This Week in WordPress #251

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It is time for this week in WordPress, episode number 251 entitled I Learn What Vestibular Means. It was Recorded Monday, the 8th of May, 2023. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and I'll be joined in a few short minutes By our guests. We have Jess Frick and Gen Herres and Matt Cromwell as it's a WordPress podcast.

Guess what we talk about? Yes, WordPress. The things that we're talking about this week are. What about AI in WordPress core? Is that something that we want? What could that look like? There's an article about that this week, the annual survey has come out, and there's lots of data about how WordPress was being used and by whom in the year 2022, the first round of Word Camp US tickets sold out.

Is there a question about the way that people are being notified about these tickets in terms of when they're coming on sale? Initially, I mentioned the fact that I've got two things going on this week. I've got an episode with Mark Westguard in our new webinar series about WS form, but also I've got a show this week about ui UX with Peach and E, so you can find out the details about that Twitter use for jet pack users has come to an end.

Why One word cost new theme called stacks. What do we make of that is certainly an interesting ui. Cadence have added some AI to their new tool and they have put people on a wait list. You can join that wait list tool, and I'm also talking about a plugin which customizes and simplifies your admin interface. There's a whole lot more about accessibility and AI in general, and I hope that you enjoy it.

This episode of the WP Builds podcast is brought to you by GoDaddy Pro, the home of manage WordPress hosting that includes free domain ssl, and 24 7 support. Bundle that with The Hub by GoDaddy Pro to unlock more free benefits to manage multiple sites in one place, invoice clients, and get 30% off new purchases. Find out more at go.me/WPBuilds.

Doodly. Hello. Good afternoon. Good morning. Depending on where you are in the world, we are here once more this week in WordPress episode 251 back. Because I'm back from the dead, I had a very mild cold and it near killed me. Which, what did they call it?

In the uk they call it man flu. And it's basically when somebody such as me gets a very mild illness, but is absolutely convinced they're gonna die, and this is what happened. I didn't feel so good, but I'm feeling really fighting fit. This week. We're here to talk about the word press news. And as you can see, we're joined by three fabulous guests.

We'll go around on one at a time. We'll start with, we'll start with Jess, if that's all right. How you doing, Jess? Good

[00:03:05] Jess Frick: morning, Nathan. I'm so glad you're

[00:03:07] Nathan Wrigley: alive. Yes, thank you. It was touch and go, I swear. Yeah, it sounds like, yeah, there was terrifying. I had to blow my nose several times. Oh my God. I know.

Jess is the director of operations at Pressable. She's an iced tea connoisseur and a proud member of the post status community. Do you wanna add anything to that or are you happy when

[00:03:28] Jess Frick: Yeah, I'm also a hosting team rep this year for Make WordPress. Ooh. What does that involve? Rolling with the old

[00:03:34] Nathan Wrigley: bio.

That's What do you have to do in that role?

[00:03:37] Jess Frick: One of the cool things is I work with the rest of the hosting team to ensure proper dissemination of information. We work on some really cool projects. If you're not already involved with the make WordPress team, there's a lot to choose from the hosting team.

We mostly work around hosting. Yeah. And matters involving hosts. So projects that we will run are, p h p related or, perhaps performance matters. We're talking about democratizing the hosting page and a variety of other things.

[00:04:14] Nathan Wrigley: It's interesting, isn't it, that WordPress as a community, you are commercial rivals, but equally at the same time when you go to a Word camp or something like that, you are all actually quite good friends, aren't you?

It's really odd. It's

[00:04:28] Matt Cromwell: wonderful. It's

[00:04:28] Jess Frick: true. Yeah.

[00:04:29] Matt Cromwell: It's true.

[00:04:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. It's one of the best things about this community is the fact that everybody can put the pitchforks down and and get along is really nice. Thank you for joining us. I really appreciate it. We're also joined by Jen Harris.

How are you doing? Good. Jen is a WordPress developer specializing in helping clients solve and prevent WordPress problems. She works with a wide range of website clients from multi-million dollar companies to solar printers, maintaining their WordPress sites with care plans and helping them with website accessibility.

We've got a little bit organized in the show today about, around that. Jen organizes the Baltimore WordPress meetup and is an active participant in WordPress online groups, including the number one WordPress community, the admin bar where she was voted most, it says here most member of the year, but I imagine there's a word missing there.

Sorry. Basically most helpful member of Okay, great. Yeah, she was voted the most member of the year. That's great. Oh, that's lovely. Thank you for joining us, and we will put your we'll put your accessibility chops to good use later on, if that's all right with you. And we're also joined by Matt Cromwell.

How Matt, how you doing? Doing all right. No colds yet over here. Oh, honestly, Matt, don't even go there. I'm afraid that the whole thing will travel over the internet as a virus. I'm also

[00:05:51] Matt Cromwell: very much a man blue kinda person. Like those things knock

[00:05:54] Nathan Wrigley: me out. It's terrible. On me. Matt is the senior Director of customer experience at do you know what, I'm gonna read this and then you are gonna correct me if that's all right.

Matt is the Senior Director of Customer Experience at Stellar WP and the co-founder of Give wp. He is the host of the Glam, that plugin in WP Talk sorry. WP Product Talk Podcast. Focus on helping WordPress product owners market and build their products better. Okay. So this is the bit that I wanted to get to, but in his latest adventure, it, that's a giant rebrand.

He and Devin Walker recently announced that they were rebranding I themes, which we've all heard of in public as solid. Wp, go on, tell us what this is all about.

[00:06:38] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. Yeah. Devin and I were asked to take on iThemes as one of our brands in the stellar, WP kind of universe. And we pulled all the team members and former folks that had been there and one of the things that they all wanted to do for a long time and never really got around to was giving it a new fresh of breath.

New breath of fresh. That'll do it. Yeah. Giving it a rebrand, a refresh, and because the Ithe brand is so well known and liked it's, it's like a historical document and the WordPress history almost. We really wanted to make sure do this in public and let people know slowly and.

Cop carefully to to rebrand this over time. So it's, you've gotta

[00:07:25] Nathan Wrigley: tread really carefully with all that stuff, haven't you? Because it's, it is such a trusted and well-known brand, but feels, I've been using it for the longest time, when Builder was a thing and they were, it was all about the themes, wasn't it?

The themes built in the functionality and Builder was a great product and all that. And now not so much themes, different things. No. Yeah. So time for a liquor paint. So

[00:07:46] Matt Cromwell: really migrated over to like more security area and backups and site maintenance type things. And for us, that was like we look for something that sounded like a good, strong foundation.

Solid is the one that

[00:08:01] Nathan Wrigley: won the day. You, it's been mentioned that you're doing this out in the open, and I'm never quite sure what that means. Does that literally mean that you just listen to people's opinion and if the ground swell is no, that's a bad idea, don't go in that direction, nobody likes that blue will.

Is that the kind of thing that's going on when you men, when you mentioned doing it in the open, A little

[00:08:22] Matt Cromwell: bit for sure. We definitely have strong opinions about our own stuff and the way that we want to see things go. But as we're starting to build it out and do things, we want to get immediate feedback right away.

Oh, I see. And that's kinda the thing. It's this back and forth of being able to be like I'm experimenting with this idea and it's not set in stone yet, and I'd love to hear what y'all think. And trying to keep the whole audience as part of the process of building it out rather than us just going from the hip and being like, we know what we're doing.

There is a lot of humility and transparency about it.

[00:08:56] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Thank you. So thanks to the three of you for joining us. Little bit of housekeeping, if that's all right. Before we begin. If you're watching this and you would like to share it, please feel free. Go for it. Copy and paste this url, WP Builds.com/live.

Shove it somewhere, like Twitter or master or. Facebook or something like that and and send people there. We'd appreciate that. The more comments that come in, the more fun the conversation tends to get. And if people go there, they need to have some sort of Google account because on that page are embedded face sorry YouTube comments.

On the other hand, you might be going to our Facebook group. That is WP Builds.com/facebook, but if you're there, you have to do one little thing. You have to go to chat.restream.io/fb. Otherwise, Facebook, keep your profile from us and we don't know who you are. But yes, any comments or things like that, please do drop 'em into the chat.

We'd really appreciate that. And it looks like, ooh, crikey, quite a few people have done that already. Cameron Jones. He's now in the uk. He's no longer asleep. It's no longer 11 at night. Cameron's been Cameron flew into, I think it was Manchester, and then got the train down to Brighton recently, and he's posting on Facebook experience with all the things that it's like to be in England.

And it's hysterical. All the things that I take for granted, he finds really weird. So it's been a really interesting journey. Thank you Cameron, for joining us. I appreciate that. He says he's from cold and cloudy. Brighton. Pete Janeer is joining us. You're gonna get a mention Peach a little bit later.

She's in Valencia. Hello says Rob Cairns. He's in Toronto usually, I guess he is today. And

Bob.

[00:10:38] Matt Cromwell: Bob

[00:10:39] Nathan Wrigley: Bob Wp joining us from Sunny Porto. Yeah, I imagine it's lovely and sunny there. And as we do every week, Peter Ingersol drops in and gives us a weather report from Connecticut today. 17 degrees centigrade, 63 degrees Fahrenheit.

It's 9:00 AM and today will be a perfect 23. That's nice. 23 under sunny sky. Yeah, that's really nice. And there's lots of other people saying hello. Good morning, Michelle Frette, nice to have you with us. We're gonna talk about your WP Speaker or speaker, wp, I can't remember off the top of my head website a little bit later.

Marcus Bennet from GoDaddy. Hi everyone. Always enjoy starting my week with beautiful, smiling faces. I shall go in that case, not spoil the things. And good morning from Knock. Is that, do you pr Do you pronounce that Knoxville? Is that how you say that? I do. Knoxville. Hi there Thomas. I don't know if we've had you with us, but oh.

Marcus, look at that. That's nice. You met up this weekend at. Buffalo Word, camp Buffalo. That's lovely. Okay. Thank you for joining us. Let's get stuck into the word pressy stuff. Couple of things first. This is our website, WP Builds.com. If you head there and fill out this little form here, one field email address, we will send you two emails a week when we produce content.

Nothing more, no spam. Just here's something that we produce, so feel free to go and fill that in. You can alternatively go to our subscribe page, and there's different ways that you can do that same sort of thing and what have you. But a couple of things that we are doing this week, the fabulous Mark West Guard with his fabulous w s form plugin.

We've started a six part live series, and we did the first part this last Wednesday, and it was entitled Form Building Basics. Each episode is gonna be aired live, so it'll be at 3:00 PM UK time, each Wednesday for the next five weeks. Same URL that you're watching this now, WP Builds.com/live, and we're gonna get a little bit more nerdy.

And technical as the episodes go on. So next week, this week, two days from now, building interactive forms, then preventing spam and deliverability, then custom form plugin integrations, then woo commerce, then AI in forms just to round out the series. So yeah, if you want to join us for that, it's really nice.

Essentially, it's a primer in how to do all things WS form. And if you've ever used WS form, I can tell you. There's a lot of things that you can do with that, so join us for that. But also tomorrow, peach and Mary and I are having a chat. It's a 3:00 PM UK time. And it's our, we call it monthly, but it's never monthly.

It's, I don't know how often it is, but we do it fairly regularly. And we would like your websites. If you want to submit a site that you're halfway through doing, or, you're fairly convinced that it's in good shape, but you just want her expert eye casting over it, go to wbp builds.com/ui, just WP Builds.com/ui and fill out the form and we'll see if we can squeeze it into one of the shows.

And, you get some free ui ux advice. Plus we're also after some deceptive designs so that we can moan about them. Essentially, those kind of things where the big green button is the one that you don't wanna press and the tiny grade out piece of writing is the one you do wanna press.

But they're all Yeah. That kind of thing. Or essentially just go to any airline website and try to fill out the form to book the ticket. You know what I'm talking about? So there we go. So that's all happening this week, right? Let's get onto WordPress. AI kicks us off. Usually we relegate the AI to fairly late in the conversation, but we're starting off today about AI because Anne McCarthy wrote a piece called Let's Talk WordPress Core and Artificial Intelligence.

Actually, it's interesting cuz if you scroll down, Matt was right on this. He was the first person to create a comment about it and in fact kept going in the comments, which is nice. There were quite a few comments in there. Essentially, Anne wants to know, what should AI be like in WordPress court?

It can't be avoided. It's coming down the pike. AI seemingly is everywhere. If WordPress doesn't have some semblance of this, Presumably in two or three years time, it'll be utterly outmoded. And so there's a little video on here showing what it potentially could be like. Text prompt comes up, somebody types in.

It's not real by the way. I think it's a fake video, if but it purports to show what could be possible. And there's a page which is half finished about getting a pizza restaurant. What kind of pizzas do we sell and all that kind of thing. And you type in, give me some templates, which would suit this design.

The AI presumably scrapes the text, has a look at the images, and then throws a bunch of different templates at you. It's just one suggestion. But the point is, what are we gonna do in core? What are we gonna have in there? And so the discussion, the beginning of the discussion is this post. And here's a few questions which might be moot, oh, sorry, might be relevant to this.

How would you want to see core updated so that it can be extended in ways accessible to AI technologies for those building or trying to build with AI today? How does CORE currently enable or hinder this effort? And are there any concerns that you think the community should be aware of as this space is explored?

And I thought Matt, this one here, your comment here about having it felt like an A api, a WordPress, a p I for accessibility, so the plugin developers can plug into that looked really interesting. So I'm just gonna hand it right off to you, Matt, if that's

[00:16:16] Matt Cromwell: alright. Yeah. Yeah. The first thing I said in there was just that I was nervous about the core development team getting distracted by.

Ai, which, AI is super important and vital and everything, but like we got big plans for core right now. And I don't, didn't want folks to get shiny toy syndrome, but they clarified there and they're like, oh, we're not just talking about core development, just how can core maybe with some minor tweaks enable some plugin innovation.

And I thought that was a good clarification. And from a plugin perspective, we've actually struggled a lot with third party APIs in WordPress core because. Especially right now with ai, everyone, it's like a big gold rush. Everybody's trying to build some new AI tool right now and they're all gonna wanna hook into the open AI API keys essentially.

And if they're all pinging open AI independently, all the plugins or even the theme ping it independently, it gets noisy and bloaty and sometimes can even produce conflicts if they're ping different versions of the same api. Things like that. And so one thing that Core could help smooth the way for was if there was an api.

Settings panel, essentially. There's lots of different ways to approach things like that. Like it could just be a, like a, like how web hooks are often generated, where you're like, create a new web hook and you choose what kind of web hook you wanna create and or it could be preset, Google Maps api, Facebook api, these type time types of typical things.

But if Core managed that, then the plugins wouldn't all be spinning up their own API settings essentially. And fighting for priority and kind of things like that. So

[00:18:07] Nathan Wrigley: I think that's a really interesting point because I've probably got about five or six different I don't really use AI much, but given what I do, I play with the plugins as they come around and they're all doing their own thing, right?

You've got an interface, which is, usually it's typically find your API key for open ai, put it in over here, and you do that. You could do that two or three times, whereas, like you said, if there was a WordPress. API panel where you could put all the different API keys for all the different services and you would, all the plugins would then hook into that.

If you've got a relationship with open ai, it can be done through there. Yeah. That seems like a totally credible thing, but your point, which I hadn't even thought of about hang on a minute. Aren't we busy doing concurrent editing and aren't we busy doing multilingual? Happened there? It's, that's not all the hotness is it?

So please, can we not lose sight of that? That was, yeah. Commended for mentioning that first, I think. Yeah,

[00:19:06] Matt Cromwell: it's really easy when things like this, when big, giant new trends come along and it's clear and obvious that this isn't like just a trend either. It's like AI's here to stay and going to be determining the future of tech in a lot of ways.

So it's definitely true that WordPress needs to do something sooner rather than later. But how is the question, so

[00:19:30] Nathan Wrigley: I don't play with the rivals. I don't really get into Wicks, I don't get into Squarespace, but I'm imagining that cohesive nature of their SAS product will enable them to do this really simply, cuz it'll just be okay, there's your, they can just do it, roll it out right away, and all of a sudden, all of those capabilities.

Anyway. Sorry. I apologize Jess and Jen, we haven't allowed you to join this, so whichever one of you wishes to take it over, go for it.

[00:19:58] Gen Herres: Sure. I think really one of the most important things with AI right now is to think before we act. Because right now everyone is just leaping off the deep end cannon ball.

Who cares if I hit everyone else? So I don't have a whole lot to add other than just we need to all stop and think before we all

[00:20:20] Nathan Wrigley: leap. Yeah. I think more widely on a just what are we doing? It is a bit of an experiment, isn't it? I feel that very keenly that there's this whole slow down movement.

And I, I believe that in the last couple of weeks there was quite a few influential people in the AI space. Maybe some of them were, notable because they were media personalities as well as being technologists, but they were asking people just to slow down. In other words, can we have a six month hiatus on the movement of the technology?

Figure out where we've got to? Of course. Of course we can't. We need to get it into search. We need to get it into posts we need and all of that kind of stuff. So we'll have to see how this goes. But Jess, sorry. Yeah.

[00:21:04] Jess Frick: Not to be an AI apologist, but. I think just to give some comfort, a lot of people are calling things AI when they are complex roll engines built by humans with a human defined solution.

By definition, ai is machine. Learning enabled. And so we're asking the machine to devise the solution. So a lot of the things that I think we're scaring people right now, we have to remember that there's actually a human prescribing every step of that journey. We're not actually like tapping into an algorithm where it's figuring out what's best.

When I hear Matt's idea, I'm thinking of like ground control at an airport and it decides what's best and who should go first and how fast that would be a perfect application for ai. A lot of people are just building integrations and I think that's an easy way to step into it.

I opened up a quote for I feel like you guys talked about this when it first happened, last month in post status for those who are not. Post status Slack members, Matt Mullenweg came in there and I'm gonna read the quote in 2015. I told you to learn JavaScript deeply. I don't have a catchy phrase yet, but my message for 2023 will be to spend as much time leveraging AI as possible.

The boosts to productivity and capability are amazing. This is not a web three crypto widgets hype cycle. It's real To this slice of the WP community. I want you to internalize this message as deeply as possible. And I share that because that's also a directive we've been given at automatic with all the different brands.

Even in my role at pressable, I'm being encouraged to look for ways to leverage AI to do my job better, not to replace me, but to extend my functionality. And I think that we need to remember that Mo the biggest contributor for five to the future. Is automatic. So many of the core contributors are sponsored by automatic.

And so look much like me, a lot of us are thinking about ai. And so I think that's probably, I'm not saying that's where this came from, but I am certainly saying I'm not surprised to see it. I'm honestly surprised it took so long. But I love that we're working in the open and we're trying to think about what can be done.

But share Matt's skepticism about what we have time for. If only ai, were now smart enough to figure it out for us, and we wouldn't have to worry about it. It could just go and do its own thing. But that's also terrifying. Again, I read, I watched a person of interest and terminators just like the rest of us.

Yeah,

[00:23:48] Nathan Wrigley: that's, yeah. I

[00:23:50] Matt Cromwell: this way in which like, AI has already done really well with multilingual applications. So I am curious, I didn't say that on the thing, on the post, but like I am curious if there are ways that AI could help accelerate the timetable for the multilingual aspect of WordPress core in particular, like that might actually be really interesting.

So like a two birds with one stone kind of effect. But, we'll

[00:24:18] Nathan Wrigley: see. I think the concern that I have at the moment is that the implementations of AI are so we're really at the infancy, aren't we? We're. This whole technology has just been birthed and we're just struggling to find ways where it might be deployed and the most popular deployment model at the moment is ask a prompt, get some text back, spin that into a blog post, publish the post, and whilst that's very cool, my fear with that was, and still is to some extent, that we'll just end up with billions of AI generated pieces of content, which I.

Nobody's got time to consume, so we'll flood the search index and nobody will know. And even Google won't know, what's worth surfacing and so on. Yeah. But when we get into those implementations, and we'll see one right towards the end of the show where it's got to do with like literally scanning people's brains.

All of these more complicated in implementations of ai. So in the example that was on the website that we saw a moment ago, you ask it the question, give me some templates, and then some kind of image generation engine goes text-based generation goes and it sticks it into a pattern, essentially a block pattern, and you can put that in and it gives you 20 different variations.

That's where I think my interest, I suddenly stop becoming fearful and skeptical and suddenly start to become a bit more Oh. Okay, that's good because somebody's, there's a bit more thought about it. It's not just consuming what chat g p t gives back. So two more things, Nathan.

[00:25:49] Jess Frick: Please. Yeah. On that number one.

It's funny you should say that because now I'm like instinctively going to my api, or excuse me, my AI checker to see if content was most likely written by an api. Huh? And they have these checkers that'll give you a score yeah, 50% AI or No, it looks human. And we have to check that now, especially if you're paying writers to create content for you.

I could plug it into chat, g p t myself and not pay, we want human content. And then the second thing, I remembered that, I forgot to include this in our show notes, but Marcus is here and he just recently launched something called W P A I universe.com. And he's cataloging all the different projects in WordPress where AI is being enabled or leveraged.

That's

[00:26:45] Matt Cromwell: a cool one. Nice. I know

[00:26:46] Nathan Wrigley: it's so smart, right? This, yeah. I'll be looking at it here. This is Marcus' project wp ai universe.com. As exactly as you imagine. Okay, so I'm coming to this for the first time, so I'm just gonna click around and go to some links and it shows you, okay. So in this case, it's showing us a whole list of plug-ins that you could.

Look at that, have got AI components to them. There's a bunch of videos here, so I don't know if that's gonna be, what is that, Marcus? Oh, sorry. It took a while to refresh. Okay, so here's some video content. Looks like tutorials about how you might implement the plugins and what they do. And then finally some what's described here as factoids as well.

Oh, Marcus. Just the per, do you know Marcus? One day we should get you on this show, huh and that would be lovely. We should talk. That looks really interesting. So that's a W P A P I. No. Is that right? WP A I Universe dot, there

[00:27:45] Jess Frick: you go. I know We both wanna do api.

[00:27:47] Nathan Wrigley: Matt, you got it edited. Yeah. Yeah. Just on that point, Jess, I was, it was interesting, I read an article, so not that stale.

I'm gonna say it was about a month old, so it's not that new, but it's not that stale. And it was about the ability of AI checkers to verify themselves correctly. And the probability at that point was extremely low. It was I can't remember the numbers, but it was something in, in the order of 20%.

That it got right and 80% that it mis mismatched as ai. Which is curious. So yeah, it is the AI tools, checking the ai we'll get some. It's not part of their scheme. That's right. We'll, yeah. All part of the scheme. Cameron Jones says, if we're talking about AI at the top of the show, he suspects that I have in fact died of man flu and been replaced by ai.

Do you know what? That's the other scary bit, isn't it? The whole deep fake thing. At what point do we stop to trust our intuitions, like a show like this? Honestly, five years. What do you reckon on a year, maybe 18 months from now? This show could be created entirely by AI might even have a better host.

Not saying but there we go. And Bob Don saying he is got a good podcast coming out with Joe Hoyle. Where they have a deep dive into AI and WordPress. Yeah. It's all the hotness, isn't it? And Matt, thank you, Matt. He's put a comment in saying that Human Made have been digging into this stuff really deeply.

They've got a conference coming up. Matt, what's the conference? Have you got a link to that? Oh, he's gone. No, he's not. He's back. Oh. Okay. Don't worry, Matt. Yes. Take your time.

[00:29:29] Jess Frick: They have a conference coming and they have a great ebook. It's 76 things about ai. Okay. You made his.

Killing it these days.

[00:29:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So some podcast episodes and some conferences coming up and there's very nice range of comments. I won't get to them all, but thank you for making the effort to make those comments. Matt has just texted us privately in the chat. He's gonna have to nip in and nip out.

He's got a few things going on. We might see Matt's screen go dark like it is at the moment, but the three of us will press on regardless. Let's put that back on the screen and let's go to our next piece. Speaking of ai, let's keep that ball rolling. Cadence, WP have got a wait list page up for their.

Foray into ai in many ways, it looks a bit like an overlap with what we just saw from Anne McCarthy where they are going to be able the the promise is that they are gonna tailor content that fits your mission and goals perfectly. So you can imagine everybody's doing this. I've just said, you'll be able to create copy i e text prompts that you can then presumably fit inside of Cadence Blocks, or maybe you can create those inside the text-based cadence blocks.

They're also gonna be looking out images for you. But interestingly, this doesn't seem, from the text that I'm reading here, it doesn't seem like this is an implementation of Dolly. They're not creating the images. It looks like they're gonna go out and. Find images, which already exist because it says the AI will provide you with a library of royalty-free images.

So presumably if you type in, I want a cat on a cushion, it will go out and see if there are cat on cushion pitches out there already, and then chuck those in. Rather than go and try to create a weird cat on a weird cushion floating in a weird sky, which is what Dolly will do. And anyway they're hoping to get people signed up.

So the page for this is Cadence WP, and the post is called Empower Your Website Creation Process with Cadence A I. And you can join the wait list by clicking this button. Don't know our timeline on that. Maybe Matt's got more intel.

[00:31:36] Matt Cromwell: We are madly trying to get to the finish line for sure, but this is one of those great examples that like Jen was mentioning, how it's really important to think and be strategic.

So I have been really impressed with the Cadence team as they've been strategizing this build and and putting it together. And it's gonna be really great. So we are planning that we're gonna have a little bit more to showcase at word Camp Europe for

example.

[00:32:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Jess. Question for you,

[00:32:14] Jess Frick: Matt. Okay. So I know that store builder, which is one of Nexus products you can put in some information and it'll give you the basic building blocks of your store. I know that uses Cadence but that's, one of those ones where we were talking about with like human-generated solutions and it was limited.

Is this leveraging any of that store builder intelligence, the opposite direction? Because I know that was using Cadence, but now this is

[00:32:39] Matt Cromwell: for cadence. Yeah, no, it's actually gonna probably, Any smart different ways that we can be leveraging ai, we're going to be doing it for sure. But this, our hope is actually that cadence AI will start to be more of like an onboarding experience for a lot of our different products.

So it's likely I'm not gonna make promises, but it's likely that you'll see more and more cadence AI powering lots of other stellar brands as well. And And coming back into store builder as well, so that at least we are, we're talking about it and how that might, what that might look like or how it might function.

The whole idea of being able to just tell the ai, Hey, I wanna build a yoga site and I am in San Diego and my target audience is X, Y, and Z. And for it to basically build out some basic layouts for you with right, the correct images, and and for it to all work it's definitely leapfrogging the whole idea of what Squarespace and Wick probably are gonna be doing themselves.

But being able to do that in a. WordPress environment just means it's that much more customizable and that much more powerful. And of course you get to own all your own data.

[00:33:54] Nathan Wrigley: I really like the notion of doing that search. So you just described, you've got a sharpen, you are living this location and blah, blah, blah, and then it throws a pattern at you, a fi finished pattern.

That seems like a really cool way of doing it because then you're dropping the pattern and, but you're still in WordPress. The bit of this whole AI piece, which I think. Freaks me out a little bit is it feels like we might go back to that theme forest day where you downloaded the super theme that did everything.

And you installed it and then you suddenly realize, I have no idea what any of this is doing. I have no idea how to unpick the portfolio page. Where even are the images for the portfolio page coming from? And it, that would be my fear with the ai, is that you tell it to build something complicated, it builds something complicated.

And then you think, what? Now what? How do I tweak any of that? How do I dumb this down? Or just tweak it. Yeah. But if it's just patterns and templates, then that's easy cuz that's the interface you're in anyway. And just by pointing and clicking, you can start, oh, okay. That's an image.

I can click on that and there's a replace button. Great. I'm off to the races. That seems like a really nice way of doing it. I like it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Jen, anything

[00:35:09] Matt Cromwell: to figure out? But that's

[00:35:10] Nathan Wrigley: the idea. Yep. Jen. Anything to, ah,

[00:35:15] Gen Herres: Not much to add on the whole Cadence AI thing.

[00:35:19] Nathan Wrigley: No worries.

Let's just see if we got any comments. Da. I'll come to those in a minute cuz I can't pause them in my head just at the moment. Okay, let's move on. Let me put my screen back up. Okay. I'm gonna, I'm gonna do a bit of reading here if that's all right with you. Cuz I, I couldn't put these into my head.

There was just too much information. But every year the WordPress community gets surveyed. Many people give over about 10 minutes of their time to answer a battery of questions. The 2022 results have been gathered in and collated and josepha. Hayden Choi has written, this post came out on May the fourth.

It's called 2022 Annual Survey Results and next steps, you can find it on the wordpress.org website slash news. And the highlights, which I'm gonna read in a moment, are I'll read those in a moment. But before then, it looks like the the participation was down, which is a, I don't know if that's concerning or not, whether people are just fed up or filling out surveys, but the survey had been made simpler to do.

So in a way you'd have hoped that would've created more survey responses, but no, they, the survey was down and I'm gonna read through some of these key takeaways and then we can go back through them and take them apart if we think they're of interest. Survey shows an increased usage of blocks and the new site editor, which I guess should be no surprise given that's now the default.

22% of respondents have only used WordPress for a year. Or less. I find that really interesting. One in five respondents learned about WordPress from a co-worker. So word of mouth is 20% of adoption. In 2022, WordPress has continued to learn about WordPress. 68% taught about WordPress, 48% and built sites for others, 55%.

WordPresses choose the C M s because it's open source. 62%. Boy, that is interesting. 47% said because it was flexible. 45 because it was low risk, only 45 because it was cost effective. And then there's some other statistics there as well. 50% of survey participants obtained news and training directly from wordpress.org.

And then other communities such as YouTube and. Places like, I guess this podcast and blogs and what have you, and 30% of it was on social media, which I find interesting. I thought that'd be significantly higher. The overwhelm, the overwhelming majority of respondents don't regularly use other CMSs can kind of figures, doesn't it?

Respondents continue to state that WordPress is as good or better than other CMS platforms. 86% of people agreeing with that and the overall contributor experience remains. Positive and something she continues to care about deeply. So I dunno if any of that jumped out to you. One of the data points, which I didn't find reading it back there, was that the demographics have gotten older.

Now you only have to take one look at me and my gray mop of hair to realize that I'm in the older demographic. But that kind of worries me a little bit that maybe there isn't this funnel of new people coming through. The fact the survey was not filled out maybe is a point of concern.

[00:38:36] Matt Cromwell: But yeah.

So on the survey,

[00:38:38] Gen Herres: One of the things about how WordPress guest people to fill out these surveys is what they do is they contact the various meetup organizers. So there's a newsletter that goes out to meetup organizers. And one of the issues with getting Meetup organizers to even encourage Meetup participants to fill out the survey is that Meetup organizers don't get access to the data.

All we ever get is the same thing that you're seeing here. So WordPress has literally told us organizers that if we want our own data, we need to send out our own survey. So what most of us end up doing is we, if we want to send out a survey at all, we send out our own. We don't send them to the main wordpress.org survey cause we won't get

[00:39:24] Matt Cromwell: that data.

That is interesting.

[00:39:26] Jess Frick: At the bottom of this post, it says view the slide deck. Can you open that?

[00:39:33] Nathan Wrigley: This link just here? Yeah. Yep. Thank you. That includes

[00:39:37] Jess Frick: a whole lot more information about the

[00:39:38] Nathan Wrigley: data. Thank you. I genuinely didn't see that link. Isn't that ridiculous? I, yeah, but thank you. I probably won't go into that right

[00:39:46] Jess Frick: now, point like that.

That's an interesting thing. But they actually do offer more here. But I can understand why as a meetup organizer, you would probably want your own data too. Yes.

[00:39:58] Gen Herres: Data's very important to organizers as

[00:40:00] Nathan Wrigley: you can imagine. Yeah. So here's the point that I was talking about. Submissions decrease by 56%. That's quite a, that's quite a wallop, isn't it?

That's a real huge decrease. Yeah, that's massive. The language. Okay, then

[00:40:13] Jess Frick: they talk about ages there. Keep going. You were talking about, it's veering older. Look at that.

[00:40:21] Nathan Wrigley: It's veering older, but it's still not old. Nope. No. So I'm looking at a chart at the moment. The age by essentially by decade it, how is that working out?

What are those numbers going up? The left hand side doesn't really matter. The point being that the th the thirties and forties dominate. So if you're in your thirties or forties, they are the two age groups that seem to be using it most. Then it's followed by the fifties, and then it declines, as you would imagine very small percentage by the time you get into the eighties and nineties.

[00:40:58] Jess Frick: If you go to the next slide, you'll see age over time to see how things are shifting. Interesting. So people in their fifties have increased. But so if people are in their forties, interestingly enough, people in their twenties have decreased.

[00:41:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So the teens presumably have gone through to be the twenties, and that's gone up from 15 to 21%.

That's actually quite encouraging, isn't it? The thirties has more or less stayed the same. It's 25, 26, 26 the forties is declining. That's an interesting demographic. And yeah, the rest of it looks more or less stable. That's interesting though. But it's, no I'm surprised by that increase in the twenties, that column there, the fact that the twenties have gone up in 2022.

Oh no, it's gone down. I'm reading it backwards. I apologize. So it's actually declined, not inclined, right? Correct. So

[00:41:50] Jess Frick: that's, now go two slides from here. That's my, that's the most interesting one for me. Where do I go? There you go.

[00:41:57] Matt Cromwell: Number

[00:41:57] Nathan Wrigley: five. Number five. Ooh, check that out. Okay, so what we're looking at here is a current position role in your organization.

So they're asking what kind of role do you take as a WordPress user? The owner slice is, I'm looking at about a third there. It looks to me, that's interesting. What else have we got in there? We've got none of the above, which, who knows what to say about that? A few years of experience comes next.

Mid-level manager, entry level, just starting in my career. Senior manager, director, executive. So the owner, you, this is the freelancer column, I'm guessing, right? This is the people who just build out their own solution and h hope to, use tools like Cadence, right? Just to make life a little bit easier.

Find some hosting. You're off to the races. See if you can figure it out by yourself. Yep. That's a lot of us. That's where you need the learn team popping in. Yeah. This is all really interesting. I'm gonna have to go back and look at this in more depth, I think for next week's show, but how did you hear about WordPress?

Word Camp? Very small magazine, very small, and it starts to creep up college or university. Fascinating. It's no such things existed when I was there from a friend or family member. It's starting to creep up. Search engine comes in at third place, workplace coworker, not sure, can't remember wins. That's great.

But it seems like coworkers and search engines are still doing the good work for us, so that's nice. Yeah. Interesting. Anybody wanna throw their lot in with this? They find anything fascinating about the space?

[00:43:35] Gen Herres: Just remember that this is a very small

[00:43:37] Nathan Wrigley: sample. Yeah. I think it was about 3000 something, wasn't it?

I can't remember the numbers, but yeah, you're right. Yeah. Yeah. It's a very small sample. Let me see if I can find now. It was up the top somewhere, no duh. No, can't see it. Oh yeah. 3,400. So yeah, of the user base. Very small. I confess this is the sort of thing that crosses my path and then if I don't immediately fill out that survey, I don't come back to it cuz I don't hear about it again, if I don't hear that gong being banged repeatedly. And I guess it would be nice to have some of this data. So you, Jess hosting company, Matt Plugin company for various different shades. Does any of this cause for concern? Is it like, we're all getting outta WordPress, the demographics have skewed.

There's no future for us. The sky is falling in. I don't think so.

[00:44:34] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, it feels like the, the 3,400 that took that, were probably all folks that we see regularly at Word Camps. It's the folks that, that are, have a lot of skin in the game and are really already vested and interested.

But it's harder and harder to get feedback from those that are on the periphery of the WordPress community. I do remember in years past feeling like I every corner I turned, I saw somebody asking me to fill out the WordPress survey. And this time around it felt like I wasn't as chased down as before.

So there is definitely a need for more volunteers to help on the front of getting these things out there cuz this data is super valuable for everyone.

[00:45:24] Nathan Wrigley: Cameron says that he's been using WordPress since he was a teenager. He's nearly 30 now. He still pretty much feels like he's the youngest person in any room when he goes to a WordPress event.

That's interesting. Yeah. Just trying to cast my head around and think, what, whether the same would be true for me, but sadly Cameron, I'm not in your demographic. I'm somewhat older. Jess, anything to add before we move on? No. Okay. In which case, let us move on. All right, so here's another thing where communication could have been interesting.

So we've just spoken about communication to get people to fill out the survey. Maybe next year we'll all be told more about it. This is an interesting piece that came up this week. First of all the sky's not falling in. Don't freak out. If you want to go to Word Camp us, you very likely still can. But this is a story about communicating the sale of Word Camp US tickets cuz they went on sale during the course of the last few days.

And as is so often the case for these flagship events that it sold out really quickly. I'm gonna be really honest, I managed by complete and utter fluke to be on Masteron at a moment when somebody that I follow posted that there were tickets on sale. I immediately went to the site. There were a hundred plus left.

So I thought, okay, I'll. I'll, that's fine. I'll come back in a few minutes. And I went off and did some dreary task I don't know, made some lunch or something like that. Came back a few minutes later and it was down to 60 or something like that in, in other words, it was selling out quick. So I at that point, made the decision, okay, I'm just gonna go for it and buy one moments after that.

It was down to zero. And as you can imagine, people thought wait what we all want to go? Shouldn't we have had better communication? And I honestly don't know what the lines of communication are. I think one of you, maybe it was maybe it was Jess said, was it you, Jen? Yeah. Jen was saying that as far as she was aware, it was simply let out by tweet or something like that, that these things were on sale.

And I guess to make it equitable, really it needs to go out to everywhere, all at once or. Maybe go out everywhere all at once, but they go on sale at a certain time. I dunno if that would create more of a drama with everybody going to the same page at the same time. But anyway, they've sold out, but they haven't sold out because Jen fillers in,

More,

[00:47:49] Gen Herres: there are still going to be two more rounds of ticket sales.

This first round of ticket sales was actually the smallest group of tickets, and the next two rounds will get progressively larger. The next round, as far as I know, is scheduled for about May 15th. I don't know when round three is, but if round one was May 1st and round two is May 15th, we can take a guess for when round three might be.

But yeah, the big thing that I have is as literally the Baltimore WordPress meetup organizer. I want to be able to tell my people in advance when tickets are going to be going on sale, because, especially with meetup groups, People aren't, looking at their email constantly. You need to give them some advanced notice, Hey, it's gonna happen at this date, at this time.

Go ahead and make your decision about whether or not you want to go and if you do, make sure to be there at this date and time.

[00:48:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, interesting point. And I think a valid one also, curiously on the article that we're looking at now, which is on WP Tavern Sarah Gooding wrote a piece entitled First Round of Word Camp Us Ti U, sorry, word Camp US 2023 tickets sold out.

She also includes a post from Tom Wilmot, I dunno if he's in the UK or not. But the date of the event, which is August 24th to the 26th in the UK at least, and I think it might be the same for a lot of European countries that is well within the boundaries of our school summer holiday. So school summer holidays in the UK typically begin at the end of July.

They're go on for about six weeks. So the kids return to school, something a around about the fifth, sixth, depending on when the Monday falls of September. Now that last year was fine because Word Camp US was well into that period. The kids had gone back to school and so on, but only Joss, but they have whereas this one falls in that timeframe where, if you're a working parent and you've gotta think about your kids going back to school, that might be a bit of a problem.

I dunno if that's a concern as well. But Tom, I'll quote in Europe, August is the summer holidays, which makes it tough to attend with kids off school, et cetera. I'm not sure I can swing it this year. I know, Matt, you are in Germany. Does this play out with you? Same,

[00:50:15] Matt Cromwell: yeah, same. It's in yeah, August is always big vacation month out here, so yeah.

[00:50:20] Nathan Wrigley: So maybe somebody like me having bought a ticket, I don't know if I can even go, but I've got that kind of FOMO feeling. So I decided to rush out and buy one, which is probably not the most principled thing to do. But

[00:50:32] Gen Herres: they did say on their website that they do have refunds available. Yeah. So if you did secure a ticket and for some reason you weren't able to use it and you weren't able to find someone in a Facebook group that needed it, although I'd be shocked if you couldn't find someone in a group who needed it you can get a refund.

I don't know what the refund period was, but you can check the website for refund

[00:50:53] Nathan Wrigley: information. Yeah. Interesting. Speaking of word camps, it's quite interesting. There's a few comments around the story that we were just doing previously where Peter Geral says, as a meetup organizer and somebody who joins many, I'm concerned that fewer young people are involved.

Average seems to be 50 plus. Of course, it could be virtual meetups, skew to an older audience. We need more data. And then Bob follows up with these days, it seems as if getting older people to attend meetups, sorry, getting younger people to attend meetups is a hard sell. However, in contrast to that, Mark West Guard says the word Camp Asia seemed to be a younger crowd, and as I was only there in cardboard cutout form, I can't really comment.

On that Jen Mark took a picture of me. That's a word, camp Asia. That's why I'm saying that. But there we go. Yeah, that's really interesting. I guess if you're a team as well and you want to take 25 people knowing that moment when the ticket's come on sale, that's pretty crucial so that you can get in there and start filling out that form as fast as possible.

Anyway, good news is there's more tickets whether or not they'll be announced in a way, which any everybody can access. I don't really know, but we'll wait and see. Okay. I

[00:52:11] Jess Frick: would like to suggest that everybody sign up for emails. That's how I found out. Yeah,

[00:52:15] Gen Herres: no, they didn't work. I did sign up for emails with two different email addresses.

Neither email address was emailed.

[00:52:24] Jess Frick: That was not my experience. I'm sorry

[00:52:26] Nathan Wrigley: that happened to you though. Yeah, that's an, that's weird, isn't it? That's an unusual one. So just on that point, Jess, where do you mean you go to the, the events page and you sign up, like for example, word Camp us. You go to their page and sign up for email updates and hopefully they'll send you a round of emails as these things are going on.

Yeah.

[00:52:44] Jess Frick: Yep. I I signed up. Right through WordPress word camp us. Yeah. Yeah. So it's part of my regular subscription and yeah, I got the email and that's how I need to go get 'em. But it came in at eight o'clock at night here, so it came at

[00:53:01] Matt Cromwell: a weird time. It did feel like, again, this felt similar to me too, that I'm usually pretty in the loop on stuff like that and I usually know when stuff's going out and I felt like I was totally like, surprised.

I was like, what tickets are on sale. I did not even know that was coming. I'm a work Camp Europe organizer again this year and yeah, I will just say like doing these hu being an organizer for these huge things, like it's a lot of pressure and people really do love to tell you what they think loudly and sometimes obnoxiously.

And so I've always wanted to avoid the whole organizer thing cuz it's so much work and people love to be angry about stuff, but yeah they're doing the best that they can. I also, the dates work camp us has changed the dates so many different times. And every single time it's a different date.

A lot of people complain and yeah. Oh yeah. I dunno, I don't know what the best date is, but somehow us seems to always find the time that nobody likes.

[00:54:00] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I think they're doing the best

[00:54:03] Matt Cromwell: that they can. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. It's going

[00:54:05] Nathan Wrigley: great. But that's right. I guess the bottom of this story really is if you felt that when you reached that page that the tickets had gone they haven't.

They just have on the first round. So keep the faith maybe do what Jes said and go and sign up to that list and hopefully your inbox will will accept that incoming email and allow you to see that. Okay. So the next one is just a plugin recommendation, just out and out. Cool little plugin that I came across this week.

So this is just gonna be me talking. I'll just mention it quickly. This is really cool. Brand new as far as I can work out. It's called Admin and Site Enhancements. And it's about 20 different tolerable things that you're always trying to do in the WordPress admin. And it's all in this one teeny tiny, lightweight plugin.

So little things like hide the WordPress logo, hide the admin bar. You can set up your S M T P connections without the need for a plugin dedicated to just that. You can do things like disabled comments, disable the rest, a p i, you can just a boat load of things, put featured images in the posts list, all those kind of things.

And I installed it, had a play. Every single thing worked as expected. And a lot of these things I try to do with dedicated plugins. Here's another one, S V G upload. It allows that to happen, and I install a plugin to do that on virtually every site. I'll put the link in the show notes, but it's called Admin and Site Enhancements.

I don't think there's a paid tier, it's just completely free by a developer called Bo wo, b o w o. So yeah, recommendation from me. If it breaks your site, it wasn't recommended by me, it was totally somebody else. Alright. Just so that we're clear. Yes. Thank you. All right, so that's that. And then we'll move on to this piece.

Oh, WP Drama of the Week, sponsored by Twitter. So we all know what's going on at Twitter. It's no, it's, no, secret Twitter's in a state of incredible flux I gotta say in terms of the front end of the Twitter site. I haven't seen it like degrade or stop working or become intermittent. My experience with Twitter is exactly the same as it's always been, but I know that a lot of people have had a, got lots of complaints about it, the politics of it, and now the cost of it.

If you've been using jet Pack, there's been a handy little area within the post and pages area where you could auto post a tweet handy. Little feature. Yeah, spread it on social, write it in there. Easily done. However the Twitter API has now become a paid for service and the cost of that service is by all accounts fairly high.

And when I say fairly high, I am, I think I'm talking mouth mouthwatering numbers. It really can be very expensive. I have a I have a third party solution, which is a bit like Buffer, but it's not called Buffer. I won't go into it. They have about 6,000 subs subscribers to their service. And they say that Twitter are wanting $42,000 a month for their service.

So they basically just killed it. They've just said, look, we can't sustain this. The same now is true for Jetpack. So they had conversations with between automatic or Jetpack and Twitter. The numbers didn't match. So it's gone. Simple as that. They've pulled it, it will not work anymore. I think the date has now gone as well.

So if you were ma making use of that feature, 43% of the web and however many percent of that we're using jet pack, I imagine it's significantly less than, anywhere, like 43% of the web. But that little feature has now gone away. I dunno what to make of this. It seems like death by a thousand paper cuts, but I was getting into Twitter, I was using it more and more.

I was still hopeless at it. But things like this, don't give me confidence. However, jet Pack are gonna put in Masteron, so yay, because I love Master and but what about you guys? If you're publishing stuff, suddenly a massive channel's gone, you can still do it, right? You do it manually, but you gotta do it manually.

Your thoughts? I. I have mixed thoughts

[00:58:34] Matt Cromwell: about it. There's one side of me that's like we mentioned how we're doing the rebrand in public effort with iThemes and Solid wp. It's specifically because of the, specifically related to the drama that I've seen rollout with the way Twitter has changed and how it's been.

Completely butchered. Like every single change that they've introduced has been met with just complete chaos and pitchforks. And it, I, to me it's like a masterclass in learning what not to do. It's been educational yeah. In all the wrong ways.

[00:59:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It's not built in the open, is it?

It's definitely build by, yeah. Reflex.

[00:59:21] Matt Cromwell: Exactly. It's let's make the API extremely expensive and just foisted on people in a short amount of time and see what happens. It's predictable of what will happen in those circumstances.

[00:59:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah, and it does feel like the strength of Twitter for all of these years has been that free access to that a p i, where you could just post stuff and thereby the community grew because everything was going on in that community.

Now you put a paywall up and not just a paywall, a really eye wateringly, large paywall. I have no idea what the number for jet Pack was, but was it Jess or Jen was telling me that it's on a per use space. That was me. Yeah. So depending on how many requests you make to the api, that's how the pricing is arrived at.

And I can imagine that the jet pack figure would be significantly higher than the SAS service that I was talking about. So I don't know, just feels like shooting yourself in the proverbial foot. I will say

[01:00:21] Matt Cromwell: I'm not an apologist for it at all, but there is another side of me that's like on the product side essentially that API is the way for folks to be able to use the platform without being exposed to the advertising of the platform, which is how that platform is monetized, of course.

And there is this side of me that's I can understand why you would not want to just have this big giant workaround essentially. If you want PO folks to. Use your platform, you want them to be on your platform. So it's not as if I don't understand the motivations there, but it's like I don't understand the motivations for the pricing of it.

That seems like exorbitant beyond,

[01:01:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But it d don't you think it's interesting that they put that on the, so I don't know what technical workaround you could do to achieve this, but as an example, we were talking earlier about the open AI key. So a lot of these SaaS products, I have to put in my open AI key, and then I am billed directly for the amount that I use of open ai.

But I do that in a third party setup. Yeah could, maybe that would've been a better thing. In other words, if I post a Twitter via jet pack, I get charged the, I don't know, 10th of a US cent or a cent or whatever it might, some trivial amount of money. But it comes down to me. And in that way, they still get their dime.

I can still use it and I know that my share is being paid for by me, and the amount that I post directly relates to all of that. This just seems to have knocked the feet out of everybody. And we've got a comment here from Bob who's saying exactly the same as me. Yeah. He's got a SaaS product, which does this kind of thing, and they've just knocked Twitter out because they've got to pay the fee.

They can't offset it to their users. So there's my idea. Twitter, do it like open ai did and anyway, there's never a week without Twitter this week. Jen, Jess, anything

[01:02:27] Jess Frick: Tim? What Matt was saying, I think I think it would probably be more open-minded if we didn't have other signals like charging to use Qfa.

Via a text. It's the nickel and diamond man. Like I paid for it before Elon bought it. I paid for it for a while and then I just stopped paying for it. Cuz yeah, I all, I, all I have to say about Twitter today is if you have a blue sky invite, hit your girl up. Cuz I am like waiting.

[01:02:59] Nathan Wrigley: Ah. So this, okay, let's talk about that for a moment cuz that's interesting.

This is the this is the Jack Dorsey endorsed, funded, maybe even alternative. It's a protocol called the, is it called the AF protocol? I believe it is. And it's a bit like activity pub, which is what Masteron uses. And at the moment they're rolling out access. Interesting. Does seem like a lot of people are moving in that direction.

It's federated, so it's a bit like mastered on in that sense. I just don't know if I'm willing to, Do that again. With Mr. Dorsey. I don't know what his incentives are in this, so there's a bit of me which thinks activity pub all the way,

[01:03:46] Jess Frick: some of the terms are sketchy. I wanna kick the

[01:03:50] Nathan Wrigley: tires.

Yeah. Try it out. Yeah. And my understanding is if you log in and you're not really paying attention, you are basically looking at Twitter. So there's no dissonance between. Signing up, you just get an account, you're off to the races, whereas Master On is just weird cuz you've gotta get, you gotta sign an up to an instance and then figure out what your username actually looks like and how to share all of that.

But my master on for me in WordPress really works. You can follow the hashtag WordPress loads of stuff, coms, but not so much like maybe 20 things a day. I can keep on top of that in a nice way and there's lots of thoughtful people posting content in there. So there you go at Protocol. Thank you very much, Courtney.

It's not the a af that sounds slightly sweary, doesn't it? But yeah, it lets you use. Oh, okay. This is interesting. It lets you use your own domain as your handle, which works well, but apparently you can spoof it because somebody has already bagged the entire Amazon S3 domain. And is now proclaiming to the to be them bec and they did it completely legit.

Legitimately.

You can't make it up. Okay let's move on. Enough of the Twitter, let's go to something else. Let's go to this Hope. Michelle Rochette's still here. Lovely project. This is so nice. So in the past, if you've been a WordPress s event organizer, one of the big things right, Is finding the speakers.

You can do that manually or you can put out a form and hope that people fill it out. But I think Michelle thought to herself, wouldn't it be nice if we just flipped that on its head and got a collection together of all the people in the WordPress space who are willing to speak and then put together some sort of faceted search so that you can drill down.

Into people who you might like to invite to your event. I run a WordPress event. Won't go into that, but I run a WordPress event and this is a thing, this is a real challenge. We reach out to people and it's quite a lengthy process. But now that Michelle's put this site up, I think we're gonna be drilling into this from now on, if you are keen to get yourself on the list, you can.

It's completely fine. They're looking for some sponsorship at the moment and you can find that on the page as well. There's a sponsor os link. It's wp speakers.com/sponsor. But also the thing that most people I think are gonna make use of is this and already look, have a look. There's 9, 217 people have signed up already.

A decent cohort. And you can start to filter by the different kind of topics and so on, and there's tags and where they are in the world and the languages that they speak and so on. So maybe this'll be a nice useful tool. She's done it off her own bat. She did previously WP events. I'm not sure if there's gonna be some sort of tie in between those two things in the future, but yeah, Michelle Frette Bravo Cool project.

I know that she ran into some technical gremlins, which she she was able to get over. So yeah nicely done. I'm gonna hand it over to you guys. Let's see if I can find any of you three on here whilst you talk. Yeah,

[01:06:57] Jess Frick: what's awesome is she was already running the under rep in tech speaker database, and this is a great way for literally anyone, for any reason to be a part of a database where camp where, meetup organizers can easily find speakers.

I think it's just such a smart idea.

[01:07:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's a really smart idea. Try. Yeah. Honestly, it's so smart. But also the

[01:07:22] Jess Frick: under in tech database is also fantastic.

[01:07:25] Nathan Wrigley: So look, I've typed in, I've typed in Frick and I got Jess Fricks. She's put herself, be careful typing that in. I know. Yeah. Yeah. This, there's many ways that can go wrong.

Logging business, community, customer success, e-commerce and various others. And then if I type in no, I'm not Cromwell, that also works. Matt's in there on the various categories. Jen not yet. Maybe she won't be. Not yet, but not yet. I

[01:07:52] Matt Cromwell: not yet.

[01:07:53] Gen Herres: I think I will definitely be using this for my meetup to Yeah.

Find some people to show up on

[01:07:59] Nathan Wrigley: Zoom. Exactly. Like, how nice will this be? And it's very young. It's maybe I'm gonna say 10 days or something like that. I've put myself in, community podcasting. That's about it for me, but yeah, exactly that. If you are in need of people and you can just head here from now on there's already over 200 who are willing to talk at events just like yours and you can filter them.

So yeah. Bravo, miss Frache. Yeah. Oh look, there she is. There she is. She says, I'm here. It's all free. Thank you. Oh, that's lovely. Yeah, so the URL for that is wp speakers.com. If you've got any pretensions of speaking, then go and sign up and you never know that phone. That email might start a ring in if you are.

Yeah. Very nice. And you can go and get Jess and Matt to talk at your next event there. There's the other caveat. Suddenly you get a deluge of emails. It's no, too many. I can't possibly speak that much. Next one up is this thing, new theme called Stacks. This is the strangest theme I've seen in a long time.

Strange. Not like strange, weird, but strange as in what? A, what a curious ui. So this kind of feels like it. Mis sorry. Sarah nearly said Michelle. Sarah Gooding on WP Tavern. Prefaces. This with, she calls this piece WordPress theme Team Release stacks a community theme for building slide decks.

We'll get onto what a community theme is in a minute, cuz I'm not really sure. And, but you can see I'm gonna play this little video. Your content ends up coming out. Ugh. If I can get that to go. Your content comes out like this. So it really is a bunch of slide decks. It's the thing that you, I don't know.

Let's say you're a speaker at an event. There you go. Nice little segue. This is the sort of thing that you could use to almost like PowerPoint, your bits and pieces. You can edit in the block interface. If you're looking at the screen, you can see that happening now. You put buttons, text, all of that kind of good stuff.

And each section, if you like, gets wrapped up in a accordion, light, collapsible colored background, which you can then advance and move to the next one. Jen, I know you've got concerns around this.

[01:10:25] Matt Cromwell: What were you thinking

[01:10:25] Gen Herres: there? Yes, A lot of times with these I would assume it's JavaScript powered. A lot of times with these JavaScript powered things, you can end up with significant accessibility issues.

Just the motion alone can end up causing p problems for people with vestibular

[01:10:42] Nathan Wrigley: issues. Can you say that word again? Vestibular issues. Can you now tell me what that word means?

[01:10:52] Gen Herres: That is for people who have issues like dizziness. Oh, vertigo. Yeah. This actually will affect I think it's don't quote me exactly on this, cause I don't remember verbatim, but I think it's close to 50% of people will experience a vestibular issue such as vertigo at least some point in their life.

Interesting. And the, this motion alone, just this simple motion that we're showing here, this could literally cause them to vomit if they have a vestibular issue.

[01:11:27] Nathan Wrigley: My eyebrows just went up. That is quite, yeah. Okay. That's a,

[01:11:30] Gen Herres: there's a recent podcast Amber Hines and the Equalized Digital Group have put out a podcast called Accessibility Craft, and they actually have a recent episode entitled Your website makes me nauseous.

Or something very similar to that name. And they actually go into a whole bunch of information about Vest particular issues and how motion on websites can literally make people sick. And Pizza just wrote in the comments, please stop moving everything.

[01:12:01] Nathan Wrigley: She's literally p maybe on tomorrow's show we should have a quick look at Stacks as a, as an enterprise and see what we think about it.

But can I ask Jen, so you just mentioned Accessibility Craft, is that the name of her podcast? So she's got a podcast, a bunch of episodes because I want to link to that in the show notes if I possibly can. But if you private message me that I'll make sure to get it right. But anyway, hat Tip to Ambe Hines whatever the name of that podcast is, I will put it into the show notes for tomorrow.

I just thought it was interesting. So all of that accessibility stuff aside. And forgive me, I know that's naughty. I just thought it was an interesting implementation of the tech, the way that you could interact with that content and you could then move into another accordion if you like.

I just thought it was a curious way of doing things and it has come out from the theme team. Given that the theme team hopefully are thinking about things like accessibility. It might be interesting to explore that a little bit further, but I didn't know what either Matt or Jess thought of this.

Indeed. Are there any thoughts at all?

[01:13:15] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, being that it's a initiative from the theme team itself, that it's a community theme. I really like the idea behind that. And specifically I feel like they came out with a theme that caters to work camp folks who might be wanting to do a presentation the at a Word camp.

So I thought that was really smart, and I hope that they listen to Jen and Amber and take some notes on how they can make this type of functionality more accessible for sure. Because being able to serve the WordPress community through dynamic themes, I think is a really cool idea

[01:13:56] Nathan Wrigley: and initiative.

Jen would the best practice in this scenario, and I'm far from a custodian of that knowledge, would the best practice in this scenario, if this was public facing and you weren't literally just using it as a slide deck to show on a screen behind you at a presentation, would it be to switch off those animations and have some sort of interface whereby you could switch them on if you chose to?

Or is it just to get rid of them altogether?

[01:14:21] Gen Herres: Animation is fine as long as someone has chosen it. Got it. So it's really about allowing people to have the choice and not imposing your ideas upon them. So you may think this is a cool animation. Sure, that's fine, as long as someone's

[01:14:45] Nathan Wrigley: choosing it.

Got it. Okay. From a slightly different perspective then we have in the comments, if I can see that Xlo, Vita X elevator. Thank you for joining us. He says that the best thing about stack, the stack theme is nothing extra. No extra bits of code has been added to achieve this. So that's interesting in and of itself.

And everything is being done just by he said just code blocks. Okay. We'll have to see. I'm gonna explore this a little bit over the next few weeks, I think. And Matt, if you get a reply from Exta to your question, I'd be interested to know what you say. Jess, we've excluded you from this one.

Anything to add? No, I think it's all been said. Okay. All right. In which case we'll press on cause there's a couple of things before we run outta time. First one, if you've got a c f I'll be very quick. Just go and update it. There was a fairly hard to exploit vulnerability. The chances of it being exploited on your site were fairly small, but nevertheless, given that there's 5 trillion people using a c f there's quite a target on its back.

So just go and get it updated. They've sorted it all out. And there's a piece which I'll link to tomorrow in the tavern to say that. Hold onto your hats if you're a cloud waste customer. Jen has got some news for you. Tell us about this. So this is a story which you know about and I don't know about.

So I am gonna put that little caveat in there before we start talking about it. I'm looking at the digital lotion website. This piece is showing us that in I think it was August, I believe, something like that. August, 2022, digital lotion was acquired by Cloud Ways. Nothing really has changed since then.

Services normal. But you've got some interesting intel about something that's happened this week. Yes.

[01:16:30] Gen Herres: In August of 22, digital Ocean announced that it was acquiring Cloud Ways, which has become a pretty significant player in the WordPress hosting space. I'm sure pretty much most of your listeners have heard of it, if not used it at some point.

So when this happened, a lot of people were concerned, oh dear God, what is going to happen to cloud ways now that Digital Ocean has acquired them specifically with concerns about will they continue to support Vulture and Lineo? Last week they answered the question, and for new subscribers to cloud ways, they can no longer get Vulture or line node.

Those are no longer options for people who were already a subscriber. So if had a time machine you could go back to last week, you will still have access to Vulture and Line Node. But while they haven't announced that in at some point in the future, they will no longer allow access to those providers.

It looks like we're headed in that direction. So there's been a whole lot of discussion going on in some of the WordPress groups about where's everyone moving

[01:17:44] Nathan Wrigley: to? Yeah, so obviously digital lotion are a provider of servers which cloud waves tap into along with some commercial rivals, Volter, and yeah, there's all sorts isn't.

There's Amazon Light sale and a whole bunch of other things and acquiring cloud waves. That kind of mud muddies the water a bit, doesn't it? If you are enabling people to sign up for rivals to your own service simply and easily through the cloud ways interface, is that shooting yourself in the foot?

In other words, have they bought cloud waves in order over time to just strip the other services out and have this really nice cloud waves interface where you can interact with everything? And from all the data that you've been receiving this week and chats that you've been having, it feels like that journey is beginning.

And if you are. Using their service, go and check that out. I think that's an important thing for them to communicate. And by the fact that we're looking at a stale article, Jen, you weren't able to track down anything. I

[01:18:43] Gen Herres: wasn't able to find any news articles about the change to cloud ways. The only thing I've been able to access is chats with customer service reps that have confirmed that Vulture and Lion are no longer available to new subscribers

[01:19:00] Nathan Wrigley: to cloud wastes.

Okay. That's, it is actually fairly big news if that turns out to be true. Because I think it's fair to say that cloud wastes have become if you like that hosting type of solution, cloud waves has been the. A real dominant force in that. So we'll have to see. Maybe somebody here is an employee or has something that they can offer as assurance.

You can confirm it on their website right now.

[01:19:23] Jess Frick: Oh, go for it. Go on. Your choices are Digital Ocean, aws. Yeah. Or

[01:19:27] Nathan Wrigley: Google Cloud. Okay. So you just

[01:19:29] Gen Herres: signed up. Look at the pricing differences between those. Digital Ocean is the only one coming in with options near, the $20 price point, whereas the others are significantly

[01:19:39] Nathan Wrigley: higher.

Okay. And is that a modification or is that just the cost of using Google's cloud? We don't know. That's as far

[01:19:47] Gen Herres: as I so obviously Cloud Waves puts a markup on all providers. If you go to Digital Ocean's website, you can get. The same server for half the price. The markup is for the tools and the support that Cloud Wastes offers.

So obviously on top of AWS and on top of Google Cloud, there is a markup for the tools and the support that Cloud Wastes

[01:20:12] Matt Cromwell: offers.

[01:20:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. So this is basically a heads up. It sounds like the intel as to whether things are gonna go away for existing users and all that we don't know, but there's definitely some story here and if you're a cloud waste user and have lots and lots of client sites on cloud waste, clearly yes, it's definitely a big concern for a lot of people time to go and start asking some questions.

And I suppose that the more questions that we get asked, the more likely we are to get some clarity back out from cloud ways on the other end. Okay. Brilliant. Thank you for surfacing that. I definitely wouldn't have seen that this week. Largely cuz there was nothing public facing. To see and then we're onto this Jess through this at us, right at the very last minute.

So I confess, haven't given this the due diligence that I should have done, but this is all about analytics essentially, isn't it, Jess? And the fact that quite a lot of your analytics may be being misreported. Tell us more. Yeah, if

[01:21:04] Jess Frick: you look at the very top, you can see there more and more platforms are blocking refer data.

So if you're looking in your Google Analytics, it looks like more and more people are just coming directly to your site, which is not necessarily true. We were talking earlier, in WordPress it's the default. If you set something to open in a new window, It's gonna have that now refer tab which is really, frustrating when you know you're on somebody's site and you wanna see what traffic's coming from there.

You have absolutely no idea. But the thing is this was not the case previously with social networks, and this is not like another, ding on Twitter. It's not just Twitter. It's most of them now you're not getting data coming from Discord or Mastodon or, you could see in the chat right there.

[01:22:02] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, apologies. I'm not looking at the chat.

[01:22:04] Jess Frick: I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I didn't mean chat. I meant the picture. Oh brain misfired. So yeah, it's Twitter's actually giving you that accurate attribution. Facebook is as well. But these other ones, I think we're gonna continue seeing it grow across the board.

[01:22:24] Nathan Wrigley: So if you are watching the show, the Black Line represents a service which gives you no reliable data about where your visitors coming from. So TikTok, you don't know if somebody's come from TikTok, so it's direct traffic, your Google Analytics or whatever is gonna show that person came directly to your website.

TikTok have got gotten themselves out of that equation. Same for Slack, same for Discord, same for master on, same for WhatsApp, which is curious. Looks like roughly 75% of direct of traffic is sent directly, or it appears to be sent directly from Facebook Messenger, Instagram, we suddenly dropped to 30% and then it all just tails off until finally Facebook and Twitter.

They will give you that data a hundred percent of the time. This data comes from Spark Toro. Sorry, did I get that wrong?

[01:23:12] Jess Frick: No you got it right. But Twitter has their own analytics and I'm sure it's just a matter of time before they charge for that too. Ah, yeah.

[01:23:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yay. But the point being you could be misrepresenting, your success with direct marketing.

You think you've got way, we've got 10 million views and they all came to us directly. We're not spending anything on adverts or, social media. We can drop all of that nonsense. Turns out not the case. This is data which is coming from Rand Fishkin, spark Toro. So I think we can, I think we can fairly confidently attribute it to be accurate.

We're running out of time, so I just wanna be brief. Matt, anything on this must, annoy you if you're a plugin developer and you wanna see where your traffic's coming from. Yeah,

[01:23:55] Matt Cromwell: it drives me nuts for sure. Just a really good article. And also in light of Google Analytics retiring Universal and going to GA four and GA four is really literally not having all the same features that Universal had.

But at, and then at the same time Europe is raising really good and valid questions about privacy and third party cookies for tracking purposes. And right now, at the moment the whole field for marketing analytics is just fraught with. Complexity and problems. And I, I said this at Work Camp Sacramento Switzerland, excuse me, that anybody who could really completely solve the marketing analytics problem that keeps privacy in mind and fa fixes the direct problem or the non attributed problem would just win millions of dollars overnight.

But yeah, I don't really know what that solution looks like exactly at this stage cuz it's just, there's just so much complexity to this

[01:24:59] Nathan Wrigley: area at the moment. My, my feeling, I could be wrong, my feeling is that the pendulum has swung and people are a little bit more savvy on. This now, and given the choice of, are you okay, with cookies?

In other words if you're given a straightforward question, do you want to be tracked? Don't you want to be tracked? Apple with their iOS update, not that long ago, confirmed it, didn't they? Ev 90 plus percent of people given a straightforward question about tracking, we'll say, Nope, don't want it, and we'll click the button to deny it.

And I just think it's interesting. We've gotten ourselves into this point where cookies have, for so many years been such a rich, amazing source of getting just like super specific data. And I wonder if public opinion is turning. Certainly the legislation in the EU is turning and I don't know Firefox in the future, if you're a Firefox user, none of this stuff's gonna be available to anybody.

So Firefox will just block everything on this chart, whether you are using Facebook or Twitter or whatever. Yeah, I think

[01:26:02] Matt Cromwell: what's the most frustrating about this data that Jess is sharing here is that. This is happening at the platform level. So like without Cook, it has nothing to do with Optins or whatever, or missing referral data because the platform itself is refusing to send it in the first place, right?

Yep. So it's just another one of the layers of complexity that makes everything harder. And it is one of those things where as a owner of many websites currently that I'm trying to track data on all the time, it's I just wanna be able to understand you folks better so I can give you better content.

And I mean there's of course tons of malicious actors out there, so it's not as if there's not really strong, legitimate concerns here. But it's the legitimate use of data that is really being hammered and hurt hard at the moment.

[01:27:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah, we need some we need some very charismatic person on the side of tracking to come forward and really swing that debate cuz it feels like all of the all of the charisma and appeal is on the other side at the moment.

By the way, I've got it confirmed. It is accessibility craft.com. That's the name of the website where you can find Amber Hz podcast. Thank you for that, Jen and I, and speaking of

[01:27:28] Gen Herres: accessibility, global Accessibility Awareness Day is

[01:27:31] Nathan Wrigley: next week. Oh, thank you. Yeah. Did I miss that? Did you put that in the show somewhere?

I did. Yes. Oh, I'm so sorry. You had an open in a tab. I did have it opening in a tab and I've clearly closed it. Let me just before we finish it off, let me grab it. I am sorry. There we go. Let's open it up. And whilst I'm doing that, I'll just tell you what it's called. It is global. Did I not show this?

That's so weird. I honestly thought I'd had that one on the screen. I probably accidentally closed it cuz I'm using a new browser called Vivaldi. It's not new, it's just new to me. And the close icon is on the opposite end of the tab to Chrome. So I'm finding I'm closing things inadvertently, but here we go.

This is it. Tell us about this. Briefly. Did we not show that? We didn't? We did. We didn't.

[01:28:19] Matt Cromwell: Okay, we didn't,

[01:28:21] Gen Herres: so Global Accessibility Awareness Day is Thursday, May 18th, and there are going to be all sorts of online and in-person celebrations for it. It's basically to increase awareness about accessibility and how it affects people.

One of the biggest things that they want, that they talk about is accessibility isn't about imposing a solution onto people. It's not about saying, oh, I can solve your problem. Here's your solution. Shove it down your throat. It's about removing barriers. So instead of trying to solve everyone's problems for them, because each person is individual and different solutions are better for different people, sometimes even at different times, it's more about just removing barriers so that people can bring their own solutions and handle things in the way that they

[01:29:16] Nathan Wrigley: choose.

So it's happening on Thursday, the 18th of May. It's not like one thing, right? It's not one event. No. It's

[01:29:25] Gen Herres: things all over the world. Uhhuh, there's all different things happening on Zoom. There's a number of different meetups happening both before and on the day

[01:29:34] Nathan Wrigley: of.

So if I was to, I'm just looking at this site and I'm trying to figure, ah, okay, this is probably the button that you're most interested in. So there's a button called Find an Event, and from there you can drill down in much the same way that Michelle Rochet had on her site. You can find by contr, find by different type, whether it's in person, virtual, private, what the kind of activities are on and so on.

So there we go. accessibility.day. Best URL ever. How call was it to bag that one slash events? We'll get you to this particular page, but accessibility.day and

[01:30:12] Gen Herres: Matt just posted in the chat about Is it plug-ins or themes that make it possible? And the answer is, accessibility of a basic HTML website is handled in your browser.

It's actually all of the things that we add that create problems. So all of the plug-ins, we add the themes, we select the color choices that we make, the content that we add, and how we add that content. That is what makes things inaccessible by

[01:30:45] Matt Cromwell: default. Absolutely. Most websites accessible. Absolutely. My comment was directed at our guy x I forget how to pronounce his

[01:30:55] Nathan Wrigley: name.

Yeah, he was fellow Vita Vi. Yeah, that's fun to say. Yeah. I'm sorry Jen, that I inadvertently close that tab. We definitely said that we were gonna feature it, so apologies. But I will make sure that it get heads into the show notes. That's Accessibility Day. And I'll also add the Accel Accessibility Craft podcast.

I'm in what can only be described as heaven Here. Look at the glowing background. I know it's weird, isn't it? There's nothing I can do with it. The sun just comes right in at this time of the year and it feels lovely. That's it. That's all we've got for you. I was gonna do some AI pieces, but we run outta time and these good people have got better things to do than drone on with me.

So as we always do, we're gonna stick up the hands and give us a away. Yes. Look at that. It's such. Yes. Look at that. That's fabulous. Thank you so much for anybody who made a comment. I really appreciate it. I'm sure our guests do too. We'll be back next week with a bunch of other guests talking about some more word pressy things.

But for now, thank you so much for joining us. We'll be back next week. Take it easy. Bye.