This Week in WordPress #327  ## Metadata - Author: [[WP Builds]] - Full Title: This Week in WordPress #327 - Category: #articles - Document Note: --- tags: [#wordpress, #updates, #events] - #wordpress - #updates - #events Author: Nathan Wrigley Source: [This Week in WordPress #327](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632vOtUg3pk) Reference: Transcript with timestamps from the episode date created: {{date:2025-03-24}} {{time:15:00}} --- # Title: This Week in WordPress #327: Updates, Annual Release Debates, and Global Event Insights ## 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) - [🔍 DARVO Analysis](#🔍-darvo-analysis) - [🔍 SEO Evaluation](#🔍-seo-evaluation) - [🎯 Conclusion](#🎯-conclusion) ### References: - [This Week in WordPress #327 Transcript](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632vOtUg3pk) ## 📝 Summary: This transcript from *This Week in WordPress #327* covers a wide-ranging discussion on the latest updates in the WordPress ecosystem. Key topics include the upcoming WordPress 6.8 features detailed in the "Source of Truth" document, debates on moving to an annual release cycle, and the implications of such a shift. The podcast also delves into global event challenges such as visa issues affecting WordCamp Asia 2026, innovative developments from Cloudfest (including AI-based bot trapping and accessibility enhancements), and a lively panel discussion on editing experiences and performance optimizations. The conversation is interspersed with humorous guest introductions and candid technical insights, all timestamped for easy reference. ## 📖 Main Content: The episode is structured around several major themes, each supported by detailed timestamped commentary: - **WordPress 6.8 Updates & Source of Truth Document:** - [00:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632vOtUg3pk&t=7): Introduction of the episode and overview of WordPress 6.8 updates. - Discussion centers on the extensive "Source of Truth" document that outlines new data views, query loops, block integrations, and API enhancements. - **Debate on Annual Release Cycle:** - [25:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632vOtUg3pk&t=1510): Panelists discuss the pros and cons of shifting to one major WordPress release per year. - Concerns include the strain on volunteer contributors, potential for overwhelming feature sets, and the challenge of maintaining security with fewer, larger updates. - **Global Event and Visa Challenges:** - [51:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632vOtUg3pk&t=3072): Discussion on WordCamp Asia 2026 in Mumbai and the impact of strained relations between Bangladesh and India on visa availability. - Additional dialogue at [55:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632vOtUg3pk&t=3306) addresses broader visa challenges for WordCamp Europe and other events. - **CloudFest Hackathon and Innovation Highlights:** - [64:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632vOtUg3pk&t=4000): Detailed insights into hackathon projects, including an AI-driven accessibility tool that converts visual data into text for the visually impaired. - [43:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632vOtUg3pk&t=2604): Cloudflare’s innovative AI Labyrinth traps misbehaving bots, preserving resources. - **Editing Experience and Performance Enhancements:** - [09:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632vOtUg3pk&t=558): Updates on new editing modes in WordPress 6.8 that improve typography and layout management. - [13:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632vOtUg3pk&t=819): Discussion on hover effects that enhance user experience yet raise concerns about extra server load. - **Guest Introductions and Community Banter:** - [00:07–04:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632vOtUg3pk&t=7): Panel introductions include Remus St (performance specialist), Anna Hero (from Germany), and John Overall (WordPress plugin veteran). - Humorous interludes, such as technical glitches and playful teasing, add levity to the technical discussions. - **OSI Model and Data Transmission Insights:** - [37:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632vOtUg3pk&t=2230): An exploration of the OSI model and its foundational role in all internet communications. - [39:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632vOtUg3pk&t=2364): A deep dive into how digital data is transmitted, highlighting the complexity and efficiency of network protocols. ### 🗒️ Notes: - **🎯 WordPress 6.8 & Source of Truth** - [00:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632vOtUg3pk&t=7): Introduction to the upcoming features in WordPress 6.8. - Subpoint: Emphasis on new data views, query loops, and block integrations. - Subpoint: Detailed documentation ("Source of Truth") is critical for understanding changes. - **🎯 Annual Release Debate** - [25:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632vOtUg3pk&t=1510): Discussion about moving to one major release per year. - Subpoint: Pros include easier planning for volunteers. - Subpoint: Cons include potential instability and overwhelming updates. - **🎯 Global Visa and Event Challenges** - [51:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632vOtUg3pk&t=3072) & [55:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632vOtUg3pk&t=3306): Visa issues affecting WordCamp Asia and Europe. - Subpoint: Strained India-Bangladesh relations complicate attendance. - Subpoint: Broader challenges for developers from regions with restrictive visa policies. - **🎯 CloudFest Innovations** - [43:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632vOtUg3pk&t=2604): Cloudflare’s AI Labyrinth traps bots. - Subpoint: Innovatively wastes bot resources to protect network integrity. - [1:07:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632vOtUg3pk&t=4027): AI translates images for accessibility. - Subpoint: Enables visually impaired users to understand graphical data. - **🎯 Editing & Performance Enhancements** - [09:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632vOtUg3pk&t=558) & [13:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632vOtUg3pk&t=819): New features in WordPress 6.8 improve editing interfaces. - Subpoint: Global styles integration and zoom-out editing enhance usability. - Subpoint: Hovering effects improve UX but may increase server load. - **🎯 OSI Model & Data Transmission** - [37:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632vOtUg3pk&t=2230) & [39:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632vOtUg3pk&t=2364): Explanation of the OSI model’s seven layers. - Subpoint: Highlights the complexity behind simple digital interactions. - Subpoint: Uses analogies (e.g., a bag of rice forming a tower) to illustrate packet encapsulation. - **🎯 Guest Dynamics & Community Insights** - [07:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632vOtUg3pk&t=437): Discussion on John Overall’s long journey with WordPress plugins. - Subpoint: Emphasis on legacy and evolution in podcasting. - [1:25:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632vOtUg3pk&t=5129): Wrap-up with thanks and future interview announcements. - Subpoint: Encourages community engagement and participation. ## 📖 References: - [This Week in WordPress #327 Transcript](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632vOtUg3pk) - Additional internal links to "Source of Truth" document and Cloudflare blog post on AI Labyrinth. ## 🗣️ Paraphrase: 1. **Original ([25:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632vOtUg3pk&t=1510)):** "Jeff Paul highlighted that a shorter three-month release cycle is easier for volunteers to commit to, compared to a lengthy 12-month cycle. Anna raised concerns about stability and strategy, questioning the implications of fewer updates and potential technical challenges with larger feature sets." **Paraphrase:** "According to Jeff Paul, a three-month release cycle suits volunteer availability much better than a 12-month schedule. Anna, however, expressed worries about long-term stability and strategic planning, as fewer updates might lead to bigger, riskier feature rollouts." 2. **Original ([43:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632vOtUg3pk&t=2604)):** "Cloudflare introduces an AI Labyrinth to trap misbehaving bots, leading them into an endless loop that wastes their resources without burdening Cloudflare's systems." **Paraphrase:** "Cloudflare has launched an AI Labyrinth designed to ensnare disruptive bots, effectively trapping them in an infinite loop that drains their resources while keeping Cloudflare’s infrastructure unburdened." ## 📰 Newsletter: Welcome to this week’s WordPress Insider! In our latest episode (#327), we dive deep into the exciting world of WordPress updates. Discover how WordPress 6.8’s groundbreaking features—such as enhanced editing modes, global styles, and a robust interactivity API—are set to revolutionize your workflow. We also unpack the debate over moving to an annual release cycle and discuss the global challenges facing WordCamp Asia 2026. Plus, learn about innovative CloudFest highlights like AI Labyrinths for bot trapping and breakthrough accessibility tools. Stay updated on all things WordPress by tuning in [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632vOtUg3pk) and join our vibrant community for more insights! ## ✅ Action Items: - **For Open Source Advocacy & Contributor Engagement:** - Develop educational sessions focused on the implications of WordPress 6.8 updates. - Create guides for navigating the challenges of a potential annual release cycle. - **For WordPress Education & Community Building:** - Integrate discussions on the OSI model and data transmission into technical workshops. - Use event insights (e.g., WordCamp Asia visa issues, CloudFest hackathon outcomes) to drive inclusive community initiatives. - **For OSPO Aspirations:** - Leverage these updates to advocate for sustainable funding and transparent development practices. - Align internal processes with community feedback on release strategies and security measures. ## 🧪 Hypotheses: - **Hypothesis 1:** Shifting to a one-major-release-per-year model will lead to significant challenges in maintaining plugin compatibility and user engagement. - **Hypothesis 2:** Enhancements in WordPress 6.8, particularly in editing interfaces and global styles, will improve overall user productivity. - **Hypothesis 3:** Implementing AI-driven accessibility tools (like Cloudflare's AI Labyrinth) will dramatically reduce malicious bot activity and enhance site security. ### 📊 Methodology: - **Data Collection:** - Analyze WordPress core update logs and user engagement metrics pre- and post-WordPress 6.8 release. - Survey plugin developers regarding the impact of release frequency on their work. - **Research Design:** - Conduct case studies comparing sites updated under a three-month cycle versus an annual cycle. - Utilize controlled experiments to measure performance improvements from new editing features. - **Analysis Techniques:** - Use quantitative data analysis for performance metrics. - Apply qualitative interviews with core contributors and community members. ### ❓ Questions: - How will an annual release cycle impact the frequency and quality of security patches? - What are the long-term effects on developer productivity when transitioning to new editing modes in WordPress 6.8? - In what ways can AI tools further enhance accessibility without compromising performance? ### 🔮 Future Research: - Investigate the impact of release cycle changes on WordPress’s overall ecosystem and third-party plugin compatibility. - Study user engagement trends before and after major updates to quantify performance benefits. - Explore further integration of AI in enhancing both security and accessibility features. ### 💡 Implications: - **Advancing Knowledge:** - Research could lead to a redefinition of optimal release cycles and update strategies for large-scale open-source projects. - **Influencing Practice:** - Findings may inform best practices for both core developers and plugin contributors. - **Policy Impact:** - Outcomes could shape guidelines on software update frequency and accessibility compliance within the WordPress community. ## 🧠 Learning Styles Assessment: - **Readability:** - Estimated reading level: 12th grade. - **Visual Learners (Spatial):** - **Present:** Mentions of diagrams (e.g., the "Source of Truth" document) and visual editing modes. - **Improve:** Incorporate infographics and flowcharts that map out update cycles and OSI model layers. - **Aural Learners (Auditory-Musical):** - **Present:** The podcast format provides rich auditory content. - **Improve:** Offer downloadable audio summaries or companion podcasts with enhanced narration. - **Verbal Learners (Linguistic):** - **Present:** Detailed technical discussions and panel banter enrich the narrative. - **Improve:** Provide annotated transcripts and additional written guides to reinforce complex concepts. - **Physical Learners (Kinesthetic):** - **Present:** Limited hands-on interactive content. - **Improve:** Develop interactive tutorials or live coding sessions that simulate the new WordPress features. - **Logical Learners (Mathematical):** - **Present:** Timestamped analysis and structured breakdown of release strategies. - **Improve:** Add data charts and logical frameworks to visually represent performance metrics. - **Social Learners (Interpersonal):** - **Present:** The panel discussion format encourages community interaction. - **Improve:** Facilitate online forums or group discussions to deepen collaborative learning. - **Solitary Learners (Intrapersonal):** - **Present:** In-depth technical details support individual study. - **Improve:** Integrate self-assessment quizzes and reflection prompts at the end of each section. - **Naturalistic Learners:** - **Present:** Minimal direct natural analogies. - **Improve:** Use analogies from nature (e.g., ecosystems, growth cycles) to illustrate community dynamics and update strategies. ## 📊 Accessibility Assessment: - **Screen Reader Compatibility:** - **Present:** Transcript is text-based, though embedded video content may lack full alt-text. - **Improve:** Ensure that all images, diagrams, and videos include comprehensive alt-text and captions. - **Keyboard Navigation:** - **Present:** Timestamps and links are accessible. - **Improve:** Optimize webpage design for full keyboard navigation, ensuring all interactive elements are reachable. - **Contrast and Readability:** - **Present:** Text is clear but may not meet high contrast standards on all devices. - **Improve:** Use high-contrast color schemes and scalable font sizes for better readability. - **Text Resizing:** - **Present:** No explicit issues noted. - **Improve:** Confirm responsiveness of the content layout across various devices and text size adjustments. ## 🌍 DEIB Assessment: - **Cultural Relevance:** - **Present:** Discussion includes international perspectives (e.g., WordCamp Asia, visa challenges). - **Improve:** Feature more case studies and examples from diverse cultural and geographic backgrounds. - **Inclusive Language:** - **Present:** Generally neutral language is used. - **Improve:** Simplify technical jargon where possible and include glossaries for non-native speakers. - **Neurodiversity Support:** - **Present:** Structured sections with clear headings aid in comprehension. - **Improve:** Break lengthy paragraphs into bullet points and shorter sections to enhance readability. - **Representation:** - **Present:** Mentions of multiple community members and international events. - **Improve:** Incorporate more diverse voices and case studies reflecting a broader range of identities. - **Psychological Safety:** - **Present:** Tone is friendly and encouraging. - **Improve:** Provide trigger warnings for particularly dense technical content and ensure supportive language throughout. ## ✅ Logical Validity: - **Sound Deductive Reasoning:** - **Occurrence:** In the debate on release cycles ([25:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632vOtUg3pk&t=1510)), clear cause-and-effect is presented. - **Strength:** Strengthens arguments by linking volunteer commitment to update frequency. - **Suggestion:** Support with quantitative data on contributor hours. - **Strong Inductive Reasoning:** - **Occurrence:** Multiple timestamped examples (e.g., [51:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632vOtUg3pk&t=3072), [55:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632vOtUg3pk&t=3306)) illustrate broader trends. - **Strength:** Provides consistent patterns that support community-wide concerns. - **Suggestion:** Incorporate statistical trends to further reinforce patterns. - **Logical Fallacies:** - **Strawman:** - **Occurrence:** Minimal; the discussion remains focused on concrete technical and logistical issues. - **Ad Hominem:** - **Occurrence:** None observed; panel banter is light-hearted without personal attacks. - **Circular Reasoning:** - **Occurrence:** Not evident; each argument is supported by timestamped evidence. - **Overall:** The arguments are coherent and well-supported; however, additional empirical data could further validate claims. ## 🔍 DARVO Analysis: - **Deny:** - **Observation:** The transcript does not attempt to deny or minimize issues; it openly discusses challenges such as visa restrictions and release cycle concerns. - **Suggestion:** Maintain transparent dialogue without deflecting responsibility. - **Attack:** - **Observation:** There is no evidence of personal attacks; criticisms are aimed at systemic challenges (e.g., update frequency, resource consumption). - **Suggestion:** Continue to focus on constructive criticism and avoid disparaging language. - **Reverse Victim and Offender:** - **Observation:** No clear reversal is detected; the discussion does not shift blame from affected developers to event organizers or vice versa. - **Suggestion:** Ensure future discussions remain fact-based and do not reframe victimhood. ## 🔍 SEO Evaluation: - **Keywords:** - **Present:** Keywords such as "WordPress 6.8," "annual release," "WordCamp Asia," "OSI model," "Cloudflare AI Labyrinth," and "accessibility" are well integrated. - **Improve:** Incorporate long-tail keywords like "WordPress release cycle challenges" and "global WordCamp visa issues." - **Meta Description:** - **Present:** The summary provides a good overview. - **Improve:** Craft a concise meta description (150–160 characters) that encapsulates the main topics. - **Title Tag:** - **Present:** The title is engaging and includes primary keywords. - **Improve:** Ensure the title remains within 50–60 characters for optimal search display. - **Headers (H1, H2, H3):** - **Present:** Clear and structured headers are used. - **Improve:** Add more keyword-rich subheadings where applicable. - **Content Length:** - **Present:** The transcript analysis exceeds 1,000 words and is highly detailed. - **Improve:** Continue to provide comprehensive content while avoiding fluff. - **Internal/External Links:** - **Present:** Timestamp links and external references (e.g., Cloudflare blog) are provided. - **Improve:** Include additional links to related WordPress articles and authoritative sources. - **URL Structure & Image Optimization:** - **Present:** Not directly assessable in the transcript. - **Improve:** Ensure the final published page has an SEO-friendly URL and optimized images with descriptive alt text. - **Mobile Optimization & User Engagement:** - **Present:** The content structure is clear and engaging. - **Improve:** Optimize for mobile devices and include interactive elements (e.g., polls, comment sections). - **Schema Markup & Social Sharing:** - **Present:** Not explicitly mentioned. - **Improve:** Implement structured data (FAQ or article schema) and social sharing buttons to boost discoverability. ## 🎯 Conclusion: The transcript for *This Week in WordPress #327* provides an extensive look into the evolving landscape of WordPress, from significant updates in version 6.8 and debates over release cycles to global challenges affecting community events like WordCamp Asia. The discussion also delves into technical insights about the OSI model, innovative solutions from Cloudflare, and the integration of AI with WP CLI. Overall, the episode emphasizes the need for balancing innovation with stability, ensuring robust accessibility standards, and addressing logistical challenges for a truly inclusive WordPress community. - Summary: The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 17th March 2025. Today we're joined by Remkus de Vries, Anna Hurko and Jonathan Overall. We discuss the proposed move to one major WordPress release annually, sparking concerns about developer and user impacts. We explore Visa challenges for WordCamp Asia 2026 attendees and the implications of WordPress's update frequency on market competitiveness. The episode highlights Cloudflare’s AI Labyrinth security feature and discusses the pros and cons of speculative loading in WordPress 6.8. Attendees' experiences at CloudFest, a large European event with diverse tech showcases and hackathons, are also shared. - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632vOtUg3pk&ab_channel=WPBuilds [Music]It's time for This Week in WordPress,episode number327, entitled "Where Did John Go?" It wasrecorded on Monday, the 24th of March2025. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and todayI am joined by three WordPressers. First,the co-host is Remus St;, but we'realso joined by Anna Hero and by JonathanOverall. In some cases, audio only, but hewas still here. Nevertheless, it's aWordPress podcast, so you know what wetalk about. Well, the first thing we talkabout is WordPress 6.8 and the source ofthe Truth document, which describes in greatdetail what is coming in WordPress 6.8. It is definitely worth a read. We also talkabout the OSI model and how it underpinsthe entire internet. Every single thingthat you do on the internet runs throughthis incredibly complicated andextraordinary, nearly unlikely series ofprotocols, and it's really, reallyinteresting. We also talk about the factthat WordPress might — I stress, might — begoing to one update per year. What wouldthe consequences of that be, and is it agood thing? Then we get into whether ornot the WordCamp happening next year inMumbai, it's WordCamp Asia. Not, it will exclude certain nations. Forexample, those people from Bangladeshbecause of visa restrictions. Wealso talk about, well, for ages aboutCloudFest and the CloudFest hackathon. Iwas there last week, and I really had anextraordinarily interesting time. Wedissect that, and it's all coming up nexton This Week inWordPress. This episode of the WP Billspodcast is brought to you by GoDaddy Pro,the home of managed WordPress hostingthat includes free domain, SSL, and 24/7support. Bundle that with the Hub byGoDaddy Pro to unlock more free benefitsto manage multiple sites in one place,invoice clients, and get 30% off newpurchases. Find out more at Go. Mew.Builds and by Bluehost. Redefine yourweb hosting experience with Bluehost Cloud,managed WordPress hosting that comeswith lightning-fast websites, 100%network uptime, and 24/7 prioritysupport. With Bluehost Cloud, thepossibilities are out of this world.Experience it today at bluehost.com.And byOmnisend. Do you sell your stuff online?Then meet Omnisend. Yes, that Omnisend, theEmail and SMS tool that helps you make73 bucks for every dollar spent; the onethat's so good it's almost boring. Hatethe excitement of roller coaster sales? Prefer a steady line going up? Try Omnistoday at omnisend.com. Good morning, good afternoon,good day, good evening, whatever goodstuff. Have a good day. It's episodenumber 327 of This Week in WordPress. Asyou can see, I'm joined by one, two, three— not three, there are three people goingto be here, but one of them was, um,inadvertently dismissed by me a momentago. I incorrectly identified aproblem on their computer; in fact, it wasme. I had a problem on my computer, andanyway, they went to reboot and gotcaught up in the, uh, the update cycle ofdeath. So hopefully John will be withus in a moment, but for now we've gotRemus. How are you doing, Remus? I'm well,how are you? Yeah, good! Remus and I hungout and, um, unnecessarily insulted eachother for almost an entire week. It wasgood fun! Yeah, thank you. I thinkyou got the better of me a little bitfrom time to time. Yeah, I'd say there'san evensplit; you're very good anyway. Here's the bio: Remus St is aWordPress performance specialist focusedon speed, security, and scalability. Asco-founder of Scanfil, he helps siteowners stay ahead of performance andsecurity updates. Remus also runs WithinWork WordPress, a newsletter and podcastfor passionate people about buildingbetter WordPress sites and sharesinsights on YouTube. Drop The Links: Remuswhere do we get Scanfil? Uh, scan.com andwithinwp.com are the ones to check out. Nice! Actually, I can see thatunder your name it says scan.com, sothat's very helpful. Uh, John, I can seeyou there. We'll drop you in just amoment, but for now, I'm going tointroduce Anna. Anna Hero, how are youdoing? Hi! I'm great. I'm still on my wayfrom Cloudfest in Germany. I havethat's why I'm late, so sorry. Oh, oh, oh.It takes a while. Yeah, yeah, gosh! Okay.Well, we'll get into Cloudfest in amoment, but Anna has possibly theshortest bio we've ever had on this show.So this is going to take just a moment,because it's nice and brief. Uh, Anna isthe co-founder and CEO of CoCer Block. Iintroduced Anna in a podcast to ouraudience not that long ago and go on. Bio was short. You have a moment to pitch.Tell us about CrocoBlock quickly. Whatis it, and what does it do? CrocoBlock iscreating plugins for developers forcreating dynamic websites that workwith the Gutenberg and Bricks for now.That's basically it. Nice, thank you verymuch. Well, it's an absolute pleasurehaving you. So, let's see if we can getJohn in as well. There he is, there's John. How are you doing, John?I am doing better, sort of.Um, well, John, I have an apology to make. Ithought it was your audio; it wasactually mine. Well, that's good to know.My computer, when it rebooted, decided to scan oneof my hard drives. It's still scanning it. So, I set up my laptop. Oh, well, thank youI appreciate the efforts you went to.I am, yeah, my audio was like... Can Iinterject real quick? Yeah, nobodycan watch us because the live page itdoes not have an embedded videoworking. It does, it's going out onYouTube, and nobody watches it on ourpage particularly. So, it's there for moreof a convenience. If you go to the YouTube live,we're good. I'm going to fixthat. I don't know what I did wrong; Imust have pasted the URL in slightlyIncorrectly, maybe I got like a closetrailing tag or something, but I'll check it. I was wasting time, right? So yeah, it's acurious thing. The way it works is I stream it to YouTube, but as aconvenience, they also—the playing system, called Wave Video, offersthis embed code, so I just put it intoour site, and a few people watch it overthere, but most people don’t. I’ll get itfixed in a minute. Um, I've definitelycopied and pasted something incorrectly,but most of the audience iswatching on YouTube, so we should be good. Um, but look, it's John. It's Johnoverall, and I’m so glad thatyou've come. I don’t know if Anna andRemus followed John’s podcastingadventures back in the day, but I was ona podcast with John recently, and I wastelling him that when I got intoWordPress in about 2014, I used to take mychildren to drum lessons. It was also the timeI started listening to podcasts. So I gotinto WordPress, got into listening topodcasts, and settled on John’s podcast. And so hearing his voice talking back tome on the podcast that we did was kindof uplifting and exciting. Eerie, it was really nice. Uh, but there heis. It's John Overall, and I'll readJohn's bio. I might, I might expound on it alittle bit. John, oh please do. There, yeah,it's a bit windy. Yeah, it's all right, noworries. For the last 16 years, John Overallhas been the creator and co-founder ofthe WordPress plugins A to Z.And I know you do as well. Uh, the podcaststarted five years ago. His daughter Amber joinedhim as his co-host on the podcast, and ineach episode, John and his daughter Amberdelve into the vast world of WordPressplugins, helping listeners navigatethrough over 100,000 pluginsavailable on the internet to separatethe junk from the gems. We’ll pause it there, but, um, Jonathan, tell us where wecan find it. What’s the website for thepodcast?You can find me at WPPluginZed.comor WPPro.com. It’s so weird listening tosomebody with a North American accentsay the letter Z. That’s what happenswhen you live in Canada. You know, yeah,you get adjusted to the Englishversion of many things. Yeah, I’ll bet. Yeah, um, okay, so this is our panel andwe're going to talk about the WordPress-y things,as I said to Remus. A minute ago, I'll try to fix it if you are trying to watch this on wps.com.For live coverage, just go to YouTube and searchfor WP Builds over there andhopefully you'll find it; you never know.Okay, what have we got for you thisweek? Let's put the screen on. The first thingto mention is that this is our website,wps.com. If you want to subscribe towhat we're doing, we send a couple ofemails each week. Just put your emailaddress into this box and clicksubscribe. We only send two. We repurpose this as a podcast episodewhich comes out tomorrow morning, soyou'll get a notification email aboutthat. On Thursdays, weproduce the regular audio podcastepisode, and we'll tell you about that.That's basically it for subscribing.I'd like to thank oursponsors. We're currently sponsored byGoDaddy Pro, Blue Host, and Om Send.Thanks to them for keeping the lights onover here. I really appreciate theircontributions and helping us keep going.Nothing else really to mention overthere, but let's crack into the news.This week, the first thing is this: I'd liketo point this to everybody's attention. Uh, recently, McCarthy has beenmaking this great big long complicateddocument called the source of truth.But, as an automaticist, her timehas been used in different ways; let’s just put it that way.So, this has been taken on nowby Big at Poy Hack over at theGutenberg Times, and it's massive.I mean, it's really long. Look, it'sreally, really, really long, so lots ofdepth here. It’s all about what's comingin version 6.8 of WordPress. I’ll just gothrough a couple of things which Ithink are of interest, and as always, panel, ifyou want to interrupt, please feel free. Here we go, focusing this timearound making improvements to the data views, the queryloop, and block integrations. There’s amore streamlined experience with thezoom-out editing mode. Expand, here’s athing I’ve never used. Go on, what thezoom-out thing? Yeah, I mean, I looked at itonce, and they go like, "Okay, fine, whatever."Never use it. Doesn’t it forceitself on you when you drop in apattern? Yeah, I click it away assoon as I can. Yeah, okay, well, oddly,I do as well, actually. You'll be able to edit with it, which is quitenice. There are also API developments,including the Block Hooks and theInteractivity API. The most exciting onefor me is the Interactivity API; I think that's reallyinteresting. Also, Remus will absolutely love it.Well, I assume Remus will be loving this.Speculative loading is dropping into 6.8, withperformance optimizations as well. Speculative loading is, uh, kind ofvoodoo; it's your website's capacity.I know it sounds like AI, but it's not.Really, is it? No. Um, it's yourWordPress website's ability to kind ofload the page up just before you click something.But tell us how it's done, Remus, 'cause Ihonestly don't get it. I assumed it wassomething to do with your mouse hoveringover something for a period of time. Yeah,there is. It's basically tracking whatyour mouse does over, uh, intentionallinks insideyour WordPress site, meaning ifyou are hovering over any of the menusor anything else linking to, for instance,a category archive, whatever, there's adelay between when your mouse is over it. And when you actually click on it, inthat delay, there’s time to optimize, andthat’s basically what the speculativeloading does. It kind offigures out, look, if you’re going here,this intentionally, you’re going to clickthis link, and then before you click,it already starts gathering all theassets and resources, and basicallycreates the DOM, the HTML documentready for you. When you click, it’sthere, it’s just poof! This requiresabsolutely no kind of fiddling froma WordPress user’s point of view, whichif you’ve got WordPress 6.8 is it on bydefault, but there’s no settings. Right, it’s just either on or off; there’sno settings. As far as I remember,there’s pretty much a safesetting there now, and I think at somepoint it’s going to be improved upon.But, yeah, everybody willstart benefiting from it. There arefilters if you don’t like it, if you wantto turn it off. But yeah, it’s a greatfeature. The only downside of it, butall of these features have, is thatif you’re a hoverer and you hover. Because I don’t know if you’ve ever seensomebody else process a page, there loads. Of people who select text and link here,and just hover everywhere, they willspend a bit more resources on processing.A site you could see that as a negative,but on the whole, on the browsingexperience, it's a wonderful solution. Can I suggest one possibleother negative consequence? And thatwould be the environmental impact.We are not loading things that we may notactually need. That's what I mean. Oh, itis what you mean? Yeah, yeah, I didn'tconnect it to the environment, but it'sessentially wasting resources. Is thatright? So if you... yeah, okay. So youmight be, I don't know, adding 1% or 2%extra stress onto your server becausepeople are hovering and they're notactually clicking. Okay, correct? Yeah, but maybe there are ways in the API,I think, to be less aggressive with it. You canthrottle back. So that's one of the things thatI'm sure at some point we'll see some sort of UIhelping you with this, or maybe it'llstay as a developer filter. I don’tknow, but there are ways to play withit. I've made the website work. The way, if you want to go backand watch it on the website, and U,Michelle Frette says that's actually howshe does it each week. So apparently,I'm wrong; there are people who watch.Over there, it's fixed, and it was me nottoggling a button in the platform whenyou copy and paste the iframe or whatever it is.You've got to switch it on, and I failed to do thatin my busyness, so it's fixed overthere. Um, okay, let me just press on andthen if Anna and John want tojust interrupt, they can. I'm going tojust push on into this article as loadsof Global Styles are going to beavailable on the main menu. Quite nice ifyou’re into theming. Previously, they weresort of just in the sidebar on thisright-hand side here in posts and thingslike that, and now they’re all available. You can click on things like there'sa little video down here where youcan click on this. For example, if itsays typography, where my mouse is,you can click onto that and enterinto a subsection where all of thetypography is displayed and change it. Um,You can also hide and show the template. Available, and this is where you actuallyclick inside the bits and pieces that Iwas just mentioning. Zoom out view thatRema says — you know, he's not actuallymanaged to use. I kind of feel if you'vegot like a big landing page, like I don’tknow, a sales page or sure, and I’ve builtthose as well. It’s just I don’t — I don’tsee the point; like, it’s so small. It’slike, let me just scroll and see thething in actuality. So here’s a point— here’s a point that I think it’s quiteuseful for. If I’ve got a smallMacBook, it’s a Mac — I think it’s 13 in orsomething, and if I’m on apage that’s quite long, and I’ve got the sidebar, WordPress sidebar on theleft, I’ve got the menu on the right open,and I’ve got the Navigator insidethe Gutenberg editor open as well. I’vegot this tiny, like, three-inch windowwhere I can actually see the content ofthe post. So in that scenario, it’squite good because I can zoom out andlook at it all. I would recommend you geta propermonitor. Yeah, chuck thatway. I do have a proper monitor at home,but out in the wild, when I'm — asan example, I put together some. Links for this post whilst I was in, um,CloudFest, which we'll get into in a bit.I had to collapse all the menusin WordPress and also I use the sidebarin my browser. I don’t have the tabsarranged at the top; I have the tabsarranged down the left side so thatconstrained it even more. So that zoomout view in that scenario was prettygood. Um, okay, uh, what else have we got? We've got a bunch of, um, well, basicallyborders have been added to a bunch ofblocks. So for example, the comment block,the comments link, comment latest post.You can see a list here; uh, borders havebeen added, and it goes on and on and on.And on, and I’d like to thank Beit forputting this together. This is awonderful resource in Anstead. Yeah, it’sover on Gutenberg Times, the URL in caseyou want it. Well, yeah, I suppose you can gofor the URL, GutenbergTimes.com, source oftruth, WordPress 68. And if you justhyphenate everything I just said, you’llget there. But if you’re looking at it onthe screen, you’ll be able to see thewords there. John, Anna, anything on therebefore we press on? No, not a gabber user. Well, that’ll be, yeah, that’s that’sIt's easy to move on from, I love GoB, and I believe in it. For me, it's just that I like that it's developing. It's not about this resource,but to see that it has some new features and develops itself makes me happier. Nice! Well, let's get into that in a moment. It just occurred to me that usually when we start the show, I mention the people that have dropped in to say hi, and I failed to do that this time. Yeah, you're being roasted. Am I getting told off?Yeah, a little bit. Okay, well let's go through that then. I am sorry, I apologize. First of all, Lana works with Anna, does Anna work with Lana? Is that right?Yeah, Lana is our best of the World Partnership manager, so she's quite known in the community. Nice! Well, thanks for joining. She says, "Good evening, everyone!"She was in Cloud Fest too, but we found you somehow. I failed to see any of these people. I'm so sorry. Thank you for pointing that out, Michelle. It should be fixed now. If you want to go back there and refresh it, it should be fixed.Um, blah blah blah blah, okay, okay.They're saying, "Okay, Andrew Palmer's joining us."I've met Anna and Lana at... CloudFest for about two minutes.Fantastic! He says, "That's nice." Okay, thisis where it gets back to the normalstuff. Every week, for reasons unknown, umpeople drop in and tell us what theweather is where they live, so we tellthem. We just get it out there. SoMichelle Frette is in Rochester, New York,and it's 44° in some incomprehensibleunit of measurement of temperature, or 7°in a sensible unit called Celsius. And, uh,and it's partly cloudy. What do you usein Canada, John? Please tell me it'sCentigrade. Oh, everything in Canada is onthe metric system, except for when we go to buy meats and stuff; and then it's inpounds. Canada uses a beautiful mix ofthe old system and the metric system. Theconventional and the metric, so it's a crazymix. We're way worse than that inthe UK. We use miles for driving onthe road. Most builders use yards andinches for measuring the lengths ofthings. We use—nobody really uses Celsius, andthen for our own height, we use feet andinches. And then for how heavy we are,how much we weigh, we use stone. Yeah,Canada doesn't use stone, but we do have thatwonderful mix that you just mentioned. Yeah, none of it adds up. Okay. Let's Press On. We're joined by Ryan from Influence WP, thanks for joining us from Charlottein North Carolina. Thank you very much.Good afternoon, Sonny in Yorkshire. I can confirm it is Sonny in Yorkshire.Uh, it's Tim Nash. Thanks for joining us, Tim.Lana's back from Ukraine; she says, "CL".Unfortunately, this system parsesthe emojis as words, so apparently it's a purple crying face. There we go. Reese is joining us from Newton La Willows. That sounds like a nice place.I don't know, I've suddenly got an urge to go to Newton La Willows.Taco, hi!It was so cloudy in that word, which is impossible to pronounce. Rema, how do we say that? V?Okay, thank you. It was so cloudy in Vacon.I couldn’t even see the podcaston the webpage; it was just one big gray mist. Luckily, it's less cloudy on YouTube.Oh, I see, that was me failing, wasn't it? I get it!Hello everybody, it's Elliot. Sorry, WP.Minute tutorial, Matt Mados joining us.Is this where I join to get freeperformance audits from Remus?Remus is at the wrong place,because this is where you can getFreeroasting. Okay, so now, I don’t knowwhere you get the free performance audits. Does one of the panelists havea dot matrix printer going? I don’t know.I can’t hearanything. I think that was John’s chair;might be my chair. I have a squeakychair, and I’m trying to keep my micmuted most of the time. Oh, okay.Okay, no, well, I can’t hear anything, so that’sokay. Cowo from Italia says,“Jackson, Jackson’s a really nice guy, andhe will give you free olive oil if yousee him in Put. He has really nice olive oil,as well. He makes his own, and it’sdelicious. It actually burns thetongue. Did you know that if you’ve got really pure olive oil, if you drink it,it hurts, like chili? Ididn’t know that until after Jackson hadgiven me some. Bless him. I’m getting a bitworried for Nathan; we coveredspeculative loading in the previousepisode. We did, you’re right, but you knowwe’ve got some new guests, so here we go.Cammy saying good morning fromSeattle. It’s raining again. Thesecomments just go on and on. I’m sorry, butWe can't keep doing this all the time,can we? Should we stop there, Michelle? Last one, weather in C, backing in F. Okay,there we go. Thank you to the otherswho joined us: Max, Cameron, Tammy,and all the other people. Thank you, butlet's crack on with the bits andpieces in the show. Okay, here we go. Nextup, we have this one. We were just talkingabout the release schedulefor WordPress6.8. Although, Taco, don't shoot themessenger, we did speak about this in thelast show as well. Taco discovered itmoments before we had the lastshow, so we briefly coveredit. I'm going to dig into it properly this time. This is the idea:given the state of play in theWordPress community at the moment, andthe lawsuits that are surroundingAutomatic and WP Engine and what haveyou, and the shrinking ofcommitments from a lot of companies andindividuals. They're shrinking thenumber of hours they contribute. Rightdown, so Automatic went from, I think,like 1,200 hours a week orsomething, I think they're currently atabout 20 or something like that. Other companies, I think Bluehost, havealso recently shrunk the amount thatthey were doing as well, untileverything's stabilized. One ofthe knock-on effects of that is, shouldwe just basically move WordPress corereleases — so WordPress 6.8 to 6.9, to7 and so on — to one a year. Now, on theface of it, that just seems to be noproblem with that, but I think thereprobably are some issues with that.Um, so Matt W put out a call toask core committers what they thoughtabout this. Now, I have no intel on whatthose core committers actually said. Um,I don’t know if thatcall has taken place yet or what haveyou, but anyway, hopefully if that hastaken place, we’re going to get someclarity on this. But, yeah, the ideabeing that if we do a release just oncea year, what will that look like? Howoften would we do little minorreleases in between? Like, I don’t know, a big security patch that needs to bepushed out. How would that get done? Um,and also, this is probably the main thingthat came up. Jeff Paul, who is thedirector of Open Source at TenUp,pointed out that if you want a bunch ofVolunteers to commit to a release cycle;the current model of three months issomething that's fairlyeasy to commit to. You can do that in anormal run of events, but if you wereasking people to commit to a 12-monthcycle, how likely is that? That's a long time, right? Yeah, um, so he makesthat point, and Aon Jo Jin emphasized theimportance of increased testing forminor releases. If the project shifts tofewer updates, and um, I don't know what you thought. Really, here's a bitabout the companies pulling back and soon. I'm getting this information, by theway, from the repository. WordPress couldsee just one major release per yearunder the new proposal. It's kind of over to you: what do you,as the three panelists, make of this? Isthere something that concerns you?Obviously, Anna, you’re in the pluginspace. Does this like bother you? Does itmake you feel a bit more nervous aboutWordPress? So for me, it raises some issues,because it just sounds, first, it soundsnot stable. So you have just worries about whatis behind it and what will be in thefuture. What is the strategy for thisdecision? Say, the 12 months is too long a time tocommit, and if the release will be too big, itwill be an issue just technically if weput in a lot of features and so on. Or weare just not going to put a lot offeatures in the new release versions.Then what does it mean for the maintenance of WordPress? So, I mean, whatare we missing here? What is the strategy forWordPress itself? Do we have one forthe vision of WordPress for five years or tenyears, for example? This is what I'mthinking about. So, I mean, I have startedto work as a supporter and we have a bigsupport team. So, of course, I am worriedabout minor releases, bug fixes, and allthat stuff. But if we're talking morestrategically, what does it mean? I just put a comment up from Tammy,who is a core committer. Tammy Liser, I’mglad; I hope you got home safely, Tammy. Bythe way, she said the meeting takesplace during the course of this week, soI guess we’ll get some clarity andfeedback on that next week. But that, thatI guess you’ve raised there, Anna. Thesame concerns raised up in the articlethere, you know, whether or not we’vegot this blockbuster release, whichhappens. I don’t know; let’s pick theThe month of June or something, that's alot for developers to cope with ifthere's a thousand different patches andupdates and features, and what have you,all dropping at the exact same moment. That's a lot of things, I guess, possiblyto go wrong in one moment. I don'tknow. I wanted to just add, for example,for paid something, it won't work; so justbecause it's open source, we can't saylike, you know, if we in Crocoblock makeone release for Jet Engine for our mainplugin a year, we will be killed by ourcustomers, because they don't feelsecurity. They don't feel the plugin isdeveloping, and so on. I think wedistinguish between major releases andminor releases, so minor releases willjust happen. Security updates willhappen; maintenance updates will happen. Idon't think that’s the thing that’sbeing suggested to also slow down;it's the major releases, so the big ones. So 6.8 is upcoming, 6.9 would be next year,7.0 potentially. It's not been decided; it's asuggestion, but it’sthere's a lot of things, and I thinkthe exhaustion is probably the worstone because I think that particularThe comment that you highlighted was thecomment that makes the most sense to consider. You know, three to four months doing stuff on a release, sure,but doing that for 12 months, I don’t seethat happening; that’s just too long.Sure, the amount of time will be less, butit also is something that will be, you know, it will be on your mind.Whether that’s eight hours per week or 24 hours perweek, I have no idea what the amount of hours are, but you’re busythinking about it anyway. I think that is actually the biggestissue, besides that we’re notprogressing fast enough when all of ourcompetitors are. Okay, that’s an interesting thought.So at that point, do thecompetitors get to use that almost like a PR strategy againstWordPress? You know, because we’ve seenthat, haven’t we? We’ve seen sort ofsubtle digs at WordPress from some ofthe proprietary platforms that you pay asubscription to. Theiradvertising is not immune to taking a shotat WordPress, and that could be aninteresting angle. If you're using a long unupdated WordPress, you might be tired of nothaving new features in your platform ofchoice. You know, the advertising isdoubling down. If you see the amountof advertising that’s being done by bothShopify, which is technically acompetitor of WooCommerce, but it's thesame principle. Um, Wix,Squarespace, they are all over. If youwatch any YouTube video with anadvertisement in front of it or inbetween it, first of all, you should get apremium subscription because you don’t want that inyour life anyway. But the sheervolume of it indicates thatthey’re ready to get even harder inpursuing that market share. Thiswould give them for sure a good argument.See, they’re not really doing thatmuch. They’re stale; they’rebehind. Um, Gutenberg, as the project hasdelivered the site editor and the blockeditor, both of them are not mature yet. The block editor is way more mature than the site editor,but we’re not there yet. That wouldmean we see an incredibly slow pace ofrefinement for those two editorsat a point where we really need toaccelerate instead of, you know,Decelerate incredibly hard. I don’t know,I don’t think it’s a good idea,but I get why we’re having this discussion. I get where the debate comes from, but it’s not a goodsign. Yeah, interesting. Um, by the way,YouTube Premium— I have YouTube Premium. I’m quite happy with it, but I didn’treally know how many ads were on YouTubeuntil I looked at somebody’s YouTube feed the other day, and I waslike, "Oh gosh, yeah, wow," that’s it. It’s likeevery eight seconds or something you geta new ad. Um, and here’s a nice tip, by theway: if you’ve got a VPN, oh, it’s easier.Albania, apparently. So the Brave browseralready filters out the vast majority ofany of your scripts. But it’s, yeah, if youdon’t protectyourself, it’s too much. But apparentlyYouTube is not allowed—so I don’t knowwhy I'm saying this. Apparently, YouTubeis not allowed to put ads in anAlbanian feed because it’s against thecountry’s laws. So, uh, I was told that youknow, if you use an Albanian VPN, then, uh,you get YouTube without ads. Anyway, I’mnot endorsing that. Who said that? It wasn’tme. I didn’t say anythingabout VPNs. It was an echo; it was an echo. Yeah, some guy over there said it.Okay, so yeah, um, anything on that, John?On the, you know, this possible shiftto a different release? Possible shift?In one aspect, I think it's kind of niceto slow it down a little bit, but on theother hand, as mentioned, stretching it out willbring out the competition to say, "Hey,look, WordPress isn’t innovating. It’s notmoving forward," and whether it is orisn’t is irrelevant to the advertisementpromotion and the perception of theaverage user out there. They wantsomething that’s new,fresh, moves forward, and has all the latest features. If WordPress startsslowing down to the point where, once ayear, they dump all the features, thatalso creates problems for allplugin developers who have to catch upto those features all at once. You know,and of course, yeah, as Rinka said,you know, it shouldn’tstop the intermediate updates, such assecurity releases and other things. So,they still have to be put out when thesecurity problem is discovered. So, yeah,it was remiss of me, really, not to sortof highlight it in those terms. Yeah, so. The patching and what have you, I'm youknow, carry on as normal, but the release of thenew features coming to an annualcycle, I don't from the way it's from allthe conversations that I'm having andall of the talk about hours fromcontributors being drawn in it.It seems like this is maybe where it's going to go.But Tammy, keep usposted on what the core committerssay during the course of that meeting.That would be reallyinteresting. Tim Nash makes the pointthat WordPress already gets labeled aslegacy; it will make the idea it's stalehard to argue again. Yeah, can you imagineif we get to like the 11th month? Howbrutal those adverts will be? You know, seen any updates in yourWordPress lately? You know, knowing thatthey're all going to come. But also, Iwould imagine that plug-in developers, soAnna and all the companies out therethat are producing commercial plugins,there's just so much scope for things tojust like your support burden for theweeks following the day that the nextversion of WordPress drops. I imagineit will be fairly insane because all theThe issue is that now it's too much; we have too manyupdates, and our developers need tointegrate it in plugins. However, doing this once a yearis another extreme. So, one idea from Ros— I like that! He tried to discussstrategy, but he highlighted it more simply. The product is not perfect; WordPress is not perfect, and wehave a lot of things to improve anddevelop. Adding features just once a yearwon't work. I mean, if we had a perfect product and only neededbug fixes once a year, that would beacceptable. However, I want to improve its quality andwe miss a lot of features in Gutenberg.We want a nice experience thatmakes me, as a user—not just aplugin developer—feel valued. We have made integration withall of our plugins for Gutenberg because webelieve in the future of Gutenberg.However, it's not perfect right now. I know that in the nextperformance update, I will see improvements.So, why did we start integration? It's aperiod of uncertainty for sure,.However, this is the moment where I guess all of this becomes clear,from this article's point of view. Hopefully, we’ll be next week, and Tammy saysthat a make post will come from it,like there was from WordCamp Asia.We’ll see.Taco is saying he disagrees with Anna.He thinks that we don’t have too many updates;way too few. We have way too few;he says ideally we’d be able tointegrate WordPress like your browserdoes updates, so everybody’s automatically gettingupdated and what have you. I guess Tacoum, but yeah, let’s see whatdrops next week. Tammy, keep us posted. And the lawsuit, which I guess will be theend of all of this uncertainty, and thehours of all the companies likeAutomatic, will maybe come into focusagain. I think that’s due to take placein the year 2027 now, so it really islike a long time. Have I got that right?If my memory failed me there, 2027? Yeah, that’swhat I remember, like, if you know, thewhole thing gone through all thejudicial layers. Yeah, so we’re just into 2025, so we’ve got two years toride this one out. Anyway, it’s a movablefeast. Let’s see where we end up.Right, let’s go to the next one then. Okay,the next piece that I’ve got up here isThis one right, and I'm going to go offpiece a little bit here. Let's pop thaton the screen. I did an interviewwith Robert Jacobe, who, by the way, wasworking for a company called Botard,which no longer exists. Botard is nowcalled Blackwall. I don't know, Annaand Remus, if you noticed Blackwall atCloudfest, but boy, they were doing apretty amazing job of getting theirbranding out there. You know, there wereBlackwall ads almost everywhere. Itwas pretty impressive. So Blackwall isthe renamed Botard. In order forthis podcast to happen, the ideareally was that Robert and I were goingto talk about how a company like Botardgets in the way of malicious traffic. In order to do that, we started talkingabout this thing called the OSI model. Now, Caveat Emptor, I am not anexpert at this at all. I basically readaround it a little bit for the interview,but the more I read, the more disbelief Ihad. The OSI model is basically whatunderpins everything that you do on theinternet, and there are seven layers toit. I'm going to butcher it horribly,but every time you try to do anything onthe internet, whatever you do has toBasically, they percolate down these layersuntil eventually stuff leaves yourcomputer, then travels around on theinternet in the most breathtakinglyunlikely series of events. It finally arrives at where it wants togo, and then it makes its way back up thelayer, and the person on the otherend can see it, be that an email or atext message or, in this case,video. But honestly, if you haven't looked, go and look at what'shappening on your computer right nowwhile watching this. It is ridiculous that it works every singlepacket encapsulated in data and thengoes down the model, gets encapsulated inmore data. Oh, isn't that yourmachine? Because you're clumsy, yeah, mymachine is doing a hell of a lotmore work. Yeah, I've got the OSI model,and it's got cotton wool around the edges just incase something goes wrong. But I knowRemus, this is your bread and butter.I guess you're really into all the tech,and I imagine you understand this stuff,but I never really peeled back how itworks, and I was utterly amazed. Justthink about it: you go to an emailYou write an email and you click send,and you just think it's arrived. Yeah, how the hell did it get there? It'smental how it works. If youcombine all the protocols that work, howthey work, and how long they've been in place,that's another thing. You start adding everything up; justa simple thing to do, and the amount ofconnections and checks,packet tracing, and all the protocolnative stuff that makes you know that thething that you just intended to do canactually happen. You know all of that happens in nanoseconds,and it's a bit much to keep in yourmind, so justrelax. I mean, so okay, back and relax. I'm not goingto encapsulate it very well, but you know,every time, let's say we're streaming,my camera is consuming the data, mymicrophone is consuming the data, that'sgoing into the browser. The browser isthen handing that off thousands oftimes a second to another layer. Thatlayer is then figuring out, okay, where the hell do wewant to go with this? That then hands itFurther down, then it gets to thetransport layer. It's then thousands oftimes per second encapsulating packetsof information—teeny tiny packets ofinformation saying, "Uh okay, this is whatit is, this is where it wants to go," and then more layers get added. Then it justfires out onto the internet andbasically says, "Figure it out; just getthere however the hell you want toget there, just get there." So, some of thebits that I'm sending are probablyrouting through San Francisco, somethrough London, some through I don’t know—Geneva, Stockholm—they're just gettingthere, and then on the other end they'regoing, "Yeah, let's just reassembleourselves." I described it likeimagine you had a bag of rice, and youget the bag of rice and you throw it onthe ground, and a tower assembles itself. That’s what’s happening all the time—every time, and we just totally take itfor granted. It's an absolute miracle.Um, this is how teleportation will workin the future. Yeah, please; I’m nottrusting that.No, thousands of packets—it’ll be a newprotocol there surely that’ll figurenever fail, but I just thought that wasReally interesting, you know, peeling backthe curtain of how it works. And thenbecause everything is getting sort ofdrilled down these seven layers, the job of what is now Blackwall, but was umBotard, is to kind of intervene a layerlong, long, long before WordPress ever gets hold of any traffic. They sort ofstand as guardians, seeing that datatraveling across the internet andbasically decide you can pass, like Gandalf in theFellowship of the Ring. You know, "None Shall Pass!" They standthere and decide what packets can getthrough and what packets cannot. And, uh,it was absolutelyfascinating. Um, and apologies to anybodylistening to that episode. I get quiteexcited like I did in this one andprobably put my foot in it several timesas well because I'm not really an expert. Uh, anyway, the miracle of theinternet, there you go. Remus, Anna, John,anything to add tothat? Walking bot traffic is good, and, uh,I saw some from Cloudflare. They'vecreated a, uh, AI Labyrinth for Bots.Should we do that now? Just was gonnacome. Yeah, that was going to come at theend of our show, but let's stick it in. Now, because it's absolutely perfect,Remus, I confess I read Remus'snewsletter and diligently plunder it forlinks so that we can talk about them.Look at him nodding, like, yeah, creditwhere credit's due. He raised one this— yeah, I'm being honest, and he canconfirm that this was in his newsletter.So what a piece of genius this is! We're talking about these bits andpieces flying around on the internet,and this is on the Cloudflare blog. Iguess it's a brand new feature thatthey've added into their platform, andit's called trapping misbehaving bots inan AI labyrinth. I read it, and then kindof about halfway through I thought, "I'vegot the gist of it," so I stopped readingat that point. But go on, Remus, beef upthe — tell us what Cloudflare aredoing. This is cool! I mean, the titlebasically says it — they sort of create a trap for amisbehaving bot and then send it down aloophole that just never has an end, um,or labyrinth. But you'll end upwith a bot that doesn't know that it’sbeing blocked, and itcontinues to go, but it’s wastingresources on their end, not on Cloudflare's. In the end, it's just a really smart way ofdoing things. The easy way would be toblock them and then be done, but this way itactually costs money on their end, and Iguess it's a more, you could say, amore petulant way to do it. But I think Ilike this way. I think this is a verysmart way to do things. I'm a big fanbecause if you— oh, sorry.You finished, John? I apologize. Oh yeah, Ithought it was a great idea as I wasreading through it. And they do what thebot does, as Remus mentioned. When the botsare just blocked, they go away, andthey'll come back again. But when they take them and throw them into this AIlabyrinth, the bots just keep running incircles, and it keeps them busy and keepsthem out of everyone's hair, so it stopsthem from goingelsewhere. Yeah, I guess if you've got anetwork and your primary objective is todo malicious things on theinternet, if there's almost no cost tothat procedure, if, basically, as Rema said,you're just blocked — you're just blockedright at the first port of call. And soit's just kind of like, okay, move on.Let's try another one and then try. Another one, and try another one, so youcould probably go through thousands inmoments, and then finally get somewhere.But whereas with this, the first port ofcall looks like fertile ground, so youkeep going, and it keeps offering up AIgenerated content that masquerades asbeingyour content. But I was thinking at thatpoint, "Well, hang on a minute; this is justAI built," and it's not. They're going outand creating authentic content, sofactually correctcontent. So that whatever they'rescraping is, firstly, it's not coming fromyour website, but it's not AI-driven; it's something which is true but totallydivorced from the enterprise of whatyou're trying to do. And then it links tofurther things which it's made. Well,articles which it's made which are againverifiably true, and the whole processjust keeps going on and on, and so it's abit like when somebody from a callcenter phones you up and says, "We thinkyou've got a problem with your Windowsinstallation," and you know right off thebat that is complete BS. You know thatthey're lying to you, and the quickestthing to do is to hang up. Of course, they're then freed up to try iton somebody else. Well, it's a bit likekeeping them on the phone for a fewhours and just pretending. And I'm notsaying I do that, but yeah, I do that. Uh,and it gives me greatpleasure to do that. You should try itsometime. So, Remus, is this free? Like, cananybody make use of this? What do youknow? What’s the deal? Uh, I don'tremember that, but I know it's, as far asI've read, it's part of what theirmain service is, so I'mjust looking at a screenshot. If you’vegot Cloudflare, it's under security andthen settings. You can see this on thescreen, and then there's literally atoggle, and it's called AI Labyrinth. Uh,and you just toggle that on. But Idon't know. Yeah, I read somewhere intheir stuff that they're giving it out to even the free accounts. Yeah, there wego, just googled the word. Yeah, I just searchedfor the word "free." AI Labyrinth isavailable on an opt-in basis to customersincluding the free plan. Maybe there aresome constraints on how long they keepthem going, but um, but yeah, great. We'regoing to be, um, you know, it'll be an armsPoint, the bad guys will figureout a way around this, but for now,it’s going to cost them an awful lot ofmoney. So, well done Cloudflare! Joy, joy, joy! What we got here, Tim Nashsays, "Email is as close to being magicas we can get. Email should not work,"which explains why so often itdoes. Thank you, Tim. TC, teleport over!Um, and then Taco says, "Somewhat insomewhat nicely, everyone reads Remus'snewsletter." Obviously, thankyou.So, not everyone quite yet, but manynever-ending.Loophole says, "Ree, thank you very much."And here we go. So, Tim, who’s a bit of anexpert in all these kinds of things, has acounterpoint to make. The resources todo this surely are greater than simplydumping the traffic or tarp it. Idon’t know, uh, Tim, I’m imagining Cloudflare deeper in their article. They go onabout how it uses very little resourcesat Cloudflare because it’s allgenerated already, and it’s just in an AIenvironment. And once the bot hits it, itjust gets stuck in that loop, and there’s nonew content being generated. Players in it are, uh, interesting, so theypregenerated the content. Right? It was aninteresting way on how they accomplished itand what they've done and are doing,considering what Cloudflare has doneover the years. It's really interestingthat they've come up with this idea, andthey probably use their lava lamps tohelp create the data. Oh yeah, they'resort of like pseudo-random noisegenerators—walls of chaos. Yeah, yeah. Okay. The article, by the way, if you want tofollow up on this further, is "TrappingMisbehaving Bots in an AI Labyrinth." Itcame out just the other day, so you gocheck it out. It's on the Cloudflareblog. So, we went off in a bit of a randomdirection there, so let's pull it back in.Uh, did we do this one? Yeah, we did thatone, but we did not get to this one. Okay,this is a—this is fascinating, um, and abit of a shame. Let's see how this onepans out. So, WordCamp Asia has justfinished. It was in Manila in thePhilippines, and, uh, no sooner does oneend than the other one is in theplanning. And, um, during WordCampAsia, it was announced that the nextdestination would be, uh, India in thecity ofMumbai, um, but we have this piece fromRay at the repository. It's called WordCamp Asia 2026, which goes to Mumbai, butBangladesh may be shut out over visaban. Now, I honestly, what I know aboutinternational politics and relationscould be written on something very tiny. I’m imagining a grain of rice, frankly. Uh,I don’t know a lot about these kinds ofthings, but it would appear that, uh, Bangladeshand India are not exactly thebest of friends at the moment, whichmeans that it’s either impossible orexceedingly hard for somebody fromBangladesh to get a visa to travel inIndia. Um, so that therefore means thatthe people from Bangladesh will beleft out of this massive event. Idon’t think anybody’s saying that theevent itselfnecessarily should be moved because ofall the low cars onplanet Earth. It seems that India isdoing more in terms of events and allof that than elsewhere, so it doesseem like a sort of justified place toput the event. But the question is, how dowe get these developers from differentparts of the world? How do we get them toattend? The dispensation that we can extend, you know,can people from, I don’t know, automaticreach out to the Indian government? Idon’t know what kind of clout that wouldhave. I’m guessing there wouldn’t be alot that the Indian government wouldchange in order for a WordPressevent to go on. I very much doubt it, butI could be wrong. However, it wasmentioned in this article that, um, notjust um, people from Bangladesh but alsofrom Pakistan, that the relations seemfrosty there as well. So, I don’t knowwhat we do about this. It strays intointernational relations, but it does makeme think. I wonder how that gotignored in the, uh, in the sort of processfor the deciding of that event. Interesting. I don’t think it got ignored.I think that there is anexception that at some point you’regoing to make a decision and thatdecision has consequences, and you livewith the consequences. Because, yeah, Idon’t expect them to willinglysay, you know, whatever, all theBangladeshi, we don’t care. I don’tthink that’s the case.However, any choice you make hasconsequences. So, are you going to satisfy everyone? No.Am I glossing over a huge countrywith an enormous amount of people? Yes.But the bottom line is, these decisions have these types of consequences.And if there's not another team that wanted to host it, thenthis is what you know. It's not just one decision basedon one little data point. I don't think, yeah, I'm guessing that it really wouldn't matter where you put it.There’s probably something that would go wrong in this sense.What you're saying, however, I'll just raise this on the screenbecause this sort of adds a little bit more clarity. If you are thinking of going through the process of applying for a visa, it is currently on hold.It would seem from this article, however, that if that process was to resume,we’ve unofficially learned from the Indian visa application centers that shouldvisas be started again for people from Bangladesh to head to India,then the process is a 3 to 4 month backlog.That’s quite a lot as well because you really do have to make decisions. I don’t know what you people are like, but if IAttending a WordPress event tends to bemore last minute than the typical threeto four month notice, soyou'd obviously have to have all yourducks in a row long before, uh,attending. So anyway, where does oneactually get thoseducks, uh, the ones that stand in a row? Yeah, like Walmart. I think Walmart, wedon't have Walmart, $6.99 for 12, okay.And then, uh, if you buy it, I think 50, youget them for like $8 or something likethat, and they're very obedient. Yeah,they are that, yeah, theystand. Okay, so there we go. Um,Anna, does anybody want to contribute on that? For me, it’s very difficult to saysomething about political issues, but weknow that there are a lot ofdevelopers in India and they havestarted to build websites before Istarted to work with WordPress. So maybeit’s not such a bad idea. So maybe I don’twant to go so farbut it sounds like a great idea inIndia. Yeah, Remus’ point is sort ofechoed down here by Taco, uh, in terms ofWordCamp Europe. He’s saying that it’sextremely hard for people fromAfrican countries to enter the EU or toAttend WordCamp Europe in this case,um, and again echoing what Rema said, thechallenge for every country is that somefolks will or will not be able to get avisa. So I guess that’s it; it’sunfortunate, but it’s what happens. Youhave to choose a city and go withwhatever the laws of the country are. Yeah, it’s an unfortunate side effect of our worldtoday. Yeah, people get excluded fromliterally every WordCamp for visareasons. Says Cameron, hello Cameron, niceto have you with us. Um, and Win saysIndia, Indian visas are fun to apply for,and then he’s got a sad emoji; I’mguessing they’re not fun to apply for. Uh,also, Ree says folks do get excluded fromWordCamps for non-visa reasons, sadly.LG, I can never get this acronym out of mymouth intact; I’m going to do itreally slow.LGBTQ+ F, I think I did it. Folks getreally, um, don’t feel safe in somecountries that have hosted WordCamps.Thank you, R. Thank you. Uh, okay, I think wecovered that one off, in which case weshall move on, and we’ll go to this one.Actually, let’s go to this one quickly.Quick hat tip to, uh, Kyle from the admin. The bar is a video, so we can't really do itjustice. But Kyle released a reallyneat little video this week. It was aboutI think it's about six—oh, it says there6 minutes 21 seconds long. It's not verylong; you'll be able to consume it reallyquickly, and it's his—um, it's hisattempt to make a WordPresswebsite more app-like. By app-like, itmeans, you know, those sort of niceinteractions you get between clicking abutton on a mobile phone app and thesort of core animations that you getfrom those kinds of things. So he chucks afew things in where he animates titlesinto different places and what have you.It's really nice, and I supportwhat Carl's doing over there atthe admin bar, so I just thought I'dmention that. Don't—if either of you—anyof you—sorry—saw that. Probably not, inwhich I did. I did; it was nice. Did youlike it? I thought it wasyeah, there's a lot of stuffinside of WordPress now that allows you to do this more and more. Now, we'reslowly but surely moving to a positionwhere we can have these types of almostnon-refreshed content sites. We're probablyWith my optimization hat on, do we create abetter experience for the user always, oris a hard page refresh a more desirableoutcome in most cases? Because I'm stillsort of stuck on this; I want toclick a button and I want to seesomething. Not just the whole thing change; I want to know thatI've gone somewhere else. Sometimes I get a bit lost. So, as an example,do you remember the TechCrunch websiteabout two years ago? Yeah, it was horrible. Youclicked on an article, and therewas the archive. They did thisclever animation thing where you clickedon a title and the whole post was inan accordion. So you felt like youwere still in the archive, but the postopened up, and it was reallyclever. However, I had no idea where the hellI was on that website; I got really lost. I noticed that they quicklykind of undid it. So, I don’t know—I mean, itI think it's brilliantwhat Kyle was doing, but I don’t know ifthat's always the best outcome for endusers. So first off, consider your age,mine as well. I often consider my age.I know, I know—there was just nogentle way to bring this up. Here we are. You are used to this behavior as you grew up on the web, right?So that's true. Yeah, younger people do a lot of discovering the web via apps.So that is a different type of behavior.You wanting to see it in a particular way, sure, that makes sense. But if you look at it from a performance standpoint, it is more a question of can you deliver that newer experiencein as performant a way as you can do the old one?Yes, you can. But stuff like fragment caching becomes more interesting.Stuff that’s built inside the interactivity API inside of WordPress facilitates this.Are those properly cachable? Is it, you know, can you build on top of that in a smart way? Those are questions you need to test your scenario with.Like, what would that normally look like? And what if I make it a one app easy refresh type of approach?The one isn't necessarily slower or faster; it's more about how you build it.With all these things, if you’re just copy-pasting stuff together, you have to be cautious. No idea what you're actually doing then.Chances are you're building a slowersolution. If you build what youunderstand, chances are higheryou're building somethingperformant. You should go check it out;though, it's on the admin barYouTube channel. The URL for thatI actually don't have off the top of myhead, but if you just Google the adminbar on YouTube, you'll get to it.This one is called "Create anImpressive Applike Experience with a FewLines ofCSS." Go check thatout. Okay, let us move on. I want to justdo this one very quickly. This is asegue into something else in just amoment. This is a piece by anI can never say Anne's name correctly. Ialways say Anne Marie, and I know it's notAnne Marie, but Anik Balet. Yeah, yousay Balet, thank you. That was what I wasgoing to say. That was verbatim what wasgoing to come out of my mouth. I'mglad that you said it, so you know, justlike Remus did. This was really interesting.This is someone who is really into accessibility.You'll find out more about that inJust a moment. Um, she wrote this articleabout how with the advent of theEuropean Accessibility Act, which iscoming into force late, I think like in afew months' time. I can't remember; I've got a feeling like it's June 2025,something like that. Anyway, the point isit's coming, and it's coming quickly, um,it feels like. And a bit in the same waywhen Google sort of said they were goingto enforce things like Core WebVitals, like a gold rush of people reachingout to their clients and saying, "We willmagically do all the things so thatGoogle does not drop your rankings." Well,this is, I think, a moment in time where thatcould be something that catches, um,people with their websites,developers who don’t necessarily knowwhat they’re doing in terms ofaccessibility, reaching out and basicallybeing cowboys. And so, she’s got thisarticle which is called "How to IdentifyAccessibility Charlatans." I won’t go intoall the different bits and pieces, butshe talks about whether ornot people are actually going to beliable under the law or whether that’sjust people coming and trying to scareYou into giving them work, and then shegoes into tools that you can use to findout whether or not your site really isin need of work. Questions that youcan ask of people who claim to beexperts, and then listen to the kind ofanswers that come back and compare it towhat somebody that reallyknows what they’re doing would say. Digging into theiractual processes and probably having alook at the website that theyactually produce and seeing whether it’saccessible. Anyway, that was anaside. Anne was at Cloudfest the otherday; she was leading one of the tables. Let’s just segue into Cloudfest. Remusand I, and Anna, were there last week. Isaw Remus a lot; I didn’t see Anna there.But Remus and I attended a thingcalled the Hackathon, and oh, what wasthat? That was like the best some of thebest days of my life. I really enjoyedthat. I arrived, oh, I will cry—sorry, Anna, I’m sorry, but you just hearwhat we’ve got to say and you too willbe there next year. I had no expectations of that; I went asa media partner, so I'll be creating someepisodes and things from it. I didn't really know what to expect. I'dread a small amount about it fromprevious years, but I arrived and there werelike 10 people in the room. Excluding me, there werea few media partners, and so we were thenon-developers. Everybody else was adeveloper or developer adjacent, andthey'd been selected to be in the room.Remus was one of them, and I thinkthey had 400 people apply to be inthe room. They managed towhittle it down to 110. Something likethat. There were no shows; everybodythat said they were going to come came, sothat's pretty impressive. Then, 10projects were announced, and the ideawas to take aproject from ideation to muchfurther on, maybe even finished in 3 days. So the 10 leaders, if you like,with their co-lead — or, you know, maybe itwas just one person or two people — wouldgo up onto the stage and say, "I wantto work on this for three days. Join me!"I thought this was going to be chaos.There'd be some tables that hadlike 20 people at them, and others would haveonly one person. It didn't work thatway; everything kind of evened out. Uh, and then the hacking began,and what was really interesting ishow complicated you can make awhiteboard in a heartbeat.So there were all these whiteboards nextto the tables, and within the spaceof two minutes, they were full ofincomprehensible jargon that, you know,the likes of me can't understand. Youknow, relationships and database tablesand what they're going to do, and howthey're going to do it. I waslike, anyway, after three days, the winnerwas announced of all of these projects,and we're going to go through what they were ina moment. It was a table that won it in what I can onlydescribe as pretty sublime. Do you wantto know what they did, dear audience? Itwas so cool. Imagine you've gone to awebsite and let's say that you are blind,and you come to an infographic: apicture of data represented in pictures.So, it could be a chart; it could be a piechart or a donut chart. It could be textwith a chart next to it. The chart couldbe, you know, really straightforward for ahuman that can see, but it could be quitecomplicated. They built a plugin whichAI reads the image and translates itinto human-readable text in a couple ofseconds. It takes that thing that isbasically a void to somebody who can'tsee, a total black hole, and it takesthe data and puts it into a summary. Itsummarizes the data; it tries to extractthe data from the pie chart, maybeset it out in a table which isaccessible. It was pretty cool,I've got to say. Remus is nodding; I know he's slightly disappointed becausehis table didn't walk. No, no, Ithink this is, there are twoprojects that I like the outcome of themost. This is one of them, and theother one is the WP CLI meetsMagic. Basically, yeah, we can talk aboutthat in a moment. I don't know, Annaor John, if I encapsulated that, but didyou understand from what I just saidwhat that project's enterprise was? Ihaven't seen you, but I have seen it, sowe have talked about it a little bit. Ofcourse, I understand, yeah, yeah. Somedid you get it from what Isaid? I think John is frozen. I did. Oh no,no, no, your audio is fine, so keepgoing; it's fine. The picture seems to havefrozen for some, as long as we can hearYou know, that's the main thing. Yeah, I didget it. That was quitenice. Yeah, something neat to see andwatch. Well, that was three daysand I was just surrounded by peoplewho were obviously very intelligent, verybright, and in just about everycase, verydriven and accomplished in the group thatAnne was working with. In that case, theywent from nothing to complete, I think,basically, in three days. So I think it was somethingthat didn't exist suddenly became somethingthat did exist. I know Remus, you weresort of dotting around from table totable, but do you want to just tell usabout the one which you mentioned there,that you quite liked? The WP CLI one,because that was a cool project too. Wasn't it? Yeah, um, most people find WPCLI, the command line interface forWordPress, a little daunting.Once you get familiar with it, it'sbasically about understanding how thestructure works, and then the commandsallow you to do various things.Now, one of the things it doesn't do isit doesn't understand certain prompts,like you would talk to an AI. So if youwere to use a prompt inside a WP CLI, itJust errors; it doesn't know how to do that. That project basically connected AIwith the command line, meaning you couldsay stuff like, "Write me five posts inthis category about that topic," andjust do it in the background. Or,show me the last seven posts that havethe tag "Nathan" and build a featureto it, and it just, in the terminal,does all the things you ask it to do.Yost even showed me the creation of a plugin that did something. So you were basically saying, "I needthis type of functionality. Can youplease create a plugin for me, put itthere, activate it, and then move on tothe next question I have for you?"Stuff like that just works on thecommand line, making life easier. Ijust, I don't know, I thought it was closeto as close to magic as you couldmake it. Yeah, it was fun to watch. They were leaning heavily, I think, into Pascal.I forget what his plugin iscalled; it's something like the AIconnector plugin or something. But he wassitting... no, that's Felix. Felix ANSis it? I apologize, yeah, AI service, yeah.That's it, thank you. Profound one, and like Rema said, youcould see people typing into commandline, which usually results in, you know,if you're an inexperienced person likeme, that's heartache. But in this case, youcould type in English words as asentence. Yeah, yeah, actual resultsliteral AI prompts like, "Create thisimage," and then you are presented with animage. You're good, and it's then nice inthe media library. Right? And then you say,"That's lovely, but I’d like a black andwhite version of that, please." And thenthe AI turns that into a black and whiteversion, like things like that. Yeah,pretty cool. So we've lost John on thevideo, but hopefully his audio is stillthere. I'm still, I'm still, yeah, we gotyou. That's fine, honestly. John, the videoI don't know why my camera shut down;it just could be my laptop. Don't worry,don't worry. So long as we can hear you,the main thing is that we can hear you.That's all good. Uh, so I'll just put itback on the screen, and we'll show youagain an article from the repository, andit's demonstrating there’s a team wewere just talking about, and it’sdescribing that Visual AI or Visual Ally. Just go through some of the otherwinners as well. So, the overall winnerwas the one that we just mentioned, andyou can find more about that. The TechVisionary Award was won by thePeer-to-Peer Federated Ragframework. The Dream Team Awardwas also won by the Peer-to-Peer Rag.The Social Media Master Award, well, itkind of doesn't really fit into it. It was an oddcategory; this one was about how wellyou could promote what you were doingvia social media. But that was done by theWP CLI as an mCP host. The PitchPerfect Award was a tie between the CMSFreedom project, which was trying to make it so that youcould port things from one CMS toanother. And Visual Ali again. TheBreaking Back Carers Award was also won by theAccessibility Infographics Team. It's going to happen next year. Can Ijust say that if you are a developerand you really enjoy working with abunch of likeminded, bright, interestingindividuals, just whenever theapplication process opens, get yourapplications in as fast aspossible. I would say it was such a coolThe event, and I think honestly, I know itsounds a bit cheesy, but the energy waspretty cool in there, wasn’t it? You know,people getting scoffed on in shortshrift was just so cool to watch. Yeah,really excellent, excellent vibe. Yeah, really, really nice. Um, okay, so therewe go. That’s what happened there. Let’ssee what the commentsare. Uh, but everyone can attendaccessibility. I don’t know what that wasin reference to. Sorry, Taco. Um, there you go, Tammy Lista, who wasthere. She was working on one of thetables. She found itexciting. And Yos, the person who demoed the asoast, the person was sitting at thetable that Remus was just talking about.This WPCL meets AI projectdemoed all image alteration via the commandline. It was insane! Yeah, they showedme a great example before it was working,where they showed me, I think it waslike somebody on a surfboard,and it was on the sea, and there werewaves and everything. And then they askedif they could get rid of the waves. Theyprompted the AI to get rid of thewaves, and it just removed the surfboardand the person on the surf, which is kind ofOf funny, so we're not there yet. No, butit was nice. Yeah, but, okay, I don'tmean this to come out the way it comesout, right? And please forgive me for whatI'm about to say. I thought it was reallyinteresting attending an event whichfelt like a WordPress event, but therewas an end goal in sight for everybodysitting down. Um, so we have contributedtoday in the WordPress space, which ismeaningful and impactful. But it was veryinteresting sitting down with a bunch of volunteers, just like at Contributor Day,only there was an absolute moment intime when it had to be over, which wasobviously three days. That's impossiblefor a WordCamp, but it was just reallyinteresting seeing how those peoplecoals combined, got energized, got reallybusy. In some cases, you'd walk pastthe room where everybody was supposed tohave left at like five o'clock, and therewere still people in there at like eight andnine o'clock, just hacking away in theevening. I got stuff done, and it wasbrilliant. And the winner, such avaluable thing for people that, uh, youknow, need those kind of things. Anybodyelse want to add to any of that before Imove on? No, nothing. Me? I think it'sIt's nice to do thehackathon thing, and I'm excited for what happened there and for peoplewho should try to get in. Sure, but Ialso think it's nice to mention that, um,on that Monday, the end of thehackathon is around noon. Uh, and thenaround noon, WP Day begins, so youactually have an afternoon, uh, basicallyof panels discussing topics we arecurious about inside the WordPress world. Um, and then the actual Cloudfestevent, which is a separate thing, isalso quite nice because there are, uh,because WordPress as a whole is growinginside Cloudfest, and it's quite nice tosee the, um, like there was an entire roomcalled the WP Zone, where a lot ofWordPress companies were present withtheir booths and allthat, um, for anybody working withWordPress, you are also touching a wholebunch of other cool stuff that ishappening on that cloud. Right? Theinternet, um, it's interesting to be therebecause you'll see a different side ofwhat you would normally see in a WordCamp.It's similar butalso quite different. So I highlyrecommend you attend if you haven't ever. I considered going to a CloudFest in 2026, or if you’re in the US, there’sa CloudFest US version as well. Um, I encourage you toconsider going because it’s one ofthose things that breaks out of thebubble of a WordCamp, which is aparticular format and a particular typeof content generally. Uh, this isdifferent; it is, in a way, refreshing. Um,I highly recommend you consider thatfor the next time it’s being held. Yeah, you do that. I know you were at theevent, so it was my reason to come to justvisit one event for WordPress,but not WordCamp. So, uh, I wanted tocompare and to see what happens, actually.The secondary reason was, first of all,I was told I shouldgo, and she is responsible for allthe events. If she says I should, I should. What together, and her reason was becauseeveryone goes. So basically, we have thesame partners as you will at WordCamp,but in a little bit differentformat. Yeah, for me, the reason was tosee the partners; some media partners aswell, to discuss in person. Forexample, we had a meeting withCodable, and after I talked personally, Ihad a completely different point ofView what we're doing and how and why. So,I mean, it's just important for me tomeet people, and it was nice. However, the badthing was that it wascold, and I didn’t like the party side. Ithink for me it was too cold. Okay, and I like more WordCampsin the summer. I’m complaining aboutthat stuff, yeah. And I liked this LordPress zone, and thatspace for speeches felt like a boxing ring. It wasquite interesting. It feltmore like a corporate event;there was definitely moreof a sort of corporate feel, wasn’t it?Because at a WordPress event, you arebasically surrounded by WordPressplugin companies, theme companies, blockdevelopers, hosting companies, and allof that kind of thing. But in this, theremit of the sponsorship area really was anything that touchesthe internet. And, you know, there werebig representations from people likeNvidia, hardware,and there were companies justdemonstrating all of their newdevelopments in rack technology. Youknow, what the servers look like forpeople who don’t know what this cloudFast, it was um, 10 to 11,000 people, so youcan just imagine, but you didn't feel itbecause it was a big territory, and there area lot of places. Nathan, can youhighlight Cammy's comment? Yeah, sorry. Yeah, Cammy is saying, yeah, I can. Um, thankyou, Cammy. Nice to have you with us. Um,Cammy says that in Miami—so there's a USversion in Miami in November, might be nice.What if you're a designer, not adeveloper? Still a good event. Uh, are youtalking about the hackathon? I’m guessingum, onthe Y? Definitely, there's a place for you. So for example, Cammy, the one that wewent to, I think I misdescribed it. Ithink I basically implied that thepeople in the room were all developers.That is not the case, so as part of eachof the project, in many cases, there werepeople that were working ondocumentation for that project. Um,because obviously if it’s launched as aplugin, it immediately needs to have, youknow, knowledge base docs and thingslike that. But there were also people whowere designers who were doing thingslike making, I don't know, the logo forthat thing or designing the landingpages for that thing. Did misrepresenting it, is not it? It was maybean 80/20 split or a 70/30split. I can find that out for you. Um, itfelt like more than half of the peopleprobably had developer chops, but Icould be wrong about that. But don'tfoot it if you don'tconsider yourself in that serious developer category. Don't letthat put you off. There's work to be doneand it’s furiously busy, interestingwork to be done as well. So it was sointeresting. Cammy, uh, Remus, does that doyou think I answered her question rightthere? Yeah, yeah, I think so. Um, there’s agood mix of differenttypes of qualities, skills, and whatnot. So yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, and Andrew Palmersays it’s a true business conference.Yeah, there is that side of it as well. Soit’s very much, you know, there are lotsof people who go there — really businessesto business, and business is definitely abig part of the agenda. The hackathonshould take place prior to the mainevent, so it basically doesn’t overlap. Soyou do the hackathon and then you canmove into CloudFest. Uh, so they don’treally combine well, put it that way. So you can do both. Of those things, Ree says he'd like togo next year. Honestly, oh, do it!As a product person, it was ace. A lot ofCloudfest is aimed at product.There’s loads about Cloud I’d verymuch like to feel. I’d very much feellike the stupidest Nathan will be thereas well. Oh, I was the stupidest person inthe room by far. I was really dumb and, um,I felt great. So, youknow, you’ll have a lovely time.And Ree, I've got an intuition that I will winthe award for, you know, the stupidest person.If it was a contest between me and you, Iam betting my mortgage on it, in fact. So,don’t you worry. Uh, and then, oh, Taco! Come on, Taco! We’lljoin forces. He says he’s alsogoing to win that award. And it’s alsogood if you’re looking for a job.That was a part of it as well. Um, in theroom, there was a jobs board. I don’t knowfor Cloudfest in general, but there wasthat. I was hoping — I was, oh, I washappily the stupidest person on myhacking team. Says Tammy, you’re beingbashful, but Tammy says Ilearned so much.Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah! Nice! So,fabulous event. Uh, definitely check it out! I don’t know what the configurationof the one in Miami is. I don’t know ifit’s got the same vibe. The one in Europeis in a theme park. I’ll say that again:the one in Europe is in a themepark. Okay, let that percolate for amoment. Some of the rides areopen, and I went on the teacups. I felt a bitill, and uh, that was it. There are no morerides. Funnily enough, it’s the one thingI do not care about. As for the teacups — no, the whole rides — Idon’t care about them. Oh, it was great, it was sogood.I’m a boring old man. Well, I didn’tsay it. I saw, yeah, yeah, moving on. Anyway,check it out. There’ll be loads of, Iimagine, all of the techcommunity will have articles about itand various things. I hope, Anna, thatyou got out of it what you intendedto get out of it. It sounds like you enjoyedit, but there’s also a big place inyour heart for the wordcamp. Yeah, yeah, said, because I wanted tovisit Hakaton. I saw it only when wecame for a day, and I understoodfrom the first second, okay, we missedsomething. Important, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well,honestly, just everybody attend and getto the hackathon if you possibly can. Itwas so worthwhile. Um, they—Tammy saysthey will have a hack day,so I think we're talking about Miami now.Tammy, they will have a hack day and atleast one project with a WP component toit. The US one, I think, is a studio ina movie studio or something alongthose lines. That's better. There's a gimmick;there's still a gimmick, which isquite nice. Thank you, Andy. Andy, Andy saidI'm not, I can't repeat that—that's noyou can't. That's far, far too true to besaid on air.See, um, okay, yeah, shock, right? Let's moveon. We're nearly out of time, so what havewe got time for? Have we got time forthis? No, let's move on. Have we got timefor this? No. Do you know what? I think Ithink probably with two minutes to spare,if we launch into another one, we'regoing to overrun. So let's just knockit on the head there. We've had a goodrun; we've done nearly the allotted time. So, yeah, we'll do that in a minute. Oh, wecan't do it with John. I'm going to haveto make—I can't get my hands up for somereason. I've been trying to reset theThe camera just won't reset; I don'tknow what went wrong. Never mind,we'll do it like that, and I'll just puta fake signal. There, you put fake handsup. Yeah, if it works, send me animage of you going like that, and, uh,we'll do it. I could send an image of youlater. Oh yeah, yeah, do it. That'll behysterical. I'm still waiting for my primarycomputer to reboot. I had to fix it up. Well,when I rebooted this morning, after youhave your reboot, it decided one of myhard drives was scanning and is still scanning. It's never nice. Never nice. Um, so first ofall, thank you to all the people whoshowed up and gave us comments. We reallyappreciate it; that's great. Um, it alwaysmakes the show much more interestingwhen people comment, and I'm glad thatyou all did. Then it remains for meto thank Remus over there from scan.com;go check it out. And also withinWordPress. You said within wordpress.com,right? Within wp.com? What did I say?Within WordPress? Oh yeah, you, yeah, whennot, not going there; yeah, yeah. Um, andalso to Anna, Anna Hero from CoCer Block.CoCerBlock.com,right? Okay, she's nodding; it's CoCerBlock.com and also John, uh, WP Plugins. Toz.com. That’s right, and if youwant to catch me later, noon my time here,I’m interviewing Ryan Logan fromInfluence WP for my show live on YouTubelater this afternoon. It goes livePacific time. Okay, thank you. I appreciatethat. Three and a half hours from now.Okay, okay. WP Plugins atoz.com, gocheck out WP Plugins az.com, and you cancatch the show. Oh, neat. Okay, andhopefully my live page is now working. Itshould be just as we end the show. Yay. Um,but that’s it, that’s all we got for youthis week. We have this thing, Anna, I’msorry, where every week we raise ourhands in this slightly humiliating way,and we all wait, and I then put itas the album art. So, Anna, do you feel yay? And look, John’s hands are nowhere to beseen, but hopefully I’ll get an AIversion of that, and you’ll getan image later when I get a camera. Yeah,that would be great if you could send itover; I’d really appreciate it. So, thankyou for joining us, our panelists, andthank you for joining us, our guests. I’mgoing to, as we say in the UK, knock it onthe head, and we’ll be back hopefullythis time next week. So, yeah, see you all. Right, take care. Bye., This Week in WordPress #327, WP Builds, 01jq7g541wsx9231tnazydt7ev.