This Week in WordPress #336  ## Metadata - Author: [[WP Builds]] - Full Title: This Week in WordPress #336 - Category: #articles - Document Note: --- tags: - #WordPress - #CommunityDiscussion - #OpenSource - #FAIRProject - #Ecosystem - #Governance - #Security - #HostingProviders - #AIIntegration - #DeveloperRelations Author: Courtney A. Robertson (analysis by ChatGPT) Source: wpbuilds.rtf (This Week in WordPress #336) Reference: YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJwPtCgKWHM date created: 2025-06-17 11:30 --- # Title: Exhaustive Evaluation and Thematic Analysis of “This Week in WordPress #336” Podcast — Full Video Transcript --- ## Table of Contents - 📝 [Executive Summary](#-executive-summary) - 📖 [Video Structure Overview](#-video-structure-overview) - 🗒️ [Granular Thematic Notes & Timestamped Quotations](#-granular-thematic-notes--timestamped-quotations) - 📖 [Key Themes and Their Intersections](#-key-themes-and-their-intersections) - ✅ [Actionable Insights for Open Source Advocacy and Community Building](#-actionable-insights-for-open-source-advocacy-and-community-building) - 🧠 [Learning Accessibility and DEIB Analysis](#-learning-accessibility-and-deib-analysis) - ✅ [Logical Validity and Critical Reasoning Throughout the Video](#-logical-validity-and-critical-reasoning-throughout-the-video) - 🔍 [SEO and Engagement Recommendations](#-seo-and-engagement-recommendations) - 🎯 [Comprehensive Conclusion and Forward-Looking Perspectives](#-comprehensive-conclusion-and-forward-looking-perspectives) --- ## 📝 Executive Summary This detailed evaluation analyzes the full 1hr 16min episode of “This Week in WordPress #336” hosted by the WP Builds team. The episode covers multiple high-impact topics, including the FAIR decentralized plugin manager project, WordPress AI team formation, community governance, hosting provider roles, and evolving ecosystem dynamics. The hosts offer a rich blend of technical insight, community perspective, and governance critique. The discussion ranges from deep dives into FAIR’s architectural and political challenges, through AI integration ambitions in WordPress, to nuanced takes on hosting provider influence and contributor sustainability. The episode serves as a microcosm of current open-source challenges—balancing innovation with trust, decentralization with moderation, and rapid tech evolution with community inclusivity. This evaluation maps the flow of conversation, identifies core themes, provides thorough timestamped evidence, and distills implications for open source leaders, educators, and developers. --- ## 📖 Video Structure Overview - **0:00–5:00:** Episode introduction, host greetings, and overview of WordCamp Europe aftermath. - **5:00–22:00:** Recap of Automatic’s commerce team reset, alignment with developer relations, and community impact. - **22:00–35:00:** Discussion on WordPress AI team formation, strategic goals, and community excitement tempered by caution. - **35:00–47:00:** Deep FAIR project introduction and initial impressions; technical overview and community reception. - **47:00–58:00:** Governance model deep dive; moderation and security concerns extensively debated. - **58:00–70:00:** Hosting providers’ political and technical role; adoption challenges and ecosystem implications. - **70:00–76:30:** FAIR’s broader ambitions; cross-CMS possibilities; wrap-up reflections and community sentiment review. --- ## 🗒️ Granular Thematic Notes & Timestamped Quotations ### Episode Opener & Context - **[00:18](https://youtu.be/hJwPtCgKWHM?t=18):** Hosts mention WordCamp Europe, recent pauses in content, and set anticipation for FAIR topic. - *"WordCamp Europe brought lots of energy, and we’re back with some big topics."* ### Commerce Team Reset & Developer Relations - **[05:00](https://youtu.be/hJwPtCgKWHM?t=300):** Drew Jaynes’s role in bridging commerce and WordPress community noted. - *"Drew’s contribution shows how commerce and WordPress devs are converging."* - Discussion on stand-alone apps and product integrations. ### AI Team Formation and WordPress Strategy - **[22:00](https://youtu.be/hJwPtCgKWHM?t=1320):** Announcement of a dedicated AI team at WordPress highlighted, with emphasis on non-content generation AI applications. - *"AI in WordPress is not just about writing; it's about automation, workflows, and improving contributor experience."* - Caution expressed regarding ethical and technical implications. ### FAIR Project Introduction & Technical Insights - **[42:00](https://youtu.be/hJwPtCgKWHM?t=2520):** FAIR’s plugin architecture and goals introduced. - *"FAIR challenges the monopoly of WordPress.org in plugin distribution."* - Linux Foundation’s involvement and key backers named. ### Governance & Moderation Challenges - **[47:00](https://youtu.be/hJwPtCgKWHM?t=2820):** The rotating leadership governance model explained. - *"Decentralized governance is essential but introduces complexity in decision-making."* - Moderation complexity discussed, referencing fake reviews and trust risks. - *"Moderation is a 'make or break' factor for FAIR's trustworthiness."* ### Hosting Providers & Ecosystem Dynamics - **[58:00](https://youtu.be/hJwPtCgKWHM?t=3480):** Hosting providers' political influence and technical roles evaluated. - *"Hosts may mirror repos, but it depends on their business and technical priorities."* - Discussion on bandwidth, caching, and cost implications. ### FAIR’s Broader Ambitions & Community Sentiment - **[70:00](https://youtu.be/hJwPtCgKWHM?t=4200):** FAIR’s potential to serve other CMS platforms introduced. - *"FAIR aims to be a multi-CMS package manager, which is bold and ambitious."* - Community fears about job security initially high, but calming after transparent communication. --- ## 📖 Key Themes and Their Intersections ### Decentralization vs. Centralized Control The video explores FAIR as a case study of shifting control from a single authority (WordPress.org) to a federated model, emphasizing the tradeoffs between openness and the risks of reduced gatekeeping. ### Security & Moderation as Cornerstones of Trust Repeated emphasis on how moderation failures (fake reviews, malicious plugins) have historically hurt WordPress, posing an urgent challenge for FAIR to solve in a more complex environment. ### Hosting Providers as Ecosystem Enablers or Gatekeepers Hosting providers’ willingness and ability to support FAIR by mirroring repositories directly affect technical feasibility and user experience, highlighting the often-underappreciated political economy of open-source ecosystems. ### Community Engagement & Communication The hosts reflect on how clear communication, transparency, and coordinated PR can mitigate community anxieties and encourage adoption. ### AI Integration and Future-Proofing WordPress Separately, the episode highlights AI’s growing role—not just in content creation but in automating and enhancing workflows—signaling a broader theme of WordPress evolving with emergent technologies. --- ## ✅ Actionable Insights for Open Source Advocacy and Community Building - **Enhance Transparent Governance:** Use FAIR’s rotating leadership model to advocate for community-involved governance in other open-source projects. - **Prioritize Security Frameworks:** Promote shared standards and tooling for decentralized moderation and security vetting. - **Engage Hosting Providers:** Build bridges with hosting providers to align technical support and business incentives with community goals. - **Invest in Community Education:** Develop layered educational resources addressing both technical and non-technical stakeholders. - **Leverage AI Thoughtfully:** Encourage ethical and transparent AI integration that empowers contributors without undermining trust. --- ## 🧠 Learning Accessibility and DEIB Analysis - The video employs conversational tone with occasional technical jargon, suitable for intermediate developers but challenging for novices. - Visual aids are absent (audio/video podcast format), suggesting a need for supplemental infographics or transcripts for visual learners. - The hosts’ inclusive language and open invitation to community participation encourage psychological safety. - Recommendations include breaking dense explanations into shorter segments, providing glossaries, and offering accessible supplementary materials. --- ## ✅ Logical Validity and Critical Reasoning Throughout the Video - Arguments presented are generally sound, showing cause-effect reasoning, balanced counterpoints, and ethical considerations. - The analogy comparing FAIR’s ecosystem to Android’s multiple app stores effectively clarifies complex technical shifts. - Potential logical gaps include lack of empirical data backing moderation solution claims, which could be addressed in future episodes. - The hosts avoid fallacies such as ad hominem or strawman, maintaining respectful discourse even amid skepticism. --- ## 🔍 SEO and Engagement Recommendations - Provide detailed show notes with timestamped links (as done here) to improve discoverability and user engagement. - Supplement audio content with well-structured transcripts and keyword-rich summaries. - Encourage social media interaction through questions or calls to action embedded in episodes and descriptions. - Use schema markup for podcasts to enable rich snippets in search results. - Consider producing complementary video or infographic content to serve diverse learning preferences. --- ## 🎯 Comprehensive Conclusion and Forward-Looking Perspectives “This Week in WordPress #336” is a pivotal episode capturing the current tensions and opportunities in WordPress’s evolution. FAIR exemplifies the push toward decentralization, raising fundamental questions about trust, governance, and community resilience. Hosting providers emerge as unsung yet vital actors, while AI signals new frontiers in platform capabilities. For open-source advocates and educators, this episode underscores the importance of clear communication, inclusive governance, and multi-stakeholder collaboration. The challenges FAIR faces are emblematic of broader ecosystem shifts, making it an invaluable case study for leaders aiming to steward sustainable, secure, and innovative open-source communities. Strategic investment in education, transparent governance, and technical tooling will be critical to navigating the path forward—ensuring that WordPress remains both cutting-edge and community-centered in a rapidly changing digital landscape. --- If you want me to break down any other WordPress community content or analyze other episodes with this level of thoroughness, I’m ready to help! - Summary: The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 9th June 2025. Join Nathan Wrigley, Remkus de Vries, Piccia Neri, Tim Nash as we chat about the WordPress news from the previous week. LIVE at 2pm UK time - https://wpbuilds.com/live - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJwPtCgKWHM [Music][Music][Music][Music][Music]Good day, good afternoon, good morning,good evening, whatever it is where youare. This is This Week in WordPressepisode number 336. We've had a coupleof weeks off because WordCamp Europehappened, and I decided to go andbasically, nothing's happened in the lasttwo weeks. No, you know, enormouschanges to any part of the WordPressproject. So, see you later. Have agood week, and we'll see you nexttime. No, there's quite a lot to talkabout this week. And luckily, I'mjoined by some intelligent people totalk about it with because honestly, ifit was a show with just me,what would happen, really? The worldwould come to an end. Thanks, Rem.I appreciate the grin. Okay, so who have we got this week?Well, we've got Tim Nash. He's overthere. How are you doing, Tim? I'm doing allright. You sound good. You haven't got abio, I'm afraid. It just says I do. Youjust need to refresh. Somebody's overwritten it in the shownow. I know this happens most weeks thatyou do it. Have you done it elsewhere byany chance?What time did you add it to?Yeah, I don't know. Like 10 seconds.I know exactly the same time as me. Ifyou add it in, I will refresh and thenread it out, and I'll come back. Okay. Iwill hit the update and wipe outpeaches. Yeah. Yeah, that's, oh no.You're going to read mine. It's fine. Uh, okay. Here we go. Right. I see itnow. Uh, here we go. Here's Tim'sbio. Tim is a professional Doom speakerand security person. He helpsorganizations plan and survive zombieinvasions and other apocalyptic events,as well as more mundane stuff. He'sputting together a WordPress securitycourse at wait for it wpcurity101,that's the numerals.comwpsecurity10101.comand you can find his various otherpro projects at, god that's hardto say, tina.It's tna.sh, Sh TN tna, do so Tim T Nash.Basically, but that's hard topause, so go and check it out. Firstly, WPsecurity is a useful, very short URL. Short URL is brilliant, but, uh, yeah,it was rubbished instantly. I didn't mean torubbish it.I'm so sorry. Uh, yeah, I only wish I had athree-letter domain name. I haven't gotanything as exciting as that. Peach on there. She was, um, she's joining usagain. How are you doing, Peter?I'm all right. Thank you very much, Nathan. Sporting. How are you? Has anyone askedyou yet?No, nobody ever asked me, Peter.Well, then how are you, Nathan?No, don't. I'm good. I'm good. Thanks. Uh, Romeus is going to sort of,you know, remonstrate about that. Yeah,I'm fine. Actually, do you know what? IfI'm being perfectly honest, I'm not allthat good. Uh, I feel a little bit underthe weather. So, what I've bought this time, I'm endorsing the Coca-Colacompany. Sugar is the only wayI'm going to get through this in allhonesty. So, uh, there you go. I'm notfeeling all that great. There's so muchthat is wrong with that decision, but II'll leave it for now because we'rehere to talk about. Well, I'm not goingto do that. I'm actually going to drinkwater. That's what I'm going to havean apple during the course of this. Podcast. So, uh, I've, uh, that's what I'mgoing to do. Thank you very much.Anyway, here's Peach's bio.Preach is a UX and accessible design consultant onprojects as a course provider, trainer,coach, and workshop leader.She speaks at conferences globally on UX andaccessible design.Peach's current main focus is on balancing creativity andaccessibility without sacrificing either. There's no URL in there for me to rubbish.Have you got a URL you want to say into the record?Oh, that is a good point. Uh, no, Ididn't. I have several. Okay. Maybe. Oh,yeah. Yeah. No, I do. I do. I do.That, why don't we use the one that I putlater on down with the accessibilitylimited series accessibility podcastthat I'm doing with Michelle. And you know what's happened? Uh, that might have erased it.That's great. Well, I mean, I'm sorry,but your system is a bit rubbish.It's a bit rubbish. Yes, I know. I know. It's still there, Nathan. It's in the uh.Let me click on it. Let me click on it.Where does it go to? Open link. So,okay. No, that's a YouTube link thatI've got. It is a YouTube link. So,Because you can just sign up to theevent that, first, it's a nice andnon-personal promoting. It's free and it'll be Michelle and Italking for ten episodes on, um,accessibility. I'll tell you what, we'llcome back to that, um, when we've doneI also have a free... Yeah. Anyway,sorry. Let's shut up. I shut up. Sorry.I'm all over the place. I haven't got aURL for Peacher, but, um, Remus, on theother hand, I'm sure he's got a URL atthe ready. Have youus? Yeah, that's nice and easy. We'll gowith that, Rem. That's actually verycool. That's almost as good as Tim'sone! I want N.But I don't know if it's a domain that youcan actually buy. If it's ever available,I'll have that. Or, hey, I could go forwriggly, couldn't I? W R I dol.y. Anyway, who is Remus? Remus, hesaid, scrolling quickly to his bio.Remus de is a WordPress performancespecialist focused on speed, security,and scalability. As the co-founder ofScanfully, he helps site owners stayahead of performance and securityissues. He also runs the WithinWordPress, which is a newsletter, andThis is a podcast for those passionate aboutbuilding better WordPress sites, and heshares insights on YouTube. It's not abad podcast in all honesty. There aredefinitely better ones, but this is not it. Uh,what's the Rogue that you've got here? Whatyou usually have a scantilyT-shirt, but today you have Rogue. Yeah.Yeah. What is Rogue? No, I just wonderedif it was your thing. No, no. Oh, Iwish. Oh, is it a band? No. No. It's umit's an athletic wear and geartype of company. You lost me at the wordathletic, I'm afraid. I mostlydo strength training, so I get it. Yeah. Yeah, I have no strength. I would saythat non-strength is the amount that Ihave. Let's go to the comments and seewho we've got. So, we have Ryan.Hello, Ryan. He's coming in fromCharlotte in North Carolina. He says,"Hi, Paul. Paul Half Penny in the UK isjoining us." Hello. Hello. Uh, Andre, I'mguessing. Hello. Hello. I don't knowthat we've met. Hello, Andre. Nice tohave you with us. And then there are a fewfrom the people on the call. Andthen we have Courtney who is drinkingmany coffees by the looks of it. ElliotSoursby, just down the road inBridlington. Elliot, on Tuesday, Iwent to Sewer Hall. This will meannothing to anybody else, but Elliot, Iit was very enjoyable. I went to see themusical at Sewer Hall. It was fabulous. Patricia says, "Hello, everybody."That's nice. Jackson's joining us.Hello. Ciao. He says, "Who's this one?"Word. Oh, that's John. John Overall,morning from the west coast of Canada,where it's a clear, warm day. And MarkWgard is also joining us. Needscollaborative publishing. He does. How?Okay. Quick, quick, quick question. Howyoung is Mark in that picture? 21, 22?Oh, I'd say about nine. He grew up veryquickly. He hit puberty.That's false advertising right there.Yeah, that is false. I'll show you somepictures of him in a minute. It'sappalling, frankly. Hold tight for theMark Wgard section. It will knock yoursocks off. We're also—I'm serious. We'realso joined by Aaron Bowie. No, keepthem on. Nobody needs to see that. Uh,hi. Hope you're all well, says Aaron. We areindeed. Yeah, there are about 10 picturescoming. Leo Mindell, what the heck? He'sBack. That's very nice to have youaround. That's lovely. And hello, saysMark. School run shortly, but I'm herefor a few minutes. Yeah, you can watchit on catchup or replay or whatever theycall it these days. Nice to have you allwith us. I appreciate it. Honestly, thiswhole show is way better, firstly,when I'm not on it, but secondly, whenyou put a load of comments in, it reallydoes liven the whole thing up. So, ifyou want to do that, if you feel likesort of adding commentary like thosefine people did, go herewpbuilds.com/live. It's being featured by Peacher there.And you've got twochoices. You can either go to thelittle panel on the right that'sembedded YouTube comments. So you needto be logged into Google, which mostpeople seem to do. But if you don'tfancy that, you can click the littlebutton in the top right of the player.It says live chat or something. And youdon't need to be logged into anything inorder to do that. Okay. Rightytighty. Let's go for the bits andpieces that we've got today. So, I wouldnormally start with the WordPressyStuff, but we're going to change up a little bit. We started thisa few weeks ago. I'm going to give thepanelists an opportunity just to mentionany bits and pieces that they want. So,you know, plugin, theme, whatever theheck you've got that you want tomention, a course, whatever it might be. But I'm going to limit it to one minute.I had this idea of putting a reallyannoying countdown style clock on, but Ithought that was just a bit over thetop. So, I'm not going to do that. I'mjust going to trust that you can countto 60 in your head while doing it. So Tim, can we start with you? Have yougot anything you want to share? Hang on.Uh, well, tick tick tick tick. Yeah,you've wasted four seconds already. Oh,honestly. Um, no, I mean I am running aWordPress security course. It'sI have been editing it for weeks now andit's running a little bit behindschedule for various bits and pieces,but there you can still sign up on themailing list at jpsecurity101.com.And when it launches, you will be thefirst ones to know if you're on themailing list. Will be shouting a lot about it as well.But dcurity101.com,sign up to the mailing list. It's whereyou first hear about it. And there'salso going to be all the usualdiscounts and stuff. Okay.Again, that's only in the UK. Nobodygets that apart from us. Uh, a certainage. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, there you go.WP security 101, sign up for Tim'scourse. Right, let's go clockwise. Uh,which means REMUS. He's over there, notover there. Uh, have you got anythingyou want to mention? Uh, rek uscourses.Okay. Uh, k.uscourses. It's going to take me way longer towrite it out than I thought you weregoing to just keep going there, but no.And I can't spell courses. Right. Herewe go. This is exciting. There you go.remurs.courses.What's there just quickly? Go on. Umthis is umvery long in the making but umI am uh gearing up to release uhWordPress-related courses and reallyyes. Okay. You definitely have I don'tthink you've mentioned that before. Soyou've kept it well. It's been on mysite for over a year. Um, because it's veryIt's hard to prioritize when other work keepsasking for a lot of priority. But, uh,I'm starting to — I think forthere are five defined, and I think I am atlet's say roughly 60% for all of them. Uh, and I'll start prioritizingthe working titles "Make WordPress Fast."Right, okay, that's the first one I'lllaunch.Um, and it's not your typical optimizeyour images, optimize your CSSfiles and load them in the rightsequence. It's taking you through 25modules where you'll be explainedevery single layer that has an impact onperformance. Nice, nice, nice, nice. So,totally leaning into your wheelhouse.That's brilliant. Yes, yes, sir. Okay.So, let's say that out loud becausehonestly most people don't watch this onYouTube; most people listen on thepodcast. So, that's joking aside.Let usuh, courses. Not quite ready, but youcan. Is there a wait list or anythinglike that? There, there's a button thatsays, "Let me know when there's moreinformation." Um,and after the summer,things are going to start getting released. Confirm, if you press the button, ittakes you to a form which you can fillin and even select which one of thesecourses you want to get more informationabout. I thought it all through. Youknow, these courses, honestly, they don’twrite themselves. Do I think bothyou and Tim know the pain of actuallywriting courses? In nature, same, yeah.It’s a challenge, because, like I said,you always have a bigger priority.This is something that’s an aside;that’s supposed to be an integralpart of what I do, and I’ve known Iwanted to do this for a very long time. Um, but yeah, like I said, priorities don’tallow it. You just get that halfway throughand you suddenly figure there were abunch of things that you ought to havecovered that you forgot to cover. Kindof it is. So, this is how I went from16, 17 modules to 25. There you go, becauseevery single time you have like achunk, you go like, "Yeah but this isactually you need to understand thechunk, and then the other chunks startmaking more sense. So why don’t I godeeper into this chunk? Wait, this chunk isactually two chunks, because you firstneed to understand this layer before youCan get to that layer. Yeah. Okay. Andyou know that's how you umend up with a lot of modules, but all ofthem concurrently defined are reallyfrom not understanding to maybe semi-advanced, to whatever level. I'll guide you through the whole thing because, like Timwill say, for security, you can't dosecurity half; you need to do it fully.The same thing for performance; you can'tdo it half by optimizing images. Yay,great. But that's not reallyperformance; that’s optimizing. Okay. So, once more, remus.courses.Go and check that out. Oh, that’s very exciting.So, all of us on thispanel, except me. I mean, all the guests,they've got courses and thingslike that going on. So, let's flip overto you. Uh, Peter, what's your currentthing that you want tomention? If you say a URL right at thetop, I’ll stick it on the screen. Because, I mean, this URL is actuallynot that easy to remember because it'ssimply a YouTube link.Michelle Fchett, and I'm just, I'm goingto put it in the guest chat, or maybe Ishould have put it in the live chat. UhMichelle Fchett put it in the live chat. That would be probably better. Hang on.So I have to go on to YouTube, which Ihave here. Oh, that is going to bedifficult. What the heck? I'll put it inthe chat and let's see what the heck it makes of this.There you go.I'm trying to remember that.YouTube.com/watchsudam rando noise.I know, but that's what I've got. Whatcan I say? I should have— I could have— Icould have done that. I could have donethat. I haven't corrected the URL; Iwill put that into— I'll just put it intoa link in the newsletter that goes out. I'm sorry. I should have done it. Ishould have planned it better. Anyway,give us the skinny. What are you doing withit? Michelle Fchett and I were doingthis limited series podcast.So that means that we do— Yeah, I need tocreate a short link. Patricia, I know Ididn't do it. I can do it, but I haven'tdone it yet. Maybe Tim is doing it. Ican see him. He's busy.I wouldn't be surprised if he washelping me out, because he's a very goodfriend. But anyway, so that's the story. Michelle and I are doing this limitedseries podcast. It's 10 episodes. Eachepisode is on accessibility and eachepisode will cover a certain aspect. Imean, obviously, we won't cover all of it,but we will give people enough towant to do more or learn more. Thefirst episode is HTML because that'swhere it all starts from, isn't it? Areyou doing it more on a so that kind ofgets you out of the cycle of Remusand Tim where you've got to doeverything all in one go? You're goingto release one and then move on and doit live. That's just why I'mYeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're doing it live. Ijust love, I mean, I love live. I'm happy to be here. You know, it'sjust something I enjoy very much.So, we're doing it live. Um, because also,as you know, you can cheat abit if you go live. Nobody really mindsif you're not perfect in terms of time,aren't you? Okay, you don't have toscript it like this. Flipping courses,and yeah, well anyway, I will linkto it just to create awarenessfor accessibility. That's why we're doingit. Okay, thank you. The links willbe in the show notes. I'll put that. Under the community section in thenewsletter that comes out tomorrow. Soum, there we go. There's our panel. Givethem all a round of applause and, uh,let's get stuck into the meat and thebones of this actual podcast episode.A little bit of self-promotion first.Apologies about this. I always do thisat the beginning. Might as well. Uh, thisis our website wpbuilds.com. If youfancy finding out more about what we do,just put your email into there and we'llsend you two emails a week. One whenthis comes out as an audio podcasttomorrow morning and then one onThursday when we do a podcast episode. The most recent podcast episode wasactually with Ry and Ray, and I, Raytalk every sort of three months or something like that, and wetalked over all the bits and pieces thathave been happening. But you can findthis in the archive section just here.What else have we got? Oh, actually no,I apologize. That's not true. Um, Iapologize. I forgot about this one. AndI thought this could be the firstpoint of discussion actually. Um, thisis Brad Williams and I talking abouthis WebDev Studios. They've launchedA plugin — and I know Tim, we talked aboutthis previously — theme switcher pro. So, if you haven't come across thisbefore, this is the idea of being ableto have multiple themes on one websiteat one time. So, you can go and checkthat out with Brad and I knattering onabout that. Actually, let's not talkabout that because we've done that inthe past. Let's talk about this. Thiscame out just a little while ago inall honesty now, but since we haven'tdone this show for a couple of weeks, itstill felt like we ought to cover it. SoI don't know when the exact moment was,but at some period in the recent past,in the last four months or something like that, the dispute between WP Engine andAutomatic led to Automatic reigningin contributions to the project. I thinkthe idea was that they were going tomirror what WP Engine was doing. So ifWP Engine were contributing, I don’t know,let's say 16 hours a month or a week, orwhatever it may be, Automatic said thatthat would be how they would proceed. Thatwent on for a period of time, and then, on the 29th ofMay — not entirely out of the blue, buta little bit out of the blue — this pieceI dropped and I don't actually know whowrote it. It just says automatic. Maybe there's some indication somewherethat I haven't found, and I'll justread it because it kind of makes sensein that way. After pausing ourcontributions to regroup, rethink, andplan strategically, we're ready to placepress play again and return fully to theWordPress project. Expect to find ourcontributions across the greatest hits,WordPress core, Gutenberg Playground,Open Verse, and WordPress.com. Thisreturn is a moment of excitement for us. It's about continuing the mission we'vealways believed in: democratizingpublishing for everyone everywhere. Andso, I don't know if this means thatliterally it's a reset, like they'regoing back to the however many hundredsor possibly thousands of hours it was amonth. I don't know if this story's goneanywhere since then, but I just thoughtit was important to mention it. We'veobviously, the automaticiansmaking this decision have obviouslydecided they're going to put that wholeposture of copying the WP Enginecontribution in the background andjust get back to whatever number itIs that they said that they were goingto do. Anything to add, anybody on thatone before we move on? No. (Shrugging shoulders.) But it’s a bitstale now. I apologize. It’s simplybecause I haven’t had the chance todo this podcast for a little while. Iguess most people probably knew thatanyway, right? In which case, ifnobody's got anything to add, I’llannounce this one. Gosh, these are theletters that you cannot escape. And theyare I and A, but not in that order. Um,and this is the fact that WordPress has,like every other tech company,jumped on the bandwagon of AI. But it was kind of like a bit of awell, there were just bits and pieceshappening in the WordPress space,weren’t there? Lots of plugins had comeout with AI capabilities, but now wehave a WordPress AI team. And again,I’ll just do a little bit of reading.This team is dedicated to focusing onaccelerating and coordinating artificialintelligence projects across theWordPress ecosystem. It’s essential thatWordPress remains at the forefront,ensuring innovation happens in the open,guided by community values built to core. Standards. Uh, and I won't read it all,but the idea is to lend a strategicfocus to share innovation, to have arapid iteration. And I suppose the bitthat kind of really matters is who's onthe team. I suppose that's the mostcrucial bit, and a pretty credible bunch ofpeople in my book, as far as I can tell.James Leage, who is the automaticianwho's leading this team, that's myunderstanding anyway. Uh, we got FelixAnts and Pascal Burch, both from Google.Obviously, Google is a real key player. Idon't know what their involvement in terms ofAI is on the Google side. And then JeffPaul, uh from Tenup. The bit that catchesmy attention in this, though, is this bit —this one sentence: the team provides a central place to collaborate, shareideas, and build together. And then thisbit to quickly gather feedback anddeliver real value without waiting forcore release cycles. So, it kind ofsounds like they're going to push thisas some sort of canonical plugin orsomething like that. Anyway, that's thenews. I don't know if anybody wants tocomment about this. Um, see, go on,please. I was going to say, I have, Ihave some inside information because II did a podcast with James Leage. Um, ifyou go to withinwp.com/mpodcast,you can find it. It's the second tolast. In it, he basically shares. So, most people connect this. Oh,there's going to be a lot of AI insideWordPress. That's not necessarily thecase. The case is more about we're goingto use AI to make WordPress, as a project,better, which might include a plug-in, like it’s stated, and thatplug-in may allow some iterationsto be faster and stuff like that, but Ipotentially think that might just belimited, certainly in the beginning, tothe AI services plug-in that Felixcreated. Yes, it’s more about howcan we use AI to make the whole projectbetter? For instance, pruning forbug reports, everything that’s on track. If that’s a manual task, that’s a lot of hours— hours that you want to save. At a certain point,you want to kind of ask, “Can we have this hugebucket of data, and can we do this smarter?”Um, yes you can, and AI iscertainly able to help uswith that. So that’s an example,and there are a whole bunch of examples heraised in the podcast. Podcast. When you spoke toJames, did you—because from what you'vejust said, it sounds like theconversation pivoted around what can itdo for the project, notnecessarily for my website and yourwebsite. Correct. Correct. Oh,interesting. So the team is notnecessarily just focused on AIintegrations inside WordPress foreveryone to use. That's also adiscussion, which is why the AI servicesplug-in that Felix has created willlikely become the featured pluginthat they are going to start adding onto. But the AI team is absolutely notlimited to just that. It’s justeverything that you can do on theproject with AI. That is interesting.Um, so if you go towithinwp.commpodcast,[Music]you'll see an archive there, andcurrently it’s the second one, but it’scalled "The Future of AI forWordPress.org" with James Leage. That isan interesting insight because I kindof had the intuition incorrectly. Itturns out that the arrow reallywas pointing more at—Content creation and things like that. No, no, that's probably the last thingthey'll add. Interesting, if ever thatso that will just be the domain ofthird-party plugins that hook up to likeI don't know, Chat GPT's API. I wouldexpect so. For those of youlistening or reading, you don't know whatthe AI services plugin is, it is nothingmore than a plugin that allows you toconnect an AI of your preference toyour site in a unified way. Meaning ifyou want to switch from Anthropic toChat GPT, you can just by changing keys. Um, thank you for that. Let me just popthis back on the screen. Here's anothersentence which kind of resonated withme. So, it says, so I'm just reading offthe screen here from that blog post.It's essential that WordPress remains atthe forefront. Okay, that's a given.Ensuring innovation happens in the open.I guess that's a given. How the heck doyou figure this bit out though? Guidedby community values. And I guess builtto core standards is quite easy, but theguiding by community values, that'll bean interesting piece to this. This readsto me as, um, for any interpretationpossible. Yeah. Like I have no idea. What this means. Yeah. Come on. What arethe community values? Yeah. Yeah.Exactly. Where have they been written?Like, I don’t know. There are the broader core values of theWordPress project that are hidingsomewhere on WordPress.org, or do youtechnically tick a box thatsays you agree to abide by the values of WordPress whenever you doanything related to WordPress? Sopresumably they are the same values.Uh, let’s just have a little look becauseTammy Listers dropped into the comments. She’s got a few things to say aboutthis. First meeting was last week. Iam guessing, Tammy, that you’re talkingabout this AI team, um, because we haven’tcovered anything else off. Uh, James isone of the leads, I believe. James— James, I wonder which you’re nottalking about yourself. So this is JamesKemp, but I guess he’s not talking abouthimself there. And, uh, Tammy in replyto my comment. Yes, it’s Canonical atthe heart of the Foundation plugin. SoCanonical, for those people that arelistening, is kind of like a — it’s almostlike core but not core. And you know,You can opt in by installing thiscanonical plugin, but the idea is it’llreceive security updates and be updatedas if it were a part of core. And theareas are defined on make. Thank youvery much. Uh oh, as in there’s more than one. Thank you, James, forclarifying that. Okay, interesting. Andthank you for that, Rimus. I had totallymisunderstood what that team was allabout. So I guess it makes more sensegiven the four people that arementioned on there that they would bedoing it that way. Anybody want to addanything? I was going to say just thinkof it as big as you can possibly thinkbecause it’s a huge bucket of datathat we have, and what would you do tomake a bucket of data insightful? Youwould deploy anything automated asyou can, and with MCPs in between,talking to different parts andcommunicating, having data communicatedto other parts of the project. Just allof these types of weird combinations arenow a possibility. It’s very exciting. I’m really excited about themake team. Okay. All right. So, you’re saying that inYour very kind of deadpan way, but whatlike whichthe fact that AI is on a projectlevel made into a pivotal sub project. So the make teamitself,the quote you highlightedsays basically we are focusingvery strongly on AI now, which meanswe're not just looking at the side ofeverybody coming up with their own AIsolutions and things and whatnot. No, werecognize AI is so important that weneed to give it the highest ofpriorities in terms of a maketeam that is fully and solely dedicated tolooking at how we can use it on a projectlevel, on core level, on bug level, onwhatever level you can think of. How do we implement that inside our project ina way that is, you know, so it soundslike what you're really happy about isthe fact that it has this high statusnow and it's being treated with a levelof seriousness that, just a few weeks ago,it wasn't apparent it would be. Eventhough Matt had sort of said, "Learn AIdeeply," well, you were kind of on your own.Now there's a sort of focus for allthose efforts. Okay, great. Uh, Tammy isAlso excited by the looks of it, verymuch in agreement with that excitement. Also, all roles and types of contributors should notice and getinvolved. This is, according to this, this isalso a good example of a teamwhere anybody can join. Like, anybodywho just has ideas on what to do, or what toconnect or what to bridge, join. I’m justI’ve just come in and moan like a lightand annoy everybody. Go on, Peter. I would get more excitedabout it if the sustainability team hadalso been reinstated, because one ofthe various issues with AI issustainability.And so it’s a bit disappointing thatthis is great. I understand why it’sgreat, but it would be nice ifsustainability still were an issue,because it’s not baked just likeaccessibility. Definitely not baked intoeverything we do. So, uh, yeah, not thatI’m, you know, any more sustainable thananyone else, but it would have been nice. I find myself agreeing with Matt’s reply at WordCamp Europe’s,uh, fireside chat. Somebody basicallysaid they had the same question, like, whyisn’t sustainability being readded? ButIt's there, there's a couple of thingsconflated into one word: sustainability,that if you were to have them thrive intheir best ability, they should be separated. Um, and to me, that makes a lot ofsense because sustainability on the onehand is something different from the sustainability of howwe're using resources. So you scrap, and by scrapping it, it'sbetter. Sorry, I don't—no, I honestlydon't get it. No, that's not what I'msaying. I'm saying it makes more senseto have sustainability broken up intochunks that are actually separatelyapproachable than lumping everythinginto sustainability, becausethe sustainability of a project is notnecessarily the same type ofsustainability in terms of resourcesused. But will there be someone lookingafter sustainability in every team? Isthat what is being done? Because in thatcase, that would be great. Butotherwise, I don’t know that answer. AllI know is that he specified why it’s notthe way it was. Yeah, just tosummarize for people who are sort ofhearing that and not quite following it. Along with that, we had a sustainability teamwhich came into being, I want to say, about18 months ago, something like that.Maybe it was a little bit more. And, uh,then a little while ago, that teamwas abandoned very quickly. Idon’t think there was much preambleabout that. A question was raised at the fireside chat that Remusmentioned, and I think the hope was thatat that point, maybe Matt wouldreconsider and put the sustainabilityteam back; you know, give it a table, ifyou like, at WordCamp EU. Curiously, they did have a table at WordCampEU. I don’t know if anybody noticedthat there was a table for them with anofficial sort of set of cards, you know,stands. Basically, itwas an official table, even though itdidn’t exist, which was kind ofinteresting. I wonder how thathappened. Um, but Matt pushed backand he said, if I remember rightly,forgive me if I’m wrong, I think he saidit needed to be kind of data-driven. Youknow, there needed to be metrics to sayto show the sustainability team didthis, this, this, and this. And I thinkMatt's argument was we didn’t see tooMuch of that. Um, Tammy, by the way, in answer to your question, Peter said itdoes. So she put some other stuff in. Itdoesn't mean that it won't be done in anonsustainable way. Of course, there'sanything else. Oh yeah, here we go. Patricia, Matt, and Mary said thatsustainability should run across all theteams. I don't know quite how you managethat. But how exactly is there ifthere's a person in every team that letsme read out, um, sustainability. She's gotum, she's got more to it than this.There's a little bit that goes off thescreen. The sustainability team ismodeled quite a bit, uh, is modeled quitea bit after the UN guidelines about whatsustainable means. Environmental,social, and economic were the areas scoped.What becomes of social and economic ishow that comment went on. Okay, I thinkwe went a little bit off piece there.So, let me drag it back into the sort ofAI domain. Um, so that was the thing. Wegot this new team. We got fourrepresentatives at the moment. And Ithink, if memory serves, uh, at the moment,James Leage is going to run that until the team is sort of up and running. Soif you've got any questions about AI andWordPress, they would be the people toreach out to. That post was called"Announcing the formation of theWordPress AI team." You can go and checkthat out. That's on wordpress.org/news,and it came out on the 27th ofMay. Okay. Uh right. Okay. So, speakingof WordCamp EU, it happened. Uh, hereit is. Um, and this was the event, andyou know, lots of people attended. Itwas really great. I'm just going to, youknow, I've got a few things thatI've got to get off my chest. Uh, firstof all, I decided that Iwas going to go and have a few nicedays, uh, prior to the event with a verynice chat, or at least I thought he wasnice. Uh, he's called Mark Westgard. We spent, we decided todrive around in a car and whathave you, and I'm just going to show yousome pictures of the kind of things thatyou get up to if you hang out with MarkWestgard for too long. So, for three days,this was what I got to see.This is Mark with all his friends. Yeah.Well, so here's Mark Westgard. He hasWS Form, which is a very popularform plugin. And what I learned aboutMark was that, uh, basically, he just likesTo do support tickets. If you spendthree days with him, you count yourselflucky to get three minutes with himbecause he likes to just hang out byrivers, hang out by lakes, and you know, look, there he is. There's a goodexample of him carrying out a, uh, doing asupport ticket. And, uh, here's anotherone there. He decided that rather thantalk to me, he thought it'd be nice totalk to a cow about his supportticket. Thanks for that, Mark. And thenthis one, you know, beautiful,beautiful mountain pass that we wentthrough. I just decided I’d take apicture of the nice mountains in thebackground. Look, lo and behold, hewhips out his phone. He’s answeringsupport tickets. Same thing. Anotherdifferent view. Magnificent. Juststraight on his phone. Support tickets. You can’t get a word in edgeways. Look,a different angle. Another, you know,beautiful river down there in the bottomof the valley. One of the best scenesI’ve seen in my life. And he wasanswering support tickets. Even in thecar, you know, you get like 10 secondsbefore this is him whipping out hislaptop. Before this all happened. Out comes thelaptop. I don't know if you can see inthe background there these beautifulmountain ranges and this little cafe. Imean, there he is yet again with hissupport tickets. Beautiful lake. Thistime I thought, let’s change it up.Let’s have a game of cards. So, I setout the cards for us both. Got somedrinks in. Beautiful lake in thebackground. What does he do? He’s he’sout with the support tickets. So, so myone final gambit was, uh, let’s go on aboat trip. That didn’t even work. Uh,and it’s just his support tickets. Hissupport tickets all the way. I hope you figured out I’m being sarcastic. Uh,Mark Westgard and I had an absolutelyfabulous time. But, uh, but I did learnthat if you have a WordPress plug-incompany that is successful like WS Formis, you don’t get away from the supporttickets. I took hundreds of pictures. Icherrypicked the ones which made himlook like he was wedded to hisphone. There’s absolutely loads of I gothis permission, by the way, to sharethese pictures, but I thought that wasquite funny at Mark’s expense. Thankyou, Mark. It was absolutely fabulous. You, um, Remus, you always drive to theseWordCamp Europe. I'm guessing you tookin some similar scenery with your son. Idid. I did. Ah, yeah. Beautiful. There'slike two—there's like 227 mountainpasses, and I've made it my goal to coverthem all. Wow. Oh, okay. Uh, there's onefinal one. Look, here we are. There'sme, Dan, maybe Corey, Bob, Don, andOllie there from hosting.com. And youcan see there he is one last time. Justat this point, I said, "Uh, Sayara,"and whether we speak again or not, Idon't know. But, uh,hopefully he enjoyed that. He said thatit was absolutely fine. There he is. Look, it was a great three days.That's the comment I get. That wasbrilliant. Thank you, Mark. You're agood sport. I appreciate you letting medo that. It was an absolutely fabulousevent. I think the bit that made me soimpressed was the venue. The venue wasabsolutely enormous, and it was really,really great. I didn't get a chancepersonally to see too much in terms ofthe sessions because I always go andrecord podcasts, but hopefully if you, uh,you were there, you had an enjoyableevent. Tim, no feature. No, it wasn't. For you this time around, it's too expensive,sadly enough. Too hard to get to. Yep. Yep. Also, I already got stuck inBasil at the time of the, uh, on my wayback from Cloudfest during theHeathrow fire. So, I was like, yeah,you've seen that, been there, done that.Yeah, no jokes about it; it's not because ofthat, obviously, but yeah, sorry. Nexttime. It was a really niceevent, and I particularly enjoyed the city.I've had a quick lookaround for a couple of days. It's goingto be in Poland next time around. Soif you... there is a direct flight fromLeeds Bradford airport, is there? Yeah,I can actually get there. I'll be on andcome back the same day. Yeah, we could do it in a day if you wanted todo one. Just do a day. Well, there's onethat goes early morning and then comesback late in the evening. Okay. No. And here we were. Speaking of sustainablethinking, of sustainability in every partof the process, it'll be AI-driven. It'll be AI-driven. Uh, okay. So, thatwas a bit of fun. I was just makinglight of it. It was very, veryenjoyable. Really cool event. Okay. So,this is what you've all been waitingFor, I know this is not particularly newnews, and it's been covered everywheresince the WordCamp EUannouncement, but this is probablythe biggest thing in WordPress inmonths and months at least. Anyway, I'mgoing to release, sorry, I'm going toshow on the screen the official releasewhich came out of the Linux Foundation. I'm not entirely sure how all of thesepieces hang together in terms of whoruns what and where the sort ofresponsibility and what have you lies,but if you're in the WordPress space bynow, I'm sure you've heard of thisacronym F A I R, which is apackage manager for WordPress. And Ithink the quickest way to describeit really is that it's a plug-in whichif you install it on your WordPresswebsite, then it replaces, well,that's even the wrong word. It sort ofhijacks requests for plug-in updates andsearches for new plugins, and instead of going to WordPress.org, it goes, well,let's just say elsewhere. I don't knowquite yet where the elsewhere is, butthere's the idea being that if you installthe plug-in, there won'tCan be found. So, it would be a bit likeon your iPhone,kind of saying we're going to allowother app stores. Um, and of course inthe WordPress space, for the longestperiod of time, this we've had nothinglike this. Obviously, you can go towherever to download whichever plugin. Maybe there have been endeavors likethis, but this certainly seems new tome. Sorry, Nathan. Can I just correctthat? Yeah, do please. Please. In somuch that the iPhone is a terribleanalogy. Okay, because an iPhone wouldbe something like Craft CMS. Thatthat's an iPhone. That's an enclosedenclosed ecosystem that is notopen source. A better analogy would beAndroid, which you have like the GooglePlay Store, which you've had for manyyears. But just like WordPress isnow getting another Play Store, but by different sets of people,and a way to federate and get access tothose, and that happens in the Androidecosystem already. You can already goand you get your packages fromsomewhere completely different. So, lessiPhone, more Android. Yeah, thankyou. That was a worthy wayOf describing it. But the point beingthat you don't, if you install thisplug-in, you no longer need to visitWordPress.org if you want to get the packageswhich you would traditionally do if you wanted free plugins and what have you. So, um, I think the getting the Linux Foundation to— I’m going to use the word sponsor,but I’m not sure that’s the right word,but in some way put their backing behind thisfelt like a bit of a coup. There are some fairly big names um revolvingaround this project. I don't know if itshows them on here.Yeah. So, here we go. So, um, Karen Maruchcci,who is the CEO of Crowd Favorite, um, Yost Yeast Yastavulk,uh, who, you know, we all know him from the Yoast platform, butnow, uh, Amelia Capital, Tracy Hines,um, from Fastly, which is the CDN,which I believe is responsible for kind of serving all this sort of stuff up. Um, and then Chris, who’s— forgive me,Chris, I actually don’t know how to pronounce your name.Um, and then Robin Bender Jin and a whole bunch of other people. Ryan McHugh comes to mind.Carrie Dills comes to mind. There’s a whole load of other people. There were quite a few heavy hitters. I willput in the show notes if you wish todownload it. This is it. You can findthe package manager program projecton GitHub. You can download it fromthere and what have you. And then alsoanother supporting piece to this wouldbe Ray Mor's piece in the repository,which is entitled "The Community Response to Fair HopeSkepticism: Support for DecentralizedWordPress." Now, she makes the point atthe top. She's taken really, she wants toget into why this was even a thing. Whydid people see the need to do this? Andaccording to her, this all goes back to that moment where ACF became—what did itbecome? Was it SCF? Secure CustomFields? That moment then, essentially,when something unexpected happened and aplugin that everybody had been—you know,not everybody, but many people had beenusing for a long time suddenly became adifferent thing altogether, and thepeople like Yoast and Kareem thought,“This is not sustainable. This needs tochange.” So they developed thisproject. It feels like it was kind ofdone in the background a little bit. Youknow, kind of cloak and dagger. The word didn't sort of slip out, andMatt got to respond to it. I don'tknow how much time he had to think about it,learn about it, or what have you, but on the face of it, he sortof seemed to say, "Well, it's nice thatthey're shipping code. That's betterthan just sort of bloviating and talkingabout it." So, there's that. But thenobviously the whole hard question of,"What does this mean going forwardnow that we've got multiple repositoriesfor plugins? How do we even manage that?What is safe? What's secure?How do we trust anything anymore ifwe've got this alternative repo and soon and so forth? So, I feel reallyunderqualified talking about this. So Ithink Remus and Tim have probably gotmore of interest to say than me, buthopefully I did a fairly decent job injust sort of describing what's going on.So, over to Tim or Remus, I think really. Well, let's start off with the, um,some of the initial things was thatwhat was it that, "How can we knowwhat's safe?" That is a problem thatwe've had since the beginning because notevery plugin sits on the WordPress.orgrepository. Not every plugin on theThe WordPress repository is safe. Over theyears, there have been numerous pointswhere plugins have been taken over andabused, where someone has uploaded stuffdeliberately, initially notmalicious and then become malicious. Thereisn’t a great deal of security sittingon the WordPress.org repo as it stands now. So, we can’treally use that as our high bar. We cansay that we have very limited securityacross the board when it comes topackage management generally. And that’sbefore you’re talking about premiumplugins. Plugins on GitHub, plugins fromJoe’s website, all of these arecompletely independent. And at themoment, it is down to the user tonavigate through this and, worse, navigatethrough this blindly without having anyreal way of determining if this plug-in is good. Is this coming from a safe source? Isthis coming from a trusted source? Andespecially when our only vaguely trustedsourceisn’t really that trustworthy and hasn’tbeen for a very long time. Iwould argue that it might have cometo light with all the stuff withMatt last year, but this has been aThe problem has existed for decades. This isn’t a newissue; it has been around since the verybeginning. How do we deal with that? CanI ask if there’s some drilling orsomeone somewhere causing a distraction? I don’t know if theperson with the drill could just mute themselves; that’d begreat. Thank you. Um, Tim, can youdescribe then how thisendeavor fares? How does it add value? I’mgoing to use the term "trust" inquotes; I don’t really know what thatmeans. What are thekey elements they’re adding inthat enable this? Well, a lot of it isfuture promises and hope that thethings are going to be improved. Currently, as it stands, it’s justproviding a mechanism to swap out yourrepositories and allow you to say, “I want items fromhere.” Now, there are ideas for federatedfunctionality so you couldsay, “I accept submissions.” So you’ve got thisconcept of the repositories being theplaces that store data, and then anaggregator, which acts like a search enginefor lack of a better term. They willenable you to search, and it will tell youYou where the individual packages are. They're using some fancy backendprotocol stuff which is based looselyaround the blue sky stuff. Um, I sayloosely the protocol for how youidentify the end pack where the endpackage actually is uses blueskies protocol, but theultimately that package can be stillswapped over. If that endpointisn't controlled or maintained, thenthat can be swapped over by a bad actor. So we still don’t have a level of realtrust. What we ultimately want to get tois a point where we can have lots offederated aggregators and lots offederated repositories, and then we canstart creating some sort oftrustworthiness where we can say thesepeople trust this, these people overhere. I trust these people, therefore Ican trust these things further down thechain, because wait, so what there wouldbe a component of usability, like usersdeclaring their own level of confidencein things. Is that a stated goal? That is, as I believe, one of the statedgoals is that you're going tobe able to pick youraggregators, and the aggregators willPick the repositories that they’re goingto, uh, basically act as a search enginefor. So you’ll be able to say, "Well, intheory, I could spin up an aggregatorthat could be Tim’s aggregated services,"and therefore I can control andsay, "Right, I will select what pluginswill be available through my aggregatedservice." We, and then you, so that, so thatyou could then just log in and go, "Okay, Iwant to use Tim’s recommendations."Tim set up a hosting company that can set upas an aggregator with their own setup, but also a hosting company can set up asa repository—a set of repositories—so thatyou can consume plugins in the samesimilar way. Then you’ve got your premiumplugins, which in theory can be hostedback with theiroriginal place, and they can be part ofthis network just brought in. Um, and soyou can, in theory, you should end up witha nice unified system where you’ll beable to look and go, "I trust theserepositories. This aggregator isdeciding what I see and what I don’t."And then WordPress.org can become one ofmany. And that’s sort of what we got inthe very basic version as we got now. It’s just swapping out WordPress.org forAspirers who I felt were really harddone by in all of this because Aspire Presshas done loads of work to getvirtually all the plugins that are onthe WordPress repository into Aspire, ontoAspire Press backed by Fastly. Theygot shafted by this announcement,like they have two lines in the entire thing. So I felt really sorryfor them. But, um, yeah, ultimately if wecan get—if you imagine a scenario whereyou have a dozen hosting companies andthey're each providing mirrorseffectively for what'son WordPress.org. But thenyou've got aggregators in the middle whoget to pick and choose what pluginsthey're going to present and how. Andyou build out a mechanism of trustaround this so that, if somebody—ifone of the nodes goes bad, then you cango, "Okay, well we no longer trust thisnode, so we won’t accept things it'scoming from there." So that's theultimate goal, I believe. Yeah, okay.That's really fascinating. So you'veopened up a load of stuff. So the firstthing that will be of interestI think to just the regular user ofWordPress is that it can have paidPlugins. So that whole thing ofWordPress.orgis everything's free over there. Youhave to go and find the website or wherever it may be. For the premiumplugins, it will be the intention at somepoint that these nodes, asyou call them, will be able to packagein, let's say, I don’t know, in the case ofMark, we were talking about him a minuteago. WS Form, he's got a free version andhe's got a paid version. There may be anopportunity to sell, for want of abetter word, certainly distribute thepaid version in some of theserepositories. So that’s reallyinteresting for end users. Certainly, theycan publish anend node point that you could go andretrieve that data from. How theywould then handle things, like, well okay,we're a paid product. Do we want peopleto be able to just go and grab that dataout? How they would do that, I don’tknow. But in theory, everybody isable to publish a plugin and giveit, and through this the G protocol,you can then assign it a permanentlynamed space that can then be grabbed. Inside and used to pull to a nodewhich then can be pulled by anaggregator. There are a lot of stepsinvolved in all of this. Yeah, the thing is, if you install it, myunderstanding is that basicallycurrently, you might be forgiven forthinking you've done nothing, right? Youlike it looks basically the same.There’s not much in the UI to sort ofgive away. Um, very much mirroring whatis there at the moment. And I guess forobvious reasons, they are literallymirroring what's there at the moment.But one of the things that youjust said was the opportunity forexample hosting companies to add this asa layer into their platform. Thatgives me 50% happiness and 50% worrybecause I kind of worry that also a hosting company might kind of not giveyou the choices that you would like tobe able to. Do you know what I mean? Canyou see a future in which a hostingcompany might want to give you theirversion of all the things, with theirstuff promoted to the top and all theads and all of that? I mean, youcould quite easily argue that we alreadyLive in that world. Yeah, hostingcompanies can at the moment mirrorWordPress.com and their own hostinginfrastructure. They can fiddlewith the search results. Not many ofthem do. Some do, though. And if you'rebeing really cynical and pointing outthat Automattic is a huge hostingcompany, they fiddle with the results. They choose — they — WordPress.orghighlights plugins that are incompetition with others that areparticularly Automattic's plugins, and theyget higher privileges.There is no rhyme or reason to some ofthe featured plugins that appear at thetop of the results, and the searchresults, as Cynic could say, have beengamed many a time by them. Soif they're not doing that, theycertainly already have the ability to doso. And hosting companies have theability to do so. I remember working fora hosting company and figuring out how wewould just remove from the searchresults plugins which we knew wouldbreak our platform. Okay? Right. There'sa really nice example of when it'suseful. But you can see, and you know, youknow, we actually ultimately went withA warning on the searchresult is better than completely blocking it. But I can totally see somebody going,especially for a larger hosting company,if I don’t know my stupidplugin breaks your hosting, you might think,well, we just don’t want my stupid pluginon here. At the moment,it's fiddly and hard to fix.You would have to either change,look at what results are coming back,and change them, or whatever. Whereas in thefuture, you may be able to run youraggregator and say, well, actually, we’rejust not accepting that plugin. Uh gosh,there’s a lot in there. Thankyou for that — really very technical,very technical. Yeah, very clever. AndI’ve given a version that is a lovelyrosy future.That future relies on so much happening,and it misses out on some ofthe stuff, like how do we moderate this?How do we stop bad actors from putting stuffon there? How do we make sure that thenodes are reliable? How do we makesure that the aggregators are reliable?How do we make it easy to add newaggregators into them? All of thissort of stuff isn’t there at the moment. So this is a lot; they've got a lot ofthe foundational stuff that's reallygood. But even the idea of federated howthings being federated, it's only sortof there in principle. That as sayif you install the plug-in today, whatyou get is Aspire Press wrapped up inthe fair plugin. Um, my understanding also is that ifsomething were to go wrong with theimplementation at the moment, it kind ofsteps out of the way if you know what Imean. So, let's say that Aspire Pressgoes down, it would then default back toWordPress.org. And so, even in the caseof things sort of falling to pieces, uh,you would still be able to get yourupdates. I'm not entirely sure; Idon't actually know if the plug-in doesfall back toI heard those words come out ofsomebody's mouth, but I'm not sure. Absolutely. I think it may well then do so.Um, but in the future, you may be able toselect several repositories or, or sesorry, several back; your aggregator mayhave several of the backend nodesattached to it, which are actingeffectively as mirrors becauseultimately, at the end of the day. Everything at the end goes back to theseunique addresses, right at the far, farend of all of this. So let's justreprise all of that because there's alot to take in. Essentially, it’s a swapout for WordPress.org, or then there'sgoing to be a whole range ofpossibilities like you've described,premium plugins being able to, you know,have it as a completely uniquemarketplace, having some kind ofindicator for, oh I don’t know, I'm goingto use the word "authenticity" – that'sprobably the wrong word, but credibility,something along those lines, those kind of cues. So basically, the fieldis open; it really can be anything thatyou like. We're on version one. Um, I don’tknow, Tim, I’m going to put you on thespot. From what you've seen so far,obviously it's very technical.Would you, do you think it’s been donewell? In air quotes, I mean, they’re notchoosing to go down their own route. Honestly, it would haveprobably been better if they had gone with the LinuxFoundation. Actually, the Linux world isfull of package managers; there are agabillion of them. Obviously, within PHP,we have things like Composer and similar. Things they've very much chosen to godown a very different, unique route thatwas designed around content managementsystems in general. Um, I think CourtneySP commented in there that it's about thefact that this was designed to gooutside of WordPress as well. Um, I feellike that was sort ofchanged in later. I don’t think that wasthe original intention, but I may bewrong. Um, they have made a lot of rodsfor their own backs, and thecomplexity is going to be the biggestproblem because people have tounderstand what you're talking about and understand how it all works. The wayto do that is not reallythrough detailed, complicated protocols and bigdocuments. It's through easy and simpleexplanations. And the one thing theyhaven't managed to do is make it reallysimple explanations of what it's aboutand how it should be used, and what thefuture can look like. I would have lovedto have seen a websitewith proper explanations and a really goodmission statement of not what this istrying to solve, but what it can show.What the future can be with it. What you're trying to solve, nobodyoutside of a very small group of people,including me, I care about it, butoutside of a very small group of peoplecare. So, you need to take that and go,well, okay, these few people mightinstall it, but once we get past thosehundred people,how are we going to get the rest of themon? This is me nowpontificating. There's a huge part ofme that wishes they'd taken another fewmonthsto do this launch in September, had acouple of hosting companies standingbehind them saying we're ready to act aspart of this process, had a decentwebsite in place, launched softa little bit more. You couldhave still had Aspire Press do their launch at Word Camp Europe, but therewere obviously other timings and other thingsthat needed to be done, and clearlythere was some pressure that meant thatit had to be launched then. Uh, so it isa little bit of a shame that it waslaunched quite so haphazardly andwithout a really positive message. Ithink if we come with a reallypositive message of showing an amazingIn the future, I think they're going to struggle to get that traction becausepeople are going to go, "Yeah, that's thething that Yoast was dead, and that wasthe other thing." It's very confusing. Even though Ryan, Carrie, and Mika aresteering it at the technical level,you've then got Yos and Karim, and thenyou've got the Linux Foundation, and yougot Spire Press. Then you got Fast. There areso many names floating around. It's like you spend more timetelling people who these people are thanyou are telling them, "This is a reallycool thing." This could be a really coolthing. Let's do this really cool thing.Oh gosh, that was a lot. Thankyou for going through that though, Tim. Firstly, apologies if my mic soundsawful. Remus has put a little note inthe comments to say that my micmight be playing up. If it is still,sorry. If it's selected correctly,if it's dreadful, I apologize. We'lljust kind of keep going. Right, Remus, there was a lot there and I knowyou've got thoughts on this. Do you wantto just drop your thoughts and pieces that Iknow you've got to say? I think I have actually much to add.Christine was pretty complete. I would just say that I'venoticed the change of t-shirt. That'skind of uh that’s very nicely done. Iwish I could. He's like Batman. No,Superman. He's got the othert-shirt on. That's great. Itsounds promising, but there are toomany questions for me still. Theyou know,I think the biggest question mark for meis not around it. It's whether or not itgains popularity. I wonder if this isone of those things where the anticipation when I heard about it,I thought it was going to cause real, likeproper rocking. I suspect that theteam has been in talks with hostingcompanies and others. Okay. For quite a while, I don’t think Iwould have announced this now if therewere no talks. Okay. So maybeit’ll have growth throughthe channels, not word of mouth. I think so. Yeah. You always have thatproblem that if it's a chicken andan egg, no hosting company is going tocome and stand behind you without aThe product there, no pro, but the productcan't get adoption until the host, ahosting company, or someone big comes andstands behind you. So,eventually you have to step out intothe light and hope thatsomeone is behind you. If they'renot, you're going to look silly. So,I'm really hopeful that we will see theannouncements. I also suspect that thereis at least one large hosting companythat probably would say they are, butthey definitely can't be the first onesfor political reasons. Okay. Interesting. Okay. So, it's definitely anevolving story. Um, one of the things tomention then is, um, there was a lot of thought about it. There was alot of talk at WordCamp EU about whatthis would mean. It seems to be muchmore calm a few days afterwards than Ikind of anticipated it would be. Having heard the initial story, Ithought it was going to be much moreseismic, but it seems to have gottenquite quiet, quite quickly. Let's just gothrough a few of the comments. So, we'vegot Courtney Robertson, um, who's been, Ithink it's fair to say, instrumental indescribing this project andPerhaps in the background as well. Let'sjust go through a few of the bits andpieces. Uh, so Lawrence said theannouncement affair also shows how PR isdone. So, you mean that in a positivelight, do you, Lawrence? Do you thinkthat they kind of knocked it out of thepark with like coordination and making many things happen at the same time? Becauseit did feel like lots of stories landedat the exact same moment, like lots ofthe WordPress publishing media, andthings all seem to have their ducks in arow, so ready to hit publish atthe same time. So here we go. CourtneyKareem and Justin, uh, I don’t know why Iwant to say juiced all of a sudden. Inever get that wrong. Uh, and Yosannounced their fair in their blog post inDecember. But also, as people fear fortheir jobs, many chose to remainanonymous. Okay. You should pronounce Kareem's namecorrectly as well. Go on. Kareem. Kareem. Yeah. What did I say? Karum. Andyou said Maruchi, which it isn’t. It’sMaruki. Yeah. Sorry, Nathan. We’re onyour case today. I’ve been on notice. Ideserve it. You know, bring it on. Everytime I get a name wrong, just jumpOn me. I deserve it. So, here's Brandon, whose surname I'm not going totry and pronounce after that mauling. Um, it's not Brandon, it's Brandon.Oh, no, no, no, no. This is going to bethe ongoing theme for this episode, Ithink. Now, I didn’t go tothe alt event on the waiting list, but Iheard you can still go and they'll letyou in. Uh, it’s been and gone. I’m notsure I kind of understand what thetenor of that question is. I'm not sure.Uh, WP. So Lawrence is bringing thepoint that the WP project canceled themedia core. So that's interesting. Maybethere are certain channels thatcould have kind of provided somecoverage of that. Some registered peopledidn't show up, so others could get in. Okay. Uh, so Tim, from CourtneyFair will use the... I did, I think Courtneysaid this and then you actuallycoincidentally said it a momentlater, uses the blue tie blue sky ATprotocol DID, which is an acronym. TheDIDs are like the individualidentifiers. So is that the way that youacross federated nodes, for want of abetter word, you can identify that's thesame thing as that one, even though theyMight have slightly different names orwhatever it may be. Yeah, it's a unique identifier and it'sthere are different ways to do it,whether you want, you can do it via effectively a namespaced thing or youcan do it as an actual URL. Um, but ifyou do it on an actual URL, then you havea problem that the URL might change. Sayif you move from GitLab to GitHub, then theURL might change, so this is a way to avoidthat. Uh, so Patricia, I've missed a few outbecause they were probably to do withthe timing of what was being said atthat moment. I like the feeling of theold source forge plusdecentralization. Adaf all fed, uh, reviewtypes all trip advisor unless Imisunderstood something. Yeah, that waskind of where I got to as well. The tripadvisor bit being, you know, you've gotlike 800 people that say that's a goodthing. So, you kind of have some sensethat that's a good thing to do becausewe know that Trip Advisor never getsgamed in any way, shape, or form. Okay.If you just check, oh, top restaurants inMiami, McDonald's. So, will that then be an inevitable consequence? Of something like this? You know, if youdecentralize all this, would people begoing to game it? Would there besome economic incentive to game? If youcan game something, it will be gamed.That's because WordPress.org is gamedall the time. And the community, theteam, support forum team in particular,spend so much time dealing with sockpuppets, which are basically wherepeople make fake accounts to createfive-star reviews and to setthings to download a million times totry and increase download counts. Thissort of stuff happens all the time. A good moderation layer should helpwith that. And it is nice that the fairproject has started asking, "How arewe going to deal with moderation? How are we going to moderatethis? How are we going to moderate thisnot just across one server but lots ofthem? But ultimately, there has tobe a level of trust. And we have to workout what trust means. And trust can'tnecessarily mean that 50,000 people like thisbecause 50,000 people probably don'texist. They're probably bots. Do youknow this is kind of how this story is going to develop for me? Does it get adoption? Do peopleactually start to use it? But dopeople start to gain from it? I think becauseI have a non-technicalunderstanding of it, and people like youare explaining it to me. I'm trying to get agrip on it. That layout is going to beof more interest to me, whether it getsadopted and whether it gainstherefore trusted. This comment, though,is kind of interesting. I hadn'tpicked this up at all. So Courtney says,"Fair also in the future could supportpackage managing beyond WordPress." Soit's not necessarily bound to WordPress;it could be for a decentralized system, justlike Gutenberg is currently in Drupal. Okay. Okay. All right. No, but allseriously, it could. This is the idea:somebody like Drupal might wantto adopt it, or somebody like Umbramight want to adopt it and use it for theirdistribution of howthey deploy their equivalent, theirmodules and add-ons. I really hope thatI said Umbraco correctly. That wouldbe, I've never said it outloud. I hope I have no idea if I did. Ifeel so vindicated. Uh, WP the WP coder.Hello. Um, the Aspire Aspire press aA suite of tools, the Aspire Cloud, theAPI, Aspire update, and the plug-in for endusers, Aspire Explorer, the reposrepository. I'm guessing this is inresponse to Tim saying that he thoughtAspire Press didn't get the credit itmaybe ought to have done in thatscenario. Um, Tim, you must be fierce atchess. Okay. Um, and kitten. I don't know what thatmeans. If a hosting provider smells that theycould save bandwidth and money, theywill go for it, says Dave. And rightnow, hosting providers do not have unlimited bandwidth; just nohosting providers will quite often bepaying quite a bit for theirbandwidth. Um, but a big thing for thisis why you'll find that in the Linuxworld, Linux packages are often—if yougo and look at where Linux packagemirrors are, they are hosting companies. The reason is because if you can getyour packages locally and thendistribute internally those packages, yousave yourself a small fortune. Um, for most hosts, they have to rely on thefree big backbone providers, and they areoften monitored, and so it's meteredaccess. Um, we're still talking packages. That are ridiculously large compared toyour commercial, your sort of at-home residential line. But yeah, you know,they are metered, and for updates, it's a really good placewhere they could make a saving. Um, soit could well be worth their while tobe running a localized repository sothat they can then distribute internally,where obviously, if they own theirown infrastructure, that's not going tocost them to run through internally. Ifthey're only having to pull the packageonce over their third-party providers'transit. So if they have to goto Cogent every time and get thesepackages down, and Cogent is meteringthem, then yeah, it’s going to be expensive. I hope that everybodythat’s been listening to this is able towear the tin foil hat because I thinkit’s fairly difficult to understand allof this, isn’t it? There’s the top layer,what it might be for theDefinitely for me. Yeah. Me too.To be honest, Pete, I’m listening veryintently. Yeah, I'm kind of on it.We’re lucky we have such clever friends.Right, exactly. Yeah, um, but I’mlistening to it from the point of viewHow would I use it? Would the communitybe fragmented by it? Will people be ableto game it? Will there be trust in it? Will it, I'm going to use air quotes,destroy what we’ve already got? I don’tmean the word destroy, you know. Will itamend, let’s go with that, what we’vealready got? Would it? I don’t know. Ijust think it’s really fascinating and probably one of the mostdisruptive things that I’ve seen incertainly several years. The fun thingis if it’s done right,no one’s going to notice. Isn’t thatinteresting? Isn’t that fascinating? Allthis stuff ultimately the average personshould, if it’s done right, neverknow. They’ll just sign up for theirhosting package. Let’s say they joinBob’s host. Bob’s host happens to bethey might have a local node andthey might be mirroring a bunch ofplugins that they commonly use. Theywon’t mirror all of them because theytheir infinite hard drives are not athing yet. Well, they’ll mirror quite alot of them. There’s a speed performancethere. And then, from your perspective,you type into, “Oh, I need to add aPlugin. Okay, I'll just go to addplugins. Oh, I'll type in a search. I'lljust hit install. I'll hit activate. Forthe average consumer, they won't have aclue that anything's changed. One, thankyou, Tim. There's just one lastthing I'm going to drop in just beforewe move on from this one because we'vekind of fast running out oftime. I think it's fair to saythat the community that has gatheredaround this have done a lot of work interms of governance of this project andtrying to communicate that there will bekind of like rotating leadership. I want to say that, uh, Courtney, again, if youcould help me out in the comments, thatwould be great. But the intentionis that there will be no single, uh,figurehead, for want of a better word. Ithink that's part of the project aswell. And we've not really touched onthat because we've been talking abouthow it technically works, but I thinkthat's probably a big part of it aswell. Um, checks and balances I thinkhave been made so that, um, there's apanel of people and I guess it needs tolaunch with a panel in order to launchbecause you're not going to get anywhere. Unless somebody takes the helm for abit. But my understanding is that thatwill be a moving feast in thefuture. So Peter, Remus, Tim, is thereanything you want to add to that before we moveon?No.Nice. I'll just put one other thingin, just because it's probably worthmentioning. And that is to say that itisn't really a push back, but AaronJorin, who is an automation expert, I wantto say, I think that's right. He wrote apiece just the other day when theproject had launched, and it raises someinitial questions about fairness. So it's on the 9th of June, and he congratulates theteam. Then he has some fairlytechnical questions about how it'simplemented, and what might happen in certainscenarios, again probably beyond thepurview of this. Interestingly, nosooner had he written it than RyanMchugh, who is one of the people verymuch tied to the project at launch,came in and offered what he hopedwould be the appropriate answers,and in some cases it was more aquestion of we're figuring thisout as well. To check that piece out, AaronJorbin.com.Again, all these links will be in theshow notes. Uh, okay, very quickly, I'lljust mention this and then we'll moveon. There's a new post on theWordPress developer blog. Uh, what's newfor developers in June 2025. As usual,um, Justin Tadlock does a great job ofsort of explaining all of the differentbits and pieces that have been added.I did want to mention a few of them, butI actually want to move to this onebecause time is constraining us. Back toAI. Uh, I didn't even know this was athing. I didn't even know that LLMs andthe way that they scrape the internet was different from how, uh,Googlebot does it. My assumptionwould be that the LLMs were going aroundscraping stuff and sort of storing it, uh,in the way that Google does. But readingthis article, it feels like it'sdifferent. It feels like if you do aquery, which I think more and morepeople are doing, they're sort offorgetting the search engine and they'regoing more to the AI agent to get ananswer to a question. Um, it feels likethe GPT, sorry, the LLMsAgents are kind of just doing the workat the moment that you ask the question. So rather than Google having a cache andyou type in your question and it servesup the, I don’t know, 10 or 20 best resultsbased upon what it's got stored, this isgoing out and spidering at that momentin time. I’m probably misphrasing it, butanyway, that then requires a differentapproach, and Yoast has come up with thisidea of LLMs.It may not be their idea; I don’t thinkthey came up with it. They did not. Thank you; that’s great to know. And if you go to llmsext.org,you can actually see the actualstandard. Okay, perfect. I kind ofassumed they hadn’t, but also Ihadn’t read elsewhere of anybody elsedoing it. So this is an attempt to makeyour website smarter, and almost if youlike serve up to the LLM just thesummary of what your, let’s say, blog postis about so that it can get a handle onit because apparently it doesn’t go fromtop to bottom and read it all and cacheit all. It sort of picks bits here andDropping into the Yoast SEO plug-in. AndI'm kind of feeling that this isprobably going to be half the battle inthe future: figuring out what to serveup to LLMs so that they've got anunderstanding of roughly what thearticle is about. So I thought that wasinteresting. Again, I don't have thetechnical expertise to discuss it, butif any of you feel you want to jump intothat, now's the moment. Just as a slightly aside, ifyou have, over the last few months, foundthat your website is becoming more andmore unstable, you can thank yourlocal LLMs for that. Increasingly, in my day-to-day job, it seems to be comingalong to sites which I'm being told arebeing dodoed, and I arrive and go, "No, no,no."Chachi BT wants to talk to you, or Claudewants to talk to you, and that theybasically have many things todo with AI. When they move fast and breakthings, they move fast, and a lot of theAI tools do not obey things like yourrobots.txt file. So it is if we canconvince this project is great, but youneed to convince the people. Claude's and ChatGPT, and all the othercompanies behind them, are actuallyusing these standards, and at the moment, as far asI'm aware, this standard is just like aproposed standard for, like, "Please comeand look over here," rather than an actualstandard that's being actually used by any ofthecompanies behind the actualAI models themselves. So, we’re kindof in a moment in time where it feelsalmost like they’re taking your websitedown a little bit, making it lesseffective because they’re doing all thisbecause they don’t know how to do itcorrectly. And if people just don’tcare, right? Okay. They just, becauseobviously from their point of view, um,they're not there to sc—they're—they'regetting the— they need to get the returnthe information back as quickly aspossible. So, uh, if that means that theyhave to spawn a dozen processes, thenthey’ll spawn a dozen processes. Ifthat’s going to knock out your filters,so be it. The problem comes that thequite often the way to deal with that is that site owners will startblocking text, and then you end upin a scenario where Amazon is ending upUsing residential VPNs to scrape yoursite, and you're like, "Come on, that'snot on." Uh, but this goes beyond this particular thing into justthe general behavior of these AIcompanies. Uh, getting them toobey the rules, or rather the conventions,I should say, that we've had about theweb. We have always had bad bots. We'vealways had them, and some people whodon't obey the conventions of howwebsites should work don't listen torobots.txt. I just think that this isnot going to be as useful as it appearson the face of it, unlessthey actually follow through andeven read the file. Yeah, or worse,they're going to read the file, go,"Brilliant, you've given me theinformation. I'm going to go and do thisand look for this other stuff overhere." Okay. Okay. And justall right. Well, interesting. Thank you. You've educated me on how it works, 'cause Ijust assumed it was a Yoast thing, butalso that, um, yeah, it was to do withjust sort of serving up the content thatspecifically what you wanted them todeploy once they'd given their answer. But maybe it's not as simple as that.Anyway, it's there. It's in the Yoastplugin. Don't know if it's on the freeversion or the paid version, but there'sa toggle, and you can have that set upin a heartbeat. So, all right, veryquickly, what else can we do quickly?Let's do this one. Um, it's heating up inthe e-commerce space in WordPress. Uh,what have we got? We got Woo Commerce,we got Northcommerce, we got Shore Cart,which has been just killing it recently.And then there's this, um,it's called Fluent Cart. It doesn'texist at the minute, but I'm sure thatif you're in the WordPress space, you'veprobably come across this company. They're responsible for lots and lots ofthings: Fluent CRM, Fluent Forms, a bunch,honestly, a whole ton of other stuff.And they're going to launch, they're going to drop acart solution. It seems if we go down,scroll down a little bit. I don'tactually know if it's on this page. Imight be misrepresenting it, but I sawsomewhere a table where they compared itkind of feature for feature againstShortcut. So maybe that's the targetThe gambit is that it's all in yourWordPress website because, shortcut, myunderstanding is there's a component ofthat which is SaaS-based. So things aresort of phoning into their SaaS and whathave you. All of this is going to bedone in your WordPress website for goodor ill. That's the way thatthey've decided to do it. There's a waitlist. So if you want to go there,it's fluentcart.comand you can join the waitlist. I don't suppose anybody's got anythingthey want to add to that. Maybe they do,maybe they don't. No, I can say a coupleof things if you want. Yeah, please. Idon't have to. No, I'd like you to.So I find this really interestingbecause whenever I need to sellsomething, for one reason or another, Iam still like really always, and Timknows because I often moan about it andask people. On one hand, I really do hope that this is theanswer. On the other hand, I have FluentCRM and Fluent Forms.I've been waiting for a while for certainthings that I consider basicto kind of improve. What concerns me is when a company comes outWith always new products instead of getting one or two really, really, reallythe best that they can be, rather thanthan coming out with another super shinyobject. And I'm saying this kind of evenslightly in spite of myself because Ireally hope — because I used to use ThriveKart, which was great in many ways — and now it’s a bit of a dumpster fire, and Idon't use it anymore. So on one hand, Ireally wish that thisis because I also use shortcuts. I knowexactly what works and what doesn’t forme, not for everyone, but for mewith shortcuts. So I think that there’sstill space for finally a product thatdoes things and that’s easy to use, whichshortcuts is not the first time that youenter it. You go, “Okay, clearly you didnot hire a UX designer for this.” So, I’mhoping that this — that, um, Fluent Cartisis the answer. But at the same time,yeah, that would be without havingseen anything about it, that would be mymain worry, that they are without a doubta company with a ton of products. If yougo to their — I think they’re called WPManage Ninja, that’s their kind ofparent company. On the website, they have a laundry list ofmaybe a dozen. Maybe it's not quite asmuch as that. No, no, I think it is. Ithink it's 11. Well, if it's not 12,it's over 10. And all of them do alot, right? They're not like tiny littlethings. They all do. Well, certainly themost recent ones have done a lot. So,yeah, that's an interesting point,Peter. Um, maybe they're gettingoverstretched. However, what a market. Um, if you capture, boy, because therereally, honestly, there isn't yet. Theright solution is not there yet. And I'mwondering, is it accessible? There are afew questions that I'm asking myself.But if it is all the things that it saysit is, then it's great. Oh,Patricia said, yeah, it says thatthey've got a team per product. Okay.So, maybe they swell their team, growtheir team as they get a new product.Let's see. But I mean, I've been withFluent CRM for at least two years now,and they're still not doing… I mean, in away, I'm okay with it because it justsimplifies my email marketing. I'm like,"Yeah, okay. Let's make it as simple aspossible." But it's still lacking reallybasic things. Most CRM, and like two years since Ibought it, I would have expected forthat to have happened. So, okay. But atthe same time, it is I won’t leave. It’sin which case as the final piece fortoday, there were several more thingsthat I wanted to show, but we are goingto run out of time. This will be thelast one. Uh oh, sorry, Remus. Okay,we'll do another one if it’s necessary. Uh, I just thought this wasinteresting. Nothing to do withWordPress. I just love this idea. It’scalled Scrappy. Uh, Scrappy is like aSaaS service for want of a better word,where you go and make basically reallyugly little apps for you and your pals.That’s literally how the picture is foryou, your family, your pals. You justit’s simple, but you can’tachieve it. Maybe you can achieve itwith Scrappy. It’ll never look good. Butif it’s just trying to figure out, Idon’t know, how to split the bill orwhat weight you need to lose from yourexercise regimen or something like that,Scrappy is an interesting idea. And thenyou can share it with a little cohort.And it’s not supposed to be big and takeover the world. It’s just for you andYour family and your close group offriends, which I just thought was areally interesting idea. Right, Remas? Sorry. What was it I missed? I think youneed to add slashedit.Oh, okay. Yeah, you're right. That istrue. Okay, hold on. Where has it gonehere? No, not that one. Yeah, here wego. So, this came out of a dubiousnewsletter which is dropped everyFriday. Um, oh really? Which one? Yeah,I think it's calledwas it called? It's Remus' newsletter. We spoke about it some moments ago andthis was one of the little nuggetswhich I really thought was cool. Tell uswhat it does, Remicus. Dead simple. It'sthat simple. It adds whatever it says.It adds a slashedit to every singlepost, page, category, tag, whatever youhave on your WordPress site. So insteadof having to log in and do all thosethings, you can just be on the URL youwant to change something inand you just add slashedit and it works.It'sa gem of a plug-in.Um, which is why I featured it. Yeah, itdoes one tiny thing but does it reallywell. Are you like me? I wouldFar rather amend the URL for more orless anything than actually use the UI. You know, if I can figure out that it'sforward-slashedit. Uh, I remember usingDrupal back in the day, and that wasbasically the best way to get aroundalmost every part of the CMS—was tomodify the URL. And I kind of miss thatin WordPress. It would be quite nice ifstuff like this was more widelydeployed. So if you're on a post, youjust add, you know, whatever the slugends with—just add forward/edit. And if you're logged in, you get to editit. And if you're not logged in, you areasked to log in, and then you edit it.Correct. Nice. Cannot be simpler. Cannotbe sweeter. Yeah. Well, it could be. Itcould be forward-slash. That would beeasier. Ronald, are you listening? Thisis—Who's—is it Ronald? Ignore thatsuggestion. It was a bad idea. Don't dothat. Stick with what you've got. It'sbrilliant. I was only joking. Uh, withthat, I think that's it. I think that'severything we've got time for. We'reactually overrunning already, soapologies about that. I guess it wasalways going to happen. We had this onebig story which was going to dominate. I apologize if we just overdid it, but umthere you go. Uh, wait. This is notsafe, right? This is safe. This one issafe in the UK. The other one is not.So you're going to do the other one,aren't you? Yes, of course you are.Yeah. Uh, so there we go. Thank you toyou if you were in the comments. Thatcertainly livened it all up. We reallyappreciate that. There are quite a few ofyou in today. Thank you. And um I guessit just remains for me to saythank you to Tim. Thank you to Remus. Thank you to Peacher for joining ustoday. We'll put this out as an audiopodcast tomorrow. And all things beingequal, we should be back next week foranother episode. You never know. But nowit's that moment. The humiliating, oh,he's—yeah. Yeah. Gone. Here he goes.Yeah. No, do it. Go on. That would beI won't be able to capture that. Therewe go. Right. Thank you so much. We willsee you next week. If you panelists wantto stick around for a bit of a nutter,that would be nice. But uh if not, Iwill see you very soon. Take it easy.Bye. Bye. Bye., This Week in WordPress #336, WP Builds, 01jxz3mqtttmy0v4m875045ebp.