there are times when I've replied to feedback as a plugin developer and gone, no, this is why. This is, the AI was wrong. or I said, look, we've done it this way because of this. And once you get to a human, they're like, okay, fair enough. Kind of thing. There have been, the, it's, things like that.

[01:22:17] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Reese, thanks for that. two very important comments coming up. Firstly, this one, nobody's ever said that before. I, can we just end on that? I think Nathan's absolutely right. Can we just stop there? because nobody's ever said that before. it was about the screenshot. Just that part. Yeah.

Just can we just screenshot

[01:22:37] Rhys Wynne: that? Is that, the title of the show

[01:22:39] Nathan Wrigley: this week? Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. That's the title baby. That's what this one's gonna be called. I think. Nathan's absolutely right. Brilliant. And then the next one is just totally outta context. I saw this Steve Lter hammer Mate. That's gotta be the title.

Surely that's gotta be this title. The episode title for this one. Steve,

[01:22:57] Raquel Manriquez: Steve

[01:22:58] Nathan Wrigley: L Hammer. I'm, what's going on with that comment? I'm trying to pause the where does it fit into everything Steve Lick to Hammer and compared the flavour? I'm not, I don't, I love it.

[01:23:07] Raquel Manriquez: It sounds like a song title.

[01:23:08] Nathan Wrigley: Steve l Hammer.

Yeah. I An album. You Absolutely. Yeah. right back to the subject at hand on first plug into mission, you get a large response that's mostly ai. Ai. My guess is that five to 10% is a human response. So it's as low as that. Is it like one in 20 kind of territory is actually a human being now. Okay. My fear is that number of vibe coded plugins has come in fast and go dead.

go dead fast because the authors move on to other interests. Yeah. If it, is a one shot, right? It's a one. If you don't get it in first time, you just move on. Do something else.

[01:23:41] Steve Burge: Yeah. the, the feedback that comes from the AI is detailed. We've, some of our plugins get like multiple page PDFs. the AI is just able to do a much deeper dive than a human ever could.

Yeah. And yeah. I think nine, probably 95% of the plugins on the repo would not qualify for the repo right now.

[01:24:05] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[01:24:06] Steve Burge: That's also very true,

[01:24:07] Nathan Wrigley: right? Yeah.

[01:24:08] Steve Burge: Okay. The bar for new plugins is really, which is a benefit, of the AI era that we can raise the bar really high on what plugin submissions are approved.

[01:24:19] Nathan Wrigley: Amber says, oh, something about, so the, it was about a Bloody Mary. Now I wonder if Nathan's heard as a bloody me bloody Mary Steve licked a hammer and compared it, compared the flavour. Okay. So apparently a bloody Mary tastes like a hammer. that's okay. I've, I confess, I've never licked a hammer, so I don't, I'm gonna try that.

That's this evening's, that's this evening's study. Go out and lick a hammer. And then try a Bloody Mary and see if the same. Thank you, Amber. I appreciate you giving us the context there. Let's quickly wrap it up. There's a few things that I want to mention. The first one is this, Rodolfo, a locally, from Please, Raquel, tell me the event name.

It is checkout. Thank you. Checkout

[01:25:01] Raquel Manriquez: Summit.

[01:25:02] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Checkout Summit amongst other things. he's in the WooCommerce space and he is, he's got the idea that there's quite a lot of WooCommerce plugins at the minute, which are not getting the attention that they deserve. So he's come up with this idea called Save the Plugin.

And it's almost like a little mini community that you get yourself involved in. And it feels like you drop into almost like a Slack channel or something like that. And you, you help each other during this month long, initiative. I dunno when it began or when it's going to, maybe it hasn't begun already, but it's a 30 day sprint for premium plugin founders, to try and get you basically back on track if your, plugins have, are foundering, or at least not if, you

[01:25:44] Steve Burge: scroll down a little.

He's got an interesting business model

[01:25:47] Nathan Wrigley: where, tell me where I should stop.

[01:25:49] Steve Burge: Oh, there just up

[01:25:50] Nathan Wrigley: just that bit there.

[01:25:50] Rhys Wynne: You back up. Back

[01:25:51] Steve Burge: up. Yeah.

[01:25:52] Nathan Wrigley: Back up, How it works. Sim simple three steps. Join the programme, buy your seat and get to a private Slack group. I was right. It was Slack. Yeah. number two, do the work.

Finish the 20 tasks in 30 days, posting proof that you, that you did it as you go. And then finally finish everything. Pick up the reward that fits you. What's the reward? Finish the check. Get more than a hundred percent back in credit. Ooh. So you get some cash back in return. That is an interesting model.

How do you make that pay? I think we need to speak to, I

[01:26:23] Rhys Wynne: think it's, I don't, think it's cash. I think it's,

[01:26:26] Nathan Wrigley: oh yeah.

[01:26:28] Rhys Wynne: It looks like nervous. So Yeah, if you scroll down, you have to choose. Yeah. You have to choose.

[01:26:33] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Pick one. When you finish four months. As a woo weekly balcony classified one year of business.

Oh, okay. So yeah. Okay. So it feeds into the different bits and pieces that he's got going on, business Bloomer and Checkout Summit at that is an interesting business model. I like that. That's very clever. He's as clever chap as Rodolfo, isn't he? So he is promoting his other services and events and things through this sort of feedback loop.

Very cool.

[01:27:02] Rhys Wynne: come, does just come in from Elliot. apparently you started today.

[01:27:06] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So go and check it out. the URL is, as you'd imagine, save the plugin.com. thank you Elliot, for letting us know of the dates. very last few. I promise. We'll get out of your hair quickly. 1 billion downloads.

There's not much more to say than that. it's, as far as I'm aware, there is no plugin that has got anywhere close to that. This is of course, Yost. Yost has now been downloaded a billion times, which is pretty impressive. We all know what it does and how it works and all of that. But, just to say, wow, what a milestone.

a billion downloads. That's really impressive. So bravo to those people. open station, has now, officially launched. It used to be called Desktop Mode, but it's now officially called Open Station. Can I just say go check it out. I know I keep banging on about this. It's my hobby horse. I love it.

I think it's such a great idea. It's imagine a desktop for your WordPress website. I know that most of you don't want it or I've no interest in it, but it's so great. It's such a good idea. and it enables you to do, for example, I don't know, preview in real time. So you put where you're editing on the left, what you wanna preview on the right, or you could have the media library.

It's got a little doc interface, like you might have, on your Mac or something like that. It's just a desktop version, all living inside of a browser top tab. So I thought that was pretty cool. and now it's officially called Open Station and we haven't got time for that last one, I don't think sadly.

but there we go. And yeah, you're right Steve. I haven't mentioned show FM at all. There's an app now if you're into podcasting, it is called show fm. There, I've mentioned it. There we go. Oh,

[01:28:54] Steve Burge: come on you next

[01:28:55] Nathan Wrigley: week. Need a t-shirt. I can't run outta time. Oh no. I need a t-shirt. I've got, yeah, I need a hat.

I need a t-shirt. I need to do the whole thing. yeah, if you're making a podcast, go to show fm. Go check it out. 'cause me and Dan may be mostly Dan, 99% Dan. I talk about it. Dan does the hard work. but we've got an app if you're a podcaster and you want help making your podcast easier, so there you go.

That's it. So do we call this episode, do we call it? So I'm after a, a vote of hands from our panellists. Do we call it Nathan Is absolutely right Or do we call it Steve Lter Hammer? what do you reckon? Call it Sponsored

[01:29:32] Steve Burge: by show fm

[01:29:34] Nathan Wrigley: sp Okay. Okay. Steve Lter Hammer sponsored by show fm. Should we go with that?

I

[01:29:39] Raquel Manriquez: think Steve lick a hammer. Just sounds so funny.

[01:29:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay, let's just go with that. Go with Steve. Lick a hammer. So Amber, this episode is gonna be called Steve Lick a Hammer. And you can, go and tell him that it's because he lick a hammer. trying to spot the flavour of Bloody Mary. That's it.

Oh, that was weird. It all went a bit fair shape there. Let me make that go away. We will be back this Monday to talk about more word pressy, bit different bits and pieces. But, I guess before we say goodbye to our guests, I wanna thank everybody. Quite a few comments in there. The obvious things that got your attention this week.

AI as usual, and then a whole load of stuff around events at the beginning. And then towards the end drinks.

[01:30:25] Raquel Manriquez: And more drinks.

[01:30:26] Nathan Wrigley: And more drinks. More drinks. terrible at my, I am so terrible at marketing. You're absolutely right. No space bus. There's no time. That could be a whole episode. Elliot. Come on and we'll talk about space, space files at some point.

That'd be lovely. So thank you to you, the commenters, but also obviously thank you to Reese. Thank you to Raquel and thank you to Steve. Thank for being on the show. I really appreciate it. Please come on again and good luck, in the first case, with Press Conf. Raquel, I hope that goes well. And obviously thank you.

Try to make it to the event in Manchester. That would be really nice. But, we will see you, next time on this weekend in WordPress. Cheers. and if you three wanna stick around to have a little bit of a natural, that would be nice. What's that? Oh, hands. Hands. We've gotta do the hands. Thank you. Can we all show our hands?

Thank you. Yeah. God dammit. I'm so hopeless that they should do managing this show. My head is full up. Thank you so much. We're hands, just say hands a lot of times and I'll understand. We'll be back. See you later. See you next week. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Oh.