This Week in WordPress #371  🔗 **Source:** [This Week in WordPress #371](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afc5kunvNT4) Hey. Hey. Hey. Hello, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are in the world. It is number 371. That's what it says, so I'll believe it. Of this week in WordPress, um, we're here to drone on about WordPress with the four of us, I think, are quite good at droning on about WordPress. Apologies, panel. That wasn't supposed to be insulting, but it came kind of came across like that, didn't it? I'm very sorry. Uh, it was supposed to be self-deprecating. That's that's it. I'm out of here. Out of here. Barely begun. Yeah, it's totting. Um, so yeah, that's the plan. We talk about WordPress rather a lot. I don't think we're going to stray too much into other subjects, but we've got the usual smogers board of plugins and themes and all of that kind of thing. Um, if you would like to uh join us in this, feel free to do that. Um, after the fact, you you obviously can't comment live, but you can comment on the blog post on wpbuilds.com. But if you happen to get a notification through your email and you are watching this live, the best place to go is is this one URL and it's wpbuilds.comlive like that. wpbuilds.comlive. If you go there, then you got two options. If you're logged into a Google account, you can use the comment box uh on the right uh on desktop or underneath on mobile. But if you don't want to be logged into a Google account, there's a little black box on the player itself. something like live chat is what it says. Click on that and that's uh that's the chat that comes through the platform. So, you know, feel free to click that. Um that would be great. So, who have we got today? Well, you can see let's go around the houses. Let's go this way. Um it's Mark Benz again first. How you doing, Mark? >> I'm doing fantastic. >> Amazing. >> Yeah. >> So good. So, two in the morning or something where Mark lives. So, he's pushing through. Uh, what time is it? >> It is it's it's uh 6:04 a.m. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Thank you. I have no words. Uh, I'm very appreciative. Let's go with that. So, I'll read the bio uh so that we and you can have a small break. Have a coffee. Mark Benzerane is the partnerships and community lead at MainWP where he spends his time working with plug-in developers, agencies, and service providers across the WordPress ecosystem. He's been involved with WordPress for many years and is particularly interested in helping site owners keep control of their own infrastructure while still benefiting from the broader plug-in and hosting landscape. At MainWP, he focuses on partnerships, community management, and using those partnerships to help unlock and extend what's possible with the open source ecosystem. Outside of work, Mark keeps busy by drinking coffee, creating hands-on projects. He's usually tinkering with a new idea, building something in the workshop, experimenting with design and graphics, or finding excuses to get outside on his bike now that the weather Yes, now that the weather supports those excuses. He also spends lots of time writing and generally exploring whatever interesting project happens to grab his attention this week. I have rediscovered my bike as well this week, which has been quite nice over the last couple of days. So, thank you for joining us, Mark. Really? Thank you for Thank you for having me. >> You're very welcome. >> Always appreciate it. >> Yeah. Well, likewise. Really appreciate it. Thank you. And let's go clockwise, I guess. Is that uh and we'll get to Remus. Hello, Remus. >> Hello, Nathan. Mark, >> it's been a while. >> It has. >> How you doing? >> Well, it you know, there's a reason for why it's been a while because, you know, I was I was being uh picked on in the one four or five years ago. So, I was like, "Yeah, we're not doing that." But I I can only apologize if it was me. What did I do? But uh No, it it really I it has been a while. I think probably several months since you've been on and >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I've been busy. I've been I've been very very busy. Not Not that I'm not busy right now, but >> yeah, just lots of lots of moving parts, lots of stuff going on. >> Okay. Well, I think we're going to find out more about that next week. I uh I failed to spot something that Remus was doing. >> No, no, no, no, no. Uh anyway, here we go. Here's the Remus bio. Remus Dere is a WordPress performance specialist. He co-founded Scanfully, a site health and performance monitoring tool and runs within WordPress, home to the guild alongside courses, a newsletter, and a podcast for those serious about building better WordPress sites. He also runs truer than North, which is a strategic guidance service for companies in the WordPress world for making the right technical and ecosystem decision. So that's Remus and on the screen if you can see it you can see the URL for the scanfully products scanfully.com. Thank you for joining us. Appreciate that. And lastly, >> Tim Nash who always leaves his bio to the last minute so I don't have a chance to practice it. And uh here it goes. How you doing first Tim? You all right? >> I'm fine. I today was unusual. I don't normally leave it to the last last second. So that's true. Apologies for the mid mediocre bio. And I I think Remicus may have been referring to our attempt to get him to do a rap battle with somebody else who rather forgotten. >> Oh yeah, that had totally gone that via Twitter. Wasn't it Cromwell? Wasn't it Cromwell? We wanted you to get it. Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> And I say if you hadn't weren't watching the episode, that could have looked much worse than if you'd actually watched it. >> One of one of the nice things about my brain, and it is a nice thing, but it's also a terrible thing, is my capacity to forget things is truly profound. And I'd completely forgotten about that. I really now it all comes flooding back. That was so much fun. I'm so sorry. Yeah, you you were threateningly, you know, trying to gain violence and there's me going, "No, I meant singing. I want them to sing." >> I was I was trying to get Remus to beat up Matt Croble, wasn't I? In memory. >> Yeah, that was that was the goal was I think it was a a two men enter, one man leaves kind of thing. >> I think I think truly I think we know the outcome of that battle, but let's not re let's not revive that whole thing. I'm only going to make it worse. Uh, so, oh, this isn't going to go well, is it? Uh, here we go. Tim Nash's biography. Cap Oh, I see. Star Trek, right? Here we go. Captain's log, star date 47291.6 discovered life form. Tim Nash, a security consultant specializing in WordPress. He seems to be some sort of educator. While observing him, he seems to help developers, site owners, and businesses navigate the hostile sectors of the website of website security, practical risk, and modern web infrastructure. First contact protocols engaged. Visit his site at tim dash.co.uk. That's not bad for just throwing it together at the last minute. I quite like that. Star Trek fans will get it anyway. >> Where did you Where did you come up with the star date? Uh when I said to uh my my favorite local AI, "Hey, uh come up with a Star Trek themed based on a star on a captain's log entry for me." Uh it came up with the star date. >> There you go. It came up with the star date. Okay, lovely. So, there's our panel. Um we'll be chatting about WordPressy bits and pieces. Like I said, if you want to join us, feel free to do that. Drop a comment in. Oh, there's a few people that have put a comment in. So, here we go. One's from Tim Nash, so I'll ignore that one. One's from Remus Dice. So, uh, is that rude? Is it rude to ignore your comments because you're on the show? No, it is, isn't it? Hi folks. Hope you're having a good week, says Tim Nash. And Remus says, "This week is awesome so far, but probably have better gauge of things after this podcast." Yeah, could easily I think we know already how it's going to go. Elliot Sersby just down the road from me. Hello. Hope all is well. Reese W, afternoon folks, and welcome back. And Elliot Richmond, good day. WP builds and panel. Seems we have a panel of cyclists. Oh, nice. That's good to know. I should explain why we've been away from the interwebs. Firstly, I went into hospital and had some eye things done. So, that knocked me out for a few weeks. And then I went to um I went to World Camp Asia in India. And listeners to the podcast from many years back will know that when I started the podcast, I did every episode with a chap called David Warmsley. really lovely guy but I don't know two years ago or something he moved on from WordPress so we stopped doing the podcast together but we very much kept in touch and started another podcast called the no script show um and he lives in India and so after word camp Asia I spent a couple of weeks um basically abusing his hospitality um and as him and his wife took me around India and I've had a absolutely fabulous time so you know no regrets there and then I landed with a bump on Saturday and this show kind of has brought me back to reality. So, okay, there we go. That's why the show hasn't been going on, but that's why we are back, right? Let's share the screen and get stuck into it. Here we go. Oh, let's forget the promotional stuff. Put your name, put your email in that thing. Press go. You know, we'll send you email. Yeah. How's that? And then I did an episode with >> How many emails will you send, Nathan? >> Uh, I'll send two a week. Two a week. There's a strict no spam guarantee apart from the spammy ones. They'll be full of spam. Uh, but the non-spammy ones don't have any spamming at all. Um, but yeah, two emails a week, something like that. And there's our archive. They're the episodes that we've done recently. A few of these went out whilst I was in Asia. I scheduled them all. So, I did one with Jamie Marsen where I debated him about the usefulness of AI. And frankly, it wasn't worth it. He's not a He's not a a rival. I absolutely wiped the floor with him. He's going to hate me for saying that. He's going to absolutely hate me for saying that. Um, we spent a lot of time in Asia and carried on the debate endlessly and both of us claimed victory, but I'm certain that I was the winner. I also did an episode with Jonathan Jernigan, with Brian Gardner, and then recently um with this chap here who's got this plug-in called Tilbuchi. So, go and check those episodes out. And that's it really. Let's get stuck into the content itself. I was very excited heading to Word Camp Asia because Jonathan D. Rosia uh and I did an episode where we talked about um the fact that WordPress 7 was going to be released with all this fanfare at contributor daycam Asia like this big red button kind of event you know where all the people gather around a big button is here and WordPress gets released it's a gimmick but it I think it's quite a good gimmick quite like the idea of mixing live events with releases and things like that however it got pulled uh at the last minute because of um well we'll get into Why? In a moment, but we have a new release date. Hopefully, this one will be stopped to. It's about I don't know 3 weeks from now, something like that. May the 20th is the uh is the upcoming release date. Uh there isn't really much to say about that, just that that is the date, the new date. But um I don't know if any of you have got more wisdom than I have about why it was pulled. I just know it had something to do with collaborative editing and the fact that the um I I guess the way that it was being handled wasn't performant. I think it was all handled as metadata, whereas now I think the move is to push it into a a specialized table for this collaborating collaborative editing experience. So I'm going to hand it over if any of you can explain what the heck that was, I would be most grateful. So over to you if you feel you can do that. And there's total silence. Nobody knows. Okay, fine. Um in which case I'll just read it from the screen. I'll read the bits that I've highlighted. D. Apparently, it was, let's have a look here. D. Here we go. The release was originally scheduled for April the 9th during contributor day at Word Camp Asia, but was paused in late March after WordPress co-founder Matt Wallenweg called for a return to the beta phase uh to allow more time to address, and I guess this is the thing, a cache invalidation issue found in real time collaboration. um blah blah blah blah blah and there's some more bits and pieces here but it basically seems that there was a bit of a snafu and if we had have gone into live production it wouldn't have been all that performant and anyway now the idea really is that um there's been a call for some of the big hosts to get involved in testing this because unlike other releases where it's just a release of WordPress you know things have changed this one really could impact you I suppose if you're a smaller host on budget hosting if you're a smaller host if If you're any if you're a bigger host, it's going to have a fundamental screw effect on you. If you're running shared hosting and you're to running on a 5 10% CPU margin, you and or and you're already running with a over stuffing your memory supply, which is like every host outside of a few of the very expensive ones. Uh that you're all going to suddenly discover that every single WordPress website's going to have a sudden massive impact performance if it's on by default. which is something that has been told repeatedly all the way through that one thing you can't do is have a performance impact on this. This and you you know you can't you don't you don't want to centralize things into a central server that's owned by one company and you don't want to have performance impact at the host level because they won't be able to do their margins and everybody's hosting is going to go up for a feature that's going to be used by literally no one. And it does feel very much like we haven't done any testing ac across the board. And when they started to do the testing, it all went horribly wrong. Right. Rant over. >> Is it is it purely of the nature of So in in a previous iteration of WordPress, you know, 6.9 and before, when you start to edit a post or a page, you you load up the experience of the editor, whichever editor you're using. Then you do your stuff, not much is happening. click save or publish or what have you or update and then information flies back between the host and you and that's the moment where things start to you know use workers and what have you. Whereas in this collaborative editing experience is it just more or less a constant stream a trickle of things backwards and forwards because on the screen here it says awareness is the data that tracks who else is currently edit editing the post. So awareness is the name that is being given to this sort of feature. I guess uh it's tracking their presence, cursor position and selection and it's re and it's read and written on every poll cycle. Now I don't know what that poll cycle means which is why it's becomes central as a performance question for the next release candidate. Um >> so if you imagine you were you sitting by yourself you you would write your document and you would hit save. >> Yeah, >> that would send a single HTTP request. Now, secretly actually behind the scenes, the editor was sending other HTTP requests, especially with Gutenberg with the blocks. Every time you dropped a block on it was making a HTTP request, but generally the the big component was hit the save button, HTTP request over, heartbeat was going in the background that was making some requests back. But you could be doing most of this in isolation and you'd be having very little impact. Right >> now, every time you move the mouse, it's sending data back to the server. So the server has and then but and if there's two of you on the post, it's now repeating that information back out. So it's got to relay it to however many people are looking. So let's get into a wonderful world where we are collaborating. Let's say all four of us are collaborating and each one of us is moving our mouse, our mice. Mes are mice around the screen and editing things. Now think about that how just how many requests are suddenly hitting this server. >> That's absolutely fine on your VPS running on a managed host. I I I don't imagine your DP engines kinsters of this world are going to have any problems for most people. Now imagine your uh 199 a year host. >> Yeah. >> Which is not atypical of what the vast majority of people run on. Um if you think about those shared host boxes, they are going to have so many problems, right? not even if they um do get brown over the CPU and RAM constraints, they might even hit the sheer just the sheer number of connections that are connecting up depending on what's happening at any given point. And the you know you're going to if you end up in a scenario where you are maxing out the transit to the server there nothing you can do about that of if you you either have to split the split out of the boxes which is going to cost you more money or say no we have to turn that feature off. Um, and I I I'm imagining a lot of hosts are going to just disable this until because not because it's wrong or not and not even and this is no reflection on whether it's even the right tool or the right thing or if it should exist in the first place. It is simply a case of a reactionary knee-jerk reaction will be to turn it off and investigate later. >> Right. Right. because that's how hosts work and that's how they have to work because they work at scales that are scary. Um, so yeah, this I really I was so surprised when this turned up in seven gone from >> a a a yeah, we would like to do this. Yeah, we're going to experiment on this to it's in seven now >> and there just seems to have been very little hang on can we do real world test? You know, if you take something like Gutenberg that took several years of re real world tests before it even got in to the five editor and this feels like it accelerated at such a rate and it the result was it gets pulled which is >> and I suppose the curious yeah the curious thing here as well is that it's not users that needed to do the tech well they did but you know it's more the hosting companies right because they're the points of failure And from this article, not I don't know that I've highlighted these bits, but this this is also a clarion call for hosting companies to get involved as well. And I know they've had feedback from some of the usual suspects. Um, >> it's unfortunately not going to be the usual suspects. The usual suspects are going to be yo going, "Yeah, we can deal with that cuz we're the good guys in this scenario." It's the generic unwashed hosts, the smaller hosts who are going to also be utterly unprepared >> because no one's telling them this. There's not a big campaign to let hosts know. a call by a by Matt in one corner of the internet hiding in a in a make post somewhere is not and a message in the uh hosts and on make slack in the host section does not constitute a campaign to to tell hosts that oh by the way we might be turning on a feature that might impact you. >> Uh it's just will impact. >> Yeah, that's a better way. Yeah. Well, I guess the ar could argue might in that the vast majority of sites still only have a single user. So, while they will be exponentially increasing the amount of calls that one user makes, >> but that that is I mean um >> still going to scale mass horribly. Yeah, I think the the if you look at the feature itself um and you know I I've had hundreds maybe up in the thousands of clients and build sites for I have maybe a handful for whom this would be fully practical. Um that said um uh Matt Mullen highlighted a case I think it was on X somewhere at some point where he essentially said this is a feature that is particularly uh well suited for AI to be the collaborative uh second I remember that yeah >> and I hadn't considered that position so if we take that in and the rise of AI as we see it uh it it will be used more than the 3 4% uh that it's currently claimed. But um your recap and as to the the whole impact, Tim, that is very spot on. It's just we're going to hear the most amount of [ \_\_ ] from the most amount of shitty hosting companies when this is going to be pushed as is. >> I mean, on on the plus side, where it was before, I think that last paragraph that you is that's not highlighted, but it's on the screen. Uh, the pre-release implementation generated close to 4,000 SQL queries in a twominute collaborative window. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. No, no. Databases don't like that. >> No. >> Okay. >> I would go as far as saying they hate it. >> Yeah. >> Okay. Okay. So, this then this then raises a question of and to to Tim's point earlier, I obviously I do this show weekly. This has been coming and coming and coming, but for the longest period of time, everybody was talking about it as a nice to have kind of, oh, it's off in the distance somewhere. And then I think you're right, Tim, it suddenly was going to be in core like two months ago or something like that. It suddenly got parcled up as a yeah, yeah, we're going to we're going to run this as part of core. And it is kind of surprising in a way, isn't it? That it never that this particular aspect of it, you know, that the burden on the server, which I think everybody that that probably has dealt with this probably knew in the background that somehow it didn't it didn't get surfaced and punting. >> I think every single naysayer of this would was would pointing it out. >> Yeah. We're talking like years ago when this was first mentioned. It was like no because the only way you can do this is centralizing it or burning or burn a server running it. >> Yeah. >> And it seems like they've fixed a lot of it to get it somewhere performant, but that's still not the same as performant. >> But uh what's really I this this will be a rantiness is 12 months ago were all talking about canonical plugins and how canonical plugins were the future and we should definitely talk about canonical plugins and canonical plug Where'd that go? >> You are you meaning this feature as a canonical plug-in? >> Well, the idea was that if we were going to have that we were going to have WordPress core was going to be really lean and light and you know there were certain features that we might need that we should that but they should be uh given as a canonical plugin. So they're still owned by WordPress. They're still maintained to the same high standards, the same release cadence, but wouldn't wouldn't take up space in the very lean and light WordPress of the future. And uh roll on nine months and we've got an what an MCP servery thing coming in. Uh an agent uh a whole new AI agent set thing that's in there with meaning for the first time ever, we're going to have credentials now in databases and this all in one place. It feels like who where at some point that that idea of canonical plugins just got thrown out the window. >> Again, that's not even a criticism of whether it's good or bad. It's just like >> we didn't even last 9 months. >> Yeah. >> That that because that announce I think that announcement might have been in Asia when they were talking about canonical plugins last year, >> but it it really was. So, it might be 12 months. It might not be nine months since they were talking about the future is all canonical. Well, that's right. And this now that you've mentioned it, it's dredged up my memory, which is exactly that that this would be the canonical plugins would be like this repository of things which could have been in core would get the same treatment as if it were core in terms of security updates and things like that, but it was more a toggable set of things if you like. You know, I don't need collaborative editing, so we'll switch that off or at least never install it. You know, that's Yeah, that's interesting. And I don't know if it was you, Tim, or Remus in in their little bit said that nobody will ever use it. I I only really interact with WordPress websites which I run nowadays. So I obviously that tells you everything. I will never use collaborative editing in WordPress in the with how I've got it set up at the moment. But I'm imagining that some of the bigger players out there, you know, the tech crunches and the, you know, the some of the big publishing houses that are using it, maybe that would be a nice feature for them to have because, you know, their editorial team is messily trying to figure things out on Google Docs and then copy and paste whatever that workflow looks like. Um, but yeah, it kind of everybody else gets to be the collateral damage because those small amount of websites use it. Um, yeah. Okay. Straw pole. The four of us who will use collaborative editing the minute it becomes part of core. Hands up. No hands. Interesting. Okay. And the idea of it maybe being used for with an AI attached to it is interesting, but you if you're use your AI is having to use the good the direct post editor interface to drive everything, then this that's probably not the right approach. So really what you're saying is that the collaborative AI the collaborative component would be to render what the AI is managing to get in from an external endpoint coming in. Uh >> I think that was tied up with notes, wasn't it? This the sort of sidebar of uh like we have in Google Docs with comments. I think they're called notes in the new the latest iterations of WordPress. And you would interact in that sidebar on the right if you like. And then the output would then get put into the the block editor which then obviously in real time you could adapt and amend as it was typing it out. So gosh. Okay. Anyway, the story there was that WordPress 7 got punted. Um and obviously that is a fairly big uh punt. Matt Mulleng made the decision to punt it and it sounds Tim from everything that you've said as if that was the right decision because there could have been some sort of systemic collapse on >> I wouldn't I wouldn't I'm not going to say that I would um put money on it but I wouldn't be shocked if on the the come the next release it actually does get that this gets ejected out and that they go actually we've talked to people we're going to save face we're going to throw this as a a collab we're going to put this in a plug-in territory for a little it, get more feedback, get it running probably and that's absolutely fine thing to do and I think I would be >> uh much more uh on board with it coming into core once it's been through that sort of release phase >> and also I think I'd have a lot more respect for people who people who are brave enough to say actually yeah we need to punt this and we we we we we can't we shouldn't be slowing things down we need to punt this and get this we can come back to load of respect for people doing that because it's not easy to do especially when your boss has made it the most important thing ever for him. >> The um the other thing I suppose is the canvas that you're working on like Google Docs it's it's a plain white sheet isn't it? You know you've got various functions and you know you can bold things and italicize things and what have you but it's really constrained and if you open up one of their spreadsheets again it's fairly constrained in what you can do. WordPress has this aspiration. Well, there's just like a trillion different things that you can do with WordPress. Like, does does the does this collaborative layer start to be involved in theming? You know, can you can you collaborate on the the theming side of WordPress and things like that? >> I don't know. Um, >> anyway, there you go. >> Yeah. But that then of course makes it all the more complicated. Whereas the Google I mean, God knows how much money Google spend on their servers each year. Can you imagine getting two people and they collaboratively can edit the pallet section? >> I want it pink. I want it green. I want it pink. I want a green. Yeah. Not this font. No, we're not having that font. Yeah. Okay. Uh right. Okay. Okay. So, there we go. There's some um there's some thoughts on that. We've had a few comments come in. Glad to have you back, says uh Kev Clark. Hello, Kev. Nice to have you with us. >> Um Remas made a comment. Oh, we were talking about uh bikes. There you go. Yeah, I was talking about a push bike, which I presumed is what they were talking about. Patricia says, "Hello." Um, I'm guessing this is Matt. Matt Maderos. Oh, you got a nice new icon, Matt. Uh, how many speed limits did Rem Remus break to get back to do this podcast? I don't know. Where was he? If you Oh, in uh in Cloud Press. Is that what >> on Saturday morning? I was at Checkout Summit in Palmo, Sicily, Italy. >> Okay. Driving. >> Driving. >> When was that? You were in Palmo >> Saturday morning. >> And how many miles is that that you had to achieve to get back to the Netherlands? >> I don't know about freedom units, but it's 2600 kilometers. >> Okay. Yeah, that Yeah. Was there any speeding? I know you're there's quite a lot in Germany. I guess you can >> Let's just say I really behaved in Switzerland, which is what >> which which is what one guy >> This is why he's on the podcast today. >> Yeah. Um, and Elliot's rebotted with at least Italy has a majority of straight roads. >> It was it Italy was uh very smooth, I would I'll have to say. Um, >> oh, I love driving around in Italy, especially coastal roads. There's so much fun. Oh, boy. >> I didn't do much of that, but I I did still have fun. So, yeah. >> Can you just tell us, Remas, I know that this isn't in the the show notes or anything like that, but you've been to two events recently, haven't you? We went to Prescom in >> I want to say Phoenix, but it's not Phoenix, is it? It's >> Tempe in the greater Phoenix area. Yes. >> Yeah. And also um the one that you just mentioned, Checkout Summit. Do you feel willing to just give us a quick appraisal of what the heck that was and what they were like and what you enjoyed and whatnot. >> So both are not work camps but WordPress centric events. Um, Presconf is a gathering of people uh more on the executive slash uh makers and movers type uh uh corner of of WordPress people I would say. Um >> very different types of conversations and and presentations. Um but incredibly valuable for for anyone really vested and interested in the WordPress and the state of it and the future of it to be uh to be at that event. Uh press conf I I highly recommend anyone who's serious about WordPress to at least visit once. It'll make you want to visit a second time because >> nice >> not not just the presentations but or the vibe of the event itself but just the conversations and who who are there. Uh it's it's um it's it's it's a good place to have those types of conversations which you may occasionally have at a work camp but uh it's quite different if the whole event is around those types of conversations which I mean >> you know um you know how it is there there's an environment that uh there are particular environments that open up different types of conversations that are to have so that's press conf okay >> um checkout summed is uh WooCommerce related ated WooCommercecentric and it's it's roughly the same type of crowd but then Woo Commerce. Uh it's also different conversations. It's also incredibly good to have woo people in the room. Um most notably uh James Kemp and Brian Cords. >> Okay. >> Um uh three things I think have been mentioned are we should really fix this and on the go James is processing them. So, we were jokingly saying there's going to be three uh um hot fixes being released uh on Woo, but the whole point is uh it's good to understand there's many players um very active in the WooCommerce ecosphere that are not doing more than talking via text essentially, right? So when you meet in person, you have longer and better and deeper conversations. And it's the type of conversations we need to have if we're >> if we're to move this community to the next level. Uh whether that's WordPress or WooCommerce, both both apply. Um Checkout Summit was I mean it's it's in Italy. Uh it's in Sicily specific, right? >> Yeah. Palmo, >> right on the beach, more or less. >> No, no, literally on the beach. >> Yeah. Yeah. It's a stones throw away. We're looking out at over the the sea as we're having um breakfast and dinner. Um Rodulfo did a wonderful job as a single organizer organizing that event and um he just brought the right type of crowd in one room. U >> and again it's Italy. I I I I I this is not an exaggeration. We had a um just just essentially dinner at a pizzeria nearby. Like literally nearby between us and the beach. So super close. Uh and I I have had the best pizza in my life. >> Yes. >> Randomly. >> Yeah. >> And I wasn't the only >> Italians don't do bad food. That's not an option, is it? They just do not allow it. and the the the the vibe of the event matched that uh feeling of the best pizza. Like there's a lot of lot of lots of things came together. Uh conversations were good spin-offs for sorry presentations were good spin-offs for conversations. Uh all that sort of stuff. So yeah, um if you haven't been you you should feel FOMO. They they were both were really good events and we should have many more of these nonwork camp types of events. >> Do you know if Rulo is planning on doing Check Out Summit again? >> He will. In fact, uh the first version of what he's done just now is uh checkoutsummit reloaded which is an offline version of this. So check out checkoutsummit.com and there's more information on that. Um, but yes, uh, all all signs are pointing into the direction that this will be a repeat. >> Yeah, I had quite a few conversations with him in the run-up to it. And the the bit that I took away from it was how incredibly seriously he was taking it all. I don't mean that in a negative. I just meant that he was he appeared to be sweating every detail. Um, and being concerned in the nuts and the bolts of it all as opposed to being sort of hands off and paying for people to organize everything. It felt like he was the decision maker here, there, and everywhere, which >> Yep. Yeah. Uh, which could be a heartache, but he seemed to be embracing it. >> Um, >> can I comment on Elliot's uh comment? >> Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Best Oh, sorry. Sorry, Elliot. There's It's best pizza in >> uh Elliot, you're going to have to believe me as as a connoisseur of pizzas and Italians literally saying the same thing that this was absolutely the best pizza I've ever had and they have ever had. >> Do you know about Elliot's side gig? >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We talked about it. >> Uh Elliot, I feel like a trip to um to check out Summit next year is going to be on. You can have some sort of pizza bake off. >> So now I was going to say now we need two ovens. >> Yeah, >> we could do some sort of collaborative >> rap battles with this. We're on to pizza wars with Elliot. This is >> so for the record, I'm not about wars and fighting, Tim. >> I'm a lover, not a fighter. No, no, no. I'm justine. >> I I think Food Wars is about the point where I'm quite I'm quite keen to get >> it. That's until someone mentions pineapple and then that's a whole >> You had to ruin things, Mark. >> Um, okay. So, he now wants to know what the restaurant's called. >> Uh, I can find it somewhere. >> Okay. He's going to Google it for you and have a little look, Elliot. That's that's great. Uh, so there we go. We have a battle set up 12 months from now in Palmo. Elliot's going to rock up with all of his gear. we can see who does in fact do uh the best bits. That's brilliant. That's so much less aggressive than the uh the previous thing between Matt and Remus. Okay. All right. Thank you for that. There are two two sort of events that we haven't really mentioned much on this show. Um yeah, there you go. I see a pizza speed builder coming along. Pizza press. Okay, so the comments are just going to be about pizzas from now on. I can tell. Right, let's put this screen back up and see where we got to next. Um, okay. This is a sort of word camp sort of thing. It may have may not be of interest to you, but I don't know if you I I can't say that I've experienced this because I'm not a developer, but if you have shown up to a WordPress event uh in the past and let's say this was your first time and you don't have your machine set up, perhaps you had this idea that you turn up to contrib and 10 minutes from sitting down you'd be fruitfully engaged in um part of the WordPress project. Well, not apparently. That's not how it works because um allegedly uh OneMar is saying a lot of people get lost at WordPress uh contributor day. So much so that people actually just sort of leave halfway through the setup of their machines um because they're just I guess just a bit weary of it. They figure out that they're not going to achieve anything just because the whole process of getting your Mac or Windows machine or whatever it is setups a bit of a bit of an ache. And uh so Wanmar has decided to take this on and he has built the core dev environment toolkit which is let's just call it a one-click install of everything that you need in order to be up and running. I'm not sure uh how effective it is. One m maybe I'll grab him on a podcast or something like that. But I just thought this was quite an interesting little project. There's some uh you know there's some videos about how it all works and Matt jumped into the comments and said awesome. He'd like to see if he can get it sort of torrented around the room so that if one person's got it correctly set up, everybody in the room can just sort of leech off their correct setup and get going. Um, not really a story there, but I'll drop that one in if anybody wants to comment. Now is the moment, but if not, >> it's weird. We already have WordPress core environment dev set up. >> Okay, I didn't know that. Uh so you've got things like JP hyphen EMV which is the worst name possible for a local development environment agency but it's basically a oneclick you get going and you can have either it you can you can go you can drop it into any if you into a folder that has a plugin or a theme and you can just literally type- enm start I think it's start and it will load up a web load up that plugin for you set up but if you just want to do something C with core you just literally I think it's WPMV core and off it goes and it gets you all the latest core setups. It was built originally for working with the uh Gutenberg stuff. So it's it was managed I think initially by the theme team. So this feels like we're >> just doing something again. This just is looks more like it's just a wrapper for Playground, which is a terrible place to be doing core tickets, I would have thought, because >> Tell me why. >> Playground's awesome. Playground's amazing. Playground is not a P proper PHP install of your WordPress site. >> Playground has interesting bugs, >> right? >> Because it doesn't behave quite the same. It behaves mostly the same. Um, >> I wonder why I wonder why Juan Mars done it. That's so that's definitely >> I guess because one of the key things he has on there is it doesn't have git, it doesn't have mpm and it doesn't have docker. And uh the problem with this is that to do serious core development sadly >> you need to have some sort of git svn access you unfortunately need to have npm because we've we've become a javascript first CMS for a humongous part of it. Uh so you need all the things he doesn't want you to have but they are all utter barriers. >> So interestingly in the post he does reference core committers doesn't he? So he says here before writing a single line of code a first-time WordPress core contributor typically and then on and on. >> Uh so would there be any utility in this for somebody that was I don't know just sort of dabbling around and wanted to see what a contributor day felt like? Probably not. Right. Okay. Now, >> yeah, I mean, it's it's it's basically he's wrapped playground, which is great if you want to have a a a a not quite like for like, but close to like setup. >> But then that's exactly what you could do. If you're going to do that, you could argue, well, shouldn't you use is it Studio by WordPress.com that uses Playground? >> Yeah, Studio >> or or Playground. Uh yeah, these are all available to you. So it feels like we've built yet another tool, >> but no, I feel like I'm I'm being really mean on people. I don't mean it. I I people are doing things like this. >> No, no. At the same time, feels left, right hand, left and right hand. What would be awesome is that we saw development along the lines of DPMV with a pretty interface on it. Okay. >> For people who might be scared of using the terminal, that would be awesome. That doesn't seem to be what this is. I will get in touch with Wanmar um and see um if he's willing to come on a podcast and explain what the uh what the the core focus of that was because that's does seem curious, doesn't it? Um if you're lurking anywhere one, let us know. Uh one click, are you sure? No. Uh I'm not sure. Um Mark, sorry Mark. Uh is that Mark Wilkinson? I think it is. Uh D. Also, just as an aside, uh it even though it says it doesn't use npm, it literally says as a second thing on its figures, what does it do? It clones a clones, so presumably it's using git and then runs npm install. So, at the minimum, it seems to be installing >> both git and npm onto your server, which means it's putting node on to your your computer. >> At this point, if you've got a previous copy of node, you're probably having conflicts. It's probably all going to break. And now you've got a bunch of people getting angry at poor one for for breaking their computers set up. >> So Mark, I I was just taking that from this line here where it says you install it, choose a directory for WordPress hyphen develop, click a button, and you have. So that was why I went for that one. >> I I reckon local setup >> Yeah. >> tools is one of the hardest things to get right. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, basically when we when we had Zam WAMP and ZAMP and all XAMP and all of those, >> they might have been the pinnacle of usability sheerely because they did they isolated enough of it away but just sort of seemed to work. >> Yeah. >> And yeah, getting local dev tools to to consistently work and not be a tech support nightmare. I have so much respect for people who try to do this. Uh so I have respect for the project. just think it would be great if we could if it was a bit more coordinated. >> Right. And also not an overlapping. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's >> we can overlap. It just needs to overlap in a way that is complimentary. >> Right. Right. Right. Okay. Well, like I said, I'll get in touch with one and we'll see if we can get him on the show. Uh Cameron Cameron Jones, he's in the UK. Good afternoon from a surprisingly sunny Brighton. It is always sunny in Brighton. Cameron, I lived there for many years and it never stopped. It was relentless. and uh WWP is I'll just move on. Uh it wasn't that funny, but thank you Mark Westgard. I guess that was you. Appreciate it. Okay, we've done two of the myriad articles. So, we need to burn through the next one. I'm going to miss that one out because we just don't have time for maybe I won't. Just very quickly, this this appeared on Word uh the makewordpress.org. It's kind of related to what was talking about. Contributing is hard, especially if you're new. And so, there's a piece written by Velder, uh, which was came out a couple of days ago, 23rd of April. It's called Help Others Contribute to WordPress. And it's it's not the technical side of getting set up. It's more the sort of, you know, how do we make it accessible to other people? Um, in terms of walking things through and giving people issues that they can immediately grab hold of like a menu, if you like, of here's a bunch of stuff which can be achieved in a day. here's what you need to do, here's how to do it, blah blah blah, that kind of thing. So, go and have a quick look at that one as well. And there's this idea of pathways as well, which is kind of scaffolding your contribution during those days. It feels like um those contributor days are I don't know they're getting thin on the ground in places like Word Camp US and Word Camp uh EU, Word Camp Europe, but man, there were so many people at the contributor day at Word Camp Asia. Like I'm going to say plural thousands. I don't know if it was that many, but that >> there were 2,200 in total at the >> in the in the contrib. >> No, at the event in total. >> Okay. And I reckon most of them were at the contra. It certainly felt that way. The biggest room I've ever been in in my life. I mean, it was truly enormous that room. It was like honestly the size of a football pitch. Um, and it was basically full of people contributing. So, that excitement is definitely still uh in that part of the world, which was kind of interesting. So, I don't know, maybe these things are not so much of an issue over there, but there's a piece that you can read. Um, just a bit of a hat tip really to uh an McCarthy. She wrote this piece. It really it's just spelling who's going to be on the 2027 theme team. So, that's all there is there really, but I just thought I'd mention it. Um, and then where did we go to next? Uh Kyle Kyle from the admin bar every year does this state of the WordPress agency report or at least he's been doing it I don't know three four years something like that. Um where he goes into what what it's like basically to be somebody that's employed building websites. So you know plug-in developer agency owner I think more agency owner freelancer kind of thing. Um, in a normal world, we probably would have spent quite a while going through all of this, but really, I think what I'm just going to say is go and check it out. Uh, it's the adminbar.com2026- survey. Um, and what the takeaway is really, I suppose if you were to distill it into one line, it's getting harder to make a living using WordPress. Not impossible. Certainly not impossible. um but harder and it seems like people that have been doing it for a while seem to do better than people that are coming into it for the first time which you know uh did anybody have a comment on that? Did anybody read a bit which I thought was worth drilling down into. >> I read I read through it and I found it actually a pretty fascinating article. Um and it's it's interesting I it's interesting that um personal burnout ended up as high as it did. I didn't expect it quite up as high as it is, but it's number three on the reasons that uh that the agencies are being held back. And then the the uh client management and scope is at the very bottom, which also surprised me. Uh but of course, I don't do a ton of agency work, so what do I know? But um it it is different than I would have expected it to be. Um I and and of course he attributes the burnout to basically underpricing uh your product, which makes perfect sense. If you're not making if you're working extra hard and you're making less money, you know, then then obviously you're going to get burned out. If you're working 24 hours a day and making two bucks a week, um you're going to get burned out. >> I know that you collaborate with a lot of people over at MainWP. Do you collaborate quite a bit with the admin bar? because it feels like the stuff that they're doing over there or at least particularly this like really fits well with what you do as a business. You know, the data that they're drawing out here would be really interesting to your your audience, I'm guessing. Mark, >> I I definitely uh read pretty much everything that they put out at the admin bar. Um and I think uh Kyle has some uh really good insights. we have interacted but we haven't really done a lot of collaboration now. Uh I I I wouldn't say that but uh okay >> but I I really did appreciate this article though. >> Um it's basically you know it's like lots of chart if you can't if you're not watching this and you're listening to it. It's um it's you kind of got to read it. There's lots of different charts drilling down into different bits of business like burnout, like how much do people make, how big are teams, um what kind of things do they sell, how much do they charge for things and all of that. And you know, there's a I don't know 30 something data points here. >> So, um you can go and draw your own conclusions. Well, and of course some of some of the things you have to take with a grain of salt is like how much money they're making because different parts of the world obviously you know a dollar or whatever is going to go a lot further than others. So um certain things you can only take into consideration so much but um but it is really fascinating data >> and beautifully presented like everything >> and very beautifully very beautifully presented. >> Yeah. say purely anecdotally from my own because most a lot of my clients are agencies. So I I get to sort of chat through them and the shift over the last couple of years has very much been the middle has been gutted. So, if you were a midsize agency, uh you're finding that the larger agencies or the more which would have traditionally been the more expensive agencies are now coming down at one level to come and try and poach your top end of your client base. >> Oh, >> meanwhile, the lower level, the agencies that are tending to be much cheaper are coming up and taking your lower level, leaving you with very few pickings left. And so you end up in a scenario where you feel like you have to compete with one or the other which then shifts you one way or the other and too many people seem to not recognize their own value and therefore seem to be shifting downwards instead of upwards that chain. So they'll reduce their prices or they'll try and compete with those lower value propositions which I don't know I feel like I I vaguely remember a business course where they told me not to do that. I'd like to add something to that because I I think in in in for the most part you're spot on Tim. Um but what I also see as a as a mix into that is >> we've had a very very long period where any type of relatively serious agency could get work. There was plenty of work to go around. uh we have entered a phase where what you're saying is happening as well as specific agencies that specialize in uh let's call it two or three things are doing much better than those who have never uh absolutely went in and said look we uh we're not just treating this as work but we're treating this as a um an opportunity to shine in certain areas of the development thing. So whether that is Woo Commerce and LMS's and I don't know something else or whe whether that's a particular market they're focusing on. you've entered the phase where this is absolutely a necessity because there's plenty of agencies that I talk to on on very different levels uh quite similar uh to yours Tim where uh most of the connections that I have are with agencies they're finding it very difficult to understand where the thing went wrong but the thing went wrong 3 four years ago when you weren't specializing and telling people you were specializing I see I've seen so many agency sites over the over the I don't know past 6 months. Uh just people reaching out to me asking questions and asking for help or a small analysis or whatever. Uh and I look at their website and it's like I'm I'm aware of what you do cuz I've seen some of your work but I don't see it on your site. There's no specification of a niche or a particular skill that sets you apart from anybody else. So if a client is looking, they're going to see the same thing. They're going to go, I recognize that this particular agency is very specialized in XYZ. I need Y and Z. So that's that's good enough. That's what I'll go for. Um that whole and and I I kind of hinted at that at my latest one of my latest blogs. I think um we as a community and and players in that community uh we need to level up in our entire thinking in our entire skill set in our our entire integrations of all the tools that we use. We need to understand what's out there what's in there in order to become the best type of uh development party as well as understand that we need to brand ourselves. We need to be out there. It's a different world. We can't go on how you know we can't go on how we've been doing for I don't know for uh I saw something like the median age of uh of that survey 11 age 11 years or so >> but in those 11 years eight of them have been relatively easy. So if you don't recognize that, if you don't if you're not aware that this is a this is in part also a very large thing about branding, a large thing about visibility, a large thing about uh understanding what your skill sets are and and not afraid to use them as a as a thing that sets you apart. It's very difficult to find continuous growth in a period where the level of of skills needed to get the base um projects done is going down that is AI. And on the complex end of things, yeah, if an agency has a really good profile on on large complex projects, then it's very logical they're going to get those projects. If a if a if a small in between agency is never, you know, every now and then touches the larger project but hasn't turned that into a skill that is sellable and presentable and all that sort of stuff. How how is the market going to react? It's going to react uh pleasantly to those who have put in the work of marketing, of presenting, of case studies, all that sort of stuff. It's inevitable. Every single industry outside of our industry goes through these levels of, you know, there's growth and then then then you hit a plateau. Something needs to change when you hit that plateau. And the thing that needs to change >> is very much something that you need to see coming instead of all right now I have to do something. You're already two years too late. If now now is the time that you think I I need to change something, it's too late. So the only thing you can do is radically improve all every single thing that you do. That is sales, that is marketing, that is development, that is understanding all the things that set you apart from a technical skill. It's everything. >> It is so hard to niche down in a drought. When you when when the pipeline is feeling good, that that that feeling of like, oh, I can we can afford to niche down now. We can become that specialist. whether that's a niched subject or a niche tool set. But when there's a drought, as someone who's been there, been in that in that place, the panic mode that comes on to every business owner is because they got to sit there and ultimately business owners are there going, I have to make payroll this month. So, I'm willing to take things to make payroll to even if it makes my life hund times worse down the line, >> they there comes a point where you sort of have to do that just to scrap through and survive. But I agree. I think if you don't if you weren't in a niche, if you're not in a niche now, you probably need to be in a niche really quickly. I think the only bit where I'm like is I'm not necessarily sure the niche has to be tools. I don't think you need to be a niche Woo Commerce developer or even a I think you can niche out in a different way. You can maybe >> there's various ways audience there there's various ways of doing it. It can be topical. It can be it can be skill set. It can be it can be many things. But you need to specialize in a way that is presentable, marketable, all those things because h how is your next client going to know? How are they going to know? They're going to look at a generic site where you present your skills as we build themes, we build plugins, we're good at it. Yay. Like well I mean that's that's the thing is when you're in a when you're in a boomer bust sort of um industry which is what we are either you can do no wrong right which is when you're in the boom you can do no wrong you're growing and and everything and then it becomes I think it feels risky when you're in that boom to say what do I specifically want to pick here when I can do no wrong. >> Yeah. and and and that's where the people succeed when there's the bust and are the people who look down the road and they can see it coming and they can choose wisely or they just plain get lucky. Um, you know, there's there's sometimes just plain dumb luck. You look at the oil booms and all that stuff, it's just sometimes it's just people pick the land that happen to have the oil, you know. So, >> it's the same type of thing. Wait, you mean my two sticks are not going to get me oil consing along for my [ \_\_ ] Maybe sticks won't work. >> I've done 20 years of the two sticks thing and I've never >> No, just grass. >> Why doesn't that Why doesn't that surprise me? >> Every evening I'm out with the dowsing rods. Um, so it's a fairly um, so the report that we had on the screen from Kyle, it doesn't paint this sort of picture of um, there's no sense of sort of doom there or anything like that, but but this is uh, this is the tenor of what is coming out of WordPress publishing houses at the moment, like podcasts and blogs and what have you. There's this sort of how the heck do we navigate this thing? And so, >> well, it starts with any problem. You are you recognize that it's a problem. So if you haven't identified it as a problem just yet, now is the time to level up and pick a direction. And it can be multiple directions. Like it's not a it's not a binary thing. >> But I I'll give you I'll give you one good example. We all know AI has taken over some version of search. How much? We don't know. But it's certainly quantifiable. Now, if you have an agency and you haven't uh optimized your site in terms of this is what I do and and all the things I just said, I'm not going to repeat all that, but you haven't made that available for the AI to do in the most uh smoothest way. >> Yeah, >> that's an indication of you're running behind. There's there's a Cloudflare uh released a website last week I think or the week before. Is my is my site agentic? What is it? >> Yeah. Is Okay. >> Is it agentready.com? >> Okay. >> So, for starters, add your site in there just to have you be aware of what uh what your site needs to qualify for nowadays just to be visible on the AI side of things. like all of these things matter now. >> Go. >> And and that's just one piece of the jigsaw puzzle. So AI feels like a giant piece of that jigsaw puzzle, but it's also possible shrinking market share. >> It can be all of the things, but you need to you need to get off your ass and and and be proactive. You there's no time for reactiveness now. >> Okay, that's it. We're going to wrap this show up and I'm going to go and uh yeah, I'm I'm out of here. I'm going to do all the things that need doing. Um there's a few comments around this. This seems to be the piece today that's got the uh got the comments. Um firstly, um Mark in the UK, Mark Wilkinson said, "Getting harder." I would agree with that for sure. Seems to be no doubt about that. And then Mark made a few uh complimentary comments about what Tim was saying. I can't remember the context because it's several minutes ago now. Um also, uh James Laauo said he totally forgot about this show. Well, I don't know what to make of that, James. That betrayal. Uh no. I'm joking. Uh I >> It's a good demonstration of promotion and branding being important and your brand clearly failed because it didn't last even three weeks. >> Okay. Damn it. Okay. My brand as if I as if I have a brand. Uh but appreciate that, Tim. That's very kind of you. Uh and then getting back to the real stuff, he says, um I will be asking the state of the WordPress. Uh, sorry. I'll be asking about the state of WordPress from Mary Hubard during tonight's Boston WordPress meetup. Okay, that's interesting. Thank you. Uh, James, uh, Tim has a great point. A small, as a small new agency owner, I am seeing this change. My niche, this is James commenting again. My niche has been uh, eaten up by Squarespace, Web Flow, etc. WP is still top, but people are asking for other options. It's truncated, so I'll read it. These platforms offer other integrated options, but I have to relearn my brain. And then an agreement. >> That last sentence is spot on. >> Yeah. >> You have to relearn your brain. >> Relearn your brain. >> Absolutely. >> And then he's agreeing with you. Um, Remus need you need to see what's coming. It depends on the niche or the client. >> And for the record, I don't mean like you need to have the the the the glass ball, right? Nobody has that. That that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is there's there's there's changes in our industry and you need to embrace them instead of I'll look at it when I'm forced to or when the project asks for it that that you don't have that luxury anymore. >> And then this sort of speaks into that a little bit. Um again, James, uh I've accepted work from my niche that isn't only WordPress work. It's just the point we're at right now. Okay. So the niche is the thing, not WordPress being the thing. But that's fine because again if you one of the things that we've got coming is that and this has always been the case but nobody's believed that clients don't actually care. They don't care for example they don't really truly care if you built their word their site on WordPress as long as it meets the feature set that they wanted at the time. This can lead them down into terrible paths when this is how, you know, dev shops that build custom CMSs still exist and shouldn't, but they still exist. But that's because clients don't actually care about that. Well, they care about the functionality. And if you give them what they wanted in terms of functionality, they don't care about what it was behind the scenes. In the same way that clients don't care if you manually update a site every day and keep it, they they care about will you keep it up to date and will you keep it secure. how you do that irrelevant to them. As long as you're doing it, >> they couldn't give a flying monkey. >> They couldn't give a flying monkey. >> If your if your niche doesn't if it mean your niche no longer has WordPress as a feature in part of its part of thing it cares about, then you don't need to use I know that's apocalypical on a WordPress podcast, but you don't need to use WordPress in that scenario. >> I'm going to mute him. so badly. >> I know you're going to if you are someone who is now sitting and you write all your blog posts or rather Claude writes all your blog posts, you might and you're never going to review them. You're never going to do any formatting on it. You're never going to log in. You probably don't want WordPress anymore. And that's >> the thing we have to accept is that is okay. That's always been okay because I'm having heart should have had to force them to do this. Nath Nathan's like, "What is my podcast going to be about next week?" >> This week in this week in talking, >> he's he's gonna change the name from WP Builds to, you know, >> build. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I agree, Tim. That makes perfect sense. And I'm sure that on many levels, many of us have got it. You have also spawned this week's titles episode without a doubt. Uh Tim Nash says, "Clients don't actually care." That's gonna I might miss the Tim Nash bit out at the beginning, but that I think will be the episode. So, some more comments about that. Uh just to keep this going for a little while. Uh where were we? Nomad skateboarding. Hello. Um some also choose to run their own waist so they can't be left behind in the popular one. Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah. So, forge your own path. Make make your own way and be the trailblazer and everybody follows you. Um, so this is definitely Steve Burge's picture, but I don't recognize the handle there. So, normally it says something different. Um, but there we go. Ali, so Steve Burge, the flat cap and headphones are a brand I'd recognize Nathan silhouette anywhere. That's very kind. I appreciate that. Um, oh, I'll just put the same comment up twice. What scares me now, says James, is when a client comes to you with a solution based on what AI told them. Oh, >> so I >> can can I say it shouldn't scare you, >> right? >> You should have an ready type of approach answer, >> right? >> In in how you deal with this because this is the new reality. I have clients as well who are paying me handsomely every month for XYZ. There's a you know a variety of things that I do. Every now and then someone now says, "Hey, I've seen this and they said I can do this. Why don't you uh integrate this for me?" And then I explain them why this is or isn't a good idea in detail. You have you need to have these answers ready now, >> right? >> That's a great start should be your should be be your hand for any for any statement when it >> sentence. That's a great that means you've had a conversation where you hashed out what you want and you we have a direction. >> It's no different than than back in the days. I remember doctors hated when you'd go to WebMD and bring in a diagnosis. Yeah. >> And and those doctors have kind of fallen by the wayside. Now when you go to the doctor, you go in and you say and you've googled it, they're like, "Oh, we really appreciate the fact that you've gone and done all the work because we only have 15 minutes to talk to you anyway, and it's best, you know, and and and I will tell you why this is wrong, but I will also tell you why this is right." And if you're going to an expert, that's what an expert does. An expert says, "Hey, thanks for doing the research before you came here." It means you're serious about your project. And here is, like you said, this is a great start and this is how we can expound upon it and this is how we can build on it. And if we the reality is there going to be people who embrace AI and there are people who don't. And the get off my lawn people, I'm sorry. They're going to have to find another industry because AI is here. You're gonna have to deal with it and you're gonna have to deal with everything that that entails. >> Correct. >> Okay. So, all of that was spawned by the We sort of went off in myriad directions there, but that was really nice. Um, they're the best bits at this point. Do you mind if I add one last bit about the article or not? Which is um and I think it was you who said it, but I think they've had far less >> responses this year. >> The survey, let's just put it back on the screen. So, the survey had 622. I can't for certain say that that's down, but I for some reason I think it was >> you put the word five there. >> Let's try 25. Yeah, let's try that. Good point. I don't know if it'll surface it in the same way. >> Literally half. Yeah. >> Okay. 2024. >> Okay. Let's see what we get with that >> similar 1,200ish. But I feel like that in itself is indicative of something. Whether that is um whether that is business owners who are going actually I'm in a really negative place and especially if they I I suspect that when it got to the financials in the questionnaire that that's where a lot of the cut off came where people sort of went >> yeah I've had a bad year and and that and that that just was where they turned off and stopped putting in or whether it is an indication that we really have just lost half an industry which which I don't believe is the case, but I I found that to be possibly the biggest statistic of all because I don't think the admin bar has lost half its readership. I don't think it's lost its uh impact to reach its audience by half in a year, which means there must be another reason that it >> Well, I I think there might also be survey fatigue just people are tired of filling out surveys. >> That could be it. >> Yeah. Okay. So, it's spawned a lot. Um, there's so much data in that. Um, and it is literally just presented as data with KL dropping in some thoughts about, you know, what that data might mean. Um, but no sort of overall uh conclusions, but we definitely toss that around a little bit. That was fascinating. I So, we've got very little time left, so we'll just whip through a few of these. So, this is an interesting one. It's by Matias Reinholds. And, um, I don't know if this kind of speaks to what we've just been talking about. you know, this fear out there of our industry sort of shrinking or what have you. But there seems to be a lot of trying out new things, let's put it that way, out there in the wild and, you know, so lots of things about setting up dev environments for contributors at word camps, lots of um educational initiatives in the WordPress space that didn't exist before. And now we have this which I think is so interesting. So Matias is obviously an automatician because this post is kickstarting a radical month at automatic. Now, Remus, I think knows more about this in terms of who's in and who's out, but um this person along with a companion inside of WordPress um has been authorized for one month and I'll just read it. Today is the first day of radical speed month at Automatic. For one month, I get to get to pair up with a colleague and build something real. No design reviews, no product signups, no marketing sign off. I'm curious to see what a pair can ship in a month without the usual approval chain in place. And um so they have decided to do a particular thing you can find out more on the website. But I I I don't first of all I don't know like I don't know if everybody gets to do this if you're a developer automatic in other words has automatic more or less shut down for a month or is it just like a cherrypicked you know five or six seven or eight people which one remicked and it's notic there's there's quite a number um our friend Jamie Marsland is one of them >> okay >> um it's best I have gathered that it this is a this is an a mechanism to spark creativity and productivity and just >> blue sky thinking unconstrained. >> It's a hackathon type approach, right? >> But it's a month of a hackathon. I mean, you know, it it reminds me of those days when Google gave all of their dev employee, in fact, I think everybody, I'm not sure, uh like a Friday off every >> every week, right? It was 20% time and you could do whatever you liked and loads of >> stuff came out of Google because of that 20% time. I'm sure there was a hell of a lot of waste. >> That's how I see this, >> right? So, it's like the 20% time, but a month I mean gosh, I am imagining these people bright individuals. They've got loads of history doing things. I'm very curious to see what the heck comes out of a month of >> So, a month is essentially saying don't don't think too small. >> Yeah. Right. Right. Exactly that. Yeah. >> Which is which is what we're inclined to do anyway because you know APR what is that? You you you you you research a particular bug or a small feature this and that and here's here's my PR and and voila. But if you have a month you get to think about it. You get to experiment. You get to play. You get you have your buddy that you're back and forthing with with um I like this. I like this a lot actually. It's a very confident step financially as well. You know, that's not a cheap gesture. >> No, >> it's going to cost millions of dollars presumably, >> but it might reward them with millions as well. >> Yeah. >> Imagine if one one of the ideas turns into, I don't know, the next SAS app. Obviously, automatic, we we align it very much with WordPress, don't we? But they also have irons in many fires. They've got podcasting things, you know, there's all sorts of they've got like Day One, haven't they? like a journaling app and things like that. So perhaps it the gamut is not going to be limited around WordPress. But I just thought that was really curious. So um let's see what these folk do. Sorry Tim, I think you might have been trying to say something. >> No, no, I'm just though I have I was sitting here going what if I could just have a month? I could do so much cool stuff. I didn't have to do anything else for that month. Yeah, >> right now I think anybody who's got that time, this is the this is the possibly the fastest point for to be able to go from idea to implementation >> ever that we've ever had. >> It's wild. >> Yeah. >> Sorry, it's not James. Sorry. Nomad skateboarding. Um I presume, let's just assume that this is research and it's true. 400 plus teams doing that. So, by that, do you mean 800 individuals or there's 400 different, you know, paired people? Either way, that's not nothing. Wow. Gosh, that's going to be so interesting. Let watch this space. Let's see what comes back in a month's time. It wouldn't be surprising if there was one. >> That's 30 days of shower thoughts, which is when all the good ideas happen. So, >> yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder what these individuals will do with themselves. I wonder what their day will look like. you know, whether they'll just, I don't know, go and sit on the beach and enjoy themselves whilst doing it as opposed to stuck in Slack meetings at home and things like that. Anyway, fascinating and an automatic which is definitely trying out some new things. So, let's see where that goes. Anybody else on that? Oh, it came from an automatic post on the Facebook page that gives you an insight into the whole program. So, it is 800 people. Man alive. That is not a cheap thing to have offered for free. Wow. Okay. >> Okay. There we go. That's that one. Uh let me just get that comment off the screen. We really are running out of time. Where did we get to? No, there's no time for that. There probably isn't time for that. No, let's just go straight to this one. >> Um I kind of like the uh agent one. >> Okay. Do you want to go for this one? >> I I think this is an interesting uh take. um that sort of has been forming as we were seeing 7.0 O come to be um coinciding with quite a few things happening on um the AI side of things I think I mean first of all this is this is published on automatic.com so it is in some way promotional it is in some way positioning sure but WordPress does have the opportunity with the market share that we have and with 7.0 O being first step into integrating AI on a few different levels, it does have to the absolute perfect position to turn into the operating system of the agentic web. There is it's more than just branding the thing. I think this is actually something that's starting to happen. uh it is an entirely new argument as to why you should want to use WordPress because yes why open source is the choice and the MCP is the thing and you know but there's already a lot of stuff going on inside and uh outside of WordPress but connecting to WordPress that really makes WordPress a fine candidate for this u um this concept the operating system of the agentic web. >> It is so interesting this debate. So I'll just read into the record the name of this piece. So it is on automatic.com and the piece is called WordPress colon uh the operating system of the agentic web and it's James Greersonen I think you would pronounce his name as and he's he's running through the you've probably thought of most of these thoughts if you're into WordPress I would have thought um how how WordPress could easily serve as the foundational layer of future initiatives on the web like like it says the operating system of the web and as you would imagine the things that are brought to bear in this argument are things like the scale of WordPress. So 43% and all of the community that that brings. um the 61,000 plus plus pro you know uh paid for plugins which probably take it well over a h 100,000 I would have thought maybe more like 200,000 don't know and um and the fact that opensource the nature of WordPress being open source I is that the the AIS know exactly what to do um with WordPress because everything's freely available so if you want to do a thing the AI knows already how to do that thing because all of the document and what have you has been out there for many many years. And that's kind of the context of his argument. He goes into the pros and the cons. I um there's a there's a little bit of me when I hear this argument um where I think I wonder in 10 years time what we'll think about arguments like this, whether it will have been a case of okay, that was very optimistic. We were desperately clinging for WordPress to be the thing. And the reason I say all of that is because I don't even know what's going to happen in two weeks time in AI. It just seems to be happening at such a breathtaking pace. I >> it is but if if the foundation of that is WordPress and WordPress makes all all the new things uh that are are there to to settle down as as permanent things. >> Uh it facilitates that, it operates with that, it integrates with that, it talks with it in a loweffort manner which is what 7.0 will be the first step towards >> um I I I I don't see any other solution than uh sorry um uh outcome than yes to some degree it will I mean the same >> it's a strong argument isn't it I agree >> the same can be said when when custom post types and tonomies were introduced like people said oh now you can build everything with WordPress and it'll be the future and some people were like nah I mean come on it's a blog we're not we're not going to we're not going to use a blog and to get out of here and yet those who were building understood what that unlocked. Um I I kind of see this the same way if I'm being really honest. >> There is also the advantage that uh people know WordPress. If you uh were to ask an AI right now to spin you up a website, it would go and get you tell it would tell start telling you to write some content into markdown files and then it would load up a Nex.js JS app which it would then spin up a bunch of crap into. Uh it would then do a bunch of stuff and then it would tell you I have a website and that's great until you need to fix something and then you need to the AI. >> That's it is like you have locked yourself back in >> to those commercial developers we were dumping on ages ago who were building their own CMSs. >> It locks itself down in that way. WordPress is something that is known by everybody that you can that is universal in that it can be deployed onto pretty much any hosting company you ever can think of. You can have it working very quickly, very easily. You can pay someone to maintain it. You can and alongside this, if we make it easier and easier for AI to operate and use it and successfully, we have the best of both. >> Yeah. We can we maintain ownership, which is something that at the moment people who are just flinging sites up with AI have actually losing and they don't even realize they're losing that really vital part, which is true ownership, which is portability because they are stuck in a scenario where they're going to have to have somebody or something debug every time. Now, I'm not saying that every person who has a WordPress site should should be doing development on a WordPress site, but they have that option and they have the ability to go to a gamut of people from really cheap companies to ginormous big VIP agencies to help them alongside AI, which is a really powerful tool in its own right. Yeah, it feels to me as if the direction of travel is a little bit more like the the editing of already kind of AI generated stuff is a big win for WordPress. So, in other words, you know, you've told you've told some um AI to build you a web page. Now, what like how do you go and amend it? How do you like do you have to have a conversation? No, not that bit. The the other cat, you know, that kind of thing. And so having it dumped into an an interface that you're familiar with, it'll be really interesting to see in the future how much creation is done by the AI and then the human in the loop bit is the okay now we need to amend it because it's Christmas and we want it to look Christmy and yada yada that that'll be I think that >> and you know with real time collaboration when you amend it it will go no I didn't tell you to do that. Oh, wheels within wheels. Um, go and check out the piece though. It's on automatic blog. Uh, it's by James Greerson. It's called WordPress operating system for the agentic web. I I I got to say I I'm kind of convinced that I think it's that's the um that is the that is how it'll turn out. Um, right. How are we doing for time? Not a lot of time. And have we got any new comments coming? Yes, a couple. So, uh, James again, James is being a truly amazing commenter. Thank you. Um, off topic, he watched Dre from the Drupal project at Drupalcon in 2026, the keynote, and they Oh, yeah. I remember this. Yeah, I remember seeing this, too. They've got uh AI built directly into their dashboard. It's called Drupal Canvas. And you you just basically start out a Drupal site now, don't you? Or at least you can. Um, and it's all baked in right at the very beginning. Um and he makes the point that Dre made a good point that even with all these agent platforms um a scaffold uh to the front end of the site is nice. You still need governance humans in the loop really to uh to help operate the nuances of the nuances of the back end. So there we go. Okay. Anything on that? I think we need to rush. We will rush. Here we go. Um a little while ago a plugin came out as a suite of blocks which I thought was quite nice. It enabled you to do a little bit more with core blocks. It extended the features. It was called Twentig. If anybody played with it, it was pretty lightweight in that it didn't try to launch new blocks. It just added menus to existing blocks. They've decided to jump in the um the theming space as well. So, I just thought I'd mention that it's called Twig One. Haven't tried it. I've no idea what it's like. As far as I can tell, it's free um just like their blocks were. But uh anyway, there's that and uh yeah, we'll just raise that on the screen very quickly and several of the panel can uh grimace. And did they grimace sufficiently is all moving on. Uh okay. Um this was supposed to be the thing that we talked about most this week and yet we got totally derailed by the admin bars article. So, >> you know, if you want to do that, you need to a tell the palist that this is the figure you want to focus on and b put it at the beginning. >> Yeah. Well, that was >> he did he did he did hint at it actually. >> But hint hinting is not being very clear in your communication. Just play never been good at this thing doing a live show. It's uh but anyway, this is a bit of a big deal and if you guys have got a couple of minutes, let's just explore it a little bit. Um this news dropped. This is the repositories version of it. But essentially, if you had Woo Commerce subscriptions, there is a chance, and you have to have the docs incorrectly lined up in a row for this to matter to you. But there is a chance that you will have had subscriptions which your customers had set to autorenew. Woo Commerce subscriptions might have switched them off without alerting you or alerting your customers. And so basically they just went into this completely silent fail state. Now, I don't have any of this, so it's just a news story to me, and it's, you know, it's kind of, wow, that's a shame. But it would appear that out there in the wild, there are people that are claiming that this is really cost them quite a lot of money. And um and now we're in that phase where uh the patches are trying to be put together. My understanding is much of it has already been patched. Um, but it's quite a big story that if you've got it set up and the intention was to set it up so that you know things would tick over next year the subscription would happen again. If it utterly silently failed, that's really really bad from a business point of view and it doesn't help Woo Commerce uh out there in the public sphere. I wouldn't have thought. Anything to add to that? >> A good example of where monitoring comes into its own. >> Yes. Yes, but who does I mean obviously the the sites that say that this hadn't happened uh sorry that this has happened to them presumably they weren't doing that. Yeah, fair enough. Um >> I mean I don't not not to you know that terms of like I don't care about the people who it has happened to but uh if you're running a subscription whether it's a membership site or you're running a subscriptions of any sort and this surely affected a churn I mean maybe maybe they're making enough that it doesn't affect the churn rate and the the percentages were small enough but even just your churn rate would have a noticeable change. What does it look like though if you're a WooCommerce store owner that from what from everything I've read it looked to them as if their customers had switched it off because I I don't know what the logs look like and you know what it actually looks like in the database and yada yada yada but my assumption I suppose as a store owner would be okay I can see that that is now not set to autorenew I would just be thinking there's a dissatisfied customer okay we lost them let's concentrate on next year getting a load of few people through the door. Do you know what I mean? I can see how this would slip through the cracks. >> But presumably what is that whole one one is unfortunate, two is a coincidence, three is starting to be >> I again it does depend on scale because if this is only affecting four out of a thousand customers a month, >> you're not likely no amount of monitoring is likely to pick that up. But if it was, >> you know, if all of your subscriptions are suddenly having this problem, then that's going to be you're going to notice hopefully and people seemingly did. >> Yeah. So, the the person who figured this all out, I'm not even going to try and pronounce their name correctly. >> Ver, >> there you go. It sound as if it might be Dutch. uh what Remus just said, they um they um got into all of this, found a bug, and then penetrated deeper over the course of the next few days and found four, three more, total of four, and discovered that 121 subscriptions in their setup had been affected and they lost 40 Oh, I mean, it's not nothing, is it? $43,000 in potential revenue. Now, you can't be certain that they were going to renew anyway, but nevertheless, >> well, yeah, >> wouldn't the subscriber also notice that their subscription is not active or >> Well, that's the only way that this would be alerted is that the subscriber noticed and got back to the website and says something's gone wrong. We wanted access to whatever it is, in this case, presumably a plugin. I guess the we're sorry to see you go email that you just that you absolutely hate when people when you're canceling subscriptions and your inbox fills in with the we're sorry to see you go here have 10% off if you click this button that you know 90% of us will probably immediately been might have in this one case this case possibly have saved no I'd have just binned it I'd have been it >> also wasn't it a a total silent fail did it it didn't trigger any emails or anything like that. I think as well that's my understanding is it just failed utterly silently. So none of the usual cavalcade of emails that might >> Yeah, that's how I took it. That's how I took it to mean that it was completely just under the radar. Maybe this is an example of where using your having your email marketing and email transactional system tied tightly into your WooCommerce. >> Right. Right. Right. Okay. So you could have mitigated this on your own. Yeah, that's possibly. I mean the thing is you can't you ultimately you can't mitigate for a bunch of series of c of cascading failures. You can mitigate against lots of things and we can be sitting here afterwards going well if you've done this and you put it like this and you could have done this wrong and perfectly fine but the reality is stuff like this happens >> and it's part of the cost of anything. This is the equivalent of somebody in the shop going and you know closing the front door and locking it by accident for 20 minutes at the start of the day. >> Yes. Yeah, that's right. Go and sack the employee. Uh anyway, WooCommerce are on it, my understanding is. And they're also trying to figure out if there's a way of um an automated tool for one of a better word. Mark's just turned into like he's gone to Hades. um if there's a way of figuring out who these affected people are and then going back to them cap in hand kind of basically saying look we messed up the system messed up what have you. So anyway that was fairly big story. What else have we got? Nothing. Oh couple of events I'll just mention these quickly before we end. Uh web agency summit is around the corner 27th of April i.e. today it started. Um if you go to atrim.iossummit io/summit you can get involved in that and because time is short uh there this will be the last one uh if you are thinking about going to word camp EU which is happening in June then the schedule has been announced in a lovely table with a lovely feature you can actually highlight with this little star the bits that you like and send yourself an email because uh you know we're all lazy and that's helpful. That's it. That's all we got time for. Take a breath, Mr. Wriggley. It's a lot It's a lot cooler here than it is in India. That's I'm gonna I'll definitely say that. I've got the even though I've got the window open, at least I'm not pouring uh with sweat. Right, there we go. We will be back hopefully uh this time next week. All that it remains for me to do is say thank you to our three panelists. Mark, Benzerane, thank you Mark. Uh, Remus somewhere there. Remus Travis, thank you. He says he's got some news next week. I don't know what that I want him to tell me now. He's not going to. Look, he's got that face of I'm not saying >> you could do do some investigating and it's not >> I'll do some investigating when we finish this show. You can tell me then. Uh, and Tim Tim Nash down there as well. Uh, thank you very much. We will push this out as a podcast audio episode, which is how most people consume it. That'll happen tomorrow at 7:30 or 7 in the morning. And we'll be back, like I said, next week for some more this week in WordPress. Take it easy. Thank you for Oh. Oh. Oh, got to do the handy thing. Quick, the hand wavy thing, if you don't mind. Only only one hand from Tim. The one handed. There we go. That'll do. That's great. See you all next week. Take it easy. Bye. Ciao for now. >> Ciao for now indeed., This Week in WordPress #371, YouTube, 01krc73r0j09wwm9sks2gfmcns.