#107 More FSE Fun and a New Plugin Repo?  ## Metadata - Author: [[WP Café]] - Full Title: #107 More FSE Fun and a New Plugin Repo? - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/e5b0cf35-9e4e-4af9-bf5e-9d2f20472d2f ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Avoid PDFs for Web Content** - Reconsider using PDFs for web content. - Instead, prioritize web pages for accessibility and maintainability. Transcript: Keith Devon And they've got loads of PDFs for various things. Lots of policies, prospectuses, things like that. And they're like, oh, the PDFs don't look good on the website. I'm like, why are we playing PDFs on the website anyway? And who is using these PDFs? Who uses PDFs today? What is the point of them? I'm not really sure. What are your thoughts on this? I know you've got strong opinions. Mark Wilkinson Yes. So back in the day when I used to work in a school as a teacher and I was involved with the internal systems that were used to sort of manage these policies and things like that. Everyone loves a PDF because they can type it out on Word and they can, you know, do whatever they want with it and then turn it into a PDF and then it gets put somewhere. And what used to happen with us, with my school, was someone would do this policy and then they'd turn it into a PDF and then they'd email it out to everybody. You know, all staff used to get an email. You know, we've updated the such and such policy and it's attached. Great. Why do I need that in my inbox? It should be at a location, which we know where these things are, you know, on an intranet, in a folder in Microsoft Teams or whatever you use these days, whatever the case may be. And then you get some people who obviously downloaded a copy, I'll save a copy of that in my desktop or in my documents folder on my laptop. And then you got the other people, like generally older people, who was like, oh, print a copy out and put it in my drawer in my filing cabinet. And then what would happen is like a day later, oh, sorry, there was a typo on that. And we've changed this paragraph for the such and such policy. So we've attached it again for you. So it's updated. And then people would just ignore that because i only got that yesterday so it's fine i don't need that anymore so now you know you've got people with old policies in the drawers that are No longer valid because they've been overwritten you've got people that have saved copies on their own computer that are no longer written no longer valid because they've been overwritten And then you've got the actual policy somewhere wherever that is you know that so it's just a complete and utter mess in that you can't actually keep track of what's what so why are we using Pdfs like we've got these beautiful web pages why don't we just write the policies on the web page and that is the source of truth like that's where we should be storing these things we Don't need to send an email out to everyone. It lives at its URL, you know, slash policies, slash whatever it is, privacy or whatever. Yeah. And it stays there and it's updated there. And every time you look at it, that is the up-to piece of information. So that's my thoughts on it. Really frustrating from just taking me back 10 years when I used to do that. And like the same situations happening here. I mean, the client's kind of tied a bit it's difficult they want to move forward with this so there is a positive move from them and then the other thing is they've got lots of like forms In pdfs so medical consent forms for like trips and things um so you know what happens is parent downloads it they could perhaps fill it in online if they know what they're doing in a PDF Reader thing, then re-save it, or they then have to print it, write on it, take a photo of it, scan it, take it. It's just a mess. So, I mean, why aren't those like Microsoft forms that they can just collect the data in a spreadsheet? You know, that sort of thing. So, PDFs is the goal, definitely. And I do think the client is on board with it, which is good. But it seems as though it could happen a lot quicker. Keith Devon When could PDFs be useful? Do you know what I was just thinking? We actually make PDFs for things like proposals. Yep. Why do we do that? Mark Wilkinson Principally because we don't have another medium in which to build them, that's all. Like they could easily be a web page. Keith Devon Yeah, exactly. Mark Wilkinson But we don't, yeah, we do, but we don't have that. I think people do like sometimes like to print those off. I noticed when we went to that client meeting for that pitch a couple of weeks ago, our proposal was printed off on the desk. I saw it with the person that they were referring to it. So I think that's potentially when a PDF might be useful. When it's going to be printed. Yeah. But still, you could make that printable from the webpage. And if it's not, I think a proposal is like, it's a very specific document to that client. It isn't public. It doesn't want a public URL, that sort of thing. So you'd have to start protecting all that as well, wouldn't you? I think that's the difference there, I think. So yeah, we do use PDFs for those things. But for things like this, which is public information that you want people to read, uploading a PDF is not the best way for them to read that on a phone, for example. It's a beautiful web page that we've built responsibly that works on all device sizes. That's the best way for them to consume information, which is exactly what a policy is. That's how they should be reading it. ([Time 0:04:06](https://share.snipd.com/snip/32baa031-1d22-47e1-8202-f40ec16af0d9)) - **PDF Management Nightmare** - Mark Wilkinson recounts his experience managing policies as a teacher. - He highlights the challenges of PDF-based workflows. Transcript: Mark Wilkinson Yes. So back in the day when I used to work in a school as a teacher and I was involved with the internal systems that were used to sort of manage these policies and things like that. Everyone loves a PDF because they can type it out on Word and they can, you know, do whatever they want with it and then turn it into a PDF and then it gets put somewhere. And what used to happen with us, with my school, was someone would do this policy and then they'd turn it into a PDF and then they'd email it out to everybody. You know, all staff used to get an email. You know, we've updated the such and such policy and it's attached. Great. Why do I need that in my inbox? It should be at a location, which we know where these things are, you know, on an intranet, in a folder in Microsoft Teams or whatever you use these days, whatever the case may be. And then you get some people who obviously downloaded a copy, I'll save a copy of that in my desktop or in my documents folder on my laptop. And then you got the other people, like generally older people, who was like, oh, print a copy out and put it in my drawer in my filing cabinet. And then what would happen is like a day later, oh, sorry, there was a typo on that. And we've changed this paragraph for the such and such policy. So we've attached it again for you. So it's updated. And then people would just ignore that because i only got that yesterday so it's fine i don't need that anymore so now you know you've got people with old policies in the drawers that are No longer valid because they've been overwritten you've got people that have saved copies on their own computer that are no longer written no longer valid because they've been overwritten And then you've got the actual policy somewhere wherever that is you know that so it's just a complete and utter mess in that you can't actually keep track of what's what so why are we using Pdfs like we've got these beautiful web pages why don't we just write the policies on the web page and that is the source of truth like that's where we should be storing these things we Don't need to send an email out to everyone. It lives at its URL, you know, slash policies, slash whatever it is, privacy or whatever. Yeah. And it stays there and it's updated there. And every time you look at it, that is the up-to piece of information. So that's my thoughts on it. Really frustrating from just taking me back 10 years when I used to do that. And like the same situations happening here. I mean, the client's kind of tied a bit it's difficult they want to move forward with this so there is a positive move from them and then the other thing is they've got lots of like forms In pdfs so medical consent forms for like trips and things um so you know what happens is parent downloads it they could perhaps fill it in online if they know what they're doing in a PDF Reader thing, then re-save it, or they then have to print it, write on it, take a photo of it, scan it, take it. It's just a mess. So, I mean, why aren't those like Microsoft forms that they can just collect the data in a spreadsheet? You know, that sort of thing. So, PDFs is the goal, definitely. ([Time 0:04:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2d4ef375-07fa-4b4a-82f9-a76c1730c924)) - **Optimizing PDF Embeds** - Avoid embedding large, landscape PDFs directly into web pages. - Optimize PDF display for mobile using conditional visibility. Transcript: Keith Devon Agree. And I think this idea of embedding the pdf so they can be viewed on the website is kind of ridiculous um that there's there's one example in this project it's a prospectus and it's uh it's Like it's done in like a landscape format um so two very kind of wide pages side by side and you're supposed to be able to flip through on the web page, and it's just a disaster. Even at really large screen sizes, you can't read the text. On mobile, obviously, it's an absolute car crash. That's a classic example, isn't it? Mark Wilkinson It's a beautifully designed brochure that, when printed out, will look gorgeous in your hand and work beautifully. But to consume that sort of information on web yeah it just doesn't work you know so I thought your solution though was really good for that what what you suggested on that call do you want Keith Devon To tell people what you suggested what we actually did well we we had we used the the block visibility plugin um to kind of so we had the embedded PDF visible at desktop with a button below It to download the PDF or just go to the file. And then on mobile, I just hid the embedded version and kept the button there. So it works. Because you're just not going to want to view that on a mobile embedded. So yeah, I mean, that's good work. They seemed really happy with that. Mark Wilkinson Mentioning this particular one was embedded with like was it flip flip stack or something it's called like a service that makes flip snacks all right okay there's various ones around Excuse me um so you kind of restricted as to what their embed gives you so when we tried to make the and this didn't work on mobile even, but when we tried to make it sort of wider so you could See on a desktop, it kind of just sat inside the iFrame and we had a load of space on the outside, didn't you? It wasn't for playing very nicely. So it was an interesting thing. But yeah, I think they want to go forward. It's just convincing everyone in time and the job to actually do it as well certainly ([Time 0:09:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f6430b5c-0ff6-49ed-84c9-3884e369cfc7)) - **Building Photo Albums with FSE** - Mark describes building a photo album post type with image counting. - They used block bindings and CSS pseudo-elements to display image counts. Transcript: Mark Wilkinson Working on? It's been very similar for me, really. I think, I don't feel like I've built an awful lot this week. I've you know tweaking things and changing things as you do you know you go to build something and then well it doesn't really work like that so let's try this way and then actually i might Have to build that or change that or something like that it's been a lot of that one thing what we have been working with though is we have some we have a post type called uh albums photo albums Uh because they want to upload photo albums, and then it wants to have an archive, and you can click on an album and then scroll through the images of this album. So we've created a custom post type for that, and they want various things. So they want an archive of all of them. So we want to pull in the featured image of a gallery, sorry, of a photo album. They used to be called galleries. That's why I might get a little confusing with the gallery block. Then show the name of the album over the top. And then what we'd like to do is to be able to show the number of images that are in the photo album. So the way in which we've decided to do this is that you go and create a new photo album post, and we've pre-populated the editor with a group which has a paragraph in it, which will be the Intro paragraph. And they can delete that if they don't want it because some galleries just don't have any text. It's just here are the images. But some have a little introduction paragraph, so they can put that in. And then below that, there's a gallery that's added to the screen, and they just go in and start adding the images. So that's what's on the page um and what we want to do is count the number of gallery number of images that are in that gallery and display on the archive as a little piece of text i think you've Got a little icon a little gallery icon that shows that it's a gallery and it says like 10 images 50 images whatever it is so it's like how do we do that? So the approach we've gone for is kind of a few fold. So the first one is we've used, instead of using our own custom block for this, which has its advantages still, and I'll come to that in a minute, because we've used a card block for the Other things, we've decided to try and build this as a card in the editor, if that makes sense. So it's like a cover block wrapped in a group. And then we've got the group linking to the post. Then we've got the post title in the cover block. And then we've got an icon block using the little icon block plugin that I think is from Nick Diego. Is that from Nick Diego, Mike? Yeah. And then we've got a paragraph of text, which is like the five images, 10 images, whatever it is. But obviously that needs to be dynamic because it needs to pull in the actual number of images from the gallery. So the way in which I've done that is when you hit save on a gallery post, it will count the number of images your gallery by getting the content of the post and parsing the blocks and so forth. And it will save that as a piece of metadata against the post. And then what we do is we've used block bindings, which is pretty cool, isn't it? That little attributes thing, and you click plus and you can bind some data. We've used block bindings to bind that value to that paragraph so it'll say like you know the number of images in the in the post so that's quite nice and then the other cool thing which We did is we wanted on the actual single gallery page we wanted underneath each image to say like image one of 10 two of 10 three of 10 four of ten five of ten so you know where you are in the Gallery when you're scrolling down the page. So the way in which we've done that is I have added data attributes to each of the figure elements, which wraps the image. And I've added the current image number, and I've added the total image number to each element. And then Keith's gone in and used CSS after elements, not elements, pseudo elements, to add that data underneath as a pseudo element and reading the values, which you can in CSS, from The attributes that are on that particular block. Keith Devon Yeah, if you didn't know that, in CSS, there is an attribute function, ATTR, and then open brackets, and you can put the value of any data attribute, in fact, any attribute, and you can Output that using the content property of a pseudo element. So that's pretty cool. So I've got like wp block image after content, and then the content is attribute data image current slash attribute data image total. Mark Wilkinson Yeah, it works pretty well, doesn't it? Yeah. We wanted to try and do it with actual markup but it would be really difficult the search replace or regex to find would be very difficult and it's also very difficult when you're rendering The block content to know which number of image you'll be in so it was much easier to do it this way than it was to sort of add some actual markup on the page yeah it would have been nice wouldn't't Keith Devon It, if instead of actually using a gallery block, we could have used a query loop block to query the images attached to a gallery or something. I don't know how we would have done it, but I kind of want that ability to loop through items and add things like we did for the card. I could add that uh current current image number total image number then maybe like an underlying using a divider and i could style them all differently that would be much nicer um but Mark Wilkinson Yeah technically more tricky difficult yeah yeah i think stuff like those data attributes, though, that I've added, I'd like to see those on the core block. You know, like, I'm in the gallery, this is image one of whatever in a gallery, and set as data attributes, because people can do so much with that information then, and it seems, I don't Know, I mean, I know it's more to maintain when you're going forward for the core team to maintain something that's on the block but I just think everyone might be doing it their own way Rather than just putting this information on those like we've always done this in the past haven't we when we've been doing repeater fields you know we've added like the total number Of things that are inside on the parent element, so you can style it based on how many there are, for example. It's an odd number or an even number or all that sort of stuff. Those little helper classes, they're so useful. And I'd love to see Core do that more. Even if it's data attributes, because they make sense, it's just data that we want to store about this thing on the page. ([Time 0:12:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5d1ecadb-b900-4dd8-b485-2435eb1b4bde)) - **Overridable Pattern Limitations** - Synced overridable patterns limit flexibility when changing individual card settings. - This can be frustrating when customizing instances. Transcript: Keith Devon Of extra data that would be wizarding the internet. So that's the only thing I'd say. And the maintainability, like you say. Mark Wilkinson Yeah, yeah. I get that. I do get that, yeah. If you want to know how I did the data attributes, I did a post. I think it's called a post on Blue Sky, which is not hard. It was one function that was, I don't know, 20-odd lines. So you can have a look at my Blue Sky handle at markwilkison.dev, and you'll see it on there. Give us a follow while you're there, why not? So, yeah, that was my stuff this week. It was quite nice to use the block editor. One downside to all this, though, is we then created, was it an overridable yeah it was a synced overridable pattern for this gallery card so we could use it inside all the other query Loops basically yeah and it was synced overridable so that if we decide to change the look and feel of this card in the future, you know, change the tint on the cover block or move the text To the top or whatever that might be, make the text bigger, smaller, different color, we could do that. But one of the restrictions of that is that you can't change settings on individual cards then that are set. And a great example of that is we've set the cover image to be, I think it was a square, so like a one-by aspect ratio. And then we wanted to put that somewhere else on the site, but because it's a synced over-ridable pattern, you can't then change the aspect ratio of the card because the setting isn't Available to you. All I can do is change the image. I can't actually change the aspect ratio. Now, what we did in this instance is detach it from the sync to overridable pattern, set it to 16.9, and then we use it that way. But that defeats the object because it's now out of sync, so if we change the pattern, it won't change those individual elements. And it's stuff like that that the block editor is still missing. That's where our card block was really good, wasn't it? Like we can put it inside a query loop. We can give some settings and we can change those settings on every instance of where that card is used. That was really, really useful. ([Time 0:19:07](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e1f9959a-2f11-4028-8bc7-ee58642c06a2)) - **Event Row Pattern Challenges** - Keith Devon shares frustrations with building an overridable pattern for an event row. - The inability to override the group link setting makes optimization challenging. Transcript: Keith Devon Are still really limited, aren't they? I came across this actually today as well. I was building a pattern called event row, I called it. And it's an image. Beside that is the event title and the event date. And beside that, on the far side, is just narrow icon. And the whole thing is wrapped in a group. And again, thank you, Nick Diego, because you're using all your plugins. I've used, I can't remember what it was called, but it's the plugin of his that lets you uh link groups enable link groupings calls not a group link that's what it's called um which is really Nice and it works as a pattern but it doesn't work as a synced overridable pattern because that isn't overridable uh that link so i've got this pattern now that i really want to lock down That i can't um and it's it's quite it's quite frustrating so i i used it a few times earlier and i was like okay yeah that's good and then i realized i'd made some mistakes or i wanted to optimize It and i was like i better get this bang on right now before it's used all across this website because i can't i can't edit this ever again um like once it's published so it's really that Stuff is frustrating i wonder if there's any plans in the works to uh i don't know just increase the number of things that can be overridden because yeah you kind of want access to almost Mark Wilkinson Everything don't you like it feels like i don't know 12 6 or 12 months ago we were sort of like 75 there you know the block editor it was it was good and you know so forth but there was still Like fundamental things that we couldn't do so it was difficult now it feels like we're like 85 to 90% there. Like it's very good. There's lots of things we can do like bindings and things like that and sync to our old patterns and so forth. But it's just that last 10% is just, it's so disappointing because like you get so far down the line and you're like, oh yeah, I've done that. And it's synced and it works. But I can't do that, can I? Which is really important. So I don't know. I'm torn. I like it. I like a lot of what it does now, and I actually enjoy using it a lot of the time. But it just disappoints me so much that it's missing these fundamental things for the stuff that we believe in, like in the sites that we create, I think. Keith Devon It'd be interesting to come up with a list of those things. Yeah. Like, you know, the five things that we, that we would love, you know, to be added, uh, that would really like improve things so, so much. Um, not necessarily low hanging fruit, cause it could be technically very difficult to achieve them, but yeah, it'd be, it'd be interesting. ([Time 0:21:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/90256673-b72d-4761-a1a2-83d82415dbf4)) - **Patterns, Styles, Variations** - Choose variations when needing pre-selected attributes. - Consider styles for easily switchable visual options. Transcript: Keith Devon Can't remember. We were talking about this earlier, weren't we? And I can't remember what the kind of use case was. Let me explain what I think this is about. Mark Wilkinson So you created an excellent little stats counter style for the paragraph block. So the idea being is you can put a paragraph, you can put a number in your paragraph, any number at all. You can click the style that says this is a counter. And then on the front end, when the page loads or when that block is on screen, it will count up to the top number that you've got. So it's like a little animation type thing. Really cool, really good thing. So I was looking last night at making this like a plugin that we could use more and more and more. And it's one of those things that you don't know what to do. Should I do this as a pattern? Should I do this as a block style? Or should I do this as a variation? And I'm not sure what the best way of doing it is. So I ended up last night getting towards a block variation. So I have a variation of the paragraph block called stat counter. And in the block inserter list, it's there called stat counter. It's not a paragraph, you know, to the user, it says stat counter. So you click that, then you drop that on the page. And that automatically adds the correct attribute that we're using on the front end to do various things. And it also sets the attribute, which means that I can put a little box on the right that says how fast should this counter count up, if that makes sense. Yeah. But that could easily have been a pattern that does the same thing. You know, it wouldn't have had the count, the sort of option on the side to change the speed of it, but I don't know whether that's actually very important to us, to be honest. Yeah, but it could be for other things. And it could easily be a style you know just a block style like we've got now so it's just difficult to know what the best solution is with these things but i'm not really sure about the pros Keith Devon And cons yet so we need to delve into that a bit further i think i guess one So block styles, since you're just adding a class, and I think with block styles, it's useful if it's something You want to be able to switch between. So like you have a button and you're like, oh, no, no, that doesn't look right here. Let me try the secondary style or the tertiary style or whatever. I think that makes a lot of sense. We're using them in places where I think we probably shouldn't, like turning things into sliders. Potentially. But you could argue that is a style. Like if it's a gallery, this is the style of gallery I want. It's a slider. I don't think that's particularly wrong. I think, have you thought about it? Sorry? That was a very generic word. You could like, it could encompass a lot of things, including variations and, you know, yeah, that's true. Mark Wilkinson But having thought about it, I'm not sure whether the block style is the right approach for a counter, but I mean, it is a style, right? It does work. It's just that a user would write, would be like, right. I want to add a counter to this page. What do I do? And at the moment, they have to add a paragraph, and then they see the counter style. Yeah. Whereas a variation, they can just go add, search for stat or counter, and then it'll actually show them that block. I know it's a paragraph, but they'll see it. So I think that's probably slightly better in that instance. Keith Devon And being able to add those meta fields is really beneficial because they might not apply to some styles and they do apply to others. So maybe variations is the place to go then. Yeah. Yeah, it's definitely another kind of tool in our arsenal isn't it or in our toolbox because i started off i started off with the paragraph block adding a toggle what i wanted to do was Mark Wilkinson To put this speed and input in so you could put in the number of milliseconds that it should take to count from zero to whatever number that you've added yeah so i put that on there and i was Like hang on that shows now on the side of every Power Graph block on the website. Yeah. Which, I mean, isn't a problem, but it's just like, what's it there? It doesn't make sense, does it? So then I thought, well, what I'd like to do is to be able to say, if they've clicked the style that you'd already created, counter, show that box. And if that style's not hide that box apparently that's either very difficult or impossible to do so yeah i ditched that idea and thought well i could have a toggle at least so i don't have The input it's just a toggle that says you know turn on the stats make this into a stat block or whatever yeah we got that working so you could toggle it on the things show, toggle it off, Let things hidden. But again, it's still there for every paragraph. So then I came up with the idea of the block variation because you can set the attributes when the block is dropped on the page, and then that stuff shows only when those attributes are Present. Yeah. So therefore, they don't show on a normal paragraph because it doesn't have the attributes that this variation has, which is good. So I think that's probably the right way to go in this instance. But it's not the right way for every instance, I'm sure. I think block styles are certainly extremely good for most things. Keith Devon The kind of penny drop moment for me about the variations was being able to pre-select the attributes. Yeah. So obviously for a paragraph block, well, I was going to say that's not very useful. Maybe it's very useful in a certain circumstance. But the thing that came to mind for us, wasn't it, was the query loop. So why would we not have a galleries loop and a news loop and a pages loop and whatever other types uh and so the query loop is pre-populated with the parameters that you want like the correct Post type and everything like that and that maybe the number and you know whatever i think that's a good idea um and that's way way more uh accessible for the for the site, the editor of A page. Because what the hell is a query loop? What does that mean? Yeah, I want to show latest news. So I've got a query loop in. It doesn't make sense to me. You're going to search for latest news, and you're going to find a variation. And that's going to be your news variation. You don't need to fiddle with it. It just kind of comes out of the box. I think that could be really, really, really useful. Mark Wilkinson I think where the patterns versus styles versus variations came in for me was, I think, let's say you wanted to put a notice on the screen. So you can use a paragraph block. So you type a sentence out and you want it to be a notice. So you might want to make it like a red border for a warning or a green border for a positive notice or something like that. Make the text size a bit bigger. You could use a style for that. So you could put the paragraph on and just click a style and it goes the right border. Everything's set, isn't it? Because the style just adds a CSS ([Time 0:25:08](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b526bb99-cb29-4908-b57f-b902c297175d)) - **Plugin Publishing Alternatives** - Host free plugins on personal websites or platforms like EDD. - Leverage GitHub and consider an aggregator for discoverability. Transcript: Keith Devon And the question is, where do we put that plug in these days? I think it's more mini protest than anything else, but I am loathe to put it on Matt's personal website. And so I'd like to avoid that just out of principle. But then the question becomes, A, where does that code live? B, how do people update it? And C, how do people find it? I think the obvious answer to A is probably GitHub. Yes. The answers to the other two are not obvious to me do you have any any thoughts or ideas around uh updates and just or discoverability well no really but updates is a solved problem like Mark Wilkinson You can you can update plugins in word without using WordPress.org. We do it for Job Relay and RecPress. I know they're slightly different because they're subscribed products and they have a license and it's checks and it's going on. But that system would presumably use for products that don't have those licenses, as it just always passes the checks, doesn't it, and says, yes, you can update, here we go. So that's a solid. So using something like EDD? Yeah, is it up to us to do that and host that? Or is there something out there that will do that for us that isn't WordPress.org? I know other people have done this, like WP Engine have done this, haven't they? I don't know how they do it. So they've had to do this themselves for their own plugins. So are they hosting it? Where do you host them? How does that work? So I think it's more of a question of learning how to do it rather than the fact that it's not possible, if that makes sense. And I haven't come to any conclusions on that yet. Keith Devon There's a GitHub updater plugin, I think, which if you have the correct headers in your plugin, I'm probably talking rubbish. But I think something along the lines of this, if you've got the correct headers, GitHub updater can work. So if you've got that installed in your plugin and you can update plugins directly from GitHub. Mark Wilkinson But I don't want to rely on another plugin being installed to be able to update my plugin. I agree. Keith Devon It's not a method that I'm really massively keen on. And it feels very niche, very developer-y rather than kind of user-friendly. So I'm not so keen on that. So I'm leaning towards something like EDD just on our own website. I think that's fine. And then, so the second bit is discoverability. How are people going to find this? Because obviously people search for stuff directly. Whenever I was searching for a counter plugin, I searched directly in the website in WP Admin. Then I found a few things, tried a few things. Mark Wilkinson Then I think I searched, just did a Google search. I don't know the answer to that. Is there any services that are offering, what you want is like an aggregator, like pulling all the WordPress plugins from different sources type thing. Well, that's what I was thinking. Something in WordPress that extends the normal backend search for a plugin to include all the stuff from the aggregator as well, you know what I mean, so you can find it all. Keith Devon And then I thought, that sounds great. Who's policing it? Who's, yeah. How are we going to stop it being full of absolute garbage? Who's moderating comments? Who's doing plug-in reviews? Who's stopping all the kind of security issues? It just, I don't know. And that's what's kind of sad about the current state of affairs in a way. The fact that that repo has been weaponized is so tragic because it's so important for this project. I agree. There's integrity there. Mark Wilkinson But what you don't want to get into a situation is we don't want to put it on Matt's personal website, but also we shouldn't be wanting to put it on keith's personal website or on mark's Personal website or on high rise digital's personal website we want sounds to me like we want something that is owned by everybody the wordpress yeah ecosystem and the community so It can't be police weaponized because everyone owns it i don't know how we do that, but that's what I think would be good. Keith Devon That's what I thought.org was. Mark Wilkinson So did I until all this came out, but it clearly isn't because he's openly stated it's his website. Yeah. Keith Devon I don't want to get into it too much. I'm not actually sure that Matt believes that i think he's maybe using that in this legal battle i i'm gonna give him the benefit of the doubt and say that i think he genuinely wanted it To be as open as we all wanted it to be but because of this fight with wp engine he's changed his tune to suit his case, his legal case. That would be the kind interpretation, I think. Mark Wilkinson I just think if you were a business right now that was, you know, you're just finishing off your big product, your plugin that you've made, would you still put that on WordPress.org today? And I'm not sure the answer to that is yes, knowing what's happened to some of the most popular plugins. And that could easily happen to yours. You can't do anything about it. I think you'd probably say no, but I don't know. Keith Devon Yeah, yeah. I think having it on our site, and hopefully people find it just by Google search or by us telling people about it, I think that's the way it should go until things change. Mark Wilkinson The good listeners and watchers of WP Cafe will spread the word for us. Yeah. Not that it really matters whether anyone uses it or not to be quite honest. Keith Devon Yeah. I just thought that was interesting that there isn't really there isn't an alternative and it would be really hard. It's almost the same kind of deal as just forking WordPress. Yes, it's possible, but it's a big it's a big big job yeah right i think you wanted a is this a rant mark this last point um i don't ([Time 0:32:56](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a80764e0-0715-4156-a62c-e33c8c637559)) - **Black Friday Annoyances** - Mark dislikes Black Friday, finding its discounts annoying. - He questions their value proposition and impact on perceived pricing. Transcript: Mark Wilkinson Know about you everyone listening but like black friday it just it kind of annoys me like all these offers that just come in at once. And it's like, why? Keith Devon Why have you suddenly decided that you're going to give me 30% off? Mark Wilkinson Like I just don't understand it. And because for me, it just devalues your price for the rest of the year. Like why would I buy a product on the 1st of October? Like why would I go and buy this plugin that I want on the 1st of October? Because I literally know that if I wait six weeks, you're going to give it to me for like 50% off. So it's just, I don't know. That's what I don't like about it. And this kind of came up because I saw a tweet. Let me just find it in my inbox, actually. Here it is. This was from Barn 2 about a new cancellation policy. It's kind of slightly off-piece, but it's kind of linked to the same sort of thing. A new cancellation policy, or not policy, what was the word they look at? Process? Funnelling you through the cancellation process type thing. And it was like a four-step process. And I immediately thought, why have we got a four-step process to cancel something? Anyway, so that's fine. So the first page, you clicked on cancel. And then the first screen was like, tell me why you're canceling. I mean, okay, that's fine. You might want to know. That's fine. So then you click on the next screen. So you said why you don't want to cancel. And then the next screen says, oh, but what about all these benefits that you're missing? Like you're going to miss out on the locked in price. You're going to miss out on all this. So at this point I can click keep current plan. I can say, no, you're right. Actually, I'd quite like to keep it actually. That's fine. But if I say no, and I still want to cancel, I then get to the next screen and it's like, oh, one more thing just before you cancel. Would you like 30% off it? Would you keep it then? So it gives me this 30% off price. At this point, I'm like, hang on a minute. I've just been paying $200 a year, and now you're offering it me for like whatever 30% off that is. I can't work out my head. I just feel really annoyed at that point that you're now going to give this me for cheaper. Why didn't I last year do you know what i mean so i think that's really weird and it's the same with black friday deals you know why are we suddenly offering all this money off things i think There's a product owner pricing is like really difficult but i just think price your product based on what is fair for you and your customers and provides value and then you shouldn't Really need to offer discounts on it. Yeah. But I must be wrong because everybody does this. So I'm open to being wrong. I've seen the old post, though, about people. Keith Devon I think it was in the WordPress space where Black Friday offers basically did nothing, like absolutely And if you did the maths, the little bump in sales did not compensate for the loss Of the sale price. And I'm just like, well, I don't understand why you do that at all. Mark Wilkinson It just didn't make any sense to me, really. I suppose an excuse is the wrong way, but it's an excuse to gain a bit of hype around the product. Look, we've got this offer and people might share it and so on. But then, like you say, the numbers don't stack up and it doesn't build any more sales. Then what's the point? But it must. Like I say, I must be wrong. It must build sales. Keith Devon I think, yeah, it'd be interesting to know about the WordPress space in particular, because I can see how it works for consumer goods, and I can see how it kind of came about. It's like, you know, it was a pre-Christmas thing, wasn't it, really? Like, everyone's doing their shopping for Christmas presents. I think that's how it started. And it was, like, one of the most popular weekends for like buying stuff. Is it not something to do Thanksgiving? It could be Thanksgiving. Yeah. Yeah. Which is today. Happy Thanksgiving. Today. Is it today? Or yesterday. Yeah. No, I don't know. I don't know. I just, you know, I just bought something. I bought that new monitor. I was on a Black Friday price and I deliberately waited. Exactly. Yeah. Mark Wilkinson So is it actually a Black Friday? I'm sat there thinking, is this actually a Black Friday offer or are you just overcharging me for the rest of the year so that you can give this offer? Keith Devon Yeah. Mark Wilkinson I don't know. Courtney says, thank you. She says, the agency I work for, Privilege, will cancel their Gravity Forms every year and rebuy it at 50% off with Black Friday. Keith Devon Wow. That's my point. That's stingy. Yes, not for stingy. How much are they saving? Honestly, it's like $250 a year for an agency license. Mark Wilkinson I'm even more stingy because I had this golf insurance package. Basically, so if you whack a shot and kill someone, you're kind of insured or you injure them, whatever. And it came up as this offer. It's a product that a lot of people buy. And it was like $26.99 for the year. This was like the first time I bought it. $26.99 for the year. You got like 12 free golf balls. And the golf balls that they were giving were worth like 15 quid so it's like it's pretty much a no-brainer you know get these i buy golf balls and they made sense comes to renew it and it's $39.99 a year with no with no offers so i was like why would i do that i'm just going to cancel it and then sign up again yeah i don't understand why they'd have these you know what is your price Keith Devon And let's just stick to the price yeah i i generally don't like sales and i generally don't like discounts you know it's just i don't know it just feels a bit weird and a bit gross like you Say like if you can if you can if you're happy to sell it at that why are you selling it for 30% more the rest of the time? Yeah, I don't know. I find it really bizarre. I really do. I'm the same. And that leaves a really nasty, that original example, I'm not having a go at Born 2 here, but whenever I've been on the receiving end of that kind of exit discount it feels gross i don't Like it and you know that idea like you've come to the end of your broadband contract and what you need to do is go to your current broadband provider and say i'm leaving what can you do for Me it's like i shouldn't have to do that no as customer. It just feels like if I don't take action, you're going to fleece me. That's how that feels to me. And I don't like it. So yeah, I won't be doing that to other people. Mark Wilkinson Clearly, they can offer that product at 30% off because that's what they're doing when I say cancel. So just why am I not doing that now? Why am I being taken advantage of? Keith Devon Because I didn't press that i want to cancel button and back to wordpress are people really well obviously courtney's just said they are are people really waiting for black friday to Buy ([Time 0:39:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/663278bd-4aaa-4417-8084-be41ebab1adf))