This Week in WordPress #385

[00:00:03] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress, episode number 385 entitled Irish Goodbye. It was recorded on Monday the 19th of October, 2026. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I'm joined by co-host Michelle Frechette, but also by Vito Peleg and Andrew Palmer.

It's a WordPress podcast, so we spend most of the time talking about AI, we honestly do get into WordPress things as the show goes on.

For example, we talk about what's coming up in Gutenberg 24.2.

We talk about the fact that AI is making it easy to make websites, but does that mean that 80% of the work is actually achievable by AI? Web Dev studios have built an entire website just to prove that it's not.

Kathy Zant has got a new community, let's call it that, which she's trying to offer to help people build sites with AI.

Devin Walker has been with Automattic, over at the Jetpack side of things for a whole year. What's happened over there?

Dave Foy is back, and I, for one, welcome it into the web dev WordPress space.

Shopify WooCommerce, which is leading Katie. Keith has some insights onto that.

And we spend a few minutes talking about show.fm, a brand new podcasting platform, which I've built with my good friend Dan Maby. I'll be talking about that more in the days, weeks, and months to come.

Anyway, that's the episode that's ahead of you. I hope that you enjoy it. This Week in WordPress coming up.

The music is awful, but sometimes it's less awful than other times because that you, I don't know if it's just me, but, occasionally a thing which is two minutes, takes about four seconds, and sometimes a thing which takes two minutes, takes about three hours. That was one of the four second variants.

[00:01:53] Michelle Frechette: Yeah.

[00:01:55] Nathan Wrigley: That just seriously disappeared. Hello, it's episode number 385 of this week in WordPress, which is rather a lot. Sometimes I question Ty, but here we are. It's

[00:02:12] Andrew Palmer: not just you.

[00:02:14] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. That's good. I'm pleased to hear it. the, I in mind all the time, the Andrew Palmer there, and we'll go around our little group, in a moment and say hi to everybody.

but before we do that, just a few bits of housekeeping if that's okay with everybody. The first thing to mention is, if you're watching this anywhere other than YouTube or the WP Builds live page, don't comment. 'cause the comments don't come to us. So if you're in Twitter or LinkedIn or anything like that, it'll just be a, you'll comment and it'll, it'll appear in the thread over there, but we won't see it.

So the best thing to do is to head to wp builds.com. go to this URL wp builds.com/live. And if you go over there, there's a little live chat widget inside the video. Top right says live chat. Or you can use the YouTube comments embedded on the right hand side, a little bit like Mr. Richmond, Elliot Richmond, saying Hi folks.

And, oh, Andrew's got the, he's got the measure of it. Look, there he is. That's fine. so do that. And if you go to one of those two places, you can, actually have your voice heard. So wp built com slash live or go to the YouTube channel. Hello t Good to see you all. whoever is typing, if they wouldn't mind just pressing mute, that would be, that would be great.

'cause it's really loud. Anybody else getting the keyboard in their ears? I'm getting it's very soft laptop. Okay. Yeah, I'll stop doing it. Know I'm a newbie

[00:03:51] Andrew Palmer: to podcasting.

[00:03:52] Nathan Wrigley: Sorry about that. That's just fine. Don't you worry about it. so there's the bits of housekeeping. So in that case, what we'll do is we will go around the houses and say hi to everybody.

Firstly, we'll go, there. And first, actually, let me remove that caption first. Sorry. What's going on? I can't make Tacho go away. Oh, it's because there's another one hiding behind it. Wait, is that, that one? Go away. There we go. how you doing, Michelle?

[00:04:18] Michelle Frechette: I am very well, thank you. How are you?

[00:04:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good, The weather here is becoming wintry. we had our dalliance with the heat a few weeks ago, and now it's back to normal. Michelle Cher is the Executive Director of Post Status. In addition to her work over there, she's the podcast barista at WP Coffee Talk. Co-founder of Underrepresented in Tech, creator of WP Speakers, WP Career Pages, and w sponsor me wp.

She's also the co-founder of Speed Network Online. She likes to write things, and so is an author, influencer, and frequent organiser and speaker at WordPress events. She lives outside of Rochester. Where she likes to take photographs of nature. And, if you want one URL to sum it all up, it's Meet Michelle online.

[00:05:05] Michelle Frechette: Yes.

[00:05:05] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you for joining us. Appreciate it.

[00:05:07] Michelle Frechette: My pleasure.

[00:05:09] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. It's good to be here. And over there we have Mr. Andrew Palmer. How you doing, Andrew?

[00:05:14] Andrew Palmer: I'm very well, thank you. Good to see you.

[00:05:16] Nathan Wrigley: You've always got such a nice like Barry White style. Let's go with that. Very deep and enjoyable,

[00:05:24] Andrew Palmer: but delighted to see my, my former boss under my, my former co-founder of Bur.

[00:05:29] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. You're over him. I don't know if you've noticed the Yeah, he's,

[00:05:33] Andrew Palmer: yeah, he's dead to me. He's dead to me.

[00:05:35] Nathan Wrigley: He's dead to you despite the fact you spent Sunday with him. Yeah, exactly. there's Andrew Palmer anyway, Andrew is a WordPress and SaaS founder. He is an investor and he likes to merge things together through m and as.

He's an advisor who's also built and scaled and exited five digital agencies. And, anything else you wanna add? 'cause I think you wanted to talk.

[00:05:58] Andrew Palmer: Nothing. Nothing. Nothing really. I worked with Terim. I was an investor in AT Room, so it's great to see Veto. We spent, all Sunday, last Sunday together. And, in between cuddling the kids and stuff like that went through everything that we're doing.

It's great. We have a great Sunday. It was awesome. At our rim.

[00:06:15] Nathan Wrigley: I'm trying to make

[00:06:16] Andrew Palmer: the, decided

[00:06:17] Nathan Wrigley: I got Put your hand

[00:06:18] Andrew Palmer: behind. Behind. We decided to, change the name

[00:06:22] Nathan Wrigley: a little floating. There's

[00:06:24] Andrew Palmer: a new already decided to change the name. Yeah. Change the name to add Rim as people Say it. Spell it.

[00:06:31] Nathan Wrigley: Nathan has, that's, a great episode. Title Nathan has out of date. Swag. I like that. I'm try and remember that one. That's. You for joining Andrew. Appreciate it. And, finally, and what feels like an ICE age ago, Vito Peleg. How you doing? It's been ages.

[00:06:52] Vito Peleg: Good. Yes, it's good to be here. I can't believe it's 345.

I think I was in episode 35.

[00:07:00] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. It was, like that length of time ago. It's absolutely pleasure having you back. Have you done anything since then?

[00:07:08] Vito Peleg: Not really. Chilling. I have three kids now.

[00:07:13] Michelle Frechette: I was gonna

[00:07:13] Nathan Wrigley: say no children. Oh, kids businesses. Empires. Back

[00:07:17] Vito Peleg: then I had none,

[00:07:19] Nathan Wrigley: man.

[00:07:20] Vito Peleg: Yeah, I've been for sure.

[00:07:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Life gets, in the way. VETO has bought the, shortest of, of bio, so it'll be really easy to say. Veto is the founder and CEO at Terim. And I'm just gonna add father of what did you say? Three?

[00:07:37] Vito Peleg: Three now? Yes. Yeah. With the latest one joining, less than two months ago.

[00:07:43] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, you wait.

I, I, as of this week, I no longer have any children. All of my children have now gone into that kind of buying beer at the pub, being able to vote period in life where they've all become 18 and

Congratulations. Enjoy it, Vito. Yeah. It goes, I know everybody says it right? Everybody says it and you don't quite believe it, but it goes quicker than you think

[00:08:09] Vito Peleg: I can already see.

And we'll enjoy that part. I'm, actually semi looking forward to that part already,

[00:08:17] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. if you like driving people places, it's great. Yeah.

[00:08:22] Andrew Palmer: I'm now a taxi driver to my 24-year-old

[00:08:25] Nathan Wrigley: university daughter. Yeah,

[00:08:26] Andrew Palmer: that's

[00:08:27] Nathan Wrigley: great. Yeah, it's absolutely true. anyway, we're gonna talk about WordPress things, but let's see if anybody has dropped any comments in, like I said, feel free to drop some comments in if you want.

tachos the only one so far. Andrew has as well, but saying hi to people. You've been trying for years to make me go away, Nathan. I refuse. I simply like your customer. Did I say make Tacho go away? I removed your

[00:08:50] Michelle Frechette: comment. I believe you did.

[00:08:51] Nathan Wrigley: I'm sorry, Tako. I didn't mean it in that way.

[00:08:54] Michelle Frechette: and

[00:08:54] Nathan Wrigley: Elliot

[00:08:55] Michelle Frechette: says hello.

[00:08:56] Nathan Wrigley: Who does?

[00:08:57] Michelle Frechette: Elliot Richmond says Hello.

[00:09:00] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah, we got him I think. Hi, there it says Elliot. Yeah. Thank you. That's great. And we've got some other comments coming in. There's a little bit of a lag actually between the various different platforms, but I can see Jackson has says chow. but it hasn't come through to our platform.

I don't quite know why that is, Jackson. We sometimes have these problems, but I'll keep my eyes peeled on the actual YouTube comments and what the platform consumes. So the idea is to talk about word pressy things. Increasingly, we go off the rails and talk about all sorts of other things as well, including AI quite a lot.

But, what we tend to do these days is firstly have a massive long advert for things that I do. So let's begin. Let's begin there.

[00:09:40] Michelle Frechette: Now's a good time to get your coffee. I'm just kidding.

[00:09:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you go get coffee, in fact, have a long meal and then come back and No, I'll keep it brief. This is our WP Build stick your email address into there and I'll send you two emails a week when we produce new content.

more recently we had, we had a, hijack episode about show fm, which I'm gonna get onto in a moment. But the, the, latest and greatest thing at the moment is Black Friday, isn't it? Everybody's sort of gearing up for Black Friday. I expect Terim you are doing the same thing. We throw this page together each year and at the minute, I dunno, I think it's got about 50, 60 deals on there, something like that.

you can search and filter it for, what kind of category it falls under, how much the discount is and what have you. And there's some little sponsor slots at the moment taken up by Nova Mirror and WS form. If you fancy doing one of those, feel free, click this little button here. but it's at wp builds.com/black despite what this URL at the top says.

It really is at wp build.com/black. and as Black Friday comes along, yeah, I strip out all the UTM parameters and stuff like that, so hopefully it'll load quickly without tracking and all of that business. but yeah, if you wanna submit your deal. You can stick your deal, whatever you've got, stick it in behind that, form there, add a deal and we'll put it on, which is free

[00:11:06] Andrew Palmer: to do, right?

[00:11:07] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah. It doesn't cost anything. Yeah. Yeah. Usually we end up with about somewhere between four and 500 deals. It, is a bit noisy. When I started doing that page, I don't know, we had 70 or something and now it does get a bit noisy and I don't really have the perfect system for filtering it and other than search, so if you go there and you click the little filter thing, I don't know if you guys line yourselves up.

I've stopped putting money to one side for Black Friday. I don't really do that anymore, but I know that if you've got a plugin and things like that, then it is quite a big time of year. So anyway, that page is there if you want it. The other thing to say is, we, were taken over, this has never happened, never before have I not been the interviewer on one of my podcasts, but for the first time ever, some 485 episodes of that show in, mark Zaca took over and he did an interview with me and Dan about this, podcast that we've got, show fm, which actually the three of you have used for the show notes and all of that to get in on this episode.

Hopefully it was fairly straightforward and easy to use. I already

[00:12:20] Michelle Frechette: have four episodes of my own show out on it.

[00:12:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Oh ha. Is it, have you published it? Is it all going?

[00:12:25] Michelle Frechette: Yeah, I'm on my fourth episode published at 2:00 AM today.

[00:12:28] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And all the problems that you had, don't say a word. the miria were, yeah,

[00:12:34] Michelle Frechette: they were user error and user understanding, but now I understand the flow better, so

[00:12:39] Nathan Wrigley: that's, we fine.

Yeah. Once you've got the flow, it's a piece of cake. It's powerful actually. And so it's

[00:12:43] Michelle Frechette: finding, finding the right places to click was just the challenge.

[00:12:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Community software. Yeah. 'cause there's so, so many options. There's quite a lot that sort of gets buried, but it's, it's, yeah. Anyway, last little promo from me.

in the run up to, Halloween, we're running a deal. We're calling it our founders deal 'cause we would like to get a hundred people onboarded onto the platform just to act as our kind of, I don't know, our initial foals of people. there's still a bunch left, so if you wanna be one of those, what we're doing is we're offering you 75% off three years of the platform.

But the quid pro quo is that you give us feedback that, you get a good deal and hopefully give us some feedback when things, don't work as you're expecting or if you just want a different feature. So far, and I am not actually being, disingenuous about this. So far we've had no negative comments, but we've had lots of people saying, can you do this?

And in answer to all of them, so far the answer has been yes. And we've built it within 24, 48, 36 hours, something like that, including a massive overhaul over the weekend of the whole permission system. So get on board and you could make this platform pretty much anything you want at the moment. So show fm, go check it out.

where do we pay for the commercial, non-commercial? There is no, oh, I'm so sorry.

[00:14:06] Vito Peleg: Too bad.

[00:14:06] Nathan Wrigley: Sorry. Yeah, that's a whole thing. Do, do any of you pay for content that you, that like excludes ads? Do any of you actually do that, like podcasts or, shop,

[00:14:16] Vito Peleg: Spotify?

[00:14:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

[00:14:20] Andrew Palmer: I don't, I think, I I, don't, I like the ads.

I think it supports businesses, the ads, you know, the reason there. The reason the pla these platforms exist. I think in general, I'm talking about the YouTubes, the Spotifys, the, the, things that we advertise on as businesses, digital businesses. I think that, I wanna be able to support the advertisers rather than the platform.

I'm a bit weird in that way, but I, think it's fine to listen to an advert for 10 seconds and on YouTube you can,

[00:14:57] Nathan Wrigley: or in this case six minutes of,

[00:15:00] Andrew Palmer: you, I mean we can't avoid this because, you are still learning on self-promotion, you know that's

[00:15:07] Nathan Wrigley: right.

[00:15:07] Andrew Palmer: Giving you leeway here.

[00:15:09] Vito Peleg: Unless you actually Alexa actually buy something, Andrew, you're actually costing them money.

[00:15:15] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah.

[00:15:15] Vito Peleg: Interesting, Cost per view.

[00:15:17] Andrew Palmer: Yeah, but I'm listening to them. I'm hearing them. Yeah. That they're in my, that their branding is in my head. So that's a good quid pro. I feel that I'm doing them a good turn.

[00:15:26] Nathan Wrigley: There's one podcast that I pay for and I pay $99 a year. And basically what they do, and I absolutely love it. And, I think to myself, gosh, that's half the cost of the TV licence in the uk and he guy produces one episode maybe every two weeks or something. I really, like it. And his technique is none of his, content has, sponsored slots, none.

But he just cuts it off in the most annoying place if you don't pay for it. So you'll be like 12 minutes in and you're just getting into it and then it's like, that's it. And he doesn't even announce it. It just suddenly stops. And it really worked for me 'cause I was enjoying the first 12, 15, 25 whatever minutes, so I pay for that.

But there's a platform that has recently launched, check, check this out for like disruptive, but also really annoying. If you're on the, if you're, if you are a podcaster, what they do is they download a copy of the podcast, listen to it with ai, figure out where the ads are, and then cut the ads out and put it into their podcast platform.

And because it's an RSS feed, they can do it. It's totally allowed, but it's also what a kick in the teeth for the people who've made that content. Isn't that such a weird business? Such a weird business model. Just, and, so he, the person that developed that platform, he gets a fee for you to use his app.

So that he can continue paying the AI fees to strip the ads out.

[00:16:59] Vito Peleg: It's it happened with TVs. You we used to have watch all of the ads, you had no way to run. And then these, recorded thing. Yeah. That was the early days of it. Similar

[00:17:10] Nathan Wrigley: stuff. The t the TiVo boxes. And you would just Exactly.

You would wait, 10 minutes, go and make a coffee, come in and then skip, skip, skip right back. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly what it is.

[00:17:19] Michelle Frechette: I, have to admit, I haven't seen an ad in years because I do everything streaming and I pay for the services that I pay for

[00:17:27] Nathan Wrigley: the services

[00:17:27] Michelle Frechette: have to listen to them. Yes.

[00:17:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. that's probably the way that I think the, the podcast industry is gonna go. I imagine there'll be a lot of that. Anyway, the point being show fm, we've got an app if you are interested in that. Okay. We ask our guests if they've got something they would like to mention. And, in this case, we've got a couple of those bits.

So let's start here. Let's start with, pressing co uk. This is Andrew's contribution. Tell us a bit more, Andrew.

[00:17:58] Andrew Palmer: you may know I had a marketplace called Elegant Marketplace, and that's closed down, which is fine. I sold it to In Motion. They've decided that's not now part of their business, which is all cool.

But I really do think that there is a place, especially, I think we're gonna mention Katie, from Barn too. Yeah. And also, other plugin developers are saying, we are not getting the sales. We're just not get, getting them at all. So this is gonna be a mix of, affiliates and also products that download with a licence, that you can buy directly from the, platform.

And it's effectively, it's a marketplace. So any plugin developers that want to get an extra bit of, exposure, and we know that Elegant marketplace was, particularly successful for, terim, particularly successful for divvy plugins. But this is literally for anyone that's got a digital product, whether it's AI generated, whether it's a plugin for WordPress or a, or, a, a plugin or extension for Shopify or any kind of proprietary system, then this is a platform that you, would want to be on as a, vendor.

because I think with, marketplaces. They, have, they've got a little bit of a bad name. And I want this to be more of a community thing. So I'm use, I'm gonna be using fluent across the board with it. I've built it with ai, fluent has a, an MCP. So it's just, it's completely ready to launch today.

But I want to just, have people interested in it and I'm still launching it, whether people are interested in it or not, because I'm quite quote about it. But I think that, we deserve another platform other than wordpress.org and other than Shopify, app stores and all that kind of stuff to be able to promote and, make sure that your products are seen somewhere.

Yes, especially we'll be using, ai, situations on SEO, but we'll also use, normal SEO as well. And I think that, having built elegant marketplace, zero to a million revenue in total was, is, something that I could, I've got a proven track record in being able to build out a marketplace and make it successful.

Help businesses like Terrin. We did in the early days with WP feedback help businesses like term Mageddon, like we did in back in the day and fifth and, 250, vendors were on there with 1200 products between them, and they all earned a very decent, living. So let's hope that I can use that as a community platform.

Yeah. Et cetera, et cetera. And I'll be using fluent community as well. I'll open it up so that we have a, a, a place where people can, be nice to each other. Really, those are the rules.

[00:20:50] Nathan Wrigley: I saw this week. Fluent community got to something like 80,000.

[00:20:54] Andrew Palmer: 80,000, yeah.

[00:20:55] Nathan Wrigley: 80,000 instals or something of

[00:20:57] Andrew Palmer: which

[00:20:57] Nathan Wrigley: yours is gonna be one of them.

So

[00:20:59] Andrew Palmer: I'll tell you what, the fluent products are really awesome, Oh yeah. And, and I'm using a, little thing called wpo.ai to build out this, because Fluent have got an m ccp and W ppos.ai connects to the WordPress MCP or, connects in within WordPress. So this is still built on WordPress, which I a hundred percent believe in, but it's also AI helping, and I've also got ATRI on there that is, helping me manage the website.

So the plug, all the plugin updates, all of the backups, everything that's in there. So I'm really getting into plug WordPress plugins that really dive into the AI aspect of helping you run a WordPress website. So not an advert for atri. I used to work for terim and I supported them in the early days and, all the things, but without.

Going too much into it. Atri AI really does help you now manage your whole website situation, whether you've got one or many. So that's what I'm, doing and, that's what I like.

[00:22:01] Nathan Wrigley: That's not an advert for atri, but this is, oh my God,

segue. Thank you. so it's been absolutely ages, veto, since we spoke. And obviously you're not gonna be able to sum up like, I don't know what that is, five years or whatever. But, I'll just quickly hand you the torch and do you wanna just tell us in a couple of minutes some of the more interesting stuff that you've been up to recently, or I don't know

[00:22:29] Vito Peleg: Sure.

[00:22:30] Nathan Wrigley: Maybe

[00:22:30] Vito Peleg: what happened since

[00:22:31] Nathan Wrigley: you're working on

[00:22:31] Vito Peleg: quickly.

[00:22:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:22:34] Vito Peleg: so as we started with a feedback solution, to allow people to click any part of the website and leave comments where the request is. very quickly it became like a dashboard to manage all of your websites from, for all of your communications, basically the delivery process of your work specifically built for agencies.

and then we realised, actually on the other side of these little chat bubbles, there could be an AI team that does the work. Oh, yeah. That passes on the information that finds more things that you prob maybe missed, because, you are juggling too many clients at the same time. And and this also came in after working with tens of thousands of, freelancers, agencies and learning from them that the, there is no way to get ahead of your clients unless you have a.

And so the, this chase, this constant chasing that we've all been a part of, I've been a part of this for years, as well when I was running my agency, is extremely hard. And you always feel like you're just like one step behind your clients. Oh, I need to reach out to this guy last week and I forgot.

And Marketing Tuesday gets rescheduled because this website went this and that website went this. And basically only the squeaky wheels get your attention, gets the oil. and so you are, you are just, there trying to juggle all of them at the same time without having the team around this, this combined with an average 7% profit margin, which is what most freelancers and agencies, operate on, which is extremely low, makes it extremely hard to get out of this, concept.

Getting out, getting ahead of your clients. And, after building an agency back then and doing it again with Andrews as well at our side at AAM over the past couple of years, we've learned that there is no way of doing this except for having a person dedicated to doing the follow-ups and the client communications and the project manager, if you will, and another person that is in charge of going out and finding additional opportunities for expansion and customers and all those kind of stuff.

And of course, the team that does the work and someone that once a month goes and checks X, Y, Z and all of the things in between. So that's exactly what we built, an AI web agency that gets plugged into agencies and takes on them or their persona, as the workspace. And so all you need to do is just drop in the URL and that's it.

No more chasing anymore. the AI web works autonomously in the background. You set the plan and you set all of the approvals, and then the AI just runs across all your clients. The one liner that I really like out of this is, on top of the top one here, but this one actually hits home for me, is, treat all your clients like they're your only client.

[00:25:28] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Nice. That is nice. Yeah.

That

[00:25:31] Vito Peleg: is good. And

[00:25:32] Nathan Wrigley: yeah,

[00:25:32] Vito Peleg: because you set the plan and just let the AI run continuously across all the websites. And in order for us to be able to accomplish this, we built, hundreds and hundreds of tools, into our ai. currently I believe we have the deepest, connection to WordPress, but it's not only because it can talk to WordPress, but because it has all of the other additional tools that professionals would have to not just do, but to make the decisions.

'cause, and any AI now can talk to Yost, SEO or something like this. but what should I put in there? what is the right that you need to go off, do keyword analysis, keyword research, SERPs analysis, GEO activities and all those kind of stuff, just so that you don't just write an alt tag, but you write the right alt tag that will help the website advance to its goal.

apart from doing the connection to the website, we built a bunch of additional tools from accessibility to SEO to performance, to security to make sure that, the ag, the AI agency's team is wrapped with all of the tools that professionals actually grow and grab, before they, execute, before they make a decision.

yeah, so it's, all wrapped up around this. at the core, we help every team that is a freelancer or an agency basically, operate like they have a team on their own. But was just one person.

[00:27:00] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. There you go. That's Terim v.

[00:27:03] Andrew Palmer: Slightly more than it was, Nathan?

[00:27:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, It was, it was, less than that.

I know this though. I'm now beginning as the, one of the founders of a new SaaS product. I get it. I see how this journey changes over time. Hey, here's something curious, right? And, your platform, I think does it differently because you are dealing with people that you already know. So it's not like an outreach tool to find new clients.

I was listening, I don't know where I got this week, but somebody, it might have been Matt Madero was saying WordPress is, there's no problems for WordPress. You only have to look at my inbox. so this is Matt, my inbox of the way that I'm, the way that he's being contacted by, plugin developers who've got new and interesting products.

I'm also noticing the same thing, but I've got this, I've got this icky feeling that a lot of it is created with AI because they, a lot of the emails seem to be saying the exact same thing. And I'm, I'm pushing this back to you a bit. Veto, I'm, guessing the AI portion isn't just set it and forget it.

You never speak to your client ever again. I'm presuming there's a bit where the human is still in that loop as we keep saying.

[00:28:14] Vito Peleg: And even exactly you said that. Nathan, this is the only AI platform that treats the professional as the escalation layer. And so anything that, that requires your approval, that requires your GWAS comes back to you based on the definitions that it has, as opposed to just trying to hallucinate its way into a solution.

So we recognise the professional as the top 20%, how you get to something of value, ha,

[00:28:42] Nathan Wrigley: that's such an interesting number. We're gonna deal with that number in a minute, actually, curiously, in exactly the same context. yeah. Okay.

[00:28:49] Vito Peleg: But to, to tackle what you're describing instead of going off and doing called out, which, then becomes really spammy and this kind of stuff.

The way that we're looking at this is we're helping you generate revenue from your own existing customers. Yeah. So what AI does, it goes throughout your entire fleet of websites once a week or once a month. It, knows their goals and then it finds things that they would be happy to have quotes it out, scopes it out, and makes a proposal that you can just push to a client with Hey Michelle, why not have a booking form on your website, that, that is relevant because X, Y, Z, and it'll give you da, So it, just takes all of that out of the equation and creates what we call upsell opportunities, for each one of your clients on a weekly basis. So you, we, always know that the, the agency that succeed are not the ones that are going out there chasing the next client are the ones that are treating their existing clients, like they are made of gold 'cause they are.

[00:29:50] Nathan Wrigley: I'm gonna say it out loud. Andrew, I've muted you because, your microphone's really hot and, we're getting all the keyboards and whenever you lay your mug down or whatever's going on, so put your, you can unmute yourself at any moment. It's just whilst Vito was talking, thank you. okay.

Thank you for that veto. That's great. The, so the, this is a weird thing. About two years ago, I probably get two email a week from plugin developers. At the moment, I'm probably getting about 40 a day.

[00:30:22] Vito Peleg: Wow.

[00:30:24] Nathan Wrigley: and it makes it unreadable, right? You get to the point where there's a deluged, which is so torrential that you can't even bear to open the ones which may be realistic, but the, but you're art.

There's a few tells. If the first line tells me what I already know about myself, Hey Nathan, you run a WordPress podcast. Oh, do I, really? Is that what

[00:30:49] Vito Peleg: I do?

[00:30:50] Nathan Wrigley: Please change to that algorithm, because it's ridiculous. Anyway, the point being there is a bit of me which worries about AI going in all the different places.

So it's nice to hear that you've got like the human in

[00:31:01] Vito Peleg: the loop there. That's 100%. Yeah.

[00:31:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:31:03] Vito Peleg: I think that agencies have a place in, in the stack, and they will always have the place. It's just not what it used to be.

[00:31:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. This is the reality, right? Nothing is what it used to be, but, I want a cat on this show.

There's look. Michelle's got look at that. Just hanging out. That's so lovely. Michelle, we're gonna go over to yours. it, feels a little early, but, it's Sumter. Tell us what

[00:31:33] Michelle Frechette: we're looking at. yeah, so a couple, it was, I think it was a couple weeks ago, the Space Fast website was launched. And it is, let's see, space, fast.com is the website.

You could see part of it in the way the URL is on this one. but you can spin up a website just by describing what you want, and using your ai like, so I connected space fast to chat GPT 'cause that's the one I'm more versed in so far. And I told it what I wanted and so it created a site and then I said I need a Santa picture on there if it's a Santa site.

So it updated with a nice AI Santa photo, which will be replaced by my boyfriend in his Santa suit soon as I can get out and take some pictures of him. But, that's,

[00:32:16] Andrew Palmer: that's nice.

[00:32:17] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. And so like the, I'm connecting the URL to a wny santa.com so that if people are looking for somebody for pet photos or parties, they can hire Nick.

[00:32:28] Nathan Wrigley: I am. I think that we are at a real moment, aren't we? Where I've never used space fast, but I'm hearing some fairly gushing commentary coming out of people who've tried it and come out the other end, And within something in the region of 20 minutes after you first log in, you've got yourself a pretty credible website.

[00:32:48] Michelle Frechette: Yeah.

[00:32:49] Nathan Wrigley: It's exciting time. It

[00:32:50] Michelle Frechette: took me about 10 minutes.

[00:32:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:32:53] Michelle Frechette: The thing is though, like I don't, I still have to learn so much. It's sitting there. I'm not, I'm probably going to remake the site in WordPress if I'm being honest, because I understand it better and I know how to control it better.

But, but the fact that you can just spin something like this up, Kathy Z has put, I wanna say 10 sites up just in the space, fast part of things. And, she's got fortune cookies that open up and tell you why you're a great developer or what your developer is. She's got her new, I think she even used it for her new, what we were just talking about earlier, her community.

So she's been, yeah, we'll mention

[00:33:28] Nathan Wrigley: that in

[00:33:28] Michelle Frechette: a minute. She's been having a tonne of fun creating things and figuring it out what the right prompts are to make the best sites.

[00:33:35] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So slight fly in the ointment then. If, if, we get to the point where everything's really easy, so this is not aimed at you, Michelle.

This is for all. No, I know. And, anybody listening, if we get to the point where everything's trivially easy, how much attention have we all got for this stuff? what is our capacity to consume? And, you, so I'm gonna use Kathy as the example, because you mentioned that she just launched 10 different things.

So again, This is not directed towards Kathy, it's just that came out of your mouth. If we're all launching like 10 different things in the space of a couple of days, how do we, gain any sort of meaningful traction on it? Does, everything become a bit of a hobby or, yeah.

Anyway,

[00:34:16] Michelle Frechette: I have thought, I have thoughts on it. So if you, were to look at the Space Fest website, at the very top, it says, brought to you by the makers of Tumblr. It doesn't say brought to you by WordPress. So it's actually going after a different crowd. It's going after the Microblogging people who are looking for fast ways to do things.

'cause Tumblr's a fast way to just get things out. Okay. It's different. it's different than Twitter. It's different than other social platforms, but it reaches a very distinct audience. And I think that's what Space Fest is geared toward. People who need something fast that they can do really quickly, but not in depth.

You're not gonna find like hotels setting up websites with Space Fest.

[00:34:52] Nathan Wrigley: Is it disposable

[00:34:52] Michelle Frechette: that's

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

[00:34:54] Michelle Frechette: I think it is. Absolutely. Okay. I could take that down. you can take any web website down in a heartbeat, right? But this was free. I didn't, and I wanted to play with it and see what happened.

And it was ridiculously easy to, bring up basically a brochure site that can do a few things and send you email when somebody fills out the form. I'm sure it can do more than that, but that's all I've needed from it. And it seems to be fairly easy to get that done.

[00:35:17] Nathan Wrigley: I'm so conflicted. I'm, really excited.

Same by what, what's possible. that child in me is oh, look, everything, you can do all the things. But then of me is, think of it another way. Nathan is one of what do we do if everybody's just launching a trillion things every week? But also my attention was shattered before all of this anyway.

And now it's gonna be more shattered. Anyway. Sorry, veto, you carry on.

[00:35:42] Vito Peleg: I see it more like the music industry for my background, but because, it used to be very hard to get an album out there to be expensive, and you had to have investment, which is like the comp, the record label, and only the top 0.0001% got to have an album.

and then, and, then streaming came in and home recordings kind of the thing, right? And it basically democratised the whole idea of producing music. now it just meant that it exactly, in a very similar way, you, got flooded with, artists releasing their indie. That's the rise of SoundCloud, if you remember SoundCloud.

Yes. Yeah, MySpace and all of those kind of stuff. It was all on the back of the ability of publishing your own music, very easily as opposed to just a handful of years prior to that. that did not change a few decades in, did not change the end perspective, that you still have the 0.001%, that rise to the top.

The Taylor Swifts. Yeah. Even in this landscape, you still have the same type of, let's say big stars, all these kind of stuff, while still the 99% that before could not get an album, out there that could not have, make a living out of this thing. It's remained the same. there's a full skillset to actually getting your music not only published, but but, promoted and cited and sang in, different places and, like basically to make it a success, what is considered in that basic success.

And I think that this is exactly what we're gonna be seeing here as well. it's easier to make, so you're just gonna have a whole bunch of it. But still, the ones that have the full rounded skillset to taking it more than just another thing that sits on MySpace and to becoming a thing that people, use, observe, click on, that's where the, that's, that ratio I think is just gonna remain the same.

[00:37:55] Michelle Frechette: And I think you can equate that. You can equate that to writing a book too, right? So I can self-publish through Amazon now. Yes. That's how I published my first book that I put any advertising behind it. No, I just wanted to write a book. I could have done something much more with it and had it like driving, driving traffic, but I chose not to.

And I think it's, I think your, music, example is, perfect just like writing a book or any of those other skills that we can put together. If you need a quick website, you've got to know what, you need as far as SEO. You've got to do all of those things on your own, because I don't see a way that like Yost ties into space fast, for example, right?

So you're really building these brochure, these quick sites that aren't necessarily going to feed your business long term, but might get, a startup up and going if you're starting up something non-technical, right? So it's something that you can start with. it's, my starter website, and then once I earn some money, I'm gonna have somebody do something much bigger for me kind of thing,

[00:38:52] Nathan Wrigley: Andrew?

[00:38:53] Andrew Palmer: I think it's the way back in the day when I, first started my agency, one of the things like spotted was distress websites. Either a website got closed down for some reason. an announcement was needed to be made by re one of the sites we did was Reno. They had a break announcement, they didn't wanna put it on their own website, they just emailed everybody and then pointed it to the distressed website that we built in a day.

So those kind of things, you, because you can build a website in a day, but that's not Forget Space Fast is actually using WordPress as well. So it's static WordPress instantaneously. And I think it's a move by wordpress.com or Automatic to say, we, you can build a static website. On the, foundation of WordPress.

So I think Yost and the plugins may come where, may come into play later in the day. Let's not forget that the guy that built space Fast was on his own until three weeks ago. Now he's got a team behind him because it's suddenly, flown off and everybody's using.

And the URL that, Michelle shared, that's a temporary URL. It's only up for a, a few weeks or something. So you, but I can connect it for that to be, you can connect it, of course, you can connect it to anything. you can connect it to a domain name. You can also export. you could decide how you built that.

You can export it to, WordPress. The way I use space fast is I don't connect it to my agent because. I'm basically inherently lazy, So I don't want to do too much. So what I do is I create something in Claude and drop the zip file into space fast, and within four seconds flat, it's there. It's Right.

Which is amazing, right? So I don't need to have a, an agent connected to it. If I make, if I wanna make an amendment, I just make the amendment in Claude, then re drop the zip on and it overwrites what I've done. So it keeps,

[00:40:41] Michelle Frechette: not all of us know how to do that.

[00:40:43] Andrew Palmer: No, that's, true. It, says drop or connect and I go drop.

Some of us went to school for

[00:40:48] Michelle Frechette: administration and higher education.

[00:40:52] Andrew Palmer: Yeah. I and s is, and I, think, Insta WP have a similar situation. You're gonna see things like swarms out there. You're gonna see things like Nova that is the, who owns them. Web pros. So web pros, doing white label stuff, but nobody's actually doing it in WordPress except for space fast.

And maybe, instant, instant WP are helping you build that cadence, of course, has AI built in. That'll get better. wordpress.com has AI built in. That's phenomenal. If you've ever built, we're gonna come to that in a bit like that. Yeah.

[00:41:29] Nathan Wrigley: And

[00:41:29] Andrew Palmer: also things, plugins like, like, Arin, WordPress plugins, if you use the WordPress plug in attri, you'll be able to build, you build out pages already in it.

You'll be able to build websites soon enough in using that.

[00:41:40] Vito Peleg: the website, you saw, our website is built 100% with a m. 100%.

[00:41:46] Andrew Palmer: Yeah.

[00:41:46] Nathan Wrigley: Huh.

[00:41:47] Vito Peleg: It's

[00:41:48] Nathan Wrigley: amazing. It's just

[00:41:49] Vito Peleg: crazy. And it's

[00:41:49] Nathan Wrigley: strangest of times.

[00:41:51] Vito Peleg: It's like you said, Nathan. I've built our website, nine times so far over the past, years. once, or twice a year, I take that opportunity to rebuild the website, to stay, in touch, This is my kind of like exercise. so it went through a bunch of iterations over the years, and I've rebuilt it from scratch, at least the design, every time. this time I had complete freedom. And it's not about ara or anything like this, it's just the technology that was given to us, whatever I wanted it, I was not capped by my own design capabilities.

I was ca by my own, ability to articulate ideas, whatever I could imagine I could make. And that's like the, that, that was the, to me, just, I, felt free. there's a whole kind of, interpretations of that freedom throughout the website. It's oh, can I do that? Let me go down this rabbit hole.

[00:42:51] Nathan Wrigley: it's such,

[00:42:51] Vito Peleg: there's something,

[00:42:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It's such a curious time that we live in. So firstly, your point about the not point, nor not, nor, let's just round that to 1%, just 'cause it's easier to say. that's a curious articulation of the argument, isn't it? Because if there is always a 1% that rise to the top.

That kind of makes the whole thing seem, it makes me, me feel a bit more sanguine about it. if, you're in that 1%, whatever, the reason for that is, there's still a, there's still like safe harbour for you. even if the AI seems to take everything over everywhere else, 1% of us will rise to the top and be successful because we need people to be successful.

Otherwise, the whole thing will collapse. If there's nobody being successful anywhere, then that industry will just disappear. I had something else in the back of my mind, but it's gone, whilst they were saying that sentence. So what I'll just quickly do is I'll click go to the comments and see if it drops back in.

da. Apparently the previous time that you were on Veto this show was, May 17th, 2022.

[00:43:55] Vito Peleg: Wow. Tako, what the heck? How there must have been one more between,

[00:43:59] Nathan Wrigley: I think

[00:43:59] Vito Peleg: there

[00:43:59] Nathan Wrigley: was one more. That's incredible. that's amazing. At least

[00:44:02] Michelle Frechette: it was post COVID, it wasn't like, oh my gosh.

[00:44:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's right.

Yeah.

[00:44:05] Michelle Frechette: 2018.

[00:44:08] Nathan Wrigley: where else,

[00:44:08] Michelle Frechette: which I think is when you were on my podcast,

[00:44:10] Vito Peleg: right? Yeah. It was the very first few months. Yes.

[00:44:14] Michelle Frechette: Yeah.

[00:44:14] Nathan Wrigley: Teco also says he pays for, I need to come back, Michelle,

[00:44:16] Vito Peleg: do another round.

[00:44:17] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. And we're, relaunching in January, so Nice.

[00:44:21] Nathan Wrigley: hopefully on the show FM platform. Ever heard of that, right?

Moving on?

[00:44:24] Michelle Frechette: Absolutely.

[00:44:25] Nathan Wrigley: Absolutely. tacho says he does pay for stuff, video land, which I've not heard of, Netflix, Spotify, and so on, so that's interesting. Duolingo as well. Yeah. Okay. That's an interesting way of describing it. Over 21. I'm not, join us. Hello Paul. Nice to have you with us.

WP Bakery joining us. pay to play model still works for sure. Love it or hate it. Yeah. I don't think that's going away at any point, is it? da dah. Any other comments that anybody's seen? Mark West Guard joining us from the airport. Me and Mark were having a conversation. Yeah, what's that about?

What's that about? He's, come to, see somebody in the UK and, he was on the plane and we were having a chat and then about, I don't know, he's visiting family and he revealed that he was on the plane. And I, don't think I've ever chatted to anybody on the plane before. It was a bit of a moment for me.

I thought it was a bit Star Trek. ba Elliot Richmond saying he's got a new product. And so obviously the negotiations have already begun in the background in the comments between Andrew, and Elliot, which is really nice. What else have we got?

there's a few more comments. I haven't got time to read the long ones I'm afraid, but anyway, there we

[00:45:39] Andrew Palmer: go. Oh, there's a good, there's a good one from Elliot that some Yeah.

[00:45:42] Michelle Frechette: The

[00:45:42] Andrew Palmer: long

[00:45:43] Michelle Frechette: one

[00:45:43] Andrew Palmer: Space vest. Yeah, it's a long one. About space Files from Elliot. He's

[00:45:47] Michelle Frechette: also real. Yeah. He says it's good for landing pages.

Brian Cords demoed this.

[00:45:51] Nathan Wrigley: Okay,

[00:45:52] Michelle Frechette: thank you. You can use 'em for, yep.

[00:45:54] Nathan Wrigley: he says, so Elliot, thank you. Space fast is also really good for landing pages. I sold Brian Cord's demo this a specific landing page that redirects the users back to a specific, it's got truncated product on your Woo store. And anyway,

[00:46:08] Andrew Palmer: Ivana, who's, I, I was lucky enough to see Ivana a couple of weeks ago in Serbia, and we, we went to a lovely Balkan, food thing and it was awesome.

She's awesome. So she, and very, into this thing. Still runs a web agency, still works with WP Bakery, totally knows her stuff. And, that's the thing. I see all these tools as Link three and just think of so much missed SEO and all. And she's right is that we can't get, sorry to overshoot you there, we can't still get this a IO and GEO thing sussed in our brains because it's all new terminology, new acronyms for everything.

But if we can get our heads over that and make sure that, Google can actually see it and chat to PTC it and we get citations and things like that, I think something like space fast, Or a number of tools like Spaceface will just help us get to where we need to be. No, all the way. Yeah. Alright, Jackson?

Yeah.

[00:47:11] Nathan Wrigley: Jackson's no mirror. he says, no, Mira all the way. That's another of the product. They're one of the ones that have sponsored our page. And then Marcus spin says hello, coming a little bit late. good to see everybody.

[00:47:22] Andrew Palmer: He's building tools.

[00:47:24] Nathan Wrigley: he is. I saw, my goodness, I saw your latest tool, Marcus.

A beautiful site. And, and it's completely gone. I had COVID last week and my memory has absolutely been punctured. I have the memory of a very forgetful sieve. and so I'm so sorry, Marcus. It's there. I can imagine it. I know the font you used and the colour palette and everything. I just can't remember what the heck it was and I'm sorry for that.

Okay. Whoever, this is beautifully sums up my fear. So a TZ 22, whoever that is the winner of all of this new AI world is the AI companies anthropic and the like. That is the bit that really frustrates me at the moment, right? We just seem to be piling all of our money and knowledge and expertise and everything into these seemingly limitless, repositories of scooping it all up.

And it does worry me that they are gonna be able to scoop so much up that they'll be, they'll just be beach heads drawn up around them. So impenetrable that the three or four AI companies will be just absolutely untouchable. I hope that the local models,

[00:48:34] Andrew Palmer: I'm pretty sure and, I, record this because, I don't mind being an idiot.

There's gonna be pretty much one AI company. They can't, you can't sustain this kind of debt. It's just crazy what they're doing. anthrop, they're called

[00:48:50] Nathan Wrigley: Evil Corp. They kind,

[00:48:52] Andrew Palmer: you just can't, you can't sustain it. There's no, there is, there's one of them, one big guy's gonna go, they within 12 months, one will not be there anymore.

Or by the

others.

[00:49:04] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, I'm rooting for the local models. Let's see if that takes off. look at all these lovely people. Says Zachary. Hello.

[00:49:10] Andrew Palmer: Zachary had a little car crash the other day. You, Nathan?

[00:49:13] Michelle Frechette: Nathan said, yeah. Was that in his new car? Oh my

[00:49:16] Andrew Palmer: goodness. I think so. Yeah.

[00:49:18] Nathan Wrigley: What this chap in the comments had a car crash.

[00:49:20] Andrew Palmer: Zach, Zachary had a

[00:49:21] Michelle Frechette: little

[00:49:21] Andrew Palmer: car crash. Yeah.

[00:49:23] Nathan Wrigley: I hope you're alright, Zachary?

[00:49:25] Michelle Frechette: he's one of Zachary is one of the nicest people in WordPress. Can I say that? Vito? You agree, don't you? Zachary Such a sweetheart. Yeah.

[00:49:32] Nathan Wrigley: Oh,

[00:49:32] Michelle Frechette: a lovely person. He is.

[00:49:34] Andrew Palmer: I'll, agree with that as well. I work with him.

He's lovely man.

[00:49:36] Nathan Wrigley: Zachary, you are getting all the love. Everybody loves Zachary. That's great Zachary, come on as much as you like because we love that positivity. That's great. Patricia is saying she got to test the new MCP plugin that connects all the core abilities and the many plugins.

Not sure if I can add the name. Go on, add the name because why not? Tell us. Tell us. We'd like to hear about it. da. I've, yeah. Thank you. Okay, let's move on. That's the comments that I've got for now. Okay. Back to the screen. Let's pop this up. the time is moving on, so I'm gonna very touch on this.

I'm just gonna do the bits that I've got a, like an H two heading or something like that. So this is what's new in Gutenberg. over the past few weeks, months, 14th of October, this was released. if you have been using notes, they are now. So notes is a bit like the Google Docs commenting sort of system, that kind of thing.

They've now been shifted into this little panel, which I think is really clever. So in the past the UX for this wasn't particularly great and now the comments have all been shoved into this. I dunno if you can see it on the screen there. There's this sort of like little sidebar here where all the comments drop means that it's gonna get out of your way.

Very minor thing, but really, nice. if you've been dropping links in, your navigation in the block editor, it's been quite difficult to discover where those links have been. I don't know, taxonomy or category links, that kind of thing. It's hard to find them now. It's all gonna be surfaced in this one, in this one search panel.

And you can now sort galleries if you, again, this is all in the Gutenberg plugin, A to ZZ two A, recent, that kind of thing. And you can sort them and filter them in that way, which is quite nice. There's a load of other stuff, but because time is limited, that's what I'm going to mention there. I don't suppose anybody's got anything to add to that, have they?

No. Okay. In which

[00:51:29] Andrew Palmer: case, I just wanna add, I just wanna add that Gutenberg plugin is different to Gutenberg blocks, right? It is.

[00:51:35] Nathan Wrigley: yeah,

[00:51:35] Andrew Palmer: Gutenberg

[00:51:36] Nathan Wrigley: plugin

[00:51:36] Andrew Palmer: is

[00:51:36] Nathan Wrigley: the sort of lot, the bleeding

[00:51:38] Andrew Palmer: edge, and I know that this is dev focused and everything, but a lot of people don't, miss that. So I've never installed Gutenberg, the plugin.

It's really weird. I just use blocks or

[00:51:48] Nathan Wrigley: most of the stuff that gets the high level attention, like in this article. So the stuff which really gets to the top probably will ship fairly soon because it's just, it's mature. People have had their eyeballs on it. and so hopefully the three things that we just mentioned will come, in a, version very, soon.

Okay. Next one then. DeVito mentioned 80 and 20. This is a site which was recently put up by web dev studios. Maybe they've been feeling this sort of AI pinch a little bit as well. Maybe they've had a, their roster of clients have been coming back, expecting more, or, just saying, yeah, but we've got this chap over here that can build a site for a hundred dollars and he claims that you can do it in eight minutes and you, get the idea, I'm over egging it.

So they put this site together, and it's called, it looks don.com. and it's really good. basically they're trying to make the case that all the bits that really matter in a WordPress website. Are not arable. that's not true. 80% of the bits that matter are not arable, if So this website is trying to paint the, point, the cause of that. So it says right at the top, here's two websites they look the same. And on the left is the vibe coded one. And on the right is the WordPress website. And you can see we start off, they look literally the same. And then the idea is that you scroll and the timeline increases, blah, blah, blah.

And then, so it's things like, by 8 59, by 9 0 2 on day one, once you've launched the website, Google shows up. what did your AI system do in order to massage the Google search results? The human would've done a lot. Maybe your ai, didn't, then its CEO shares it on LinkedIn, but there's no preview.

you get the idea. It goes on. Anyway, I just thought from a very, big web development agency, they're obviously feeling the pinch and the need to fight back on the AI front. I just thought this was a, a website worth looking at. I dunno if you panellists had a chance to look at it. If you do comment, if not, I'll move on.

[00:54:01] Vito Peleg: I think that this is a really nice way to look at the things that, the AI or these AI labs that we were talking about earlier Yep. Do out of the box.

[00:54:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yep.

[00:54:12] Vito Peleg: But it is completely incorrect that, you can't do any, or all of these things with ai. that's exactly what I was talking about. You can't have, you can't expect it to be able to do the work without the relevant tools given to it.

So if you actually look at the stuff that it says or that they say that, it couldn't do, these are exactly the stuff that you would go to a third place to find information, make a decision, and then execute. And so

[00:54:41] Nathan Wrigley: I think what they're, my guess is that they're trying to, they're trying to draw a, strong line between people who know what they're doing.

That's right. And people who just make the claim that they can throw out a website in eight minutes with no experience because they just don't have that back catalogue of Okay. SEO's a thing. al alt tags and image, optimization is the thing. And it goes on and on

[00:55:07] Vito Peleg: Yes.

[00:55:08] Nathan Wrigley: and I think it's a really powerful way of doing it.

So I yeah. It, the way that I phrase it maybe sounded like it was in contra to Terim, but that wasn't

[00:55:19] Andrew Palmer: No, that's not what I'm saying. No, I think that's what, is the difference between a, an AI solution built with purpose? Built. Built, with purpose, but also built with knowledge of what it takes to actually build a website.

So when you have that inherent knowledge of what needs to be in a website, you are an agency owner, you know exactly what needs to go onto a website, your veto, your me or whoever. We know that we've gotta do the SEO bit, the page optimization, the alternative text, the, the product descriptions perfectly well and, all of the kind of stuff.

But the people that are vibe coding who've come into vibe coding and said, look, I've built an app and I've got a live example of this. Somebody built an app for a tyre service company that's a friend of mine. I had to step in, because it just wasn't right. It was just this guy just, oh no, I've built an app.

It's great. and it was accessible by everybody. an analogy that no login in

[00:56:18] Nathan Wrigley: my head, and it came into my head because Veto's got a load of guitars. if I was to say to any human being who've got, who's got working hands, play me a, play me the note of C and I point them to where they've got a press on the fretboard and then pluck the, so you can play a C, now do a d, d is this one, and now do an E.

That's E. Okay, now play me Bohemian Rhapsody. No, Yeah. But you could do all the things. No, but you can't, do you know what I mean? It's a bit like that. There's this whole industry and expertise. It will be so interesting seeing that case being made over and over. I, really feel that we're at the beginning of people having to make that case.

And it'll be, it will also be really interesting to see how, quickly people's wallets close in the next year or so. how compelling will the argument be of, but I can do it for a hundred dollars. How quickly will people be receptive to that and how much business will they lose and how much Google tanking will they have to endure and all of that.

[00:57:27] Vito Peleg: But this has been around for, decades. I sold the website for a hundred dollars when I first started, and then for 300 and then for 500. And, and you, just, that's how it starts. And believe me, it would've been way worse than these ones, when I first built those sites, so

[00:57:44] Andrew Palmer: you don't, we don't need to believe

[00:57:45] Vito Peleg: you.

[00:57:47] Nathan Wrigley: I've seen, Marcus, comes back with AI can do all of those things. So that's me saying, I can play an e, I can play an f, I can play a D, but then you have to know what to ask for. That is the difference. Yeah, that's cool. it looks dumb is a great example, says Elliot Richmond of where human intervention, is needed versus vibes.

tacho,

[00:58:12] Vito Peleg: let me, try and frame this a little bit differently. The vibes are us from 15 years ago. so eventually that this is the new blood coming into our industry. We need to, actually encourage them to come in. there's been rounds of people joining the industry over the couple of decades.

We were the ones in WordPress and locked it and now amazing. A designer can do some of these kind of stuff. And then you learn about accessibility and security and SEO and all those kind of stuff throughout the years. then website builders came in or like the, the drag and job builders came in 10 years ago and that brought another flood of, of professionals or they were not professionals at the time.

and this is the same, this is the same cycle happening here. which I, think exactly with that like music analogy, you're gonna get like an explosion of professionals coming into the. space. 'cause now not every, some people learned administration and they don't wanna copy, paste into, a space, thing that we saw there.

[00:59:16] Nathan Wrigley: Space bus. Yeah.

[00:59:18] Vito Peleg: but, some will, and, and, that, those folks will come in initially and do those crappy websites like we all did. And next year they will learn that okay, he, actually a static website is nothing. I need some sort of a CMS to carry this thing. And so let's figure that out and figure that out.

So I think this is all a blessing to our space that, that it's still been able to bring in, talent, into it with, the new tools that are coming in. so we should just embrace those people. They are us, Yeah. We looked down at the, they got less wrinkles. We, people looked down at us 'cause they were developers coding from scratch and we were using WordPress.

Yeah. And then, we looked down at the elemental folks or whatever because they were just drag and dropping and now we're doing the same thing. So let's just all get along,

[01:00:12] Nathan Wrigley: That's it. Okay. Let's all get along. There's a few other comments in here. I'll leave those for now.

[01:00:21] Michelle Frechette: can I just say one more thing about the AI stuff?

Is that we also forget that not every person building a website is our client, because not every person can afford to hire somebody else to build a website. Okay. That's tools like Wix and tools like Space Fast and tools like allow people to get on the web and start to build their, company or their brand, before they can afford to hire somebody.

And so I think that this is a great way for people to actually start to stake some claim and start to make some moves with their own businesses.

[01:00:51] Nathan Wrigley: if you thought we'd done with ai, you are wrong because we're not quite there yet. so we were talking about Kathy's aunt earlier. Kathy, frequent Appearer on this show many times she's been on and she's launched a community specifically for the, the, the people that we're talking about, the AI folk in the WordPress space.

She's calling it. Zant amplified. It's amplified zant.com. I'll just be really brief because I. I haven't been through the, the onboarding or anything like that. But essentially she would like to have a community, to share her resources, her courses, her learning materials and her expertise, and gather you together in, things like Zoom calls, by the sounds of it, things like that.

but it also is very much leaning into what we've just talked about. If you are using AI and you would like to hang around with a bunch of people who have that same approach to building websites, this is something that she's just launched. She's trying to get 50 people, at $49 a month. and so if any of that has resonated with you, if you are using ai, but you are slightly modelled up in how it works and what the best tools are, and you wanna find out by hanging out with other people, then amplified.zant.com is where you can go.

So

[01:02:16] Andrew Palmer: I know Kathy.

And I don't, I, and I don't know anything about, this is the first time I've heard of it, but I guarantee that anybody joins this. We'll also have a business coach, she's such a good coach. She's amazing. so I know that what the, side benefit of this doing it is that it's not just about building products or building WordPress with AI or using ai.

I think that people are gonna, I'm, tempted to join myself.

[01:02:46] Nathan Wrigley: It says next week you're gonna get direct access to Kathy. There's courses and workshops, including anything that Kathy does in the future. and then also the, the bits and pieces, I think that she's launched in the past and then, networking and office hours type content.

Yeah.

[01:03:02] Andrew Palmer: You're gonna get a coach. It's great. It's great.

[01:03:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah,

[01:03:06] Andrew Palmer: and it's not, expensive. Andrew,

[01:03:10] Nathan Wrigley: you broke up for me when you said that sentence. Could you

[01:03:14] Andrew Palmer: It's, inexpensive.

[01:03:17] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

[01:03:17] Andrew Palmer: Like a, a good investment. Awesome.

[01:03:20] Nathan Wrigley: So once more amplified as you would expect it to be, spelled.zant.com.

Go and check it out. Good luck with that, Kathy. I hope it goes well. where are we moving to next? Okay, so this is Devin Walker. Devin, longtime person in the WordPress space. He was behind, give WP amongst many other things. He, took over Jet Pack a year ago and, this is just his sort of summary of what's happened.

Firstly, I interviewed him about, I don't know, a couple of weeks after he'd started and where did that year go? That's one thing. but the other thing is he's, it's a really nice article about somebody who's fairly honest with his audience. he doesn't hide things when things have been messed up.

He mentions it, but boy did he have, a bit of a, a bit of a product to get his teeth into. I dunno if any of you use Jetpack. I think it's fair to say that it does a lot, but it was a bit of a hot mess of, of different UIs and different ways to access products. In some cases, there were UI notifications for products that you already had bought.

And so it is all, it is very confusing mess. So Devin has tried to wrangle that, tried to fix the ui, tried to update some of the products like, Jetpack forms and video press and things like that. Some of it's worked, some of it is still a work in progress. Some of it has been him running up against the way that they do things over at Automatic, which is different to the way he's done it, and he's very honest about that.

So anyway, if you haven't used Jet back in a while and you've fancy given it a go, it's probably worth another look. 'cause with a year under the belt, quite a lot has changed and it's,

[01:05:05] Andrew Palmer: there's, security in it as well. there's anti-spam, there's security, there's so much in jet packets there load amazing backups.

The, the, the, whole thing. And I think that the problem is in, this world allows that we've especially now dived into over the last few months, couple of years with, since, Vito and I launched a thing in 2021 with ai, and it's, and how much that has grown. It's crazy, Since, those days.

And I think where we are in danger is that we are going to make these things that we use too complex. So, that they become almost unusable so that we, have to be very careful as product owners or product promoters to make sure, and Jetpack is a real perfect example of this is when it hit the market and they added all these things and it was one thing and you couldn't toggle things off and all that kind of stuff.

They learned by iteration, you needed one dashboard, turn these things off. I don't want this. Yes, I want that and whatever. But it's still a very complex. Concept. So we have to make sure that when we are developing products, whether it's SaaS or whether it's a plugin, take the complexity out of it for the user.

Make sure that your onboarding is so spot on, that they don't miss anything, that they don't get confused. That cuts down your support bill. that cuts down all kinds of, oh, there's a bug. No it isn't. You didn't turn this on. Oh, I didn't see it. Oh, so much of that. These kind of things that you, have to, when you are building a product, you have to make sure that your user experience from the off, from the second that somebody instals it, they know exactly what to do, where to go, and, how to use your products.

And that's a, that's the difficulty of launching products these days because with AI we can put so much in, it's crazy. So like music, if you use a, a music analogy, people over first starting up, Dave Gilmore says, I learned to actually put silences in to make the music stand out more.

And that's, I think we

[01:07:19] Nathan Wrigley: should just end the show there now that we've had the Dave Gilmore quote. It's gonna go downhill from here. That's, the,

[01:07:25] Andrew Palmer: it's great. It's great. So anyway, you can see, you can tell that I'm an old, boy, but that point I

[01:07:29] Nathan Wrigley: love

[01:07:30] Andrew Palmer: Dave Gilmore.

[01:07:31] Nathan Wrigley: I, let's reduce the

[01:07:32] Andrew Palmer: complexity.

Let's keep the complexity to a level where we can all understand it.

[01:07:36] Nathan Wrigley: I think Devin was not lucky. What I was about to say there sounded wrong. he was, the right person for that job because he is got loads of experience. But also there was so much to get your teeth into over with the jet pack product.

It, felt to me as if over 10 years, all of the different bits of jet pack had just gone off in their own direction with nobody to shepherd the whole thing. And actually as a cohesive product, it does an awful lot of the things that you would wish to have on your WordPress website. It's just you didn't realise that they were from the same vendor because it's just oh, okay.

That how, you, in some cases, you click a link and you end up in a new tab on a completely different URL, like some automatic home property that could easily be I framed inside of your, anyway. I should, I'll stop there, but de I think it's

[01:08:28] Andrew Palmer: now. I think it is now. Yeah. I think Devon, what we, just on Devon, 'cause Vito, and I know him, Vito knows him much better than I do, but I know him pretty well.

[01:08:35] Vito Peleg: Love Devvin.

[01:08:37] Andrew Palmer: He's you I UX expert. There's no doubt about it. he's a complete, he knows what a UX should be, a user experience should be for a person. He's also really quite technical and he's not a bad designer. I'm not taking anything away from him. He's a really good designer, so he knows what to do.

And I think Jetpack needed a leader like that, that actually came from a commercial operation, to, go into things and say, this is the way we should do it. And I said, if you read his ask. Openly admits that he got kicked in the shin a couple of times by saying, we don't do it like that. and all that kind of stuff.

So that, that's the, handle. But he's also a very good politician. He's very, laid back and very, but very positive at the same time. So he can, he's, he was the only person that was, appropriate for that job as far as I

[01:09:30] Nathan Wrigley: know. I reckon that the Marvell franchise are probably after him to play the Thor character.

The next, big blonde haired, broad guy. He'd be great.

[01:09:43] Andrew Palmer: Yeah, he's looking to, he's looking too fit. I think he's obviously got too much time on his hands, to be able,

[01:09:49] Nathan Wrigley: that's not fair, is it, Andrew? What the heck? Okay, so we were talking about Devin, let's go to somebody else whose name, begins with a D.

What about that for a segue? this is Dave Foy. Oh, Dave. I love Dave. genuinely, I really like Dave Voy. I think his character is not, I, don't know. There's just an awful lot that I really like about him. And a few weeks ago, I dunno if you've been following Dave's story, a few weeks ago he decided to leave web development altogether and he posted on all the places how he was gonna go and go off.

And, he was gonna teach children how to, how to play music, play in bands. And it was like a real moment for him. And he'd apparently written down several months before what would be your perfect job. And it was literally to teach children to play in bands. This job came up, he thought, screw it, I'm gonna go for it.

I'm gonna put the web development stuff behind me and I'm gonna leave the, the, the tech space. So he did it both feet, all the way in the lot, sadly, didn't turn out to be what he wanted. it would seem that the job that was advertised wasn't actually the job that it was. And so he's back. And so I suspect we're gonna see more from dead in the future.

The bit that I want to commend him on though is, I don't know, there's a bit of me much as I would like to not admit that this is part of my personality. I think there's a bit of me that would've been. I'm gonna use the word ashamed, or there'd be some bit of me that felt, oh, I can't go back and do that.

that's so humiliating. Not Dave. Dave's got enough spine and enough intelligence to realise I messed up, not messed up. That's the wrong word for it. I did a thing, it didn't work out. I'm gonna go back and do the thing that I was doing all those weeks ago. Oh. And I

[01:11:42] Andrew Palmer: recommend

[01:11:42] Nathan Wrigley: you for that, Dave.

[01:11:44] Andrew Palmer: There's no shame in it. I was on a podcast and said on outer WordPress, I was, when I left Andrew?

[01:11:50] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, yeah, You were

[01:11:51] Andrew Palmer: the same.

[01:11:52] Nathan Wrigley: That's

[01:11:52] Andrew Palmer: right. I was retiring. so it's retired. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. It's just, the thing is that the, what drew, me back, and I think what draw draws Dave back is there are commercial aspects to drawing us back into the WordPress community.

But let's not, let's you know, I was in Serbia a few weeks ago. No commerciality for me at all. It was just catching up. People that I know in Serbia had a fantastic time in WordPress. Yes, we talk business. Yes, I talk to plugin developers, blah, blah, blah. But I had a great time with the community and I think that what Dave is, good at.

He's a teacher and he's a qualified teacher anyway, so he's got all the qualifications. That's

[01:12:31] Nathan Wrigley: right. He

[01:12:32] Andrew Palmer: literally, but when he talk little children. Yeah, When, when he teaches stuff like, divvy or elementary or bricks or whatever course he's decided to do, he's also quite a technical guy.

And I think being a musician, we've got a real musician's sort of thing going, but being a musician, he knows how to put things together.

[01:12:52] Michelle Frechette: Yeah.

[01:12:52] Andrew Palmer: And I think part of his problem was that he, act if he, didn't have a roadie with him when he was having to do the teacher stuff because he had to take his speakers with him and emptying the car and filling the car up again and doing all the boring bits that

[01:13:05] Nathan Wrigley: you've

[01:13:05] Andrew Palmer: forgot.

Yeah, exactly. Boring, yeah. Things that are necessary to do. And he's, and yes, welcome him back with open arms. Because I think anybody that misses or, says goodbye to a community like I have done three times now, in the last five years, I've had enough of you that I'm off. How

[01:13:22] Vito Peleg: come it never sticks?

What's going on?

[01:13:24] Andrew Palmer: I can't, I just can't make it stick. it's just, it's basically boredom, veto. I can't, just keep on walking around the lake and playing golf. I just can't, I just can't do it. I've gotta do some work. Tao says, more often than all of us together ever will

[01:13:39] Nathan Wrigley: Tao says, Andrew Barbers retired more often than all of us together ever will.

[01:13:43] Andrew Palmer: But I'm retirement eight. the point is, that I am at retirement age, I'm drawing a pension, which is pretty cool as far as I'm concern. I've made it to draw a bench.

[01:13:52] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's great. Never thought I, he's glad that you're back though. Every time. So here we are. Oh look, it's turned into an honesty fest.

Marcus Burnett. He's saying he is done the same thing. He said he quit the agency. I was out to work at a different one. I lasted two days before I was asked to come back. They were generous enough to give my job. But do you know what though? Forgive me, Marcus. I didn't know that. Obviously that was probably a really harrowing time at the time.

I think for Dave, it was, what was curious was that he did this big explanation to everybody that he was leaving and he was like, I'm really leaving. I'm really leaving. All my courses are going up, the deadlines here, blah, blah, blah. After that, I'm done. It was quite a, he drew a big line in the sand and so I've got enormous respect for him to be able to just say, actually that didn't work out.

Screw it. 'cause I know there's a bit of me that would be right in that thinking, oh, this is so humiliating and I wouldn't, I don't wish for that to be a part of my character, but it definitely is. And so I'm glad that Dave clearly is a big issue with

[01:14:57] Vito Peleg: Got no

[01:14:58] Andrew Palmer: pride.

[01:15:00] Vito Peleg: He also went into, Webflow a couple of years ago for, for a little bit.

Then it came back to a yes.

[01:15:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I've forgotten about that.

[01:15:10] Michelle Frechette: when I retire, I'm just gonna do the Irish goodbye. You're all gonna go, wait, where did she go? Where did where?

[01:15:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Is that,

[01:15:16] Michelle Frechette: called The Irish didn't say goodbye?

[01:15:17] Nathan Wrigley: Goodbye is,

[01:15:18] Michelle Frechette: that's call they do. The Irish goodbye

[01:15:20] Nathan Wrigley: is like, you just silently,

[01:15:22] Michelle Frechette: you just leave.

You don't put the host through any kind of, whatever. You just slowly evaporate.

[01:15:28] Nathan Wrigley: And on that bomb. Oh,

[01:15:31] Michelle Frechette: we

[01:15:32] Andrew Palmer: lost it. We've lost our host, I think dis evaporated.

[01:15:35] Michelle Frechette: Very funny. Very

[01:15:36] Nathan Wrigley: funny. If only I could have followed through.

[01:15:40] Andrew Palmer: that was, easy. Do you've gotta put up taco's being particularly philosophical today.

Okay.

[01:15:45] Nathan Wrigley: This, oh, his, is harder. Still got a lot of humble pie. Yes. I wasn't trying to draw a comparison there, but, Tcho the good thing about lines in the sand. Oh, that is very nicely done. Tcho. I like that. Yeah. The good thing about lines in the sand is they get swept away by the tide a few hours later.

And

[01:16:02] Michelle Frechette: that's

[01:16:03] Nathan Wrigley: your own words, taco,

[01:16:04] Michelle Frechette: are you quoting somebody? That's

[01:16:05] Nathan Wrigley: lovely. Yeah. Okay. Nick, Diego did the same.

[01:16:10] Andrew Palmer: No, he said he would be back all Nick Diego definitely said he would be back. Did he said he's taking a little rest. Did he? Hey. Yeah, he's taking a rest and now he's back. But also that, there's a, we have a talent pool and we have, and they're, quite well connected as well.

they can always be tempted to go, Devvin Left, left Liquid Web. We didn't know what he was gonna do after that. He, and then all of a sudden he's leading jet pack, which is great because, and that's, what we need. But the, the, key is, anybody can take a, a career break or do anything.

And then hopefully with whatever community they're with, they're in, they're just welcome back with open arms, specific,

[01:16:49] Nathan Wrigley: you know what though? I think, and I, we, I've droned on about this for decades. I think we are as a whole, a fairly nice bunch. Yeah, I agree. And I think that if, I don't mean the four of us, although, I'm just saying as a community, I think we're quite nice.

I think we're quite a nice, thoughtful, a bunch of people. And I do wonder if in a different industry, let's say, I don't know, you're into merchant banking for example, as soon as you are out the door, ha he's gone. I'm going into your shoes. No, you're not coming back. No, You said your goodbyes clear off.

We've, better off without you. That kind of thing. But Dave, you've sparked

[01:17:30] Andrew Palmer: very interesting. I think that, I think, and we've got an example with, within hosting people move around and they come back and all the kind of things and that, and I think within the, within this industry, because of the certain skillset that we all have, we can, we get on with people, we know the tech stuff.

We know the, the way people work, want to work within websites and stuff like that. And, when you lose someone from that talent pool. You want 'em back, because you, there's a little gap to fill, right? Yeah.

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

[01:18:01] Andrew Palmer: So I think, is it Courtney? she left a, a very large company within weeks.

She was in Get, she's a That's right. I'll have that person. That's great. so

[01:18:14] Nathan Wrigley: she was supposed to be on the show last week and I got COVID. I was really keen

[01:18:17] Andrew Palmer: to, yeah, very rude of you to get COVID. she's one of our

[01:18:20] Michelle Frechette: co-host.

[01:18:20] Nathan Wrigley: She's good see her. Yeah. She's been put inside the show FM app as a team member of this podcast.

there you go. Okay. We really are running out of time. I had so much that wanted to say, we've got hijacked on some different topics. It's fine, but we're not gonna be able to delve into all of these as deeply as I thought. So we were talking earlier about, space fast, and then there's an article over here.

This is on the.com side of things, and it's the, the new WordPress agent. Basically, it feels a bit like the same thing, only it spits out a WordPress site. I would encourage you, if you are into AI and some reliable text-based way of getting a website off the ground very, quickly, it's probably worth checking that out.

Let me just go through a few others. Oh gosh. I was gonna talk about Edge Images, which is John o Alderson plugin. He's had an update. Hadn't really played with this before. That's probably gonna have to hit the back burner for now as well. I'll be seeing

[01:19:17] Andrew Palmer: Johno in a couple of weeks at work.

[01:19:19] Nathan Wrigley: WordPress, tell him I very much like his plugin.

unfortunately no time. Now, do wanna mention this quickly, Ansin Rou, and myself for many years have been doing the Page Builder Summit. I've decided, that I'm stepping away. A Anshan is gonna carry on. She's gonna be doing that, on the second to the 6th of November. it's an entirely online event.

It's for, it's Page Builder Summit. It speaks for itself what it's all about. But if you go to page builder summit, dot com, you can scroll down and you can see the great and the good that are on this time around. there's lots of these that are familiar faces, and what have you.

Anyway, page builder summit.com. Again, I'm sorry, can't give it a lot of, time. Sorry. Action. I'll mention it in the weeks to come. As we lead up to that event, actually probably only another week or two, two mention that. Another quick couple of ones. press conference is happening, in the next few, next week or so.

So if you haven't got a ticket and you're gonna be, and you'd like to know, it's in Barcelona 27th to the 30th of October. Raquel was mentioned, was on the podcast a couple of weeks back. So if you wanna go check that out and you wanna know what that event is about,

[01:20:38] Vito Peleg: and I've been to the US one last year.

It was awesome.

Great. Yeah. Small group of people. Yep. Which is the, was a huge benefit actually. 'cause you gotta speak to actually everyone. the, the talks were just completely open, transparent, more than any other event I've been to. And I go to a 14 a year. so this was really nice to see, how she made it very clear.

There's no cameras, there's no recordings. If you're in the room, you're in the room. So everyone can be like. Uber transparent, and that, that made a whole lot of difference there. People breaking down and crying on stage and, oh, all kinds of,

[01:21:22] Nathan Wrigley: for good reasons, I'm guessing. Yeah,

[01:21:24] Vito Peleg: sometimes.

Sometimes. Yeah.

[01:21:26] Andrew Palmer: Mostly,

I told you, veto, you gotta be nicer to people. What's going on? That's

[01:21:30] Nathan Wrigley: right. Don't take

[01:21:30] Vito Peleg: No, it was me. I was crying. Oh, was it, was

[01:21:33] Andrew Palmer: it, were you,

[01:21:34] Nathan Wrigley: were you crying?

[01:21:35] Vito Peleg: Oh, I see. But I did shed a tear from the crowd looking at someone's,

[01:21:39] Michelle Frechette: I did too.

[01:21:40] Vito Peleg: Talking very emotional.

[01:21:41] Michelle Frechette: More than once.

[01:21:43] Vito Peleg: Yeah. But

[01:21:44] Nathan Wrigley: anyway, that's happening. it's in Barcelona, so it's the first variant. There's been two in the US are now one in Barcelona that's coming up. And a couple of other quick mentions. this is CMS Conf, which is coming up, in Poland, middle of dec, sorry, middle of November 12th, 13th, and 14th of November.

If you are,

[01:22:08] Michelle Frechette: you

[01:22:08] Nathan Wrigley: know, CMS agnostic or if you've got your eyes straining off in different directions and are playing with different things, maybe this is for you. A lot of the WordPress people that I've, met over the years, again, are in attendance and speaking and things like that. So definitely worth looking at.

CMS conf com. And you can see the recently released agenda there. And then the last one on the, on the, events front is the, I've translated this from Portuguese into English, so I dunno if it scans perfectly, but WordPress and AI in, do you say that's Pharaoh? Is it Pharaoh? Pharaoh? I'm not sure

[01:22:45] Vito Peleg: what is it?

[01:22:47] Nathan Wrigley: it's, you, can

[01:22:48] Andrew Palmer: you

because

[01:22:49] Nathan Wrigley: it's okay in Don Felin. not, you can't pronounce as long as it's

[01:22:56] Andrew Palmer: spelt

[01:22:56] Nathan Wrigley: similar. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. the word press and AI in Pharaoh. So this I presume, is a conference which is going to be delivered in Portuguese. I don't really know, an awful lot about it, but if you're in that neck of the woods, there's also

[01:23:10] Vito Peleg: Cloudfest Americas coming up

[01:23:11] Nathan Wrigley: around Speak.

Oh yeah. Do you have the dates for that? That one hasn't hit my inbox quite so much.

[01:23:16] Michelle Frechette: It's next month. Yeah. Is

[01:23:17] Nathan Wrigley: it okay? cloud, is it called? Cloud Fest? US

[01:23:22] Vito Peleg: Americas.

[01:23:23] Michelle Frechette: It's Cloud Fest.

[01:23:24] Nathan Wrigley: Americas Cloud Fest Americas. Okay. Okay. so there is that as well.

[01:23:29] Michelle Frechette: Can I tease two, upcoming events really quickly too?

[01:23:32] Nathan Wrigley: Sure.

[01:23:34] Vito Peleg: wait, lemme even make a, sorry, Michelle, but, I do have a couple of extra tickets. I'm advisor to Cloud Firsts, Americas as, the, agency kind of advisor. if someone wants some tickets, ping me on, X or on Facebook, yeah, I have three extra tickets and they're like 800 bucks each, so feel free.

Okay.

[01:23:58] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. Very good.

[01:24:00] Nathan Wrigley: Thanks. Nice. Alright. Thank you. Thank you. Sam.

[01:24:02] Michelle Frechette: Simon Nasser. K Kathy Z and June Luu and I are putting on a woman's event on, international Women's Day called She Speaks Tech. There's no site for it yet, so please don't look it up 'cause I haven't built it yet. We just

[01:24:16] Nathan Wrigley: space fast. 12 minutes from now there'll be a,

[01:24:19] Michelle Frechette: it'll be a WordPress site for sure.

We've gotta do all the things. and then we're looking at a date, hopefully in June or July of next year for Word Camp Northeast US. I've been given permission to have a regional Word camp in the US which should hopefully draw more people than just city camps alone. So I'm pulling together a team of people from the northeast USA and we will have a, an event hopefully in Philadelphia next summer.

[01:24:45] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you. Keep me posted on those, Michelle, and we'll, obviously I'll, and I'm gonna

[01:24:51] Andrew Palmer: Manchester WordCamp.

[01:24:53] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah, we mentioned that last week actually. so Word Camp Manchester is now on. We had Reese on as well. I've, the date has gone out my head. COVID Dear COVID, can I have my memories back?

[01:25:07] Andrew Palmer: Sixth, 6th of November.

[01:25:08] Nathan Wrigley: And apparently, when is it?

[01:25:10] Andrew Palmer: 6th of November.

[01:25:12] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you.

[01:25:12] Vito Peleg: Oh, just like next week?

[01:25:15] Andrew Palmer: Yeah. a couple weeks. Two

[01:25:16] Vito Peleg: weeks. And is this like a, a meetup or an actual

[01:25:19] Andrew Palmer: It's just a one. It's a WordPress done on a different way. Different way. They're doing it. That's sort, they've got one, one special speaker that they haven't announced yet.

There's no after party, but I'm thinking about doing an after party. So if you're a word, if you are the WordPress, organisers there, I want to talk to you so that I don't wanna step on anybody's toes. There's no lunch either. You go out and you get your own lunch, which is I think is fine. and, you just meet, people and there's the attendee list is, massive.

There's lots of people going, so it's gonna be great fun. I'm lucky enough to be able to stay up in Liverpool with my nephew, which is awesome. So I just drive from Liverpool to Manchester, get there by 10 o'clock and, we'll all have a good time in Manchester. But I'm thinking with, with, the outsourcing agency, we're thinking about doing a, drinks, free drink and meetup afterwards as well.

'cause there is no after party. Okay. If that's okay with the organisers, then we'll, we can talk to them about it and make sure that it happens.

[01:26:18] Nathan Wrigley: tacho says you knows a great band for the, they're not doing one. I, I reached out to them, I offered my son's band, and, he said they're not doing live music, which is a bit of a shame.

So I'm gonna show it with my, on Tempe Organ, and whack out hits from the eighties,

[01:26:37] Andrew Palmer: right? I don't think there's an after party, is that?

[01:26:39] Nathan Wrigley: No, but I'm still showing up with my Bon Tempe organ.

[01:26:42] Andrew Palmer: Good. And

[01:26:42] Nathan Wrigley: I'll see you there. It's, yeah, it's, yes. Nobody's gonna go now. I was gonna do two more articles by Katie.

Keith, I'm sorry, Katie. We've run outta time. But basically it goes like this, Shopify is advancing. WooCommerce seems to be in, retreat in terms of stats. That's not entirely true. It depends which segment of the market you look at. If you look at it in, if you look at it through one eye, WooCommerce still winning.

If you look at it through the other eye, Shopify is winning. Read the article, you'll understand more. And the other one that Katie was mentioning, basically can be boiled down to do not spend money on chat GPT ads. At the moment, Katie sunk a few a hundred quid into chat GPT ads, and while she got a little bit of traffic, it was the, the determination she made is it was really unqualified traffic and it led to absolutely no conversions.

So go and read that article. As always, she puts all the data behind her arguments. It's not just hot air, definitely worth looking at. And did someone say after party? Yes. Yeah, but, no after party, although Andrew might be putting on an after party. So there we go. So sorry Katie about that. We were gonna get right into your pieces, but we're, we've run out time.

That's fine. I'll have you on the podcast instead and we'll talk about it at length. I think that's it. We have used up our allotted 90 minutes. Has

[01:28:12] Andrew Palmer: that time gone already?

[01:28:14] Nathan Wrigley: where does that go?

[01:28:15] Michelle Frechette: It goes

[01:28:15] Nathan Wrigley: so quickly. I know. And I, don't feel like I've got any extra wrinkles from today's episode as well that went without a hitch.

So it just remains for me to thank, firstly my panellists. Andrew Palmer. Michelle Cher.

[01:28:30] Michelle Frechette: Hey Andrew

[01:28:30] Nathan Wrigley: Ek all joining us today. Thank you very much. Hopefully you'll come back, again soon. You'll get an automated reminder from the show.fm podcasting platform, at some point in the next 24 hours or say, I'll

[01:28:42] Michelle Frechette: be back next week with you

[01:28:45] Nathan Wrigley: on bid by the platform.

If you don't get a reminder, I wanna know why. but for the rest of you, thank you. If you came in and dropped in a comment, it really keeps the show going and I really, appreciate it. and Tcho, although it hasn't come into the platform, he said he's glad his Monday is complete. Again, thanks for bringing this week in WordPress population.

You are more than welcome. It was,

[01:29:08] Michelle Frechette: absolutely,

[01:29:08] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. I, felt, not quite right, not doing it on a Monday, but yeah, things needed to be done, We will see you all next week. Different panellists talking about WordPress. You know the drill. See you soon. And you three, if you wanna sit hands a few minutes and have a hands, we need to do the hands, everybody do that.

Just, this is my memory. This is what COVID has left me with. I appreciate it. Andrew, thank you very much. you three, stick around if you wish and we'll have a netter and I'll see you all soon. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.