This Week in WordPress #310  ## Metadata - Author: [[WP Builds]] - Full Title: This Week in WordPress #310 - Category: #articles - Document Note: --- tags: [#WordPress, #Podcast, #Developer, #Community, #AI] Author: [Nathan Wrigley, Michelle Frett, Courtney Robertson, Mark Benzaken] Source: [This Week in WordPress #310](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnTOfhZSTYw) Reference: N/A date created: 2024-10-08 11:30 --- # Title: This Week in WordPress: Episode #310 — "Taco Shaped Hole" ## Table of Contents: - [📝 Summary](#summary) - [📖 Main Content](#main-content) - [🗒️ Notes](#notes) - [📖 References](#references) - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#paraphrase) - [📰 Newsletter](#newsletter) - [✅ Action Items](#action-items) - [🧪 Hypotheses](#hypotheses) - [📊 Methodology](#methodology) - [❓ Questions](#questions) - [🔮 Future Research](#future-research) - [💡 Implications](#implications) - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#learning-styles-assessment) - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#accessibility-assessment) - [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#deib-assessment) - [✅ Logical Validity](#logical-validity) - [🔍 SEO Evaluation](#seo-evaluation) - [🎯 Conclusion](#conclusion) --- ## 📝 Summary: This episode of *This Week in WordPress* (#310), titled "Taco Shaped Hole," covers the latest in the WordPress ecosystem. The hosts, Nathan Wrigley, Michelle Frett, Courtney Robertson, and Mark Benzaken, discuss topics such as WordPress 6.7 beta, Automatic plugin rollbacks, and Dre from Drupal's thoughts on WordPress's future. They avoid the ongoing WordPress drama and focus on the technical and community news within the project. ## 📖 Main Content: The main points include: - **WordPress 6.7 Beta Release**: The beta includes features like the new 2025 theme, zooming capabilities, media enhancements, and an API for custom preview options. Courtney Robertson emphasized the importance of testing and invited the community to participate. - **Automatic Plugin Rollback**: A feature led by trauma surgeon and developer Andy Fragan ensures that plugin updates can automatically revert if issues arise. - **Dre's Suggestions**: Dre, from Drupal, provides a perspective on how WordPress could benefit from a "maker vs. taker" credit system to address governance and community contribution challenges. He draws on Drupal's experience with similar issues. - **WordPress Automatic's Alignment Offer**: Automatic offered a voluntary exit for employees who disagreed with the company's direction, which led to 159 employees leaving. - **Community Initiatives**: Updates on WP Campus's research on WordPress in higher education and upcoming hackathons were also shared. ## 🗒️ Notes: - **WordPress 6.7 Beta**: - New 2025 theme inspired by nature and ancestry. - Zoom-out feature for better pattern composition. - Direct uploads from iPhone images. - API enhancements for content previews. - More flexibility in the query loop block. - **Automatic Plugin Rollback**: - Auto-updates now include rollbacks if an update fails. - Complex exceptions and edge cases were solved to make this possible. - Ensures a more stable experience for users. - **Dre's Proposal**: - Maker vs. taker system in Drupal rewards contributors. - WordPress could benefit from more distributed governance and a credit system. - Encourages fairness and more explicit recognition of contributors. - **WordPress Community Updates**: - WP Campus's research project with Human Made. - New WordPress hackathon announced with $5,000 in prizes. ## 📖 References: - WordPress 6.7 Beta (source: WordPress.org) - Dre's article on governance in Drupal (LinkedIn post) - Automatic's alignment offer (Matt Mullenweg's announcement) - WP Campus's research project (WPCampus.org) ## 🗣️ Paraphrase: 1. **Automatic Plugin Rollback Feature**: Andy Fragan, a trauma surgeon and dedicated WordPress contributor, has been instrumental in developing a feature that allows automatic plugin rollbacks. This means that if a plugin update fails, WordPress can revert to the previous version automatically. The project has taken years due to the complexity of addressing edge cases and ensuring that it works smoothly under various conditions. 2. **Dre's "Maker vs. Taker" Proposal**: Dre, founder of the Drupal project, suggests that WordPress adopt a system similar to Drupal’s, where contributors (makers) are rewarded through a credit system. This system would offer incentives such as higher rankings and visibility for organizations that actively contribute to WordPress, while non-contributors (takers) would receive fewer opportunities and recognition within the community. ## 📰 Newsletter: In this week's WordPress newsletter, we dive into the WordPress 6.7 beta release, offering exciting new features like a zoom-out view for patterns, enhanced media uploads, and improvements to the query loop block. Automatic plugin rollbacks are now live, ensuring a safer updating process. Plus, don't miss Dre's intriguing perspective on how WordPress can learn from Drupal’s contribution system! We've also got updates on WP Campus's new research project and an exciting WordPress hackathon coming soon. Be sure to test the new features and stay engaged with the community! 💻✨ ## ✅ Action Items: For Courtney, who focuses on supporting contributors and open-source advocacy, aligning with topics discussed in this episode can highlight: - **Open Source Governance**: Dre's proposal directly aligns with her work in growing open-source contributors, offering a potential model for fostering sustainable contributions in the WordPress ecosystem. - **Beta Testing**: Encouraging the community to engage with WordPress 6.7 beta testing fits Courtney’s mission to onboard new contributors. - **Automatic Plugin Rollback**: The focus on stability and quality in WordPress aligns with her advocacy for creating a better developer experience in the WordPress ecosystem. These topics fit her aspirations toward creating a sustainable, inclusive open-source program office. ## 🧪 Hypotheses: 1. If WordPress adopts a credit system for contributors, it will increase participation from both individuals and organizations. 2. The automatic rollback feature will reduce plugin-related support tickets by 30%. ### 📊 Methodology: - Surveys of plugin developers and users regarding rollback feature usability. - Longitudinal analysis of contributor numbers pre- and post-credit system implementation. - Interview community leaders about their participation motivations. ### ❓ Questions: - How could a credit system change the WordPress contributor culture? - What challenges could arise in implementing a Drupal-like governance model in WordPress? ### 🔮 Future Research: - Explore how automatic rollbacks impact site security and maintenance. - Investigate the effect of adopting a maker vs. taker system on open-source communities. ### 💡 Implications: - Future research could help design more effective governance systems in open source, influencing not only WordPress but other large projects like Joomla or Magento. ### 🧠 Learning Styles Assessment: - **Visual Learners**: The episode could benefit from more diagrams or infographics explaining the plugin rollback feature. - **Verbal Learners**: The discussion was rich with explanations but could be improved by providing more written resources for deeper dives. - **Physical Learners**: A hands-on beta testing workshop would help engage kinesthetic learners. ### 📊 Accessibility Assessment: - **Screen Reader Compatibility**: All images and diagrams should include detailed alt-text descriptions. - **Improve**: Suggest adding summaries for auditory engagement and simple keyboard navigation for interactive components. ### 🌍 DEIB (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging) Assessment: - **Inclusive Language**: Ensure gender-neutral language throughout the episode. - **Improve**: Encourage more representation of diverse voices, particularly in discussions about governance. ### ✅ Logical Validity: - The plugin rollback discussion followed a strong causal argument—"if updates fail, rollback will prevent site issues." - **Fallacy Watch**: No major logical fallacies noted, though the "maker vs. taker" discussion may oversimplify the complexities of contribution. ### 🔍 SEO Evaluation: - **Keywords**: "WordPress 6.7," "auto - Document Tags: [[wpbuilds]] - Summary: Another week, and we’re bringing you the latest WordPress news from the last seven days, including... - Let’s leave the #WPDrama for others to worry about shall we? We’ll concentrate upon the WordPress news in other areas… - What’s coming up in WordPress 6.7? Beta 1 is out for testing. - Automatic plugin rollbacks are a features you’ve likely not heard of, but they’re super useful and were difficult to build. Find out how difficult. - Are you a Maker or a Taker, and is this a Drupal label that we could learn from? - Web AI is coming to a browser near you and it’s going to matter for your WordPress content. - Black Friday is just around the corner and we’ve got a page starting to list all-the-deals… There’s a lot more than this, so scroll down and take a look… 00:00 Avoiding drama in WordPress episode 310. 10:23 Mark, MainWP marketing manager, starting podcast soon. 11:07 Podcast: Generational discussions with respect and learning. 16:17 Monitor weather impacts on colleagues in Orlando. 22:35 Zoom out to view ... - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnTOfhZSTYw [Music] it's time for this week in WordPress episode number 310 entitled tacos shaped hole it was recorded on Monday the 7th of October 2024 my name is Nathan Wrigley and today I am joined by co-host Michelle frett but I'm also joined by Courtney Robertson and by Mark bakine benzak Kane bener can't never quite get it right but you'll hear more about that in the show it's a WordPress podcast and we certainly have a lot to talk about to be honest with you we try to stay clear of the WordPress drama which is going on at the moment and try to hunker down on WordPress itself so we talk a lot about WordPress 6.7 beta 1 what's coming up and how you can test it we talk about automatic plugin roll backs this is the ability to roll back a plug-in which is automatically updated itself I did a podcast with Andy fragen and we get into all of that we talk about Dre from the Drupal project his opinion on how WordPress as a community can move forward from what's going on at the moment we also get into the wp campus research project they want some information from you me and everyone about WordPress and higher education we also talk about web AI baked into a Chrome browser I'm excited about about it apparently nobody else is TFA is going to be enforced to log into to wordpress.org if you are a plug-in developer and there's a whole bunch of other bits and pieces as well and it's all coming up on this week in WordPress this episode of the wp bills podcast is brought to you by GoDaddy Pro the home of manage WordPress hosting that includes free domain SSL and 247 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% of new purchases find out more at go. mewp builds and by blue host redefine your web hosting experience with blue host Cloud managed WordPress hosting that comes with lightning fast websites 100% % Network op time and 247 priority support with bluehouse Cloud the possibilities are out of this world experience it today at bluehost.com cloud and byy omnisend do you sell your stuff online then meet omnisend yes that's omnisend the email and SMS tool that helps you make 73 bucks for every dollar spent the one that's so good it's almost boring hate the excitement of roller coaster sales prefer a steady line going up try omnisend today at omnis send.com and by memberful building a membership website check out memberful memberful allows you to easily add gated content private member spaces payment collection and more to your WordPress website get started for free at m.com slw builds that's mm bf.com SL WP builds hello there good morning good afternoon good evening um and all the other good things it's um what is it it's the 7th of October um and it's this week in WordPress episode number [Music] 310 if you've tuned in to watch us drone on about the WordPress drama then uh you may as well now because we're going to try and avoid it if that's all right with you I think there's enough loudness elsewhere and so we're going to try and actually focus on some word pressy stuff which will drop into it I don't think there's any avoiding it entirely but the the plan isn't to go like thermonuclear on that topic go to Twitter just type in the hashtag WordPress and you can enjoy it all there it's all happening uh live in real time with lots of people getting I rate angry but over here we're we're going to maintain the happiness that can come from being part of an open source software Community we're just going to join forces sing Kum by and be uh be very very happy more kittens and puppies please so many more kittens and puppies yeah I've still got that video actually I might be able to must that up in a few moments um as always I like monkeys I think we need monkeys I don't I don't have monkeys on tap I'm afraid I've only got the cats uh cats dogs and next week next week next week is G be all the monkeys yeah um as always if it was just me on this show it'd be dreadfully boring because I wouldn't have it anywhere near enough stuff to say and I certainly wouldn't have the intelligence to say it well so I always bring in the intelligence the intelligence this week comes in the form of three other people first of all over there on my screen at least anyway Michelle fette co-host of the episodes which she's on nice to have you with us Michelle how's life good to be here life is good I'm a little tired because we had tell me why we had a word camp this weekend so word Camp Rochester happened on Saturday yeah and if you've ever been an organizer for a word Camp you know that Monday is difficult oh I'm I'm I'm pleased that the event is now behind you at least and can I just ask you to sum it up in a in in a shorter space of time as you feel comfortable with did you was it an enjoyable experience did you manage to talk about WordPress and not just the politics around WordPress we had 16 amazing speakers who gave some really awesome talks we had a workshop it was was phenomenal and the drama talk was absolutely very limited uh most of the attendees weren't even aware of what was going on because their business as usual so it's mostly the Insiders that were you know having some private conversations here and there but for the most part um it was just business as usual and it was a phenomenal event gosh that's really interesting because even people are attending an event they're not inside that little bubble that's fascinating I watched a Tech podcast the other day which tried to tackle the story and it was so replete with errors and I just thought you know what that's interesting that it's full of Errors because it's not that important for them to like do the factchecking it's just you know they just it's not that big of a story but of course to us it's it's a big thing anyway there she is Michelle frette she is the director of community engagement for Stella WP at liquid web in addition to her work at Stella WP Michelle is here we go the podcast Bist WP Coffee Talk co-founder of under represent easy for me to say under rep presented in tech.com creator of wpsp speakers.com and also WP career pages.com she's the direct executive director at post status.com co-host of the wp motivate podcast co-host also audacity marketing podcast and WP constellations podcast she's an author a frequent organizer and speaker as we heard an organizer of Wordpress events and is living outside of Rochester New York where she likes to take nature photographs and one final UR if you want to just check out the whole gamut of things on offer from Michelle head to meet michelle. online um yeah thank you so much for joining us once more I really appreciate to be here and we're also joined by Courtney Robertson there's Courtney how you doing Courtney I am doing well today I'm enjoying my coffee and getting started for the week had a lovely time escaping to state parks and such over the weekend okay yeah trying to get into nature well it's easy when you go where there's no mobile reception oh yeah nice cannot be bothered there yeah perfect um Courtney Robertson is an accomplished open source developer Advocate at GoDaddy a dedicated WordPress training team faculty member co-founding board member of the wp Community Collective and she engages with audiences with her relatable insights on getting involved in supporting contributors in the open source Community she's a professional educator merging her teaching expertise with her passion for technology both on and off the stage and in the WordPress Community Courtney is one of two or three people that I go to every week well I don't directly go to her I just consume all bits and pieces that she posts everywhere and sadly uh took a bit of a weekend off this weekend and so my my Fe that's okay I took a bit of a weekend off too but it was fascinating to me actually on a on that you know what's been happening in the WordPress space it was interesting that my normal roots of finding what's going on in the WordPress space came up very dry this week I would say there was about a quarter the amount of content that normally is being published in RSS speeds um and I reached out to a few people and said what's going on and they basically said it's just everything is getting drowned in all the noise so uh yeah anyway thank you so much for all that you do there's loads more to your biography I oh yes we don't need all of that but I want to give a shout out to James La who is in the chat I know James was one of the speakers for Rochester he get to go to Rochester but I had the opportunity to meet James at Monclair last year uh had some food together at the Afterparty and such and I know it was a big deal for James to be speaking at this event so congrats James looking forward to seeing one in person hopefully at a camp in our general North Mid-Atlantic vicinity in the near future nice nice nice nice I'll get to the comments in a moment but first of all I feel it's important to introduce our third and final guest there he is Mark a no oh no I know it I know it I know it um benzan yes awesome awesome I was just going to tell you to say Johnson or I got it this I had to say I had to say the word Nova came in my head first and then I got it oh dear you know as long as you as long as you spell it correctly in your head I'm good yeah well I fully appreciate you being here it was very nice to meet up with all three of you in Portland Oregon just a few weeks ago and um Mark was there too with hanging out with uh with the the person he works with Dennis Doran from mainwp and uh on that note uh Mark has been involved in the WordPress Community for over 14 years he's currently the marketing manager at Main wup which is a self-hosted nons SAS WordPress management dashboard and will soon be starting his own non WordPress related podcast you can learn more about the podcast right I'm going to have to try and pause this X V or XV SZ or Z you say podcast.com what's XV SZ what's that so it's it's a it's a basically a podcast uh where we bring in like different generations and discuss issues of the day so it's it could be politics it could be pineapple on Pizza it could be anything but the idea is that each generation this each gener yeah I know Generation X awesome but uh anyway the idea is that every generation has something to bring to the table and so so my my concept is you know like I like to think of myself as like a generation of wisdom and things like that but maybe not as much energy and and then you've got the younger Generations who have a lot of energy and a lot of ideas and creativity and you bring it in together in the same under the same roof and have like these very respectful conversations where we share our perspectives and and learn from each other and grow that's you know I I think that uh I think that Generations tend to disqualify or or dismiss other Generations ations very easily and I'd like to actually open up the dialogue a little bit more kind of like you know other ancient cultures have done over the years they've respected the wisdom of the ages but also they've also respected the the energy of the youth and and uh so that's kind of the concept and and I've been working on it for I've been working on it for about two years and I'm like okay I really got to get this thing going you got to do it yeah well I'll tell you what I've just realized I paused it utterly wrong didn't I it's X versus z x versus Z okay okay it's not which is more which will be more obvious on the website than it is like in the actual URL yeah but the the URL if you want to check it out when it finally comes out it's xvz podcast.com all one word and and I have kind of a landing page up right now but it's nothing it's it's it's work a work in progress so I don't know I don't I kind of feel in my own heart I feel like I'm still 15 but you know you have to take one look and uh sadly the reality all you have to do is talk to your kids that's right Dad you're so not cool uh yeah yeah okay so let's go to a few comments just before we do that I'll just tell you how you might comment best um the quickest way to do it is to go to wpu docomo you can see that URL on the screen wps.com you've got two options if you're logged into a Google account then you can use the chat widget on the right if you're on desktop is below if you're on a mobile and feel free go for it if you don't want to be logged into Google or you've got an objection to that that's fine you can be a non-logged in con uh conversation list if you click on the little live chat which is inside the video it's top right I think it says live chat it's in a little black what looks like a bottom that'll pop out it'll hover over the right hand side of the video so you can use that instead so send people there if you got friends relations dogs cats stick insects Beatles anything you know that you want to send here uh I'd be fascinated to see how a stick insect would come near a keyboard that would be an interesting view um but send them there and hopefully you'll be able to join in the conversation quite a few people have done that already let's have a little look see who we've got from where so we've got Lawrence Lawrence L lomy joining us from I guessing Australia James Lao just got a mention um was that right was it James that you mentioned just now yeah so congratulations to your speaking Endeavor Cameron Jones is joining us I thought Cameron was going to be on a yeah I won't go into that he sent me a message and anyway sorry Cameron I'll be quiet now um Adam is joining us saying hi Jose is also saying hola and who else have we got Max saying hi Big's joining us saying hi from is that the German flag that's the it is um what else have we got oh of course Peter ingol as he does each week joining us to tell us about the weather 16 degrees he says good good rainy morning I don't know if the two things go well together there you go rainy morning from Connecticut Conti cut easy for you to say I want to say that a lot this week uh 16 degrees 61 oh it's a palindromic number look at that 6116 I didn't know that one was one I know 82 and 28 are uh with some son on the way thank you so much Peter I really do appreciate you dropping in each week I really do uh oh yeah okay uh this is about Cameron getting blocked we who knows if we'll get into that Atif saying hello hello hello Marcus uh good morning over here headphone gang yeah we're all doing the headphones good to see you all at the start of the week Jeff joining us gosh there's so many thank you very much uh this will be Matt mados although it's marked as WP minute Mark has been involved in WordPress for 40 years it says uh okay ands like sometimes yeah I'll bet uh Cammy listening on my way to the gym this morning happy to see you all oh that's nice that's really nice and Patricia is the final one to drop on something there uh just before we hit record um and I'll bring Marcus's one up um Courtney you were saying about the fact that there's there's trouble in store in the neck of the woods where Marcus lives uh I don't know anything about it sadly do you want to just yeah yeah so uh half of my team directly at work is in the Orlando area Marcus and Adam um Adam Warner that is and I'm keeping a close eye on the weather but also if you want to check out we pressors that are near zones that we know have some major weather patterns or other natural disasters um go from your average news source to the wp World site and you could zoom in and see what pressors you may know that might be impacted by that so if you scroll down just a little bit Nathan uh halfway there you go there's a map and you could start the zoom in um towards certain areas and this works for people around the Globe now I am more aware of what my direct co-workers are facing than I am in other parts of the globe but the path right now looks like it's heading through the middle of Florida coming in from the Gulf and heading west so if you want to check in with any of your friends and loved ones in the area this might help you find some of those folks thank you Marcus for making the wp world yeah indeed and uh stay safe everybody you know I I have no real intuition as to what that means not having been in a hurricane but you know my thoughts are with you all I hope you manage to stay safe yep Nathan on each of those if someone clicks on the little uh W flag icon that's there you'll see the folks that are in that area it does not give down to street address just City level yeah okay thank you so much what a good idea so you can check in with the WordPress community over at the wp do world so the the title of the site is the wp world but the wpor if you you wanted to do that okay we do we have any more comments just David joining us as well from Phoenix hey Dave Arizona so okay right in which case we'll get stuck into the word pressy stuff before we do that just a few little bits of self-promotional nonsense I hope that's all right with you lot uh This Is Us wps.com um we are sponsored by as you can see at the moment it's GoDaddy Pro Blu host omnisend and memberful thank you so much for their ongoing support Keeps the Lights on over here once more god daddy Pro blue host omnisend and memberful you end up on on any of their properties and you genuinely did come from us don't don't feel shy mention that that was the case and it um you know that's a nice quid pro quo we we we we um have a Black Friday page it's very Spartan at the moment there's only I don't know a handful of deals but the way this goes is probably over the next week or two um companies will be contacting me and getting their deals put up there but it's at wpb.org wpbuilders docomo that on the page there it is bookmark that and then when your WordPress stuff comes over the next you know your WordPress he kind of Black Friday stuff comes around you'll be able to search and filter for it you click that little button you can do it by category by price that kind of thing as well and you can see at the moment we've got one person that sponsored us that's Mark westgard um Mark westgard has sponsored this page and if you want to do the same and get yourself on this page click this little get started button and you can find out more [Music] [Music] wpuld.you up the WordPress community over the last three months gosh Courtney we're going to have a fair amount to say during that one but thankfully the episode that you did was more or less exactly three months from the next one so hopefully things come down a little bit dear well if folks want to find out how I'm following all of this news that and keeping a pulse on the community that's the episode I'm directing everyone to go find how do this Courtney and I talked through how you uh how how Courtney actually manages to keep on top of all the things going on but I've started another show with uh Tim Nash and we're going to do the same sort of flavor uh only his is from a security position and uh we're going to call it feeling insecure uh with Tim Nash and so that was episode 392 of the wp bels podcast like I say it's going to be every quarter roughly and he's going to focus in on some things that have been happening in the security space in WordPress and then a few little tips and tricks to help you keep your site in tiptop shape okay that definitely is all the promotional stuff so let's get stuck into word pressy stuff actual word pressy stuff not the stuff going on on around WordPress so this is way more than I remembered so WordPress 6.7 beta 1 has come out if you're inexperienced oh not that's not the right word if you're not really that new if you're not really that um longstanding in the WordPress Community you might not realize that the software goes through these like beta Cycles where it's put out for testing and the more people that test it the more likely it is that the version that ships and goes into the 43% of the internet will have less bugs in it and so here we are step one normally there's three beta cycles and this is the first of those and this article which you can find written by David bwal um came out on the 1st of October so it's pretty new and it indicates some of the bits and pieces in beta 1 if you do want to test it's dead easy it's genuinely drop dead easy these days and the instructions of how to do it are just there I won't bore you with that but you can figure that out uh I would recommend this last option this playground option if you just want the super simp Le version of that okay so what's new and the answer is a boat load so we've got the new 2025 theme uh and it says some stuff here which I never kind of I don't really know how to pause it but it says here here we are I'll just read it inspired by glimpses of natural beauty and ancestry Heritage it invokes ideas of impermanence the passage of time and continuous Evolution mirroring life's journey okay um but you can check out the new theme if you download that and see what you make of it you've also got the option to zoom so this is new stuff this is all new things that are going to be dropping in so you can zoom out to compose with patterns and this idea is you've got this little icon you click it and rather than being right inside the full editor everything just zooms right out so that you can see everything oh gosh imagine sort of like in a Google doc just clicking the the minus button and taking the the size of the page down it just gets smaller and smaller and smaller so that if you've got a complicated big pattern you could see everything that's going on it's really cool You' got try it to see and it it just does exactly what it says you get one eyeball on the whole thing you can see all of it in one shot without the detail media improvements you'll now be able to upload directly from your iPhone with the heic uh image format uh it's not going to keep that because most web browsers won't display it or at least some won't display it it's going to turn it into a JPEG that's all happening uh expanded block supports um so basically some blocks are going to have an extended range of options the preview options API this one's a little bit above my pay grade but it says here the latest WordPress release enhances the preview options in the block editor empowering developers to customize content views a new API allows plug-in and themes to add custom items to preview download drop- down menu enabling users to see content in different formats or environments and seemingly quite a few theme developers are exceedingly happy about this and um I'm sure they could explain more why uh data views s which is the ability to add different context to your uh lists if you like of posts and pages and things like that in WordPress uh that's shipped in 6.5 and there's going to be more features added into that block bindings so that you can connect one thing to another thing um that's going to be uh you're going to be able to manage it directly so it says uh 6.7 will add polish to and open most underlying apis improving the overall user experience and add a UI which allow you to connect attributes with custom Fe felds to their binding sources dead cool really interesting a simplified and smarter query loop block um edit and control font size presets view meta boxes in and in the I'm framed post editor so you can sort of decople the meta boxes from the from the content editor which means that you can sort of like push it out the way if you like making it bigger the area that you're editing the content in really big and I think that's it I mean like that's it that's it that's it yeah is it so basically there's a boatload in there okay and just reset right cast your mind back two and a half weeks ago I think we all lost sight of this the software like like I said at the beginning of the show if you want to do the drama have that fun on Twitter or whatever I'm back to being about the project um and there it is there's the project in a nutshell a ton of features yeah can I confess something here uh I firmly believe in testing this is not a the test test test this is not a confession um at that point so the next test window uh for beta 2 we have going on at um midnight UTC into Tuesday so for me that is 800m Eastern time I will be present uh for that one but the confession comes that I caused the rebuild because I showed up to the release party and Nathan at the top so the rebuild means that something happened before we shipped um there is the party schedule you could see what time this is all taking place in coure inside of a slack chat um the general policy is once the release starts you could like tell the world the releases beginning but you don't say it's out or anything until it's done uh so could take an hour it could take a little longer the betas tend to be a little slower during the release party than others especially if you're like me and you find a thing that because is the rebuild before we ship so what I found is that on the um this is why I show up to these things Nathan do you still have the the post up that had the uh the the info about if you scroll down to the part where it has the testing playground right there oh we that one yeah that one so this link um I helped Adam zalinsky customize a blueprint that uh comes with what's called theme unit test data which means that if you're going to test the query block you probably want some content you don't want to have to make six posts to test the query block so it's already included along with other Dev kind of plugins and ways to quickly log your tickets and issues in the right places it's great so um that picked up the new theme but whenever I was testing on upgrading an existing site with Andy Fagan uh in that case it did not find that 2025 was bundled in when you're doing an update like I had an existing site and I was upgrading it and because 2025 is the big new theme of the year which I'm super excited about um it's pretty important that we get folks in there in testing so I went to run the update and said uh Team should I be seeing this in here so even if you're not a really skilled developer it's worth testing these things and anyone that works for a Plugin or a theme company or even hosts absolutely should get in here and test test test because you find weird Edge case things like Des AIP file upload uh we need to make sure we test these things and so please if you can come to the release parties due and if you cannot slot some time that on each release you test if you are building your own plugins or what have you against it um and the more eyes that we have on things the more stable we are and really stay I'll just post these back on the screen for the benefit of people's calendars so obviously the first one the beta one happened already that was last Tuesday but you can see the Cadence is every Tuesday from now on Tuesday the 8th is number two Tuesday the 15th number three RC stands for release candidate and it just carries on 22nd 29th all Tuesdays Tuesday November the 5th release candidate 3 and the intention is to ship uh on Tuesday the 12th so you can you can sort of see how that whole project works you have sort like this eight week Cadence or it's maybe a little bit more than that but we're right at the top of that so you've got a chance to uh get your get your voice in there um okay so there was loads in there I'm just going to hand it let me just reduce the size of that hand it over to either Mark or Michelle if they've got anything they wanted to add some things in there that they like or or not if not we'll move on I just kind of feel like uh WordPress may be bringing sexy back which is which is kind of cool so which bit which bit are you well you know I think I I think the new theme actually sounds uh pretty cool and and actually I know that this uh I don't know I kind of like the uh the ey frame thing a little bit I think that's kind of cool too um just just kind of pull that out and separate oh yeah and the zooming the the ability to zoom in I really like that so yeah I don't know it just seems like it's uh it I I wonder about how fast all that will be um but I uh I have been inspired by Courtney's uh last five minute talk about actually testing the beta which I have always uh kind of skipped um but I I I I think I may actually after this I may actually load it up on a test site and and run some tests on it and see all the descriptions and how cool it is and and uh uh and maybe uh you know maybe maybe people start thinking that WordPress is a little less boring again yeah and also just concentrate on the stuff right the actual bit of software that we're about sorry Courtney I cut you off oh one thing markor sorryy just one second uh Mark may not bother you at all but on this short this clipped version where we got the screen shared and there's the four of us on the right the we can only see from your like nose upwards I don't know if you can oh really yeah I don't know if you want to twist the camera down or well I I can I can I can hop up and lower the camera a bit Yeah sit up straight okay sorry I know yeah no thanks for pointing that out because my nose is my least attractive feature so you know that's the last thing you need to see there you go that's today I'm just grabbing the link that on the test team site there's directions for what what would be helpful From org's perspective that you test but also please my own acknowledgement is uh extend that testing into also trying it against any of the things that you maintain um and I could speak more to that another time okay so there's a post here that Cy just pasted in I I'll try to get it in the show notes uh it's called Help test WordPress 6.7 So speaking to what you were just saying there is the laundry list awesome of ways to go and the things that they want so that was um anit Gupta on 1 of October 2024 and Courtney I will probably lose this link so I'll hit you up afterwards to give it to me again show Notes too I'll put it in the show yeah anyway so there we go Michelle anything you want to add before we move on I I love the poetic language around 2025 I think it sounds like it's going to be really beautiful this bit here nice yeah um I've never been that good with poetry to be honest you know when you know when you were in school and the teacher would be reading out the poem and loads of the kids would be like yeah I get it it's really mean I was was a kid I don't know I I'm not I'm not feeling it so that's not me denigrating what's been written there but I I struggle to pause that kind of thing uh okay that's there you go so WordPress 6.7 bet to one hopefully by November so not that far away now few weeks we'll have a nice shiny new version of Wordpress let's go back to the live chat see if there's anything that's coming here uh Dennis joining us um saying safe to the Floridians is that how you pronounce it Floridian um the people in Florida who obviously got the you know the the sort of you pronounce that better than you pronounce my last name okay I feel bad now col Colin says Colin Devo says uh I'm guessing he's talking about the release this uh is great for us plug-in development oh yeah any testing to test our plugins against the upcoming releases Cameron um yeah he says it's time for bed it's late where he is of course it's probably like 11: at night um hoping the soothing tones of Nathan Wrigley rocks me to sleep good grief um no oh there's no pressure then uh if Cameron's still here at the end of the episode we know that it didn't work and Lawrence who's also in Australia says it's a time change in Australia making it AIT bit hard to watch okay well I'm sorry about that um we'll keep it probably at the same time just because it yeah one of one of my friends calls your voice the audio um uh what's uh bulldozer no the the sleep aid I can't think of the the oh like a throwing pan to The Forum no it's like Valium you're saying I sound like volum I love it knocks you out oh that's great I uh sweet D tone Oh that's kind thank you whoever they are say thank you in a nice soothing smooth voice uh Elliot saying hi that's nice ated Applause uh for moving on and focusing on the project itself though without heads in the sand of course yes Colin I appreciate it it was a it was a it was a definite decision and not a hard one it it came quite easily the the desire to talk about something else Patricia says the mentorship program starts today and we'll invite all mentees to test okay so that's another bit of news that I seem to have missed sorry Patricia so um Patricia um if you want to drop any more comments in that like URLs or anything like that that would be fun fine she loves your nose um Mark so say your nose is perfectly fine I appreciate that uh Tim okay well I'll I'll cancel that appointment with the plastic later way cheaper just to stay with what you've got um Tim we've already mentioned the podcast episode that we did the other day but I appreciate you joining us and a shout out to all who contributed to the call for testing post I worked on it for 6.4 and it is a load of work indeed indeed indeed indeed yeah isn't that interesting we got three things around that just that one thing so we've obviously got this long post then we had this one uh the help testing one and then we also had this one there's a lot of work goes into this let alone you know let alone the actual software uh which itself had to be up to that point speaking of the software I was lucky enough to um to attend word Camp uh Us in Portland a few weeks ago and one of the people that I spoke to because I I went there so that I could do podcast there episodes for the tavern WP Tavern and one of the people that I spoke to um I was saying earlier about Courtney you know giving me all the things to say on this show if memory serves courney I think you you collided me with Andy Fagan I think it was you um and I love Connecting People yeah well I appreciate that it was really really helpful Andy okay firstly let's get something out the way right Andy contributes to Wordpress um in a very very high level way like you know he he gets the code he's very expert at that and so you're kind of thinking he's probably working for an agency you know he's fairly high up in the agency he's been doing this no no what Andy does is Andy Saves people's lives actual lives because he's a trauma surgeon and once you've got over that thing and think wait hang on that's a pretty high-powered career and he said to me he has literally actually answered support questions whilst in the you call the emergency room right so he's he's he's almost ready to go but the prep hasn't started for what whatever reason so he's got himself a he's got a few minutes you know lying around and he thinks I'll just whip out the laptop he's one of the few people that could take a scalpel to both humans and cod but he's So Graceful with it I mean he just I think he's described it as the only fungible commodity we've got is time and so he obviously sees that as an important you know mechanism if he's got time he's going to try and use it so when when your jaw comes off the floor that he's a trauma surgeon and is committing to Wordpress core then go and listen to this episode we get into that a little bit because it is interesting but he was one of the people and they're mentioned in this podcast episode who have created a feature in WordPress core that let's hope a never it needs to be used and if it is used you'll probably never like you you might not even kind of know you will know but you it's not like you're going to go rushing out to Andy and saying oh thank you so much but you should so quite a while ago WordPress shipped the ability to switch on automatic updates for plugins so you go in and you click the word it says I don't know enable auto update or something like that in the plug-in screen and it thinks for a moment and and then it says yeah it's enabled from that moment on if the WordPress repository has an update to that your website will just find it on its cron schedule and it will update itself but what the heck happens if it goes wrong you could be in really big a much worse problem than you were in before so the idea was let's build Auto roll backs for automatic updates now you say like oh yeah we'll just roll it back yeah piece of cake that'll be easy no no no no no no no it turns out that was fantastically hard um not just hard from the point of view difficult to execute there were just so many weirdy exceptions like that they had to take care of and honestly I'm listening to it thinking if that was me that exception I would just I just ignore that one it's like no. no no one% of the population used that no no no they did it by the book so go and have a listen to that episode about how they did it and thank you to people like Andy who just doggedly commit to core and make our lives so much better you know if you got a a website that you never want a touch you just want to set it up set it up and forget it this kind of feature really does in the future make that kind of thing possible so brilliant brilliant brilliant and um I don't know if any of you have got anything to say about that it's a brilliant feature but it's the kind of feature that you'll never know about particularly you know so there we go anybody I just how great of a guy Andy is I I mean he's like one of the most humble people you'll ever meet and you'd never know he's like probably the smartest guy in WordPress but uh yeah I've known him for a long time and I consider him a friend and and uh we used to hang out in the same Southern California meetups and stuff oh nice oh yeah yeah just a fantastic fantastic guy I didn't even know he was a trauma surgeon until probably a year after I met him wow yeah and that was the moment you were on a table underneath the knife and it was like wait hang on it it's Andy actually actually it's a it's a little bit like that um if everyone knows John Brown John Brown actually was in the hospital uh a few years ago uh where he had some sort of a a brain thing I can't remember what it was exactly but um but Andy ended up like working on him and that's when I was like wait Andy Fagan you know and so yeah I was like he's he's so he's so humble uh and he's so freaking smart um I've been fortunate enough to go to dinner with him once twice and just yeah uh great guy to talk to I mean you could talk to him for hours so he's one of the kind kindest people as well he really is so generous yeah yeah if he's not got burning ears at the moment then he really should have I don't want to give I don't want to give him a big head but you know but we will um the the thing I want to say about Andy in this case is that I am really glad that it was recorded on the tavern especially because I've been watching this thing build momentum when I worked at the events calendar a lot of us were using git updator which is a plugin Andy has and if I was doing you know I like to test things before they get out and try and break them before so that other people don't break them later uh so when I worked at the events calendar we were using git updator and Andy's developed a pro version of that now but what it did for me was the ability to basically toggle between the beta version of the plug-in and the stable version because I had to bounce back and forth between writing technical documentation for the knowledge base and answering support q and all of those things um Andy has just solved so many things that developers face as challenges and it was great to hear the backstory of the crew working on this in a recorded place because Andy only has so much time and I'd rather him use the time how he wants to but all of us should know this story and I don't expect him to tell it to everybody oneon-one so thank you for recording that that was the thing about the episode we don't we don't really get into the nuts and the bolts of the codess is the story and the story is really interesting and it goes back like a decade or more um where this thing was suggested and it never happened um and then obviously Gutenberg came along and made that whole proposition a whole lot more difficult and finally have achieved it and they've I think he said that in the time it's been in core they've only had one example where it didn't work and he was able to solve it at word Camp Portland somebody came up and said oh this happened he was like oh I know why that is I'll just hang on did a quick fix and obliterated that problem so really interesting fantastic feature kind of quality of life thing that you'll probably never know is happening but it's all baked into core now and make means that you can confidently switch on uh updating your plugins automatically so here we go um Tim Nash is saying Andy is amazing massive shout out for all of the work he's done on the automatic updates yeah that's lovely uh Graham Tucker howdy from Atlanta please be careful and consider reloca if you live in Florida okay is that is that where is that where people go do they go to your state hi everyone says Ali nice to have you with us Colin uh commenting on the feature that we're talking about the automatic roll backs a great feature however nerd press found a bug in the automatic update rollback feature this past week for sites on shared hosting and will be you can't see it on the screen so I'll just keep reading we'll be documenting and Reporting it okay there you go um I bet you Andy will be all over it um and Camy says that she met him in Portland yeah have a listen it's on the tavern website now it's episode number I think it's 139 uh yeah there it is 139 anything else before we move on give it a listen okay yeah give it a listen please do yeah so we are going to sort of stray into the uh the stuff that's been going on in the WordPress space but we're going to we're going to come at it from a different angle uh we're not com at it so that we can explain all the drama so you can get hot under the collar we're going to offer somebody's perspective from outside of the WordPress community and this is the Dre bagart I think that's how you pronounce it I've heard it a variety of different ways but I'm going to go with Dre bagart or bagart something like that now if you don't know Dre Dre is the founder Courtney did you manage to find out whether founder singular was correct or not I believe so I'm found singular yeah yes um of the Drupal project now Drupal is a CMS in the same way as WordPress is it's got a really Vibrant Community it's probably nowhere near the size of the WordPress Community but you know what you go back 20 years and roll the dice it had everything in it it could have been Drupal it could have been WordPress it just sort of ended up being WordPress for a variety of different reasons the point being uh the Drupal Community has many of the same problems that the WordPress Community has um and we obviously over the last few weeks have encountered a fairly gigantic problem and so Dre decided I'm going to put pen to paper or I'm going to put pixels on a screen to say what they did in the Drupal Community because they saw uh this problem and took some action early on now I guess one thing that you could say in the mix here is that because the Drupal Community is smaller maybe it's easier to turn that ship around and it is the WordPress Community um but Dre encapsulates the problem as maker and AK so if in the WordPress space you're thinking about people who contribute and people who don't just think about it like that you know people that contribute you could generally classify as makers and people who are in the community but only consume its resources and I guess you could describe it as profit from it purely profit from it you could describe those as takers and so he goes on and he he lays out the the story of you know how this all happened in the WordPress community but then if we scroll down um we we learn that Drupal has got what's called a credit system in place so that if you are a maker you contribute you earn credits and if you are a taker you don't earn credits and I think that's true right it's not like you get credits taken away I don't think in air quotes I'm doing air quotes I don't think bad behavior can consumes your credits you know it's not like you've got 20 this week and you did something silly and so you got 10 this week I think it's you just don't earn them you don't earn any more but the point is here we go um and so the it's the Drupal Foundation or the Drupal open source Community whatever the the thing is um this is what they've done and this is how they accomplish it so they say things like benefits like event sponsoring or advertising on drupal.org are reserved for organiz ations with a minimum number of credits the Drupal Marketplace so think I don't know wordpress.org or something like that uh is only available only lists makers ranking them by their contributions actually it's probably not wordpress.org I imagine it's something different in that case organizations that CH stop contributing gradually drop in ranking and are eventually removed we encourage end users to require open- Source contributions from their vendors Drupal users like fiser and state of Georgia only allow makers to apply in the vendor selection process so you're going to get more clients because some clients literally say we won't allow you to build our Drupal website unless you are a certified maker now I know what you're going to say to me I I actually don't know what you're going to say to me you could say anything frankly but this is what I anticipate how do you enforce it and how do you keep it fair good job Dre figured that one out as well here's what he's got to say to make the contribution system Credit Credit system Fair it benefits from an of an O oversight from an independent neutral party in the D Drupal ecoystem the Drupal Association fills this critical role the Drupal Association operates independently free from control by a single company within the Drupal ecosystem some of the Dr Drupal Association respon responsibilities include organizing events Drupal cons managing drupal.org overseeing the contribution tracking and credit system and then he makes some recommendations for WordPress he says ex what WordPress could do is expand the current governance model to be more distributed provide clear definition of makers and takers within the ecosystem Implement a fair and objective system for tracking and valuing various types of contributors and Implement a structured system of rewards for makers who meet specific thresholds priority placement at events increased visibility on the wordpress.org website opportunity to exhibit at WordPress events or access to key services now caveator I am not advocating any of that I'm reading it right I'm just reading it off the page it's Drew it's Dre's idea so don't come after me with the pitchforks just saying this is what somebody else thinks and this is somebody who is is closer to this than I am you know they've got a community and all so right what do you think do you think Dre's idea's got legs or is this just you know blowing hot air from another Community which doesn't quite matter map on to the WordPress community so go on over to you silence who wants to go first no it's okay no so okay so I'm trying not aware that I have sorry let me and then I'll follow let me caveat something first right um You don't need to say anything uh if you've got nothing to say just don't say anything I'm totally happy I've I've just read out Dre's ideas I know you know you there's the potential for this to sort of go off in a different direction I don't want it to so I don't want anybody to say something uh under jurus for me that's the last thing I want so if you want to just move on from this article we totally can but I'm just there it is the one thing I do want to say is that I don't and I mentioned this last week and I committed to doing a webinar which I am working on right now actually is that I don't think enough people understand how to build their wordpress.org profiles to actually comment or you know commit their hours um to different uh make teams and I think that setting up your WordPress profile is an important thing if you are going to be a contributor to the community and so I want to help people be able to do that it's not enough to just have a login so that you can you know favorite plugins and things like that I think if you really want to be um a robust commun uh contributor to our community having more information in there like maybe even just your name as opposed to some you know strange handle or something but also being able to say which make teams you are working on how many hours a week you're doing that so that the information that's being com you know transmitted over to F for the future and things like that would also be more accurate and so that's one of the things that I'm committed to helping people do okay interesting so that there's some sort of relationship between what you put in and some visible um thing that you get out it might be a badge or something like that okay that's interesting so it is a bit like the sort of credit system actually thinking about it this the bits that I read kind of refer it's definitely companies it's not it's not really mentioning individuals in Dre's article is it so that is a bit right but individuals are part of the companies right so yeah yeah so like for for Stellar WP my hours as an individual person count towards the company right so that's and I want other people to understand how to make that work into and it's it's an honor System so I could say I'm putting 40 hours in there and nobody's going to say is she right I mean I didn't do that I put my four hours a week in that kind of thing um but it's an honor System and so we ask people to be um honest with the their contributions and maybe this week I did two hours and maybe last week I did you know 10 because of a word Camp what is your average number of hours that you're contributing to the community on a weekly basis and that's the information that we really want to know yeah one of the things that um Dre mentioned and I could I might be making this upright because I read it a little while ago and then reread just quickly reread it today I have a feeling that these people are in some way separated from the community and there's a panel of four of them which make decisions and they have to be like there has to be a chorum to make the decisions and no one person gets to override the decisions so there's got to be some general consensus was it four or 12 you mean it was documented yeah the fact that it's documented that so so uh that's what I've been asking Matt about whenever I speak to these things and it came up you know even in uh my question to Matt right after the address at us is can we document what the procedures are because otherwise it feels like we have moving targets um and that the rules can change and that's a challenge then because um getting the Buy in that that organizations need for funding contributing um when the rules feel like they can flex and change it's harder then to make the case because it's at the whim of perhaps information we don't all know about and that gets all these big feelings and in Drupal um I know that this it was a challenge when they implemented this and in fact um somebody Roger at kinsta thank you Roger for doing this when Dre made the post on LinkedIn to share his link uh Roger tagged me in and it opened a conversation a bit between D and I and I shared here is what we're doing in the contributor dashboards initiative and contributor dashboards um I shared the link we don't have to show it on the screen again right now I have it no no I'll pop it up we don't we don't really it's yeah so from there you can track off to the various teams that we have so far consider this an MVP some of it is very manual we are automating though Gathering the data that can be gathered so for instance it's hooked up to GitHub right now we have the opportunity to hook up uh slack to it pending budget but additionally there are some other areas I'm going to talk with Otto about getting track data piped into the source of some of the dashboards it is just solely activity points it is not necessarily an hourly pledge but the activity points should help verify the hourly pledge and if someone is doing knowledge work that work that cannot be automatically tracked or attributed then I think drupal's crediting system certainly comes into play and I I just want to say community I am super glad that you're looking at like what other how do other projects solve some of the same things because we are a very large bubble but we stay in our bubble sometimes and learning how others have addressed this wins and losses pros and cons understand just because that worked for their Community doesn't work for ours necessarily but it might spark ideas that might improve our experience and um I think is a bit of our way forward so I'm curious to talk with uh if I manage to have a good conversation further with trees to understand from that perspective what were the challenges that he as a Founder faced as well and getting that buy in I'll tell you the the idea of makers versus takers is a lot easier for me to go to my Executives and say versus let's explain for someone that is not particularly acquainted with open source what does the cathedral and the bizaar mean or free riter or tending the commons right like we got to boil it down because these people are not their their their heads space is not solely in open source they are dealing with other issues in life too and so they are very smart individuals but the learning curve to jump into open source and understand them why organizations need to do this funding we need something distilled down that is still at their language skill level but is not uh going to involve a lot of research into these open source philosophies the nice thing that I took from it is that it was really that's a really easy thing to pass right it's binary it's take us and makers but but also it's all carrot right everything's carrot there's no stick uh yep you know the stick is kind of the lack of a carrot um you know so if you don't contribute you just don't get the extra stuff um which is fine you know in that scenario not contributing is you're just not getting the stuff so you can't I don't know appear in the marketplaces and things like that that I quite like it's also a good time to mention that just the the four in the dashboards that Courtney had up that you had up there a second ago aren't the only ways to contribute like all of the make channels are contributions yes so just because it's not measurable through GitHub or something like that like I organized a Work Camp last week right and so right yeah but I mean at this point I just want people to realize that you don't have to be a developer to contribute to Wordpress I've been doing it for years and I have written maybe 30 lines of code in my entire life and so um and that was not something that contributed to Wordpress uh so you know you don't have to be a developer you can work in community you can work in marketing you can work in the photos uh you can do testing all these other things to be part of the contribution to Wordpress thank you um Mark anything to add you know I you just you just brought up something and I really debating whether or not to cross this because it might get a little bit into the drama but I sort of wonder if you you bring up the carrot part and I wonder if one of the reasons that that the drama exists right now one of the main reasons is that I think we all thought that it was all carrot and WordPress too and then all of a sudden the stick came out and and um I out of you know Dre's article you know the one thing that I think everybody keeps talking about and bringing up is is this idea of an independent oversight uh commit committee that kind of decides what counts and what doesn't but also the you know having kind of a rule book or or a Playbook uh so that we know because um the interesting thing is the closest thing that we have to that is a five for the future you right contribution program right and it's interesting uh the dialogue that's gone on over the last couple of weeks to see how many people didn't really know what counted as contributing and what did and and all of that and so if nothing else I mean I also try to look at like what's the positive of all this stuff that's come out one of the things right now and and actually like people are becoming aware and once the shock settles down and whatnot well we may actually like be able to build something that that is you know as as simple as maker versus taker you know as far as understanding goes but actually has a little bit more meet to it so we have a better understanding of of what all is involved uh with the the contribution process yeah it'll be interesting because obviously we've got this what feels like a big inflection point at the moment um and and it'd be interesting to see if any of these things do come into play whether or not um as a project we have you know we reach out and try to figure out what other projects are doing because obviously there's value in other people's thoughts as well speaking of that let's just just raise a few things J James noticed the uh slightly pregnant pause as well none of us none of us wanted to get into that but we did I think we did it and we did it well so congratulations the three three panelists uh brilliant I think we've sidest stepped that uh Tammy says it's not an easy problem to solve um but we're going to solve it together uh by listening to all the needs of contribution right that's been my thing this last couple of weeks is just get my head down and just keep listening see what everybody else is saying equally though she carries on uh equally though we need to ensure our essential contributions are covered we often distract saying not code and leave those areas with people uh leaving and unsponsored thank you very much and um I don't I don't even know what this is what what is that that's got like what is that can anybody help me out it's got like a dollar amount attached to them yeah I think in there I've seen YouTube doing this in a couple spots and like on Theo's in interview with Matt a week ago I see that I think there's some Financial way of uh in YouTube chat making sure your comment gets really highlighted by Kick really gram given like I haven't learned it all yet but no idea uh gram if you've just given me some money I I I have no words uh if that's what I have no idea whether you just did that and if you did I'm uh I'm eternally grateful I shall out and buy a um buy a coffee or something and I will say cheers to you thank you very much um written on top of a purple heart it says uh that's a oh it's called a super chat I believe okay right from this moment on grahe you're a maker you are a maker everybody else just taken you just Tak come to these comments you don't give me the cash Mark Andrew okay but I have no idea so apparently take coffee that's honestly I don't want to get derailed by this because it's not the point uh is okay I'm rich apparently yeah thank you I thought the money went to you maybe it will thank you Graeme I appreciate it whoa no wait what the heck's happening this isn't real Andrew and noad skateboarding character if you see these on YouTube themselves then you'll understand the descrition that's a description of an emoi okay okay so there's a so Nomad skateboarding is just a $5 okay F let's firstly greatly appreciated thank you very much let's move on I appreciate that ever so ever so much I suddenly feel too old to be on YouTube me too Tammy yeah thank you same um that's amazing thank you to noad skateboarding and gra Tucker okay that's great right right right what's next okay we're going to go to this one first of all let let me get that Chat thing off the board there I didn't know you could do that that's fascinating YouTube is amazing isn't itend one place Nathan yeah yeah that's right yeah uh okay so we we're gonna just deal with this one um no Fallout but this was just an interesting one obviously um Matt mullenweg has uh was the sort of the prime mover in the well I suppose he would argue differently but in in terms of the debate and the way it started over the last few days I I'm saying that when he stood on stage at word Camp Europe he was the prime mover in letting us all know that there was something that was about to happen and clearly uh quite a few of the automatici the people that work for automatic um obviously in some way let him know that this what was what was going on wasn't in line with what they were thinking and so automatic decided that they would have this thing called um alignment I can't remember the Eco what did they call it I think it was just automatic alignment or something like that where they they offered all the staff automatic um a way to opt out of being an automatici anymore you know in other words if your thought process was disagreeing with Matt's thought process uh here's a quick way that you can extricate yourself from this so that it doesn't get messy and it will stay simple for both sides automatic and ex automatici and so what they did was I thought it just kind of interesting they offered oh the alignment offer is what they called it so you had a few short days you had to you had to make your decision by Thursday the 3rd of October and and it was a binary stay no stay if you stayed everything carried on as normal I'm imagining um but if you decided to go then you would be offered $330,000 or six Monon salary whichever was higher uh you would however lose access to automatic almost immediately that same evening and you would never be eligible to be rehired so you were making you know you're making your bed and you were lying it if you like 159 people so 8.4% of the company decided to go for that which obviously tells you that a lot of people didn't 91.6% was the remainder they gave up so Matt's obviously calculated what that would have meant um 126 million pounds uh dollars sorry um that would potentially been what he would have had to pay out uh 63.5% were male 53% were in the US 79% were involved in What's called the ecosystem business which is I guess more WordPress facing and 18.2 were Cosmos which is other things like Pocket Cast day one Tumblr and things like that and uh one person who decided to go left two days after joining automatic and I presume under the offer they still got the $30,000 or six month salary and uh I guess Matt's added that in because it's you know it's kind of kind of an interesting statistic if you were that person that's a very interesting two days work kind of a big Roi on two days wor the work yeah um so I just like i' put that out there I don't know if this is like a normal thing to do I presume it's like quite abnormal a thing to do but I guess for Matt at least anyway you know he's got to concentrate on whatever it is that he is going to be in the future having the knowledge that your company is is the way it is and that you've given these people the opportunity to to remove themselves and so presumably uh you've got a company that is aligned with you and all the employees are aligned with you it does raise the question I guess in my head is if you lose close to 10% 88.4% of your Workforce overnight I presume that was just peppered throughout different teams I don't know how you quite manage the um the Fallout of that you know if certain key staff left and obviously it's not on this screen but a tweet came out uh there's a brew Hara about that as well but the the bottom line is the executive director josepher Hayden chomos um has also left automatic um as well which was kind of an interesting development so I don't know if you've got anything you want to say about that if not I'll just move on but I thought that was certainly newsworthy chlo and naoko have o taken leave naoko assumed the role that Angela jyn had held um Angela left about a month ago um Hari Shankar has remained and it will be interesting to see the Community Management of wordpress.org moving forward having those significant leaders um that have taken their leave and my only wish is that you know they've they've chosen what is right for them for sure um and I'm looking forward to continuing on and contributing to word press with Hari as we work on the dashboards and the new contributor mentorship and get into all sorts of other good fun together uh but it's it's got my heart feeling pretty heavy yeah it was kind of interesting that there was quite a lot of automatici who clearly felt the need to publicly um state that they hadn't left maybe there was some speculation and they just wanted to avoid that and so there was quite a lot of tweets BAS Bally was just two words you know I stayed or something like that and so you were able to figure out on social media if if the people that you were I don't know in relationships with or maybe working with or what have you had uh had managed to stay so uh best of luck to everybody who's made that decision or obviously you know the best will in the world I hope that this turned out to be the the right thing for you I'm sure that you know I'm sure that it will be anybody else before we move on it seemed like a a good way to work within your company with being a a generous way to allow people to opt out yeah yeah indeed yeah yeah yeah okay yeah the only thing I would the only thing I'd add is um I think we as a community need to be careful not to whichever side of the coin you fall on this particular issue just be careful not to judge the uh the people in the decisions um because uh we don't know what went into their decision and and I I don't like seeing that animosity uh when it comes to the the choosing sides of of things and and uh everybody has their own story and they got to pay their bills so right right that's totally it right I mean I imagine that there's a there's a proportion of the people who've stayed who um maybe would have made a different decision had they not have got the constraints of the the economics of life let's just call it that you know family and what have you right um and so I guess we can't read into the decision you stayed as I am going to be this sort of benign um feature uh figure in the future maybe you've stayed because you you needed to more than anything else and there may be disagreements still still to come it's an ongoing story we'll uh we'll see how it goes okay all right so um back to some sort of community related type news this is over oh gosh I've clicked the wrong button there apologies about that where are we here we are this one um WP campus which the strapl line of that is where WordPress meets higher education they are on the lookout for information from people if you're connected in any way with WordPress and higher education or I don't know maybe you've just got an interest in that you don't necessarily have to be involved this article says announcing dou campus research project on the state of Wordpress in higher education um and this came out just a couple of days ago five days ago wkp campus is excited to launch a large scale research project which they're calling the state of press in higher education in partnership with human made the aims of the project are to Spotlight the challenges goals frustrations hop streams of people working with WordPress in higher ed to examine organization considerations text facts governance and more WP campus and I guess that should say human made uh will share all of the uh findings publicly so if this is something that you're interested in uh you can click this big blue button links to this article in the show notes but it's over at WP campus.org I have to say I'm not in any communities which kind of where those two things Collide but obviously there is enormous uh interest in higher education and WordPress and so obviously trying to figure out what that is uh I guess I'm guessing just reading between the lines I'm guessing that human Ma's um portfolio maybe there's an overlap there maybe human made build websites for a lot of um Edge higher ed websites I don't know um anyway if you want to contribute to that you can anything or shall I press on just a reminder that um WP campus was also behind the um Le fundraising and some research on accessibility within WordPress a few years back as well okay thank you very much uh just going back to the post that we said a moment ago uh Daven uh says 100% Agreed 100% everyone has their own story thank you and uh here here I second Mark's View thank you so much that was from Graham uh who who is a maker by the way just saying you know just you know so I don't know what to make of this I just genuinely that's freaked me out I didn't even know that was a thing and there's like dollar amount suddenly on the on the thing wow uh right okay moving on before I stop stop breathing um okay so this is just so interesting and just snuck right under the radar I kind of feel that if Pascal had put this piece out three weeks ago everybody would have been like just totally all over it but it it's come out at this period where obviously there's a lot of noise elsewhere so straping um AI everybody is talking about it right I I don't care who you are even if you hate it you're using it a bit you know you are you're just a tiny little bit somewhere you've used it um and obviously there's a cost to that it requires you to connect to some third party API like chat GPT or gemini or whatever it might be and you're paying for it there'll be a cost associated with that there'll be a bit of lag you're you know you're propping up one company that you might not know too much about anyway Pascal who is a uh he's an Google employee and he works on is he on the performance team somebody helped me out I think yeah thanks nod in ahead I think he's on the performance team um so doing great work over there a little while ago he introduced us to some things that you could do in the browser which was like I don't know upload an image directly into a uh WordPress post and it would be done handled by the browser not by some sort of upload service right so it turns out that in the what do they call it the canary version of Chrome a lot of this AI is is now in the browser so I'll just let that snc in for a minute so it's in the browser and it's if it's not in the browser that you've got it's coming soon these llms are going to be inside the browser and so that got Pascal thinking H what can we do with that and the answer is a lot now first thing it's not in your browser unless you're on the canary build it's a stripped down version so it runs now which one was it it's something called Gemini Nano so Google's llm Google's AI Endeavors are called Gemini and there's this thing called Gemini Nano which I don't know much about but I'm guessing it's you know they've stripped it down to the Bare Essentials made it smaller so it can C carry out certain tasks and presumably it can be on device and that's the point right it's all happening on device in your browser so there's a load of technicalities here we'll just quickly scoll scroll through it and we'll get to the interesting bit for a WordPress podcast if WordPress call wants to offer AI capabilities to each and every one of its users it can't jeopardize users privacy by relying on expensive thirdparty Services I'm just going to inject a little bit of my own thoughts into there you're still using Google's AI right so presumably there's a caveat there but it's not leaving the device I'm guessing would be Pascal's position there so here's some other things that you could do right remember so this is all happening in the browser none of it's going off to CH GPT or anything like that so he says well why don't we write a post and then get the browser's AI to summarize it so he's built a button so use this Gemini Nano to do just that and if you're watching on the screen you can see these little videos that he's put together what about if you've written an article and you can't be bothered to do the SEO step so the metad descriptions and what have you you can't be bother with that just click a button get it to do it that's fine um you could summarize bullet pointer elaborate shorten or rephrase is what we've got here and again you can see it on the screen we're not stuck with text though what about if you want to generate some images or some alternative text to go with those images again it's great you don't need to go anywhere else it's done inside the browser help generate some meaningful quotes assign tags and categories to blog posts do sentiment analysis to see if you're on the right you know if you're on the right uh course for comments and things like that and all of this is happening in the browser so this to me feels like that moment that I saw playground and when what what happened what just what just happened there because it was all done in the browser this feels pretty transformative to me like it's in the browser that's one thing but it's bound now inside of Wordpress and you're clicking buttons to do all the Fab things that you see uh with things like chat GPT sorry I got really excited there and droned on far too long but I'm hoping you're excited as well uh over to you nobody's I like the Tinker I like the tink no I like the tinker and this makes this is something I'd like to Tinker with yeah but does it not does it not like like one of the whole things about the AI thing is it freaks me out that all that data is going off and you know you might have written the most heartfelt thing imaginable and you've sent it off to chat GPT I just love the fact that it's in the browser and you can ship a version of Wordpress which is agnostic you don't need that API key it just feels pretty cool or but on the other hand if you write something heartfelt then it goes out to the world isn't that what we all want anyway so yeah yeah you're right okay yeah good good catch there mark yeah you've undermined that argument yeah okay uh Courtney Michelle I get nothing no same gosh I thought that was really interesting okay it's just yeah it really no that's all yeah it's it is but it but like you said it's flown under the r and because of that I I don't know about the other two panelists here but I just want to go and play with it and until I get actually dig in and play with it um it's it's hard for me to I'm one of those people that I can read all I want and until I actually have my hands on it doesn't really impact you know what I think the interesting thing about this is it won't be that inspirational when you actually do play with it because presumably the Nano variant of this Google Gemini AI will not be as good as chat GPT 40 m um but it's just the mere fact that it's in the browser is fascinating to me so it's completely offlin you know you could be sitting in a cafe with no internet connection right in your blog post and it can still do a proportion of these tasks and that that just feels like a really interesting thing and married with WordPress if you've got the browser in this case Chrome you're suddenly Unshackled from that you know you could launch a playground version of Chrome disconnect from the internet and you could do all these things and you don't need to be paying any but I don't know what the heuristics will be that Google managed to suck out of it on the other end I'm sure there'll be plenty of data mining uh that they get so I'm sure and maybe and maybe that's part of it too is the fact that there's that whole that whole you know yeah but it's gole you know yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah you're right we need a credible AI That's come out of the open source Community don't we I'm sure it won't be too far behind and um Patricia says the great Pascal that's right uh yeah so anyway go check that out uh it was called what was the piece called it was called Web I'll put it on the screen sorry knocked it off web AI for WordPress and it was on Pascal butler.com uh I'm a fan Pascal I think you're doing great work here so uh keep it up I'm absolutely brilliant okay another thing which I failed to mention last week because we got stuck in the weeds of the big story and we talked about it endlessly I I had this on the screen but it the tab never got raised um and this is a set of uh e-commerce shipping no not shipping I don't know why I said shipping payment Gateway Solutions um the company that is behind it they're called we a so we a. co.uk and this is forward plugins I think this came to me I think Andrew Palmer tweeted it and I saw it and um so it's it's if you're based in the UK some of these are going to be a bit specific to the UK but if you're not based in the UK some of them will still work so it's all these payment Gateway Solutions like strip Barkley card trust payments Lloyd's ingenico Barkley card orthy pay and all these other ones you can see them here but my understanding the difference here is that the guy that's building these who is called Aaron uh sorry Aaron if that's not your name we spoke last week but in the height in the moment I can't summon up your name um they don't take a cut so they're not creaming off anything off the top I don't know how much the pluging actually cost there you go they're relatively inexpensive $35 some of them a little bit more obviously based upon the work he's done but I just thought these were worth mentioning so if you get these what you're what you're getting paid what you're creaming off with the payment Gateway that's all all the fees nothing is going into quite for the all right and and and and an event instad WP announces the world's first WordPress online hackathon which they're calling anyone can WP uh dates for your diary it's going to be starting on the 11th of October the submission deadline is the 26 and then final judging will happen on the 10th of November um it's going to be there's a panel of people that are going to be judging it um keynote is going to be announced by Jose the vul uh and we've got a little bit of news about him in a minute sort of him tangentially um and the winner will take home $3,000 second place gets 1,000 and 5,000 for third place so if you want to be a part of that and show off your WordPress skills particularly building websites then uh you can register now you've got until what did we say submission deadline 26th of October if you want to take part and it's it's being done by insta wpu I'm sure you've heard of by now I'm guessing nobody's got anything to say on these bits I'll just keep cracking on if that's all right you might have something about this though if you are a um plug-in developer there's a few new little things that you might like to know firstly you're not going to be able to log into your.org account um unless you've got two faas switched on so two Factor authentication that's now going to be mandatory as of well now you if you can't get in that might be the reason uh you need it to have set that up by a few days ago and the other thing to say is from now on uh any plugin submitted to the plugin directory will first go through the plug-in check tool which is going to check for any you know obvious errors it obviously won't be able to spot use cases but it's going to go through a a bunch of things like w sorry PHP code sniffer things like that uh to see and the idea would be that this will automate a lot of the things which previously meant that that queue was astronomical and we have good news if you're a plug-in developer uh the number of plugins that are now in the queue was dun dun 8,36 no zero uh for the first time in living memory the team have managed to get that down I imagine it's something to do with tools like this but that's pretty phenomenal I remember saying not that long ago that it was still a gigantic amount of time between submission and getting your plug-in approved so that's amazing is it still zero or has it crept up for like four or something it's at 17 right now but a good bit of the plug-in review team um do their shifts at night and so I would say uh check back when Europe gets into nighttime and see where things are yeah there we go so 17 is is tantum out to zero basically it was way higher than that that really amazing yeah it is yeah yeah so I mean basically now if you're a plug-in plug-in developer you're going to go to that fully expecting like next working week kind of Return of your of of the bits and pie and obviously you know if it's failed due to the automated testing you got something to work on if not I presume you're going to be hearing really really soon so there's economics involved there isn't there you know if you're putting something like that in you want it to be um recognized quickly rather than the three months that we were at until recently so Patricia um I'm I'm classifying you as an honorary maker Patricia now you're also a maker uh she says loves your enthusiasm uh when you're impressed by something every time yeah sorry get a bit carried away don't I uh and then Daven said it's interesting I probably wouldn't need to use grammarly as much there yeah I imagine it's a bit of a grammar killer um sorry gramy does look like they're coming after you there you go Aaron Bowe thank you so much pacher that's great oh oh and there's Aaron there you go um thank you pacher yeah uh and then pacher because you are mate she says anyway there we go so that's quite nice right Michelle it's over to you we are very cled at the end of the show here we go navigating accessibility with role Mobility yeah so under represented in Tech last week we interviewed the uh makers of Ro Mobility it's an app that you can um put in the accessibility of any place that you have visited so as somebody who uses a Mobility device I have been able to say this place has these amenities and I can also look and see in in advance um sometimes the restaurant will say it's accessible but that means that you have to come in through the kitchen so if I can see that there's actually a ramp up in front and I don't have to kind of you know be lesser than because I'm entering through the back alley so to speak uh I think this is a great opportunity and it's a free it's a free app so I've got it on my phone when I saw them on Tik Tok I invited them to come on the podcast and I just think anybody who has any accessibility isues will benefit from this that is really cool so it gives you confidence idence when you get in the uh the taxi or whatever it may be but when you get there you're going to have an experience which is you know desirable like you said yes you don't want to be rolling in through the kitchen what have you so underrepresented in tech.com I'm guessing if we go to all episodes on the podcast it will there you go yeah so under represented in tech.com you can find out all about role accessibility right just other few quick bits and pieces I've got this thing from uh X here uh oh interesting so Taco who is often on this show um he's he's leaving yast he is uh but he's not leaving yast he's leaving yast but he's going to work for yast work that out yeah how does that work um it's all about it's all about the spelling it's all about the spelling so he's leaving y the company that he's been working with for many years and when he's been sat on this show you've always seen his yo the yo logo the company and um and he's going to go and work for Yos the person who and ma yeah and Ma who founded um Emelia capital and no doubt other things I'll just read it out because it's nice it says I'm leaving Yos this is his ex tweet whatever there are thousands of things I want to add how absolutely epic my journey over the past 11 years has been how much I've learned here how much I'm going to miss my colleagues at yast how much I appreciate all the opportunities Yos has given me to travel the world learn new things meet new people how strong my connection to the Yos brand still is how great the adventure with newold digital has been how much I love that Yost introduced me to the WordPress Community just to name a few and it goes on but that's really Bravo mate um congratulations it goes without saying we wish you the best I'm sure you're leaving a giant tacos shaped Hole uh in the company behind you that's got to be the name of this show there's no way that's not it Taco shap to I'm just ring down sorry uh but Bravo um you'll be missed I'm sure but also you'll be warmly received where you're going so that's lovely anybody want to throw anything towards that before we move on best wishes to him absolutely right absolutely yeah yeah uh WordPress accessibility day what a phenomenal job coming up this Wednesday man alive you are killing it on the socials just my social feed is full of this so it's getting spread beautifully so it's coming up Wednesday the 9th of October it's a 24hour event it's at 2024 WP accessibility. day uh We've plugged it a whole bunch of times but if you still haven't got the memo uh go to that website sign up and you can attend it's run through Zoom so you do have to register to be able to attend y um and then you'll also have access to all of the videos after afterwards um so you can replay them okay so if you're in the accessibility space or you're just curious about what you can do then yeah accessibility is everybody's issue so every it applies to everybody nicely done Michelle you turned you turned that around yeah my faar there uh have we got anything else on here what is this one I've got these there was one about cord Dev days uh oh yeah that's it I'm looking at it now yeah great okay uh right over to you schedule's been announced this is an official WordPress event along the lines of a NextGen camp um so the schedule's posted and if you go to the main page there's like a link to or even here there's a link to go buy the tickets um so we can see who are the speakers coming up at this this looks really interesting I think it's going to be heavily on the uh Dev side of it just looking over the schedule that's here Miriam speaking about scaling the WordPress release process Miriam Schwab from Elementor Carlos Bravo uh new public apis for Block bindings there's a bar Camp track which uh word camp kind of sprung out of bar camps have been around a long time they're just general unconference Tech events so there's a couple blocks for that in the schedule it looks really interesting there's two days of different tracks going on um and it looks like a spot that those that are really active in contributing to core might be interested in as well as those that want to become more active in the developer side of this so check out um it's on events. wordpress.org and you'll find lots more information about it there November 8 and nine yeah um so it's coming up well tomorrow it begins so uh we just showed the schedule that I'll link to it in the show notes no a month from tomorrow sorry I apologize yeah quite right thank you you have time to buy your your plane tickets yet yes because it is being held in Rome and the venue location was just here the hob zest a great name for a location I like that and we' did that we did that and there's nothing to say about that one so that's it I think we've cracked it we've nailed it and we managed to um to get through it without throwing any mod at anybody so Bravo Team good job um unless anybody's got anything else to say I will just thank all of my panelists we've got the co-host Michelle foret and we've got our two wonderful contributors to today we've got Courtney and Mark I'm just going to say mark because I'm never going to get it right twice no I am you got benzan and I had to say that word in my head again that's okay that's okay Nathan Wiggly I don't have a problem yeah love it just throw it right back that's perfect uh oh lovely H so that's it thank you so much and thank you to the two makers you know no mud skateboarding and uh who else was it who joined me and Gram Gram Tucker I have no idea what just happened that was so soal so we're just going to do the wave which we always do at the end of an episode if it's all right with you three should we raise our hands and uh give us a smile that's perfect and thank you for joining us and making the comments happen and uh really appreciate it we'll be back next week for another episode of this week in WordPress do we want to see the cat and dog and other video or do we want the usually yeah we want okay panelists I'll be back in it's about a minute and a half I'll be back when it's done but uh here it comes if you feeling stressed out if you're feeling unsure about the future if anything is you know making you feel not calm Here Comes an unadulterated 90 seconds of cats dogs and sheep we'll see you next week take it easy bye-bye [Music], This Week in WordPress #310, WP Builds, 01j9p7qc3b0p5td6ns3zzy0cg2.